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Georgia legislation would provide school choice in the form of education savings accounts

redefinED staff
redefinED staff

A bill that would create education savings accounts that participating families could use for private school tuition, homeschooling or other educational expenses passed Georgia’s House Education committee Thursday.

House Bill 60 resembles legislation from previous sessions, most notably a school voucher bill introduced by Republican state Rep. Wes Cantrell. Cantrell and others have argued that such legislation would provide options to families whose children are not being served well at their district school.

“What this is about is helping the kids who are less fortunate,” Cantrell said last week. “They’re trapped in a cycle of poverty and an education strategy that’s not working for them for whatever reason, and it’s giving them a simple opportunity to have an option.”

Students from families making less than 200% of the federal poverty level – about $53,000 for a family of four – would be the first to receive eligibility, along with military families, students with disabilities and children in foster care. Next in line would be students in school districts that do not have an option for 100% in-person learning for at least a semester.

The bill proposes an eligibility cap of .25% of the state’s public school students for the first year, adding another quarter percent each year with a cap of 2.5%, or about 43,000 students based on current enrollment. A previous version of the bill allowed twice as many students.

Republican state Rep. Ed Setzler observed that school districts where students take advantage of an education savings account would see more money overall, and that while state money would go to the private school, the share of funding from local taxes would remain in the district.

“If students in your district use this program, this program actually lines the pockets of your district,” he said. “This program actually increases the per-pupil funding of the kids in your district who do not take this program.”

The bill needs approval by the full House to move forward.

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Florida can drive fast and freeze out the Texans

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

The American economy suffered greatly during the 1970s, with Texas being an exception.

While most of country struggled with unemployment and inflation, Texas struggled with breakneck population growth from people moving in. Drivers experienced overnight traffic jams on Texas freeways, and the classified advertisement section of the Houston Chronicle was an eagerly sought aid to many would-be job seekers nationally.

“Drive fast, freeze a Yankee” bumper-stickers were quite the thing in Texas back in those heady days.

The Texas oil industry didn’t much care for federal price controls on heating oil and natural gas. Milton Friedman famously joked that if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert in five years there would be a shortage of sand.

Like clockwork, they did the same for oil and gas outside of Texas, whose internal distribution laid beyond the reach of Congressional interstate commerce authority. Recently, however, it was Texans who froze as their Texas-only power grid failed in the grips of a winter storm. Besides the obvious lesson (karma) Floridians should view the Texas power fiasco as an example not to follow (more on that below) and an opportunity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an accelerant of pre-existing trends. If you have anything to say to beloved institutions such as shopping malls and print newspapers, best to say it now.

One of the clearly accelerated trends has been the decline of the state of New York and the rise of Florida and Texas. New York had quite the run as the financial and cultural capital of the United States and then the world as a whole. It has bounced back before, but in a column in last week’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan laid out a case not to assume it will bounce back this time:

The Partnership for New York City reports 300,000 residents of high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. You know where they are going: to lower-tax and no-income-tax states, those that have a friendlier attitude toward money making and that presumably aren’t going hard-left. Florida has gotten so cheeky that this month its chief financial officer sent a letter inviting the New York Stock Exchange to relocate to Miami.

New York needs to hold on to the wealthy—the top 5% percent in New York pay 62% of state income taxes—and force down crime. If you tax the rich a little higher, most will stay: There’s a lot of loyalty to New York, a lot of psychic and financial investment in it. But if you tax them higher for the privilege of being attacked on the street by a homeless man in a psychotic episode, they will leave. Because, you know, they’re human.

The New York Stock Exchange in Miami? Might as well follow all the former New Yorkers there.

New York produces bad public services at extremely high costs and it’s been losing population to Florida for decades. Despite New York’s former greatness, as a competitor to Florida, it’s yesterday’s news. Florida and Texas, meanwhile, are rising, and Texas makes for a far more formidable opponent moving forward.

As a Texan living abroad (in Arizona) I will tell you the advantages Florida has over Texas in an Alcibiades-advising-the-Spartans type fashion.

Texas has an abundance of strengths: a huge amount of privately held land (unlike the remainder of the American west), abundant natural resources, a wildly innovative private sector and the friendly attitude towards money-making Noonan referenced.

Texas has access to the ocean and has largely succeeded at making diversity a strength of its growing society. It’s no accident that it was a Texan who revolutionized global energy markets. If you are going to compete with Texas, you had better bring your A-game.

Florida also, however, has many of these strengths, and something that Texas (alas) lacks: a willingness to do the hard work of innovation in the public sector. K-12 reform in Texas, as an example, emphasized testing over setting families free, while the Florida model emphasized both improvement strategies.

Additionally, Texas has no equivalent of the Florida Virtual School, no private choice programs, and caps on enrollment for charter schools.

The Texas effort at improving K-12 outcomes through testing collapsed in 2013, and as far as I can tell, nothing approaching a real strategy is under serious discussion. While Florida lawmakers pioneered allowing children with disabilities to choose private schools through the McKay and subsequently the Gardiner Scholarship programs, the Texas Education Agency shamefully created covert caps on public school students receiving special education services at all.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the former came despite the objections of incumbent interests, and the latter with the complicity of incumbents.

You may recall the academic growth chart for Texas charter schools that accompanied last week’s post. Green is high growth, blue is low growth, and only Texas charter schools are in the chart reprinted below. Now, ask yourself: Does this look like something you want to cap?

Well, it does if you are a Texas school board or an education union lobbyist. They want to keep Texas charter schools capped regardless of the value they bring to Texas families and taxpayers. They have routinely prevailed in such efforts.

Now, back to the Texas power grid failure.

It was both predicted in advance and entirely inevitable, the result of bad public policy. A legislative effort was made in 2011 to move toward fortifying the Texas grid and energy production against cold weather, but it was blocked (with sad predictability) by incumbent interests.

Incumbent interests also routinely block efforts at meaningful education reform in Texas. The Texas public sector accordingly lacks the vitality of the Texas private sector- more like New York in this regard than Florida.

In an age where states compete not just for companies but also remote workers, innovation in the public sector can be an important advantage. When it comes to expanding education and other freedoms, Florida should drive fast and freeze out the Texans.

Or, as the new Texas Longhorn Football coach Steve Sarkisian puts it, Florida lawmakers should go #AllGasNoBrakes on expanding freedom.

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Attendance zone boundaries: Barriers to educational opportunity

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: Jude Schwalbach, a research associate in the Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation, wrote this commentary expressly for redefinED.

For a century, public schools have been billed as the center of a community, with Friday night football games, clubs, theater, and arts activities. But not all students have access to these “community” schools.

Within school districts, most public schools have attendance zones determined by district officials. These “lines within districts,” as author Tim DeRoche describes them, mean all families that reside within the geographic boundaries of the attendance zone are assigned to the public school in that zone. These zones, however, often divide communities by race, socio-economic divisions, and social capital.

In his book, A Fine Line, DeRoche illustrates how much school zones can affect the make-up of a school’s community. For instance, students attending Mount Washington in Los Angeles during 2019 lived in a zip code with a median home value of $847,522. Mount Washington Elementary is ranked a B+ school on Niche.com – a school rating website – with nearly 68% and 75% of students meeting or exceeding state standards in math and reading, respectively.

Meanwhile, just a little more than a mile away, Aldama Elementary School’s student body lives in a zip code where the typical home value is $47,000 less than in Mt. Washington’s zip code. Niche ranked the school a C school, with only 33% of students meeting or exceeding state standards in both math and reading.

At the same time, each school’s number of eligible students for the Free Lunch and Reduced-Price Lunch Programs — historical poverty proxies—illustrate a marked difference in student body. More than 70% of Aldama Elementary students — nearly seven times the number of eligible students at Mt. Washington — are eligible for the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program.

Depending on which side of the boundary line a student lives on, she will be assigned to either Mount Washington or Aldama — likely having a significant impact on the educational opportunities available to her.

Even though students who attend Aldama and Mount Washington are in the same school district, paying the same property taxes to support all public schools within the district, government officials draw lines around which “public” schools they may attend. This hardly seems fair.

The school zone boundaries sharply divide families that live literally next door to each other. Which side of the street a family lives on can determine the educational opportunities fostered by their “free” public school.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is all too common; families in cities across America, such as New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to name a few, find themselves in similar situations.

For example, in 2019 the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee reported that enrollment in a high-performing public school and greater educational opportunities is often associated with purchasing a more expensive home.

The committee’s report found that “The average U.S. zip code associated with the highest quality (A+) public elementary school has a 4-fold ($486,104) higher median home price than the average neighborhood associated with the lowest quality (D or less) public elementary schools ($122,061).”

At the same time, the gerrymandered nature of school zones means that in many cases some children assigned to a poorly performing school actually live closer to a higher performing school.

For instance, children living between San Adreas Ave and Oneonta Dr. in Los Angeles are closer to the high-performing Mt. Washington Elementary — just a 15-minute walk — but are assigned to the lower-performing and more distant Aldama Elementary.

“No matter the goal, an attendance zone always creates sharp inequalities of opportunity for families who live in the same neighborhood. Some children will be allowed to enroll in the best public schools, and their playmates across the street will be excluded because of where they live,” writes DeRoche.

School zones can divide communities, shepherding children from different social and economic backgrounds into different schools. Such divisions are antithetical to the free and voluntary collaboration essential to American institutions.

Instead of assigning students to schools based on attendance zone boundaries, school districts should stop drawing attendance zone boundaries and instead adopt open enrollment policies, which would allow students to enroll in any school within their school district. Open enrollment, Heritage’s Lindsey Burke and Jonathan Butcher write, “effectively separates housing from schooling.”

However, Burke and Butcher note that even though 47 states in addition to the District of Columbia already allow some type of open enrollment policy, many school districts choose to not participate.

For instance, Alaska only requires that school districts provide open enrollment to students in persistently dangerous schools. By contrast, families in Florida can enroll their children in any school operating in the state’s 67 districts that is not at full capacity.

Expanding open enrollment to benefit all children would mean all children within a district have equal opportunities to attend public schools that are the right fit for them. 

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Micro-schools could be answer for low-income Black students

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

Glenton Gilzean speaking in September on a podcast about his early entrepreneurial experiences. Listen to the full interview at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3417597471621950.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Glenton Gilzean Jr., president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League and former Pinellas County School Board member and Florida A&M trustee, appeared earlier today in the Orlando Sentinel.

 When I became president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League, it was clear that our community faced some incredible challenges. Yet, I always believed that the path forward began with education.

Generational poverty stems from a vicious cycle that we’re all too familiar with. While our organization has helped upskill thousands to compete for high-paying, high-skilled jobs, this is a Band-Aid solution. If our goal is to end this cycle, our fight must begin with children.

For generations, children in low-income Black communities have endured a sub-par education model and these underperforming schools not only hurt our children, but our entire community.

According to the Orlando Economic Partnership, the average net worth for Black adults in Central Florida is less than $18,000 annually, compared to more than $215,000 for white adults. This overt discrepancy is a direct result of a failing education system. Without innovation, these failures will continue to compound as parents are forced to choose between feeding their families and supplementing their children’s education.

With a lack of support both at home and in school, the interest of our children to engage in their learning wanes. While I believe that every child is born with a thirst for knowledge, those in our community are born into a drought with no end in sight.

We can change this. Imagine a school with only a handful of students, learning in a safe and welcoming environment. With such small numbers, their teacher can work with each student, developing and following a personalized learning plan.

Aptly called micro-schools, this is the reality for those with means. But if the state passes a new education choice bill, this can become a reality for those in underserved communities too. Simply put: the low-income Black children who need them the most.

Senate Bill 48, sponsored by Sen. Manny Diaz Jr. (R-Hialeah Gardens), combines five education scholarship programs into two. The bill also extends the use of education savings accounts (ESAs), currently only available to the Gardiner Scholarship for special-needs students and the Reading Scholarship, to the newly merged income-based scholarships.

These accounts could be used to cover private-school tuition, technology, tutoring, curriculum and other approved items. Families would have the flexibility to spend their education dollars, providing them access to the learning environment that best fits their children’s needs.

This bill puts us on the cusp of providing these youth with a high-quality learning environment that will begin to close both the historical achievement gap, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the growing COVID-19 learning gap.

The past year has demonstrated that, now more than ever, families require educational options. Most children have regressed, struggling to maintain even the most basic curriculum. Throwing these students back into an unsuccessful system will further exacerbate their situation.

While the benefits for our youth are clear, micro-schools also provide economic opportunities. If parents have the freedom to spend their children’s education dollars through ESAs, they will demand providers that meet their needs. Entrepreneurs will invest in our communities and this cannot be understated.

As a result of the pandemic, over 40% of Black-owned businesses have closed, while the Black unemployment rate is hovering around 10%, four points higher than the state average. Networks of micro-schools would not only our lift up our children, but their families too.

My organization knows first-hand the success of ESAs. The Urban League partnered with several Orange County Public Schools to register more than 700 students to receive supplemental tutoring funded by the Florida Reading Scholarship. This was a blessing for parents who were unable to afford tutoring for their children.

We now have the opportunity to take ESAs to the next level and positively impact not hundreds, but thousands of children. I pray that our elected representatives listen to their constituents. Please fund students over systems, put money in the hands of parents who know what’s best for their children, and bring micro-schools to communities that desperately need them.

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Innovative teacher recaptures spirit of the ‘little red schoolhouse’

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

Dynamic Micro-school aims to provide a powerful, student-centered learning environment focused in the unique interests, abilities and learning styles of each child.

MESA, Arizona – “Miss Laura! A chick! There’s a chick in the shed!”

The excited cry set students at the Dynamic Micro-school scurrying. My height advantage allowed me to see over the students’ heads to spy a noticeably protective mother hen. Moments later, I caught a glimpse of the long-awaited hatchling.

As the students broke out in a cacophony of celebratory conversation, I wondered to myself: What percentage of America’s youth attending school on Zoom or some other virtual platform are having this much fun? I’d put the over/under at 1% — but give me the under.

My next thought was: If this farm/animal rescue shelter/school is a glimpse into what’s possible for education, the future looks … well, fun!

Laura DeRoule, a 15-year veteran of Mesa public school classrooms, had, until recently, left the profession entirely. Endless test prep and teaching from a script left her burned out and unfulfilled.

“It just was a bunch of testing at that time where I felt like we weren’t really using what we found out,” DeRoule told her local newspaper in January.

The chance to run her own school got her back in the education game.

The Dynamic Micro-school meets at Superstition Farm in East Mesa. It never serves than a dozen students at one time, but that’s in part because families have the flexibility to choose their schedules. Some kids come daily, but others only occasionally. One student I met when I visited earlier this week was enrolled in a district distance learning program. Others were homeschoolers.

Among them were students who participate in Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program.

Delightfully, the once hard-and-fast distinctions that define “education” are beginning to blend, and the Dynamic Micro-school is a great example. Distance learning, homeschool and private choice program students are all, well, students. In a multi-age environment where everyone alternates between group efforts and doing their own thing, there’s little to distinguish one educational flavor from another.

These particular students were busy feeding ducks, chickens, goats, pigs and tortoises when I arrived. Oh, and donkeys. (My personal favorite of all the animals was a donkey named Migs. Migs was very friendly but voiced his opinion loudly and clearly to show he was hungry.)

There are any number of policy implications to this happy farm school – and more than a hint of the multi-educator world foreseen by Jack Coons and Stephen Sugarman.

Most Baby Boomers who went into teaching after college reached retirement eligibility long ago, and enrollment in colleges of education nationwide began to see sagging enrollment years ago. The need for teachers like Lara DeRoule to return to education will become increasingly acute year by year.

Put her and other innovative teachers like her in charge, or it’s game over, man.

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Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipNewsParental Choice

How a great-grandmother and a school choice scholarship changed the lives of two young girls

Roger Mooney
Roger Mooney

Sharon Strickland’s great-granddaughters, Savannah and Karlee, gather shells on Daytona Beach.

Editor’s note: This story about how one family is participating in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program first appeared on Step Up For Students’ sister blog.

On a Friday morning in March 2020, a judge granted Sharon Strickland temporary custody of her great-granddaughter, Savannah.

The little girl, 8 at the time, had been living in unsanitary conditions, Strickland said, with an elderly relative who was in failing health. Savannah often went hungry.

According to Sharon, the family dynamic has been complicated and the children’s mother lost parental rights to all four of her daughters.

The youngest great-grandchild, Karlee, was already living with Strickland, having been placed there by the state four months earlier. Karlee arrived at Strickland’s doorstep at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday in early November 2019, carrying all her possessions in a backpack and a trash bag. She was 3.

Savannah came with even less. Just the clothes she wore that day to school – a shirt that was missing a few buttons and tattered pants. No socks.

To continue reading, click here.

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Dispelling the ‘damaged goods’ myth about school choice scholarships

Ron Matus
Ron Matus

Students at all three locations of Academy Prep — Tampa, St. Petersburg and Lakeland — routinely matriculate to top high schools and go on to attend top colleges. All Academy Prep students attend on state scholarships.

There is no evidence that students who use Florida school choice scholarships return to public schools worse off academically.

But that doesn’t stop critics of education choice from repeating variations on that claim.

The Florida League of Women Voters is the latest to air this “damaged goods” myth. In a Feb. 21 newspaper op-ed criticizing Senate Bill 48, which would convert Florida’s school choice scholarships into education savings accounts, two of its officials wrote:

“Stories abound of children who return to their neighborhood public school after a private school closes, only to find they are far behind academically.”

But for the qualifier “after a private school closes,” the Florida League of Women Voters op-ed echoes a charge that choice opponents have been levelling for years (for example, here and here.)

We can’t say with certainty whether “stories abound.” But data to support such claims certainly does not.

The authoritative take on this issue comes from respected education researcher David Figlio, dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern. For years, Figlio was tasked by the state of Florida with annually analyzing the standardized test scores of students using the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, the biggest choice scholarship program in the nation. (The scholarship is administered by nonprofits such as Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

In his 2011-12 report, Figlio addressed the academic performance of scholarship students who return to public schools. He wrote:

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.

Figlio also wrote:

These pieces of evidence strongly point to an explanation that the poor apparent FCAT performance of FTC program returnees is actually a result of the fact that the returning students are generally particularly struggling students.

Subsequent analyses led to the same conclusion.

The best available evidence doesn’t point to shortcomings with choice scholarships. If anything, it underscores the need for even more options for the most fragile students.

Other evidence also turns the League of Women Voters claim on its head.

Thirteen years’ worth of test score analyses offer remarkably consistent findings about Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students. No. 1, they were typically the lowest-performing students in their prior public schools. And No. 2, they’re now, as a whole, making a year’s worth of progress in a year’s worth of time.

A 2019 Urban Institute study found even more encouraging results: The same students are up to 43 percent more likely than their public school peers to enroll in four-year colleges, and up to 20 percent more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees.

These outcomes don’t suggest damaged goods.

They suggest more students living up to their potential.

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Florida students now No. 2 in America in AP exam success

Ron Matus
Ron Matus

When it comes to academic performance, Florida’s public education system continues to rack up the trophies.

The Sunshine State now ranks No. 2 in the nation in the percentage of graduating seniors who have passed college-caliber Advanced Placement exams, behind only Connecticut, according to data released Wednesday by the College Board.

At 34.2%, Florida’s performance in 2020 far outpaces the national average of 24.4% and is just a hair behind Connecticut, at 34.5%. Florida moved up one spot in the rankings from last year, passing Massachusetts.

AP exams are standardized tests that correspond with dozens of college-caliber high school courses. They are widely viewed as a good gauge of a student’s college readiness and, in some credible quarters, as a valuable indicator of a state’s educational quality.

Florida’s performance is all the more impressive given its high rate of high-poverty students and its relatively low per-pupil spending. In fact, Florida has both the lowest per-pupil spending of any state in the AP Top 10, and the highest rate of students eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch. According to the most recent federal rate, Florida spends less than half per pupil than Connecticut.

The Sunshine State’s academic progress tends to get overlooked in media coverage, but those following Florida’s trend lines know the latest results are not a fluke. Last fall, Education Week ranked Florida No. 3 in K-12 Achievement, the state’s highest ranking ever after more than a decade in or near the national Top 10. 

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