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public education

Column: School quality rises as school choice expands

Ron Matus April 24, 2019

Editor’s note: This opinion piece, written by Step Up For Students’ director of policy and public affairs, appeared April 19 on the Florida Politics blog. The commentary was submitted as a rebuttal to an editorial in the Palm Beach Post, which declined to publish it.

Florida’s public education system is leaps and bounds better today than the national embarrassment it was 20 years ago.

But critics triggered by “school choice” continue to suggest, without a scrap of proof, that our schools are basket cases, and choice is to blame.

In its April 7 editorial, the Palm Beach Post perpetuates long-running myths and hides inconvenient facts in condemning a proposed new choice scholarship. Its conspiracy theory is a doozy: “Vouchers” are draining money from public schools, in violation of the Florida Constitution, and while our public schools are being decimated, privateers are cashing in.

The new scholarship would end a waitlist of 13,000 for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which serves 100,000 lower-income students. The value of the new scholarship would be akin to the existing one, yet the Post concludes it “robs Florida’s public schools of needed money.”

No, it doesn’t.

The tax credit scholarship is worth 59 percent of per-pupil spending in district schools. That’s why every independent fiscal impact analysis of the program — eight to date — has concluded it saves taxpayer money that can be reinvested in public schools.

The drain on public schools would come if the program ended.

Construction costs alone would surge into the billions if private school students flooded into public schools. If teachers thought getting a decent raise was tough now, imagine the difficulty with massive new strains on government coffers.

The misinformation and oddities don’t end there.

The editorial suggests private schools are run amok with for-profits when in reality the vast majority are tiny nonprofits. If the paper’s main beef is Florida public schools are being fed crumbs — it calls the state’s low rankings on education funding “pathetic” — how could tiny nonprofits “grab a healthy haul” with 59 percent of “pathetic?”

The editorial also gives credence to the insights of the Florida teachers union, which is rich.

In 2017, the Florida Supreme Court dismissed the union-led lawsuit to kill the tax credit scholarship because the union couldn’t provide a microfiber of evidence to back its claims of harm to public schools.

That hasn’t stopped the union from continuing to flood the public arena with the same erroneous claims.

The Post is right about one thing: accountability is different for public and private schools. Private schools aren’t subjected to the same level of regulation as public schools because they also face the accountability that comes when parents have power to choose.

Parents dissatisfied with private schools can leave, at any time. That’s not true for many parents in public schools, particularly low-income parents.

Unlike parents of means, they can’t just up and move to neighborhoods where they’re guaranteed spots in high-performing schools.

Finding the balance between regulations and choice isn’t easy. But the evidence to date suggests we’re on the right track. Standardized test scores show tax credit scholarship students were typically the lowest-performing students in their prior public schools.

But now, according to a new Urban Institute study, they’re up to 43 percent more likely than their public-school peers to attend four-year colleges, and up to 20 percent more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees.

That success is not coming at the expense of public schools. Florida’s graduation rate was 52 percent 20 years ago. It’s 86 percent now. Florida is now No. 3 in the nation in percentage of graduating seniors who’ve passed Advanced Placement exams; No. 4 in K-12 Achievement, according to Education Week; No. 1, 1, 3, and 8 on the four core tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, once adjusted for demographics.

These rankings aren’t “moribund.” They’re encouraging.

There’s no good reason why the steady progress of our public schools is routinely ignored. Or why choice programs are selectively scrutinized. Florida has been spending billions of taxpayer dollars on tuition for private and faith-based schools for years — for multiple scholarships in higher education, preschool and K-12. If the proposed new scholarship is “an abuse of the Florida Constitution,” wouldn’t they all be?

Why do critics obsessively single out the choice scholarships that are designed to help low-income families? And shrug at the rest?

Public education in Florida has big challenges, and adequate funding is one of many.

But emotional arguments detached from basic facts don’t advance the hard conversations we need to have.

April 24, 2019 5 comments

Blog Guest Customization Jack Coons Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice

“Public education” is anything but public

John E. Coons September 28, 2018

John E. Coons

Jack Coons of Berkeley Law writes that it’s time we all grasp that what we have called “public education” is actually anything but – and it’s long time to make it so through school choice.

In much of American society, children attend a school that has been chosen by their parents. Mom and Dad have picked out a home in the attendance area of a certain school that is owned and run by the government. At the very least, when they moved they knew its reputation. Whether or not the school was a major consideration, they accepted it as a substantial part of the culture that would count greatly in shaping their child’s worldview.

That school of theirs will be called “public.” My Webster’s defines this word in various ways, but most prominent among these meanings, and consistent with all, is this one: “Open to all persons.”

Think about it. Is that government school that you chose for your child open to all children? Of course it is, with one condition – namely that every American family can afford to live where you have chosen to live. Is this public?

Of course, your chance of location in this “public” school attendance area may have had little to do with your finding that dream home. You may be able to afford a private school, and that is your choice now. It may be Saint Mary’s or the Free Thought School, but it is there for the picking, and you pick it. Now my question: Is this private school any less public than the Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary in your attendance area?

September 28, 2018 0 comment

Gardiner Scholarship Parental Choice School Choice Student spotlight

Multiple school choice options are just right for this family

Patrick R. Gibbons August 13, 2018

Patrick R. Gibbons

From Left to Right: Mark, Cora, Corin, Zuri, Leonte, Nathan and Zachary.

Today is back-to-school day for most school districts in Florida. But for the Plucinski family of Central Florida, it’s back to schools. And not just district schools.

Sisters Cora and Zuri will board a school bus to start the day at a district elementary school, while mom Corin Plucinski will drive brothers Zach and Nathan 30 minutes to a private school. They attend with help from one of Florida’s multiple educational choice scholarships.

In many parts of the country, this may be unusual. But in Florida, which offers one of the robust arrays of school choice in the country, it’s increasingly common. Growing numbers of families have different children attending different schools in different educational sectors.

To the Plucinskis, whose oldest is now headed to college after graduating from a district high school, there’s nothing odd about it.

“When you’ve got five kids you’re always juggling something anyway,” Corin Plucinski said.

Thirty years ago, roughly 90 percent of Florida students in preK-12 attended assigned district schools, and about 10 percent attended private schools. Beyond a handful of magnet schools, there was no state-supported school choice.

Fast forward a generation. Today, 46 percent of Florida students – 1.7 million – attend something other than their assigned district schools. About 300,000 attend charter schools. Another 300,000 attend private schools. Most of the rest attend options created by school districts, from magnet schools and career academies to IB and dual enrollment programs.

This flourishing landscape gives parents more opportunities to find the right fit for their kids. And for many families, that means one child in this sector, another in that sector.

August 13, 2018 1 comment

Education and Public Policy Education Politics Education Reporting Education Research Know Your History School Choice

William N. Sheats and pitfalls of democratic control of public education

Patrick R. Gibbons November 16, 2016

Patrick R. Gibbons

William N. Sheats was, in many ways, the father of Florida’s public school system. He was also an ardent racist who declared war on a racially integrated private school in North Florida, which he referred to as a “nest of vile fanatics” in an episode that subjected the state to national ridicule.

But perhaps the most fascinating — and troubling — aspect of this complicated figure is this: By the standards of his time, he was a moderate.

Several times during his long run as the leader of Florida’s public education system, he faced threats to his political career because, in the view of his opponents, he wasn’t racist enough.

Sheats was Florida’s first elected education superintendent, serving from 1893 to 1904, and again 1913 until his death in 1922. He worked to modernize Florida’s uniform system of public schools and helped draft the first statewide curriculum. He reformed teacher training and certification, requiring educators to pass exams to prove subject-area mastery. He worked to ensure more public high schools were accredited, and helped pass the state’s compulsory-attendance law in 1919. During his tenure, Florida had one of the best-funded public school systems among southern states and had more accredited high schools per capita than any other state in the region.

But Sheats was also a racist. He once declared access to education would “make the vast number of idle, absolutely worthless negroes industrious and self-supporting.”

November 16, 2016 0 comment

Blog Administration Education Legislation Education Reporting Tax Credit Scholarships

School choice scholarships don’t hurt public education

Doug Tuthill March 15, 2014

Doug Tuthill

Editor’s note: This op-ed by Step Up For Students President Doug Tuthill was written in response to a March 10 column by Palm Beach Post columnist Frank Cerabino. The Post published it online last night.

The new world of customized public education is not a zero-sum game. A student who chooses an International Baccalaureate program is not hurting a student who picks a career academy. A student in a magnet school is not undermining students in her neighborhood school. We need to offer children different options because they learn in different ways.

Sixty-thousand of Florida’s poorest schoolchildren chose a private school this year with the help of a scholarship, and this 12-year-old program strengthens public education by expanding opportunity.

The program, called the Tax Credit Scholarship, is one learning option for low-income students who face the toughest obstacles, and is part of an expanding universe of educational choices that last year served 1.5 million — or 42 of every 100 — Florida students in PreK-12. Those who suggest scholarships for low-income children harm public education are wrong. These scholarships and the opportunities they provide strengthen public education.

The state’s covenant is to children, not institutions, and these low-income students are being given options their families could not otherwise afford. That their chosen schools are not run by school districts makes them no different than charter schools or McKay Scholarship schools or university lab schools or online courses or dual college enrollment. That the state supports these scholarships is no different than the state paying for these same students to attend a district school. These scholarships are publicly funded, publicly regulated, public education.

Why, then, would a Palm Beach Post columnist suggest that scholarships for low-income children come “at the expense of public education”?

Independent groups and state agencies have repeatedly concluded that these scholarships, worth $4,880 this year, actually save the state money. The most recent projection came from the Consensus Revenue Estimating Conference, which placed the savings last year at $57.9 million. While it is regrettably true that district, charter and virtual schools have suffered financial cutbacks in recent years, they were not caused by these scholarships. In fact, this scholarship program was impacted by those same cuts.

The bill the Legislature is considering this year helps reduce the waiting list for this scholarship, so it is important to know who it serves. On average, the scholarship students live only 9 percent above poverty, more than two-thirds are black or Hispanic, and more than half come from single-parent homes. State research also shows they were also the lowest performers in the public schools they left behind.

These students are required to take a nationally norm-referenced test yearly, and the encouraging news is that they have been achieving the same gains in reading and math as students of all income levels nationally.

The new world of customized public education is not a zero-sum game.

March 15, 2014 1 comment

Blog Administration Charter Schools Common Ground Customization Education and Public Policy Education Legislation Education Politics Magnet Schools Parental Choice Private Schools School Choice Vouchers

School choice opposition too often mired in myths

Patrick R. Gibbons February 13, 2014

Patrick R. Gibbons

Bigfoot…also a myth…

Education is a complex and nuanced issue, and advocates on all sides need to be mindful not to overreach. Supporters of school choice sometimes overpromise the benefits of vouchers and tax-credit scholarships, leaving them open to attack. On the other side, school choice critics sometimes appeal to a mythical concept of the common/public school that never really existed.

Edward B. Fiske, a former New York Times education editor, and Helen F. Ladd, a professor at Duke University, demonstrate exactly this in a recent op-ed in the News & Observer. Fiske and Ladd keep their arguments simple: school choice is unconstitutional because it “destroys” the state’s ability to provide a free uniform system of education that is, as they say, “accessible to all students.”

Their argument may sound reasonable to a school choice critic, but the reasoning is grounded in mythology. Understanding this mythology exposes the underlying contradictions with the opposition to school choice.

First, it is a myth that common/public schools are open to every student. Students are assigned to schools and those schools are free to reject any student not within the school zone.

As Slate columnist Mathew Yglesias recently noted, the word “public” in public school really only means the school is government-owned and operated. He correctly observes that “a public school is by no means a school that’s open to the public in the sense that anyone can go there.”

Yglesias isn’t a school choice fanatic but he isn’t blind to the results of a zone-based attendance policy. The result turns neighborhood schools into a “system of exclusion.”

February 13, 2014 3 comments

Blog Administration Unionism

Private interests abound for everyone in public education debate

Doug Tuthill February 5, 2014

Doug Tuthill

Everyone in the debate over how best to improve public education has private interests. Our collective challenge is to manage these often conflicting interests in ways that best serve the common good.

We all have private interests.

People pursuing their private interests – individually or as a group – is what drives progress and innovation. But our private interests should never trump the common good.

Private interests usurping the public good is privatization. Privatization is bad. It undermines democracy and progress.

Encouraging the pursuit of private interests while avoiding privatization is a core challenge for our economic and political democracy. In pursuing their private interests, individuals and organizations often claim their interests promote the common good, while the interests of those they disagree with don’t. Politics derives, in part, from conflicting claims of whose private interests better align with the common good.

We see this regularly in our debates over how best to improve public education.

As a long-time teacher union leader, I sold financial services, insurance and advocacy services to teachers working for school districts. Therefore, maximizing the number of teachers employed by school districts served my business interests. Our union continuously asserted that more teachers working for school districts served the common good, as did higher teacher salaries and benefits. Our favorite marketing slogan was, “Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.”

Our union’s political and marketing strategy was to tie the private interests of district teachers to a greater common good (i.e., the welfare of children). Of course, the private interests of teachers are often – but not always – tied to children’s interest, so this was, and still is, an effective strategy.

Teacher unions use a similar political strategy when attacking school choice programs that empower students and teachers to attend schools not covered by union contracts. The unions accuse these schools of furthering privatization. As the National Education Association recently stated about charter schools not under union contracts: “We oppose the creation of charter schools for the purpose of privatization.”

Teacher unions are often criticized – unfairly in my opinion – for advocating for the private interests of district teachers.

February 5, 2014 0 comment

Achievement Gap Blog Administration Common Core Funding Private Schools School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships

Low-income students need more resources to close achievement gaps

Doug Tuthill August 23, 2013

Doug Tuthill

Tuthill: The obstacles we face trying to improve public education, especially those related to generational poverty, are daunting. But I’m optimistic about the progress we’re making.

The latest Florida Department of Education report on the tax credit scholarship program, and my summer discussions with scholarship parents, students and teachers, have led me to some conclusions. These thoughts are not new, but sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves of things we know but occasionally forget.

On average, scholarship students are achieving a year’s worth of learning gains in a year’s time, but this is not enough. We are attracting the state’s most disadvantaged students, and many of them are several years behind when they enter the program. These students need to be making 1.5-to-2 years of learning gains annually if they’re to catch up with their more advantaged peers.

We will not achieve these accelerated learning gains if we don’t provide scholarship students with more time to learn. Six-to-seven hours per day and 180 days per year are not enough for these students to achieve parity. Programs that are successfully reducing the achievement gap, such as many of the KIPP charter schools, are providing more learning time for disadvantaged students via longer school days and school years.

More time in school is still insufficient. Much of the achievement gap is created by large disparities in out-of-school learning opportunities. Many scholarship families can’t afford private music lessons, summer camps, equipment fees for Pop Warner football, or gymnastic lessons. While most of these experiences are not academic, the development they nurture contributes to success in a variety of settings, including school.

The new Common Core State Standards, because they are more rigorous, will exacerbate the achievement gap in the short-term. This greater disparity will become permanent if we don’t provide disadvantaged students with more access to in-school and out-of-school learning opportunities, and provide private school teachers with the training, technology and other support they need to successfully teach these new academic standards.

The concentration of high-poverty students in Florida private schools is growing as the number of tax credit scholarship students increases and more middle class families transfer from private schools to magnet and charter schools. This fall, more than 30 percent of Florida’s private school students will be paying tuition using McKay scholarships for disabled students or tax credit scholarships for low-income students. These changing student demographics will put greater stress on already meager private school resources.
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August 23, 2013 0 comment