Mr. Gibbons’ Report Card: Living together and playing together with school choice

MrGibbonsReportCardLisa Falkenberg, columnist for the Houston Chronicle

Lisa Falkenberg’s latest column in the Houston Chronicle contains many of the familiar arguments against school choice: it doesn’t benefit students (yes it does), public schools must educate everyone (no they don’t, no they don’t, no they don’t), poor kids won’t get into elite private schools (yes they can, yes they can, yes they can). So maybe its headline, “Can Dan Patrick champion the poor and vouchers in the same breath?” should come as no surprise.

I understand newspaper reporters and columnists don’t always write the titles of their pieces, but that is kind of like asking if you can hold your breath while swimming under water.

Lisa Falkenberg

Sure, Patrick, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Texas, isn’t your quintessential social justice warrior, but he wasn’t wrong when he argued minority students would benefit from school choice. In fact, the “voucher” model he’s looking to bring to Texas is similar to Florida’s tax credit scholarship program (which is administered by nonprofits like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.)

More than two thirds of the students in the Florida program are black or Hispanic, half come from single-family homes and their average household income is 5 percent above the poverty level. And as we’ve noted many times before, the evidence shows these students are now making solid academic progress.

Grade: Needs Improvement

 

Jeremy Klaszus

Jeremy Klaszus, metro columnist Metro News Canada

According to Jeremy Klaszus, school choice in Calgary, Canada is ruining his local neighborhood. He writes,

“In our neighbourhood, kids who have grown up playing together from infancy onward are now scattered every which way, attending different schools.

As a result, the kids don’t see each other as much and neither do the parents. The social fabric of our neighbourhood is weaker.”

Klaszus’s annual bus pass also went up $35 and that is too great a cost for him, but I digress.

Klaszus is nostalgic for a past where people never traveled more than a few miles from their home (if at all), and he’s worried about kids not playing together if they don’t go to school together. But let’s be clear: If parents are willing to drive their kids across town to school (or spend an extra $35 on a bus pass), they probably don’t hesitate to walk their kids across the street to play with the neighbor’s kids.

Even if they don’t, what is wrong with kids playing with kids from other neighborhoods?

Grade: Needs Improvement

 

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter, fellows at the Century Foundation

Charter school advocates and opponents have waged a bitter war for the better part of two decades. Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter are asking both sides to end the feud. They write,

“It’s time to call off the wars. Advocates and policymakers need to stop arguing about whether we need more charter schools or fewer and start focusing on how we can best leverage the charter school model to improve all public schools.

Charter schools are here to stay, and they can be a great source of innovation. Some are delivering absolutely outstanding results for young people. But simply increasing their numbers won’t put us on a path toward stronger outcomes for all kids.”

If charters continue to grow then great, that is what parents and students want. If they remain a small sector of the education economy, then that is fine too. Traditional public schools have tons of experience but charters offer new ideas in a world where it is increasingly obvious that one size does not fit all. Collaboration is key and both sides can learn a lot from each other.

Grade: Satisfactory

 


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BY Patrick R. Gibbons

Patrick Gibbons is public affairs manager at Step Up for Students and a research fellow for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. A former teacher, he lived in Las Vegas, Nev., for five years, where he worked as an education writer and researcher. He can be reached at (813) 498.1991 or emailed at pgibbons@stepupforstudents.org. Follow Patrick on Twitter: at @PatrickRGibbons and @redefinEDonline.