More than 600 people joined Teach Florida’s board and staff for the organization’s annual legislative breakfast this week at the Signature Grand in Davie, Florida.

Attendees included state legislators, elected local officials and members of the Jewish day school communities of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. The focus of the event, which began in 2017, is to celebrate the organization’s legislative victories in securing government funding for families sending their children to Jewish day schools.

To see a video recap of the event, click here.

Speakers included Allan Jacob, a South Florida physician and chairman of Teach Florida; Daniel Aqua, Teach Florida’s executive director; state Rep. Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay; and Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Spring Hill; as well as Carol Lasek, a local lay leader, and Rabbi Elie Estrin, a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve and parent of a Florida choice scholarship recipient.

During the event, the organization named Fine its Legislator of the Year and gave Simpson its School Choice Champion Award. Fine sponsored HB 7045, the largest expansion of education choice in the nation. Simpson was a strong supporter of the bill, which the Senate ultimately approved, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law this past spring.

“By fixing our education system, by putting parents in charge, by getting bureaucrats out of the way, we’re not only going to solve the problem of opportunity for our children, but we’re also going to solve the problem of crime and other problems that exist in our society,” Simpson said.

Fine pointed out that thanks to the expansion, 50% of students attending Jewish schools are receiving state scholarships.

Estrin shared the story of his son, Nissi, who was born with life-threatening health issues. Now 6, Nissi is benefiting from a Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities.

“Every child deserves a school that can provide him or her with their unique needs,” Estrin said. “Every parent deserves the right to make that choice. We hope that our legislators find inspiration in Nissi’s story and continue increasing educational options for all of Florida’s children.”

Jacob said this year’s event drew supporters from Orlando as well as South Florida. He said Florida’s scholarship programs allow schools to provide high quality education and improve the quality of life for the entire Jewish community.

“We are always giving support to the politicians who advocate for school choice,” he said. “It’s the most significant issue in the Jewish community in Florida.”

While leaders of some religious organizations that provide childcare and prekindergarten believe their students could benefit from President Joe Biden’s $1.85 trillion Build Back Better bill, they worry that a nondiscrimination provision in the social policy bill could disqualify children who utilize their programs from such benefits.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Orthodox Union are part of a coalition of faith-based groups that are lobbying to have parts of the legislation rewritten to prevent them from having to turn families away who want to enroll in their centers.

In an action alert, Catholic leaders urged their advocates to write to Congress about the potential impact of the bill’s current language, which would give certificates to parents to choose their providers. The funding method would classify faith-based providers as recipients of federal financial assistance.

Such a move would place the providers, who have historically been exempt under current funding methods, under requirements of certain federal laws, namely the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination.

“As a general rule, Catholic schools and most nonpublic schools purposefully avoid federal financial recipient status, because it triggers a whole host of federal regulatory obligations with which nonpublic schools are not currently required to comply,” Michael B. Sheedy, the executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in a letter last week to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, according to the New York Times.

Catholic leaders say the bill also might require the church to obey laws that govern Head Start programs, even if their programs don’t offer Head Start.

“Head Start nondiscrimination provisions to faith-based providers could, for instance, interfere with faith-based providers’ policies or practices that acknowledge any difference between males and females, such as sex-specific restrooms, or with their preferences for hiring employees who share the providers’ religious beliefs,” according to the Conference’s bill analysis.

Leaders also fear the Americans with Disabilities Act provisions would force providers to pay for expensive renovations to facilities and in some cases, churches.

“Although, of course, Catholic schools and other Catholic entities endeavor greatly to be accessible to all persons, especially persons with disabilities, there are, nevertheless, many cases where new renovations would be required that are cost-prohibitive at present,” according to the analysis.

Faith-based providers make up a substantial part of the nation’s child care services, with 53% of families who used center-based care choosing them for their children, according to a 2020 survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Trust was the main reason parents cited for choosing their provider.

“The Archdiocese of Miami serves over 2,600 students in pre-kindergarten, over half of which would be classified as coming from a high-poverty background,” said Jim Rigg, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Miami. “If non-public schools are excluded from this bill, many new families will be drawn toward programs that are free of cost, regardless of their quality. We know we do an excellent job of educating young children and believe that families should make the best choice for their child’s education regardless of their economic status.”

Jennifer Daniels, the Conference of Catholic Bishop’s associate director for public policy, said religious protections have been in place for years and have allowed faith-based providers to maintain their religious identity and offer religious instruction.

“They’ve changed the way that program is going to be designed,” she said. Previous scholarship programs for low-income families allowed them to choose religious schools, but the new law would force those schools to comply with the same rules as secular schools thereby eliminating that choice for those parents.

“Catholic teaching tells us that parents are their child’s first and primary educator, so they should have a say in where their child gets to go to school and what type of school that is,” said Daniels. “If they choose a religious school for their child, they should have the ability to do that.”

On this episode, Ladner and the Heritage Foundation’s Will Skillman Education Fellow discuss Butcher’s new report studying spending trends of families using North Carolina’s Education Savings Account.

 

The report shows that significantly more families in North Carolina are using their ESA money on different purchases and services than in other states that have ESA programs. Ladner and Butcher dive into the particulars of the ESA program in North Carolina and how it can be used with other choice options available to families in the Tar Heel state. They also discuss the decade-long history of ESAs and how more states appear willing to create the flexible spending option for families seeking additional choice in education.

“As long as these entrenched systems and interest groups remain committed to limiting the choices that parents have, we will always have tension between those that want students to be successful and those that want a system to provide what they consider to be the same outcomes for everyone - and that's not what anyone should want.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

• Education choice in North Carolina, the scholarships available to families, and how the ESA grew from the programs in Arizona and Florida
• The bright future for choice programs as they become more ubiquitous and withstand legal challenges
• How the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Education Savings Accounts and other forms of schooling
• The broad look at ESA programs after 10 years and how the Espinoza v. Montana Supreme Court decision changed the dynamics of education choice in America

Editor’s note: In a moving 20-minute presentation Tuesday at the Florida Senate Education Committee’s first meeting in advance of the 2021 legislative session, lifelong education choice advocate Doug Tuthill set the stage for continued expansion of school choice as a means of leveling persistent gaps and improving education outcomes for all students. Here are excerpts from that presentation.

“Helping public education fulfill the promise of equal opportunity – this is what gets us up every morning. This is what we think about before we go to bed every night … We know we have huge inequities in our system. We know that not every child has the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and so part of the process here is to make sure we create a public education system that’s flexible enough to make sure every child gets his or her needs met … And you want the parents to be engaged in that process.”

“We have to have a partnership with parents, work with them and collaborate with them to make sure they have the resources and the information they need to make the very best choices for their children. I know a lot of people don’t trust parents to make good decisions, but I think that’s wrong. I think parents are the best educators for their kids. They have to be partners in this process. What I’ve learned over 42 years of doing education reform is that you’ve got to engage the parents in a much deeper way than we have historically. That’s what these programs are designed to do.”

“The other thing I’ve learned over the past 42 years is the power of ownership … I think the sense of ownership is really important. People who own things have a greater commitment to them, they work harder to make those things a success. Too much of our system is designed to treat people as renters and not owners. Part of what the choice movement does is it tries to give that sense of empowerment. It tries to give people that sense of ownership.”

“What we’re seeing in these programs over the past 20, 30 years is that ownership is transformational. When people have a sense of ownership it really transforms them. It motivates them. They engage in ways they don’t if they don’t feel that sense of ownership. And that’s really I think the magic sauce.”

“Choice is now the norm in Florida. It’s not going away. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle. The question is equal opportunity. How do we make sure that some kids don’t get left behind? That’s what these programs are about, to make sure we don’t leave any children behind.”

“Oftentimes, we hear people say, ‘You’re giving money to private schools.’ That’s a false statement. None of the programs give money to private schools. What the programs do is give money to families, and families make a choice as to how they want to spend that money … This is a parent empowerment program. It’s not a private school subsidy program. No money goes to private schools. That’s the law. The money goes to the families, and the families make a decision how they want to spend that money.”

“You are going to hear a lot about ESAs over the next several years. Education savings accounts give families more flexibility on how to spend their money. One of the things we learned from the pandemic is in order to keep their children safe and well-educated, families want as much flexibility as possible. You’ve read about families creating homeschool co-ops, learning pods. There is a lot of innovation going on out there by trying to make sure their children are safe. We want to make sure low-income children don’t get left behind. If you’re committed to equal opportunity, you want to make sure that all these families have these options.”

“It’s kind of like missionary work. You do this because it’s a chance to make a difference in people’s lives ... Parents fight to get through the application process because they’re fighting for their kids. You have to honor that and respect it. Low-income families in particular who are trying to break the cycle of generational poverty know that education is the key. It’s an honor to work with those families.”

“I’ve had grandmothers come up to me and say, ‘I dropped out of school in eighth or ninth grade because of financial situations, home situation. I had to work to take care of my family. My grandchild is now on a scholarship, my grandchild is doing amazingly well. I’m so moved by the transformation of my grandchild I’ve gone back to work on my GED.’ Those stories are just powerful. It’s really about hope, it’s really about empowerment, it’s really about ownership. Those things are the magic sauce in changing people’s lives.”

“We serve the highest poverty, lowest performing kids in the state, which makes sense. If you’re going to go through this process, it’s because you’re desperate. That’s what we see, families who are desperately advocating for their children.”

“What the programs do is they give people hope, meaningful hope, that leads to transformation in people’s behavior.”

“It’s impossible to be serious about equal opportunity if you only think about school as six hours a day, 180 days a year … We’ve got to figure out how to deal with all the learning that happens outside of school, and what an education savings account does is it allows families to spend money not just on the school day but on after-school activities and summer activities to begin leveling that playing field. It’s really important as we move forward that we talk about how we can provide families with the resources they need, not just during the school day, but after school and during the summer to begin to level the playing field, to be really serious about equal opportunity.”

To view the Senate Education Committee meeting in its entirety, click here.

Elisabeth Edwards came home from school one afternoon and told her mom that she wanted to die.

She was 6.

Elisabeth was stupid, she told her mom. That’s how they made her feel at school. She questioned why God made her that way. She questioned why God made her at all.

She told her mom that she wanted to kill herself. She asked if she could kill herself right then.

Her daughter’s words were nearly too much for Consuelo to process. But she clung to the hope that Elisabeth was having a rough time adjusting to the first grade and to her new school, and this was her way of acting out.

But then Elisabeth began banging her head against the walls at home when she was angry. Then she started banging her head against the walls at school.

“That’s when I knew she was serious,” Consuelo said.

Elisabeth, now 9, has a sensory disorder that can prevent her from processing at lot of information at once. It became an issue soon after Elisabeth began attending the first grade. She would get confused in class and grew angry over her confusion. What Elisabeth perceived as a less-than-empathetic reaction from those around her – classmates and teachers – made the situation worse.

That’s when Elisabeth developed suicidal thoughts. Consuelo found a therapist and another school for her daughter. Elisabeth lasted a week. Administrators at the new school asked Consuelo to withdraw Elisabeth because they weren’t equipped to handle students with behavioral issues.

Consuelo and her husband, Maxwell, a plumber, qualified for a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, one of two income-based scholarships managed by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog. She found herself scrolling through the school directory on Step Up’s website, searching for one near their Apopka, Florida, home that accepts students with a sensory disorder.

Consuelo came across Master’s Training Academy in Apopka, a K-12 private Christian school about 20 miles outside of Orlando. The school focuses on students with behavioral health and learning disabilities. She called Helenikki Thompson, the school principal. Consuelo was upfront about Elisabeth’s condition and expected to be turned away. Thompson invited Elisabeth to spend a day at the school.

It was a perfect match. Elisabeth is now in the fourth grade at Master’s. She has a legion of friends. She leaves thank you notes and homemade muffins for her teachers. She said she can’t remember the last time she was angry at school.

“I felt like I was at home, because I just saw everybody was happy,” Elisabeth said of that first visit. “All the kids were funny, happy, everything that you would want in a friend. So was the teacher.”

Consuelo no longer receives phone calls from exasperated teachers and is no longer worried about her daughter’s mental health. She said she owes Elisabeth’s life to Master’s Training Academy and to Step Up.

“If it wasn’t for Master’s, I’d probably be going to grave site grieving for her,” Consuelo said. “It was that bad.”

‘We want her back’

Consuelo describes her daughter as an outgoing young lady with a beautiful smile and a warm heart.

“To me she is a typical person who is trying to find her way in a world that is full of craziness,” Consuelo said. “Sometimes, when she was young, she didn’t know how to internalize that.”

A person’s tone of voice can provoke Elisabeth. Stern language from the teachers and staff at the first two schools Elisabeth attended only made her outbursts worse.

“I had broken out in hives when she was going through all that,” Consuelo said. “That’s how bad it was. It was because of nerves. When your kid goes through something, you go through something.”

Elisabeth did have an outburst during her initial visit to Master’s Training Academy. It happened when a teacher asked her to read out loud. Elisabeth received speech therapy to help her properly enunciate words. She had some bad experiences when asked in school to read in front of the class. She thought this new teacher was setting her up for more embarrassment.

The reaction from Thompson, who was in the room, was not what Consuelo or her daughter expected.

Thompson remembers telling Elisabeth, “I’m sorry for your past hurt. I don’t know who hurt you. We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to help you.”

She said she gave Elisabeth a hug and told her she would see her the next day.

“I don’t know what type of experiences she had, but I know she was hurt,” Thompson said. “She was damaged really bad.”

Thompson’s son, Brendan, was bullied in his district school. He received therapy and attended Apopka Christian Academy for high school, where he attended on a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. He graduated in 2016 and is currently enrolled in Seminole State College of Florida.

Dealing with what her son went through gives Thompson a unique perspective on why children can feel threatened at school. Thompson and her staff do not raise their voices when a student is acting out. They try to dilute the situation with kind words and hugs. The school has a quiet room, where a student go to calm down. The room has soft lighting and comfortable chairs. The student can read, listen to soft music or pray if they choose.

Teachers at Master’s have been known to diffuse a situation by taking the student or the entire class outside for some fresh air. Thompson said there is at least one activity a week that allows the students to put away the books and have some fun. An example: a spa day for the elementary school girls, where they do each other’s hair and nails. Pre-pandemic, of course.

Consuelo said it took Elisabeth months before she realized she could trust the staff at her new school. And when she did, she took off academically.

“I can tell you, when someone breaks down a kid, they can really break a kid down, and it takes a long time to build a kid back up,” Consuelo said. “What they did for her in the beginning, when she had her blowouts and cried, the teacher would look at her and say, ‘You know what? We still love you here. You can be mad at us and you can cry, but we’ll see you again tomorrow.’”

Thompson remembers a day not long after Elisabeth enrolled when Consuelo came after school to pick up her daughter. Consuelo asked Thompson how the day went. Thompson said Elisabeth had a moment.

“She said, ‘I’m sorry. I know you don’t want her back,’” Thompson recalled. “I said, ‘Why would you say that? We want her back. I just want you to know as a parent that she was having a bad day.’”

Master’s tailored the curriculum for Elisabeth, giving her extra time in subjects where she struggled and letting her advance at her own pace in those where she excelled.

Elisabeth has stopped telling her mom that she feels stupid. “I feel like I’m the smartest kid in the world,” she said.

Consuelo volunteers at the school. She’ll help out in the main office, chaperon field trips and watch a class if a teacher needs to step away. She has nothing but praise for Master’s Training Academy, the empathy toward Elisabeth shown by Thompson and her staff, and for Step Up, for managing the scholarship that enabled Elisabeth to attend the school.

“(Master’s) represent the scholarship very well,” Consuelo said. “If it wasn’t for Step Up, I wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition. I owe (Step Up) my daughter’s life, and that means the world to me.”

Schools and families that participate in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program now have a faster, easier and more secure way to process tuition payments.

A new automated system developed by Step Up For Students, Florida’s largest scholarship funding organization, allows parents to approve tuition payments for their children’s schools electronically. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, the largest of six scholarship programs in the state, serves about 100,000 economically disadvantaged students and allows companies to receive state tax credits in exchange for scholarship donations.

Families received emails this week explaining the new process and requesting payment approvals for the final payment of the 2019-20 school year. Those who haven’t responded will receive follow-up emails and texts today.

Here’s how it works: Based on each school’s verification of scholarship students’ attendance, Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, will email each parent or guardian a link that includes the amount of their tuition check. The parent or guardian will be asked to click on the link and approve or deny the amount electronically. Once approved, an ACH payment will be sent on the already existing Florida Tax Credit Scholarship schedule.

At that time, an advisory email will be sent to the school that the money is being deposited into its bank account. Parents who deny payments will be required to give a reason. A Step Up For Students representative will contact them to follow up. Step Up officials are urging parents to contact the organization before denying a payment to allow the opportunity to address any issues.

Under the former system, Step Up mailed paper checks via traditional mail to the schools. Parents then had to visit the school and sign over their checks, which the school accounting staff deposited into the school’s bank account.

The law establishing the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program in 2001 required that paper checks be signed in person. In 2017, the law was changed to allow alternative methods of fund transfers.

Step Up already had been working toward an electronic system, but social distancing ordered to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic prompted staff to fast-track the project, said chief financial officer Joe Pfountz.

“It really helps from a cost and documentation perspective,” Pfountz said. “The electronic process allows us to be even better stewards of the generous gifts donors have entrusted to us to help every student receive a high-quality education by attending the school that best fits their needs.”

The new system will allow non-contact processing, which means parents and school staff can maintain social distancing, keeping them safer during the pandemic. Beyond that, it also will allow business to continue during emergencies such as hurricanes.

Currently, the new system is being used only for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, but Step Up expects to expand it to serve families receiving the other scholarship programs it administers.

“Most schools are closed right now, so they won’t have to open for parents to sign checks,” said Scott Smith, director of program accounting for Step Up For Students.

Smith said the old system left the program vulnerable to errors and fraud due to checks being lost in the mail or stolen by third parties. The new system will prevent that and speed up processing time to as little as two business days once a parent approves the payment.

“Some of our schools are very small and depend on scholarship payments to meet their payroll and pay their bills,” Smith said. “They don’t have a large safety net.”

Parents and school staff must do their part for the new system to work. Parents should open the emails and click on the links and approve the payments as soon as they receive them so that scholarship payments are not delayed. Those who fail to approve payments risk forfeiting their child’s scholarship.

Meanwhile, schools should make sure they update their banking information with Step Up For Students now and whenever they switch banks or accounts so that payments can be deposited promptly, Pfountz said.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Alicia Davis needed a fresh start after a storm of challenges – including being a teen mom – overwhelmed her in high school. Kaitlin Davis needed a safe place after kids in her assigned middle school tormented her over her sexual identity.

They are adults now, happy, married, and raising a family. For their 9-year-old twins, Brian and Leah, who endured bullying in kindergarten, the Davises turned almost instinctively to the kind of education choice options that are available to parents in one of the most choice-rich states in America. They found a private school, courtesy of a state scholarship, that knew how to navigate their children’s “disabilities” while also understanding their pain.

When you have options, “You don’t have to sacrifice being emotionally okay to have a good education. You don’t have to sacrifice a good education to be emotionally okay,” said Kaitlin, now 23. “You can have both.”

(Watch the video at the end of this post to hear Alicia and Kaitlin tell their story in their own words.)

Kaitlin and Alicia, 25, have been together five years. They married last year. Kaitlin is a collision adviser at a Toyota dealership. Alicia stays at home so she can best care for their 5-year-old, Emmett, who has diabetes. Kaitlin is pregnant with their fourth child. Their cozy house in a working-class neighborhood is 20 minutes from the school they consider a lifeline.

The Davis’s experience with public education is fast becoming the new normal in Florida. A generation ago, about 10 percent of K-12 students in Florida attended something other than assigned district schools. Today it’s more than 40 percent.

“Multiple choice” families with children enrolled in two or more options are not hard to find. It won’t be long before the same is true of families like the Davises.

***

Alicia Davis didn’t do well in district schools. ADHD made her unruly. Medication for it left her sleepy. Other issues piled on. Making friends was a struggle when her family moved from small-town Ohio. So was coming to terms with her sexual orientation. So were family members who didn’t understand.

In 10th grade, Alicia got pregnant. She didn’t listen to those who advised her to end the pregnancy; abortion violated her belief system. She didn’t listen to dark voices in her own head, either. At one point, she said, she stood on a third-floor apartment balcony for 45 minutes before crawling away. “I said, ‘This isn’t how my life should be for my babies,’ ” she said through tears. “So I talked myself down.”

School, though, didn’t get easier. In her junior year, Alicia was told she couldn’t graduate because she was too far behind to catch up. That’s when her mom went searching for options. She discovered Alicia could get a McKay Scholarship, an education choice scholarship for students with disabilities. By coincidence, Nadia Hionides, the principal of an inclusive, faith-based private school called The Foundation Academy, came calling. Alicia’s school had alerted her that Alicia might benefit from something different.

She did. “Nadia never said no, she never turned her back, she never said I couldn’t do anything,” Alicia said. The non-judgmental atmosphere was key. “Nobody cared that I was a teen mom … nobody cared that I was open with my sexuality,” she said.

Alicia and her classmates worked on a project about coping with schizophrenia. For the community service component, she volunteered at a mental health resource center.

Without all the distractions, she said, she could finally focus on learning.

***

Kaitlin Davis “came out” in eighth grade. The bullies pounced. They called her names, bumped her in the halls. Kaitlin wondered if it would ever end. She didn’t fight back because she didn’t want to risk a suspension. She didn’t tell school officials because, “I felt like it was my battle.”

Silence took its toll. “I was depressed,” she said. “I stayed home from school a lot. I would make up things. I was quote unquote sick a lot.”

Kaitlin worried high school could be as bad if not worse, because she and the bullies were zoned for the same school. By coincidence, Kaitlin’s brother had been attending The Foundation Academy with a McKay Scholarship. Her parents knew it was warm and welcoming.

Kaitlin was not eligible for education choice scholarships. Her parents’ income was too high for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for lower-income students, and she didn’t have disabilities to qualify for McKay. Today, she would be eligible for two, newer state scholarships: the Family Empowerment Scholarship for working- and middle-class families, and the Hope Scholarship for bullying victims. (The FTC, FES and Hope scholarships are administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Kaitlin said it hurt her parents financially to pay tuition. Mom’s a nurse. Dad’s a Navy vet and a welder by training. But for a year they found a way. The next year, Kaitlin enrolled in Florida Virtual School. She was in a hurry to get to work, and total immersion in FLVS allowed her to complete two years of schooling in one. She returned to The Foundation Academy for her senior year, to enjoy prom and other rituals of a more typical school. Hionides offered a tuition break in return for Kaitlin’s work as a file clerk and camp counselor.

Had it not been for the school, Kaitlin said, “I would have still been in my shell.”

And probably, she said, a dropout.

***

Brian and Leah have speech impediments, which at times can make them a little hard to understand. But Brian’s kindergarten teacher, Alicia said, heard a kid who couldn’t learn.

When Brian struggled, the teacher “put him off to the side,” Alicia said, which gave his classmates an opening to pick on him. “Once it started,” Alicia said, “it just never stopped.” On a bus ride home, both Brian and Leah, who defended her brother, ended up with knots on their heads the size of half dollars.

When Alicia complained, she said school officials told her to file a police report. (She refused, given the bullies were 5-year-olds.) When problems with the teacher persisted, she said district officials suggested a transfer. But other district schools either had no openings or other reasons the twins couldn’t be accommodated.

In desperation, Alicia again turned to The Foundation Academy and McKay Scholarships. At the time, she and Kaitlin were living in a neighboring county. But with Brian and Leah in a safe school, the commute – more than an hour each way – was worth it.

Now the twins are in third grade and making steady academic progress. One of their teachers said Brian’s confidence makes him especially smooth at public presentations, and Leah’s makes her a natural leader.

“That school is like a giant family,” Alicia said. And for her and Kaitlin’s family, it has been for two generations now.

It feels, she said, like home.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GHOSmEETzvE

Editor’s note: This post is an edited version of a talk Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill delivered in October to the Florida Charter School Conference in Orlando.

Products and services in many industries are in the process of being unbundled. Thirty years ago, we had to buy albums to own our favorite songs. Now we can buy individual songs and bits of songs online.

Classified newspaper ads used to be a cash cow for daily newspapers. But no more. Craigslist’s unbundling of classified ads is a key reason daily newspapers are dying.

The demise of cable TV may be next as streaming services such as Netflix unbundle programing. Shopping malls are closing as Amazon unbundles retail shopping, and banks are responding to the unbundling of banking services by licensing unbundled banking applications in a new business model called “banking as a service.”

Now the process of unbundling public education services has begun. Thus far, this unbundling has included magnet schools, charter schools, dual enrollment, virtual schools, course choice, micro-schools, home schooling, workspace, and scholarships and vouchers to help families pay for private schools.  

But the real game changer will be Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). ESAs are going to accelerate the unbundling of public education services.

ESAs are publicly-funded financial accounts that families use to purchase state-approved education products and services for their children. Instead of a school district spending a student’s public education dollars, through ESAs state government allows a student’s family to spend these dollars.

About 18,000 Florida students will have ESAs this school year through two programs -- the Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs/unique abilities, and Reading Scholarship Accounts for struggling readers in district elementary schools. These students’ families will use their ESA funds to purchase products and services, such as public and private school courses, afterschool tutoring, physical and occupational therapy, speech therapy, education hardware and software, summative and formative assessments, curriculum material, and books. Over the last two years, Florida families have used ESA funds to purchase products and services from over 10,000 education providers.

The number of families using ESAs will probably increase in the future. In six years, Florida could have 200,000 families spending $1.5 billion annually through their ESAs. This much purchasing power in the hands of families presents opportunities and challenges for Florida’s charter schools.

There will be competition to serve these families. Charter school companies in other states are exploring coming to Florida with offerings beyond schools. Some are planning to open charter and private schools with robust afterschool and summer programs. Others are planning to sell onsite and online courses, and one is exploring partnering with ride-sharing services to help transport students to in-school, afterschool, and summer programs. Think “Uber for Kids.”

Home schooling is the fastest growing education choice option in the country. Charter schools could be selling this population access to classrooms, computer and science labs, afterschool and summer programs, and onsite and online courses.

With the possible exception of Miami-Dade, most Florida districts will be slow to offer services to ESA families. Florida charter schools could help fill this void.

Dayspring Academy charter school in Pasco County moved quickly to create an afterschool tutoring program after the Reading ESA became law. It is now one of Florida’s top providers of ESA-funded tutoring services. (Dayspring founder and chief financial officer John Legg is a board of directors member for Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Other charters could follow the Dayspring example. Entrepreneurial Urban Leagues across Florida are also moving quickly to develop afterschool and summer reading programs for families with reading ESAs.

The unbundling of products and services inevitably leads to innovative ways to rebundle them. Spotify is a good example of a company facilitating rebundling in the music industry. Spotify empowers and enables music listeners to organize songs from diverse artists into customized playlists and share these lists with others. Spotify empowers customers to have a greater sense of ownership over their music since they now control how their “albums” are assembled. They also have access to the diverse playlists of millions of other music fans.

We need to replicate an appropriate version of the Spotify experience in public education. Educators need to be empowered and enabled to rebundle their services and products so that families can purchase highly effective customized instruction for each child with their ESA funds.   

The unbundling and rebundling of education products and services is coming. Charter schools can help drive this train or follow the example of daily newspapers and get run over by it.

It’s their choice.

MIAMI – Christopher Bermudez likes plants. Like, really likes plants. The thought of reviving a droopy sprig of mizuna inspired the 17-year-old to riff: “When you kind of have faith in the plants, and you keep taking care of it, and you see it spring back up to life, that’s one of the biggest fulfilling feelings ever.”

How gratifying for Bermudez that he gets to pair that infatuation with real-world research. Among other projects, he and his classmates at BioTECH High School are helping scientists with a mammoth, years-long venture to determine which cultivars of edible plants will make the best crops for – no joke – space travel.

“Our research helps supplement their research,” said Bermudez, who’s aiming for a career in experimental horticulture. “You’re kind of helping the future of our species.”

BioTECH and its lovable science geeks make for a compelling narrative. So does the back story.

First pan to Florida, which has expanded charter schools, private school scholarships, education savings accounts and other varieties of educational choice as much as any state in America. Then zoom in to Miami-Dade County, home to a forward-thinking school district that chose to surf this “tsunami of choice” rather than fight it. The result is a rich, evolving, educational ecosystem where a slew of new educational cultivars are vying to find their niches.

If the theory holds, ever more students will choose from ever more options – including district choice options like BioTECH – to find the one that fits their needs and fuels their passions.

“Choice is very important in human nature, right? And I think that for students, choice is of utmost importance,” said BioTECH principal Daniel Mateo, a chemist by training. “When you force a child to do something, it never really works out quite the way you think it’s going to work out. But when you give them the flexibility of choice, you allow them to select what it is they want to do based on that natural affinity that they have for that particular subject. It’s a given. They’re going to perform.”

BioTECH, all of five years old, is a magnet school and the nation’s only high school specializing in conservation biology. Its aim: to develop successive generations of researchers who will apply their ingenuity and training to the conservation of life on Earth.

Heady stuff. Which makes it all the more remarkable, maybe, that BioTECH has no entrance requirements; serves a student body that is mostly low-income; and shares a campus with a once-struggling middle school.

Richmond Heights Middle, 14 miles southwest of gleaming downtown Miami, was perpetually C-rated by the state. Over the years, scores of school choice options mushroomed around it – and parents responded accordingly. Enrollment fell by half.

In turn, the Miami-Dade school district responded accordingly. It considered what academic programming students and parents wanted; what college degrees and jobs were hot; what community partnerships it could forge or strengthen. With help from a $10 million federal magnet schools grant, BioTECH was born.

The middle school is home base. But BioTECH’s 400 students spend big chunks of time doing research at three partner institutions: Zoo Miami, Everglades National Park and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Their lab equipment is college-caliber. Half their teachers are working scientists. They’re expected to shoot for publication in a scientific journal by the time they graduate.

Some of BioTECH’s “junior scientists” are studying the intestinal flora of spider monkeys to develop diets that make captive monkeys less prone to stomach problems. Others, like Bermudez, are doing research for Growing Beyond Earth, a partnership between Fairchild and NASA. Still others work in micropropagation labs at Fairchild, growing rare orchids that can be reintroduced into slices of South Florida where they once thrived.

“Who thought plants could be so fun?” said senior Peyton Ecklund.

Ecklund, 17, who plans to pursue botanical research in college, chose BioTECH over other high-performing schools in Miami-Dade. She liked that it was “trying to do something special” and emphasized student-driven learning.  “We have to make the projects from scratch. And we have to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “If you learn how to be independent and figure it out on your own now, who knows what you can do in the future?”

Judging by demand, BioTECH is a smash. Last year, it reeled in 600 applications for 150 seats. So far this year, it’s on pace for 1,000 applications for 100 seats.

It’s no surprise the school took root in Miami. Miami-Dade has the highest rate of charter school and private school students of any urban district in Florida. It has one of the highest rates of students exercising district choice. More than 60 percent of Miami-Dade students are now enrolled in hundreds of district options, from magnet schools and career academies to international programs and K-8 centers.

“We recognized … the choice tsunami was upon us,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said in April. “And I was not going to do what lot of my colleagues did. Which is, ‘Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t hit us.’ “

BioTECH earned an A from the state this year. (Richmond Heights earned a B.) Its demographics mirror the district’s. Eighty-nine percent of its students are non-white (it’s 93 percent for the district). Sixty-three percent are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch (it’s 66 percent for the district). Forty-two percent, meanwhile, receive special education services or accommodations.

“That’s 100 percent by design,” Mateo said. “It’s not about having elite students … If you have a passion (for science), we can cultivate that.”

The district does not provide transportation to BioTECH. That’s not a plus for equity. But HVAC repairmen and nursing assistants find a way to get their kids there just like radiologists and military officers do.

Daniella Lira, 17, a junior at BioTECH, said her parents left poverty in Peru for a better life in the U.S. A love for animals and a desire to be a veterinarian led her to the school. Diving into hands-on science has her considering other possibilities.

“Being part of the research and being treated as an actual scientist has opened my eyes,” Lira said.

BioTECH should open some eyes, too. There’s no end to the variety that can sprout in choice-rich soil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDmOT7P-Aso&feature=youtu.be

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in July 2017, chronicles several chapters from the movement's rich past.

In the 1900's, Mary McLeod Bethune founded a private vocational school as an alternative for black students Florida had relegated to separate-and-unequal public schools. In the 1910's, a group of Catholic nuns clashed with segregationist politicians. Their crime? Educating black children. In the 1960's, civil rights activists sought to protest schools that systematically shortchanged black students. So they created their own.

Fast forward to 2017. Politicians can no longer segregate public schools by law. State constitutions in Florida and elsewhere mandate public school systems that provides for all students according to "uniform" funding standards. Educators who, like their predecessors of the last century, want to create alternatives that better serve their communities, no longer face prosecution. And they have new options that didn't exist a century ago. They can start new private schools. 

In Florida, if they comply with state regulations, their students can turn to one of the nation's four largest private school choice programs* to help pay tuition.

A long, winding road brought us here. It includes some dark passages that, recently, became fodder for scurrilous attacks on the school choice movement. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called scholarship programs like Florida's "only slightly more polite cousins of segregation."

Her charge rests on a short-lived, but real, chapter of history. Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians began devising a "massive resistance." In some communities, they even shut down public schools. In their place, they let students take tuition tax credits to attend private "segregation academies."

The Center for American Progress chronicled that episode in a recent (and flawed) report. It unveiled the research at an event hosted by Weingarten's group. The report focuses on Virginia's Prince Edward County, where segregation academies flourished. Courts put the kibosh on those efforts by the end of the 1960s, and definitively outlawed them in the '70s.

Still, as they responded to some pushback on their report, the CAP authors argued the school choice movement has failed to reckon with this history. That's not quite right.

In fact, a group of progressive school choice thinkers confronted that history while it was unfolding. The authors of a 1970 report looked with concern at attempts to evade court-ordered desegregation through so-called freedom of choice. They concluded:

It would be perfectly possible to create a competitive market and then regulate it in such a way as to prevent segregation, ensure an equitable allocation of resources, and give every family a truly equal chance of getting what it wants from the system.

That group was led by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, liberal academics with an eye toward equity also began crafting visions for vouchers that would still be timely today.

The intellectuals of the Voucher Left sometimes crossed swords with the likes of free-market economist Milton Friedman. He launched the "Voucher Right" with a seminal essay calling for vouchers — coincidentally around the same time southern racists were hatching plans to resist segregation. As Rick Hess and Matt Barnum note, Friedman drew not on segregationist impulses, but on the ideas of 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe pushed Friedman's ideas further in their influential book Politics, Markets and America's Schools. They argued, in brief, that education bureaucrats had sapped schools of their vitality. The solution, in their view, was to create a new public education system that encompassed all schools — including those considered private — and give students the means to choose among them.

That same year, the voucher left and voucher right found a way to work together. Urban progressives like Wisconsin state Sen. Polly Williams joined forces with Friedman acolytes in the Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson's administration to create the first modern voucher program.

That wouldn't be the last time they joined forces. Last year in Florida, school choice advocates led by Martin Luther King III rallied to protect the nation's largest private school choice program, which this year will serve more than 100,000 low-income and working class students — 70 percent of them children of color.

That program was created under Jeb Bush, a Republican governor, and expanded through multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation. The protest challenged a lawsuit led by the president the American Federation for Teachers' Florida affiliate. And that lawsuit ultimately failed.

This brings us back to the Center for American Progress.

Randi Weingarten leads a national organization that has battled private school choice at every turn, and repeatedly lost. When some Voucher Left ideas first gained traction in Washington (albeit in milder forms, like private school tuition tax credits), nationwide teachers unions began wielding their newfound influence in the Democratic Party to stamp out support.

It's hardly out of character for the unions to attempt to cast voucher advocates as racists, amp up their calls the slow down charter schools, or attempt to tie every diverse corner of the school choice movement to President Donald Trump.

The question is why a center-left think tank, long known for its reasonable positions on education reform, would work so hard to help them, resting its attacks on such a thinly constructed factual foundation.

Note: See also this article by Andrew Rotherham, which traces a similar historical arc.

*The four scholarship programs are Tax credit scholarships, McKay and Gardiner Scholarships for children with special needs, and Voluntary Pre-K scholarships.