Analysis

Popular scholarship program continues to serve more students

Patrick R. Gibbons July 10, 2020

Patrick R. Gibbons

Growth in a Florida education savings account created for students with unique abilities continued its steady increase in 2018-19 according to figures released this week by the leading organization that administers the program.

A new report from Step Up For Students that includes information on enrollment, student eligibility and scholarship expenses shows that 12,245 students participated in the Gardiner Scholarship Program, a nearly 2,000 student increase from 2017-18.

For 2018-19, 11,393 students were enrolled in the program through Step Up for a total award of $117 million. Another 852 enrolled through the AAA Scholarship Foundation. A total of 71 percent of the students were renewing their scholarships, and 29 percent were receiving scholarships for the first time.

Funded by state legislative appropriations, the scholarships average $10,266 a year and increase in value, some exceeding $20,000, depending on the severity of a student’s medical diagnosis. Parents can spend the money on various educational expenses such as tuition, instructional material, therapies, tutoring and electronic devices.

Families of 6,648 students used the funds in 2018-19 for tuition at one of 1,130 participating private schools. Approximately 34 percent of students were enrolled in home education. The remaining students utilized a portion of their scholarship funding for private school tuition.

Nearly 58 percent of all funds, or $57.2 million, were spent on private school tuition and fees, while 22 percent, or $21.9 million, was spent on instructional materials. Families spent $8.9 million on therapies and specialized therapies and $4.7 million on part-time tutoring.

Students are eligible for the Gardiner Scholarship if they have one of several specific diagnoses including autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and spina bifida. The majority – 63 percent – have a diagnosis of autism.

The full report, including additional breakdowns on expenses and enrollment, is available here.

July 10, 2020 1 comment

Analysis Coronavirus / COVID-19 Demographic Research Education Polling Featured News

Survey: What American families experienced when COVID-19 closed schools

Patrick R. Gibbons July 9, 2020

Patrick R. Gibbons

A new Education Next survey reveals 71% of parents perceived their children learned less during the pandemic than they would have had they remained in brick-and-mortar schools.

COVID-19 upended and changed the lives of millions of Americans this spring, forcing the nation’s schools to close and requiring a shift from in-person to virtual learning. In retrospect, what do parents think about the quality of instruction their children received?

Education Next surveyed them to find out. The results, released earlier this week, paint an interesting picture.

Among the 1,249 parents of 2,147 children surveyed, 71% said they thought their children learned less at home than they would have had they been in school. But surprisingly, 72% said they were satisfied with the attempt.

Black and Hispanic parents reported higher satisfaction with remote learning (30% and 32%, respectively), than white parents (26%). Charter school and private school parents (45% and 39%, respectively), reported higher satisfaction than parents whose children attended a public district school (29%).

According to their parents, larger shares of the children of white respondents and children in higher income households learned less than they would have if schools had remained open than children of Black and Hispanic students and those in lower-income households.

Not all schools prioritized learning new content according to the survey. Overall, 74% of parents said their child’s school introduced new content, while 24% said the school focused on reviewing content students had already learned.

A large gap in perception persisted between high- and low-income families. Among low-income families, 33% reported that schools reviewed content students had already learned, compared to 19% of high-income parents.

Parents overall reported that one-on-one meetings between students and teachers occurred rarely, with only 38% saying such meetings occurred at least once a week. About 40% said one-on-one meetings never occurred.

Parents reported that class-wide meetings occurred more frequently, with 69% reporting class-wide virtual meetings with teachers occurred at least once a week.

Black parents reported their children spent more time per day (4.3 hours) on schoolwork than white parents (3.1 hours). Black parents also said their students suffered less learning loss than the parents of white students.

The survey also included a sample of 490 K-12 teachers who work in schools that closed during the pandemic. Teachers’ responses generally mirrored how parents described their children’s experiences with several exceptions.

Thirty-six percent of teachers said they met individually with students multiple times a week, compared with 19% of parents. Teachers also reported providing grades or feedback more often than parents. Meanwhile, teachers reported providing fewer required assignments than parents said their children received.

Parents and teachers generally agreed on how much students learned during distance learning, with teachers more likely than parents to say children learned less than they would have if schools had remained open.

The survey was conducted from May 14 to May 20 by the polling firm Ipsos Public Affairs via its KnowledgePanel. Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish.

July 9, 2020 0 comment

Analysis Courts Education Choice Education Equity Education Legislation Featured Parental Choice Private School Scholarships Private Schools Religious Education School Choice

Court lays to rest age-old debate with Espinoza decision

Patrick R. Gibbons July 1, 2020

Patrick R. Gibbons

After more than a century, the U.S. Supreme Court finally has determined that Blaine amendments, which were created in the late 19^th century under a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic bias, violate the U.S. Constitution’s Free Exercise clause.

“A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious,” ruled the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision this week.

Montana’s school choice program became the first tax credit scholarship to be struck down by a state supreme court, but not the first private school choice program to be struck down because of a “Blaine Amendment.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling reverses the Montana Supreme Court, arguing the state’s “No Aid” provision violates the rights of parents, students and religious schools under the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling is in step with the Trinity Lutheran (2017) decision which argued denying grants for playground resurfacing simply because the institution was religious was unconstitutional.

Though the Court ruled that the Blaine Amendment violates the Free Exercise clause, it declined to rule whether it also violated the Establishment Clause or Equal Protections Clause.

Not surprisingly, school choice opponents are up in arms about the decision.

“… the court has made things even worse opening the door for further attacks on state decisions not to fund religious schools,” said National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García in an NEA blog post.

But the court’s decision does nothing of the sort. The decision to create and fund education scholarships still falls to the people.

Other school choice opponents are arguing the decision erodes separation of church and state.

Ron Meyer, lawyer for the Florida Education Association, went so far as to state in an interview with the Miami Herald, “It’s another chipping away of the free exercise of religion.”

But the decision falls in line with a long-standing recognition of religious neutrality required of governments. Though many of these cases deal with the Establishment Clause rather than the Free Exercise Clause, they demonstrate this long-standing precedent on religious neutrality.

The first case to apply the Free Exercise clause to a state matter was Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), which reversed a criminal conviction of three Jehovah’s Witnesses for proselytizing door-to-door without a state license. In a unanimous decision the court ruled:

“Freedom of conscience and freedom to adhere to such religious organization or form of worship as the individual may choose cannot be restricted by law. On the other hand, it safeguards the free exercise of the chosen form of religion. Thus, the Amendment embraces two concepts, freedom to believe and freedom to act.”

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the court defined the Establishment Clause beyond simply establishing a national church by declaring the clause prohibited the aid of one religion or even all religions. However, the court still upheld public bus fare reimbursements to parents sending their children to Catholic schools because the reimbursement was available to all. Regarding New Jersey’s publicly funded programs, the court ruled:

“Consequently, it cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation.”

In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court held Ohio’s voucher program “does not offend the Establishment Clause” because the program was neutral with respect to religion.

As with Zelman, several other national cases support tax exemptions and other public benefits for seemingly religious activities, but only so long as the programs pass the “Lemon Test.”

Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) established the “Lemon Test,” a three-part test to determine if a program violates the Establishment Clause. The test requires the program to have a secular purpose, to not advance or inhibit any particular religion, and to not excessively tangle government with religion. In Lemon, the court allowed state subsidies of textbooks, educational materials and even teacher salaries at private schools in Pennsylvania.

Mueller v. Allen (1983) upheld a Minnesota tax law that allowed individuals to deduct parochial school expenses. The Supreme Court ruled the program was neutral with respect to religion since the tax deduction was available to all, and that helping to fund education (even through tax deductions) was a secular purpose.

Agostini v. Felton (1997) allowed public funds to pay the salaries of public school teachers educating economically disadvantaged children, including private religious schools. This landmark ruling reversed Aguilar v. Felton (1985), which held that paying public school teachers to teach parochial school students was “excessive entanglement” with religion. Agostini reversed that decision and determined the program was neutral with respect to religion and that the purpose of educating disadvantaged children was a secular one.

Deference to religious neutrality flows down to the state courts as well.

Florida cases such as Koerner v. Borck (1958) argued that, “State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions, than it is to favor them.”

Meanwhile, in Johnson v. Presbyterian Homes of Synod of Florida, Inc. (1970), the Florida Supreme Court ruled on a tax exemption:

“A state cannot pass a law to aid one religion or all religions, but state action to promote the general welfare of society, apart from any religious considerations, is valid, even though religious interests may be indirectly benefited.”

Espinoza isn’t deviating from the U.S.’s “separation of church and state,” as critics have misunderstood. The ruling follows a long history of allowing religious institutions and persons to benefit from public programs, in this instance extending that right to K-12 education where powerful opponents attempted to carve out an exemption.

A fight over how much religion can be taught in a private school may be around the corner. But that is a fight for another day.

July 1, 2020 1 comment

Analysis Ashley Berner Blog Guest Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education and Public Policy Education Research Featured School Choice

New national report provides recommendations for re-opening brick-and-mortar schools

Special to redefinED May 14, 2020

Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: redefinED guest blogger Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, and David Steiner, the institute’s executive director, comment on their new report, jointly released with Chiefs for Change, that outlines relevant research and provides key recommendations for reopening K-12 schools when public officials deem it safe to do so.

COVID-19 brought face-to-face learning around the world to an abrupt halt. Now, after weeks and months of remote learning, some countries are beginning to open the schoolhouse. Others, including most U.S. systems, will not resume brick-and-mortar operations until August or September. The first order concern is, of course, the health of our families and teachers.

But education leaders already are wrestling with critical issues that are next in line, such as: How will we structure instruction to maximum effect? What additional supports should we build into the school year to prepare for abrupt changes in the future? And, most importantly, what is the best way to accelerate, rather than remediate, student learning in the wake of COVID-19?

To answer these questions, our team at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy partnered with Chiefs for Change to evaluate the research on interventions that work for students in normal times and in the wake of crises such as SARS in Hong Kong or tsunamis in Japan. The result is The Return: How Should Education Leaders Prepare for Reentry and Beyond?

Our guidance is evidence-based, represents the collective wisdom of our country’s forward-thinking chiefs, and offers concrete steps to scale up excellence. It is also sector-agnostic; the changes we suggest apply to district, charter, and private schools alike. A summary is below.

First, add hours and days of learning time to the school calendar, in line with international norms. Students in many countries take shorter summer holidays (6-8 weeks instead of 12!) and experience more days of instruction. Extending the academic year has lots of benefits, such as stanching the summer learning loss that particularly affects low-income children, and allows more young people to hold part-time jobs throughout the year.

Second, redesign staffing models to maximize instruction and social-emotional support. Teachers have different strengths. Some possess extensive content-knowledge expertise and deliver highly effective instruction; others are incredibly adept at connecting with kids and making them feel known and seen. Changing the model makes sense. Instead of aiming for smaller class sizes across the board, we should let “master teachers” lead larger classrooms, while teachers who are demonstrably excellent at providing individualized academic support and personal relationships can lead smaller mentor groups.

Third, help students build habits of self-direction and self-regulation. There are many ways to promote these capacities, but two that we mention in the paper are building in practice time for remote learning models and allowing meaningful consequences for academic success and failure. Too few American classrooms enable the “productive struggle” of letting students wrestle with a problem until it’s satisfactorily solved; too many assessments lean heavy on teachers without placing commensurate responsibility on students to learn the material. This needs to change.

Fourth and finally, use this opportunity to ramp up the rigor of classroom instruction. Remediation toward grade-level reading or math does not work in the aggregate; students who start behind usually stay behind. Instead of addressing students’ missing skills, we should be accelerating their access to knowledge-rich materials that challenge and delight them. Skills can be learned along the way. Teachers’ professional development should meanwhile revolve around excellent use of high-quality materials – the ones they actually use in the classroom. For their part, leaders should embrace – and incentivize – content-rich assessments that are integrated with strong curricula, in every tested subject, thus creating a virtuous circle around student learning.

We know that “high expectations” matter for student success. But copious studies from around the world lead us to the much more profound, and much more specific, nature of the “high expectations” that really do narrow achievement gaps and accelerate social mobility: expect students to master, synthesize, and deploy knowledge-rich content. (For more on why curriculum matters, see recent posts on this blog (here, here, here, and here). And keep in mind that two things matter: what we teach and how effectively we teach it.

COVID-19 has been devastating for entire domains of American life. There is much we cannot control as we look ahead to Fall 2020. One thing we can do, together, is use the unexpected pause on business as usual to design education for the better.

May 14, 2020 1 comment

Analysis Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Education Legislation Featured

Save Our Schools suspends ballot initiative effort after Arizona Supreme Court ruling

Matthew Ladner May 13, 2020

Matthew Ladner

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled against groups that had been suing the state in an effort to gather initiative signatures online. Similar efforts had been rebuffed in the federal court system, and the Save Our Schools group announced the suspension of its effort aimed at limiting family access to the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program shortly after the ruling.

The court’s ruling is not available online at the time of this writing.

Prior to the current effort, Save Our Schools spokespersons claimed on multiple occasions that they had no desire to take choice away from special populations eligible for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program. Those special populations include children with disabilities, children living on Native American jurisdictions, foster care children, children attending D or F rated public schools, military dependents and orphans.

The proposed 2020 statewide ballot initiative would have created an overall participation cap on the program of 1 percent of the total student enrollment of the public school system. That cap would have been reached within a year or two of normal growth.

To put this in perspective, about 1.7 percent of Florida students used special education private choice programs last year. Under the provisions of the initiative once reaching the cap, the Arizona Department of Education would have been required to remove students other than those with disabilities from the program. Afterward, it may have been only a matter of time until new applicants with disabilities would have been denied access to the program.

Arizona ESA families, like everyone else, are facing plenty of challenges these days. The biggest challenge in terms of remote learning involves providing services to children with disabilities. The Navajo Nation faces a severe challenge in the health crisis. Taking this off its plate for 2020 will be a welcome ray of sunshine during a very challenging period.

May 13, 2020 0 comment

Analysis Blog Guest Customization Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Education Savings Accounts Featured Jonathan Butcher School Choice

Victory for Utah students and families

Jonathan Butcher April 27, 2020

Jonathan Butcher

Benjamin Franklin Academy in Salt Lake City is an assistance program to homeschooled children with special needs.

Around the country, talk of closures and quarantine is giving way to plans for re-opening. Despite moving in fits and starts, Utah officials found something unique for families and students to look forward to even if schools are closed for the rest of the year.

On Friday, state lawmakers approved a proposal to provide flexible learning scholarships to children with special needs. The Utah account-style scholarships combine the features of what are commonly known as tax-credit scholarships (like Florida’s scholarships for children from low-income families) and education savings accounts, as found in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

Individuals and corporations will receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to scholarship account-granting organizations. The scholarship organizations will use the contributions to award accounts to students. Parents can use a scholarship account to find educational therapists that meet a child’s unique needs, buy textbooks, and pay tuition at a private school or for online classes, to name a few possible uses.

Utah’s new scholarship offers families and students multiple private learning options, similar to education savings accounts. By funding the accounts through charitable contributions, Utah officials connected the scholarships with the private choices of businesses and other donors.

In 2016, Jason Bedrick, now policy director at EdChoice, Clint Bolick, former Goldwater Institute vice president and current Arizona Supreme Court Justice, and I described how such an arrangement could work in our research for the Cato Institute. We wrote, “Tax credits simply leave money in the hands of taxpayers who are free to choose which scholarship organizations to support with their own money,” and by adding the savings account component to the scholarships, Utah families can challenge their students or otherwise design a learning experience for a student.

Utah’s scholarship accounts followed a winding path to approval. Gov. Gary Herbert vetoed the proposal near the end of the legislative session, suggesting the scholarships would require new taxpayer spending. State analysts, however, had already reported that every child that leaves a public school to use a scholarship would save the state $1,871. While estimates were not available for existing homeschool or private school students, children with special needs often require expensive interventions no matter their school or learning routine.

With a global financial crisis settling in, lawmakers everywhere should be looking for effective, cost-saving ideas. The scholarships will be worth different amounts based on a family’s income, similar to K-12 private school scholarships available in Indiana. Utah children from families with income levels at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line will receive scholarships worth approximately $9,000 per year, according to Utah Policy, while students from wealthier families will receive scholarships worth between $5,000 and $7,000, depending on a family’s income.

States around the country need innovation such as this. Before the pandemic, families of children with special needs were already aware of the kinds of products and assistance their children need to be successful and, if possible, learn to be independent. But during the recent shutdowns, meeting the needs of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum or living with Down syndrome presented a challenge to parents and educators. Families using accounts in North Carolina and Arizona have reported that they can continue many services for their children because the accounts are so versatile. Families of these children celebrate when their students make progress and are justifiably fearful those improvements will be lost when normal routines are interrupted.

Utah’s scholarships will be active in January 2021, which gives officials time to sort out some of the features clearly available to children using education savings accounts, such as the ability to save money from one year to the next to prepare for future expenses. Utah policymakers should look to the states with accounts to find answers to common questions about how students can access more than one product or service.

Good ideas like this have a way of breaking through, despite a governor’s veto pen. And this one arrived just in time for Utah families who are ready for life after the pandemic.

April 27, 2020 0 comment

Analysis Catholic Schools Featured Homeschooling School Choice Testing and Accountability

NAEP History, Geography, Civics scores paint dismal picture

Matthew Ladner April 27, 2020

Matthew Ladner

Diffusion, then, rather than discovery, is the duty of our government. With us, the qualifications of voters are as important as the qualifications of governors, and even comes first in the natural order. -Horace Mann

Preparing students to responsibly exercise citizenship represented a foundational aspiration in the founding of the American public-school system. Then as now, we did not simply aspire to have schools equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary for economic flourishing; we also wanted students to develop a grounding in history and civics.

Our education system is failing to accomplish this goal.

Last week, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released nationwide eighth-grade data on the 2018 exams taken in United States History, Geography and Civics. Fewer than one-third of American public-school students scored proficient on any of the three exams. In fact, on each exam, the percentage of public-school students scoring “Below Basic” exceeded the percentage scoring “Proficient.”

For every eighth-grade public-school student who scored “Proficient,” there were more than 2.5 who scored “Below Basic,” the lowest achievement level. We can’t be sure what the ratio of “Proficient” to “Below Basic” would be among American eighth-graders if we abolished their history classes, gave them a library card and offered to pay them a dollar for every history book they read, but it might surpass 2.5 to 1.

While scores aren’t available for private schools in general, scores for Catholic school students are – and they tell a different story.

Scores of Catholic school students show an advantage, in several ways: when comparing them to free and reduced-price lunch-eligible public-school students; non-eligible free and reduced-price lunch populations; and racial and ethnic groups. If you compare Catholic school students of parents without college degrees to public-school students of parents without college degrees, Catholic school students get the better of it. The same holds true when you compare Catholic school students of college-educated parents to public-school students of college-educated parents.

Ironically, we heard last week a faint echo of the Know-Nothing Party’s anti-Catholic school rhetoric directed at home schooling. Harvard Magazine quoted Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Barthole:

“From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves.

“But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” she says, noting that European countries such as Germany ban homeschooling entirely and that countries such as France require home visits and annual tests.

People can have honest disagreements about home-school policy, but I invite the reader to ponder the first chart in this post and attempt to square it with the quote above. Should we be worried about the civic values and knowledge of the 3 percent of students who home-schooled before the pandemic? Or might the appalling lack of history, geography and civics displayed by the 87 percent or so students attending public schools constitute a more pressing concern?

April 27, 2020 1 comment

Analysis Coronavirus / COVID-19 Education and Public Policy Education Choice Featured Private Schools School Choice

K-12 traditionalists: Be careful what you wish for

Matthew Ladner April 21, 2020

Matthew Ladner

Robert C. Enlow at Ed Choice crunched some numbers on how things might look if 10 percent to 30 percent of private school students migrate to public schools this fall. The state-by-state analysis is not an unimaginable scenario, given our suddenly massive unemployment rate – one in five American workers currently are out of work.

Enlow points out what might happen if private school students can no longer attend those schools due either to their families’ financial hardships or due to drops in charitable giving that supports scholarships for students in need.

Click on this link and you’ll see that Florida is the fifth state from the top of the chart. The 10 percent scenario would cost the state an additional $161.5 million; the 30 percent scenario would precipitate a drift closer to half a billion in added costs.

The total state and local cost scenarios for Florida are $363 million and $1.1 billion for the 10 percent and 30 percent scenarios, respectively.

I use the term “added costs” rather than “increased revenue” because it is easy to estimate even from a distant patch of cactus that Florida is unlikely to have a lot of extra cash available next fall. Even if there were a spare billion dollars available, hospitals are in terrible shape (they make most of their money from elective procedures), universities around the country have begun closing and/or furloughing staff, and there is no telling what other calamities await.

Could K-12 enrollment go up and state funding go down? It’s hard to rule anything out in a world where oil producers pay people to carry away oil at a negative price.

Nationally, the 30 percent scenario looks like $10 billion in added costs at a time when state budgets will be under fantastic strain with a great many competing demands for funds. So public schools could get lots of new students and budget cuts at the same time if this goes poorly.

So, to our friends out there with lamentably traditional K-12 policy preferences, please be careful what you wish for – you might just get it.

April 21, 2020 0 comment