Archive | February, 2012

In Florida, a teachers union that doesn’t just say no

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On February 29, 2012 in General, Teacher quality, Unionism

Editor’s note: In one of yesterday’s posts, we noted how often school choice supporters are caricatured. But truth be told, we’re not alone. Teachers unions and their members are sometimes dismissed with unflattering generalizations too. Doug Tuthill, a former teachers union president himself, pauses today to spotlight a union right here in our backyard that defies the stereotype.

Jean Clements is the teachers union president in Hillsborough County, Florida, which is the eighth largest school district in the U.S. And she and her union, the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, are unique in a way that deserves national attention – and national praise. While most teacher unions are resisting efforts to systemically improve public education, Jean and her constituents have partnered with their school district to embrace innovations that are taking on all kinds of sacred cows.

Teacher unions came into being in the early 1960s to protect teachers from management decisions, most notably in the areas of employee evaluations and compensation.  Consequently, teachers’ collective bargaining contracts today prescribe evaluation procedures that render evaluations irrelevant except in the most extreme cases, and standardized pay scales that treat every teacher the same, regardless of their effectiveness.  So, naturally,  eyebrows were raised across the country when Jean and her HCTA colleagues partnered with the Hillsborough school district to win a $100 million Gates Foundation grant to reinvent the district’s employee evaluation and compensation systems.

This wasn’t the only time Jean went out on a limb. Continue Reading →

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In Florida, a rare opportunity to redefine supporters of school choice

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On February 28, 2012 in Achievement Gap, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

They hold public schools in contempt. They think private schools are better. They want to privatize everything. Supporters of school choice, including vouchers and tax-credit scholarships, have long been defined by cartoonish stereotypes. And as a former education reporter for one of the biggest newspapers in the country, I know how hard it is to redefine story lines that are so set in stone, it doesn’t matter how overwhelming the evidence is to the contrary.

Glen Gilzean

Glen Gilzean

Glenton “Glen” Gilzean Jr., the newest school board member in Pinellas County, Florida, the seventh biggest school district in Florida and the 24th biggest in the country, has a rare opportunity to chip away at those perceptions.

Appointed last month by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Gilzean, 29, openly supports vouchers and tax-credit scholarships for low-income children, which makes him as rare among school board members as a mouse at a cat convention. We can’t think of another sitting school board member in Florida who so openly supports private school choice options.

Believing that such options hold promise, of course, does not in any way mean easing up on other efforts to improve outcomes for children within public schools. For many school choice supporters, it has never been either/or. Gilzean can show that in coming months as he weighs in on all kinds of decisions affecting a sprawling district of 101,000 students. Continue Reading →

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Good job, now get back to work

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On February 28, 2012 in Education Research, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students got a pat on the back Monday at a State Board of Education workshop, albeit from a not-unexpected source. But the brief discussion that followed the presentation was a reminder that the oversight for these educational endeavors, even one that is now a decade old and the largest of its type in the nation, can benefit from open-minded questions.

The attaboy came from Scott Jensen, senior governmental affairs advisor for the American Federation of Children. (Full disclosure: John Kirtley, founder and board chairman for Step Up for Students, the nonprofit that oversees Florida’ tax credit scholarships, is AFC’s vice president.) The board workshop was focused on choice options in Florida, both public and private, and Jensen highlighted the state’s reputation as a national leader in a choice movement that has moved from fringe to mainstream in just the past decade.

The Florida scholarship is a model for other states, Jensen said, because its per-student scholarship amount – $4,011 this school year – is enough to give low-income parents real options. (The average for other states with such programs, he said, is between $1,500 and $2,000.) It has financial and academic reporting requirements. And it is a verified money saver for state taxpayers, according to, among other reputable sources, OPPAGA – the Florida Legislature’s respected research arm. “That has been helpful to us around the country as we encourage other states to adopt these programs,” Jensen told the board. “They’re very reluctant, given no track record in their states, to say it’s going to cost money or save money. The good work that’s been done in Florida is very valuable to that.”

But as we all know, the good work isn’t done yet. Continue Reading →

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Who you calling conservative?

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On February 27, 2012 in Charter Schools, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice

I am a left-of-center Democrat who’s been an education reformer for 34 years and have always considered myself progressive, so I was surprised when the Ledger, a newspaper in central Florida, recently asserted that education reformers in Florida are conservative:

“Conservative education reformers are back in the state Capitol this year with an array of proposals that would strengthen alternatives to Florida’s traditional public schools, from more private school vouchers to expanded virtual education programs.  But the bills promoting charter schools are generating the most resistance from public school districts.”

Now I’m not naive to the partisan politics that shape many of these debates and, given the large Republican majorities in the Florida Capitol it is hardly surprising they would be driving the agenda. But let’s pause for a moment on the term “conservative education reformers.”

I’ve always assumed traditionalists protecting the status quo were conservatives, while those advocating improvements were progressives.  Had this Ledger writer shared my assumptions, he would have written, “Progressive education reformers are back in the state Capitol…”, and the next sentence would have read, “But the bills promoting charter schools are generating the most resistance from conservative public school districts.”

Even if the writer in this case is using the terms conservative and progressive as synonyms for Republican and Democrat, he still has some explaining to do. Clearly, not all charter school supporters are Republicans. President Obama is a charter school advocate, as was President Clinton, and these men are both prominent Democrats. In Florida, the original charter school bill was signed into law by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, also a Democrat.

Given how rapidly the political landscape surrounding education reform is shifting, trying to label reformers as conservative or progressive seems counterproductive.  The most successful public education reformers are values-driven pragmatists who effectively balance progressive and conservative solutions.  So are education reforms conservative or progressive?  They’re both.

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Hello from the new guy

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On February 27, 2012 in Parental Choice, Private Schools, Religious education, School Choice

Hi everybody. My name is Ron Matus. I’m the new assistant director of policy and public affairs at Step Up for Students, a nonprofit in Tampa, Florida that oversees a tax credit scholarship for 38,000 low-income students. Among other responsibilities, I’ll be editing redefinED, which means I have the unenviable task of replacing the irreplaceable Adam Emerson, who put this forum on the map and is now the school choice czar at the Fordham Institute. I have mountains of homework to do before I can approach the depth and breadth of knowledge that Adam brought to redefinED. But I am pumped about keeping the blog’s spirit alive and finding ways to bring more people into the conversation. I think redefinED stands out for its tone and view. I appreciate its humility. And I know it is absolutely on point in 1) trying to reshape what is meant by “public education” and 2) accentuating the common ground between so many of us who have somehow been segregated into warring camps.

I’m sure I’ll be sharing more about myself in future posts, but for now I think two things are worth noting.

I was a newspaper reporter for 25 years. Continue Reading →

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Building a new education system with an old financial formula

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On February 15, 2012 in Charter Schools, Funding, General, Parental Choice

A new report on how charter schools are funded in Florida is a reminder that being different typically comes at a price. Though state policymakers are indeed charting new approaches in the field of public education, their budget writers are still ciphering students in the same old ways. The impact is difficult to overstate.

How Charter School Funding Compares, written by the respected nonprofit Florida TaxWatch, looks beneath the hood of a state funding system that ostensibly delivers the same per-student allocation whether the student is in a traditional public school or a charter school. But what it determines is that charter schools are funded, per student, at roughly 68 to 71 percent of a traditional public school.

This finding might seem at odds with a state that has allowed charter schools since 1996 and has positioned itself among the national leaders with 180,000 students enrolled. But TaxWatch describes the dilemma this way: “Because the charter school model is both a relatively new entrant to the state’s public education system and a rapidly expanding educational delivery option, there is much discussion, and confusion, concerning the differences in funding between charter schools and traditional district schools. Because of a variety of factors, largely stemming from the relational dependency of charter schools on their local authorizing agency, commonly the local school board, questions of equal distribution of funding from federal, state, and local sources have emerged.”

The charter school math works like this: the per-student allocation removes between 2 and 5 percent for district School Board oversight, doesn’t include some local and federal sources or some spending categories deemed not relevant, and takes most of the capital money off the table entirely. That’s how a Florida charter school student ends up worth 70 cents on the public school dollar. Continue Reading →

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What other nations are telling us about educational diversity

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On February 14, 2012 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, Religious education

This essay was first posted at the CLR Forum by the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University School of Law.

In a recent column for the New York Times, David Brooks argued that a healthy society requires a “thick ecosystem” in which diverse organizations create a rich “spiritual, economic and social ecology.” He contrasted this with an abstract, rule-based “one-size-fits-all” approach favored by government technocrats. He wrote, “Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity.”

Brooks’s contrast applies to public education: America favors technocratic uniformity, while most other liberal democracies prefer a diverse ecosystem.

Here are a few examples of diverse educational ecosystems from other countries. Some good sources on this are Helena Miller’s work on Jewish schooling; Salisbury and Tooley on international comparisons; and Glenn’s Contrasting Models.

  • New Zealand has three different categories of schools: state-sponsored schools, state-integrated schools, and fully independent schools. They receive differing amounts of government funding and a commensurate level of state regulation.
  • Four Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec) allow 50 percent of total per capita costs to follow children to the school of their parents’ choice. Alberta also grants some funding for families who home school. Continue Reading →

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Retracing America’s path away from pluralism

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On February 13, 2012 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, Religious education

This essay was first posted at the CLR Forum by the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University School of Law.

Let me begin with a thought experiment. Suppose that a majority of parents in a school district wished their children to have a traditional curriculum that included Latin, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, sentence diagramming, advanced mathematics and experimental science. Also suppose these parents wanted the teachers to have subject matter instead of education degrees. Suppose, further, they wanted the philosophical framework of their children’s schooling to be Modern Orthodox Judaism. Finally, suppose that these parents agreed to comply with the district’s regulations for school facilities, extracurricular activities and student-teacher ratios, and to surpass the district’s academic standards.

Would the district fund the new school? No, because the United States’ educational system was not designed to allow this kind of diversity.

This comes as no surprise to most Americans. But they might be surprised to learn that this is in sharp contrast to virtually every other liberal democracy. In England, for example, if such parents provide 15 percent of the capital costs, Central Government contributes the remaining 85 percent and also funds the ongoing operations of the school. In the Netherlands, the new school would be funded on an equal footing with the Muslim, Catholic, Montessori, and Anthroposophic schools down the street.

Continue Reading →

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Is parental choice really the enemy?

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On February 8, 2012 in Funding, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice

Back in December, some of the top elected and appointed officials in Seminole County schools used a public meeting covered by the Orlando Sentinel to blame Florida’s tax credit scholarship for low-income children for their financial woes. They called the program a “travesty” and “part of an agenda” to weaken public schools. The school board chairwoman also claimed “there is no accountability in the program.”

It saddened me to see officials of a quality school system such as Seminole making such factually incorrect and inflammatory remarks, but they weren’t finished. This week, Seminole school superintendent Bill Vogel was asked tough questions by county commissioners who wonder whether his district had built too many schools in the face of declining student enrollment. His response was to again blame parental choice programs, according to the Sentinel, saying his district will need to close down schools because of “a huge shift to charter schools and private school vouchers — programs that Seminole school officials do not favor.”

Please allow me to lay out some facts.

First, let’s report on what the state’s independent researcher has determined about Tax Credit Scholarships:

  • Scholarship students are poorer than their peers on free or reduced-price lunch in public schools.
  • They are among the worst performers at their public schools when they leave on scholarship.
  • Their learning gains are slighter higher than their peers in public schools — a notable achievement for kids who might normally keep trending downward.
  • The more a public school’s students participate in the scholarship, the higher the learning gains for the kids who remain at that public school.

Second, let’s look at the impact of private options on Seminole school enrollment forecasts and planning. In Seminole today, there are:

  • 588 students on the Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students.
  • 480 students on the McKay Scholarship for disabled students.
  • 814 students in charter schools.
  • 63,872 students in public schools.

In other words, only 2.7 percent of the district’s traditional public school students are attending private options. And yet the students are cited as the main source of the financial woes of the district, and the reason public schools need to be shut down. The district has become so averse to parental choice that the School Board voted recently to restrict student transfers even within traditional public schools next year. I have to believe that restricting public school choice will only spur more parents to seek choice outside of the district-run schools.

Perhaps someday the board and the superintendent will accept a new definition of “public education.”  The old definition: all tax dollars are used by district-run schools with students assigned by zip code. The new definition: using taxpayer dollars to educate children using the best methods, and the best providers, for each individual child. Sadly, I think the day they adopt this definition is far away.

 

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He didn’t really say that, did he?

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On February 8, 2012 in Achievement Gap, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, Unionism

New Jersey employs a brand of education politics that is not renowned for its nuance or subtlety, so let’s credit New Jersey Education Association Director Vincent Giordano with raising the bar. In an interview on the New Jersey Capitol Report over the weekend, Giordano was pressed on the timely subject of a legislative proposal there to give private learning options to low-income students who attend public schools that are judged to be under-performing. For context, let’s add the fact that, according to the Newark Star-Ledger, his salary in 2010 was roughly $422,000.

His response, captured in this video clip, is nothing if not succinct: “Well, you know, life’s not always fair and I’m sorry about that.”

Giordano is no doubt thinking better of his remarks today. But it does seem fair to point out that key New Jersey Democrats, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker, support the scholarship option precisely because life is unfair for children who grow up in poverty. The mayor sees the scholarship as one modest way to try to level the playing field.

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