@willweatherford: One of my big priorities is 2 give parents #schoolchoice http://t.co/QJE1GPtKap via @TBOcom #edFL #legFL #edreform #Sayfie13 hours agoReplyRetweet
@JasonBedrick Your chart rocks!13 hours agoReplyRetweet
RT @JasonBedrick: #Schoolchoice tax credits grow more popular once implemented. Legislators, be not afraid! http://t.co/I2aOwqnOAm13 hours agoReplyRetweet
Strong demand for #schoolchoice among #Hispanics http://t.co/tTGFo4bdtI via @AaronMRodriguez #vouchers #edreform #edpolicy @HispanicCREO13 hours agoReplyRetweet
RT @PEFNC: Critical Vote on Tuesday!:Tap here http://t.co/8oo1ZuVFyq to contact your legislators & show your support for Opportunity Schola…13 hours agoReplyRetweet
@LisaLeslie Thanks for the RT! And thanks for speaking at #AFCPolicySummit. We're honored to be on the same #schoolchoice team with you.14 hours agoReplyRetweet
Follow #schoolchoice #vouchers #charterschools #magnetschools #virtualschools? Then you'll like our facebook page! http://t.co/iJd9hErKwS15 hours agoReplyRetweet
RT @PEFNC: Opportunity Scholarships are being debated now by NC legislature. ACT NOW!: Text SOS to 52886 and ask your legislator to support…1 day agoReplyRetweet
RT @HispanicCREO: Congratulations to the 2013 National Charter Schools Hall of Fame Inductees http://t.co/gZLwqm0fSA1 day agoReplyRetweet
@TXparentsunion Thank you!1 day agoReplyRetweet

The legacy of Ted Forstmann

By on November 21, 2011

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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The success of the Children’s Scholarship Fund

By on November 21, 2011

Editor’s note: Theodore Forstmann, philanthropist and co-founder of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, died Sunday at the age of 71. Forstmann created the scholarship fund in 1998. Darla Romfo, the fund’s president and an associate with the American Center for School Choice, recently contributed this post for redefinED.

News from the education front tends to be grim these days. Despite all the significant education reform efforts in recent years, there are still hundreds of thousands of students in underperforming schools in every state. But there are pockets of hope, and it’s important to remember there are always reasons to be optimistic.

This fall marks the thirteenth year that thousands of low-income children were able to attend the private school of their family’s choice with a partial scholarship from Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF). Now that almost 123,000 children have gone through our program, we are beginning to witness our CSF Scholars become young adults and take their place in the world. The value of what we are doing struck me again this August at a CSF alumni gathering when I met Jason Tejada, an impressive young man in his junior year at Columbia University.

Jason was in fourth grade when a teacher at his public school told his mother, Luz, about CSF because she thought it would open the doors to better educational opportunities. Although Jason was smart and did well at school, Luz liked the idea of a more disciplined environment, and with a CSF scholarship, she enrolled Jason at Incarnation School in Washington Heights.

While Luz and her husband, Francisco, couldn’t afford full tuition at Incarnation on the money they earned from their cleaning jobs, the small family contribution required by CSF was manageable. When Jason’s younger sisters, Joandalys and Jorvelyn, were ready to start school, they also became CSF Scholars at Incarnation.

Jason’s sister, Jorvelyn, recently told us, “The day you gave my brother that scholarship marked a huge change in our lives.”

After Incarnation, Jason went on to All Hallows High School with another scholarship, eventually graduating as valedictorian. As he told us, “The CSF scholarship afforded me a disciplined and thorough education which set my standards and goals. Incarnation gave me a second family. All Hallows made me a responsible gentleman.” After high school, Jason earned a full scholarship to Columbia. An economics major, he interned at J.P. Morgan Chase this summer.

Jason’s success inspired his sisters to set high academic goals too. Joandalys, who just began her senior year at St. Jean Baptiste High School (also with a scholarship), plans to major in international business. She is already making college visits with an after-school program at Barnard College. And Jorvelyn, who won a scholarship to attend Notre Dame High School in Manhattan this fall, wants to become an archeologist or paleontologist.

Their mother, Luz, told me, “As parents, we wish the best for our children. I hope to see all three of them become professionals with careers.”

What a privilege it is to watch young people like Jason and his sisters grow up to fulfill their potential and to empower parents like Luz and Francisco to choose a high-quality school for their children. Our families remind me there is no better way to break the cycle of poverty than through education. So however difficult it may seem as the latest round of test scores are released or a new political fight about charters or vouchers or accountability emerges, we have to remember the real people involved, and persevere to offer more and more children access to a high-quality education. Our future as a nation depends on it.

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Overheard in Florida

By on November 18, 2011

“I’m concerned that our Legislature is succumbing to the mega-Wall Street charter school operations that are certainly not local and are far removed from the public.” — Dan Boyd, superintendent of the Alachua County school system, to the Gainesville Sun, on his fears that a Florida law encouraging the expansion of high-performing charter schools will attract profit-making academies to his district.

“We’re not from Wall Street, we’re from Fort Lauderdale.” — Jon Hage, the president and CEO of Charter Schools USA, in the same Gainesville Sun story.

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Californians like charters

By on November 18, 2011

From the Los Angeles Times:

Charter schools have won over about half of California voters, but these independent, non-traditional public schools are not widely viewed as the solution to the state’s education problems, according to a new poll.

Among those surveyed in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, 52% had a favorable opinion about charters; only 12% had an unfavorable impression.

Asked whether charter schools or traditional schools provided a better education, 48% gave superior marks to charters; 24% considered traditional schools more effective.

“As people learn more about what charter schools are, they tend to like the idea of choice,” said USC professor Priscilla Wohlstetter, who directs the university’s Center on Educational Governance.

But further in the story:

Far more people favored increasing funding for traditional schools over the strategy of creating more charters, by a 64%-21% tally. Nor are voters inclined to hand over low-performing public schools to outside operators, including those that run charters.

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Ohio mom jailed for crossing school zones launches parent union

By on November 17, 2011

Kelley Williams-Bolar, the Akron, Ohio, mother who spent 10 days in jail for enrolling her daughters in a high-performing school district outside her attendance zone, has formed the Ohio Parents Union, according to the Dropout Nation blog. Editor RiShawn Biddle writes:

Williams-Bolar is taking her place alongside parents such as Gwen Samuel, Matt Prewett and Hanya Boulos to launch the nation’s fifth parents union. The Ohio Parents Union is still in its infancy, and according to Williams-Bolar in an e-mail to Dropout Nation, still working with families to map out a full agenda. But Williams-Bolar’s new group is already getting help from the Samuel and the Connecticut Parents Union; Samuel has already introduced Williams-Bolar to the growing network of Parent Power activists and to Whitney Tilson, whose e-mails reach into the core of the overall school reform movement.

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Andy Rotherham occupies educational inequality

By on November 17, 2011

This column from Andy Rotherham appearing today on Time.com is so well worth reading that it’s hard to edit it down to a few excerpts. It’s the most prescient and fair-minded argument on where to direct our “Occupy” anger in the cause for social and economic justice, ending with a plea to the Occupy Wall Street movement to “demand the kind of radical change we need to create a school system that lives up to our values rather than mocking them.”

On economic inequality: “… when it comes to giving Americans equal opportunity, our schools are demonstrably failing at their task. Today zip codes remain a better predictor of school quality and subsequent opportunities than smarts or hard work. When you think about it, that’s a lot more offensive to our values than a lightly regulated banking system.”

On ideas to foster equal opportunity: “… our politicians are too skittish to take on special interests or too wrapped up in ideology to acknowledge that no single solution — for instance, school choice, ending the federal role in education or just addressing poverty — will fix our education system.”

On the teacher union embrace of the Occupy movement, what Rotherham calls “a sad irony”: “The unions are hardly the only cause of our educational problems, but they’re not doing enough to fix them. In ways large and small, they defend practices and policies — things like how teacher pay is factored into the amount of money that is allotted to individual schools — that disadvantage low-income students. Can the Occupy movement square this circle? We’ll see.”

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Five degrees of separation — a changing American anomaly

By on November 16, 2011

Editor’s note: Gloria Romero is a former Democratic senator from California and the California director of Democrats for Education Reform. She serves on the board of the American Center for School Choice. Peter H. Hanley is the center’s executive director.

Only in education have we empowered strangers and geography rather than parents to make choices as to what is best for children. Essentially, parents and children are tied to the land — much like peasants under feudalism. Five digits, known as ZIP code, continue to allocate and segregate students. We use handy phrases like “neighborhood schools” and “local control.” But we don’t dare try that in housing, or healthcare, or places of worship. Racial discrimination was barred long ago, freeing us to live in any neighborhood. It’s unthinkable that a local health department official could look at your address and assign your child to a doctor or dentist. You are free to worship at the church or temple of your choice.

Yet in American education, someone in your local school district, who does not know you or your child, orders you each fall to send the child to a school based on these five digits regardless of whether its programs fit your child’s and family’s needs or delivers strong academic outcomes.

The best thing about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law is that it opened our eyes — real data revealing a widening achievement gap for students of minority and low-income parents. We also learned that, too often, bargained contracts give highly effective teachers the choice to “opt-out” of schools where they are most needed. Further, many charter and independent schools have demonstrated that children in poverty can perform at high academic levels.

But, the times they are a changin’!

Gradually, ZIP code is being challenged and replaced with choice. Forty states have authorized public charter schools, which operate without many of the bureaucratic requirements of traditional schools, but with high accountability expectations. Between 1993 and 2007, the percent of families who were able to choose their child’s school, either within the public school system or at private schools, has increased from 20 percent to 27 percent.

Progress, however, has been uneven as the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) found that families with low incomes, composed of a single parent or of parents with only a high school diploma or less, and Latino families have not been increasing their ability to make educational choices.

This year, 42 states have introduced legislation, most targeted for the underserved, to create or expand school vouchers or tax credit scholarship programs. The latter allow businesses and individuals to receive a tax credit for a donation to a nonprofit organization that in turn provides scholarship money, mostly to low-income families. Already this year, 12 states and the District of Columbia enacted programs to permit parents to choose schools, including private schools, which best serve their children. Moreover, 15 states have introduced legislation modeled on California’s landmark Parent Trigger Act, which empowers parents to force change in persistently underperforming public schools.

NCES also found that parents who are “very satisfied” with multiple aspects of their children’s school rose dramatically as their ability to exercise choice grew. Data consistently shows at least a 10-percentage point difference for those that had public school choice and a 25-point difference for those that had private school choice over parents that did not have choice.

Americans value freedom and like choices in their lives, so these trends are not surprising. Indeed, some parents are willing to be arrested and even go to jail for trying to enroll their children in schools which they know can better serve their children. Parents will challenge ZIP code controls, sign petitions, and form turnaround movements when their “neighborhood” school is chronically failing. Yet opposition to expanding parental choice to all schools — including private schools — persists. These schools, especially religious schools, have served urban communities for decades, but have been closing at alarming rates. Aside from the strong academic credentials of most of these schools, a recent Notre Dame Law School analysis found that in Chicago “the presence of a Catholic school in a police beat appears to suppress crime.”

America needs more good schools, traditional public, charter, and private, which serve families well. We need an honest and forthright debate over parental responsibilities and choice in public education, especially whether five digits should continue to be the most powerful five degrees of separation from the American Dream. Whether it’s Johnny or Juanita, it’s time to make parents the architects of their children’s future.

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How a stubborn Catholic Church fostered worldwide educational choice

By on November 15, 2011

I head this week to Madrid for the annual meeting of OIDEL, a Geneva-based organization promoting educational freedom around the world. We advocate for policies that allow parents to decide to what school they entrust their children and that allow teachers to decide to which educational project they will dedicate their energy and their passion.

Some on the board are especially concerned about conditions that allow Catholic schools to flourish with integrity (I joke that it is as the “token evangelical” that I was made vice president), a reminder that, were it not for the Catholic Church’s insistence on separate schools for its children, there would be no effective choice in many countries for either parents or teachers.

While today school choice on the basis of pedagogical emphasis is spreading, especially in the English-speaking world, the precedent for tolerating “structural pluralism” in education and thus making room for charter schools, academies, and other alternatives is the stubborn resistance of Catholics in scores of countries over many decades to the imposition of a single monopolistic system of education.

It is easy to forget how persuasive has been what I have called “the myth of the common school,” the belief that only through sending all children to schools identical in their programs and underlying philosophies could social and national unity be achieved. Horace Mann and his allies were not unique in this conviction; it can be traced in every country that I have studied. In my book on education under communist regimes and in my recent Contrasting Models of State and School, I’ve shown how dangerous this program is to freedom of conscience and of political life.

Lately my historical research has focused on the conditions of opinion that led to Supreme Court decisions, after World War II, forbidding public funding of faith-based schools. This occurred at the very time when the United States was endorsing international human rights covenants asserting the right of parents to decide about the education of their children.

While my earlier work had shown how fears about the effects of immigration in the 19th century promoted anti-Catholic sentiment, the 1940s and 1950s were a low point in concerns about immigration in which, nevertheless, fears about Catholicism and about Catholic schooling flourished. Why was that?

To summarize what I will spell out in my next book, Challenging the American Model of State and School, American opinion leaders in that period saw the Catholic Church as the great enemy of educational and other dimensions of freedom. It is, on the surface, hard to see how to reconcile this belief with the long struggle by the Catholics for educational freedom, in the United States and in Europe.

Justices Rutledge and Black and other members of the American elite understood educational freedom in an individualistic dimension, as educational experiences that “freed” the student from family and from traditional beliefs and loyalties. The existence of schools answerable to parents rather than to Society, and dedicated to fostering alternatives to the prevailing secular worldview, was thus a threat to educational freedom rather than an expression of it.

Readers of Rousseau’s Emile often ask how an education ostensibly designed to create a radically free individual could, instead, produce a young man totally dependent upon his teacher. We might well wonder, similarly, how those receiving an education designed to free them from all external commitments could find a secure footing in convictions, rather than be blown about by every cultural trend, every fashionable opinion.

Two understandings of educational freedom, then: one calls for policies providing for a diversity of schools competing on equal terms and reflecting the educational convictions of parents and the educators they trust. The other calls for a single model of schooling that promotes rootless individualism and calls it freedom.

Every day we see encouraging signs that the persuasive power of this model is waning. One of the most recent is the school board election in Douglas County, Colo., in which the board’s policy of providing scholarships for hundreds of its students to attend non-public (including faith-based) schools was a central issue. With over 67,000 votes counted, the three winners were all supporters of the policy. Now we will see whether the appeal of the district court’s decision against the policy will allow it to be continued – and set a precedent for real educational freedom.

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The teachable moment escaping Occupy Oakland

By on November 14, 2011

The Occupy Oakland protest has gone national as it has continued to grow and generate controversy. From someone who has lived in Oakland previously and has worked there for more than a decade in various roles, the education component of the Occupy Oakland movement is disturbing. Educators appear to be missing one of those classic “teachable moments” not only in Oakland, but also with the entire Occupy movement.

During the general strike on Nov. 2, almost 15 percent of Oakland Unified School District teachers left their students to participate in the strike for the whole day. One school’s entire faculty participated. Although Oakland Unified has shown some improvement in recent years, it remains a troubled district by any measure. The graduation rate is 53 percent and the official dropout rate is 37 percent, though many suggest those statistics underestimate the real dropout statistic. For those that actually remain, 48 percent of juniors are below or far below basic on the California Standards Test in English and 62 percent of the district is below or far below basic in Algebra. So the premise that the district should have facilitated mass teacher participation in a demonstration that they could easily have joined after the academic day seems flawed.

The damage from the financial and banking excesses and downright bad public policy decisions of the last decade is very real, but the story is much more complex than a selfish 1 percent consciously victimizing an innocent and unwilling 99 percent. Yet simplistic generalizations and slogans continue to dominate the discussion. The 99 percent have not been, for the most part victims, but rather enablers and participants in creating the situation we find our society in currently.

For example, in our education system, which is the theme here, the debate is still polarized around how to fix a system that clearly is not successful for millions of American children and their families. A fundamental question that those who resist change never seem to answer is how can we triple educational spending in real terms over the last 30 years and see minimal academic improvement while other countries spend less and outperform us. The only message from the Oakland Education Association, the teachers union, during the strike is that they are victims of budget cuts, yet until just the past few years, education spending in California grew rapidly and consistently. California kids at all demographic points trail the rest of the nation and overall the United States trails the world’s major countries in academic performance. Something else must be going on in education other than budget cuts, yet the education status quo is stubbornly resistant to change.

Elsewhere in our society parents have nearly absolute authority and responsibility for their children, yet in education a faceless, albeit well-meaning in most cases, government official assigns children by ZIP code to a school without ever even meeting them. As Jack Coons noted in an earlier post here, “passivity and despair are the response of powerless parents,” particularly in inner cities. But parents in both low-income and middle-class communities are now starting to question why half their high school graduates can’t do college level work and have to be remediated and why their college graduates aren’t prepared for the 21st century workforce. Thousands of jobs in technology, science, and health care are unfilled because candidates are unqualified. Why aren’t we preparing students for the real world? We are beginning to see parents insist on reclaiming the authority for educating their children and for changing the outcomes. It is late and overdue, but it is happening despite the edublob’s resistance.

This reclaiming of both responsibility and authority seems to be directionally correct for addressing many of the real problems that the Occupy movement has correctly identified. The 99 percent are hardly a powerless group. They changed the U.S. Congress and state governors and legislatures dramatically in each of the last three elections, but in schizophrenic ways searching for the easy way out that involves goring someone else’s ox.
We are where we are today because a solid, if not overwhelming, majority of the 99 percent embraced or continue to embrace such things as:

  • Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs that have $61 trillion in unfunded promises, which translates to $528,000 per U.S. household. This is clearly unsustainable and reductions have to be made that affect the “100 percent.”
  • Initiating two wars and simultaneously substantially cutting taxes for everyone. In fact, 47 percent don’t pay any income tax at all. The richest country in the history of the world is going bankrupt because the feeling that we can have it all without paying for it has permeated the entire society for the last 30 years.
  • Excluding the cost of employer paid health care benefits from taxable income, which in just the next five years will be the equivalent of a $1.1 trillion tax expenditure that subsidizes mostly the middle class. As employees perceive health care as free or heavily subsidized, they utilize the health care system more intensively, further driving up costs.
  • Continuing the home mortgage interest deduction for mortgages up to $1 million, a $609 billion tax expenditure over five years that benefits almost exclusively the upper middle class.

Occupy is correct that the 1 percent has benefited disproportionately from policies we as a collective democracy have supported repeatedly in the last three decades, but casting the 99 percent as victims who don’t share a significant responsibility to set things right makes getting to a solution more difficult. Some in the 99 percent undoubtedly were victims, but you are only allowed to be a victim for a limited time and then you have to step up and move forward.

We need more messages out of the 99 percent that fixing this economic and educational mess involves not just asking the 1 percent to step up to do larger fair share, but also that we must collectively rethink how to realign the expectations and benefits we want with what we are willing to pay for. Educators, along with the media, that fail to balance the discussion with the reality that all of us must be part of the solution and exercise our authority to restore a sensible economic order to the country are failing us. Walking out of classrooms, especially ones where so many students are struggling and underperforming, is just one small example of that failure.

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Acceptable American Inequality

By on November 11, 2011

David Brooks addresses a fictional foreign tourist in today’s New York Times by presenting a guidemap to acceptable and unacceptable American inequality. “Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other,” Brooks writes, and I’m reminded of a passage in Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson’s book, “Saving Schools,” which addressed the fiscal equity movement of the 1970s. Peterson tries to help the reader understand why the equity movement ultimately ran up against entrenched interests, highlighting specifically the challenges redefinED hosts John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman faced when championing the Serrano case in California and the Rodriguez case in Texas. Coons, Sugarman and others had conceived a powerful idea, Peterson writes:

Equal protection before the law implies that all school districts within a state should have the same fiscal capacity. But that idea came up against the basic fact that those with more money want to spend more on their children’s education, just as they want to spend more on housing, transportation, and all the other good things in life. To be told that their child’s school shall have no more resources than any other school in the state runs counter to the desire of virtually all educated, prosperous parents to see their own children given every educational advantage. Fiscal equity was divisive.

The evidence that Coons and Sugarman had unearthed struck at the inequalities in spending between rich districts and poor districts, and it led the pair on a four-decade long mission to champion the cause of school choice. A commitment to family choice in education, Coons would later write, “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” Has the opposition to choice led to another form of acceptable American inequality?

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