The legislative push in Florida on education is being generally described as light this year, with most of the emphasis on restoring financial cuts made to public schools last year. That being said, the annual 60-day legislative session has now reached its midpoint, and there are a number of important issues on the table.
Career Academies:
CS/SB 1314, Career-Themed Courses by Sen. Don Gaetz. Last Action: 2/2/12, a committee substitute was approved by the Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee, 6-0. Next up is the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Education PreK-12 Appropriations The bill revises provisions in the Career and Professional Education Act and allows greater access to industry certifications in high demand fields.
Charter Schools:
CS/HB 903, Charter Schools by Rep. Janet Adkins. Last Action: 1/31/12, a committee substitute was approved by the House K-20 Innovation Subcommittee, 12-0. Now in PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee. The bill requires the Commissioner of Education to annually determine a high-performing charter school or school system’s continued eligibility for “high performing” status, prohibits renewing a charter if a school received two “F” grades within a three-year period, and requires each charter school to maintain a website. It also authorizes certain Florida College System institutions to establish one charter school, and requires sponsors to distribute a charter school’s share of federal funds to the school within 60 days.
CS/SB 1852, Charter Schools by Sen. Stephen Wise. Last Action: 2/6/12, a committee substitute was approved by the Senate Education PreK -12 Committee, 5-1. The bill authorizes certain Florida College System institutions to establish one charter school, authorizes each district to share revenue generated by its capital outlay millage levy with charter schools on a per-student basis, and requires sponsors to distribute a charter school’s share of federal funds to the school within 60 days. It also revises certain restrictions on high-performing charter schools. (more…)
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius didn’t set out to make life hard on Catholic hospitals, and it is not difficult to imagine why a guardian of health would come down on the side of contraception. But New York Times columnist David Brooks makes an enticing point as he examines how technocrats, to use his term, tend to cower from complexity and run from religion. He sees those same behaviors tying President Obama in knots on school vouchers.
Wrote Brooks:
"The administration’s policies on school vouchers and religious service providers are demoralizing because they weaken this ecology by reducing its diversity. By ending vouchers, the administration reduced the social intercourse between neighborhoods. By coercing the religious charities, it is teaching the faithful to distrust government, to segregate themselves from bureaucratic overreach, to pull inward."
The communities that a young Barack Obama organized are deeply tied to the church, and those church leaders provide a form of social ballast. Indeed, one of the reasons most of the private schools participating in voucher or tax credit scholarship programs across the country are faith-based is that one of the missions of these schools is to help children who are in social or financial or educational need. That aligns with the mission of most of these private-option programs.
Florida is certainly an example. The Tax Credit Scholarship is available only to students whose household income qualifies them for free or reduced-price lunch, or 85 percent above poverty, and the actual average income this school year is only 12 percent above poverty. In turn, roughly four-fifths of the 38,375 students this year attend faith-based schools.
That these schools are tied in some way to religion can indeed give technocrats serious pause. They think of a wall that is supposed to separate church and state, and forget that the Establishment Cause was prompted by fears not that the government would cooperate with religions but that it would allow for only one. We’re a pluralistic nation, and the participating Florida schools make that point emphatically: Of the participating religious schools, 36 percent are nondenominational, 17 percent Catholic, 16 percent Baptist, 5 percent Seventh Day Adventist, 3 percent Pentecostal, 3 percent Jewish, and the rest representing at least nine other faiths.
These schools are a snapshot of our communities, just as Catholic hospitals are a part of the medical landscape. As long as the government isn’t forcing children to attend them and as long as the options are religiously diverse, then technocrats have nothing to fear. In fact, there is a persuasive constitutional argument that the government can’t offer options that exclude religious ones. More importantly, these kinds of learning options strengthen the public education quilt by adding pieces of community fabric that sometimes can play a constructive role in helping disadvantaged children learn. That’s certainly something community organizer Barack Obama can appreciate.
A parental empowerment bill inspired by the California trigger law has now moved through three different committees in the Florida Legislature, and former California Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero has entered the debate. As those who followed the fight on the Pacific Coast know, this is a deeply personal issue to her.
In a brief commentary today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Ms. Romero reminds us that this issue has cut across party lines and that the end game is not as much about shutting down schools as it is about giving parents a seat at the table. The Florida effort is moving in both chambers with HB 1191 and SB 1718.
Here is a fuller version of her column:
Florida Should Embrace the Parent Trigger
By Gloria Romero
Our children too often function as debit cards for public education, valued in a struggling school system for the cash they bring through the front door. But parents have no such financial interest at stake, and Florida has the chance to give them more of the educational control they deserve. The Parent Empowerment in Education Act, proposed by Rep. Michael Bileca and Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, takes a step toward focusing on the families that schools serve.
I wrote the nation’s first “parent trigger” law, in part because I was frustrated with the lack of urgency in turning around chronically underperforming schools. As a Democratic senator in California, I was tired of the status-quo education interests dictating education policy. Since that bold bipartisan bill was signed into law, some 20 other states have sought to grant this power to parents across the nation. Florida is the latest state to do so. (more…)
The modern school choice movement was made possible by the 1925 Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters. This unanimous decision struck down an Oregon law, which was strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan, requiring all Oregon children be educated in government-run schools. The law was part of the KKK’s anti-Catholic campaign and was intended to force Catholic schools to close.
The court used the 14th Amendment as the basis for its decision. Writing for the court, Justice McReynolds asserted:
“The fundamental theory upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
As Joseph Viteritti, one of the country’s top experts in the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and school choice, has observed, the Pierce decision helped establish “the constitutionally protected right of parents to have their children educated in schools that reflected their own values, as well as the commensurate right of religious and private schools to coexist as viable alternatives to public schools.”
Unfortunately, all parents do not have an equal opportunity to exercise this constitutional right. Parents with sufficient resources may satisfy their state’s mandatory school attendance law by sending their children to secular or sectarian private schools, but parents with insufficient resources cannot. As Steve Sugarman recently wrote on this blog, just as the choices guaranteed by the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision require public funding to be fully realized, so do the choices guaranteed by the Pierce decision.
Over the last decade, school choice opponents have used state and federal constitutional provisions as the basis of legal attacks on various school choice programs, but these same provisions provide the basis for expanding and strengthening school choice. For example, if the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses require that government remain neutral when parents choose their child’s school, then shouldn’t the government provide equal financial support for the parents’ choice — regardless if the chosen school is secular or sectarian? Isn’t government putting its collective thumb on the scale when it financially supports parents to attend secular schools but not sectarian schools? And shouldn’t the Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee low-income parents the same access to sectarian schools as wealthy parents?
Though the Pierce decision is the better part of a century old, it may still have direct relevance to the issues playing out in a public education system that today is trying to keep pace with the individual needs of students and growing demands of parents. Liberty, equality and pluralism are so deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of America that parental choice seems inevitable.
In a Florida House committee last week, a dutiful Democratic representative objected to a bill expanding Tax Credit Scholarships by raising a common objection. “I could run a successful school as well if I could cherry-pick my students, ’’ said Rep. Scott Randolph, “unlike the public schools who take everyone, both low-performing and high-performing.”
Leave aside the fact that the scholarship to which he referred is available only to students whose household income qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch and that the actual average income this year is only 12 percent above poverty. Randolph’s question persists in the national debate, and a new, as-yet-unpublished academic study gives us one of the most complete answers to date about which students choose these private options and why.
The short answer is this: In Florida, the students who choose these scholarships are struggling academically and come from school districts that don’t give them many other options.
The research is titled "Selection in means-tested school voucher program" and was conducted by University of California-Davis education professor Cassandra Hart with help from respected Northwestern University researcher David Figlio. It takes the measure of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which is now 10 years old and has 38,000 students in nearly 1,200 private schools. Figlio has previously determined, with four straight years of consistent data, that students choosing the scholarship are among the lowest performers at the public schools they leave behind. This report goes further in providing context.
The students who choose the scholarship:
“From a policy perspective,” Dr. Hart wrote, “examining public school contexts is important because these policies are often justified as a way to help students exit underperforming, unsafe schools. Knowing that these policies do in fact attract applicants in poor schools is useful in gauging the success of the voucher policies in opening up choices to families in low-quality schools.”
Just as important, the research suggests that, at least in Florida, there is no skimming the educational cream. These are students who are among the lowest academic performers and their parents go through an extensive application process to verify their income and usually pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket to make up the difference between the $4,011 scholarship and actual tuition and fees. As Hart noted, “These time and financial costs suggest that parents are unlikely to apply on a whim. Rather, some specific factors are likely impelling them to apply.”
The people who administer the program in Florida and work with the parents who apply for scholarships typically describe them as desperate. Their children are on a downward path academically, and they’re just looking for an option that might work. In other words, these are not students that most educators would associate with the words "cherry pick."
