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By Dan Spencer
Watchdog.org
January 29th, 2015

It’s National School Choice Week. School choice is all about public policy enabling families stuck with low-performing schools to being able to choose to attend higher-performing public and private schools. School choice encourages healthy competition among schools to better serve students. Parents are allowed to use the public funds set aside for their children’s education to choose schools that work best for them.

School choice includes things like charter schools, home schooling, and school vouchers:

• Charter schools are public schools that are given independence from some local or even state rules. They are financed through public funds. Charter schools are open to any child, and if enrollment exceeds available space, charter schools accept students by random, public lottery. More than 2.5 million students now attend nearly 6,500 charter schools.
• Some parents choose to home school their children instead of sending them to a traditional public or private school. Home schooling is legal in all 50 states. It is estimated that more than 1.5 million children are being home schooled in the U.S.
• Vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and personal tax credits allow parents to use public funds to pay for some or all of their child’s private school tuition. The Center for Education Reform reports that there are 21 school voucher programs in 18 states plus the District of Columbia.

All these choices provide families with alternatives when a traditional school fails to adequately meet their student’s needs.

Study after study has found that school choice increases graduation rates and student achievement.  Education is the gateway to a better future. School choice is seen “the surest way” to end the cycle of poverty, as a way to expand opportunity, and a means to end the school-to-prison and welfare pipeline.

Why aren’t these alternatives to traditional public schools available to all children? Imagine how different things might be if school choice was universal.

By Amy Schneider
Eugene Weekly
January 29th, 2015

It’s National School Choice Week, a time for parents, students and teachers around the country to celebrate and recognize the diversity of school options available to kids. Sometimes all those options can be overwhelming — Eugene School District 4J alone has five alternative elementary schools.

Fortunately, the Jan. 31 Alternative Education Fair at the Eugene Public Library is here to help. The fair is a one-stop shopping opportunity for parents and students to chat with more than a dozen representatives from local charter schools, private schools and homeschooling advocates.

According to a 2014 survey by the Center for Education Reform, the number of charter schools in the U.S. has grown steadily since 2000, with an average growth rate of 340 schools per year.

“There seems to be a feeling among parents in 4J that public schools are under stress with chronic financial shortages and mandates from the feds that are pushing all kinds of testing on kids,” says Rebecca Daniels, executive director of Network Charter School. “As a longtime parent who’s had kids in both alternative schools and 4J neighborhood schools, I certainly feel that among the parents I know, there are people interested in looking at what the alternatives are.”

Parents can even find alternatives within traditional public school districts, like 4J, which will table at the fair. “We’re not the only choice in this area,” says Kerry Delf, communications coordinator for 4J. “You can choose to attend a school in 4J, or you can look at a charter school or private school.”

Delf says it’s important to distinguish between alternative public schools and public charter schools. “We have different processes,” she says, adding that the deadline for 4J’s school choice lottery is Feb. 27.  “A lot of times parents will assume a charter school is in 4J, but we have separate systems for enrollment. If you’re interested in those schools, talk to those schools.”

She says schools such as Corridor Alternative Elementary, a school that specializes in the performing arts, fieldtrips and enrichment programs while still operating within the 4J district, are opportunities for kids to experience alternative learning styles.

Laura Philips with the Eugene Public Library says the fair provides that very opportunity. “It’s been going on for more than a decade,” she says. “It’s a really lively event, and it’s fun because it brings together all these different people who are interested in education. We usually have a few hundred people visiting.”

Other schools tabling include the Eugene Sudbury School, which helped organize the event, High School Connections at LCC, Ridgeline Montessori Public Charter School and West Lane Technical Learning Center. The library will also showcase its free, online homework center for students.

The Alternative Education Fair is 1 to 4 pm Saturday, Jan. 31, at the Eugene Public Library.

By Joanne Butler
The Daily Caller
January 29th, 2015

As it’s National School Choice Week, I wanted to see how Republican presidential hopefuls measure up on their actions to increase school choice (versus just talking about it). My specific focus: how charter schools are faring in their home states. Some states are doing well, others are muddling through, and still others are failing. (You can view a state-by-state matchup on charter schools here).

My home state of Delaware has popular charter schools; billboards advertising for students are a common sight. One school, the Charter School of Wilmington, is ranked number 10 nationwide among all high schools, public and private.

Despite this, establishing charter schools in our small blue state has not been easy. Democrats have controlled the governor’s office since 1993 and much of the statehouse over the past twenty years. Even now, statehouse Democrats are trying to limit access to charter schools. Delaware’s lesson is simple: charter schools need strong support from Republicans to survive and thrive.

With that in mind, I did some calculating. See the table below.

Interestingly, the winner of my little survey is Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the mild-mannered Clark Kent of the 2016 pack. He may act like Clark Kent, but he governs like Superman.

While Walker cannot take credit for establishing charter schools (that happened in 1993), he has helped the charter cause in his public career. As executive for Milwaukee County (2002-2010) and in his first term as governor, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee was empowered to form a charter school, and then to form more charters throughout the county. Coincidence? I don’t think so. An important extra benefit is the university is graduating people from its teachers program who have experience and a positive attitude to charter schools. Trust me, this is unusual.

The end result: Wisconsin has the most charter schools (245) for its population size (5.7 million).

However, it’s clear New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has some explaining to do. His population share per charter school is more than double that of neighboring Delaware’s. Blame grumpy teachers unions? We have them too! However, with so many charter schools in Delaware, I believe we now have a critical mass of charter school acceptance by parents and students.

Although Christie approved five new charter schools last year (with more to come in the 2015 pipeline), his approvals are too few to reach that critical mass, considering the state’s population of nearly nine million.

In Ohio, Governor John Kasich is doing a very credible job in promoting school choice. The Center of Education Reform rated Ohio 11th in the nation for school choice ‘Parent Power.’ Note that Ohio calls charter schools ‘community schools’ – a somewhat misleading term.

Florida can boast a respectable number of charter schools (625) for its population size (19.5 million) but it’s unclear if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio can take much credit for this.

Florida’s initial charter school law was enacted in 1996, and the first school opened the same year. Bush became Florida’s governor in 1999 – well after the charter movement had taken hold. Same for Rubio, he first became a state legislator in 2000. Perhaps these men, as governor or legislator, took certain steps to expand access to charter schools. If so, these are stories they must tell us.

Meanwhile former Governor Rick Perry of Texas has little to boast about regarding charters. His state’s population (26.4 million) is about 25 percent larger than Florida’s (19.5 million), but has only 64 more charter schools than Florida (an increase of nine percent). Plus there are over 100,000 Texas kids on a charter school wait list. The Lone Star state’s population share per charter is just a wee bit better than Delaware’s – puzzling when you consider the length and strength of Republican control in Austin.

Why such abysmal charter school numbers, Mr. Perry?

Turning to Louisiana, the state has a relatively low number of charter schools, perhaps because its charter system is so complex.

Louisiana’s charter school website lists seven types of schools; variables include the entity that authorizes the charter. Yes, the website states there are five types, but look closer and you’ll see a Type 1B and Type 3B tucked in below. Cute, but it still makes for seven types.

So, Governor Jindal, how does this classification information help your average Louisianan choose a charter school? A parent’s main concerns are about the quality of teaching and the safety of the students. Knowing that a charter was authorized by a school board versus some other agency does not add value to the decision making process.

Final comment for Governor Jindal: when blue-state Delaware is beating your state on charter schools, something’s wrong. He’s a famous wonk with an Ivy League degree.

I included Kansas (with its meager 11 charter schools) in my survey, as it’s a sad example of missed opportunities caused by a governor who switched policies in midstream.

Governor Sam Brownback used to support charter schools, but moved away from them in the run-up to his 2014 re-election campaign. He opted for tax-credit funded school choice scholarships (enacted in 2014), as those involve private schools. However, the Center for Education Reform gives Brownback’s tax-credit/scholarship program a ‘D,’ stating it has “seriously restrictive provisions.”

Further, Brownback’s embrace of tax credit scholarships over charters resulted in the 2013 failure of proposed legislation to help expand charters. Without his backing, the legislation died in the statehouse.

While some conservatives see vouchers or scholarships for private schools as a purer solution to our education problems, realists know America has thousands of charter schools teaching millions of children. Vouchers and/or tax credit scholarships are generally restricted to the poorest families, while charters serve all students, including the middle class.

Charter schools are a way for people to create schools to fit certain needs, without having to raise the huge amount of money required to open a private school.

By Evan Grossman
Watchdog.org
January 30th, 2015

Pennsylvania could be a lot friendlier to public charter schools.

That’s the message delivered by a pair of independent reports that call for an equitable funding formula and more hospitable policies for the state’s charter schools.

The NAPCS placed Pennsylvania 25th out of 43 states in its sixth annual charter law report, while a Pew studyzeroed in on Pennsylvania’s lack of a statewide funding formula as a prime reason why some charter schools receive a fraction of the funding that traditional district schools get. Pennsylvania was one of the first states to establish a charter law in 1997, but Ziebarth said the law is now “out-dated.”“They got out of the gate strong, but it’s beginning to stagnate there,” said Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which published its ranking of the nation’s charter laws this month. “A number of states have updated their laws. Pennsylvania has not.”

“Pennsylvania is really not up to par with some other states that have more widespread choice and access for students to get into better schools,” said Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform.

NAPCS’s report shows the need for additional policy improvements across the nation, particularly in areas of funding. This evaluation is indicative of Pennsylvania’s greatest area of concern, too, as it is one of only three states without a funding formula for financing its schools.

State lawmakers have worked to rewrite Pennsylvania’s charter school law over the past few years, but have been unable to reach consensus. The funding formula and the creation of state-level authorizer for new charter schools have been the main sticking points.

NAPCS measures states’ charter climate according to 20 categories, from caps on the number of schools permitted to who can authorize them to transparency in the approval and denial process. Pennsylvania fell from No. 24 to 25 out of 43 states with charter laws this year because of its performance in the Equitable Operational Funding and Equal Access to All State and Federal Categorical Funding category.

In all, NAPCS scored the health of Pennsylvania’s charter school movement very high with 23 of a possible 26 points. However, the report recommends Pennsylvania shore up several areas, including prohibiting district-mandated restrictions on growth, ensuring authorizer accountability, providing authorizer funding, allowing multi-school charter contracts or multi-contract governing boards, and ensuring equitable access to capital funding and facilities.

For the fifth time in six years, Minnesota was named the No. 1 state for charter laws, while Maryland was last for the second straight year.

“More states need to enact legislation that reduces the funding gap between charter schools and traditional schools, provides charter schools with the flexibility to innovate and holds charter schools accountable for student achievement,” NAPCS President and CEO Nina Rees said.

Until 2011, the state provided school districts with a subsidy that reimbursed them for up to 32 percent of their per-pupil spending to offset the cost of charter schools. Pennsylvania eliminated that assistance, which cost districts $219 million in revenue, half of which was earmarked for Philadelphia schools, according to Pew.

“As a result of the change,” the report said, “individual districts had to spend a greater percentage of their overall funding on charter school students.”

Pennsylvania is one of five states that makes individual districts responsible for funding charter schools, placing a “greater financial burden on districts such as Philadelphia,” according to the Pew report.

The state determines how much districts must fund charters based on the district’s per-pupil operational cost, which is determined by taking the district total cost per pupil and subtracting certain federal reimbursements along with expenditures for facilities, transportation, adult education, dual enrollment and pre-K programs. Using this model funds charters $1,500 less per student than traditional public schools, according to the Commonwealth Foundation.

Last year, Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a similar evaluation calling for an overhaul of the state’s charter laws, saying the system was “seriously flawed” and recommended restoring an exclusive funding stream for charters. In some cases, DePasquale found disparities in pupil funding as much as $21,000 among districts and $10,000 among charters.

Among DePasquale’s recommendations were to eliminate cyber charter school payments from school districts and replace them with direct funding from the state. He also recommended requiring charter schools to have the same teacher and principal performance evaluations as school districts.

“For school districts, the increasing costs of tuition, as more students opt to attend charter schools, combined with the loss in 2011 of the charter school reimbursement paid by the state are part of the funding problem,” he said.

Despite the hurdles facing charter schools in Pennsylvania, one school district could turn completely charter. The York City School District was taken over by the state in 2012 and may turn over its eight schools to Charter Schools USA in an effort to repair its bleeding budget and improve students’ academic performance. If approved, York would be the fourth district in the country to go all-charter.

Gov. Tom Wolf has made education a major issue as he takes office and establishing a progressive funding formula is among his administration’s top priorities as Pennsylvania faces a $2 billion budget deficit. Finding new revenue streams for schools will be a challenge, but lawmakers have already begun the process of fixing what is clearly a problem for districts across the commonwealth.

Last year, Harrisburg formed the Basic Education Funding Commission, a 15-member committee tasked with developing and recommending a new school funding formula to the Legislature. Its final report is due in June.

Jay Evensen
Deseret News
January 29th, 2015

Utahns are hearing some strange political noises these days. State lawmakers, mostly conservative to the core, are entering a legislative session with a booming economy — December’s unemployment rate was 3.5 percent — and a healthy state surplus — estimated at $638 million — and yet many voices are calling for tax increases.

A news conference on Tuesday typified this. Business leaders and the Salt Lake Chamber joined to say it’s time for lawmakers to “look at all the options on the table.” While they didn’t specifically endorse an increase in the state income tax or gas taxes, the message was clear.

The state should no longer struggle to choose between funding education and funding transportation, they said. It should do both. The state’s strong economy is seen as an opportunity for higher taxes.

Well ….

Raising the gas tax would be about as useful as charging your child for using the family typewriter. Cars are becoming more fuel-efficient — the federal government wants to raise the average miles per gallon of new cars to 54.5 by 2025 — and hybrids and electrics are becoming more prevalent. People will be using gas stations less as time goes by, even if prices remain low.

And making the gas tax a sales tax would only turn every drop in pump prices into a state fiscal emergency.

Meanwhile, raising income taxes for schools probably is a political non-starter. But regardless of whether that happens, the need for more money should not come at the expense of other things that are improving education in Utah.

Chief among these is school choice. National School Choice Week began Jan. 25. As an illustration of how the movement has grown, Forbes contributor Maureen Sullivan said there were only 150 events to commemorate this four years ago. This year, more than 11,000 were planned nationwide. Among these was a scheduled rally at the Utah Capitol, sponsored by the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools, which was expected to involve more than 400 charter students.

Utah voters rejected private school vouchers in 2007 — an unfortunate decision to end an effort that, by now, could have had a significant positive impact on school funding. But the state has embraced charters, which are public schools that operate under contracts, freeing them from many state regulations imposed on other public schools. That has been a good thing.

The state now has 109 of these and, according to the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools, they are teaching 12 percent of Utah’s public school students. The Center for Education Reform gave Utah a B ratinglast year for its charter program, ranking it 11th best in the nation.

Advocates want to make sure this continues. They see some possible obstacles ahead, especially in the way we select members of the State Board of Education.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups threw out the state’s current method of choosing board candidates, which had required the governor to select two finalists after a committee had narrowed the list. At some point during the current session, the Legislature is likely to decide how to change the system.

The likely three options are to allow people to vote on all comers in a nonpartisan race, to allow political parties to winnow the candidates in a partisan race or to let the governor simply pick who sits on the board.

Of these, charter advocates fear the nonpartisan option the most, noting it would take only a few enemies of school choice to begin making life difficult for charters.

That would be a shame. A recent PDK/Gallup poll found about 70 percent support nationwide for charter schools, with 54 percent saying charter students receive a better education than other public school students.

That last point is a source of endless debate. Recent research published by the Cato Institute suggests charters are improving overall. But studying performance can be tricky. School choice allows some students who might otherwise fail to succeed, even if they may not do spectacularly well.

Yes, tax increases deserve a thorough debate in this legislative session. One thing lawmakers should not do in their effort to shore up school funding, however, is to begin limiting choices.

Dr. Susan Berry
Breitbart
January 28th, 2015

Economist and author Thomas Sowell has a way of very succinctly articulating profound truths. The Cato Institute tweeted one such nugget as the country celebrates National School Choice Week.

Cato, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, and the Heartland Institute—among other organizations—agree that, when it comes to “school choice,” the generic concept is fine, but it is parental choice—the right and responsibility of parents to choose the best form of education for their children—that is the hallmark of a free society.

The rhetoric associated with National School Choice Week aside, Joy Pullmann atHeartland writes, “Yes, we have school choice in this country – we have centralized school choice. Bureaucratized school choice. Central planning. The few, the proud, the paper-pushers making whatever decisions please them.”

In fact, some of the organizations that are sponsors of National School Choice Week are also supporters of the Common Core standards, a controversial top-down education reform initiative that promotes a one-size-fits-all approach to education in the name of social justice and equity.

“Partners” of the annual event this year include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Black Alliance for Education Options, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education.

With the centrally planned Common Core standards and the fast development of a government and corporate, elitist-led education system—that also says it supports school choice—should American parents be suspicious that perhaps Common Core proponents don’t want them to have the “choice” in their children’s education?

Cato observes why the “choice” needs to belong to parents:

Educational choice programs empower parents to choose the education that best meets their child’s needs. While all humans are imperfect, parents have historically made considerably better educational choices for their own children than state-appointed bureaucrats have made for the children of others.

The reality, however, is that if parents “choose” to send their children to a private school, that school may have additional regulatory burdens placed upon it by the state in which it is located in order to qualify as a participant in a school choice program.

In a 2010 study at Cato, Andrew Coulson looked at the question of whether school vouchers and tax credits increase regulation of private schools, and ultimately found that “vouchers, but not tax credits, impose a substantial and statistically significant additional regulatory burden on participating private schools.”

Voucher programs, Coulson concluded, are more likely to “suffocate the very markets to which they aim to expand access,” because state funds—which invariably invite state regulation—are directly transferred, in the form of vouchers, to parents to spend in an alternate education setting.

Tax credit scholarships, however, involve no state funds directly expended on private schools. Instead, taxpayers, both individual and businesses, can receive full or partial tax credits when they donate money to nonprofits that provide private school scholarships.

“For the most part, voucher programs are truly about getting more educational power to parents, but accepting rules and regulations is often the price of getting and keeping such programs,” Dr. Neal McCluskey, Associate Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at Cato, told Breitbart News. “Opponents of choice want the programs hamstrung, and many people feel like, if their tax money is going to go to a private school, they should get some sort of assurance it is ‘working.’”

“This is why the superior method of delivering choice is through scholarship tax credits, programs in which individuals or corporations get credits for money they choose to donate to scholarship granting organizations,” he added. “That eliminates the concern that a taxpayer’s money is going, against their will, to a school of which they disapprove.”

Last May, in a study at the Friedman Foundation titled “Public Rules on Private Schools,” Andrew Catt provided a means for measuring the regulatory burdens placed upon private schools that seek to participate in three types of school choice programs: vouchers, scholarship tax credits, and education savings accounts.

In a phone interview with Breitbart News, Catt said, “Private schools are regulated even without school choice, and the amount of regulation changes from state to state and area to area.”

What Catt found in his study is that “voucher programs have more regulations tied to Paperwork, Reporting [one category of regulations] than tax-credit scholarship programs do,” and that, “[o]n average, the choice regulations for the voucher programs had impact scores more than three times as negative the scores of tax-credit scholarships.”

The issue of regulation of private schools that seek participation in school voucher programs has been addressed by some conservative groups.

For example, as Breitbart News reported earlier in January, a conservative coalition of 40 groups in Indiana signed onto an agenda titled the “Platform for Educational Empowerment,” which urged state lawmakers to address, among other things, the issues of “reducing regulations on voucher-accepting schools” and “freedom in testing and choice of non-Common Core-aligned/rebranded standards.”

“As conservatives and activists who have been at the forefront of the education debates in Indiana for the past two years, the groups represented here reject recent media reports that the expansion of school vouchers is a major priority for grassroots conservatives,” said Heather Crossin, co-founder of Hoosiers Against Common Core. “School choice needs freedom to thrive; therefore our first priority is to free voucher schools from the stifling regulations which bind them.”

According to the Platform, while Indiana has the largest school voucher program in the country, the Center for Education Reform finds the Hoosier State is “ranked as the second-worst state in the country at ‘infringing on private school autonomy’ due to our voucher program’s many suffocating and unnecessary regulations.”

The Platform continues:

Because of these regulations, Indiana’s voucher program has one of the lowest private-school participation rates in the nation, at one-third of Indiana private schools. State lawmakers should cut all but the most basic of transparency requirements on private voucher schools, given that parents and private accreditation agencies already place higher demands on private schools than any bureaucrat can generate. Particularly egregious is the requirement that voucher-accepting schools administer the new assessment aligned to Indiana’s rebranded/Common Core-aligned standards… If true school choice is to be realized, this issue must be addressed so that parents may have genuine and competing curriculum options.

Jeff Spalding, director of fiscal policy and analysis for the Friedman Foundation,articulated the problem of increased regulations for private schools that wish to participate in school choice programs.

“With the surge in school choice legislation over the past five years, more attention has turned toward the effects of new regulations on the operations of private schools,” Spalding wrote. “A pressing concern is how new regulatory environments might impact the supply of participating private schools. This is a matter of significant importance to school choice advocates because, at a very basic level, there is no choice if there is no supply of real alternatives to traditional public schools.”