Note: Step Up For Students helps administer Florida's tax credit scholarship program. It also publishes this blog and employs its editor.
I'm not a baseball fan, but I love the movie "Bull Durham." In the film, baseball groupie Susan Sarandon compliments Kevin Costner for approaching the minor league home run record. Costner remarks that it's a dubious honor – it means he's spent an awful long time trying to get to the majors. That's how I feel sometimes when I realize I have been working for the cause of parental choice in education for 20 years. If I were any good at this, shouldn't the job be done by now?
Nothing like the parental choice movement to make you appreciate incremental progress. But on the 15th anniversary of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC), I look around and see so much to be thankful for. When the Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush created the FTC in 2001, school choice in Florida was in its infancy. The definition of "public education" was pretty simple: raise taxpayer dollars to educate kids, give all the money to the districts – which run all the schools in a fairly uniform manner – and assign kids by their ZIP codes.
How far we have come since then. Today, more than 30 percent of K-12 children funded by the taxpayers don't attend their zoned public school. They attend magnets, charters and virtual schools. They take classes under dual enrollment programs at colleges and community colleges. They now even combine providers and delivery methods at the same time. And yes, some children even attend private schools, including faith-based ones.
The FTC is a small but critical part of this new definition of public education. This year the program is serving 92,000 children, who are attending more than 1,600 private schools chosen by their parents. This sounds like a lot—and it's more than I ever thought we would serve – but it's still a pretty small number in context. There are 2.8 million students in Florida's public schools (including magnets and charters). So the FTC still represents only 3 percent of that total. But to each scholarship family, it's the most important thing in the world. Research shows the FTC kids are the poorest, and poorest performers, in their public schools when they leave. The scholarship empowers poor parents to find an environment that better suits their children's unique needs. (more…)
Students at Franklin Middle School in Tampa.
Vouchers need more accountability. So say David R. Colburn, director of the Askew Institute at the University of Florida, and Brian Dassler, chief academic officer for the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, in this exclusive op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times. Response here from the Heartland Institute, which says parental satisfaction is “a more effective form of accountability than extending mindless bureaucratic oversight to the private sector.”
New charter school to focus on “Latin and logic.” Tampa Bay Times story here. The applicant for the school is Anne Corcoran, the wife of state Rep. Richard Corcoran. He’s a future House speaker and a strong proponent of private school choice, too.
Threats to single-gender learning options. U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barbara Mikulski are considered to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but in this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal they unite in defense of single-gender options in public schools. (They single out Florida as one of the states where such options have been under legal fire.) It’s worth noting that in our own backyard, old lines of division have also faded over this issue. Last year, John Kirtley, who chairs Step Up For Students, donated $100,000 to the Hillsborough County School District to support single-gender academies at two public middle schools. The Walton Family Foundation kicked in another $100,000.
More on race-based achievement goals. The New York Times writes today about the state Board of Education’s decision last week to set different academic achievement targets for black, white, Hispanic and other subgroups. The targets incorporate steeper rates of improvement for groups with lower proficiency rates, but they have nonetheless caused a ruckus. The parents group Fund Education Now weighs in. So does Naples Daily News columnist Brent Batten, who hears from Collier County education officials that this is “much ado about nothing.”
