Author

Jon East

Jon East is special projects director for Step Up For Students. Previously, he was a member of the editorial board and the Sunday commentary editor at the St. Petersburg Times, Florida’s largest daily newspaper, where he wrote about education issues for most of his 28 years at the paper. He was also a reporter and editor at the Evening Independent and Ocala Star-Banner. He earned a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

fact-checkED: This ‘quick fact’ about scholarships hurting public schools is no fact at all

Jon East November 26, 2019

Jon East

A story in Sunday’s Lakeland Ledger about a union-sponsored public education summit in Polk County included a chart of “Quick Facts” that bears scrutiny. One of them, about the financial impact of Florida Tax Credit Scholarships, is false.

The statement: “In 2018, tax-credit scholarship programs totaled $1.058 billion, money that went to private and religious schools that could have gone to public schools.”

First, the total dollars are off. According to the state Department of Revenue, which tracks tax credits awarded under the scholarship law, companies received permission in 2018-19 for tax-credited contributions of $689.3 million. Those dollars translated into scholarships for 104,091 lower-income and working-class children to attend 1,825 private schools in that same year, according to the Department of Education.

The $1 billion figure may well include money spent on two voucher programs – McKay and Gardiner Scholarships – for students with special needs that are funded directly from the state treasury, but it is nonetheless misleading.

The more substantive claim, though, is that the money “could have gone to public schools.” This is at the core of a longstanding and erroneous argument – that vouchers harm public schools financially – offered by the Florida Education Association. In fact, FEA lost a 2014 legal challenge to the Tax Credit Scholarship in large part because it could prove no such harm.

In that case, McCall v. Scott, the FEA argued that public schools “have been and will continue to be injured by the scholarship program’s diversion of resources from the public schools.” The Leon Circuit judge who heard the case, George Reynolds, offered union attorneys the chance to amend their complaint to provide facts that bolstered that claim.

They declined, and Reynolds dismissed the case, writing: “Whether any diminution of public school resources resulting from the Tax Credit Program will actually take place is speculative, as is any claim that any such diminution would result in reduced per-pupil spending or in any adverse impact on the quality of education.”

On appeal, the union lawyers went a step further and asserted the scholarship program cost public schools $300 million in 2013-14. But the state education budget that year increased by $1 billion and per-student funding went up by 6.3 percent, leading First District of Appeal Judge Lori Rowe, during oral arguments, to ask: “But exactly what is the special injury you are articulating here? You haven’t alleged that any individual student is suffering. You haven’t alleged that per-student funding has been reduced. You haven’t even alleged that the education budget has been reduced.”

Outside the courtroom, eight different independent financial studies have all concluded the scholarship saves tax money that can be used to enhance public schools. That’s because the state spends less to educate these students on the scholarship than it otherwise would spend in a traditional public school.

In March, Florida TaxWatch added to that body of research with a report on what it called the “true cost” of education in 2017-18. TaxWatch went beyond the basic operating formula used to fund public schools and added all the other appropriations as well. It found the state spent $10,856 to educate the average student in public school, and contrasted that amount with $6,447 spent on the average Tax Credit Scholarship student. In other words, the scholarship cost 60 cents on the public school dollar.

One final note: Amid the lawsuit challenging the Tax Credit Scholarship in 2014, Nan Rich, a former state senator, made a similar claim about scholarship programs pulling money out of public schools, and PolitiFact Florida rated it “mostly false.”

We rate this “quick fact” to be false.

November 26, 2019 0 comment

Education and Public Policy Education politics Education reporting factcheckED Family Empowerment Scholarship Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Gardiner Scholarship McKay Scholarship School Choice vouchers

fact-checkED: Family Empowerment Scholarships are not the only state-funded voucher

Jon East October 18, 2019

Jon East

Julian Cruz, pictured here with his mother, Emily, was one of the first students to receive a Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs. The direct-state-funded scholarship now serves nearly 12,000 students.

Editor’s note: We add a new feature today, called fact-checkED, that is inspired by the many factchecking efforts across the media landscape these days. Our work will focus solely within the arena of educational choice, and our goal is to bring clinical precision to issues that are often complex and misunderstood. Our intent is not to shame but to inform.

In an editorial Sunday criticizing 19 “bad bills” that became state law this year, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote the following of a new school voucher called Family Empowerment Scholarships:

“Tuition vouchers (SB 7070). For the first time, money goes straight from (the) state treasury – not just by tax credits.”

This is false.

We begin by first acknowledging that the sentence above ends with a phrase describing the money as going “to unregulated private schools, most of which will be religious and can cherry-pick their students.” That’s a handful in itself, particularly given that the participating private schools are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations and that annual state evaluations of a similar program, called the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, have concluded it draws some of the state’s poorest and lowest-performing students from public schools.

But our focus here is on the claim that the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) is the first school voucher to draw funds directly from the state treasury. That’s in part because the claim has current legal and political salience. Ron Meyer, attorney for the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, has told reporters he plans to file a lawsuit asking courts to declare the new program unconstitutional. Even before the bill was passed, Meyer told the GateHouse Capital Bureau: “This could lead to the dismantling of the public school system as we’ve known it.” In June, a month after the bill was signed into law, he told the Florida Phoenix: “There is going to be a challenge.”

The Sun Sentinel editorial draws a proper contrast between the new FES program and an existing 18-year-old program called the Tax Credit Scholarship. Both serve disadvantaged students from low-income and working-class households, but the Tax Credit Scholarship is fueled by contributions from corporations. In turn, those contributions receive 100 percent credits against six different state taxes. Last year, the Tax Credit Scholarship served 104,091 low-income students at a cost of roughly $644.7 million. The funding distinction is important, and led in part to the 2017 dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Tax Credit program.

As the editorial notes, FES is funded directly by the state. In fact, it is funded directly out of the operational funding formula, known as the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), that pays for district public schools. One distinct difference between FES and district schools is that the scholarships receive money only through state general revenue dollars and do not receive any local property tax money (see subsection (11)(e) in the law).

The claim of being first, though, is wrong. FES is neither the first nor the only state-funded education voucher in the PreK-12 arena. It’s not even the only voucher funded directly through the FEFP. Here are the others:

The McKay Scholarship for students with learning disabilities. It was created two decades ago and last year served 30,695 students at a cost of $219.7 million. The students are tracked inside the FEFP from each school district in which they live, as is exhibited in this FEFP calculation sheet from 2018-19 (note the second column, which subtracts McKay dollars from each district). 1819 FEFP 3rdCalc
The Gardiner Scholarship for students with specifically named special needs. It was created in 2014 and served 11,917 students last year at a cost of $124.1 million. Gardiner is funded by a direct line-item appropriation (see line item 110 on page 28 of this year’s State Appropriations Act).
Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten for 4-year-olds. This program was approved by voters in 2002 and took effect in 2005. In 2017-18, it served 133,870 students in private schools and day care centers at a cost of roughly $326.2 million. The VPK program is funded by a direct line-item appropriation (see line item 89 on page 20 of this year’s State Appropriations Act).

To its credit, the Sun Sentinel published a partial correction to the editorial above. We rate the original claim as FALSE.

October 18, 2019 0 comment

Courts Education and Public Policy Education legislation Education politics Family Empowerment Scholarship School Choice Tax credit scholarships Unionism vouchers

Blaine amendments ‘discriminate against all religion’

Jon East October 2, 2019

Jon East

As religious and education interest groups furiously file amicus briefs in the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case on whether states can ban faith-based schools from voucher programs, a respected Catholic university professor is offering a remarkably dispassionate plea:

Don’t reject Blaine amendments because they were born of Catholic bigotry; ban them because they discriminate against all religion.

The argument posed by University of Notre Dame law professor Richard W. Garnett is part of an enticing new SCOTUSBlog symposium on Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The case may determine whether no-aid-to-religion clauses in 37 states, known as Blaine amendments after a Maine congressman who pushed them in the late 1800s, can be used to exclude religious schools from government-supported scholarship programs that allow students to choose private schools.

Garnett writes, in part:

“To be sure, anti-Catholicism was, is and has been from the beginning real in the United States, and it has long skewed constitutional doctrines and public debates about school funding and education policy. Still, it increasingly seems unhelpful – and, indeed, unhealthy – to construct and apply judicial doctrines that invite mind-reading for malice and that make the legality of legislative, executive or other official acts depend less on the harms they cause than on the motives, or even the character, ascribed to their supporters.

“Our political and legal climate and discourse are not well served by a hyper-driven hermeneutic of suspicion, and perhaps the court could help by, in this and other contexts, moving to judicial tests that do not incentivize accusations of bad faith or reductionist accounts of others’ aims. It is appropriate, of course, to take judicial notice of historical facts. Indeed, some cases are probably better decided with deferential reliance on tradition and longstanding practice than by application of clear-cut rules and tests. Here, though, a straightforward application of what (Justice Neil) Gorsuch called the “general principle” that discrimination against religion, as such, is not permitted by the free exercise clause unless it is required by the establishment clause is the court’s best bet.”

The Montana case is particularly relevant to Florida, given that state teacher union attorney Ron Meyer has told reporters he plans to file a lawsuit challenging the new Family Empowerment Scholarship that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in May. That K-12 scholarship aims to serve up to 18,000 students this fall with state-funded vouchers to private schools.

Though the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 overturned a direct-funded school voucher on the grounds that it violated a requirement that public schools be “uniform,” Meyer is certain to also argue that vouchers awarded to participating faith-based schools violate the state no-aid provision.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2002 that a Cleveland voucher program that included religious schools did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s church and state provisions, but it has not previously ruled on whether state Blaine amendments can be used to circumvent that decision. The court is expected to rule in the Espinoza case by summer 2020.

October 2, 2019 0 comment

School Choice

Private school responds after being called anti-gay by Florida newspaper columnist

Jon East July 2, 2019

Jon East

Students at Calvary City Christian Academy and Preschool perform in a holiday pageant.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell, a frequent critic of school vouchers, is urging companies to stop donating to Florida Tax Credit Scholarships for low-income students because some participating religious private schools have anti-LGBTQ statements on their web sites. In turn, the Sentinel has published two responses over the past four days.

The most recent one comes from an Orlando school that was singled out by Maxwell as having “a policy against letting gay students walk its halls.” Rev. Dr. Nino Gonzalez, pastor of Calvary City Church, which runs Calvary City Academy, noted that his school not only enrolls LGBTQ students but that it served a high-profile role in assisting victims and families in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016. He said discriminatory language that appeared in a “lifestyle” statement on the school’s web site was outdated and has been removed.

The other comes from Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, which helps administer the scholarship (and publishes this blog). Tuthill criticizes Maxwell for pressuring companies to stop their donations, arguing that fewer donations only hurts the economically disadvantaged children who are helped by the program. He also reports that only a small fraction of the schools appear to have any discriminatory statements toward LGBTQ students in handbooks or web sites and that he has yet to encounter evidence of any LGBTQ student being denied admission or mistreated by a scholarship school.

July 2, 2019 0 comment

Education and Public Policy Education legislation Education Research Policy Wonks School Choice Tax credit scholarships Testing and Accountability

Setting the record straight on choice scholarships

Jon East March 6, 2019

Jon East

As Florida senators get their first look today at a new private school scholarship for economically disadvantaged students, some familiar taunts about academic results for the existing Tax Credit Scholarship have resurfaced. Be wary of rhetorical flourish.

Yes, the low-income scholarship students are not required to take the Florida Standard Assessment administered in traditional public schools. But they are required to take state-approved nationally norm-referenced tests whose academic validity is not in dispute.

So those who claim “Floridians have no idea if private schools are succeeding,” as one South Florida newspaper wrote recently, are ignoring 10 years of testing data to the contrary. They also neglect extraordinary new independent research that shows scholarship students are more likely to attend and graduate from college.

The testing trend line

Students in grades 3-10 on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarships have been required since 2006 to take a standardized test, and most take the Stanford Achievement. In the most recent report, their average percentile ranking in reading was 48 and in math was 46. That’s basically average, which is made more encouraging by the fact that these students are among the poorest in the state (and were the lowest performing from public schools they left).

The more important measure is whether the students are learning, and the bottom line has been almost identical each year: These low-income students have achieved the same annual gains as students of all income levels nationally.

Test score gains for individual schools with at least 30 tested scholarship students are also reported annually. In the most recent report, 342 schools were listed.

Comparisons with public school students

When budget cuts removed norm-referenced portions of the state test in 2011, researchers were no longer able to make a direct comparison between scholarship and public school students. In that 2011 academic findings report, though, researcher David Figlio concluded that scholarship students outperformed their peers in public schools, even though the public school students had higher incomes.

Figlio wrote of what he viewed as increasing gains: “These differences, while not large in magnitude, are larger and more statistically significant than in the past year’s results, suggesting that successive cohorts of participating students may be gaining ground over time.”

Students who enter and leave the scholarship

From the earliest years, state researchers have found that scholarship students who come from public schools were among the lowest academic performers in schools that themselves had disproportionately low test scores. That’s no slight on the public school. It’s intuitive. If a student is doing well in his or her current school, why change?

Similarly, scholarship students who return to public school are among the lowest performers in the private school they leave behind.

This recurring fact has been stretched in the current debate to imply that scholarship students who return to public schools have learned essentially nothing. That’s not what test results show, and, further, Figlio addressed that question head-on in his 2013 report. He looked at students who had switched twice – from public to private and back to public. In those cases, the state public test scores remained essentially the same.

Wrote Figlio: “FTC participants who return to the public sector performed, after their first year back in the public schools, in the same ballpark but perhaps slightly better on the FCAT than they had before they left the Florida public schools. The most careful reading of this evidence indicates that participation in the FTC program appears to have neither advantaged nor disadvantaged the program participants who ultimately return to the public sector.”

Beyond test scores

In February, the respected Urban Institute released perhaps the most significant research in the scholarship program’s history. The report was a followup to work released in 2017 and was directed again by the Institute’s Director of Education Policy, Matthew Chingos, who has a PhD in government from Harvard University. His team matched data between roughly 89,000 scholarship and public school students from 2003 to 2011, representing the largest study of its kind in the nation.

The institute found that scholarship students are more likely than their public school peers to attend and graduate from college. The difference is striking.

Scholarship students as a whole were up to 43 percent more likely to attend college, a difference that rose to 99 percent for those on the scholarship at least four years. Similarly, scholarship students as a whole were up to 20 percent more likely to get a degree, a difference that rose to 45 percent for those on the scholarship for at least four years.

March 6, 2019 0 comment

Education legislation Education politics School Choice Tax credit scholarships

Florida Tax Credit Scholarship enrollment drops

Jon East December 19, 2018

Jon East

Enrollment in the nation’s largest scholarship program for economically disadvantaged K-12 students dropped this fall for the first time in 14 years. The decline was caused by a slowdown in corporate contributions and has led to an extraordinary gap between scholarship supply and demand.

“We’re working hard to raise more scholarship funds, but we’re bumping up against a ceiling,” said Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, one of two state-approved scholarship funding organizations. “It’s devastating to see how many qualified students are being turned away.”

The Department of Education reported that, as of September, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship was serving 98,039 students in 1,780 private schools. That’s 3,603, or 3.5 percent, less than the same reporting period last year. It’s also 10,000 less than last year’s final total.

In the previous 13 years, the average annual growth rate was nearly 20 percent.

Smaller increases in annual corporate contributions are the driving factor. Under the scholarship law, companies that contribute to approved nonprofit scholarship organizations receive a 100 percent credit against six different state taxes. The cap on those credits increases 25 percent following any year in which 90 percent of the cap is raised, which allowed the program cap to grow from $140 million in 2010 to $874 million in 2018.

The corresponding climb in corporate contributions allowed scholarship enrollment to triple during that period. But according to the Department of Revenue, tax credit reservations have begun leveling off. Last year, companies pledged $639 million in contributions, which barely met the 90 percent threshold. This year, against a larger cap of $874 million, tax credit reservations through November totaled only $637 million.

In turn, scholarship amounts for Step Up students increased roughly 4 percent this year. The result has been an abbreviated application season and a 2018-19 waiting list of 14,474 approved students. (The DOE report included no enrollment numbers for AAA Scholarship Foundation, which served 1 percent of students last year.)

The approved waiting list understates the actual demand because it includes only students for which Step Up verified income eligibility. Over the summer, Step Up stopped accepting and evaluating applications that had no chance of being funded. Step Up received scholarship applications from 170,096 students before shutting down the online application system on June 29, though not all the applications were completed. Given previous years application growth and utilization patterns, Tuthill projects Step Up would have served about 70,000 more students had it had the funds.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers approved some new fundraising tools for the scholarship program, including a new credit on the commercial lease tax and a provision allowing scholarship organizations to receive an alphabetized list of the top 200 corporate income taxpayers. Tuthill says those changes have yet to translate into significant increases in fundraising.

The effects of the scholarship gap this fall are still being felt. Earlier this month, a Miami school principal wrote to Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis to highlight the hardship of nine low-income students at the school who had failed to get scholarships. Two weeks ago, a parent called Step Up to report the death of a close friend’s child. The parent, according to Gina Lynch, Step Up’s vice president of operations, wanted to know whether that child’s scholarship could be transferred to her own. The subject line of Lynch’s email to Step Up staff: “A sad example of why the wait list is so bad.”

The Tax Credit Scholarship was created in 2001 to give parents access to learning options they could not otherwise afford. The program provides $750 transportation scholarships for children attending public schools in another school district and private school scholarships worth up to $6,519 in elementary, $6,815 in middle and $7,111 in high school for students whose household income is no more than double the poverty rate. Those whose household income is between 200 and 260 percent of poverty are only eligible for partial scholarships.

This year, the average household income for scholarship students is $25,746 – or 9.1 percent above poverty. More than two-thirds of the students are Hispanic or black and more than half are from single-parent homes.

For the past decade, state research has shown that the students who choose the scholarship were struggling in the public schools they left behind and are now making the same academic gains in reading and math as students of all income levels nationally. The Urban Institute reported last year that students who remain on the scholarship for at least four years are 40 percent more likely than their district school peers to attend college.

December 19, 2018 2 comments

Blog administration

RedefinED is looking for a new editor

Jon East July 10, 2018

Jon East

As readers will learn in more detail on Friday, redefinED editor Travis Pillow, an education journalist extraordinaire, is leaving Florida and this blog to set up shop in another hotbed of educational innovation – New Orleans. (Okay, so there’s also an amazing woman, who happens to be an enormously talented educator and Travis’ new fiancée, who provides an even more powerful draw.)

We’d like to think there is another Travis out there somewhere, perhaps even among our audience. So we steal a piece of the blog this morning to advertise ourselves. The position of editor is open, and we are accepting applications.

RedefinED is a seven-year-old education blog with what we view as a national footprint in the arena of school choice. The editor is in charge of all operations of the blog and related social media, including planning, writing, editing and execution of the daily output. In that role, the editor oversees the work of three staff members, including a writer, social media specialist and a part-time daily roundup editor. We seek someone with seasoned writing, editing, interviewing, research and organizational skills and a broad knowledge of education issues. She or he must have a bachelor’s degree in journalism or related field and at least five years of related experience or equivalent combination of education and experience. The blog is published by Step Up For Students, a nonprofit that helps administer four state-authorized scholarship programs in Florida, and we would prefer the editor be based in our administrative headquarters in St. Petersburg.

Those who are interested can apply online here.

July 10, 2018 0 comment

Charter Schools Funding Tax credit scholarships

Report shows true bottom line on Florida’s public education spending

Jon East March 15, 2017

Jon East

The most commonly cited price tag for Florida public schools represents only two-thirds of what they actually spend, a new report from Florida TaxWatch shows. The “true cost,” it says, shines a more favorable financial light on public education alternatives.

“To be good stewards of education dollars,” writes TaxWatch president Dominic Calabro, “it is critical that taxpayers have a clear understanding of how much education revenue is available, how that revenue is spent, and what it is spent on. Without this understanding, taxpayers and policymakers will be unable to determine whether their state and local K-12 education investments are cost-effective.”

As the Florida Legislature enters the second week of an annual session that already is punctuated by budgetary duress, the report tackles perhaps the most widely misunderstood funding formula in public education. It’s called the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) and was adopted in 1973 as a way to provide the appropriate balance of state and local funding for basic school operations.

March 15, 2017 0 comment

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