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  • Home
  • ABOUT US
  • Content
    • Analysis
    • Commentary and Opinion
    • News
    • Spotlights
    • Voices for Education Choice
    • factcheckED
  • Topics
    • Achievement Gap
    • Charter Schools
    • Customization
    • Education Equity
    • Education Politics
    • Education Research
    • Education Savings Accounts
    • Education Spending
    • Faith-based Education
    • Florida Schools Roundup
    • Homeschooling
    • Microschools
    • Parent Empowerment
    • Private Schools
    • Special Education
    • Testing and Accountability
    • Virtual Education
    • Vouchers
  • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Guest Bloggers
    • Ashley Berner
    • Jonathan Butcher
    • Jack Coons
    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
    • Patrick J. Wolf
  • Education Facts
    • Research and Reports
    • Gardiner Scholarship Basic Program Facts
    • Hope Scholarship Program Facts
    • Reading Scholarship Program Facts
    • FES Basic Facts
  • Search
Author

Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow
Travis Pillow

A former editor of redefinED, Travis Pillow is editorial director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. He has covered Florida politics, budgets, health care and education policy. Reach him at travis.pillow@gmail.com.

Advocate VoicesArchivEDCustomizationEducation EquityPodcastSchool Choice

archivED: Virginia Walden Ford on two generations of school choice advocates

Travis Pillow November 23, 2019
Travis Pillow

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit a November 2016 interview with Virginia Walden Ford, an education choice advocate and pioneer, in advance of three Florida appearances Ford will make in December to promote the new film Miss Virginia.

Two of Virginia Walden Ford’s children went to public schools and thrived. They had access to mentoring programs and classes that nurtured their talents. But it was the experience of her youngest child, William, that led her to become a school choice advocate.

In middle school, he started to show signs of academic struggles. At the same time, drugs and gang activity were on the rise in the family’s working-class neighborhood in the nation’s capital.

“I always said I would never lose my kids … to the streets, but I knew that if I didn’t do something, then the possibility that this child would not succeed was right staring me in the face,” Ford says.

She found a private scholarship that allowed him to enroll at Archbishop Carroll High School, where he started doing better “almost immediately.” He told his mother that, for the first time, he felt surrounded by adults who cared about his education almost as much as she did.

“That was my first time realizing that if a child is an environment that meets his needs, then he will thrive and he will excel,” Ford says.

That’s the kind of turnaround story Denisha Merriweather can relate to. She changed her own academic trajectory after enrolling in a private school with the help of a Florida tax credit scholarship. On the latest edition of our podcast, she talks with Ford about using her own experience to advocate for educational options in the political arena.

Ford helped launch D.C. Parents for School Choice in 1998, and became an advocate for the Opportunity Scholarship Program. After years working in education reform in the nation’s capital, she recently returned to her home state to serve as executive director of the Arkansas Parent Network.

As a child, she was part of a group of black students chosen to help desegregate the Arkansas public school system, a decade after the Little Rock Nine first broke the color barrier. She says her parents, both educators, taught her that her involvement in her children’s education did not end when she dropped them off at school. She needed to be an advocate.

Ford talks with Merriweather about navigating the tribalism of school choice politics, the awkwardness that comes with praising pro-school choice Republicans when many of her friends are Democrats, and brushing off accusations that she serves as a “mouthpiece” for various groups. She says she tells fellow parent-advocates to carry pictures of their children to help stay focused on what matters.

“Every time you get discouraged, and every time you get sad, and every time you lose a battle, look at those children and say, ‘You are who I’m working for, you are who I’m fighting for, and I won’t give up,'” she says.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/VFW-podast-edited.mp3
November 23, 2019 0 comment
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Advocate VoicesArchivEDCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation Savings AccountsParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceVouchers

archivED: Revisiting a podcast with school choice and political power Howard Fuller

Travis Pillow November 2, 2019
Travis Pillow

Howard Fuller, founder and director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, served as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and became nationally known for his support of fundamental education reform.

Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit an August 2015 interview with civil rights activist, education reform advocate and academic Howard Fuller.

Ever since social justice advocates joined forces with free-market conservatives to create the groundbreaking Milwaukee Parental Choice program in the early ’90s, there have been ideological divides in the school choice movement.

Because most places have fewer school options than parents want, and private school choice programs have usually targeted disadvantaged students in some way, similar left-right coalitions have formed all over the country.

Howard Fuller sits squarely in the social justice camp. When other private school choice supporters try to make eligibility universal, he often objects, on behalf of disadvantaged students he fears will be short-changed and in support of principles staked out by the late Polly Williams and others who helped create the Milwaukee voucher program.

Hence his concerns about the new, near-universal education savings account program recently created in Nevada. In our latest podcast interview, Fuller says this sort of intramural debate is almost inevitable in a movement that spans ideological boundaries.

“The only way we could have avoided that would have been to say we’re not going to have parent choice for low-income people, because you couldn’t get to where we got to without pulling together the type of coalition that was pulled together,” he says.

Despite their philosophical differences, Fuller can find some agreement with those, like Matthew Ladner, who support universal eligibility.

Fuller says it can make sense to offer scholarships to some families higher on the income scale, especially if funding levels are “graduated” so they receive smaller amounts. That can help build a stronger base of political support. However, he says, there should still be a cut-off at some point, so school choice programs aren’t subsidizing private-school tuition for the wealthy.

He acknowledges some of the points Ladner and others have made. Even the wealthiest families, he says, have access to public schools, which sometimes are walled off in exclusive enclaves inaccessible to low-income families. That said, Fuller notes state laws tend to treat public and private schools differently.

“Maybe what’s happening is, the generation behind me (in the school choice movement) doesn’t make those same distinctions that I’m making,” he says.

Ultimately, Fuller says, he’s trying to raise a deeper issue. Private school choice programs should aim to be social equalizers. It’s the poor who are most short-changed by the existing education system, and who often lack the political power to fix that inequity.

“I’m always looking at the fact that no matter how we try to skim over it, talk about it, intellectualize it, or whatever, the system is set up to favor people who have more resources,” he says. “… If we do not fight to make sure that there are programs out here that give poor people a leg up, give them some more opportunity — if we don’t fight for that, it’s not going to happen.”

Can Nevada’s universal program do more for low-income families? We recently discussed the possibilities with Seth Rau, who’s working on the ground there.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Fuller-Podcast.mp3
November 2, 2019 0 comment
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ArchivEDEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsKnow Your HistoryProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

archivED: For school choice foes, a more complete history of vouchers and race

Travis Pillow October 26, 2019
Travis Pillow

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in July 2017, chronicles several chapters from the movement’s rich past.

In the 1900’s, Mary McLeod Bethune founded a private vocational school as an alternative for black students Florida had relegated to separate-and-unequal public schools. In the 1910’s, a group of Catholic nuns clashed with segregationist politicians. Their crime? Educating black children. In the 1960’s, civil rights activists sought to protest schools that systematically shortchanged black students. So they created their own.

Fast forward to 2017. Politicians can no longer segregate public schools by law. State constitutions in Florida and elsewhere mandate public school systems that provides for all students according to “uniform” funding standards. Educators who, like their predecessors of the last century, want to create alternatives that better serve their communities, no longer face prosecution. And they have new options that didn’t exist a century ago. They can start new private schools. 

In Florida, if they comply with state regulations, their students can turn to one of the nation’s four largest private school choice programs* to help pay tuition.

A long, winding road brought us here. It includes some dark passages that, recently, became fodder for scurrilous attacks on the school choice movement. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called scholarship programs like Florida’s “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

Her charge rests on a short-lived, but real, chapter of history. Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians began devising a “massive resistance.” In some communities, they even shut down public schools. In their place, they let students take tuition tax credits to attend private “segregation academies.”

The Center for American Progress chronicled that episode in a recent (and flawed) report. It unveiled the research at an event hosted by Weingarten’s group. The report focuses on Virginia’s Prince Edward County, where segregation academies flourished. Courts put the kibosh on those efforts by the end of the 1960s, and definitively outlawed them in the ’70s.

Still, as they responded to some pushback on their report, the CAP authors argued the school choice movement has failed to reckon with this history. That’s not quite right.

In fact, a group of progressive school choice thinkers confronted that history while it was unfolding. The authors of a 1970 report looked with concern at attempts to evade court-ordered desegregation through so-called freedom of choice. They concluded:

It would be perfectly possible to create a competitive market and then regulate it in such a way as to prevent segregation, ensure an equitable allocation of resources, and give every family a truly equal chance of getting what it wants from the system.

That group was led by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, liberal academics with an eye toward equity also began crafting visions for vouchers that would still be timely today.

The intellectuals of the Voucher Left sometimes crossed swords with the likes of free-market economist Milton Friedman. He launched the “Voucher Right” with a seminal essay calling for vouchers — coincidentally around the same time southern racists were hatching plans to resist segregation. As Rick Hess and Matt Barnum note, Friedman drew not on segregationist impulses, but on the ideas of 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe pushed Friedman’s ideas further in their influential book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools. They argued, in brief, that education bureaucrats had sapped schools of their vitality. The solution, in their view, was to create a new public education system that encompassed all schools — including those considered private — and give students the means to choose among them.

That same year, the voucher left and voucher right found a way to work together. Urban progressives like Wisconsin state Sen. Polly Williams joined forces with Friedman acolytes in the Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson’s administration to create the first modern voucher program.

That wouldn’t be the last time they joined forces. Last year in Florida, school choice advocates led by Martin Luther King III rallied to protect the nation’s largest private school choice program, which this year will serve more than 100,000 low-income and working class students — 70 percent of them children of color.

That program was created under Jeb Bush, a Republican governor, and expanded through multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation. The protest challenged a lawsuit led by the president the American Federation for Teachers’ Florida affiliate. And that lawsuit ultimately failed.

This brings us back to the Center for American Progress.

Randi Weingarten leads a national organization that has battled private school choice at every turn, and repeatedly lost. When some Voucher Left ideas first gained traction in Washington (albeit in milder forms, like private school tuition tax credits), nationwide teachers unions began wielding their newfound influence in the Democratic Party to stamp out support.

It’s hardly out of character for the unions to attempt to cast voucher advocates as racists, amp up their calls the slow down charter schools, or attempt to tie every diverse corner of the school choice movement to President Donald Trump.

The question is why a center-left think tank, long known for its reasonable positions on education reform, would work so hard to help them, resting its attacks on such a thinly constructed factual foundation.

Note: See also this article by Andrew Rotherham, which traces a similar historical arc.

*The four scholarship programs are Tax credit scholarships, McKay and Gardiner Scholarships for children with special needs, and Voluntary Pre-K scholarships.

October 26, 2019 0 comment
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Charter Schools

These Central Florida charter schools strive to include all students

Travis Pillow August 6, 2018
Travis Pillow

Students at UCP of Central Florida’s Bailes Campus encounter insects in the hallway.

It was entomology day at a charter school campus in Orlando, Fla. Kindergarten and first-grade students lined the hallways, pointing and shouting as they passed around cages of bouncing crickets and other critters.

Down the hall, there were rooms with physical therapy equipment. Out the back door, on the playground, there was a swing specially designed for students in wheelchairs. Looking closely, it was possible to spot children with hearing aids or assistive physical devices.

But watching the students, as they took their turns with insect encounters and then filed into their classrooms, it was possible to miss the fact that their school has a unique mission, and serves a unique cross-section of students.

UCP of Central Florida’s Bailes Campus sits nestled among the aerospace contractor offices and student housing complexes that abut the University of Central Florida. It’s the flagship of seven charter school campuses created by the Orlando-area affiliate of United Cerebral Palsy, an organization created to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

It’s unique among Florida charter schools not just because it caters to children with special needs, a niche a growing number of charters have started to fill, but because it aims for a 50/50 mix of students with special needs and those without. With some creative staffing, it works to include all its students in the same learning environment, from the classroom to the playground to the cafeteria.

“Kids, at a very young age, don’t see each other as different,” said school CEO Ilene Wilkins. “If we get them at a young age, that changes how we see the world.”

Each class at the school combines two grades. In the classroom, there will be a dedicated teacher for each grade and a classroom aide, plus a complement of in-house therapists. That mix of adults allows the school to support diverse students with diverse needs in the same learning environment.

“You take your classroom, and you put the level of support where it needs to be,” said Doris Lawson, who teaches second and third grades.

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August 6, 2018 0 comment
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Blog Administration

Moving on

Travis Pillow July 13, 2018
Travis Pillow

Today is my last day editing this blog. After 23 years as a Floridian, six years chronicling the politics and policy of the public education system that educated me, and four and half years writing in this space, I’m moving on to start a new chapter alongside my fiancee, who teaches high school English in New Orleans.

It’s a transition from one hotbed of education reform to another. And it’s got me thinking.

A couple months after I first joined Step Up For Students, I wrote a recap of the 2014 Florida legislative session. It was a bruising one for school choice advocates. My thesis was that all the sturm and drang over how to measure academic outcomes of students who used scholarships to attend private schools, or how to manage the charter school application process, signaled a new era in the politics and policy of public education in our state. We were done fighting over whether charter schools or voucher programs ought to exist. They existed, and it was clear they weren’t going anywhere. We’d moved on to thornier questions about how to govern them.

Looking back, more than four years later, that may have been wishful thinking. In Florida and around the country, advocates and academics burn staggering amounts of intellectual jet fuel litigating whether charter schools are good or bad for public education and whether private school choice is a win-win solution or an affront to American ideals.

In this space, we’ve tried to push the debate in more productive directions. How can the state stop the bad charter school operators, while encouraging new, better ones to open and expand? How can politicians who support public education draw lessons from charter schools and apply them in districts? How can schools of all types foster innovations that will help them meet the educational needs of all their students?

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July 13, 2018 2 comments
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Charter Schools

Groups challenge Fla. charter school ballot proposal

Travis Pillow July 12, 2018
Travis Pillow

The League of Women Voters and the Southern Poverty Law Center are challenging the wording of a Florida ballot measure that could, among other things, overhaul charter school authorizing in the state.

The proposed Amendment 8 would do three things if voters approve it this fall. It would impose term limits on elected school board members, elevate the importance of civic literacy and allow entities other than school boards to “operate, control, and supervise” public schools.

That third part has drawn the most attention from critics. And it’s the focus of the lawsuit, filed this morning in Leon County court.

Florida is somewhat unique compared to other states. Its constitution creates 67 countywide school boards. Courts have held that, with certain, narrow exceptions, those countywide school boards have the exclusive power over public schools. That means statewide charter school authorizing boards, like the one that exists in Massachusetts, are unconstitutional.

The proposed amendment, drafted by the Constitution Revision Commission, would change that by adding the underlined words to the state constitution.

(b) The school board shall operate, control, and supervise all free public schools established by the district school board within the school district and determine the rate of school district taxes within the limits prescribed herein. Two or more school districts may operate and finance joint educational programs.

A proposed ballot summary, intended to explain the change to voters when they go to the polls in November, describes the change this way:

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July 12, 2018 0 comment
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Charter SchoolsFunding

Millions in Fla. charter school funding may hinge on the meaning of this phrase

Travis Pillow July 11, 2018
Travis Pillow

Are charter schools entitled to an equal per-student share of the funding their districts raise from voter-approved property taxes?

Or can districts keep all the revenue for the schools they operate themselves?

The answer appears to hinge on the definition of this phrase in Florida statutes: “Current operating discretionary millage levy.”

The law requires school districts to share all the revenue described by that phrase with charter schools. Last year, an Indian River County circuit judge ruled voter-approved property taxes fit that definition, and charter schools were entitled to their fair share.

The Palm Beach County School Board, informed by a similar legal analysis, was poised to share any revenue from a proposed property tax referendum with the nearly 50 charter schools the district authorizes.

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July 11, 2018 0 comment
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Charter SchoolsSchool Choice

The charter school turnaround that may not have been

Travis Pillow July 10, 2018
Travis Pillow

A small, single-gender charter school in Bradenton, Fla. is celebrating a remarkable turnaround. In two years’ time, Visible Men Academy has improved its state letter grade from an F to an A.

The school’s improvement caught the attention of a local TV news station.

[T]wo years ago, the school switched to i-Ready: a widely-used learning program for Florida testing. Almost instantly, the growth parents were already seeing inside the classrooms was reflected outside on test scores, going from an F to a C last year, and another two-grade jump to an A in 2017-18.

“They are the most supportive people in this universe, that would help you out anywhere, anytime, any place,” says Breyon Peterson about faculty. Breyon has attended VMA since kindergarten, and will start 5th grade next year.

“My grandson went to local camp for the last two weeks, and halfway through the second week, he said when can I go back to school,” says Leesa Holmes, who chose VMA so her grandson would have male role models.

In addition to the work of its teachers, the school may have benefitted from a fortuitous bit of timing.

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July 10, 2018 0 comment
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