School assignments. Parents should have more say in where their kids go to school, rather than face felony charges for lying about their addresses, a Sun-Sentinel guest column argues. (The author works at Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog, and an earlier version of the piece ran here.) The Escambia school district starts implementing a digital school registration system. Pensacola News-Journal.
Elections. Florida's statewide teachers union is keeping a close eye on legislative races as they develop. Gradebook. Charter school operators make campaign contributions in school board races. Gradebook. The League of Women Voters weighs in here. Collier County School Board hopefuls debate. Naples Daily News. A Marion school board candidate drops out of her race, citing confusion over residency requirements. Ocala Star-Banner. A Leon County superintendent candidate may abandon his bid, and seek re-election to the Tallahassee City Commission instead. Tallahassee Democrat.
Collective bargaining. Hillsborough County schools look to rewrite teacher job categories after a Gates Foundation grant expires. A proposal would create three classes of teachers: Tenured teachers, one-year contract employees and probationary hires. Gradebook.
Charter schools. The St. Johns County School Board moves to take over a charter school plagued by financial problems. St. Augustine Record.
School boards. Alachua County's April Griffin is set to lead the Florida School Boards Association next year. Gainesville Sun. (more…)
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
Florida's senior U.S. Senator is slated to speak out against a charter school measure tomorrow, even as its prospects in the state Legislature grow increasingly dim.
The Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald Tallahassee bureau reports that the League of Women Voters plans to host Sen. Bill Nelson at a press conference denouncing a proposed constitutional amendment creating a statewide charter school authorizer in Florida.
The group, which has become increasingly vocal on school choice issues, is holding a three-day legislative gathering in the state capital this week.
Nelson, a Democrat, is expected to address other topics, like voter registration, redistricting and funding for environmental restoration. (more…)
A common school
Relying on a 19th century concept of public education and a legal precedent from the early 20th century, the Washington State Supreme Court on Friday struck down one of the country's newest charter school laws.
The League of Women Voters v. State ruling clouds the futures of nearly 1,200 students in nine charter schools, and could cast doubt on other educational programs. But it also raises a question that should resonate beyond the Evergreen State: Can archaic legal concepts stymie a 21st-century education system?
The court's 6-3 majority relied on three-step reasoning. First, Washington's state constitution restricts some state funding to the support of "common schools" only. Second, charter schools are not common schools, a definition drawn from a 106-year-old legal precedent. Third, the state's funding system risks giving charter schools some of the "common schools" money they're barred from receiving, since the state hasn't segregated the common school fund from the general fund since 1967.
When the Washington Supreme Court decided District No. 20 v. Bryan in 1909, the state was home to more than 2,800 public schools (132 of them in log cabins) spread across 2,710 school districts. At the time the court held common schools were "subject to and under the control of the qualified voters of the school district." All nine justices agreed last week that charters authorized by the state — a concept voters approved in 2012 — were not common schools.
The idea of common schools traces to the 1830s, when Horace Mann envisioned a form of free primary schools that would be tasked with teaching students reading, writing and arithmetic.
The term appears in Article IX, Section 2 of Washington's state constitution:
The public school system shall include common schools, and such high schools, normal schools, and technical schools as may hereafter be established. But the entire revenue derived from the common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively applied to the support of the common schools.
Washington officials have long struggled to reconcile a modern public education system with a concept that may have been envisioned under the dim light of a whale-oil lamp. The Washington State Attorney's General Office warned antiquated definitions of the "common school" did not include high schools (along with vocational education and teacher training colleges), as these schools were referred to as separate from the "common school" in Article IX, Section 2.
Sometimes, school choice opponents argue it leads to underpaid teachers and children taught on the cheap. At the same time, they often argue it drains much-needed funding from public schools.
As Mike McShane points out for U.S. News & World Report, it seems they contradict themselves — or perhaps they're luring school choice supporters into a rhetorical trap.
When critics accuse school vouchers or tuition tax credits programs of "taking money from public schools," school choice advocates can point out that almost every program in the country allows only a fraction of a student's per-pupil allotment to follow that student. For example, in Indiana, the voucher for low-income students is capped at 90 percent of the state's contribution toward a child's education. All of the locally raised tax dollars stay in the traditional public school system.
But once this concern is put to rest, critics pivot to other questions: Do schools have adequate services for students with special needs? Do they provide transportation? Are they in old or outdated buildings? Do they have the technology, science labs and other infrastructure that modern schools need?
School grades. Low grades create more teacher turnover, a teacher columnist argues. StateImpact Florida.
Turnaround schools. Pushback in Pasco yields some flexibility from the state. Tampa Bay Times.
Charter schools. The League of Women Voters ask questions in Polk. Lakeland Ledger.
Common Core. Administrators are training for Common Core too. StateImpact Florida.
GPAs. A proposed change in how they're calculated in Pasco stirs debate. Tampa Bay Times.
Principals. St. Lucie will have 13 new ones in August. TCPalm.com.
Superintendents. Duval board members evaluate Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, reports the Florida Times Union. Alachua Superintendent Dan Boyd wins the Florida School Boards Association's President's Award, reports the Gainesville Sun. New Lee Superintendent Nancy Graham starts shaking up administrative staff, reports the Fort Myers News Press. More from the Naples Daily News.
School safety. A third custodian is considered a suspect in the shooting deaths of two custodians at a West Palm Beach high school. Palm Beach Post.
School spending. A Marion school board member suggests some controversial cost-savings ideas to save teacher jobs, including having staff clean their own schools and either shutting down or charging students to attend IB programs. Ocala Star Banner.
Reading. More than 100 residents turn out to kick off a reading mentoring program for kids in Fort Meade. Lakeland Ledger.
Editor's note: This piece ran in Monday's Gainesville Sun.
Parents with financial means long have chosen their children's schools by where they live or which private tuition they pay, but Florida is approaching a remarkable threshold in school choice. Last year, 1.5 million students — or 43 percent — attended something other than their neighborhood school. Of special note, 51,023 of the poorest among them are attending a private school at public expense.
This move toward customizing public education is owed to a simple proposition — that different children learn in different ways — and it represents an extraordinary commitment to equal opportunity. In Alachua County last year, 5,800 students chose magnet or choice programs or used open enrollment, and another 2,200 went to charter schools. This year, 335 low-income students are also attending private schools through state-backed scholarships.
That last learning option, called Florida Tax Credit Scholarships, gives pause to the Alachua League of Women Voters. Its respected president, Kathy Kidder, recently questioned the program's constitutionality and accountability. She cited a state Supreme Court case, the 2006 dismissal of a voucher given to students in schools judged to be failing, without noting two prominent U.S. Supreme Court precedents that affirm the scholarship's constitutionality.
The first, a 2002 case from Cleveland, rules that religious schools cannot be excluded from private voucher programs as long as the primary goal is education and parents aren't coerced into choosing. The second, a 2011 case from Arizona, finds tax credit scholarships to be in a separate constitutional arena altogether. In Arizona, the court ruled that tax-credited contributions are not government expenditures.
The more important measure, though, is educational progress. The $4,335 scholarship is available only to children in K-12 whose household income qualifies them for free or reduced-price lunch, and this year the average income is just 6 percent above the poverty line. Two-thirds of the students are black or Hispanic, and more than half live in households with only one parent. More striking, the students who choose the scholarship are the lowest academic achievers from the public schools they leave behind.
The encouraging news is that these same students, according to the latest annual standardized test scores, are achieving the same gains in reading and math as students of all income levels nationally. (more…)
