The Louisiana teacher union employs a shameful tactic to stop school vouchers

yes Adam Emerson / July 26, 2012

The Louisiana teacher union can’t get the courts to stop private schools from enrolling voucher-bearing students this fall, so they’ve taken to threatening the schools with litigation.

The law firm representing the Louisiana Association of Educators and others in their legal challenge against the state’s new voucher program has sent letters to schools that opted to participate in the program that “it will have no alternative other than to institute litigation” against them unless they opt out.

Two weeks ago, a district judge in Louisiana denied the union’s request for an injunction to block funding to the program, and an appellate court this week threw out the union’s request to overturn that decision. So now the plaintiffs have turned to bullying the schools.

A letter sent by attorney Brian Blackwell to one school asked for a promise not to accept any voucher funds. The alternative, Blackwell said, might be litigation. “We hope that you agree with us that proceeding with a program that is blatantly unconstitutional does not benefit students, parents, public schools or non-public schools,” he wrote.

The tactic worked. The school later wrote to state Superintendent John White that it was pulling out of the program. So long as the union employs such a shameful tactic, that school will undoubtedly be joined by others.

» Continued

The Louisiana teacher union employs a shameful tactic to stop school vouchers

Private school choice AND quality control

yes Adam Emerson / July 24, 2012

Louisiana has shown us that it’s possible to offer private-school choice and control for quality in a way that doesn’t cramp what makes a private school unique.

And in doing so, Louisiana is among rare company in school-voucher policy. While other states have made voucher and tax credit scholarship programs more transparent, Louisiana joins only Indiana in an attempt to regulate enrollment at schools that consistently show poor performance.

Other states should take notice of what is a sensible plan for voucher accountability.

Other states should take notice of what is a sensible plan for voucher accountability.

Under the proposal submitted today to the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, private schools that enroll an average of ten voucher students per grade or more than forty in grades that are tested will be assessed points under a scoring system similar to one administered to public schools. Once in the voucher program, if these private schools score below fifty out of 150 points in their second year of participation, or in any year thereafter, they won’t be able to enroll scholarship students for the following school year.

Additionally, schools that have been in the program for at least four years and score below a fifty for the majority of the time they have been assessed won’t be able to enroll new voucher students until they raise their score above fifty and pass a quality review by the Department of Education.

These regulations are based on

» Continued

Private school choice AND quality control

An overly simplistic concept of local control

yes Adam Emerson / July 20, 2012

Who should control education? That’s the subject of a new study analyzing forty years of polling data assessing public opinions on education governance. Michigan State University researchers Rebecca Jacobsen and Andrew Saultz mostly examined survey results from the often-cited annual Gallup poll to conclude that “the public often expresses strong support for local control.”

Who should control education?

Gallup poll questions aren’t known for nuance and complexity. So it’s no surprise that the conclusions from this study are just as simplistic.

Jacobsen and Saultz begin their report by carping that folks like Fordham’s Checker Finn say that school boards and current notions of local control have become antiquated in the twenty-first century. Reformers and policymakers, Jacobsen and Saultz argue, should realize that the public sees a role for federal and state governments in education, but not when it comes to local decision making.

But the authors suggest the only alternative to the status quo of “local decision making” is federal or state control. In fact, Finn has argued for a re-invention of local control, and more recently wrote in the journal National Affairs that enhanced levels of parental influence and choice have allowed new forms of local control to take root.

Specifically:

• Most states allow parents, educators, and organizations to establish and manage their own charter schools;


• The more recent proliferation of school choice – charters, vouchers, magnet schools, virtual schools, and the like – are beginning to fracture the school district monopoly; and



» Continued

Category: Charters & Choice / Governance

---

An overly simplistic concept of local control

Voucher transparency in the Hoosier State

yes Adam Emerson / July 17, 2012

The first results of the statewide testing of Indiana’s voucher students shows generally good marks for private schools participating in the program.  The group School Choice Indiana recently highlighted that voucher schools had an average 91 percent pass rate on the language arts portion of the test known as ISTEP+ and had an average 89 percent pass rate on the math portion. These exceeded the public school averages.

Indiana deserves credit for shinging light on the performance of schools with voucher students. Photo by Yorick_R.

In fact, NPR’s StateImpact Indiana reports that 171 of the 224 private schools in Indiana participating in the state’s new voucher program posted higher-than-average passing rates, and the average ISTEP+ pass rate at all schools receiving vouchers was 9 percentage points higher than the state’s overall average. But StateImpact also looked more closely at the schools that posted lower-than-average passing rates. Although that number only came to 41 voucher schools, those schools enrolled, on average, higher concentrations of voucher students.

As with most voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs, relatively few private schools in Indiana rely on the program for most of their revenues; most students pay privately. But, outside Indiana, we have little evidence of student performance at those private schools

» Continued

Voucher transparency in the Hoosier State