BuckeyeBlog

The Cincinnati Enquirer had a great column yesterday by Peter Bronson that notes an interesting trend in one Cincinnati neighborhood:

While most of the city has been losing families to suburbs that offer more land, newer houses, lower taxes and better schools, this neighborhood is a magnet for young professionals with large, growing families.

Why is this happening? EdChoice vouchers. Orthodox Jewish families are being attracted into the city so they can be near a private Cincinnati Jewish school. These are young professionals, the same type of people who have been fleeing urban settings since the 1960s.

As Bronson notes:

This is not your typical economic development plan. But it shows how a strong school can glue a neighborhood together. These families bring contributions far more valuable than the cost of vouchers.

Freedom as a way to spur economic development? Who would have imagined?

The way states calculate their high school graduation rates has been big news the past few days. The New York Times carried a story about the US Department of Education’s plan to require all states to use the same formula for determining graduation and dropout rates. Their decision, according to the Times, is based on the widely accepted belief that states currently use inaccurate and misleading methods for determining these rates.

Recent graduates line up at South High School in Cleveland, last August. Research shows the city’s public school district had the third highest gap between urban and suburban graduation rates (35.9%) during the 2003-04 school year. Baltimore City’s public school system had the highest at 47%.
By Tony Dejak, AP

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The Friedman Foundation has graded 21 school choice programs across the country against to the gold standard ideal set forth by founder Milton Friedman. Programs were rated based on student eligibility restrictions (demographic, geographic, and program size), the purchasing power of the vouchers, and school restrictions (school eligibility, admissions restrictions, and testing requirements).
Two of Ohio’s three publicly financed school choice programs fared relatively well on the criteria – the Autism voucher program (6th) and EdChoice (8th). The Cleveland voucher program, however, did not fare well, ranking a low 17th.

The most important contribution of the Friedman report is that it serves as a strong reminder that not all school choice programs are created equally. Too often terms like choice and markets are used to describe markedly different types of programs. This has created confusion and overshadowed important distinctions and differences. Quite often, as this report clearly shows, states have created limited choice programs which, at best, generate quasi-market forces.

The media typically report on school choice programs as though they were all the same. In reality, there are numerous differences between school choice programs, in large part because opponents of reform have succeeded in saddling school choice with all kinds of restrictions that prevent them from offering full educational choice to all students. Everything from who may participate, to how much of their education funding they may take with them out of the government-run system, to what kinds of schools they may attend, is tangled in a thicket of legal and legislative proscriptions.

As Friedman notes, that extant school choice programs do not live up to the ideal of a true education market is not cause for doubting the market model in general. Rather, it should serve as a catalyst for continued efforts to create programs that serve more students with fewer restrictions.

Columbus City Schools (CCS) trumpets on its homepage its “school choice” program.

They’ve even produced a television commercial about it.

Do listen to the teasing line: “You can pick the right school to go to, and then apply to go there!”

Of course a true choice program actually gives people the right school and not just an application form for it.

Still, I think this is a small victory in the Long March to Liberty in Learning. What causes people to demand freedom from government tryanny? The desire to overcome frustrated aspirations is often at play. CCS’s choice program will be creating and then frustrating aspirations on the part of many parents.

A little glasnost and perestroika helped to bring down the Berlin Wall and CCS’s “school choice” program may some day do the same.

Yesterday AG Marc Dann announced that he was suing to close two struggling charter schools. Charter school advocate Ron Adler had a couple of good points in response:

So, what’s the big deal? The Attorney General obviously wants to defend public tax dollars and protect kids from low performing schools. Well, let’s think about this.

Last year, the state legislators passed HB-79 which requires closure for chronically poor performing community schools. After the 2008-09 school year, community schools that have been in Academic Emergency for three years will be closed.

[My organization] supports high performing, quality schools……but, we also support following the legislative process. This surprising rush to action by the Attorney General raises several critical questions:

1. Legislative Process: Our society is orderly because it functions under the rule of law. House Bill 79 was carefully crafted by our state legislators. It was debated by both the House and Senate and set into motion to defend public tax dollars and protect the children. Then the Governor signed this bill into law. Now, I suspect that the Attorney General’s staff researched the powers of his office before taking this action…..but how can one man circumvent the entire legislative process to serve his desires?

Are citizens of Ohio to question every new law enacted because one man, albeit in high office, may choose to skirt the entire legislative process? If that’s true….then why do we need legislators….why should we obey the law?

2. Discriminatory Application of Policy: Why is the Attorney General targeting only failing community schools and ignoring failing district schools? A close examination of the traditional district schools Report Cards in Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown will reveal over 175 district schools that are not meeting state standards and are ranked Academic Emergency or Academic Watch. Dozens of them have been ‘stuck’ in their School Improvement Status for 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 6 years, 7 years and a few are in their 8th year. There are over 90,000 children languishing in those 175 plus district schools.

To target the failings of a handful of community schools and ignore 175 failing traditional district schools is without question a discriminatory application of policy.

Funny thing is that Marc Dann voted for HB 79 when he was in the Senate (Senate Journal, 126th G.A., pg 1684; Oct 26, 2005).

HB 79 will protect taxpayers from poorly performing charter schools. This, in turn, will permit successful charter schools to protect taxpayers (and kids) from poorly performing public schools. The AG has no value to add to this formula and he should remove himself from the process.

Today’s Columbus Dispatch editorial rebuffs Governor Ted Strickland’s move to eliminate school choice programs and severely restrict charter schools. In the editorial, the Dispatch reminds the governor why choice and charters exist in the first place. Also, it makes an excellent case for strengthening — not eliminating — Ohio’s parent-empowering educational options.

The Columbus Dispatch
Sunday, March 25, 2007

Preserve choice
Governor is wrong to target charter schools, vouchers

On March 16, Gov. Ted Strickland lashed out against educational alternatives for Ohio’s schoolchildren, saying charter schools have been a “dismal failure” and that vouchers are “undemocratic.”

But the dismal failure he should have talked about is the one that continues in so many conventional public schools. After all, this is the original sin that led to the creation of charter schools and voucher programs. The Cleveland Municipal School District met none of the 25 state measures of performance in the 2005-06 district report card. Columbus Public Schools met just five; Dayton City Schools, one.

Like others who want to end choice in education, the governor seeks to portray the conventional public-education system as a victim of charters and vouchers. This is accusing the treatment of causing the disease. The focus should be on how public schools have been victimizing tens of thousands of students in urban Ohio districts for years.

The parents of Ohio’s 8,700 voucher students and 76,000 charter-school students do not consider these educational alternatives dismal failures; they see them as a way out of something worse.

As for undemocratic, consider the circumstances that existed before charters and vouchers offered choice: Parents paid taxes to send their children to schools that were chosen for them by district officials. If the schools were awful, too bad. Yes, parents were free to send their children to private schools, but only if they were affluent enough to pay school taxes and private-school tuition. That financial double-whammy puts this option out of reach for most parents, especially for poor ones whose kids are most likely to be stuck in failing schools.

The idea that parents can make schools better by exercising their democratic right to vote for school board members has not seemed to work in the urban districts cited above.

For public-school districts to claim that the money diverted to charters and vouchers has made their jobs more difficult is sheer chutzpah. This is like an employee whose salary was cut because of his poor performance complaining that he can’t do a good job because he is underpaid. Except that public schools have not taken a pay cut; they receive more money today than ever. From fiscal year 2001 to 2006, per-pupil spending in the Columbus district has risen 31 percent, to $11,918, from $9,078.

The only thing that has prodded the conventional school system to do something about its mediocrity, inefficiency and inertia is the alarm generated when students and the money to educate them began to decamp for voucher and charter schools.

As for accountability, that’s a far bigger issue for public schools than for charter and voucher schools. The latter have the most direct accountability imaginable: Parents can pull their children out of these schools whenever they like for any reason. Until the advent of charters and vouchers, the majority of parents had no way of punishing a failing conventional public school so immediately and directly.

And while the state should continue to insist on better accountability from charters and voucher schools, some of which are not performing well academically or financially, there is now a dynamic at work in the charter and voucher issue that few anticipated.

A survey conducted last year by KidsOhio.org, a Columbus-based education-advocacy group, found that academic performance is not the primary reason parents choose charter schools.

The survey found that discipline, safety and individual attention to student needs were the most-cited reasons parents pulled their kids out of Columbus Public Schools and put them into charters. Quality of education came in fourth on the list.

This survey shows that dissatisfaction with conventional public schools goes far beyond their poor academic performance and their dismal graduation rates. Parents feel that some public schools are threats to their children’s moral and physical safety.

The governor has taken aim at the wrong target. The legislature should address the legitimate accountability issues connected with charters and vouchers. But it should stand firm on the programs themselves. Educational choice should be preserved.