"Failing schools are failing students" - a powerful case for school choice from a man whose life's work has been rescuing young men from public schools and giving them a better education.
"If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with." --Ronald Wilson Reagan
Food for thought when AISD's Johnson High School, rated 'unacceptable' for the past 4 years and in danger of closure, is reporting progress in TEKS tests in May 31st Statesman. What 'progress'? If any, its from abysmal to merely awful: 35% of black students are passing math TEKS, last year a pitiful 14% did. Overall passing rates in 2008 are in the mid-60% range, still below the 70% score that is minimal for being considered acceptable. To put it another way - 2/3rds of black students are failing in math; 1/3 of all students are failing overall to learn the basic minimal curriculum and skills required.
The comment was made that 'buildings don't teach', which is certainly correct:
"Buildings do not teach. You can't hold a building responsible for the education of a child," said Trustee Cheryl Bradley
Parents Desperate for Choices
By Jamie Story, Texas Public Policy Foundation Education Analyst
Last month, dozens of Austin parents camped out on the cold concrete of the Austin Independent School District headquarters parking lot with one goal in mind: securing a better learning environment for their children.
For reasons ranging from better academics to safer learning conditions and less crowded classrooms, these parents sought transfers from their children’s assigned public schools to others within the district.
This campout has become an annual tradition for some Austin families. One Saturday each February, the district opens its transfer application period for the next school year. Some parents get in line up to 24 hours early to ensure their child’s first-choice school. This school year, 10 percent of Austin ISD students will transfer out of their assigned campuses.
Late that Saturday morning, a father hurriedly parked, jumped out of his car, and ran into the building with his son following close behind. Perhaps the babysitter was running late, or the oil change took longer than expected; whatever the reason, this man was clearly panicked at the possibility of his son not receiving the transfer he so desperately needed.
Another father left the administration building with his two sons, for whom he had just requested transfers. As he put it, “gerrymandering” by the school district had changed the school to which his home was zoned. “In the past, we have moved to get to a school that we wanted to go to,” he stated. But finances and other situations kept that from being an option this time around, he said.
The ability to transfer is especially important to his family, since one of the two boys is enrolled in special education classes due to a learning disability. This father’s transfer requests have always been successful, but he knows the mother of another special education student who has not been so fortunate.
While Austin ISD provides concerned parents with some degree of choice, parents should not have to camp out overnight in the hope that their child is one of the lucky few to be accepted for a transfer. At the very least, students should be allowed to attend the school of their choice within their local district.
Beyond that, the state must commit itself to offering meaningful choice between districts for students who are eligible for the Public Education Grant (PEG) program.
This program allows students in low-performing schools to transfer to higher-performing schools within or outside of their home district. Last year, more than 600,000 students were eligible for the PEG program, but unfortunately, a mere 188 exercised this choice.
It is not enough merely to create the options that allow children to transfer away from low-performing schools. Parents need to be aware of these options, and the system needs to be structured so that the schools have appropriate incentives to accept these transferring students.
But ultimately, unsatisfied parents need the opportunity to take their tax dollars to the public or private school of their choice. While public school transfers may offer a quick remedy for students in undesirable situations, they will never result in the systemic improvements associated with widespread school choice programs.
At Austin ISD that Saturday morning, a third father emerged from the administration building after requesting a transfer for his daughter, who “wants to go to a better school and wants to get a better education.” When asked if he would take advantage of a school choice program that would allow him to choose a private school instead, he said, “Yes! St. Ignatius [Martyr School] is very good, but is too expensive for my family.”
Perhaps someday, Texas parents will be blessed with a statewide school choice program that allows them to choose the public or private school that is best for their children. But until then, lawmakers should focus on ways to make school choice within the public system a viable option for more parents.
Jamie Story is an education policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.
Sol Stern says "School Choice is not enough":
During the 15 years since the first voucher program got under way in Milwaukee, university researchers have extensively scrutinized the dynamics of school choice and the effect of competition on public schools. The preponderance of studies have shown clear benefits, both academically and otherwise, for the voucher kids. It’s gratifying that the research confirms the moral and civil rights argument for vouchers. But sadly—and this is a second development that reformers must face up to—the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better.
Clive Belfield and Henry Levin at Teachers College, no friends of school choice, conducted a systematic review of over 200 analyses in that literature, concluding: “The above evidence shows reasonably consistent evidence of a link between competition (choice) and education quality. Increased competition and higher educational quality are positively correlated.”
The Weekly Standard reported on the debate:
The school choice movement correctly recognized that the quasi-monopoly powers that school boards and teachers' unions exercise over public education is an anachronism in a society increasingly built around consumer power. Their mistake, however, was in thinking that you could be agnostic on what these schools ought to be teaching. ...
You can't be indifferent to the curriculum, E.D. Hirsch argues in his response to Stern. Without making content an explicit part of your education agenda, you abdicate to some third party--bureaucrats, textbook writers, political activists--control over what is actually taught every day. That's not only what parents really care about, it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement. "Grade-by-grade core substance of the curriculum is what schooling is," Hirsch writes.
Ultimately school choice deserves support for reasons more fundamental than markets and incentives. School choice is about getting parents involved in the education of children. Parental responsibility cannot be exercised without a level of parental choice, and parental involvement in a child's education correlates with higher achievement. We need to treat education as a parental responsibility, and one that parents delegate and decide, not as a Governmental responsibility that bypasses the parents.
We all know that a statewide voucher program is the beginning of improving our education system and teaching our next generation the necessary skills to succeed. Now is our time to take up the torch of the voucher issue and bring the issue to the people.
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San Antonio voucher program to end, but voucher debate will not
An article appeared in today's San Antonio Express-News. After 10 years, Children's Education Opportunity Foundation (CEOO) of San Antonio -- which has provided some scholarship money for parents to send their children to private schools -- will end with this school year.
CEO San Antonio is the sister program to Horizon, a voucher program for kids in the Edgewood Independent School District. Both are funded by San Antonio businessman James Leininger, arguably the state's biggest support of school vouchers.
Jessica Almanza has sent her daughter Jenna to St. Leo the Great Catholic School with a CEO voucher for the past five years. She said she'd find a way to keep her daughter there. "My first thought was, 'What are we supposed to do now?' This is our choice. Are we supposed to abandon our choice?" Almanza said. "I'm not saying public schools are bad, but this is what's right for my daughter."
Horizon, the better known of the two programs, was billed as a decadelong experiment to prove that vouchers not only will help students who use them to go to private schools, but also improve public schools by providing competition. It currently serves 1,703 Edgewood students and is scheduled to end this year.
But CEO, which serves almost 700 students, has been available for students all over San Antonio and pays up to $1,500 a year in tuition assistance — just under half of the cost of most Catholic schools' tuition on the South Side.
The program wasn't scheduled to end this year and it left parents, and Catholic school leaders, surprised. "We thought CEO was going to continue indefinitely," said Carol Johnson, principal of St. Leo's, where 43 of 186 students use CEO vouchers. "Parents have considered it a blessing that CEO was there for them. Otherwise a private-school education would be beyond their means."
Voucher critics speculate that shuttering CEO and Horizon might mean the end of the voucher debate in Texas. Leininger, who has spent $50 million funding the programs, long has lobbied for a publicly funded voucher program.
But Ken Hoagland, a spokesman for Leininger, said they're not giving up. They'll continue to lobby for a publicly funded voucher program at the grass-roots level as well as reach out to legislators that represent inner-city districts, Hoagland said. "Dr. Leininger's hope was that when state legislators saw the results of letting parents choose any school they wanted for their child that they would see this is a reasonable solution to the high drop-out rates in public school," Hoagland said, pointing out that more than 90 percent of students in the Horizon and CEO programs not only graduated from high school but went on to college.
Hoagland said Democrats in other states are beginning to warm to the idea of school choice — a broad spectrum that includes charter schools and voucher programs. He still hopes to convince lawmakers, Democratic and Republican, that vouchers are a good idea. "We're just going to keep trying and not make this a partisan issue," Hoagland said. "Really, his (Leininger's) passion is for the children not the politics…."
The article which appeared in the San Antonio Express-News is online here: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA021408.01A.ceovouchers.3805efb.html
Voucher myopia digs at the school choice proposal in Utah, but brings up the usual mythical arguments against school choice.
As a parent who sent our children to a private school for a while in Austin, I found the experience a complete rebuttal to tired argument of opponents of school choice.
(When we moved our kids into public schools, it only confirmed our experience.)
We found a school that could better educate our children at half the cost of a public school education, at only $3000 tuition. It served people who mainly of limited means. I found that even poor parents are motivated to make large sacrifices to educate their children, in some cases more motivated and self-sacrificing than well-to-do parents.
We also experienced a remarkably good education that was built on old-fashioned technology and teaching principles. The experience proved that effective learning has very little to do with the level of amenities in the school, such as how fancy the buildings are (the school buildings were not great, but the learning was 1-2 grades ahead of the best public schools in Austin); quality education has everything to do with how the teachers teach and more importantly how parents help motivate their children to learn. I learned that in reality, all schooling is homeschooling.
These parents who sent kids there did a double service to the community: They were sacrificing financially so that their children would have a better education, and they were saving the public schools from the $100,000 burden of taking a child through a K-12 education. We really are backwards in our thinking in not thanking or wanting more kids in private schools and less of a burden to taxpayer financed education.
In Utah, the proposed $3,000 parental voucher for education could and would indeed be used by the same kinds of parents willing to make some financial sacrifice to better their children's education. The idea that incentives only work if they are 100% is myth easily debunked by any 10% off sale. Incentives always work at the margin. There is competition today, with homeschooling and private schools being chosen even with the cost and inconvenience compared with just sending your child to public school.If 3% go to private school with no vouchers, each incremental subsidy would increase that amount. Choice and competition is limited by the financial advantage of public school subsidies, and as the playing field gets leveled more, that choice and competition will increase.
Any partial state subsidy will clearly give more educational choices to more parents, whether they are low-income parents able to spend $1,000 a year for a school that has $4,000 tuition, or spend $3,000 at a school charging $6,000, We are told "only" 14 percent of Utah schools are under $3,000 in tuition - well, that is still a choice available for some low-income parents for a no-cost education. Good luck finding even a single public school that will educate children that cheaply and yet have willing customers paying for it.
It is absurd to talk of vouchers "hurting" the public schools, as if students exist to serve schools. Schools should exist to serve students! And if vouchers provide choice for students that leads to more effective education, then it is a good thing.
Thus the bizarre conclusion:
"While vouchers will not hurt public education within the first five years, they would needlessly be giving a government handout to these families at the expense of the average taxpayer."
Giving money for the express purpose of educating a child is "needlessly giving a government handout"? Yet that is the sole purpose for the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on public education. Or is there some agenda besides educating children that drives the insistence on the inefficient, monopolistic school system.
"No matter how much voucher proponents claim the right of parents to use their tax money to choose where their child is educated, that money is not their own."
Education taxes are raised and spent for the ostensible benifit of the children, yet the children or their parents should have no right or claim on how it is used? That socialistic ethos leads to the unaccountable system we have today.
"Let's assume that the average private school is significantly better than the average public school. If I am middle-class, why should I subsidize a poorer family's child's opportunity to have an education far better than the one my child receives? "
So the 'logic' is that it is wiser for the middle-class to keep the poor locked into bad schools that cost twice as much to the taxpayers, than let the poor family get ahead? Apparently the win/win concept is lost on this man.
We know the way it ought to be: Schools should serve students, and the money spent on education should be focussed on what is best for the schoolchildren, not the 'system'; parents should have a choice and say in their children's education; the education system should have accountability, allow for competition, and not be a monopoly; and excellence should be the goal for all not just for some.
To be pro-school-choice is to be pro-school-children.
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