Looking forward to @schoolchoicenow #AFCPolicySummit Mon & Tues. So much to learn & tweet about #schoolchoice #edreform #edpolicy8 hours agoReplyRetweet
FL student Denisha Merriweather among speakers @SchoolChoiceNow #AFCPolicySummit Read about her: http://t.co/pf8vheYoiT #schoolchoice #edFL1 day agoReplyRetweet
"Public education is a collective commitment to each new generation" http://t.co/pSylpSsCAm #schoolchoice #vouchers #edpolicy #edFL1 day agoReplyRetweet
On @TheJusticeDept worries about Wisc #vouchers: "There isn't even a molehill here" http://t.co/XECa6On1JE via @P_Diddy_Wolf #schoolchoice1 day agoReplyRetweet
Florida offers answers to North Carolina questions about #schoolchoice http://t.co/pSylpSsCAm #edreform #edpolicy #vouchers #edFL1 day agoReplyRetweet
FL magnet school considers converting into a charter school to save music & arts programs from budget cuts: http://t.co/ZFFGLyV6Hv #charters1 day agoReplyRetweet
@KhoriWhittaker Thanks so much for the RT!1 day agoReplyRetweet
@mgininger Thank you! Honored to be in the same tweet as @adamjemerson @mattfrendewey @HowardLFuller1 day agoReplyRetweet
@JoyPullmann Thank you!1 day agoReplyRetweet
RT @JoyPullmann: Excited to read the "teachers choosing schools" series coming up from @redefinEDonline http://t.co/GIBCXWpVHM1 day agoReplyRetweet

About Jon East

Policy and communications for Florida education nonprofit
Author Archive | Jon East

Let’s try a little less finger pointing

By on May 3, 2013

finger pointingHaving spent the better part of a quarter-century writing editorials and commentaries for a major metropolitan newspaper, I have wagged my finger with the best of them and spied more than my share of blood on the hands of shameless lawmakers. So I read New York Times columnist David Brooks routinely not only as a form of therapy but inspiration. His column on Tuesday, “Engaged or Detached,” is a wonderfully calibrated look at why the finger pointers teach us far too little.

“The detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans,” Brooks writes. “She is progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue. The detached writer believes that writing is more like teaching than activism. … She sometimes gets passionate about her views, but she distrusts her passions. She takes notes with emotion, but aims to write with a regulated sobriety.”

There is a role for “engaged” writers who fire up the troops, but Brooks’ “detached” writer is the model that should motivate those of us who want to make a difference in the educational arena. Neither I nor this blog, redefinED, always measure up to that intellectual test. But it is something to which we aspire, and I can only hope that my former colleagues in journalism would as well.

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Parent trigger bill goes down to defeat in Florida Senate

By on April 30, 2013

Parental trigger history repeated itself in Florida’s Senate today. After deadlocking last year on a plan to let parents vote to take over struggling public schools, the Senate was offered a milder approach this year that put the trigger finger in the hands of the elected School Board in each county. It didn’t matter. The bill again went down on a 20-20 vote.

Given that the Legislature is scheduled to adjourn on Friday and a parent trigger bill that passed earlier this month in the House contains more explicit language, the Senate vote likely signals an end to the fight for 2013.

The bill had been amended on Monday by a moderate Republican, David Simmons, to vest the final decisions about school turnaround strategies with school boards — and not with parents. Sponsors were hoping the change would clear the way for approval on the floor. But key Republicans still voted against it. Most telling was the opposition of Jack Latvala, who voted in favor of the more stringent trigger bill last year as he was in the midst of fighting for votes to be elected Senate president. To date, Latvala has failed in that quest.

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Philanthropy magazine chronicles political evolution of ed reform, school choice

By on April 23, 2013

PhilanthropyThe cover story in this spring’s Philanthropy magazine opens with redefinED host John Kirtley walking beside a civil rights legend at the front of a record-setting 2010 rally that urged Florida lawmakers to expand Tax Credit Scholarships for low-income students. It then drops backs a dozen years to trace his efforts at helping poor schoolchildren and, in the process, provides considerable detail about how and why he entered the arena of political action committees and campaign contributions.

The magazine is published by the Philanthropy Roundtable, which is directed by former Heritage Foundation educational affairs vice president Adam Meyerson, and the article certainly takes for granted that the public education system needs a profound push to get students back on track. But this story includes a variety of political and philanthropic voices, all of whom insist the charitable model for education reform must now apply business principles similar to those instituted by Kirtley and, more pointedly, be committed to stepping into the political arena to counter the powerful influences of teacher unions.

Those voices include New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who tells Philanthropy: “We have an obligation to stand up for our children, for their lives, their futures, their hopes and dreams. And that means putting their needs first.”

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The faces of school choice

By on April 18, 2013

Rallies tend to be choreographed political endeavors, but the video above is worth your four minutes if for no other reason than the glimpses of the parents who participated.

This school choice rally was held at the Florida Capitol on April 3, and it represents something you don’t see every day. It brought more than 1,000 students, parents and activists together to celebrate the full spectrum of educational choice – from magnet schools to career academies to charter schools to online courses to tax credit scholarships for low-income students and vouchers for students with learning disabilities.

Forget the attendance numbers, which incidentally were stronger than any of the PTA-type parent rallies in recent years, and look instead at the faces. They are remarkably diverse, racially and economically, and some of them traveled all night and missed work to be there. They brought with them their passion and their belief that the school they chose is working for their children. And they are hardly alone. In Florida last year, 1.5 million of the students in PreK-12 – or 43 percent – attended something other than their assigned neighborhood school, and this kind of event is a reminder that parents are choosing their schools in ways that also change the politics of public education.

No one should read too much into a political rally, but, at a time when the more traditional parent associations continue to fight many of the learning options these parents consider essential to their children’s future, there is something poignant here. Many of these parents have felt disenfranchised in the past, and their magnet choice or charter school or scholarship has given them a sense of educational ownership. To see them fight to keep these options is uplifting, and not because it reflects one political ideology or another. It means they believe in their child’s education, and that has to accrue to their child’s benefit.

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School vouchers for low-income students strengthen public education

By on April 16, 2013

all hands on deckEditor’s note: This piece ran in Monday’s Gainesville Sun.

Parents with financial means long have chosen their children’s schools by where they live or which private tuition they pay, but Florida is approaching a remarkable threshold in educational choice. Last year, 1.5 million students — or 43 percent — attended something other than their neighborhood school. Of special note, 51,023 of the poorest among them are attending a private school at public expense.

This move toward customizing public education is owed to a simple proposition — that different children learn in different ways — and it represents an extraordinary commitment to equal opportunity. In Alachua County last year, 5,800 students chose magnet or choice programs or used open enrollment, and another 2,200 went to charter schools. This year, 335 low-income students are also attending private schools through state-backed scholarships.

That last learning option, called Florida Tax Credit Scholarships, gives pause to the Alachua League of Women Voters. Its respected president, Kathy Kidder, recently questioned the program’s constitutionality and accountability. She cited a state Supreme Court case, the 2006 dismissal of a voucher given to students in schools judged to be failing, without noting two prominent U.S. Supreme Court precedents that affirm the scholarship’s constitutionality.

The first, a 2002 case from Cleveland, rules that religious schools cannot be excluded from private voucher programs as long as the primary goal is education and parents aren’t coerced into choosing. The second, a 2011 case from Arizona, finds tax credit scholarships to be in a separate constitutional arena altogether. In Arizona, the court ruled that tax-credited contributions are not government expenditures.

The more important measure, though, is educational progress. The $4,335 scholarship is available only to children in K-12 whose household income qualifies them for free or reduced-price lunch, and this year the average income is just 6 percent above the poverty line. Two-thirds of the students are black or Hispanic, and more than half live in households with only one parent. More striking, the students who choose the scholarship are the lowest academic achievers from the public schools they leave behind.

The encouraging news is that these same students, according to the latest annual standardized test scores, are achieving the same gains in reading and math as students of all income levels nationally. Continue Reading →

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Florida tax credit scholarships offer good model for Texas school “vouchers”

By on April 4, 2013

factsNo essay titled the “Voucher Rabbit Hole” needs to be treated as though it were a search for academic truths, but Grand Prairie educator Jerry Burkett would better contribute to the current debate in Texas if he weren’t so fixated on Georgia.

To be sure, Georgia’s tax credit scholarship has been insufficiently accountable to taxpayers and has invited some abuses the Legislature took an important step toward fixing last week. But we should no more judge the fitness of all private scholarships based on the law in Georgia than we would judge the integrity of all public schools based on the cheating scandal in Atlanta.

In the same 2011 Southern Education Foundation report from which Dr. Burkett quoted so extensively, the foundation contrasted the practices it criticized in Georgia with a program directly to the south.

“The neighboring state of Florida,” the foundation wrote, “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.”

Florida is now serving 51,000 low-income students with the largest tax credit scholarship program in the nation and, more importantly, offers an extensive public record on educational and financial impact as it completes its 11th year. Since I work for the nonprofit that oversees the scholarship and since Dr. Burkett mostly neglected it, let me offer some independent findings that could ease his fear of falling. (In Florida, we fear sinkholes instead of rabbit holes.)

First, we know the students who seek the scholarship are among the poorest and lowest-performing students in the state. The Florida law restricts the scholarship to students whose household income qualifies them for free or reduced-price lunch, which is 185 percent of poverty, and the average this year is only 6 percent above poverty. We also know through five years of state-contracted research that the students who choose the scholarship are the lowest performers from the public schools they leave behind. Continue Reading →

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Former Democratic lawmaker joins Step Up For Students board

By on March 28, 2013

Al-Lawson--for-webAl Lawson, an iconic Democratic lawmaker who served in the Florida Legislature for nearly three decades, has joined a nonprofit board that oversees state-supported scholarships for low-income schoolchildren.

Lawson was selected last week to serve on the corporate board of Step Up For Students, which is a state-approved “scholarship funding organization” that provides Tax Credit Scholarships this year to 51,000 students whose household income meets the threshold for free or reduced-price lunch. (Step Up also oversees this blog.) The program is fueled by $229 million in corporate contributions that receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit from the state.

“Throughout my legislative career, I was always concerned about students, especially minority students, who had no option when the regular school wasn’t working for them,” Lawson said. “The most important thing is to give these kids an opportunity to succeed, and this scholarship is one of those opportunities.”

Lawson was praised by Step Up board chairman John Kirtley, a Tampa businessman who helped persuade lawmakers to adopt the law in 2001. “Senator Lawson has been a smart, compassionate leader in Florida for years,” Kirtley said. “We’re thrilled Step Up and our families will benefit from his judgment and experience.”

Two-thirds of the students on the scholarship are black or Hispanic, the majority live in homes with only one parent, and their average household income is only 6 percent above poverty. State research shows they are the lowest academic performers in the public schools they left behind and, on their latest standardized test scores, they achieved the same gains in reading and math as students of all incomes nationally.

Lawson, who initially voted against the creation of the scholarship in 2001, told a newspaper reporter in 2007 that he could no longer oppose a learning option aimed at economically disadvantaged students with desperate needs: “When you have a lot of poor kids in your area that need help, and you have people saying, ‘We’re willing to work with these kids,’ … it’s hard to say no.” By 2010, he was co-sponsor of a bill that expanded the program and made the closing argument on the Senate floor. Continue Reading →

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Fordham: Florida group wrong to resist state testing for voucher students

By on March 26, 2013
Emerson

Emerson

The Fordham Institute took Florida’s McKay Coalition to task Monday for a survey the institute says “stoked emotions” about state tests at private schools that serve disabled students on state scholarships. In a post by parental choice program director Adam Emerson, the Institute chided the coalition for resisting academic assessment for the McKay Scholarship, which this year serves more than 26,000 students with learning disabilities and physical limitations.

“Virtually no accountability measures … exist in most of the nation’s special-education voucher programs, including the largest such program in the United States, Florida’s McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities,” Emerson wrote. “And the coalition of schools that oversees the McKay program appears to want to keep it that way — and it’s wrong to do so.”

Fordham remains a strong national supporter of parental choice, including charter schools, vouchers and tax credit scholarships. But the institute also has called on the learning options to be held to account for the achievement of their students.

In its recent report, “Red Tape or Red Herring,” Fordham looked at the participation rate of private schools in voucher and tax credit scholarship programs in 11 states and surveys from 241 private schools that do and don’t participate, and found that testing requirements are not a significant deterrent. Only a quarter of the schools ranked state-required testing as a “very” or “extremely” important factor. The response rate among participating schools was 73 percent.

McKay countered with its own yes-or-no survey of Florida private schools participating in the state scholarship for disabled students. Its response rate was 40 percent. Continue Reading →

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On school choice frontier, lessons from Lake Wales

By on March 15, 2013

The community takeover of Lake Wales public schools feels so much like an educational Camelot that it is easy to forget this romance was spawned by Florida’s charter school conversion law. It’s also easy to forget that its local benefactor was a powerfully connected Democrat.

Students at Bok Academy Middle celebrate their school's designation as an Apple School of Distinction.

Students at Bok Academy Middle celebrate their school’s designation as an Apple School of Distinction.

The account of these schools and their champion, Robin Gibson, so ably reported this week by redefinED associate editor Sherri Ackerman, is a poignant reminder that school reform can indeed start in the homes of parents who think children are not getting what they deserve. Gibson, an attorney who helped run campaigns for former Democratic governors Lawton Chiles and Bob Graham, and was once chairman of the state university Board of Regents, thought his own children and the tiny city of Lake Wales were being hampered by public schools that were treated like stepchildren. So he began an effort, in 2002, to convert them to charters.

“I don’t think there’s anything partisan about it, if you’re for a first-class education system, ’’ Gibson says today. “I think everyone’s for that. I’m an advocate for what works, and I’m an advocate for educating the entire demographic.’’

Unsurprisingly, there was resistance. But Gibson and his friends brought sophistication and enterprise to the effort, taking over five schools in 2004 and starting a sixth from scratch. The charter campuses of Lake Wales now enroll 3,800 students – ranking them ahead of 15 of the state’s school districts in size – and the academic success has put the schools on track to be designated “high performing” under charter law.

The Lake Wales conversions provide educational as well as political lessons. Continue Reading →

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Most “voucher” schools not afraid of testing, report suggests

By on January 29, 2013

red tape or red herringThe Fordham Institute may be the closest thing to an honest academic broker in the contentious private school choice arena these days, and its latest report will no doubt enhance that reputation. “Red Tape or Red Herring?”, released today, provides strong evidence that private schools are not averse to academic or financial oversight – a finding that runs counter to a longstanding libertarian narrative.

As Fordham president Chester Finn Jr. acknowledged in the forward: “Many proponents of private school choice — both the voucher and tax credit scholarship versions — take for granted that schools won’t participate (or shouldn’t participate) if government asks too much of them, regulates their practices, requires them to reveal closely held information and — above all — demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement.”

The report looks at the participation rate of private schools in voucher and tax credit scholarship programs in 11 states and surveys from 241 private schools that do and don’t participate, and it finds that testing requirements are not a significant deterrent. Only a quarter of the schools ranked state-required testing as a “very” or “extremely” important factor. Among the schools not participating in voucher or scholarship programs, testing was the fifth most-cited concern – behind such issues as protection of religious activities and admission processes and government paperwork.

This is not to suggest that private schools are eager to embrace more government regulation. The report did find a modest negative correlation between the degree of regulation in a state and the rate of schools participating. But the survey is a reality check on private schools and the educators who run them. Catholic schools remain a major player in the voucher-scholarship market, in part because their mission is to serve poor children, and they also demonstrate remarkable leadership on the issue of testing and academic accountability.

The report echoes similar on-the-ground work in Florida. Continue Reading →

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