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podcastED: Senator Jeff Brandes on the future of public education

David Hudson Tuthill
David Hudson Tuthill

Sen. Jeff Brandes (R- St. Petersburg)

If you ask Florida Sen. Jeff Brandes (R-St. Petersburg) what he thinks the education world will look like in the year 2040, he’ll tell you it will be going back to the past.

“I see us moving back to the one-room schoolhouse where we have students of different capabilities working with each other to help everyone rise,” Brandes says.

The Pinellas County lawmaker pushes innovative education policies every year in the Florida Legislature, but new leadership more focused on education choice appear to be giving his ideas more traction.

His signature education bill this session, SB 226, would expand a mastery-based education pilot program from the three Florida counties currently testing the concept to any district in the state that wishes to participate. The bill wasn’t heard in committee last session but is on track to pass this year with wide bipartisan support. A similar bill is currently awaiting passage in the House.

Brandes firmly believes that the flexibility of mastery-based education and the wide array of options it provides will expand opportunities for students.

“Our goalposts cannot simply be you got an education or degree,” Brandes said. “A job is the goalpost. How do we focus everything that we’re doing to line up to professions that are out there for people who complete their education?”

SB 226 is not a mandate. Districts would have to opt in to participate, and there are unanswered questions about implementation, funding and state-mandated testing. But testing certainly would change under a mastery-based education system.

Brandes says this is a good thing.

“The upside is that we get to take the temperature of each individual student in real time … Why do we need to take the temperature once a year if we’re taking it every day?”

Listen to the full interview below or on iTunes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsParental ChoicePolicy WonksProgressives and ed reform

How public education can learn from the health care reform debate

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

Doug Tuthill is president of Step Up For Students, which helps administer the nation’s largest private school choice program (and co-hosts this blog).

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis caused an uproar recently when he commented that all publicly-funded K-12 education services are part of public education. He was speaking about a proposed new education voucher program that, if it becomes law, will give low-income and working-class families public funds to help pay for private school tuition and fees. The assertion that education vouchers are part of a devious scheme to dismantle and privatize public education is undermined if publicly-funded vouchers are part of the public education system. Hence, the strong political backlash from education choice opponents to the governor’s statement.

My hometown paper, the Tampa Bay Times, immediately attacked the governor’s comment by quoting a line from the Florida Constitution stating that Florida is required to provide “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools.” But the governor didn’t say all publicly-funded education services are part of public schools. And I don’t think he was making a legal or constitutional argument. He was simply stating the obvious. It’s in the public interest to understand that public schools, alone, can never meet the educational needs of every child because much of their education occurs outside of schools. And always will.

The Florida Constitution properly requires that we provide every child access to a high-quality public school. But sit in any teachers’ lounge and you’ll quickly hear that educators know that’s not enough. Especially for children trying to escape generational poverty, we need a concept of public education that extends well beyond public and private schools.

The criticisms of Gov. DeSantis’ comment illustrate an obstacle people of good will face when discussing how best to improve public education. We don’t have a common set of linguistic and conceptual understandings to facilitate our discussions. Consequently, we often talk past each other.

Conversely, debates about how to improve our nation’s health care system, while often contentious, benefit from commonly understood concepts. Perhaps applying some of these health care reform concepts to public education could help us clarify where we agree and disagree, and maybe help us find common ground.

The New York Times recently published this useful glossary of health care reform terms:

Single-Payer: A health care system in which the government pays for everyone’s health expenses.

Private Pay/Private Insurance: Individuals pay for their health care through their personal funds and/or a private insurance provider.

Public Option: Allows individuals who don’t qualify for the current Medicaid or Medicare programs to purchase health insurance from the government.

Socialized Medicine: A single-payer system in which the government owns the hospitals and employs the medical staff. The British health care system is an example of socialized medicine. The British government owns the medical facilities and pays the doctors and nurses. According to the Times, in the U.S., the Veterans Administration health care system is an example of socialized medicine.

Medicare for All: Expanding the current health care system for older adults to cover everyone. Some Medicare-for-All proposals are single-pay programs that cover all medical expense, while others include privately-funded co-pays and options for supplemental private insurance coverage. No current Medicare-for-All proposals include socializing the U.S. health care system by requiring doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel to become government employees.

Universal Coverage: Everyone is guaranteed access to health care.  This could be accomplished through a single-payer system, requiring everyone to purchase private insurance, or some combination of single payer, private insurance, and a public option.

I don’t speak for the education choice movement. But my sense is that the goal of most education choice advocates, using the Times’ health care reform taxonomy, is a single-payer public education system that provides universal coverage and allows educators to participate without having to be government employees. This approach is similar to Canada’s health care system and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-For-All proposal.

Most ed choice advocates would also support weighted funding based on each student’s needs and allowing parents to supplement single-payer funding with private funds.

Education choice advocates are generally skeptical of socialized public education (and socialized medicine). They are fine with doctors and teachers working as government employees in government-owned VA hospitals and district schools, respectively. But they think doctors and teachers should have the freedom to choose whether they want to be in public or private practice. Doctors have this freedom today. Most teachers do not.

Our two primary public health care systems today, Medicare and Medicaid, provide a context for understanding what Gov. DeSantis might have meant when he equated publicly-funded K-12 education services with public education. U.S. doctors who treat both private- and public-pay patients are simultaneously participating in private and public health care systems. When doctors in private practice are being paid by private health insurance companies to treat a patient, they are in a private health care system; when they start treating a Medicare patient a few minutes later, they are participating in a public health care system. From one minute to the next, what determines whether private practice doctors are participating in a public or private health care system is who is paying the bill.

If we apply today’s health care reality to K-12 education, private practice teachers are in private education when they are being paid by private funds and participating in public education when they are being paid by public funds. Given Gov. DeSantis’ congressional background and his experience with the Medicare and Medicaid programs, it’s not unusual that he may see parallels between public health care and public education.

The history and politics of public education and public health care differ greatly, which is why Sen. Bernie Sanders and others on the Left strongly support a single-payer, universal coverage plan for health care, yet oppose a similar plan for K-12 education. But low-income and working-class families are increasingly flexing their political muscles and causing the politics around education choice in public education to change. Gov. DeSantis’ comment will eventually be seen as common sense, even by the Medicare-For-All political Left.

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FundingPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceVouchers

Death, taxes and K-12 funding disputes

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

Two new studies illuminate Florida K-12 funding. The first, from Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, includes this chart:

So, for those of you squinting at your iPhone, the east-west axis is tracking the percent change in enrollment between 2000 and 2015, while the north-south axis is showing the constant dollar percentage increase in per pupil funding.

There obviously is a negative relationship between rapid enrollment growth and high levels of per pupil spending growth. Most of the states with very large increases saw their student population shrink. Florida looks to have seen population growth of approximately 15 percent during this period and per pupil funding growth of 18 percent.

Petrilli notes a national baby-bust, but in Florida this may simply mean a moderating of enrollment growth, already noted between older Census estimates and more recent state projections. There will be no moderation of the increase in the elderly population. A decade from now this may look like the good ole days of funding increases, so buckle up.

TaxWatch also released a study finding an “all in” per pupil number for Florida schools of $10,856. The analysis compared the traditional district school cost to the cost of two of the largest learning options the state currently provides to parents and their students – charter schools and tax-credit scholarships.

TaxWatch estimated per charter school student funding for fiscal year 2017-18 to be $7,476. The average maximum scholarship available through the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which allows children from low-income and middle-income families to attend private schools, for fiscal year 2017-18 was $6,447.

A Florida newspaper editorial board that recently editorialized that Florida “could not afford” vouchers may require some remedial math; Florida has a great deal of enrollment growth on the way and can more easily afford to choose charter and private schools than districts, although all three will remain options.

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CourtsEducation PoliticsFaith-based EducationKnow Your HistoryPolicy WonksReligious EducationSchool ChoiceTax Credit Scholarships

Montana school choice case appealed to U.S. Supreme Court

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

Montana parents are appealing a ruling that found tax credit scholarships unconstitutional – and its impact might be felt around the entire country

Montana parents appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, asking the court to overturn a ruling that found tax-credit scholarships unconstitutional in the state.

The Montana Supreme Court had ruled 5-2 in December that the state’s tax credit scholarship program violated the state’s constitutional bans aid to sectarian schools. The ruling allowed the state to create a new tax credit scholarship program for students to attend only non-religious private schools.

“It is a bedrock constitutional principle that the government cannot discriminate against religion,” said Institute for Justice attorney Erica Smith in a press release. “Yet for the past 24 years, some states have blocked religious schools and the families who choose them from participating in student-aid programs. It is time for the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and settle this issue once and for all.”

At issue is Montana’s Blaine Amendment, a relic of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bias that swept America in the late 19th century. The amendment is still on the books and bans direct and indirect aid to religious schools.

Florida has a similar ban on aid to religious institutions, though these arguments failed to sway the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Holmes (2006) and McCall v. Scott (2017).

Scholarship parents in Montana are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if banning participation in educational programs because of religious preferences ultimately discriminates against religious parents in violation of the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Past U.S. Supreme Court cases also come into play, such as Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which ruled vouchers did not violate the Establishment Clause because aid was to the student and not the religious institution.

The Court also has rejected the notion that tax credits are equivalent to tax expenditures by the government in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn (2011).

More recently, the Supreme Court ruled in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) that state governments could not deny grants to religious organizations for playground resurfacing while providing grants to similar, but non-religious organizations. Denial of the grant, the court ruled, violated the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment.

In light of that ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Colorado Supreme Court to revisit Taxpayers for Public Education v. Douglas County School District (2015), which found the district-run voucher program violated the state’s Blaine Amendment ban on direct aid to religious schools. However, the voucher program was dismantled and the issue rendered moot after the American Federation of Teachers funneled $600,000 into local school board election and took over conservative Douglas County.

Blaine Amendments have successfully struck down vouchers in Arizona and Montana but failed in Florida, Nevada and Oklahoma.

If the appeal from the Montana parents is accepted, a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court likely would clarify how states may read their respective Blaine Amendments.

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Education and Public PolicyEducation LegislationEducation ResearchPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceTax Credit ScholarshipsTesting and Accountability

Setting the record straight on choice scholarships

Jon East
Jon East

As Florida senators get their first look today at a new private school scholarship for economically disadvantaged students, some familiar taunts about academic results for the existing Tax Credit Scholarship have resurfaced. Be wary of rhetorical flourish.

Yes, the low-income scholarship students are not required to take the Florida Standard Assessment administered in traditional public schools. But they are required to take state-approved nationally norm-referenced tests whose academic validity is not in dispute.

So those who claim “Floridians have no idea if private schools are succeeding,” as one South Florida newspaper wrote recently, are ignoring 10 years of testing data to the contrary. They also neglect extraordinary new independent research that shows scholarship students are more likely to attend and graduate from college.

The testing trend line

Students in grades 3-10 on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarships have been required since 2006 to take a standardized test, and most take the Stanford Achievement. In the most recent report, their average percentile ranking in reading was 48 and in math was 46. That’s basically average, which is made more encouraging by the fact that these students are among the poorest in the state (and were the lowest performing from public schools they left).

The more important measure is whether the students are learning, and the bottom line has been almost identical each year: These low-income students have achieved the same annual gains as students of all income levels nationally.

Test score gains for individual schools with at least 30 tested scholarship students are also reported annually. In the most recent report, 342 schools were listed.

Comparisons with public school students

When budget cuts removed norm-referenced portions of the state test in 2011, researchers were no longer able to make a direct comparison between scholarship and public school students. In that 2011 academic findings report, though, researcher David Figlio concluded that scholarship students outperformed their peers in public schools, even though the public school students had higher incomes.

Figlio wrote of what he viewed as increasing gains: “These differences, while not large in magnitude, are larger and more statistically significant than in the past year’s results, suggesting that successive cohorts of participating students may be gaining ground over time.”

Students who enter and leave the scholarship

From the earliest years, state researchers have found that scholarship students who come from public schools were among the lowest academic performers in schools that themselves had disproportionately low test scores. That’s no slight on the public school. It’s intuitive. If a student is doing well in his or her current school, why change?

Similarly, scholarship students who return to public school are among the lowest performers in the private school they leave behind.

This recurring fact has been stretched in the current debate to imply that scholarship students who return to public schools have learned essentially nothing. That’s not what test results show, and, further, Figlio addressed that question head-on in his 2013 report. He looked at students who had switched twice – from public to private and back to public. In those cases, the state public test scores remained essentially the same.

Wrote Figlio: “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.”

Beyond test scores

In February, the respected Urban Institute released perhaps the most significant research in the scholarship program’s history. The report was a followup to work released in 2017 and was directed again by the Institute’s Director of Education Policy, Matthew Chingos, who has a PhD in government from Harvard University. His team matched data between roughly 89,000 scholarship and public school students from 2003 to 2011, representing the largest study of its kind in the nation.

The institute found that scholarship students are more likely than their public school peers to attend and graduate from college. The difference is striking.

Scholarship students as a whole were up to 43 percent more likely to attend college, a difference that rose to 99 percent for those on the scholarship at least four years. Similarly, scholarship students as a whole were up to 20 percent more likely to get a degree, a difference that rose to 45 percent for those on the scholarship for at least four years.

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Education LegislationEducation PoliticsEducation ReportingEducation ResearchFeaturedFlorida Education RevolutionFundingKnow Your HistoryParent EmpowermentPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceTax Credit ScholarshipsTesting and AccountabilityVouchers

Reviewing the past as a path to the future

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

florida education revolution

Editor’s note: March 2 marked the 20th anniversary of the legislative session in which Florida Gov. Jeb Bush launched a series of K-12 reforms that transformed education throughout the state. (No, I can’t believe it’s been 20 years either.) Beginning today, as the 2019 Florida legislative session is set to open, and continuing for several months, redefinED will examine aspects of Bush’s K-12 education revolution.

——————————————————————————————-

It was 20 years ago today

When Gov. Jeb Bush taught the ed reform band to play

They’ve been going in and out of style

But they’re guaranteed to get sued at trial

So may I introduce to you

The act you’ve known for all these years

Jeb Bush’s K-12 ed reform band

Twenty years have passed since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush launched his far-reaching set of education reforms. Those reforms included A-F school grading, school funding incentives, a suite of early literacy efforts, digital learning opportunities and expanded parental choice. Controversy ensued, and indeed, these policies remain controversial today.

The Florida Education Association hated the reform measures so much that its members infamously took out a second mortgage on their Tallahassee headquarters to donate to Bush’s opponent’s campaign. Nevertheless, the recent Florida Supreme Court school finance ruling and a chart from a Stanford-based academic make a very powerful case for just how misguided reform critics have been – and alas, remain to this day.

Before diving into the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens for Strong Schools vs. Florida State Board let’s note from the outset that people have varying and deeply held preferences on school funding. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to spend more; lots of folks do. Lawmakers, however, must balance this desire against the desire to spend funds on competing demands for priorities such as heath care, higher education, transportation, criminal justice etc., and within a context of preferred overall levels of taxation. This, in short, is how democracy works. In Citizens a group of petitioners sued the state to have the courts take over education budgeting. After a decade of proceedings, the Florida Supreme Court ruled against the petitioners:

Moreover, Petitioners’ argument flies in the face of the trial court’s detailed findings, none of which Petitioners challenge for lacking a basis in the record. As just a few examples, the trial court found that: “Florida has been a national leader in education reform”; Florida intentionally adopted rigorous standards and set cut scores at a level that places the majority of students below the satisfactory level; scoring a “Level 1 or 2” on the assessment “is not an indication that a student ‘can’t read’ or is illiterate”; the State’s “high performance standards . . . have led to improvement over time”; and Florida “has outpaced the nation in closing” achievement and performance gaps that “exist throughout the country.”

Translation: The trial court made detailed findings that Florida public schools have improved that the petitioners entirely ignored, and this is a large problem for a case urging the courts to take over school budgeting.

The next paragraph is also quite revealing:

While Petitioners’ proposed standard is problematic in and of itself, Petitioners’ own pleadings expose the flaws in their arguments and highlight why Coalition requires that we approve the result reached by the First District. Indeed, what Petitioners seek is for the courts to order Respondents “to establish a remedial plan that . . . includes necessary studies to determine what resources and standards are necessary to provide a high-quality education to Florida students.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, Petitioners do not know what a “high quality system” looks like, how it can be achieved, or what resources and standards are necessary. Instead, they—and presumably the courts—will know an “efficient” and “high quality” system, as well as an “adequate” level of overall funding, when they see a study that shows what it is. Petitioners invite this Court to not only intrude into the Legislature’s appropriations power, see Coalition, 680 So. 2d at 407 (“[P]resumably the Plaintiffs would expect the Court to evaluate, and either affirm or set aside, future appropriations decisions . . . .”), but to inject itself into education policy making and oversight. We decline the invitation for the courts to overstep their bounds.

Translation: the majority was unwilling to suspend normal democracy on K-12 budgeting to begin a process of trying to figure out what to do as an alternative.

Even if we were inclined to accept all of Petitioners’ arguments regarding justiciability and separation of powers, on the record presented here Petitioners still could not prevail. At bottom, Petitioners’ blanket challenge to the educational system is a funding challenge, one rooted in the notion that the Legislature is not providing an adequate overall level of funding and that the lack of funding has resulted in disproportionate outcomes for certain students. That is clear from Petitioners’ allegations, Petitioners’ specific request for relief, and the rest of the record. Indeed, the trial court noted, among other things, that “[t]he primary thrust of [Petitioners’] complaint is that there is a crisis . . . caused by the State of Florida’s inadequate funding of education,” that Petitioners “asserted that more resources were clearly needed to address the problems they identified in their – 35 – complaint,” and “that the evidence was focusing on [Petitioners’] ‘need for more resources’ argument.” But the trial court’s express findings doom Petitioners’ funding challenge and theory of the case. Not only did the trial court find that Petitioners “failed to establish any causal relationship between any alleged low student performance and a lack of resources,” but the trial court found that “the weight of the evidence . . . establishes a lack of any causal relationship between additional financial resources and improved student outcomes.” Petitioners’ failure to establish such a causal relationship provides an independent basis for rejection of their claims.

Translation: bitter experience has taught us that it is entirely possible to infuse public school systems with additional resources without realizing improvement in student outcomes of the sort that Florida has in fact seen.

In essence, the court ruled that the improvement the petitioners claim to seek is already underway, that they can’t quantify what it would take to achieve a high-quality system, and that their preferred remedy (large funding increases) would not necessarily result in improvements in student outcomes. The chart below, produced by Stanford, Harvard and University of Munich scholars, plots academic achievement scores by spending per pupil trends:

The Florida Constitution states, “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.” Did New York fulfill this mandate? No. The state increased spending by a huge $6,000 per pupil only to see average academic gains – nothing “efficient” about that, I’m afraid. How about Wyoming? Nope. Once again, there were huge increases in per pupil spending but below-average academic gains for students. The taxpayers of Iowa provided an increase approximately three times larger than Florida, and Maine four times larger. But both states saw academic improvement far less than a third of what Florida’s students achieved.

According to this chart, the state that came closest to providing a uniform, efficient and high-quality system of schools was Florida. The petitioners asked the Florida Supreme Court to take over school funding decisions in order to spend like Maine or Wyoming to achieve the sort of results seen in, ahem, Florida, with modest rather than large increases in per pupil funding. The Florida Supreme Court (wisely, in my opinion) declined.

Gov. Bush’s education reforms aimed to improve student outcomes employing a variety of strategies – including increase in funding – and the available evidence strongly suggests that in tandem, these reforms succeeded in raising achievement, particularly among historically low performing student subgroups. Florida’s taxpayers shouldn’t be surprised that many folks in the education system – those who deserve national recognition for their success – would like to have greater resources. Everyone wants more resources, but those resources are scarce. Public funds are budgeted democratically, and this chart makes it easy to see where the budgetary priorities have been.

It’s very difficult to imagine large increases in K-12 funding while more than doubling health care spending, even with the federal government picking up half the tab. People care deeply about all kinds of spending in the “All Other” category, and Florida lawmakers have shielded K-12 from Hurricane Medicaid better than most. The potential funds for a Wyoming style surge in K-12 spending, which didn’t do Wyoming students any apparent good by the way, went to pay for health care. The school lobby doesn’t have to like this decision, but both the decision to seek what amount to efficiency gains (more bang for the education buck) and to focus state resources on health care were decided democratically. In other words, not everyone has to like the decisions, but they nevertheless were legitimate.

Lawmakers, moreover, have a moral and in Florida, a constitutional duty to seek an efficient system of schools that maximizes return on investment. Globally, the United States is a very high-spending country with catastrophically poor results for minority students on international exams. The international PISA exams show, for instance, that American Black and Hispanic students score closer to the average scores in Mexico than they do to students in Europe, Asia or indeed to American Anglo students.

Mexico spends but a fraction of what American schools spend in per pupil spending and faces far greater poverty challenges than those in the United States. People can differ on whether to spend more in the United States, but we must close these shamefully low levels of achievement – and that involves getting more out of our already enormous investment.

William Faulkner wrote that the past is never dead, it’s not even past. The health care budgetary pressures are set to accelerate due to the aging of our already elderly population. Nevertheless, Florida policies can empower educators to provide highly appealing school models at reasonable costs in a way that will attract and retain high-capacity teachers and include disadvantaged students. This is mutually beneficial to teachers, parents, students and taxpayers, and is improving and evolving over time through a decentralized process of voluntary exchange. If this process can continue, the best is yet to come in Florida K-12 education.

Florida not only needs to continue this good work on K-12, it needs a leader as effective and fearless as Jeb Bush was on K-12 reform to radically improve the effectiveness of heath care spending, as another couple of decades like the last two threaten to squeeze out other vital priorities.

Gov. Bush and his team took a sad song (the Florida K-12 system of 1999) and made it better. This task now falls to a younger generation of leaders, and most importantly, to you.

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Course ChoiceEducation and Public PolicyEducation ResearchEducation Savings AccountsPolicy WonksSchool ChoiceTax Credit ScholarshipsVouchers

Urban Institute findings encourage an opportunity powerup

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

A new study by the Urban Institute shows how much the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship helps students like Robert Crockett, pictured here.

A new study from the Urban Institute on college enrollment/completion rates of Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students represents both a triumph and a call for additional action. Let’s touch upon the triumph part first.

The analysis shows statistically significant benefits for students participating in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship in both college attendance and degree competition compared to a matched sample of similar Florida public school students. Moreover, the study finds that the longer students participate in the program, the greater the size of positive effect.

Some context makes these findings all the more impressive: The average size of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship is less than $7000 on average while the state of Florida spent $10,145 per pupil in 2015-16. Increasing the return on K-12 investment is precisely what Florida needs, and what the tax-credit program delivers.

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program provides scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools. Florida is among those states with the highest degree competition rates in the country, and this includes very successful programs providing bonuses to public schools for students passing college credit by exam. We have reason to suspect, therefore, that the Florida “blue” columns in the Urban Institute chart above would rank competitively if we had similar data from the other 49 states. Nevertheless, the FTC students (“yellow” columns) show statistically significantly higher attendance rates across all attendance groups.

The progressively larger impact seen in the Urban Institute analysis sits comfortably with earlier random assignment studies of choice programs, which found modest but (crucially) cumulative year-by-year gains for choice students. Seeing significant long-term higher education benefits for disadvantaged students at a lower per-pupil cost represents an unambiguous triumph of policy innovation. This success should embolden further reform.

These results are great, but students need much more. Thus far, we only have scratched the surface of the potential to positively transform learning. It is vital to give families the opportunity to choose a good-fit school for their child, and there are a variety of benefits to such policies above and beyond those captured in the Urban Institute study. School, however, represents only part of the picture to learning, and what the country and Florida needs is a process to discover methods to substantially improve learning on a continual basis. In other words, American learning should constantly improve.

Status-quo defenders frequently lay the blame for the failings of public education at the feet of poverty. This school of thought struggles to explain why countries with far less money and far greater poverty manage to deliver a much higher bang for the education buck. Take a gander at the above chart and ask yourself: Just how much of the success in American learning can we attribute to our schools?

If history is any guide, we safely can conclude that a system of ZIP-code assigned schools governed by boards with visibility and turnout with few to no other choices is not likely to produce continual improvement. We’ve enjoyed some success with quasi-market mechanisms to allow educators to create alternative public schools and policies to allow select students to attend private schools. We should, however, view these policies as primitive prototypes in an evolutionary process.

In 2006, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which included a bipartisan mix of the great and good including two former Secretaries of Education and an assortment of other grandees concluded, “We’ve squeezed everything we can out of a system that was designed a century ago. We’ve not only put in lots more money and not gotten significantly better results, we’ve also tried every program we can think of and not gotten significantly better results at scale. This is the sign of a system that has reached its limits.” Commissioner Jack Jennings told the Christian Science Monitor: “I think we’ve tried to do what we can to improve American schools within the current context. Now we need to think much more daringly.”

Some 13 years later, these assessments still ring true – and not just for public schools. School vouchers and charter schools were radical and state-of-the-art technologies in 1990 and 1991, respectively. We need new policies, new schools, new school models and more choice among methods of education in addition to schools and policies that will empower teachers to realize their own visions of a high quality education. Emboldened by the success of our prototype policies, we do indeed need to think much more daringly.

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Shoddy statistics nearly doomed school choice in Florida

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

The dissent’s cursory review of faulty education data in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education could have deprived many Florida families of educational choice.

Do vouchers and charter schools harm public schools, thereby violating the state’s constitutional duty to fund an adequate system of uniform public schools? Until last month’s 4-3 decision in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education, the Florida Supreme Court had ignored the empirical question entirely. In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the court majority decided that a theoretical harm, real or not, was enough to declare the Opportunity Scholarship Program unconstitutional.

The three dissenting justices in Citizens for Strong Schools, who all decided on Bush v. Holmes 13 years earlier, finally were forced to examine the evidence. Unfortunately, the dissent’s cursory review of education data focused on some bad statistics. One more vote and shoddy data could have spelled the end of educational options for more than 425,000 children in the Sunshine State.

The dissent prominently featured a USA Today article that ranked education by state.

The article was compiled from Education Week’s Quality Counts “overall” 2017 ranking. That ranking used multiple statistics: graduation rates, public school spending, eighth-grade proficiency in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), adults with a bachelor’s degree or above, and the percentage of adults in the state with incomes above the national median.

The ranking is severely flawed for several reasons:

  • It incorporates K-12 per pupil spending – an input – into its analysis of K-12 quality (which should be based on outputs). One cannot argue that school quality is poor because funding is low, if the cited statistic also uses funding as part of the definition of school quality. Otherwise, you’re just arguing that “school funding is low because school funding is low,” which is not an impressive line of reasoning.
  • Graduation rates do not tell us anything regarding school quality or efficiency because states can set low or high standards for graduation.
  • NAEP proficiency rates are important and useful in determining the relative quality of a school system. However, the ranking fails to adjust for poverty or race, which biases the results in favor of whiter and wealthier states.
  • The percentage of adults with college degrees and their incomes might tell us something about the quality of education in the distant past. But the results might also be skewed by recent immigration or cost of living differences. At the very least, degree and income stats favor whiter and wealthier states, and don’t really tell us much about K-12 quality now.

During the trial, lawyers for the Florida Department of Education argued that Florida’s K-12 outcomes were superior to that of New Jersey, a state that lost a funding adequacy lawsuit in 1985 and was forced by the court to greatly increase spending for students in high-poverty school districts.

The dissent pointed to the USA Today article and noted that New Jersey ranked No. 2 while Florida ranked No. 29. But as stated above, the overall USA Today/Education Week ranking biases in favor of wealthier and whiter states, like New Jersey.

Digging deeper into the data, we find that Florida has a larger minority population with black and Hispanic students making up 54 percent of the student body, compared to 42 percent in New Jersey. When comparing NAEP eighth-grade reading and math results, Florida tends to do just as well as New Jersey for black, Hispanic and low-income student populations.

The fact that New Jersey’s low-income districts spend nearly three times as much as Florida and achieve the same results on eighth-grade NAEP tests is telling. If New Jersey is high quality, as the dissent insists, then so, too, is Florida.

Contrary to the insistence of some critics, the court majority correctly rejected the power to determine “adequate” K-12 spending based on platitudes like “efficient” and “high-quality.” The majority also recognized the complexity of education statistics and rejected the argument that school choice makes Florida’s K-12 system perform poorly. In fact, the court recognized that these programs may have a positive effect on public schools.

Whether public schools should be better funded is another story entirely. It’s a debate we should continue to have, but you just can’t use bad statistics to throw Florida’s entire K-12 system, including school choice, under the bus to make your case anymore.

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