Dr. Glover

Public school supporters should stop fighting private school choice programs in court, and instead find ways to work "hand-in-hand" to meet the needs of low-income students.

That was the message of two influential Florida pastors who recently spoke out against a lawsuit opposing Florida's tax credit scholarship program: Bishop C.E. Glover of Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale, and Bishop Victory Curry of New Birth Baptist Church of Miami. (The program is administered by organizations like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog).

The need to cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship with public schools was one of the main themes of a radio rally last month that Bishop Curry hosted and Bishop Glover participated in. Both men offered additional comments in interviews with redefinED, which you can hear by clicking on the audio link below.

Glover, whose church runs a K-8 school, was born the son of a sharecropper in Vienna, Ga. He said the nexus between churches and public education was clear to him when he first enrolled in kindergarten, known at the time as "prima." His first encounter with schools came in a church. And later, when his segregated sixth-grade class was overflowing with students, another church helped accommodate half of them.

Glover said Mount Bethel Christian Academy, which he helped start 25 years ago, was a natural outgrowth of his ministries. For more than a decade, tax credit scholarships weren't available, so many parents who wanted to enroll their children couldn’t afford to do so. Now many of them can.

"Some of these boys who have come through our school, they probably would have dropped out if it were not for the fact that they had the opportunity to come and be nurtured," he said. (more…)

Editor's note: With debate heating up over a proposal to expand Florida's tax credit scholarship program, a good amount of misinformation is circulating too. C.E. Glover, senior pastor and CEO of Mount Bethel Ministries, based in Fort Lauderdale, penned this op-ed in response to an editorial in the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The Sun Sentinel published Dr. Glover's piece today. (And again for the record, the school choice scholarship program is administered by Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.)

Dr. Glover

Since we opened Mount Bethel Christian Academy in 1990, we have worked with a steady stream of students who arrived in our classrooms academically behind. Many of them were in danger of falling through the cracks in school – and in life.

In recent years, many of them were able to come to us only because of Florida's tax credit scholarship program, which offers educational options to the low-income parents who need them the most. And, I'm happy to report, many of those students have gone on to excel not only at our school, but in other schools both public and private.

I bring this up in response to the Sun-Sentinel's editorial, "Make testing a part of state vouchers." The suggestion that tax credit scholarship students should take the same standardized tests as public school students is worthy of serious public debate. All of us want to make sure that all students, whether they are in public school or private school or some other sector, are learning enough to succeed in a world that's getting more competitive and complicated by the second.

But the Sun-Sentinel omitted some important details about the scholarship program that are vital to having an informed debate.

To be clear, tax credit scholarship students are not exempt from accountability tests. Since 2006, they have been required, by state law, to take a state-approved standardized test. At our school, they take the widely respected Stanford Achievement Test. The results are sent to a top-notch education researcher for analysis and comparison to public school students. Since 2010, state law has also required the public disclosure of average test score gains or losses for private schools with 30 or more students in tested grades.

We know two important things from the test data. First, the students who use tax credit scholarships tend to be the lowest-performing students in the public schools. That finding is in sync with our experiences. Second, scholarship students are making the same annual learning gains as students of all income levels nationally. That should be encouraging to parents, taxpayers and policy makers.

It's worth noting that scholarship students are achieving these results with much less public funding than children in public schools. This year, the scholarship amount was $4,880. And though that's roughly half of total government spending on children in Florida public schools, it still comes with meaningful requirements for financial accountability. (more…)