Editor's Note: Alabama's new tax credit scholarship for low-income students has created a stir among opponents, including the state teacher union, and one of the latest attacks was aimed at Florida and its scholarship program. Doug Tuthill, redefinED blog host and president of the nonprofit that administers the Florida scholarship, responded in an oped published today in the Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register.
By Doug Tuthill
As Alabama introduces a scholarship program that empowers low-income parents to choose a school that best fits their children's needs, the apprehension of traditionalists in public education is understandable. But allow me to rebut a false accusation launched at your neighbor to the south: no one who administers Florida's scholarship for underprivileged children is profiting from it.
I should know. I am the president of the only remaining nonprofit organization still administrating tax credit scholarships in Florida. We originally had eight nonprofits doing this work, but Florida's scholarship funding organizations get no reimbursement until they operate for three years with clean audits, and then they can only keep up to 3 cents on each tax-credited scholarship dollar they collect. Little wonder that only one has been able to raise sufficient funds to survive.
Our nonprofit, called Step Up For Students, has raised dollars privately to help keep its doors open for 12 years. So I laughed when I read that at least one newsletter columnist and some public educators in Alabama think our nonprofit has enriched John Kirtley, the Tampa businessman who has personally funded much of our efforts. The columnist was particularly blunt: "This man Kirtley down in Florida has made $6.3 million last year managing that fund." The scholarship, he wrote, "has resulted in a very lucrative business for him." How absurd.
Pick up any of the publicly available state-mandated annual audits of Step Up or any of its annual IRS nonprofit tax returns, and it is clear that Kirtley, our board chairman, has never received a penny in compensation. In fact, these statements show he has repeatedly opened his wallet to keep the scholarship operation alive.
Read the whole commentary here at AL.com.
Gov. Romney gave a speech last month to a Hispanic audience calling for more school choice for parents. He promised, if elected president, to provide all children from low-income families and all special needs children with choice in a broad range of public and (where legal) private schools. This is a promise that should very much please school choice supporters.
The likelihood of Congress actually passing such a plan may be small, but a president can provide leadership (although this could turn out to be like many of President Reagan’s pro-family promises during his campaigns that failed to yield actual policy changes).
While Romney’s broad rhetoric was attractive, what was distressing about his talk is the uncertainty as to just how his promise could be delivered. As I will explain, I fear the Romney team has not sufficiently thought through the details.
For public school choices that families would make, things are clear enough. Today, federal funding for low-income and special needs students is distributed in a very complicated way. Romney’s plan would simplify things by converting that funding into specific amounts per eligible pupil and, more importantly, that per pupil funding would follow the child to the school he or she actually attended, whether traditional, charter, magnet, out-of-district, or whatever – thereby providing the child’s school with extra money to help pay for extra services the children from low-income families may need in order to achieve at grade level. This is how federal aid to education should be working already and is overdue.
But for those families choosing private schools, the proposal is much murkier. Federal aid to education is a small share of overall school funding, and so a low-income child’s per pupil share of federal aid (say, $2,000 a year) would, in most cases, be far too little to pay the tuition at either a religious or secular private school. Put differently, we are talking about a sum that would be far less than the $7,500 per pupil now provided by the federal government (by way of vouchers) to low-income families in the District of Columbia who send their children to private schools participating in the voucher plan (a successful program that Romney supports continuing). (more…)
by Allison Hertog
In Robyn Rennick’s post on Florida's McKay Scholarships for Students With Disabilities last week, she argued that standardized testing measures are “inappropriate,” even “cruel,” for disabled children due to their diverse levels of achievement and in some cases immeasurable levels of progress. But this assumes that standardized testing is a “one size fits all” accountability measure. In reality, there are dozens, even hundreds, of standardized assessments that are designed for every segment of the student population – whether children are learning self-care or calculus. The choice of test can be left to the private school, not the state.
More importantly, standardized testing is perhaps the only way to provide parents with the data they need to make informed choices about schools, and it is emerging as the overwhelming accountability trend for school voucher programs nationwide. Without standardized testing data, the McKay program cannot prove that it’s effective for students – the vast majority of whom are not intellectually disabled and spend most of their time in classrooms alongside typical students. According to the most recent state Department of Education report, only 7.5 percent of all McKay students are labeled Intellectually Disabled, though there are clearly some others with cognitive deficits who are labeled with other disabilities, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Every voucher program enacted or expanded in 2011 and 2012 (in Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Colorado and Washington, D.C.) – except for the McKay Scholarship in 2011 – included standardized testing measures. What’s more, the Romney Education Plan, which proposes to voucherize federal special-education funding, includes annual student accountability testing for private schools precisely so that parents can make informed decisions. McKay is clearly behind that trend, which is an unfortunate development for this once ground-breaking program. (more…)
Rev. Manuel Sykes is a long-respected church and community leader in St. Petersburg, Florida, an increasingly diverse city at the mouth of Tampa Bay. That he also is now the president of an NAACP chapter that helped change the face of Pinellas public schools is all the more reason his commentary today in the Tampa Bay Times speaks volumes about educational change.
Sykes reacted to an editorial in the Times that branded tax credit scholarships for low-income students as a Republican plot to “starve” public schools “to death.” He in turn called the newspaper “stubbornly out of touch with modern reality.”
The backdrop here is relevant. The Times is Florida’s largest newspaper and is nationally acclaimed in journalism circles. It also has a proud liberal tradition editorially. It has never endorsed a Republican candidate for governor or president and was a bulwark in the 1970s and 1980s against politicians who would dare to turn their backs on the court-ordered school desegregation order the NAACP lawsuit produced (Disclosure: I wrote some of those editorials during my years on the editorial board there).
So for Sykes and the newspaper to be at odds on scholarships for poor children mostly of color is indeed striking. When the court order was lifted about a decade ago, many black community leaders such as Rev. Sykes turned their focus directly to the achievement of black students. The Times itself played a crucial role by reporting in-depth on a startling and persistent achievement gap between black and whites in county schools.
This disconnect is not unique to St. Petersburg, certainly. But white liberals who find themselves at odds with powerful figures in the African-American community would be wise to reflect on the sense of urgency that bonded them with black children in the divisive desegregation wars following Brown v. Board of Education. That call to justice is precisely what motivates Rev. Sykes and others like him today. They counsel everyday to black children whose lives are headed in the wrong direction, and they’re not looking for lectures on school governance or fond recollections of neighborhood schools. They see children who need help now, and they want every option on the table. That's something we white liberals should get.
Waldorf schools are a splendid example of how the private marketplace can fill a learning niche. Their humanistic approach can work in perfect harmony with some families to produce creative, lifelong learners who become highly successful adults. And as redefinED editor Ron Matus pointed out in this post about the Waldorf Sarasota and an oped in today’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune, they also help make two pertinent points in the world of tax credit scholarships. One, not every school is right for every student; and, two, any education program that includes Waldorf is not easily described as a right-wing conspiracy.
Back in December, some of the top elected and appointed officials in Seminole County schools used a public meeting covered by the Orlando Sentinel to blame Florida's tax credit scholarship for low-income children for their financial woes. They called the program a “travesty” and “part of an agenda” to weaken public schools. The school board chairwoman also claimed “there is no accountability in the program.”
It saddened me to see officials of a quality school system such as Seminole making such factually incorrect and inflammatory remarks, but they weren't finished. This week, Seminole school superintendent Bill Vogel was asked tough questions by county commissioners who wonder whether his district had built too many schools in the face of declining student enrollment. His response was to again blame parental choice programs, according to the Sentinel, saying his district will need to close down schools because of “a huge shift to charter schools and private school vouchers — programs that Seminole school officials do not favor.”
Please allow me to lay out some facts.
First, let's report on what the state's independent researcher has determined about Tax Credit Scholarships:
Second, let's look at the impact of private options on Seminole school enrollment forecasts and planning. In Seminole today, there are:
In other words, only 2.7 percent of the district's traditional public school students are attending private options. And yet the students are cited as the main source of the financial woes of the district, and the reason public schools need to be shut down. The district has become so averse to parental choice that the School Board voted recently to restrict student transfers even within traditional public schools next year. I have to believe that restricting public school choice will only spur more parents to seek choice outside of the district-run schools.
Perhaps someday the board and the superintendent will accept a new definition of “public education.” The old definition: all tax dollars are used by district-run schools with students assigned by zip code. The new definition: using taxpayer dollars to educate children using the best methods, and the best providers, for each individual child. Sadly, I think the day they adopt this definition is far away.
New Jersey employs a brand of education politics that is not renowned for its nuance or subtlety, so let's credit New Jersey Education Association Director Vincent Giordano with raising the bar. In an interview on the New Jersey Capitol Report over the weekend, Giordano was pressed on the timely subject of a legislative proposal there to give private learning options to low-income students who attend public schools that are judged to be under-performing. For context, let's add the fact that, according to the Newark Star-Ledger, his salary in 2010 was roughly $422,000.
His response, captured in this video clip, is nothing if not succinct: "Well, you know, life's not always fair and I'm sorry about that."
Giordano is no doubt thinking better of his remarks today. But it does seem fair to point out that key New Jersey Democrats, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker, support the scholarship option precisely because life is unfair for children who grow up in poverty. The mayor sees the scholarship as one modest way to try to level the playing field.
The legislative push in Florida on education is being generally described as light this year, with most of the emphasis on restoring financial cuts made to public schools last year. That being said, the annual 60-day legislative session has now reached its midpoint, and there are a number of important issues on the table.
Career Academies:
CS/SB 1314, Career-Themed Courses by Sen. Don Gaetz. Last Action: 2/2/12, a committee substitute was approved by the Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee, 6-0. Next up is the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Education PreK-12 Appropriations The bill revises provisions in the Career and Professional Education Act and allows greater access to industry certifications in high demand fields.
Charter Schools:
CS/HB 903, Charter Schools by Rep. Janet Adkins. Last Action: 1/31/12, a committee substitute was approved by the House K-20 Innovation Subcommittee, 12-0. Now in PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee. The bill requires the Commissioner of Education to annually determine a high-performing charter school or school system’s continued eligibility for “high performing” status, prohibits renewing a charter if a school received two “F” grades within a three-year period, and requires each charter school to maintain a website. It also authorizes certain Florida College System institutions to establish one charter school, and requires sponsors to distribute a charter school’s share of federal funds to the school within 60 days.
CS/SB 1852, Charter Schools by Sen. Stephen Wise. Last Action: 2/6/12, a committee substitute was approved by the Senate Education PreK -12 Committee, 5-1. The bill authorizes certain Florida College System institutions to establish one charter school, authorizes each district to share revenue generated by its capital outlay millage levy with charter schools on a per-student basis, and requires sponsors to distribute a charter school’s share of federal funds to the school within 60 days. It also revises certain restrictions on high-performing charter schools. (more…)
A judge in Colorado on Friday blocked the Douglas County school district's voucher experiment, insisting that allowing the program to move forward will lead to "real, immediate, and irreparable injury" to the plaintiffs and others who asked for the injunction.
Specifically, Judge Michael A. Martinez wrote in a 68-page ruling that the program provides aid to churches and faith-based schools and ignores safeguards that would ensure no public school funding would promote a participating school's "sectarian agenda." Further, Martinez said, there is "overwhelming evidence" to show that the voucher program violates Colorado's constitutional provisions which call for "uniform" funding of public education across the state.
Interestingly, Martinez wasn't persuaded by the ACLU's argument that the program also violated the constitutional demand for a thorough and uniform "system of free public education." A similar uniformity clause sunk the private school option in Florida's Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2006. Martinez, though, said the plaintiffs failed to show that the scholarship program prevented students "from otherwise obtaining a free public education in Douglas County."
Maddeningly, the judge acknowledged that the scholarship program "appears to be a well-intentioned effort to assist students in Douglas County," further stating that he agrees that the purpose of the school district was to help students and parents, "not sectarian institutions." The U.S. Supreme Court said the same when it came to a wholly different conclusion in the challenge to Cleveland's voucher program.
From the Evansville Courier & Press:
INDIANAPOLIS — Two key planks of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ education reform platform cleared their final legislative hurdles Wednesday and are now headed to the Republican governor’s desk.
The Indiana House of Representatives approved measures Wednesday afternoon that would ease the process of opening new charter schools and launch the nation’s most broad private school voucher program.
Their passage comes as the Republican-led General Assembly enters its final two days, and despite opposition from Democrats in the House who at one point fled to Urbana, Ill. for five weeks to block progress on the education bills and others.
