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Process to create charter schools in Maine weak, ineffective

June 25, 2013 By

by Jeanne Allen
Kennebec Journal
June 25, 2013

On Jan. 17, 2001, the Maine Association of Charter Schools met in Bangor to discuss the possibility of creating charter schools here.

It was another decade before the Maine Legislature passed a law to allow charter schools to serve students in need of more options. It soon became clear, however, that the law would not result in significantly more choices for students, but rather preserve the status quo.

Maine’s mechanism for setting up charter schools has proven to be weak and ineffective. This was most recently exhibited in January, when the state charter school commission rejected four out of five charter applicants.

Gov. Paul LePage rightly called the commission’s rejections “a dereliction of duty.”

He also said, “What we are talking about is a commission moving far too slowly and putting political favors ahead of the needs of our children.”

The commission’s parsimonious approval of new schools displayed why Maine epitomizes the wrong way to go about charter school authorization.

A May analysis from the Center for Education Reform, titled “Charter School Authorizers: The Truth About State Commissions,” explains how Maine’s charter school commission has offered no evidence of success.

“[C]harter school commissions, like those currently in place in states like Maine … offer no evidence of success, have been subject to more political oversight and bureaucratic interference than any other chartering institutions, and have shunned many charter applications, even by proven providers, because they employ external consultants who have varying degrees of expertise,” the report said.

What separates independent authorizers from state commissions is their freedom from public entities.

Though approved by the state, authorizers typically do not operate under boards of education and are free from existing bureaucratic frameworks. This means they are able to objectively review charter school applicants without political interference.

The commission in Maine is composed of state appointees with a propensity to establishment interests and no practical experience in actually setting up charter schools.

Since the 2011 charter law was enacted, only two small charter schools have opened their doors to students, with another three finally approved. With those kinds of numbers, it’s no wonder LePage told the commission that Maine needs people “with backbones.”

Although Maine is very homogeneous, most families’ median income is below the national average and 12 percent live in poverty.

While some 83 percent of students graduate on time, high school graduates make up only 34.4 percent of the population; 21.6 percent have some college, 10 percent have a two-year degree and 17.9 percent have a bachelor’s degree.

This is clearly not the picture of a state where education can be ignored, and many young adults lack what is necessary to raise the bar for themselves and their families. Only 32 percent of Maine’s fourth-graders can read at grade level, and only 45 percent are proficient in math.

Those numbers don’t get better for eighth-graders, with only 38 percent proficient in reading and 39 percent in math.

LePage’s bill, L.D. 1529, would have been a bold step in the right direction, by removing the limit on the number of charter schools approved to 10 within 10 years and allowing for multiple and independent charter school authorizers.

LePage is showing that he’s got the backbone to stand up for the students of Maine; it’s unfortunate legislators couldn’t do the same.

The public university in Michigan and the State University of New York network have designated authorizers and have a proven track record of approving quality charter schools.

University authorizers also tend to be more innovative with K-12 curriculums, and often have the necessary infrastructure to oversee successful charters.

In Michigan, this has led to public university authorizers being responsible for the vast majority of the state’s nearly 350 charter schools.

These university authorizers oversee all aspects of approved charter schools, monitoring their compliance with state laws as well as academic performance.

It’s time for Maine legislators to act on this potential, and produce a system that will foster the most amount of opportunity for students.

As far as LePage is concerned, they’re duty bound to do so.

Filed Under: Opinions

Reviewing the Conclusions of CREDO’s National Charter School Study 2013

June 25, 2013 By

Prior to its release of the National Charter School Study 2013, The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) produced a series of reports – one national, the others state-based – looking at student achievement in charter schools as compared to traditional public schools. CREDO’s 2009 national report, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, is the basis for the statement often made across certain media, policy and education circles that only one out of five charter schools succeed.

We at The Center for Education Reform (CER) have questioned that conclusion, both due to the lack of research rigor in its methodology (pairing charter school students with virtual twins in traditional public schools), and to the subjective nature that is required to make such assessments about unobserved variables in students. In addition, CREDO’s continuing habit of making comparisons of schools and student achievement across state lines ignores the wide variation in state standards, tests, and measurements.

This CER analysis scrutinizes the new CREDO National Charter School Study 2013, identifies the problems with its data and calls into question the subsequent conclusions.

Summary of Analyses

This report is broken down into two separate analyses. First, it provides an update on the 2009 report, which reviewed charter school performance in 16 states yet made generalizations about charters nationwide. Second, it examines learning gains across states, schools and nationally using data from 27 total locations (New York City is included as separate data from New York state). In the 16-state revisit, schools are broken down into continuing schools (those included in the 2009 report) and new schools, and analysis of overall charter impact in reading and math is done within these states and by those types of schools. In the 16 states, continuing schools made modest progress – about seven more days of learning in reading compared with traditional school students, and closed the learning gap in math by seven days. CREDO believes the closure of eight percent of schools from 2009 is the cause for this improved charter school performance.

The data from the 27 states were used to show national trends in charter schools as compared with traditional school students, and found that the average charter student gains an additional eight days of learning in reading and they are on par with their counterparts in math. In addition, in reading 16 states had charter students performing better than traditional students, weaker for charters in eight states and similar academic performance in three states. For math, 12 states had higher charter school academic growth, 13 had weaker growth and two were similar.

If National Comparisons Are So Easy, Why Do We Need Common Core?

Within this CREDO study it is said that, “not surprisingly, the performance of charter schools was found to vary significantly across states.” CREDO recognizes in fine print that there are wide variations in state tests and that they have somehow determined a way to align them for meaningful comparison. That of course begs the question – if it’s that easy to align state tests and results across state lines, why is there a national move for Common Core State Standards and aligned tests? Leaders across the political spectrum recognize that America’s school standards are a mixed bag in terms of rigor and requirements. In addition, the assessments that measure them are completely different and impossible for even the best researchers to standardize. Not only are there uneven rules and varying assessments, but the cut scores to determine which outcomes are passing – and those that are failing – are all over the map.

This great variance in school standards is why year after year the NAEP results, while limited because they only offer a snapshot in time, are so compelling and so universally accepted by those who understand research, and why CREDO’s results are so wanting and, in some quarters, derided. When NAEP measures student performance across state lines, it measures them on identical levels, albeit in a small sample and not for the same students each time. When CREDO claims to do the same, it is improvising at best, but even worse jumping to erroneous conclusions that are potentially detrimental to students.

In addition to the two national charter reports, CREDO has released 25 state reports using the same methodology, and through which many find overall positive results. Such comparisons, while still based on the same questionable methodology, at least compare students on the same state assessments. CREDO argues that many states now have data that permit growth over time comparisons. Such acknowledgement makes one wonder: why bother with sweeping, national generalizations when one can obtain state by state results and compare non-virtual traditional public schools students with charter students in the same state, and in some cases, same cities? Comparing students within the same location, and under the same policy environment and laws is closer to the gold standard methodology for which researchers have been advocating. Researchers want to know the effects of the activity or intervention being studied even if only for a limited population. Having inaccurate measurements of said activity does researchers and policy makers no good.

If the methodology employed were based on randomized controlled trials (RCT), then one would also want to account for variances in state laws that often dictate conditions under which charter schools operate. Some states require charters only to recruit at-risk students; most underfund charter school students, on average, 30 percent less than their traditional public school peers; a very select few have policies in place that allow for objective authorizing and oversight; and all vary greatly on how they look at school and student-based performance.

Student Achievement

CREDO’s report argues that it employs growth data for students to create a picture of (ignore edit above) student achievement gains – or losses – over time. It attributes the ability to do this to better and more consistent data collected by states. However, it’s not that simple. For example, some students in the groups are only in their first testing year in a charter school. Others have been tested each year over five years in the same school. Growth measures are supposed to be grounded in comparable data for comparable students year after year. If the sample doesn’t account for the same students year after year, how can it conclude that achievement is positive or negative?

Page 24 of CREDO’s Supplementary Findings Report demonstrates the conundrum of analyzing groups of data and not individual student data consistently over varying periods of time. For example, CREDO acknowledges that their results include students who have only spent one or two years in charter schools, “not allowing much time for their cumulative impact to be seen.” Much more is of great concern and anyone using this report to make conclusions would be wise to read the fine print before doing so.

Methodology

CER has argued – echoing highly respected researchers — that the only studies that are valid for understanding and comparing charter school achievement are “gold standard” randomized control studies such as those done by Stanford Economist Dr. Caroline Hoxby, and University of Arkansas’ Dr. Patrick Wolf, to name just two among at least a dozen more. Such studies compare students who were chosen randomly from two pools – students who were chosen by lottery and attend the school of choice, and students who did not attend, but were also in the lottery. Hoxby has done such studies with regard to charter schools and Wolf has conducted such studies for voucher programs.

The CREDO study employs a completely different method of assessing student achievement, which is described in detail in the report. Because of the Center for Education Reform’s ongoing critique of their methodology, CREDO addresses the issue of randomized control “gold standard” studies and argues that RCTs are not valid for broad charter school studies.

The 2013 CREDO Study takes CER’s previous critiques to account in a side-by-side rebuttal, stating, “The lottery must be random. This is often not true in charter schools, as many schools permit preferences to siblings of current students, children of school founders or staff, or residential preferences for students who live near the school.” Once again we take issue with this statement.

CER has responded in a point-by-point counter response you can find here.

The bottom line is RCT ‘Gold Standard’ research is prominent accepted research practice, which CREDO rejects. In fact, some researchers have suggested this is a way to draw easier, not better, conclusions.

RCTs easily handle students who are exempt from lotteries, like siblings, by excluding those students from the analysis. This is common research practice and in no way threatens the internal validity of the research. Randomization can be tested and is tested by all ‘gold standard’ student performance analyses.

The CREDO study’s authors have admitted that it is easier to “generalize” about a charter school by creating so-called virtual twins, while admitting that head-to-head studies (referred to as “Lottery Studies,”) are superior to their approach. According to respected researcher Dr. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford, Harvard, and the National Bureau of Economic Research, “the CREDO study does not have data on charter schools’ admissions lotteries, so it does not use a randomization-based method of evaluation. Randomization is the ‘gold standard’ method of evaluating charter schools’ effects on student achievement because it effectively eliminates all forms of selection bias so long as (i) randomized admissions lotteries were used and (ii) a sufficient number of students participated in them.”

Matched vs. Unmatched Students

CREDO acknowledges that there are problems with finding matches for all students and that in some cases students who may or may not have a huge impact on the outcomes of the achievement data are excluded altogether. In addition, whereas this report finds matches for 85 percent of the students in charters, the last report found only 75-80 percent. However, as Dr. Hoxby argues, “lacking lottery data, the CREDO study depends on a matching method based on charter school students prior histories in the traditional public schools. But it does not match each charter school student to individual traditional public school students with similar demographic characteristics. Rather, it matches each charter school student to a group of students in traditional public schools. A charter school student can potentially be matched to a group that contains many students. The study then computes average achievement and other average characteristics of each group. Thereafter the study treats these group averages as though they were students.” There are numerous other problems with this approach that experts such as Hoxby have enumerated and CREDO addresses itself in this newest report:

“Although the VCR method used in this report provides matches for 85% of the charter students in our data set, it is important to identify ways in which unmatched students may differ with those included in the analysis. The ability to extrapolate findings from a particular sample to the broader population is referred to as external validity (discussed above). In the case of this analysis, CREDO’s sample encompasses a large proportion of the entire population of charter students across the country, but as can be seen below, unmatched charter students do differ from their matched counterparts.

“We see that the test scores of matched charter students are significantly higher than for unmatched students in both math and reading in the year in which they were matched (period 1). This is because charter students at the very low and high end of the test score distribution have more trouble finding matches in TPS. The fact that our data represent over 90% of all charter students in the country makes us confident that estimates are highly aligned with actual population values, although we are uncertain to what extent our results apply to students without matches.”

Policy Prescriptions vs. Data

As weak as CREDO’s research is, its policy prescriptions are even more troubling. For instance, CREDO’s plan to address what it concludes as uneven student achievement in charters is lacking in any experience in how state policies are written and how they impact actual schools and students. CREDO concludes that the closure of eight percent of charter schools in the 16 original states studied in 2009 is why the achievement may be a strong factor in why previously studied states have improved. However, this latest report also concludes that new schools alone are not responsible for the improved quality.

In reality, charter schools that are inadequate close long before they are academically deficient. This is because, as CER has pointed out in years of study, operational and financial deficiencies are the first and earliest sign that a school may not be equipped to educate children.

Conclusion

At the Center for Education Reform, we follow a simple premise: all schools, including charter schools, must be held accountable. The path to accountability for charter schools must start with strong laws with multiple and independent charter school authorizers and tools in place to hold charters to the highest academic and operational standards.

State-by-state and community-by-community analyses are the only true measures to date that offer validity for parents, policymakers and the media to report to make smart decisions about educational choices and outcomes for students.

Continued analysis of this report is forthcoming and ongoing given the voluminous nature of the data.

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools

New CREDO Study Fails Test of Sound Research

June 25, 2013 By

THE CENTER FOR EDUCATION REFORM FINDS MULTIPLE SHORTCOMINGS IN NEW STANFORD RESEARCH STUDY ON CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE

According to Jeanne Allen, President of Washington, DC-based Center for Education Reform, “No matter how well intentioned, CREDO report is not charter school performance gospel.”

CER Press Release
Washington, DC
June 25, 2013

The Center for Education Reform (CER), the nation’s leading advocate for substantive and structural change to K-12 education, today criticized a new study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), taking issue with flawed CREDO findings that purport to show the performance of charter schools in the United States.

The new CREDO report, an update of one previously issued in June 2009, is again extremely weak in its methodology and alarming in its conclusions, according to Jeanne Allen, founder and president, CER.

“No matter how well-intentioned, the CREDO research is not charter school performance gospel, said Allen.  “Similar to its failed 2009 effort, this CREDO study is based on stacking mounds of state education department data into an analytical process that is decidedly lacking in rigor.”

Added Allen: “The extrapolation of state-by-state data is a worthy exercise, but hardly the foundation upon which to set forth sweeping national solutions, when there is no consensus on the problems.”

Allen, a leader in the education reform movement for nearly two decades, explained that CREDO’s misguided attempt to make comparisons of student success across state lines ignores the reality behind the widely varying state assessments that make such alignment impossible.

Joining Allen in voicing criticisms of the CREDO report was David Hardy, CEO, Boys Latin of Philadelphia.

“As someone who has seen firsthand the power of charter schools to transform student lives, I crave credible studies of school performance,” said Hardy of Boys Latin.  “It is simply not credible of CREDO though to claim it is primarily the closure of certain low-performing schools that leads to better academic metrics for the entire charter school sector.  School closure is a tool that should always be available, but it is not a long-term strategy for serving students.”

According to Allen of CER, as lacking as CREDO’s research is, its policy prescriptions are even more troubling.  For instance, CREDO’s plan to address what it concludes is uneven student achievement in charters is lacking in any experience in how state policies are written and how they impact actual schools and students.

“At the Center for Education Reform, we follow a simple premise: all schools, including charter schools, must be held accountable,” said Allen.  “The path to accountability must start with strong charter school laws, with multiple and independent charter school authorizers and tools in place to hold charters to the highest academic and operational standards.”

About the Center for Education Reform: Our nation’s economic future depends on the successful creation of new, available school choices that break the mold of conventional education. Such competitive forces have continued to yield dramatic improvements in achievement among students of every income level.  The Center for Education Reform helped launch this movement in 1993, and continues to be the leading voice and advocate for lasting, substantive and structural education reform in the U.S. The Center was founded with a simple, but ambitious, guiding principle: to restore excellence to education by bridging the gap between policy and practice such that great ideas are put into action.  To learn more, visit www.2024.edreform.com

About Boys Latin of Philadelphia: Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School, a college preparatory high school, serves qualified boys of diverse backgrounds who live in the City of Philadelphia.  Boys’ Latin offers its students a rigorous contemporary/classical education that prepares them for college matriculation and sets high standards for achievement, character development, and age appropriate conduct.|The school has created a self-selected group of young men who value academic success, hard work, and the development of their intellectual, moral, social, creative, and athletic potential.  Boys’ Latin is a school where young men prepare to become leaders through challenging coursework within a supportive environment.  Our curriculum blends liberal arts, classical studies, and state-of-the-art technology as we cultivate world citizens for the twenty-first century.  To learn more, visit www.boyslatin.org.

 

Filed Under: Press Releases

Response to CREDO’s 2013 National Charter Study Rebuttal of CER Methodology Concerns

June 24, 2013 By

June 25, 2013

The Center for Education Reform (CER) has argued – echoing highly respected researchers — that the only reports valid for understanding and comparing charter school achievement are “gold standard” randomized control trials (RCTs) such as those authored by Stanford Economist Dr. Caroline Hoxby, and University of Arkansas’ Dr. Patrick Wolf, to name just two respected creators of nearly a dozen reports. Such studies compare students who were chosen randomly from two pools – students who were chosen by lottery and attend the school of choice, and students who did not attend but were also in the lottery. Hoxby has done such studies with regard to charter schools and Wolf has conducted such studies for voucher programs.

The CREDO 2013 National Charter Study employs a completely different method of assessing student achievement, which is described in detail in the report. Because of the Center for Education Reform’s ongoing critique of their methodology, CREDO addresses the issue of randomized control “gold standard” studies and argues that RCTs are not valid for broad charter school studies. Once again, we take issue and have addressed each of CREDO’s research methodology arguments below:

CREDO concedes that, “randomized controlled trials (RCT) are considered the ‘gold standard’ in social science research. However, there are a few caveats necessary to conduct a RCT.” Points 1 through 4 in the Technical Appendix are CREDO’s points about RCTs. The subsequent notations represent CER’s response, based on input from experts and credible researchers in the field.

CREDO POINT 1. The lottery must be random. This is often not true in charter schools, as many schools permit preferences to siblings of current students, children of school founders or staff, or residential preferences for students who live near the school (See Betts, J. and Hill, P., 2006 for a summary of potential challenges to the internal validity of RCTs).

CER RESPONSE TO POINT 1. This is not a valid statement. RCTs easily handle students who are exempt from lotteries, like siblings, by excluding those students from the analysis. This is common research practice and in no way threatens the internal validity of the research. Randomization can be tested and is tested by all good charter studies.

CREDO POINT 2. There must be sufficient numbers of students participating in the lottery. In other words, there have to be large numbers of students who do not get selected into the charter school. While many charter schools have waiting lists, most charter schools do not have large enough waiting lists for a RCT.

CER RESPONSE TO POINT 2. The CREDO study does not have data on charter schools’ admissions lotteries, so it does not use a randomization-based method of evaluation. Had they had access, they may indeed have had enough subjects to conduct such a trial. According to Caroline Hoxby’s critique in 2009, “Lacking lottery data, the CREDO study depends on a matching method based on charter school students prior histories in the traditional public schools. But it does not match each charter school student to individual traditional public school students with similar demographic characteristics. Rather, it matches each charter school student to a group of students in traditional public schools. A charter school student can potentially be matched to a group that contains many students. The study then computes average achievement and other average characteristics of each group. Thereafter the study treats these group averages as though they were students.” There are numerous other problems with this approach that experts such as Hoxby have enumerated.

CREDO POINT 3. The charter schools that meet conditions 1 & 2 above must be representative of all charter schools. Violating condition 3 creates major problems in conducting a valid national charter study using RCT for several reasons.

1.     Charter schools which have a long-term reputation for quality may be more likely to hold a lottery than weaker or newer charter schools.

2.     Charter schools located near particularly low quality traditional public schools may be more likely to hold lotteries than charters located near higher performing TPS.

3.     Charter schools in areas with fewer choice options may be more likely to have lotteries than charter schools located in areas with a higher number of choice options.

CER RESPONSE TO POINT 3. There is nothing scientific or evidentiary about the points in this argument. Presuming that highly reputable charters are more likely to hold a lottery than weaker or newer schools is not only presumptuous, but it ignores the legal requirements set forth in states and as a consideration of federal funding. Charter schools that have more applicants than seats are required to have a lottery. As such schools fill up, students who are selected by lottery have preference year after year. Most charters then have lotteries only for certain numbers of seats that are available in certain grades year after year. Some schools may not have a lottery for years after they have been open and operating because they are oversubscribed. That doesn’t mean that the students attending those schools are not able to be part of a trial because they have self-selected as they began in that school by lottery and subsequently chose to stay in that school. That is no different a condition than students who attend their neighborhood public school who choose to stay year after year because they either have no choice, were denied from a charter lottery, they are satisfied, they have no knowledge of other choices or any number of scenarios. In other words, once a charter school lottery occurs, the students who “settle” in each of the schools being studied are comparable.

Federal law defines a charter by virtue of lotteries: NCLB, Title V, Part B: Charter Schools. Section 5210: “The term ‘charter school’ means a public school that . . . (f) does not charge tuition, and ;. . . (h) admits students on the basis of a lottery if more children apply for admission than can be accommodated.”

The presumption by CREDO that charters near low-performing traditional public schools are more likely to hold lotteries again ignores requirements of law and has no basis in fact. Whether or not a state or community has many or limited choice options, every school community has different circumstances dictating how parents may view their local options. From NYC to Boston to rural Colorado, charters are having lotteries when they are new to fill seats unless they do not have enough enrollment, and if they do not have enough enrollment, experience tells us that that whatever that school offers is not sufficient in the eyes of parents in that community, or the school was compromised by local political battles or procedural delays in getting approved. There are also several other possibilities that exist for undersubscribed charters that do not have lotteries, but to attribute one possible cause relating to quality options demonstrates ignorance of the landscape CREDO is purporting to study.

Thus CREDO’s Point 3 to qualify why RCTs do not work with broad charter samples – based on assumptions about why parents choose and bad information about how lotteries are conducted – is wholly without foundation.

CREDO POINT 4. RCTs have strong internal validity but weaker external validity. While RCTs are the gold standard for estimating the effect of a single treatment (e.g. the effect of attending a specific charter school), any of the violations listed in 3 above could damage the ability to generalize results to other charter schools. CREDO’s matching method has much greater external validity because it is not limited to charter schools with random lotteries and sufficiently large waiting lists. The charter schools and students in CREDO’s data set look much more like the national charter sector than those eligible to be included in a RCT. In addition, a recent meta-analysis of the charter school literature found that, “as long as baseline test scores are controlled for, the specific method of analysis employed will not severely impact conclusions.” (Betts, J et al., 2011) In this light, RCTs and quasi-experimental methods should be considered complements, not substitutes.

CER RESPONSE TO POINT 4. External validity (i.e. extrapolation to charter schools outside the study) is a problem for ALL studies. It is not at all improved by the CREDO methodology, which is fundamentally flawed because it cannot control for selection.

 

Many researchers concede that there is a trade-off between internal and external validity. But rigorous research almost always prefers internal validity when a trade-off is forced. We want to know precisely and accurately the effect of an intervention, even if we can only know that for a limited population. It does us little good to know inaccurately the effect of an intervention on a broader population.

All studies are representative of the schools they include. This does not make CREDO studies better–just different.

The overwhelming problem with CREDO studies is that they have NO method of controlling for self-selection into charter schools or for charter schools disproportionately attracting disadvantaged students.

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools

Illinois Charter School Achievement: The CREDO Report

June 20, 2013 By

Continuing its research series on state charter school achievement, CREDO releases a report finding that Illinois charter school students outperform their traditional public school (TPS) counterparts, especially in Chicago where the majority of Illinois charter students live.

According to the four-year study, the majority of charter students perform at the same level or higher in reading and math, and charter schools show greater gains in closing the achievement gap for low-income and minority students than traditional public schools. About 20 percent of charter school students perform significantly better in reading compared to their public school counterparts, while 37 percent performed significantly better in math.

For more information on CER’s long history of analyzing CREDO’s research, including our continued concerns with their methodology, which they use in this report, please go here.

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools

CER Issues Policy Perspective on ESEA Reauthorization

June 20, 2013 By

VETERAN EDUCATION REFORM GROUP ISSUES POLICY PERSPECTIVE ON ESEA REAUTHORIZATION
CER Outlines A Course of Action for Congress

CER Press Release
Washington DC
June 20, 2012

Calling the actions of both parties and chambers of Congress on ESEA inadequate, The Center for Education Reform (CER) today released a “Policy Perspective” that identifies the biggest deficiencies of current deliberations and the lack of evidence based results behind the policy prescriptions in both chambers’ efforts to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

“With more than 60 billion dollars on the table, there must be firm consequences for federal spending at state and local levels. The Democrats are right that some accountability for spending must be in place, but it’s not the kind that simply mandates well-written plans and promises of reform. The Republicans are right that flexibility in state education policy is critical to real reform, but local control is a hallow theme when it is both school board groups and teachers unions doing the controlling.”

“There must be accountability, and high standards and consequences for spending and whether or not states meet the criteria set forth should be cause for more money, or cutbacks. Such criteria, however, must be simple, based on results, and reforms incentivized but not prescribed. Until both parties get that formula right, we are wasting the American people’s time,” says the Center’s leadership in “A Course of Action for the Next Generation of ESEA.”

The first of several “Policy Perspectives” to be released over the next week, the Center’s leadership will outline a course of action intended to reset Congressional action and unite people on both sides of the issue to ensure the federal commitment to K-12 education results in better student outcomes, not a focus on inputs that only affects adults and association jobs.

View the policy perspective here.

Filed Under: Press Releases

A Course of Action for the Next Generation of ESEA

June 20, 2013 By

POLICY PERSPECTIVE
June 2013

A COURSE OF ACTION FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF ESEA
Guiding Principles for a Renewed Federal Commitment to K-12 Education in the US

Despite the lack of consensus on just about every other issue, both sides of the aisle of the 113th Congress seem committed to get something done to reestablish the federal role in K-12 education in the U.S.

What’s even more surprising is that two very different camps are approaching this reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) in seemingly very distinct ways, but may essentially end up at the same place.

With House action taking place in the immediate future, along with the likelihood that a new ESEA may actually get to conference subsequently, it’s time for a real education reform perspective to guide the debate.

Numerous groups and organizations have surely filled the halls of Congress over the past several years and more immediately, the past several months to celebrate and herald those Members who seem most to espouse their own programs and points of view.  Most, however, seem to be viewing the ESEA debate through a narrow lens.

This paper defines the proper role of federal programs to meet the needs of all education reform strands combined – not just charter schools OR accountability OR teacher quality but ALL – while putting the interests of parents and students first and ensuring the adults around our schools have the authority and freedom to defy the status quo.

The New Course – Build on Both Versions.Five years overdue, we’re in the midst of much debate on the Republican-controlled House version, H.R.5 Student Success Act, and the Democrat-controlled Senate version, S. 1094 Strengthening America’s Schools Act. While neither version offer the right balance of incentive and consequence, its important to look to the lessons of the past to shape the future. What’s clear from much of the Committee debate in both chambers is that the best way to move forward on ESEA is to take a little from both sides and build on what there still seems to be a consensus on—that once upon a time, before waivers and broad use of the “safe harbor,” No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had pieces that once worked.

Performance-based accountability should be the goal of any federal funding that is allocated for the express purpose of supporting education, as well as being the basis upon which NCLB was created and the basis upon which all conflicts about that same program today revolve. There are two major and very opposite visions of the federal role and they are visions that were united for a short time when NCLB was first developed.

History is critical if we are to learn from where things went awry. The assumption is often that such history is known by most when in fact it is known by very few, even among those negotiating on Capitol Hill.

Original Vision. There was once just one prevailing vision of federal program efforts. This vision was embraced mostly by the leaders of the education establishment who for the 30-plus years after ESEA was enacted in 1965 administered programs that they helped create with their advocacy and significant presence on Capitol Hill. These programs – from Title I and Bilingual Education to Special Education – were implemented largely free from real performance-based accountability. It was conventional wisdom that all the federal government needed to do was to create enough rules to ensure that kids would be served by the programs, send enough money — and more each year — to states and communities, and the programs’ role would be fulfilled. This vision of federal involvement in education supposed that the state and local communities and any special interests should be “trusted” to make decisions about how to teach and what to teach; who could and couldn’t teach or administer was safe guarded not only by local and state policies but by strong lobbying at the federal level. By the time NCLB was debated, the federal role was simply that of regulator and check writer. While accountability for funding was often set and demanded, there were no consequences for success or failure.

Enter President George W. Bush, Senator Edward Kennedy and the reauthorization of ESEA in 2001. Hundreds of days and thousands of pages of negotiations, battles and collaboration resulted in a program with actually a simple premise – that federal funds should be deployed to help students succeed, and to determine success they must be measured, with data about their measurements disaggregated to better understand the landscape and challenges. Federal funds should only support improvement; to that end, schools would have to meet certain benchmarks and parents would have options to have their kids supported outside of that school, or given other choices if their assigned school did not live up to the set benchmarks.

What resulted initially was the first national effort to understand the real story in education. With mounds of data being collected and made fully available to the public eye for the first time, no more were ordinary people forced to accept education-speak when important questions were asked. Tests and data about schools would provide a bird’s eye view into communities that later would permit groups like Education Trust to discover and report out the widespread practice of school districts unevenly distributing funds to schools and assigning teachers without regard to where they’d add the most value.

How many recall that recognition of the very real “achievement gap” was a byproduct of NCLB? The public simply didn’t know how bad it was until it was revealed by the data that NCLB mandated and was made the law of the land as a condition for federal funding.

But like all federal programs, good intentions are not enough and human nature is a stronger force than even law. Those for whom NCLB meant a completely different way of doing business would rebel and begin to respond to the new mandates by creating unforeseen rules of their own – requiring teachers and schools to become test prep entities rather than leaders of education, and creating a public backlash that is at the heart of today’s debate over how best to move forward with a new ESEA. It’s not the fault of one political party or another.

Tunnel Vision. The backlash is evenly distributed among ideologies and political parties:

Local Control Camp: Those who lead state or local school boards and who long for the nostalgia of local control that existed before NCLB have welcomed the waivers that the Obama Administration provided from meeting pre-determined benchmarks but insist that they know best how to spend money. These “local controllers” want simply for the new ESEA to give them structure but few rules on school improvement, on teacher quality, on programs in general. This camp tends to be represented by the Republicans, with a focus in the House, whose Members seem to want ESEA to be all carrot and no stick. What they fail to realize is that their idea of local control was never really a reality, and that the school boards have become almost as oppositional to consequences for failing as the teachers unions are to education reform in general. Local control isn’t really local anymore – it’s been replaced by interest group politics that dictate who is local and what is control.

Federal Control Camp: The other camp is led by the leaders of organized labor, the leaders of associations of certain segments of teachers (National Council of Teachers of Math, of English, etc.) of traditional education school pundits and their representatives in Washington. This group includes conventional civil rights organizations that believe money is the root of all problems and that good programs with money will take care of the kids. This camp tends to be most represented by the Democrats in Congress, who argue that the federal government must clearly define how federal funds are spent so as to protect the programs in which members of their camp are fully vested. Their ideas for ESEA require prescriptive spending on programs, so they are protected from people locally who may have other ideas about how to spend it. They have advocated for specific regulations that protect their ideas of how best to do education, while also arguing, like their local control colleagues, that carrots are enough and sticks need not be applied. They, too, like waivers, as they remove an obligation to meet NCLB’s 2014 benchmarks for proficiency that the U.S. education system is far from meeting.

While the conventional media punditry – aided by a willing public – dismiss Congressional inaction as incompetency or ideological rigidity, the reality is that these two visions of the way education should be funded, managed and expected to perform are at the heart of every policy battle on education in the Nation today. From board rooms to state halls to associations to charter school research, there are fundamental disagreements about how best to govern education funding when results are so very lacking and the nation’s achievement gap remains wide and bleak – even more so than our economic gap.

More importantly, the two visions pay homage to some education reform efforts, but at their core increase federal oversight of reform while loosening accountability on the establishment and status quo. It’s the law of unintended consequences but a reality that must be addressed.

A Reformer’s Vision. To minimize the damage, a new ESEA should include parental choice as well as performance driven evaluations of students, teachers and schools. A new vision must be forged that unites the majorities of the two camps. That of course requires their own constituencies to pressure and to speak up around some very simple, proven methods for ensuring progress in American education and ensuring that federal funds follow and not impede that progress.

 1)    Standards and Testing

Consider that rather than setting Common Core as a bar or ignoring it altogether, why not ensure that every state has standards that meet or exceed those of the Common Core, while not imposing the notion of the Common Core on every state? As a condition for Title I, it’s not okay to simply submit to those standards but instead, like a charter contract, states must outline a way to close their achievement gap that includes things like standards, testing, school improvement and turnaround models, online learning and more. Unlike Race to the Top (RTT), such a model doesn’t prescribe specific reforms or methods for doing so (such as requiring states to have teacher union buy-in or charters to have to comply with certain rules for participating in RTT grants). Instead the state plan is just that – a plan, and is public and informed by demonstrating a certain percentage of progress on state tests over a three to five year period of time.

This direction addresses the concerns of the local control camp who recognize that the federal government has set in motion a testing regime that is now focused not on results but on test preparation and permits wide latitude in how states might set out to achieve clear goals. It addresses the interests of the federal control camp that wishes to see Common Core all but-mandated as a condition for certain funding pools but permits latitude for states to submit plans that uniquely recognize their own political conditions while still ensuring monies flow to fund those plans.

2)    Teacher Quality and Performance

We know that teacher quality is the bedrock of good schools. Why then would the federal government not impose requirements on states to receive federal money to support teachers? Good teachers deserve a boost up and those who fail to achieve student-learning gains during their tenure need a boost down. There are dozens of ways to do this and all may be equally valid in accomplishing the goal. The local control camp wants no prescriptions on teacher funding programs and the federal control camp wants money prescribed for teachers and their development but with no real performance evaluation required. The middle road here is easy — incentives for states to use funds for performance pay and to support any state program that is already based on evaluations — and the consequence for failing to use these monies to improve student learning should be termination of funding when the state plans are renewed.

In 2004, Bryan Hassel wrote similarly of the middle road: “I think we need to consider a hybrid approach that harnesses market dynamics but also retains a key state role in ensuring quality. We call this model a portfolio of providers model or a multiple-providers model, and the basic idea is that the state’s role is to authorize providers of teacher preparation that meet certain criteria.”[i]

Race to the Top, the federal competition offering winning states a share of over four billion dollars, placed a huge emphasis on teacher quality, developing teacher evaluations that were really appraising a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom and performance pay. When all was said and done, RTT didn’t move the ball forward on teacher quality issues, largely because winning states had to receive full support from teachers unions, not known for their willingness to change. The ‘Race’ was rendered meaningless from the start because no federal law could mandate against the teacher collective bargaining agreements by which local districts are held hostage to. That said, the combination of NCLB and RTT did bring teacher quality to the fore of the reform debate. States and the federal government recognized that states and districts who took teacher quality seriously – by creating evaluations that measured academic effectiveness, and by offering real merit pay programs – were actually making significant academic gains.

3)    Charter Schools and School Choice

The earliest role of the federal government in the charter school program worked well once upon a time in 1997 and gave life to the Public Charter Grant Program under then President Bill Clinton. Bi-partisan efforts by Republican Frank Riggs in the House and then Democrat Joe Lieberman in the Senate accomplished unprecedented support for this early and controversial reform from their respective chambers. That original vision, provided much needed start up funds, and incentivized states to adopt charter laws that had high or no caps, operational flexibility and were not limited to school board authorizing. The program was that simple.

It is not so anymore. Today a wide variety of strings have grown attached to the program, and there is less focus on whether state charter laws are strong and more on whether states have shown certain benchmarks—benchmarks that the federal government is ill-equipped to evaluate—for qualifying for funds.

Today’s debate on charters seems unified – at least at the national level. The leaders of the charter school movement’s associations argue for more money and more programs aimed at specific kinds of school networks and needs. Such prescriptions drive not accountability but paperwork, and add strings to state education agencies which is problematic as most state laws do not cede authority for chartering to SEAs but to other authorizers, including universities, independent boards, mayors or other elected municipal governing authorities, non-profit organizations and local school boards.

NCLB was supposed to affect charter schools like all other traditional public schools, with the key difference being that charters were first held accountable to their authorizer, as defined by state law. Charter schools were supposed to continue to report to their authorizers and simply add AYP to the list of things to be monitored. Charters were not, therefore, to start reporting on their progress to anyone else. Today’s recommendations on both sides changes all that and it is cause for concern among real rank and file advocates leading and managing schools.

This was a concern in the earliest discussions of federal support for charter schools. There was debate around NCLB in the early stages on how best to protect charter schools’ independence with this federal law to require schools to show yearly academic progress or face sanctions. Language was urged to be included to ensure that charter schools’ compliance with this act was overseen by their “authorized chartering agencies” and not the state education agency. Steps were taken in the beginning to ensure their autonomy.

As time has gone on, it’s become much more regulated and unnecessarily so. There are now complicated formulas, more money and attempts to regulate charters and charter authorizers from the federal government when no such attempt to regulate traditional public schools and their districts is happening in the same legislation.

When Race to the Top was introduced in 2009, policymakers across the country were declaring it a success for reform. In truth, the impact on reform was minimal, but what it did do was require states to sign off on certain guidelines, such as common core, teacher quality, and various charter law components.

Both the House and Senate versions of the new ESEA will keep the charter schools grant program intact, but each propose changes that state education agencies will interpret as license to directly oversee charter schools regardless of their state law’s provisions:

HR 5 (Republicans) proposes to expand eligibility for entities for funding to include statewide entities to foster greater charter school growth. It encourages greater expansion and replication of proven, high-quality charter school models at the state level, and requires states to set aside funding to focus on charter school authorizer quality. The question is how is high quality defined? Those words themselves invite federal officials to make determinations in concert with state education entities that remain hostile to charter schools to this day.

S. 1094 (Democrats) asserts it will create a “successful charter program” where grants will be available for “successful” charter models so that they can create, expand or replicate charter models including through conversion of a public school. Eighty-five percent of federal charter funds would go to this program. In this arena too, someone has to take charge of what “success” means. That assuredly will not be people who understand data and conditions for success, even with verifiable tests and assessments that are still subject to varying cut off scores and interpretations.

The federal role in charter schools should look a lot more like the Clinton-era program that incentivized states to create a healthy and strong charter school environment for themselves by passing strong laws. It’s not up to the feds to dictate or make judgments on which charter school models should be replicated or expanded. That’s the role of authorizers and each state’s charter marketplace.

On more general school choice efforts, NCLB afforded parents a newfound freedom to leave a school that was failing their child and pick another public school or get tutoring services. Despite foot dragging and bureaucracy and attempts to discredit this opportunity by districts, millions of parents made a choice. They credit that law with having given their children real opportunities but now the consequence of bad schools is removed and supplementary education services (SES) are simply another federal pool of funds that districts draw down. Most districts administer their own SES programs, some still contract with private providers, but few demonstrate the progress seen in the early days of NCLB.

Choice belongs at the state level, and it’s unlikely any Congressional Republican or Democrat will ever truly reinstate the ability of parents to vote with their feet. We’d prefer no more damage be done to choice and recommend that the feds stick with ensuring accountability for funds over traditional schools, use a stick when they don’t meet their proposed goals and let the states grapple with the finer details of choice and charters.

That said, the federal government could benefit from taking a page out of the recent Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA. Regardless of one’s view of that decision, the reality is we now have precedent for a program where federal law is predicated on state law. States that do permit school choice should be permitted to use federal funds to follow students to the schools they attend. This simple prescription, offered repeatedly by U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander over the years, is always rejected as folly for education but perhaps it’s time we recognize that state education efforts are often more bold and more innovative and more closely aligned with their needs and federal law that contradicts or impedes that progress should and can be challenged.

Conclusion

Despite reformers’ best intentions, it is not clear whether or not many have looked at how the language in laws gives people far away from the final signed laws license to create new requirements or stall progress. A Reformer’s vision ensures that the federal government be held accountable for its role in education but not seek to control programs and services that are often not even provided for in federal law. We know and agree that the federal government can’t dictate what goes on in a classroom it actually has no control over, but the federal role in education must be one that ensures every child’s civil right to learn is protected.

As AEI’s Frederick Hess said, “A decision to focus NCLB reauthorization on promoting transparency, honest measurements of spending and achievement, and on ensuring that constitutional protections are respected ought not be seen as a retreat from NCLB but as an attempt to have the feds do what they can do sensibly and well.”[ii]

The ability of the federal government to ensure that the public’s interest is protected, and that education is well managed, is best left to those closest to our families and communities. The federal role should be one of assessment and data gathering, conducting nonpartisan, objective research to support policymaking, and ensuring that the most needy are supported and helped, provided that such support is predicated on success, and not the status quo. It needs to find that right balance of incentive and consequence necessary to ensure that money spent on education actually makes a difference. Republicans need to take another hard look at their Student Success Act with potential future interpretations in mind and consider talking to local actors more vigorously before taking steps to implement charter and choice provisions. They should also revisit their assumption that local control means what it used to mean – and ensure that accountability for federal spending be restored with clear benchmarks set including the option for the feds to penalize states that fail. The Democrats should similarly reevaluate their instincts on charter funding and remove prescriptive language that reflects certain opinions of what “successful” models should look like and limits innovation as well as a more diverse charter marketplace.

As both laws move toward further national debate and potential conference, it’s critical to put these issues on the table with all due speed.

 

Respectfully,

Jeanne Allen, President
Kara Kerwin, Vice President of External Affairs
Alison Consoletti, Vice President of Research

 

ENDNOTES

[i] Hess, Frederick; Rotherham, Andrew and Walsh, Kate. “A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom: Appraising Old Answer and New Ideas,” 2004. http://www.nctq.org/nctq/research/1109818629821.pdf

Download or print your PDF copy of A Course of Action for the Next Generation of ESEA

Filed Under: Federal Policy

Newswire: June 18, 2013

June 18, 2013 By

Vol. 15, No. 24

POORLY PREPARED. Only 11 percent of our nation’s elementary school teacher prep programs are providing “adequate content preparation for teachers in the subjects they will teach,” according to a report released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). Of the over 2,400 teacher prep programs across the country evaluated, only 23 percent are doing enough to provide teacher candidates with concrete classroom management strategies to improve classroom behavior problems. None of the 1,130 higher ed institutions in the 50 states and DC earned top billing. As the Washington Post pointed out, only Furman, Lipscomb, Ohio State and Vanderbilt received a ‘four-star’ rating. The report has surely sent shockwaves through the majority of America’s education schools. Take the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, earning only 1.5 stars in this detailed analysis, but considered 7th best in elementary teacher education in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.

NCTQ uncovered that three out of four elementary teacher programs are not teaching research-based, proven reading instruction. So it’s no wonder that less than 40 percent of our nation’s elementary school students can read at grade level!

POOR STATE POLICY. Maryland’s teacher preparation policy earned a D+, with only the University of Maryland earning a “three-star” rating for both of its undergraduate programs for elementary and secondary education. Coupled with the 7th weakest charter school law in the country, it’s hard to believe anyone would be crazy enough to try and start a school in the Old Line State. The founders of Frederick Classical Charter School (FCCS) have found that out the hard way. Under Maryland law, charter schools can’t make their own personnel decisions. Teachers and principals are typically placed by school districts and must remain covered by the district’s collective bargaining agreement. For Frederick Classical Charter, this has become a major problem. In an open letter, Tom Neumark, president of FCCS and longtime advocate for teacher reform, told the Maryland House of Delegates, “A lot of what is taught in education schools is trendy pedagogy that tends to not work very well… Anything you could do to improve our law to allow Maryland’s charters to function more like real charter schools do would be greatly appreciated. Charter schools will be a part of the solution in this area, if you will let us…”

POOR PERFORMANCE. June is busting out all over apparently, with bad news, that is. On top of ominous news regarding teacher prep and bad state policies comes news of another bad international ranking. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, we are the fourth biggest spenders with little to show for it. US college grad rates are declining and the impact on our national productivity as well as international standing is huge. How we spend money the Council says, is part of the problem, but so is the quality of our programs. All the more reason to hasten the pace of reforms that can solve the problems….

GREAT SOLUTIONS. Across the country states and communities are doing things to arrest the decline of poor programs, policies and performance:

Indiana. Imagine a K-12 issue where equity wasn’t the problem and all traditional students were equal to the same amount of money for education purposes. Such “back pack” funding would go a long way to ensure that money be spent to educate, and not to prop up buildings and fixed contracts that don’t work for kids. The Council on Foreign Relations report suggests inequity is part of the problem, a problem that is solved for some kids in states like Indiana, which takes its role seriously in providing equitable choices for kids, just not enough to cover the entire state – yet. According to School Choice Indiana, 9,000 Hoosiers last year “participated in [the opportunity scholarship] program statewide, allowing those children to experience an educational environment that is best suited to them. A list of qualifying private schools will be available at the meeting.” “We are thrilled that now more low- and middle-income families have the opportunity to choose a school that meets their child’s unique learning needs,” said Lindsey Brown, Executive Director of School Choice Indiana. “We expect more local families to take advantage of these programs in the 2013-2014 school year and we look forward to providing them with more information on their options.”

Louisiana. And if Diane Ravitch’s week wasn’t bad enough (Parent Revolution launched its http://truthinedreform.org/ to rebut the big hairy ones that are coming from her troops daily), out comes news from Governor Bobby Jindal, who just signed into law a parent trigger bill that would allow parents to shift control from the state’s Recovery School District to the local district if a school has received a “D” or “F” grade for five consecutive years and has a petition signed by a majority of parents in the school from the past two years.

Tennessee. The VOICE for Public Charter Choice campaign is on in the Volunteer State. The Tennessee Charter Schools Association has launched this public information effort to help inform woefully under-informed lawmakers about how charter schools do indeed make a difference for kids in and out of those schools, and to raise visibility among parents, who according to polls say they support them but are still relatively unaware of the finer details. Join the effort, and learn more here.

NOT-SO-SUNNY SESAME STREET. Just when you thought it was safe… meet Alex, the first Muppet to have a dad in jail. The Today Show reported yesterday that Sesame Street introduced this new character since the show is known for “helping kids open up about all sorts of serious subjects, from hunger and divorce to military deployment.” Today reported that one out of 28 children in the US has a parent in jail. (In fact, thoughtful reflection on having a parent in jail helped a MN second grader win first place in an essay contest.) There is such a strong correlation between schools and prisons that prison management companies are looking at fourth grade test scores to plan for future growth. Incarceration rates are a real problem in the US, but it’s not surprising given the dire state of our schools. It’s time to focus on the “great solutions” rather then letting “Alex” become a household name. No offense Alex – you’re cute and all, and represent a huge population of US kids – but if our lawmakers got their priorities straight, we wouldn’t have you hanging out on Sesame Street.

Filed Under: Newswire Weekly

Tom Neumark: Change Maryland Law to Let Charter Schools Innovate

June 18, 2013 By

An open letter from Tom Neumark, President of Frederick Classical Charter School in Maryland.

June 18, 2013

Delegates,

In case you hadn’t seen this, this report on teacher preparation is one of the best and most important ever released, and has implications for you as elected officials. Having read more than my share of education reports, I can tell you that this one is worth your time. Most teachers in this country are not selected or trained very well, which is a big reason why our schools trail other countries.

The bottom line is that schools aren’t screening out candidates who lack academic skills and aren’t training them in the practical skills of what works in the classroom. Our teachers are drawn disproportionately from the bottom third of college graduates, and we fail to train them in scientifically-based reading instruction, solid math content, history (we teach “social studies” instead)–and the other subject-matter preparation lacks content as well. A lot of what is taught in education schools is trendy pedagogy that tends to not work very well.

The training we are providing at the Frederick Classical Charter School is exactly what this report is calling for. If Frederick had allowed us to create an alternative certification program as we had requested, ours would have met or exceeded all the criteria in this report. Because Frederick County was unwilling to let us use the existing Resident Teacher Certificate program to do this (as other Maryland counties allow), we had to go to the legislature to try to get a law passed to allow us to stop being blocked by our local district. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it out of the Ways and Means Committee this year.

I hope you will change the law to let charter schools innovate in this area. The entire point of charter schools is to allow them to bring innovative practices to the state and not be blocked by the local district from doing so. Right now we are being blocked by our local district and Maryland’s weak law from innovating. The fact that local districts can block innovation is one reason why Maryland’s charter law has been ranked as the second worst in the nation.

Most other states give charters much greater freedom to innovate. Maryland’s charter schools don’t really function like real charter schools do, which means we don’t qualify for both public and private grants that require applicants to be within the mainstream of charter laws. This puts our charters at a disadvantage both financially and operationally. Anything you could do to improve our law to allow Maryland’s charters to function more like real charter schools do would be greatly appreciated. Charter schools will be a part of the solution in this area, if you will let us.

I’d like us to aim to have the best law in the nation. Is this something you would be interested in considering?

Tom Neumark
President
Frederick Classical Charter School

Filed Under: Opinions

School Choice: Why It’s Essential in America Today

June 18, 2013 By

by Kevin P. Chavous
Take Part
June 17, 2013

As the school year comes to a close, something remarkable is taking place in state legislative chambers across the country. In a span of two weeks, two legislative bodies have passed laws expanding school choice, and possible action in five other states could result in more than 33,800 new scholarship opportunities. That’s 33,800 children who will be lifted up through school choice.

Practically, this is the result of parents demanding the right to put their child in a school that best fits their child’s needs. Politically, it is because—like few issues these days—school choice transcends political parties.

Danahe, a refugee who struggled in her public school, received a scholarship in Iowa in the fall of 2012. She chose to attend a Catholic high school in West Des Moines thanks to the state’s scholarship tax credit program. When she first enrolled as a sophomore, she could not read, write or speak English. The program made it possible for her to attend a school where she is now flourishing through their Pathway to Success program. It is likely that Danahe has no clue that Iowa’s program expanded a few weeks ago, and received unanimous support from the Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate.

Who cares about the bipartisan impact? Special interests who oppose empowering parents who wish to make the best educational choices for their children.

Prominent liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow used her blog on May 30 to discredit school choice as a policy initiative only supported by conservative Republicans.

But only nine days prior to this article on The Maddow Blog, former Clinton White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry spoke at the American Federation for Children’s National Policy Summit. He urged Republicans and Democrats to come together. “There’s an agenda here and it’s about our children and we’ve got to work together to make life better for them and to give them the kinds of schools, the education and the opportunities that they deserve in a country that’s as great as this one…” McCurry said.

In the coming days, the North Carolina legislature will debate legislation that would provide educational choice to low-income families. The Wisconsin, Ohio, and Arizona legislatures are considering expanding their existing school choice programs. And, in Louisiana, the legislature just fully funded the highly popular Louisiana Scholarship Program.

Torriana Treaudo, a mother in Louisiana, doesn’t think about the politics, and she doesn’t consider Maddow’s blog part of the dialogue. What she cares about is ensuring her children receive the best education possible. And, she’ll proudly tell you that both of her kids are thriving as a result of educational choice.

Danahe has hope, Torriana Treaudo has optimism, and thousands of additional children across the country have educational options because of the strong bipartisan support school choice is receiving nationwide.

The message is painfully clear to the opponents of expanding educational options: Educational choice is not a partisan issue because the education of a child is not a partisan issue.

Filed Under: Opinions
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