For their project, Gussie Lorenzo-Luaces and three classmates at Deer Park Elementary in Tampa, Fla., wanted to find out what kind of paper allows a paper airplane to fly the farthest. After five trial runs, they determined copy paper, with its smooth surface and stable weight, worked best.

The boys’ exhibit was among more than 1,800 presented at last week’s 33^rd annual Hillsborough Regional STEM Fair, which featured 2,000 students from district schools, charter and private schools, and home schools.

That diversity was a big plus for Gussie’s mom, Susie, who was curious where other students in the county registered on the science track.

“I just feel they don’t need separation,’’ she said. “I like seeing them all together.’’

Increasingly, though, Hillsborough students are not all together in academic competitions.

In the past year, district officials have begun excluding charter schools from some districtwide contests, including Battle of the Books, a reading competition, and the Math Bowl and Math League for elementary and middle school students.

The reasons for the splintering are not clear. But everything from cost, to fear of competition, to a desire for charter schools to be more independent, has been suggested. At the least, the move points to potential pitfalls as school choice options mushroom across the landscape – even in a district with a choice-friendly reputation like Hillsborough.

“They’re all our children,” said Lillia Stroud of King’s Kids Academy of Health Science, a new charter in Tampa. Stroud said she can relate to the district’s concerns, but “separation at any level is disheartening.” (more…)

Editor’s note: As we reported last night, Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett made newsworthy comments yesterday when he spoke at an all-boys magnet school in Tampa. He suggested school choice wasn't a matter of public vs. private, and credited Florida school districts – Hillsborough’s in particular - for expanding magnets, career academies and other quality choice options. Here are his full remarks, edited slightly for length and clarity.

The overview I want to give you about Florida’s choice framework is one that is, in my opinion, a true blueprint for our country. And I want to take you on this little journey. So just bear with me for a moment.

For many years, we said choice was about competition in education. And competition will raise all tides, right? The rising tide of competition will raise all the boats. And I can tell you, Florida has kind of changed that discussion. Again, being from Indiana, being from a state that tried and worked very hard to champion very similar policies, while competition in the educational system is good, the issue of choice here in Florida personifies the importance you put on what I believe to be the most important social justice issue in education. And by that, I want to do a little scenario.

If my wife and I didn’t have grown children, and in December when I was appointed, we would have gotten in our car, we would have driven to Tallahassee, and we would have driven around the community of Tallahassee, and we would have found the school that works best for the Bennett children. And the reason we could do that is frankly we could afford to. We could afford to live anywhere we wanted, send our kids to the school that we thought best fit their needs ...

And my point in this is, Florida is leading the discussion that all parents, regardless of the color of their skin or regardless of how much money they have, should have the same choice as Tony Bennett or MaryEllen (Elia, the Hillsborough superintendent). And that is a very different discussion in choice. And it is a discussion that I see is transcending what I believe can be really the first round of choice. And the first round of choice was frankly privates and charters against the public schools. Virtual schools against the traditional bricks-and-mortar buildings.

And I think MaryEllen in Hillsborough is an example of how we have taken that discussion in a completely different direction. Because this school (Franklin Middle Magnet and its Boys Preparatory Academy) provides a choice for children. This district provides a culture and a climate where choice is accepted and encouraged, and the opportunity that all children should have the same choices that Tony or MaryEllen have. They live that way.

So we’re now talking about choice – not just private schools and charter schools and virtual schools – we’re talking about public school choice. We’re talking about creative leaders like MaryEllen, like the team here, creating educational opportunities for children within the district. And really going to what we all heard was the purpose of choice to begin with, to provide incubation for innovation for our public schools. So I am very encouraged. (more…)

In 2010, Doug Tuthill took a look around and realized he was living in a new era.

“Florida had this rapidly expanding portfolio of school choice options,” said Tuthill, the president of Step Up For Students, which administers the state’s tax credit scholarship program. “Yet there was little dialogue among the groups representing those choices. We weren’t talking to each other about what was working, what wasn’t, and why.”

Several important players in this bourgeoning movement recognized the need for more collaboration. Florida Virtual School and Step Up For Students, among others, wanted to see the school choice movement united, so they could learn from each other and talk through any differences.

Thus, FACE was born.

Florida Alliance for Choices in Education, or FACE, is comprised of more than 50 members, representing a diverse coalition of organizations dedicated to providing Florida school children with more educational options. Such organizations include National Coalition of Public School Options, Florida Charter School Alliance, Foundation for Florida’s Future, and StudentsFirst - all coming together with the belief that, as the FACE website says, “State policy should enable all parents to be fully engaged in their children’s education and to access those learning options that best meet their children’s needs.”

Step Up For Students (which co-hosts this blog) staffed the initial effort. Three individuals - Wendy Howard, a parent advocate from Tampa; Jim Horne, a former legislator and state education commissioner; and Julie Young, president and CEO of Florida Virtual School - spent a year facilitating outreach and diplomacy, eventually bringing all components of choice together in one organization.

Florida is the first state to do this. (more…)

It's not news that Florida Gov. Rick Scott is a strong supporter of parental school choice. But some of his comments Wednesday night in Tampa are still noteworthy. Scott was the keynote speaker at the annual donor appreciation dinner for the state’s tax credit scholarship program, which now serves more than 50,000 low-income students.

In the excerpts below, Scott refers to John Kirtley, who founded Step Up For Students and now serves as its chairman. Step Up administers the scholarship program and co-hosts this blog. Scott also refers to results released this week from a test called PIRLS – the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which is given to a representative sampling of fourth graders from around the world. In reading, Florida students finished second only to their peers in Hong Kong. Here's a sampling of what you'll hear from Scott in the video:

Over 50 percent of the families in our state make less than $50,000 a year. Every one of them has the same goal we have: They want to be able to choose where their child gets an education …

I tell people all the time: you can get anything passed in Florida you want, if you can explain how it impacts a family making $40,000 a year. This impacts families making $40,000 a year. Families like mine that lived in public housing. Families like mine that the father never had a job at Christmas. Families like mine that didn’t have the money to pay for junior college, college …

If every child has a choice, then the thing I ran on – getting the state back to work – will actually happen. There is no reason for this state not to be No. 1 in job creation. But the only way that’s going to happen is through a great education system. And a key component of that is choice, which makes everybody better and gives different students – like my daughters are both different – different opportunities. …

What John started, what you’re continuing, is forcing the rest of the country to change. Because they see how well Florida is doing. I don’t know if you saw the numbers yesterday, but everybody can be proud of our students. In the international test, we’re right at the top. We weren’t at the bottom. We were at the top.

The head of one of Florida’s two statewide charter school support groups is stepping down to lead a more targeted effort. Cheri Shannon, president and CEO of the Florida Charter School Alliance, is leaving at the end of the month to lead University Prep, a new charter network she says will focus exclusively on low-income students. To some extent, she’ll be coming full circle, having once run a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., that served students who were predominantly black and high poverty.

“This is my passion, my mission. ... I felt called, for lack of a better word, to come back in and do that work,” Shannon told redefinED. “This is where I want to end my career, making a difference in the lives of kids who deserve a difference.”

Shannon joined the alliance in April 2011 as its founding CEO. A former associate superintendent in the Kansas City school district, she has years of experience in both traditional school districts and the charter sector.

Her new venture already has four charter school proposals in the pipeline, including one scheduled to go before the Pinellas County School Board on Tuesday. The school boards in Broward and Palm Beach counties have already signed off on the University Prep applications in their districts. The application in Hillsborough is scheduled to go before that district’s board next month, Shannon said.

The Pinellas proposal is for a K-8 school in St. Petersburg with a projected, first-year enrollment of 694 students. The plan is to open next fall. (To read more about the application, go to page 318 of the school board agenda packet.)

The proposal stands before an interesting legal backdrop - a 2010 settlement from a class-action lawsuit that accused the Pinellas district of failing to educate black students in violation of the state constitution. Under its terms, the Pinellas school board set an aspirational goal of having at least 500 spaces in charter schools available for black students. (more…)

Vouchers need more accountability. So say David R. Colburn, director of the Askew Institute at the University of Florida, and Brian Dassler, chief academic officer for the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, in this exclusive op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times. Response here from the Heartland Institute, which says parental satisfaction is “a more effective form of accountability than extending mindless bureaucratic oversight to the private sector.”

New charter school to focus on “Latin and logic.” Tampa Bay Times story here. The applicant for the school is Anne Corcoran, the wife of state Rep. Richard Corcoran. He’s a future House speaker and a strong proponent of private school choice, too.

Threats to single-gender learning options. U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barbara Mikulski are considered to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but in this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal they unite in defense of single-gender options in public schools. (They single out Florida as one of the states where such options have been under legal fire.) It’s worth noting that in our own backyard, old lines of division have also faded over this issue. Last year, John Kirtley, who chairs Step Up For Students, donated $100,000 to the Hillsborough County School District to support single-gender academies at two public middle schools. The Walton Family Foundation kicked in another $100,000.

More on race-based achievement goals. The New York Times writes today about the state Board of Education’s decision last week to set different academic achievement targets for black, white, Hispanic and other subgroups. The targets incorporate steeper rates of improvement for groups with lower proficiency rates, but they have nonetheless caused a ruckus. The parents group Fund Education Now weighs in. So does Naples Daily News columnist Brent Batten, who hears from Collier County education officials that this is “much ado about nothing.”

Editor’s note: Tuesday’s New York Times story about tax-credit scholarship programs sparked a flurry of reaction from leading school choice supporters, including John Kirtley, who chairs Step Up for Students, the non-profit that administers the tax credit program in Florida. In a blog post today, the Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer took exception to some of the guidelines Kirtley proposed for other state programs, and also raised concerns about what he calls the “hyper-centralization” of Florida’s program. Here is Kirtley’s response:

First, I want to thank Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute for his engaged dialogue on the vital subject of tax credit scholarship program design. I also want to say that I have been an admirer of Cato for over a decade, and even attended its wonderful “Cato University” in the late 1990’s.

The main point of my response is this: as someone who is trying to pass, grow and protect parental choice laws in Florida and across the country, I live in the real world of legislation and politics. We are trying to change something that has been the same for 150 years. Those who don’t want change are extremely powerful, well-funded, and have willing allies in the press. We have to fight hand-to-hand legislative and political combat state by state. And we can’t hand our opponents grenades with which to blow us up.

Adam is absolutely correct that you can only drive so much excellence through top-down accountability. Our scholarship organization’s president, Doug Tuthill, and I constantly talk about the “new definition” of public education we would love to see — a transformation from “East Germany” (pre-Berlin Wall fall) to “West Germany.” We see a system where end users allocate resources and choose among many providers and delivery methods – public or private. Of course I understand, as Adam asserts, that such a system will produce better results. I’m a businessman! Or at least I used to be, before this movement took most of my time. But we can’t wave a magic wand and create that transformation overnight. And as in any free market system, there is a role — though many will argue over the extent – to be played by government.

Adam points out there is more fraud and waste in public schools than in scholarship programs. So what? We’re held to a higher standard. It’s not fair, but it’s a fact. In Florida, when stories of public school teachers having sex with students was the topic of Letterman and Leno monologues, one of the most respected newspaper columnists in Florida blasted vouchers because a private school principal took a bunch of young girls unsupervised to Disney World. There weren’t even any scholarship kids at the school. Another newspaper called for the repeal of the tax-credit program because (among other things) not every school had submitted documentation of their fire inspections. At the same time, the Orlando Sentinel (to its credit) ran an article about public schools in the area that were so out of fire code they had to hire fire marshals to stand watch at them. No one called for those schools to be shut down.

The point is we operate in a zero tolerance environment in Florida. Opponents to choice are desperate for examples that the program isn’t being operated properly. They would love to find a family that makes too much money to qualify, or to learn household incomes or sizes weren’t documented properly. And it would hurt us if they did. (more…)

Stephanie Saul offered an indictment in the New York Times today of tax credit scholarship programs that have, in my opinion, serious design flaws. These flaws were almost guaranteed to provide examples like Saul found for her article. How lawmakers and, just as importantly, parental choice advocates respond is an important test of their credibility.

Not much of what Saul reported is new, though that makes it no less troubling. Georgia’s law sets no boundaries on the income of scholarship recipients and no limit on the amount of the scholarship itself. It requires no financial audits, no attempt at any meaningful data collection. Many of the contributions are steered through schools and parents with a self-interest to underwrite the tuition of their own students. In Georgia and two other states she covered, Pennsylvania and Arizona, the public has little idea whether students are learning because no tests are required and no academic data collected.

The story was loaded with powerful anecdotes of abuse, but employed surprisingly pedestrian journalistic standards in its attempt to portray those practices as national in scope. The punchline in what newspaper writers call the nut graph – that “the programs are a charade” – was qualified as a  question raised by “some” private school administrators. The characterization of programs becoming “enmeshed in politics” was leavened again with the word “some.” How many of the eight states with tax credit scholarship laws “collect little information”? You guessed right. The answer was “some.”

To her credit, Saul did acknowledge that at least one state has different statutory and regulatory standards: “In Florida, where the scholarships are strictly controlled to make sure they go to poor families, only corporations are eligible for the tax credits, eliminating the chance of parents donating for their own benefit. Also, all scholarships are handled by one nonprofit organization, and its fees are limited to 3 percent of donations. Florida also permits the scholarships to move with the students if they elect to change schools.”

The Florida scholarship program, as readers of this blog should be aware, is where the creators of this blog work. So we certainly have a self-interest in seconding such an assessment but also an intimate appreciation of the tension that appropriately exists with education options that have one foot in the private market and the other in the public treasury. We want to give the parents of poor and struggling school children something they could not otherwise afford – a private school learning option – and we recognize that with tax-credited funding comes public responsibility.

Finding the right balance between regulation and market is no simple feat. But our prescriptions for a well-designed law are as follows: (more…)

Two different reporters contacted me this week, asking why I contribute so much to candidates who support education options for low-income children. Please allow me to share part of my answer to them, because it speaks to one of the real-world limitations we face as we expand public education choices for low-income students. The harsh truth is that teacher unions react with vengeance against any Democrat (and if they can, Republican) who votes for any option that involves teachers who can’t easily be organized for collective bargaining. So if we expect legislators to be able to resist these threats and bring an open mind to this new definition of public education, they need help.

In 1998, I started a privately funded K-12 scholarship program for low-income families in Tampa, and with no advertising we received 12,500 applications for 750 slots. That was when I first realized how much low-income families want parental choice in education. When the Florida Legislature passed the Tax Credit Scholarship in the 2001 session, we tried hard to get Democrats to vote for it. We could get only one. I was baffled by this, because the program would benefit only poor families, who largely vote Democrat.

One of these Democrats took me behind closed doors. He said he knew it would be the right thing to vote for the program, but he couldn't because the teachers' union was the largest donor to his campaigns and they would find and fund an opponent to take his seat.

In 2004, the national parental choice movement realized that if we were going to help more low-income parents have choice, we had to begin investing in the political process. For too long, the teacher unions have been the only player in the education reform political space and last year alone they spent more than $70 million nationally. Low-income families don't have this type of well-funded apparatus to make sure they have their voices heard in the political process. The result today is the American Federation For Children Action Fund, a "527" organization I am affilated with. AFC believes that parental choice for low-income families is a fundamentally nonpartisan issue, and that it is one of the most important social justice issues of our time. We try to help these families have a voice.

The reporters asked me specifically whether the support of parental choice by black Democrats was the result of my contributions and AFC's communications. That’s not only an insult to black elected officials who have shown remarkable courage, but it also ignores the obvious: African-American and Hispanic Democrats are receptive to parental choice because their constituents strongly desire it. Roughly three-fourths of the students on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship are children of color. Why wouldn't these legislators support giving more power to their constituents to choose the best school for their kids? The reason they didn't before is simple -- there was no counter to the poltical spending of the union.

The reporters also seemed incredulous that I would contribute to Democrats when Republicans dominate the Florida Legislature. I told them that, first, it’s the right thing to do. These legislators are voting to give low-income parents more educational opportunity, and they deserve support for doing so. Parental choice for low-income families should be a bipartisan cause. By countering the union’s money with some of our own, we are helping to make that a reality.

Today, redefinED host John Kirtley appears on the St. Petersburg Times' education blog, the Gradebook, with an essay that showcases the increasing bipartisanship evident in providing school choice for underprivileged students. "For far too long, the important debate over whether we should provide private learning options for low-income schoolchildren has been a source of friction in education circles and partisan combat in political quarters," Kirtley writes. "But when Oprah Winfrey spotlights the desperate needs of these children and some of the private schools that are turning around their lives, we can safely conclude this issue is now mainstream."

Kirtley is the chairman of Step Up For Students, a nonprofit group that administers the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students, and he's currently serving on the education transition team for Florida's Republican Gov.-elect Rick Scott. In Florida, Republicans control the governor's mansion and the Legislature, and their voices once stood apart from Democrats in the support over school choice. But times have changed, and now, as Kirtley points out, nearly half the Democrats and the majority of the legislative Black Caucus in Florida support the tax credit scholarship. (more…)