Kathy Jamil, the principal of an Islamic school in Buffalo, N.Y., has a suggestion for anyone who balks at the inclusion of Muslim schools in school choice programs.

Please, come visit.

"This is something that I wish I could just get on a soapbox and just shout at the top of my lungs,” Jamil told redefinED in the podcast attached below. Before passing judgment on Muslim schools, she said, “We hope that those who have fears … would take the opportunity to get to know them."

Anti-Muslim bigotry is a small but steady undercurrent in school choice debates. In the past year alone, it surfaced in Alabama, Tennessee, Kansas and a handful of other states. In the most-publicized example, a state lawmaker in Louisiana said she regretted supporting that state’s new voucher program because it could wind up promoting Islam.

Jamil is chair of the Islamic Schools League of America, an associate of the American Center for School Choice (which co-hosts this blog) and a member of the new national Commission on Faith-based Schools. Given the atmosphere, she believes school choice in America is particularly important for Muslim families.

“You find that Muslim children oftentimes – and their families for that matter – feel intimidated or afraid to openly practice their faith. So we find that some students in the public school setting will not tell their classmates or their friends, or be openly Muslim if you will,” she said. “This is challenging for any child, because now you have to play these two roles. You’ve got this duality going on, where at home or in your faith tradition, community center - wherever it is that you feel safe in terms of practicing your faith - you can act Muslim. But in the public school sector, you’ve got to avoid being Muslim at any level. This duality is very difficult for children. It’s very unhealthy.”

“We need to help children reconcile how they can practice their faith and how they can further solidify their commitment as citizens of America,” Jamil continued. School choice helps them “bridge those two worlds.”

“I am heartbroken,” was Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s response upon hearing that her Catholic alma mater, Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx, would be among the 24 latest Catholic schools to close in an impoverished area. She continued in her New York Times interview to describe it as “symbolic of what it means for all our families, like my mother, who were dirt poor … It was a road of opportunity for kids with no other alternative.”

In this country, we unquestionably have a shortage of quality schools, particularly those that serve urban poor families. So why do we continue to watch as hundreds of quality faith-based schools close because the financial deck is stacked against them?

Families would eagerly choose them. They have served their communities for decades. They’ve been effective. As Sotomayor noted, their dropout rates are lower and their college attendance rates are higher than comparable public schools, not to mention the significant output of distinguished civic and corporate leaders. U.S. government surveys show parents are consistently highly satisfied with them – at even higher rates than parents in chosen public schools.

The continuing closure of nearly all types of faith-based schools is a disturbing trend. And raising awareness with the public and policymakers about it is why the American Center for School Choice launched its Commission on Faith-based Schools. At its second meeting, recently held in Jacksonville, Fla., this ecumenical group with representation across the spectrum of faith-based communities decided to organize a national conference in Austin, Texas in the May/June time frame. It will focus on the peril these schools face, and draw attention to how much will be lost in American education if families who wish to choose faith-based schools cannot continue to do so. The target audience will be religious leaders, media, the research community, and legislators and staff.

In the past two years, impressive progress has been made in expanding school choice to include these schools. We now have 32 private school choice programs in 16 states and Washington, D.C., with the enactment of five new programs and the expansion of six existing ones in 2012.

The commission believes that with a focused effort and call to action, these programs can and need to grow at a faster rate to preserve the opportunities faith-based schools bring to urban communities in particular. (more…)

I wish faith-based schools, many of which have served urban communities and low-income families admirably for decades, could be seen more as partners than outsiders in a system of 21^st Century schools that will educate our students.

What we need perhaps most in American education are more high quality, replicable schools. Among faith-based schools we have many of these, yet we have watched them disappear rapidly, especially from our inner cities where they have not only been education centers, but community centers. Enrollment in Catholic schools, for example, began to decline in 1965 and has since fallen by more than 60 percent, resulting in the closure of 5,000 schools, according the National Catholic Educational Association.

The overall decline in faith-based schools was chronicled well in 2008 in a White House Domestic Policy Council report, “Preserving a Critical National Asset.” Yet almost no progress has been made in halting the deteriorating circumstances for these schools. The Great Recession and ongoing demographic changes have continued the trends, but faith-based schools still educate about 3.8 million students and account for 80 percent of private school enrollment, according to the latest U.S. Department of Education data from 2009-10.

The American Center for School Choice launched its Commission on Faith-based Schools in large part to focus attention on the value these schools have for American education and for many families. We want to expand the understanding that the public and policymakers have before we lose more high quality schools, especially in areas that have precious few of any type.

Virtually all of our international competitors have education systems that integrate government-operated schools and private schools, including faith-based schools. We know, therefore, that the distinctions we make are artificial. At a time when we suffer from a dearth of high-performing schools - schools that can deliver a consistently rigorous curriculum and successfully graduate a high percentage of the student body - we can little afford to watch indifferently as more good ones close.

Coming Thursday: Wishing for a progressive teachers union.

If there was one thing you could change to further the cause of parental school choice, what would it be? We posed that question to some of the folks at Step Up For Students and the American Center for School Choice, and over the next week or so we’ll be publishing their responses.

First up Monday: a post from Jon East, the vice president for policy and public affairs at Step Up. His wish: A little more common ground.

Most of us at redefinED will be off until after New Year’s, so the blog will be a little less tended to than usual. But we hope the wish posts still give you something thoughtful to chew on between sips of egg nog and forks full of stuffing.

Thanks so much for reading us. Happy holidays!

Florida: Tony Bennett is selected the state's new education commissioner (redefinED). He tells reporters afterwards that he champions school choice first and foremost because of the social justice component (redefinED). A new group headed by T. Willard Fair,  co-founder of the state's first charter school, aims to create a pipeline of black executives and entrepreneurs to help lead private and charter schools (redefinED). The Miami-Dade school district ranks No. 10 in the country for school choice, according to a new report from Brookings (redefinED). A Catholic school in Tampa is at the heart of a University of Notre Dame project to revitalize Catholic schools, particularly for Hispanic students. (redefinED).

Louisiana: Voucher parents are worried in the wake of the legal ruling that puts the program in limbo (advertiser.com). Gov. Bobby Jindal makes a pitch for vouchers at a Brookings Institution event in Washington D.C. (Huffington Post).

Washington: More than 150 teachers, parents and administrators attend a charter school conference in the wake of the successful passage of a charter school ballot initiative (Tacoma News Tribune). (Full disclosure: The conference was sponsored by the Washington Charter School Research Center, which was founded by Jim and Fawn Spady. Fawn Spady chairs the board of directors at the American Center for School Choice, which co-hosts this blog.)

Michigan: The education adviser to Gov. Rick Snyder presents the governor's sweeping public school choice proposal to business and education leaders (Grand Rapids Business Journal). (more…)

A new Florida House subcommittee devoted to all things school choice does not necessarily signal major reforms in the upcoming legislative session, says incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford. The point, rather, is to keep choice in the debate.

“I think choice has always been in the conversation,’’ Weatherford, who is scheduled to be voted in as speaker today, told redefinED.

Creating the Choice & Innovation Subcommittee is really more about helping the Education Committee make sure parental empowerment, technology and other school choice issues don’t get lost in the general discussion, he said. Education is “such a huge policy area,’’ Weatherford said. “There are a lot of bills that get filed.’’

Expect those bills to include many that have more to do with overall education policies and red tape than turning classrooms into a “21st learning experience,’’ he said.  “There’s a lot of reform and a lot of innovating taking place across the country and across the world,’’ Weatherford said. “I want the Legislature to lead this debate.’’

The subcommittee has sparked interest across party lines. (more…)

President Obama has often called on us to be true to who we are as a people, as Americans. And in his second term, he has the opportunity to transform the education system back to our core - to where parents are primarily in charge of children’s educations.

We have paid a price for transferring authority and responsibility for educating children from parents to government entities. With mostly though not always good motives (remember Brown v. Board of Education), we allowed the dream of the government-owned and operated common school to live on despite overwhelming evidence that, in reality, it wasn’t working. A child’s educational destiny continues mostly to be a function of his/her zip code and the competence of strangers who sit on local school boards.

For more than three decades, a long, slow correction of this anomaly in American society has been underway. First, intradistrict and interdistrict transfers began to appear that allowed limited parental choice within some parts of the public school system. Then magnet schools surfaced, offering options such as vocational, talented and gifted, and language immersion programs, and responding to more demands. In 1992, charter schools emerged. Today they account for almost 6 percent of all public schools, approaching 6000 total, and the number grows steadily each year because the demand from parents so far is insatiable.

Thanks to my colleague at the American Center for School Choice, Gloria Romero, a new tool has appeared. The parent trigger empowers parents to make changes to their school when they are not satisfied. Already 20 states have considered the approach and seven have adopted laws.

Private school choice programs continue to gain support, too. And they have done so despite fierce opposition from forces that want to defend market share over a parent’s right to choose. Today, 32 such programs operate in the country. And in recent years, many school choice bills have either been passed by legislatures with Democratic majorities or signed by Democratic governors. Just as important, once enacted, these programs have only grown. No state has repealed a program or decided choice does not serve the public well. Moreover, the doomsday scenarios that opponents consistently forecast for public education systems have never happened.

It’s said you can’t argue with a river; it is going to flow. Parents are going to take back the authority and responsibility for educating their children. The river has been flowing for more than 20 years and the current is gaining speed. It’s time for more Democrats to stop arguing as families assert their fundamental and universally accepted American value that they know the best choice for their children. Democrats need to work in positive ways to transform our system. We need good schools and there’s plenty of room for all types - public, charter, and private.

President Obama has the life experience, as well as the political skills and credentials, to lead this transformation, and to make it less jarring and less confrontational. (more…)

Faith-based schools will be more effective in expanding school choice – and in getting Americans to see their value - if they work together across traditional lines, suggests the chairman of a new national commission that aims to foster that kind of coalition.

“We want to encourage the leaders of faith-based schools to become more engaged, to make sure that together, across lines, across sectarian and religious lines, they join forces to advocate for the families and for their institutions,” said Michael Guerra, who chairs the Commission on Faith-based Schools, in the podcast below.

The 14-member commission, which met for the first time last month, was launched by the American Center for School Choice. Guerra is a founding director of the center (which co-hosts redefinED) and past president of the National Catholic Educational Association.

It’s no coincidence the commission is emerging now, he said. Publicly funded school choice is rising in acceptance and yet, at the same time, there is enormous flux among faith-based schools. Catholic schools, for example, have been dwindling in urban areas where they long anchored neighborhoods and served low-income families. “These are assets too precious to be lost,” Guerra said. (more…)

The gurus of school choice have often shuddered at the word “regulation.” On occasion this instinctive hostility has been tactically justified. Viewed objectively, however, it is meaningless - even self-contradictory. And too often has it driven fair-minded listeners from the civic conversation about the ideal structure of this very necessary reform called “school choice.”

Regulation is itself a pre-condition of any system of choice, whether the intended beneficiary be the have-not family or the comfortable suburbanite. The empowerment of parents always comes as the effect of a particular set of rules. Nor is this reality limited to reforms aimed at the complex and private world of the family. The simplest of legal systems - one, for example, that embraced the most complete market freedom - would depend upon the regulatory oversight of some third-party authority to interpret and enforce those promises which constitute any market. Contracts are not self-enforcing. Nor is parental choice or any other human regime.

Children present perhaps the most obvious example of my point; by nature their lives will be regulated by someone. The only question is “by whom?” That the state will be one of the players seems quietly accepted by all. This includes the school choice reformer who has unequivocally embraced compulsory education - a thing to be enforced and paid for by the state. The issue, then, becomes how far beyond the requirement of schooling shall the state penetrate the natural territory of the family?

We appear to agree on rules forbidding child abuse. Beyond this and compulsory schooling, where shall we the people allow (or require) the state to go? The answer can come only in some cluster of regulation - some that command, some that limit the state. If it is parents who are to rule (i.e., to regulate their children), then government must be commanded (again, regulated) first - in a positive way - to subsidize the family’s preference in schooling, and second – negatively - to avoid subverting parental authority by unnecessary busybody rules. The state itself must be ruled in both positive and negative ways: it must do this; it may do this - but not that. (more…)

The American Center for School Choice, which partners with Step Up For Students to host redefinED, has just established a Commission on Faith-based Schools. Here is the press release announcing its formation.

An ecumenical commission of leaders representing the majority of faiths that operate schools in the U.S. plans to collaborate and inject the importance of full parental choice in education into the national dialogue, the American Center for School Choice announced today. The Center’s newly-established Commission on Faith-based Schools met for the first time last Thursday in New York City.

“It is essential that the right and freedom of parents to choose the best education for their children be recognized and we believe this Commission will make an important contribution toward that goal,” stated Peter Hanley, executive director of the Center.

The Commission’s two immediate tasks will be to: 1) expand public understanding and appreciation of the role of faith-based schools in American education, especially in low-income communities; and, 2) address the need for expanding publicly funded school choice to increase a family’s ability to choose from among a full range of options, including a faith-based school.  Over the coming months the Commission will be documenting the characteristics and benefits these schools provide to families and to American education. It will be releasing a report and convening a national conference in spring 2013 to communicate its findings.

 “Faith-based schools have served families well since America's earliest years. In recent years, many religious communities have opened new schools, and today faith-based schools are more diverse than ever. Unfortunately, many more have closed, especially in urban areas where they have been a powerful source of hope for many families. Faith based schools are precious assets, not only for the families they serve, but for the nation. Families have a right to choose faith based schools, and a wise nation should support their choice" commented Commission Chairman Michael Guerra, an American Center board member and former president of the National Catholic Educational Association. (more…)