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florida and education reform

Elisabeth’s story: From a mom’s worst nightmare to a mom’s best dream

Roger Mooney November 2, 2020

Roger Mooney

Elisabeth Edwards 9, attends Master’s Training Academy in Apopka, a K-12 private Christian school about 20 miles outside of Orlando, on a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship.

Elisabeth Edwards came home from school one afternoon and told her mom that she wanted to die.

She was 6.

Elisabeth was stupid, she told her mom. That’s how they made her feel at school. She questioned why God made her that way. She questioned why God made her at all.

She told her mom that she wanted to kill herself. She asked if she could kill herself right then.

Her daughter’s words were nearly too much for Consuelo to process. But she clung to the hope that Elisabeth was having a rough time adjusting to the first grade and to her new school, and this was her way of acting out.

But then Elisabeth began banging her head against the walls at home when she was angry. Then she started banging her head against the walls at school.

“That’s when I knew she was serious,” Consuelo said.

Elisabeth, now 9, has a sensory disorder that can prevent her from processing at lot of information at once. It became an issue soon after Elisabeth began attending the first grade. She would get confused in class and grew angry over her confusion. What Elisabeth perceived as a less-than-empathetic reaction from those around her – classmates and teachers – made the situation worse.

That’s when Elisabeth developed suicidal thoughts. Consuelo found a therapist and another school for her daughter. Elisabeth lasted a week. Administrators at the new school asked Consuelo to withdraw Elisabeth because they weren’t equipped to handle students with behavioral issues.

Consuelo and her husband, Maxwell, a plumber, qualified for a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, one of two income-based scholarships managed by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog. She found herself scrolling through the school directory on Step Up’s website, searching for one near their Apopka, Florida, home that accepts students with a sensory disorder.

Consuelo came across Master’s Training Academy in Apopka, a K-12 private Christian school about 20 miles outside of Orlando. The school focuses on students with behavioral health and learning disabilities. She called Helenikki Thompson, the school principal. Consuelo was upfront about Elisabeth’s condition and expected to be turned away. Thompson invited Elisabeth to spend a day at the school.

It was a perfect match. Elisabeth is now in the fourth grade at Master’s. She has a legion of friends. She leaves thank you notes and homemade muffins for her teachers. She said she can’t remember the last time she was angry at school.

“I felt like I was at home, because I just saw everybody was happy,” Elisabeth said of that first visit. “All the kids were funny, happy, everything that you would want in a friend. So was the teacher.”

Consuelo no longer receives phone calls from exasperated teachers and is no longer worried about her daughter’s mental health. She said she owes Elisabeth’s life to Master’s Training Academy and to Step Up.

“If it wasn’t for Master’s, I’d probably be going to grave site grieving for her,” Consuelo said. “It was that bad.”

‘We want her back’

Consuelo describes her daughter as an outgoing young lady with a beautiful smile and a warm heart.

“To me she is a typical person who is trying to find her way in a world that is full of craziness,” Consuelo said. “Sometimes, when she was young, she didn’t know how to internalize that.”

A person’s tone of voice can provoke Elisabeth. Stern language from the teachers and staff at the first two schools Elisabeth attended only made her outbursts worse.

“I had broken out in hives when she was going through all that,” Consuelo said. “That’s how bad it was. It was because of nerves. When your kid goes through something, you go through something.”

Elisabeth did have an outburst during her initial visit to Master’s Training Academy. It happened when a teacher asked her to read out loud. Elisabeth received speech therapy to help her properly enunciate words. She had some bad experiences when asked in school to read in front of the class. She thought this new teacher was setting her up for more embarrassment.

The reaction from Thompson, who was in the room, was not what Consuelo or her daughter expected.

Thompson remembers telling Elisabeth, “I’m sorry for your past hurt. I don’t know who hurt you. We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to help you.”

She said she gave Elisabeth a hug and told her she would see her the next day.

“I don’t know what type of experiences she had, but I know she was hurt,” Thompson said. “She was damaged really bad.”

Thompson’s son, Brendan, was bullied in his district school. He received therapy and attended Apopka Christian Academy for high school, where he attended on a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. He graduated in 2016 and is currently enrolled in Seminole State College of Florida.

Dealing with what her son went through gives Thompson a unique perspective on why children can feel threatened at school. Thompson and her staff do not raise their voices when a student is acting out. They try to dilute the situation with kind words and hugs. The school has a quiet room, where a student go to calm down. The room has soft lighting and comfortable chairs. The student can read, listen to soft music or pray if they choose.

Teachers at Master’s have been known to diffuse a situation by taking the student or the entire class outside for some fresh air. Thompson said there is at least one activity a week that allows the students to put away the books and have some fun. An example: a spa day for the elementary school girls, where they do each other’s hair and nails. Pre-pandemic, of course.

Consuelo said it took Elisabeth months before she realized she could trust the staff at her new school. And when she did, she took off academically.

“I can tell you, when someone breaks down a kid, they can really break a kid down, and it takes a long time to build a kid back up,” Consuelo said. “What they did for her in the beginning, when she had her blowouts and cried, the teacher would look at her and say, ‘You know what? We still love you here. You can be mad at us and you can cry, but we’ll see you again tomorrow.’”

Thompson remembers a day not long after Elisabeth enrolled when Consuelo came after school to pick up her daughter. Consuelo asked Thompson how the day went. Thompson said Elisabeth had a moment.

“She said, ‘I’m sorry. I know you don’t want her back,’” Thompson recalled. “I said, ‘Why would you say that? We want her back. I just want you to know as a parent that she was having a bad day.’”

Master’s tailored the curriculum for Elisabeth, giving her extra time in subjects where she struggled and letting her advance at her own pace in those where she excelled.

Elisabeth has stopped telling her mom that she feels stupid. “I feel like I’m the smartest kid in the world,” she said.

Consuelo volunteers at the school. She’ll help out in the main office, chaperon field trips and watch a class if a teacher needs to step away. She has nothing but praise for Master’s Training Academy, the empathy toward Elisabeth shown by Thompson and her staff, and for Step Up, for managing the scholarship that enabled Elisabeth to attend the school.

“(Master’s) represent the scholarship very well,” Consuelo said. “If it wasn’t for Step Up, I wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition. I owe (Step Up) my daughter’s life, and that means the world to me.”

November 2, 2020 0 comment

Featured Florida Tax Credit Scholarship News Parent Empowerment School Choice

New automated tuition payment system offers FTC families convenience, improved security

Lisa Buie April 17, 2020

Lisa Buie

Schools and families that participate in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program now have a faster, easier and more secure way to process tuition payments.

A new automated system developed by Step Up For Students, Florida’s largest scholarship funding organization, allows parents to approve tuition payments for their children’s schools electronically. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, the largest of six scholarship programs in the state, serves about 100,000 economically disadvantaged students and allows companies to receive state tax credits in exchange for scholarship donations.

Families received emails this week explaining the new process and requesting payment approvals for the final payment of the 2019-20 school year. Those who haven’t responded will receive follow-up emails and texts today.

Here’s how it works: Based on each school’s verification of scholarship students’ attendance, Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, will email each parent or guardian a link that includes the amount of their tuition check. The parent or guardian will be asked to click on the link and approve or deny the amount electronically. Once approved, an ACH payment will be sent on the already existing Florida Tax Credit Scholarship schedule.

At that time, an advisory email will be sent to the school that the money is being deposited into its bank account. Parents who deny payments will be required to give a reason. A Step Up For Students representative will contact them to follow up. Step Up officials are urging parents to contact the organization before denying a payment to allow the opportunity to address any issues.

Under the former system, Step Up mailed paper checks via traditional mail to the schools. Parents then had to visit the school and sign over their checks, which the school accounting staff deposited into the school’s bank account.

The law establishing the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program in 2001 required that paper checks be signed in person. In 2017, the law was changed to allow alternative methods of fund transfers.

Step Up already had been working toward an electronic system, but social distancing ordered to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic prompted staff to fast-track the project, said chief financial officer Joe Pfountz.

“It really helps from a cost and documentation perspective,” Pfountz said. “The electronic process allows us to be even better stewards of the generous gifts donors have entrusted to us to help every student receive a high-quality education by attending the school that best fits their needs.”

The new system will allow non-contact processing, which means parents and school staff can maintain social distancing, keeping them safer during the pandemic. Beyond that, it also will allow business to continue during emergencies such as hurricanes.

Currently, the new system is being used only for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, but Step Up expects to expand it to serve families receiving the other scholarship programs it administers.

“Most schools are closed right now, so they won’t have to open for parents to sign checks,” said Scott Smith, director of program accounting for Step Up For Students.

Smith said the old system left the program vulnerable to errors and fraud due to checks being lost in the mail or stolen by third parties. The new system will prevent that and speed up processing time to as little as two business days once a parent approves the payment.

“Some of our schools are very small and depend on scholarship payments to meet their payroll and pay their bills,” Smith said. “They don’t have a large safety net.”

Parents and school staff must do their part for the new system to work. Parents should open the emails and click on the links and approve the payments as soon as they receive them so that scholarship payments are not delayed. Those who fail to approve payments risk forfeiting their child’s scholarship.

Meanwhile, schools should make sure they update their banking information with Step Up For Students now and whenever they switch banks or accounts so that payments can be deposited promptly, Pfountz said.

April 17, 2020 4 comments

Education Choice Featured McKay Scholarship Parent Voices Parental Choice School Choice Video

One family, two generations of education choice

Ron Matus December 18, 2019

Ron Matus

Alicia Davis, left, and her wife, Kaitlin Davis, help their 9-year-old twins, Brian and Leah, with their homework. Like Alicia and Kaitlin did when they were students, Brian and Leah are benefiting from education choice options available to Florida families.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Alicia Davis needed a fresh start after a storm of challenges – including being a teen mom – overwhelmed her in high school. Kaitlin Davis needed a safe place after kids in her assigned middle school tormented her over her sexual identity.

They are adults now, happy, married, and raising a family. For their 9-year-old twins, Brian and Leah, who endured bullying in kindergarten, the Davises turned almost instinctively to the kind of education choice options that are available to parents in one of the most choice-rich states in America. They found a private school, courtesy of a state scholarship, that knew how to navigate their children’s “disabilities” while also understanding their pain.

Brian and Leah Davis are making steady progress at The Foundation Academy. They are pictured here with one of their teachers, Donna Anderson.

When you have options, “You don’t have to sacrifice being emotionally okay to have a good education. You don’t have to sacrifice a good education to be emotionally okay,” said Kaitlin, now 23. “You can have both.”

(Watch the video at the end of this post to hear Alicia and Kaitlin tell their story in their own words.)

Kaitlin and Alicia, 25, have been together five years. They married last year. Kaitlin is a collision adviser at a Toyota dealership. Alicia stays at home so she can best care for their 5-year-old, Emmett, who has diabetes. Kaitlin is pregnant with their fourth child. Their cozy house in a working-class neighborhood is 20 minutes from the school they consider a lifeline.

The Davis’s experience with public education is fast becoming the new normal in Florida. A generation ago, about 10 percent of K-12 students in Florida attended something other than assigned district schools. Today it’s more than 40 percent.

“Multiple choice” families with children enrolled in two or more options are not hard to find. It won’t be long before the same is true of families like the Davises.

***

Alicia Davis didn’t do well in district schools. ADHD made her unruly. Medication for it left her sleepy. Other issues piled on. Making friends was a struggle when her family moved from small-town Ohio. So was coming to terms with her sexual orientation. So were family members who didn’t understand.

In 10th grade, Alicia got pregnant. She didn’t listen to those who advised her to end the pregnancy; abortion violated her belief system. She didn’t listen to dark voices in her own head, either. At one point, she said, she stood on a third-floor apartment balcony for 45 minutes before crawling away. “I said, ‘This isn’t how my life should be for my babies,’ ” she said through tears. “So I talked myself down.”

School, though, didn’t get easier. In her junior year, Alicia was told she couldn’t graduate because she was too far behind to catch up. That’s when her mom went searching for options. She discovered Alicia could get a McKay Scholarship, an education choice scholarship for students with disabilities. By coincidence, Nadia Hionides, the principal of an inclusive, faith-based private school called The Foundation Academy, came calling. Alicia’s school had alerted her that Alicia might benefit from something different.

She did. “Nadia never said no, she never turned her back, she never said I couldn’t do anything,” Alicia said. The non-judgmental atmosphere was key. “Nobody cared that I was a teen mom … nobody cared that I was open with my sexuality,” she said.

Alicia and her classmates worked on a project about coping with schizophrenia. For the community service component, she volunteered at a mental health resource center.

Without all the distractions, she said, she could finally focus on learning.

***

Kaitlin Davis “came out” in eighth grade. The bullies pounced. They called her names, bumped her in the halls. Kaitlin wondered if it would ever end. She didn’t fight back because she didn’t want to risk a suspension. She didn’t tell school officials because, “I felt like it was my battle.”

Silence took its toll. “I was depressed,” she said. “I stayed home from school a lot. I would make up things. I was quote unquote sick a lot.”

Kaitlin worried high school could be as bad if not worse, because she and the bullies were zoned for the same school. By coincidence, Kaitlin’s brother had been attending The Foundation Academy with a McKay Scholarship. Her parents knew it was warm and welcoming.

Kaitlin was not eligible for education choice scholarships. Her parents’ income was too high for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for lower-income students, and she didn’t have disabilities to qualify for McKay. Today, she would be eligible for two, newer state scholarships: the Family Empowerment Scholarship for working- and middle-class families, and the Hope Scholarship for bullying victims. (The FTC, FES and Hope scholarships are administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Kaitlin said it hurt her parents financially to pay tuition. Mom’s a nurse. Dad’s a Navy vet and a welder by training. But for a year they found a way. The next year, Kaitlin enrolled in Florida Virtual School. She was in a hurry to get to work, and total immersion in FLVS allowed her to complete two years of schooling in one. She returned to The Foundation Academy for her senior year, to enjoy prom and other rituals of a more typical school. Hionides offered a tuition break in return for Kaitlin’s work as a file clerk and camp counselor.

Had it not been for the school, Kaitlin said, “I would have still been in my shell.”

And probably, she said, a dropout.

***

Brian and Leah have speech impediments, which at times can make them a little hard to understand. But Brian’s kindergarten teacher, Alicia said, heard a kid who couldn’t learn.

The Davis twins’ confidence has increased at The Foundation Academy.

When Brian struggled, the teacher “put him off to the side,” Alicia said, which gave his classmates an opening to pick on him. “Once it started,” Alicia said, “it just never stopped.” On a bus ride home, both Brian and Leah, who defended her brother, ended up with knots on their heads the size of half dollars.

When Alicia complained, she said school officials told her to file a police report. (She refused, given the bullies were 5-year-olds.) When problems with the teacher persisted, she said district officials suggested a transfer. But other district schools either had no openings or other reasons the twins couldn’t be accommodated.

In desperation, Alicia again turned to The Foundation Academy and McKay Scholarships. At the time, she and Kaitlin were living in a neighboring county. But with Brian and Leah in a safe school, the commute – more than an hour each way – was worth it.

Now the twins are in third grade and making steady academic progress. One of their teachers said Brian’s confidence makes him especially smooth at public presentations, and Leah’s makes her a natural leader.

“That school is like a giant family,” Alicia said. And for her and Kaitlin’s family, it has been for two generations now.

It feels, she said, like home.

December 18, 2019 0 comment

Charter Schools Customization Education Equity Education Savings Accounts Parent Empowerment Parental Choice School Choice

Charter schools and the unbundling of K-12 education services

Doug Tuthill November 8, 2019

Doug Tuthill

Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill

Editor’s note: This post is an edited version of a talk Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill delivered in October to the Florida Charter School Conference in Orlando.

Products and services in many industries are in the process of being unbundled. Thirty years ago, we had to buy albums to own our favorite songs. Now we can buy individual songs and bits of songs online.

Classified newspaper ads used to be a cash cow for daily newspapers. But no more. Craigslist’s unbundling of classified ads is a key reason daily newspapers are dying.

The demise of cable TV may be next as streaming services such as Netflix unbundle programing. Shopping malls are closing as Amazon unbundles retail shopping, and banks are responding to the unbundling of banking services by licensing unbundled banking applications in a new business model called “banking as a service.”

Now the process of unbundling public education services has begun. Thus far, this unbundling has included magnet schools, charter schools, dual enrollment, virtual schools, course choice, micro-schools, home schooling, workspace, and scholarships and vouchers to help families pay for private schools.

But the real game changer will be Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). ESAs are going to accelerate the unbundling of public education services.

ESAs are publicly-funded financial accounts that families use to purchase state-approved education products and services for their children. Instead of a school district spending a student’s public education dollars, through ESAs state government allows a student’s family to spend these dollars.

About 18,000 Florida students will have ESAs this school year through two programs — the Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs/unique abilities, and Reading Scholarship Accounts for struggling readers in district elementary schools. These students’ families will use their ESA funds to purchase products and services, such as public and private school courses, afterschool tutoring, physical and occupational therapy, speech therapy, education hardware and software, summative and formative assessments, curriculum material, and books. Over the last two years, Florida families have used ESA funds to purchase products and services from over 10,000 education providers.

The number of families using ESAs will probably increase in the future. In six years, Florida could have 200,000 families spending $1.5 billion annually through their ESAs. This much purchasing power in the hands of families presents opportunities and challenges for Florida’s charter schools.

There will be competition to serve these families. Charter school companies in other states are exploring coming to Florida with offerings beyond schools. Some are planning to open charter and private schools with robust afterschool and summer programs. Others are planning to sell onsite and online courses, and one is exploring partnering with ride-sharing services to help transport students to in-school, afterschool, and summer programs. Think “Uber for Kids.”

Home schooling is the fastest growing education choice option in the country. Charter schools could be selling this population access to classrooms, computer and science labs, afterschool and summer programs, and onsite and online courses.

With the possible exception of Miami-Dade, most Florida districts will be slow to offer services to ESA families. Florida charter schools could help fill this void.

Dayspring Academy charter school in Pasco County moved quickly to create an afterschool tutoring program after the Reading ESA became law. It is now one of Florida’s top providers of ESA-funded tutoring services. (Dayspring founder and chief financial officer John Legg is a board of directors member for Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Other charters could follow the Dayspring example. Entrepreneurial Urban Leagues across Florida are also moving quickly to develop afterschool and summer reading programs for families with reading ESAs.

The unbundling of products and services inevitably leads to innovative ways to rebundle them. Spotify is a good example of a company facilitating rebundling in the music industry. Spotify empowers and enables music listeners to organize songs from diverse artists into customized playlists and share these lists with others. Spotify empowers customers to have a greater sense of ownership over their music since they now control how their “albums” are assembled. They also have access to the diverse playlists of millions of other music fans.

We need to replicate an appropriate version of the Spotify experience in public education. Educators need to be empowered and enabled to rebundle their services and products so that families can purchase highly effective customized instruction for each child with their ESA funds.

The unbundling and rebundling of education products and services is coming. Charter schools can help drive this train or follow the example of daily newspapers and get run over by it.

It’s their choice.

November 8, 2019 0 comment

Magnet Schools School Choice School spotlight Spotlights Student spotlight Video

Look what can sprout when school districts embrace education choice

Ron Matus November 7, 2019

Ron Matus

Christopher Bermudez and Peyton Ecklund, both 17, engage in a classroom-based citizen science project at BioTECH High in Miami. The school allows students to pursue authentic scientific research studies that may result in publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presentations at local, national and international conferences. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

MIAMI – Christopher Bermudez likes plants. Like, really likes plants. The thought of reviving a droopy sprig of mizuna inspired the 17-year-old to riff: “When you kind of have faith in the plants, and you keep taking care of it, and you see it spring back up to life, that’s one of the biggest fulfilling feelings ever.”

How gratifying for Bermudez that he gets to pair that infatuation with real-world research. Among other projects, he and his classmates at BioTECH High School are helping scientists with a mammoth, years-long venture to determine which cultivars of edible plants will make the best crops for – no joke – space travel.

“Our research helps supplement their research,” said Bermudez, who’s aiming for a career in experimental horticulture. “You’re kind of helping the future of our species.”

BioTECH and its lovable science geeks make for a compelling narrative. So does the back story.

First pan to Florida, which has expanded charter schools, private school scholarships, education savings accounts and other varieties of educational choice as much as any state in America. Then zoom in to Miami-Dade County, home to a forward-thinking school district that chose to surf this “tsunami of choice” rather than fight it. The result is a rich, evolving, educational ecosystem where a slew of new educational cultivars are vying to find their niches.

If the theory holds, ever more students will choose from ever more options – including district choice options like BioTECH – to find the one that fits their needs and fuels their passions.

Daniel Mateo is principal at BioTECH High, the nation’s only high school specializing in conservation biology. To hear an interview with Mateo, click on the video link at the end of this story. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

“Choice is very important in human nature, right? And I think that for students, choice is of utmost importance,” said BioTECH principal Daniel Mateo, a chemist by training. “When you force a child to do something, it never really works out quite the way you think it’s going to work out. But when you give them the flexibility of choice, you allow them to select what it is they want to do based on that natural affinity that they have for that particular subject. It’s a given. They’re going to perform.”

BioTECH, all of five years old, is a magnet school and the nation’s only high school specializing in conservation biology. Its aim: to develop successive generations of researchers who will apply their ingenuity and training to the conservation of life on Earth.

Heady stuff. Which makes it all the more remarkable, maybe, that BioTECH has no entrance requirements; serves a student body that is mostly low-income; and shares a campus with a once-struggling middle school.

Richmond Heights Middle, 14 miles southwest of gleaming downtown Miami, was perpetually C-rated by the state. Over the years, scores of school choice options mushroomed around it – and parents responded accordingly. Enrollment fell by half.

In turn, the Miami-Dade school district responded accordingly. It considered what academic programming students and parents wanted; what college degrees and jobs were hot; what community partnerships it could forge or strengthen. With help from a $10 million federal magnet schools grant, BioTECH was born.

The middle school is home base. But BioTECH’s 400 students spend big chunks of time doing research at three partner institutions: Zoo Miami, Everglades National Park and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Their lab equipment is college-caliber. Half their teachers are working scientists. They’re expected to shoot for publication in a scientific journal by the time they graduate.

Andrea Medina, 17, a senior at BioTECH High, wants to pursue a career in the medical field when she graduates from college. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

Some of BioTECH’s “junior scientists” are studying the intestinal flora of spider monkeys to develop diets that make captive monkeys less prone to stomach problems. Others, like Bermudez, are doing research for Growing Beyond Earth, a partnership between Fairchild and NASA. Still others work in micropropagation labs at Fairchild, growing rare orchids that can be reintroduced into slices of South Florida where they once thrived.

“Who thought plants could be so fun?” said senior Peyton Ecklund.

Ecklund, 17, who plans to pursue botanical research in college, chose BioTECH over other high-performing schools in Miami-Dade. She liked that it was “trying to do something special” and emphasized student-driven learning. “We have to make the projects from scratch. And we have to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “If you learn how to be independent and figure it out on your own now, who knows what you can do in the future?”

Judging by demand, BioTECH is a smash. Last year, it reeled in 600 applications for 150 seats. So far this year, it’s on pace for 1,000 applications for 100 seats.

It’s no surprise the school took root in Miami. Miami-Dade has the highest rate of charter school and private school students of any urban district in Florida. It has one of the highest rates of students exercising district choice. More than 60 percent of Miami-Dade students are now enrolled in hundreds of district options, from magnet schools and career academies to international programs and K-8 centers.

“We recognized … the choice tsunami was upon us,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said in April. “And I was not going to do what lot of my colleagues did. Which is, ‘Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t hit us.’ “

BioTECH earned an A from the state this year. (Richmond Heights earned a B.) Its demographics mirror the district’s. Eighty-nine percent of its students are non-white (it’s 93 percent for the district). Sixty-three percent are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch (it’s 66 percent for the district). Forty-two percent, meanwhile, receive special education services or accommodations.

“That’s 100 percent by design,” Mateo said. “It’s not about having elite students … If you have a passion (for science), we can cultivate that.”

The district does not provide transportation to BioTECH. That’s not a plus for equity. But HVAC repairmen and nursing assistants find a way to get their kids there just like radiologists and military officers do.

Daniella Lira, 17, a junior at BioTECH, said her parents left poverty in Peru for a better life in the U.S. A love for animals and a desire to be a veterinarian led her to the school. Diving into hands-on science has her considering other possibilities.

“Being part of the research and being treated as an actual scientist has opened my eyes,” Lira said.

BioTECH should open some eyes, too. There’s no end to the variety that can sprout in choice-rich soil.

November 7, 2019 0 comment

ArchivED Education and Public Policy Education Politics Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice

archivED: For school choice foes, a more complete history of vouchers and race

Travis Pillow October 26, 2019

Travis Pillow

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in July 2017, chronicles several chapters from the movement’s rich past.

In the 1900’s, Mary McLeod Bethune founded a private vocational school as an alternative for black students Florida had relegated to separate-and-unequal public schools. In the 1910’s, a group of Catholic nuns clashed with segregationist politicians. Their crime? Educating black children. In the 1960’s, civil rights activists sought to protest schools that systematically shortchanged black students. So they created their own.

Fast forward to 2017. Politicians can no longer segregate public schools by law. State constitutions in Florida and elsewhere mandate public school systems that provides for all students according to “uniform” funding standards. Educators who, like their predecessors of the last century, want to create alternatives that better serve their communities, no longer face prosecution. And they have new options that didn’t exist a century ago. They can start new private schools.

In Florida, if they comply with state regulations, their students can turn to one of the nation’s four largest private school choice programs* to help pay tuition.

A long, winding road brought us here. It includes some dark passages that, recently, became fodder for scurrilous attacks on the school choice movement. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called scholarship programs like Florida’s “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

Her charge rests on a short-lived, but real, chapter of history. Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians began devising a “massive resistance.” In some communities, they even shut down public schools. In their place, they let students take tuition tax credits to attend private “segregation academies.”

The Center for American Progress chronicled that episode in a recent (and flawed) report. It unveiled the research at an event hosted by Weingarten’s group. The report focuses on Virginia’s Prince Edward County, where segregation academies flourished. Courts put the kibosh on those efforts by the end of the 1960s, and definitively outlawed them in the ’70s.

Still, as they responded to some pushback on their report, the CAP authors argued the school choice movement has failed to reckon with this history. That’s not quite right.

In fact, a group of progressive school choice thinkers confronted that history while it was unfolding. The authors of a 1970 report looked with concern at attempts to evade court-ordered desegregation through so-called freedom of choice. They concluded:

It would be perfectly possible to create a competitive market and then regulate it in such a way as to prevent segregation, ensure an equitable allocation of resources, and give every family a truly equal chance of getting what it wants from the system.

That group was led by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, liberal academics with an eye toward equity also began crafting visions for vouchers that would still be timely today.

The intellectuals of the Voucher Left sometimes crossed swords with the likes of free-market economist Milton Friedman. He launched the “Voucher Right” with a seminal essay calling for vouchers — coincidentally around the same time southern racists were hatching plans to resist segregation. As Rick Hess and Matt Barnum note, Friedman drew not on segregationist impulses, but on the ideas of 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe pushed Friedman’s ideas further in their influential book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools. They argued, in brief, that education bureaucrats had sapped schools of their vitality. The solution, in their view, was to create a new public education system that encompassed all schools — including those considered private — and give students the means to choose among them.

That same year, the voucher left and voucher right found a way to work together. Urban progressives like Wisconsin state Sen. Polly Williams joined forces with Friedman acolytes in the Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson’s administration to create the first modern voucher program.

That wouldn’t be the last time they joined forces. Last year in Florida, school choice advocates led by Martin Luther King III rallied to protect the nation’s largest private school choice program, which this year will serve more than 100,000 low-income and working class students — 70 percent of them children of color.

That program was created under Jeb Bush, a Republican governor, and expanded through multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation. The protest challenged a lawsuit led by the president the American Federation for Teachers’ Florida affiliate. And that lawsuit ultimately failed.

This brings us back to the Center for American Progress.

Randi Weingarten leads a national organization that has battled private school choice at every turn, and repeatedly lost. When some Voucher Left ideas first gained traction in Washington (albeit in milder forms, like private school tuition tax credits), nationwide teachers unions began wielding their newfound influence in the Democratic Party to stamp out support.

It’s hardly out of character for the unions to attempt to cast voucher advocates as racists, amp up their calls the slow down charter schools, or attempt to tie every diverse corner of the school choice movement to President Donald Trump.

The question is why a center-left think tank, long known for its reasonable positions on education reform, would work so hard to help them, resting its attacks on such a thinly constructed factual foundation.

Note: See also this article by Andrew Rotherham, which traces a similar historical arc.

*The four scholarship programs are Tax credit scholarships, McKay and Gardiner Scholarships for children with special needs, and Voluntary Pre-K scholarships.

October 26, 2019 0 comment

Charter Schools Customization Educator spotlight Magnet Schools Podcast Private Schools School Choice Spotlights

Beat them at their own game: Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, podcastED

Ron Matus October 23, 2019

Ron Matus

Alberto Carvalho has served as superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools since 2008. The district is the fifth-largest in the United States with more than 350,000 students, nearly three-quarters of whom are enrolled in choice programs. PHOTO: Miami-Dade County Public Schools

You can be forgiven for thinking, given the vivid “tsunami of choice” metaphor used by Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, that America’s fifth-biggest school district saw the rapid expansion of charter schools and private school choice a decade ago and concluded, If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

But listen to Carvalho for a few minutes and you might arrive at a different take – that Miami-Dade sized up the forces of choice and customization re-shaping public education and decided they’d beat competing sectors at their own game.

“I think it would be fair to say that I am by nature a reasonably competitive guy, and my team is as well,” Carvalho told me in a recorded interview in April, as I was putting together a paper on Miami-Dade for the Education Cities conference at Harvard. “But I can also tell you that we stopped trying to out compete others long ago. And now we’re in a phase of work where really we’re trying to outperform ourselves.”

“It really was a transition,” Carvalho continued. “We have seen the growth of the charter school movement in our community. But we’ve seen an even more aggressive … growth of public school choices within the previously-known-as traditional schools in Miami-Dade. So yes, I would credit in part our success, and the explosive nature of choice programs in our system, to, at least in part, to competition. But it was strategic competition. It’s not just to win the gold medal in anything. It was actually competition to deliver choice at much higher levels, being strategic in the deployment of choice programs, by analyzing their existence by zip code, across the district, and filling in the gaps.”

We at redefinED converted the interview into a podcast to complement the paper on Miami-Dade, which Education Next published this week. Among other points Carvalho makes about educational choice:

Resistance is futile. “We recognized … that the choice tsunami was upon us. And I was not going to do what lot of my colleagues did. Which is, ‘Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t hit us. Or let’s just allow this to go through. Like all things, this is a fad that will go away.’ … I could anticipate the policy shift in the state of Florida and across the country. And we were right. It has, quite frankly, materialized exactly as we predicted. But rather than being a spectator, or a victim of it, we were an active participant in it.“

More choice, better outcomes. “It’s not disputable that students that are enrolled in these choice programs usually perform academically better than those who are not. I think we ought to celebrate that. But the celebration should not last very long. We ought to replicate the success and continue to amplify through equitable access to the same opportunity that’s now being granted to 70 percent of our kids, but needs to be granted to the rest of them.”

You ain’t seen nothing yet. “Ten to 20 years from now, how will we be teaching kids in America? In Miami-Dade? … The most honest answer to that question is, we don’t know. And I say that because I think the mode and model of educational work will be significantly different from anything we know and understand today, as a result of three powerful forces: digitization, automation and artificial intelligence. You put those three forces together and you have to anticipate a dramatic shift, perhaps the most powerful shift we’ve seen in education in the history of mankind.”

Enjoy the podcast, and read last week’s redefinED post about Carvalho here.

October 23, 2019 0 comment

Education and Public Policy Education Equity Education Research Education Spending Florida Tax Credit Scholarship School Choice

If you love somebody, set them free – with equity

Matthew Ladner October 21, 2019

Matthew Ladner

Per-pupil expenditures in Florida’s 10 largest school districts, 2017-18. SOURCE: Education Reform Now

If you love somebody
If you love someone
If you love somebody
If you love someone set them free
(Free, free, set them free)

A new report by Charles Barone and Nicholas Munyan-Penney for Ed Reform Now, a nonprofit particularly focused on the content of student learning in public schools, has found that Florida’s system of K-12 funding broadly delivers a greater level of total subsidy to the schools of low-income students.

From the report:

In the vast majority of the largest districts in Florida, high-poverty schools have a distinct advantage over low-poverty schools, ranging from a 9.7 percent advantage ($9,000 to $8,200) in Duval County to an incredible 70.6 percent advantage ($13,900 to $8,100) in Palm Beach County …

When considering race/ethnicity, in all 10 of Florida’s largest districts, schools with the highest concentrations of nonwhite students have a significant advantage over schools with lower concentrations of nonwhite students.

Statewide, high-poverty schools receive $9,000 per student, which is greater than the statewide average of $8,200 per pupil for low-poverty schools. This is worth noting as a significant achievement. Heavy reliance upon local property taxes creates large funding inequities favoring high-wealth districts absent state equalization efforts. In the worst cases, wealthy areas both spend far more per pupil and enjoy lower tax rates than poor districts. An $800 per-pupil advantage for high poverty districts took no small amount of effort to create.

Florida does, however, have a large group of high-poverty students receiving considerably less than either high-poverty or even low poverty schools – the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. This year, 101,862 scholarship students have an average household income of $27,188, or about 13 percent above the poverty level. Sixty eight percent are black or Hispanic and 57 percent are in single-parent households.

In 2019-20, scholarship recipients will not receive either the average of $8,200 received by low-poverty districts nor the $9,000 statewide average for students in high-poverty districts. For 2019-20, scholarships will average between $6,775 and $7,250.

Hopefully, Florida policymakers will not only equalize funding but also liberalize allowable uses. Families should have the option to spend their funds on school tuition, but also on tutors, therapists and enrichment. Families should not only have the power to choose, they should also have the opportunity to maximize the value of their funds given the particular needs and aspirations of the student. Equity and efficiency need not be at odds, but instead could proceed hand-in-hand toward a brighter future.

October 21, 2019 1 comment