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Louisiana’s push for vouchers is historic, rewarding – Eric Lewis, podcastED

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On March 30, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

Louisiana is the center of the school choice universe right now. Last week, the state House passed a bill that creates a statewide voucher program for low-income students (expanding the one now limited to New Orleans). And this week, it passed a bill that creates a statewide tax-rebate scholarship (which is something like a tax credit scholarship).

The Louisiana campaign has been “historic” and “rewarding,” Eric Lewis, director of the state chapter of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, says in this podcast. The choice programs, which are expected to clear the Senate and be signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal, are “going to greatly change the landscape of education in Louisiana,” he says.

Clearly, though, the debate isn’t over. The bill that includes the voucher program leaves creation of accountability provisions to the Louisiana Department of Education and Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. BAEO supports some type of regulatory action, Lewis says, for private schools that don’t show academic gains for voucher students.

“We want parents to be able to exercise choice, and we want to empower them to do so,” he says. “But we also want to make certain that while we’re fighting to pull the poor kids out of failing public schools, we’re not putting them in a situation where they’re entering sub-par private schools.”

“What we will want to see is the department and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education set up some process where, if at some point in time, after some given period of time, schools are not able to show growth with the kids, then some measure needs to be put in place to recompense that,” Lewis continues. “There needs to be some type of threshold where you know it’s clear that it’s not working with a particular school, and so kids shouldn’t continue to matriculate within that school.”

Lewis also credits the 12 Democrats, including six black Democrats, who voted for vouchers despite what he calls “incredible heat.” One political blog said the 12 “Jindal Democrats” were motivated by politics, money, re-election, selfishness, fear and “general spinelessness.”

“It was intense,” Lewis says. “I applaud all 12 of them for standing up for kids, and standing up for what they felt was right.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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More choice for low-income parents shouldn’t be limited to charter schools

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On March 21, 2012 in Charter Schools, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

John Kirtley, chairman of Step Up for Students and one of the hosts here at redefinED, offered some thoughts on parental choice and parental empowerment over at Fordham’s Board’s Eye View blog today. Here’s a taste:

Parents must be truly empowered, however. They can’t just be empowered to choose charters, as some reformers believe. In most states, there is a surprisingly large inventory of private schools that are already serving low-income children. In some of these places there are few charters—sometimes (but not always) because the district is slow to authorize them. In Duval County, Florida, for instance, the district has only thirteen charters despite its large size (over 150,000 students). And not all of them serve low-income children. By contrast, there are over 100 private schools in the county that serve low-income children under the state’s tax credit scholarship program.

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redefinED roundup: Voucher plan advances in Alaska, Florida Virtual School gets more scrutiny and more

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On March 19, 2012 in Charter Schools, General, Parental Choice, Private Schools, redefinED roundup, Religious education, School Choice, Virtual Education

Alaska: Voucher bill gains ground in the legislature. (Alaska Dispatch)

Florida: Florida Virtual School, a national model, comes under more scrutiny for its effectiveness. (Education Week.)

Indiana: Indiana Supreme Court agrees to hear voucher case. (Associated Press) More competition from school choice means school districts must step up marketing, a columnist argues. (Lafayette Journal & Courier) All-boys charter school coming to Indianapolis. (Indianapolis Star)

Minnesota: Big money being poured into school reform campaigns. (Minneapolis Star Tribune) Continue Reading →

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Good job, now get back to work

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On February 28, 2012 in Education Research, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students got a pat on the back Monday at a State Board of Education workshop, albeit from a not-unexpected source. But the brief discussion that followed the presentation was a reminder that the oversight for these educational endeavors, even one that is now a decade old and the largest of its type in the nation, can benefit from open-minded questions.

The attaboy came from Scott Jensen, senior governmental affairs advisor for the American Federation of Children. (Full disclosure: John Kirtley, founder and board chairman for Step Up for Students, the nonprofit that oversees Florida’ tax credit scholarships, is AFC’s vice president.) The board workshop was focused on choice options in Florida, both public and private, and Jensen highlighted the state’s reputation as a national leader in a choice movement that has moved from fringe to mainstream in just the past decade.

The Florida scholarship is a model for other states, Jensen said, because its per-student scholarship amount – $4,011 this school year – is enough to give low-income parents real options. (The average for other states with such programs, he said, is between $1,500 and $2,000.) It has financial and academic reporting requirements. And it is a verified money saver for state taxpayers, according to, among other reputable sources, OPPAGA – the Florida Legislature’s respected research arm. “That has been helpful to us around the country as we encourage other states to adopt these programs,” Jensen told the board. “They’re very reluctant, given no track record in their states, to say it’s going to cost money or save money. The good work that’s been done in Florida is very valuable to that.”

But as we all know, the good work isn’t done yet. Continue Reading →

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Hello from the new guy

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On February 27, 2012 in Parental Choice, Private Schools, Religious education, School Choice

Hi everybody. My name is Ron Matus. I’m the new assistant director of policy and public affairs at Step Up for Students, a nonprofit in Tampa, Florida that oversees a tax credit scholarship for 38,000 low-income students. Among other responsibilities, I’ll be editing redefinED, which means I have the unenviable task of replacing the irreplaceable Adam Emerson, who put this forum on the map and is now the school choice czar at the Fordham Institute. I have mountains of homework to do before I can approach the depth and breadth of knowledge that Adam brought to redefinED. But I am pumped about keeping the blog’s spirit alive and finding ways to bring more people into the conversation. I think redefinED stands out for its tone and view. I appreciate its humility. And I know it is absolutely on point in 1) trying to reshape what is meant by “public education” and 2) accentuating the common ground between so many of us who have somehow been segregated into warring camps.

I’m sure I’ll be sharing more about myself in future posts, but for now I think two things are worth noting.

I was a newspaper reporter for 25 years. 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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The Quiet Audacity of Michigan

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On November 28, 2011 in Customization, General, Private Schools, School Choice

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in my home state of Michigan, where labor and public employee unions exhibit outsized-influence in the public square. If you want to know just how much influence, ask recalled Representative Paul Scott. But for all the union supremacy that could sound alarms on any expansion of school choice in the Wolverine State, the sweep of several education measures hasn’t drawn national headlines the way other reforms have in neighboring Midwestern states.

The policy debates within the state have tended to focus on the proposed increase of the cap on the number of charter schools, but this overlooks other bills that could have a profound effect on the number of quality educational options as well as on the way school boards govern public education.

One notable effort would expand dual enrollment in Michigan’s colleges and universities to high school students in private institutions, removing the requirement that those students would have to enroll first in a public school and calling for the state to pick up the tuition bill. But just as importantly, school districts would have to extend their information and counseling services on college enrollment options to private school students who want to participate.

This would clear what the Michigan Catholic Conference has called the “unnecessary hurdles” to all students who want an early start on their postsecondary studies, and the conference clearly has the urban poor at Catholic high schools in mind. A spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, however, has called the proposal a back-door voucher, and the Michigan School Boards Association wants to know what’s going to happen to its share of the state School Aid Fund.

The union and the school boards largely stayed silent on the plan until the bills passed their last committee by a 2-to-1 margin, mostly along party lines. This Democratic and union opposition adds to other legislative efforts in Michigan that could rightfully be labeled progressive, such as a move requiring public schools to open their doors to students from other districts as long as they have seats. Few outside the state have taken notice, but each initiative rethinks the way we govern public education through artificial boundaries.

Requiring districts to guide private school students on their dual-enrollment options would begin to redefine the governing role of school boards as answerable to parents, who become the primary customers here. Eliminating the boundaries dividing school districts can enable a student in Detroit to access an education in, say, Grosse Pointe, making the system truly public.

Teachers aren’t marching on Lansing yet, but Michigan is bringing audacity to a reform effort that rethinks the way we deliver a public education.

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Continuing one researcher’s seminal work — a call to action

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On October 28, 2011 in Demographic Research, Education Research, General, Private Schools, School Choice

One of the most devastating arguments made for the school choice wars has been the observation by researcher Denis Doyle that public school teachers have long sent their own children to private schools at higher rates than the general public. His analyses of the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census Bureau data has shown that while about 11 percent of average U.S. families send their children to private schools, more than 14 percent of public school teachers do so. This is, of course, the moral equivalent of a doctor warning away his own family from the hospital in which he or she works.

Doyle retired this year, and the American Center for School Choice and California Parents for Educational Choice would like to see this project continued. That data is typically available about three years after the actual census, thus we need to be up and running by early 2013. Although either of us would be pleased to lead this research, we do not have the funding presently to do so. We would be glad to have another organization take this on, but most important is that the analysis is completed.

We are hoping to expand this study to include not just public school teachers, but also public school administrators, who, with their six-figure salaries, are highly likely to be sending their own kids to private schools at higher rates still.

Denis deserves some kind of medal for his brilliant and extremely important work, but we suspect that his greatest legacy will be simply that his friends and colleagues have seen the enormous value in what he did and will carry on the torch. Is there an organization out there that would either fund the project or take it on itself?

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Seeking a paradigm shift for private schools with public purpose

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On September 29, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Private Schools

Editor’s note: This guest column comes from James Herzog, the associate director for education at the Florida Catholic Conference.

More than 80 private school organization leaders met at the Education Department’s headquarters for the Seventh Annual Private School Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss ways to cross the public-private divide and thus better serve the interests of all schoolchildren.

“We need to create some means for public and private schools to support each other and leverage those resources that are in private schools,” said Jacqueline Smethurst, co-founder of a 501(c)(3) called Wingspan Partnerships and one of four panelists for the discussion. Smethurst said this was a lesson she and her husband learned in witnessing first-hand the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Smethurst had lived in New Orleans for more than a decade and was amazed by the level of support she and her husband received when they evacuated to Dallas. Her husband, David Drinkwater, was head of an independent K-12 school that was able to reopen within three months of the hurricane due to community assistance for space, technical support, telephone donations, etc. She was discouraged, however, to learn that public schools in the New Orleans area were declared closed for the year.

“We saw that was the end of the line,” Smethurst said. Since the couple wanted to do something about the disparities created by the public-private divide, they co-founded the nonprofit in Napa, Calif..

Another panelist gave moving examples about how his private school reached out to other public and private schools in his community during times of need. Roger Weaver, former headmaster of the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, Calif., spoke about efforts ranging from restoring arts programming in a public school to securing the very existence of a storied Catholic school.

Weaver recalled the impact of “Proposition 13,” which was a property-tax-reduction measure in 1978 that maintained core curriculum but reduced “everything else” in the public classroom. He visited a nearby public school some time after the passage of Proposition 13 and reached out to the school by offering services of a choral instructor for a few periods per day. This type of outreach continued and evolved to a point in 1984 in which the nonprofit “Crossroads Community Outreach Foundation” was established. Since then the Foundation has helped to restore arts and science programs for thousands of public school students.

Weaver also spoke about his experience in visiting St. Anne School in Santa Monica in the mid-2000s. He learned from Michael Browning, principal at St. Anne School, that the school faced a $60,000 funding deficit and was struggling to keep its doors open. Weaver offered encouragement to the school to overcome this challenge since it served such a vital mission. In particular, St. Anne’s was founded in 1908 and serves many Title I low-income students. The St. Anne School Support Council was formed in 2006 and has to date raised more than $700,000. The Council members includes stakeholders from the school itself along with representatives from private schools in West Los Angeles and local businesses.

The moderator for the discussion was Debora Southwell, management and program analyst from the Office of Non-Public Education. The two other panelists included Al Adams, former headmaster of Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, and Jim Scott, president of Punahou School in Honolulu. (Incidentally, Punahou School is the alma mater for President Barack Obama; he attended the school from grades 5-12.)

The panel also featured a dialogue with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who continued to offer support for public and private partnerships but also continued to disparage the support that might come from school voucher-type programs.

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A new strategy?

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On July 20, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Private Schools, School Choice

This week, the Denver-based Legal Center for People with Disabilities and Older People filed a federal complaint alleging that a Colorado school district’s pilot voucher plan discriminates against children with special needs. The voucher program would provide “only limited services (if any) for students with disabilities” and violates not only the Americans with Disabilities Act, but also Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act protecting civil rights law, reads the complaint to the Justice Department. “Parents of students with disabilities do not have the same choice to participate in this program,” the center states.

This, of course, comes just a month after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar complaint to the Justice Department alleging that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and two schools in particular, also violate both ADA and Section 504 by discriminating against students with disabilities and further segregating Milwaukee students. “Proposed legislation to substantially expand the voucher program, if implemented, will exacerbate the discrimination against and segregation of students with disabilities by permitting more schools to participate in the program,” the ACLU states.

The Milwaukee program did indeed expand to Racine, Wis., just as many private school options passed state legislatures during the past several months. Will we be seeing more complaints like these as one strategy to reverse the momentum?

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