The American Enterprise Institute brought together some luminaries in academia and policy yesterday to ask whether vouchers "force public schools into a zero-sum game by redirecting public funds and promising students to private schools? Or do school-choice options spur healthy competition by pressuring public schools to improve." The forum was built, in part, around the research of Northwestern University economics professor David Figlio, who recently found that the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program boosted the academic performance of the public schools faced with the threat of losing students to the program. (Disclosure: the editors and contributors of redefinED work for the nonprofit that administrates the Florida program) Other panelists included Grover J. Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, Nada Eissa of Georgetown University and Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute.
The video here runs nearly 90 minutes:
For sharing a stage with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to urge passage of a tax credit scholarship bill to benefit low-income students, for pushing an expansion of charter schools in some of Camden's most depressed neighborhoods, Democratic power broker George Norcross finds himself the target of attack ads engineered by the New Jersey Education Association disparaging Norcross and Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney for backing legislation that would require the state's public employees to pay more for health and pension benefits.
In response, Norcross surrounded himself with influential Democrats who stood in his defense, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Gov. James J. Florio. "What I saw this past week in an attack ad was a departure from the sensible -- was painful and poisonous -- and not in any way adding what is necessary for us to move forward," Booker said.
The Wisconsin Assembly passed Gov. Scott Walker's state budget early today, which would expand the City of Milwaukee's school voucher program to schools in Milwaukee County and in Racine. Despite a plan to bring the choice program to Green Bay, The Associated Press reported that Republican leaders failed to generate enough support in the face of strong opposition from Green Bay school leaders.
The budget bill passed along party lines, with no Democrats voting in support. The Senate will take up the measure later today.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest school voucher program in the nation, currently serves about 21,000 students at 102 private schools in the city.
When a school board president tells the New Jersey Education Association that its lobbyists and spokespeople "appear conditioned to defend the status quo with Pavlovian predictability," it's a clear sign there is more nuance to the debate over education reform than the union is willing to acknowlege. Laura Mercer, a former college instructor and current president of the Lawrence Township School Board in Mercer County, N.J., begins her piece today in NJ Spotlight by highlighting the party affiliations of some of the most serious education reformers in America and in New Jersey, pointing out that they're from the Democratic Party the union has been historically aligned with.
"In both policy and politics, education reform is neither red nor blue," Waters writes. "It's purple."
To that end, Waters has urged the NJEA to "eschew anachronistic slogans for 21st century strategies" by considering three suggestions. She writes:
--While the NJEA’s publicity propounds that "high-quality public charter schools" are "one component of an innovative, progressive system of public education," the union seems to spend a lot of time deriding these autonomous public schools, even those in districts suffering from decades of educational neglect. Get out in front of the issue and announce a pilot program of NJEA-sponsored charter schools. Your sister union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), did the same thing in New York City years ago and won accolades. Consider teaming up with the Education Law Center to create rigorous, inclusive programming with unionized teachers in one of our Abbott districts. Show New Jersey how to do it right.
--Propose a merit pay program for your colleagues willing to teach in Abbott districts. No education reform initiative ever dreamed of can approximate the value of a great teacher in the classroom. However, our neediest districts struggle to retain our best educators. In New Jersey, the average percentage of classes not taught by highly qualified teachers is a praiseworthy 0.3 percent. In Camden, it’s 16.5 percent. Show the Department of Education that the NJEA is able to create a framework that offers incentives for great teachers willing to work in our most challenging classrooms.
--NJEA President Barbara Keshishian should propose an annual 2 percent cap on salary increases. Over 70 percent of a typical district’s budget is dedicated to salary and benefits. Last year’s legislation capped annual budget increases at 2 percent. Staff contracts that specify salary increases higher than 2 percent can only be paid for through cuts in instructional programs, extracurricular activities, supplies or overhead. That’s a no-win scenario for local bargaining units and the NJEA’s public image. Take the high road and offer to keep salary increases within legislated limits. Everyone -- red, blue, and purple -- will applaud your largesse.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting today that the Georgia Supreme Court won't reconsider its 4-3 decision last month declaring the Georgia Charter Schools Commission unconstitutional. The commission, the court ruled, empowered the state to approve charter schools over the objections of local school boards. Chief Justice Carol W. Hunstein said that only locally elected boards of education were empowered under Georgia's Constitution to open and finance public schools.
The request for reconsideration came from Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, a move that even charter school advocates called a "Hail Mary."
In addition to calling for mayoral control of Baltimore's troubled public school system, Democratic candidate Otis Rolley told The Baltimore Sun that he wants to close the city's five worst-performing schools and award students $10,000 vouchers to use at private or parochial schools. While Rolley's proposal is unfortunately predicated on a failing-schools model of choice, he would empower any parent of a middle-school aged child to choose from any public middle school in Baltimore.
"It's in middle school that we're losing kids," said Rolley, Baltimore's former city planning director who now works as the senior manager for Urban Policy Development LLC, which describes itself as a minority-owned public sector management consulting firm that helps public school districts, state education agencies and local government agencies "transform into organizations that manage performance for better outcomes."
He continued, "I think it's crucial when we're talking about rebuilding Baltimore to have a real choice for parents."
Earlier this year, Rolley got a political boost from entertainer and education advocate Bill Cosby, who led a $4,000-per-head fundraising event in January and lamented the "intertia and entropy" present in Baltimore's governmental status quo.
In a weekend interview with The New York Times, former tennis star Andre Agassi elaborated on the motivation for his plans to finance the construction of as many as 75 charter schools in the United States during the next several years:
Every school, I will partner with the best in-class operators, so these won’t be Agassi schools. Now charter schools as a whole aren’t necessarily high performing because there are so many mom-and-pop shops, but the top 10 percent, the best in-class charter school operators, are incredibly high performing. So what we want to do is help them expand their footprint, and one of the single greatest impediments to the growth of charter schools are not the software, not the children or the teachers. It’s the facilities themselves. Operators cannot access public dollars in a charter school space to build their facility, but the money from that state is allocated to those children if they go to a charter school. So if you can find a way to actually build the facilities and find a way to actually create a return for investors, you have now access to a pool of resources that has traditionally never been invested in the space. So it’s very innovative, it’s very visionary and it’s incredibly timely.
Amid my overly academic analysis of the Southern Education Report report on Georgia’s flawed Tax Credit Scholarship law, I failed to mention an important and highly relevant development on the ground there. The law may in fact be overly permissive and lack sufficient accountability, but at least one scholarship organization is doing things the right way. It is called the Arete Scholars Fund.
Arete targets scholarships to only low-income students and operates with genuine transparency and accountability. The organization was just created last year by two men, Atlanta Falcons CFO Greg Beadles and Arete executive director Derek Monjure, who are in this for all the right reasons. They have voluntarily limited full scholarships to students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The average household income for their students is only 15 percent above poverty, and three-fifths of the students are minority and two-thirds are being raised by a single guardian.
At Arete, parents choose any school they want. Neither donors, schools nor Arete has a say in that decision. The organization also verifies household income every year, and its own books are audited and it discloses full data about its students and contributions.
I was remiss to tell this important story, because our own tax-credit scholarship organization, Step Up For Students in Florida, is a partner with Arete. So I didn’t want to appear to be tooting either their or our horns. But now that I am toot mode, I will also share that the report did single out Florida’s tax credit scholarship law as a model for Georgia to follow. That’s certainly a source of pride for those of us who have worked hard to bring the right balance of transparency and accountability, and here’s what the report said:
“The neighboring state of Florida offers an example of a tax-credit educational program that has evolved and improved over the last few years. As a public-private venture, it has begun to require more effective measures for public accountability and educational performance from all entities and all private schools that take tax-diverted funds to support student learning.”
The Southern Education Foundation’s new and scathing report on the Georgia Tax Credit Scholarship does veer into some unfortunate doctrinaire attacks on religion and race, but its description of the missing layers of public accountability is largely on target. That the report’s title, A Failed Experiment, turns on some unproven assumptions is, unfortunately, part and parcel to debate. The reality is that, three years into this program, no one can really say.
The report states:
The law in its present form contains a number of troubling features. It lacks transparency regarding contributors, beneficiaries, and the criteria by which scholarships are awarded or even the size and number of scholarships awarded. Nor do the schools involved appear to be subject to any accountability regarding the academic standards in force or academic outcomes of their students. There are no income limits for eligibility and, in the absence of a mandate to report demographic information on participating students, it is difficult to see how the program is meeting its stated policy objective of increasing the affordability of private schools for low-income families.
Though the report suffers generally from conjecture and overstatement, that observation is certainly credible. A law that was to serve low-income children, for example, does in fact contain no income eligibility requirement and no requirement that income even be gathered and reported. Worse, some of the lapses in execution appear to have been by design. For example, the Georgia law requires scholarship students to come from public schools (unless they are starting kindergarten), which is a common provision in other states. The report not only documents that private schools and scholarship organizations are counseling parents to beat the system by merely registering at a public school. It also features transcripts of a legislative author now telling schools he intended to create the loophole by inserting the word “enroll” as opposed to “attend” in the law.
Needless to say, this is no way to inspire public confidence. Private learning options don’t need to be held to precisely the same standards as traditional public schools in order to prove their value in a diverse and customized world of education. But these scholarships are funded by tax-credited contributions that would otherwise end up in the state treasury and they must be answerable to the public. That includes assuring the money is spent as intended and that the scholarships are provided only to the target students.
As readers of this blog are aware, we work for a Tax Credit Scholarship program in Florida. So it is no surprise that we believe fervently that these kinds of learning options are a vital tool for economically disadvantaged students who suffer enormous odds and have few choices. But we also see these programs as part of the public education system, broadly defined, and so the challenge is to find the right vehicles for public transparency and assessment. As this new report suggests, Georgia has a long way to go.
by Kenya Woodard
I made it a priority to join my college’s NAACP branch when I enrolled in the fall of 1997. But just a year later, I let my membership lapse. While I’m sure part of my disassociation was due to my participation in other activities, I do remember feeling disconnected from the 102-year-old civil rights organization.
I was reminded of that split after reading about the NAACP’s controversial lawsuit against New York City as well as the accusation from the group's New York President, Hazel Dukes, that persons of color who support the decision to co-locate traditional and charter schools in the same building – essentially, expanding school choice – are “doing the business of slave masters.” Luckily, as the public affairs officer of a nonprofit organization that strives to provide school choice options to low-income students, and who also happens to be black, I didn’t take Dukes’ raw language personally.
By Tuesday, Dukes somewhat softened her tone in an interview with NY1, telling a reporter that she wasn’t against charter schools and that “parents have a right for choice.” The motive for the NAACP’s lawsuit, she said, is the pursuit of “justice and equality.”
But the lawsuit and Dukes’ initial remarks have cast the organization as out of touch and divisive. New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch captured it best when he wrote in his June 6 column:
The suit is proof of how low a great civil rights organization has fallen since its days of advocating for racial equality in the face of tremendous hatred.
... The NAACP significantly shifted the American racial consciousness in 1954 when it won the Brown vs. Board of Education decision before the Supreme Court. This began a systematic dismantling of Southern segregation once and for all.
So what has happened since? Not knowing when to hold or when to fold, the NAACP refuses to look at public education with any kind of nuance. If it did, it would understand that the UFT and its allies are only hurting the push for fair schools that began with the Brown victory more than a half-century earlier.
As a columnist for my college paper, I penned a piece expressing my frustration at the lack of baton-passing from Dukes’ generation to mine, asking the question, “Are there any black leaders emerging from my generation?”
In the years since that column was published, I’ve surmised that maybe it’s not prudent for my peers to look to the older generation for a tap on the shoulder. Dukes’ lashing out and the NAACP’s lawsuit reaffirmed that belief.
