F.A.C.E. to FACE   F.A.C.E. BULLETIN     December 10, 2008 Dear Friends, School Reform News, School Choice Gains Unlikely Advocates in Florida. Doug Tuthill, the new president of the Florida School Choice Fund and Jon East, the new communications director explain their respective position on school choice… Tallahassee Democrat, Courts resist changes in education. A column that Doug Tuthill wrote regarding the First District Court of Appeals ruling against the state’s charter school commission. National Review, Special Rules for Special Needs. Could learning-disabled kids lead the way to market-based education reform? Lynette Estrada, a parent of a McKay Scholarship student, special-needs teacher and FACE Spartan advocate from Miami speaks to the National Review. Thank you for Stepping Up For Students, Michael A. Benjamin Executive Director, F.A.C.E. Florida Alliance for Choices in Education School Choice Gains Unlikely Advocates in Florida School Reform News - December 2008 Written By: Aricka Flowers Published In: School Reform News - December 2008 Publication date: 12/01/2008 Publisher: The Heartland Institute Two new hires at the Florida School Choice Fund have made waves in the movement. The Tampa-based organization seeks to advance public policy giving parents the power to choose the educational institution that best suits their child’s needs. So it was a surprise when two formerly outspoken critics of school choice joined the fund’s staff in August and September. Doug Tuthill is the new president of the Florida School Choice Fund. At one point in his career he was a teachers union leader who reportedly told the St. Petersburg Times vouchers were “based on false assumptions and faulty logic.” But Tuthill says he has been a supporter of school choice all along. “I’ve been an advocate for school choice for 25 years, so it’s really not a new thing for me,” Tuthill said. “I started the first international baccalaureate program, which was one of the first choice programs in the 1980s. I have been advocating for school choice for quite some time—I just haven’t supported it across the board. “There have been some choice programs that I didn’t support because they were not set up properly,” Tuthill explained. “What you’re seeing now is much more sophistication about accountability in these programs. I have always been in support of choice, just not programs that were poorly designed.” Skeptical Public Some members of the public have expressed concern about the new hires. “Some people that I admire are skeptical of my motivations, but they should know better,” said Jon East, the group’s new communications director and former editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times who joined the fund in September. “In some ways it’s been a window on the narrowness of the public debate on this issue. There is very much a polarization and idea that you have to be either for public schools or school choice, and there is no middle ground. But I am really for both. “I’m into serving children and their parents, and giving them the opportunity to choose the school that is best for their needs. If people would turn down the temperature on the debate and stop the finger-pointing, they would see what we do serves kids very well, and we don’t always have to be at odds,” East continued. Changed Opinion As a journalist, East wrote numerous articles criticizing school choice. He says now the motivation for some of those stories was misinformation. “I became a critic of school choice in 1999 and wrote articles that reflected that,” East said. “I think the newspaper saw the choice movement as an attack on the institution of public schools. “It may have been [that] in the beginning, but most of the people in the education community who strongly support public schools missed the point and have not allowed themselves to look at what these efforts are trying to do,” East continued. “If you look closely at what we do here, helping low-income kids get better learning environments, you can’t see it as anything but providing better opportunity for the students of Florida.” Jon Kirtley, chairman and founder of the Florida School Choice Fund, said the new hires show how school choice has evolved in the state. “The hires of Doug and Jon are reflective of a changing environment for K-12 education in Florida,” Kirtley said. “The overwhelming bipartisan vote in our 2008 [legislative] session expanding the tax credit scholarship is another example. People are becoming more concerned with children and outcomes, rather than systems and inputs.” Natural Evolution East has been a journalist for more than two decades. As a highly respected reporter, he covered education issues and was seen as a staunch critic of school vouchers. His reputation as an effective communicator who was highly knowledgeable about the education system made him attractive to the Florida School Choice Fund when the position opened earlier this year. “I was lured into taking this position by Doug Tuthill,” East said. “And I realized that this is really a perfect match for me. Education advocacy is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. “Having been a journalist my whole life, I’ve had to keep a distance between myself and the topics I cover, even when writing editorials,” East continued. “And after some time, I felt that I could do more by working in the industry rather than just commenting on it as a journalist.” Easing Tensions Tuthill said he and East, with their combined experience, will help ease the tension between teacher unions and school choice advocates, ultimately leading to better opportunities for Florida children. “The transition has been great,” said Tuthill. “Jon East and I were recently in Tallahassee for a meeting with school boards and teachers associations, and the politics in Florida have changed pretty dramatically. There is large bipartisan support of the tax credit program, and there is a growing bipartisan movement in terms of school choice. “The education establishment is looking to find common ground,” Tuthill continued. “One of the reasons why Kirtley wanted us in these positions is because we can bring people together from both sides of the issue. It’s been a great experience so far, and we have gotten positive feedback from all sides.” Aricka Flowers (atflowers2@gmail.com) writes from Chicago. Courts resist changes in education Tallahassee Democrat December 9, 2008 By Doug Tuthill While the Florida Constitution says public education is "a paramount duty of the state," an appellate court in Tallahassee has just told state government to ignore that obligation and butt out. The ruling, issued by a First District Court of Appeal panel last week, invalidated a statewide commission that was established to strengthen public education by reviewing and approving charter schools. Unfortunately, the court went beyond narrowly finding that this commission usurps the authority of county school boards and asserted that the 2006 law "encourages the creation of a parallel system of free education escaping the operation and control of local elected school boards." This logic, if applied throughout public education, would create a disaster. Using the court's logic, many state-managed public education programs are unconstitutional, including the state's five university laboratory schools, the Florida Virtual School, the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, the Arthur Dozier School for Boys, and all of the state schools for juvenile offenders. Three years ago, the Florida Supreme Court used similar rationale to invalidate a school voucher program. The high court invoked the same claim of a "parallel system" and argued that the constitutional requirement for "uniform" schools means all schools must operate the same. It even cited, as one example, the absence of a legal requirement that voucher teachers be state-certified. But on community college and university campuses across Florida today, high-school students earn graduation credits from courses taught by noncertified professors. Are these dual-enrollment programs unconstitutional? Given the diverse needs of Florida's K-12 students, this uniformity clause has to mean uniformity of opportunity, not of delivery. These rulings travel down a treacherous and highly selective constitutional path. The 14 school boards that filed the charter lawsuit were not seeking constitutional consistency. Rather, they wanted to eliminate state-sponsored charter schools, which some school boards see as troublesome competition. So they asked a court to use a constitutional provision that has its origins in the 19th century to block state government from meeting its 21st-century education obligations. Local educators and school boards are understandably frustrated. For years, the Legislature and Congress have underfunded and over-regulated public schools and then blamed them for not being more effective and efficient. But in Florida, K-12 education is the joint responsibility of county school districts and state government. They are constitutional partners, despite the court's assertions to the contrary. The same constitution that empowers school boards to "operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district" also says that education is "a paramount duty of the state" and that "adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools." This charter school ruling will be appealed, but it is significant because this fight goes to the heart of the changing nature of publicly funded education. Customization and education entrepreneurs are transforming where and how children learn, and the trend is accelerating at a rapid pace. The first charter school in Florida opened only a dozen years ago, and now one in every 25 students attends one. Students today are choosing from an array of options that were nonexistent a generation ago — online classes, fundamental schools, magnet programs, career academies, dual enrollment, advanced placement, private scholarships for disabled students, private scholarships for low-income students. These choices are not "parallel systems" but a single continuum of publicly funded learning options. The legal battles between school districts and state government are menacing obstacles for those of us working to create a more vibrant future for public education. What makes them even more aggravating is the extent to which they are about political power and not the needs of schoolchildren. There is nothing "parallel" about new and improved learning options for students, and maybe this is the time for the courts to butt out. Doug Tuthill is president of the Florida School Choice Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports scholarships for low-income students and education options for all students. October 20, 2008 National Review Special Rules for Special Needs Could learning-disabled kids lead the way to market-based education reform? JOHN J. MILLER Although Sarah Palin's GOP- convention address was full of partisan zingers, one of its most memorable passages was anything but pit-bullish. It touched gently on her infant boy's Down syndrome: "To the families of special-needs children all across the country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House." Palin didn't elaborate. It wasn't necessary: The words humanized her before an audience that was hearing her voice for the first time. Yet her promise to promote the interests of special-needs children holds the potential to do more than target sympathy voters. It puts her in position to become the patron mother of one of the most hopeful developments in conservative education reform: the marriage of special education and school choice. If this emerging movement has a patron father, he's John McKay, a now-retired Florida legislator whose daughter was diagnosed with learning disabilities. "I tried public schools, private schools, tutoring — everything I could think of," he says. Ultimately, he sent her to an expensive boarding school about a hundred miles away. He recalls: "I started to think that if parents banded together, we could hire a teacher and keep our kids at home." In the mid-1990s McKay, a Republican state senator, approached Gov. Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, with the idea of creating state-funded scholarships for special-needs children — i.e., school vouchers for the learning-disabled. Chiles said he was opposed to school choice but didn't immediately dismiss McKay's suggestion. Still, it took the election of Jeb Bush as governor in 1998 to make it a reality. "He asked me to sponsor his education bill and I agreed on the condition that we start a pilot program for special-needs kids in Sarasota County," says McKay. The pilot program was established in 1999. It quickly grew into an official policy for the whole state. Today, every special-needs child in Florida is eligible for a McKay Scholarship. The value varies depending on circumstances, but averages more than $7,000. Parents can use it at either public or private schools. Last year, almost 20,000 students used McKay Scholarships, and their numbers are bound to rise. This success stands in sharp contrast to other school-choice initiatives. So far, efforts to pass universal voucher programs have been defeated or struck down in every state where they've been tried, due in large measure to the fierce hostility of well-heeled teachers' unions. Last year, voters in right-of-center Utah overwhelmingly rejected a measure passed by the legislature to create what would have been the country's most ambitious school-choice plan. Conservatives have long appreciated the political challenge of school choice, which is one of the reasons they've touted small-bore voucher programs that concentrate on low-income children in cities such as Milwaukee and Cleveland. This focus made sense from a policy standpoint because poor kids suffer most at the hands of failing public schools. Even so, these well-intentioned efforts haven't exactly sparked a revolution in urban education. Rather than enjoying a growth spurt, they're on the brink of a painful reversal: Congressional Democrats are poised to wipe out a federally funded school-choice program in Washington, D.C. (though scholarship schemes funded through tax credits, as Robert VerBruggen writes elsewhere in this issue, are flourishing). Yet mental disabilities strike across class lines and can affect any family, including that of a presidential running mate. Several years ago, Ohio state representative Jon Peterson became involved in the issue for the same reason as John McKay: He has a special-needs daughter. In his case, the girl is autistic. "It put me in touch with a community of people who saw that many public schools weren't doing as well as they could," he says. "When I read about the McKay Scholarships in Florida, the answer just jumped off the page." Ohio went on to let parents of autistic children use state funds to pay for private-school tuition. Last year, Peterson, a Republican, tried to expand the program to include all special-needs kids. The legislature approved the bill, but Gov. Ted Strickland blocked it with his line-item veto. "We'll be back," says Peterson. "Free choice of provider is a core principle of the disability-rights movement, and it should include education." This simple standard has helped win over skeptics. "A lot of teachers weren't too happy with McKay Scholarships when they were introduced," says Lynette Estrada, a special-needs teacher in Miami. "We were frightened of them." Then her autistic son had a rotten experience at the public school where Estrada works: "It wasn't meeting his needs, the students bullied him, the classes were too large — there were a lot of problems." So she looked into a McKay Scholarship, got one, and sent her son to a private school. "He's doing well there," says Estrada. "It goes to show that one-size-fits-all isn't the best approach." Research suggests that Estrada's satisfaction with the McKay Scholarship is typical. "That's what market accountability delivers," says Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas, who has studied McKay Scholarships more closely than anybody else. He says that McKay parents are far more likely to report that they're receiving the services promised for their children. "They're happier, their kids are abused less, and the class sizes are smaller," adds Greene. A common argument against school choice is that private competitors could skim the public schools' best students and leave behind the hard cases. In April, Greene and co-author Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute demonstrated that McKay Scholarships actually have had the opposite effect. As private-school options became available, students who qualified for vouchers but remained in public schools saw their test scores improve, presumably because increased competition led to better performance, better use of public-school resources, or both. "Having zero effect on public schools would be a positive outcome," says Winters. "This is even better." In recent years, the number of special-needs schoolchildren in America has risen to 7 million — about 14 percent of the total, up from 8 percent in 1977, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Some of the growth has come from better identification, and the stigma of disability also has faded: Kids are no longer labeled "retarded," but rather described as having "special needs." Money may have fueled most of the expansion, however, because schools often receive extra cash for learning-disabled students, so they have a financial incentive to classify children that way. Sometimes kids whose only handicap is having fallen behind in their academic performance are slotted into special-needs classrooms. Whatever the causes of the increase, school choice offers an attractive strategy for addressing it. The McKay Scholarships deliver a savings to taxpayers because in many cases the vouchers are worth less than what the public schools would spend on the kids. The Alliance for School Choice says that legislators in 22 states have offered school-choice bills for special-needs kids. In addition to Florida and Ohio, three states have enacted laws. Arizona and Utah have programs with tight budgetary caps, but last year Georgia passed a law without financial restrictions. This means that the Peach State probably will see the same explosive growth in special-ed vouchers as the Sunshine State. Entrepreneurs are already moving in. Center Academy, a for-profit company that runs schools for disabled students in Florida, just opened its first in Georgia. "We hope to have four or five more," says vice president Steve Hicks. Others are sure to join them. Whereas close personal encounters with disability motivated school-choice laws in Florida and Ohio, this wasn't the case in Georgia. "I've always seen school choice as a solution for our education woes," says David Casas, a Republican state representative who is also a high-school teacher. "But the debate on school choice is always so negative because the attacks by teacher unions have been effective. We had to look for different angles." For Casas and others, concentrating on special-needs students was an incremental step on the way to a larger goal. "We got support for this that we probably wouldn't get for a broader form of school choice," says Eric Johnson, a Republican state senator. The liberal editorial page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for instance, endorsed the legislation. The success of that effort served as a springboard for another accomplishment. Earlier this year, Johnson and Casas pushed through a tax credit, worth up to $50 million, for individual and business donations to non-profit groups that fund tuition scholarships. Next year, they may go for it all and propose a universal voucher plan. They'll face tough opposition. So will imitators who want to create special-needs scholarships in other states. Until now, the teachers' unions haven't put up much of a fight against school choice for learning-disabled students. Who wants to go head to head with families that so obviously deserve compassion? At this point, however, what the school-choice movement sees as a major opportunity, the unions regard as a serious threat. With the right kind of leadership, the battle could move to Washington. The federal government currently spends about $11 billion on special-needs students. "Someone should propose voucherizing these funds," says Scott Jensen, a consultant with the Alliance for School Choice. It sounds like a cause that a special-needs advocate in the White House might wish to adopt — and a political fight that a pit bull would savor. The Step Up For Students (SUFS)/Corporate Tax Credit (CTC) Scholarship Program administered through Carrie Meek Scholarship Foundation, Children First Florida and Florida P.R.I.D.E. provides K-12 scholarships that currently allow over 22,000 low-income Florida students to attend an eligible private school or out-of-district public school. School Year 08 - 09 Income Eligibility Guidelines Persons in Household New & Add-Ons (185%) Renewals (200%) 2 $25,900 $28,000 3 $32,560 $35,200 4 $39,220 $42,400 5 $45,880 $49,600 6 $52,540 $56,800 7 $59,200 $64,000 8 $65,860 $71,200 9 $72,520 $78,400 10 $79,180 $85,600 11 $85,840 $92,800 12 $92,500 $100,000 13 $99,160 $107,200       For each additional person, add $6,660 $7,200       Effective from July 1, 2008 to July 30, 2009

 

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