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Fight over education choice pits family against family in Tennessee

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

Institute of Justice client Builguissa Diallo plans to use education savings account funds to send her kindergartener to Pleasant View School in Memphis, saying her zoned public school doesn’t meet her daughter’s needs.

Editor’s note: Some of the parties mentioned in this post, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have expressed interest in suing to stop the Family Empowerment Scholarship, a program administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.

The legal battle over Tennessee’s new education savings account (ESA) program is causing families and educators alike to choose sides.

On one side are nine parents, a legal guardian and a retired public school principal represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center and Education Law Center, who argue the new program is unconstitutional on a plethora of grounds. On the other side, two parents represented by the Institute for Justice are arguing the program is constitutional and beneficial to their children.

The cities of Memphis and Nashville filed similar suits earlier in February.

The program in question, the Tennessee Education Savings Accounts Pilot Program, offers scholarships to low-income and working-class students to attend private schools. Qualified students must live in households not earning more than two times the threshold for the free or reduced-priced lunch program ($66,950 for a family of four) and be assigned to low-performing public schools in districts with at least 10 such struggling schools. Scholarships are worth up to $7,300 and can be spent on tuition, fees, textbooks, tutoring and more.

“Public schools are open to all children, while private schools receiving voucher funds are not held to the same standards,” Nashville mother Terry Jo Bichell said in a press release. Bichell, whose son is non-verbal and has special needs but is ineligible for the scholarship, is suing the state to stop the program.

Natu Bah, who has two sons who are eligible for the program, said in the Institute of Justice’s press release: “I’m defending the ESA program because it will help me provide a better education for my sons.” Bah plans to use the scholarship to send the boys to Christian Brothers High School in Memphis.

The case is another in a long line of voucher lawsuits that focus on state constitution matters to avoid entanglement with the U.S. Constitution in situations where voucher opponents have been thwarted. Though the “Blaine Amendment” issue currently is being debated before the U.S. Supreme Court, Tennessee does not have a prohibition on funding private religious schools. Opponents must argue other state-specific reasons in their efforts to show the scholarship is unconstitutional.

State centric strategies attacking various school choice programs have reaped mixed success. Florida’s first such program was overturned in a controversial and widely panned decision that found the program unconstitutional due to a state amendment intended to increase public school spending. Nevada’s Supreme Court found the ESA program constitutional, but then declared the funding mechanism to be unconstitutional. Washington’s Supreme Court ruled charter schools unconstitutional after digging up a century-old case on “common schools,” an archaic term referring to elementary schools in the 19th century.

In each case, school choice opponents tossed the proverbial kitchen sink at the program hoping at least one argument would stick with court justices. Tennessee’s case appears no different, with opponents highlighting five different reasons the ESA might be unconstitutional.

The ACLU argues the ESA program:

·       Violates the state’s “home rule” provision in the state constitution by targeting Shelby and Davidson counties without local approval

·       Violates the “appropriation of public money” provision since the Legislature did not appropriate money to the program when it passed in 2019 (the program won’t enroll students until the 2020-21 school year)

·       Violates “equal protection clauses” of the state constitution by diverting funds from public to private schools

·       Violates the Basic Education Program (BEP) statute by diverting dollars intended only for public school districts

·       Diverts money to private schools that are not required to adhere to the same standards as public schools

But the kitchen sink approach may not stick in Tennessee.

A 1957 case, Fountain City Sanitary District v. Knox County Election Commission, spells out that the state’s “home rule” provision protects “cities and counties,” and that the rule excludes public school districts. BEP is Tennessee’s funding formula for K-12 education, but nothing within the law appears to restrict expenditures to solely public-school districts. In fact, charter schools are funded through this same formula.

Tennessee’s former Attorney General (and Democrat) Robert Cooper even argued that voucher programs pass constitutional muster in part because of the “Supreme Court’s recognition of the General Assembly’s constitutional flexibility in the field of education.”

There is no telling how long Tennessee’s school choice civil war will last in court, but the first hearing is scheduled for later this month.

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Achievement GapAnalysisDemographic ResearchEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipSchool ChoiceVouchers

Study shows positive impact of Florida Tax Credit Scholarship on public schools

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

As the nation’s largest tax credit scholarship program has expanded, students attending public schools most likely to be affected by the competition of private schools are experiencing higher test scores, reduced absenteeism and lower suspension rates, according to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The findings of David Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart and Kryzstof Karbownik are contrary to what scholarship opponents like the Florida Education Association, which sued to stop the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program in 2014, have claimed.

The report, “Effects of Scaling Up Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students,” is the latest in a series of studies demonstrating positive impacts of the tax credit scholarship program. And in this case, those positive impacts go beyond the students who benefit directly from the scholarships.

The Urban Institute found last year that students participating in the scholarship program were more likely to attend and graduate from college than eligible peers remaining in public schools, while annual evaluations from the Florida Learning Systems Institute repeatedly have revealed that Florida’s most disadvantaged students have the same annual learning gains as all students of all income levels nationally.

Figlio and company found the positive impacts of the program, which is providing more than $600 million in scholarships this year to help more than 109,000 economically disadvantaged students, were largest for schools facing the most competitive pressure from scholarship-eligible private schools and for lower-income students as well as black and Latino students.

Statistics for children who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch

The researchers previously had studied the scholarship’s impact on public school students and found positive results, but the program has grown significantly since then, encompassing 4 percent of Florida’s K-12 student population. Their new study was focused on determining the effects of the expansion.

Measuring the impact against six categories of competition – density, distance, diversity, slots, churches and a combined measure they call the “competitive pressure index” – they found positive impacts across all of them for reading scores, combined math and reading scores, absenteeism and suspension rates. (See charts below.)

Using standard deviation to measure the impact, they were able to determine that suspensions and absences would be reduced by 0.6 to 0.9 percent of a standard deviation for every 10 percent increase in program size. To put this in perspective, the researchers pointed out that the black and white achievement gap itself is 62 percent of a standard deviation.

The upshot: The researchers’ results were consistent with their past findings, which showed modest benefits at the time the voucher program was introduced and indicated further growth of those positive effects as the program has scaled up.

Averaged math and reading scores

 

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Espinoza may not be the game changer some are predicting

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

It seems especially appropriate midway through National School Choice Week to ask:

Can the use of state “Blaine Amendments” to prohibit publicly available funds from being used by parents at religiously affiliated educational options be considered discriminatory? And if so, does that discrimination violate a family’s right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to equal protections under the law?

Those are questions education choice advocates have been asking for nearly two decades. The issue came to a head last week when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.

Voucher opponents have managed to avoid these questions since 2006 when the Florida Supreme Court ducked the state’s “Blaine Amendment” arguments altogether in Bush v. Holmes. Opponents lucked out again when they seized the opportunity to pour millions into the Douglas County, Colorado, school board races to kill a voucher program that would have been a perfect test case for the U.S. Supreme court in 2017.

Voucher opponents may get lucky once again in 2020. It’s possible the U.S. Supreme Court will sidestep the issue and instead scold the Montana Supreme Court for thinking tax credits are functionally the same as direct tax dollars – a distinction the court already made in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn in 2011.

And while Espinoza is an important case, some commentators have overblown its possible impact. Ian Millhiser, writing for Vox, and Jay Michaelson, writing for the Daily Beast, incorrectly claim that a victory for school choice supporters would be a “mandate” for states to fund religious schools and “starve” public schools. David Dayen, executive editor for the American Prospect, elevates the case to conspiracy level “brought … to undermine public education” by corporations seeking to obtain tax breaks from their donations to religious schools.

There is no corporate conspiracy theory, nor will Espinoza result in the starvation of public education, dozens of new voucher programs, or even a mandate to fund private religious schools.

At best, the U.S. Supreme Court simply will provide some consistency, or at least some guidance, on how all the various state Blaine Amendments can or cannot be applied to education. Florida is a great example of how Blaine Amendments have been inconsistently applied.

In 2004, the First District Court of Appeal ruled the state’s first voucher program, the Opportunity Scholarship, unconstitutional because it violated the state’s constitutional ban on direct or indirect aid to religious institutions. But the ruling was unsatisfactory because it failed to address the dozens of examples raised by voucher supporters. Examples included several legal cases in which churches benefiting from state or local programs did not violate Blaine.

In Koerner v. Borck (1958), the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a portion of a last will and testament allowing for land donation to Orange County for use as a park as long as a local church be granted perpetual easement to access the lake was constitutional because the benefit to the church also was a benefit to the general public.

In Southside Estates Baptist Church v. Board of Trustees (1959), the Court ruled that the use of public schools to hold private religious meetings did not violate the “No Aid” clause.

In Johnson v. Presbyterian Homes of Synod of Florida (1970), the Court ruled that tax credits for retirement homes were constitutional even if the retirement home was owned and operated by a religious organization. The Court stated: “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.”

In Nohrr v Brevard County Education Facilities Authority (1971), the Court ruled that the government could issue bonds for facilities at religiously affiliated schools.

And in City of Boca Raton v. Gidman (1983), a case that dealt with publicly funded daycare at a religiously affiliated program, the Court stated: “The beneficiaries of the city’s contribution are the disadvantaged children. Any “benefit” received by the charitable organization itself is insignificant and cannot support a reasonable argument that this is the quality or quantity of benefit intended to be proscribed.”

These cases strongly suggest that programs created to benefit the general public CAN be provided by religious organizations, and that any benefit derived from the program to the church is merely incidental.

Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship Program voucher also forbade private schools from admitting students based on their religion and prohibited private schools from requiring students to take religious courses or attend religious services. The scholarships themselves didn’t cover the full cost of tuition, though the private schools had to accept the voucher as full payment. In other words, the private schools educated each child at a loss compared to private pay students. Voucher supporters argued that all these facts made education at a private religiously affiliated school functionally no different, as far as the “No Aid” clause was concerned, than medical services provided at a religiously affiliated hospital.

And so another question comes to mind: Why is it possible for individuals to use public programs to pay for medical services at religious hospitals, but not use public funds to pay for education at religious affiliated schools? The First District Court of Appeal failed to address this example entirely.

Voucher supporters pointed to the McKay Scholarships for children with disabilities along with the Florida Private Student Assistance Grant Program and Bright Futures Scholarships, which could be used at one of 23 private religiously affiliated colleges in Florida. The state Attorney General noted that the Legislature appropriated nearly $9 million to private religious universities in Florida in 2002.

Other examples include rent paid to churches for use as polling places, subsidized childcare and prekindergarten education at churches and religious schools as well as public funds to churches for the preservation of historic structures. The First District Court of Appeal ignored these examples, too.

The First District Court of Appeal defined the “No Aid” clause as prohibiting any funds being taken directly from the treasury to be paid to a religious organization, regardless of how the money arrived, even indirectly through choices made by parents offered scholarships. This ruling threatened many existing programs in Florida highlighted by the lawyers for the state.

Even Judge James R. “Jim” Wolf, who wrote a concurring opinion, argued the ruling endangered other programs unless arbitrarily confined to K-12 education, stating: “In order to avoid catastrophic and absurd results which would occur if this inflexible approach was applied to areas other than public schools, the majority is forced to argue that the opinion is limited to public school funding and article 1, section 3 may not apply to other areas receiving public funding.”

In other words, the court had to distinguish K-12 education as being uniquely prohibited by the “No Aid” clause compared with other aid programs. Florida is not unique when it comes to Blaine. Other states have treated K-12 education as being distinct from other government programs in which churches may participate or benefit.

What conclusion can we draw from all of this?

Don’t expect Espinoza to be a major game changer. State legislatures still must create voucher programs and families still must choose schools for their children. All we can hope for is that the U.S. Supreme Court will provide some clarity in how Blaine Amendments can or cannot be applied.

Hopefully, we’ll learn that distinguishing K-12 education from other publicly beneficial programs is arbitrary and in error.

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Analysis: Montana scholarship program fulfills a public purpose in providing K-12 education

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

Editor’s note: The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral argument in the latest chapter of the battle over the use of public funding for religious schools. Supporters of such funding argue that the government should not be allowed to discriminate against religious families and schools, while opponents warn that requiring the government to allow public funds to be used for religious schools could harm public education. redefinED executive editor Matt Ladner shares his thoughts in today’s post. Stay tuned for an analysis from Leslie Hiner, vice president of legal affairs at EdChoice, coming next week.

I’m not an attorney, nor do I play one on television. Nevertheless, the transcript of the Espinoza vs. Montana oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court make for fascinating reading.

In 2015, the Montana Legislature passed a small scholarship tax credit under which taxpayers donate to groups providing scholarships to students wishing to attend private schools. The state provides the donor with a credit against their state tax burden and the nonprofit collects funds to provide scholarship aid to eligible families.

After the Montana program passed, the Montana Department of Revenue made an administrative ruling that the scholarships could not be used at religious private schools. The amendment reads:

The legislature, counties, cities, towns, school districts, and public corporations shall not make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies, or any grant of lands or other property for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination. This section shall not apply to funds from federal         sources provided to the state for the express purpose of distribution to non-public education.” (Montana Const. Art. X, § 6)

A group of Montana mothers challenged the administrative ruling in state court, noting that the position of the Montana Department of Revenue was contrary to a number of U.S. Supreme Court rulings requiring government neutrality toward religious groups. The Montana Supreme Courts ruled against the mothers and struck down the entire program. The plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So, let’s get a few things out of the way.

The Montana Department of Revenue ought not to have made this ruling in the first place. The Montana Legislature did not make an appropriation, and the purpose of what it did was not to aid any church or school, but rather to aid students and families.

Read the argument in its entirety, but in my book, the crucial exchange came in a question from Justice Kavanaugh to the attorney defending Montana’s action:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: But this is a – this is a school, in education, there satisfies the compulsory education laws of the state, correct?

UNIKOWSKY: That’s true.

This exchange reveals that the scholarship program fulfills a public purpose in providing a K-12 education to students. For however long Montana has had compulsory K-12 attendance laws is the same period that attendance at a private school has satisfied that state requirement.

The U.S. Supreme Court has established a standard of government neutrality toward religious groups, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc. v. Comer  being the most recent. Thus, a Montana fire department would be engaging in unconstitutional religious discrimination if it refused to put out a fire in a burning place of worship for fear of “aiding” religion.

Several justices further noted that if Montana decided to establish a scholarship program but then decided to strike it down based upon the race of the recipients, that would represent unconstitutional discrimination. Why, they asked, should the Montana Supreme Court be allowed to strike down this neutral program simply because some of the families would choose a religious education?

Disbanding a program simply because some of the beneficiaries would be religious lies at the heart of this case.

The Institute of Justice’s Dick Komer summed it up well in his closing:

What we’re saying here is that Trinity – what Trinity Lutheran says, the state can’t discriminate on the basis of religion. The decision is crystal clear when you read it that that is what they are doing in this case. They focus on the religious affiliation or religious nature of the schools. They are not talking about what the schools do. They are talking about what the schools are.

Second, Zelman has already answered the question about who this program is aiding. It’s not aiding the schools. It is aiding the parents. You have a choice to make about the parents here. You can either view them as mere inconsequential conduits through which public funds flow to the religious schools they choose or you can regard them, as you did in Zelman, as free and independent decision-makers who are being given the power to choose a religious education or a secular education in private schools.

We’ll learn the ruling of the justices later this year.

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FACT-CHECKED: Tallahassee educator’s attack on ‘monstrous’ system is misleading

Jon East
Jon East

Editor’s note: The goal of fact-checkED is to bring clinical precision to complex issues that are easily misunderstood, aiming to counteract incorrect information before it continues to circulate.  

Sally Butzin has a rich and accomplished history in public education, as a classroom teacher, instructional innovator and published author. But her latest column in the Tallahassee Democrat offers an unfortunate brew of bitterness and hyperbole about modern reforms.

Butzin cast Florida today as something of an educational wasteland, reminiscing about the early 1990s when “innovation was encouraged” and contrasting that with the election of Gov. Jeb Bush in 1998 when “the bottom fell out.” She deplored the “emphasis on testing and accountability” but especially blames charter schools and private school vouchers. They constitute a “monstrous parallel system” that “has bled the life out of public education” and “left millions of children behind.”

We’ll leave to others the political defense of Bush, who ushered in a wave of education reform in his eight years in office, and instead focus on three of her more tangible claims.

Claim No. 1: “These new schemes had no accountability to taxpayers.”

The “schemes,” in this context, refer to charter schools and private school scholarships.

First, charter schools are created through a contract with each public school district that involves oversight into educational goals and tax dollars received. Their students are required to take the same state assessment tests as all other district students and the schools receive the same letter grade ratings as public schools. Further, under state law, a charter school can be shut down, and many have been, for receiving two grades of F.

Second, the state’s largest scholarship program, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students in 1,836 private schools, is overseen by the state Department of Education. Students are required to take nationally norm-referenced tests approved by the state and those test results are reported publicly each year. Schools that receive more than $250,000 in scholarship dollars are required to submit financial reports by certified public accountants, and scholarship funding organizations are audited each year by the State Auditor General and private accounting firms. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Third, both charter schools and scholarship schools face a form of accountability that can be more intense than state regulations and audits. Because they are schools of choice and students are free to attend or not, they can go out of business if parents are dissatisfied and choose elsewhere.

These points are brief in part because Butzin’s claim is categorical. She wrote that they have “no accountability,” which is flatly false.

Claim No. 2: “This parallel system has bled the life out of public education, as billions of dollars flowing to it have left millions of children behind.”

This claim seems to have a life of its own, despite the fact that it is refuted by extensive independent research. At its core, it assumes that public schools should be paid tax dollars without regard to how many students attend them, even though Florida has always funded education on a per-student basis. And it ignores the fact that students choosing these two alternative options receive fewer dollars than they would if they remained in a traditional public school.

This is the third time in the short history of fact-checkED that we have analyzed this financial cost claim, and for more detail we invite you to read our first effort. Once again, we rate this claim as false.

Claim No. 3: “Now, it would be one thing if this parallel system was improving outcomes for all our children. But this is simply not the case.”

Butzin did not share her data on outcomes, but the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is generally regarded as one of the most reliable indicators of academic achievement in elementary and secondary schools. NAEP, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” paints an entirely different picture.

By every measure, the NAEP reading and math test scores of fourth- and eighth-graders have increased over the past two decades – the period after which Butzin says “the bottom fell out.” The percentage of fourth-graders who meet basic standards in math is up by nearly two-thirds, and the percentage rated proficient or above has tripled. The percentage of fourth-graders who meet basic standards in reading is up by a third, and the proficient and above is up by two-thirds. Similarly, the percentage of eighth-graders who meet basic in math is up by a fifth, and proficient is up by four-fifths. The percentage of eighth-graders at basic in reading is up by a tenth, and the percentage above proficient up by half.

And, according to the Urban Institute’s adjustment of rankings for race, income and English language learner status, Florida ranks first in fourth-grade reading, first in fourth-grade math, third in eighth-grade reading and eighth in eighth-grade math.

A few other measures are worth mentioning. The most recent Education Week Quality Counts report ranked Florida fourth in the nation in terms of K-12 academic achievement. The College Board ranked Florida third in percentage of graduating high school seniors who have passed college-caliber Advanced Placement exams. The high school graduation rate has jumped from 60.1 percent to 86.9 percent in the past two decades.

We don’t know the data Butzin used, but we rate her claim as highly misleading.

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AnalysisBlog GuestCourtsEducation and Public PolicyEducation EquityEducation LegislationFeaturedJonathan ButcherSchool ChoiceUnionism

Can an amendment close a state’s achievement gap?

Jonathan Butcher
Jonathan Butcher

One of several century-old school buildings in Minnesota, where new language is being proposed to the state constitution that would give students “a fundamental right to a quality education.”

A member of the “Purple People Eaters” may have retired from the NFL, but he now has a state teacher union on the run.

Former Minnesota Viking defensive lineman and justice of the state Supreme Court Alan Page is among those supporting a change to the state constitution that has philosophical and practical problems, but the idea has elevated an important K-12 discussion and has unions scrambling.

Page and Neel Kashkari, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, have drafted a change to Minnesota’s “uniformity clause,” a provision that says the state must have a “general uniform system of public schools.”

Page and other supporters of the amendment argue that the state’s commitment to a system of schools is not enough: “No parent aspires for their child to have an adequate education,” Kashkari and Page told the StarTribune. The system should do more than spend “more and more money and [get] the same poor results,” Page said.

An admirable sentiment, but similar efforts have (appropriately) failed in some state and federal courts. According to local media, the new language gives students a “fundamental right to a quality education,” and the state’s “paramount duty” would be to make sure all children have “the skills necessary for participation in the economy, our democracy, and society.”

Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Again, this concept has been considered in court. At the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodriguez that the Constitution does not guarantee a federal “right” to education. Similar cases in Colorado and Wyoming resulted in debates and rulings concerning how much taxpayers should spend on K-12 schools—not a surprise, because if education is a right, then others have a duty to pay for it. And keep paying until terms such as “quality” and “skills” are fulfilled according to someone else’s definition.

Page and his allies introduced this proposal amidst a longstanding discussion of Minnesota’s K-12 achievement gaps. Recently, Kashkari’s office released a report that found the state has “some of the largest gaps in the nation” in academic outcomes such as test scores and graduation rates. The Nation’s Report Card also shows disparities in math and reading between students eligible for free- or reduced-priced school meals (a less accurate measure of poverty than before recent changes to federal meal programs, but an indicator nonetheless) and children from wealthier families. In 8th grade math, the disparity between low-income students and their peers is greater than 30 points.

Meanwhile, unions are looking for dollar signs. In its statement against the proposal, the special interest group said educators are “waiting for funding” and the legislature needs to “fully fund public education.”

The union also says the proposal would “bring our state closer to vouchers,” as though taxpayers and lawmakers should fear giving children more access to quality learning options. Left unspoken is that other state unions have used uniformity clauses to challenge education choice—something Floridians may remember from Bush v. Holmes. A revision to Minnesota’s constitution may force the union to adjust its plan for potential litigation.

The union is resisting meaningful, substantive change, which Page and Kashkari told Minnesota Public Radio that they are hoping for, at least in part. “If some kids need more choices, this amendment can support that,” Kashkari said, and if “some kids need more funding for their schools, this amendment can support that.”

In that case, we should applaud half of the intent, even if the means are flawed. Catrin Wigfall, Policy Fellow at the Center of the American Experiment (based in Minnesota) writes, “While I respect that the conversation on how to solve the gap is at least started by this proposal…[solving] Minnesota’s education achievement gap is more complicated than an amendment change.”

Minnesota is home to the nation’s first charter school law, so if this proposal has taxpayers and policymakers talking about more K-12 learning opportunities, including private options, the conversation is welcome. Making education a right is neither a necessary nor sufficient (nor fitting) condition to give students from all walks of life a chance at the American Dream.

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fact-checkED: Sanders’ education choice claims in Florida op-ed misleading

Jon East
Jon East

With the presidential primary election in delegate-rich Florida just two months away, Democratic candidates are beginning to knock on the door.

In a Monday column in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders found little to like about Florida’s public education system. But our focus is on educational choice and three assertions he made while insisting that “Florida is ground zero of a school privatization movement intent on destroying public education.”

“Each year almost $1 billion in state money goes to private schools instead of public schools.”

“These private schools operate with little to no accountability.”

“In many cases, their students’ math and reading skills have declined.”

These claims are misleading, at best.

Claim No. 1: The $1 billion citation draws attention but does not prove Sanders’ point. He implies that private school voucher and scholarship programs harm public schools financially, which is a longstanding and erroneous argument advanced by the Florida Education Association (FEA) that we have dealt with previously in this space. There is simply no evidence to support it.

Eight different independent financial studies all have concluded the scholarships, which cost less per student than the total amount spent in a traditional public school, save tax money that can be used to enhance public schools. Florida TaxWatch weighed in last year, finding existing scholarships cost 60 cents on the public school dollar. And the FEA lost its legal challenge to the 19-year-old Tax Credit Scholarship program in part because the trial and appellate courts summarily rejected its argument that public schools “have been and will continue to be injured by the scholarship program’s diversion of resources from the public schools.”

Claim No. 2: The qualifier in this assertion – that private schools operate with “little to no” accountability – gives Sanders some wiggle room in part because accountability is hard to objectively measure. But Sanders seems to dismiss entirely the accountability that is inherent with any school that survives only if parents choose it for their children.

That market concept may not appeal to a self-professed socialist but does have real-world consequences and, in the case of the state’s two scholarships for underprivileged students, gives genuine educational power to parents who typically have little.

As to the regulatory oversight, Florida’s largest program, the Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students this year, is ranked among the nation’s most aggressive. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Among those requirements: scholarship students must take state-approved standardized tests; those test results are reported publicly every year; schools must submit annual financial reports by certified public accountants; and scholarship organizations must be audited each year by the state Auditor General and independent accounting firms.

Sanders is entitled to believe the program is not subject to sufficient regulation, but we rate his claim of “little to no” accountability as misleading.

Claim No. 3:  Once again, Sanders uses an interesting qualifier – “in many cases” – in his assertion that scholarship students’ “math and reading skills have declined.” Eleven years’ worth of standardized test reports refute his claim.

Students who receive the Tax Credit Scholarship must take a nationally norm-referenced test each year approved by the state, and most take the Stanford Achievement. The test scores are sent to Florida State University’s Learning Systems Institute, which is paid to aggregate and report them publicly.

For the most recent year, 2017-18, scholarship students scored on average at the 47.4 percentile in reading and 45.2 percentile in math. That’s basically average, which is encouraging given that these scholarships students are among the poorest in the state and were among the lowest-performing students in the public schools they left behind.

More to the point, their annual gains have been remarkably consistent. The scores reflect that these low-income students have achieved the same annual gains as students of all income levels nationally.

In other words, they have increased, not declined.

Certainly the average doesn’t reflect every student. In the most recent report, about as many students – 0.6 percent – achieved extraordinary gains of more than 40 percentile points as those who dropped an equivalent amount. But Sanders’ qualifier that “many” students declined seems intended to distort the overall test findings. We rate it mostly false.

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Arizona’s anti-fragile schooling system

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

We tend to think of K-12 schooling systems as delicate. Cut their funding a bit and their performance falls apart. But what if we were to envision a K-12 schooling system that is anti-fragile, using the concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb?  

Under Taleb’s definition, systems that are anti-fragile aren’t necessarily hard to break; rather, they simply get stronger when placed under stress. Exercise is a ready example of an anti-fragile system. Exercise tears down muscle, but then that muscle grows back stronger than it was before.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush appeared to place his state’s education system under a policy-induced stress during his two terms from 1999 to 2007. The Florida Education Association didn’t much care for it, mortgaging its Tallahassee headquarters in a (fruitless) effort to defeat Bush’s 2002 reelection bid. Florida academic outcomes, however, clearly improved during that period.

The Obama-era effort to incentivize states and create a teacher evaluation system based on test scores was another effort to create a healthy stress for the K-12 system. Alas, I am unable to create a broadly encouraging national chart similar to the one above (national performance was flat on both NAEP and PISA), but what may loom increasingly over the next decade is a severe competition for public dollars. It may, in fact, more closely resemble the Great Recession than a purposeful K-12 strategy.

Arizona has the best example of an anti-fragile K-12 system. The Great Recession drop-kicked that state’s housing-heavy economy with a steel-tipped boot. State general fund revenue dropped 20 percent in 2009 and the rapid enrollment growth Arizona had enjoyed since World War II suddenly stalled.

Despite Obama stimulus money and a temporary sales tax increase, K-12 per-pupil funding experienced some of the largest cuts in the country. Arizona charter schools already received less funding per pupil than Arizona’s (modestly) funded districts, and then those funds were cut along with everything else. As an Oxford debate is to a punk rock mosh pit, so is 1999-2007 Florida K-12 to the Great Recession in Arizona.

So, what happened with academic outcomes in Arizona charter schools during this difficult period?

At around 200,000 students, Arizona’s charter sector is about the size of a large American school district and more than twice the size of the Wyoming public school system. It also educates a mostly minority student body at a level of per-student subsidy compared to systems nationally. This chart shows eighth-grade NAEP reading absolute scores and gains/declines for Arizona charters compared to state district systems from 2009 to 2019.

Math looks very similar, as do the Science exams. Arizona charters also show high achievement on the state AZMerit exam, and an analysis of transfers shows that on average, they send students to districts with above-average AZMerit scores and receive from districts transfers with below-average scores.

So: This system is looking anti-fragile; funding got cut, but achievement rose. This anti-fragile system of schools draws its strength from the fragility of undesired schools.

The Great Recession hit Arizona’s economy early and hard. Charter operators with long waitlists and strong track records who were able to access capital financing despite the downturn found inexpensive facilities in abundance. Charters that had been struggling with parental demand before the downturn folded under the weight of their difficulties. The Arizona charter school sector overall grew rapidly in size and simultaneously in average levels of achievement.

Far from extraordinary, this is perfectly normal in most human endeavors. Firms with services and products in high demand grow to meet demand, while those with low demand close. When placed under severe stress, Arizona charter schools became much stronger (as did Arizona K-12 education as a whole; Arizona alone made statistically significant gains on all six NAEP exams during the 2009 to 2015 period). It’s very rare in public education, however, that districts routinely face community pressure to keep under-enrolled schools open and school boards routinely fold under this pressure.

Likewise, many districts have high-demand schools with waitlists, but those schools commonly are kept as niche players rather than scaling to meet demand. The dynamic here is the same. Incumbent interests would see a scaling high-demand district offering as a threat to the employment/operations of other schools in the district.

Few districts, therefore, display antifragility; undesired schools remain in operation despite diverting funds from classroom use, high demand schools don’t get the opportunity to replace low demand schools, and frustration abounds for decades as we try – and largely fail – with top-down schemes to spur greater productivity from a system that largely lacks the ability to dynamically improve.

Winston Churchill once noted that Americans will always do the right thing once they have exhausted all the other possibilities. Education is not an exception.

Happy holidays, and see you in 2020!

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