The 1990 launch of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program marked the dawn of the modern school voucher movement.

It was the product of an unlikely collaboration. Conservative acolytes of free-market economist Milton Friedman in the administration of Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson aligned with progressive black Democrats like the late state Rep. Polly Williams*.

The motivations of the two camps make sense. Conservative reformers drew upon ideas Friedman had promoted for decades. Williams wanted new options for disadvantaged Milwaukee children she represented.

And yet, opponents of today's private school choice programs continue to assert the ideas shaping today's voucher programs have other, far more sinister, origins — specifically, short-lived, shameful attempts by Southern whites to create private "segregation academies," with tuition funded from public coffers.

The Center for American Progress is out today with a report titled "The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers."  (more…)

Special needs. WTSP profiles a boy from Ethiopia who benefitted from a special needs scholarship in Florida. Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog, helps administer the Gardiner Scholarship program.

Desegregation. Plaintiffs demanding integration and equity in Pinellas County schools are unsatisfied with improved test scores at troubled elementary schools, and say they plan to continue lawsuits against the district. Tampa Bay Times.

Think global. Students at a Manatee County charter school make books for children in Honduras. Bradenton Herald.

Kicked out. A Sarasota Herald-Tribune columnist critiques a charter school's decision to oust a second grader.

Career education. A Pasco student helps promote a Ford Motor Company-backed education program. Tampa Bay Times.

Pay raises. Salaries for Florida school board members and district superintendents will rise, though not by much. Gradebook.

Testing. Miami-Dade Public Schools are paring back mid-year assessments to free up instructional time. Miami Herald.

Bad checks. A collection agency hired by the Palm Beach County school district to go after parents who write bad checks is now bouncing checks of its own, and a porous contract may prevent the district from recouping lost money. Palm Beach Post. Sun-Sentinel. (more…)

If all parents had their choice of schools, schools would grow less segregated over time, and people would abandon low-performing in favor of higher-performing ones.

That's the implication of a new study of parent preferences in the nation's capital, where 22,000 students entered lotteries for more than 200 public schools — nearly half of them charters.

Steven Glazerman and Dallas Dotter of Mathematica Policy Research looked at parent preferences in Washington, D.C.'s new unified enrollment system for public schools, which allows parents to rank their favored schools, and assigns students to their highest-ranked school with available space.

Parents tended to prefer schools that were close to home, with high test scores, and where their students would not be racially isolated. In a predominantly African-American urban school system, parents seemed to wannt some measure of diversity in the student body.

From the study's abstract:

The results confirm previously reported findings that commuting distance, school demographics, and academic indicators play important roles in school choice, and that there is considerable heterogeneity of preferences. Simulations suggest segregation by race and income would be reduced and enrollment in high-performing schools increased if policymakers were to expand school choice by relaxing school capacity constraints in individual campuses. The simulations also suggest that closing the lowest-performing schools could further reduce segregation and increase enrollment in high-performing schools.

The research builds on several earlier studies of school choice preferences in choice-heavy cities that, crucially, allow parents to sign up for both charter and district-run public schools through a single, unified enrollment system. Such systems are becoming more common, but have yet to be made available in Florida school districts. (more…)

As communities across the country rekindle decades-old battles over racial integration, education reform advocate Chris Stewart argues that other efforts to improve schools and create new options for parents shouldn't take a back seat.

Most black parents are realists. There is no evidence that perfect integration will occur soon, but our kids need an education today. With this in mind, it is unnerving to see integration fundamentalists criticizing policies aimed at educating our kids where they are. To them, reforms that assist marginalized communities are a consolation prize for our failure to achieve an idealized picture of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream community. To us, they’re an imperfect but ultimately useful pathway helping us to navigate our kids through a racist society.

What if the supposed beneficiaries of public school integration aren’t actually pining for it? There is a long line of black intellectual thought that questions the primacy of integration as an educational goal and as a means of cultural health for black children.

W.E.B. Dubois said: “The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad.”

(more…)

This week, we received important reminders about the two oldest forms of parental school choice:

The housing market ...  :

[W]hen asked at a news conference in November why the city did not at least do what it could to redraw attendance lines, [New York Mayor Bill de Blasio] defended the property rights of affluent parents who buy into neighborhoods to secure entry into heavily white schools. “You have to also respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area,” he said, because families have “made massive life decisions and investments because of which school their kid would go to.” The mayor suggested there was little he could do because school segregation simply was a reflection of New York’s stark housing segregation, entrenched by decades of discriminatory local and federal policy. “This is the history of America,” he said.

... and address fraud.

My mom and dad had only been in America for four years. Their financial situation was tough, and they didn’t know the system yet. But they knew I had to attend the school where I was assigned, based on where we lived.

So my parents did something thousands of other public-school parents feel forced to do, because they feel they have no other options. They lied about where we lived so I could go to a different school where I would feel safe.

Traditional schools, assigned based on where students live, may be nominally public, but they aren't equally accessible to all. (See also: The latest chapter long-running legal battle of Missouri parents looking to transfer from low-performing school districts to higher-performing ones).

There's a better way. It involves creating new and better options for parents, and ensuring those options are most accessible to those who have historically been excluded from the old system.

Meanwhile... 

(more…)

In a rich new article in the New York Times Magazine, which may hold lessons for the school choice movement, Nikole Hannah-Jones recounts her decision to enroll her daughter in a segregated public school in New York City.

She also describes her own experience, growing up nearly three decades after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, when she rode a bus across town to a predominantly white, mostly affluent public school.

I remember those years as emotionally and socially fraught, but also as academically stimulating and world-expanding. Aside from the rigorous classes and quality instruction I received, this was the first time I’d shared dinners in the homes of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers and scientists. My mom was a probation officer, and my dad drove a bus, and most of my family members on both sides worked in factories or meatpacking plants or did other manual labor. I understood, even then, in a way both intuitive and defensive, that my school friends’ parents weren’t better than my neighborhood friends’ parents, who worked hard every day at hourly jobs. But this exposure helped me imagine possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered before.

It’s hard to say where any one person would have ended up if a single circumstance were different; our life trajectories are shaped by so many external and internal factors. But I have no doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — more likely.

Her experience suggests the potential benefits of a new approach to desegregation, which focuses on students' economic status, rather than their race. It's gained currency, in part, because courts have at times blocked race-based desegregation efforts, but mixing disadvantaged students with better-off peers seems to have real, positive effects.

The problem, which Hannah-Jones' full article reveals, is an imbalance of power. When the number of well-off students in a school reaches critical mass, their disadvantaged peers often get pushed out, or shunted into segregated classrooms. For that reason, she calls for schools to set aside guaranteed spots for low-income students. Unless the power balance is addressed, any success at integration will likely be fleeting. (more…)

A parent is challenging a desegregation order that was supposed to help integrate public schools in St. Louis, Mo., but is now barring her child from attending a school of his choice. La’Shieka White alleges discrimination against her son, who is black, and wants to enroll in a public school which, ironically, is predominantly white.

"I feel like I'm being treated differently because of my skin color," Edmund Lee, Jr., White's 9-year-old son, says in a video produced by the Pacific Legal Foundation.

At the center of the lawsuit is a 33-year old desegregation order that was designed to help black students transfer to whiter suburban public schools and to allow non-black students to transfer to inner-city schools such as magnet schools. The school transfer program prevents black students living in the suburbs from transferring to inner-city schools. (more…)

The population of students attending private schools has gotten whiter nationwide, even as the proportion of Black and Hispanic students in public schools has grown, according to a new report. But the report overlooks some compelling evidence that private school choice programs, particularly those aimed at low-income families, could mitigate the imbalance by giving more minority parents access to private schools they couldn’t otherwise afford.

Florida, for example, appears to buck the trend. Between 1998 and 2012, its private schools became less predominantly white, according to an analysis of federal enrollment data release this week by the Southern Education Foundation. The racial balance of Florida's private schools improved by 4.4 percentage points, the second-best in the nation.

It may be no coincidence that in 2001, Florida began offering tax credit scholarships, which soon became the largest private school choice program in the nation, and, by the end of the 2011-12 school year, helped make private-school education available to more than 40,248 low-income children. (Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog, helps administer the scholarships). This year, the program serves more than 78,000 students, 75 percent of them non-white.

Only one other state — Wisconsin, which pioneered school vouchers — improved the racial balance of its private schools more quickly.

The foundation's report, however, sounds an alarm about the proliferation of voucher and scholarship programs. Private schools, it notes, remain "disproportionately white, and often extremely segregated and exclusionary especially in the Southern states." Enrollment surged in the Deep South after Brown v. Board of Education, as states looked for creative ways to thwart integration. For that reason, the report argues, new efforts to subsidize private school tuition deserve extra scrutiny. (more…)

Generations of black students fought to leave St. Louis public schools, but third-grader Edmond Lee wants to remain in his.

Under city rules designed to promote racial desegregation, however, he might be forced out of his school because he is black.

Edmond and his mother, LeShieka White, are moving to the suburbs, away from the public charter school he attends. While researching Edmond's enrollment options, White discovered a 33-year-old desegregation agreement prohibits black students living in the suburbs from enrolling in inner-city public schools, and non-black students from leaving.

White, a victim of unintended consequences, has since gotten a good bit of media attention, and started a petition to change the state law to allow her son to stay in his school. It now has more than 120,000 signatures.

James Shuls, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, argues the race-based transfer restrictions in his city may already be unconstitutional. He points out a similar program in Arkansas was struck down in 2012 after the court ruled that race-based transfer requirements violated violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The absurdity of Edmond's case – a child being denied access to a public school because of his race – underscores the difficulty of reconciling decades-old desegregation efforts with the proliferation of charters and other school choice options. Should the decades-old logic of desegregation still apply when the government no longer has the sole power to dictate where children go to school? (more…)

As school vouchers spread across Louisiana in the 2012-13 school year, they put private schools within reach of black and Hispanic students who couldn't afford them before. As a result, they helped reduce segregation in the state's schools, a new study has found.

The report, one of four released Monday looking at different aspects of vouchers in Louisiana, is the first of its kind to examine the rollout of a new private-school choice program across an entire state.

The Louisiana Scholarship Program allows low-income students to transfer out of schools rated C, D or F by the state accountability system. The vast majority of participants — including 80 percent of the 1,741 students examined in the study — are black.

Researchers (Anna Egalite of North Carolina State University, Jonathan Mills of Tulane University, and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas) compared the racial makeup of public and private schools to their surrounding area.* They then looked at how that makeup changed when students started using vouchers the year the program expanded statewide.

They found the "vast majority" (82 percent) of students who changed schools using vouchers reduced segregation in their former public schools. However, only 45 percent of voucher-related transfers reduced segregation in the private schools where students wound up.

Taken together, the researchers found a net gain for racial integration.

Since the positive effect of student transfers on better integrating the public schools they left is much larger than the negative effect of student transfers on reducing integration in the private schools that receive them, the net effect of the [Louisiana Scholarship Program] on school-level racial integration across both school sectors is positive.

(more…)