Podcast

‘We can’t ignore the pleas of our parents anymore’ – BAEO President Kenneth Campbell, podcastED

Ron Matus March 14, 2013

Ron Matus

Campbell

Elected black Democrats who support vouchers and charter schools are slowly but surely finding themselves less isolated. And for that, they can thank relentless parents, said Kenneth Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

The tide is changing because of “this constant drumbeat that they’re hearing from parents about how much their kids are struggling,” Campbell told redefinED in the podcast interview attached below. “More and more people are just coming to this realization that even if I don’t necessarily like the people that are proposing this, we don’t have any other options. And we’ve heard that time and time again, as we’ve gone out and worked with elected officials – that we can’t ignore the pleas of our parents anymore.”

Campbell offered his comments on the eve of BAEO’s annual symposium, which is being held today through Saturday in Orlando. The largest gathering of black school choice supporters in the country will draw 650 people this year, including 50 current and former elected officials. It comes amidst head-spinning ferment on the choice front, with states as disparate as Louisiana, Washington and New Hampshire passing historic measures in the past year alone.

“There are a lot of people in our community who are rightfully concerned and skeptical about motives, and about is this the right thing to do,” Campbell said. “But I think increasingly, we have reached the point where there’s no excuse for not acting with urgency in giving kids and parents options.”

BAEO has been a leading voice for parental school choice since it formed in 2000. Its ranks include a number of leading reformers, including Howard Fuller, Kevin Chavous and T. Willard Fair, who co-founded the first charter school in Florida and served as chair of the state Board of Education.

Florida is an apt place for the group to meet.

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March 14, 2013 1 comment

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Taking school choice to the class level – Florida Sen. Jeff Brandes, podcastED

Ron Matus February 27, 2013

Ron Matus

Sen. Brandes

Florida has been a national leader in expanding parental school choice via magnets, charters, vouchers, tax credit scholarships, career academies and virtual classes. Now a state lawmaker wants to hasten the customization wave by opening up choice at a more fundamental level: Class by class.

A bill filed by freshman Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, would allow providers of all stripes to create state-approved “charter courses” in K-12 and higher ed, and allow students to choose a la carte.

“We’re offering choice within choice,” Brandes said in a podcast interview with redefinED, attached below. “You might go to a charter school. And then you’d say, ‘Look, I want to take the MIT version of physics. So can I take the MIT version of physics from my charter school?’ Why aren’t we letting students do that?”

Brandes, a member of the Senate Education Committee, does not shy from ahead-of-the-curve ideas. As a state representative two years ago, he sponsored a bill to create education savings accounts. Last year he led a successful effort to make Florida a test site for self-driving cars (and was both attacked for it in a senior-scaring political ad and given free, positive publicity from the likes of Forbes and The Atlantic). This year, he’s sponsoring legislation to transform public libraries.

Course choice is a new frontier. Louisiana created a head-turning course choice program last year. Brandes’ bill puts emphasis on STEM fields and industry certifications. He said he got the idea from watching a YouTube video of Clayton Christensen, in which the Harvard business professor talked about accrediting individual courses.

“And when he said that, I remember rewinding it, and thinking about that concept again,” Brandes said. “And I must have rewound it two or three times and I went, ‘Wow. This is a radical idea.’ And I instantly got where all this could go. Because you think about the variety of people that spend so much time and energy and effort creating all of this content, when you could have only a handful of people creating really high-quality content – and instructors now really coaching on that content.”

Students will benefit when providers compete to create the best classes, he said.

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February 27, 2013 1 comment

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School choice can help Muslims bridge two worlds – Kathy Jamil, podcastED

Ron Matus February 19, 2013

Ron Matus

Kathy Jamil, the principal of an Islamic school in Buffalo, N.Y., has a suggestion for anyone who balks at the inclusion of Muslim schools in school choice programs.

KathyJamil

Please, come visit.

“This is something that I wish I could just get on a soapbox and just shout at the top of my lungs,” Jamil told redefinED in the podcast attached below. Before passing judgment on Muslim schools, she said, “We hope that those who have fears … would take the opportunity to get to know them.”

Anti-Muslim bigotry is a small but steady undercurrent in school choice debates. In the past year alone, it surfaced in Alabama, Tennessee, Kansas and a handful of other states. In the most-publicized example, a state lawmaker in Louisiana said she regretted supporting that state’s new voucher program because it could wind up promoting Islam.

Jamil is chair of the Islamic Schools League of America, an associate of the American Center for School Choice (which co-hosts this blog) and a member of the new national Commission on Faith-based Schools. Given the atmosphere, she believes school choice in America is particularly important for Muslim families.

“You find that Muslim children oftentimes – and their families for that matter – feel intimidated or afraid to openly practice their faith. So we find that some students in the public school setting will not tell their classmates or their friends, or be openly Muslim if you will,” she said. “This is challenging for any child, because now you have to play these two roles. You’ve got this duality going on, where at home or in your faith tradition, community center – wherever it is that you feel safe in terms of practicing your faith – you can act Muslim. But in the public school sector, you’ve got to avoid being Muslim at any level. This duality is very difficult for children. It’s very unhealthy.”

“We need to help children reconcile how they can practice their faith and how they can further solidify their commitment as citizens of America,” Jamil continued. School choice helps them “bridge those two worlds.”

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February 19, 2013 0 comment

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School choice: an extension of the civil rights movement

Ron Matus January 21, 2013

Ron Matus

Rev. Matthews

The Rev. H.K. Matthews, 84, was beaten by white police in Selma, jailed more than 35 times and blacklisted from jobs for not backing down. So when he says expanding school choice and civil rights go hand in hand, his words carry the weight of someone who’s been there. The west Florida icon sees no inconsistency in an agenda that puts support for vouchers, tax credit scholarships and charter schools on the same list as protesting police brutality, integrating lunch counters and ensuring equal opportunity in the work place.

“It has always been my contention that if a parent felt that his or her or their child was not being adequately educated in one school in the public school system, that they should have the opportunity or the choice of moving that child to a school where it would be more beneficial,” Matthews said in the redefinED podcast attached below. “If you’re being forced to keep your child in a school where he or she is not learning, that is doing nothing but crippling that child.”

As the nation pauses today to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., we thought redefinED readers and listeners should hear from Matthews. Now living in Alabama, he is a diehard for Florida’s tax credit scholarship program and Step Up For Students, which administers the program and co-hosts this blog. In 2010, when more than 5,000 students and parents marched in Tallahassee for an expansion of the program, Matthews was in the front row.

Rev. Matthews was among more than 5,000 people who rallied in Tallahassee in 2010 to support school choice. He’s in the front row on the left, walking with a cane.

He remains an activist for other causes, too. Last month, he participated in a “rally for justice” stemming from the controversial arrest of a 27-year-old mom in a Wal-Mart. And in 2011, members of the Occupy movement asked him for advice. They gathered around him as he offered this nugget: “They said I was an agitator. But if you look at a washing machine, it’s the agitator in the middle that gets all the dirt out.”

Here are some highlights from the podcast:

On what Dr. King might think of school choice: “Knowing him as I knew him, and knowing his desire and his fire for people having a right to choose, my feeling is he would support school choice. Because he was always for the rights of individuals. Not barring any particular race, not barring any particular origin or religion. But he just felt that people should have a right, I think, to be free, to express themselves, and to go where they wanted to go. And to go to places that would be more beneficial to them.”

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January 21, 2013 0 comment

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A Florida superintendent’s take on choice, charter schools & competition – Nikolai Vitti, podcastED

Ron Matus January 14, 2013

Ron Matus

Vitti

The sprawling, 125,000-student school district in Duval County, Fla., has a reputation for being particularly cold territory for vouchers and charter schools. But last month, its new superintendent recommended the school board approve a dozen new charter schools and, in doing so, sounded this refrain: We have to compete.

In an interview with redefinED, Nikolai Vitti said the competition injected into public education through expanded choice will improve schools in Duval, which has struggled with low-income students more than other big districts in Florida. He said he “vehemently opposed” limiting options for low-income parents. He spoke admiringly of the mission and innovative practices of the KIPP charter schools.

“The reality is, the market – meaning the structure of choice – forces me to compete, even if I don’t want to. And if I don’t compete, parents will continue to leave the school district,” Vitti said. “And so my role as superintendent is to improve our product.”

But Vitti, who previously served as chief academic officer in the Broad-Prize-winning Miami-Dade district, also offered a number of caveats. State rules tilt the playing field towards charter schools, he said. And in his view, the debate over them has been driven by perceptions of quality, not data.

“There are charter schools that have a track record of success, and particular charter schools that have failed, and failed in multiple areas,” he said. “Let’s not have an ideological conversation. Let’s have one based on data where we look at individual charter schools, individual traditional public schools, and ask the question: Who’s successful? Who’s not? And what’s the best situation for parents based on how they’re looking at it, and how the district as informed educators are looking at it?”

Vitti also offered a surprising take on who should authorize charter schools. In Florida, only school boards can do so – a situation that charter school opponents prefer, and one that may be tough to change because of restrictive language in the state constitution. But Vitti said unless changes are made to the charter application process – something that forces better dialogue between charters and districts – he’d rather have the state do the authorizing.

“I do believe there’s a way to create a balance between simply approving charter schools at the district level based on a boilerplate application process … and instead allow and require the charter school to be more strategic with the district,” he said. But “if we’re not going to create some kind of balance between that, then simply place the onus of the application process on the state. Because essentially that’s what’s happening already.”

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January 14, 2013 3 comments

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A new tool for school choice – Matthew Ladner, podcastED

Ron Matus January 8, 2013

Ron Matus

Ladner

Call them Vouchers 2.0. In the age of customization, researcher Matthew Ladner sees education savings accounts as the tool for the times. Unlike vouchers or tax credit scholarships, ESAs would allow parents to use state funds to pay for a blend of K-12 educational options – schools, tutors, online programs, etc., in whatever combo works – and perhaps squirrel away some of those funds for college.

“We we like to say that ESAs are sort of school choice and parental control over education down to the last penny,” Ladner said in a podcast interview with redefinED. “What we really want to do is allow parents to customize the education for their child. Education shouldn’t be necessarily an all or nothing proposition – you’re either attending this school or that school. In fact, the whole definition of what a school is is being fairly rapidly changed by technology.”

Ladner is senior advisor of policy and research at the Foundation for Excellence in Education. He’s one of the creators of the ESA concept and its most diligent Johnny Appleseed. In October, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice published a report he authored about ESAs called, “The Way of the Future.” Ladner also was instrumental in creating the ESA program in Arizona, which to date is the only one in the country but was recently expanded.

A key feature of ESAs, Ladner said, is that it requires parents to make choices based on quality and price. That in turn will spur innovation and, at the same time, reign in costs that have risen steeply for decades with little improvement in academic outcomes. “If you want to reverse that, you have to do something that’s going to seem a little radical at first,” Ladner said. “But by giving parents complete control over the money and requiring them to consider possible alternative uses for that money, it really sets them up to be discriminating consumers.“

Florida lawmakers flirted with ESAs in 2011, with critics panning the idea as “universal vouchers” and “vouchers for all.” But Ladner said even if a state went “whole hog” with the idea, the vast majority of kids would remain in public schools, as the Florida experience has shown with McKay vouchers and tax credit scholarships. In his view, ESAs should also be designed for equity – with greater funding for students with greater needs.

Are people ready for ESAs? Maybe not just yet, Ladner said. But it took a while for people to catch on to Palm Pilots, too. “As a movement we always need to be taking a strong interest in the development of our product. And our product in this case is our methods to increasing the freedom and the effectiveness of parents the parents within the schooling system,” Ladner said. “I think there is work to be done. But I do think that when this work is done we will have a product that is clearly superior to the ones we have today.”

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January 8, 2013 0 comment

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Another Democratic lawmaker for school choice – Algie Howell, podcastED

Ron Matus December 3, 2012

Ron Matus

Algie Howell

Algie Howell is a former public school teacher, a former school board member and a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia. He also happens to be a firm supporter of parental school choice – so much so, in fact, that he used a provocative term last week – “brainwashed” – to describe minorities who oppose private options such as vouchers and tax credit scholarships.

“I have a difficult job of selling this (school choice) to people, especially minorities, who have been to some degree brainwashed by unions and other people,” Howell said during a panel discussion at the Excellence in Action summit in Washington D.C.

In a follow-up interview with redefinED, Howell went into more detail, dismissing claims that school choice is an attempt to resegregate schools or that vouchers are a drain on public funding.

“If you have say 20 or 50 students that’s attending a public school, and they are not being provided with what they need in order to learn, and you take them out of there, and put them in a school where they can learn, you have not really lost anything,” he said in the podcast attached below. “You have gained something, because you have 50 students that benefited …. But they can’t see that.”

Howell is among growing numbers of Democratic lawmakers who support publicly funded, private learning options and defy the either/or caricatures perpetuated by school choice critics. He backed a tax credit scholarship bill that was signed into law last summer by Gov. Bob McDonnell. At the same time, one of his top campaign issues was higher pay for public school teachers. “For me, school choice is a strong Democratic value,” he said.

Howell said black churches and black ministers could do more to build support for school choice. He also said he wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama became a more forceful advocate for choice in his second term, including coming down squarely for the D.C. voucher program. “Does he not send his children to private school?” Howell said. “It’s kind of hard to argue, isn’t it?”

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December 3, 2012 0 comment

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School choice in sync with Democratic values, but not Democratic leadership

Ron Matus October 23, 2012

Ron Matus

Vouchers and tax credit scholarships are in line with Democratic Party support for social justice and equal opportunity, says Florida state Rep. John Patrick Julien, D-North Miami. And yet, he says, Democratic lawmakers in Florida who support those options risk getting “whipped” by party leaders who don’t.

He says he’s a perfect example.

He lost the August primary by 13 votes after the party establishment lined up behind his opponent, Rep. Barbara Watson, D-Miami Gardens. Julien, who strongly backs expanded school choice, challenged the outcome, alleging some absentee ballots were obtained fraudulently. But last week a Tallahassee judge dismissed the suit.

Democratic lawmakers who “care about educating the children, especially the poor children, they would want to support (vouchers and tax credit scholarships),” Julien told redefinED in the podcast interview attached below. “But they would get whipped out of it. … A lot of these folks, I guarantee you, if they try to push back, they’re going to be told, ‘Um, go talk to John Patrick Julien down there in Miami. And ask him how those votes worked out for him.’ “

Julien isn’t leaving quietly. He told Sunshine State News his family didn’t flee a dictatorship in Haiti so he could “be a slave” to Democratic Party leadership. He used similar language with redefinED: “If you want to sit down with me and treat me as a human being, and help me understand why my vote is wrong, I welcome it,” he said. “But what I don’t welcome are people that want to put the chains back around my ankles and my arms, and pull me in the direction that they want.”

Democratic opposition to vouchers and tax credit scholarships, Julien suggested, doesn’t mesh with party values. “Democrats say that they want to educate people. Democrats say that they fight for the poor. Democrats say that their entire mantra is to be the voice for the voiceless. Democrats say that they are there for the sole purpose of fighting for the people,” he said. “What better fight is there than to fight to educate a poor child?”

The row in South Florida runs counter to long-term trend lines. Support for school choice among Florida lawmakers has grown over the past decade; in 2010, nearly half of them voted for a major expansion of the tax-credit program. Last spring, though, Democratic support dropped to about a third for a much more modest expansion. In the podcast, Julien offers one possible reason why.

Julien also suggests the Democratic Party should have a “big tent” on school choice. But as long as teachers unions remain a top financial contributor, he said, it’s not going to happen. “If you look at who my primary opposition was in this election cycle,” he said, “it was the teachers union.”

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October 23, 2012 0 comment