SC Treasurer: School Choice Makes Financial Sense

From GreenvilleOnline.com
By Converse Chellis

My goal as state treasurer is to safeguard our state's financial future and work toward making South Carolina a better place to live, raise a family and do business. Part of a better future for all South Carolinians is the recruitment of higher paying jobs into our state. To accomplish this, we will need a better educated workforce. But, we must offer more educational choices for South Carolina families to ensure this happens.

My children were fortunate in that they were able to make a choice of which school they wanted to attend. Our daughter chose to finish her education in a private school and my son elected to continue his education in the public school system. Our family chose the best path for each of our children.

Education is crucial to a better future for our citizens. We must find innovative approaches that enable parents to choose what is best for their children. The clock is ticking and our economy is in freefall.

The South Carolina Educational Opportunity Act creates a path for thousands of South Carolina children to earn an education that helps them to break the cycle of poverty plaguing so many of our families.

The bill, S. 520, sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of state senators, creates a tax credit for parents who send their children to private schools. The tax credit will go to those who home school their children and individuals and businesses who donate to student scholarship organizations.

An analysis by the former director of the South Carolina Department of Revenue, Burnet Maybank III, shows that the legislation will save taxpayers $5.4 million dollars in the first year. That number could be much higher depending upon how many students opt for private schools if the bill becomes law. He estimates 3,790 children would take advantage of the credits – a figure from a 2005 Board of Economic Advisors analysis of similar legislation.

The main reason it would benefit the state is that the tax credit is limited to $2,433.50, which is 50 percent of the General Fund average per pupil allocation for the state. So for every credit granted, the state saves $4,867 that it would otherwise have to send to the school district. Maybank estimates the home school credit and scholarship component would cost the state about $3.7 million; but that is more than offset by the savings generated by the tax credit part of the bill. Millions more will be saved by local school districts that will continue to receive all the locally raised taxes despite having fewer children to educate.

While the numbers are compelling, the moral imperative for passing the bill is even stronger. Of the projected 690,363 students in public school, 73,772 are attending schools rated as failing. Some 67,000 of that group are at or under 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

And even for those students fortunate enough to attend the best public schools in the state, they still lag far behind their peers in other states. The most recent American Legislative Exchange Council “Report Card on American Education” ranks South Carolina 42nd of the 50 states across a broad swath of measures, including a state average graduation rate of 52.8 percent. That's 17 percentage points below the national average.

We need to give our students options. As a state, we've already endorsed school choice at the higher education level through HOPE, LIFE and Palmetto Fellows Scholarships. Those scholarships allow students to use state money to attend their choice of public or private universities. But we can never expect to increase the number of students qualified to attend college if we do not first give them the right start in their education careers.

Other states are ahead of us in giving their disadvantaged students an opportunity for a quality education. Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania are among those that have taken the leap. Since a similar law passed in Pennsylvania in 2001, more than 3,600 companies have given more than $360 million to support scholarships and innovative public school programs in that state.

Children's Scholarship Fund Philadelphia, which projects it will award 3,300 scholarships next year to low income K-8th grade students and receives about 40 percent of its money through the tax credit program, has tracked its students.

Ninety-five percent of them graduate high school on time and 90 percent are going on to college. This is a phenomenal record given that its students are chosen by lottery, all are low-income, and that the graduation rate in Philadelphia public schools is 50 percent.

That is the record we can build in South Carolina with the Educational Opportunity Act. Failing to pass it will cost the state millions. But for the 73,772 students trapped in failing schools, it means a life sentence of poverty. In a time when we cannot afford to throw money at failing programs, this is one example where saving the state money will also significantly enhance lives.

Converse Chellis is the South Carolina state treasurer. For more information, go to www.treasurer.sc.gov.

Democrats and Poor Kids

From Review and Outlook
The Wall Street Journal

Sitting on evidence of voucher success, and the battle of New York.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.

In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.

President Obama's stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation's school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. "I'm looking at the data here in front of me," Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. "Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That's real progress."

Mr. Duncan's help in New York is in stark contrast to his department's decision to sit on a performance review of the D.C. voucher program while Congress debated its future in March. The latest annual evaluation was finally released Friday, and it shows measurable academic gains. The Opportunity Scholarship Program provides $7,500 vouchers to 1,700 low-income families in D.C. to send their children to private schools. Ninety-nine percent of the children are black or Hispanic, and there are more than four applicants for each scholarship.

The 2008 report demonstrated progress among certain subgroups of children but not everyone. This year's report shows statistically significant academic gains for the entire voucher-receiving population. Children attending private schools with the aid of the scholarships are reading nearly a half-grade ahead of their peers who did not receive vouchers. Voucher recipients are doing no better in math but they're doing no worse. Which means that no voucher participant is in worse academic shape than before, and many students are much better off.

"There are transition difficulties, a culture shock upon entering a school where you're expected to pay attention, learn, do homework," says Jay Greene, an education scholar at the Manhattan Institute. "But these results fit a pattern that we've seen in other evaluations of vouchers. Benefits compound over time."

It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would "not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids." Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.

Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.

The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.

DC Opportunity Scholarship Kids Appeal to Obama

The Obama administration faces quite a dilemma. Does it side with Democrats in Congress who are doing the bidding of self-serving teacher unions, and force poor, inner-city, minority students back into failing schools? Or will it allow students, some of whom are in class with Obama's own daughters, to continue in the schools their parents have chosen?

Durbin: Private School for Me, But Not for Thee

Windy City Hypocrites: Senator Durbin, Governor Blagojevich and Obama

From The Weekly Standard

As part of the negotiations for passing the increasingly embarrassingly delayed omnibus bill, the Senate is considering a number of Republican amendments, one of which would strip the omnibus bill of language that would kill the Washington Opportunity Scholarship program. The program, which allows 1,700 low-income Washington students to attend private schools with a $7,500 voucher, would lose its funding at the end of next school year if the Senate doesn't pass Sen. John Ensign's amendment. Sen. Dick Durbin, who attended private school and sent his children to private school, like any good Democrat, insists that those who don't have the means to do so be loyal to the failing public school systems he spurned. Usually, this is the hypocrisy that dare not speak its name, but on the floor this week, Durbin treated the Senate to a justification:

My wife and I sent our three children to Catholic schools. That was our choice. We continued to pay our property taxes to support public schools. I have openly supported public school referenda in my community. I have done everything in my State to make sure there was adequate funding for public schools, but we made a personal family decision, based on a number of circumstances, to send our children to the local Catholic schools. That was our decision at our expense. I have no prejudice against private education. If I entrusted my children to it, I certainly believe in it. But the question always came up in my mind: Who should pay for it. We were prepared as a family to pay for it. It was an extra sacrifice we were prepared to bear.

Well, then, as long as he was voting to support public-school referenda. I'd like to see one other time in his career when the "question came up in his mind, 'Who should pay for it?'" and the answer was not the taxpayer. Odd that the fiscal and personal responsibility bug bites Durbin only when he's voting on a $14 million dollar program that allows inner-city kids to escape the teachers' unions grip on education and the Mags, guns, and apathy of their public schools.

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School Choice Can Free Education

From The Bluegrass Institute
By John Garen


Gov. Steve Beshear outlined in his inaugural address a sampling of Kentucky’s economic problems. He urged leaders to “take bold steps” to resolve them.

I agree with the governor. Kentucky faces serious issues that require bold action. And I’m going to suggest a bold step for our state that I hope lawmakers take seriously.

I am not alone, and I think the time is right: Let’s have serious education reform that brings market-based incentives into the province of primary and secondary education by creating charter schools and voucher systems.

Before you say they won’t work, remember that these kind of free-market ideas work everywhere else.

We rely heavily on market incentives for so many goods and services. Yet, we rely so little on them in education. We utilize the free market with everything from food, housing and clothing to the frivolous Magic 8-Ball and Whoopee Cushion.

Market incentives drive the mundane – paper towels and flashlight batteries – and the intangible – music, art and film, which touch deep emotional chords. Market-driven goods range from the simple to the sophisticated, such as automobiles, jet engines, digital cameras and complex legal cases.

The free-market system works pretty well. But somehow lawmakers resist using it in primary and secondary education policies. Given the considerable dissatisfaction with public schools, it’s high time to consider alternatives.

First, free and competitive markets create a great incentive system. An important basis for markets involves voluntary exchange. In order to profit, the seller must provide something that someone else wants. This forces the seller to provide something valuable.

Second, the free market creates competition. Not only must sellers provide something

valuable, its quality must match or exceed the competition. Sellers that provide better products draw customers. Sellers that improve efficiency increase profits.

These mechanisms disappear when government provides goods and services – the case with public education. Public schools get customers “assigned” to them based on a neighborhood. As a result, competition disappears. Yes, a family can choose schools by moving to a different neighborhood – a cumbersome and expensive way to create competition, thus limiting it.

Also, public schools automatically get money they need to operate from state and local governments. This eliminates the need to satisfy the customers – parents with students in a school. And it adds more reasons to please the political “masters” who control the money. All of this reduces the need for efficient spending, since the same number of students attend the school, regardless of the school’s policies or performance.

Bringing market-type incentives into public education does not necessarily translate into a lack of government support for schools. For example, government gives money to families to buy food in a foo-stamp program, even though they shop exclusively at privately operated stores.

One way to do this in education is by creating a charter-school policy. Here’s how charter schools can improve public education:

• Charter schools are privately run schools “chartered” by school districts and can enroll any student who wants to attend. The public’s money for the student gets credited to the school. So, parents dissatisfied with their child’s school can apply for a student’s admission to a charter school.

• The public schools must compete with the charter schools, and incentives to satisfy families and students enrolled in the public schools emerge – more bang for the buck.

A full-fledged voucher system represents an even bigger step toward market-based education incentives. Vouchers work this way:

• Parents get money, a “voucher,” for each of their children, and parents can spend the voucher at a school they choose. Parents can use the voucher at public or private schools.

• Parents can “top off” a voucher, meaning they can add their money to the voucher if they want to send a student to a more expensive school. For example, a school that charges tuition of $10,000 per year becomes affordable even to families of modest means with an $8,000 voucher.

• This education system operates no differently than the aforementioned food-stamps program.

Do not equate charters and vouchers with wild, untried schemes dreamt up by cranks.

They work in many places throughout the United States. Nationwide, charter schools have become increasingly common and now account for 1.8 percent of enrollment – but not in Kentucky.

The state tried to move to the forefront of education reform with the passage of Kentucky Education Reform Act 1990. But 18 years later, you cannot find Kentucky on the education-reform radar.

Moving to a system with market incentives ingrained in our educational system presents significant challenges, including implementation and transition issues, along with considerable political resistance and others. But overcoming these hurdles offers the best chance for an effective primary and secondary schooling system.

Let’s take this bold step.

John Garen is department chair and Gatton Endowed Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky, and an adjunct scholar with the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. A version of this article appeared in Business Lexington.

School Choice? Yes: New Studies Show All Students’ Scores Rise

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

By David Pusey

For cynics who do not believe school vouchers help students who remain in public schools or those who transfer to another public or private school of their choice, solid new evidence is emerging that will make believers out of the biggest skeptics.

Two new studies find school choice is indeed a tide that lifts all boats in educating all students. Just as Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winner and founder of the modern school choice movement, suggested 50 years ago, evidence now shows that competition helps all students, even those who remain in public schools.

A July 2008 study by David Card of the University of California-Berkley shows that competition in Ontario, Canada, led to higher achievement for all students. Pupils in Ontario may attend a public school or a Catholic school. The taxpayer-funded voucher is equivalent no matter whether a parent chooses a public or private school. Card and his research colleagues found that students who stayed in their assigned public schools performed better on standardized exams of reading, writing, and math under this school choice model. The positive effects on student achievement were largest where there was more choice. Since choice is restricted to public schools or Catholic schools in Ontario, one wonders if student achievement would increase even more significantly if options were made available beyond Catholic schools.

A second 2008 study, this one by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, analyzed two phases of the Milwaukee voucher program and showed student achievement increased with the availability of school choice.

When the Milwaukee program was initially launched between 1990 and 1996, there were never more than 1,500 students using a voucher. That’s because the state forbade children from using the scholarship to attend a religious school, and the voucher amount was very small.

After Wisconsin court rulings declaring vouchers constitutional, changes were made to the program. Milwaukee pupils were then allotted a $4,900 voucher and could apply that to a secular or religious school of their parents’ choice. That enabled more families to participate in the program.

The New York Fed study found no effects of vouchers — positive or negative — on any students when the Milwaukee voucher program did not provide much competition or choice. However, once students were given larger voucher amounts, once students could choose from a variety of schools, and once public schools actually faced competition, then students using the vouchers and students who remained in public school both earned higher test scores. This study confirms a 2003 study on this topic by Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby.

These new studies show that if you care about the students who remain in public schools, then more choice and more competition are what will improve their academic outcomes.

The point of these research papers is clear. If we are to be successful with vouchers in Georgia, we must not create a half-hearted program. Specifically, the data show that true competition will compel all schools to improve. A successful program would provide a substantial scholarship and have few restrictions where parents could use the voucher.

Some opinion writers and defenders of the status quo cite no academic benefits of school choice plans. However, a careful read of the evidence shows that while limited choice and limited competition may have no benefits, more competition does lead to academic gains for all students. It is telling that detractors of choice cannot find a single study that finds school choice harms a single student.

All Georgia public school students would benefit from students who use a voucher to attend a private school. The threat of losing customers — students and their parents — would motivate public schools to take better care of their remaining patrons.

David Pusey is an education specialist with the Center for an Educated Georgia.

Vatican Official Defends Rights of Parents to Educational Choice

From LifeSiteNews

By Hilary White

An “inclusive” education means that which respects the rights of parents to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children, a Vatican Cardinal told the U.N.’s International Conference on Education last week.

Citing the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent observer at the U.N. offices in Geneva, said, “Educators should remain aware that they carry out their service in cooperation with parents, who are the first 'educational agency' and have the priority right and duty to educate their children. This convergence of efforts is an evident application of the basic principle of subsidiarity.”

The concept of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching means that the needs of the individual are best served by the stratum of society closest to him, starting with the family. Catholic teaching holds that it is the purpose of the state to safeguard the family and the family’s rights. This doctrine is directly opposed to the high-level statist concepts of social theory that are currently at the fore in the UN and European Union, where governments are creating increasingly tightly regulated social conditions.

Tomasi’s assertion on the rights of parents is directly opposed by some European countries, most notably Germany, which retains a Nazi-era law forbidding homeschooling. In recent years, parents who have chosen to shield their children from the heavily secularised, and sexualised, state education have been hounded in the courts and had their children seized by the state.

Archbishop Tomasi also criticized the emphasis on “efficiency” in education and in society in general, saying that the global financial crisis is a “concrete lesson” in what happens when a society subordinates the needs of the individual to utilitarian ideals.

"‘Inclusion’ works through the promotion of a society that respects the dignity of every human person and goes beyond criteria of efficiency.”

“Only the person that conceives relations with others beyond criteria of productivity and control can value reality in a balanced perspective and assume appropriate responsibility.”

The Sidwell Choice

The Obama family leads by example

From The Wall Street Journal

Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington's elite.

AP

Vice President-elect Joe Biden's grandchildren attend Sidwell -- as did Chelsea Clinton -- where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. The Obama girls have been students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where tuition runs above $21,000. "A number of great schools were considered," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. "In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now."

Note the word "selected," as in made a choice. The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington's public schools are among the worst in America.

Most D.C. parents would also love to be able to choose a better school for their child, but they lack the financial means to do so. The Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program each year offers up to $7,500 to some 1,900 kids to attend private schools, but Democrats in Congress want to kill it. Average family income for kids in the voucher program is about $22,000.

Mr. Obama says he opposes such vouchers, because "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The example of his own children refutes that: The current system offers plenty of choice to kids "at the top" while abandoning those at the bottom.

Public Schools Not Good Enough For Obama's Children, But You Should Stay Put

The Sidwell Friends School

In a long tradition of hypocritical, limousine liberals, the Obama's have sworn before the NEA and the AFT their unyielding opposition to allowing poor, inner-city families the freedom to seek out better schools for their children. "We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools; not throwing our hands up and walking away from them," he told them.

But when it comes to his own family, he's not about to subject his children to those schools:

Obama's Girls Will Attend Private School

By Lisa Tolin, AP

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife have chosen Sidwell Friends School for their two daughters, opting for a private institution that another White House child, Chelsea Clinton, attended a decade ago.

"A number of great schools were considered. In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Michelle Obama.

She said Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, "bring with them a number of security and privacy concerns that come with being part of the new first family — and the school they've selected is positioned to appropriately accommodate that."

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School Choice for the Obama's

When Barack Hussein Obama addressed the National Education Association to spell out his plans "to invest" more of your money in public education, Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association proclaimed that Obama "gets it."

But when it comes to putting his children where his mouth and your money is, Obama is not willing to trust his own reforms and proposed massive increases in federal spending. Public schools may be fine for the "little people," but the Obama's will do what all the other liberal hypocrites in Congress do, find private schools for their children. Sure, they will placate those that the education establishment really serves -- teachers and administrators -- but they will not risk the lives of their two girls on the chance that massive increases in funding might accomplish what they have never accomplished before.

And those unable to get out like the Obama's? Did you really expect change you could believe in?

The New York Post has the story about Washington, DC's newest private school family:

MICHELLE LOOKS FOR A CLASS ACT

By Jennifer Fermino

Future Mom-in-Chief Michelle Obama flew into DC ahead of her husband yesterday on a reconnaissance mission to scope out private schools for her two daughters.

She headed first to the tony Georgetown Day School, an ultra-progressive prep school where students and their teachers are on a first-name basis.

"She's so tall. Oh, my gosh," said an awed eighth-grader, Ellie Lasater-Guttmann. "And she's prettier in person."

If Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, are enrolled at Georgetown Day, Michelle will bump into plenty of friends at Parent Association meetings.

The school, which is pre-K through 12th grade, is brimming with the offspring of several key Obama aides, and a rumored future attorney general, Eric Holder, is a trustee.

The Obamas are widely believed to be deciding among three schools - and the contest has Washington's prep-school parents riveted.

The other two contenders are Sidwell Friends and Maret.

"There's a frenzy going on in terms of speculation. It makes me want to vomit," one Maret parent told The Atlantic.

At a private dinner party several weeks ago, Beth Dozoretz, a major Democratic Party donor, handed Mrs. Obama a handwritten note from her daughter, a fourth-grader at Sidwell, pushing her school, the magazine reported.

The youngster wrote about how much she loved her school, which counts Chelsea Clinton and Tricia Nixon as alumnae.

After Georgetown, Michelle headed to Sidwell, a liberal Quaker school that many consider the front-runner in the heated Race for the Schoolhouse.

Joe Biden's youngest son goes there, and it has got the Secret Service drill down pat from the relatively recent Chelsea days.

But the candidate who won the White House on a platform of change might find the school too Clintonesque.

Many of Bubba and Hillary's close pals - including Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald - send their kids there.

Still to be visited is Maret, a college-prep school with an emphasis on sports.

The president-elect's senior foreign-policy adviser, Susan Rice, sends her kids there.

The DC public schools made an unsuccessful push for Chelsea Clinton back in 1992, but it seems unlikely the Obama girls will end up in a city school. The last presidential child to attend public schools was Amy Carter.

Malia and Sasha are currently enrolled in the rigorous University of Chicago Laboratory School, which boasts of concentrating on character development as much as its curriculum.

Obama and Vouchers

From the National Center for Policy Analysis

According to public opinion polls, 65 percent of adult African-Americans and 63 percent of adult Hispanics favor the use of school vouchers, and more than half of minority adults give higher marks to their local police than their public schools. Yet, the number of minority students that are quitting the education system is staggering, says the National Journal.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics:

• In 2006 nearly 11 percent of African-American students between the ages of 16 and 24 dropped out of school -- almost double the rate for white students.
• The dropout rate among Hispanics was 22 percent.
• Higher dropout rates also mean higher unemployment: in 2006, more than half of all African-American dropouts and more than one-third of Hispanic dropouts were not in the labor force.

The fundamental problem with the voucher debate is that it is always seen as an either/or proposition. For Republicans, it is the panacea to all the education woes; for Democrats, it is something that will destroy public education. So what does the future hold for them now with President-elect Obama?

Obama argues that voucher-based initiatives fund mostly faith-based schools, violating separation of church and state. But faith-based institutions may participate in voucher programs as a result of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which the Supreme Court ruled that students may study at any private or public school as long as aid is awarded directly to the parent or guardian and not the school.

Some critics argue that voucher programs drain funding that could be used to reform and improve public schools. But others counter that under voucher programs state aid allotted to public schools would move with the student regardless of whether he or she attends a public or private school. It's really no different than any other change of school; you want the money to follow the child, says the Journal.

Rev. Al Sharpton, Other Prominent Democrats Break with Unions, Join Choice Movement

Teacher unions and other traditional voices in education may be getting it wrong, the Rev. Al Sharpton has decided.

In the past, the civil rights activist has been known more for his opposition to school choice than for any teamwork with New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, but that changed radically in June when Sharpton joined Klein and a diverse group of fellow free-thinkers from all political stripes to form the Education Equality Project, a group advocating more charter schools and greater accountability.

"We keep going to the old ways that don't work, to protect the political careers of some and the contracts of others at the expense of the children. And the results are the data that we have," Sharpton said at a June 11 press conference.

"And someone has to have the political and the social courage--and I hope this group helps to begin that nationally--to say, 'Wait a minute, the children are suffering,'" Sharpton said.

Civil Rights Issue

Klein noted African-American student achievement lags four years behind that of white students nationwide. Fixing that, he said, may mean Democrats such as Sharpton will have to call on the National Education Association (NEA) and other unions to stop standing in the way of systemic reforms.

"We failed to fix what was so obviously broken in the 1950s and long before that," Klein said. "Today if you're born African-American or Latino in this country, if your parents are poor, you're much more likely to fall behind in a struggling school. You're likely to get much lower scores in math and reading than you need and in other core subjects, and you're much more likely to drop out. And if you do graduate, you're more likely to graduate less prepared for college and for success.

"We need to be clear about this. To me, this is not just an issue of school reform. It's a civil rights issue--indeed, the civil rights issue of our time," Klein said.

Broad, Bipartisan Support

The Education Equality Project's goals include creating accountability in every level of schools, putting effective teachers in classrooms of students with the greatest needs, and expanding parental choice through charter schools.

The effort has garnered unusually broad bipartisan support nationwide. Members include former Democratic National Party Chair and Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

"The results [of today's school system] are that over half of [our] young black men are not graduating school--many of them fast-tracked to jail and their lives destroyed. And we don't have the time, because we have our alliances and our old core missions, to speak on their behalf," Sharpton said.

"This group is being formed to give voice to that, to say to those that are bringing about this era of change, whomever that might be, in the White House or in our houses, that we must make a priority this devastating problem, of lack of equal achievement accessibility for young students around this country," Sharpton added.

Klein and Sharpton have already begun their campaign to bring their message to the White House by seeking out both presidential candidates this summer. Members of the Education Equality Project have met with the campaign staffs of the presumptive major-party candidates, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL).

NEA Wants More Money

NEA President Reg Weaver said the union has been tackling such issues for years.

"We have recognized that there are a number of children in urban and rural areas that are not receiving the education we want them to receive," Weaver said. "The policymakers know what is wrong, but they are not doing anything."

Weaver said school reformers ought to focus on securing "adequate and equitable funding," smaller classrooms, and more parental involvement. However, NEA and other unions are not so keen on tying teacher performance to wages or expanding charter schools, as the Education Equality Project proposes.

The question, some say, is what "adequate and equitable funding" means.

"Charter schools operate with 40 percent less funding than other public schools," said Jonathan Oglesby, director of public relations for the Center for Education Reform (CER), a charter school advocacy group based in Maryland.

According to CER's 2008 charter school survey findings, released in July, charter schools' main populations are at-risk, minority, and poor students. Eighty-five percent of charter school teachers responding to the survey do not participate in a union.

Say It Isn't So, Barack

From The Cascade Policy Institute

By Matt Wingard

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promises voters that he is a different kind of politician. There hasn’t been much proof of that yet, but Obama did hint early on that education reform might be the issue where voters actually would see "Change."

It would have been a perfect fit for Obama. As an African-American, he would know better than most whites just how poorly America’s inner-city school districts perform. The national dropout rate for African-Americans is 45 percent.

In addition, African-Americans (Obama’s strongest constituency) support school choice at a rate higher than any other ethnic group. A recent Harvard poll showed 67% of blacks support school choice for low-income students and 52% support vouchers for all children in failing public schools.

One would think that Obama, as an African-American, has some room to break from the education special interest groups on this issue. It would be hard for white liberals who support the status quo to criticize a black presidential candidate championing the right of every black child in America to get a decent education. The statistics and the emotional rhetoric would appear to provide candidate Obama a great deal of political cover.

So imagine the disappointment in the African-American community in Washington, D.C. when Barack Obama recently refused to stand up for their voucher program as Congress threatened to end it. Nineteen hundred students and their families were facing the prospect of having to leave the schools where they were succeeding and being forced to return to one of the worst performing inner-city school districts in the country.

Public pressure from many African-American leaders has saved the program for one more year (although with reduced funding), but Barack Obama was not one of those who stood up. Bear in mind that the primary fight with Hillary Clinton was over, and Obama was free to take positions that might upset those on the political Left.

In fact, he put out a statement opposing the program. According to ABC News (June 16, 2008):

On the same day that he was extolling the need to shake up the "status quo" in education, Obama also defended his opposition to school vouchers.

"We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools," Obama said… .

"But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools," he said. "That’s going to make things
worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country."

Barack Obama’s "commitment" to public schools might seem sincere if it weren’t for the fact that his two daughters attend a very exclusive private school, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where elementary tuition is $17-20,000 per child per year.

On the issue of educational choice, Obama is a hypocrite and, as it turns out, not a very different kind of politician at all.

Matt Wingard is Director of the School Choice Project at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market think tank.

The Power of Choice

New data from Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program

show even 'charity vouchers' can help public schools improve

As some educators and school choice advocates begin to question whether school vouchers can reform public education, a new study of Milwaukee's pioneering voucher program -- the nation's oldest and largest city-specific program -- concludes it has had a positive effect on the city's public schools and will become even more influential in the near future.

The study, "Can Vouchers Reform Public Schools? Lessons from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program," was released today by The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research organization. It finds that most voucher programs are not universal programs but simply "rescue" efforts that offer a life-line to poor parents with children in struggling school systems, what Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman characterized as "charity" vouchers.

"Since existing voucher programs are limited largely to charity vouchers, or rescue efforts, it is not surprising that they have produced no dramatic improvement in the public schools," writes author George A. Clowes, Ph.D., a senior fellow for education studies for The Heartland Institute. "Before writing off universal vouchers, it would seem prudent first to actually try them."

Clowes shows how competition from voucher schools in Milwaukee, despite being hobbled by legal challenges, a voucher amount that is less than half the public school's per-pupil spending, and enrollment caps, has prompted the Milwaukee Public Schools to implement a long list of reforms, including before- and after-school programs, more Montessori schools, improved teacher selection procedures, decentralization of budgeting authority to local schools, and greater influence of parents in local school councils.

According to Clowes, the voucher program gave school reformers including public school officials considerable clout in their negotiations with public school system interest groups. The results include a high school graduation rate that improved from 49 percent in 2002-03 to 58 percent in 2006-07. Black and Hispanic graduation rates during this period increased more than the white graduation rate. This was accomplished despite rising minority and low-income enrollments as a share of total MPS enrollment.

Critics of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, says Clowes, overlook the fact that steadily increasing voucher school enrollment had little apparent effect on MPS because of growing K-12 enrollment during most of the program's history. Since 2003-04, however, MPS enrollment has been falling while voucher school enrollment has continued to rise by an average of 1,500 students a year. Public schools are finally being exposed to serious competition for students.

"The next few years are likely to reveal the reforming power of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program on the Milwaukee Public Schools, since only now is the success of voucher schools posing a genuine competitive threat to existing public schools. The city's public schools may begin to improve more rapidly in response to this enhanced competitive environment," Clowes concludes.

"Can Vouchers Reform Public Schools? Lessons from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program" is available for free online at http://www.heartland.org/article.cfm?artId=23540. The printed report is available for $19.95 by calling The Heartland Institute at 312/377-4000.

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Editors: Report author George A. Clowes, Ph.D., a senior fellow with The Heartland Institute and founding managing editor of School Reform News between November 1996 and January 2005, is available for comment on this study. To communicate with him, please contact Dan Miller, Heartland's executive vice president, at 312/377-4000 or by email at dmiller@heartland.org.

The Heartland Institute is a 24-year-old national nonprofit organization based in Chicago, Illinois.

Poll Shows Most Oklahomans Don’t Prefer Public Schools

From The Tulsa Beacon

Results from a new public opinion survey taken in Oklahoma in late April indicate that more than 4 of 5 voters - 83 percent - would send their children to private, charter or virtual schools or educate their children in a home school setting. The survey was released today by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) and the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, along with eight other co-sponsors.

The survey touched on such issues as tax-credit scholarships, public school funding, and school choice. The results of the poll - the first of its kind conducted in the state - indicate divided public opinion on the quality of Oklahoma’s public school system. Forty-one percent rated the public schools as poor or fair, while 40 percent indicated the schools were good or excellent. Nineteen percent were undecided.

According to Paul DiPerna, director of the Friedman Foundation’s School Choice Survey in the State, “Oklahoma’s K-12 system does not fulfill parents’ schooling preferences. If tuition were portable to both public and private schools, it seems as though families and students would sort and match themselves across school types much differently than is allowed in the current system.”

The survey results indicate majority support for tax credits for both businesses and individuals who contribute money to nonprofit organizations which distribute private school scholarships. Fifty-four percent of those polled support tax credits for businesses, while 57 percent support tax credits for individuals. A larger majority, 58 percent, supported legislation creating a tax-credit scholarship system for students in low performing schools.

This past session the Oklahoma legislature failed to pass a bill that would create tax incentives for businesses that donated to private school scholarships. The measure passed the Oklahoma Senate but failed to make it past the Republican controlled House.

The scientifically representative poll of 1,200 likely Oklahoma voters was conducted April 25-27 by Strategic Vision, an Atlanta-based public affairs agency whose polls have been used by Newsweek, Time Magazine, BBC, ABC News, and USA Today among others. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In addition to the Friedman Foundation and the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, other sponsors of the poll include the Department of Catholic Education-Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, Americans for Prosperity-Oklahoma, American Legislative Exchange Council, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Center for Education Reform, Connections Academy, Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, and the National Catholic Educational Association.

Give Parents A Choice In Education, Says Bob Barr

The federal Department of Education is spending almost $70 billion this year on a function not even mentioned in the Constitution. “The Department should be closed down and the money left with the American people to use for education at the family, local, and state levels,” says Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee.

While spending so much money on programs that should not exist, in 2003 the Congress created a small voucher program started for students in Washington, D.C., which has some of the worst schools in the nation. Now the Democratic majority is planning on killing the initiative, putting nearly 2000 students back into the failed public school system. “The only federal education program Congress wants to get rid of is the one doing the most to help poor kids,” observes Barr.

But since education is not a federal responsibility, “a better way to promote educational opportunity is at the state level,” explains Barr. There are now 22 different choice programs in 14 states. Some of those initiatives provide vouchers; others create tax credits. “I commend Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue for recently signing into law legislation creating a state income tax credit for individuals and companies that donate to groups which provide private scholarships for students,” said Barr.

In fact, “private scholarships have become an increasingly important choice mechanism across the nation,” Barr notes. Examples range from the District of Columbia's Washington Scholarship Fund to Portland, Oregon’s Children’s Scholarship Fund. “In this way average people who want to improve education can avoid the political obstacles to reforming the public schools,” he adds.

America’s public educational monopoly is not working. “The failure to adequately educate our children to compete in the international marketplace and to be good citizens in a free society is truly scandalous,” says Barr. “The answers will not come from Washington. Instead, they will come from families across America as they educate their own children, put their children into private schools, and improve the public system,” Barr adds. We expect choice and competition throughout the economy. “It’s time to apply those same principles to education,” he insists.

Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, where he served as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, as Vice-Chairman of the Government Reform Committee, and as a member of the Committee on Financial Services. Prior to his congressional career, Barr was appointed by President Reagan to serve as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and also served as an official with the CIA.

Since leaving Congress, Barr has been practicing law and has teamed up with groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Conservative Union to actively advocate every American citizens’ right to privacy and other civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Along with this, Bob is committed to helping elect leaders who will strive for smaller government, lower taxes and abundant individual freedom.

Putting Children Last

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

The Wall Street Journal

Democrats in Congress have finally found a federal program they want to eliminate. And wouldn't you know, it's one that actually works and helps thousands of poor children.

We're speaking of the four-year-old Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers to about 2,000 low-income children so they can attend religious or other private schools. The budget for the experimental program is $18 million, or about what the U.S. Department of Education spends every hour and a half.

This fight has nothing to do with saving money. But it has a lot to do with election-year politics. Kevin Chavis, the former D.C. City Council member who sits on the oversight board of the scholarship program, says, "If we were going to do what was best for the kids, then continuing it is a no-brainer. Those kids are thriving." More than 90% of the families express high satisfaction with the program, according to researchers at Georgetown University.

Many of the parents we interviewed describe the vouchers as a "Godsend" or a "lifeline" for their sons and daughters. "Most of the politicians have choices on where to send their kids to school," says William Rush, Jr., who has two boys in the program. "Why do they want to take our choices away?"

Good question. These are families in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. More than 80% of the recipients are black and most of the rest Hispanic. Their average income is about $23,000 a year. But the teachers unions have put out the word to Congress that they want all vouchers for private schools that compete with their monopoly system shut down.

This explains why that self-styled champion of children's causes, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congressional delegate from the District of Columbia, is leading the charge to kill the program. Ms. Norton contends that vouchers undermine support and funding for public schools. But the $18 million allocated to the program does not come out of the District school budget; Congress appropriates extra money for the vouchers.

The $7,500 voucher is a bargain for taxpayers because it costs the public schools about 50% more, or $13,000 a year, to educate a child in the public schools. And we use the word "educate" advisedly because D.C. schools are among the worst in the nation. In 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all urban public school systems on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Opponents claim there is no evidence that the D.C. scholarship program is raising academic achievement. The only study so far, funded by the federal Department of Education, found positive but "not statistically significant" improvements in reading and math scores after the first year. But education experts agree it takes a few years for results to start showing up. In other places that have vouchers, such as Milwaukee and Florida, test scores show notable improvement. A new study on charter schools in Los Angeles County finds big academic gains when families have expanded choices for educating their kids.

If the D.C. program continues for another few years, we will be able to learn more about the impact of vouchers on educational outcomes. The reason unions want to shut the program down immediately isn't because they're afraid it will fail. They're afraid it will succeed, and show that there is a genuine alternative to the national scandal that are most inner-city public schools. That's why former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and current Mayor Adrian Fenty, both Democrats, support the program.

"Hopefully," says Mr. Chavis, "Congress will focus on the kids, not the politics here." Barack Obama might call that the audacity of hope, if he finally showed the nerve to break with the unions on at least one issue and support these poor D.C. students.

Georgia Governor Signs School-Choice Bill

From Family News in Focus

About 10,000 students could benefit from landmark legislation.

Thanks to a $50 million school-choice bill signed into law last week by Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, students stuck in failing public schools will be able to transfer to private schools.

The Scholarship Tax Credit program allows corporations and individuals to grant private-school scholarships in exchange for a tax credit.

Jamie Self, vice president of public policy at the Georgia Family Policy Council, said about 10,000 children could receive assistance.

“We’re looking forward to helping organizations start scholarship funds so students can get the education that their parents feel is best for them," she said.

The law puts Georgia among the leaders in school-choice legislation, with two programs in play. The state’s Special Needs Scholarship has been helping kids for the past year.

“Across the country, we are seeing more and more states adopting programs," said Andrew Campanella, spokesman for the Alliance for School Choice. “School choice provides a competitive marketplace. It gives parents options that they desperately need, and it revitalizes communities.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Most states have policies and programs that increase education options for families.

Kids Deserve Choice of Better Schools

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger, 7/4/99)

As a sixth-grade public school student in 1963, I was asked to deliver a speech about brotherhood that my class had written to commemorate National Brotherhood Week. The riots that accompanied James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi had occurred a year earlier, and photographs of the dogs and fire hoses being turned on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, were fresh in the minds of Americans everywhere.

The closing words of that speech, suggested by our teacher, have remained with me ever since. They were the words of another Long Island student, an African-American girl, who said in a forensics competition, "Take my hand, for it is clean; take my heart, for it is pure; but do not refuse me justice because of the color of my skin, for if you do, I will refer you to God who made me."

The battle for universal civil rights, for freedom and opportunity for every American, has been the animating struggle of American history. It is a struggle that continues to this day. Meredith's struggle concerned the right of African-Americans to attend the college of their choice. Today, a growing number of parents, policy makers and citizens are beginning to demand recognition for a new civil right -- the right of poor Americans to send their children to the schools of their choice.

The opposition of modern-day teachers unions to school choice has placed them in direct conflict with poor inner-city parents, and with our American ideals of liberty and justice. The ultimate threat to government schools comes not from caring parents seeking the best schools for their children but from self-interested teachers unions, which secure generous salaries and benefits from monopoly school systems where, in inner-city neighborhoods, only one of every four students who enters the ninth grade graduates from high school.

In the years since delivering the Brotherhood Week speech, I have been privileged to work in Congress for the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., and in the White House for former President Bush. However, it was only in the past five years, while working in the inner-city for Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, that I fully grasped how far many American school systems have strayed from their ideals.

In 1995, Pepsi-Cola Co. approached the mayor's office with a proposal that would have resulted in a contribution from the company to a college scholarship program for every case of Pepsi products sold in Jersey City. We thanked the company for the offer, but explained that the great majority of kids in Jersey City had no hope of going to college. More than half of those who enter public high schools drop out, and fewer than half of those who remain pass a basic test required for graduation.

Would Pepsi consider, we asked, contributing to a new, privately funded scholarship program being established to help low-income parents who want to send their children to private elementary and secondary schools? This plan involved no public funds, would ease the burdens on the city's overcrowded schools, and would let poor people exercise the same choices enjoyed by more affluent parents, including the majority of Jersey City public schoolteachers who send their children to private schools. Pepsi agreed, and the scholarship program was announced to an approving media and a grateful city.

But within a day, we saw how ruthless those in control of the education monopoly are prepared to be in order to thwart choice and competition. Pepsi machines in public schools were vandalized throughout the city, and an official of the public schools (whose children had attended private schools) called Pepsi officials into her office to state that school choice is "elitist" and to protest Pepsi's involvement in the scholarship program. The president of the Jersey City teachers union, who sent his son to an elite private school, threatened a New Jersey Education Association boycott of Pepsi products across the state if the company did not withdraw its scholarship offer. Pepsi complied.

The racial oppressors of Meredith's day were able to hold back racial justice for a time, but they ultimately were moved out of the schoolhouse door, allowing Americans of all races to enter. Those who oppress the poor today think they can do so forever, but they are on the wrong side of history.

School choice can be delayed, but it can not be denied. The most powerful human instinct -- the love of parents for their children -- will overcome today's heartless union bosses, who would leave children in schools where they have a better chance of dropping out than of receiving a diploma. Polls now show strong majorities in New Jersey and across the United States in favor of school choice. Political and religious leaders and the courts are increasingly giving the idea a thumbs-up.

Americans are starting to recognize school choice as an important chapter in the civil-rights movement. But what will history say of those who denied justice, stood in the doorway, blocked private initiatives, thwarted the potential and ruined the lives of so many millions of students? Perhaps, like the Long Island girl, we can only refer them to the God who made us all.

Daniel J. Cassidy serves on the South Carolina Advisory Board to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.