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Blog Guest

Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentParental Choice

This is liberal ‘equality’?

John E. Coons January 8, 2021
John E. Coons

The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

Our national constitution recognizes the right of all parents to decide where, and by whom, their child will be schooled; this equal prerogative is assured not merely by the First Amendment, but by the rule of equal treatment that is assured by the 14th Amendment.

In the current media focus upon something called “equality for all,” it would seem that the good “cultured” liberal minds would lead in the national effort to empower the poor family to exercise this fundamental responsibility.

Tragically, Arnold was wrong.

The world of the elite liberal decided 150 years ago to treat the poor parent as serf to the new “public” school system that respects the power of the comfortable family to choose but delivers the child of the poor to the state and its highly organized agents. The principles of equal treatment and of honoring the right of both parent and child are flouted in the name of what?

The 19th Century design of the “public” school systems was intended to secure the position of Protestantism and to “Americanize” the poor immigrants and their children who were mostly Catholics and Jews.

Over the next century, that religious purpose wore thin and was gradually replaced by secular theories of schooling, but the structure that disempowered the poor has remained ever in place, eventually becoming dominated by the government unions whose leaders’ interest in the poor was, and remains, to insure their presence in unchosen, mostly urban, public schools.

Yet most of my “liberal” colleagues and friends continue to imagine that these institutions serve as primary hope for a truly civil society. The anti-liberal essence of our inner-city schools simply eludes their eyes.

If equal treatment of all our people is truly a vison of the self-styled liberal, let us pray that he or she awakens to this contradiction that has for so long eluded the liberal eye.

January 8, 2021 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducator VoicesFeaturedPrivate SchoolsSchool Choice

Montessori education: Ahead of its time

Special to redefinED January 7, 2021
Special to redefinED

Summit-Questa Montessori School serves toddlers through eighth-graders on a 10-acre campus in Davie, Florida.

Editor’s note: This post from Judy Dempsey, founder and longtime principal of Summit-Questa Montessori School in Davie, Florida, is based on a chapter from her 2016 book “Turning Education Inside Out: Confessions of a Montessori Principal.”

Judy Dempsey

Education today must establish different goals for itself compared to generations ago. Today’s world is an inconsistent place that continues to change at a mind-boggling pace. Technology has transformed our world in a way that would be unrecognizable to our ancestors.

The extraordinary thing is that it may be unrecognizable to us in the near future.

In the past, education prepared students for a familiar and predictable world; the goal was to have students memorize a set of facts or learn specific skills that would serve them well in a variety of careers. Today, in the Information Age, any fact that a student would need or want is at the tip of their finger, a mouse click or screen tap away.

As educators, it is imperative that we prepare our students for the unique demands that the 21st century world will place upon them. It is vital in this age to teach students how to find the knowledge they need – knowledge as varied as the changing times themselves. Students must be able to think outside of the box and be creative learners and problem solvers.

Upon entering the workplace, they will need to work in the global community, so it is imperative for them to know how to communicate well and get along with others. They must be respectful of other cultures and traditions since it’s likely, in any business transaction, that their clients and the team with which they work will be from somewhere else in the world.

The statistics also indicate that people will change jobs much more frequently than ever before. Young people who can adapt to new and changing needs and expectations will be the ones getting and keeping the available jobs.

Our world is facing a multitude of challenges at different levels: environmentally, socially, ethically, politically, and economically. We need young people who have the skills to face unprecedented situations in the world. These are very different skills necessary for success in the 21st century and for the survival of our culture, planet, and species. When parents ask me, “Will Montessori prepare my child for the real world?”, I confidently respond by saying, “Montessori will, without any doubt, prepare your child much better than traditional education ever could for this new real world.”

If you look at all the previously mentioned skills necessary for success in the 21st century, they are all inherent in the Montessori experience. Children learn to think differently based on their unique perception of the world. They learn how to get along with classmates from different cultures, ages or genders, or perhaps a very different type of learner, thinker, and problem solver.  

Exposure to these different personalities, abilities, and individual gifts allows children to develop skills that are different from their traditional counterparts. Their vocabulary, critical thinking, social, and communication skills increase with every year that they are in the Montessori classroom.

They learn to explore their own interests and the Montessori materials at their own pace. The Montessori teacher will always guide the students along the path of learning, not by providing the answers, but by constantly asking the child the questions needed to stimulate critical thinking and discovery. A Socratic questioning type of approach allows students to develop and expand their own learning and critical thinking skills.

As much as our world has turned into a machine/technology-dominated society, social skills are still highly important for success. The highest paying jobs today demand people who are not only competent with technology, but also have strong people skills—an important human trait. Social skills are not usually part of the curriculum in traditional schooling. Michael B. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, said, “Machines are automating a whole bunch of things so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement technology is critical, and our educational system is not set up for that.”

Although these skills may not be taught in traditional schools, they are a fundamental part of the Montessori experience. In a Montessori interactive and ever-changing classroom, students learn to communicate, adapt, and problem solve in socially appropriate ways as they navigate the classroom.

That classroom is like a sea full of unique and beautiful creatures, all with their own needs and interests. As the day flows, they all learn to share their habitat, enjoy each other’s company and beauty, negotiate, and sustain the peaceful atmosphere. In the process, their own gifts grow and flourish, contributing to the overall health of the environment.

Contrary to some who believe that Montessori classrooms are chaotic and nonstructured, where students can do whatever they want with no responsibility, nothing could be further from the truth. Students are expected to be responsible community members, finish the work that they choose, and return it to the shelf so that someone else can use it.

They mentor each other and care about each other. They collaborate, thereby learning to be more productive as a team. They trust each other and work on sharing their strengths with each other for the good of all. Our Montessori students are very well prepared for the 21st century.

President Barack Obama stated on CBS news, “I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”

Remarkably, those in the traditional world of education do indeed have this important information; however, implementing a system that incorporate these skills into their classrooms remains a mystery to them. The National Education Association has been working for many years to bring innovation into public school systems. Its educational researchers have long recognized that students need to acquire very different skills for the future and have narrowed the focus to the “Four Cs.”  

They name these Four Cs: communicators, collaborators, creators, and critical thinkers. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It also is interesting to note that while we’ve had the Montessori education system successfully in place worldwide for more than 100 years, few policymakers and educators take our approach seriously.

The American Management Association in a 2010 survey on critical skills stated:

“The Four Cs will become even more important to organizations in the future. Three out of four executives who responded to the survey said they believe these skills and competencies will become even more important to organizations in the next three to five years; additionally, 80% believe that reading, writing and arithmetic are not sufficient if employees are unable to think critically, solve problems, collaborate, or communicate effectively.”

I could continue to cite dozens and dozens of additional resources that give the same message about the importance of many other skills beyond reading, writing and arithmetic that our students need today. It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the Montessori approach that Montessori has been doing this the entire time it has been in existence. There is no doubt how timely it is today in preparing our students for the world in which they will find themselves as adults.

Dr. Maria Montessori, ever the visionary, was able to understand what our students would need for their future.

January 7, 2021 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJonathan ButcherLindsey BurkeMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Education in a time of pandemic: Not making the grade

Special to redefinED January 5, 2021
Special to redefinED

This commentary from redefinED guest blogger Jonathan Butcher, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, and center director Lindsey Burke, first appeared on Tribune News Service.

When it comes to her daughter Emerson’s education, Sarrin Warfield says, she’s “in it to win it.”

When Emerson’s assigned school in South Carolina announced plans for virtual learning this fall, Sarrin says she asked herself, “What if we just made this in my backyard and made a school?” After talking with friends who have children the same age as Emerson, Sarrin said, “Let’s do it. Instead of it being a crazy idea, let’s own this process and be really intentional about doing this and make it happen.”

Sarrin is one of the thousands of parents around the country who formed learning pods when assigned schools closed. By meeting in small groups with friends’ and neighbors’ children, these pod families could try to keep at least one of part of their child’s life from being upended because of COVID-19.

The time-honored practice of school assignment did little to help the Warfields — or thousands of other students around the U.S. during the COVID spring … and then COVID summer and fall. In the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, officials in some of the largest districts in the country reported significant enrollment changes from the previous school year, especially among younger students.

Officials in Mesa, Arizona, reported a 17% decrease in kindergarten enrollment after the first two weeks. In Los Angeles, Superintendent Austin Beutner reported a 3.4% decrease in enrollment, but said another 4% of students couldn’t be found, making the change closer to 7%. Figures are similar in Broward County, Florida, and Houston. In large school districts, these percentages amount to over 10,000 children per district.

Some of these changes can be attributed to learning pods. But officials in large cities and even those representing entire states simply reported having no contact with many students.

Under normal circumstances, if thousands of children who were once in school suddenly were nowhere to be found, this would be an issue of national concern. Hearings would be held, and officials would demand to know what is happening with schools around the country. Loud calls for change would be heard.

But life during the pandemic is anything but normal.

Likewise, if more students around the country were failing — say, twice the figure from last year — this would also be worrisome, right? From Los Angeles to Houston to Chicago to Fairfax, Virginia, school officials and researchers are now reporting that the proportion of students earning D’s and F’s in the first semester has increased, doubling in some cases, in comparison to the last school year.

Yet across the U.S., many school districts, especially those in large metro areas, remain closed to in-person learning for some if not all grades and may not reopen at the start of 2021.

According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of parents in lower-income brackets report being “very” or “somewhat” concerned this fall that their children are “falling behind in school as a result of the disruptions caused by the pandemic.” With thousands of students not in class, even virtually, and falling grades among those who are attending, who can blame them?

For taxpayers and policymakers looking for lessons in the pandemic, the utter failure of school assignment systems to provide quality-learning options to all students, especially the most vulnerable, is clear.

The quality and consistency of the education a child received during the pandemic has been dependent on the attendance boundary in which that child’s family lives. At the same time, so many of the issues plaguing education during the pandemic — and for that matter, the entire century leading up to the pandemic — are rooted in policies that fund school systems, rather than individual students.

Allowing dollars to follow children directly to any public or private school of choice is a critical emergency policy reform that states should pursue. Such a policy change is overdue.

Since it’s anyone’s guess how soon life will get back to normal, we can’t wait any longer for the system to fix itself.

January 5, 2021 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedSchool Choice

Common ground to advance choice: Miltonite means and Coonian ends

Special to redefinED December 28, 2020
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, and Jason Bedrick, director of policy at EdChoice, provided the following response to a post from redefinED columnist John Coons.

In a recent redefinED blog post, school choice icon John Coons proposed finding common ground between two groups of education reformers whom he calls the “Miltonites” or “marketeers” (supporters of a free-market approach to educational choice with universal eligibility in the mold of Milton Friedman) and the “voucher left” (those, like Coons, whose primary concern is improving the well-being of the poor). His point is that what unites the two groups is much more—and more important—than what divides them, so they should find ways to work together as “happy co-conspirators” to advance educational choice.

As two staunch Miltonites, we couldn’t agree more.

Advancing choice and opportunity requires a broad and ideologically diverse coalition, as when the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson, worked with Democratic legislator Polly Williams to enact the first voucher program of the modern era. More recently we’ve also seen a largely successful coalition of staunch conservatives and ardent liberals working together to advance criminal justice reform.

As with any diverse coalition, however, there is bound to be some healthy disagreement, particularly over the means to achieve shared ends. In the choice coalition, the fault lines have often been over access (universal vs. targeted) and regulations (libertarian vs. equalitarian).

First, the common ground. As with many on the social justice wing of the school choice movement in recent years, Coons now appears ready to support Miltonite universal access—so long as the financial support for the disadvantaged is greater. On this front, today’s Miltonites are already pretty much in agreement in principle though there may be some disagreement over the details.

When it comes to regulations, however, the differences over means are more profound. While well-intended, the regulations Coons proposes are likely to stymie the ability of choice programs to benefit the very people Coons wants to help the most. Instead, we propose that Miltonite means are best to achieve Coonian ends.

Universal Choice

Whereas in the past, Coons and Friedman ran dueling proposals that differed sharply over eligibility, now Coons proposes a universal approach in which “at least a trophy amount to the well-off in recognition of their civic role as parent, while awarding the poor the full economic reality of that same parental responsibility and authority.” It’s not clear what a “trophy amount” means in practice, but while we think it is important that everyone receive a substantial scholarship, we support giving additional aid to disadvantaged populations, such as students with special needs, English Language Learners, and children from low-income families.

Universality is essential for both policy, political, and personal reasons. In terms of policy, targeted choice programs may fill empty seats in existing schools, but only the widespread availability of educational choice will lead to the systemic transformative change that our K-12 system needs.

Universality is also more politically sustainable. There is significantly higher public support for universal programs than targeted ones. EdChoice’s latest Schooling in America Survey found that 81 percent of Americans support universal choice policies while only 17 percent oppose them. By contrast, only 59 percent supported making choice programs available based on financial need while 39 percent opposed doing so.

Moreover, as Milton Friedman often observed, “Programs for the poor are poor programs.” Welfare is often on the chopping block, but Social Security never is. Likewise, programs that serve upper-middle-income families who have political capital tend to be better-run than those that serve only the poor. One need look no further than the district schools serving well-off families compared to those that serve lower-income families. The poor are best served by being in the same boat as the more advantaged.

On the personal level, low-income families don’t want to feel like or be seen as charity cases. Families who send their children to a public school are receiving a government subsidy, but they don’t feel like a charity case because everyone gets access. No wonder then that our recent poll found significantly higher support for universal choice among low-income families. Among respondents earning less than $40,000 annually, 92 percent supported universal access while only 66 percent supported means-testing.

As we noted above, we support giving additional aid to disadvantaged families, but we should be clear-eyed about the tradeoffs and wary of pitfalls. Families who must prove their income face additional barriers, including intrusive questions and a significant amount of paperwork. Also, we must be careful that we don’t create a poverty trap that takes away benefits as a household’s income rises. Educational choice programs should assist low-income families by expanding opportunity but should not ever be designed in such a way as to create a disincentive for families to improve their financial situation.

Ultimately, universal access to educational choice is about erasing the invisible but all-too-real lines that divide our nation’s education system into haves and have-nots. A Friedman noted in Free to Choose:

The tragedy, and irony, is that a system dedicated to enabling all children to acquire a common language and the values of U.S. citizenship, to giving all children equal educational opportunity, should in practice exacerbate the stratification of society and provide highly unequal educational opportunity.

Ending this stratification—ending the lines between us all and creating opportunity for all especially the most vulnerable—is the true goal of the Miltonite view of educational opportunity.

The Role of the Market

A well-functioning market is necessary to provide families with a diverse array of educational options and to spur systemic innovation and improvement. Coons is open to the importance of the market to educational choice but takes Friedman to task for taking a “let the market rip” approach, claiming:

It was to [Friedman] an economic sin to favor lower-income families in either the amount of the subsidy or the design of regulation for participating schools. The focus for him was not on the role of the parent, but rather the achievement of simplicity and laissez-faire in the economy.

This does not do justice to Friedman’s views, which were considerably more nuanced.

What Coons calls Friedman’s “let it rip” approach is really Friedman’s sincere belief in parents and their ability to choose. As Friedman wrote in Free to Choose:

Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else. Social reformers, and educational reformers in particular, often self-righteously take for granted that parents, especially those who are poor and have little education themselves, have little interest in their children’s education and no competence to choose for them. That is a gratuitous insult. Such parents have frequently had limited opportunity to choose. However, U.S. history has amply demonstrated that, given the opportunity, they have often been willing to sacrifice a great deal, and have done so wisely, for their children’s welfare.

Moreover, Friedman’s opposition to certain regulations stemmed not from a sense that they were a “sin” against a free-market religion but rather from his empirical studies of how markets work and how certain well-intended regulations can have unintended consequences.

As Friedman himself wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2000:

I have nothing but good things to say about voucher programs, like those in Milwaukee and Cleveland, that are limited to a small number of low-income participants. They greatly benefit the limited number of students who receive vouchers, enable fuller use to be made of existing excellent private schools, and provide a useful stimulus to government schools. They also demonstrate the inefficiency of government schools by providing a superior education at less than half the per-pupil cost.

But such programs are on too small a scale, and impose too many limits, to encourage the entry of innovative schools or modes of teaching. The major objective of educational vouchers is much more ambitious. It is to drag education out of the 19th century – where it has been mired for far too long – and into the 21st century, by introducing competition on a broad scale. Free market competition can do for education what it has done already for other areas, such as agriculture, transportation, power, communication and, most recently, computers and the Internet. Only a truly competitive educational industry can empower the ultimate consumers of educational services – parents and their children.

Coons claims that the Miltonites have “succeeded largely in giving subsidized parental choice the image of Friedman himself,” meaning universal programs that have “nearly zero regulation of the chosen providers.” In reality, the Miltonites have been all too willing to settle for small, targeted programs that often come with regulations that undermine their effectiveness.

As we highlighted in a recent essay for the American Enterprise Institute, markets are essential for creating a feedback loop that organically expands options and improves quality over time. In the words of AEI’s Yuval Levin, markets enable the channeling of “social knowledge from the bottom up” rather than “impos[ing] technical knowledge from the top down” via a Hayekian three-step process of “experimentation, evaluation, and evolution.”

Markets are ideally suited to following these steps. They offer entrepreneurs and businesses a huge incentive to try new ways of doing things (experimentation); the people directly affected decide which ways they like best (evaluation); and those consumer responses inform which ways are kept and which are left behind (evolution).

This three-step process is at work well beyond the bounds of explicitly economic activity. It is how our culture learns and evolves, how norms and habits form, and how society as a general matter “decides” what to keep and what to change. It is an exceedingly effective way to balance stability with improvement, continuity with alteration, tradition with dynamism. It involves conservation of the core with experimentation at the margins to attain the best of both.

Policymakers should be careful to avoid policies that unduly interfere with this process. As Jason Bedrick and Lindsey Burke explained in greater length in chapter nine of School Choice Myths, some of Coons’ proposed regulations have unintended consequences that undermine the ability of choice programs to aid the very people they’re intended to help. For example, as Bedrick and Burke explain, such open-admissions requirements can restrict the diversity of options available to scholarship students:

Open-admissions mandates prevent families from using vouchers at schools with certain missions or those that are oriented around voluntary communities, such as religiously affiliated schools or single sex schools. They also discourage participation among schools that are designed to serve certain types of students, whether the academically gifted, students with particular special needs, or those with a penchant for STEM or drama and the arts.

College voucher programs, like Pell Grants, are publicly funded without imposing open-admissions requirements out of a recognition that the purpose of the public funding is to expand educational opportunities for students to enroll in the learning environments that are the right fit for them. That requires a diversity of options, including schools that are geared toward particular student populations or that have particular missions or religious affiliations.

Such regulations can also affect the quality of available options. Louisiana’s voucher program is the most regulated in the country, imposing open admissions, the state test, and price controls to guarantee low-income families access to high-quality schools. What happened is that most private schools refused to participate, and Louisiana’s voucher program became the first in the nation to produce negative effects in a random-assignment study.

How did that happen?

Well-intentioned regulations are the likely culprit. In a survey by the American Enterprise Institute, three out of four Louisiana private school leaders who opted not to have their school accept voucher students cited concerns about the effects of the open-admissions requirement. As Bedrick and Burke explained, there were important differences between the participating and non-participating schools:

These concerns [about regulations] appear to have dissuaded many of the higher-performing schools from accepting [Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP)] students, so participating schools were of lower quality, on average. One of the initial LSP studies contained some suggestive evidence of this. In the decade before the LSP was expanded statewide, the non-participating schools experienced modest enrollment growth (about 3 percent, on average). By contrast, over the same period, the participating schools experienced a significant decline in enrollment (about 13 percent, on average). In other words, private schools that had been able to attract students before the LSP expansion tended to reject the vouchers, while voucher-accepting schools tended to be those where enrollment had been falling.

These concerns are not confined to Louisiana. Another multi-state study found that admissions mandates significantly reduced the likelihood that private schools would participate in a potential school choice program. The number of private school principals who were “certain to participate” in a school choice program dropped by around 17 to 21 percentage points, or 70 to 84 percent, if the program had an admissions mandate.

By contrast, Florida eschews admissions mandates and other Louisiana-style regulations yet more than 130,000 low-income students are now attending the schools of their families’ choice. Moreover, far from “creaming,” studies show that Florida private schools are admitting scholarship students who were lower-performing, on average, than their demographic peers before receiving a scholarship. In other words, as Louisiana and Florida show, open-admissions mandates are neither necessary nor sufficient to expand access for lower-income families—and may even have the opposite effect.

Better Together

Miltonites and Coonians are united in a shared desire to improve the lot of “the least among us.” We should also share a commitment to learning from what has and hasn’t worked. The past three decades of experience with educational choice show that Miltonite means are the surest path to achieving Coonian ends.

December 28, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Would Milton mind?

John E. Coons December 11, 2020
John E. Coons

American economist Milton Friedman received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His vision was to give parents, not government, control of their child’s education.

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman was my repeated guest on “Problems of the City” on Chicago radio KQED-KFMF, and later, I was a guest on his TV show to debate United Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker. We – Friedman and I, not Shanker – shared the hope for a free market in schooling but differed regarding both its justification and appropriate design.

He favored a subsidy of equal value for the child of every parent, then would let the market rip! It was to him an economic sin to favor lower-income families in either the amount of the subsidy or the design of regulation for participating schools. The focus for him was not on the role of the parent, but rather the achievement of simplicity and laisse-faire in the economy.

Friedman was never to change his mind; in fact, he took the opportunity along the way to promote just such an unregulated voucher as a popular initiative in California in 1978, designed so as to compete with a prior and more lower-income-oriented initiative written and promoted by Steve Sugarman and myself. So divided, neither proposal made it to the ballot.

He did, however, succeed at inspiring a covey of monied and dedicated marketeers who have to this day remained willing to support a let-her-rip approach to choice. Their generous enthusiasm has given birth to a covey of pure-market non-profit organizations, today’s most plangent cheerleaders for choice – that is, for equal subsidy for both the poor and for the already comfortable family, and with nearly zero regulation of the chosen providers. These well-intending market folk have succeeded largely in giving subsidized parental choice the image of Friedman himself.

This picture may have held very little glamour for voters, but paradoxically has been much appreciated by the captains of the public school unions; it allows them to picture subsidized choice as another deceit of the rich and powerful (other than themselves).

When Sugarman and I began designing model choice statutes in the ’60s, our first invention was a complicated device intended to arm the lower-income parent with an array of choices, including the level of the subsidy in both public and private sectors. Over time, our published inventions have become more simplified but ever with the central aim of empowering the lower-income parent to act as responsibly as does the comfortable suburbanite.

After this half-century of division between Miltonites and “voucher left” (their pet name for people like us), could it be that the time has come to consider what sort of compromise might give political life to our shared democratic hope? Could we learn a bit from Ohio, Florida and Washington, D.C.? Could it be both “fair and free market” for us lefties to concede at least a trophy amount to the well-off in recognition of their civic role as parent, while awarding the poor the full economic reality of that same parental responsibility and authority?

The success of any choice system in empowering the poor would, of course, require some commitments from the (freely) participating school – private or (at last) “public.” For example, the participating school could retain complete liberty to select two-thirds of its admissions, but then to select the rest at random from among its unchosen applicants.

In designing such statutory proposals, a half-dozen other forms of commitment by the participating schools would be considered to ensure fairness. Each of these compromises in design could be bargained by the “voucher left” and the Miltonites. These variations were examined in some detail and modeled in our 1978 book, “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control” – and in our later published models.

It will not necessarily be politically hurtful to the cause of choice that Betsy DeVos will be gone, and that the president-elect appear as mendicant of the union elites. The individual state will still decide whether and in what precise form those who need choice should receive it. And, at some point, in another paradox, SCOTUS may well take occasion to lend its voice to the rescue of the penniless under the Constitution. This could well be the time for voucher folk, “left” and right, and in every state, to become happy co-conspirators.

December 11, 2020 1 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Democracy in action

John E. Coons December 4, 2020
John E. Coons

“I’m Sally Common. My spouse, Bill, and I began married life in a cozy apartment on the east side of Chicapoulus. When the kids came along, we counted our beans and headed north to suburban Refugia. Its worked out fine. We feel more at home here in our not-so-fancy-but-okay house. The neighbors are cool and seem to care about basic things. The teenagers have fun without hurting anybody, even as they wait for the present school mess to get straightened out.

We’ve helped organize a first grade “pod” for little Louie. Of course, it’s all temporary; the public school here was, and will be, fine again. We hear a lot of stuff about school choice, but we’ve already made ours. Of course, we’re Democrats and support the public schools for everybody, and especially the poor.”

Sally and Bill are Democrats, just like me, and that explains their rejecting school choice for the common folk. Really? You say we are the party of the poor; hence, we hold that they must go to public school. Is this a sequitur? Is there something peculiar here?

I suppose it all depends. Maybe the children of struggling parents are better off if we just keep mom and dad completely out of the process. Is that our idea? Is the decision about young Mary Lou more wisely left in the hands of professional state officials instead of her indigent parents?

That could be plausible to some minds if every child and parent were to be examined by experts to determine whether the decision could safely be left in their hands. It would be plausible but hideous. Happily, that system is too expensive to become real.

Instead, the child – stranger to this new world – will show up at her anointed school, say a fretful farewell to her parents, then experience … whatever. This fateful decision about a vulnerable child will have been made by whom? Nobody.

I suppose one could say this child’s fate was already determined by those 19th century designers of this seizure of the child by a force majeure. They lived in fear of those immigrant families, mostly poor, with their un-American ideas of religion and the good life.

These elites decided that unless you can afford to buy your child’s way out, here is where he or she goes to school. Period!

Of course, we can hardly blame the origin and staying power of these inner-city “public” schools on us Democrats alone. A variety of changing political and social realities were to inspire our nation’s invitation to the comfortable parent to separate their child from the struggling mob. I suppose it was inevitable that the teacher union brass eventually would lend its hand to this educational conscription of our poor, and with it, their physical and political separation from the middle class.

Is there hope that my political party will ever begin to represent and honor the poor family by subsidizing its choice of school? The current educational turmoil could imaginably work to deliver the lower-income parent. How will we Democrats react a decade hence when the Supreme Court decides that the “Blaine” amendments in the constitutions of half our states violate the first and fourteenth amendments?

Such a decision will empower and invite state legislators to subsidize the choice of private schools by lower-income parents. We can guess the reaction of the union bosses. But just how will my political party respond?

December 4, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestChris StewartCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Let’s be honest about school choice

Chris Stewart November 20, 2020
Chris Stewart

Editor’s note: This commentary from Chris Stewart, executive officer of Brightbeam and redefinED guest blogger, published earlier this week on Education Post.

School choice strawmen are a formidable army that thinking people have yet to defeat.

Nevertheless, we must keep trying.

As a reader who casually consumes education debate in mass media, I understand if you see school choice as a stealth scheme, devised by racist wealthy people to destroy wonderfully performing public schools that produce annual bumper crops of democratic fruit in the form of well-adjusted citizens.

Our teachers work so hard, and our schools get so little funding. Fix those two things, and there is no need for choice. Or, so we’re told.

Add to the mix a towering voice like the American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten, who tells you that charter schools—which are one primary form of school choice—are the “polite cousin of segregation,” what else would you believe?

On that point, I’d ask you to consider the fact that Weingarten started two New York charter schools herself, which, perhaps it logically follows, makes her the gentle aunt of segregation. If nothing else, it makes her a good symbol for the duplicitous nature of education politics and debate.

The truth is that school choice theory predates the convenient points in time that its critics use to bludgeon it. Long before the racist “segregation academies” school choice opponents rightfully say were erected in the south to publicly fund white private havens from desegregation, there were full-blown choice programs that provided vouchers for families to use at public or private schools. The oldest of these programs dates back to 1869 in Vermont.

And, to broaden the scope, we should call in Ashley Berner’s excellent research that explains school choice as a global norm in advanced countries. In fact, the United States is an educational outlier for not publicly supporting private education.

In a report she wrote for the Manhattan Institute (“The Case for Educational Pluralism in the U.S.”) she says:

A majority of the world’s democracies support school systems in which the state funds and regulates but does not necessarily operate, a mosaic of schools. The Netherlands, for example, supports 36 different types of schools—including Catholic, Muslim, and Montessori—on an equal footing. The U.K., Belgium, Sweden, and Hong Kong help students of all income levels attend philosophically and pedagogically diverse schools. So do most Canadian provinces. Funded schools in these pluralist systems are also subject to robust regulations and, in some cases, to a common academic curriculum. Educational pluralism does not guarantee high academic performance and strong civic behaviors, but when this system is well-executed, it makes such outcomes more likely. Importantly, educationally plural countries also provide for what the U.S. calls “district schools”; a third of Dutch students attend them. The difference is that, in educationally plural systems, many types of schools are considered to be part of the public education system.

Realizing that most of the world disagrees with us on how much opportunity governments should afford citizens when it comes to learning environments for children, we have to question the politically stubborn antipathy for private schooling and the prevailing parochialism of one-size-fits-some government schools.

Some traditional schools do amazing things for their students while others fail spectacularly to provide even a basic level of education. The same can be said for all other forms of schooling. A great option for one family may be an outstandingly bad one for another. From that view, choice is not about defining any school as good or bad as much as defining it a school as good or bad for a specific child.

I write about choice frequently because, having been a parent for three decades, I know kids have different needs. My little mathematician may need a different school than my baby artist or my special needs student. Sending them through one all-purpose schoolhouse door may not only be suboptimal, but it might also be inhumane knowing what I know about their needs.

Does it help to tell families like mine that we should concern ourselves more with the impact our school choices have on the system than how the system impacts our children?

Further, what good is an education system that prioritizes its welfare over the welfare of the vulnerable populations it supposes itself to serve?

I don’t ask these questions to be a heretic to America’s public education precious little temples as much as to be a realistic and ruthless guardian of my children’s’ intellectual development. Still, I know my voice alone isn’t enough to conquer the tower of oppositional rhetoric generated by public employees or their unions. Especially when they count ideologically intoxicated journalists, servile politicians, overly-lettered academics, and posh parents who benefit from the existing system that privileges some families to the detriment of other families as their adherents.

So, to rescue school choice and its history from the dull thinkers so dominant in our country’s facile discussion about education, it’s essential to consistently broaden the conversation with the voices of thoughtful people of note from past and present.

To that end, I raise a quote from famed sociologist James S. Coleman. In a 1977 U.S. News & World Report article, he prescribed school choice to remedy deteriorating conditions in public schools.

He said:

There are three key problems [that] face the schools right now :

One is the dissatisfaction of parents and students—because of the feeling that the schools are not working well. Secondly, there is the extreme loss of the schools’ authority, particularly with regard to maintaining discipline. Third is the reduced levels of academic achievement at schools everywhere—in small towns; big cities and suburbs.

If there were one change that I would make to resolve these problems, it would be to introduce vouchers, or entitlements, for parents to use in educating their children.

Under that system, each family would be given a voucher that would permit it to send children to any school—public or private—in any school district regardless of where the family lived. The value of the entitlement would be roughly equivalent to the per-pupil expenditure in the public school.

The school that received the voucher would then cash it for operating funds. It would work very much like food stamps, except it would benefit all persons instead of just low-income persons, and people wouldn’t have to pay for it as they do in differing degrees for food stamps.

The advantages of such a plan?

To begin with, it would allow more authority for teachers and principals because the students would not be compelled to go to a particular school, but rather to one of their choice. This allows the school to demand more of those who choose wide range of schools, including those that have very different educational philosophies and curricula.

Furthermore, competition between schools—particularly public and private—would be raised because there would truly be a mixed economy in education, with State-run and privately run institutions serving as models for each other.

In addition, I believe a voucher system would help resolve the problems of segregation and white flight. It’s not going to wholly solve those problems, but it will help prevent segregation which currently occurs on the basis of residence. It would especially aid lower-class and Black families because it is they who are most restricted in their schooling on the basis of their residence. It would also reduce the fears of parents—Black and white—whose children are, under some current desegregation plans, transferred to schools, not of their choice far than their homes.

Finally, it can restore a sense of control over their children’s education on the part of parents who feel they have been pre-empted by professional educators, administrators, and organizations.

Agree or disagree with this analysis of family-based school choice; you would be wrong to argue that it is the ignorant pulp of an ill-willed plutocrat. That type of demagogic shorthand is a go-to weapon for school choice opponents. It is also a dishonest one. I prefer fair people to debate urgent and critical issues like educational inequality or poor educational outcomes more productively.

While not a cure-all to educational failure, research shows promising signs that school choice stokes improvements beyond test scores: it improves political and economic freedom; increases graduation rates; and even reduces crime and unplanned pregnancies.

Those favorable results, while not an answer to all the critics, add context to school choice. Properly understood through its actual proposals and its documented history, choice has always been rooted in improvement, parental power, opportunity, hope and social fairness. It is more characterized by its earliest start in Vermont’s tuitioning program, and in its best modern example, in Milwaukee where Black leaders and families fought for and won America’s first modern choice program.

Let’s put the strawmen in the barn and have a worthy debate.

November 20, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCharter SchoolsCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool ChoiceTesting and Accountability

Test scores plus responsibility

John E. Coons November 13, 2020
John E. Coons

“Liberty means responsibility.”

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

The school choice movement continues to plead its case by focusing on “results.” That is, the experts compare the test scores of low-income students whose parents have transferred them to a “charter” school against those of age-mates who remain in the public school to which they were assigned according to their residence.

This fixation on numbers is understandable; the media need to keep the tale as simple as possible, and scores do exactly that.

Up to now, the outcomes so measured favor the performance of charters to a fair degree; in the world of numbers, choice appears to work. Of course, in the hands of anti-choice professionals, these reports can be and are portrayed as the effect of greater sophistication of those parents who made the choice of charters and of their children who have already profited by living with them in such a home.

In any case, the public who consume such conflicting news can, and too often do, conclude that choice would be okay – but it’s no big deal.

But it is. The comparison of scores is, of course, relevant to the wisdom of subsidizing choice for the poor. If, instead of this positive picture, there were a gulf in favor of those students whose families who decided their child should stay put, we might worry about aiding parents to make the escape.

But, in fact, choice of charters and private schools seems not merely to do no harm, but rather to raise scores and make subsidized choice possible. Society can now turn to address the more profound social problems it has created by its disabling of the parent.

The core argument for empowering the poor lies not in statistics but rather in the centrality of parental responsibility in creating and maintaining a stable home and, in so doing, increases our hope for the good society.

Here is a reality not so easily tested; there is no standard mathematics to report the spirit and functioning of parents and its link to the maturing of the heart and mind of their child. There is only our human experience of families.

I fear that, in the eyes of the child, by deposing the parent we have rendered fathers and mothers figures of impotence. They may ask their child at dinner how the school is shaping up, but, when given a negative response, they are helpless to aid their own.

And to the child, the overall message is clear: For 180 days of the year, the raising of a family is out of the parents’ jurisdiction. They may be loving people, but they remain powerless subjects of the public school. The design and pursuit of the good life are in government hands.

One must ask: Just what is the point of this peculiar subordination of fellow citizens according to their bank account? And just what is its effect upon the child’s respect for the very idea of family, and upon the parents’ respect for themselves?

And finally, what will be the contribution of each to the civil order?

November 13, 2020 0 comment
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