Thomas B Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

Left-of-center reformers: Join the voucher movement today

yes Michael J. Petrilli / April 4, 2013

Andy Rotherham deserves respect as one of the most thoughtful proponents of education reform, as well as an impressive institution-builder. He and I probably agree on 90 percent of the issues, though we have sparred at times over the federal role, the balance between “excellence and equity,” and sundry other topics.

My greatest frustration, though, has been his unwillingness to offer full-throated support for school vouchers.

Maybe he’s finally ready. In a blog post yesterday, he predicted that if current reform efforts stall, the future will bring a “low-accountability environment coupled with much more choice” and pointed to the Indiana voucher program (recently upheld by that state’s Supreme Court and hailed by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post) as a sign of things to come.

What Andy may not fully appreciate is that Indiana’s voucher program has accountability in spades. As David Stuit and Sy Doan explain in their recent report for Fordham, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring? , the Hoosier State has an “annual performance-accountability rating system” for participating private schools that is based on the results of state assessments—the same tests that public school pupils take. Indeed, the fact that private schools will soon be held accountable under Common Core standards and assessments has become a major issue in the Hoosier State—because it gives palpitations to the right, not the left! (Other recently enacted private-school-choice programs, including those in Louisiana and Alabama, also include

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Left-of-center reformers: Join the voucher movement today

A sensible supreme court paves the way for Alabama choice plan

yes Adam Emerson / March 14, 2013

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley today signed into law his state’s first private school choice program—a K–12 tuition tax credit—avoiding what was perhaps the most ridiculous attempt yet to thwart efforts to enact a voucher or tax-credit plan anywhere.

Bentley put his signature on the Alabama Accountability Act one day after the state’s Supreme Court lifted a restraining order that prevented him from even getting the bill, which passed two weeks ago along party lines. The Alabama Education Association had convinced a state judge last week to block legislative staffers from sending the bill to the governor, arguing that too many Republican lawmakers privately discussed rewriting a separate measure to include the tax credit without calling a public meeting.

The Alabama Supreme Court sensibly determined that the restraining order issued by Judge Charles Price was “premature.” The bill hadn’t even become law, and according to the top justices, there was no “existing case or controversy” that needed adjudicating.

In other words, there was no one harmed. As political scientist Joshua Dunn noted, courts don’t typically intrude in the internal workings of a state legislature, as a matter of separation of powers. The notion that the teacher union might have suffered “irreparable harm” without the restraining order (Judge Price’s words) was ludicrous.

Now that the bill is law, Bentley and others who supported the tax credit can expect a lawsuit. And families whose children are zoned to a failing public school and who

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A sensible supreme court paves the way for Alabama choice plan

A journalism review dupes its journalists

yes Adam Emerson / April 3, 2012

Paul Farhi’s smackdown of education reform and education reporting in the American Journalism Review may be inspirational to those who would march with the status quo, but it is dangerous coming from a publication that sets the standard for how newsrooms ought to conduct their affairs.

A cursory read of national news media should shatter any belief that journalists are making life easy for reformers or education entrepreneurs.  Photo by NS Newsflash.

Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, argues that reformers and billionaire philanthropists have fooled us into believing that American education is in crisis. And worse, passive journalists have allowed this ruse to go unchallenged. Reformers may be used to these sophomoric critiques, but Farhi would have reporters believe that our system of public education has never been better and that their job is to contest any claim to the contrary.

AJR would do better to remind its readers that, yes, some of our education system is fine, but a lot more is mediocre, ragged, losing ground to international peers, leaving many of our poorest and poorest-performing children with worsening odds that they’ll ascend to success and to the higher education of their choice. And it would do better to remind its readers that some of our best education reporters and

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A journalism review dupes its journalists

Schools of choice need to be schools of quality

yes Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 14, 2011

This post originally appeared as an op-ed column in the Columbus Dispatch.

Recent news that White Hat Management, the big, Ohio-based, profit-seeking charter-school operator, faces financial problems surely was received as an early Christmas present by many longtime charter opponents, particularly within the Buckeye State.

The company’s founder and leader, Akron industrialist David Brennan, has been a larger-than-life target for school-choice foes since Gov. George V. Voinovich appointed him in 1992 to head a commission intended to advance choice in Ohio kindergarten-through-12th grade education.

That commission’s work led to the Cleveland Scholarship Program, the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program. Its constitutionality would be debated and litigated until being upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002, a decision that has reverberated across the country.

Brennan’s vision, doggedness and political connectedness in the education-policy sector have not been limited to vouchers. Without him, Ohio’s charter-school program might have been stillborn, or strangled in its crib by the outraged forces of the public-school establishment. From Day One, the teachers unions teamed up with the League of Women Voters, the PTA, the Ohio School Boards Association, the Ohio AFL-CIO and others to savage charters at the Statehouse, to challenge them in the courthouse and to denounce them in every sort of public forum.

The vitriol of these attacks was illustrated in 2003 by then-Cleveland Teachers Union president Richard DeColibus, who announced his union’s $70,000 “truth” campaign by declaring that “these bad (charter) schools are like

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Schools of choice need to be schools of quality