Editor's note: This post comes from Dr. Alan Bonsteel, the president of California Parents for Educational Choice and an associate with the American Center for School Choice, which recently joined an alliance with redefinED.
The nation’s staggeringly high dropout rates are perhaps the strongest argument for school choice, and state-level school choice organizations can have enormous leverage in wielding this weapon. At one time it seemed that test scores might be that argument, but the public school establishment has been largely successful in dodging that concern, both by using non-secure tests in which the teachers can teach to actual test questions, and by churning out phony studies that falsely claim that the test score improvements seen with school choice disappear once the results are adjusted for the poverty levels of the students.
Graduation rates, however, are far harder to spin, and the public intuitively accepts the observation that when families can choose the school right for them, the investment that is made and the sense of community that results has profound benefits in getting kids safely to graduation day.
Our organization, California Parents for Educational Choice, launched the first salvo in this war in 1999, when we got newspapers across the state to report on their front pages the reality that we were losing a third of our kids to dropping out. In 2002, Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute took the issue to the national stage. In 2004, George Bush and John Kerry both used the correct figure of one-third of our kids dropping out of high school in the presidential debates, and the war for public opinion was largely won.
Almost all state departments of education, however, are still reporting falsely low dropout rates. It is here that local school choice groups can use their leverage, as it turns out that, while Democratic politicians still usually oppose school choice, most will at least favour accurate dropout rates being made available to the public.
In 2008, for example, California passed SB 651 by Democratic State Sen. Gloria Romero, which reformed dropout rate reporting in our state. As a result, we now have the nation’s strongest dropout reporting system, although still one that needs much work. The more accurate dropout rates generated by that law were key in 2010 and again this year in passing our Parent Trigger law, a concept that is now sweeping across the nation.
Passing a new law may seem daunting to members of a state school choice organization, but it turns out to be easier than it seems to persuade even the old guard that supports the status quo that the public is entitled to the truth on this crucial issue.
The dropout issue has turned out to be the school choice movement’s secret weapon -- the equivalent from World War II of the bazooka, the cracking of the Nazi enigma code, and the Flying Fortress bomber all rolled into one. Let’s not hesitate to keep using this breakthrough weapon to free our children.
Editor's note: As redefinED enters its second year of publication, it has joined an alliance with the American Center for School Choice. Its first post comes from Fawn Spady, the Center's chairwoman, and Stephen D. Sugarman, its vice chairman.
Today the American Center for School Choice begins its exciting partnership with redefinED in a joint effort to focus attention on the importance of empowering parents with the authority to educate their children. The mission of the American Center for School Choice, advocating expansion of public support for families to choose the schools they believe will best serve their children, is rooted in two basic propositions:
The American Center supports the work of the many fine organizations advocating for education reform based on expanding the power of consumers in the educational marketplace and the need for greatly improved academic outcomes. The movement has won significant political victories, but also experienced many defeats.
Our organization’s name was intentionally selected because we believe a strong political center and consequently a broad coalition for school choice exists in a focus on parental empowerment. In placing families first, the Center’s perspective creates a unique and powerful opportunity to expand support for school choice to include greater numbers of political centrists, religious leaders, social justice advocates, and ordinary citizens who are either uninformed or uninspired by current educational reform debates.
Ultimately, we need to create and support good schools of all types to serve the diversity of our population’s needs. We want to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities, including inter- and intra-district choice of public schools, choice through public charter schools, and choice of private and religious schools through publicly funded scholarship and tax credit programs. The American Center for School Choice believes that expanding support for families to choose public, private, or religious schools for their children is a civic and moral imperative.
The Center’s primary activity is education. All families, but especially low-income parents and students who have not been well served historically, benefit when they select the school that they believe will best serve their children. The Center has utilized a variety of media and forums to provide information and analyses to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities. In partnering with redefinED, we have found a kindred spirit where great synergy exists.
Our board, associates, and staff will be regularly contributing their thoughts on where we are, where we hope to go next, and how best to get there. In addition to us, you will hear from Jack Coons, Charles Glenn, Gloria Romero, Terry Moe, Darla Romfo, Alan Bonsteel, Rick Garnett, and others in our network. We all look forward to joining and stimulating ongoing thoughtful and respectful exchanges that have marked redefined since its beginning.
Parent trigger advocates are applying more presure on AFT president Randi Weingarten to pay more penance after an AFT document surfaced in Connecticut that detailed a textbook plan on killing "trigger" legislation. Notably, prominent California Democrats and parent-trigger backers Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have written Weingarten suggesting that simply distancing herself from the Connecticut document is insufficient.
As Romero, a sponsor of California's trigger law, writes in her letter to the union chief:
I am requesting that you make public all other Power Points that were developed to train AFT members on how to disable and kill parent empowerment legislation that were used in subsequent states where Parent Trigger legislation was introduced. To my count, there have been at least thirteen other states ...
... This type of “lesson plan” and strategies are offensive and dismissive to the very individuals who should be fully respected for their goals to further the educational opportunities of their very own children: the parents. I believe you need to go one step further and offer an immediate apology and a commitment to never let something like this happen again.
The Connecticut strategy, emblazoned with AFT's logo and titled, "How Connecticut Diffused The Parent Trigger," outlined how AFT leaders in that state worked to "kill the bill" that would have established a parent trigger similar to California's (The document was originally on AFT's Web site but has since been removed; Dropout Nation editor RiShawn Biddle copied the presentation and made it available to his readers). Romero also says she was singled out in that strategy and wants that "lesson plan" public as well.
Austin, the executive director of California's Parent Revolution, wrote to Weingarten saying that:
Over the last year, we have requested on multiple occasions to meet with you and discuss our common agenda. Each time, you have refused to meet. Now, after reading your memo, it has become clear why. You seem to view parent empowerment as a zero-sum game: if parents win, teachers must lose ...
... the substance of your plan includes ensuring that parents are “not at the table” when real decisions are made, and creating fake "governance" committees that trick parents into thinking they have power when they actually do not. The fact that this memo has surfaced in the wake of the president of your California affiliate calling the Parent Trigger a “lynch mob” law – and then also refusing to apologize even after civil rights groups demanded it – makes your reaction to this incident all the more troubling.
As much as we have in the past viewed you as a progressive leader and potential partner in kids-first transformation, we cannot have a respectful dialogue with someone who cannot disavow those positions and tactics. If you view parental power as a threat to be "killed," then we unfortunately don't have much to talk about.
It will take a centrist voice to advance the debate over school choice, and few individuals know that better than Jack Coons and Steve Sugarman of the University of California at Berkeley. The two law professors have thought more about parental empowerment in education during the last 41 years than perhaps anyone else living today, and they have established a rare progressive voice in school choice in an enterprise that has taken root at Berkeley.
That effort is the American Center for School Choice, an advocacy group that recognizes that the power of the marketplace alone in education reform has limited political appeal. “The empowerment of ordinary families will come only as the fruit of a credible coalition of recognized centrists,” the center’s leadership states. To that end, Coons and Sugarman have invited Gloria Romero and redefinED host Doug Tuthill to join them on the board. Tuthill is the president of Step Up For Students, which administers a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program that today serves more than 34,000 students with bipartisan backing, and he also serves as the Florida coordinator for Democrats for Education Reform. Romero is DFER's California chief and a former Democratic state senator in California.
Those moves are the latest in the center’s ambitions to elevate the national debate over school choice. It has already hosted two national conferences and has plans to assemble more gatherings in the future. It sees choice as a moral imperative and as a public policy that has profound social effects on the poor families who benefit, and it is looking for credible researchers to examine just how profoundly. It sees a role for faith-based schools in a system of public education that is continually setting new precedents of pluralism and diversity, but the center recognizes that only a broad, interfaith coalition of support can advance that discussion (the center also named to the board Robert Aguirre, the chief executive of the Catholic Association of Latino Leaders and appointed Kathy Jamil, the director of the Islamic Schools League of America, to its list of associates).
But while the center has collaborated with more free-market oriented groups who favor liberating the parent and the educator from “government” schools, it knows what is – and isn’t – needed for the school choice movement to gain political traction.
“When our political discourse proposes subjecting education to the same market forces as banks, airlines and electric power, we give aid and comfort to the enemies of school choice,” Coons wrote in a 2001 article in America. “Voters care more about the visible hand of the parent than they do about the invisible hand of Adam Smith. And they are right to do so.”
When Tuthill and Romero addressed the center’s conference in April, the assembly was exposed to two active Democratic voices that have largely been overlooked since the Reagan administration appropriated the quarterback role of school choice from the War on Poverty. But just as Coons and Sugarman framed the idea of choice as equity in 1970, the American Center for School Choice is trying to guide us away from the political extremes and look with clarity and reason on the value of parental empowerment. Look to it as an emerging centrist voice in a conversation accustomed to simple ideological divisions.
At the edge of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, there is today unfolding a conference that has brought together advocates for school choice of varying ideological stripes. There are some participants who support public school choice among charter academies but who are skeptical of the success of publicly funding private learning options. There are those who back private options for the social justice they bring to disadvantaged families but who have issues with the free-market embrace of universal vouchers.
But City University of New York professor Joseph Viteritti, one of the nation's most legitimate experts on educational administration and one of the most devoted students of school choice as social justice, opened the session with the glue that bound everyone together. It is fundamentally indefensible, Viteritti said, to confine a child to one education option only because our public policies challenge or even prohibit a choice of varied learning opportunities.
The opportunities defining today's discussion, titled "May Superman Pray?", are those that enable a choice among faith-based schools. Viteritti, for one, defined as a moral imperative the chance to choose among religious institutions if it allows a family who could not otherwise afford such an option if it wanted to raise their children according to their value system. Furthermore, Boston University educational historian Charles L. Glenn said, "It is a fundamental right of the citizenry to decide how you're going to educate your child."
This was not a partisan conference, and its participants went to great lengths to illustrate this point. The conference was sponsored by the Berkeley-based American Center for School Choice, which is chaired by law professor John E. Coons, one of the nation's most liberal voices for parental choice -- particularly private choice -- in education. One panel featured both Cato scholar Andrew Coulson and former Democratic California Sen. Gloria Romero. "I believe in public education," said Romero, the California director of Democrats for Education Reform. "But I don't believe only the rich should have school choice."
But can Superman (a play off the documentary "Waiting for Superman") pray? Most of the participants agreed he should, but they're not aligned on how he could. Some would advocate extending school choice to families who want to benefit from the unique identity of a faith-based school. Others, such as Glenn, believe the voucher war is unwinnable and would take the admittedly risky approach of allowing a religious school to become a charter school while still maintaining its religious identity.
The threat of the Blaine Amendments in the states had brooded over the conference like the Holy Ghost. So how do our public policies fulfill the moral imperative of choice even for our most disadvantaged families? Tax credit scholarships may survive a legal threat, some, such as Coulson, said. But not every state has a tax code that could create a viable system of educational choice. The Supreme Court has given us guidance on navigating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution with its 2002 decision in Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris, but the Blaine threat is much more pervasive for many states considering these options.
These questions aren't new, but the American Center for School Choice is to be commended for drawing the debate away from the margins and toward the center of our discussion over education reform. Whatever divides our approach to the schoolhouse door, it is either misguided or politically calculated to define the discussion as anything other than a moral imperative.
