Several factors began draining urban Catholic schools long before the first charters even opened.

But, to suggest, as Ravitch did in a recent post, that there is a direct, causal relationship between the proliferation of charters and the closing of urban Catholic schools seems to me to ignore the impact of several things that have been draining urban Catholic schools long before the first charters even opened.

For starters, it’s a well-known fact that the decline in the number of religious (nuns, priests, etc.) who are available to teach in Catholic schools is a major problem. Catholic schools long relied on the cheap labor that was supplied by nuns in particular, and now that schools have to increasingly rely on lay faculty, parishes that serve our most disadvantaged students have had a very difficult time making ends meet. This problem is obviously particular acute in urban areas where the number of Catholic families supporting the parishes has declined and where the financial need of the students served by the schools has grown considerably.

To make matters worse, though, the support for urban Catholic schools among diocesan leaders is often far too weak. In fact, there are far too many who believe that urban Catholic schools should close. There are pastors who’ve been assigned to parishes with schools who have no experience—or interest—in running a school and who see financially strapped schools as a drain on their already scarce resources. And there are too many Diocesan leaders who do not believe that keeping urban Catholic schools—which often serve far more non-Catholics than Catholics—open is a top priority.

Closing charter schools—or preventing the opening of more—will simply not turn the tide in favor of urban Catholic schools.

Of course, there are several visionary leaders around the country who believe keeping urban schools open is critical–including the late James Cardinal Hickey who famously (and inspiringly) noted that “we don’t education [urban] students because THEY are Catholic, but because WE are.” But there has been far too little movement among Catholic leadership writ large to make saving urban Catholic schools the priority it should be. (The work being done in the Archdiocese of NY to rethink school funding is, I think, very promising and may do more to help slow, or even reverse, the closing of urban schools than isolated philanthropy could do.)

To be sure, the emergence of urban charter schools has given poor parents more choices—and, frankly, more affordable choices, since many simply could not afford to continue to pay the even very low tuition that Catholic schools required. But closing charter schools—or preventing the opening of more—will simply not turn the tide in favor of urban Catholic schools. The best, or perhaps the only, way to save Catholic schools is for Catholic leaders—lay and religious alike—to make the commitment we need to keeping these schools alive. And in the meantime, closing or limiting charter options will only further limit the options available to urban parents who desperately crave better choices for their children.

This post was also submitted as a comment on Diane Ravitch's blog.

It just looks callous to reverse an effort that would have placed no financial burden on the district.

What Hess probably doesn’t know is that the situation in Zachary is more complex. There the superintendent and school board embraced a plan to take in just thirty low-income and low-achieving students from other districts under the state’s new voucher program before the school community told them to back down. A flood of new students this was not.

Zachary schools are Louisiana’s best. And Republican Governor Bobby Jindal had schools like that in mind when he pushed for legislation awarding more public and private options to low-income kids in schools rated C, D, or F. In late April, Zachary schools Superintendent Warren Drake said his district could “make a difference” for these kids and devised a plan to accept fifteen kindergarteners and fifteen first-graders using vouchers. That would have come to just 4 percent of the district’s current kindergarten and first-grade enrollment of 769.

Drake scrapped that plan less than two weeks later, citing a need to focus on Zachary students first as the state placed higher expectations on academic performance. What changed? Parents and others in the community demanded that school leaders renege on their pledge. And in a statement that followed, Drake acknowledged “the sacrifices many of our own families make to provide their students with a first-rate education.”

Suburbanites aren’t going to willingly erode the quality of their schools and the value of their homes.

This reluctance is not unusual among parents and property owners who fear that open enrollment policies would weaken schools and neighborhoods that demand their hard work and sacrifice. And I concede I should have more fairly acknowledged this concern. But it just looks callous to reverse an effort that would have placed no financial burden on the district—full public funding would have accompanied each voucher student—and would have increased its total enrollment of 5,235 by less than 1 percent.

Beyond Zachary, the larger question is worth asking: Do we believe in “zip code education” or not? Do the public schools belong to everybody, or just to the parents and taxpayers in their catchment zones?

Hess clearly sees this as an issue of property rights—and pragmatic politics. Suburbanites aren’t going to willingly erode the quality of their schools and the value of their homes. The question for the school choice movement is whether we should take such realities as a given. What do you think?

We are left with a community that has chosen to erect a fence around its public schools.  Photo by Martin Magdalene.

Why the quick reversal? Once Zachary schools Superintendent Warren Drake announced the district’s intent to “make a difference” for children coming from C-, D-, or F-rated schools, his community told him to back off.

In a written statement, Drake scrapped his original plan with a declaration that illustrates the challenges school choice advocates face even after their hard-won legislative victories:

We recognize the sacrifices many of our own families make to provide their students with a first-rate education and appreciate the community’s continued financial support of our district.

As with many private school choice plans, Louisiana’s voucher allows students from poor-performing public schools to switch to high-performing public schools. And the best-performing public schools in the Pelican State are found in Zachary.

But, as with many plans that allow cross-district school choice, sometimes those who make “sacrifices” for the best want to keep their investment exclusive.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder learned that lesson after he proposed making the voluntary cross-district choice policy in his state mandatory. Most of the districts in Michigan that refuse to allow other students to enter their boundaries are the wealthier suburban school systems that border Detroit. The Grosse Pointe school district, to name one, went so far as to pass a resolution fighting Snyder’s effort that sought to preserve the “personal sacrifices” of its citizens who opted to invest “in premium housing stock.” The governor’s plan later died in a legislative committee.

What’s surprising about Zachary’s resistance is that it has shown greater outreach to disadvantaged students in the past. As Drake reminded his school board, Zachary Community Schools took in 300 students who were displaced from their homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Sometimes those who make “sacrifices” for the best want to keep their investment exclusive.

But in the days following last week’s board meeting, parents and others in Zachary appealed to Drake and school board members to reconsider their decision. First, there was confusion about the cost, but that fog cleared after the state explained that a student’s full public funding—averaging $8,500—would accompany the child. Then Drake justified the reversal by noting that teachers would be burdened next year with a new evaluation system and didn’t need the stress of more students, but he told board members previously that the voucher would add only one new student in each kindergarten and first-grade class.

So we are left with a community that has chosen to erect a fence around its public schools.

The Black Alliance for Educational Options has since urged the school system to reverse its reversal, but its plea is too little, too late. As Zachary and Grosse Pointe have shown, advocates like BAEO and lawmakers who champion school choice have to take their fight outside the statehouse and into the communities that are supposed to provide better options for students who have so few. If they can’t convince better-performing schools to open their doors to low-income, low-achieving children, then their legislative victories will be short-lived.

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Zachary changed its position after two days, not two weeks.

Charter schools are different by design and they develop their strength when parents, students, and teachers buy into their mission.

Lawmakers now want to study the “feasibility” of such an opt-out plan before rushing into it and ordered the state Department of Education to report back with recommendations in two years. This might be an agile way to retreat from a bad idea, but legislators should have killed the plan before committing state resources to its study.

Charter schools are different by design and they develop their strength when parents, students, and teachers buy into their mission. An opt-out lottery would tailor charters into one-size that tries to meet the needs of every student and turn them into the first schools of assignment. A New Jersey lawmaker who hatched a similar scheme last year realized the lottery would lead to chaos in both district and charter school offices that tried to plan for the school year. He’s no longer pursuing the bill. Connecticut shouldn’t be either.

The legislation the Connecticut General Assembly passed this week already prescribes the mission of two of the next four charter schools approved: They must focus on the needs of English language learners. The relatively few charter schools in Connecticut – just eighteen statewide – were already prepared to work with district schools on ways to better meet the needs of underrepresented students. Cooperation was in their interest. The bill’s mandate unfortunately obviates the need for partnership.

Policymakers will initiate change quickly if they design their choice policies smartly.

That’s because it was Erika Aaron’s job to talk about what happens after legislatures win the fight to establish vouchers or tax credit scholarships, which Christie said had “the chance to get the most change, the most quickly.” No doubt, Aaron shared the same sense of urgency with others at the American Federation for Children’s annual summit, but she also reminded the participants that they’ll initiate change quickly if they design their choice policies smartly.

Aaron is the community relations director for Waste Management, Inc., which has contributed $16 million to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program alone as well as millions to similar programs in other states in exchange for a tax credit. But Aaron said the company is particular about where it redirects its tax liability, and a smart private school choice policy to Waste Management may not be the most disruptive.

Unlike voucher programs that receive direct taxpayer support, tax credit scholarship programs in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona, just to name a few, need corporate support. While these companies receive a tax credit for their contributions, they do have the views of shareholders and employees to consider. Indeed, Aaron said she convinced Waste Management executives that this was a cause worth supporting only after determining that, in addition to the tax credit, four standards would be met:

• That the scholarship be means-tested: While tax credit scholarship programs vary in their approach to means-testing and in their definition of “low income,” Aaron said support from Waste Management depends on whether the scholarship is first helping those who are the least able to afford a private school on their own.


• That the program is transparent: The level of accountability and transparency in most tax credit scholarship plans varies as widely as the approach to means-testing, but Aaron said that scholarship programs need to show that they are being good financial stewards of the public trust and that they are meeting the academic needs of their students. Many programs in Arizona and Georgia have little accountability to taxpayers, and so they get little, if any, support from Waste Management.


• Scholarship portability: Some programs limit scholarships to only a couple of schools or a network of schools, which limits the range of choice that the scholarship was supposed to provide. Aaron said an effective program in no way restricts a student to move from one school to another with the scholarship.


• That the program provides a savings to the state budget.

The reason that Waste Management has contributed more to Florida than in any other state is because the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program meets these standards better than others (Disclosure: I helped to run the policy and communications initiatives for the Florida program from 2009 to 2011). Most of these restrictions are established in Florida Statute. In Georgia and Arizona, for example, they are not. Only a few scholarship funding organizations in those states voluntarily limit their scholarships to the poorest students and voluntarily submit to greater transparency, and it is to those few that Waste Management directs its support.

This has lessons for anyone with a stake in the current movement toward expanded private school choice, including for those who would allow families of all income levels access to a tax credit scholarship and those who would resist attempts to enhance transparency and accountability. Their political victories, if they come, may be short lived if the corporate support necessary to bankroll the scholarship doesn’t follow.

But this also has a lesson for those who argue that school choice is nothing but a corporate takeover of public education. In reality, a corporation is nothing if not an alliance of individuals with competing interests and varying degrees of power. In this context, some in Waste Management have more in common with skeptics of school choice. The internal corporate tension resulted in some stipulations the company favored before it put its name and reputation in a controversial enterprise.

For more on this issue read Fordham's study, Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students.

So a lawmaker in Florida pushed successfully for a law that makes schools focus more attention on students at or near the top.

This week, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill that establishes a minimum number of accelerated learning opportunities while making sure parents and students know how they can take advantage of those options (called Academically Challenging Curriculum to Enhance Learning options, or ACCEL). The measure was championed by state Representative John Legg, who feared that talented students were going through school unchallenged, especially in districts that paid little attention to accelerated learning.

Each of Florida’s sixty-seven school districts largely draft their plans for student progress by stressing expectations for meeting minimum standards, Legg says. Few highlight procedures for enrichment and acceleration. Without being overly prescriptive, Legg’s proposal brings more attention to high-flying opportunities, bringing its own set of uniform standards that serve as a baseline for greater innovation at the school level.

Specifically, the law now says that schools, at a minimum, must offer whole-grade and mid-year promotion for eligible students as well as accelerated learning and early graduation options. Schools also must develop requirements to qualify for those options, because the law also empowers parents to request those opportunities in a way they couldn’t before.

Legg says he wanted a different kind of “parent trigger” for students with IQs that fall short of gifted status but who nonetheless sit bored through their classes. While not the kind of trigger or “choice” in vogue among education reformers, Legg’s effort does establish, for some students, a road map to academic enrichment that Advanced Placement and dual enrollment alone may not satisfy.

The law leaves a lot of room for principals to be innovative. If they care about their best and brightest, they must spend more than the minimum energy required.

Teacher unions will pit Democrat against Democrat by using the support of school vouchers as a wedge.

An unexpected reminder of that came last week in the Wisconsin Democratic recall primary campaign for governor. The Wisconsin Education Association recently distributed a mailer claiming that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett wanted to expand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The union supports Barrett’s opponent in the primary, and is now using a story from seven years ago claiming that Mayor Barrett supported raising the enrollment cap on the voucher program.

Barrett said then that he was willing to back the cap increase in exchange for more money for all public schools, and he has since repeatedly expressed alarm over the voucher program’s cost to local taxpayers. But that’s beside the point for the union and enough to force Barrett to spend energy on the campaign trail defending his support for public education.

This strategy has worked before. A Democratic candidate for Florida Senate named Terry Fields spent weeks addressing his past support for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship before ultimately losing a primary campaign against an opponent backed by the Florida Education Association. Both were seeking to represent an impoverished community in Jacksonville, where thousands of students benefit from the voucher. Before his loss, Fields meekly added that he wouldn’t support expanding the program with the Florida economy in doldrums.

Also in Florida, the 2010 Democratic primary for Florida’s attorney general led to a skirmish over vouchers, with the losing candidate, Dave Aronberg, stumbling to explain his past support over the tax credit scholarship program while he was in the state Senate. After the loss, Aronberg withdrew his future support for the program.

Other examples in the Sunshine State followed, and as the primary season this year got underway, more Democrats backed away from a voucher program they once embraced. That’s troubling for a voucher movement that repeatedly boasts of the bipartisan support it does manage to get.

Democrats who support private school options will need to find their resolve and better communicate why vouchers figure into their guiding principles. If they don’t, their opponents will mock those principles and the political viability of private school choice will suffer.

Two conditions of the agreement make this momentous and should give Catholic leaders throughout the nation something to consider:

• This so-called Great Schools Compact will add Philadelphia’s Catholic schools to an online clearinghouse being developed that will provide families information on public, charter, and Catholic education in the city, and;


• The Archdiocese will make its standardized test-score data available for that clearinghouse. Most Philadelphia Catholic schools currently administer the Terra Nova, but the Archdiocese has signed on to the Common Core State Standards.

The Archdiocese also has pledged to do something most Catholic schools have not: open up student performance to public scrutiny.

Finally, a group committed to enhancing urban public education has recognized that the urban Catholic school shares a common purpose, and the Great Schools Compact is doing more than paying lip service. But the Archdiocese also has pledged to do something most Catholic schools have not: open up student performance to public scrutiny.

Most Catholic schools fail to disclose test scores and other key indicators of student achievement. While regulations accompanying voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Florida will soon be changing that practice, the agreement in Philadelphia represents a rare, voluntary move to embrace academic transparency. Other Catholic school systems should follow suit.

Why? They will aid their own survival by publicizing their academic outcomes. As my Fordham colleagues observed in their 2008 report, Who Will Save America’s Urban Catholic Schools, an era of No Child Left Behind has heightened the expectation that Catholic schools must measure student performance and make the results easily accessible to everyone.

But that isn’t important only for the principle of accountability. Catholic schools should market their performance. That’s what driving the Philadelphia Archdiocese, which had, at one point, disclosed school-by-school test results before ending the practice years ago. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, who was appointed to his Philadelphia post in 2011, believes his school system can provide the city’s children an outstanding education, but he knows he has to prove that.

Earlier this year, Chaput announced that the Archdiocese would close 49 schools due to plummeting enrollment. Transparency and branding alone cannot reverse the slide, but Catholic schools still have attributes to show off. And they must: Gone are the days when parish priests could simply admonish their flock to pursue a Catholic education.

The Philadelphia School Partnership, which oversees the compact, is seeking a share of the millions that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is making available to aid schools, and it contends the collaboration with the Archdiocese will make Philadelphia stand out. It should stand out. But for the sake of Catholic education, the compact shouldn’t be unique for long.

Such a law may only be a few legislative steps away in Connecticut. Democratic leaders in the state General Assembly have hitched this “opt-out” lottery to a sweeping omnibus bill that covers reforms that range from teacher quality to school improvement, and where better to bury it? Many provisions in Senate Bill 24 have generated heat over tenure reform and charter school funding, distracting the public from this perversion of parental choice in education.

SB 24 twists the concept of choice and could decimate the progress charters have made in the Nutmeg State.

The lottery would be imposed on all new charter schools and would draw from the names of every student from the district in which the charter operates, leaving it to the family to accept or decline the spot. The provision emerged from a closed-door meeting with union leaders and the Democratic chairs of the state’s joint education committee and follows attempts in at least one other state to get around the issue of “creaming” in school choice.

Indeed, an opt-out scheme may position more English language learners and special education students for entry in charter schools, but it would do so by making charters the first schools of assignment and upend what makes them unique. They are different by design and they develop their strength when students, parents, and teachers buy into their mission. If legislators tailor charter schools into one size that fits every student, they will twist the concept of choice and decimate the progress charters have made in the Nutmeg State.

A similar idea took shape last year in New Jersey. Lawmakers in the Garden State considered, and ultimately ignored, a bill establishing an opt-out lottery that sought to make charters look more like the communities they anchored. Not surprisingly, the bill had the support of Save Our Schools NJ, a vocal advocacy group that sees school choice as a threat to students who remain in public schools. Mercifully, the bill sponsor agreed to table the legislation this year after charter operators convinced him that the lottery would tax their operations.

Under such a law, districts would have to wait for families to leave the charter pool before planning for the school year, and charters would end up calling thousands of parents who may have no interest in their schools in order to open seats for families who would. But this may be what the Connecticut teacher unions had in mind: burden charters with a taxing mandate that mutes the concept of parental choice. “If you can’t beat them,” said Lisa Grover, state advocacy director for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “then at least you can make their lives difficult.”

"If you can't beat them, then at least you can make their lives difficult."

Legislators whose constituents benefit from a charter school education should not let this measure pass without debate. Additionally, Governor Dannel Malloy would help by drawing more attention to the lottery as he builds support for his original ideas for education reform. Senate Bill 24 today is mostly a weakened substitute for the reforms Malloy proposed in early February. The governor championed local funding for charter schools, heightened expectations for teachers, and higher standards for public schools. The education committee and the Democrats who lead it diluted all of those plans after they met privately with union leaders.

If the unions and their legislative allies want to slow the expansion of charter schools, then this ploy might work. If they want to ensure that more underrepresented students have access to quality options, then they would be more successful by emboldening districts and charters to work collaboratively. An opt-out lottery would only discourage effective charter applicants who will see a burdensome and costly mandate getting in the way of their mission.

Housing costs are 2.4 times greater near a better performing school.

After surveying 100 metropolitan areas, Brookings analyst Jonathan Rothwell found that housing costs are 2.4 times greater near a better performing school, as judged by state test scores, than near a lower performing school. Zoning, Rothwell told Education Week, “is an underlying problem.”  Exclusionary zoning has priced lower income families out of high-flying schools in higher-flying neighborhoods where population density is low by government design and where fewer people own larger houses and more acres of land.

By loosening or even eliminating restrictive zoning, cities may see housing cost gaps narrow by as much as 63 percentage points and see school achievement gaps narrow as a result, Rothwell writes.

Naturally, Rothwell has an affinity for school choice, including district choice plans, charter schools, and school vouchers, because the practice helps to neutralize the effects of zoning. It’s no surprise that Fort Myers, Florida, shows some of the lowest test score gaps between lower and higher income students in the Brookings report. The Lee County school district has a more robust district choice policy, implemented largely to settle a desegregation lawsuit. But whatever the motivation, the policy highlights what should be obvious: Districts with strict student assignment plans that leave little or no room for school choice only intensify the effects brought on by zoning as detailed by Brookings.

Rothwell is careful not to focus entirely on choice as a solution. It’s better that school districts work with local governments to establish effective housing and education policy, he says. But it’s important to note, if Rothwell doesn’t, that more and more districts are restricting school choice as a way to cut down on costs. They do this in many ways, but more are drawing tighter attendance zones around specialty schools, like magnets, or by denying bus service to these schools. That’s a poor way to save money. And if Rothwell teaches us anything, it’s that quality choices are still largely available only to those who can afford them. 

It’s hard to identify the political motivations that drove Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to veto an expansion of the state’s publicly funded savings accounts to help more disadvantaged students pay for private education. But we do have her explanation, one that pretends the expansion of private school choice would “artificially manipulate” the market to the disadvantage of public schools.

This fear of an “unlevel playing field” is a milder variant on the assertion that school vouchers would “virtually abolish public education,” as the head of the Lousiana teachers union told the Wall Street Journal for a story today. But it’s all the more surprising coming from a Republican governor who has supported school choice for the Grand Canyon State in the past. Does Brewer really agree with voucher opponents who insisted that last year’s adoption of education savings accounts for special education students was really just the camel’s nose in the tent, heralding doom for public education? Her veto suggests this much.

That few Arizona reporters would challenge Brewer’s explanation or express shock that she was the one making it shows how ingrained this narrative has become since the 1970s. At that time, United States senators including Daniel Patrick Moynihan were sponsoring legislation that would award tuition tax credits to parents who opted for private or parochial education. The opposition insisted this would inspire families to flee their neighborhood school.

Moynihan grew more exasperated by August 1978 when he took to the floor of the Senate to debate his colleagues:

The issue is not the future of the public schools. They now enroll more than 90 percent of all primary and secondary students and more than 75 percent of all postsecondary students. Although they do not lack for problems, their future is secure and is not the least threatened by our proposal …

… Far the more important policy question before the Senate is whether nonpublic schools are to have a future or whether the national government is to aid and abet those who would not mind in the least if they were to shut down entirely … Let there be no mistake about this either: In the field of education, the public sector is slowly but steadily vanquishing the private.

In other words, Moynihan, one of the most notable Democrats in the nation’s history, argued that it was the public sector gaining monopoly status by quashing any proposal that offered aid to the private sector. “In no small part,” the senator added, the security for public schools “is due to two decades of federal provision for public education.”

Thirty-four years later, a Republican governor struck down a legislative initiative she feared would unfairly disadvantage a public school system that now has a 90 percent market share of all school-aged children in Arizona, a security due in no small part to decades of state provision for public education. No single voucher proposal in the nation has shown the ability to so dramatically affect that balance. At best, Governor Brewer is naïve. At worst, duplicitous.

Nearly three-quarters of parents in Detroit have shopped for a school for their child, whether the options included a traditional public school, a magnet school, a charter school, or a private school, according to a think tank in the Wolverine State called Michigan Future Inc. Moreover, fifteen percent of the families the think tank surveyed opted for a public school outside the district.

“Seventy percent are actively shopping rather than letting the government tell them where to go—that’s huge,” Michigan Future President Lou Glazer told The Detroit News.

Glazer says the study represented one of the most aggressive attempts nationally to further explain how families, especially those who are low-income, think about their school options in an urban area. Researchers spent last summer knocking on the doors of 1,073 households to collect data on 1,699 schoolchildren, eighty-five percent of whom were black and sixty-eight percent of whom came from households where incomes that fell below $30,000.

The Detroit school district has lost more than 100,000 students in the past decade, but fifty-five percent of the families interviewed said they sent their children to a district school. Twenty-three percent opted for charter schools. The fifteen percent of families who chose schools outside Detroit took advantage of a state law that allows cross-district enrollment.

Forty percent said they chose their school based on its academic performance, but safety and discipline ranked high among respondents, too. Eighty percent said they had access to a vehicle and thirty percent said they would drive at least eight miles to get their kid to the right school.

Not surprisingly, moms are the most likely to make the final school choice, and they generally talked with other parents about their options.

The Motor City is fortunate to be in a state that has taken a sometimes unorthodox approach to school choice.

Detroit isn’t frequently a part of the policy debates that feature major “portfolio” districts like New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and New York. But the Motor City is fortunate to be in a state that has taken a sometimes unorthodox approach to school choice. In addition to charter schools, Michigan students have enjoyed a generous “Schools of Choice” law that allows them entry into an adjacent school district as long as that district is willing to take them.

The law is voluntary for districts, something Gov. Rick Snyder tried recently to change. He wanted to mandate that districts must open up seats to students in other school systems as long as they had space. His effort stalled in the Legislature, mostly because of the resistance found in the wealthier school systems that border Detroit, including Grosse Pointe, which went so far as to pass a resolution that sought to preserve the “personal sacrifices” of its citizens who opted to invest “in premium housing stock.”

The impoverished families of Detroit cannot invest in “premium housing stock,” but they do have the wherewithal to shop for the right school and the drive to make uncomfortable sacrifices. Their actions should guide policy makers to enable more low-income parents in other cities to make the same choice.

The legislative moxie Louisiana showed should stimulate a new conversation about private school choice and accountability.

When lawmakers last week approved Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to award vouchers to low-income children, they also ordered state schools Superintendent John White to develop a system that holds participating schools accountable for the performance of their voucher students. Critics say this lacks specificity, but it’s almost revolutionary compared with most voucher regulations nationwide.

Louisiana’s law may be similar to a voucher program Indiana lawmakers approved last year in that it requires participating students to take the same assessments administered at public schools. But even voucher supporters in the Pelican State had a hard time defending against tougher accountability standards in a state known for its low-tolerance of poor-performing schools.

So now that low-income students in schools graded C through F have a greater array of public and private options available, this is a chance for White and the Department of Education to design what my Fordham colleagues have called “accountability, done right.”

The degree of scrutiny and potential consequences for poor performance should be proportional to the number of voucher students each private school accepts. The Fordham Institute in 2009 advocated a sliding scale of accountability, whereby regulations might be heightened for private schools that receive more public revenue.

In our collective debates, we all too flippantly refer to “voucher schools,” when in reality private schools that participate in most voucher programs rely more on private-paying students. Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, for example, shows that just one in five scholarship students make up the average enrollment at 1,100 private schools throughout the Sunshine State. But there are schools that get more than 90 percent of their revenues from the scholarship program. Those schools should be treated more like public schools, and it’s reasonable to hold them accountable for failing to meet established academic benchmarks, even if that means withdrawing them from the voucher program.

Private schools that receive much less in voucher revenue should be treated more like private schools.

Conversely, private schools that receive much less in voucher revenue should be treated more like private schools. If all voucher students will have to take the same tests given at public schools, then their schools should submit their scores to an independent evaluator so that the public can at least judge the effectiveness of the program as a whole. Private schools that educate just a few voucher students out of a private-paying enrollment of hundreds should face no further scrutiny. Indeed, public disclosure of test scores, in this scenario, would divulge the identity of the voucher students. But test score results should be posted as voucher enrollments increase.

This is a common-sense approach Louisiana should consider, one that balances the decision-making power of the parent, the rights of the taxpayer, and the values of standards and transparency. Bobby Jindal has the spotlight now, and with it the ability to advance the debate away from its extreme poles. He has already proven himself a leader who can muster a comfortable majority of support for one of education reform’s most controversial efforts. Now he can take the conversation to its next stage.

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 analysts like Sam Dillon, Thomas Toch, and Jay Mathews, just to name a few, have captured the best and worst of the efforts to turn this around.

Instead, Farhi and AJR give us a database search identifying 544 newspaper and wire stories in one month containing the phrase “failing schools” as confirmation that journalists have immortalized a myth. They give us Valerie Strauss, who unsurprisingly gives the media an “F” for coverage of education reform. They give us more bogeymen like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of Strauss’ favorite targets in her feverish chronicles of the “corporatization” of public education. Worse, they give us “evidence” that Tom Brokaw and NBC have lavished excessive attention on the foundation to promote education reform and even money to carry out the foundation’s mission.

Much of this mirrors the opinion Farhi published last year in the Washington Post that erected the familiar straw men arguments: the absurdity that billionaires know best and that charter schools are the answer. No serious champion of educational attainment and reform has made either of those claims, and no newsroom would allow any such narrative to go unchallenged. A cursory read of national outlets like the New York Times or regional papers like the Miami Herald should shatter any belief that journalists are making life easy for reformers or education entrepreneurs.

But many more reporters, especially younger journalists who look to AJR for guidance and credible reviews of their craft, will only read an ill-informed polemic on the media’s “enthusiasm” for education reform. We have better guideposts for education journalism, and it’s a shame that AJR has missed them. Farhi has done a disservice to newsrooms that need more nuanced critiques of their enterprise.

The U.S. Supreme Court's Zelner decision didn't end the fight for private school choice.  Photo by TexasGOPVote.com.

How can this be? The nation’s highest court declared in 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that Cleveland’s voucher allowed parents to exercise “genuine choice,” leaving the decision to attend a faith-based school to the family, not to the state. The answer is in the wildly varying Blaine Amendments and compelled support clauses to constitutions in 47 states. And in many ways, these obstacles raise a larger hurdle than the Establishment Clause at issue in Zelman.

The capable attorneys at the Institute for Justice foretold the challenges in Oklahoma. The libertarian law firm, not one to shy from a school choice lawsuit, reported in a 2007 state-by-state analysis that the Oklahoma Constitution “would probably foreclose voucher legislation.” Oklahoma doesn’t distinguish between state aid to students and state aid to schools they attend, the institute said, and its supreme court struck down a relevant private school transportation law accordingly.

Of course, higher courts may reverse the decision from Tulsa Judge Rebecca Nightingale on appeal, and no doubt choice advocates would savor the chance to affirm the “genuine choice” that, indeed, comes with voucher legislation. But there are policy options that may stand more securely in states with even the strictest of Blaine interpretations.

The Institute for Justice believes the Oklahoma Constitution doesn’t preclude all private options. Tax credit scholarships may survive a challenge, just as they may in most states, because tax-credited funds are arguably no different than a contribution to a favored charity. In fact, IJ concluded that constitutions in only two states have Blaine interpretations so strict that they shut out the possibility for any private option—Michigan and Massachusetts.

Policy makers would be wise to consider these idiosyncrasies that vary state to state before designing programs that may only lead easily to disrupted educations afterward, just as it has done for 149 special-needs students in Oklahoma. Zelmannever ended the fight, even though it should have caused states to rethink what they so sweepingly consider “aid” to sectarian institutions. Vouchers and tax credit scholarships are different tools that achieve the same purpose. If states won't put the legacy of James Blaine to rest, then legislators need to figure out which tool gets the job done.

Closer inspection of Mr. Evers’s gamesmanship reveals the tricks he employs to attack a program he once called "morally wrong."

Just like last year, Evers distributed a press release this week asserting that students in the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs scored no better, and in some cases worse, than district students on Wisconsin’s standardized test. We all know that such comparisons are problematic because of “selection bias” since nobody can be sure whether kids using vouchers and those using the public schools differ in important ways. (The former might, for example, have fled bad districts precisely because they were doing poorly there.)

Especially galling was Evers’s use of the Racine data.

His press release claims that far more district students in that city scored at grade level or better in reading and math than did Racine students who chose the private school voucher, barely half of whom were rated proficient in either subject.

But what the superintendent failed to note was that voucher recipients had been in their chosen private schools for only two months before taking the test. In other words, their performance mostly reflects what they learned in the public schools that they left. The fall exam should be seen as a pre-test or baseline, one that (in this case) shows that the youngsters availing themselves are lower performing than the kids who stayed behind. One might reasonably surmise that their parents are the most desperate for schooling options that might work for their children.

Nor did Evers stop there. He also said that state aid for the voucher program was up 10 percent while state aid for Milwaukee Public Schools was down by a similar proportion. What he failed to note, however, is that Milwaukee also receives a LOT of money in local funds, while voucher students get exactly zero from those sources. As a result, students using vouchers get less than half of what kids going to Milwaukee Public Schools receive for their education ($6,442 vs. $13,000).

Families and schools in Wisconsin should demand integrity and accuracy from the supposedly professional head of their education department, not shrouded polemic deprecating programs and policies that the guy in charge simply wants to go away.

The mainstream resistance to school choice has embraced the language of fear and unrest.

For instance, a proposed parent trigger law in Florida failed in the state Senate after opponents similarly warned that gullible parents would be swooned by corporate education raiders looking to profit by converting traditional schools to charters. Never mind that charters have been flourishing in the Sunshine State for more than fifteen years. Democrat Nan Rich, the Senate’s minority leader, said the trigger would lay “the groundwork for the hostile corporate takeover of public schools across Florida.” Eight Republicans joined Rich and eleven other Democrats to defeat the measure, and nearly all expressed the same contempt.

There is more than just semantics at stake. Rich and her colleagues arguably were trying to revise history and the parent trigger gave them the opportunity. Bryant, while representing more than 90,000 local school board members, used her polemic to frame how states should contain online learning—for those public schools “in small or rural school districts that do not have the capacity to hire teachers for specialized courses, such as foreign languages, or schools that need to provide advanced or remedial classes for just a few students.”

Just a few students. This is why Hoover scholar John E. Chubb argued Monday on Fordham’s Boards Eye View blog for states to relieve local school boards of the authority to govern student access to online learning. “Boards may decide these matters with more on their minds than quality control,” Chubb wrote. “Every time a student opts to receive a bit of education outside of a home school, the school or district faces a financial hit.”

Indeed, Bryant expresses concern that the “messy, emerging field” of virtual education has documented little evidence of success. She’s not the first to do so, but her descent into the rhetoric of the Save Our Schools movement further casts the debate of education reform into one of students versus profits. Unfortunately, as Florida has shown, Bryant and her constituency have a receptive audience in the statehouse.

This year’s “Keeping Pace” report from Evergreen gives us a snapshot of online and blending learning practices and tells us that the fastest-growing segment is coming from single-district programs—those run by one district for that district’s students. While it’s satisfying to see more districts embrace digital learning programs—some with the purpose to compete with state-run virtual schools—these are school systems that are drawing boundaries around a practice that should be boundless.

These aren’t examples of disruptive innovations. These are not all fully online programs, but rather mostly blended models that combine face-to-face learning with virtual instruction that is mostly supplemental. This is not surprising, given that districts are serving only their own students, many of whom are at-risk and take advantage of online instruction mostly for credit recovery. The self-paced, fully online multi-media instruction with one-on-one teacher support that bridges long distances is found primarily in state-run programs, not in school districts.

Even the most reform-friendly states can be unwelcoming to the disruptions to which Chubb refers.

Even the most reform-friendly states can be unwelcoming to the disruptions to which Chubb refers. Last year, the Florida Legislature considered a bill that would have allowed the Florida Virtual School and its private competitors to offer fulltime online education at all grade levels statewide. With candor and confidence, Florida Virtual School CEO Julie Young said she welcomed the competition.

But the Legislature’s own staff attorneys predictably advised against the strategy, fearing its constitutional repercussions, and lawmakers ultimately kept online instruction with the Florida Virtual School and the state’s 67 countywide school districts. A compromise created virtual charter schools, but approval of those schools would rest with the school districts, restricting the technology to the confines of each county. That meant the instruction from a virtual charter in, say, Miami-Dade County would not travel to neighboring Broward County. 

Chubb writes, “If states leave access in the hands of local boards, they will slow the development of technology-based instruction, which is clearly not in the best interest of students.” On that, he is right. While more districts are creating online programs to serve their own students, they are presiding over 21st-century educational innovations with a 19th-century system of schooling. The longer that happens, the harder it will be for states to deliver a public education that attempts to be different.

Learn more by registering to attend or view Fordham’s April 19 panel discussion on digital learning, “Education Reform for the Digital Era,” featuring John Chubb.

Governor Bobby Jindal’s school voucher proposal for Louisiana has been dragged into the familiar politics of parental choice.

Let’s set aside the size of the eligibility pool—Jindal would offer vouchers to low-income students in schools graded C, D, or F, and opponents want to drop the “C” schools—and focus on accountability. The governor is going further than most school choice advocates in preferring to assess voucher students with the same tests given at public schools, but he wouldn’t have private schools face any legislatively determined sanctions if their students score poorly. There may be a political craving among some Louisiana lawmakers to hold dominion over private schools that receive public funding, but the best evidence we have supports the path Jindal has chosen.

The Milwaukee voucher program gives us guidance. The researchers at the University of Arkansas’ School Choice Demonstration Project reminded us in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer that Wisconsin’s school accountability requirements seemed at least partly responsible for the reading gains among voucher recipients. The final year of the project’s study showed the achievement of voucher students outpaced that of public school students, progress that may be attributable to the transparency required of participating private schools. Milwaukee’s voucher schools have to administer the state standardized test and report the results publicly.

“Interestingly, the voucher students’ superior gains became clear only after the private schools that accepted vouchers were required to publish their average test scores, just as the public schools do,” the researchers wrote in the Inquirer. “Whether this improved the private schools’ teaching or test preparation is open to question. Still, the combination of school choice and public accountability led to a clear boost in reading achievement, though no significant difference in math.”

Granted, the Milwaukee voucher program has gatekeepers empowered by the Legislature to keep weak schools from entering the program and poor performers from staying. But these watchdogs look at more than just test scores, and the School Choice Demonstration Project may have shown that the threat of public scrutiny alone can boost achievement levels. It would be wise to allow Jindal the flexibility to test that potential further.

This is not to say that consequences should never be imposed on publicly funded private schools. Three years ago, my Fordham colleagues proposed a sliding-scale measure of accountability for voucher programs, whereby regulations might be heightened for private schools that receive more public revenue. If a school has, say, 90 percent of its revenues coming from a voucher program, then it’s reasonable to hold that school accountable for failing to meet established academic benchmarks, even if that means withdrawing funding from the school.

But if a 40,000-student tax credit scholarship program in Florida gives us any indication, there may be relatively few schools in Louisiana that rely so strongly on voucher revenue. On average, Florida tax credit scholarship recipients make up one of every five students at 1,100 participating private schools.

It’s unlikely this kind of nuance would sway Louisiana’s most ardent voucher opponents, and it’s unlikely that many who call for penalties on poor-performing private schools would vote yes on the voucher plan without finding another reason to vote against it. But given the sweep of Jindal’s proposal, the debate can only benefit from these distinctions.

The authors of the Council on Foreign Relations’ report on US education reform and national security compared the sweep of their work with 1983’s A Nation at Risk, updating the “rising tide of mediocrity” with 21st century warnings of America’s weakened competitiveness. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll be talking about the Council’s recommendations 30 years from now, but there is much to this report that makes it one of the boldest statements on our progress toward higher educational standards and enhanced school choice.

The recommendations are not groundbreaking. The task force, chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, is urging the expansion of Common Core standards and the spread of more choice and competition—measures that are already driving our public debates. But the recommendations are no less impressive for the luminaries behind them. Klein, for one, called school choice a “uniquely American approach” and led a task force that insisted that school vouchers should be in our public policy toolkits.

The report signals that America’s poor educational outcomes are a threat to national security in addition to its competitiveness in a global economy.

What sets the report apart is its signal that America’s poor educational outcomes are a threat to national security in addition to its competitiveness in a global economy. Three of four kids are unqualified for military service either because they’re inadequately educated, they’re physically unfit or they have criminal backgrounds, the task force concluded. Too many young people are unemployable in an economy that relies on brainpower and human capital. “Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy,” the report states.

The task force lays blame at the “innovation deficit” and the very structure of an ailing system of public education that is turning the American Dream into “an American memory.” Primary and secondary schools in the United States are simply unorganized to promote competition, choice and innovation, values prized in nearly every other sector in American life. Choice largely is available to families with the financial means to opt out of public schooling, a condition that perpetuates what the task force calls “the worst form of inequality.” That’s why the report appropriately makes room for voucher programs like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship in addition to greater public school choice.

But a call for enhanced choice and competition should have come with an insistence that quality and transparency must greet the student in either public or private school. While arguing for the expansion of Common Core State Standards and meaningful assessments, the task force recommended a “national security readiness audit” that would be publicized to show whether schools are teaching students what they need to learn. The model voucher programs for the task force fall short on this measure of accountability. If private schools want to answer this call, they should embrace these standards as well.

The dissents to the findings have been predictable, but notable in that some are coming from some of the task force members themselves, namely American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. The union leader wrote in a dissent appended to the report that the recommended expansion of charter school and voucher programs “undermine this vital institution” of public education, and that competition hasn’t worked “in a scalable and sustainable way.” Maybe it would if she stepped aside and allowed statehouses to experiment with some of these bolder suggestions smartly.

D.C. charter school enrollment, already 41 percent of the public school population, could increase by as much as 10 percent next year alone.

Disciplinary data compiled by the D.C. Public Charter School Board show, for instance, that the District’s charter schools collectively resort to expulsions and 10-day suspensions more quickly than D.C. Public Schools. One school in particular, Friendship Collegiate Academy-Woodson, reportedly expelled 8 percent of its students—102 of 1,231 students—last year alone. While many schools questioned the accuracy of the data, even conservative estimates show some charters remove students from school at higher rates than their traditional school counterparts.

It is more conceivable now than ever that charter schools could ultimately educate a majority of D.C.’s public school students. But as they get closer to that milestone, charter operators will have to do more to counsel the pupils they’re too quick to remove from their campuses. Otherwise, they risk validating one of the biggest critiques of the school choice movement: the claim that charters provide a false sense of choice, turning away or expelling the hardest to teach.

Charter operators will have to do more to counsel the pupils they’re too quick to remove from their campuses.

Seven charter schools expelled at least five of their students during the 2010-11 school year, according to the charter school board’s data. Even if one accepted Friendship’s self-reported data over the charter board, the school still expelled at least 67 students during that time. Further, eight charter schools accounted for 310 suspensions that lasted 10 days or more.

It’s foolish to assume that one school can meet the needs of all students, and a school could do more educational harm to a child by keeping him in an environment that is a poor fit, not to mention the dangers and distractions posed to his classmates if the issues are behavioral. But traditional schools in D.C. largely have learned that expulsion is discipline best meted out as a last resort. When it is applied, D.C. Public Schools makes available alternative education programs to troubled students. The district is not a dumping ground for troubled charter students.

If the school district and the charter board are approaching equal market share, it is inevitable that the two systems will have more commonly shared goals. And if the two are to collaborate more on building the capacity for high-performing schools, as a consultant recommended recently to D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray, then each must learn best practices from the other. With all the students collectively in their care, D.C. charters should do more to implement the best interventions that district schools exhaust before resorting to final judgment. Charters need their autonomy. But acting too quickly on suspensions and expulsions could lead policy makers to impose a more uniform system of discipline.

Church leaders tell the Wall Street Journal that this is an experiment and are giving three boards wide latitude to make profound changes to schools now under the control of parishes and a central superintendent. While the archdiocese says it will make the system more cost efficient, the new plan likely will lead to more painful decisions before schools find stability. The hard times for Catholic schools haven’t passed—enrollment has shrunk by 14,550 students in five years—but the boards may be better equipped to study their respective regions and grapple with the burden of recommending closure for some schools with an eye toward reviving others.

What will this mean for parishioners and other parents who have either made the choice of a Catholic education or who have considered doing so? A leaner, more efficient system, for one. The Journal reports that the archdiocese will reduce funding for elementary schools, but it is planning an endowment funded by the sale or lease of assets. Those transactions would have an educational benefit if the church sold or leased to high-performing charter schools, particularly those that share the church’s mission in reaching out to the poor and disadvantaged.

But the changes also may mean that parents and parishioners must be willing to make short-term sacrifices and a greater effort to revitalize the institution of the Catholic school. There are those who will suffer from the closure of their school so that others may flourish, but the church also plans to levy a new sliding tax on parishes in order to generate an additional $10 million. Others should step up and contribute more to help schools reduce the financial burden on low-income families while the bishops usher the system toward solvency.

Moreover, policy makers should observe the hard decisions undertaken by the archdiocese and find ways to provide financial assistance. The city will be better off if the church’s experiment succeeds, and the church shouldn’t have to go it alone. It’s hard to imagine a state like New York legislating vouchers or tax credits to parochial schools, but there are other ways to provide financial or in-kind support that wouldn’t run afoul of its Blaine Amendment.

What happens in the Big Apple resonates widely. At least one observer told the Journal that other Catholic communities long ago adopted the changes New York is making, but it takes a system like New York’s to draw attention to bold ideas and practice. Win or lose, other dioceses can learn from this effort.

This is a step other states should consider if they want to rethink the way they govern public education in the 21st century.

If Governor Rick Scott signs the state’s digital learning bill, as expected, students in grades K-5 then could bypass a brick-and-mortar school and directly enroll full-time in a virtual instruction program, whether that program is managed by the Florida Virtual School, a virtual charter academy, or a school district. Previously, students were required to attend a full year in a traditional school prior to their full-time enrollment in an online program. Removing that requirement is a significant step for policy makers, as they’re making little distinction between those who are learning at home and those who are “home schooled.” That’s a step other states should consider if they want to rethink the way they govern public education in the 21st century.

The bill had the support of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future and passed by a collective 136-19 vote in the Republican-controlled legislature. The margin of victory was surprising, given that a fiscal analysis determined that the measure would cost the state money ($1.8 million the first year, increasing thereafter) at a time when lawmakers were hunting for savings. The fiscal impact, however, is nominal given the options this makes available for parents who want their children to learn at home but don’t have the money or expertise to develop and deliver a curriculum.

For critics who argue that online learning should remain an option only for public school students, consider that home school families in Florida who skip the neighborhood school in favor of virtual school must now, under this bill, be assessed with the same accountability measures administered at public schools. Faced with that requirement, many home schooling families will say, No thanks. Those who do will benefit from a professionally developed curriculum. Moreover, taxpayers have transparency and the state takes another step toward organizing a public education system by dropping barriers and boundaries erected last century.

I would have done anything to stop the childish dialogue among Florida senators to ask these questions about the trigger.

Really, these are just the questions I’ve had about the trigger, and I would have done anything to stop the childish dialogue among Florida senators to ask them. Eight moderate Republicans joined 12 Democrats to vote the trigger down, and nearly all of them were seized by the threat of “privatization” and for-profit charter schools. Not a word on whether parents can take on the burden of running a low-performing school or turning it over to a charter manager. Not a word on whether it should require more than a simple majority of parents to make such a drastic change. Legislators missed an opportunity to bring clarity to a discussion now ruled by passion. For the Senate Democratic minority leader, Nan Rich, the trigger did nothing but lay “the groundwork for the hostile corporate takeover of public schools across Florida.”

For the legislator who wants to give serious consideration to a controversial idea that has yet to be tried successfully, I offer these questions to a bill sponsor:

• Why not enhance school choice? (If we’re really concerned with empowering parents, particularly those who are low-income, then shouldn’t we empower more with the ability to “vote with their feet?” On the Dropout Nation blog, RiShawn Biddle makes a good case that parents whose roots are grounded deeply in a neighborhood school need the power to turn it around, not walk away from it. But many others would avail themselves of more public and publicly funded private options given the chance.)


• If a trigger is preferred, why not require a supermajority of parents to pull it? (A 51 percent vote has the potential to breed factionalism among parents, pitting those who favor a charter takeover against those who just want more authority over, say, personnel issues. A two-thirds vote is required of many state constitutional referenda, and it would ensure a solid core of support for what happens after the trigger is pulled.)


• What support do parents receive once they’ve pulled the trigger? (Parent Revolution, the California-based parent “union” has the organizing power and bandwidth to help parents navigate through the thicket of school governance, should parents decide to take on hiring and firing decisions themselves. But that won’t be the case in every state.)

Can we establish greater transparency in the process before the trigger is pulled?

• Can we establish greater transparency in the process before the trigger is pulled? (The Los Angeles Times smartly called for an open forum in California where both sides can make their case and challenge arguments before parents sign anything. That kind of transparency would inherently limit the effectiveness of teachers unions organizing to get petitioning parents to reverse their support, as was alleged in Adelanto, California.)


• Can we create an ombudsman’s office to investigate complaints of intimidation, coercion or malfeasance? (Even with an open forum, there is still a risk that either side would act irresponsibly or illegally outside the public eye. That behavior might be curbed if parents had an independent office they could turn to. Given that California parents have only tried pulling the trigger twice, staffing such an office wouldn’t cost a state much during an economic recovery.)
  


• Barring successful legislation establishing a trigger, why not create three-party contracts, with parents being the third party? (If the trigger is meant to bring parents to the bargaining table, why not literally bring them to the bargaining table, and open that process to the public.)

Are there more? Of course, Some opponents in Florida asked for a trigger that would prohibit for-profit charter operators from benefitting. Others asked to strengthen public school parent advisory councils. The PTA wanted to know why legislators were pushing a bill that its members rejected. But these were political statements dressed as legislative inquiries and did nothing to address the fundamental idea for the trigger in the first place – giving parents the democratic power to turn around a struggling school. The legislative remedies so far have been imperfect. Without a meaningful dialogue, they will remain so.

But are happy families and budget savings enough? What about academic achievement? Do the private schools these kids attend teach them anything? How does their performance compare with those of special-needs kids who remain in public schools? Right now, we simply don’t know.

Currently, 28,800 special-education students receive publicly funded private-school scholarships in seven states. Florida’s McKay program serves nearly 80 percent of those youngsters; according to Manhattan Institute scholar Marcus A. Winters, it’s “a nearly ideal template” for policy makers to consider. The Sunshine State’s Legislature established it 13 years ago with the encouragement of then-governor Jeb Bush, and today the program enjoys modest bipartisan support of a sort seldom found with vouchers of any kind. Last year, the McKay program served about 22,200 students, about 6 percent of the 340,000 young Floridians with special needs (to be precise, those students who received an Individualized Education Plan). While that number may be small, the savings these students yield to the state are significant; the average award of $7,209 paid to McKay students was less than the $9,000 Florida paid per pupil in all of elementary and secondary education and far less than the sums typically spent for special education.

The Mckay voucher comes with virtually no state-mandated accountability.

But the voucher comes with virtually no state-mandated accountability. Most participating parents declare themselves satisfied with their chosen schools, but the public knows nothing about McKay’s effectiveness. Instead, Florida residents see press accounts of McKay students enrolling at private schools with dubious academic programs and suspicious business practices. When such reports surface, support for the initiative becomes unsettled, and some lawmakers overreact with calls demanding, for instance, state approval of textbooks and instructional materials.

Most programs modeled after McKay in other states are still small, but growing. Since 1999, McKay has expanded to help a majority of students with milder disabilities. About 82 percent of McKay students came to the program with IEPs that required moderate interventions. If they remained in public school, many would likely have received accommodations when taking the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Test scores are a muddy measure for students with severe cognitive disabilities, but it’s reasonable to gauge the performance of students with milder disabilities—with either a state assessment or a nationally-normed achievement test.

At a minimum, McKay and programs like it should adopt the same level of program measurement used in Florida’s other publicly-funded private option: the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students, which has also emerged as an “ideal template” for scholarship policies of its kind. (I should disclose that, for two years, I helped to run the policy and communications initiatives for the tax credit scholarship program) Under the terms of that program, participating schools must administer a nationally-normed achievement test and submit the results to a research team under contract with the state to measure the program’s academic progress. Schools that receive at least $250,000 in scholarship revenue must submit a financial report and those with at least 30 scholarship students must publicly disclose the gains of those students as shown on their tests. (This is in line with the “sliding scale” of accountability that Fordham proposed for scholarship programs several years ago.)

McKay should reestablish its status as a pioneer by embracing a reasonable form of results-based accountability.

Presently, only Ohio’s new Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program takes similar steps toward accountability. Enrollment has just started, but students will be expected to take the same state assessments and statewide graduation test that is administered in public schools. Lawmakers in the Buckeye State had already required the same of students receiving its Educational Choice scholarships, which is a sizable statewide voucher program for youngsters otherwise trapped in low performing public schools.

McKay should reestablish its status as a pioneer by embracing a reasonable form of results-based accountability. Doing so would overcome the objections from critics such as Sara Mead of Bellwether Education Partners. “There’s no evidence that children with disabilities need additional education options more than any other youngsters in underperforming schools, or that vouchers address the underlying problems in special education,” Mead argued in 2010.

It’s doubtful that McKay families would agree with that assessment. But in order to remain a sound and politically-viable policy option, special education vouchers need to demonstrate their effectiveness to the public. I have no doubt that they will pass the test with flying colors.

Instead, Florida legislators are using taut political muscle to join California, Mississippi and Texas in the attempt to empower parents to go so far as to convert a failing school into a charter—and they’re trying to maneuver the legislation through committee stops while leaving little time for debate. But if lawmakers try to take this out of the sunshine, they’re only going to sow the same confusion that has frustrated Californians.

If lawmakers try to take this out of the sunshine, they’re only going to sow the same confusion that has frustrated Californians.

Only the second attempted trigger in California ended in failure two weeks ago. Organizers at Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto had, at one point, convinced a supermajority of parents to sign a petition to trigger reforms before nearly 100 of them backed out. The Parent Revolution, which organized the Desert Trails campaign, says it has evidence that operatives for the teachers union fraudulently doctored campaign materials to thwart parents from pulling the trigger and misled others into revoking their signature. Doubtless, the union flexed its muscle to preserve its market share, but it probably didn’t have to break a sweat.

The campaign circulated two petitions—one to preserve Desert Trails as a traditional school but turn over decisions of instruction, hiring and firing to the parents, and a second to use the threat of a charter conversion as a backup. It’s little wonder that some parents would eventually say they didn’t know what they were signing. That has led to a need, argued the Los Angeles Times recently, for the state to intervene and throw some sunshine on the process:

Once parents sign petitions, their signatures shouldn't be subject to changes of mind. But that's true only if there has been a sensible and transparent process to provide them with complete information. The state board should refine the rules for trigger petitions. All parents should be officially notified about trigger campaigns affecting their school; that's not the way it currently works. And before they sign anything, parents should have an opportunity to attend open forums where they can hear from both sides, ask questions, challenge assumptions and debate details. Parent-driven school reform shouldn't be subject to misinformation or lack of information, or depend on which argument was heard most recently.

Florida could make a good parent trigger policy better by bringing such a level of transparency to its own measure—both before and after adoption. The legislation directs the Florida Board of Education to “adopt rules regarding the petition process,” but that’s vague and nebulous direction given the problems and setbacks we’ve seen in California. The trigger does, as its proponents argue, help to bring parents to the bargaining table, but the bargaining table has never been transparent in the first place, and families need clarity before making a decision that, for them, is a game-changer. All they have now is information warfare. Unfortunately, by limiting debate on such a polarizing bill—Senate leaders allowed more discussion after the vote—the Florida Legislature is providing a poor example to follow later.

It’s almost become flippant for Democratic lawmakers to disparage a school voucher as “a war on public education.”

Unlike many existing scholarship programs that award an attractive dollar tax credit for every dollar in contributions, Virginia would allow individuals and businesses to write off only 65 cents for every dollar they donate to a nonprofit scholarship organization. And lawmakers capped state funding for the program at a paltry $25 million a year. Even with these baby steps, it took Republican Lt. Governor Bill Bolling to cast a tie-breaking vote last week in an evenly divided 40-member Senate to pass the bill.

The vote was mostly along party lines, showing that Virginia Democrats learned nothing from members of their party in Florida, particularly those in the Black Caucus, who since last year have urged their brethren to look at this option differently. A similar program in Florida awards taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar credit for their donations to a scholarship organization and is currently capped at $175 million. Even at these numbers, the Florida program has still managed to hang onto the support of nearly half the Democrats in the Legislature. That’s not that surprising; the 40,000 children now on the scholarship are among the most impoverished constituents of these lawmakers.

If Marsh had looked at his legislature’s own bill analysis, he’d see how silly his hyperbole is. The fiscal note looked at Florida’s program, in particular, and found that enrollment last year only came to 2.3 percent of the eligible population in the Sunshine State. This program has been enrolling students for more than 10 years.

Consider, too, Arizona, where the legislature just doubled the maximum tax credit the state will award individuals and married couples who contribute to a scholarship organization. The program, the oldest of its kind, now benefits 25,000 students – or 2.3 percent of Arizona’s public school population. And it’s not even restricted to poor households.

The same can be said for a third: Georgia’s tax credit scholarship. Lawmakers in the Peach State didn’t means-test the scholarship, but they established a $50 million ceiling on the program. Enrollment amounts to a half-percent of the state’s K-12 public education system.

A $25 million cap in Virginia is one way to keep scholarship enrollment artificially low. Restricting tax credits to 65 cents for every dollar in contributions may assure the cap is unreachable in the first place by making it less attractive for corporations and wealthy individuals to open their wallets. So while Marsh may be pounding his chest for his base of support, talk of war only looks, at best, aloof. At worst, callous.

By the time the project gathered data during its final year of study, the schools participating in the voucher program were required to abide by a number of new regulations. Besides requirements to adopt curriculum, instructional, and graduation standards, the participating private schools had to test their voucher students with the same assessments used in public schools, and each school had to report the results. At a minimum, these new regulations “played a role” in generating the achievement gains found in the final year of the study, said Patrick J. Wolf, the project’s principal investigator and professor at the University of Arkansas.

The results show a need to further explore the right balance between parental choice and state standards.

“We cannot determine conclusively how big a role the accountability policy played, however, only that the combination of Choice and accountability left the MPCP students in our study with significantly higher levels of reading gains than their carefully matched peers in MPS after four years,” Wolf said.

Whatever the effect, the results show a need to further explore the right balance between parental choice and state standards, even if that discussion leaves many voucher proponents with a bad case of heartburn. After 21 years, taxpayers want to know what they have gotten for their money in Milwaukee. The political process that has enhanced the voucher program in good times and bad may be showing that Wisconsin is, after all, on to something.

The gatekeepers to the program may have, in recent years, excluded the poorest performing schools and left fewer to participate, but that has done nothing to discourage families. Quite the contrary, while the number of participating schools in the program declined from 120 to 107 in the five-year period of the study, student enrollment grew by 18 percent to nearly 21,000 students in the 2010-11 academic year.

And the higher standards may be doing less to dampen the unique characteristics of each participating school than to strengthen their core missions. Wolf said that many of the students in the project’s study were one to two grade levels behind academically, and each school employed varying strategies of support and instruction with two goals in mind: high school graduation and college enrollment.

Higher standards may be doing less to dampen the unique characteristics of each participating school than to strengthen their core missions.

These conclusions come at critical time for the voucher program. While the researchers examined the voucher’s effects on Milwaukee’s poorest, the program has expanded to include students who come from households with incomes up to 300 percent of the poverty level. And Milwaukee is no longer alone; a sister program now exists in Racine, Wisconsin. All of these changes have come despite the objections of the state Department of Public Instruction, which has over the years shamefully used its position to disparage the voucher program and the snapshot test performance of its students in press releases and in public assemblies. (Additionally, the School Choice Demonstration Project found that the disability rate among voucher recipients is, conservatively, four times higher than the rate reported by the department.)

In other words, the findings give everyone something to consider, but especially those legislators that are looking to establish new or enhance existing private school options. Milwaukee has provided its poorest students with a school choice that has led to reading gains and college enrollment rates that outpace the performance in public schools (math gains were similar between samples of voucher students and public school students) but some of that achievement may have come from the greater accountability that voucher supporters once resisted.

A public school establishment may react with pomposity and skepticism, but the evidence can show what the program has accomplished and can point the way to more work that needs to be done.

In May, Georgia’s highest court disbanded the state’s charter school authorizing commission, ruling that no publicly funded educational enterprise is permissible unless first engineered or christened by a local school board. A resolution that passed a supermajority vote in the House on Wednesday would ask voters to reinstate the commission by amending the constitution. This is significant, as Hunstein proclaimed that the constitution limits authority over public education “to that level of government closest and most responsive to the taxpayers and parents of the children being educated.”

This resolution puts authority squarely in the hands of the taxpayer.

This resolution puts authority squarely in the hands of the taxpayer and recognizes that nothing is more responsive or consequential to a child’s education than the choice the parent makes on his behalf. The commission created 16 charter schools before the court ruled it did so in violation of the constitution, but the commission merely provided families the lever to make the educational decision themselves.  

It’s true, as Hunstein notes, that Georgia voters last approved the constitution in 1983 – nine years before the nation saw the first charter school open in Minnesota and 10 years before the Georgia Legislature established its first charter law. It is nonsense to assume these same voters would have forever favored a scheme limiting their public education options only to those hatched by local government.

You don’t have to be a libertarian to see the value of an independent commission that authorizes more school choices for parents to consider. But a 4-3 majority of the Georgia Supreme Court believed that the commission is only an attempt by the state to compete with the principal of local control. That’s an antiquated constitutional test that would likely vanquish many 21st-century attempts to meet the individual needs of students.

It should be difficult to campaign for the sweeping reform parent trigger laws allow.

The effort may not have divided the school, as a Times headline asserted earlier this week, but it certainly led a community of parents to splinter into factions, including those who wanted to see change at a troubled school but not a wholesale charter conversion. As more states like Florida and Michigan consider their own trigger laws, they should set the bar high to make sure that transformational change is capable with only a supermajority of parents.

California’s law demands that a simple majority of parents at a low-performing traditional school can petition for a charter conversion, and most states with trigger proposals follow that formula. Ben Austin, the executive director of California’s Parent Revolution, which helped organize Desert Trails parents, has said it’s hard to meet even that threshold. He’s right. But a successful effort to upend a school community with only 51 percent support has the potential to tear that community apart and can leave the school with a parochial authority of parents who would leave permanent marks long after they’ve divested their social capital.

A parent trigger is good policy. It brings families to a bargaining table that has been the exclusive province of teachers unions and school boards, and it begins to rethink the way we govern public education in ways that meet the unique needs of low-performing and low-income students. As Austin has said, the parent trigger empowers parents to declare, “You haven’t listened to us for years, but now we have the power to fire you, so you have to listen to us.”

The trigger also helps to balance any one monopoly, which is why its first enactment last year in the Compton Unified School District shamefully met with strong resistance from a school board that made every attempt to intimidate the petitioners. And its popularity led to an embarrassing leak for the American Federation of Teachers, which drafted a memo that served as a textbook lesson on how to kill a trigger bill while giving parents a false sense of authority.

But a parent-directed reform with a tenuous hold on support and authority can lead to its own imbalance of power, a problem that can be checked if two-thirds of the families agree to sign up. That’s a threshold required to pass constitutional referenda in many states, and it’s one that can give parent unions an iron-clad tool of leverage to turn around a struggling school.

The GOP presidential hopeful is both a blessing and a curse for home-schooling advocates.  Photo by Marc Nozell

The spotlight shining on Rick Santorum’s educational philosophy is both a blessing and a curse for home-schooling parents and their advocates. As the Los Angeles Times noted over the weekend, the Republican presidential hopeful has emerged as the most prominent home schooler in America, a fact that gives momentum to a movement that is growing in popularity to include, by some estimates, nearly two million people nationwide. But the same story also identified Santorum as the GOP leader who “bashes public schools” and disparages the government’s hand in keeping education mired in the Industrial Age.  

A greater range of home-school practitioners is making it harder to draw broad conclusions about the movement, but most commentators and journalists still see it far enough outside the mainstream to develop anything more than a caricature. Hence, readers end up with nonsense like that from Dana Goldstein, who writes in Slate that liberals who home school their children are violating their own progressive values by sowing distrust in public institutions. But however unreasonable it might be for Goldstein to draw upon extremes, Santorum’s weekend jeremiad only invites a similar inquisition.

That’s unfortunate for a home-schooling movement that demands more nuance to better capture the varying motivations of its adherents. “Home schoolers are now a diverse population,” Stanford political scientist Rob Reich wrote in 2005. “Indeed, it is easy to observe a kind of internecine warfare among the two most prominent advocacy groups, the Christian-based [Home School Legal Defense Association] and the more secular and inclusive National Home Education Network.” The wildly different ways states regulate home schooling make it difficult to gather data on the emerging trends, but the federal government last estimated, conservatively, that there were 1.5 million home schoolers nationwide, a 36 percent increase from 2003. Advocates say there are as many as two million children schooled at home, a number that would rival the nationwide charter school enrollment.

Santorum is hardly the first to call for a transformation of our one-size-fits-all public education system.

The trends also are blurred by the escalating enrollment of online learners at home. In theory, there’s little that separates a “home school” from a “virtual school” until we get into the arena of regulation, a word that instinctively unites most home schoolers in opposition. For the sake of their cause, home-schooling parents and advocates may have to overcome that instinct, especially as states contract more with online learning providers in ways that redefine the “factory” model of education that occupies so much of Santorum’s thoughts on schooling. Greater technologies can transform the home-school experience, but they’re not cheap. Legislatures can give home schoolers access to the growing number of virtual charter schools state by state, but it is reasonable to expect that they’ll ask for some account of their academic progress in return.  

These are the subtleties that escaped Santorum during his address to the Ohio Christian Alliance, and the pool of campaign reporters got their story as a result. What the press largely disregarded was the unoriginality of the candidate’s argument. Santorum is hardly the first to call for a transformation of our one-size-fits-all public education system, and one can go back to Ronald Reagan to find a more influential threat to reduce or eliminate the federal role in education. But Santorum is our presidential candidate today, and he’s feeding extremes to a hungry national debate on a cause that, at least among a growing number of followers, is searching for the center.

A cursory search through Catholic school codes of conduct shows that Noble’s policies aren’t so extraordinary.

Let’s set aside the fees for a moment and consider the “sauce” that makes up this particular charter network. State achievement test data show that Noble beats the public school test score average. Families have lined up for entry and the school has a long waiting list, despite – or maybe because of – its strict disciplinary policies. It boasts a 90 percent graduation rate, compared to 54 percent for Chicago Public Schools, and 91 percent of its graduating seniors go on to college.

It also puts a price tag on misbehavior. The student who collects four demerits in two weeks will be sent to detention and charged $5. Twelve detentions require a behavior modification class that costs $140. A group called Parents United for Responsible Education, or PURE, tallied all the fees the school has levied over three years and called a press conference Monday to announce the total: $386,745.

Julie Woestehoff and the folks at PURE, who identify charter and parental choice policies as “phony,” charged Noble with employing a “dehumanizing discipline system” that picks the pockets of already disadvantaged families. Yet the practice of levying fines for misbehavior has precedence in some Catholic schools. Give credit to the Chicago Sun-Times for calling the Chicago Archdiocese to determine whether the age-old institution of detention in Catholic schools comes with a cost. A spokesman with the archdiocese said that was not the case in Chicago, but the reporter shouldn’t have stopped there.

Ninety miles away, in Rockford, Illinois, St. Edward School fines students $5 for behavior that includes fighting, foul language, or “disrespect.” The money collected goes to existing scholarship funds. Mount Notre Dame High School in Cincinnati charges students $3 for chewing gum; $4.25 if the fine remains unpaid after one week. Students caught with a cell phone or cigarette (not necessarily both) at Mount Michael Benedictine School in Elkhorn, Nebraska, will be fined $25 for their first offense, $50 for their second, $75 for the third.

There are dozens of other examples, but is there an expectation that a seat in detention at a public school like Noble shouldn’t come with a fee? Judging by the reaction this week, a level-headed observer might say yes. But our conversation might be better informed by another layer of context. Few would accuse Catholic schools of being soft on discipline, or sloppy in student outcomes. And in many ways, the Noble charter network emulates the best of what makes many urban Catholic schools successful.

Noble CEO Michael Milkie was careful to call the charges “fees” not “fines,” and the money goes to cover the costs of detention. This is splitting hairs, and the semantics will only exacerbate the scorn heaped on a charter that stands among the best of any public school in Chicago. There is something to be said for asking families to put some skin in the game, especially if their children are the ones generating the costs associated with discipline. But until Noble is ready to defend the practice proactively, it will remain on the defensive. And it can’t rely on Chicago’s media to supply the context.

The passions stirred by a legislative effort in the Sunshine State to direct local tax revenues to charter schools show just how hard it is for charters to find equity in school systems that rely on property taxes to fund most of their needs. A Florida senate bill would make it mandatory for districts to share as much as $140 million in local tax revenues with charters on a per-pupil basis for construction and renovation. State law currently allows districts to voluntarily share that money. Not surprisingly, few volunteer.

A senate education committee passed the bill recently along party lines, and the reaction from school districts and newspaper editorial boards was apoplectic. “Wait. Rewind,” read the Orlando Sentinel editorial page. “Didn’t charter school prophets pledge to do more with less? Wasn’t less regulation supposed to deliver greater efficiency?”

The charter school must pledge to do more while others determine how much less it’ll get.

Yet it’s the charter school that must pledge to do more while others determine how much less it’ll get. A report released last week from Florida TaxWatch, an independent think tank and government watchdog, found that the state’s 517 charter schools perform their work with about 70 cents on every public school dollar. Some charters are able to access the state capital outlays that districts receive to pay for new buildings and building repair, but those charters only get about 40 percent of what districts get.

But the root of the disparity can be found in the funding formula that leaves Florida charters far from alone in state-by-state comparisons. Indeed, the Fordham Institute found in a 2005 report on the charter school funding gap that the disparity worsens in states that rely more on local sources of revenue. Additionally, a team of researchers at Ball State University in 2010 found that charter schools in only 15 states had access to local funds. Just 12 states gave charters access to facilities funding.

Perhaps districts in Florida and elsewhere can be forgiven for being a little possessive in recent years. Florida Gov. Rick Scott wants $1 billion back into public education, but that would just replenish the cuts the Legislature made to schools last year. The state’s superintendents association has aggressively fought against the local revenue sharing plan, telling the senate education committee that it has hardly anything left to share.

But the question remains: To whom does local funding belong – the district or the student? Stephen Wise, the Florida senate bill sponsor and chairman of the Education Committee, told critics, “They’re all our kids, and they’re all public school kids, and I think they’re not getting their fair share of things they need.” That echoes Fordham’s own approach, which considers that local taxes assessed for education “belong” to the child, not the school board:

If, under a duly enacted state policy, families choose to send their children to public charter schools, it’s only fair for all of their funding to “follow” them there. Any other policy treats some public school students differently from others and is thus unfair.

Wise’s legislation gets us closer to that position, despite the insistence of the Miami Herald editorial page, which proclaimed today that the bill would let charters “steal limited resources from those struggling public schools.” Absent such a policy, TaxWatch recommends that Florida, for one, allow charter schools to be their own local education agencies to remove their dependency on districts for federal and state funds. As in many states, only Florida school boards may authorize charter schools.

In Florida, at least, who controls the power to authorize charter schools may be a constitutional battle to fight another time. For now, allowing local dollars to follow local students will go a long way to overcoming the political compromises that leave too many inequities in public education.

The president would provide no new funding for the OSP, proposing instead to use the money available in the program to provide vouchers to currently enrolled students through the 2013-14 school year—effectively capping the number of scholarships available at a time when demand is spiking. He then would redirect $60 million and divvy it among Washington’s charter schools as well as “the District’s efforts to transform its public education system.”

Obama’s proposal shamefully sends the voucher movement back to familiar territory during an election year.

Despite the president’s long-held opposition to a scholarship program that has provided private school tuition assistance to more than 1,600 of D.C.’s most disadvantaged students, Obama found common ground with Boehner in April in order to avert a government shutdown and to preserve education initiatives favored by Democrats. “Life has been breathed into the voucher movement,” the Brookings Institution’s Grover J. Whitehurst said at the time.

Obama’s proposal shamefully sends it back to familiar territory during an election year.

Not long after he took office, Obama and Congressional Democrats shut down the voucher program to new students and as recently as last year argued that the OSP did nothing to raise student achievement. This ignores the findings from the U.S. Education Department’s own independent evaluator of the program, who found that the program increased high school graduation rates among participants by 21 percentage points. But that’s beside the point for the president.

When he and Boehner reached their compromise, D.C. families who wanted to participate in the program could move on with the assurance that politics had been set aside. After Congress reauthorized the program, enrollment in the Opportunity Scholarship grew by 60 percent.

Now the political headwinds have returned in a $3.8 trillion spending plan that has no room for this $20 million initiative for the poorest D.C. students. That’s disgraceful for a president who has chosen to spend as much as $64,000 annually to match his children with the school that best meets his family’s needs.

His attempt to find common ground with adult interests in public education has led Obama to policy positions that oppose school vouchers.

President Obama has historically understood that it’s the diversity of our communities that strengthens the greater good, but as New York Times columnist David Brooks noted this week, Obama has governed with a “technocratic rationalism” in his presidency that strives for uniformity and common effort. Thus, his attempt to engender comprehensive healthcare has roiled Catholic hospitals and social agencies that must support health insurance coverage that violates a fundamental doctrine of faith. And his attempt to find common ground with adult interests in public education has led Obama to policy positions that oppose school vouchers in general and the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship in particular.

Let’s leave aside the polarizing nature of voucher programs for a moment and consider a report released this week from our friends at the Hoover Institution that ably recognizes the fault lines and appreciates what Washington does well, and what it does not. The Koret Task Force on K-12 Education has called for a redefined federal role in education, one “founded on two principles that have served the nation exceedingly well for our entire history: federalism and choice.” Embracing neither the top-down requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act nor the devolution of absolute authority to states and school districts, the task force has turned to the organizing principle of choice and a system that offers lots of quality education options.

This calls on the federal government to employ its strongest attributes, namely its ability to gather data and information on school performance for families to consider when making the choice, and it calls for “backpack” funding that follows the child and is weighted to compensate for the higher costs that come with the education of high-need students.

Elaborating further, the task force report states:

“One great virtue of a ‘competitve’ system—a choice system offering lots of alternatives—is that, even if no schools actually respond to the competition, the schools that are providing a higher quality education will still have an advantage, the bad schools will lose students and money, and students will have options that prevent them from being trapped in schools that are not serving them.”

A model like this might be a heavy lift politically, but it does recognize that there is, to use Brooks’ phrase, “a think ecosystem of positive influences” that would have the ultimate effect of matching children with more options than they currently have—public or private.

It enhances the charter school sector while demanding more transparency from private providers than our current slate of voucher or tax credit scholarship programs currently provide. But in return, it weaves private and parochial schools into the fold of our social fabric. Obama’s modus operandi until now has been to favor giving parents the power to “vote with their feet” while promulgating rules and policies that keep the universe of choices discreet and focused on a common cause.

The federal government and its executive branch—no matter the party—have a long history of providing support and aid to Catholic social agencies that carry out a secular mission. While that support has existed to varying degrees, and perhaps has crumbled in the current administration, these agencies have always been accountable for their services. Now that the contraception mandate has tightened the tension between government and faith in the public square, it has helped to illuminate other examples of Washington’s tendency to dampen diversity with good intentions.

No storybook ending is imminent. The school district says it’s broke and can’t pay its teachers past the end of the month. Gov. Tom Corbett has assured students they will be able to finish the year at Chester Upland, but no one knows where the money is coming from. And the New York Times has identified another problem: the Chester Community Charter School, which claims it’s owed nearly $7 million in past-due payments from the district and the state.

One shouldn’t expect a state judiciary to demand budget cuts from the charter before it can expect to get paid the money it’s owed.

Chester Community Charter School has grown to enroll 45 percent of the district’s students, and its presence has led commentators to declare that the school choice policies of the Corbett administration, and the governor’s relationship with the charter school owners, are to blame for Chester Upland’s financial woes. That’s to be expected. But one shouldn’t expect a state judiciary to demand budget cuts from the charter before it can expect to get paid the money it’s owed.

Yet the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania said exactly that in a January 30 ruling when denying a preliminary injunction to the charter school. If the district met its obligation under the charter school law and paid what it owes Chester Community Charter School, the school district likely would shut down by mid-February, Judge James Gardner Colins wrote. The school system already has fired a quarter of its staff and furloughed 180 teachers. “The Charter School,” Colins added, “has not discussed the possibility of layoffs or cutting educational programs.”

According to the school, it hasn’t had to. Chester Community Charter School opened in 1998 with 97 students. It’s now the largest charter school in Pennsylvania serving about 3,000 students in grades K-8. Its chief executive, David Clark, wondered aloud in a statement following the court’s ruling whether he and his team should jettison its best business practices and “suffer the negative effects of program reductions and layoffs” so that it can establish enough credibility to receive the funding due to them.

This might be a little tone deaf. Public opinion will decide whether the charter school should have pursued relief in the courts so aggressively. Clark and other leaders at Chester Community, which is managed by the profit-making Charter School Management, Inc., have blundered in claiming that the charter’s own closure is imminent without the district’s payments, even though it has $4.2 million in reserves and the district’s own staff had pledged to work without pay to ensure minimal disruption to the children’s educational experience. Moreover, Judge Colins admonished the charter for turning to the courts before exhausting all “administrative remedies.”

But Clark can be excused for his frustration. The problems at Chester Upland preceded the birth of his charter by several years, and many entities, public and private, have gotten their hands dirty. The state took over the district’s finances in 1994. At one point, Edison Schools was brought in to turn around its academic performance to no avail. The state gave control of the district back to the school board two years ago. Between 2010 and 2011, the board lost about $18 million in revenue.

It might be politically expedient for Van Roekel and the National Education Association to suggest that charter operators see the money for public education in Chester as nothing more than “a treasure chest ripe for plunder.” But it does nothing but fan the flames against a charter that has successfully scaled up to educate nearly 1 in 2 students in a community ravaged by poverty. And while it has yet to decide on the merits of the charter’s legal claim, the Commonwealth Court already has taken a heavy hand in determining just how much success Chester Community should exhibit.

A lot of negative forces contributed to Chester Upland’s present circumstance, and it will take an equal or greater number of positive forces to turn it around. That should include a successful charter school.

Will the one-size-fits-all approach of a school board dampen the unique characteristics of a charter?

The report from Midwestern-based consultant IFF to D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray identifies a need to invest in more high-performing schools in a cluster of underserved neighborhoods, and it suggests that D.C. Public Schools and the Public Charter School Board can play an equal and complementary role in fulfilling the task. Despite the release of creative energy in the District in the last several years, just 1 of 3 public school students is enrolled in what IFF labels the highest-performing of four “tiers” of schools. To turn that around, the report recommends filling the capacity in the top tier, investing in the second and third tiers, and upending or closing the bottom dwellers.

IFF has, and will continue to, take heat for looking kindly throughout its history on charter schools. Most of the fourth tier of schools includes the poorest performing in the school district, and IFF recommends that the charter board recruit “the highest performing charter school operators” to fill the void of school closures left in the neediest neighborhoods. But this also complicates what makes choice and charters valuable to families. It focuses on “zones” in a way that many charters do not.

In one sense, IFF redefines the value of choice: “Despite the range of choices in the District, two-thirds of students attend a school within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. The pattern suggests that most students prefer to attend a school close to their home, yet for most students, a local performing school is not an option.” Of the charter students who stay close to home, just 15 percent attend a top tier school. For D.C. Public School students, just 13 percent attend a neighborhood Tier 1 school. Yet in wanting to deliver more options to these underserved neighborhoods, especially in replacing underperforming traditional schools with high-performing charter schools, IFF tends toward an approach in admissions characterized by neighborhood preference.

As Robin Lake of the Center on Reinventing Public Education observed in a report last month, charter school environments built to satisfy neighborhood preference or “assignment zones” can collide with the needs and desires of families who may not embrace the charter’s focus. Also, simply calling on the D.C. charter school board to “recruit the highest performing charter school operators and ask them to replicate their performing school model” in high-need neighborhoods, as IFF recommends, assumes the one-size-fits-all approach that can leave traditional schools so risk-averse.   

To his credit, charter board executive director Scott Pearson told The Washington Post that he welcomes the prospect of greater collaboration with the school district, but calls the idea of neighborhood admissions preference for charter schools “a very dangerous, slippery slope.” No one should begrudge an enterprise that delivers high-quality options to students with the greatest need, but D.C. has been innovative because of its focus on public and private school choice. Let’s hope that collaboration doesn’t co-opt educational diversity.

Cassandra Hart, an education professor at the University of California, Davis, conducted a study of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students to take a deeper look at the characteristics of the participants and the public schools they left. With help from Northwestern University economist David Figlio, Hart finds that scholarship recipients not only are among the lowest performing students who are economically disadvantaged, they came from public schools that are, she writes, “troubled along a number of dimensions.” (Full disclosure: From 2009 to 2011, I helped to develop the policy and communications initiatives for the nonprofit that administers the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship.)

Significantly, Hart says the students might have been less likely to use the voucher if they had better public school options to begin with: “Where they have a greater ability to exercise public choice, they are more likely to do so even if they are also offered a private school voucher.”

As for the cherry-picking, the students who enrolled in private schools on the scholarship tended to have lower standardized test scores than other students on free or subsidized lunches in public schools before entering the program. And, according to surveys and Hart’s analysis, the public schools they left were challenged in the following ways:

• They had lower aggregate student performance on standardized tests;
• They had higher rates of violent incidents and out-of-school suspensions;
• And principals were more likely to say that “parents worry about violence in this school” while teachers were more likely to say they spent more of their time on discipline.

Parents of these students were driven to exercise a choice for their child that was unavailable in the public school system.

So parents of these students were driven to exercise a choice for their child that was unavailable in the public school system. They had limited options for open enrollment and charter schools, Hart writes, but they were more likely to live near a wide variety of private schools.

But a greater array of private options doesn’t imply they’re all are ideal choices. The most convenient private school options available to scholarship participants received lower parent ratings, Hart explains, “suggesting that their private school options engender somewhat less client satisfaction than do the private schools proximate to Non-participants.”

In other words, these parents are desperate for options. Their children are the worst-performing students among their peers at public schools that are disproportionately poor-performing with outsized incidents of violence and disruption. They are more likely to be black and poorer than other students on free or reduced-price lunch. And there are limited public choices in their district other than their assigned school, which motivates their families to apply for the tax credit scholarship regardless of whether all their private school options are particularly attractive.

Hart concedes there are limitations to her study that make the results difficult to generalize to programs in other states. Scholarship students in Florida are concentrated in major urban areas. Further research is warranted, she writes, on access to public options. But one conclusion is clear in this case: The question of cherry-picking has become irrelevant.

Just four months ago, Noguera embraced the complexity of his position while enduring the jeers of a protest movement with whom he sorely wanted to find common ground. “I think we need ways to change and improve our schools, and if charters become one means to do that, I support it,” he once said. On Wednesday, he told The New York Times that the SUNY board has harbored a political agenda to increase the number of charter schools and has ultimately hastened inequities between charter and traditional schools.

Noguera has muddied a debate painfully in need of clarity.

Noguera didn’t contradict his earlier statements as much as he deserted the complexity of his convictions all too quickly. In doing so, he has muddied a debate painfully in need of clarity. His resignation highlights how support for charter school initiatives can weaken when advocates fail to agree on why school choice has value to begin with.

Similarly, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, another self-professed charter school supporter, twisted this knot further by disparaging a consultant’s report for D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray that called for, among other things, investing in seats at higher performing charter schools with students from low performing traditional schools. “Regular schools and the people who work in them, with a few exceptions, would become a permanent education underclass,” Mathews writes.

Really? Besides distorting the recommendations from Gray’s consultant—who asserted that D.C.’s charter board and school district must work collaboratively to target ten priority neighborhood clusters—Mathews’ hyperbole assumes that investing in high-quality charter school seats in Washington would unravel a traditional neighborhood school system that is, as he writes, “still woven into the American education system and our culture.”

With friends like these, the growing coalition of support for charter schools will have a harder time coalescing around a common purpose. And those who oppose the expansion of charter schools with absolute conviction will enjoy the ambiguity.

After Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed a sweeping voucher program for low-income students, the head of the state’s teachers union, Michael Walker Jones, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that parents living just out of poverty’s reach would have neither the time nor the knowledge to make the right educational decisions. In another case, an Orlando Sentinel editorial panned a proposed “parent trigger” bill working its way through the Florida legislature by asserting that parents in the worst performing schools would be unable “to face a steep and brief learning curve in making such a game-changing call.”

So what can a sample of relatively poor families in Mexico do to inform the conversation? That’s what a team of researchers set out to explore in several rural Mexican states participating in a decentralized government education program we might consider almost revolutionary in the United States.

Paul Gertler, Harry Patrinos, and Marta Rubio-Codina examined an initiative that directly involved parents in the management of schools located in disadvantaged communities. The program, Apoyo a la Gestiόn Escolar (School Management Support), gives seed money to parent associations so that they can make improvements to a school’s resources and materials. In return, the parents must commit to greater involvement with the school and they must receive instruction in school-based management.

Parents, even those a step above poverty, are ready to exercise more control over their children’s education.

The results of the study were published in September in the Journal of Development Economics. The program, the authors concluded, showed increased parental participation in school matters and improved communication between parents and teachers. Parents involved in the management of school affairs were more likely to complain about poor teaching and teacher absence, and they were more likely to know when their child was performing poorly and when to intervene.

And because parents were more accountable for their children’s performance, the researchers found that their intervention led to a decrease in failing grades and a decrease in grade repetition for students in primary school grades. Students moved ahead by about a year in reading and math after dropout rates fell by more than 1.5 percentage points.

“The AGE project shows just how much improvement a simple parental and community empowerment program can achieve when it is implemented properly,” said Patrinos, a World Bank education economist, in a blog post last week.

The program isn’t perfect. The researchers didn’t find any improvement among Mexico’s most extreme cases of poverty. But, just as school choice policies do in the United States, the project is one tool to help educators become more responsive to the needs of low-income families. It opened up a communication and information link to parents, something that school districts and teachers unions in the U.S. say they want to do. But Apoyo a la Gestiόn Escolar goes a step further by giving low-income parents power and holds them accountable for their performance.

Florida is just the latest state to call for a trigger to give parents that power and the waiting lists of families to obtain the mature tax credit scholarship options in Florida and Arizona show that parents, even those a step above poverty, are ready to exercise more control over their children’s education. We would do better to help them make the right decisions than to point out their limitations.

Taking the safe route too often welcomes mediocrity.

Many are not, as a report released today by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers makes evident. And widely varying practices means that too many authorizers aren’t making the right decisions to keep good schools open and bad schools closed, NACSA president and CEO Greg Richmond said.

Just 6.2 percent of the nation’s charter schools up for renewal in 2010-11 were closed, down from 8.8 percent the year before and 12.6 percent in 2008-09, according to the report. While the association attributes the decline to any number of factors – stronger policies regulating charter oversight, better quality among charters, or even political pressure to keep bad schools open – it believes that trend is heading in the wrong direction. “Our experience suggests that authorizing agencies should be closing more, rather than fewer, poor-performing schools,” Richmond said in a written statement.

Authorizers with a larger portfolio of schools are more likely to implement what the association identifies as “essential practices,” but size doesn’t always matter. Nonprofits represent the smallest percentage of those that oversee charter schools, but they employed the highest average number of essential practices, according to the survey. And, incidentally, they closed more schools on average than other types of authorizers, including school districts, colleges and universities, or independent chartering boards.

The association is careful not to identify a “best” application or closure rate, but our expectations for charter schools have heightened in the last few years as more and more networks like KIPP enter the market. Scrutiny of a charter school application on the front end does not require avoiding all risks, but it does demand that we’re asking the right questions before we take the plunge. Rotherham is right to say that the price of innovation and progress is the creation of some lemons. But until we adopt the right benchmarks at the beginning, we should be less patient about living with them.

Moves to enhance tenure reform, merit pay, and transparency in public school performance all receive praise from ALEC, but it’s the “roaring comeback of parental choice” that signals the promise for academic gains. When Ladner and Lips note that low-income students in Washington, D.C., have made outsized leaps on the fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP reading and math exams, they point to an expanded public and private school market, combined with an audacious array of policy changes that recognized district teachers by their merit and eliminated administrative blockades to innovation. “Hall of Shame members ought to rethink their improvement strategies,” the authors conclude, referring to the bottom-dwelling states that have stumbled in their NAEP gains and, which incidentally, have done little to enhance choice, tenure reform and transparency.

Indiana has joined Florida as ALEC’s gold-standard state, adopting an A-through-F school-grading system, limiting collective bargaining among teachers and establishing what will ultimately be the most expansive school voucher program in the nation. Indiana’s comprehensive reforms now constitute ALEC’s model omnibus bill. And, Ladner and Lips assert, “reformers should study that model bill carefully.” But they don’t note that the state’s testing regimen will capture both public and publicly financed private school students, a standard of transparency that proponents and skeptics alike will scrutinize heavily and a standard that continues to be divisive in the choice movement.

The authors, too, are largely silent on the development of common core standards and assessments, now adopted by nearly every state in the wake of the Race to the Top strategies that embraced many of the reforms lauded in the ALEC report. That silence is not surprising, considering ALEC is one of the most vocal opponents to the common core model. But the gold-standard states of Florida and Indiana are among those that have adopted that model, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a revered figure in the report card, implored ALEC last summer to view the standards “as a floor from which states can build a framework of high-quality and rigorous coursework that equips all students with the knowledge and skills for success in life.”

The authors conclude the report by looking ahead to the promise of digital learning, which they argue is “a potentially game-changing reform that should appeal to a broad and diverse coalition of parents and constituents.” They’re right to call it game-changing, but the coalition won’t be as easy to build as they claim. Just ask The New York Times. But it might just be true, as they assert, that we’re at the “end of the beginning in the battle for K-12 reform.” Such a coalition is more conceivable now than ever.

This post originally appeared on the redefinED blog.

As many do, Carey traces the movement’s roots to Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” but he dispatches the left turn that school choice made in the 1970s as if it was a political afterthought. In reality, the means-tested policies that facilitate public and private school choice today more closely resemble the proposals from the political left and center that surfaced between the Johnson and Reagan administrations than anything that Milton Friedman sought to test. Greater awareness of that history might not transform the debate, but it could help to lift it from isolation.

The means-tested policies that facilitate public and private school choice today more closely resemble the proposals from the political left and center that surfaced between the Johnson and Reagan administrations than anything that Milton Friedman sought to test.

Lost to history are the rich Chicago radio debates that took place between Milton Friedman and Jack Coons, who was to champion the cause for equity in the financing of public education and emerged as one of the most stalwart liberal advocates for school choice. To Coons, the poor would show us the right way to develop a proper test for parental choice that extended to private and religious schools, under regulated conditions. He and colleague Stephen Sugarman developed their centrist theory and constitutional framework in their 1978 book, Education by Choice, which drew the attention of a Democratic congressman from California, Leo Ryan. Ryan urged Coons to draft an initiative, saying he would raise the money and organize the campaign. This all happened, of course, before Ryan left to investigate reports of human rights abuses at the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, where he was murdered. Coons and Sugarman began the campaign anyway, confident the money would somehow appear. “Both libertarians and teachers unions laid their curse, and the thing died,” Coons would later write.

Around that time, a newly elected Democratic senator named Daniel Patrick Moynihan crafted a measure with Republican Senator Bob Packwood that would have awarded up to $500 in tax credits to families paying private or parochial school tuition. At one point, 24 Democrats and 26 Republicans in the Senate ranging from Sen. George McGovern to Sen. Barry Goldwater signed on as co-sponsors. Moynihan would write that, when the bill was heard, there was a palpable strength felt in the chamber “of the views pressed upon us that this was a measure middle-class Americans felt they had coming to them.” Even soon-to-be elected President Jimmy Carter promised, in a campaign message to Catholic school administrators, that he was “committed to finding constitutionally acceptable methods of providing aid to parents whose children attend parochial schools.” That was before Carter received the first-ever endorsement from the National Education Association. After he took office, the Moynihan-Packwood measure eventually fizzled.

And this flirtation with history cannot forget the forgettable experiment at Alum Rock, California, home to the nation’s first test of school vouchers. Although the experiment took place under the auspices of the Nixon administration, the project began with a team led by the liberal Harvard social scientist Christopher Jencks. “Today’s public school has a captive clientele,” Jencks would write in Kappan. “As a result, it in turn becomes the captive of a political process designed to protect the interests of its clientele.” It was that political process that eventually doomed Alum Rock to a compromise that agreed only to choice within public schools and guaranteed employment for the instructional staff. Just six of the district’s 24 schools volunteered to be the educational guinea pig. The experiment lasted just five years.

This isn’t just a trip down memory lane. What links these initiatives is a call for equity, and that has precedence in today’s targeted voucher and tax credit scholarship laws in Milwaukee, Florida, and most other states that have initiated private school options for the poor and disabled, and it has precedence in the positioning of our more innovative educational experiments in the inner city. I wish the organizers for National School Choice Week would do more to point to this Democratic heritage when they highlight the areas where we see growing bipartisan support for choice today, and I wish commentators like Kevin Carey would stop dismissing these points in history as if they had no relevance to our dialogue today. That job might be easier if people like Dick Morris stepped out of the spotlight for a moment.

This post also appeared on the redefinED blog.

How do we categorize, or properly finance, the smorgasbord of options available to today’s student?

How do we categorize, or properly finance, the smorgasbord of options available to today’s student? And how do we enhance the debate to rethink how we administer a public education? The resistance to customized forms of schooling is not new. Many a well-meaning principal and superintendent fought back-to-basics schools and International Baccalaureate programs and gifted education for fear they would dilute other public schools. But too many of today’s well-meaning school leaders and policymakers remain stuck in those old conversations.

Furthermore, our dialogue remains muddy with assumptions that keep us entangled in old fears about vouchers, charter schools, virtual education or, more particularly, homeschooling. And that does little to enrich the support systems that allow, for instance, a child to take Advanced Placement and honors courses at a magnet school in the morning before taking courses through an online learning provider in the afternoon. What of the talented low-income child in the inner city who receives the value of a rigorous Catholic education with the help of a publicly funded voucher in grades K-8 but who, for high school, chooses the IB program in her district? Has the state failed to deliver her a “uniform” public education?

By now, traditional schools should have learned to co-exist with the menu of public and publicly funded private options that have proliferated during the past two decades. And states and school districts should have learned better from the promise that comes with the autonomy of charter academies without spending so much effort to slow their expansion and dampen their unique characteristics.

At the same time, school choice supporters too often dismiss concerns of accountability and quality with an arrogance that is tone deaf to the educational demands and expectations of the 21st century. In their fervor to free the education market from more Byzantine regulatory conditions, the more passionate advocates for choice sometimes forget that public education is in the public interest. The success of their cause depends more on the visible development of the student and the visible empowerment of the parent than on the invisible hand of the free market.

This blog celebrates the many potentials that come with school choice – through whatever platform those options may take shape – but its mission is also to improve the national conversation about what my Fordham colleagues have long termed “accountability, done right.” I’ve come to edit Choice Words after having spent a professional lifetime in education journalism and communications, developing principles of equity and transparency in public affairs, but also challenging my own assumptions on what makes an education truly “public.” I’m married to a mission-driven and talented public school teacher who plies her trade at a coveted district school, but I believe a quality education can become manifest through many providers if we continue to move beyond our notion of the neighborhood school. 

Please join our dialogue. Our posts here will be provocative but respectful, and I hope the responses will be the same.

Adam Emerson is the editor of the Choice Words blog and the new director of Fordham's policy program on parental choice. Keep up on all of Adam's commentary by subscribing to the Choice Words RSS feed.

“We’re thrilled to welcome someone with Adam’s abilities and track record to the Fordham team,” said Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. “Few commentators combine his experience, expertise and enthusiasm in this vital realm of education with his talents as a writer.”

Emerson comes to Fordham from Step Up For Students, where he served as the assistant director for public and policy affairs. In that role, Emerson developed and executed communications strategies for an organization that provides private school tuition assistance to more than 37,000 low-income children throughout Florida. Previously, he worked as a journalist for more than nine years, including eight years as an education reporter for the Tampa Tribune and Lansing (Mich.) State Journal.

Media inquiries should be directed to Fordham’s external relations manager, Ty Eberhardt at (202) 223-5452 or teberhardt@edexcellence.net. More information about the Thomas B.Fordham Institute is available online at its redesigned website: www.edexcellence.net. 

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More democracy, not less, is what this movement is about.

Given my own experiences, I read Deborah Meier’s recent column comparing today’s education reformers in America to Boris Yeltsin (of all people!) with some trepidation. Meier is right that well-connected “new Russians” did a bang-up job buying state-owned property for a song in the 90s (really stealing it), creating billionaires overnight while leaving most ordinary citizens impoverished. She’s wrong, however, in thinking that “the people” ever controlled that property in the Soviet era, or that oligarchs and ed reformers both “smell property like a beast after prey.”

Despite Meier’s claims about Yeltsin doing away with “inconvenient” ownership of the state’s wealth by “the people,” wealth in the USSR was owned and controlled (in fact, if not in name) by the nomenklatura who ran industry, agriculture, and education for the socialist state. It goes without saying that party officials didn’t suffer from the food shortages that hit Russia as late as 1990; “the people” did. To the extent that ordinary Russians got their hands on the finer things in life (fine food and clothes, televisions, etc.) it was often through connections in the West. A joke from the late Brezhnev era has the Soviet premier stopping at a Moscow apartment to see how ordinary people are living under his rule. He knocks on the door and tells the little boy who answers that he (Brezhnev) is responsible for all the new creature comforts they enjoy. The boy turns away, excited, to announce to his parents that Uncle Mitya from America has arrived to visit!

That history lesson aside, Meier’s suggestion that education reformers “smell property like a beast after prey” in their efforts to improve America’s schools and provide more choices to parents is very troubling. Most of us, I suspect, agree with her that parents deserve more control over their children’s schooling. That’s why school choice (and funding to support it!) is so central to the agendas of many reform organizations. It’s not as if the Gates and Walton foundations aspire to own the charter schools they invest in; on the contrary, meaningful representation of parents on boards and serious responsiveness to the needs of families are key priorities of the private philanthropists who support choice. More democracy, not less, is what this movement is about.

We agree on one thing: Nostalgia for the past (Soviet or otherwise) is not going to get us anywhere. Looking forward, Meier might find more friends on this side of the wall than she expected.

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle rarely discussed outside the Catholic Church and the European Union, and it’s a shame so few academics and advocates of school choice in the United States talk about it. It is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units' capacities to function for the common good. At this past weekend’s inaugural international school choice conference in Fort Lauderdale, an Italian researcher introduced the concept to describe why a stubborn region in his country could not accept the government’s insistence that public education must be centrally administered. A sympathetic audience nodded in approval, but there was no obvious sign that the conference understood that its mission was just given political order.

Subsidiarity is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units' capacities to function for the common good.

If there was, it could have better informed the rhetorical jousting match that happened minutes later between Stanford University political scientist and union scourge Terry Moe and United Federation of Teachers vice president Leo Casey. For Moe, author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, the problem of public education is one of structure, organization. “Nobody has a coherent vision of the whole, and no one is organizing schools in the best interest of kids,” he said. Casey countered that Moe favors market-driven and top-down “punitive” reforms that diminish an institution of public education built from the ground up in a model of civil society.

Would that it were so. If we’re to take Casey at his word, then his union would favor the public support of an educational enterprise built in the American tradition of association and social charity with minimal interference from a higher order of government and bureaucracy, the kind of effort facilitated by charter school and school voucher policies. Moe was right to call out the union’s insincerity in promoting transformative reform and its role in maintaining a structure of public education that is largely unresponsive to the unique needs of schoolchildren. But, except for calling for an end to the collective bargaining of work rules among public school teachers, he stopped short of defining how we can reorganize our governance of public education.

If the principles of subsidiarity were more commonly dispatched in our nation’s school reform debates, it could inspire more competing ideologies to find common ground and it could expand our definition of what we consider “public.” We have wrung our hands over what could have stopped the closure and consolidation of 49 Catholic schools in Philadelphia, but we have failed to collectively acknowledge that the urban Catholic school meets the original definition of the “common school” better than many schools that today we call public. The Philadelphia families whose households have been upended by the news have ordered their lives around the social capital they’ve invested in these schools, and the school closings leave fewer stakeholders who share the common goal of reaching out to the city’s most disadvantaged.

Former assistant education secretary Bruno V. Manno once wrote that subsidiarity is not only a principle of justice, but one of empowerment . “The doctrine of subsidiarity values both individual liberty and community,” Manno said. “It is a way to of formulating and pursuing true social order. Even though groups have varying interests, subsidiarity implies that common ends are not antithetical to the pursuit of particular interests.”

For states to grasp Moe’s plea to develop “a coherent vision of the whole,” they’ll have to see how traditional schools, parochial schools, charter schools and virtual schools can maximize their unique characteristics and organize around the common goal of a quality education for all. In many ways, that will force us to grasp political concepts foreign to our ears. But in other ways, it simply defines what we’ve been searching for all along.

School voucher critics generally approach their job reviewing the research on school choice with unfair assumptions, and otherwise insightful commentators risk recycling old canards. This is true with Thomas Toch’s critique of vouchers in the newest edition of Kappan, which concludes that voucher programs haven’t shown enough impact to justify their position in a large-scale reform effort. Questions of scale can lead to legitimate debate, but we’ll get nowhere until we acknowledge what’s in the literature.

Questions of scale can lead to legitimate debate, but we’ll get nowhere until we acknowledge what’s in the literature.

Toch grounds what he calls “the underwhelming record of voucher schools” first with an anecdotal report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which determined that America’s first voucher program “is very much like a teenager: heart-warmingly good at times, disturbingly bad at others.” The problem is that this newspaper report is nearly seven years old. We’ve learned so much since then, and at no time has the peer-reviewed science on the subject shown the back-and-forth swing from good to bad that the Journal Sentinel implied in 2005.

John Witte and Patrick Wolf, for instance, gave us a glimpse this year into their evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Among other findings, they conclude that the competitive pressure from the voucher program produced modest achievement gains in the school district, and that the gains of the low-income choice students were comparable to a low-income sample in the school district. Notably, they also found that high school students in the choice program enroll in four-year colleges at a higher rate than do students in Milwaukee Public Schools, a factor that Toch dispatches with a rhetorical afterthought.

And if “comparable” gains between voucher and public school students are insufficient to Toch, he need only turn to more recent evidence from Northwestern University’s David Figlio, who annually studies the academic impact of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program and wrote last summer that scholarship students had modestly better gains in reading and math than similar low-income students in public schools. “The estimated effects of program participation on math performance are statistically significantly positive at conventional levels … and the estimated effects on reading performance are significantly positive in the case of reading,” Figlio said. “These differences, while not large in magnitude, are larger and more statistically significant than in the past year’s results, suggesting that successive cohorts of participating students may be gaining ground over time.”

Critiques like Toch’s have been applied carelessly by others to charter schools and other choice initiatives as well, but Toch is correct to point out that public school choice has evolved to grow more accountable to taxpayers in a way that most voucher programs have not. But this, too, ignores more recent developments that would make private school options more transparent. Toch notes that Indiana has established a sweeping new program that will significantly increase the size of the nation’s voucher population, but he doesn’t mention that voucher students will be subject to the same state testing regimen as public school students. And next summer we’ll see the learning gains of Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students according to each participating school in which there are 30 qualifying scholarship student test scores.

The picture is far from perfect, but the lessons we’re learning year by year should help inform states to develop well-regulated private school options that help us find common ground on issues of accountability, quality and scale. Toch’s commentary may have succeeded in shedding more light on the lingering political divide on parental choice, but it also seems more relevant with debates that took place years ago. Vouchers and tax credit scholarships in Florida, Milwaukee and elsewhere are now well established in systems of public education that defy traditional notions of “public” and “private.” Enrollment in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship has grown by nearly 61 percent in just the last three years, and 95 percent of all scholarship parents rate their school as “good” or “excellent.” It’s time to graduate to a new conversation about choice where we leave old fears behind.