It may have drawn bigger headlines if President Obama had supported the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship, but his continued opposition to the program is all the more disappointing for its tenor. The White House's most recent assertion that the program has proven ineffective reads more like a screed from the National Education Association, not from a president whose education secretary is committed, as he said in December, "to empower parents and help them figure out what the best learning environment is for their child."

The absolute characterization that the Opportunity Scholarship has failed to boost achievement and has targeted "a small number of individuals" contrasts illogically with the president's embrace of charter schools, which are no more a scalable solution for all that afflicts public education than are vouchers. Additionally, the administration's statement assumes that vouchers help the few while dooming the rest. The president isn't naive; even if he won't accept the evidence showing positive fiscal and academic imprints left by vouchers in D.C. and in other states, Obama surely can't claim the Opportunity Scholarship hurts the children who remain in public schools. As the Washington Post today stated in its editorial written in response to the president's opposition, the White House has a right to its opinion, but it "doesn't have a right to make up facts."

And so, we are assured further partisan division in Congress over an idea that has attracted more Democratic support in several states for the dignity it brings to low-income families. In today's Indianapolis Star, Michelle Rhee told an interviewer that, as a Democrat, she first came to D.C. and responded to vouchers the way she thought Democrats were supposed to. Then, she said:

I actually changed my mind after I had met lots of families who by my perception were doing exactly the right thing. They researched their neighborhood school, found it was a failing school, said "that is not good enough for my child," then they turned in an application for a dozen high-performing schools on the other side of town. They didn't get a spot through the lottery. They would come to my office and say "now what do I do?" I thought, who am I to deny this family a $7,500 voucher so they could go to, say, a Catholic school where they would get a great education?

The Post editorial board tonight challenges the White House's assertion that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship has failed to demonstrate progress in raising the achievement of the low-income students who benefit. "The White House has a right to its own opinion, as wrongheaded as we believe it to be," it begins. "It doesn't have a right to make up facts."

But beyond the academic progress the program has made -- progress that, as the editorial notes, has been charted rigorously and reported before the Senate -- the Post supports the program, above all, for the dignity it provides to families who have felt all but disempowered without it:

There are, we believe, other benefits to a program that expands educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. The program, which provides vouchers of $7,500 to low-income, mainly minority students to attend private schools, is highly regarded by parents, who often feel it allows their children to attend safer schools or ones that strongly promote achievement. Our view has never been that this voucher program is a substitute for public school or public school reform. But while that reform proceeds, scholarships allow a few thousand poor children to escape failing schools and exercise a right that middle-class parents take for granted — the right, and dignity, of choice.

UPDATE: A team of university researchers is releasing data showing more comprehensive results on the performance of students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program than the state of Wisconsin has shown, according to a story in today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The team, which includes professors John F. Witte of the University of Wisconsin and Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas, have tracked the performance of a sampling of children in the choice program over three years and found that the students performed about the same as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools, not worse. The day before, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released data showing that half the students at either setting read at grade level, but that district students far outperformed choice students in math.  The university team also found that a sampling of ninth-graders in the voucher program had slightly higher rates of graduation and enrollment at a four-year college than a matched sampling of students in the school district.  

The results of Milwaukee's first comparative assessment of students in the Parental Choice Program and those of their peers in the school district have uncorked the kind of responses one might expect from an education policy that has divided the community for more than 20 years. But that does more to highlight the political strains of the voucher program than it does to explain the performance of its 21,000 students.

This is not to dismiss the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's data, which showed that the low-income students in the choice program performed similiarly to their traditional public school peers on free or reduced-price lunch in some ways, and worse in others. About half the students in either setting are reading at grade level. But only 34.4 percent of choice students scored proficiently in math, compared to 43.9 percent among low-income pupils at Milwaukee Public Schools. 

That's certainly not good news for the choice program, but it's hardly the occasion to tell the low-income parents who've chosen to participate that they've been "bamboozled," as one Democratic representative told the Wisconsin State Journal. As University of Wisconsin political science professor John Witte noted, "in order to study achievement growth and gain, you have to study individual students over time." Witte has been among the most clear-eyed and careful scholars to study the academic impact of school vouchers generally and the Milwaukee program specifically, and his careful response to yesterday's news should better inform the state's own superintendent of instruction. Shamefully, state Superintendent Tony Evers distributed a news release statewide showcasing that Milwaukee public schools do it better. 

Such a move from Wisconsin's top educator does nothing to advance the debate over how best to educate our most disadvantaged children in the 21st century. We have a growing array of educational alternatives from which to choose in our public education systems and we should be careful to avoid singling out one option as better than another. Milwaukee's program was created in 1990 at the urging of a Democratic representative who wanted to empower her low-income and mostly minority constituency with the same ability to choose a private or even faith-based alternative that wealthier families had long enjoyed.

This response may seem to avoid the reality of the data. I don't argue that test scores are insignificant, but just as in traditional schools, they are best judged over time. Florida's tax credit scholarship for low-income students suffered the same criticism two years ago. Northwestern University professor David Figlio examined the performance on the Stanford Achievement Test of students in the scholarship program, as commissioned by the state, and found they made the same gains as students of all income levels nationally. The same achievement was not good enough for critics, but Figlio later cautioned against a rush to judgment. "I feel we need to have stronger causal evidence on the relative effectiveness of the program," he told the St. Petersburg Times.

All schools need to be held accountable for learning, and Milwaukee's record of reaching low-income students through either traditional programs or choice leaves considerable room for improvement. But after 20 years, Milwaukee's public school system should have learned to co-exist with schools like St. Thomas Aquinas Academy or Yeshiva Elementary, which can rightfully be called "public" by any definition. Instead of thumbing his nose, Superintendent Evers should work to find common ground to ensure the poorest and lowest-achieving among us enjoy every opportunity that meets their needs.

UPDATE: From the AJC's Get Schooled blog: The state Supreme Court just issued an order extending the term of court as to this case “until further order of the Court.” The court gave no indication on how much longer the case may take.

From today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Charter schools are awaiting a state Supreme Court opinion this week that will decide whether they are allowed to continue operating. The schools are standing their ground and beginning to make back-up plans so they can keep educating students in their care.

Mark Peevy, executive director of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, said he has been in talks with state officials and school operators about what to expect if the legal battle over local control of public education dissolves the commission. The state commission is facing a constitutional challenge filed by seven metro Atlanta school districts who say it illegally approves and funds charter schools.

The commission has approved 17 schools -- nine of which serve students and anticipate a combined enrollment of more than 15,000 students in the fall.

"Obsession with class size is causing many public schools to look like relics," Success Charter Network founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz writes in the Sunday Washington Post. Small class sizes are no guarantee of success, and a "19th-century school can be transformed into a well-managed 21st-century school by adding just two students per classroom."

 As an example, she cites the makeup of the network's crown jewel, the Harlem Success Academy Charter School:

... we’ve gotten some of the best results in New York City ... some classes are comparatively large because we believe our money is better spent elsewhere. In fifth grade, for example, every student gets a laptop and a Kindle with immediate access to an essentially unlimited supply of e-books. Every classroom has a Smart Board, a modern blackboard that is a touch-screen computer with high-speed Internet access. Every teacher has a laptop, video camera, access to a catalogue of lesson plans and videotaped lessons.

Public schools are spending so much to reduce class sizes that there isn't enough left to ensure the development of the teachers they hire, Moskowitz writes. What's worse, she says, human capital is getting more expensive while better technology and intellectual property are getting cheaper.

There are many things we value in public education today that were once unthinkable. Southern school boards defiantly resisted integration. Charter schools were anathema to the Democratic Party. Even International Baccalaureate programs were challenged by well-meaning principals who feared they would cream the best students and dilute traditional public schools.

All of that has changed. But Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews today points to one educational policy that remains politically challenged: school vouchers. He is, of course, correct. Vouchers and tax credit scholarships have enjoyed only modest growth in popularity in some sectors, and have typically taken a pounding at the ballot box. This, for Mathews, is reason enough to abandon hope for any private learning option in public education, even though he admits there's nothing wrong prima facie with vouchers. He writes:

I have never thought that they drained public schools of vital resources. I think a low-income family that gets the chance to choose a private school that suits their child should do so. But I think such programs have limited growth potential because there are never going to be nearly enough empty spaces in private schools to help all the students who need them.

Mathews says he was impressed by a report from Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice that highlights the positive effect of vouchers not only on participating students but on public schools as well. But Mathews counters by comparing two numbers -- the 1.5 million students who attend charter schools and the 190,000 students who attend private schools on public subsidies. Based on that momentum, he says, charters are the better bet.

But education politics are not immutable. Just last month Mathews noted that Congress had to browbeat a reluctant school board in Washington, D.C., 15 years ago to accept charter schools. Today, charters don't elicit the fear in the education world the way they did 15 years ago. In fact, the International Baccalaureate program Mathews values so highly in his ranking of the nation's best public schools was once spurned by educators in traditional schools who feared the loss of their highest-achieving students and the decay of their own advanced-course offerings. Today, no one seriously questions the positive influence of the IB program on school districts. Traditional schools adapted, and strengthened. (more…)

An expansion of what remains of the Opportunity Scholarship in Florida gives us an opportunity to highlight a report that has been largely overlooked but is notable for its implications of how Florida public schools once responded to the threat of vouchers.

As newspapers in Florida reported today, a bill is advancing in the Legislature that expands the definition of a "failing" public school for the purposes of allowing students to transfer to a different school. While most papers called this an expansion of a "voucher" program, the program offers choices only among public schools; the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 ruled that the OSP's private school option violated the state Constitutional provision for a "uniform" system of public schools.

But it is that now-defunct private option that piqued the interest of a researcher with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In a paper the Federal Reserve released this month, economist Rajashri Chakrabarti reported on her findings from the earliest years of the Opportunity Scholarship  after then-Gov. Jeb Bush persuaded the Legislature to establish the program in 1999. Chakrabarti wanted to see how public schools responded to the threat of a voucher in an "accountability regime." Specifically, she wanted to know if F-graded schools faced with the threat of losing students were tempted to "manipulate their test-taking population."

Under Florida's accountability plan, two "F" grades within a four-year period meant that students were eligible for a school voucher. But test scores of special-education and limited-English-proficiency students were exempted from the computation of school grades. Chakrabarti asked, "Did this rule induce the threatened schools to reclassify some of their weaker students into these 'excluded' categories so as to remove them from the effective test-taking pool?"

The answer, she found, was a qualified "yes." She did not find evidence that the voucher led schools to reclassify students into excluded special-education categories. But, she said, "I find evidence in favor of strategic reclassification into the excluded LEP category in high-stakes grade 4 and entry-grade 3." In other words, before the Opportunity Scholarship was in place, Chakrabarti found that schools that would eventually be threatened by the voucher behaved no differently when they classified students in those grades. But in the first year of the program, there was a "statistically significant increase" in the percentage of students classified as having limited English proficiency. 

She writes:

These findings have important policy implications. They suggest that schools facing vouchers tied to accountability regimes might choose to behave strategically to classify their low-performing students into excluded categories in an effort to remove them from the effective test taking pool. It follows that when designing policies that incorporate vouchers (or sanctions) tied to accountability regimes, policymakers should be wary of creating exemptions for certain groups of students as they might create adverse incentives to game the system.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has issued an injunction prohibiting the Compton Unified School District from requiring parents at McKinley Elementary School to verify their signatures in person with photo identification. Judge Anthony Mohr's order gives the district until April 1 to verify the signatures parents submitted to trigger a state law that allowed them to take over the failing school and convert it into a charter academy.

For more on the parent trigger, check out our podcast with Ben Austin, the executive director of the Parent Revolution, the parent advocacy group that fought for the law.

T. Willard Fair, the chairman of the Florida State Board of Education, has resigned to protest Gov. Rick Scott's move to force Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith out of office, The Associated Press is reporting.

Fair, who was term limited, said a move to conduct a national search to replace Smith was bogus. In his letter of resignation, Fair wrote that a national search "flies in the face of reality that Governor Scott will choose his new commissioner.

As the AP notes, Fair was term limited but stayed on because Scott has not yet appointed his successor. Fair also complained that the governor didn't tell the board that he wanted a change in education commissioners until two days after Smith announced his pending resignation. In his letter to the board, Smith said his resignation would be effective June 10. "The time has come," Smith wrote, "to allow our newly elected Governor to have input through the State Board of Education on the type of leader to pursue his goals for education."

From Education News Colorado:

With interest flourishing in the Douglas County voucher pilot, school district officials are working to create the funding mechanism that will allow public dollars to flow through parents to private schools.

Robert Ross, the district’s attorney, said the creation of a district charter school for voucher students is the most likely of three possible options that have been considered, largely because of the flexibility of the state’s charter laws.

“One of the guiding principles here is that we want to make sure that these students are going to be funded,” Ross said Friday. “In order for that to happen, they have to be public school students.”