A recent headline in the Charlotte Observer offers inspiration this season. “Compete and cooperate,” the newspaper wrote of charter, district and private schools there, “A new direction for Mecklenburg schools.”

This is not a fictional account and it turns on a basic truth about education reform: Despite the caverns that sometimes separate those who are loyal to the great institution of neighborhood schools and those who fight to expand the menu of learning options, the collective effort is still pulling in the same direction. Both believe in the social necessity of public education and both want to give every child the best chance to succeed.

So allow me to wish this season for fertile and productive common ground, and begin it with a salute to Kevin Welner, professor of education and director of the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His center is known for its allegiance to traditional schools and its steadfast rejection of most, if not all, alternatives to them. Welner is known, in part, for a book that treats tax credit scholarships for low-income schoolchildren as an assault on public education, that dismisses them as “a distraction away from proven solutions and real needs,” and includes the memorable line: “The inherent value of choice should … not be overstated.”

Needless to say, Dr. Welner has a different definition of public education than suits my tastes, but his recent column on Huffington Post made a perfectly legitimate point: Many politicians do use the term “school choice” as a catchall phrase that skips over the educational design and value of individual choice programs. Those on the extremes tend to view choice as though it is either an inherent blessing or evil.

As such, Dr. Welner writes: “There can be a true value in parental choice – matching, for example, a child's interests with the focus of a school. But in making policy we shouldn't assume school choice has some magical power. … Like most tools, school choice can be used in beneficial as well as damaging ways.”

Agreed.

In fact, Dr. Welner’s words sound so much like those of Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee school superintendent and national leader in the arena of parental choice, that I share a few from redefinED last year: (more…)

Welner

Give Sean Cavanagh at Education Week credit for a relatively balanced report on tax credit scholarship issues that have been raised in several states, though not all of his sources displayed a similar rigor. The story offers us a snapshot into how one noted academic researcher draws financial conclusions, and the picture is not pretty.

In 2008, in fact, Welner raised a legitimate question about a state agency report that concluded the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship saved taxpayers $38.9 million in 2007-08. He criticized the agency, called the Office of Public Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA), for using what amounted to an educated guess that 90 percent of low-income students who chose the scholarship would have otherwise attended public schools. This is one among many factors that are critical to the evaluation because students who would otherwise have attended a private school save the state no money. Welner focused on this 90 percent figure and went so far as describe it as a form of “smoke and mirrors.”

Fast forward four years. Four different independent organizations, including highly regarded OPPAGA and the nonpartisan Florida Consensus Revenue Estimating Conference, have now issued seven different reports that all conclude the program saves money. In both the second OPPAGA report, issued in 2010, and an estimating conference projection issued in March (page 36), fiscal analysts turned to the U.S. Census for some answers. OPPAGA used the 2000 U.S. Census, the year before scholarships were enacted, and analyzed the Public Use Microdata Sample to determine that the 90 percent estimate was actually too low. The actual percentage of families in the relevant income category who attended public schools that year was 94.6 percent. The estimating conference went even further, combining American Community Survey data from 2005-09 with private school enrollment data to make projections about the actual number of low-income students enrolled in each grade level in private schools in 2012.

The results: The second OPPAGA reported found savings of $34.6 million in 2008-09, and the estimating conference projected a savings of $57.9 million for 2012-13.

Asked to respond to this new analytical consensus in Florida, though, and Dr. Welner largely reprised his 2008 remarks. (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…)