Mostly agreeing with Andy Smarick, but …

In his keynote speech to a national gathering of faith-based educators in New York City last month, Andy Smarick offered several thoughtful ideas about how to regulate and expand access to faith-based schools. I agree with some of these ideas. I disagree with others.

Here’s a rundown. I paraphrased Smarick’s positions for the sake of brevity.

Smarick: Faith-based educators need to assume some responsibility for the decline in student enrollment in their schools. Families today have many schooling options and faith-based schools need to become more effective and efficient if they are to survive.

Me: I agree. Many of the faith-based schools our nonprofit, Step Up For Students, works with in Florida excel at providing children with safe and loving environments, but they need to improve their instructional practices. We recently launched an ambitious statewide partnership with scholarship schools and families to enhance their teaching and learning.

Smarick: Faith-based schools need to be more transparent with their student achievement data and do a better job using these data to help communicate their schools’ effectiveness.

Me:  I agree, but I also think faith-based schools and parents need to better integrate standardized test results into their improvement efforts.

Every Florida tax credit scholarship student is required to take a nationally normed standardized test yearly. But faith-based schools seldom, if ever, use these test results to inform instruction, and parents in faith-based schools seldom, if ever, review their children’s results, either. The limitations of standardized test data are well documented, but these limitations do not justify ignoring these data.

Smarick: Faith-based educators must become more politically engaged if they want government to enact public policies making faith-based schools more accessible to low-income and working-class families.

Me: I agree. Money to pay tuition and fees is the primary obstacle blocking low-income and working-class families from accessing faith-based schools. Thanks, in part, to the political engagement of Florida’s Catholic and Orthodox Jewish communities, Florida is slowly eradicating this impediment through two voucher programs (i.e., Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten and McKay Scholarships) and a tax credit scholarship. Florida’s faith-based school enrollment is increasing as a result. The tax credit program is serving 30,000 more low-income students this year than it did just four years ago.

Smarick: The school should be the unit of analysis and improvement. Our goal is not to create great school systems, but great systems of schools.

Me: I agree and disagree.

More of our improvement efforts should be driven from the bottom-up, not the top-down. We should start with the goal of every student performing at a high level, then build the school systems, or systems of schools, that best allows us to achieve this goal. Too many of our education reform initiatives today begin with the top-down, command-and-control orientation public education adopted in 19th century. Public education needs to be well regulated, but we can’t regulate our way to excellence. Excellence comes from a relentless focus on meeting each student’s needs.

Smarick: Public education is increasingly embracing district schools, charter schools and private schools as equal participants in a portfolio of schools. Parents care more about a school’s quality than who owns and manages the school. They are “sector agnostic.”

Me: I agree. The future of public education is customized teaching and learning, with parents accessing instruction from multiple providers. Parents care about quality; not a school’s corporate structure or tax status.

Smarick: In exchange for state governments allowing low-income families to use publicly funded vouchers and scholarships to pay tuition and fees at faith-based schools, these schools should be regulated similar to charter schools.

Me: Whether I agree depends on the state. Allowing charter school authorizers to approve and regulate faith-based schools is a bad idea in Florida. Florida already has state-regulated voucher and scholarship programs that are allowing increasing numbers of low-income families to access faith-based schools, which is why Florida’s faith-based student enrollment is increasing.

School boards are Florida’s only charter school authorizers, and they are generally hostile to school choice programs that do not generate revenue for their districts. Allowing hostile authorizers, such as Florida’s school boards, to regulate faith-based schools would undermine faith-based education. In other states, where charter school authorizers are more objective and fair, Smarick’s suggestion might be a good approach politically and practically.

Smarick: All schools that receive public funds are part of the public education system and should be regulated accordingly.

Me: I agree, but this statement is incomplete; it ignores schools receiving no public funding that are also part of public education. If attending a school that receives no public funding allows its students to satisfy their state’s mandatory school attendance law, then this school is part of that state’s public education system and should be regulated accordingly.

Our government doesn’t have different safety standards for food purchased with private versus public funds. Medical standards for Medicaid patients are not different from standards for private-pay patients. And the FDA doesn’t have one set of drug safety standards for drugs purchased with private funds and another for those purchased with public funds. Why should the government regulate private-pay K-12 schools differently than public-pay K-12 schools? Do we care less about the education of private-pay students than public-pay students?

Schools receiving public funding should be required to show these funds are being spent properly, similar to what doctors and hospitals receiving Medicaid payments must do. But this is different than applying different quality standards to public and private-pay education.

Through this speech and similar commentaries, Andy Smarick is helping us think more deeply about how best to regulate and expand access to faith-based schooling. This is important work.