redefinED

In Florida, another school board candidate who backs expanded school choice

By Ron Matus on July 27, 2012

It’s rare to find strong school choice advocates on local school boards. But in Florida, another such advocate has emerged as a viable candidate in one of the state’s biggest school districts.

Jason Fischer, 29, is one of six candidates running for the District 7 seat in Duval County, which is the county that corresponds with the city of Jacksonville. As we’ve noted before, Duval has been particularly unfriendly territory when it comes to charter schools, vouchers and tax credit scholarships. So it’s worth noting that not only is Fischer openly supportive of expanded school choice, including private options, but he’s no ordinary contender by other measures. Last month, Gov. Jeb Bush endorsed him. And yesterday, with less than three weeks to go before the Aug. 14 primary, three speaker-designates for the Florida House of Representatives did the same.

Like Glen Gilzean, a school board member and candidate in Pinellas County, Fla. who we’ve also written about (and who also snagged an endorsement from Bush), Fischer defies the caricature of the school choice supporter who wants to tear down traditional public schools. His platform is by no means limited to school choice; it includes, among other things, more focus on teacher quality and performance pay. But Fischer doesn’t shy from the potential benefits that come when more learning options are available to more kids.

“If the government has a good functioning school in an area, and people want to send their kids there, that’s fine,” Fischer told redefinED in a phone interview this week. “My goal isn’t to undercut public education. It’s to make sure parents have the widest opportunities available.”

“I think the choices will improve the quality of education of their child primarily,” he continued. “But secondarily, it will force the public school education system to improve its service level … so everyone benefits.”

Duval has struggled even more than most Florida urban districts to improve test scores for low-income students, and the School Board and one of the county’s key education advocacy groups have resisted more learning options for these students. But Fischer suggests that expanded choice can be part of the solution. Continue Reading →

The real story: Florida students have made big academic strides in the FCAT era

By Matthew Ladner on July 26, 2012

Seeking to improve national test scores consistently ranking near the bottom, Florida policymakers and educators created a system of academic standards and the FCAT to test performance against those standards. Despite substantially improving student learning, anti-testing activists have made headlines in recent months with strident arguments. No serious person, whether on the right or the left, should desire to return Florida’s schools to a transparency dark age.

Florida’s academic gains have a critical external source of validation. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has given academic achievement tests to random samples of students for many years. Administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, the NAEP provides a “gold-standard” measurement allowing cross-state comparisons. Education Week conducted a survey of education policy experts in 2006 and found NAEP to be both the most influential education data source and most influential education study. NAEP earned the highest possible score (100) in both categories.

Following the NAEP data back to the days before FCAT, we find the Florida ranked quite low compared to other states. The earliest available state by state exams for 4th and 8th grade reading and math (the main NAEP assessments) from the 1990s reveals that Florida students consistently ranked near the bottom. Florida students ranked 6th from the bottom in both 4th and 8th grade reading achievement, 5th from the bottom in 8th grade math, 10th from the bottom in 4th grade math.

All of these NAEP exams came before the advent of Florida’s standardized testing and other reforms. Tracking the NAEP data across time, however, reveals that Florida students have made progress greater than the national average. Florida students outgained the national average by almost 10% in 8th grade math, and more than 23% in 8th grade math.

The gains achieved by Florida students in reading have been truly extraordinary. Florida’s 4th grade reading progress has been more than three times the national average, and Florida’s 8th grade scores more than twice as large.

A recent problem with the FCAT writing test drew a great deal of attention from FCAT opponents. We should take care not to miss the forest for the trees. NAEP gave a Writing exam in 1998 (just before Florida’s reforms) and again in 2007. Florida students achieved the largest gain of any state and more than three times larger than the national average during this period.

Sadly, leading the nation in writing gains on the highly respected NAEP exam seems to mean little to Florida’s testing opponents.

Continue Reading →

Louisiana strikes the right balance on accountability for school vouchers

By Jon East on July 25, 2012

Ideologues tend to exaggerate political debate, but Louisiana school superintendent John White reminded us Tuesday that rational policy is the key to integrating vouchers into a robust public education system. The accountability that White introduced, and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) adopted, represents a thoughtful balance of testing, regulation and market forces that ultimately will require vouchers to prove their value.

That’s a formula for how private learning options will become mainstream.

Lawmakers have shown themselves to be particularly inept at writing policy framework for vouchers so, in expanding the New Orleans voucher program to the rest of the state, the Louisiana Legislature punted accountability to the bureaucrats. That left White, a former Teach For America administrator and New York City schools executive under chancellor Joel Klein, with a task that requires careful calibration in a volatile environment. (As if to reinforce the rhetorical excess, one BESE board member on Tuesday assured his colleagues they were about to bite into the forbidden fruit of Eden and could be assured that “evil is going to arise.”)

What makes accountability so difficult is that there is still no clear blueprint. Every state with a voucher or tax credit scholarship has a different iteration, and the loudest voices are usually at the extremes – the voucher critics who demand the private schools be held to precisely the same standard as a public school and the voucher advocates who argue that no regulation is necessary because the market will force schools to respond. So the chore is to find the right balance, one with academic and financial oversight that taps into the accountability that follows from a parent who can walk out the door. This is made all the more challenging by the fact that, in most states, the students who receive the scholarship or voucher represent a minority of the enrollment in the private school.

White navigated the academic maze this way: 1) Every voucher student takes the state test; 2) The results of every test are reported on a statewide basis; 3) Any school with at least 40 students taking the test is held accountable; 4) Those schools will be evaluated on a scale similar to that of public schools. If they fail three out of any four years, their students will be given priority to attend other schools. Furthermore, the failing school will not be allowed to take new students and could be dropped from the program.

The rule has been criticized because the accountability portion is projected to capture only about a fourth of the participating schools in the first school year and schools will not be banned after one failing year. But the small number of schools with at least 40 tested students is the very nature of this school landscape. The 5,600 Louisiana students who receive vouchers this fall will not generally be attending schools where every student receives public support. Instead, they will go to private schools with mostly private-paying students, and you can’t reliably measure a school’s fitness based on two or three or a dozen student test scores.

That said, there is nothing sacrosanct about the lines that are drawn in this new Louisiana accountability rule, and they will no doubt be amended and improved over the years. But the rule is a commendable start and one, similar to the approach in Indiana, that makes an important statement about private learning options. They are part of, not in competition with, the public education system, and they need to be properly held to account.

Florida’s education reformers should acknowledge and fix their own mistakes

By Ron Matus on July 25, 2012

There is no defense for the latest blemish on Florida’s school accountability system. And it’s incumbent upon those who have built and supported that system to quickly acknowledge oversight and management issues within the state Department of Education and ensure the proper steps are taken for a fix.

After the problems with the state writing test in May, it’s hard to believe what has now been widely reported: The state got more than 200 school grades wrong, evidently because it forgot to calculate one of the new elements in its revised grading formula. With all due respect to the hard-working, well-intentioned people in DOE, that’s a bit maddening. To make matters worse, the state announced the grade changes in a press release, emailed after 10 p.m. Friday, that didn’t own up to errors but instead referred to “preliminary revisions” discovered during a “continuous review process.”

A state that has rightly set a high bar for its schools, its students and its teachers obviously has to set a high bar for its own piece of the education bureaucracy. Florida’s education leaders have given more than lip service to terms like “data driven” and “evidence based” and “no excuses.” But in this case, the data isn’t right. And the evidence suggests that honest mistake is no longer a credible excuse.

Critics are using this mishap to shore up their call for a roll-back of Florida’s ed reforms. What a shame for Florida’s kids if they succeed. Standardized tests and school grades are imperfect tools. But in Florida, they’ve been used effectively to put a bigger spotlight and more focus on student achievement, particularly for low-income and minority kids. For years now, one credible, independent analysis after another has found Florida students in the national vanguard in terms of academic progress. Three positive reports have surfaced in the past six weeks alone (see here, here and here).

It’s not fair that DOE’s successes are overlooked and its mistakes amplified. It’s not fair that its critics are held to a lower standard. But this is the environment that Florida’s ed reformers live in, and it’s not likely to change any time soon. At the end of the day, they should continue to be guided by the evidence, no matter how much it is ignored by critics. Or, in this case, how much it points to their own shortcomings.

In school districts, low-income children will always lose the battle for resources

By Doug Tuthill on July 24, 2012

Editor’s note: Doug Tuthill responds today to a post I wrote yesterday about the failure of school districts and teachers unions to enact meaningful differential pay plans for teachers – and how that’s indicative of a bigger failure to help low-income students.

Ron, you raised some excellent points in your blog post about the unwillingness of the Pinellas County, Fla. school district to provide each student with equal access to a quality education. For nine years, I received supplemental pay to work in a magnet program that served the district’s academic elite, and for 11 years I was a leader in the local teachers union, which was complicit in the district’s refusal to provide equal opportunity. So your criticisms stung, but they were accurate.

This may be self-serving, but I’m convinced the cause of this leadership failure is not bad people, but an organizational structure and culture that favors the politically strong over the politically weak.

Growing up in Pinellas, I attended segregated public schools. When the federal courts finally forced the school district to desegregate, the focus was on ratios and not learning. The district closed most of the black neighborhood schools and bused those children to schools in the white neighborhoods because busing white students into black neighborhoods was too politically difficult. But white flight meant some forced busing of white students was necessary, so the district created a rotation system that bused low-income/working class white students every two years to schools where the black population approached 30 percent. (The court order said no Pinellas school could be more than 30 percent black.)

While working-class white neighborhoods lacked the political clout to prevent their children from being bused every two years, their protests were loud enough to force the school board to look for alternatives. In the early 1980s, the district started creating magnet programs to entice white families to voluntarily attend schools that were in danger of exceeding the 30 percent threshold.

These magnet programs were designed to provide white students with a superior education. Class sizes were small, textbook and materials budgets seemed unlimited, professional development opportunities were extraordinary and special pay supplements to attract the best teachers were impressive. In my case, when I quit my job as a college professor to teach in the International Baccalaureate (IB) at St. Petersburg High School (SPHS), my annual salary increased 28 percent.

The magnet strategy worked – especially the IB program. Affluent white families began voluntarily busing their children to attend our program, and in many cases students got on buses at 5 a.m. and rode over 50 miles per day to attend.

Unfortunately, desegregation via magnet schools increased the resource inequities that desegregation was suppose to reduce. Continue Reading →

When school boards and teachers unions look the other way

By Ron Matus on July 23, 2012

Years ago, the powerful director of a local teachers union told me in no uncertain terms: Differential pay for teachers in high-poverty schools wasn’t a good idea and wouldn’t help poor kids. He called it, and I quoted him, “a glitzy solution.”

So what a jolt it was to learn, after the union leader’s passing, that the big school district he helped shape for decades actually had a differential pay plan – a lucrative benefit he signed off on for a handful of teachers in the district’s elite magnet programs.

I bring this up now because of a new report that touches on teacher views about differential pay. And also because of the backdrop it brings into focus on so many ed reform issues, including expanded school choice. Too often – and I say this as respectfully as I can – school boards and teachers unions appear to lack the will to do the right thing for low-income kids.

Differential pay obviously isn’t all that and a bag of chips. But it is a tool that can be used to attract and/or keep high-quality teachers in high-needs schools. Survey after survey shows the vast majority of teachers agree.

In the latest, an Education Sector report that asked teachers about all kinds of things, 83 percent said they supported more money for teachers in low-performing schools. That’s up from 70 percent in 2008 and 80 percent in 2007. With young teachers, the results were even more lopsided: 88 percent of them liked the idea.

And yet, with few exceptions, school districts have not tried differential pay in a meaningful way. In Florida, this has been true even though state laws and rules have required it. Many districts abide by the letter of the law, offering minimal amounts that don’t make a difference, and so the vicious cycles that could be mitigated instead swirl on.

The district in Pinellas County, Fla., is no exception. That’s the district whose longtime union chief, Jade Moore, I was referring to above. Continue Reading →

redefinED roundup: Charter school progress in New York, voucher fears in Michigan and more

By redefinED staff on July 23, 2012

New York: For the third year in a row, New York City charter schools outperform traditional public schools, drawing praise from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, pictured here (New York Times). More from the New York Daily News.

New Jersey: The state teachers union fights new charters even as it attempts to unionize charter school teachers (NJ Spotlight). State education officials approve nine new charters, but reject 10 and postpone 13 (NJSpotlight), including a full-time virtual charter. (NJ.com)

Florida: State education officials reject appeals from three virtual charter schools seeking to open in the Miami-Dade school district. (Miami Herald) Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson defends charter schools at a town hall meeting (South Florida Sun-Sentinel). In a key Democratic primary in South Florida, state senate candidates differ over support for vouchers and tax credit scholarships. (Palm Beach Post)

Louisiana: Students and schools in the state’s new voucher program are not likely to face the same regulatory accountability measures as public schools (Baton Rouge Advocate). A nonpartisan watchdog group recommends state education officials seek legislative guidance as they craft accountability rules (Associated Press). The state teachers union pans the academic results of the state’s first all-grades, on-line charter school, but the school fires back with accusations of cherry picking (Baton Rouge Advocate).

Michigan: Democrats fear vouchers will be part of Gov. Rick Snyder’s plans to overhaul school funding (MLive.com).

Washington: Gubernatorial candidates Rob McKenna and Jay Inslee agree on many aspects of education policy, but disagree on charter schools. (Seattle Times)

Elsewhere: Study finds students in K12 Inc. virtual charter schools are lagging behind their peers in traditional public schools. (Washington Post)

Choice nuggets: Ravitch on vouchers, Florida’s academic progress and how “bad” public schools are like Ol’ Man River

By Ron Matus on July 20, 2012

Editor’s note: Here’s another selection of “choice nuggets,” a feature we started last week to keep some smaller but still blogworthy items from going to the compost heap.

Are vouchers too popular, or not popular enough?

For years, school choice critics have posited that vouchers and tax-credit scholarships will open the floodgates for a mass exodus from public schools. So it was a bit of a monkey shock last week to read Diane Ravitch belittling Louisiana’s new voucher program because, in her view, too few students had applied.

“Not exactly a stampede for the exits,” Ravitch wrote. “No big rush to enroll in the little church schools that are supposedly better than the public schools … ”

According to published reports, about 9,000 students applied for vouchers, not counting those already enrolled in the voucher program in New Orleans. Sounds like a lot of people to me. But if it’s obvious that only a small percentage of parents will opt for private schools (because, truth be told, most parents are satisfied with their public schools) then why are critics so upset? Doesn’t that undermine the argument that school choice is a Trojan Horse for profiteers?

Ravitch ends her piece by suggesting Louisiana officials puffed up the application numbers. “As usual,” she concluded, “they were playing the media for headlines.”

Two days later, the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog ran Ravitch’s piece in full.

A tale of two reports

Two national reports released in the last week purported to offer some gauge of academic progress in Florida’s public schools. One relied on apparently undisclosed measures to determine that Florida’s educational ranking dropped from No. 35 to No. 42 in the past year. The other tracked nearly 20 years of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to conclude that Florida students have made more progress than their peers in every state but one.

Guess which report got more play? Continue Reading →

← Previous 1 … 80 81 82 … 145 Next →