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About John Kirtley

Chairman of Florida scholarship organization for low-income students, Vice Chair of American Federation For Children, a national parental choice organization

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A longtime parental choice advocate backpedals like a cornerback in coverage

By John Kirtley on October 12, 2012

I was wrong.

For 15 years I have dedicated myself to empowering low-income families to choose the best school for their kids. I was the strongest advocate for parental choice you would ever meet.

But I was wrong.

For almost two decades I swatted away false arguments from choice opponents. “There’s no evidence students do well in choice programs.” No, the consensus of studies show they do. “Creams the best low-income students away from public schools.” Sorry, studies show just the opposite.

But the scales have now fallen from my eyes. I have to leave the movement. Why?

I just learned that vouchers will mean the end of high school football. Yes, that’s right – giving low-income parents choices will mean the end of that great American tradition – and I just can’t tolerate that.

You see, high school football used to be the most important thing in my life. When I was 15 and my father told me our family was moving from Iowa to Florida, my only question was, “Does the high school have a good quarterback”? When I was 17, the only thing I wanted for my birthday was a case of Gatorade (three practices a day, in full pads, in the summer in South Florida). Some of my fondest memories are of taking the field for the Fort Lauderdale High School Flying L’s. Yes, that was our team name.

Given this background, I hope my fellow choice advocates will understand my abdication.

A group called Save Texas Football has just come out with a video explaining how choice will kill high school football in Texas. As I watched it, I was so impressed by the quality of the message and the production, I said to myself, “There’s no way a grassroots, amateur group did this.” Sure enough, the group behind the video is Progress Texas, a 501C4 advocacy group that is run by veterans of Texas Democratic politics. C4s don’t have to reveal their donors, but I’ll buy you a hot dog at this Friday’s game if the major funder of this group isn’t the Texas teachers union. Continue Reading →

School choice movement can’t give grenades to opponents

By John Kirtley on May 24, 2012

Editor’s note: Tuesday’s New York Times story about tax-credit scholarship programs sparked a flurry of reaction from leading school choice supporters, including John Kirtley, who chairs Step Up for Students, the non-profit that administers the tax credit program in Florida. In a blog post today, the Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer took exception to some of the guidelines Kirtley proposed for other state programs, and also raised concerns about what he calls the “hyper-centralization” of Florida’s program. Here is Kirtley’s response:

First, I want to thank Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute for his engaged dialogue on the vital subject of tax credit scholarship program design. I also want to say that I have been an admirer of Cato for over a decade, and even attended its wonderful “Cato University” in the late 1990’s.

The main point of my response is this: as someone who is trying to pass, grow and protect parental choice laws in Florida and across the country, I live in the real world of legislation and politics. We are trying to change something that has been the same for 150 years. Those who don’t want change are extremely powerful, well-funded, and have willing allies in the press. We have to fight hand-to-hand legislative and political combat state by state. And we can’t hand our opponents grenades with which to blow us up.

Adam is absolutely correct that you can only drive so much excellence through top-down accountability. Our scholarship organization’s president, Doug Tuthill, and I constantly talk about the “new definition” of public education we would love to see — a transformation from “East Germany” (pre-Berlin Wall fall) to “West Germany.” We see a system where end users allocate resources and choose among many providers and delivery methods – public or private. Of course I understand, as Adam asserts, that such a system will produce better results. I’m a businessman! Or at least I used to be, before this movement took most of my time. But we can’t wave a magic wand and create that transformation overnight. And as in any free market system, there is a role — though many will argue over the extent – to be played by government.

Adam points out there is more fraud and waste in public schools than in scholarship programs. So what? We’re held to a higher standard. It’s not fair, but it’s a fact. In Florida, when stories of public school teachers having sex with students was the topic of Letterman and Leno monologues, one of the most respected newspaper columnists in Florida blasted vouchers because a private school principal took a bunch of young girls unsupervised to Disney World. There weren’t even any scholarship kids at the school. Another newspaper called for the repeal of the tax-credit program because (among other things) not every school had submitted documentation of their fire inspections. At the same time, the Orlando Sentinel (to its credit) ran an article about public schools in the area that were so out of fire code they had to hire fire marshals to stand watch at them. No one called for those schools to be shut down.

The point is we operate in a zero tolerance environment in Florida. Opponents to choice are desperate for examples that the program isn’t being operated properly. They would love to find a family that makes too much money to qualify, or to learn household incomes or sizes weren’t documented properly. And it would hurt us if they did. Continue Reading →

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Program design is crucial for tax credit scholarships

By John Kirtley on May 22, 2012

Stephanie Saul offered an indictment in the New York Times today of tax credit scholarship programs that have, in my opinion, serious design flaws. These flaws were almost guaranteed to provide examples like Saul found for her article. How lawmakers and, just as importantly, parental choice advocates respond is an important test of their credibility.

Not much of what Saul reported is new, though that makes it no less troubling. Georgia’s law sets no boundaries on the income of scholarship recipients and no limit on the amount of the scholarship itself. It requires no financial audits, no attempt at any meaningful data collection. Many of the contributions are steered through schools and parents with a self-interest to underwrite the tuition of their own students. In Georgia and two other states she covered, Pennsylvania and Arizona, the public has little idea whether students are learning because no tests are required and no academic data collected.

The story was loaded with powerful anecdotes of abuse, but employed surprisingly pedestrian journalistic standards in its attempt to portray those practices as national in scope. The punchline in what newspaper writers call the nut graph – that “the programs are a charade” – was qualified as a question raised by “some” private school administrators. The characterization of programs becoming “enmeshed in politics” was leavened again with the word “some.” How many of the eight states with tax credit scholarship laws “collect little information”? You guessed right. The answer was “some.”

To her credit, Saul did acknowledge that at least one state has different statutory and regulatory standards: “In Florida, where the scholarships are strictly controlled to make sure they go to poor families, only corporations are eligible for the tax credits, eliminating the chance of parents donating for their own benefit. Also, all scholarships are handled by one nonprofit organization, and its fees are limited to 3 percent of donations. Florida also permits the scholarships to move with the students if they elect to change schools.”

The Florida scholarship program, as readers of this blog should be aware, is where the creators of this blog work. So we certainly have a self-interest in seconding such an assessment but also an intimate appreciation of the tension that appropriately exists with education options that have one foot in the private market and the other in the public treasury. We want to give the parents of poor and struggling school children something they could not otherwise afford – a private school learning option – and we recognize that with tax-credited funding comes public responsibility.

Finding the right balance between regulation and market is no simple feat. But our prescriptions for a well-designed law are as follows: Continue Reading →

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Is parental choice really the enemy?

By John Kirtley on February 8, 2012

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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The legacy of Ted Forstmann

By John Kirtley on November 21, 2011

When I graduated college and was lucky enough to get a job at a new venture capital firm, I heard about an emerging kind of investment, the “leveraged buyout.” Unlike today, back then there were no business school courses or “industry” publications on the topic — it wasn’t yet an industry! I had to learn about this investment technique by reading obscure government filings by the few firms that were practicing this financial art. One of the most prominent was the firm started by Ted Forstmann. I read everything I could about his investments.

Little did I know that years later, Mr. Forstmann would influence my life in even a bigger way. In late 1997, I decided to start a privately funded scholarship program for low-income families in Tampa Bay. I wanted to see how many of these parents would choose a private school for their children, if they had some financial assistance. I hadn’t done as well as Mr. Forstmann, so I could only offer 350 scholarships worth $1,500 a year.

As I was preparing to announce the scholarship progam, I read in the paper about an effort launched by Mr. Forstmann and John Walton, of the Wal-Mart family. I couldn’t believe it — they wanted to partner with local funders to create scholarship programs in major cities! I actually flew to New York without an appointment, went to the offices of the newly created Children’s Scholarship Fund and said, “I am your partner in Tampa Bay.” The staff, literally still unpacking boxes, said, “Um, okay … I hope all the other cities are this easy.”

Forstmann and Walton each contributed $50 million to the national CSF effort, and they allowed me to double the number of scholarships in Tampa Bay. With little publicity, we received 12,000 applications for our 700 scholarships. Similar incredible responses were seen in other cities. In Baltimore, over a quarter of the eligible families applied!

This response was, to me, the great accomplishment of CSF and a great legacy of Mr. Forstmann, who died Sunday at the age of 71. Prior to CSF, opponents to parental choice would say, “Poor parents don’t want vouchers. They want more money for their childrens’ public schools.” CSF demolished this lie forever.

As we fought in Florida to expand choice for low-income families, nothing was more powerful than this response from parents. I will never forget one committee meeting when the state Senate was considering the tax credit scholarship bill. A Senator from Miami scolded the bill sponsor: “Senator, I know my constituents, and they don’t want this voucher program.” He didn’t know we had brought up 15 parents from his own district to give testimony during public comment. I will never forget the Senator’s face as parent after parent came to the podium and said “Senator, I am from your district, and I want this scholarship.” The politics of choice had changed forever.

Since the tax credit scholarship program was created by the Florida Legislature in 2001, more than 200,000 low-income children have attended the private school of their parents’ choice, using over $900 million of donations from companies. CSF has become the spark for tax credit and voucher programs in many other states, and hopefully soon many more. Mr. Forstmann’s generous contribution made that possible. On behalf of all those families, and all those to come, I say thank you, Mr. Forstmann. May you rest in peace.

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A leader who is changing the conversation of parental choice

By John Kirtley on June 21, 2011

Every good leader knows how to spot an individual capable of transformational change, and Howard Fuller saw that in Gerard Robinson nearly 10 years ago. Robinson displayed the conviction to empower poor families with the education options long enjoyed by wealthier households, and he had the fortitude to challenge the status quo that would resist him. Fuller and the Board of Directors of the Black Alliance for Educational Options eventually picked Gerard to lead their burgeoning advocacy organization, a decision that had a profound effect on the politics of school choice. Elected officials of different ideological stripes from across the nation who would have shunned the prospect of publicly funding private school options were now being courted by a charismatic young man who implored them to put the parent and the child first.

The years that followed would result in rapid growth for BAEO, which established seven state chapters during Robinson’s tenure and would partner with Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy & Governance to develop an annual gathering of elected officials to talk about bringing parental choice back to their states and districts. The first meeting could have been held in an elevator, but that gathering now brings several hundred officials together. And choice has become a bipartisan cause with legislators who now see that the poorest among us are those who have the fewest options.

Today, Robinson was picked to replace Eric Smith as Florida’s next education commissioner, affirming the state’s role as a national leader in redefining the way we deliver a public education in the 21st century. But, just as importantly, low-income families have an advocate in Florida’s top educator. Gerard could be convincing with governors and lawmakers, but he could also be relentless in his push to provide opportunities for disadvantaged children.

Virginia saw how he helped to redirect the conversation of school choice in that state. While Robinson was secretary of education earlier this year, Virginia lawmakers introduced a proposal to award tax credit scholarships to low-income children. And the same black elected officials whom Robinson wooed years ago were the same ones standing before the commonwealth legislature to urge the adoption of the Education Improvement Scholarships. A senate committee may have killed the proposal after it passed the Assembly, but one Florida Democratic lawmaker who joined Gerard in fighting for its passage believes they have begun to change the debate. “Everybody wants to do the right thing,” said Terry Fields, a former state representative in Jacksonville, Fla. “But I think they’re a little afraid of what the right thing is.”

We may have surmounted many of those fears in Florida, but it will take someone like Gerard Robinson to remind us why those fears were unfounded.

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Facing a harsh truth when fighting for a bipartisan cause

By John Kirtley on May 20, 2011

Two different reporters contacted me this week, asking why I contribute so much to candidates who support education options for low-income children. Please allow me to share part of my answer to them, because it speaks to one of the real-world limitations we face as we expand public education choices for low-income students. The harsh truth is that teacher unions react with vengeance against any Democrat (and if they can, Republican) who votes for any option that involves teachers who can’t easily be organized for collective bargaining. So if we expect legislators to be able to resist these threats and bring an open mind to this new definition of public education, they need help.

In 1998, I started a privately funded K-12 scholarship program for low-income families in Tampa, and with no advertising we received 12,500 applications for 750 slots. That was when I first realized how much low-income families want parental choice in education. When the Florida Legislature passed the Tax Credit Scholarship in the 2001 session, we tried hard to get Democrats to vote for it. We could get only one. I was baffled by this, because the program would benefit only poor families, who largely vote Democrat.

One of these Democrats took me behind closed doors. He said he knew it would be the right thing to vote for the program, but he couldn’t because the teachers’ union was the largest donor to his campaigns and they would find and fund an opponent to take his seat.

In 2004, the national parental choice movement realized that if we were going to help more low-income parents have choice, we had to begin investing in the political process. For too long, the teacher unions have been the only player in the education reform political space and last year alone they spent more than $70 million nationally. Low-income families don’t have this type of well-funded apparatus to make sure they have their voices heard in the political process. The result today is the American Federation For Children Action Fund, a “527″ organization I am affilated with. AFC believes that parental choice for low-income families is a fundamentally nonpartisan issue, and that it is one of the most important social justice issues of our time. We try to help these families have a voice.

The reporters asked me specifically whether the support of parental choice by black Democrats was the result of my contributions and AFC’s communications. That’s not only an insult to black elected officials who have shown remarkable courage, but it also ignores the obvious: African-American and Hispanic Democrats are receptive to parental choice because their constituents strongly desire it. Roughly three-fourths of the students on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship are children of color. Why wouldn’t these legislators support giving more power to their constituents to choose the best school for their kids? The reason they didn’t before is simple — there was no counter to the poltical spending of the union.

The reporters also seemed incredulous that I would contribute to Democrats when Republicans dominate the Florida Legislature. I told them that, first, it’s the right thing to do. These legislators are voting to give low-income parents more educational opportunity, and they deserve support for doing so. Parental choice for low-income families should be a bipartisan cause. By countering the union’s money with some of our own, we are helping to make that a reality.

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Parent Revolution should empower parents with all options

By John Kirtley on April 29, 2011

It is wonderful to see the leaders of the Parent Revolution receive this recognition in the Wall Street Journal. I have admired their work from afar, and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel last year with the group’s founder, Ben Austin. They have done amazing work organizing low-income parents and giving voice to their desire for more educational opportunities.

Here’s my wish: that Parent Revolution would advocate for true empowerment for these parents. Families should have the right not just to reconstitute the schools to which their children are assigned. They should be empowered to choose whatever school will best serve their children. It might be a charter school, it might be a magnet school, but it also might be a faith-based school. What we have learned in Florida and other states is that there is a vast inventory of private, mostly faith-based schools in urban areas with high concentrations of low-income families. In Jacksonville, for example, there are only about a dozen charter schools, and not all of them serve low-income children. However, there are more than 100 private schools in that city serving low-income students on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.

One of these schools, The Potter’s House Christian Academy, has a graduation rate at more than 90 percent. More than 300 of the school’s 600 students attend on the scholarship program. What if you were a low-income parent with a child doing poorly in his assigned public school? What would you rather have, the ability to force change at that one public school or a passport to leave and select the best school available?

The clergy in Florida has indeed recognized that educational opportunity is a matter of social justice. There have emerged two official coalitions of Florida ministers, one African American and one Hispanic, demanding full parental choice for low income families. They both strongly support the tax credit scholarship program.

In Florida, the clergy is not only recognizing that low-income parents need all options on the table for their children, they are in many cases providing that option. My own hope is that the Parent Revolution will expand its amazing work to demand full empowerment for low-income families.

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The New Face of Choice in Virginia

By John Kirtley on February 25, 2011

Virginia is one of several states where parental choice advocates are trying to pass legislation to help low-income families. The challenges in this state are unique, because Virginia has an unfortunate history with choice legislation. In the early 1960’s, as public schools were under court order to integrate, the Virginia legislature passed a choice program that was largely seen as a vehicle for white parents to pull their children from integrating schools. Understandably, several long serving members of the Virginia legislature remember these times and these motivations.

Half a century has passed, and a new generation of parents in Virginia are now looking to the legislature to once again pass a choice bill. This time, African American parents are asking for this empowerment. This recent article from the Washington Post does an excellent job describing this development.

I want to personally thank former Florida House Representative Terry Fields, and former Florida Senate Democratic Leader Al Lawson for their efforts in trying to help pass this bill. The sponsor of the bill in the Virginia Assembly called looking for help in persuading members of their legislature’s Black Caucus. When the tax credit scholarship program was created by the Florida Legislature in 2001, only one Democrat—and not a single member of the Black Caucus—voted for the bill. In the 2010 session, when the legislature aggressively expanded the program, roughly half of House Democrats, a third of Senate Democrats, and a majority of the Black Caucus voted in favor. Representative Fields, who was one of the first to convert to the cause, personally went to Richmond to talk to members of the caucus. Senator Lawson, who sponsored several of the Florida bills, published this column in the Roanoke Times supporting the bill.

Although they were not successful this year, as you can see from the Washington Post article, things are changing. Perhaps next year we should send the Rev. H.K. Matthews from Pensacola, Fla., who like Virginia’s Senator Marsh is a hero of the civil rights movement. But unlike Marsh, Matthews supports parental choice for low-income families. In fact, he has called it “an extension of the old movement”. That would be quite a conversation, I imagine.

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New Jersey is ready, Mr. Florio

By John Kirtley on February 24, 2011

Many of you are aware that the New Jersey legislature is considering a tax credit scholarship bill modeled on Florida’s successful program. Sponsored by some prominent Democrats, this bill has inspired spirited debate in legislative committees, at rallies at the Capitol, and in the press. Today, former Democratic Gov. James Florio weighed in with a column published in the Newark Star Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper. I don’t often do this, but I couldn’t resist adding my own comments after the Governor’s (His column is below, and my comments are in italics).

By James J. Florio

The establishment of a system of universal public schools for all American children was a historic event for the world and the key to our nation’s development and prosperity. It provided unmatched literacy levels for our citizens and a commitment to excellence as a national goal. It enabled people from every country to be blended into one people, representing an amalgam of ideas of freedom and opportunity through upward mobility. Our diversity was molded in the public schools and became our strength. [Democracy does require a publicly funded education system that embraces and develops our diverse strengths into a unified whole, but empowerment and customization are necessary for this to occur. Top-down, command and control education systems are the wrong way to go. In this century we cannot expect a one-size-fits-all model, where we assign students to schools by zip codes, to work effectively.]

Now, we find — through proposed voucher systems — a rejection of our unifying universal educational model. [Not true. Parental empowerment is a part of a new, more democratic model of publicly-funded education. The old model gave taxpayer dollars to a monopoly system that disempowered parents by assigning students to schools by geography. The new empowerment model allows parents to choose from qualified, properly regulated suppliers of many kinds—without preference for who the provider is.] Continue Reading →

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About John Kirtley

A longtime parental choice advocate backpedals like a cornerback in coverage

School choice movement can’t give grenades to opponents

Program design is crucial for tax credit scholarships

Is parental choice really the enemy?

The legacy of Ted Forstmann

A leader who is changing the conversation of parental choice

Facing a harsh truth when fighting for a bipartisan cause

Parent Revolution should empower parents with all options

The New Face of Choice in Virginia

New Jersey is ready, Mr. Florio

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