In an American political system ripped apart by partisanship, the school choice movement stands out as a rare example of centrism, former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Tuesday. But the movement can build even better bridges if it eases up on the name calling and finger pointing, he continued.

“We cannot demonize our opponents,” McCurry told several hundred people at the American Federation for Children summit in Washington D.C. “I hear too often, as I do the work I do at (the Children’s Scholarship Fund), hear people talk about teachers unions in a way that’s frankly ugly. Those people love our children just as much as anyone in this room. They happen to be particularly wrongheaded about the way … to improve their lives. But it’s not because they are ill motivated.”

“We need to recognize that, and have compassion for the people on the other side,” he continued. “Not everything needs to be mud wrestling on CNN with people calling each other names. … We’ve got to nurture the better angels on that side and understand where they’re coming from.”

McCurry worked for liberal Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (himself a strong school choice supporter) early in his career and later for President Bill Clinton. He serves on the board of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which provides privately funded scholarships for low-income students in grades K-8.

The school choice movement’s appeal to all points on the political spectrum is a source of pride, McCurry said. The movement needs to continue doing the hard work of making the center hold, of putting aside differences on other issues to find common ground on kids and education. He suggested it might even model good behavior in other realms. (more…)

Ben Austin of Parent Revolution and Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute have been engaging in a civil dialogue on the merits of educators and parents being able to purchase instructional and management services from for-profit corporations. Austin opposes allowing parents and educators to have this option, while Hess is a supporter.

Austin’s advocacy of parental empowerment derives from his belief that public education too often puts adult needs over the needs of children. He thinks giving parents more influence over how their children are educated will move students to the center of educational decision-making. But Austin opposes allowing parents to contract with for-profit corporations because he thinks these companies will be more concerned with profit than children’s needs. A summary of Austin’s position was recently posted on the Parent Revolution blog: “Because we believe children need to be put first in every decision, it is far better to have non-profit organizations – accountable to parents, taxpayers and a stated mission – than a for-profit organization, which by definition is accountable first and foremost to investors and shareholders … ”

Hess argues that for-profit corporations already provide billions of dollars of products and services to school districts every year, and if parents decide a for-profit company can best meet their children’s needs, they should be allowed to work with it.

I agree with Hess. While Ben Austin is clearly well intentioned, his argument is based on ideology and politics, and not good public policy. Parents should be free to contract with providers that best meet their children’s needs.

The ad hominem aspect of Austin’s argument is troubling. While I was doing my holiday shopping this year, the gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity of the salespeople I talked to was irrelevant, as was their employer’s tax status. What was relevant was the quality and price of the products or services they were selling. I suspect Ben has these same priorities when he shops, and he likewise does not consider a corporation’s tax status when he purchases products and services for his family and friends. (more…)

One of the national Democratic Party’s leading lights for expanding school choice, including private school vouchers and tax credit scholarships, will be the featured speaker Saturday at a local Democratic Party event in Tampa, Fla.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker will be the keynote speaker at the Kennedy King Dinner, an annual event sponsored by the Hillsborough County Democratic Party.

“Like the men for whom the event is named - President John Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr – he (Booker) has shown great leadership in dealing with tough problems when others saw things as unchangeable,” county party chair Chris Mitchell said in a press release. “Mayor Cory Booker is a leader in our Party, mixing a pragmatic, 'get it done' approach with energy and a unique connection with voters."

Booker is fresh off a powerful speech at the Democratic National Convention that included moving lines about education but did not specifically mention his support for charter schools and vouchers. The press release announcing his speech in Tampa also skips that topic, instead noting Booker has “significantly reduced crime in Newark, championed a $40 million transformation of the City’s parks and playgrounds through a ground-breaking public/private partnership and doubled affordable housing production.”

In this recent Los Angeles Times piece, education historian Jonathan Zimmerman (pictured here) credits Mitt Romney for offering a more ambitious education agenda than President Obama. The Republican's voucher plan, which would let students use government funding to attend  either private schools or public schools in other districts, "would take on the true sacred cow in American education: local control," Zimmerman writes.

But here's the part that really caught our eye: Zimmerman's reference to the progressive roots of school choice. We can't trumpet this theme enough, so here's the relevant excerpt:

Yet the plan does remind us of the radical potential of school vouchers, which are today blithely dismissed by liberals as a right-wing plot to gut public education. But vouchers once drew significant support from the left too, including from such luminaries as Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks and urban muckraker Jonathan Kozol.

To Jencks, who crafted a 1970 report on the subject for Richard Nixon's White House, vouchers could help equalize American education if public as well as private schools were required to admit a certain fraction of low-income students. And the vouchers would have to be distributed progressively, with the poorest kids getting the biggest tuition assistance.

The Jencks report represented a high-water mark of bipartisanship for vouchers, which have sparked nasty political divisions ever since. Despite court rulings to the contrary, many Democrats insist that public vouchers used in parochial schools violate the separate of church and state. They also claim that vouchers hurt public schools by skimming off the best students, although a long-term voucher experiment in Milwaukee shows little evidence of that.

Sad but true: The other day, one of Louisiana’s statewide teachers unions tweeted that the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the stand-up school choice group, supports “KKK vouchers.” It subsequently tweeted, “Tell everyone you know.” (Details here.)

Even sadder but true: This wasn’t an isolated event. In recent months, critics of school choice and education reform have time and again made similar statements and claims – trying to tie Florida’s school accountability system to young black men who murder in Miami, for instance, and in Alabama, trying to link charter schools to gays and Muslims.

But this is also sad but true: Reform supporters sometimes go way too far, too.

Late last week, the Sunshine State News published a story about two Haitian-American Democratic lawmakers in South Florida, both strong backers of school choice, who narrowly lost primary races to anti-choice Democrats. The story quoted, at length, an unnamed political consultant who sounded sympathetic to the arguments raised by school choice supporters. He made fair points about the influence of the teachers union in the Democratic Party; about racial tensions that rise with Democrats and school choice; about a double standard with party leaders when Dems accuse other Dems of voter fraud. But then he said this:

“It’s a kind of ethnic cleansing of the Democratic Party,” he said, according to the report, “centered on the interests of the teachers’ unions.”

School choice critics may often be wrong;  their arguments may at times be distorted and inconsistent. But to brand their motivations with a term that evokes Rwanda and Bosnia is more than off-key. It’s repulsive. It’s also a distraction and counterproductive.

I’m floored by extreme statements from ed reform critics. In the past couple of months alone, a leading Florida parents group accused state education officials of using the school accountability system to purposely “hurt children”; a left-wing blogger described John E. Coons, a Berkeley law professor and redefinED co-host, as a “John Birch Society type” because of his support for parental school choice; and other critics used fringe blogs and mainstream newspapers alike to shamelessly tar Northwestern University economist David Figlio, a meticulous education researcher who is not only widely respected by fellow researchers on all sides of the school choice debate but is so highly regarded beyond the world of wonkery that he was cited as a prime example of this state’s “brain drain” when he left the University of Florida. I’m further stumped by how such statements are rarely challenged by mainstream media, and by how more thoughtful critics simply shrug and look the other way.

Attacks like these make me want to say, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” But then, at less regular intervals, statements like the ethnic cleansing quote come up and knock reformers off the high road. I’m left with a less satisfying response: “Can’t we all just get along?”

Should Florida’s next education commissioner be committed to the success of all students, no matter what type of educational setting they’re in? Or to public school students first and foremost?

State Rep. Reggie Fullwood, D-Jacksonville, believes it should be the latter. He issued a statement to that effect Friday, following the state Board of Education’s official launch of a search to replace Gerard Robinson, who left at the end of August.

“It is gratifying that the State Board of Education appears to be making it a priority to hire a commissioner who is committed to obtaining the input of parents and education stakeholders as future education reforms are contemplated,” Fullwood’s statement said “However, it is disappointing that the Board, by its actions today, remains anxious to hire yet another advocate for private-schools vouchers or a proponent of private virtual school operators. I believe Floridians expect our next state education commissioner to be committed – first and foremost — to Florida’s public schools and public school students.”

It's not clear what board actions prompted Fullwood's conclusion about voucher advocacy. But Fullwood, who sits on two education committees in the House, recently penned his criticism for school choice in a letter to the Jacksonville newspaper. “In Florida,” he wrote, “we have bet the house on vouchers and charter schools.”

As we noted Friday, the state board elected a new chair Friday – Gary Chartrand, a Jacksonville businessman who was instrumental in bringing the first (and so far only) KIPP charter school to Florida. As we have noted before, the Duval County School District, which encompasses the city of Jacksonville, has had less success with low-income students than any other urban district in Florida.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a star in the Democratic Party, is already considered a future presidential candidate. But he is also an unflinching supporter of private school vouchers. In a rousing speech at the DNC tonight, he moved delegates with his lines on education: "You should be able to afford health care for your family. You should be able to retire with dignity and respect. And you should be able to give your children the kind of education that allows them to dream even bigger, go even farther and accomplish even more than you could ever imagine."

Booker didn't even hint at vouchers or private schools. The Democrats aren't ready. How long before they are?

Like the Democratic Party platform on education, this is no surprise: Democratic tension over school choice and parental empowerment is on display at in Charlotte. But some of the developments and statements are still worth logging in.

StudentsFirst co-sponsored a special screening of the new movie “Won’t Back Down” at the DNC yesterday, just as it did at the RNC in Tampa last week. And in the panel discussion that followed, Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution, told the audience that the parent trigger law – upon which the movie is loosely based – is a progressive idea aimed at giving parents more power to right struggling schools. According to coverage of the panel by Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog:

The laws allow parents to "unionize and collectively bargain, just like teachers' unions," said Austin, who served in the Clinton White House. "Parent trigger fundamentally makes public schools more public. ... We need to be modern 21st-century progressives" who stand for government working.

To be sure, people like Austin and former California state Sen. Gloria Romero have tried, mightily, to dispel the notion that the trigger is a right-wing creation, but the myth persists. In June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously endorsed the parent trigger idea, and among the big-city Democrats who led the charge was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Villaraigosa is chairman of the Democratic National Convention this year, as the Huffington Post notes in this piece over the weekend. He’s also a former teachers union organizer. Wrote the HuffPo: “It is hard to paint the school reform movement as a right-wing conspiracy. Support for taking on teachers’ unions is growing in Democratic and liberal circles.”

More DNC coverage of the growing divide between Dems and teachers unions in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times.

After going 56 years without attending a national political convention, I’m headed to Charlotte for my second convention in a week. For school choice advocates, the Democratic National Convention will be a somewhat hostile environment, unlike last week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, where all forms of school choice were enthusiastically embraced.

As we’ve discussed previously on redefinED, the political left, including wide swaths of the Democratic Party, was supportive of giving parents - especially low-income and minority parents - access to more diverse schooling options in the 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s. That support began eroding when the National Education Association gave Jimmy Carter its first-ever presidential endorsement in 1976, and was mostly gone by 1980.

President Clinton’s support of charter schools marked the beginning of a renewed interest in school choice within the party, and pro- and anti-school choice forces have been battling ever since. After two decades of struggle, the momentum today is clearly on the side of the pro school choice Democrats, which has caused anti-choice Dems to become more desperate and strident. American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten’s recent attack on the new teacher/parent empowerment movie, Won’t Back Down, was so disingenuous and hyperbolic I was embarrassed for her.

Both Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel will be participating in a town hall meeting tomorrow sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform. Four years ago, at the Democratic convention in Denver, DFER burst on the scene at a similar event, and, with close ties to the Obama Administration, immediately became a majority power center within the party. I’m anxious to see what issues predominate tomorrow, and how Weingarten and Van Roekel position themselves.