Gov.-elect Rick Scott got some national attention last week while speaking at an event celebrating the companies that so far this year have contributed $126 million to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students. Scott, former CEO of the Columbia/HCA healthcare organization, ran a campaign pledging to bring jobs to Florida and his education platform included a strong embrace of parental choice. The scholarship donor rally was the Governor-elect's first education-related even since he took office, and he took the opportunity to voice support for private learning options.
In turn, the state's largest newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, reported on a plan for "education savings accounts" that could bring those options to far more families. Is that Scott's plan? Here's what he said to an audience of nearly 1,000 students, parents, teachers and corporate donors.
As the Florida coordinator of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), I am frequently asked by Democrats in other states why so many elected Florida Democrats support all forms of school choice, including vouchers and tax credit scholarships, but not tenure and teacher pay reforms. The answer is black middle-class jobs and the rise of black-owned schools.
During the days of Jim Crow, school districts were the biggest employers of college educated African-Americans and even though other professions have opened up, school districts today remain a leading employer of college-educated African-Americans. Consequently, education reforms that are perceived as negatively impacting school districts are usually opposed by the black community. This is one reason former chancellor Michelle Rhee’s effort to reduce job protections for Washington, D.C. educators was so fiercely opposed by many district African-Americans, even though they knew black children were benefitting. Saying that school districts should put the needs of students above the concerns of adults ignores that adults feed, clothe and house students and meeting those needs is difficult without a job.
Every Florida black elected legislator opposed the early school choice programs, but the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students and the McKay Scholarship for exceptional students have caused a change in attitude. These programs have enabled black churches and community groups to create financially viable schools, and as these schools have grown so has black political support for school choice. Black ministers are employing black teachers and administrators to work in their growing schools and are seeing the lives of black children turned around. These ministers, in turn, are pressuring black elected officials to support these scholarship programs, and they are responding. (more…)
Florida is one of seven states with no personal income tax, which explains why its Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students depends on corporations for contributions. A rally in St. Petersburg today also explains why the approach strengthens education options in this state.
The rally is an annual celebration of the corporate contributors, and it has come to be a sizeable event that is attended by students, parents, educators, civic leaders, mayors, key legislators and governors. Gov.-elect Rick Scott took time away from his busy transition schedule today to speak, and the event was emceed by a University of West Florida freshman who failed third grade twice before switching to the scholarship and becoming the first in her family to attend college.
The larger point here is that executives of some of Florida’s most successful businesses gather to be recognized and to voice their own public support for the scholarship. UnitedHealthCare of Central Florida CEO David Lewis, whose company has given $20-million in tax-credited contributions in the past two years, was one of those today. He told the audience: “We are honored to be part of a program that is making such a profound impact on Florida’s children and ultimately our future.”
This is good news for education reform because it allows businesses to become partners. (more…)
In one part of the country, parents are forcing reform in their school by triggering a law that would bring in a charter company to take things over. In another region, a school board has voted to put the interests of students and families ahead of its own by taking a step toward a pilot voucher program in the next academic year.
Both are signs that, as former assistant education secretary Bruno V. Manno recently said in Education Week, “families have hijacked the long-winded debates on school choice, taking the power to make a decision about which school a child attends away from bureaucrats, thereby empowering themselves.”
Consider families at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif. Sixty-two percent of the school’s parents signed and submitted on Tuesday a petition to the school district that would require district officials to bring in a charter company to run the school. The initiative activates California’s new “parent-trigger” law, under which families can bring sweeping changes to the state’s lowest-performing schools. “Yes, we can!” parents chanted at district headquarters.
On the same day, the school board in Douglas County, Colo., took another step toward providing additional educational options in its district by ordering its superintendent to investigate whether school vouchers would be good for the school system. The board’s president said he would like a pilot voucher program for the 2011-12 school year. (more…)
Families everywhere will benefit from Michelle Rhee’s impatience with the staid politics that interfere with new ideas in education, even if those benefits may not be entirely clear yet. Lost in the media blitz over Rhee’s latest effort to speed the transformation of public education is her support of parental choices, support that goes beyond simply calling for more charter schools.
Rhee has lent her support to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, and she made it clear yesterday that her new advocacy group, Students First, will push for similar programs. Getting states to clear the obstacles to additional charter schools and pushing for opportunity scholarships will anchor what Rhee identified as a key component of a four-part legislative agenda for the group: an expansion of school choice and competition.
Rhee understands that expanded choices in education are critical to the success of any reform, and she also knows it will take a significant grassroots effort to convince elected leaders of that. Advocates of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship went through great pains to fight for renewal of the program, only to see it flounder among the opposition of Congressional Democrats. (more…)
Speaking with education reformers by phone this morning, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee announced her plans to ensure the political climate is friendly to bringing robust change to public education nationwide.
The brainchild of Rhee's ambitions will be called Students First, a 501c4 nonprofit that she said would be politically active in supporting reform-minded candidates for political office. Just minutes after she announced her news to Oprah Winfrey's viewers in the Chicago area, Rhee identified four parts to a legislative agenda she said she "hopes to be a gold standard for what policymakers should have in place."
Those elements are:
In a Newsweek piece titled, "What I've Learned," Rhee elaborates further on what has driven her next enterprise.
A new report from Andrew Coulson helps bring context to one of the most bedeviling issues we face when sending public school students to otherwise private schools: What’s the right way to hold these schools accountable?
Let’s respect that Coulson, the astute director of Cato Institute’s Educational Freedom Center and a free-market advocate, is focused on what he views as the potential for “regulatory suffocation” of tax credit scholarship and voucher schools in 15 states. His report nonetheless presents an intriguing contrast between the levels of regulation. He finds that voucher regulations in places such as Ohio, Louisiana, and D.C., are multiple orders of magnitude more strenuous than those for tax credit scholarship programs in states such as Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Coulson controlled for enough variables that he can plausibly make the case that “tax credits seem significantly less likely than vouchers to suffer the Catch-22 described in the introduction – less likely to suffocate the markets to which they aim to expand access.” But let’s leave aside the question of whether there is a genuinely different political impulse for accountability between these two programs, and address the responsibility for advocates of private choice.
Coulson is right that regulating private schools in precisely the same way as public schools tends to undermine their uniqueness and defeat the purpose of offering them as alternatives. But it is simply untenable in a public education world that is being measured and forced to account for student outcomes to suggest that private options are exempt. If tax money is being spent, directly or indirectly, then the schools need to answer for it. (more…)
The tantrum Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert has thrown over the departure of NBA league MVP LeBron James was part of the subplot Thursday night as 7-million viewers watched James return to Cleveland in a Miami Heat uniform. But it is also a reminder that not all unions exist merely to protect an employee’s tenure.
In professional sports unions, free agency is the Holy Grail. Through free agency, individuals can sell their services to the highest bidder. All the sports unions have fought — and continue to fight – bitter battles with team owners for the right to free agency. Teacher unions, on the other hand, have historically fought against free agency. They oppose teachers having the ability to sell their services to the highest bidder, but this opposition is illogical in this emerging new public education system.
Customization may someday force teachers to adopt a new unionism that includes some form of free agency. As public education moves away from the one-size-fits-all assembly line and towards customization, teacher unions will lose market share to schools that aren’t easily covered by a master collective bargaining agreement. So they might be forced to consider other models, and pro sports unions are one. Whereas teacher unions use their collective power to disempower individuals, pro sports unions use their collective power to empower individuals.
The 1930s model of industrial unionism teachers embraced in the 1960s and 70s is obsolete and no longer serves teachers well. A new teacher unionism is inevitable – a topic I’ll write more about in future posts.
Outgoing New York schools chancellor Joel Klein is right to identify that low-income families deserve to have the best educational options available to them, but he frames the argument for school choice in a way that stops short of advocating for equal opportunities for our most disadvantaged families.
In the Wall Street Journal today, Klein reflects on his tenure running the nation's largest school system and explains how his embrace of charter schools was especially controversial in a district where, he wrote, "bureaucrats, unions and politicians had their way." He writes, "the debate shouldn't be about whether a school is a traditional or charter public school. It should be about whether it's high-performing, period."
Allow us to take his argument a step further, in two ways. First, charter is not the only alternative for underprivileged children. Second, we should take special care when labeling any school as high- or low-performing, because the variation within schools is typically greater than between schools. An International Baccalaureate school is high-performing based on standardized test performance and many other measures, but is not necessarily the best fit for all students. (more…)
Midway through this week’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C., I was reminded of an observation Thomas Kuhn made in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While researching how scientific fields progress, Kuhn found that during paradigm shifts communities work to improve the old paradigm while simultaneously creating the new paradigm that will render much of the old paradigm irrelevant.
Ending social promotion is a good example of this phenomenon in education today. Reformers in Washington were discussing the importance of ending social promotion while advocating for a customized public education system in which assembly-line education, and therefore grade-level promotion, no longer exists.
Tenure reform and merit pay are also good examples. These reform discussions usually assume employment and compensation will continue to be centrally determined, but in the new paradigm these decisions will probably be made at the school level or below, which means they will have little or no systemic implications. Tenure and merit pay are not contentious issues today within charter school and virtual learning communities. (more…)
