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New Stanford data cause for investigation but not alarm in Florida

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

Stanford’s Sean F. Reardon released a new data tool last week allowing the user to view academic scores and gains by school, district (with charters included) and county. One of the visualization tools allows you to track the academic growth in grades 3-8 for every school covering those grades in a state. This measure does not look good for Florida:

The horizontal axis of this chart runs from 100 percent free- or reduced-lunch eligible (left side) to 0 percent (right side). Each dot represents an individual public school, and the color scheme denotes a lot of academic growth (dark green) to below-average academic growth (dark blue). Florida’s chart above has a lot of blue and not so much green. For example, see high-growth Arizona’s chart:

Arizona is rolling in the green compared to Florida! Time to celeNAEP good times in Arizona!

Well, OK, let’s take a close look at this before getting the Kool and the Gang brass section going. It turns out this pattern has been evident in Florida’s NAEP data for years.
Below are Florida’s fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP math scores:

This is all the Florida math data from oldest to newest at the time of this writing. Going back in our way-back time machine to 1996, Florida students were seven points below the national average on both fourth- and eighth-grade math. Those were large and statistically significant differences. Move the clock forward to 2017 and Florida students had a seven-point advantage over the national average in fourth-grade math, and a three-point deficit in eighth-grade math.

We can calculate a cohort gain by looking at the fourth-grade scores for a group of students, and then their eighth-grade scores four years later. For example, in 2011 Florida’s fourth-graders scored 240, and in 2015 as eighth-graders the same cohort of students scored 275. That’s a cohort gain of 35, and that doesn’t look so hot. This is similar to what Dr. Reardon is presenting in the charts above.

Now let’s look at the same data for Arizona:

Arizona fourth-graders scored 235 in 2011, and then 283 in 2015 for a cohort gain of 48 points — the highest in the country. Note, however, that five of the 13 points separating Arizona and Florida came simply because Florida had higher fourth-grade scores than Arizona in 2013. Moreover, if we repeat this procedure between 2013 and 2017, Arizona’s cohort gains shrinks to 42 points — mostly because fourth-grade math scores increased by five points between 2011 and 2013, but eighth-grade scores did not improve.

So, what to make of all of this?

I like the fact that Arizona students seem to be learning about math and reading between fourth and eighth grade. I especially like seeing all those green dots on the high poverty side of the graph. It’s a (hopefully) good sign. Florida’s strong emphasis on the early grades leads to faster progress on fourth-grade scores than eighth-grade scores. Florida’s eighth-grade scores have improved, but not at the rate of the fourth-grade scores.

Ultimately, what is most important are not your fourth- or eighth-grade NAEP scores, or the difference between the two of them, but rather your long-term outcomes. I can’t even recall what math I studied in eighth grade, but I do remember graduating from high school, attending college and graduating from college. Here’s what is going on at Florida’s two-year community colleges:

Florida students have a higher graduation rate across subgroups.

Here’s the public four-year data:

Florida’s NAEP scores up, high school graduation rates up, college graduation higher than the national average overall and across subgroups. The case made here is not that Florida education is great but that it has improved.

NAEP releases 2019 data in late October, so let’s see what happens next.

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Patricia Levesque describes public education in the year 2039

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

If you hopped in Doc Brown’s DeLorean and traveled to the year 2039, what would your utopian public education system look like?

That’s the question Step Up For Students President Doug Tuthill posed to Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Foundation For Excellence in Education, on this episode of PodcastED.

For Levesque, utopia begins and ends with equalizing opportunity – putting more money, more power, and better information into the hands of parents who traditionally have had little of all three.

“If you give parents the ability to have power and leverage in (their child’s educational) process so they can curate…that is the ultimate form of accountability,” Levesque says.

Both Tuthill and Levesque believe that if you started building public education from scratch, funding systems wouldn’t look like what we have now. Funding would be based on each child’s unique needs – with an eye towards equal opportunity.

The two influential policy wonks also discussed equalizing access to out-of-school learning opportunities, including travel, computer science becoming a core component of every child’s education, giving teachers more control over their professional development through professional spending accounts, and raising teacher pay.

You can listen to this thought-provoking podcast below, or on the Apple Podcasts app. Thank you for listening.

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CourtsEducation and Public PolicyEducation legislationEducation politicsMyth bustersPolicy WonksSchool Choice

‘Paramount duty’ never intended as weapon against school choice

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

school choice

Editor’s note: Misinformation abounds across the education choice landscape, adding confusion to an already complex issue. The redefinED team is dedicated to shining a light and providing the facts. Today’s post debunks a long-standing misconception: The state constitution says free public schools are the sole means for the state to provide education in Florida. You can see more myth busting here, or click the link at the top right-hand corner of this page.    

The primary reason the Florida Opportunity Scholarship program was struck down 13 years ago was noticeably absent from recent news coverage of a potential lawsuit over Florida’s newest voucher program. Instead, discussions focused on issues of regulatory “uniformity,” and “separation of church and state,” the latter of which wasn’t part of the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling at all.

The primary legal reasoning, which is based on the “paramount duty” clause of Article IX Section 1 of the state constitution, isn’t easy to understand. The court had to invent prohibition where none existed, and it did so after misinterpreting another legal case.

Ironically, the Florida Supreme Court initially rejected the “paramount duty” argument before reversing itself five years later in what the Harvard Law Review called an “adventurous reading and strained application” of Florida’s constitution.

In Bush v. Holmes in January 2006, the Florida Supreme Court struck down the Opportunity Scholarship, reasoning it “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida’s children.”

But how did the court determine public schools were the sole means by which the state could provide education?

The court relied on the second and third sentences of Article IX, Section 1(a) of the state constitution:

It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high-quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education…

No one is likely to read the language above and conclude vouchers are unconstitutional.

Most of Article IX, Section 1 was added to the state constitution by Amendment 6 in 1998, which was a response to public school advocates losing a funding adequacy lawsuit. As Justice Kenneth Bell noted in his dissent in Bush v. Holmes, there is no historical evidence the amendment was ever intended to be weaponized against school vouchers.

To justify prohibiting vouchers and declaring public schools the “sole means” of education, the court invoked “expressio unius,” which means, “the expression of one thing implies the exclusion of another.”

According to Irina Manta, writing in the St. Louis University Law Journal, the Florida Supreme Court,  “appears to base its entire understanding of expressio unius on a quote from a statement in the 1927 Weinberger v. Board of Public Instruction decision.”

The Weinberger case dealt with constitutional language that specified “any bonds” issued for the purpose of funding public education “shall become payable within thirty years from the date of the issuance.” Similar language still exists today.

But in Weinberger, a school district had issued bonds that matured after the maximum 30-year period prescribed by the constitution. The 1927 court struck down the district’s bonds as unconstitutional, noting that the constitution mandated a maximum date by which bonds must be payable. Anything later than 30 years was thus prohibited.

According to Manta, “the relevant provisions in Holmes contain no prohibitions; in fact, they contain no language whatsoever that even comes close to Weinberger’s ‘any bonds.’”

The prohibition is clear in Weinberger, but not at all clear in Article IX, Section 1.

Justice Bell concluded in his dissent, “The clear purpose behind Article IX is to ensure that every child in Florida has the opportunity to receive a high-quality education and to ensure access to such an education by requiring the Legislature to make adequate provision for a uniform system of free public schools. There is absolutely no evidence before this Court that this mandate is not being fulfilled.”

Sadly, for the nearly 800 students on the Opportunity Scholarship at the time, the Florida Supreme Court invented a prohibition where none existed and did so entirely by misunderstanding a legal case from nearly a century before. Given this, it is easy to see why school choice critics omit the “paramount duty” clause when discussing the constitutionality of vouchers in Florida.

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Achievement GapDemographic ResearchEducation politicsEducation ResearchPolicy WonksSchool Choice

Private school choice in Florida: more programs than rest of American South combined

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

I wrote in my last column about a new presentation on education in the American South from Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit focused on changing education and life outcomes for underserved children.

As I noted, Bellwether Education partners tabulated the number of K-12 students participating in private choice programs by state. Florida has the largest scholarship tax credit program for low-income families, the largest voucher program for students with disabilities (the McKay Scholarship) and the nation’s largest Education Savings Account program (Gardiner Scholarships), also for children with disabilities.

Have Florida students benefited from this embrace of private choice?

Louisiana has the second largest number of private choice participants, but a large majority of those students participate in a tuition tax deduction program providing a limited amount of assistance. If we excluded this program from consideration, Florida would have several times more private choice program participants as the rest of the region combined. Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina each operate multiple private choice programs. Tennessee passed a second program in 2019.

Texas and Florida are the two giants of the American South. Both states have large, rapidly growing and highly diverse student populations, and both states earned reputations as national leaders in K-12 reform efforts during the 1990s. Florida, however, has been an enthusiastic adopter of private choice programs for low-income students and students with disabilities. Texas has yet to pass a private choice program of any kind.

Back in 1998, before the advent of choice in Florida, Texas had a higher percentage of students eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch who scored Basic or Better on eighth-grade reading than Florida (58 percent compared to 52 percent). Both states had a dismal 33 percent of students with disabilities scoring Basic or Better on eighth-grade reading in 1998.

Based on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress “report card,” however, Florida outshone Texas in regard to students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch (69 percent to 62 percent Basic or Better) and even more so in regard to students with disabilities (53 percent to 35 percent Basic or Better). Policies and factors other than choice programs obviously influence these outcomes, but disadvantaged students in innovative Florida have seen substantially more progress than in the more status-quo oriented Texas.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spearheaded the creation of a major new choice program for waitlisted students in 2019, while Texas lawmakers concluded their session once again standing pat on education choice. The South has long been a region containing visionary leaders of change, but also is shackled with laggards who cling too tightly to the past.

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Achievement GapDemographic ResearchPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceTesting and Accountability

To compare state test scores, adjust for their demographics

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

Critics denying the achievement gains of Florida’s K-12 students often do so after comparing state achievement with a whiter and wealthier national average. Only one critic has been bold enough to actually single out a whiter and wealthier state for comparison with the Sunshine State.

Lauren Ritchie, a columnist at the Orlando Sentinel, recently picked Connecticut, a state that spends more than $17,283 per pupil.  She has a family friend in Norwalk whose daughter attends an IB program for 290 students, where they learn Arabic, Japanese or Mandarin Chinese. (Orange County, where Ritchie lives, has three high schools with IB programs and a total of 32 magnet schools. Students can also learn Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese and more.)

Ritchie said she chose Connecticut because it produces “some of the highest-performing students…because they genuinely care about education.”

To compare the two states, we must first understand their differences. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54 percent of students in Connecticut are white compared to just 38 percent in Florida. Only six states have fewer white students than Florida.

Connecticut spends $17,283 per pupil, according to Education Week. Florida spent $9,737. Only four states spend more than Connecticut.

Connecticut’s median household income in 2017 was $74,168, whereas Florida’s was only $52,594. Only three states had higher incomes than Connecticut, while only nine states had lower incomes than Florida.

So what does Connecticut get with that $17,000 per-pupil? Not much, unless you’re one of the rich white kids learning Arabic in Norwalk.

In 2003, Connecticut was ahead of Florida on every math and reading metric. By 2017, Florida tied or beat Connecticut on reading and fourth-grade math. When examining achievement by subgroups, Connecticut can beat Florida only on white student achievement in eighth-grade reading and math.

Black students are a full grade level ahead of black students in Connecticut on fourth-grade math. Hispanic students are two grade levels ahead. The difference shrinks to half a grade level ahead by eighth grade, but Florida remains ahead.

Fifty-six percent of low-income students in Florida score at grade level or higher on the NAEP eighth grade math test. Only 52 percent of low-income students in Connecticut do.

On eighth-grade reading, 69 percent of Florida’s low-income students score at grade level or better, while just 64 percent of low-income students in Connecticut do.

When adjusting for student race and income, the Urban Institute ranks Florida eighth on NAEP math. Connecticut ranks 29th.

Florida ranks third in the nation on eighth-grade reading, behind big spenders New Jersey and Massachusetts, but still ahead of ninth-ranked Connecticut.

Despite outspending every state in the Urban Institute’s Top Ten list on both tests, Connecticut just doesn’t have a lot to show for its extravagant spending.

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Achievement GapEducation ResearchPolicy Wonks

Florida achievement gaps in international context

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

Several weeks ago, we looked at American racial achievement gaps in math and reading from an international perspective using data from the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test that every three years measures reading, mathematics and science literacy of 15-year-olds.

In 2012, the PISA exam included subgroup specifically for Florida. Let’s take a look:

So, a couple of notes. This PISA data is from 2012. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that Florida’s white, black and Hispanic students all saw very large academic gains since the 1990s. We have reason to fear, therefore, that if the PISA exam had been given in, say, 1998, the results would have looked very frightening indeed. As it is, the results didn’t look so great in 2012.

Florida’s black students land in the vicinity of students in Chile and Mexico. Chile and Mexico spend only a fraction of what is spent per pupil in the United States and must contend with much larger student poverty challenges. Florida’s Hispanics scored higher, but still performed similar to students in Greece and Turkey, lower-spending countries.

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study exam from 2015 allows us to take a similar look at Florida subgroup achievement in international context. PISA and TIMSS test a different grouping of countries (with quite a bit of overlap) and test somewhat different things. Nevertheless, TIMSS also included Florida subgroups.

Here are the results for mathematics for nations and Florida racial/ethnic subgroups on eighth-grade math.

As was the case in the PISA data, American black students achieved similarly to students in nations that spend only a fraction of what American schools spend per pupil, and with more severe poverty challenges. Florida’s Hispanic students score higher but also find themselves outscored by countries such as Malta, Slovenia and Kazakhstan, which don’t begin to match American levels of spending. Florida’s Asian and Anglo students didn’t conquer the globe but had scores that were comfortably European if not Asian.

Make what you will of this information, but in my opinion, we have miles yet to go.

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Achievement GapEducation and Public PolicyFundingPolicy Wonks

American achievement gaps in international context

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

The Economist published an interesting article recently titled, “How Chile combines competition and public funding.” The piece included a graphic demonstrating how Chilean students fared on the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test that every three years measures reading, mathematics and science literacy of 15-year-olds. The assessment also includes measures of general or cross-curricular competencies, such as collaborative problem solving.

The graphic revealed how the PISA scores of Chilean students compared to those of students in nearby countries, provided the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development average, and showed the market share for various schooling sectors.

Here is the summary graphic:

Chile created a national voucher program in 1981, and lawmakers have made significant revisions to improve equity in recent years. Argentine scholar Mariano Narodowski performed a deep dive on the Chilean voucher program in 2018.

So, when you are an edu-nerd like me and you see something like this, it makes you say, “Hmmm … I wonder how Chile compares to student subgroups in the United States?” Well wonder no more!

Soak up that achievement gap, America, and note for the record that Chilean students attending school in a developing nation outscored American black students – after at least a decade and a half of Chilean improvement.

Greece represents American Hispanic’s nearest international achievement neighbor. American Anglo students, meanwhile, sit comfortably toward the top among the higher performing European and Asian systems but still get beat by countries like Estonia.

If I were feeling unusually cruel, I would look up the average spending per pupil in Chile, Estonia, Greece and the United States. Well, I can tell I’m not fooling you, dear reader; we all know how cruel I can be, so here goes:

Chileans surpassed the average scores for American black students on PISA despite an average per-pupil spending well below half the American average. American Hispanic students score in the vicinity of Greece, which spends more than Chile, but again a mere fraction of the spending in the United States.

Estonia spends less than Greece, and well below half the level of the United States, but outscores America’s highest scoring racial/ethnic subgroup. Estonia, by the way, also has an extensive system of public and private school choice.

Low-performing students have the most to gain from choice, but even relatively high-performing American subgroups may be underperforming their potential. A universal system of choice with a significant funding advantage for low-income families could help students of all backgrounds flourish.

 

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Education and Public PolicyEducation politicsFundingPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceTax credit scholarshipsvouchers

Money is fungible, not magical

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

Critics have spilled considerable ink attacking Florida’s proposed Family Empowerment Scholarship. The voucher would cost about $100 million and allow at least 15,000 low- and working-class students to attend private schools.

“I’m afraid it will do damage to the regular public schools in the state of Florida,” said Sen. Bill Montford (D-Tallahassee), who opposed “diverting” money in the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) from public schools to private schools.

“DeSantis private school voucher plan robs Florida public schools of needed money,” exclaimed the Palm Beach Post editorial board.

“The plan would divert money from public education in a state that already ranks a disgraceful 41st in the country in per-pupil funding and 46th in teacher salaries,” the Gainesville Sun editorial board wrote.

These critics seem to think the $100 million for the Family Empowerment Scholarship could be used to improve public education, increase per-pupil spending and raise teacher salaries all at the same time. But it’s not like the 15,000 kids who could have accessed the program are suddenly going to educate themselves.

Although $100 million would be removed from the total public school pot, 15,000 students – and many of the expenses that come with them – would go, too. And while the proposed program isn’t finalized, both the House and Senate versions set the voucher amount at a percentage of what the FEFP pays public schools.

One version even excludes more than $1.6 billion in the FEFP from being used to calculate that percentage. That’s $1.6 billion that can be spread among remaining public school students.

Additionally, the FEFP doesn’t cover the full cost of public education in Florida, as local and federal sources collect billions more. This is why the average scholarship from the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program is worth just 59 percent of Florida’s per pupil expenses.

Every student who takes a scholarship not only removes expenses from public schools, but also creates a savings that can be spread to other students. That is why multiple studies have shown that scholarships save taxpayers money. It’s also part of the reason why the Florida Supreme Court tossed out a lawsuit claiming scholarships harmed public schools.

And it’s not like the FEFP is some sacrosanct source of public school funding, either.

Last year, the state “diverted” $221 million from the FEFP to fund 31,044 private school scholarships for children with special needs. No one batted an eye.

Even if the Legislature decided to appropriate $100 million from the General Fund to pay for the Family Empowerment Scholarship, as it does with the Gardiner Scholarship program, the FEFP would decline by around $100 million anyway. Why? Money is fungible.

The FEFP is mostly based on the number of students enrolled in public schools. If 15,000 low-income students leave public schools because they now have a scholarship to a private school, that is 15,000 fewer students to calculate a base student allocation and more. The FEFP would decline by about the same amount as the total voucher fund. Other pots of money still would be available for the remaining public school students.

Money is fungible, but it’s not magical. You can’t take a voucher worth a fraction of per-pupil spending and suddenly increase per-pupil spending in public schools, and increase teacher pay at the same time. Let’s stop pretending you can.

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