Switching to a different school didn’t just make dreams come true, “it allowed me to have dreams I didn’t know I could have,” writes a former school choice scholarship student in an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal.

Denisha Merriweather of Jacksonville, Fla., says by fourth grade, she disliked school so much she thought she’d eventually drop out. But at the urging of her godmother, and help from a tax credit scholarship for low-income students, she enrolled in a private school, graduated with honors and became the first member of her family to attend college. A few months ago, she earned a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary social science and is now headed to graduate school.

“This didn’t happen by chance, or by hard work alone,” she writes. “It happened because I was given an opportunity.”

Merriweather’s piece notes the lawsuit that the Florida teachers union, Florida School Boards Association and other groups filed Aug. 28 to end the 13-year-old scholarship program, which is administered by non-profits like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog. The program serves nearly 70,000 students this fall, more than two thirds of them black or Hispanic.

Merriweather is also featured in a new TV ad, paid for the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which encourages the teachers union and school boards association to drop the lawsuit. In the Wall Street Journal, she said she hopes people who care about disadvantaged children pause to hear stories like hers. Read the full op-ed on the Wall Street Journal here.

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From the News Service of Florida:

The co-sponsor of a measure that would overhaul the state's de facto voucher program has filed an amendment that would scale back the legislation by removing one of the more controversial elements.

Rep. Manny Diaz Jr., R-Hialeah, filed an amendment Tuesday that would strike a proposal to increase the cap on fundraising for the program. The original proposal would have upped the cap to about $30 million above what it would otherwise be over the next five years, assuming the number of students using the vouchers continued to grow. If Diaz's amendment is approved, the bill would mostly expand the eligibility for the program and boost the amount that each scholarship would cover.

The House could consider amendments to the bill (HB 7167) as soon as Wednesday.

The Senate, meanwhile, has shown no interest in attaching the voucher provisions to a bill (SB 1512) that would help parents pay for education services for disabled children --- something that is also included in the House bill. Senators withdrew a stand-alone voucher proposal last month.

Editor's note: The tax credit scholarship (aka "voucher") program is administered by Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.

Editor's note: About 200 people who support Florida's tax credit scholarship program, including many scholarship students themselves, attended yesterday's legislative committee hearing on a bill to expand the program. Many speakers made many good points, but a woman from Ocala stole the show. The audience applauded her, lawmakers praised her, reporters quoted her. Here is what Chanae Jackson-Baker told the committee. Her remarks were edited slightly for length and clarity.

I worked 12 hours last night in Gainesville. I drove to Ocala to get my kid to school, then drove to Tallahassee to be here. That’s how important this is to me.

We keep talking about money, we keep talking about the money. The children are an investment.  ... I pay $500 a month over what the scholarship covers. ... Because we’re putting in more, and investing more, we are willing to give more.

I don’t know about anybody else’s private school, but the one my children attend, they took the Stanford 10, which is actually a lot better ... than the FCAT. I keep hearing talk of the FCAT. When my son took the FCAT in third grade, he was doing horrible. He was doing horrible because he had auditory processing disorder. He has dyslexia. He’s on the autism spectrum. When he was in public school, and I hate to bash public school because I was the parent on SAC committee and PTO before I gave up on public school … He left public school reading at third grade, four month level in sixth grade. He’s now in seventh grade and he’s on level. I never thought I’d see my son read a book.

I have my step daughter … she came from a public school. She missed 85 days in kindergarten. No one stepped in. No one. She almost flunked out of kindergarten. She’s now in her school. She’s now excelling.

It’s not just education. It’s character. When my eight-year-old and my nine-year-old come to talk to me about integrity, when they talk about being good to people, when they talk about there being a family at school, that’s what this scholarship is all about. (more…)

Waldorf schools are a splendid example of how the private marketplace can fill a learning niche. Their humanistic approach can work in perfect harmony with some families to produce creative, lifelong learners who become highly successful adults. And as redefinED editor Ron Matus pointed out in this post about the Waldorf Sarasota and an oped in today’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune, they also help make two pertinent points in the world of tax credit scholarships. One, not every school is right for every student; and, two, any education program that includes Waldorf is not easily described as a right-wing conspiracy.

No doubt, the decision to grant private learning options for public school students is a tough one for any lawmaker who has spent a lifetime supporting the neighborhood public school. But the debate on the floor of the Louisiana House today sounded at times almost anachronistic.

The House was hearing a tax credit scholarship bill, HB 621 filed by Rep. Kirk Talbot, a Republican, that aims to give options to low-income students at a scholarship amount, roughly $4,000, that is less than even the state portion of the Louisiana public school formula. Not incidentally, the state’s legislative fiscal office said the program would likely save taxpayers money. (By way of disclosure, we have helped advise Rep. Talbot, who to his credit insisted on strong academic and fiscal accountability provisions in the bill.)

The bill provoked some predictable and reasonable concerns, as opponents wrestled with the potential impact on public schools. But seldom has the line between public and private been drawn so harshly or with such indifference to the needs of students.

Rep. Patricia Smith, a Baton Rouge Democrat and retired oil company spokesperson, challenged the very concept of parental choice: “Don't you think there’s enough choice already?”

Rep. J. Rogers Pope, a Denham Springs Republican and retired school superintendent, sounded as though he were establishing terms for the war on terrorism: “You’re going to have to answer to the public schools in your district. Either you’re for them or you’re against them.”

Rep. Joe Harrison, a Gray Republican and financial planner, offered a singular gauge on how to measure such legislation (Hint: It's unrelated to whether children are helped): “This is not the kind of bill that is going to help our system out.”

The bill, incidentally, was approved by a margin of 52-43 but fell one vote short of the absolute majority of the full chamber necessary to pass because 10 representatives were absent. Supporters hope to bring it back for another vote next week.

It is wonderful to see the leaders of the Parent Revolution receive this recognition in the Wall Street Journal. I have admired their work from afar, and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel last year with the group's founder, Ben Austin. They have done amazing work organizing low-income parents and giving voice to their desire for more educational opportunities.

Here's my wish: that Parent Revolution would advocate for true empowerment for these parents. Families should have the right not just to reconstitute the schools to which their children are assigned. They should be empowered to choose whatever school will best serve their children. It might be a charter school, it might be a magnet school, but it also might be a faith-based school. What we have learned in Florida and other states is that there is a vast inventory of private, mostly faith-based schools in urban areas with high concentrations of low-income families. In Jacksonville, for example, there are only about a dozen charter schools, and not all of them serve low-income children. However, there are more than 100 private schools in that city serving low-income students on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.

One of these schools, The Potter's House Christian Academy, has a graduation rate at more than 90 percent. More than 300 of the school's 600 students attend on the scholarship program. What if you were a low-income parent with a child doing poorly in his assigned public school? What would you rather have, the ability to force change at that one public school or a passport to leave and select the best school available?

The clergy in Florida has indeed recognized that educational opportunity is a matter of social justice. There have emerged two official coalitions of Florida ministers, one African American and one Hispanic, demanding full parental choice for low income families. They both strongly support the tax credit scholarship program.

In Florida, the clergy is not only recognizing that low-income parents need all options on the table for their children, they are in many cases providing that option. My own hope is that the Parent Revolution will expand its amazing work to demand full empowerment for low-income families.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has confused many in the school choice community during the last 24 hours by signing into law a bill creating "savings accounts" for students with special needs while simultaneously killing a measure that would have expanded opportunities in the state's tax credit scholarship. 

In a letter announcing her veto, Brewer says she recognizes "the importance of empowering parents" but warns that HB 2581 "unbalances the budget." A tax credit scholarship made available to students who want to leave the public school system likely can lessen the financial burden of the state, Brewer wrote, but the current measure "expands the pool of qualified students that may qualify." Also, she added, removing the cap on corporate tax credits would make budgeting difficult.

This is where things get muddled. Nothing in the bill's fiscal analysis backs up the governor's assertion that an expanded pool of students would unbalance the budget. In fact, House analysts report that if more public school students took advantage of the scholarship -- just 3,300 -- they would offset the loss of tax revenues that resulted from the bill, which they estimated to be at $17.2 million for 2012. Brewer seems to be suggesting this wouldn't happen, but she doesn't say why. 

Brewer did, however, bestow her blessing on a limited version of a plan, birthed at the free-market oriented Goldwater Institute, that has generated a lot of controversy in other states such as Florida. In Arizona, the plan creates what are called "Empowerment Accounts," which in this sense would benefit special education students with money their parents can apply to the instructional needs they determine are appropropriate. These might include private school tuition, tutoring or textbooks.  The amount of money placed in an account would be 90 percent of the per-pupil funding that a public school would have received for the child.

While the accounts are limited to special education, their proponents somehow managed to escape much of the notice directed at those who advocated for their passage in Florida. When Florida Gov. Rick Scott's education transition team recommended a more universally applied "Education Savings Account," the suggestion was attacked as a "voucher for all," and Scott has since backed away from the idea.

UPDATE: From The New York Times on the ruling: The Supreme Court on Monday effectively upheld an Arizona program that aids religious schools, saying in a 5-to-4 decision that the plaintiffs had no standing to challenge it. The program itself is novel and complicated, and allowing it to go forward may be of no particular moment. But by closing the courthouse door to some kinds of suits that claim violations of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion, the court’s ruling in the case may be quite consequential.

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said that plaintiffs objecting to an Arizona tax credit scholarship on the grounds that it amounted to government aid of religious schooling have not been harmed by the program and therefore had no right to sue. The decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn overturns a ruling by the Ninth Circuit and is significant in the distinction it draws between direct governmental aid and tax credits for contributions to a cause.

We'll have more analyses later, but here are reports from Bloomberg and the ABA Journal, as well as an analysis from Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute.

by Kenya Woodard

Now into their third day of a self-imposed exile in neighboring Illinois, Indiana’s House Democrats say they want another 11 Republican-backed bills soon to come up for a vote to be “killed” along with the proposed “right-to-work” legislation that initially prompted their flight from the state.

Republicans have offered to dump the latter, but are refusing to yield on any of the other bills, including a proposal to allow low- and middle-income families a public means to choose a private school for their children. House Minority Leader Patrick Bauer, a Democrat from South Bend, told reporters that the tax credit scholarship proposal and a bill that limits teachers' collective bargaining rights are “dealbreakers.”

While it’s common for Democratic leaders to distance themselves from tax-credit and voucher programs, it’s interesting to see Indiana’s Democrats do so. After all, in Indiana, such programs had their roots in the Democratic Party, and those roots don't go back far. (more…)

Before a Virginia senate committee had a chance to kill a proposed tax credit scholarship for low-income students, legislators heard from a former Florida lawmaker who had his own change of heart about supporting private learning options for families who could least afford them.

Terry L. Fields, a former Democratic state representative from Jacksonville, Fla., traveled to Virginia this week to share with lawmakers skeptical of HB 2314 how a group of families once showed him that supporting a scholarship for low-income children helped fulfill the state's commitment to equal educational opportunity.

"It's very personal with me," Fields said in an interview with redefinED this morning. "When my son was in grade school, I realized as a parent that he didn't do very well in that setting. So we made a decision to put him in a private school." A few years later, a group of about 30 parents and 30 students came to his House office  and confronted Fields' opposition to Florida's own tax credit scholarship and asked for the chance to give their children what he had given his own son. (more…)