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2011 is ‘year of school choice’

July 7, 2011 by

Republican electoral gains have made 2011 The Year of School Choice, writes the Wall Street Journal.

No fewer than 13 states have enacted school choice legislation in 2011, and 28 states have legislation pending. Last month alone, Louisiana enhanced its state income tax break for private school tuition; Ohio tripled the number of students eligible for school vouchers; and North Carolina passed a law letting parents of students with special needs claim a tax credit for expenses related to private school tuition and other educational services.

Wisconsin removed the cap of 22,500 on the number of kids who can participate in Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, the nation’s oldest voucher program, and expanded school choice in Racine County.

Even more significant, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed legislation that removes the charter cap, allows all universities to be charter authorizers, and creates a voucher program that enables about half the state’s students to attend public or private schools.

Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma have created or expanded tuition tax credit programs. North Carolina and Tennessee eliminated caps on the number of charter schools. Maine passed its first charter law. Colorado created a voucher program in Douglas County that will provide scholarships for private schools. In Utah, lawmakers passed the Statewide Online Education Program, which allows high school students to access course work on the Internet from public or private schools anywhere in the state.

Pushed by House Speaker John Boehner, Congress revived the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program for low-income students.

Choice doesn’t guarantee excellent schools, the Journal concedes. But it drives reform by eroding “the union-dominated monopoly that assigns children to schools based on where they live.”

I’ll be very interested to see what happens in Indiana.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

From 11th grade to college

June 9, 2011 by

Indiana will encourage students to skip senior year and go straight to college, the Hechinger Report notes. Under Gov. Mitch Daniels’ plan, high school students who complete their core requirements by the end of their junior year can go straight to college with a scholarship based on how much money the state would have spent — $6,000 to $8,000 for most — on their 12th-grade education.

Daniels said he came up with the idea after years of asking seniors he met across the state what they were up to and too often being told “not much.”

“I kept bumping into seniors who said, ‘Well, I’m done,’ ” he said. “They’d laugh and tell me they were having a good time. We are spending thousands of dollars on students who are eligible to move on.”

Senior year is a time for “drift and disconnection,” concludes the National Commission on the High School Senior Year.

Solutions over the past decade have trended toward mixing college and high school courses through dual-enrollment programs or early-college high schools, where students can earn an associate degree and a diploma.

But Daniels’ preferred strategy — shortening high school altogether — also is catching on.

In Idaho, 21 districts will give early-graduation scholarships. Kentucky is thinking about it. In the fall, eight states will begin a program that lets students test out of the last two years of high school and go directly to community college. The National Center on Education and the Economy and the Gates Foundation are backing the idea.

One of my best friends in high school left after 11th grade for college. She was impatient to get on with it. (She dropped out after a year to organize the proletariat for the revolution.)

My daughter’s half-sister skipped high school entirely. Now 18, she will earn a bachelor’s in classics, summa cum laude, on Saturday from the University of Santa Clara and go on to Berkeley for her PhD. It was a challenge to buy her a graduation card. Nothing seemed to fit quite right.

Update: Ed Next looks at high school students who attend college part-time.

Filed Under: College, Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Indiana OKs broad voucher bill

May 5, 2011 by

The nation’s most sweeping school voucher program — with tuition aid for low- and middle-income families — is now law in Indiana. Gov. Mitch Daniels signed the bill today, along with another bill expanding charter schools.

Parents can choose to use vouchers at private schools that accept state regulation, including religious schools. As family income rises to $60,000 for a family of four, the voucher’s value will go down.

Other voucher systems across the country are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools.

Indiana’s program would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those already in excellent schools. Indiana’s program will be limited to just 7,500 students for the first year and 15,000 in the second, a fraction of the state’s about 1 million students. But within three years, there will be no limit on the number of children who could enroll.

Indiana will save money on voucher students: Vouchers for elementary and middle school students are capped at $4,500 and no voucher will equal funding for public-school students.

According to Rick Hess, 60 percent of Indiana schoolchildren will be eligible for a voucher worth up to 90 percent of public education costs. The student must attend a year of public school to qualify for a voucher.

The bill also gives a $1,000 tax deduction for private-school tuition or the costs of homeschooling. That’s expected to cut revenues by $3 million.

While most choice advocates are celebrating, Cato’s Adam Schaeffer argues the law is a “strategic defeat for educational freedom” because it greatly expands state regulation of participating private schools.

To qualify for vouchers, schools will have to administer state exams and submit data on students’ progress, admit students by lottery and “provide good citizenship instruction” that stresses respecting authority, the property of others, the student’s parents and home, the student’s self and “the rights of others to have their own views and religious beliefs.”

What does this mean for religious private schools teaching that one can only be saved by belief in Jesus Christ?

Private schools that refuse to be regulated will risk losing most of their students,   Schaeffer writes.

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‘Stuck schools’ stay stuck

April 28, 2011 by

Most high-performing schools are leaving low-income and minority students behind, concludes Stuck Schools Revisited: Beneath the Averages, a new Education Trust report that analyzes data from Maryland and Indiana.

In Maryland, the achievement gap in reading narrowed from 2005 to 2009, but African-American and Latino students often lag behind.

“In Indiana, gaps between low-income students and their more affluent peers have remained both wide and stagnant,” Ed Trust reports. 

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Vouchers pass Indiana Senate

April 21, 2011 by

Indiana’s Senate has passed a school voucher bill that includes tuition aid for middle-income families. The bill has passed the House in similar form. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels is a strong supporter.

Under the plan, a family of four earning less than $41,000 a year would be eligible for a tuition voucher of up to $4,500 for grades 1-8, and up to $4,964 for high school.

A family of four with an income between $41,000 and $61,000 would be eligible for a voucher of up to $2,758 for all grades.

Some 7,500 vouchers will be available in the fall, with 15,000 vouchers available for 2012-13.

The Senate changed the legislation to require private schools participating in the voucher program teach American history and government, maintain a selection of patriotic readings and not advocate the violent overthrow of the government.

With so many Indiana families eligible for tuition aid, it will be fascinating to see how this plays out. Will kids from $60,000-a-year families crowd out lower-income students?

Gov. Daniels has signed a bill limiting teachers’ collective-bargaining ability.

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Wisconsin: Who’s to blame?

February 23, 2011 by

Who’s to blame for the teachers’ crisis in Wisconsin?  Andrew Rotherham has blame to go around.

The liberals want local control in Wisconsin, while Republican Gov. Scott Walker doesn’t trust local school boards to drive a hard bargain with teachers’ unions, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.

Indiana Democrats left the state to block a right-to-work bill. Gov. Mitch Daniels said he won’t ask state police to pursue the missing legislators. He wants his fellow Republicans to postpone the bill.

Teachers’ pensions are unsustainable, writes RiShawn Biddle.

Does the conflict in Madison represent “creative destruction” or plain old destruction?  Government workers are in for a painful transition, writes Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest. But the only alternative to improving productivity is seeing living standards decline for all Americans, he argues.

What we’ve got to do here is to deploy technology and aggressive, creative reform and restructuring to health, education and government.  Much bureaucratic work in government is routine; computers are going to have to replace people wherever possible.  Staffs are going to have to shrink in ways that are simply unimaginable to present day government workers and their union leaders.

The educational system is going to change radically, Mead predicts. Students will be “evaluated and credentialed on the basis of what they know, not on the basis of time served.”  That will end the pressure to earn meaningless degrees.

Employees will demonstrate their competence to employers by passing exams in different job-relevant subjects that test real skills; the training for these tests will be provided by entrepreneurial organizations that are likely to rapidly replace many of the inefficient and expensive post-secondary educational institutions around today, once appropriate systems to regulate their practices and monitor their performance can be developed.  (Traditional liberal arts education needs to survive, and it will, but education and training are very different things that require very different approaches.  To promote economic growth and social mobility, and to help individuals continually retool their skills in a changing economy, we need to separate training from education and make training as widely available, cheap and convenient as possible.)

I was a union (Newspaper Guild) member for many years when I worked for a Knight Ridder newspaper.  Knight Ridder, once the second largest newspaper chain in the U.S., no longer exists. My former colleagues have taken wage cuts, unpaid furloughs, “give backs” on benefits and still seen two thirds of the editorial staff laid off.  If your employer’s business model becomes obsolete, workers have to adapt, which means working harder and smarter to replace your laid-off colleagues, finding a new job and learning to live on less money.  “Creative destruction” is a bitch, but it beats destruction.

Filed Under: Education, technology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Indiana raises ‘highly effective’ bar

February 7, 2011 by

Under Indiana’s new evaluation system, a “highly effective” principal would run a school in which most students show 1.5 years of growth in one year, reports the Indianapolis Star. In addition, the school would need to rank in the top 20 percent statewide in academic growth and average 95 percent attendance or better.

The teacher evaluation process hasn’t been released, but it will have a similarly high bar to earn the “highly effective” rating.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

In college, back to basics

December 29, 2010 by

Graduation rates are rising in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but most high school graduates who enroll at Ivy Tech’s local campus need remedial math or reading or both. Success rates are low for students who start in remedial classes.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Many high school counselors aren’t prepared to guide first-to-college students through the college admissions and financial aid process.

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‘Early-college’ high schools lose funding

December 21, 2010 by

‘Early-college’ high schools are struggling to survive now that Gates Foundation funding has run out. Some states pay for high school students to take college classes, but others do not.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Indiana colleges get pay-for-degrees funding.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , ,

Free and too easy

June 30, 2010 by

To encourage students to apply to college, Indiana education officials persuaded the state’s colleges and universities to waive application fees during College Go! Week. It was a big mess, reports the South Bend Tribune.

Enrollment officials across the state said their staffs wasted hundreds of hours sorting through applications, many of them incomplete, and trying to follow up with students who had no intention of attending college.

. . . Students at many Indiana high schools were simply instructed to fill out college admission applications as a class project. So it was difficult for universities to predict who was serious about attending college.

Indiana University, which lost  more than $300,000 in fees, will not repeat the experiment next year. Purdue sounds like it’s out too. Serious applicants won’t pay to apply if they can wait till College Go! Week and do it for free. Organizers say next year they won’t pressure college and universities to waive fees and will tell high schools not to assign students to fill out applications.

Via Washington Monthly.

Filed Under: College, Education Tagged With: ,
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