Archive | January, 2011

Accelerating the merger of public education and publicly-funded education

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On January 30, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice

As publicly-funded private schools have become more integrated into public education, the terms “publicly-funded education” and “public education” are becoming synonymous. I noticed the latest evidence of this semantic merger from Sara Mead earlier this month on her blog, Policy Notebook. Mead wrote that:

… charter schooling and publicly funded pre-kindergarten are both ultimately structural reforms that expand the boundaries of public education and create new spaces and opportunities for educators to serve children. Charter schools do this by allowing organizations other than school districts to operate public schools. Publicly funded pre-k does this by allowing districts and early childhood providers–both existing and new–to receive public funds to serve 4-year-olds.

She’s correct. Publicly-funded providers are expanding the boundaries of public education. Public education today no longer means district schools only, but instead means all publicly-funded education, including charter schools, virtual schools, district schools and private schools receiving pre-K vouchers and tax credit scholarships. One reason I like this semantic and systemic integration is that it move us beyond the trite “private” versus “public” school debates. If all publicly-funded education is public education, then private schools receiving public funds are part of public education. School choice opponents can no longer argue that private schools receiving public funds are draining funds away from public education because these private schools are public education. And teacher unions can provide services to employees in publicly-funded private schools and still maintain their ideological and rhetorical commitment to public education.

Governors and legislatures in states as diverse as New Jersey, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Mexico are discussing legislation to provide families with more publicly-funded learning options via private providers, and many of these proposals will become law in 2011. The merger of public education and publicly-funded education is accelerating.

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Merit pay the MLB way

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On January 29, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher empowerment, Teacher quality, Unionism

As redefineED editor Adam Emerson observed last week, Andy Rotherham and I both like using professional sports comparisons when discussing how to improve teacher employment and compensation practices. But whereas Andy thinks school districts should “act more like professional sports franchises so they can protect and incentivize the talent they most want to hold onto,” I see individual schools as being analogous to professional teams and school districts functioning as the league office.

Major League Baseball does not hire and fire players, nor decide their pay. These decisions are made by individual teams. This decentralized decision making benefits teams and players. Teams are able to hire the players that best meet their needs, and players have 30 different employment opportunities rather than just one. Multiple employers enable baseball players to earn more money by selling their services to the highest bidder, a process called free agency, and to customize their contracts within the parameters of league rules. Some players prefer the security of longer-term contracts, even if it means less money, while others accept less job security in exchange for more money. The players’ union would fiercely resist any attempts by MLB to centralize hiring, firing and compensation decisions, as would the teams.

If public educators were interested in replicating the success of Major League Baseball, we’d move hiring, firing and compensation decisions to the school level. School districts would stop owning and managing schools and instead focus on providing an effective regulatory environment within which the publicly-funded schools under their jurisdiction would operate. In essence, every district school would operate like a charter school. Teacher unions would represent teachers’ interest by ensuring state and district regulations were good for teachers and helping them negotiate contracts with their preferred schools.

The few professional sports leagues that have tried centralized team ownership and player employment have all failed. Public educators understand why.

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How the Democratic Party historically defined equal opportunity in education

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On January 28, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

Columbia University education professor Amy Stuart Wells is troubled by the spread of bipartisanship in education reform. “President Obama’s signature Race to the Top program, which promotes charter schools, state tests, and tough-love accountability for educators, might just as well have been proposed by a Republican president,” she writes in Education Week.

True. But professor Wells has a short memory of what she considers the “traditional goals” of the Democratic Party. Far from subverting the party’s ideals, as she claims, today’s proposals for education reform echo the proposals for school choice and equal opportunity that Democrats advanced more than 40 years ago.

Both Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972 proposed tuition tax credits for elementary and secondary school students in their respective Democratic presidential platforms. Also, in 1978, McGovern joined 23 other Democratic senators in co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan that would have awarded up to $500 in tax credits to families paying private or parochial school tuition. Continue Reading →

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The debate over school choice, and the need for save haven

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On January 28, 2011 in General, Parental Choice, School Choice

In the debate over school choice, it’s easy to overlook a mother’s fundamental need to create a safe environment for her child. But we could inform a more civil discourse over choices in education more generally and the fate of imprisoned Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar more specifically by reminding ourselves that many poor families aren’t just looking for better schools for their children, they need to find safe haven.

You could ask thousands of low-income families participating in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program why they chose the school they did, and many will respond that their decision was influenced by their desire to take their children out of harm’s way. Academics get lost in a child’s anxiety over what’s going to happen at the lockers during class break or on the route home from the schoolhouse. Defense attorney Kerry O’Brien, who represented Williams-Bolar at her trial, could have been speaking for many more when he told an Akron jury that gunfire and neighborhood violence drove his client to make a tough choice.

It is responsible, and ethical, public policy to consider this basic need for safety. When a young girl in northeast Florida named Denisha Merriweather spent much of her time in school brawling with her classmates and failing the third grade twice, it took her aging godmother, Johnell Jones, to intervene. Jones knew that other children harrassed her goddaughter daily and saw that, eventually, Denisha simply disengaged from her education. Jones lived in one of the poorest sections of inner-city Jacksonville, but the state of Florida empowered her with a tax credit scholarship for low-income families to find a school — even a faith-based private school — if that’s what she thought it took to turn her goddaughter around. When Denisha was in the sixth grade, Jones placed her in the Esprit de Corps Center for Learning, a private school that emphasizes structure and discipline. That was six years ago. Today, Denisha is halfway through her freshman year at the University of West Florida.

The inflexibility of a suburban Ohio school district that spent thousands investigating Williams-Bolar to unearth her true residency has led many pundits and activists to condemn the punishment of a mother whom they consider to be the next Rosa Parks. In a statement, the school choice advocacy organization, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, currently chaired by former D.C. councilman Kevin P. Chavous, said that Williams-Bolar faced trial and imprisonment “for pursuing a better educational option for her daughters,” adding:

Her children must, like thousands of other low-income students of color, endure a sentence of their own: consignment to unsafe, underperforming schools in close proximity to their homes, year after year. There is no justice here.”

It took a high-profile prosecution to remind us that, too often, impoverished families are desperate for options. Ms. Jones knew that Denisha could only succeed in a school that nurtured her. Our hope at redefinED is that a story like hers prevents another prosecution like Akron’s.

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The consequences of treating all teachers alike

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On January 27, 2011 in Customization, Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher empowerment, Teacher quality

Andrew Rotherham, in his weekly Time.com column, explores the move among many states to reform laws governing teacher tenure. But when weighing ending the practice of tenure altogether or at least expediting the process of removing teachers guilty of misconduct from the classroom, Rotherham’s commentary takes an intriguing turn toward teacher empowerment (redefinED host Doug Tuthill similarly framed the issue last month):

… both these approaches reinforce an underlying problem in that they basically treat all teachers alike. Why not look to empower teachers and administrators by giving them the ability to negotiate more flexible contracts? Let school districts act more like professional sports franchises so they can protect and incentivize the talent they most want to hold onto. Contracts could offer more than monetary incentives. Excellent teachers could be protected from layoffs, for example, or given enhanced professional development experiences. Most of us are not professional athletes, but you see the same approach in a variety of workplaces all the time.

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President signals support for district school that operates more like a charter

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On January 26, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher quality

Most policy watchers measuring the impact of the State of the Union have responded to President Obama’s calls to reform public education with disappointment, but some have leavened their criticism with details that have been slow to stand out. “The education passages didn’t have a lot of substance but they did have some interesting signals,” said Andrew Rotherham on Eduwonk. One of those signals, Rotherham notes, is the story of Denver’s Bruce Randolph School.

In 2008, Bruce Randolph, a struggling middle school, was granted autonomy from key union and district rules and won what was considered historic freedoms in staffing and scheduling (Mike Antonucci has more backstory here). With that autonomy, Bruce Randolph was able to decide its own calendar, develop its own hiring procedures and devise its own incentives for teachers. Most notable was a decision by then principal Kristin Waters to ask all teachers to reapply for their jobs. Of 40 teachers at the time, only six came back.

The results from that move caught the attention of Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, who visited the school in 2009 and surrounded himself with reporters while praising what Waters had called, “Challenge 2010.” It signaled support for nothing less than a district school that gained the flexibility to operate like a charter. The following summary last spring in The Denver Post appears to have inspired the passage in the president’s State of the Union:

Bruce Randolph — where 95.4 percent of students are poor enough to be eligible for federal meal benefits — could be considered the point of origin for Denver’s education-reform movement.

It is a turnaround school that went from being the state’s worst middle school, located on the turf between two rival gangs, to a grades 6-12 school that on Tuesday graduated 97 percent of its first class of seniors. Eighty-seven percent of those grads were accepted to college. Most will be the first in their families to attend a school of higher education.

“This is what it is all about,” said school board president Nate Easley Jr. “It’s proof that reform works.”

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Democratic support for vouchers? Florida serves as a case study for Boehner, Lieberman.

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On January 25, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

When John Boehner and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation on Wednesday that would reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, as anticipated, they would be wise to look to Florida if they’re looking for bipartisan results, as Boehner has indicated. Lieberman, who became an independent only in 2006, championed voucher proposals for years as a Democrat, but that has never buoyed hopes among the program’s advocates for a bipartisan embrace. Only three other Democratic senators stood by Lieberman in his effort last March to reauthorize the scholarship.

By contrast, nearly half the Democrats in the Florida Legislature now support the Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students, along with two-third of the Black Caucus and all but two members of the Hispanic Caucus. But that ratio of Democrats to Republicans wasn’t always the case. When the Legislature approved the program nearly 10 years ago, only one Democrat backed the plan.

What changed, and why is Florida so different? As Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute told a St. Petersburg Times reporter last year, the chief proponents of the Tax Credit Scholarship have cooled the political rhetoric from years past. That’s unlike Boehner’s provocation at President Obama. The House speaker’s statement to reporters begins, “If the president is sincere about working together on education reform …”

When it came time to consider a bill that would expand and strengthen the scholarship program, the Florida Legislature collectively approved the measure by a 122-34 margin. The following is a selection of quotes from lawmakers who voiced their support on the House or Senate floors. Try to spot who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican. The answer(s) will follow: Continue Reading →

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Rattling the constitutional cage

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On January 24, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice

Ron Meyer is the longtime attorney for the Florida Education Association who has succeeded in getting Florida’s original school voucher program and an independent charter school authorizing panel thrown out in the courts. So when he threatens to sue two other voucher programs if the state moves forward with an even larger plan to provide stipends to any public school student who switches to private school, his warning begs an obvious question. Why hasn’t he sued already? The other two programs have existed for a decade.

Welcome to the constitutional cloud through which most ambitious states are now flying as they try to square a 21st century education with what in most cases are largely 19th century constitutional scripts.

Meyer is a smart and experienced attorney who is earning his pay when he says, as he did Sunday to Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, that: “If we go back to court now – and I think we would go back to court if there were this voucher-for-everybody concept – these other programs would be impacted.”

So let’s put aside the bravado and look through his constitutional lens. Like many states, Florida has a provision for a “uniform” system of public schools. A variation first appeared in 1868, as a call for a “uniform system of Common Schools” aimed at establishing the ambition that all schools would possess similar resources. But in 2006, the Florida Supreme Court threw out former Gov. Jeb Bush’s Opportunity Scholarship Program because “it diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools.” Continue Reading →

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DFER: Promote school reform through community action

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On January 21, 2011 in General, Grassroots

Today, our friends at Democrats for Education Reform bring us their thoughts on the power of community. Michigan DFER director Harrison Blackmond points to examples where community and grassroots action culminated in educational policies that upended the status quo, such as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship and the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. But, as Blackmond notes, “such efforts nationally are few and far between.”

In Michigan, like most states, the education reform movement appears to be led, for the most part, by those suspected of having other agendas. Whether true or not, this suspicion undermines the legitimacy of our efforts and authority to speak for those most adversely affected by the status quo — parents, students and the communities in which they reside.

He continues:

As a participant in and observer of the civil rights, antiwar, environmental and labor movements, I have come to appreciate the value of large scale community organizing as a strategy to promote social change and specifically school reform. What seems to be missing, in large measure, from school reform strategies is large scale community organizing to force reform within urban school districts.

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Getting beyond left and right in education reform, a rally from an unlikely source

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On January 21, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Technology and Innovation

Soon after redefinED launched in late November, contributor Jon East commented on Jeb Bush’s call for bipartisanship  in developing “meaningful, child-centered” education reform during the former Florida governor’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C. As Jon noted then, “this is not to be dismissed as idle happy talk,” and he should know. Jon covered education policy for more than two decades when he was an editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times, and recalled that “Bush achieved much of his own sweeping education agenda in Florida from 1999 to 2007 through taut partisan muscle …”

This week, Reason.tv released its interview with Bush at the National Summit, exploring mostly Bush’s interest in transformative and disruptive technologies in the classroom. But in the closing seconds of the 6:30 minute video, Bush returns to the theme of bipartisanship and reminds his interviewer of the liberal heritage of school choice:

I think a liberal can support systemic change. School choice in the 60s was a creature of the left, not of the right. It makes no sense for me to think you have the left supporting an unsustainable system and the right not focusing on rising student achievement as a high priority but just kind of focusing on local control being the dominant feature. We need to get the debate beyond that, and I hope to play a role in that.

Here’s the full video:

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