Reform? Go for the whole package!
Great letter to the editor in The Indianapolis Star from Robert Enlow, President of the Friedman Foundation.
As we’ve noted, Indiana has recently joined the ever-growing list of states to embrace school choice, and Governor Mitch Daniels recently hosted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to share Florida’s successes with education reform.
In his letter, “Go for whole package of school reform, not pieces,” Mr. Enlow urges support for a comprehensive package of education reforms for Indiana in order to ensure success for students. He writes:
Bush argued for a comprehensive package of reforms, all of which were critical to Florida’s success. In his remarks to the Education Roundtable, clear accountability (grading schools), good incentives (merit pay) and real consequences (school choice) were inextricably linked. Without each component working together, success would not have been possible, a fact evidenced by a recent study showing that improvement among failing public schools went from double digits to zero after the Florida Supreme Court removed the school voucher option.
There is no one silver bullet to improve education. But a comprehensive package of reforms, including greater accountability and school choice, will help to give all students a better chance at academic success.
Virginia leaders, too, should take note. While we are encouraged by greater talk about charter schools from the two candidates for Governor, Virginians need to ask whether these candidates are ready to stand up and support a broad package of comprehensive education reforms- a package that includes greater parental choice in education.
Thursday reads
Couple quick headlines to start off the morning.
WISH-TV 8: Bush backs governor on education reform
Governor Mitch Daniels recruited a big name politician to help him sell education reform ideas Wednesday.Jeb Bush came to the Governor’s Education Roundtable to tell a success story of improved test scores in Florida schools. He told Indiana educators looking for similar results to start out by taking the ISTEP test themselves.“Take it,” said Bush. “Take the test and then say, ‘Is this what you want your children to aspire to?’”Bush then told how teacher bonuses, charter schools and virtual schools helped improve learning in his home state.Afterward, the brother of former President George W. Bush made a pitch for school choice.“I think if you created a system where the money follows the child, sometimes that child might go to an option that may not be a public option and that’s alright with me too, that’s kind of the American way,” said Bush.
And for more on Florida and special needs education vouchers:
Jay P. Greene Blog: Tampa Tribune Op-Ed
In Florida, as in most other states, schools receive additional funding for each student identified as disabled. Often, these additional resources are greater than the actual cost of providing special-education services, giving schools a financial incentive to increase their diagnoses.
The financial incentive to misdiagnose is particularly apparent when classifying students as having a specific learning disability (SLD). That’s because SLD is the most common, the most ambiguous, and the least costly category of special education. In many cases, school officials might simply be trying to get extra resources to help struggling students. But the net effect is the misclassification of a huge number of students as having an SLD.
The McKay program reduces the financial incentive for Florida’s schools to misdiagnose learning disabilities by placing revenue at risk whenever a student is placed into special education…
And, from the School Choice Ohio Blog: Back to School with Scholarships. (While Ohio is still working out the kinks in the system, wouldn’t it be nice if some of Virginia’s kids had a choice as they headed back to school this fall?)
Nearly 2 million students across Ohio have headed back to school. Around 20,000 of these precious little Buckeyes are attending local private schools thanks to tax-funded scholarships they receive from the state of Ohio.
Families always tell us how excited they are to choose where their children go to school, rather than relying on default options.
“I feel like I’ve won the lottery!” - Rose, grandmother from Lorain
“EdChoice has empowered me to sustain that my children will have a strong foundation on which to build their lives. It has opened a door of opportunity for a community of children whose parents may not be as successful as they want to be, but they work hard everyday trying to get there!”- Angelnique, parent from Dayton
Who will think of the children?
As we mentioned yesterday, back-to-school time means education is making headlines. A few more for your consideration today:
From the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives’ PolicyBlog: Won’t Somebody Think of the Children!?
Jim Roxbury brought to my attention a quote by Governor Rendell that “the one group that has no lobbyist here in Pennsylvania is our children” as well as too a commenter, who suggest that children have plenty of lobbyists, including those from school boards, agencies that get taxpayer funding for programs ostensibly serving children, and the PSEA lobbyists.
Sorry “edstem”, but Governor Rendell and I agree on this. And I am glad he has finally come around to the view that those that feed at the trough of taxpayers - and in particular the PSEA - are no friends of children. In fact, outside of child predators and Miley Ray Cyrus, no one does more to exploit children than the teachers’ unions. The PSEA uses its influence to undermine school choice, promote strikes, and oppose merit pay and reforms to improve school performance.
From The Examiner: Study backs vouchers for special education
Offering vouchers for students diagnosed with special needs to attend private schools leads to fewer diagnoses and could save state and federal dollars, according to a new study by the pro-school-choice Manhattan Institute.
More than 20 percent of D.C. public school students are diagnosed with learning disabilities, compared with about 12 percent in Montgomery County and about 14 percent in Fairfax. Educators have long worried that failing districts label students as disabled when, in reality, they are behind academically for other reasons.
Vouchers could help the District, according to the study’s authors, because the city has a disproportionate number of special needs students and is obligated to send about 2,400 of them to private and boarding schools, which sometimes cost nearly $100,000 per student per year.
And from the Heartland Institute, September’s School Reform News is now available online. School Reform News is a great publication sharing lots of news and information about education reform and school choice efforts from around the country. Check it out- lots of great articles including:
- Fight Underway to Save DC Voucher Program
- Florida Expands Corporate K-12 Tax Credit Program
- Iowa Expands Tax Credit Scholarship Program
- Private Choice Program in Colorado Beats State Graduation Rate
These are our children
“Bottom line is these are our children, they are disadvantaged children, and they often return to our public schools,” said Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers’ Association. “I want them to get the best possible education, wherever they get it.”
Yes, you read that right folks. The St. Petersburg Times reports the head of a local Florida teacher’s association putting kids first- not matter where they go to school. Kudos to Ms. Clements for standing up for children and education, and not getting caught up in the politics of school choice and where families choose to educate their kids. And kudos to the Hillsborough County schools and teachers’ union, who have joined forces with a nonprofit Florida voucher group in an effort to provide additional training to private school teachers who serve some of Florida’s scholarship students- among the county’s most economically disadvantaged children.
It is wonderful to see a community coming together and finding common ground on education. As we have noted before, this isn’t a matter of pitting public versus private, home school versus charter school- it is about ensuring every child gets the best education possible and giving them every chance to succeed.
Friedman Foundation: Dramatically higher parental satisfaction in Florida tax credit scholarship program
The Friedman Foundation has released a study of parental satisfaction with the Florida tax credit scholarship program, and the results speak for themselves. Parents are report signifcantly more satisfaction with the schools that they are able to choose versus their prior public schools.
From their press release:
Parents participating in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program report dramatically higher levels of satisfaction with academic progress, individual attention, teacher quality, school responsiveness, and student behavior when compared to the public schools their children previously attended, according to a study released today by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
Some of the highlights of their finding include:
- 80 percent of the parents are “very satisfied” with the academic progress their children are making in their current private schools, compared to 4 percent in their previous public schools.
- 80 percent are “very satisfied” with the individual attention their children now receive, compared to 4 percent in public schools.
- 76 percent are “very satisfied” with the teacher quality in their current schools, compared to 7 percent in public schools.
These is good news- especially for these families who seem to be much happier with the schools that they are able to select for their children. We think that all families deserve to have the chance to feel “very satisfied” with the education their child is receiving. To take a look at the rest of the findings, the full report is available on the Friedman Foundation’s website.
“Choice in education is the key”
The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) has this editorial from Florida up on their website today.
The editorial, “Choice in education is the key,” concludes:
Students perform best when they and their parents are able to select the schools they will attend. They may be traditional public schools for most, charter schools for some and private or homeschools for others.
The growth in the number of legitimate options in education is encouraging and should be promoted both locally and nationwide.
We agree, and hope that Virginia legislators will work to encourage more options in education for students here in the Commonwealth.
Public? Private? Does it matter?
For too long, many folks have viewed the fight over school choice as a battle of public versus private, instead of a battle to make sure every child has the education that best meets his or her own unique learning needs. Opponents of choice want to try and pit people against each other, as if giving families options is an attack on public schools, rather than giving children hope.
This great article, When private and public meet in class, by Doug Tuthill- a lifelong public educator who has served as president of two local teachers unions, and now serves as president of the Florida School Choice Fund, which oversees tax credit scholarship funding organizations, takes a closer look at what is really at stake.
Public is not always the enemy of private, and Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program is a case in point. This program serves more than 23,000 low-income students and is intended only to offer a different type of learning environment for students who often have the fewest options. It has managed to build bipartisan support over its first seven years, and, in May, the Legislature approved an expansion with the support of a third of the Democrats and half the Black Caucus.
Senate sponsor Al Lawson, an African-American senator who is the Democratic leader in the Senate, said: “When you have a lot of poor kids in your area that need help, and you have people saying, ‘We’re willing to work with these kids,’ it’s hard to say no. … I am the strongest possible supporter of public education. But I know that not every school works for every child.”
Those who claim that public funding of private schools is a Republican attack on public education have short memories. Both Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972 included a tuition tax credit for elementary and secondary school students in their Democratic presidential platforms, and liberal icon Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was among its biggest advocates. In the 1960s, “freedom schools” served as an alternative to racially hostile school bureaucracies, a point not lost on the Rev. H.K. Matthews, a Florida civil rights legend. “This is a flashback of the old movement,” Matthews told thousands of Tax Credit Scholarship supporters last year on the steps of the old Florida Capitol. “It’s a continuation of the dream.”
The full article is definitely worth the read.
Florida Reports on Cost Savings from School Choice
The folks over at Virginia’s Cost Cutting Caucus (a bipartisan group of state legislators working for a more transparent, accountable and competitive government that will yield better services at a lower cost to the taxpayers) reported today on the report released by Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability on the fiscal impact of their tax credit scholarship school choice program.
The results are not so surprising to us, but still impressive nonetheless: “The Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship Program Saves State Dollars.“
One key finding worth noting, the report concludes that for “Fiscal Year 2007-08, taxpayers saved $1.49 in state education funding for every dollar loss in corporate income tax revenue due to credits for scholarship contributions.”
As we have said before, school choice works. It gives parents choices, it gives kids opportunities, and it saves taxpayers money.
Take a look at the report online here: http://www.oppaga.state.fl.us/reports/pdf/0868rpt.pdf
Florida’s success
Florida has served as a leader in the area of educational options, and the results are paying off- for students and for taxpayers.
As Virginia Walden Ford notes in this post for the Heritage Foundation’s blog, The Foundry:
And now growing evidence shows that school reforms that incorporate school choice can deliver real progress. One place where this is becoming increasingly clear is Florida, a state that is a national leader in offering families school choice options. In Florida, a decade of aggressive education reforms has led to remarkable progress in improving students’ academic achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Since 1998, Florida students have improved by 32 percent in the percentage of 4th grade students scoring “basic” on the reading exam as well as a 54 percent increase in those scoring “proficient.”
What’s most inspiring about this story is that the greatest academic gains have been made by Florida’s African American and Hispanic students. For example, Florida’s Hispanic students now outscore the statewide average of all students in 15 states on the 2007 fourth-grade reading exam. Florida’s African American students also beat the statewide average of all students in Louisiana and Mississippi, and they are close to passing other states.
Ms. Walden cites the new Heritage study that shows just how Florida has achieved this success. Hopefully, Florida’s success will help other states, like Virginia, provide the same kinds of opportunities for all students, so that they may all have the opportunities to avhieve success.
Another option: vouchers
We haven’t talked a lot about vouchers here at School Choice Virginia, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t one option that is already benefitting many students across the country.
In this op-ed for the Appeal-Democrat in California, the author, Douglas Binderup, argues that vouchers are working already in localities across the country.
Having been in place now for more than a decade the results are in: publicly-funded vouchers have proven to be successful in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Dayton, San Antonio and most recently the state of Florida. The voucher system has been so successful in our nation’s capital that the democrat-controlled congress, under pressure from the National Teacher’s Union, is trying to outlaw it.
He continues that those who oppose vouchers use scare tactics, rather than facts to try and defeat choice measures.
The opponents of the school voucher system have used ad hominem arguments to scare the public and keep the rank and file in line. The idea that vouchers would condemn the worst performing students because the private schools would recruit the best students has been proven wrong and actually, the reverse is true. The costs to educate a voucher student are half of what it takes to educate a public school student, thereby affording teachers more time with struggling students in smaller classes. Another myth that has been dispelled is the fear that there would be mass teacher layoffs under the voucher system. What has actually happened in that a lot of teachers have decided to open up their own private schools. Teachers in areas where vouchers have been established have reported that because of the competition, the yoke of bureaucratic regulations have loosened and they are able to exercise more creativity. When schools must compete, it is our youth that are the winners.
Finally, he concludes with three challenges:
• It is time to put the interests of our youth over special interests.
• It is time to embrace the change that will give our youth a leg up in a competitive world.
• It is time to assume our roll as leaders in an ever-changing world.
These are 3 key steps that should be embraced by all who want to improve education and create more affordable choices for all.
