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Did they really say that (about education reform in Florida)?

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On May 18, 2012 in Education reporting, Funding, General, rebuttED, Testing and Accountability

As you know, we keep tabs on what’s written and said about school choice and ed reform, particularly in Florida. This week has been a doozy when it comes to head-scratching statements. Today we highlight a few and offer a quick response …

In just a few years, Orlando-based Fund Education Now has become the leading parent group in Florida. Aggressive. Media savvy. Super effective. I respect its members for their passion. I sometimes agree with them. But there are times when the rhetoric is at odds with reality.

After this week’s FCAT fiasco, the group wrote in an action alert to members: “These abysmal FCAT Writes scores are proof that Tallahassee’s ‘education reforms’ are an unmitigated disaster.” I agree the state raised the bar too fast and too fast on some of our standardized tests. But have the state’s policies as a whole flat-out bombed?

In the past four years, Florida has ranked No. 11, No. 8, No. 5 and No. 11 among all 50 states in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report. And contrary to some critics’ claims, that’s not just because of policies on paper that sound good; it’s also because the state has moved the needle on student achievement, particularly for low-income kids. On the K-12 achievement portion of EdWeek’s rating – which considers performance and progress on NAEP, AP and graduation rates – Florida finished at No. 7, No. 7, No. 6 and No. 12 over the past four years. In 2011, it finished in the Top 10 in eight of nine progress categories. It finished in the Top 3 in six of them.

The reason Florida tumbled out of the overall top 10 this year is because of budget cuts, and because its NAEP scores have stalled in reading and math. That’s troubling when the state is still nowhere near where it needs to be. I think that’s what led the state Board of Education to be too bold in raising the bar.

But Florida’s policy makers, like them or not, have been more right than wrong in the past decade when it comes to standards and accountability and school choice. To deny there’s been progress is good for stoking fury and mobilizing troops. But it’s unfair to the teachers who made it happen. And it could undermine changes that really did make things better for kids.

In an op-ed Sunday, syndicated columnist Bill Maxwell describes what he sees as another round of teacher bashing in Florida and blames “conservative lawmakers who dominate Tallahassee” and are gunning to privatize public schools. The prompt for his outrage: A cost-cutting decision by the Pinellas County School District to curb the use of individual printers by teachers. Continue Reading →

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California’s toe in the water on school “vouchers”?

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On May 14, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, Funding, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Editor’s note: Progress in the parental school choice movement is measured not only by big gains in states like Indiana and Louisiana, but by the flurry of incremental developments in more states every year. Peter Hanley, executive director of the California-based American Center for School Choice, offers a look at encouraging developments in his home state.

California has the nation’s largest charter school program, with 982 charter schools serving 412,000 students. But with nearly a two-thirds Democratic legislature heavily influenced by the California Teachers Association, tax credit scholarships or vouchers have been entirely off the table. In fact, charter schools’ flexibility is under near constant attack. Now, though, two legislators have introduced innovative approaches that address a unique feature in California’s constitution and attempt to bring educational tax credits to the state.

Unlike any other state, California has a voter-initiated constitutional amendment (Prop. 98) that sets a floor on the percent of general fund monies that must be spent on education. Anything that removes money from the general fund will instantly trigger the public education coalition to oppose it. So these legislators, one Democrat and one Republican, have proposed models that benefit both public and private schools.

Senate Bill 1542, introduced by Democratic Sen. Gloria Negrete McCloud, provides individual and corporate tax credits to Local Educational Advancement Program (LEAP) organizations. They will assist K-12 students from families with demonstrated financial needs to receive critical services before or after school, on weekends, or during the summer. SB 1542 precisely aims to ensure academic services – such as diagnostic evaluations, tutoring, summer school, and college and career planning and counseling – that have been heavily damaged by the extraordinary recession California has experienced since 2008. Although many more fortunate families in the state continue to be able to provide such services for their children, those with low and moderate incomes cannot and are disproportionately suffering. Children from public and private schools would be eligible for these services.

The Senate Governance and Finance Committee is expected to hold a hearing on this bill within the next few weeks. The future likely depends on whether it can be fit into the state’s budget, with questions now revolving around whether both individuals and corporations will be eligible for the credit, how large the credit will be, and whether it will be a straight credit or a percentage of a donation. Notably, the committee has not raised any objections about private school participation.

Assembly Bill 2582, sponsored by Republican Assemblyman Brian Nestande, takes a more traditional approach. Continue Reading →

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Public? Private? Charter? Voucher? Parents just want a good school

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On May 3, 2012 in Charter Schools, Funding, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Bruce Baker at School Finance 101 offered a calibrated analysis Tuesday on how neighborhood and charter schools differ in the public education arena, but his distinctions miss the larger point. The current expansion of K-12 educational options cuts across all the traditional boundaries in ways that make public and private less relevant.

Take his assertion that charter schools are “limited public access.” Two of his supporting claims are that “they can define the number of enrollment slots they wish to make available” and that “they can set academic, behavior and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students via attrition.” In truth, these two descriptions could just as easily apply to many, if not most, district-operated public schools. All schools, including virtual schools, generally base enrollment on capacity, which has the effect of allowing some students in while excluding others. Of greater relevance is that many district schools now admit students based on test scores or other screening factors. Magnet schools and programs such as International Baccalaureate typically use grades and test scores and conduct to determine eligibility. Many district choice schools, notably the back-to-basics fundamental programs, remove students who don’t meet behavior standards or whose parents fail to meet participation requirements.

While individual district schools may select and reject students, Dr. Baker is right that a public school district must generally take all comers at any time of the year. But it is also true that parents in charter schools can simply leave whenever they are dissatisfied, a powerful tool that is not typically available to them in their assigned district school. Further, his failure to note the similarities in admission policies between many charter and individual district schools ignores the extent to which this remarkable transformation is blurring the lines between public and private. After all, a waiting list for a magnet school is no less disappointing to an eager parent than one for a charter school. Not surprisingly, a recent academic report on low-income students who choose the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship found that students in districts with few district school options were more likely to choose the non-district option.

Sherman Dorn, himself an astute academician who is a professor of education at the University of South Florida, reacted to Baker’s post by placing the common school in historical context. Dorn correctly asserts that charter schools and vouchers and tax credit scholarships have “chipped away at the multi-level meaning of ‘public’ that had mostly consolidated by the end of the 19th century.” But this is nothing to rue. It speaks to an educational evolution that is strengthening public education by recognizing parents indeed have unique insights into which learning environments work best for their children.

In this emerging world of educational choice, parents simply want a school that turns on the light for their children. In that most personal of calculations, school governance is unlikely a significant factor.

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rebuttED: Tax credit scholarships (“vouchers”) don’t drain money from public schools

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On April 24, 2012 in Funding, School Choice, Unionism

No matter how many times critics of parental choice say it, it’s still not true: Tax credit scholarships in Florida (aka vouchers) do not drain money from public schools.

The latest example: An op-ed in Sunday’s Ocala Star Banner by Andy Ford, president of the state teachers union. Ford (pictured below) focuses on the state of education funding in Florida, and much of what he argues is undeniable. These are tough times for schools. The money that Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature scraped together for education this year is still billions short of where the state was five years ago. I have one child in public school. In a few months, I’ll have two. I sympathize.

But then Ford redirects his financial argument toward tax-credit scholarships, suggesting they’re part of the reason why public schools are in dire straits. “There’s also money in the budget for expanding charter schools and increasing money for corporate voucher schools,” he writes. “Here’s another example of political leaders favoring unproven and less-accountable schools over our traditional neighborhood schools.”

He concludes: “At a time when the governor and lawmakers doled out more tax giveaways for corporations, more money for unaccountable voucher schools and more support and freedom for for-profit charter schools, our public schools are given a budget far from adequate and far from a true investment in our children.”

We’ll save the issue of accountability for another day, because it’s the pervasive myth of financial loss that resonates most with parents and voters. Despite what Ford says, one credible, independent report after another has found tax credit scholarships save taxpayer money. The Collins Center for Public Policy came to that conclusion, as did Florida Tax Watch, the Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability and, just last month, an impact report from Florida’s Revenue Estimating Conference. The latter found the tax credit program will save taxpayers $57.9 million next year alone. Continue Reading →

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Businesses, teachers unions benefit financially from status quo in education

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On March 21, 2012 in Charter Schools, Customization, Funding, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, School Choice, Unionism

Editor’s note: Corporate greed! Profits! Privatization! Shout the same, alarming buzz words enough – as critics of education reform are doing – and it defines the debate. But as Doug Tuthill, a former teachers union president, argues in this post, businesses benefit more from the status quo in education than they will from expanded parental choice.

Public education would not exist without the products and services provided by for-profit corporations. Every year, for-profit corporations receive billions of tax dollars from school districts to build schools and supply them with desks, books, computers, pens, pencils, paper, calculators, buses, crayons, and power to turn on the lights. And yet school choice critics continue to assert that giving parents more schooling options is a plot by for-profit corporations to make more money.

I don’t buy it.

The profit margins of businesses providing goods and services to public education are greater under the current command-and-control system because the costs of sales and servicing contracts are lower when the customers are large, centrally controlled organizations.  My friend Jean Clements, who is the teachers union president in Hillsborough County, Florida, was the first person to explain this to me.

Four years ago, I asked Jean why her union refused to sell union memberships to private school teachers. Her answer? She would lose money. Jean said the membership revenue she would receive from teachers in small, non-district schools would not cover the costs of negotiating and servicing their collective bargaining contracts.

Large school districts allow teachers unions to spread their costs across a large number of members, which is why large districts are their preferred market. It’s also why unions are so opposed to public education occurring in schools not owned and managed by school districts.

I suspect the same economy-of-scale issues influencing Jean’s business decisions are also relevant for Dell, Pearson and Apple. Continue Reading →

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Report: Tax credit scholarships (“vouchers”) will save Florida taxpayers $57.9 million next year

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On March 20, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, Funding, General

Critics of Florida’s tax credit scholarship program often say it’s a “drain” on public school funding. But yet another credible report underscores how much that’s not the case.

The little-known “impact” report, issued last week by Florida’s Revenue Estimating Conference, brings genuine financial context to the scholarship program, which helps low-income K-12 students. It says, with a degree of professional precision, that the Florida Tax Credit scholarship will save taxpayers $57.9 million next year (line 55, page 36).

That number is at odds with the financial lament of some opponents, such as Rep. Dwight Bullard, a Democrat from Miami-Dade. In his passionate opposition to HB 859, a bill that that expands the program and now sits on Gov. Rick Scott’s desk, Bullard told his colleagues the scholarship “has cost all of your respective school districts million and millions of dollars in lost revenue” and tried to pit scholarship schools against district schools.

“We’re talking about funding a program that, yes, we can all agree is successful,” Bullard said. “We can always point to the fact that it helps low-income and minority students get out of a bad situation and get into a better one. … But here’s the question: When are we going to stop adding to the bad situation that they’re trying to run from?”

Bullard’s plea to increase funding for public schools is sincere and commendable, but his attempt to use scholarships as a foil is neither. Continue Reading →

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redefinED roundup: parent triggers in Florida, voucher studies in Milwaukee and more

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On March 5, 2012 in Charter Schools, Funding, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, redefinED roundup, School Choice

Editor’s note: We’re going to try something new this morning – a quickie roundup of recent headlines that we think deserve your attention. In keeping with redefinED’s focus, we’ll put the spotlight on stories regarding school choice (vouchers, charters, tax-credit-scholarships, etc.) and/or speak to new definitions of public education.

Florida: A parent trigger bill clears a key Senate committee in an unusual Saturday morning vote. (Tampa Bay Times). A proposal to give charter schools more money for capital projects falters in the state House. (Tampa Bay Times.)

Arizona: Gov. Jan Brewer signs legislation that expands the state’s tax credit scholarship program. (Arizona Republic.)

Wisconsin: Voucher students in Milwaukee make bigger reader gains that peers in public schools, study finds. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.) Proposed voucher expansion could open private-school doors for parents in 37 school districts. (Appleton Post-Crescent) Continue Reading →

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Cherry picking, uneven playing fields and other myths about Florida’s ‘voucher’ program

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On March 2, 2012 in Funding, General, School Choice

Editor’s note: As debate over HB 859 – which affects Florida’s tax credit scholarship program - heads to a floor vote in the House of Representatives as early as today, it’s likely that its critics will offer some of the same curious arguments they have throughout the bill’s committee stops. Jon East, vice president for policy and public affairs at Step Up for Students, which administers the scholarship program, put together the following point-by-point response in support of HB 859 and its Senate compansion SB 962. In some cases, the rebuttal follows a direct quote from a lawmaker. In others, it follows a paraphrasing of the lawmaker’s position.

Rep. Scott Randolph in the House Finance & Tax Committee on Jan. 26: How can you justify raising the cap again when it already is increasing by 25 percent?

First, it is important to remember that this is the only major learning option for which the Legislature imposes an explicit enrollment cap. So this question never comes up in other areas because there is no such cap on, for example, scholarships for disabled students, charter schools, magnet or choice schools. Second, interest for this option among low-income parents has exploded. The scholarship capped out at roughly 38,000 students this year and still had a waiting that at one point reached 13,000 students. We know from the research that the students who choose this option are struggling academically, so we should never want to shut the door on them.

Rep. Gwyndolen Clarke-Reed in the Education Committee on Feb. 27: How can we afford to raise the cap when we are struggling to meet other needs?

This is a help, not a hindrance, to the budget. These students will attend a traditional public school or a scholarship school next year, and if they attend the latter we know the cost is only 68 cents on the FEFP dollar. The House and Senate bills have been reviewed by the Revenue Estimating Conference, and it concluded on Jan. 13 that a cap increase of $31.25 million will produce a first-year savings of $7.6 million and a four-year savings of $33.9 million.

Rep. Randolph in F&T on Jan. 26: “I could run a successful school if I could cherry-pick my students.”

This claim is directly contradicted by the facts. For four straight years, the state has determined that the students who choose the scholarship are among the lowest performers from the public schools they leave behind – a trend the researcher said in August is “becoming stronger over time.” They are also poorer, with an average household income this year of only 12 percent above poverty. 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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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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