‘My message is that Florida is about choice in education’

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On May 9, 2012 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Florida’s top education official offered a strong pitch for continued expansion of school choice options Wednesday after visiting a Tampa charter school where a quarter of students are dually enrolled in community college classes.

“My message is that Florida is about choice in education,” Kathleen Shanahan, chair of the Florida Board of Education, told redefinED. The state board is “all for reform and we’re all for (school choice) options and we have to continue to be strong advocates for that.”

Shanahan’s comments come in the wake of heightened media scrutiny of charter schools in Florida, which now number more than 500 and enroll 180,000 students.

To be clear, there are some problematic charters that are underperforming and/or financially mismanaged. But the evidence suggests charter students as a whole are performing as well if not better than like students in traditional public schools. And there’s no doubt parents can’t get enough of them: In the last six years, enrollment in Florida charters has doubled.

“They’re exceeding their timeline of excellence and performance and impacting the overall system of education,” Shanahan said.

Shanahan visited the 300-student Brooks-DeBartolo Collegiate High School along with MaryEllen Elia, superintendent of Hillsborough County schools and Mike Kooi, executive director of the Florida Department of Education’s parental choice office. Other state Board of Education members also visited charters this week as part of National Charter School Week.

Tucked away in a gritty stretch of north Tampa, Brooks-DeBartolo was co-founded five years ago by Derrick Brooks, the former All-Pro linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Continue Reading →

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Alabama falls short on school choice, education reform

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On May 9, 2012 in Charter Schools, Unionism

More than 5,600 charter schools are celebrating National Charter Schools Week this week, but none are in Alabama. Barring a miracle, there won’t be any in the near future, either.

The Alabama state senate whiffed last week on a historic opportunity to finally bring charter schools to one of the last states without any. It took an initially modest bill that had already been downsized in earlier rounds of legislating and proceeded to make it a joke.

“As watered down as a glass of iced tea left to sit in Alabama’s summer sun,” the Birmingham News editorialized this week.

The original bill would have allowed up to 50 charters statewide. What passed last week reduced the cap to 20. It also limited charters to the four biggest cities; allowed only the conversion of existing, low-performing schools into charters; gave veto power to the local superintendent or any member of the local legislative delegation; and provided for no appeals process. In other words, it makes charter schools in Alabama pretty much impossible.

The House could revive the bill, but that appears unlikely.

What a shame for the students of Alabama. This year’s Education Week rankings put Alabama at No. 44 among the 50 states in K-12 academic achievement. To be sure, the state has made some recent moves in the right direction by beefing up standards and accountability. But they’re not enough. Alabama students deserve to benefit from the kinds of expanded school choice offerings that have helped students across the nation. Continue Reading →

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redefinED blog stars: Michelle Rhee’s misread on vouchers, why teachers unions aren’t to blame and more

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On May 8, 2012 in General, Parental Choice, Progressives and ed reform, School Choice, Unionism

Editor’s note: This is our second installment of “blog stars,” a compilation of thoughtful material from other ed blogs. If I missed something good, by all means let me know at rmatus@stepupforstudents.org.

Jay P. Greene’s Blog: Much to Learn About Vouchers Rhee Still Has

Michelle Rhee’s faith in regulation is odd. The public school system is super-heavily regulated with laws and policies streaming down from the federal, state and local levels. Despite all of that, much of the system performs at a tragically poor level.  That of course is not to say that vouchers should have no regulation, but the right level of regulation is not “heavy.”

Rhee also places far too much weight on the results of standardized test and gives far too little deference to the judgment of parents. Parents make decisions about schools for a large variety of reasons- including things like school safety, peer groups and the availability of specialized programs. In addition to missing the whole point about school choices being multifaceted with parents best able to judge all the factors, individual test scores bounce around from year to year, they often take a temporary hit when a child transfers and adjusts to a new school.

The notion of having program administrators looking at the math and reading tests and deciding to cast children back to their ‘failing neighborhood school’ is very problematic. Pity the poor voucher program apparatchiks who have to drag children back to a public school where they had been continually bullied because they had the flu on testing day. Pity the children more. The subject of what to do about poorly performing private schools in a choice system is a complex topic and opinions vary widely. Rhee’s proposed solution however does not begin to capture this complexity. Full  post here.

The Blog, Huffington Post: Are Democrats Wrong to Blame Teachers Unions?

But why are teachers unions so much more successful than other unions? The answer is simple: public schools lack both competitors and paying customers, eliminating the checks and balances on union demands that exist in the private sector. A business whose unionized workers drive up costs without raising quality loses customers and may have to lay off workers or even shut down. Union success is thus self-regulating. But if, as a parent, you don’t like the way your local district runs its schools, you have nowhere else to turn — not without moving or paying for a private school. And as a taxpayer, if your local schools mismanage your tax dollars, you can’t send those dollars anywhere else. That’s why public schooling’s inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has more than doubled in the past four decades despite stagnating or declining academic outcomes: revenues don’t depend on satisfying customers.

That’s not the unions’ fault. Continue Reading →

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School vouchers for the poor? Or for all?

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On May 7, 2012 in General, Parental Choice, School Choice

When Indiana’s celebrated state superintendent of instruction, Tony Bennett, spoke in support of universal vouchers at last week’s American Federation For Children summit, the panel’s moderator did not sit quietly. After all, just last year, Howard Fuller (pictured here) fought legislative attempts to include high-income families in a Milwaukee voucher program he helped create for poor children. Of the prospect of universal vouchers in Wisconsin, Fuller proclaimed, “That’s when I get off the train.”

So Fuller, a legend in the school choice movement, politely invoked “the moderator’s privilege” after Bennett spoke. And he was characteristically blunt.

“The thing that I most worry about is that people will forget the importance of protecting poor people in this,” Fuller said, before adding a few sentences later, “I just want people to know … when folks move towards universal (vouchers), just know that some of us are going to fight it.”

The world of school choice is more textured and dynamic than it’s portrayed. It’s not a monolith. It’s many camps, with overlapping but not always consistent visions. For the most part, those differences were glossed over at the AFC summit, and for good reason. The summit was a fitting celebration of recent victories. It was rightly punctuated by moving speeches from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

But the differences are there. And beneath the surface, some tensions too. Fuller has drawn a line in the sand before, including in this podcast interview last year with former redefinED editor Adam Emerson. Here are his latest remarks in full, as best as I could hear and transcribe them: Continue Reading →

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redefinED roundup: School choice advocates gather in New Jersey, charter school woes in Alabama and more

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On May 7, 2012 in General, Grassroots, Parental Choice, School Choice

New Jersey: At the American Federation for Children national summit, N.J. Gov. Chris Christie invokes civil rights era imagery to make his case for vouchers. (Associated Press) Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal tells choice advocates they have “truth and the American people on (their) side.” (abcnews.com) Newark Mayor Cory Booker decries an education system that “chokes out the potential of millions of children.” (redefinED) Beyond the headlines, choice supporters also talk accountability. (redefinED)

Alabama: Embattled charter school bill is watered down again before passage. (Associated Press)

New Hampshire: Charter schools in the state are expanding rapidly. (Concord Monitor)

Montana: Vouchers and tax credit scholarships become an issue in the race for governor. (Billings Gazette)

California: Two dozen high-performing traditional public schools in Los Angeles seek to become charter schools. (Los Angeles Times) Continue Reading →

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Chipping away at the imaginary wall between public education, school choice

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On May 5, 2012 in Charter Schools, General

Arlene Ackerman, Tony Bennett and Kenneth Whalum are hardly a representative sample of elected and appointed officers in public school systems across the nation today. But their participation on an American Federation For Children National Summit panel Friday does chip away at the imaginary wall between public education and parental choice.

“We have allowed our opponents to draw a caricature of us that says we’re against public schools,” said Bennett, state superintendent of public instruction in Indiana (pictured here). “I’m not an adversary of public schools. I’m an advocate for public school children.”

Whalum, an elected member of the Memphis Board of Education, was more dire in his remarks. He used a Titanic analogy to describe the educational predicament facing this generation of students. But he sees nothing inconsistent in providing public or private options or anything in between. “I’m responsible,” he said with a degree of volume in his voice, “for distributing the lifeboats.”

To a manager such as Bennett, charter schools or voucher schools are simply another tool to meet the needs of individual students and to stimulate traditional public schools to think of new and better ways to answer those needs. For Ackerman, the former superintendent for Philadelphia schools, the issue is also intensely personal.

Ackerman spent 40 years in the traditional public education system. She says she was proud to see the growth in reading and math achievement for Philadelphia students until she asked her staff to compute how long it would take the district, at that pace, to assure that all students met basic proficiency standards. The answer is part of the reason she left and is now trying to bring about change from the outside. That answer: 2123.

“That’s a number I cannot get out of my head,” she told the audience. “How can any of us live with that?”

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‘A system that chokes out the potential of millions of children’

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On May 4, 2012 in General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Video streaming by Ustream

Newark Mayor Cory Booker offered a stirring, soaring plea for expanded school choice today, in the close-out speech at the American Federation for Children summit in New Jersey. Here’s a taste:

“Every child born we recognize by our founding principles is born and created in the reflection of the divine. They have innate and endowed by their creator the ability to achieve incredible things. But yet, we’ve created a system that still chokes out the potential of millions of children, who are trapped in systems that deny this nation the benefit of their genius.”

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Voucher, charter school advocates talk accountability, too

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On May 4, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, Testing and Accountability

The headlines covered Gov. Chris Christie’s passionate call for education options in New Jersey, but the fine print here was equally edifying. In papers and workshops presented Thursday afternoon at the American Federation For Children’s Annual Summit, the policy message was unambiguous and remarkably consistent:

All learning options must be scrutinized and must measure up.

Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel Corp. (pictured here), may have most succinctly summed up the discussions of accountability for charter schools and private learning options. 

“We have to be willing,” Barrett said, “to shut down schools that aren’t working. We have to be ruthless, and I’m hopeful we’ll have enough pragmatism to do that.”

Summit participants were also handed a three-page document from AFC that described various academic, financial and administrative accountability provisions as essential ingredients to “ensuring the highest level of program quality and sustainability.” 

“Not only are transparency and accountability smart public policies,” the document stated, “but they provide the school choice movement with readily available data and information to improve programs and illustrate the success of those programs.”

AFC has gone so far as to rate the strengths and weaknesses of voucher and tax credit scholarship accountability provisions in 26 different programs across the country. And it didn’t pull many punches. For example, it ranks Arizona’s “Empowerment Scholarships” as measuring up on only two of eight broad accountability measures.

These proclamations won’t end the division over how to measure success, of course, but they demonstrate a policy maturity that is beginning to draw a sharp contrast with some of the opponents of charter and private options - including the New Jersey teachers union with which Gov. Christie is at war. Just as it would be untenable for proponents to reject any public oversight and rely only on market mechanisms, it is also unpersuasive for opponents to argue that every option must be regulated in precisely the same way.

(Image from podtech.net)

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Parent trigger founder: school reform changed ‘we the people to we the parents’

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On May 3, 2012 in General, Parent empowerment

As is routine with school choice proposals, the parent trigger bill in Florida – defeated in March after a dramatic 20-20 vote in the state Senate – was portrayed by critics as another front in a systematic campaign to privatize public schools. So it was fascinating today to hear more detail about the history and motivations behind the bill from Gloria Romero, the former California state senator – and Democrat – who sponsored the original trigger bill in that state.

“This is a law that’s so simple, it’s revolutionary,” Romero told participants at the American Federation for Children summit in Newark. “This law has the power to really shift paradigms, to give true power – not just lip service, no longer window dressing – to parents who are sick and tired of failing schools.”

“I wanted to have a law for parents based on the most basic foundations of our democracy,” she also said. “Think back. Petitioning our government. We the people. And if we could change that from we the people to we the parents, with the power of our signatures, our Johnny Hancocks, to collectively sign a petition, present it those of us who are supposed to be looking out for our interests, and basically saying, ‘If you won’t do it, then basically, get the hell out of the way and we will.’ ”

We’ve attached a recording of Romero’s remarks below. They followed a passionate speech about vouchers by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, which you can read about here and here and here. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is the keynote speaker tonight. Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter at @redefinEDonline.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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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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