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Palm Beach Post, one-trick pony

The editorial board of the PB&J goes after the Florida Senate and round two of the amendment fight.  And, of course, the gang can’t quite stop itself from hitting the tired old accountability argument.

But most of the blame falls on Gov. Bush, who has betrayed his own voucher programs by refusing to make them accountable.  When the Florida Supreme Court this year struck down the first voucher program, the justices noted that Gov. Bush had given private schools taking so-called "opportunity scholarships" special treatment he denied to public schools. The gap is even larger for "corporate voucher" schools, whose students, for example, don’t have to take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

Been there.  Done that.  Got the T-shirt.  Didn’t fit.  Took it back.  In fact, we swung by for a visit as early as yesterday!  And that was after our trip last week! 

On one hand, I’m tempted to merely copy and paste my arguments in those posts (hey, two can play at that game).  But I like to show that I earn my keep, so while you are encouraged to read those prior posts for a more in-depth explanation, here’s a quick restatement:

• The legislation currently pending before the Florida legislature–which isn’t unlike the legislation that has been introduced during the last two or three sessions–both accomplishes exactly what you want it to do (that is, it requires choice schools to administer tests to compare students’ progress to their peers in public and private schools nationwide) and will likely fall victim to the same partisan infighting that killed its forerunners in previous legislative sessions.
• Most–not just many, but most–choice schools already administer these sorts of tests, because it is in their best interests to do so. 
• The major school choice organizations in Florida, along with state private school accrediting organizations, support the legislation, and have been trying to get it passed. 
• Constant cries for "more accountability!" are, ultimately, accusations that parents are too stupid to see if a school is effectively educating their children. 

Onward:

Teaching and financial standards also have been much lower in voucher schools – a deficiency that has resulted in scandals at several schools.

And what happens with those schools?  They get shut down.  Sure, it’s painful and tragic.  But those schools deserve to get the axe.  And unlike the public school system, it’s actually possible to pull the plug on schools that aren’t measuring up or are leeching money.  We covered Florida spending in one of the posts above (just like the PB&J keeps dredging up the same old complaints), and found that aside from the fact that the Sunshine State spends more on K-12 than on any other budget area (to the tune of $21 billion a year), Florida schools truly are starving to death and are in desperate need of cash. 

Last year, Republicans tied down the Legislature for two weeks by wrongly trying to "save" Terri Schiavo.

What a cheap shot.  Do we have to go back there? 

Sen. Lee’s action has forced delay during the critical last week of the session.Even if vouchers do get on the ballot, it is unlikely that voters will approve such substandard programs.

The situation in Florida has been a bit difficult for researchers, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.  The program that was shut down, the Opportunity Scholarship Program, has only been in existence for around five years and has just over 700 children.  Even though the program is just now at the point where results begin to surface (it usually takes around four years to see an impact), the full population of children in the program isn’t enough for any sort of meaningful, comparative research.  And to top it off, long-term comparisons of test scores, finally available due to passage of legislation yesterday, are about three years late due to any number of political slapfights. 

So the jury is still out with respect to statistics on the benefit of school choice to Florida voucher recipients.  But significant research concludes that school choice has been a boost to kids not in the program:

• Florida’s low-performing schools are improving in direct proportion to the challenge they face from voucher competition. These improvements are real, not the result of test gaming, demographic shifts, or the statistical phenomenon of “regression to the mean.”
• Schools already facing competition from vouchers showed the greatest improvements of all five categories of low-performing schools, improving by 9.3 scale score points on the FCAT math test, 10.1 points on the FCAT reading test, and 5.1 percentile points on the Stanford-9 math test relative to Florida public schools that were not in any low-performing category. 
• Schools threatened with the prospect of vouchers showed the second greatest improvements, making relative gains of 6.7 scale points on the FCAT math test, 8.2 points on the FCAT reading test, and 3.0 percentile points on the Stanford-9 math test.
• Low-performing schools that have never received any grade other than a D, or that have received at least one D since FCAT grading began, produced small and indistinguishable gains, respectively, relative to Florida public schools that were not low-performing. While these schools were similar to schools facing voucher competition, they failed to make similar gains in the absence of competitive incentives.
• Some researchers theorize that failing schools improve because of the stigma of a failing grade rather than the threat of voucher competition. The results of this study contradict this thesis. Schools that received one F in 1998-99 but none since are no longer exposed to the potential of voucher competition. These schools actually lost ground relative to non-low-performing Florida public schools, supporting the conclusion that once the threat of vouchers goes away, so does the incentive for failing schools to improve.

(Also, see this.)   

In short, the PBP has got to find a different adjective to describe Florida school choice.  While all three school choice programs have been thrown under the bus from a legal standpoint, and therefore might (and we do stress might) have an argument that these programs are legally substandard, no serious researcher has concluded that school choice results in poorer choices for children; in fact, the worst they’re able to say is that school choice doesn’t hurt.

In addition, many Floridians object to using public money for the private religious schools that take most voucher students. Republicans kept the word "voucher" out of their proposed amendment because they know that vouchers are unpopular.

Presumably they’re referring to polling data.  Once again, the PBP makes my job that much easier.  Quoting from an earlier post:

As we’ve pointed out earlier (along with Eduwonk

), it depends on how the question is worded.  Thanks in no small part to the work of newspapers like the PBP, the dreaded "v" word has become hopelessly loaded.  But when the poll question is posed such that people are told what the term actually means–giving children a publicly-funded scholarship to attend a higher-performing public or private school–the poll numbers tend to shift in the other direction.

Moving right along:

Gov. Bush said senators who didn’t back his voucher amendment "turned their backs" on students who would be stuck in failing schools. Wrong. Students at schools that get two F’s from the state can transfer to a higher-graded public school. 

The PBP is referring to the transfer option available under NCLB.  That transfer option assumes there are better quality public schools available for those students to attend.  There’s just one problem–there aren’t any.  So for those students who have no other public school options–and that’s the reality for many of those students–just what are they supposed to do?  Besides get kicked out of the only good schools they’ve ever known? 

Rather than fulfill commitments to the 2.5 million public school students – for example, by paying for the class-size amendment that he again tried and failed to kill – …

As luck would have it, Andrew "Eduwonk" Rotherham recently did some heavy lifting on the subject of class size:

Common sense and research both tell us that if all else is equal, smaller classes are good for students. Unfortunately, in urban education, all else is rarely equal, and a host of problems hinder efforts to attract top teachers. So reducing class size without addressing teacher quality more broadly is akin to continually adding pitchers to your bullpen without worrying about whether any of them can even throw a fastball.

Back to the editorial:

…Gov. Bush wants to use legislative sleight-of-hand on behalf of about 750 students to preserve the voucher program that the state Supreme Court declared unconstitutional.

Well, it’s nice to see where newspapers really sit when it comes to the underdog.  

The good thing is that even if Gov. Bush and Sen. Lee can strong-arm enough senators into putting the voucher amendment before the voters, they can’t strong-arm enough voters into passing it. 

Then what are you worried about?  Seriously, now–if you really believe the poll numbers, why not put it to a vote?  We won’t deny that Bush and (especially) Lee are making huge political gambles.  Nor will we deny that Villalobos has paid a political price in all this (although the truth is that the amendment saga is just one component of the larger fistfight occurring right now among the Senate GOP).  But if you really believe that public opinion is on your side, what do you have to lose by going to the polls with this?