Voucher Left

revisitED: Lessons from a school choice trailblazer

Ron Matus May 18, 2019

Ron Matus

Civil rights activist Mary McLeod was a school choice pioneer, opening a private, faith-based school for African-American girls in Daytona in 1904. The state of Florida may honor her with a statue in the U.S. Capitol. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Editor’s note: This month, redefinED is revisiting the best examples of our Voucher Left series, which focuses on the center-left roots of school choice. Today’s post from June 2016 tells the story of civil rights activist and school choice pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune, who started a private, faith-based school for African-American girls in 1904 that became known as Bethune-Cookman University.

How fitting: The choiciest of school choice states may soon be represented in the U.S. Capitol by the statue of a school choice pioneer.

A state panel nominated three legendary Floridians for the National Statuary Hall last week, but the only unanimous choice was Mary McLeod Bethune. The civil rights activist and adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt is best known for founding the private, faith-based school that became Bethune-Cookman University.

Assuming the Florida Legislature gives the Bethune statue a thumbs up too, more people, including millions of tourists who visit the hall each year, may get to hear her remarkable story. And who knows? Maybe they’ll get a better sense of the threads that tie the fight to educational freedom in Bethune’s era to our own.

With $1.50 to her name, Bethune opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904. There were public schools for black students in early 1900s Florida, but they were far inferior to white schools.

Bethune’s vision for something better was shaped by her own educational experience.

She attended three private, faith-based schools as a student. She taught at three private, faith-based schools before building her own. In every case, support for those schools, financial and otherwise, came from private contributions, religious institutions – and the communities they served. Backers were motivated by the noble goal of expanding educational opportunity. Black parents ached for it. That’s why, in the early days of her school, Bethune rode around Daytona on a second-hand bicycle, knocking on doors to solicit donations. That’s why her students mashed sweet potatoes for fund-raiser pies, while Bethune rolled up the crust.

Failure was not an option, because failure would have meant no options.

Goodness knows, I’m no expert on Mary McLeod Bethune. But given what I do know, I think she’d be amazed at the freedom that today’s choice options offer to educators. More and more teachers, especially in choice-friendly states like Florida, are now able to work in or create schools that synch with their vision and values – and get state-supported funding to do it.

Bethune was forever hunting dollars to keep her school afloat, and it wore her down. In 1902, she asked Booker T. Washington for money. In 1915, she asked philanthropist and civil rights advocate Julius Rosenwald for money. In 1920, she made a pitch on the letters page of the New York Times. (All of this can be found in “Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World,” a nice collection of Bethune’s writing.)

In 1941, Bethune even asked FDR. “I need not tell you what it has meant in Florida to try to build up a practical and cultural institution for my people,” she wrote to the president. “It has taken a wisdom and tact and patience and endurance that I cannot describe in words.”

“We are now in desperate need of funds,” she continued. “My nights are sleepless with this load upon my heart and mind.”

I can’t help but wonder what a superhero like Bethune could have done, had Florida had vouchers and tax credit scholarships a century ago. I don’t mean to dismiss the inequity in funding for choice programs – it’s real, and it deserves more attention – but inequity is relative. The funding streams available for low-income students today would have allowed Bethune to park the bike, forget the pie crust and focus on her core mission.

It would also have allowed her to rally more to the cause.

Bethune, who initially hoped to be a missionary, understood how much education and faith are intertwined for so many parents, and that it doesn’t make sense to pit public against private, or one school against another.

In 1932, she weighed in on a feud between state teacher colleges with an essay that foreshadows the all-hands-on-deck views of many of today’s choice supporters. She referenced the massive number of truant African American students and the “pitiful handful” that graduate from high school. “Unfriendly rivalry was never more needless, never more inexpedient among the schools of Florida than just now,” Bethune wrote.

The same could be said for K-12 education today.

Somehow, though, Bethune managed to end her essay on an up note, with an appeal to common ground:

Florida faces a new day in education. Grim as the picture appears today, it is not nearly so bad as it was just a few years hence, and the aspect is rapidly changing for the better; a veritable miracle is transpiring before the eye. The day for which many warriors now aging in the service have longed, the day for which they have prayed and sweat drops of blood – that new day of the hoped-for better things is approaching. With the scent of victory in the nostril, may every agency redouble its zeal; with jealousies forgotten, with the spirit of competition thrust aside, may every organization and individual unite under the banner of One Common Cause, the grim battle against ignorance and vice, and carry the issue to a glorious victory.

May 18, 2019 0 comment

Charter Schools Progressives and ed reform Voucher Left

revisitED: Rosa Parks, school choice supporter

Ron Matus May 11, 2019

Ron Matus

Soft-spoken and reserved, Parks did not want a big to-do about her proposed charter school. She simply wanted to help kids in her neighborhood, and she was uneasy with the possibility the school could become “political.” (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Editor’s note: This month, redefinED is revisiting the best examples of our Voucher Left series, which focuses on the center-left roots of school choice. Today’s post from March 2016 illustrates how civil rights activist Rosa Parks believed in the value of giving parents more educational choice.

If the full, rich history of school choice wasn’t so hidden, perhaps it’d be less shocking to stumble on a link (hat tip: Chris Stewart) between charter schools and “the first lady of civil rights.” But since so much of that history remains off radar, I have the honor of amplifying the blip.

Rosa Parks liked school choice, too.

In the late 1990s, she and her foundation applied for a K-12 charter school in Detroit in the hopes of uplifting black students in tough neighborhoods. Bad timing and twisted ed politics apparently doomed the effort, but it’s clear Parks, the product of a private Christian school, saw value in giving parents more options.

Said the application:

The mission of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Academy for Self Development (the “Academy”) is to provide mentoring and alternative learning, through creative education techniques, that incorporate the philosophies of Rosa and Raymond Parks. The Principles are based on their life experiences of pride, dignity and courage. Students will be educated and trained in a community environment to transfer common sense and survival skills into leadership and marketable skills.

The Academy will also provide training in life skills that incorporate the philosophies of Rose and Raymond Parks: dignity with pride, courage with perseverance and power with discipline.

Parks and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957, not long after her quiet act of courage on that Deep South bus sent dominoes falling. Their Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development operated an after-school program that stressed character education. Parks wanted a school that did the same.

Pride, dignity and courage “were the words that were important to her, and that she wanted translated into a bigger educational program,” said Anna Amato, an education consultant who worked with Parks on the application and hasn’t talked publicly about it for nearly 20 years.

The Rosa Parks charter school also planned to emphasize project-based, experiential learning. For instance, students would take field trips to Michigan “stops” on the Underground Railroad and use that as a springboard for lessons in reading, writing, history – and more.

“Our students and parents, as an entire family,” said the application, “will be provided opportunities to develop a thorough knowledge of the history of the African American struggle for civil rights, along with a sense of responsibility for themselves and their communities.”

Soft-spoken and reserved, Parks did not want a big to-do over the school, Amato said. She just wanted to help kids in her neighborhood, and was uneasy with the possibility the school could become “political.”

Of course, the idea that low-income parents should have options beyond district schools has become ridiculously political.

Michigan was a pioneer in the charter school movement – it opened its doors in 1994, just three years after Minnesota did it first – and blazing the path triggered a particularly partisan reaction. Meanwhile, Amato said, other changes on the education landscape added to the turbulence, like the state taking over low-performing district schools.

Parks submitted her application to the Detroit school board in 1997. The board had only approved two charters up to that point, and even more snags were surfacing, including a power struggle between the district and state. (The Michigan Legislature ended up removing the elected school board in 1999, and another elected board didn’t return until 2005.)

Incredibly, the Detroit newspapers seemed to have ignored Parks’s proposal (I found zilch in the archives of the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press), and it drew little attention in the national press (the New York Times story above being an exception). It did, however, turn a head in the White House.

“I am pleased that Rosa Parks, who taught us a lot about dignity and equality, is now working to open a charter school in Detroit,” President Bill Clinton told the NAACP as he pitched charter schools to its national convention in 1997. “And I urge you to consider doing so in your communities. If you believe it will help, the Department of Education will help you.”

It’s unclear exactly what happened to Parks’s application. According to Amato, a number of charter proposals that came before an unfriendly school board and superintendent at that time fell through the cracks. Amato said she vaguely remembers that Parks’s application made it on to the board agenda, but the board took no action.

Parks, increasingly frail, turned to other issues. She died in 2005.

“I was personally crushed,” Amato said. “I had the great honor of taking her vision and turning it into an application. But there were too many hurdles that I couldn’t overcome. I still get sad about it.”

The fact that Rosa Parks didn’t get to realize her vision of a charter school, though, doesn’t diminish the fact that Rosa Parks had such a vision.

Isn’t that something?

May 11, 2019 0 comment

Faith-based Education Know Your History Progressives and ed reform Religious Education Unionism Voucher Left

revisitED: Sex, drugs and school choice

Ron Matus May 4, 2019

Ron Matus

When it comes to its education system, the Netherlands decided nearly a century ago to end long-running religious strife over schools and let 1,000 flowers bloom. The Dutch system of universal school choice gives full government funding to public and private schools, including all manner of faith-based schools.

The Netherlands decided nearly a century ago to end long-running religious strife over schools and let 1,000 flowers bloom. The Dutch system of universal school choice gives full government funding to public and private schools, including all manner of faith-based schools. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Editor’s note: This month, redefinED is revisiting the best examples of our Voucher Left series, which focuses on the center-left roots of school choice. Today’s post explores one of the world’s most robust systems of government-funded private school choice in a country known as a progressive’s paradise: the Netherlands.

By common definitions, the Netherlands is a very liberal place. Prostitution is legal. Euthanasia is legal. Gay marriage is legal; in fact, the Netherlands was the first country to make it so. Marijuana is not legal, technically, but from what I hear a lot of folks are red-eyed in Dutch coffee shops, saying puff-puff-pass without looking over their shoulders.

Given the rep, it might surprise school choice critics, who tend to consider themselves left of center, and who tend to view school choice as not, that the Netherlands has one of the most robust systems of government-funded private school choice on the planet. Next year the system will reach the century mark, with nearly 70 percent of Dutch students attending private schools (and usually faith-based schools) on the public dime.

By just about any measure, the Netherlands is a progressive’s paradise. According to the Social Progress Index, it was the ninth most progressive nation in 2015, down from No. 4 in 2014. (The U.S. was No. 16 both years.) On the SPI, it ranked No. 1 in tolerance for homosexuals, and No. 2 in press freedom. On another index, the Netherlands is No. 1 in gender equality. (The U.S. is No. 42.) It’s also among the world leaders in labor union membership (No. 19 in 2012, with 17.7 percent, eight spots ahead of the U.S.). And by some accounts, Amsterdam, the capital, is the most eco-friendly city in Europe.

Somehow, this country that makes Vermont look as red as Alabama is ok with full, equal government funding for public and private schools. It’s been that way been since a constitutional change in 1917. According to education researcher Charles Glenn, the Dutch education system includes government-funded schools that represent 17 different religious types, including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Rosicrucian, and hundreds that align to alternative bents like Montessori and Waldorf.

Glenn, an occasional contributor to redefinED, has written the book on the subject. He calls the Netherlands system “distinctively pluralistic.”

The Netherlands’ tradition of pluralism dates back hundreds of years. After the Dutch won their independence in 1609, Amsterdam became the commercial capital of Europe. It served as a hub for trade and finance, a cultural center that produced the likes of Rembrandt, and a refuge for migrants from across the continent, many of whom came fleeing religious persecution.

By the late nineteenth century, however, the country’s diverse religious factions, including Catholics, different Protestant sects, and various secular groups had created their own cultural silos, or “pillars.” Each had its own churches, its own schools, and its own social clubs. Some wanted public schools to be faith-based. Some wanted them to be “neutral.” Some wanted them to reflect one faith more than another.

The 1917 constitutional change was part of a broader reconciliation in Dutch politics called “The Pacification.” It followed decades of strife over schooling. No remedy worked until different factions agreed to let the parents decide, and let the money follow the child.

The system continues to have its tensions and tradeoffs. Some liberals still wonder if “common schools” would be better at unifying a country that grows ever more diverse. The influx of Muslim immigrants gives people pause, even as older divisions between religious factions fade. The Dutch way also includes far more regulation than some choice stalwarts in the U.S. would be comfortable with.

I don’t know enough to have a good opinion. But Glenn does, and he concludes most parents and the general public in the Netherlands are satisfied with their schools. Ed policy expert Mike McShane also points out the Dutch system produces some of the world’s best academic outcomes (Top 10 internationally in math, science and reading), at less cost per-pupil than the U.S. That should count for something.

For my skeptical liberal friends, I’d like to note that even the socialists are on board. Even before the 1917 constitutional change, the Socialist Party in the Netherlands was backing full public funding for private and faith-based schools. Why? Because, according to a resolution it adopted in 1902:

“Social democracy must not interfere with the unity of the working class against believing and nonbelieving capitalists in the social sphere for the sake of theological differences … “

There you have it: Fight the man. Not school choice.

May 4, 2019 4 comments

Courts Education and Public Policy Education Legislation Education Politics Education Research Florida Education Revolution Know Your History School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships Testing and Accountability Voucher Left

Accountability’s rocky legal road, Part 2

Patrick R. Gibbons April 9, 2019

Patrick R. Gibbons

Gov. Bush’s “A+ Plan” for accountability faced a long road of legal battles as soon as it began 20 years ago.

Editor’s note: March 2 marked the 20th anniversary of the legislative session in which Florida Gov. Jeb Bush launched a number of K-12 reforms that transformed education throughout the state. With the start of the 2019 legislative session earlier this month, redefinED embarked upon a series of articles that examine aspects of Bush’s K-12 education revolution and how it continues to reverberate. Today’s piece is the second of two retrospectives that chronicle the plan’s legislative roller coaster ride. You can read Part I here.

The critics strike back

With vouchers deemed constitutional by the First District Court of Appeal and with an appeal rejected by a 4-1 vote by the Florida Supreme Court, state leaders not only began to improve the A+ Plan; they birthed an entirely new scholarship program.

In the summer of 2001, Florida created the Florida Corporate Income Tax Scholarship, later renamed the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, for low-income students. The prior year, the state had created the McKay Scholarship for students with special needs. Both programs swelled in size immediately, dwarfing the embattled school voucher, the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). McKay served 8,000 students with special needs in 2002, while more than 55,000 low-income students applied for 15,000 corporate tax scholarships in its first year.[1]

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship would eventually grow to become the largest private school scholarship program in the nation, serving 100,512 students in the 2018-19 school year. (The program is administered by non-profits such as Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

The state also revised the A+ Plan’s accountability system in December 2001. Previously, schools were evaluated only on fourth-grade reading, fifth-grade math, and both tests in eighth and 10^th grades. New rules based school grades on both math and reading tests in all grades between third and 10^th. The new grading scale also gave a substantial weight to learning gains, with bonus points for significant gains for low-income students.

With the new rules in place, more schools received “F” grades, and enrollment in the OSP soared to 557 students in the next school year. Enrollment peaked at 788 students in 2004-05.

After a year away from the courtroom, the lawsuit resumed in the Leon County Circuit Court under a new judge, Kevin Davey, in the summer of 2002. Voucher opponents now argued the programs violated Florida’s “Blaine Amendment,” a constitutional ban on direct or indirect aid to religious institutions.

Voucher supporters were eager to argue the case as the U.S. Supreme Court just two weeks prior to the hearing had ruled an Ohio voucher program did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s “Establishment Clause.”

On Aug. 5, Judge Davey issued his ruling. “The language utilized in this provision is clear and unambiguous,” he wrote regarding Article I, Section 3 of the state constitution. Known as the “No Aid” clause, it bans “direct and indirect” aid to any church, or sect, or sectarian institution.[2]

School choice supporters appealed, claiming the ruling also threatened other religiously affiliated organizations such as several non-profit hospitals operating in the state.

The First District Court of Appeal would uphold the ruling 8-5 on Nov. 12, 2004. Scholarship supporters appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, knowing a loss could still be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lawyers for both sides argued on the “No Aid” clause before the Supreme Court on June 7 2005. Lawyers representing parents argued the aid was to the student, not the school, as U.S. Supreme Court had reasoned in its 2002 Zelman decision.

On Jan. 5, 2006 the Florida Supreme Court in a 5-2 vote ruled the voucher program was unconstitutional, but for entirely different reasons than anyone expected.

The OSP “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida’s children,” wrote the majority in a decision that completely contradicted its own ruling five years earlier.

Back in 2001, Justices Charles Wells, Harry Lee Anstead, Barbara Pariente and Fred Lewis voted 4-1 (against Peggy Quince) to decline jurisdiction on the case, which allowed the Circuit Court of Appeal decision to stand. That ruling found nothing within Article IX Section 1 of the state constitution prohibited vouchers or any other educational alternative created by the Legislature.

But with all other avenues of ruling the program unconstitutional now defeated or in jeopardy of being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida court suddenly reversed course. Not comfortable with its own ruling, the court invented its own definition of “uniformity” and declared vouchers “inevitably harmed” public schools without examining a single piece of evidence.

Clark Neily, a lawyer representing scholarship parents, condemned the decision as “among the most incoherent, self-contradictory and ends-oriented court decisions in recent memory.”

Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher agreed, called the ruling “a results-oriented decision.”

But Steve Gey, a law professor at Florida State University, believed the ruling “adhered closely to the text of the Constitution.”[3] Gey had co-authored a friend of the court brief in March 2005 entirely on the “No Aid” clause in support of the teachers union’s lawsuit.

Many legal critics, including the Harvard Law Review, would criticize the ruling.

While legal experts debated its merits, the impact of the ruling hit families the hardest.

Barbara Cruz used the scholarship to send her daughter to La Progresiva Presbyterian School in Miami. Her daughter would graduate using the scholarship, but Cruz still described the court ruling as, “so, so bad.”[4]

Many others were in limbo.

“I think [the ruling is] going to hurt a lot of students and their parents who can’t afford it, and they are forced to go to these public schools,” said Bobby Evans, whose daughter, Kiara, attended St Paul’s Catholic School in Jacksonville on the scholarship for the sixth and seventh grades. Kiara would finish out the year on the scholarship, but whether she could remain at St Paul’s remained unknown.[5]

School choice supporters worried the ruling might be used to target other programs.

“One of the attorneys for the plaintiff made it very plain,” said Sen. John McKay, sponsor of the state’s McKay Scholarship. “If they succeeded with this case, they will be going after children with disabilities next.”

Opponents celebrated.

“I think this spells the end of this diversion of public monies to private education programs in Florida,” said Ronald Meyer, the lawyer representing the teachers union in the case.

When asked about challenging the tax credit scholarship or McKay Scholarship, Meyer told Education Week, “The significance of this travels well beyond the state of Florida.” He hinted that the ruling could help overturn vouchers in other states as well.[6] A few months later, Meyer would deny that the teachers union had any interest in challenging either scholarship program.[7]

Bush promised to save the program.

In mid-February, Gov. Bush stood before a rally of thousands of parents and students, most of them black, wearing t-shirts stating “Save Our Students,” and promised to get a constitutional amendment passed to rescue the voucher program.

“This is a fundamental right, this is a civil right, this is American as apple pie,” Bush said to a cheering crowd.[8]

Bush and Senate President Tom Lee moved to pass a constitutional amendment that would save the OSP and protect other private scholarship programs. The amendment would need to pass the Senate and the House by three-fifths votes before being approved by voters in November 2006.

Those efforts collapsed when Sen. Majority Leader Alex Villalobos, Sen. Nancy Argenziano, Sen. Dennis Jones, and Sen. Evelyn Lynn joined Democrats to oppose the amendment. Bush came up one vote shy of the three-fifths threshold. Villalobos would be stripped of his power as a result.[9] Today, Villalobos works for the legal firm headed by Ronald Meyer, the teachers union’s lead counsel.

Bush and Sen. Lee brushed off the defeat and moved to a new plan, passing a bill to allow the remaining OSP students to transfer to the tax credit scholarship program.[10] Tensions were high with just a few days left in the session. Democrats’ best hope for defeating the bill was to stall. Senate Democratic Leader Les Miller demanded the full text of bills be read aloud, a parliamentary trick that brought the legislative process to a grinding halt.[11] The House eventually ran out of time to vote on the bill.[12]

The OSP’s private scholarship was finally dead.

The end

Although the legal case that ended the OSP, known as Bush v. Holmes, faced considerable criticism from legal experts at the time, scholarship supporters worried that copycat lawsuits would upend voucher programs around the country.

But the case was never successfully duplicated. And despite threats from the teachers’ union, the case even failed to overturn significantly larger scholarship programs in Florida. At the time of the Holmes ruling, the tax credit scholarship enrolled more than 14,000 low-income students in private school, while the McKay Scholarship enrolled more than 15,000 children with special needs. Combined, both programs cost $136 million that year.[13]

The Opportunity Scholarship’s private option ended in 2005-06 with 734 students. During the program’s seven-year lifespan, the state spent a mere $11.2 million for 2,848 scholarships. Ninety-five percent of the students on the program were black or Hispanic, and 70 percent participated in the free or reduced-price federal lunch program.

None of the worries conjured by critics, including Sen. Betty Hozendorf’s claim the scholarship was a “lynching of the civil rights movement,” ever proved true.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program continues today, though students may only choose to attend another public school. Enrollment and the students who are eligible fluctuate annually. OSP enrollment peaked with 4,424 students attending new public schools in 2011-12 and had a low of 1,280 in 2008-09. In 2017-18, the latest data available, the program served 3,074 students.

Despite its small size, the OSP started a massive fight over how to educate Florida’s students. Today, its history is half-forgotten and half-confused, but its legacy reshaped Florida’s educational landscape forever.

[1] Balona, Denise-Marie. “Tax Vouchers Trigger Rush; More than 15,000 Kids Received Private-School Scholarship From Corporate Taxes; Many Children Are On Waiting List,” Orlando Sentinel, March 21, 2003.

[2] Flannery, Mary Ellen and Kimberly Miller. “Judge Rejects School Vouchers,” Palm Beach Post, August 6, 2002.

[3] Matus, Ron and Steve Bousquet. “Court throws out vouchers,” St Petersburg Times, January 6, 2006.

[4] Matus, Ron and Steve Bousquet. “Court throws out vouchers,” St Petersburg Times, January 6, 2006.

[5] Mitchell, Tia. “Student’s life in limbo with end of vouchers; the Florida Supreme Court ruled Opportunity Scholarships violated the state Constitution,” Florida Times-Union, January 9, 2006.

[6] Richard, Alan. “Florida Supreme Court Finds State Voucher Program Unconstitutional,” Education Week, January 6, 2006. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/01/05/18voucher_web2.h25.html (accessed 3.25.19)

[7] Klas, Mary Elen, “Senate moves to keep vouchers; The state Senate advanced a proposal to fix the constitutional weakness of Florida’s first voucher program. It comes up for a vote today,” Miami Herald, May 3, 2006.

[8] Follick, Joe. “Thousands rally to push lawmakers on vouchers,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, February 16, 2006.

[9] Cotterell, Bill. “Party-switching votes doom tuition vouchers,” Tallahassee Democrat, May 2, 2006.

[10] Klas, Mary Elen, “Senate moves to keep vouchers; The state Senate advanced a proposal to fix the constitutional weakness of Florida’s first voucher program. It comes up for a vote today,” Miami Herald, May 3, 2006.

[11] Kennedy, John. “Democrats try to stall revival of vouchers,” Orlando Sentinel, May 4, 2006.

[12] Kaczor, Bill. “Bush’s Prized School Voucher Plan Looks to Be Out of Time; House Has No Plans to Vote On Program,” Sun Sentinel, May 6, 2006.

[13] Stockfish, Jerome and Marilyn Brown. “Court Rejects School Vouchers,” Tampa Tribune, January 6, 2006.

April 9, 2019 0 comment

Blog Administration Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice Testing and Accountability Voucher Left

revisitED: Peace, love & accountability

Ron Matus March 2, 2019

Ron Matus

War on Poverty liberals who supported private school vouchers saw school choice as a means to create more accountability for a public education system that they saw as unresponsive to the needs of low-income parents. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Editor’s note: redefinED continues its journey through the archives, reviving on Saturdays interesting posts on various topics that deserve a second look. In March, we’ll feature pieces on school accountability, beginning with this one that shines a light on War on Poverty liberals who supported private school vouchers in the 1960s and ‘70s.

This is the latest post in our ongoing series on the center-left roots of school choice.

The Great Society liberals who pushed for private school vouchers in the 1960s and ‘70s were all about social justice. They saw a tool for empowering low-income parents. For promoting equity. For honoring diversity.

They also saw a means to redefine accountability.

In 1971, the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity – the office created to lead the War on Poverty – put out this brochure explaining the “voucher experiment” that would eventually be sorta kinda conducted in California’s Alum Rock school district. (You can read the full proposal here.) The brochure notes the pathetic academic outcomes for low-income students across America, then pivots to a theory for progress through “greater accountability”:

One reason for this disparity could well be that poor parents have little opportunity to affect the type or quality of education received by their children. The poor have no means by which to make the education system more responsive to their needs and desires. More affluent parents usually can obtain a good education for their children because they can choose schools for their children to attend – either by deciding where to live or by sending the children to private schools. Poverty and residential segregation deny this choice to low-income and minority parents.

The Office of Economic Opportunity therefore has begun to seek a means to introduce greater accountability and parental control into schools in such a way that the poor would have a wider range of choices, that the schools would be encouraged to become more accountable to parents, and that the public schools would remain attractive to the more affluent. This has led to consideration of an experiment in which public education would be given directly to parents in the form of vouchers, or certificates, which the parents could then take to the school of their choice, public or nonpublic, as payment for their children’s education.

Now is a good a time to re-surface this blast from the past. Plenty of smart folks have been trying to help people understand a definition of accountability through school choice (see here, here, here and here). But truth be told, opponents of choice – and I’d put many of my media friends in that category – still haven’t heard that definition, or still don’t appreciate it, or still characterize it exclusively as an extension of free-market “ideology.” Perhaps hearing it from the left will cause some healthy cognitive dissonance. 🙂

A better grasp of accountability is especially important to us in Florida. We’ve been barraged by negative stories ever since President Trump visited an Orlando Catholic school in March 2017 and praised Florida’s scholarship programs. Many of these stories suggested, if not outright claimed, that the Florida programs lack accountability. The name of the Trump-spurred series in the Orlando Sentinel says it all: “Schools Without Rules.” (Our response here.)

But this notion of unaccountable private schools is only true if you believe in a narrow, warped view of accountability that includes regulations alone. If “accountability” means holding a state-supported program to account for results, then parental choice exercises that pressure, too.

The liberal academics behind the OEO voucher proposal clearly believed that.

March 2, 2019 0 comment

Achievement Gap Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice Voucher Left

revisitED: Racism, irony, and school choice

Ron Matus February 23, 2019

Ron Matus

Editor’s note: This February marks the 43^rd anniversary of Black History Month. redefinED is taking the opportunity to revisit some pieces from our archives appropriate for this annual celebration. The article below originally appeared in redefinED in July 2016.

This is the latest post in our series on the center-left roots of school choice.

Former student Ozell Ward stands in front of a historical marker of the Milner-Rosenwald Academy in Mount Dora, Fla.

The school was all black. The textbooks, hand-me-down. The teachers paid less. Yes, the Milner-Rosenwald Academy in Mount Dora, Fla., was separate and unequal, said Ozell Ward, who attended 60 years ago.

And yet, in his view, it was better.

Teachers were invested, he said. Parents were engaged.

The community made it their “anchor.”

“Education-wise, I think I had one of the best foundations, period, despite the so-called handicaps,” said Ward, 69, a retired human resources consultant.

It may seem odd to highlight a segregated, Deep South school for a series about the roots of school choice. But the K-8 Milner-Rosenwald Academy was built during an all-but-forgotten campaign, nearly a century ago, to expand educational opportunity throughout the South. Like today’s school choice movement, it was propelled by a desire to give more and better to the kids who need it the most. The school and literally thousands like it reflected many of the core characteristics that have long defined the struggle for educational freedom, particularly in the African American experience.

It offered options (in this case, of having one formal, quality school or none at all). Private sector support. Close ties to churches and faith leaders.

And local control.

“The school was the center of the community,” said Vivian Owens, a former chemist and retired public school science teacher who also attended Milner-Rosenwald. “And the community supported it in every way.”

Irony abounds. Mount Dora, population 12,000, is a charmer of a town in the middle of Lake County, an easy-on-the-eyes stretch of Central Florida known for citrus-covered hills, stunning lake vistas – and notorious, racist violence. For nearly 30 years, it was ruled by Sheriff Willis McCall, the overseer for the county’s white bankers and citrus barons. McCall was the dark force at the center of the Groveland Four case, which generated international headlines in the 1940s and ‘50s and pitted him against Thurgood Marshall, the larger-than-life NAACP lawyer who, at the same time, was leading the charge to desegregate public schools. Thanks to the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Devil in the Grove,” a movie is being made about the case, potentially giving millions of Americans a glimpse of the home-grown terrorism that, not long ago, was as much a part of the Florida landscape as sugar-sand beaches.

This was Florida at its worst. Yet for many African Americans here, it was also a golden age for education.

February 23, 2019 0 comment

Know Your History Progressives and ed reform Voucher Left

revisitED: Choice history, choice policy

Ron Matus February 9, 2019

Ron Matus

One of a series of murals covering the walls of the Center for Pan-African Culture at Kent State University, dedicated to a group of Kent State students called Black United Students, who first proposed the adoption of Black History Month

Editor’s note: This February marks the 43^rd anniversary of Black History Month. redefinED is taking this opportunity to revisit some pieces from our archives appropriate for this annual celebration. The article below originally appeared in redefinED in December 2015.

James Forman Jr.

Credit James Forman Jr. with the best account yet of the center-left roots of the school choice movement. Credit his stint as a public defender for being the spark.

Forman, now a Yale law professor, said the district “alternative” schools serving his juvenile clients in Washington D.C. 20 years ago were giving them the least and worst when they needed the most and best. He began exploring options like charter schools, only to be told by some folks that school choice couldn’t be trusted because of its segregationist past.

Forman knew about the “segregation academies” some white communities formed to evade Brown v. Board of Education. But he knew that wasn’t the whole story. Among other reasons, he was the son of James Forman, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group whose courageous members became known as the “shock troops” of the civil rights movement.

Wait, he thought, recalling stories his parents told him about Mississippi Freedom Schools. Wasn’t that school choice?

“It seemed impossible to me to think that over all of those years, African-Americans had never organized themselves to try to create better (educational) opportunities outside what the state was providing them,” Forman told redefinED in the podcast interview below. “So that was my idea. My thesis was there had to be an alternative history, there had to be a history of African Americans who were not relying on the government and were trying to organize themselves to create schools to educate their children.”

The result of Forman’s research is “The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First.”

The 2005 paper traces the progressive movement for educational freedom from Reconstruction, to the civil rights movement, to the “free schools” and “community control” movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. A century before many activists were using the term “school choice,” it notes, black churches were making it happen. Decades before conservative Gov. Jeb Bush was pushing America’s first statewide voucher program, liberal intellectuals were promoting the notion in The New York Times Magazine.

A decade later, “The Secret History of School Choice” remains a must-read for anyone who wants a fuller, richer picture of choice’s beginnings. But Forman, who co-founded a charter school named for Maya Angelou, hopes progressives in particular see the light.

They ignore the history of school choice, and their role in shaping it, at their own peril, he said. Believing, wrongly, that it’s right-wing can result in it becoming just that. If progressives aren’t at the table, he suggested, they can’t bring their values to bear in shaping policy. In his view, it’d be good if they did.

Forman, for example, believes per-pupil amounts for many voucher and tax credit scholarship programs are too low for the low-income students they’re intended to help, reflecting conservative positions that education funding as a whole is bloated. (Other left-leaning choice supporters have raised concerns that modern voucher programs are too cheap.) Equity concerns surface in other ways, with few publicly supported, private school choice programs employing the sliding scales for family income and scholarship value that liberal voucher supporters in the ‘60s and ‘70s thought crucial.

“Our understanding of the history influences the direction that the issue goes,” Forman said. “If people who have an equality orientation and a civil rights orientation see themselves as on the outside of the movement for school choice, then the only people who are going to be left are people who have different motivations. … So the question is going to be, who owns the movement? Who directs the movement? Who is dominant? Whose educational vision leads the way?”

Forman said perceptions about choice will change as more and more low-income and minority parents embrace it. But the narrative won’t tack back to fully mesh with the reality of the movement’s diverse roots, he said, unless other things change too. One obvious hurdle, he said, is how the movement’s leadership ranks are “almost lily white.”

“Every time I go to a (school choice) conference, I am appalled by how invisible almost the folks of color can be at the top level of leadership,” Forman said. “That’s a problem.”

February 9, 2019 0 comment

Education Politics Podcast Voucher Left Vouchers

Meet Florida’s newest school choice Democrat

Ron Matus February 6, 2019

Ron Matus

On MLK Day, Rep. Bush attended a special event with Gov. Ron DeSantis at Piney Grove Boys Academy, an all-male, predominantly black private school in Lauderdale Lakes where all 85 students are recipients of state-supported educational choice scholarships. From left is Piney Grove Principal Alton Bolden, Rep. Bush, Frances Bolden, Bobby Bolden, and Tellis Bolden

OPA-LOCKA, Fla. – If you want to know why Florida state Rep. James Bush III supports educational choice, take a ride with him.

Just a few blocks from his legislative office, District 109 – which Bush called “one of the largest and poorest and most violent and neglected districts in the state” – is more Mad Max than Miami, a hodge-podge of industrial zoning and bars-over-windows residential. On a recent Sunday, Bush bumped a rented Mustang down a moonscape of graded road, lined with teetering chain-link fence and littered with cast-offs: a flat-screen TV, a jet ski, a crushed camper top. Around the corner, a line of salvage yards emerged like fortresses, stacks of crunched cars rising over walls topped with barbed wire.

Then, right next to them, a public housing complex …

Bush braked. The contrast panned into view. Satellite dishes poking out of lavender stucco … a woman pushing a stroller … kids riding bikes …

“Now what is right five steps from this (junk yard)?” Bush said. “Look at all this stuff the kids are breathing. I don’t want it to sound like I’m painting a real negative picture of our city but … this should be our focus.”

“Those are the kinds of concerns I have when it comes down to doing what I’m supposed to be doing as a rep in Tallahassee,” he said minutes later. “Not getting caught up in who can control who, and doing the most politically correct things, and not putting the children of this state first … ”

Say hi to Florida’s newest school choice Democrat.

Bush, 63, served four terms as state representative in the 1990s. He was elected for a term in 2008. He was elected again in August.

His Democratic roots run deep. Bush retired after 30 years as a public school teacher (and teachers union member). He served as acting president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He earned his bachelor’s from Bethune-Cookman, the private-school-turned-college founded by Mary McLeod Bethune. Bush doesn’t just know the history of black churches, education and liberation. He’s lived it.

Listen on iTunes (or below)

His support for choice is, on the one hand, practical. His district includes thriving faith-based schools. His district has far more pressing needs than what schools parents choose. As a lawmaker, he said he’s going to fight for more funding for the Miami-Dade school district (and everything else his district desperately needs) at the same time he supports the options his constituents desperately want.

On the other hand, Bush’s support is grounded in a belief. When parents are empowered to determine the educational destinies of their children, he said, that confidence in the power to make change spills over into the rest of their lives.

“Because the parent now would say, ‘Well I feel now better because I got my child where I think it’s best for them,’ as opposed to going through just a normal traditional way of educating,” Bush said. “It gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership and a sense of having some input.”

“It propels them to another level of getting involved in other things that affect their child,” he continued. “It’s a plus in the long run.”

HD 109 is 20 minutes, but a world away, from the condo towers gleaming along Biscayne Bay. It’s split between blacks and Hispanics. It’s shaped like a gun.

Liberty City sits where the grip is. The neighborhood of Brownsville, once dubbed Miami’s most blighted, is where the barrel begins. The city of Opa-Locka is where the sight would be. By some measures, it’s one of the most dangerous cities in America.

As night fell, Bush turned towards Ali Baba Avenue, once a notorious drug hole. He stopped between a zippy mart with a Lotto sign and a tiny apartment complex with plywood-covered windows. A woman emerged from the shadows, a man on a plastic sheet – asleep? – on the ground behind her.

“My friend,” Bush said through the car window. “This Bush.”

“Hey!” the woman chirped. “How are you sweetie?”

The two clasped hands. Turns out, the woman worked on Bush’s campaign. He thanked her for the help, then asked about the man on the ground. She assured him the man was okay.

HD 109 is full of good people doing good things, Bush said over and over. But that guy on the ground?

“I got spots,” he said, “where a lot of that takes place.”

Bush riffed on his district’s challenges. Better roads, better jobs, better housing … safer, cleaner neighborhoods “so our children can have a different perspective on life.” He kept repeating: The people in HD 109 “have a lot of needs … need assistance … just need our share … ”

Same with schools. The Miami-Dade district is on the rise, arguably one of the best urban districts in America. At the same time, half its low-income students aren’t reading at grade level.

Given its depth of poverty, Bush said it’s no surprise HD 109 has among the highest concentrations of school choice scholarship students in the state. Some 2,330 use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, for lower-income students, to attend 28 private schools. Bush said the students in his district “benefit immensely from … not only the public schools but schools of choice.”

He said he supports them. All of them.

It remains to be seen how many other elected Democrats do.

Democrats in the Florida Legislature strongly back the Gardiner Scholarship, an education savings account for students with special needs. But Democratic support has waxed and waned for the FTC scholarship, where 75 percent of the roughly 100,000 recipients are non-white and average family income is $25,756 a year. Both programs have waiting lists.

Bush said he had a choice about choice. Take the “politically correct position (and) do what others want me to do.” Or take a stand for his constituents.

With HD 109 rolling past, he made it sound like an easy call.

Listen below:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

February 6, 2019 1 comment