Bill Maxwell, a highly regarded African-American columnist with the Tampa Bay Times, has used a new Hechinger Report to argue that charter schools are introducing a second wave of “white flight” in public education. His argument tracks the work of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which has called charter schools a “civil rights failure” and echoes the assertion of University of Minnesota researcher Myron Orfield that charters are “an accelerant to the normal segregation of public schools.”

Some of these findings are certainly cause for concern. But racial integration in American education is rooted in nearly a half-century of social policy and federal court intervention, which makes isolated conclusions about the new role of charter schools problematic. Yes, it could be that charter schools cause more racial segregation. It is also possible something else could explain the racial demographics. It could be, for example, that charter school enrollment merely reflects the racial makeup of the neighborhoods in which they operate.

In that sense, examining the racial ratios in charter schools is but one part of a much larger equation.

Maxwell’s column was inspired by an article in the Hechinger Report that began with an anecdote about a very white elementary charter school south of St. Paul/Minneapolis, Minn. The charter school, Seven Hills Classical Academy, was 82 percent white while the surrounding Bloomington Public School District averaged 57 percent white.

However, the school district obscures the vast range within the public schools themselves. Among Bloomington public elementary schools alone, the ratio of white enrollment ranged from 15 percent to 81 percent. In other words, there are also public schools with similar degrees of racial segregation.

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Twenty years ago, Dennis DiNoia taught middle school math in typical classrooms, in typical Florida public schools. Now his classroom is a local church, or bookstore, or online. Students come from public schools, private schools, and homeschooling co-ops. Lessons are based on a curriculum he designed and put on video.

DiNoia even has a toehold in the growing market of charter school consulting, explaining math and test-taking skills to students and teachers at a conversion charter school in Hawaii.

School choice has opened up a whole new career track for DiNoia, allowing the business school graduate to earn enough money to remain in a profession he loves while giving him the satisfaction of helping students master his favorite subject.

“A lot of people don’t go into teaching because they don’t think they can make a living at it,’’ said DiNoia, a father of three who lives in Sarasota, Fla. “If you go into it with that mindset, you’ll be right.’’

DiNoia went into the field thinking that one day he would have a successful business. Apparently, he was right, eventually figuring out how to grow his tutoring company from a sideline that supplemented his district paycheck to a full-time endeavor to support his family.

It serves as yet another example of how having more education options not only meets the different needs of children, but can benefit educators, as well.

“Everybody has different vehicles to educate students,’’ said Clayton Snare, a former principal who worked with DiNoia in the Pinellas County, Fla., school district. “Some people are good in a classroom. Some people are better online. Others are better one on one.’’

DiNoia “defined what I thought a successful teacher was all about and it truly starts with developing a rapport with your students,’’ Snare said. (more…)

In mid-June, Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett visited a modest retreat on the outskirts of Tampa where a University of Notre Dame program was hosting a symposium on school choice. Fewer than 40 people were in attendance, but Bennett spoke and answered questions for an hour.

“I will never ever change my stripes on school choice,” he told them. “If giving poor kids an opportunity cost me my job,” he continued, referencing the fledgling voucher program and his electoral defeat in Indiana, that's a “pretty good trade off.”

Even in a state that leads the nation in expanding school choice, Bennett was arguably the most pro-school-choice education commissioner Florida ever had. Choice supporters expressed shock and disappointment with Thursday’s announcement that he was abruptly resigning after a two-day barrage of negative stories about grade changes at an Indiana charter school.

“This is a sad moment for Florida education,” said Rep. Manny Diaz Jr., R-Miami, a member of three House education committees. Bennett was a “rock solid proponent for students, accountability and choice.”

“It’s unfortunate and I’m very saddened,” said Florida Board of Education Chair Gary Chartrand, who was attending the KIPP conference in Las Vegas Thursday. “I told him, ‘We think the world of you and we’ll weather the storm together.’ But he made the decision to leave. Obviously, the turnover is not a good situation.”

Bennett’s replacement will be the fourth education commissioner under Gov. Rick Scott, who pushed out highly regarded Eric J. Smith in favor of Gerard Robinson, who then resigned after high-profile glitches with the state’s testing and grading system. A national search to replace Robinson drew no star-power candidates until Indiana voters put Bennett on the market.

"How much can we take?" said T. Willard Fair, a former Board of Education chair who co-founded the state's first charter school and resigned in 2011 to protest the ouster of Commissioner Smith. "We lost an outstanding commissioner in Eric Smith. We were blessed when Tony Bennett became available. To lose two great intellectuals is absolutely devastating."

The leadership churn has put smudges on Florida’s reputation as a national leader in ed reform. It has also come as thorny questions about the growth of Florida’s school choice sectors remain unresolved, including funding for charter schools and online learning. (more…)

Editor's note:  Jason Bedrick is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. 

Earlier this week, Doug Tuthill, the president of Step Up for Students, argued that Common Core can help school choice. Tuthill is a champion of school choice whose organization has helped hundreds of thousands of Florida students attend their preferred schools. That’s why it is all the more disappointing to see him advocating for a policy that would undermine the very system of diverse educational options that he’s worked tirelessly to promote.

In Tuthill’s view, common standards merely “serve the same function as the operating systems in computers or smart phones” in that they provide a common platform that’s open to an “endless supply” of different applications (curricula, lesson plans, activities, etc.) that can be customized by users.

But Common Core is not just an open-platform operating system. As Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has written, standards-based accountability requires a “tripod of standards, testing, and accountability.” My colleague, Neal McCluskey, has pointed out that a system of national standards like Common Core requires a “national tripod”: “all schools must use the same standards and tests to compare how all kids are doing, and there must be uniform punishments for schools that do not do well.”

Tuthill claims there’s nothing to fear because private schools and their parents “value their autonomy. They will oppose government efforts to mandate curriculum or instructional strategies.” But the government doesn’t have to mandate a curriculum to control content. When standards are tied to tests by which a school’s performance is evaluated, schools will have little choice but to conform. The tests will de facto dictate content: what concepts are taught when and perhaps even how. As James Shuls of the Show-Me Institute has written:

The fact is that curriculum standards don’t tell teachers how to teach in the same way that a high jump bar doesn’t tell a jumper how to jump. You could theoretically jump over a high jump bar in whatever way you would like; but because of how the jump is structured there is a clear advantage to doing the old Fosbury Flop.

Rather than providing a mere operating system, it's as though Apple told app-designers they could make any kind of app they want so long as all the apps perform the same basic function, operate at the same speed, and cost the same amount. Of course, they're welcome to vary the color scheme. (more…)

For practical reasons, many Florida private schools are rolling up their sleeves and getting ready for the new Common Core State Standards for math and English/language arts. This fall, our nonprofit, Step Up For Students, will help about 140 private schools and their parents implement these new standards, and based on the dialogue we’re having with other schools, we’ll be helping many more next year.

Some observers believe common standards will undermine school choice. I disagree.

In the context of school choice, common standards serve the same function as the operating systems in computers or smart phones. Just as common operating systems (e.g., Apple or Microsoft) allow software developers worldwide to create an endless supply of innovative software applications, common academic standards are allowing teachers nationwide to create and share innovative curriculum, instructional materials, teaching activities and online lesson plans. We are already seeing a plethora of websites where teachers are posting open source lessons plans and instructional strategies aligned to Common Core. Innovative, free and Common Core-related professional development opportunities are also becoming ubiquitous online.

Common standards are helpful in this emerging new era of customized learning, where students are increasingly accessing content and taking courses from multiple providers simultaneously and/or sequentially. Parents want the freedom to continuously match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs, but they also want to know their children will not be disadvantaged as they move in and out of charter, virtual, home, magnet, private and neighborhood schools. Knowing that many schools are using the same operating system (i.e., the same standards) can help reassure parents that their children are able to receive a seamless, high quality education from diverse providers.

This is particularly important to low-income families. (more…)

Questions have arisen in two large Florida school districts about the fees some charter schools are charging parents, putting a bigger spotlight on a gray area involving charters in Florida and beyond.

Last month, the 200,000-student Hillsborough County School District sent letters to 11,170 charter school families, telling them fees at some schools might be against the law, and that charters can’t kick out children whose parents don’t pay up. In May, meanwhile, the state Department of Education issued an opinion to the 41,000 Lake County district, saying charter schools cannot allow parents to pay a fee in lieu of volunteer hours.

Charter schools are publicly funded and open to students regardless of income. Many charge fees in the same way district schools do – for lab supplies or band equipment, for example. But some also ask for voluntary donations that may make parents feel pressured to contribute, and could raise questions about access.

Florida isn’t the only place where such fees have come under scrutiny.

A recent Reuters story highlighted several examples. In Illinois, families at Cambridge Lakes Charter School pay registration fees of $210 to $225 per student and invest in the company that built the school or risk losing their kid’s seat. At a minimum, families must invest $120 a year, the story said, or pay $5,000 for a “lifetime stake.” In California, the Pacific Collegiate School asks parents for a voluntary $3,000 donation. In Arizona, most charters in the Great Hearts Academy networks ask parents for a voluntary $1,500.

In Florida, it’s not clear how many charter schools charge fees, and for what purpose, or for how much. No one tracks the fees.

Mike Kooi, the departing executive director of DOE’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice, said there is a point where the fees would become inappropriate. “Any fee that becomes a condition on acceptance into any school, charter or non-charter,” he said, “would be problematic in my opinion.’’ (more…)

My colleagues at Democrats for Education Reform are planning a panel discussion with the Fordham Institute on July 25 on how charter schools are - and should be - held accountable. This is an important topic that too often suffers from confusion about what we mean by accountability.Accountability is comprised of two interdependent factors: government regulations and consumer choice (in this case, school choice). Their interdependence is such that as one goes up, the other goes down. Industries that are highly regulated tend to have less choice, while industries that have robust choice are usually less regulated. My favorite example is phone service in the 1950s versus phone service today. In the 1950s, every community had only one phone company and since there was no choice, these companies were highly regulated. Today we have a plethora of phone companies and plans to choose from. Consequently, today’s companies are far less regulated than their predecessors.

So the challenge in every sector, be it banking, medicine, telecommunications or education, is finding the proper accountability balance between government regulations and consumer choice.

Achieving this ideal balance is more complicated in public education because we are going through a transition in which some schools are operating in a highly regulated environment (e.g., neighborhood district schools), while others are operating in a more choice-driven environment (e.g., charter and private schools). These differing accountability balances are creating political tensions, especially since district schools are increasingly competing with charter, private and virtual schools for students. If district schools are going to be exposed to more choice accountability, they want charter schools to operate under more regulatory accountability.

Similar tensions existed between East and West German organizations immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (more…)

Editor's note: It's no secret that Patricia Levesque, the executive director of both of Jeb Bush's education foundations, has a reputation as a hard-charging ed reformer. So it's definitely noteworthy to hear her take on possible changes to Florida's school grading  formula. "With Common Core coming online and a lot of other things being tasked of our schools and teachers, do we need to take a look at getting back to basics?" she tells the News Service of Florida. "So many things are added that maybe the calculation needs to be a little simpler, a little clearer." Levesque also comments on the possibility of Florida lawmakers considering a "parent trigger" bill for a third time last year, and what one of the foundations' top issues is likely to be next year. Here's the Q&A as it was distributed in full this week and, as far as we can tell, published nowhere else.

Patricia Levesque runs the state-focused Foundation for Florida's Future and the national Foundation for Excellence in Education. Both were created by former Gov. Jeb Bush. Levesque and Bush have successfully pushed the Common Core curriculum standards, school choice and data-driven school and teacher assessments. They've also strongly supported the controversial parent-petition bill, which died on 20-20 votes in the Senate the last two years.

Levesque served as Bush's deputy chief of staff while he was governor; before that, she spent six years as a key staffer in the Florida House. She is married to George Levesque, general counsel to the Florida Senate, and they have two children.

The News Service of Florida has five questions for Patricia Levesque:

Q: What do you say to the social conservatives who are fighting Common Core?

LEVESQUE: What I would say to conservatives specifically is that the Common Core State Standards movement is a very conservative movement. It is actually a great example of federalism at work. It's where state chiefs and state governors got together and said, "Let's do something in common that will help us all in our individual states." And so they got together, over years, and developed a common set of high standards in reading and math, and that became the state standards movement.

Actually, conservatives have always been champions of high standards and American exceptionalism. And if you really read the actual standards, you'll see that it goes back to original texts, requires close reading of the Constitution and the Preamble and the Declaration of Independence --- really conservative documents. And the standards movement is something that conservatives have for a very long time been leaders of.

The other thing that I would say to conservatives specifically is that the concerns that they're raising --- the concerns of the federal government telling our teachers exactly what textbooks to use in their classrooms, or concerns about the federal government data-mining our individual students' private records. Those are very legitimate concerns. They just happen to be misplaced against Common Core, because those things aren't true about Common Core. But they're legitimate concerns that all parents should be vigilant to make sure aren't happening in other aspects of education.

Q: Will Florida be ready for Common Core? (more…)

After seven years of decline, Florida private school enrollment ticked up modestly for a second year in a row last year.

Enrollment grew from 316,745 in 2011-12 to 320,423 in 2012-13, an increase of 1.2 percent, according to a report released last month by the Florida Department of Education.

The latest numbers are still a far cry from a decade ago, when the state wasn’t crawling out of the Great Recession and private school enrollment topped 380,000. But private school supporters see more than a short-term spike.

Private schools, too, have had to step up their game because of increased competition, said Howard Burke, executive director of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. They’ve responded to the explosion in charter and magnet schools by beefing up technology, improving communication with parents and seeking multiple accreditations, he said.

He pointed to growth in pre-K and kindergarten enrollment in private schools as evidence that parents have responded in turn. Private schools made up 14.6 percent of all pre-K enrollment in 2012-13, up from 12.9 percent five years ago. In raw numbers, private school pre-K enrollment is up more than 5,000 over that span.

“The foundation is being rebuilt,” Burke said.

It's clear from the latest enrollment numbers that publicly funded, private school choice options, particularly tax credit scholarships, are giving the private school sector a boost. They also suggest that many parents still prefer private schools despite massive growth in tuition-free charter schools. (more…)

After months of reports that some Florida public schools are limiting or denying students access to Florida Virtual School, the state’s chancellor of public schools is putting districts on notice.

“School districts may not limit student access to courses offered through the FLVS,” Pam Stewart wrote in a recent memo to superintendents. “Since the Florida Legislature passed legislation in 2013 that impacts the funding of school districts and FLVS will receive, it is important that you remember the statutory requirements.”

As redefinED has noted, the new funding formula has left fewer state dollars for both districts and Florida Virtual School and resulted in an unintended consequence: a dramatic drop in enrollment for Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest provider of online classes. Some districts immediately started steering students away from Florida Virtual School, while at least a few charter schools told students they would have to pay for Florida Virtual School courses.

That’s not acceptable, Stewart wrote. The memo also said districts cannot require students to enroll in district courses in the same subjects as FLVS courses; restrict students to only FLVS courses for electives; or limit the number of FLVS courses students can take.

It’s not clear what the consequences will be if districts engage in such practices. State Rep. Erik Fresen, R-Miami, who led the charge for the funding change, did not respond to several requests for comment in recent weeks.