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    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
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Author

Jon East

Jon East
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.

tax credit scholarship
Education and Public PolicyEducation LegislationEducation ResearchPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceTax Credit ScholarshipsTesting 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
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Education LegislationEducation PoliticsSchool ChoiceTax 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
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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
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Charter SchoolsFundingTax 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.

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March 15, 2017 0 comment
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Education and Public PolicySchool ChoiceTax Credit Scholarships

Trump cites Florida as a model; school choice critics look elsewhere

Jon East March 10, 2017
Jon East

As President Trump looked with favor on Florida’s 15-year-old tax credit scholarship last week, some of the reviews seemed to suffer a form of interstate transference.

The formulation went something like this: If Arizona, then Florida.

Take Kevin Carey, the able director of education policy at New America, as one example. After Trump on Tuesday introduced a graduate student who attributed her academic turnaround to the Florida scholarship program, Carey responded in the New York Times with an extended discourse not on the Sunshine State but on the Arizona Tax Credit Scholarship. Carey is troubled that Arizona’s Senate president runs one of the largest scholarship-granting organizations, thinks 10 percent is too much to pay the organizations to administer the program, criticizes the state for allowing scholarship students with higher household incomes, and is worried about the lack of testing and financial accountability requirements.

Those are all reasonable concerns, but none of them apply to Florida.

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March 10, 2017 2 comments
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School BoardsSchool ChoiceTax Credit Scholarships

Does school choice harm public schools? Claims fall apart under scrutiny

Jon East May 23, 2016
Jon East

One of the most emotionally potent arguments against educational choice – that it cripples public schools financially – is slowly unraveling in a Florida court of law. Teacher union attorneys, who seek to abolish tax credit scholarships for 78,000 low-income children, are stumbling to make the case.

This is no small matter. The claim that scholarships and vouchers and charter schools financially undercut public education has been repeated so often for so long that it tends to get treated as though it were fact. The money is commonly described as being “diverted” or “siphoned” from public schools, pitting choice schools against neighborhood schools and creating understandable anguish for parents who want only for their children to have the best education possible.

The Florida case, McCall v. Scott, is shining an unforgiving light on that assertion. The backdrop is the issue of standing – the typically arcane calculation of whether someone is connected to and harmed by a legal matter the court can resolve. Because the union is challenging a scholarship that involves no direct appropriation of tax dollars, the attorneys are being asked to prove their clients suffer “special injury.”

They are quite conspicuously failing.

In the original complaint, filed Aug. 28, 2014, the Florida Education Association (FEA) attorneys said their clients “have been and will continue to be injured by the scholarship program’s diversion of resources from the public schools.” They bolstered the case with two arguments: 1) The tax-credited contributions that are made to private nonprofits to pay for scholarships reduce state taxes that would otherwise fund public schools; and 2) School districts lose funding for each student who leaves a public school to attend a scholarship school.

During the arguments in trial court, Leon Circuit Judge George Reynolds was openly skeptical. “You could do away with this program tomorrow morning,” he said at one point, “and the budget for the school system might change not one iota.” He then dismissed the case on May 18, 2015, ruling: “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.”

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May 23, 2016 0 comment
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Charter SchoolsMagnet SchoolsParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceTax Credit Scholarships

School choice still rising in Florida: 1.5 million students choose

Jon East January 25, 2016
Jon East

School choice options in Florida grew last year at more than twice the rate of total enrollment, surpassing 1.5 million students. That means 43 percent of preK-12 students in the nation’s third-most populous state picked their own form of education.

This trend also shows little signs of slowing. Enrollment in charter schools grew by more than 9 percent, and a scholarship program for low-income children continued to grow at double-digit rates. In the past two years alone, 88,527 Florida students have joined the choice movement.

The numbers come from 2014-15 data compiled by the state Department of Education, and speak to a broader transformation that transcends the traditional debate about public-vs-private. Indeed, two of the three most chosen learning options in Florida are provided by school districts themselves – through open-enrollment plans that let parents choose from clusters of schools, and through choice and magnet schools that cater specifically to children’s academic interests and aptitudes.

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January 25, 2016 0 comment
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School ChoiceTax Credit Scholarships

Why students benefit when scholarship organizations serve all schools

Jon East December 17, 2015
Jon East

The resistance to a proposed requirement that state-approved nonprofits provide scholarships to students attending any eligible private school has taken on an unusual fervor in Georgia. Some highly respected national education reformers recently described it as both a “threat to a growing and successful type of educational choice” and “contrary to our nation’s founding ideals.” One even called it “the nuclear option.”

In Florida, we welcome it as part of the law.

Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, now in its 14th year, stipulates that scholarship organizations “must allow an eligible student to attend any eligible private school and must allow a parent to transfer a scholarship during a school year to any other eligible private school of the parent’s choice.” The intent is obvious. It gives low-income parents an easier shopping experience among the 1,600 participating schools and a smoother path to the one that best meets their children’s needs. After all, one of the program’s core principles is to empower parents.

This is not to argue that the serve-all-schools approach is the only possibility, but the Florida experience certainly belies the apocalyptic claims of opponents in Georgia. The scholarship this year serves 78,154 students with tax-credited contributions totaling $447.3 million. As such, it’s nearly 10 times the size of the Georgia scholarship and is often viewed as a national model. No nuclear fallout so far.

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December 17, 2015 0 comment
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