New Hampshire: The state legislature overrides Gov. John Lynch's veto of a tax credit scholarship bill. (Manchester Union-Leader)

North Carolina: School choice leaders throw in the towel on a legislative proposal for tax credit scholarships. (Associated Press) A judge rules that a virtual charter school cannot open, siding with the state board of education, which had refused to consider the proposed school's application. (Raleigh News & Observer)

New Jersey: Gov. Chris Christie says it's unlikely that a school voucher bill will move in the state legislature this year. (NJ Spotlight)

Florida: Faced with declining enrollment and increased competition from school choice, the Broward County School Board wants to open its own charter schools. (South Florida Sun Sentinel) Meanwhile, the state Charter School Appeal Commission sides with four of five charter school applications rejected by the Palm Beach County School Board. (Palm Beach Post)

Pennsylvania: A well-funded political action committee and the Philadelphia Archdiocese are pushing hard to expand the state's tax credit scholarship program. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Texas: The state's main charter school group filed suit against the state, charging it with short-changing charters on facilities funding and arbitrarily capping the number of charters that can open. (Houston Chronicle) (more…)

Michelle Rhee and I are members of the same political tribe. We’re progressive Democrats. Throughout most of the 1800s and into the mid-1970s, our tribe supported school choice, including allowing parents to use public funds to help pay for private school tuition. Our group’s position began to change in the late 1960s as urban teachers, who are core tribal members, began to unionize. By the time Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, the transition was complete. Progressive Democrats opposed school choice.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, school districts began using within-district school choice to promote voluntary desegregation, so our tribal position began to gradually evolve. I say gradually because in 1986, I led a floor fight at the annual National Education Association convention, on behalf of then-NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell, for a resolution endorsing within-district magnet schools. The opposition argued that magnet schools were voucher programs which siphoned off money and the best students from neighborhood schools. The resolution failed.

As the number of unionized teachers working in magnet schools expanded, the NEA eventually embraced magnet schools and other within-district school choice programs, and progressive Democrats followed. Today most progressive Democrats support within-district school choice programs that employ unionized teachers, and they oppose publicly-funded private school choice. But this latter position is evolving. Increasingly, core progressive constituencies, such as African-Americans and Hispanics, are embracing full school choice, as are some progressive leaders.

At Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s annual education reform conference a few years ago, Michelle Rhee began her morning speech by saying she was hired in Washington D.C. to reverse the flow of students into charter schools. But in her new position as founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, Michelle is slowly becoming more open to school choice. (more…)

Michelle Rhee clarifies her position on vouchers, tax-credited scholarships and education savings accounts in this interview with Sean Cavanagh at Education Week. To sum up: She thinks they should be limited to low-income students. And there needs to be transparency and accountability. "It has to be a heavily regulated industry," she told Cavanagh. "I believe in accountability across the board. If you're going to be having a publicly funded voucher program, then kids have to be taking standardized tests. We have to be measuring whether kids are academically better off in this private school with this voucher than they would be going to their failing neighborhood school. If they're not, they shouldn't get the voucher. ... I'm about choice only if it results in better outcomes and opportunities for kids." Full post here.

Let's be clear. The American Federation For Children spends significant sums of money to elect candidates who support educational options, and it usually does so in direct competition with teacher unions. But those who dismissed the AFC 2011 National Policy Summit as either politically or philosophically monolithic are playing some partisan games of their own.

Yes, as a Salon columnist readily noted on Monday while depicting the event as “right wing” and “religious right,” the two-day summit in Washington indeed featured speeches by two Republican governors, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Both governors have pushed education agendas that include private school options.

But let's also fill in the rest of this picture. The event was emceed by a black Democrat and former D.C. Council member, Kevin Chavous. Those sharing the stage over the two days included: Michelle Rhee, a Democrat and former D.C. school chancellor; Ann Duplessis, a black Democrat who served in the Louisiana Senate and is now New Orleans' deputy chief administrative officer; Alisha Morgan, a black Democrat and Georgia representative; Anthony Williams, a black Democrat and Pennsylvania senator; Kenneth Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options BAEO; and Julio Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options.

The federation's annual education advocacy award was handed to Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee superintendent and BAEO founder who has called private options for poor black students the civil rights cause of this era. The conference closed with a rousing call to action by an African-American minister from New Jersey, Rev. Reginald Jackson, who invoked the memory of Malcolm X. “We must assure that our children get a quality education,” Jackson intoned, “and, as Malcolm X said, by any means necessary.” (more…)

To hear former D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee tell it, even a politically charged issue such as private options can be brought into focus through the eyes of a caring mother.

Rhee, now one of the nation's most celebrated education reformers, told the American Federation For Children's 2011 National Policy Summit in Washington this morning that she was slow to accept the role of private options in public education. She is a lifelong Democrat who grew up with a healthy respect for the role of unions, and she said distraught D.C. mothers helped her see options in a new light.

"These are parents who are doing exactly what we want them to do," Rhee told the audience. "They researched their schools and found out they were failing, and they wanted options for their kids. They tried the lottery and lost ... and I simply was not willing to tell these parents, 'Just give me five years to turn things around. You know, just take one for the team.' "

Rhee believes that private options should be focused solely on children who lack the financial means and that participating private schools should be held to rigorous accountability standards. But she still finds that some of her Democratic friends don't easily embrace such options because they represent "vouchers," which they assume are in competition with traditional public schools. For these friends, she also appeals to their parental instincts.

In a recent discussion with one, Rhee asked whether she had watched the Davis Guggenheim documentary film, Waiting For Superman.

The reply: Yes.

Did she remember the story of a fifth-grade student from Harlem named Bianca?

The reply: Yes.

Did she remember how the Catholic school across the street had turned around her educational life?

The reply: Yes.

Did she remember how she felt when Bianca was turned away from the school and its graduation ceremony because her single mother came up short on the $500 monthly tuition?

The reply: Yes, I wanted so badly to write a $500 check for her.

"Right," Rhee said she told her friend. "That's a voucher."

The St. Petersburg Times caught up with Michelle Rhee today and asked for her thoughts on the Florida Senate's swift approval of a measure that would revamp the hiring and firing of teachers and install performance-based evaluations. Rhee told reporter Jeff Solochek, "We're very excited about the progress that's been made ... We've been using Florida as an example across the rest of the country as a state that is taking an aggressive stance on these important issues."

Rhee has been highlighting these issues frequently in Florida, where she works as an informal education adviser to newly elected Gov. Rick Scott. The state's legislative session just opened this week, and what the Senate did this week for the teacher bill, the House is expected to do next week. When that's done, Rhee won't be finished in the Sunshine State. She tells the Times that she plans to return to promote proposed changes to charter school governance.

Michelle Rhee spent this afternoon at the Florida Legislature, speaking first in front of the state Senate PreK-12 committee and then in front of the House K-20 Competitiveness Subcommittee. Much of her testimony was spent addressing Florida's Senate Bill 736, which is the Sunshine State's latest effort to revamp teacher contracts and evaluations, but, in keeping with her agenda for StudentsFirst, she had the following to say about school choice and parental empowerment:

[Florida's] current charter school laws and tax credit scholarship programs address the need for more choices for families, particularly for low income parents. All types of schools that are held accountable for excellent results should be allowed to grow. The competition this creates makes the entire system better as parents vote with their feet to the best schools for their children.

I have been working with some dedicated parents in Marco Island, who have been tireless in their fight to use the charter law to create a better high school option for their children. I hate to say it, but the school district has thrown up many roadblocks, including one to deny a parcel of land the district owns for the charter school’s use. The approval process to open a charter school should be rigorous, but the districts, some of which don't want competition, should not get to hold all the cards. This dynamic must change and districts have to be held accountable for their obligations around charter schools, such that they cannot be the limiting factor in starting great new schools.

That brings me to a provision that I understand will soon be raised in Florida, which currently has a form of the parent trigger law. Under this law, if 51 percent of parents and teachers demand a change to a failing school with their signatures, they can convert the public school to a charter school. But in order to truly empower parents, they need the right to demand a new school on their own, even if their administration and teachers are resistant to change. I believe Florida’s children would benefit if the House worked to change the language in the law -- from "parents and teachers" to "parents or teachers."

I agree with those who say we need more parent engagement in schools, but I do not believe we get to criticize parents when they then band together just because we don’t like the specific way they choose to engage. We cannot force parents into a prescribed list of preferences for the nature of their engagement, and if we are truly going to empower parents, we cannot force any parent to keep a child in a failing school.

Parental empowerment and high-quality options will serve as the nexus of Michelle Rhee's policy agenda for her new organization, StudentsFirst.

Rhee unveiled the proposal today, breaking down what StudentsFirst referred to as "a call to action and a roadmap for state and local lawmakers ..." Anticipating the polarization her proposals are sure to bring, she prefaced that the agenda "has assembled policies that will improve public education without regard to their point of origin on the political spectrum."

Sure to start some dialogue is her embrace of "real choices" for parents, even those that publicly fund private options:

There simply are not enough good options to meet demand, and there will not be until policy-makers take bold steps to expand access to high-quality schools. StudentsFirst will stand for parental choice, recognizing that we can only increase the scale of quality schools through a mix of strategies. Parents must be empowered to place their children in the learning environment that will work best for them, in a high-quality traditional public school, a district-run magnet, a charter school, a private school, or even a virtual school. StudentsFirst will be agnostic about school choice vehicles as long as the schools deliver results for students.

When Michelle Rhee visited a Miami charter school on Thursday to announce that Florida would be the first state to partner with her Students First initiative, it may have been easy for most observers to focus on the star power of the event and not the venue. But the reason that Rhee and newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott chose the Florida International Academy for their joint announcement is the same reason why the school’s waiting list for seats has more than 200 names.

The school reaches out to an impoverished community, where all students are children of color and nearly all qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and it delivers on results. In 2002, the state of Florida gave the school a failing grade, based on its dismal core performance in reading and writing. Today, that school has an A grade with a nearly identical demographic, and the majority of its students are now meeting high standards in those subjects.

How it got there exemplifies what Rhee and Scott and President Obama and Arne Duncan have been insisting on: Customizing a public education that best meets a child’s needs, and giving disadvantaged children more educational alternatives than they might otherwise have.

For Florida International, that means following the state’s curriculum standards but constantly redesigning the instruction based on its students’ needs, targeting teaching strategies to the individual student, if necessary, and revisiting those strategies every week, according to Principal Sonia Mitchell, who spoke with redefinED Friday. (more…)

Families everywhere will benefit from Michelle Rhee’s impatience with the staid politics that interfere with new ideas in education, even if those benefits may not be entirely clear yet. Lost in the media blitz over Rhee’s latest effort to speed the transformation of public education is her support of parental choices, support that goes beyond simply calling for more charter schools.

Rhee has lent her support to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, and she made it clear yesterday that her new advocacy group, Students First, will push for similar programs. Getting states to clear the obstacles to additional charter schools and pushing for opportunity scholarships will anchor what Rhee identified as a key component of a four-part legislative agenda for the group: an expansion of school choice and competition.

Rhee understands that expanded choices in education are critical to the success of any reform, and she also knows it will take a significant grassroots effort to convince elected leaders of that. Advocates of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship went through great pains to fight for renewal of the program, only to see it flounder among the opposition of Congressional Democrats. (more…)