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Commentary and OpinionDemographic ResearchEducation ChoiceEducation ResearchFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipSchool ChoiceVouchers

Extra! Extra! More good news about Florida schools

Ron Matus March 5, 2020
Ron Matus

When it comes to Florida’s public education system, good news does not travel fast.

The latest examples: Two encouraging reports that got zero traction in mainstream media circles.

The first is a rigorous study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It found that as America’s largest private school choice program grew, so did positive impacts on Florida’s public schools.

The second is the latest College Board report on Advanced Placement. Florida again ranks No. 3 in the percentage of graduating seniors who’ve passed college-caliber AP exams, even though it has a higher percentage of low-income students of any Top 10 state but one.

To date, neither report has received any coverage from any of the scores of mainstream media outlets in Florida, including the dozens that report state education news. (The choice report did get a thorough write up in Education Week.) Nor, as far as I can tell, has either report gotten even a perfunctory attaboy from the mainstream organizations that represent Florida parents, teachers and school boards.

This is not a surprise (see here, here and here) but it’s still a shame. Florida public schools haven’t reached the promised land. But they’ve come a long ways since the 1990s – when barely half of Florida students graduated from high school – and shouldn’t be denied accolades from those who claim to be their biggest supporters. One sad reason why is because acknowledging their progress would mean conceding that the expansion of education choice has not hurt Florida’s public education system – and probably helped it.

The new NBER paper shows exactly that.

As the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship expanded – it now serves more than 100,000 low-income students – students in Florida public schools most impacted by the competition saw higher test scores, fewer absences and fewer suspensions. In other words, Florida public schools didn’t get decimated when more parents got more power to choose. They got better. (The scholarship is administered by nonprofits such as Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

How dissonant to hear, in the report’s wake, nothing but crickets. Especially now. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship has never faced more media scrutiny.

Ditto for Florida’s other private school choice options. Last year, the state’s leading newspaper editorialized that creation of the state’s newest K-12 voucher, the Family Empowerment Scholarship, was “the death sentence for Florida’s public schools.” A sham “analysis” that followed warned of dire financial consequences for districts – and managed to spawn at least 10 news stories statewide.

This year’s coverage of a proposed expansion for the new scholarship (also administered in part by Step Up) is hardly more grounded. This week, it spurred a five-alarm op-ed from a school board member whose district has the state’s biggest black-white achievement gap. “Vouchers hurt all,” read the headline. “Time is running out,” the board member wrote, “to save traditional public schools from the steady march to privatization by the Florida Legislature.”

The shrug at Florida’s Advanced Placement success is even more curious. I’m a broken record about this (see here, see here, see … 😊), so I won’t belabor the point. And I’ll continue to agree with thoughtful critiques. But the outcomes here are yet another sign that Florida public schools continue to get better at serving the low-income students who are now a solid majority.

Of the 53,543 graduates in the Florida Class of 2019 who passed an AP exam, 40.3 percent got an exam fee reduction available to low-income students. Of the Top 10 states, only California had a higher rate, at 42.2 percent. The two states ahead of Florida, Massachusetts and Connecticut, had fee reduction rates of 18.6 percent and 14.9 percent, respectively.

Given that it’s low-income parents who are most apt to seek school choice options, shouldn’t traditional public school supporters be the first to shout these results from the rooftops? Maybe if media coverage didn’t suggest the sky was falling, they’d venture up there – and see the big picture of a public education system that really is getting better.

 

March 5, 2020 0 comment
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Education ChoiceEducation EquityEducation LegislationFamily Empowerment ScholarshipFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipSchool Choice

Senate moves closer to expanding income-based scholarship programs

Lisa Buie March 3, 2020
Lisa Buie

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted along party lines today to bolster and align two state scholarship programs that provide education choice to economically disadvantaged students.

SB 1220, a bill that spells out rules for teacher training and qualifications, also includes provisions aimed at aligning policies between the new Family Empowerment Scholarship, adopted last year and serving 18,000 students, and the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, created in 2001 and serving 108,000 students.

Both scholarship programs serve students from lower-income and working-class families. The primary difference is that the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship is funded by corporations that receive a 100 percent tax credit, and the Family Empowerment Scholarship is funded directly from the state education budget.

The final vote was 13-8, with all Republicans supporting the bill. The bill now heads to the Senate floor. A similar bill in the House, HB 7067, is awaiting action on the floor there.

Several parents whose children receive scholarships attended the hearing in support of the bill, including Natalie Gillespie, a mother of nine from Tallahassee. She called the scholarships “life changing” and said her youngest three daughters, who are adopted, “can be nurtured in a smaller environment that is not as overwhelming to them.” Her son, now a successful employee at an insurance company, was able to attend a faith-based school that provided spiritual training and a “moral compass.”

The bill would increase the allowed enrollment growth in the Family Empowerment Scholarship. Under current law, the program can grow by up to 0.25 of total public school enrollment each year, which is roughly 7,000 students. SB 1220 and HB 7067 both increase that growth to 1 percent, or roughly 28,000.

A strike-all amendment proposed by Education Committee Chairman Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah, was intended to give clear priority to renewal students in both programs and also provided for a gradual increase in household income eligibility over time. That provision allows the eligible income level in the Family Empowerment Scholarship, currently 300 percent of federal poverty, to increase by 25 percentage points in the next year if more than 5 percent of the available scholarships remain unawarded.

The provision is also in the House bill. The income limit for Tax Credit Scholarships would remain at 260 percent of poverty.

Other parts of the bill approved today included:

  • Allowing Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students to continue receiving the scholarship until they graduate from high school or turn 21, aligning it with the Family Empowerment Scholarship provision. Now, Florida Tax Credit students must reapply each year.
  • Allowing Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students whose scholarships were not renewed due to a lack of funding to transfer to the Family Empowerment Scholarship.
  • Allowing students in the Family Empowerment Scholarship program to take up to two state-supported virtual courses each year without cost. That provision already applies to Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students.
March 3, 2020 0 comment
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Sending out an SOS in Arizona

Matthew Ladner March 2, 2020
Matthew Ladner

Editor’s note: In case you missed it, click here to listen to Matt Ladner’s recent interview on Phoenix-based public radio station KJZZ.

After claiming to have no desire to take choice away from the special populations eligible for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, opponents have filed a ballot proposition to do precisely that.

A group calling itself Save Our Schools Arizona has filed a new ballot initiative that will over time squeeze Native American students, military dependents and foster care children out of the program. Once the group has completed this task, it may further deny access to special needs children.

You can read the entire document by clicking the link above, or you can read the relevant portion of it below – the one that would create a statewide cap on the program equal to 1 percent of the total public-school population and that would create a rationing protocol.

Arizona has more than 1.1 million K-12 students, so if this initiative were to become law, it would kick in at somewhere around 11,000 participants. With approximately 7,200 current participants, this is only a matter of time.

The Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program currently allows participation to students with disabilities (those with IEPs and 504 plans), those who have been through the foster care system, are attending D- and F-rated public schools, are the children of active duty military or their orphans, and those living on Native American reservations. If the initiative were to gain the necessary signatures and pass, students in all categories but children with disabilities would be squeezed from the program over time.

Arizona has more than 150,000 students either served under IDEA or with a Section 504 plan. The number of children with disabilities served in the Arizona public education system has nearly tripled since 1990.

A single-digit participation rate among these students would begin the process of squeezing other students out. A slightly larger but still single-digit participation rate would deny access to additional children with disabilities. When this would happen would depend on a variety of factors, but whether it will happen can’t be in doubt. The participation rate in special needs choice programs in Florida, for instance, is already well above the rate required to trigger rationing under this misguided proposal.

The number of signatures required for the proposition to make the ballot is substantially greater than that required to recall a piece of legislation as was the case with the previous Proposition 305. Save Our Schools leaders admit to using choice for their own children but plan to spend their summer collecting signatures attempting to diminish the opportunities for disadvantaged students to do the same.

March 2, 2020 2 comments
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Education EquityEducation LegislationFamily Empowerment ScholarshipFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipGardiner ScholarshipNewsParental ChoicePrivate School ScholarshipsSchool ChoiceVouchers

House Committee aligns, expands K-12 scholarship opportunities

Lisa Buie February 25, 2020
Lisa Buie

family empowerment scholarship

The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday voted along party lines to give 28,000 more economically disadvantaged students a shot at a K-12 private school option next year.

Under HB 7067, the Family Empowerment Scholarship program, which is serving 18,000 students in its first year, would be allowed to serve as many as 28,000 additional students next year. Under current law, the program could grow by 0.25 percent of the total public-school student enrollment, or roughly 7,000 students. The bill changes that amount to 1 percent.

The bill also would provide for a gradual increase in household income eligibility. Currently, the eligibility is limited to students whose household income does not exceed 300 percent of poverty, which is $78,6000 for a household of four. Under the bill, the eligibility limit would rise by 25 percentage points in any year in which more than 5 percent of the number of available Family Empowerment Scholarships are not awarded. Priority under the law would continue to go to households whose income does not exceed 185 percent of poverty, or $48,470.

The bill also makes changes to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, allowing students who receive scholarships to remain the program until they enroll in a public school, graduate or turn 21 — aligning that provision with the Family Empowerment Scholarship.

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship is administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, and serves 108,000 students from economically disadvantaged families. A similar bill, SB 1220, won approval earlier today from the Senate Education Appropriations Subcommittee.

More than 50 people attended the House Committee meeting prepared to speak in favor of the bill, including families who have benefited from the scholarship programs. Among them was Adriana Ortega, mother of a 9-year-old on a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and a 6-year-old who participates in the Gardiner Scholarship program. Both attend Downey Christian School in Orlando.

“The scholarship has been a blessing to us,” Ortega said. “We need to ensure more Florida families can benefit from them.”

Nadia Hionides, principal of The Foundation Academy, a faith-based and LGBTQ-affirming private school in Jacksonville, urged lawmakers to support the bill.

“I hope that whatever you decide to do leads to more options for more parents in the end,” she said.

Elijah Robinson, a senior at The Foundation Academy, told lawmakers the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship transformed his life after he endured two years of constant bullying at his public school.

“Please support this and bill and don’t do anything that will result in fewer scholarships,” he said.

Also included in the bill were changes to the Gardiner Scholarship program for children with unique abilities. Under the new law, eligible students who turn 3 after Sept. 1 would be qualified to receive a scholarship if funds are available instead of having to wait until the following year to apply.

Additionally, the bill would close scholarship accounts that have been inactive for two years instead of the current three years, paving the way for more students to be served.

The Gardiner Scholarship, created in 2014, allows parents of students with unique abilities to create a customized education program for their children and covers expenses beyond tuition including tutoring, therapies and curriculum materials. The program currently serves 13,000 students.

A companion bill that would revise eligibility requirements for the Gardiner Scholarship, sponsored by Sen. Keith Perry, R-Gainesville,  SB 1164, is currently in the Senate Education Appropriations Subcommittee.

February 25, 2020 0 comment
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2020 Presidential ElectionBlog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation PoliticsFeaturedJack CoonsSchool ChoiceVouchers

The state of the (teachers) union

John E. Coons February 14, 2020
John E. Coons

Somebody in the White House has been thinking. President Trump’s recent State of the Union address, while wanting perhaps in style, included a truly clever turn of the screw.

Trump stole an issue only Cory Booker among the Democrats dared to touch – school choice for low income families. Booker was ready to face the teachers union; the other candidates for the Democratic nomination were not, and now really cannot.

Trump now owns the issue, and it connects him to those individuals who are sick of having their kids conscripted for a school the child and family despise. Those persons had found the president wanting in this area, but he now will be a hero to thousands who have been crying for so long for an end to compulsion.

The details of any specific proposal will, of course, be crucial to its actual success. I trust this proposal will not be the sort of small and uniform voucher for rich and poor alike, the sort one associates with the late Milton Friedman. The rich do not need the help, and at most should qualify for a token subsidy. The need is centered on low and lower-middle income families who are simply stuck.

Could the federal government by itself afford to provide the necessary dollars for an authentic and sufficient subsidy for all the poor to have their choice of school? Of course not. But, properly designed, it could intensify popular awareness of the potential of reform at the state level.

One great stumbling block for school choice subsidies has been the 19th century adoption by most states of so-called Blaine amendments to their constitutions. These raised legal barriers to all financial aid to religious institutions. Such laws greatly limit the states’ ability to aid the parents’ choice of religious schools which make up most of the private sector. Happily, the Supreme Court has before it litigation which could well eliminate the problem by holding these 19th century relics of prejudice unconstitutional.

What will be the response of Democratic candidates to the dilemma Trump has posed for them? If they continue their hostility to forms of aid that allow the poor parent to choose, they will maintain the support of the teachers union but risk that of those low-income fathers and mothers who have enthusiastically stood for subsidies spendable in private school.

Trump now has in hand the sort of weapon he obviously prizes and perhaps should. He has his opponents clearly in his sights as hypocrites, the kind of slam they have so frequently given him. The Dems have made their careers as heroes of the poor. For whom will they be heroes now?

February 14, 2020 4 comments
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Education LegislationFamily Empowerment ScholarshipFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipNews

Senate Education Committee approves school choice bills

Lisa Buie January 22, 2020
Lisa Buie

school choice

TALLAHASSEE – Bills that would align two scholarship programs for lower-income students, speed the opening of charter schools, and make it easier for private high school students to participate in college dual enrollment programs all won approval from the Senate Education Committee Tuesday.

SB 1220, a bill that spells out rules for teacher training and qualifications, was approved and will be reported favorably out of the committee. It now includes an amendment proposed by Education Committee chairman Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah. The amendment adds provisions aimed at aligning application and eligibility guidelines between the new Family Empowerment Scholarship, adopted last year and serving 18,000 students, and the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, created in 2001 and serving 108,000 students.

SB 1420, sponsored by Deputy Majority Leader Anitere Flores, R-Miami, would require school districts to let charter schools with approved applications open the next school year.

SB 1246, sponsored by Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, would prohibit colleges and universities from charging fees to private schools with students who participate in dual enrollment. It also would establish a scholarship fund to help colleges cover the costs. Additionally, the bill clarifies that home schooled students are allowed to participate in dual enrollment programs at no cost to their families.

January 22, 2020 1 comment
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Advocate VoicesEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationFeaturedParent EmpowermentSchool ChoiceVouchers

archivED: Remembering the rebels

Ron Matus December 31, 2019
Ron Matus

Tracy James and her daughter, Khaliah Clanton-Williams, are greeted by principal Maria Mitkevicius and administrator Mary Gaudet at the Montessori School of Pensacola. Khaliah
participated in Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship program in early 2000. PHOTO: Michael Spooneybarger

Editor’s note: During this holiday season, redefinED is republishing our best articles of 2019 – those features and commentaries that deserve a second look. This article from Step Up For Students’ director of policy and public affairs Ron Matus was part of our “Education Revolution” series marking the 20th anniversary of the far-reaching K-12 changes Gov. Jeb Bush launched in Florida. Originally published May 30, it spotlights a mom and daughter who participated in Florida’s historic Opportunity Scholarship.

PENSACOLA, Fla. – Tracy James finished the graveyard shift to find her car a casualty of the “voucher wars” – and her 8-year-old, Khaliah, needing another ride to school.

This was 20 years ago, when this Deep South Navy town became the front in the national battle over school choice. In June 1999, Florida’s new governor, Jeb Bush, had signed into law the Opportunity Scholarship, the first, modern, statewide, K-12 private school voucher in America. Khaliah and 56 other students in Pensacola were the first recipients, and now enmeshed in a political clash drawing global attention.

CNN came. A Japanese film crew showed up. So did a member of British Parliament. All wanted to see the “experiment” a Canadian newspaper said “will shape the future of public education in this state and perhaps across the United States.” Tracy and Khaliah were in the thick of it, with Tracy among the most outspoken of an unconventional cast of characters. The single mom with the self-described rebel streak wouldn’t hide her joy at this opportunity for her only child – and refused to cave to anybody who suggested she was being “bamboozled.”

“If you want something better for your children,” she told one paper, “you would do the same thing.”

Not everybody appreciated her resolve.

Tracy walked out of her shift as a phlebotomist to find her car sabotaged, three tires flat as week-old Coke. She called her dad, who said he could take Khaliah to her new school, one Tracy could not afford without the scholarship. The flats left Tracy shocked and ticked – and more determined.

I guess I need tougher skin, she thought. Because we ain’t going back.

Lots of folks know Ruby Bridges. But Khaliah Clanton-Williams? Maybe one day.

The original Opportunity Scholarship students, their parents, and the five private schools that welcomed them have never gotten their due. After an epic legal battle, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the school choice program unconstitutional in 2006, and the decision in Bush v. Holmes seemed to close the chapter. But it didn’t. Many of those whose lives were touched by the scholarship have untold stories, with some still unfolding in ways that attest to the power of that experience.

In one sense, the Opportunity Scholarship was as small-scale as it was short-lived. Students were eligible if their zoned public schools earned two F grades in a 4-year span, and in 1999 only two schools – both in Pensacola – fell into that category. At the same time, most private schools sat it out. Among other restrictions, the law barred them from charging tuition beyond the scholarship amount of $3,400 to $3,800. At its height, the Opportunity Scholarship served 788 students.

And yet, it loomed so large. Florida’s “first voucher” stirred the imagination about what could be with a more pluralistic, parent-driven system of public education. It exposed the festering dissatisfaction many parents had with assigned schools. It enabled and amplified voices that still aren’t heard enough.

Pensacola may be best known for its Blue Angels and sugar-sand beaches. But most of the parents who applied for the school choice scholarships were working-class black women – nursing assistants and bank tellers, cooks and clerks, Head Start workers and homemakers. They had a lot to say about schools in Pensacola’s low-income neighborhoods, and for a few months in 1999, they had the mic.

***

Khaliah’s assigned school was modest red brick, five blocks from her home, named for the district’s first “supervisor of colored schools.” Khaliah would be starting kindergarten, so Tracy stopped to visit. She never got past the front office. “It was a zoo,” she said. “Kids were running around. They were screaming. There was no discipline. There was no structure.”

Nobody with the school acknowledged her, so after a few minutes, Tracy left … for good. She turned to her only option: another district school near her mother’s house, two miles away. Tracy said her mom, a former custodian for the school district, became Khaliah’s guardian so Khaliah could attend. But that school didn’t pan out either.

One day, Tracy watched through a window as kids in Khaliah’s class danced to music blaring from a boom box. She found the teacher in a side office and asked what was going on: “ ‘She said, ‘It’s reading time.’ I said, ‘They’re not reading.’ “ Tracy opened her eyes wide for emphasis.

Khaliah, meanwhile, shy and soft-spoken, was falling behind. “I had a hard time concentrating because it was so loud,” she said. “I’d ask for help and it was like, ‘just a moment.’ But the moment never came.”

Tracy heard about Opportunity Scholarships while working another job as a hotel desk supervisor. Some guests asked her in passing about local schools, and as fate would have it, they were lawyers with the Institute for Justice, the firm that would later help defend the scholarship in court.

Ninety-two students applied for the scholarships, including Khaliah, who had come back to live with Tracy. That exceeded the available seats in the four Catholic schools and one Montessori that opted to participate, so a lottery was held.

Khaliah emerged with a golden ticket.

***

Tracy took her time before deciding on a school. She read up on Catholic schools, talked to friends and co-workers who attended Catholic schools, learned everything she could about Montessori. She was intrigued by the latter – by the mixed-age classrooms, the cultivation of creativity, the curriculum that was so different. In the end, the rebel and her daughter decided they wanted different.

Khaliah Clanton-Williams, left, used an Opportunity Scholarship to attend the Montessori School of Pensacola.

Khaliah attended Montessori School of Pensacola from second through seventh grade, and, in Tracy’s words, “blossomed” in confidence and knowledge. She returned to public school in eighth grade (Tracy wanted her re-acclimated to public school before high school) and graduated from Pensacola High in 2010. For most of the next few years, she worked as a mortgage loan officer. She earned her associate degree in business administration from Pensacola State College in 2018. She’s on track to earn a bachelor’s in human resources management (with honors) in 2020.

Without the Montessori, Khaliah said, much of that would not have happened.

“It made me better,” she said. “I don’t think I would have gone to college. I don’t think I would have gotten my degree. (Montessori) made education more important. It was a higher standard.”

The upside wasn’t just academic. Tracy and Khaliah said nearly everyone in the school embraced Khaliah as family. There were only a few black students before a few more enrolled with the scholarships, but race was not a divide, they said. Khaliah made fast friends. They invited her to sleepovers, to ride horses, to U-pick blueberries. “These things were normal to them, but not to me,” she said.

Montessori co-owner (and head of elementary and middle school) Maria Mitkevicius said increasing diversity was a big reason the school opted into the scholarship program. So was the belief the school shouldn’t be limited to parents of means.

The staff knew the stakes, even if they didn’t know how much things might change. Twenty years after five private schools and 57 kids cracked the door, at least 26 private schools in Escambia County (Pensacola is the county seat) participate in Florida’s K-12 school choice scholarship programs, serving at least 2,163 students. Statewide, 2,000 private schools serve more than 140,000 scholarship students, with thousands more on the way.

“We thought this might change the face of education,” Mitkevicius said. “I guess it did.”

***

The news on Pensacola TV showed 10,000 sign-waving students and parents, marching at a 2016 school choice rally in Tallahassee with Martin Luther King III. As Khaliah watched it again last week, tears fell.

It hurt, she said, to see so many who still don’t have choice or fear their choices could be taken from them. At the same time, how nice to see strength in numbers.

“Back then,” she said, meaning 1999, “it was just us.”

Tracy James and her daughter, Khaliah, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush circa 1999.

Remembering back then is tough for Tracy too. Some in Pensacola’s black community could not understand why black parents would support anything connected to Jeb Bush. “We were looked on as kind of those people who are being arm twisted by the governor, like you’re letting the Republicans bamboozle you,” said Tracy, now a clinical recruiter for a Pensacola hospital.

It got ugly. Dirty looks. Heated words. The tires. Tracy said some friends and family stopped speaking to her, and she switched jobs because she felt she was being harassed for taking a stand.

But the rebel has no regrets.

“I wanted to try something different, I wanted to be different, I wanted a different opportunity for my daughter,” Tracy said. “From what I saw happening, I wanted to be able to make the choice, myself, of where she’d end up as an adult.”

“I had no idea that it’d turn out to be such a controversial issue,” she continued. “To be thrown into sort of the limelight of a political battle, I had no idea. I had absolutely no idea how important it would be.”

Or how much of a struggle.

“When we went through that program, I was thinking that was kind of the end of an era,” Tracy said. “But it was actually the beginning.”

***

The shy girl who helped pioneer school choice is now a tough-minded mom who needs more.

Khaliah is married to a paper mill machine operator, and their oldest, Kyrian, will begin kindergarten this fall. His zoned school is one of 11 D-rated schools in the district, so like her mom before her, Khaliah looked for alternatives. She applied to three higher-performing district schools through an open enrollment program, but all were full. On a second go-round, Kyrian got into a new elementary north of Pensacola. It’s not ideal. The drive will be up to 45 minutes each way, and Khaliah switched jobs – to drive for Shipt, Lyft and Uber – so she can have flexibility.

Still, she’s worried. Kyrian has special needs – he’s hyperactive, averse to change in routine and undergoing speech therapy – but has not been formally diagnosed with anything. At this time, he wouldn’t qualify for any of Florida’s private school scholarships.

The irony isn’t lost on Tracy and Khaliah. School choice helped them. They helped pave the way for more. Yet 20 years later, there still isn’t enough choice for Kyrian.

The rebel’s daughter said that just means the work isn’t done.

“I’ll continue to fight for my children as my mom fought for me,” Khaliah said. “I’m not taking no as an option.”

 

December 31, 2019 0 comment
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archivED: Revisiting a podcast with Marcus Brandon

Ron Matus November 9, 2019
Ron Matus

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit a September 2015 interview with a voucher advocate who has fought for the educational rights of disabled and low-income students.

Marcus Brandon’s resume starts off like a progressive’s dream.

National finance director, Dennis Kucinich for president. Staffer, Progressive Majority. Deputy director, Equality Virginia. But once it rolls into Brandon’s education accomplishments, some fellow progressives get whiplash. During two terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, Brandon was a leading force behind bills that created vouchers for disabled and low-income students, and removed the state’s cap on charter schools.

Inconsistency? Not for Brandon, a rising political star whose family’s civil rights bona fides are unquestioned.

“I tell people that my views on education are the most progressive stance that I have,” Brandon told redefinED. “Progressives have to take a real hard look at the way they view education because I’ve always been brought up, in the civil rights movement and all of that, (to) fight for equal opportunity and equal access for everybody.”

Brandon, who now directs the Carolina CAN education advocacy group, isn’t an anomaly. A growing list of influential liberals, progressives and Democrats are increasingly supportive of school choice. In the process, they’re wrenching the left back into alignment with its own forgotten history – a history that is especially rich in the African-American experience.

Milton Friedman would merit a few paragraphs in a book on this subject. But there’d be whole chapters devoted to the educational endeavors of freed slaves and black churches. To Mississippi freedom schools and Marva Collins. To the connections between Brown v. Board of Education and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.

“School choice is not new for African-Americans,” said Brandon, whose family played a role in the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., which toppled segregationist dominos nationwide. “It is very much a part of our history for the community to be involved with the school. It’s very much a part of our history for the churches to start their own school. That is just as deep in our history as any part of our history. … It mind-boggles me that the people who are fighting this will forget that.”

The evidence is in plain sight. A who’s who of black Democrats have explained their support for school choice in many ways, in many forums (see here, here, and here for starters). Progressives who are still skeptical should consider James Forman Jr.’s paper, “The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First.” Or check out the annual gathering of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Or look at the polling, which shows deep support for school choice in black communities.

Better yet, they should pause and consider the pleas of black parents.

In the meantime, they should hear out one of their own. (A podcast with Brandon is included below.)

Brandon’s support for vouchers and charter schools led fellow progressives to threaten to run him out of office, and worse. (Those kinds of attacks on black choice supporters aren’t an anomaly either.

Consider hit pieces like this one. And headlines like this.) What they should have done instead, he suggested, was consider choice on its merits – and the hypocrisy of many choice critics.

“You get a lot of harsh rhetoric from progressives … who would never send their child to my school one day of the week. That’s why I have a problem with that,” Brandon said. “They’re like, ‘Keep your kids there, keep your kids there.’ But at the end of the day they would never send their kids to my school.

“I remember being in a parade one time, and one progressive yelled at me, ‘You’re privatizing schools.’ And I asked her, ‘Would you send your kid to my school?’ And every time I ask that question the conversation gets very silent. And so what African-Americans need to do is understand that. Our leaders need to understand that those that are leading this fight (against school choice) do not send their kids to our school. And so what are we going to do?”

It’s not progressive, he said, to keep looking the other away.

“We’ve allowed these educational outcomes and these policies to go on for 40, 50 years, and then we say we’re going to continue that and someone says that’s progressive,” Brandon said. “If you have data that shows consistently that there is one particular segment of the population that doesn’t do well under a system, well that’s not progressive.”

Actually, he said, it’s “extremely conservative.”

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Rep-Brandon_mixed-and-shrunk.mp3
November 9, 2019 0 comment
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