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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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He didn’t really say that, did he?

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On February 8, 2012 in Achievement Gap, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, Unionism

New Jersey employs a brand of education politics that is not renowned for its nuance or subtlety, so let’s credit New Jersey Education Association Director Vincent Giordano with raising the bar. In an interview on the New Jersey Capitol Report over the weekend, Giordano was pressed on the timely subject of a legislative proposal there to give private learning options to low-income students who attend public schools that are judged to be under-performing. For context, let’s add the fact that, according to the Newark Star-Ledger, his salary in 2010 was roughly $422,000.

His response, captured in this video clip, is nothing if not succinct: “Well, you know, life’s not always fair and I’m sorry about that.”

Giordano is no doubt thinking better of his remarks today. But it does seem fair to point out that key New Jersey Democrats, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker, support the scholarship option precisely because life is unfair for children who grow up in poverty. The mayor sees the scholarship as one modest way to try to level the playing field.

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Gloria Romero weighs in on Florida parental empowerment

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On February 7, 2012 in General, Parent empowerment

A parental empowerment bill inspired by the California trigger law has now moved through three different committees in the Florida Legislature, and former California Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero has entered the debate. As those who followed the fight on the Pacific Coast know, this is a deeply personal issue to her.

In a brief commentary today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Ms. Romero reminds us that this issue has cut across party lines and that the end game is not as much about shutting down schools as it is about giving parents a seat at the table. The Florida effort is moving in both chambers with HB 1191 and SB 1718.

Here is a fuller version of her column:

Florida Should Embrace the Parent Trigger

By Gloria Romero

Our children too often function as debit cards for public education, valued in a struggling school system for the cash they bring through the front door. But parents have no such financial interest at stake, and Florida has the chance to give them more of the educational control they deserve. The Parent Empowerment in Education Act, proposed by Rep. Michael Bileca and Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, takes a step toward focusing on the families that schools serve.

I wrote the nation’s first “parent trigger” law, in part because I was frustrated with the lack of urgency in turning around chronically underperforming schools. As a Democratic senator in California, I was tired of the status-quo education interests dictating education policy. Since that bold bipartisan bill was signed into law, some 20 other states have sought to grant this power to parents across the nation. Florida is the latest state to do so. Continue Reading →

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For community organizers, parental empowerment is not about party politics.

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On January 13, 2012 in General, Grassroots, Parent empowerment, School Choice

Edit Barry is a mother, activist, writer and education blogger from Baltimore who criticized my recent blog post connecting feminism with school choice, where I wrote:

The school choice movement is founded on the empowerment of teachers and custodial parents. Since most teachers and custodial parents are women and since feminism is about empowering women, the school choice movement is rooted, in part, in feminism.

In a comment to my post, Edit asked me to defend my position by more precisely defining feminism and giving examples of local feminists who support school choice.

Feminism is part of the movement to democratize power. Feminists seek to ensure women’s abilities to acquire and use social, economic and political power are not inhibited by their gender. Most feminist activism occurs in local communities.

Yvonne Clayton-Reed is an African-American woman who taught in the Pinellas County school district for 34 years. Twenty years ago, Yvonne retired on a Friday and on the following Monday used her retirement funds to open a private school in the basement of her church. Yvonne is passionate about teaching black children how to read, and she’s especially proud of her work with low-income black boys.

Yvonne is a legendary educator in our neighborhood and, despite health challenges, refuses to quit. In addition to her work in the classroom, she’s also a community organizer and political activist. Two years ago, when we held a rally in Tallahassee to support scholarships for high-poverty children, Yvonne filled two buses and led her families to the Capitol steps in her wheelchair.

Suzette Dean moved from the Islands to Florida as a teenager and ended up earning an education degree from the University of South Florida in Tampa. While at USF, Suzette began tutoring students and when she graduated she and her husband Daniel decided to open a church and school in one of Tampa’s highest poverty neighborhoods. They had few financial resources but managed to borrow enough money to purchase a small piece of land and with their own hands built a small church and school.

Today Suzette is raising five children while running a K-12 private school with about 100 students. She is also the chief administrator for the church, runs an afterschool tutoring program for the neighborhood public middle school and helps Daniel with a variety of community development projects.

Yvonne and Suzette are feminists who utilize school choice to improve their communities. Unfortunately many state and national feminist leaders want to deny these women and their communities the empowerment that comes from school choice. For example, the National Organization for Women’s website refers to school choice advocates as “right wingers” who “are intent on passing an array of voucher proposals and tax credit proposals that favor the well-to-do.” And in Pennsylvania the state NOW branch recently opposed a tax credit scholarship for low-income students to attend private schools.

I know most feminist leaders are Democrats and since Jimmy Carter changed the Democratic Party’s position on parental choice in 1976, most Democrats now oppose private school choice. But for community organizers like Suzette and Yvonne, parental empowerment is not about party politics or ideology. It’s about having the tools they need to empower and enable the low-income families in their communities.

I hope Ms. Barry will one day visit Tampa Bay and talk with Suzette, Yvonne and other local activists about how publicly-funded private school choice impacts their community development work. I’m sure she’ll find the dialogue interesting and these women inspiring.

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Widening our school reform horizons

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On January 4, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, Education Research, General, Parent empowerment, School Choice

In the early decades of the 19th century, American education reformers followed eagerly the developments in European countries that were building systems of popular schooling; Horace Mann even spent his honeymoon touring Prussian schools! More recently, however, there has been a marked disinclination to learn from what – for good or ill – is happening in the schools of other countries. Now and again, it is true, there will be a flurry of interest in why measured performance is better in Taiwan or in Finland than in the United States, but the reports we receive commonly lack the context that would allow us to make sense of national differences.

Of course, there are increasingly rich data on performance outcomes, and studies that correlate these outcomes with different characteristics of national education systems. An especially powerful study, for those concerned with education reforms that include both accountability for results and the empowerment of parents and teachers through school autonomy and choice, was published a couple of years ago as School Accountability, Autonomy and Choice around the World, by Ludger Woessmann and others, including Martin West of Harvard.

Those who want more details on how different educational systems – at least those in Europe – function can turn to Eurydice.org or, for a broader but less detailed view, to OECD’s invaluable annual Education at a Glance  and to the reports of the World Bank and of UNESCO on a range of education issues. The new edition of our Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, with chapters on more than 50 countries, will be out in four volumes in 2012.

But how to make sense of all this information and, especially, how to think about it in a systematic way that can serve as the basis for structural and governance reforms? It is not enough, surely, simply to assert that reading and math scores will go up if this or that change is made; efficiency in producing such measurable outcomes (while essential) is not the only result that a society expects from its educational system.

Americans often turn to decisions of our Supreme Court, such as Pierce, Meyer, Barnette, Brown, Yoder, Lau, and others, to articulate fundamental principles that should guide decisions about education, and we do so in ways that often go beyond the particular circumstances of the decision or its actual legal implications. We do this because we lack more general formulations of the right to education and rights in education, apart from the varied provisions of state constitutions. This makes it difficult to think and to discuss in a principled way and causes us to fall back on arguments about test scores as though they were the only issue in education. Continue Reading →

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The inspiring sacrifice of India’s poor

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On January 3, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, Private Schools

I first became aware of the plethora of private schools serving India’s poor through James Tooley’s extraordinary book, The Beautiful Tree. Apparently India’s government schools are so corrupt and incompetent that education entrepreneurs in India’s urban slums and rural areas have created private schools for the poor that are thriving. Amazingly, parents in living in squalor and supporting their families on pennies per day are paying up to half their yearly income so their children can get educated.

According to this recent New York Times article, India’s government has decided to increase the regulations on these private schools and put more money into the government schools in an attempt to reverse the flow of poor children into private schools. Private school operators say the primary effect of these new regulations will be to give local government officials more opportunities for extracting bribes.

The sacrifices India’s low-income parents are making on behalf of their children are inspiring. The Indian government should embrace these parents’ efforts instead of trying to thwart them. Providing publicly funded education vouchers for India’s poor would increase the number of parents able to educate their children, and increase the supply and quality of private schools serving the poor. One small-scale effort shows promise, but the demand, obviously, is much greater.

India should leverage its expanding private school infrastructure to more effectively and efficiently serve more children, and not let corruption and incompetence usurp these children’s needs.

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Forming school communities on the basis of choice

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On December 20, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, School Choice, Teacher empowerment

Boston University professor Charles Glenn, one of redefinED’s newest contributors and an expert on comparative school choice policy, has taken to the journal First Things to further explore what he has long called the myth of the common schoool. From 1970 to 1991, Glenn served as director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education, where he oversaw the administration of state funds for magnet schools and desegregation:

What has developed in recent decades is a substantial emptying out of the content of democratic localism in education, without a corresponding increase in real control from society as a whole. Professional educational administrators and the teachers’ unions have, between them, come to shape educational practice in countless ways that are beyond the reach of the democratic process, whether at the local, state, or national level. Seldom are real issues of how, much less why, to educate put before parents and other citizens.

Most parents have little appetite to debate these questions, but they are eager to choose among schools with distinctive missions when the alternatives are explained clearly. I saw that in Massachusetts in the 1980s when I had responsibility for promoting educational equity and worked with a dozen cities to create choice-based desegregation plans based on clear differentiation of schools. Parents were much more interested in choice than in “voice.” This in turn made it possible for the teachers in each school to work together to fashion a distinctive approach or mission that would be attractive to parents.

American education now is undergoing a reinvention of localism, in the form of charter schools and other innovations that place significant decisions back in the hands of those engaged with shaping and maintaining an individual school: teachers and other school staff (and students as appropriate) in dialogue with parents and community institutions and supporters, as in the nineteenth century. Since the barriers of distance have been greatly reduced, such school communities can be formed on the basis of choice rather than of geography.

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Grassroots feminism is helping drive the expansion of school choice.

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On December 2, 2011 in General, Grassroots, Parent empowerment, School Choice

The school choice movement is founded on the empowerment of teachers and custodial parents. Since most teachers and custodial parents are women and since feminism is about empowering women, the school choice movement is rooted, in part, in feminism.

Civil rights leaders, such as the legendary Florida civil rights leader H.K. Matthews, have for years argued that school choice is an essential component of the modern civil rights movement, but feminist leaders nationally haven’t made a similar connection. Women at the grassroots across the country are fighting for the power to create more diverse learning options for children and to match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs, but unfortunately national feminist leaders seem to be ignoring their struggles. Perhaps their silence is a reflection of race and class differences within the women’s movement. Much of Florida’s school choice movement is being led by low-income women of color.

Seeing these women advocate for their children is inspiring. They hold planning meetings in the evening after working two jobs, ride all night on buses to Tallahassee, march on the capitol, testify in committee meetings and then ride all night home so they don’t miss a second day of work.

These feminists know that finding the right educational fit for their children is a matter of life and death, and they will not be denied.

The school choice movement is one of the most dynamic and growing sectors of modern feminism. That this effort is being lead by local activists with little formal connection to feminist leaders nationally is a reaffirmation that the fuel for democracy and social justice always comes from below.

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Framing school choice as parent empowerment

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On November 30, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, School Choice

Most parents try to protect their child from dangers, to nourish their child’s development, and to instill values and a sense of purpose in their child so that, as he or she matures, each child will be able to make sensible choices for his or her own life path.

Yet, most parents need government assistance in order to promote their children’s best interests. For one thing, if left unchecked outside forces may overwhelm parental efforts. These include the child’s peers, undesirable cultural and commercial influences, and so on. In addition, family poverty and ignorance may prevent parents from effectively carrying out their roles.

To be clear, parents need help, not only from extended family members and the community at large, but also from government. For example, public regulation can increase parental power and authority over their children by preventing others (like retail cigarette sellers) from tempting children into self-destructive behaviors. The state can also provide information (or require others to provide information, like movie ratings) that parents need to enable them to make good decisions for their children. Moreover, government can provide resources (like food stamps) that some parents lack. In all of these power-enhancing ways, government can help parents better fulfill their responsibilities to their children.

Sometimes, in the name of “child protection,” government reduces rather than enhances parental power. To be sure, as a last resort it may be necessary to substitute collective or professional decisions as to what is best for children. Yet policymakers may be too quick to override parental control when further empowering parents would, overall, be best for children.

Other times, government actions are misleadingly framed as “child protection” measures that, on closer analysis, may be better understood as actually parent-empowering (like issuing teenage driving licenses that limit when youths may drive and who may be in the car with them).

Add to that this key point: it may often be politically easier to win the adoption of a policy when it is understood as helping people be good parents than when it is understood as curtailing parental authority. Isn’t helping people be good parents something on which conservatives (the “family values” groups) and liberals (who talk of “personal empowerment”) agree? By contrast, the constituency may be narrower for “child protection” measures, especially those that are seen to push a large share of parents around because “legislators or experts know better.”

Take the problem of childhood obesity, for example. Getting colas out of middle school vending machines and junk food commercials off TV programs aimed at children ages eight and younger removes temptations that parents generally would like to be out of sight. Policies that would achieve those ends empower parents to have more control over what their children eat. This is not the nanny state. Parents who still want to feed their kids Froot Loops and have them drink Cokes are free to do that.

Finally, then, consider the debate over school vouchers (or scholarships) for children from households of modest means. They should not be defended on the ground that this mechanism will improve the test scores of America’s children or that it will destroy teachers’ unions and unleash the wondrous innovations of capitalism. Those are collective objectives that some people favor (and others oppose, doubt, or care little about). Rather, subsidized school choice is best promoted on the ground that it empowers additional families to make decisions for their children that nearly all parents want to be able to make. Just like food stamps, school scholarships for needy families can help parents be better parents.

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The legacy of Ted Forstmann

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On November 21, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, School Choice

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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