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open enrollment

Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParental ChoicePodcastPublic School ChoiceSchool Choice

podcastED: Matt Ladner interviews Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Chad Aldis

redefinED staff February 18, 2021
redefinED staff

In this podcast video, redefinED’s executive editor speaks with longtime education choice advocate Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy at Fordham, wo previously served as executive director of School Choice Ohio and was Ohio State director for StudentsFirst.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Ladner_Aldis-1.mp4

Ladner and Aldis discuss a recent Fordham study that mapped out open enrollment policies across Ohio after some media outlets questioned whether open enrollment education choice policies exacerbated school segregation. The study concluded they do not, it brought to light something more alarming.

Under state law, districts choose whether to accept nonresident students. Most suburban districts in Ohio have kept their doors shut. Despite being public agencies – often boasting of being “open to all” – these school systems deny children access just because they don’t have the right address.

“Let’s be real about this … no, you’re not to open to everybody. You’re open to everyone who can pay the price of admission … The price of admission is property taxes.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

·       Aldis’s critique of the current system, which results in high-wealth suburban school districts “walling out” poorer students from urban centers, who have been shown to benefit the most from education choice

·       How Ohio’s open enrollment system is different in rural counties

·       How rules restricting charter schools to urban areas further restricts choices for minority and low-income families

·       Comparisons with another education choice state, Arizona

·       What can be done to correct the inequities caused by Ohio’s open enrollment choice system

LINKS MENTIONED:

 https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/research/open-enrollment-and-student-diversity-ohios-schools

February 18, 2021 1 comment
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Commentary and OpinionDemographic ResearchEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedParental ChoicePublic School ChoiceSchool Choice

Mr. Burbleaf: Tear down this wall!

Matthew Ladner February 15, 2021
Matthew Ladner

Ronald Reagan speaking at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

In your author’s humble opinion, this chart from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is the most revealing K-12 graphic of the last decade.

Ohio’s urban areas find themselves surrounded by districts that choose not to participate in open enrollment, featured in dark green. The children of Columbus, for instance, represented by the white star, appear to be surrounded by districts that do not offer open enrollment.

Later this week, this blog will offer a podcast interview with Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio Policy and Advocacy at Fordham, whose research produced this map. Before criticizing the Ohio suburbs that deny open enrollment, let’s just put it on the table that a map of your state, if one existed, might look eerily similar to this one.

Unless, that is, you live in Arizona.

In Arizona, nearly all districts participate in open enrollment. Open enrollment students outnumber charter students nearly two to one in the Phoenix area despite its distinction as the nation’s largest charter sector.

Arizona has the largest state charter sector in the country, with nearly 20% of students attending charter schools. Ohio not only has fewer charter schools than Arizona; the schools are more geographically concentrated in urban areas. Ohio has a larger student population – 1.7 million students compared to 1.2 million in Arizona – but has far fewer charter schools overall and especially fewer suburban charter schools.

Data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows approximately 50 suburban charters in Ohio compared to 136 in Arizona.

The Brookings Institution measured the availability by the percentage of students with access to one or more charter schools in their ZIP code. Arizona led the nation with 84% of students having one or more charter schools in their ZIP code, whereas Ohio stood at 31.9%.

Your author is going to go way out on a limb at this point.

While it could be that the people running suburban districts in Arizona are unusually interested in stamping out economic and racial segregation because of the dry climate or … something … the level of non-district options held by suburban families has a lot to do with it. Scottsdale Unified, for instance, may accept 4,000 open enrollment transfers because 9,000 students who live within the boundaries of the district go to school elsewhere.

How is this working out for the kids?

Stanford University’s Opportunity Project linked state academic exams across all 50 states to allow comparisons between schools, districts and their associated charters, and counties. The chart shows the comparison for academic gains for poor children in the largest counties in each state: Maricopa County (Phoenix area) in Arizona and Franklin County (Columbus area) in Ohio.

The rate of academic growth for poor students in Maricopa County is 19.3% above the national average for all students. The rate of academic growth for Franklin County students is 2.6% below the national average. Maricopa County outperforms Franklin County across all eight subgroups available in the Stanford data.

What we see in the Fordham map at the start of this post isn’t working, but don’t look for shame alone to open the gates of opportunity for Ohio’s urban students. Only broad choice programs can create the incentives needed to tear down these walls.

February 15, 2021 0 comment
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Achievement GapCommentary and OpinionDemographic ResearchEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Gigantic and all-too-real segregation must end

Matthew Ladner June 29, 2020
Matthew Ladner

James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and activist. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western society, most notably in regard to the mid-20th century.

“You were born where you were born and faced the future you faced because you were black and for no other reason,” James Baldwin wrote to his nephew James in 1962.

“The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry.”

Nearly 58 years have passed since Baldwin wrote those words. How much has changed?

Are Black students still “not expected to aspire to excellence” and to “make peace with mediocrity?” Look at the PISA math and reading exam results and judge for yourself:

Are people still telling Black students “where you could go and what you could do?” Ask Kelly William-Bolar, a Black mom who spent time in jail for sending her children to a better-performing public school in Ohio. Read the Newsday investigation regarding the continuing role of race, income and real estate in segregating families by school.

Or look at the report published by the Fordham Institute on interdistrict open enrollment in Ohio, a first-of-its-kind analysis conducted by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Oklahoma. See any suburban districts volunteering to take urban kids through open enrollment transfers?

Me neither, which leads inevitably to the conclusion that Kelly William-Bolar’s case was anything but a fluke, that those lines were working exactly as intended, and still do today.

Hundreds of thousands of students, many of them students of color, sit on private choice and charter waitlists. Anti-choice interests not only shamelessly do whatever they can to keep those families waiting, but they also sometimes mumble about segregation in a theoretical fashion, attempting to justify their actions. The gigantic and all-too-real sort of segregation on display in the map above does not ever seem to merit their attention.

“The purpose of education,” Baldwin wrote “…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.”

The time is long past for families to make their own decisions about where and how their children will be educated.

June 29, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionEducation ChoiceFeaturedParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Florida’s mélange of K-12 education options expands opportunities for students, educators

Matthew Ladner February 3, 2020
Matthew Ladner

Step Up For Students’ annual Changing Landscapes document reveals 48.2 percent of PreK-12 students attend a school of choice, up from 47.5 percent last year.

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.” Leto Atreides, Frank Herbert’s Dune

Studying the Florida Education Landscape document, released last week by Step Up For Students, has become one of my favorite January rituals along with playoff football and enjoying Arizona’s sunny, mild weather.

Serving just under a combined 150,000 students, Florida’s private choice programs would have ranked at approximately the sixth largest in the state by enrollment. The wide world of Florida K-12 choice, however, is much larger than just private choice programs. School districts offer an array of additional programs, Florida’s charter school sector continues to grow, and homeschooling is becoming more popular.

Open enrollment is an option that clearly has room to grow. The 273,377 figure cited in the document looks like – and is – a large number. But as the Reason Foundation’s Vittorio Nastasi notes, only 5,693 of these students transferred between districts, which means the vast majority of open enrollment is occurring within the same district rather than between districts.

This is due in part to Florida’s large system of county school districts. We would not expect to see many students travelling long distances from the center of one country to the periphery of another to attend school.

To put this into perspective, Arizona’s Scottsdale Unified School District takes in 4,000 open enrollment students in a district of approximately 22,000 students. Given that Florida’s public-school enrollment is nearing 3 million, 5,693 between-district transfers might seem like a good start – if it were occurring between Dade and Broward counties rather than statewide.

Bottom line: If too many of Florida’s school districts remain a sleeping giant of choice, other actors will step up to fill the gap. This is the tension in the system that’s needed to spur improvement and innovation and stave off stagnation. Every Florida student deserves the opportunity to attend a school that’s a good fit for his or her aspirations and needs. We have many miles to go before that will be the case.

February 3, 2020 0 comment
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Florida Schools RoundupredefinED education roundup

Free school lunches at risk for 200,000, teacher evaluations, rezoning and more

Compiled by redefinED staff December 2, 2019
Compiled by redefinED staff

Free lunches threatened: Almost 200,000 Florida students could lose automatic access to free or reduced-price school lunches if a new Trump administration proposal to limit the number of people enrolled in the federal food stamps program (SNAP) is enacted, according to the Florida Policy Institute. Hardest hit would be Okeechobee County, where 83 percent of students are now automatically eligible. “Once these SNAP benefits are pulled, it will drastically impact the kids who are accessing free lunches at school, and it will put that much more of a burden on families that are already struggling,” said Paco Vélez, president and CEO of the hunger relief organization Feeding South Florida. Miami Herald. An anonymous donor has given $1,500 to the Leon County School District to help cover $4,000 in unpaid student lunch debts so far this school year. Tallahassee Democrat. About $11,000 in unpaid lunch fees are owed by Monroe County students. Key West Citizen.

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December 2, 2019 0 comment
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MLK Day
Charter SchoolsEducation ResearchParent EmpowermentSchool ChoiceVouchers

Ladner: Let freedom ring from every city and every hamlet

Matthew Ladner January 21, 2019
Matthew Ladner
MLK Day

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, on Aug. 28. The march, and King’s 17-minute speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda for reformers and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Decades after Brown v. Board of Education, a map generated by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute indicates we have miles to go regarding school integration.

The map displays 615 Ohio school districts, using color coding to show those that allow open enrollment from any district; those that allow open enrolment from an adjacent district; and those that allow no open enrollment at all. A very disturbing pattern of segregation emerges as it becomes clear that each of Ohio’s large urban districts is surrounded by districts that choose not to give students the opportunity to attend their schools.  

(Keep this map in mind the next time you hear someone claim that “school districts take everyone.” Districts take every child who can afford to live in their attendance zones, which is not the same thing as “everyone.”)

Ohio is not likely a stark outlier nationally, but it is very different than my home state of Arizona, where almost all districts participate in open enrollment – including fancy suburban districts like Scottsdale. Ohio, in line with the nation, has posted flat results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whereas Arizona is one of two states that have made statistically significant gains on all six exams since 2009.

Another map, this one from the Brookings Institution Hamilton project, suggests why Ohio and Arizona are so different, and where Florida stands. This map measures the percentage of students who had access to one or more charter schools in their Zip code in 2014-15.

Arizona had the highest percentage in the nation of students with a charter school operating in their Zip code: 84 percent, which is more than two-and-a-half times higher than Ohio’s 31.9 percent. Ohio has choice options, but they are overwhelmingly clustered in urban areas, thus providing limited incentive for suburban districts to participate in open enrollment. Arizona has the highest percentage of charter school students in the country, but open enrollment students outnumber charter school students approximately two to one. One of the great contributions of Arizona’s charter and private choice policies has been to create an incentive for districts to participate in open enrollment.

Florida’s choice options, meanwhile, are more inclusive and diverse across community types than Ohio’s, and less so than Arizona’s. In 2014-15, just more than half of Florida students had one or more charter schools operating in their Zip code. Florida’s private choice programs focus on low-income families and children with disabilities. Low-income students are concentrated in large urban districts, but they are present in every district in the state, as are children with disabilities. Florida also has taken steps to increase open enrollment. This should be strongly encouraged, but in the end, incentives carry greater power than laws.

A great and counter-intuitive irony is at work here. The charter and private choice movement has been very focused on students in large urban districts. There are compelling moral reasons for this, but it may not have represented the optimal strategy for helping urban students. Urban students absolutely need access to charter and private schools, and they need it more than others. Urban students should however be able to attend suburban district schools as well through open enrollment. Only broad choice policies will incentivize districts to participate. Thus, urban students will be best served when all community types participate in choice.

The attempt to force district integration through forced busing during the 1970s caused no end of grief and ultimately ended in well-intentioned failure. Forcing families to bus their children across large distances based upon their race predictably did not go well. Progress can, however, be made through voluntary enrollments and incentives.

Prior to 1995 in Arizona, for instance, students who wished to attend a school in a different district, when allowed to do so, were required to pay tuition. Today, 4,000 students who don’t live within the boundary of Scottsdale Unified attend Scottsdale district schools free of charge. Arizona law merely requires districts to have an open enrollment policy, which could in effect mean, “buy or rent real estate here or get lost.” As a Scottsdale Unified taxpayer, I’d like to flatter myself by thinking my school district lowered the drawbridge over a suburban moat out of the goodness of our hearts. I am confident, however, that the thousands of Scottsdale students attending charter schools had a good deal to do with it.

In the end, our aim must be to increase the opportunity for families to find a school that matches the needs and aspirations of their families. We as a movement have underestimated the complexity of the interactions between different types of choice programs. Attempting to improve urban education with the suburban public schools sitting on the sidelines is akin to fighting with one arm tied behind our backs. The integrationists had a noble goal, but they pursued it with what turned out to be the wrong tools. People respond better to carrots than sticks, incentives rather than force.

The state of the education emergency in our inner cities can only be described as dire, which is exactly why we need to give the maximum opportunity and freedom possible across all types of schooling. Our policies can be configured in such a way as to open the walled gardens of our highest performing public schools and promote integration in the process. But don’t take it from me. The same idea was embedded in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity for this nation … When we allow freedom to ring – when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.”

We’ve reached 2019, and throughout the country, urban students still are largely not free to attend suburban district schools. Let’s speed up that day when they will be welcome.

January 21, 2019 2 comments
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Charter SchoolsCommon GroundParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Change in open enrollment law providing more choice options for students

Livi Stanford October 17, 2018
Livi Stanford
open enrollment

The controlled open enrollment  law, which was modified in 2016, is working, according to choice experts.

In the first year after Florida lawmakers passed legislation that lets parents choose public schools across county lines, the state Department of Education reports that 5,397 students took advantage in 2017.

As such, educational choice experts proclaim that the controlled open enrollment law signed by Gov. Rick Scott in 2016 is working.

“As more parents learn about this option, it will mean more students will have the opportunity to receive a quality education in the school that best fits their needs,” said Adam Peshek, managing director of opportunity policy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Even so, there is still a lot that is not known about the effect of the law, including its impact on school districts. Several districts officials said the law’s failure to provide transportation options for transferring students is a serious shortcoming. The options for parents are also limited by capacity at the most popular schools.

“Florida does not have a lot of data on the topic and what they do have is self-reported enrollment data,” Peshek said. “We don’t know much about which schools students are leaving and which districts/schools are benefiting the most. “Transportation is a large issue. Florida has very large, county-based districts. So, in addition to transportation being a barrier, options may just be too far for a parent to consider.”

House PreK-12 Education Appropriations Chairman Manny Diaz, who sponsored the legislation, said his goal was to provide students access to quality schools and provide the best use of empty seats. Though Florida has long allowed students to choose among district school through a policy known as “controlled open enrollment,” students could attend districts in other counties only through specific signed agreements. Diaz found that process to be too daunting for families.

Sonja Baker said she was grateful for the open enrollment program, which gave her the opportunity to apply to several schools outside the district for her son, who has autism and struggles academically in traditional public schools.

“As a parent of a child with special needs, I realized the traditional setting wasn’t for my child,” Baker said. “We live on a county border line. It doubles the options of giving him the quality education I feel he deserves.”

Baker ended up choosing to put her son in a charter school in the district.

All told, 266,515 students participated in open enrollment in 2017, according to DOE. Most attended schools within their district, but both programs present challenges, according to district officials.

Peter Licata, the assistant superintendent for choice and innovation for Palm Beach County Schools, said the lack of transportation options for students creates an inequity that hurts less-advantaged students. Some parents also have complained that more popular schools are not available because they tend already to be at capacity with traditionally zoned students.

In St. Johns County, for example, only two elementary schools had space available to be chosen under its open enrollment program. Countywide, there were only 29 applications this year for open enrollment.

Christina Langston, St. Johns chief of community relations, said in an email that no other schools meet the controlled open enrollment criteria to allow more students. She said the student population increases by more than 1,500 students each year.

Peshek suggested the state might consider offering financial incentives to schools that take students outside of their attendance zones.

“I can certainly see a scenario where the state would want to reward schools for taking students outside of their zoned district, in the same way they reward schools for academic success or providing access to advanced courses or industry certifications,” he said.

October 17, 2018 0 comment
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CourtsEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsEducation ReportingParental ChoiceSchool Choice

When public schools refuse to accept disadvantaged students

Patrick R. Gibbons June 9, 2016
Patrick R. Gibbons
normandy

Normandy High School Graduates. Photo: Normandy Schools Collaborative

Parents in the low-income, predominantly black Normandy School District in St. Louis, Mo., have been made to feel unwelcome for years, as public school officials repeatedly fought to deny them the right to choose new public schools. Their saga may finally be coming to a close, as a three-judge panel this week unanimously rebuffed school officials’ latest efforts to thwart Missouri’s public-school transfer law.

The transfer law allows parents of students enrolled in “unaccredited” public school districts to request transfers to public schools in higher-performing districts. (Districts lose accreditation if  the school fails to meet certain performance goals.) The law was passed in 1993, but went largely unnoticed until two parents sued to transfers out of the then-unaccredited Clayton and St. Louis Public School districts.

Public school officials fought the law through trial and appeals courts until 2013, when the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of public school transfers. With that ruling, nearly a thousand children in the persistently struggling Normandy School District rushed for the door, causing a near-collapse of the small inner-city district, prompting a takeover by the state Department of Education.

Unfortunately for the parents, a victory at the Supreme Court did not secure their right to choose a new school, as public school officials scrambled to undo the law.

Renaming the district the “Normandy Schools Collaborative,” state officials at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) claimed the “new” district was suddenly no longer unaccredited. That interpretation meant thousands of future transfers could be denied. State officials created other rules to force students back into Normandy. Addressing one legitimate flaw in the transfer law, officials stated public-school transfer students could only receive $7,200 in public funding. Districts were not required to accept the students with this lower payment, and wealthier districts had long been charging more than $7,200 to accept transfers.

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June 9, 2016 0 comment
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