School budgeting: The Lake County School District's tentative budget for the next year is set at $549 million. The district's tax millage rate will fall slightly, but a 7 percent increase in property values will largely offset the decline. Orlando Sentinel. Daily Commercial. The Clay County School District sets a tentative budget of $376 million that calls for a slightly lower tax millage rate that will be offset by higher property values. The budget is an increase of almost 8 percent over last year's. Florida Times-Union. The Collier County School Board will consider a tentative budget of $972 million. While the budget calls for a lower tax millage rate, increased property values would drive up a typical homeowner's taxes for schools by about 6 percent. Naples Daily News. The Volusia County School Board approves an $847 million operating budget. Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Legal fees fight: The state is requesting almost $379,000 in legal fees from the groups that are suing the state over the adequacy of the public educational system. The group, Citizens for a Strong Florida and others, lost the case and are appealing. They object to the state's request. News Service of Florida. WJXT.

Teacher firings: The Florida Board of Education and teachers unions are at odds over the ability of districts to fire low-performing teachers at failing schools. The board says exceptions to the usual firing process should be made for schools that underachieve year after year. Unions say no teacher should be fired based solely on the performance of their students on state testing. Politico Florida.

Earlier school starts: After the Legislature passed a law allowing schools to open as early as Aug. 10, 40 of the state's 67 districts took advantage. In central Florida, Lake, Seminole and Osceola start Aug. 10 while Orange and Volusia open Aug. 15. Orlando Sentinel. (more…)

After a one-year hiatus, Florida's public school choice program for students in schools with low academic ratings is active again.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program allows students in schools that received an F or three consecutive D's under the state's A-F grading system to transfer to another, higher-performing public school.

It was suspended during the 2015-16 school year, as the state made a transition to a new school accountability system, though students who had previously changed schools under the law were allowed to remain in place. (more…)

California's parent empowerment law spawned organizing campaigns aimed at transforming individual schools by parent petition, and went on to inspire legislative showdowns over similar "parent trigger" legislation across the country, including in Florida.

Yet that was only half of what the law did.  Another part of the 2010 statute could affect students at 1,000 California schools, and one of the law's original architects says that provision has yet to get the attention it deserves.

In brief, it also allows parents at those schools, determined to be the lowest-performing in the state, to transfer their children to a higher-performing public school. It's analogous to Florida's Opportunity Scholarships, which allow children assigned to schools that earn low grades to transfer to other public schools.

California's program casts a wider net that could affect nearly 10 times the number of schools. But it can't help parents who don't know it exists, or whether its applies to their schools, or what it allows them to do.

For that reason, former state Sen. Gloria Romero, who sponsored the original legislation, has set up a new organization aimed at informing parents of their rights under the law.

"We want to create public awareness - to reach out to parents whose kids are enrolled in one of these 1,000 schools," she said.

Starting this summmer, the Center for Parent Empowerment has been operating out of an office in East Los Angeles. In addition to cajoling education officials to support the goals of the law she helped put on the books, the Democratic former lawmaker says she plans to hold meetings with parents from key schools on the list.

In a recent phone interview, Romero said the state's convoluted formula for selecting the "persistently lowest achieving" schools isn't perfect. But she's also had a hard time getting good information from school districts about how many parents are taking advantage of the law, and what's being done to inform them of their options. (more…)

Editor's note: This op-ed ran in today's Orlando Sentinel.

Florida allocates five different scholarships from prekindergarten to college that allow students to attend faith-based schools. They don't violate the U.S. Constitution because students choose, and government doesn't coerce.

Both factors were why, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Cleveland school voucher did not violate the Establishment Clause, even as 96 percent of the students chose faith-based schools. To the court, in the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, the program met three critical standards that also apply to Florida: The primary objective is education; students can choose among secular and sectarian schools; and parents exercise an independent choice that is not steered by government.

The article "Many church schools get tax cash" in Sunday's Orlando Sentinel did not mention the Zelman case or that the Florida Supreme Court specifically avoided religion in 2006, when it overturned the private-school portion of the Opportunity Scholarship program. Consequently, readers might have thought that these programs are constitutionally suspect, when they are not.

The tax-credit scholarship is one of Florida's five scholarships. It strives to give low-income students access to the same learning options now available to more affluent families, via a $4,335 scholarship. This program complements other choice programs, such as magnet and charter schools, and is built on the truism that students learn in different ways. Last year, parents placed more than 1.2 million public-education students in schools other than their assigned district school.

In this new world of customized learning, encouraging differentiated instruction while maintaining quality control is a challenge. The tax-credit scholarship does this, in part, by requiring nationally norm-referenced tests that show these students are achieving the same gains in reading and math as students of all income levels. (more…)

President Obama has often called on us to be true to who we are as a people, as Americans. And in his second term, he has the opportunity to transform the education system back to our core - to where parents are primarily in charge of children’s educations.

We have paid a price for transferring authority and responsibility for educating children from parents to government entities. With mostly though not always good motives (remember Brown v. Board of Education), we allowed the dream of the government-owned and operated common school to live on despite overwhelming evidence that, in reality, it wasn’t working. A child’s educational destiny continues mostly to be a function of his/her zip code and the competence of strangers who sit on local school boards.

For more than three decades, a long, slow correction of this anomaly in American society has been underway. First, intradistrict and interdistrict transfers began to appear that allowed limited parental choice within some parts of the public school system. Then magnet schools surfaced, offering options such as vocational, talented and gifted, and language immersion programs, and responding to more demands. In 1992, charter schools emerged. Today they account for almost 6 percent of all public schools, approaching 6000 total, and the number grows steadily each year because the demand from parents so far is insatiable.

Thanks to my colleague at the American Center for School Choice, Gloria Romero, a new tool has appeared. The parent trigger empowers parents to make changes to their school when they are not satisfied. Already 20 states have considered the approach and seven have adopted laws.

Private school choice programs continue to gain support, too. And they have done so despite fierce opposition from forces that want to defend market share over a parent’s right to choose. Today, 32 such programs operate in the country. And in recent years, many school choice bills have either been passed by legislatures with Democratic majorities or signed by Democratic governors. Just as important, once enacted, these programs have only grown. No state has repealed a program or decided choice does not serve the public well. Moreover, the doomsday scenarios that opponents consistently forecast for public education systems have never happened.

It’s said you can’t argue with a river; it is going to flow. Parents are going to take back the authority and responsibility for educating their children. The river has been flowing for more than 20 years and the current is gaining speed. It’s time for more Democrats to stop arguing as families assert their fundamental and universally accepted American value that they know the best choice for their children. Democrats need to work in positive ways to transform our system. We need good schools and there’s plenty of room for all types - public, charter, and private.

President Obama has the life experience, as well as the political skills and credentials, to lead this transformation, and to make it less jarring and less confrontational. (more…)

Our preoccupation these days with a Florida amendment removing the state’s no-aid-to-religion clause may strike some redefinED readers as a touch obsessive, and we won’t argue the point. But the truth is that we agonize over whether to write at all, and we want to explain why.

At the end of the day, we are confident that Amendment 8, whether it passes or fails, will have no legal effect on school vouchers. And yet opponents so far have invested $1 million in a campaign that argues otherwise. They not only contend the amendment will open the door to new vouchers, but that those programs will be, to borrow the words of one elected Alachua County school board member, “the very death of public schools.”

So the quandary is obvious. We’re a blog built around the new definition of public education, run by an organization that administers private options to low-income students, and we think we can bring clarity to the issue. But how do we complain about a debate that we say is falsely about vouchers without being viewed as though we doth protest too much? How do we enter the volatile, polarizing world of political campaigns and not be viewed as an angry combatant?

This is shaping up as a most peculiar campaign. The pro- and anti-amendment forces are on two entirely different planets, one fighting against the scourge of vouchers and the other extolling the virtues of faith-based community services. And yet the legal landscape is unmistakable: The state Supreme Court overturned Opportunity Scholarship vouchers in 2006 through a public education uniformity clause that would be untouched by this amendment. In other words, the principle barrier to any new vouchers is not on the ballot. That’s one of the reasons, and this is important to note again, that no groups supporting parental choice are spending a penny on this campaign. They see it as legally irrelevant.

We admit taking offense at some of the liberties that have been taken so far with the legal truth. And we’re left only to speculate on why the opponents would spend so much on an amendment that means so little in the education world. (more…)

Former Florida House Speaker Jon Mills (pictured here) will now get his day in court, representing a group that has sued the state over both the funding and quality of public education. But the state Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday to let the suit move forward also invites a more enticing legal debate: Does the constitutional requirement of “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools” mean that every school must look the same?

That question may sound facetious, but unfortunately has judicial grounding. In 2006, the state high court invalidated Opportunity Scholarships by rejecting “separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools.” And the court didn’t stop there. It went further, arguing that “uniformity” calls for consistency in school accreditation, teacher certification and education qualifications, background screening for employees, academic standards, and curriculum in reading and history.

The question of school variety and choice might not sound like fodder for a case that’s primarily about money, but give Mills credit for being open to all interpretations of high quality. “The mission,” he said when the case was first filed in 2009, “is for students to have a good educational opportunity and to succeed, and it seems to me we need more options and not less.”

That is clearly the direction in which Florida is moving. (more…)

To highlight the power of school choice, Jeb Bush, during his prime time slot at the Republican National Convention, turned the mic over to a former student from Miami. Frantz Placide, 24, calmly but directly told millions of viewers that a private school voucher program in Florida gave him the opportunity to bypass his neighborhood school – “unproductive and failing” - and attend an academically rigorous Catholic school. The voucher “gave me the chance to achieve academic success,” he said. “I took it from there.”

In an interview today with redefinED, Placide offered more details about his educational path – and more testimony about the difference that additional learning options can make for kids. “I just wanted to let everyone know,” he said, “that because I had a choice in my education, I was granted a better life.”

Placide, who grew up in the Little Haiti section of Miami, was zoned to attend an F-rated public high school with low grad rates and lots of distractions. But with an “opportunity scholarship” from the state’s first voucher program, he instead attended Archbishop Curley Note Dame. “It was wonderful,” he said. “You learned so much coming in as a freshman. And when you leave as a senior, you’re ready to take on the world.”

Placide graduated in 2006 and went on to Wagner College in Staten Island, where he graduated in 2010 with a sociology degree. He’s now in the application process to become a state trooper in New Jersey – and on the verge of fulfilling a lifelong dream of serving in law enforcement. (more…)

While a Senate committee in Virginia killed a proposed tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students, legislatures in Pennsylvania and Indiana engaged in day-long hearings this week on their respective voucher plans.

Indiana's HB 1003 cleared its first committee on Wednesday, but not before lowering the income eligibility requirements of prospective scholarship recipients. The Indianapolis Star reports that families with incomes that qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches could get 90 percent of each child's public school funding to use for private tuition assistance. Families with 200 percent of that income level could get half of their child's public school funding.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's SB 1 was the subject of a nine-hour hearing Wednesday. The measure would provide tuition assistance to low-income students who, in the first year of the program, attend the "persistently lowest-achieving schools." But by the third year, low-income children anywhere in Pennsylvania would be eligible.

Tax credit and voucher plans in other states also saw some action this week. They include:

Arizona: SB 1312, SB 1553, HB 2581 and HB 2706 all passed their respective committees Monday;  SB 1553 and HB 2706 are the state's proposed education empowerment accounts, which according to a senate fact sheet, "requires the State of Arizona to deposit monies to each Empowerment Account equal to ninety per cent of state aid that would otherwise be allocated for a student and computed using all state funding weights."

Washington, D.C.: S.206, or the Opportunity Scholarship Program, sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, was the subject of a hearing Wednesday of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Among the testifiers was D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray, Kevin Chavous, board chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice.

Other bills we're watching, and which will be the subject of future updates, include Georgia's HB 62, HB 1881 and SB 87, and Oklahoma's HB 1029.

No matter how fair-minded advocates for school vouchers or tax credit scholarships make their case, they're often drawn into a straw-man argument.

Newark Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun is the latest to criticize New Jersey's proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act as "another gimmick masquerading as school reform." Braun is right to point out that "vouchers won't fix" the collapse of traditional public schools throughout the Garden State, but few of the bill's proponents are claiming that it will. While Braun mocks Newark Mayor Cory Booker for invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "no fewer than three times" during his testimony in support of the New Jersey bill, he neglects the core of Booker's argument. "This bill doesn’t remove our moral obligation to fix the failing public schools in New Jersey, nor does it relieve the crime that’s happening every day when we fail our children," Booker told the New Jersey assembly's Commerce and Economic Development Committee on Thursday, which approved the measure 5-0. "[But] it’s about time we give some small sliver of immediate hope for parents who are desperate in our city.”

This is not to say that advocates for school choice have never made far-reaching claims. Researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe didn't help the debate when they wrote in their 1990 book, Politics, Markets & America's Schools, that "without being too literal about it, we think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea." Whether Chubb and Moe's rhetorical flourish helped build the straw man that opponents to vouchers, charter schools and other forms of choice have found it convenient to knock down is another debate. But for more than two decades, people like Cory Booker have been engaged in a debate over an assumption they've never made. (more…)