Tag Archives | Opportunity Scholarship

Coming back to freedom of choice, 46 years later

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On March 8, 2011 in General, Parental Choice, School Choice

While defending his sponsorship of Pennsylvania’s proposed Opportunity Scholarship, state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams has been known to draw parallels between opponents to school choice and the demagogues who blocked the advance of the civil rights movement. But there have been an increasing number of critics who blanch at the analogies, most recently from Kevin Ferris at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Ferris acknowledges that “education is indeed a civil right” and he supports the educational options that would result from the Opportunity Scholarship. “But voucher opponent does not equal Klansmen,” he writes.

That may be a harsh indictment of Williams, who hardly appears ready to adorn his political adversaries with a white hood, but it raises a fair question in our discourse over education reform: Is it appropriate to resurrect the history of the civil rights movement and relate its struggles to today’s effort to establish more educational alternatives for disadvantaged children?

The name of the Rev. H.K. Matthews may not be as familiar as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in history books, but Reverend Matthews is well known in the Southeastern United States as a pioneer in the movement who led the first sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in the Florida panhandle and was jailed 35 times during the process. He also marched with Dr. King at Selma, and his achievements have been celebrated and his life story chronicled in the biography Victory After The Fall. But for the past several years, Matthews, who’s now 83, has been active in the cause for school choice for low-income children, calling the effort “a natural extension of the civil rights movement.” Continue Reading →

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New Jersey is ready, Mr. Florio

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On February 24, 2011 in Customization, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Many of you are aware that the New Jersey legislature is considering a tax credit scholarship bill modeled on Florida’s successful program. Sponsored by some prominent Democrats, this bill has inspired spirited debate in legislative committees, at rallies at the Capitol, and in the press. Today, former Democratic Gov. James Florio weighed in with a column published in the Newark Star Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper. I don’t often do this, but I couldn’t resist adding my own comments after the Governor’s (His column is below, and my comments are in italics).

By James J. Florio

The establishment of a system of universal public schools for all American children was a historic event for the world and the key to our nation’s development and prosperity. It provided unmatched literacy levels for our citizens and a commitment to excellence as a national goal. It enabled people from every country to be blended into one people, representing an amalgam of ideas of freedom and opportunity through upward mobility. Our diversity was molded in the public schools and became our strength. [Democracy does require a publicly funded education system that embraces and develops our diverse strengths into a unified whole, but empowerment and customization are necessary for this to occur. Top-down, command and control education systems are the wrong way to go. In this century we cannot expect a one-size-fits-all model, where we assign students to schools by zip codes, to work effectively.]

Now, we find — through proposed voucher systems — a rejection of our unifying universal educational model. [Not true. Parental empowerment is a part of a new, more democratic model of publicly-funded education. The old model gave taxpayer dollars to a monopoly system that disempowered parents by assigning students to schools by geography. The new empowerment model allows parents to choose from qualified, properly regulated suppliers of many kinds—without preference for who the provider is.] Continue Reading →

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New Jersey Opportunity Scholarship plan advances

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On February 4, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

UPDATED: New Jersey’s proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act won unanimous approval Thursday in the state assembly’s Commerce and Economic Development Committee. Of the five members who approved the plan, three were Democrats, including the committee chairman, Albert Coutinho. While Coutinho acknowledged there are concerns over the measure within his party’s caucus, he said the vote was “a sign that we’re serious about education reform and considering all options.”

Newark Mayor Cory Booker testified in favor of the proposal: “This bill doesn’t remove our moral obligation to fix the failing public schools in New Jersey, nor does it relieve the crime that’s happening every day when we fail our children. [But] it’s about time we give some small sliver of immediate hope for parents who are desperate in our city.”

Before approving the plan, Coutinho said the overall size of the program would be reduced from nearly $1 billion over five years to $360 million, the Asbury Park Press reported. Proponents said they expect further amendments as the bill heads to the assembly’s Budget Committee.

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The dialogue in New Jersey is changing

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On February 1, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Two recent items from New Jersey have showcased just how the political lines separating support for either vouchers or tax credit scholarships continue to blur.

The first is commentary from Tom Byrne, who served two terms as chairman of New Jersey’s Democratic Party from 1994 to 1997, supporting New Jersey’s proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act. The politics are changing, Byrne says, because “many have come to see school choice as a civil rights issue,” and an increasing number of Democrats don’t believe it weakens traditional public schools:

Saying that it is not fair to leave some kids behind in a public school is a tacit acknowledgement of a serious problem there. If you saw ten people drowning in a lake and knew you could only rescue one or two, would you let them all drown in order to be fair to all victims?  Let’s flip the logic in another direction. Democrats almost all favor affordable housing policies with lotteries that give some people a wonderful new home while leaving others behind. This is so even though the available funds might be better spent making far more existing homes more energy-efficient and lead-free.  A housing lottery that leaves people behind is okay, but an education lottery somehow is not.

The second item is notable for a fact that might escape some readers: A news story from the Bergen Record that quotes only Democratic lawmakers — those who support, and are sponsoring, the proposed Opportunity Scholarship, and those who oppose it.

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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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We’ll see more school choices with Rhee’s impatience

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On December 7, 2010 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

Families everywhere will benefit from Michelle Rhee’s impatience with the staid politics that interfere with new ideas in education, even if those benefits may not be entirely clear yet. Lost in the media blitz over Rhee’s latest effort to speed the transformation of public education is her support of parental choices, support that goes beyond simply calling for more charter schools.

Rhee has lent her support to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, and she made it clear yesterday that her new advocacy group, Students First, will push for similar programs. Getting states to clear the obstacles to additional charter schools and pushing for opportunity scholarships will anchor what Rhee identified as a key component of a four-part legislative agenda for the group: an expansion of school choice and competition.

Rhee understands that expanded choices in education are critical to the success of any reform, and she also knows it will take a significant grassroots effort to convince elected leaders of that. Advocates of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship went through great pains to fight for renewal of the program, only to see it flounder among the opposition of Congressional Democrats. Continue Reading →

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