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“Vouchers” can help revive Catholic schools in Florida, beyond

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On May 14, 2012 in Achievement Gap, Catholic education, General, Religious education, School Choice

After reading story after story about Catholic schools closing, it was heartening this morning to instead read about an aggressive local effort to help them rebound. The Diocese of St. Petersburg, in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, has launched an ambitious plan to reverse declining enrollment and ensure that Catholic schools remain a solid part of the community bedrock that they have been for generations.

As detailed in today’s Tampa Bay Times, the effort aims to make school operations more efficient and academic offerings more rigorous. It includes a key partnership with Notre Dame University’s Ace Academies, which will help with the quality piece. And it involves increased use of Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, which gives low-income families more learning options for their kids. “It’s a reimagining of how our schools would look like in five to 10 years from now, to make them viable,” Alberto Vazquez-Matos, the diocese’s superintendent, told the Times.

In this podcast interview with redefinED in March, Christian Dallavis, director of the ACE Academies, put the Tampa Bay partnership in context. He noted Hispanics in the U.S. make up two thirds of practicing Catholics under the age of 35, and that the high school graduation rate for Hispanics is about 50 percent. “We see the future of the church is on pace to be kind of radically undereducated,” he said. But “we also have a solution in that we know Catholic schools often put kids on a path to college in ways that they don’t have other opportunities to do so.”

The success of Hispanic students is especially important in Florida, where Hispanics could be a majority in a few decades. Boosting Catholic schools with innovative partnerships and school choice programs is a bold response that offers hope for the future.

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Reaction roundup to expansion of private school vouchers in Louisiana

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On April 18, 2012 in Catholic education, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Editor’s note: I just updated the post at 7:15 p.m. I’ll continue to update it as I see more reaction in news stories, press releases, etc.

It’s official: Louisiana has a new, statewide voucher program. With a Catholic school as a backdrop, Gov. Bobby Jindal today signed into law a bill that allows the state to pay private-school tuition for many low- and moderate-income students.

Jindal also signed off on other sweeping education changes, including making it easier to fire ineffective teachers and to create charter schools. Here is a roundup of the immediate reaction from supporters of school choice and ed reform:

From the American Federation for Children: “This is a great day for low-income children in Louisiana, whose parents will finally have the opportunity to give them the chance at an amazing education that they deserve,” said Kevin P. Chavous, senior adviser to AFC. “Thousands of students who were stuck in schools that were not working for them will now have an opportunity to attend a school that fits their needs and, ultimately, allows them to succeed.”

From the Foundation for Excellence in Education: “Louisiana is clearly committed to adopting and implementing reforms that will improve the quality of education for their students. These policies allow more families to select the best education options for their students and empower schools’ superintendents and principals to retain effective teachers in their schools,” said Patricia Levesque, the foundation’s executive director. “Building on the data-driven accountability system they adopted in 2010, Louisiana is on the fast track towards becoming a national leader on student-centered reform. Thanks to the bold leadership of Governor Jindal, Superintendent John White and state lawmakers, Louisiana and its students will have a brighter future.”

From the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice: “States are realizing that school choice works,” said Robert Enlow, the foundation’s president and CEO. “The more that states can move from limited school choice to universal availability, the greater its benefits will be to those in need. Indiana is witnessing this now. So, too, will Louisiana.” Continue Reading →

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Anti-Muslim bigotry has no place in school voucher debates

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On April 3, 2012 in Catholic education, Parental Choice, Religious education

When it comes to school choice debates, Muslims are the latest religious group to be singled out for fear mongering. Anti-Muslim bigotry, often an undercurrent of opposition in recent tussles over private school vouchers, surfaced last week in a state that appeared to be on the verge of taking school choice to the next level.

Kansas state Rep. Bill Otto tried to convince his legislative colleagues to send a tax credit scholarship bill back to committee because he worried about the potential expansion of Islamic schools. “What kind of schools might we develop?” Otto said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “Schools that may or may not agree with your values or my values.”

Otto, a Republican, didn’t persuade his colleagues on that particular proposal. But the bill went down 55-66, and political observers in Kansas say his concerns were not unique.

Obviously, they’re not confined to Kansas either. Or to any one political party. (Or just to vouchers and tax credit scholarships. In Tennessee, a group concerned about Islamic influence is backing a bill that would limit the number of foreign workers a charter school can hire.)

Voucher critics occasionally rile up blogs and news story comment sections by hyping angst over Muslim schools. About a year ago, W.C. Gentry, a Duval County (Fla.) School Board member, expressed concerns about Muslim schools while discussing his opposition to tax credit scholarships in a radio interview.

“Now there’s nothing wrong with Muslim schools,” said Gentry, a Republican who is also a member of the Save Duval Schools board of directors, “but people need to appreciate when you start taking public money and giving it out to these various entities it’s going to go all over the place and maybe some places that you really wouldn’t want it to go.” Continue Reading →

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More school choice can boost Florida’s success with Hispanic students

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On March 15, 2012 in Achievement Gap, Catholic education, General

One of the big, untold stories in Florida education over the past decade has been the rising academic achievement of Hispanic students. As researcher Matt Ladner has pointed out, on the fourth grade NAEP reading test, Hispanic students in Florida now tie or outscore the statewide average for ALL students in a majority of states. Meanwhile, in high schools, Hispanic students – who made up 25 percent of all Florida graduates last year – made up more than 25 percent of all graduates who passed at least one Advanced Placement exam.

Why doesn’t this make a bigger splash in Florida, where some demographers say Hispanics could be the majority in a few decades? I’ll save my conspiracy theories for another day. The bottom line is, this trend is not only a hopeful sign for the state’s future, it’s more evidence that public schools here are rising to huge challenges.

Now, that being said, it’s also true that the overall numbers still aren’t where anybody wants them to be, and that some school districts are making bigger gains than others. Among those with flatter trend lines: the Pinellas and Hillsborough districts right here in Tampa Bay.

I bring this up because Pinellas and Hillsborough counties also happen to be the next stop for an innovative program aimed at improving Catholic schools, particularly for low-income Hispanic students. Continue Reading →

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Christian Dallavis, working to revitalize Catholic schools – podcastED

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On March 9, 2012 in Achievement Gap, Catholic education, General, Religious education

Catholic schools used to be neighborhood schools. Many of them served immigrant familes. But since 2000 alone, more than 1,700 have closed in the United States, leaving voids in communities and diminishing school choice options for families who could use them now more than ever. In an effort to change that, the University of Notre Dame is leading a partnership that aims to improve the quality of Catholic schools, particularly for low-income, Hispanic families.

The university’s ACE Academies program began two years ago in Tucson, Arizona and is now rolling out at two schools in Tampa Bay (St. Joseph in Tampa and Sacred Heart in Pinellas Park). In this redefinED podcast, program director Christian Dallavis notes two important statistics: 1) two thirds of practicing Catholics in the U.S. who are under the age of 35 are Hispanic, and 2) only about 50 percent of Hispanic students graduate from high school in four years.

“We see the future of the church is on pace to be kind of radically undereducated,” Dallavis said. But “we also have a solution in that we know Catholic schools often put kids on a path to college in ways that they don’t have other opportunities to do so.”

It’s no coincidence the program came to Arizona and Florida. Both states have large Hispanic populations. Both offer tax credit scholarships to low income students.

“They provide a mechanism that allows Catholic schools and other faith-based schools to sustain their legacy of providing extraordinary educational opportunities to low-income families, immgrant communities, minority children, the people on the margins,” Dallavis said. “We see the tax credit as really providing the opportunity to allow the schools to thrive going into the future.”

But make no mistake. This effort isn’t about quantity. The Notre Dame folks know in this day and age, school quality, whether public or private, is essential – and they’re looking to beef up everything from curriculum to leadership to professional development. Their goal for the kids: College and Heaven. Enjoy the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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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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The ‘technocrats’ need not fear religion

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On February 8, 2012 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, Religious education

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.

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Why it matters that compulsory education can mean private schools

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On February 6, 2012 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

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.

 

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School choice, subsidiarity and the common good

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On January 17, 2012 in Catholic education, Education and Public Policy, General, Grassroots

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle rarely discussed outside the Catholic Church and the European Union, and it’s a shame so few academics and advocates of school choice in the United States talk about it. It is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units to function for the common good. At this past weekend’s inaugural international school choice conference in Fort Lauderdale, an Italian researcher introduced the concept to describe why a stubborn region in his country could not accept the government’s insistence that public education must be centrally administered. A sympathetic audience nodded in approval, but there was no obvious sign that the conference understood that its mission was just given political order.

If there was, it could have better informed the rhetorical jousting match that happened minutes later between Stanford University political scientist and union scourge Terry Moe and United Federation of Teachers vice president Leo Casey. For Moe, author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, the problem of public education is one of structure, organization. “Nobody has a coherent vision of the whole, and no one is organizing schools in the best interest of kids,” he said. Casey countered that Moe favors market-driven and top-down “punitive” reforms that diminish an institution of public education built from the ground up in a model of civil society.

Would that it were so. If we’re to take Casey at his word, then his union would favor the public support of an educational enterprise built in the American tradition of association and social charity with minimal interference from a higher order of government and bureaucracy, the kind of effort facilitated by charter school and school voucher policies. Moe was right to call out the union’s insincerity in promoting transformative reform and its role in maintaining a structure of public education that is largely unresponsive to the unique needs of schoolchildren. But, except for calling for an end to the collective bargaining of work rules among public school teachers, he stopped short of defining how we can reorganize our governance of public education.

If the principles of subsidiarity were more commonly dispatched in our nation’s school reform debates, it could inspire more competing ideologies to find common ground and it could expand our definition of what we consider “public.” We have wrung our hands over what could have stopped the closure and consolidation of 49 Catholic schools in Philadelphia, but we have failed to collectively acknowledge that the urban Catholic school meets the original definition of the “common school” better than many schools that today we call public. The Philadelphia families whose households have been upended by the news have ordered their lives around the social capital they’ve invested in these schools, and the school closings leave fewer stakeholders who share the common goal of reaching out to the city’s most disadvantaged.

Former assistant education secretary Bruno V. Manno once wrote that subsidiarity is not only a principle of justice, but one of empowerment . “The doctrine of subsidiarity values both individual liberty and community,” Manno said. “It is a way of formulating and pursuing true social order. Even though groups have varying interests, subsidiarity implies that common ends are not antithetical to the pursuit of particular interests.”

For states to grasp Moe’s plea to develop “a coherent vision of the whole,” they’ll have to see how traditional schools, parochial schools, charter schools and virtual schools can maximize their unique characteristics and organize around the common goal of a quality education for all. In many ways, that will force us to grasp political concepts foreign to our ears. But in other ways, it simply defines what we’ve been searching for all along.

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