Tag Archives | Jeb Bush

Reaction roundup to expansion of private school vouchers in Louisiana

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On April 18, 2012 in Catholic education, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Editor’s note: I just updated the post at 7:15 p.m. I’ll continue to update it as I see more reaction in news stories, press releases, etc.

It’s official: Louisiana has a new, statewide voucher program. With a Catholic school as a backdrop, Gov. Bobby Jindal today signed into law a bill that allows the state to pay private-school tuition for many low- and moderate-income students.

Jindal also signed off on other sweeping education changes, including making it easier to fire ineffective teachers and to create charter schools. Here is a roundup of the immediate reaction from supporters of school choice and ed reform:

From the American Federation for Children: “This is a great day for low-income children in Louisiana, whose parents will finally have the opportunity to give them the chance at an amazing education that they deserve,” said Kevin P. Chavous, senior adviser to AFC. “Thousands of students who were stuck in schools that were not working for them will now have an opportunity to attend a school that fits their needs and, ultimately, allows them to succeed.”

From the Foundation for Excellence in Education: “Louisiana is clearly committed to adopting and implementing reforms that will improve the quality of education for their students. These policies allow more families to select the best education options for their students and empower schools’ superintendents and principals to retain effective teachers in their schools,” said Patricia Levesque, the foundation’s executive director. “Building on the data-driven accountability system they adopted in 2010, Louisiana is on the fast track towards becoming a national leader on student-centered reform. Thanks to the bold leadership of Governor Jindal, Superintendent John White and state lawmakers, Louisiana and its students will have a brighter future.”

From the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice: “States are realizing that school choice works,” said Robert Enlow, the foundation’s president and CEO. “The more that states can move from limited school choice to universal availability, the greater its benefits will be to those in need. Indiana is witnessing this now. So, too, will Louisiana.” Continue Reading →

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redefinED roundup: Jeb Bush to talk ed reform in S.C., voucher politics in Pennsylvania and more

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On April 9, 2012 in General, Parental Choice, redefinED roundup, School Choice

Louisiana: Senate approves statewide voucher program on a 24-15 vote. (New Orleans Times Picayune) The vote was bipartisan, again. (redefinED) Gov. Bobby Jindal succeeds in a sweeping education overhaul. (Associated Press)

South Carolina: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will be the keynote speaker at an education reform summit later this month.

Pennsylvania: Flier flap in state House race tied to voucher battle. (philly.com)

Alaska: School choice expansion effort stalls. (Juneau Empire)

Arizona: Gov. Jan Brewer vetoes expansion of education savings accounts. (Arizona Republic)

Connecticut: Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy points to the rift over education reform between two of his party’s biggest constituencies, African Americans and teachers unions. (CT News Junkie)

Mississippi: House education committee narrowly votes down charter school expansion bill. (Associated Press) It gets real ugly afterwards. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)

Tennessee: Charter school diversity blooms. (Nashville Tennessean)

New Jersey: State Department of Education is set to consider 32 new charter school applications. (Newark Star-Ledger)

Georgia: More families are considering on-line learning options. (Macon Telegraph)

(Image from politico.com)

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Darrell Allison, parental choice leader in North Carolina – podcastED

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On March 19, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, School Choice

North Carolina lawmakers took parental choice to new heights last year by removing a cap on charter schools and creating a tax credit scholarship program for students with disabilities. But all signs indicate they’re not done yet – and that a tax credit scholarship for low income students may be next on the agenda.

A dozen North Carolina lawmakers visited Florida on a fact-finding trip last week. They heard from former Gov. Jeb Bush and John Kirtley, chairman of Step Up for Students, which administers Florida’s tax credit program for low-income students. They met Florida lawmakers and corporate leaders who support it. And they visited the Miami Union Academy, a participating private school with nearly 300 students.

“Let’s be honest: When you talk about a state in our nation that has a lot of sunshine, a lot of innovation and a new frontier in ed reform, it’s the state of Florida,” said Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina.

Allison, who also made the trip, along with some North Carolina business leaders, said strong, bipartisan support for last year’s choice legislation in NC is a hopeful sign that the adversarial tone that characterized so many past debates about choice is beginning to lose its edge. For North Carolina families, he said, that’ll be a good thing.

“Around the kitchen table, that discussion is different than at the policy table, right?” he said. “Mom and Dad are not really thinking about Republicans and Democrats and philosophy. They’re just trying to make sure that Johnny has the best school option that they could possibly have.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Sorry, but you got it wrong: redefinED introduces rebuttED

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On March 6, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, Education reporting, General, rebuttED, School Choice

Last week, the Tampa Bay Times, the biggest newspaper in Florida, published a front-page story about Jeb Bush’s still-substantial influence in Florida education reform. The headline was fair and straightforward — “Jeb Bush shaping education in Florida” — but then came the blurb beneath it: “Lawmakers listen. Private and charter schools and online learning benefit.”

It sounds provocative, but we think the evidence shows it’s pretty distorted. If you don’t believe us, just read the first two paragraphs of the story:

When Sen. David Simmons needed his colleagues’ support on the education budget last week, he dropped a powerful name on the Senate floor.

“I had a conversation last week with former Gov. Jeb Bush in which we discussed this and his support of it,” Simmons said of the provision to spend $119 million on reading programs at low-income schools.

It’s a little bit baffling how an editor or copy editor could read that lead – about Bush supporting a big-ticket effort to help struggling readers in public schools — and then write the aforementioned blurb. But the truth is – and we say this respectfully to our friends in the media — that kind of thing happens fairly often in reporting about school choice. It feeds a narrative we don’t think is rooted in reality. And we think it’s time somebody set the record straight.

Since we call our blog redefinED, it might as well as be us. So, today, we humbly introduce rebuttED, complete with funky new logo!

Behind the silly goat horns, rebuttED is what we’re going to tag blog posts that aim to chip away at misinformation circulated by anyone who shapes public opinion about school choice and other aspects of school reform we find critical. It might be a newspaper. It might be a lawmaker. It might be an interest group. Continue Reading →

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At its core, a political and practical ideal

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On October 14, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Testing and Accountability

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush opened his national education conference in San Francisco today with an impassioned plea for national Common Core Standards, reminding us of both their relevance and broad political acceptance.

Bush’s conference, the National Summit on Education Reform, has become one of the country’s top venues for education reform and a place where ideas are increasingly attracting bipartisan attention. His support of national standards is hardly new, of course, and reflects the foundation on which he built his A+ Education Plan in Florida. There, he employed “Sunshine State Standards” to drive a plan that then used tests not only to assure the progress of students but also to grade the performance of public schools. “What gets measured,” he often says, “gets done.”

Among the examples Bush used was that of writing. Most states now teach and test writing in strikingly superficial ways. They ask students to write about personal experiences, their family, their travel, their likes and dislikes. But the Common Core Standards, now adopted by 46 states, aspire to do much more. Even fifth-graders are required to “support a point of view with reasons and information, to introduce a topic or text clearly …. to provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details.” By high school, a student is expected to “introduce a topic and organize complex ideas, concepts and information so that each new element builds on that which precedes it to create a unified whole” and to use “relevant facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations or other information and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic.”

These are skills that will help a student succeed not only in college but also in a work world that increasingly depends on people who can synthesize and communicate complex information. Bush certainly knows that.

These standards give some federalists heartburn, of course, which is why it is so important to see a prominent Republican conservative make the case so forcefully. Bush also makes the distinction in how standards are implemented that should provide common ground for common standards. “It is good for our nation to embrace these kinds of standards,” he said. “But for the solutions we need to let states determine their own path.”

Politicos may call that threading the needle, but educators should embrace it for its practicality.

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Obama champions Jeb Bush, scorns the educational status quo

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On March 5, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General

Education Secretary Arne Duncan turned heads last winter when he joined former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on a stage in Washington to find common ground in education reform. Yesterday, the governor was joined by Duncan’s boss. And as Duncan did, President Obama went out of his way during a tour of Miami Central High School to congratulate Bush as “somebody who championed reform when he was in office, somebody who is now championing reform as a private citizen.”

What does reform mean to Obama? These passages from his speech speak with more substance than did his highly anticipated State of the Union, and the message isn’t all too distant from his Republican companion:

I say I am not willing to give up on any child in America. I say I’m not willing to give up on any school in America. I do not accept failure here in America. I believe the status quo is unacceptable; it is time to change it. And it’s time we came together — just like Jeb and I are doing today -– coming from different parties but we come together not as Democrats or Republicans, as Americans –- to lift up all of our schools — and to prepare students like you for a 21st century economy. To give every child in America a chance to make the most of their God-given potential.

Now, the good news is we know what works. We can see it in schools and communities across the country every day. We see it in a place like Bruce Randolph School in Denver. This was rated one of the worst schools in Colorado three years ago but last May graduated 97 percent of its seniors. And by the way, most of them are the first in their family to go to college.

We can see it in Mastery Charter School in Philadelphia, where four times as many students are proficient in math, and violence is down 80 percent compared to just a few years ago.

And of course, we can see it right here at Miami Central. A little more than a decade ago, when the state exams started, Miami Central scored a D in each of its first five years. Then it scored an F in each of the five years after that. Halls were literally littered with garbage. One of the buildings here was called the Fish Bowl because it was always flooded. In one survey, only a third of all students said they felt safe at school. Think about that — only a third …

… You are proving the naysayers wrong –- you are proving that progress is possible. It’s possible because of your principal; it’s possible because of all the great teachers that are going above and beyond for their students, including the Teach for America Corps members who are here today. We’re proud of them. To all of the teachers here, I hope you will stay with the Miami Central family as long as you can — because this community has already benefited so much from your teaching and your mentorship and your dedication.

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Getting beyond left and right in education reform, a rally from an unlikely source

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On January 21, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Technology and Innovation

Soon after redefinED launched in late November, contributor Jon East commented on Jeb Bush’s call for bipartisanship  in developing “meaningful, child-centered” education reform during the former Florida governor’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C. As Jon noted then, “this is not to be dismissed as idle happy talk,” and he should know. Jon covered education policy for more than two decades when he was an editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times, and recalled that “Bush achieved much of his own sweeping education agenda in Florida from 1999 to 2007 through taut partisan muscle …”

This week, Reason.tv released its interview with Bush at the National Summit, exploring mostly Bush’s interest in transformative and disruptive technologies in the classroom. But in the closing seconds of the 6:30 minute video, Bush returns to the theme of bipartisanship and reminds his interviewer of the liberal heritage of school choice:

I think a liberal can support systemic change. School choice in the 60s was a creature of the left, not of the right. It makes no sense for me to think you have the left supporting an unsustainable system and the right not focusing on rising student achievement as a high priority but just kind of focusing on local control being the dominant feature. We need to get the debate beyond that, and I hope to play a role in that.

Here’s the full video:

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What school choice contributes to systemic improvements in education: A spotlight on Florida

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On January 13, 2011 in Achievement Gap, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

I’ve spent the previous two days discussing accomplishments in Jeb Bush’s tenure as Florida’s governor while highlighting that, despite Bush’s forceful leadership and insistence that high-poverty, minority children would succeed, the state has failed to implement all the systemic improvements the governor envisioned.

But one significant change that did occur during Bush’s first term was the creation of three publicly funded private school choice programs.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) and the McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities both were established in 1999, while the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students passed in 2001. The Florida Supreme Court ruled the OSP’s private school option unconstitutional in 2006, but the McKay and tax credit programs today currently help a combined 53,000 students attend more than 1,300 qualified private schools.

The McKay and tax credit programs positively impacted the achievement of low-income students during Bush’s first term by creating more competition, which research suggests benefitted the students who remained in their public schools, and by reducing the concentration of low-income and disabled students in inner-city public schools.

The competition benefit generated by the tax credit program was documented recently by David Figlio and Cassandra M.D. Hart, two Northwestern University researchers. They reviewed seven years worth of Florida test data and found the competition created by the tax credit scholarships had a positive impact on public school students’ achievement. No matter what measure the researchers used – the proximity of private schools to public schools, for instance, or the density of private schools within five miles of a public school – the effect generally was the same. Continue Reading →

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Friends and foes of Jeb Bush overlook the real reason for Florida’s gains

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On January 11, 2011 in Achievement Gap, Education and Public Policy, General, Testing and Accountability

Supporters and critics of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s education reforms have long missed the mark. In 1998, when he was first elected, Bush used the tools available to him, most notably the bully pulpit, to drive gains in student achievement, but he did not make the systemic changes necessary to sustain these large yearly gains. He’s advocating for those systemic improvements today and making progress, but we’re not there yet.

One of the former governor’s more sophisticated critics is Michael Martin, a research analyst at the Arizona School Boards Association, who recently analyzed Florida’s reading gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) from 1998 to 2009, and issued this challenge:

People who claim various programs were responsible for the improvement in NAEP test scores in Florida over the past decade must explain why their improved NAEP reading scores primarily occurred among the lowest scoring students while other student scores largely stagnated, and why those increases were most dramatic from 1998 to 2002, diminishing afterward.

Based on what I saw and heard in schools and school districts during this period, the primary reason for these initial reading gains was Bush’s leadership. Beginning with his election in 1998, he used his political power to pressure school districts to improve the basic literacy skills of low-income and minority students, and the districts responded. Educators are good people who care about children and want them all to succeed, but the message from the top has never identified the achievement of low-income and minority children as a top priority. That changed when Bush took office.

After he turned up the heat, talk about improving the literacy skills of low-performing students started dominating formal and informal meetings in school districts across the state. Even Bush’s harshest in-state critics admit no other leader in Florida history put as much focus on improving the achievement of low-income and minority students as he did.

Initiatives such as eliminating social promotion, grading schools and bringing more professional development into high-poverty schools reinforced Bush’s commitment to increasing the achievement of low-performing students, but it was the governor’s drive and forceful personality that convinced schools and school districts to reorder their priorities.

Martin asked why the impressive reading gains from Bush’s first term tapered off in his second. I’ll address that in a post tomorrow.

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The blueprint for digital learning recognizes no distinction between public and private

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On December 2, 2010 in Customization, General, Technology and Innovation

Two former governors from two different political parties this week announced the 10 elements of a digital-learning initiative they hoped would set educators on an entrepreneurial path to disruptive innovations in public education. If it wasn’t clear to the more than 500 people in attendance at the Washington, D.C., conference, where the elements were unveiled, this was a bipartisan drive to further scramble the current conept of “public schools” and “private schools.”

What former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise identified at the National Summit on Education Reform were the principles of transformational productivity in education demanded by President Obama’s White House education team. When Bush says that we have to think of public education “as educating the public” and calls for policies that allow students to customize their education, he’s applying the same concept that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan does when Duncan tells schools to do more to “personalize” education.

The Digital Learning Now! initiative meets all these goals, and makes no distinction between public and private schooling. Indeed, its provisions demand that states recognize all learning providers – public, private and charter – equally. And for traditional school districts to adopt the digital innovations at the core of education reform, they will have to recognize private providers – with all their human and financial capital – as partners. Continue Reading →

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