Common Core: National support for the Common Core State Standards has fallen to the lowest level in five years, according to a report in Education Next, a journal published by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Only about 42 percent of those polled support the standards, down from 90 percent in 2012. The report also shows that support remains as high as ever for testing, charter schools, tax credits to support private school choice, merit pay for teachers and teacher tenure reform. Sunshine State News.

School threats: School officials struggle to stay ahead of rumors and social media when it comes to online threats made against schools. Tampa Bay Times. Parents of students at Coral Springs High School are questioning how a former student could get on campus with a loaded gun. District officials say the school does not have a limited access single point of entry, which they plan to address with proceeds from an $800 million bond referendum, but there are no guarantees that it can't happen again. Sun-Sentinel.

Money for SACs cut: The Hillsborough County School District has cut funding for school advisory committees, saying it has run out of money for the programs. SACs help districts put together improvement plans and vote on how to spend school bonuses. Tampa Bay Times.

Opt-out and election: Members of the Opt-Out Florida Network create a voter guide outlining candidates' positions on state testing, and are campaigning for those who also oppose the state's use of the Florida Standards Assessments. WFSU. (more…)

Katisha Rucker works for a school district. She’s a member of a labor union. And her daughter attends a private school thanks to a scholarship from the nation’s largest private school choice program.

You could be forgiven if you think Rucker’s profile is unique. But it’s not.

This fall, more than 1,200 low-income and working-class parents whose children benefit from Florida’s tax credit scholarship program are employees of school districts, according to data from Step Up For Students, which helps administer the program, hosts this blog and pays my salary.

That’s a lot of district employees. And it comes despite the fact Florida’s statewide teachers union is so hostile to the program, it’s aiming to kill it with a lawsuit.

The lawsuit “would hurt me a lot, it would hurt my child,” said Rucker, an 11-year bus driver for the Marion County school district in north central Florida. “As a single parent, I can’t afford a private school.”

The employer information is available at Step Up because parents list their employers on scholarship applications. This fall, by my count, 1,256 employees in 58 districts are scholarship parents. The program is serving more than 92,000 students total.

We don’t know the job titles. But it’s a safe bet many of the district employee who are scholarship parents are “support staff” and blue-collar workers: clerks, custodians, bus drivers, receptionists, food service workers, paraprofessionals and so on. Given their incomes, a far greater percentage of workers in these categories would be eligible for tax credit scholarships than teachers.

It’s also fair to assume many of them, like Rucker, are represented by unions other than teachers unions, such as SEIU and AFSCME.

This puts a new twist on the lawsuit. If it succeeds, the teachers union will not only be throwing 90,000 economically disadvantaged students under the bus, but 1,200 fellow district employees who, in many cases, are brothers and sisters in the labor movement.

The First District Court of Appeal dismissed the lawsuit last month. The union now has a matter of days to decide whether it will appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.

At this stage in the case, a crucial issue is whether the plaintiffs can show the school choice program harms public schools. A Leon County Circuit Judge and a unanimous panel of three judges on the First District Court of Appeal have all concluded the teachers union and other groups behind the lawsuit have not demonstrated that it does.

Rucker said she’s not surprised so many district employees value the scholarship. She said she has recommended it to other bus drivers and fellow union members. They have the same concerns about safety and bullying the general public does, she said, and like all parents, want a school that is the right fit for their child.

Rucker said she sought a scholarship after her eighth-grade daughter, Taliyah, got into a fight and school officials decided to place her in a school for disruptive students. Rucker didn’t think the placement was fair, given what she said were no other disciplinary issues on Taliyah’s record. She also thought her child would suffer in the unruly atmosphere she feared would be the norm at the other school.

Now “she’s doing better grade wise and everything else than she was in public school,” Rucker said. “She loves going to school. If I’m late, she has a fit. It’s been an amazing turnaround for her.”

Rucker also secured a tax credit scholarship for her son, Clyde, who is in sixth grade, but decided for now to leave him in public school. So far, so good. “But if something happens, I know I have that option,” she said. “It’s very important to have a choice.”

(more…)

Editor’s note: Wendy Howard is executive director of Florida Alliance for Choices in Education, a group that includes a wide range of school choice organizations, including Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog. A shorter version of this post ran this week as a letter to the editor in the Tampa Bay Times. Given Wendy’s conservative political bent, her staunch support for school choice and the concerns about Common Core, we thought it worthwhile to share a fuller version.

With attacks on the Common Core State Standards for education coming from both sides of the aisle, what are parents to think?

I’ve heard Common Core is Obama’s agenda to indoctrinate our children. I’ve heard it’s an unconstitutional federal takeover. I’ve even heard it’s a scheme to perform experiments nationwide on our next generation. After doing some research, I learned none of those concerns hold water. The bickering continues, however, while our children suffer the consequences.

The fact is, our kids need higher standards for education. Let’s look at a couple of disconcerting facts from the perspective of a parent with two children attending a public charter school.

Forty percent of Florida’s class of 2013 who took the ACT college entrance exam were graded “not college ready” in any subject, which is higher than the national average of 31 percent. As a parent, this has huge financial implications. If my children are part of these statistics, I will have to pay for remedial classes in college, something I simply cannot afford. As a taxpayer, I expect my child’s diploma to mean she actually succeeded in high school and can move right into college courses. As a nation, millions of kids and their parents are impacted each year when that turns out not to be the case.

Higher standards will mean our next generation is better prepared for college or the workforce. That’s good for kids, parents, taxpayers and our country.

Here’s another troubling statistic: Thirty percent of high school graduates can’t pass the U.S. military entrance exam, which is only focused on basic reading and math skills. At what point does the lack of high standards become a national security issue? If the learning gap between the U.S. and other countries continues to rise, which country becomes the next super power? What does our country look like in 20, 40, 60 years? I guess that depends on whether we look at the achievement gap between the U.S. and other countries as a crisis – or another issue we kick down the road. (more…)

Editor's note: This is the third post in our series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's Dream speech.

It was January 18^th, the Saturday of the MLK weekend in 1997, when I printed out the “I Have a Dream” speech. I’m not completely sure why, except that I was transitioning in my life from international business to education reform. The powerful language and ideas King conveyed, especially the notion that we had defaulted on our promissory note, captured me then and have stayed with me. The speech has been in my briefcase ever since. Multiple times each year, I pull it out when I need to refresh my memory as to why I remain engaged in what is often such an arduous struggle.

By now, I hope, people are familiar with the dismal stats. Our schools remain mostly separate and unequal. Schools that enroll 90 percent or more non-white students spend $733 less per pupil per year than schools that enroll 90 percent or more white students. That’s enough to pay the salary of 12 additional new teachers or nine veteran teachers in an average high-minority school with 600 students. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend those high minority schools, whereas the average white student is in a school that’s 77 percent white. Whites now constitute only 52 percent of K-12 demographics.

Meanwhile, only 19 percent of Hispanic 4^th graders and 16 percent of black 4^th graders scored proficient or above on the 2011 NAEP reading exam. About half of Hispanic and black students were “below basic,” the lowest category. Even our best students often leave the K-12 system unprepared, as best evidenced by a 60 percent remediation rate in the first year of college and large numbers of dropouts.

Although progress has been made, America remains in default on its promise of access to a high quality educational experience for all. In the words of Dr. King, we are addicted to the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” and mired in a “quicksand of racial (as well as class) injustice.” Powerful adult interest groups continue to benefit. That part is analogous to the civil rights struggle of the 50’s and 60’s, though thankfully so far without the snarling dogs, fire hoses and bullets. My frustration with the pace is that the vision of justice, of what is right and what is possible, is so clear. We see hundreds of charter schools, private schools and traditional public schools achieving at high levels with children of all classes and ethnicities. When we know better, as we do, we should do better. But mostly we do not.

Parental school choice alone is no panacea. Standards need to be raised; teacher recruitment, preparation, training, evaluation, and compensation systems dramatically restructured; and technology integrated to improve efficiency. But Dr. King would likely look askance at using school district attendance boundaries to corral families the way we do cattle, allowing them in and out only when it pleases the owner. This system is inherently unjust, immoral, and even evil when it condemns families to poor performing schools year after year, generation after generation. It forcibly segregates us from one another. Without choice, we de facto have Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate, but equal” that has never actually been equal. Often it destroys hope. (more…)

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of posts we're running this week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

I grew up in a Minnesota city of 100,000 with - in my time - one black family. My introduction to the reality of public school segregation came in 1962 as - now at Northwestern in Chicago - I agreed to probe the public schools of the district on behalf of the U.S. Commissioner of Education. The racial separation was there as expected, but there was one big surprise; I was astonished to find enormous disparities, not only in taxable local wealth - hence spending - among the hundreds of Illinois districts, but even in individual school-by-school spending within the Chicago district itself. I wrote about both problems, sprinkling research with “action” including marches and demonstration both in Chicago and in Selma (prior to the main event there).

My interest in deseg politics had already provoked a law review article on the risks of anti-trust liability for King et al. who were planning boycotts of private discriminators. On the strength of that essay, Jack Greenberg, then director of the NAACP Inc. Fund, invited me to meet with King and his lieutenants at dinner in Chicago to discuss the question. We spoke at length - mostly about boycotts but also about schools. By that time I was already into the prospects for increasing desegregation in Chicago, partly through well-designed school choice.

I won’t pretend that I recall the details of that evening. What I can say is King’s mind was at very least open to and interested in subsidies for the exercise of parental authority - which clearly he valued as a primary religious instrument. I took my older boys next evening to hear him at a South Side church and, possibly, to follow up on our conversation, but he had to cancel. We heard sermons from his colleagues, some to become and remain famous. I did not meet King again.

King’s “Dream” speech does not engage specific public policy issues - on schools or anything else. Essentially a sermon, it is a condemnation of the sins of segregation and an appeal to the believer to hear scripture, with its call for indiscriminate love of neighbor, as the life-task of all who recognize the reality of divine love for us - his image and likeness. It is purely and simply a religious appeal that declares the good society to be one that rests upon benign principles that we humans did not invent but which bind us. I don’t know King’s specific understanding of or attitude toward non-believers, but this document clearly rests the realization of the good society upon its recognition of our divine source and its implication of the full equality of all persons.

Given that premise and the Supreme Court’s insistence upon the “wall of segregation” in the public schools, plus - on the other hand - the right of parents to choose a private religious education, the logic is rather plain.

Private schools live on tuition, and many American families couldn’t afford to enroll then or now. If low-income families were to exercise this basic human right and parental responsibility enjoyed by the rest of us, government would have to restructure schooling to insure access to an education grounded upon, and suffused with, an authority higher than the state. Given the economic plight of so many black parents, the only question would be how to design the system to secure parental choice without racial segregation by private educators.

And that possibility was to be the principal crutch of “civil rights” organizations in hesitating about subsidized choice. (more…)

The latest Florida Department of Education report on the tax credit scholarship program, and my summer discussions with scholarship parents, students and teachers, have led me to some conclusions. These thoughts are not new, but sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves of things we know but occasionally forget.

• On average, scholarship students are achieving a year’s worth of learning gains in a year’s time, but this is not enough. We are attracting the state’s most disadvantaged students, and many of them are several years behind when they enter the program. These students need to be making 1.5-to-2 years of learning gains annually if they’re to catch up with their more advantaged peers.

• We will not achieve these accelerated learning gains if we don’t provide scholarship students with more time to learn. Six-to-seven hours per day and 180 days per year are not enough for these students to achieve parity. Programs that are successfully reducing the achievement gap, such as many of the KIPP charter schools, are providing more learning time for disadvantaged students via longer school days and school years.

• More time in school is still insufficient. Much of the achievement gap is created by large disparities in out-of-school learning opportunities. Many scholarship families can’t afford private music lessons, summer camps, equipment fees for Pop Warner football, or gymnastic lessons. While most of these experiences are not academic, the development they nurture contributes to success in a variety of settings, including school.

• The new Common Core State Standards, because they are more rigorous, will exacerbate the achievement gap in the short-term. This greater disparity will become permanent if we don’t provide disadvantaged students with more access to in-school and out-of-school learning opportunities, and provide private school teachers with the training, technology and other support they need to successfully teach these new academic standards.

• The concentration of high-poverty students in Florida private schools is growing as the number of tax credit scholarship students increases and more middle class families transfer from private schools to magnet and charter schools. This fall, more than 30 percent of Florida’s private school students will be paying tuition using McKay scholarships for disabled students or tax credit scholarships for low-income students. These changing student demographics will put greater stress on already meager private school resources. (more…)

I agree with Utah state Sen. Aaron Osmond’s assertion that over the last 150 years government has used compulsory school attendance laws to inappropriately usurp much of the parents’ responsibility and authority for educating their children. But while I believe this educational responsibility should be restored to parents, I also believe compulsory school attendance laws should be maintained, with some modifications.

When mandatory school attendance laws were first passed in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, brick-and-mortar schools and formal instruction were synonymous. That’s not necessarily the case today. In this new era of digital technology and customized teaching and learning, students are increasingly being educated in venues as diverse as libraries, community centers, private homes, museums, and Starbucks.

This proliferation of eclectic learning environments suggests our education laws should focus on compulsory learning and not compulsory school attendance. As long as children are making adequate progress mastering their state’s academic standards, the public should not care where this learning is occurring.

I oppose Sen. Osmond’s proposal to eliminate mandatory attendance (or learning) laws because the parents’ authority to education their children should not be absolute. Parents should never have the authority to purposely raise an illiterate child. That’s child abuse.

The Washington Post made a similar point in its recent editorial criticizing Virginia’s religious exemption law, which allows parents to opt out of the school attendance law without providing any evident their children are becoming literate:

“States have an interest and an obligation to see that children get a basic education; that’s why we have compulsory attendance laws. By writing such a broad exemption, Virginia has tipped the scales that balance a parent’s religious freedom with a child’s right to an education.”

In many ways, we’ve already begun making the transition from compulsory attendance to compulsory learning. In most states, homeschooling satisfies  compulsory school attendance laws if parents can prove their children are making adequate academic progress. Unfortunately, what constitutes adequate academic progress is often vague and a source of disagreement between parents and local officials tasked with enforcing school attendance laws. If we're going to properly balance the parents' authority to educate their child with the government's interest in protecting children from abuse, then we must improve our ability to determine what constitutes acceptable academic progress for each child.

The new Common Core State Standards should help with this task since most students nationally will be working toward mastering the same content standards and their collective progress should help inform the progress we should expect from individual children.

Public policy should be more deferential to parental authority, but this authority cannot be absolute. We can create and implement policies that honor parents’ authority to educate their children while still protecting the child and society from abuse.

For practical reasons, many Florida private schools are rolling up their sleeves and getting ready for the new Common Core State Standards for math and English/language arts. This fall, our nonprofit, Step Up For Students, will help about 140 private schools and their parents implement these new standards, and based on the dialogue we’re having with other schools, we’ll be helping many more next year.

Some observers believe common standards will undermine school choice. I disagree.

In the context of school choice, common standards serve the same function as the operating systems in computers or smart phones. Just as common operating systems (e.g., Apple or Microsoft) allow software developers worldwide to create an endless supply of innovative software applications, common academic standards are allowing teachers nationwide to create and share innovative curriculum, instructional materials, teaching activities and online lesson plans. We are already seeing a plethora of websites where teachers are posting open source lessons plans and instructional strategies aligned to Common Core. Innovative, free and Common Core-related professional development opportunities are also becoming ubiquitous online.

Common standards are helpful in this emerging new era of customized learning, where students are increasingly accessing content and taking courses from multiple providers simultaneously and/or sequentially. Parents want the freedom to continuously match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs, but they also want to know their children will not be disadvantaged as they move in and out of charter, virtual, home, magnet, private and neighborhood schools. Knowing that many schools are using the same operating system (i.e., the same standards) can help reassure parents that their children are able to receive a seamless, high quality education from diverse providers.

This is particularly important to low-income families. (more…)

Up to a certain point schooling is an example of the free market. Any family with financial resources or the ability to home school can choose where and how children are educated. However, schooling is a compulsory good and the forms of education that satisfy the parent’s duty are limited.

Moreover, parental authority over schooling is an instrument to be judged by its effect upon the goals to be served. One of its goals may be the healthy development, not merely of the child, but of the parent - in turn enhancing the family’s possible contribution to specific social goals. Suppose one decides that a 7-hour-a-day, 12-year disengagement of the parent from the child is a very bad thing for the social order. Suppose it teaches parents to leave responsibility to government strangers and invites the child to view the role of parent as an insipid condition to be avoided. What deadly disease of contemporary society does this image identify? Would responsible parental choice of school be at least part of its necessary social medicine? In the short run or the long run or neither? Perhaps this is the kind of question about ends that a fixation on economic means tends to obscure. The American Center for School Choice exists to ensure the conversation about parental choice includes serious discussion of both ends and means.

To the extent that any market is unregulated or “free” it is left so for the enhancement of certain ends that are approved by our society and its 51 constitutional governments. One of these ends is rather immediate; before all else, the free market is an instrument to achieve the personal objectives of individuals who exchange goods and services or make promises to do so. Promises create contracts, which are enforced (or not) by courts, which are an arm of formal government and decide whether certain bargains are illegal or ineffectual - because there are other ends that can override the aims of individuals. An example is an agreement for delivery of illegal drugs or (in California) the livers of force-fed geese. The free market has these various limits because society has purposes other than realizing individual choices.

Although contracts for schooling are - up to a point - relatively free, what is peculiar about the market in schooling is the law and reality that the individual most affected by the free choice has none at all himself. Nature has decided that Junior’s intellectual fate is in the hands of one adult or another; some older person will decide. If schooling is a free market, it is not his freedom. Indeed, he is the subject matter of a contract between two adults - parent and educator. He is in effect a valuable animal who is being farmed out to the greenest pastures the parent can find and afford.

Society and its laws thus recognize the reality that the choice of schools - if it be a “free” market - is a unique species of choice, having objectives that extend beyond just the child for whom the choice is made. (more…)