F.A.C.E. to FACE
F.A.C.E. BULLETIN
03/12/07
March 12, 2007
Thousands of New Scholarships Available for Low-Income K-12 Students
(More scholarships available! See bottom of Newsletter!)
Teachers only represent 53% of total Dade school district employees, Editorial by Francisco Framil to the Miami Herald. Mr. Framil is a collaborator of Hispanic CREO and the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Selective School Choice, commentary by Clint Bolick, Wall Street Journal. Mr. Bolick is president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice and senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute.
Let vouchers help kids, not pain schools, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Florida’s own Lynette Estrada represents in Georgia. Mrs. Estrada is a special education teacher in the public school system of Miami-Dade County and a parent of a student on the McKay Scholarship.
Thank you for Stepping Up For Students,
Michael A. Benjamin
Executive Director, F.A.C.E.
Florida Alliance for Choices in Education
EDITORIAL
Dear Mr. Fiedler:
The Miami Herald plays a fundamental role in orienting and encouraging debates regarding the critical issues in South Florida, serving as citizens’ watch-dog over government’s mishandlings. As your newspaper has repeatedly reported, we are in the midst of a deep crisis where the economic process is excluding a growing number of citizens from the possibility of making a living in Miami. The newspaper also has demonstrated a firm commitment to education and has supported most of the policies intended to improve the opportunity for our kids to receive a quality academic preparation. Today, our kids and citizens appeal to the Miami Herald to stand again for the best interests of both their educational opportunities and the fiscal discipline that would allow citizens to live and contribute to the economic and social development of Miami. Driven by real estate values, property taxes in South Florida are out of control and have nourished a bloated bureaucracy that threatens the affordability of living in this city. In the meanwhile, good intentions in providing more funds to the public education system have resulted in worse outcomes, as reported by your newspaper on several occasions. It is time to expand our vision and think beyond the traditional paradigms that have entrapped our thought process in the past years. Its obvious that the monopoly of educational public funds held by the Public School District has resulted in serious administrative inefficiencies without delivering the intended results. The casualties of this dysfunctional process are the students left behind and the taxpayers pushed beyond their financial capabilities, and this has to change. The article below intends to open an insightful debate regarding the paradigms that have justified the public education monopoly and invite the community to evaluate and discuss responsible alternatives. The challenge to our state is how to deliver better results at more efficient costs, and as private companies know, this can only be achieved with open competition where the citizen-consumer is empowered with the right to choose, and corporations or government agencies have to be more sensitive to consumer needs or risk to lose their favor. This was achieved with PURPA in the electric generation sector where the government was forced to allow the private sector to openly compete in the electricity generation business. Public education needs competition to improve its quality, to make it more efficient and save taxpayers dollars.
Major corporate leaders such as Marriott, Walgreen's, Verizon, Lowe's Companies, WellCare and Wachovia have taken the lead in supporting Corporate Scholarships in Florida as a way to empower students in their quest for a better education. We invite the Miami Herald to provide the platform to foster this debate in the midst of a major discussion regarding property taxes and the affordability of living in our county. Multiple business and educational organizations are committed to these efforts in providing students, particularly excluded minorities, with the educational possibilities denied to them by the public school system.
Parents, students, taxpayers and these organizations count on your newspaper for our voices and suggestions to be heard, contributing to this debate. We also invite The Miami Herald to visualize expanding the NIE program in the private school sector. We are available, at your best convenience, for a meeting with your editorial staff to discuss the facts and analysis exposed in this article.
Sincerely,
Francisco Framil
1216 SW, 22 Terrace
Miami, FL 33145
305-389-7858
School District Delivers Meager Quality at Exorbitant Costs
Teachers only represent 53% of total Dade school district employees!
By Francisco Framil
According to the “Quality Counts 2007” study conducted by Education Week magazine and as recently reported in the Miami Herald newspaper, Florida’s educational system significantly lags behind most other states, with a secondary school graduation index of only 57.5 percent compared to the 69.6 percent national average. A recent report from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research also shows that Florida’s public school system is abandoning minority students, as African Americans and Hispanics have an average graduation rate of 51.5 percent in contrast to 69 percent for non-Hispanic Whites. This mediocre performance contrasts dramatically with the exorbitant $5.9 billion total spending budget of the Miami Dade School District for year 2006-2007. Subtracting $2.3 billion for construction and $221 million in interest costs, the district has a net operating expense budget of $3.86 billion. Divided into 362,406 students, the Miami Dade School District spends approximately $9,344.73 per student. These facts suggest an inversely proportional relation between school district expenses and student performance. On the other hand, average tuition in the private schools that participate in the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program is only $4,300, 54 percent less than the school district’s expenditure. This program provides scholarships of up to $3,750 to low income children to help pay that $4,300 tuition. Based on these figures, we could send all low income Dade public school students to the private school of their parent’s choice and still realize a savings of more than 50 percent of taxpayers’ dollars! The Miami Dade school district has 40,000 full time employees of which 21,000 are teachers, only 53 percent, while in private schools typically at least 80 percent of their employees are teachers. This excessive bureaucratic structure represents an unbearable weight that rests on the backs of taxpayers and homeowners. Approximately 35 percent of property taxes paid in Miami Dade are sucked in by the school district. While homeowners struggle to save their properties, or are forced to sell and move elsewhere, the district’s insatiable expenses exert inflationary pressures on taxes. The expansion of the programs like the corporate tax credit scholarship would allow homeowners to significantly reduce the luxurious school district costs and save up to 18 percent in property taxes while helping provide students a better education. School choice and free competition is a win-win proposition for students, parents, taxpayers, and homeowners, and it’s the only way to improve the performance of our educational system, as well as to call for accountability. School choice programs represent an opportunity for minority students to get out of the poverty and crime cycles that engulf their neighborhoods and enable them to study in a “safe, secure, and high-quality environment,” as mandated by the state’s constitution. fframil@yahoo.com
Graphic Source: www.co.miami-dade.fl.us/taxcollector/property_tax_whereitgoes.asp
The author is a collaborator of Hispanic CREO and the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Hispanic CREO is the only national public policy Latino organization dedicated solely to K-12 education reform. Hispanic CREO's mission is to improve educational outcomes for Hispanic children by empowering families through parental choice in education. For more information you can visit www.hcreo.org.
The Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce mission is to promote the economic advancement of the Florida Hispanic community, with a focus on economic and political empowerment, and public advocacy to improve the quality of life in the state of Florida. For more information you can visit www.fshcc.com.
NOTE: Dade School District: 40,000 full-time employees, 11,000 part-time employees and 5,000 substitutes (21,000 teachers) http://payroll.dadeschools.net/general.asp
Wall Street Journal - March 2, 2007 - Commentary
Selective School Choice
By CLINT BOLICK
March 2, 2007; Page A11
There's something about our nation's capital that converts many leading Democrats to school choice. Perhaps it's the glimpse that Washington, D.C. affords into inner-city public schools.
But in most cases this appreciation of school choice extends only to their own children -- and not to the millions of children in failing public schools. Indeed, a nearly perfect correlation exists among Democratic presidential candidates who have exercised school choice for their own children and those who would deny such choices to the parents of other children.
When the Clintons came to Washington, D.C. in 1993, they could choose any public school for Chelsea. Being responsible parents of means, Bill and Hillary Clinton sent her instead to the elite private Sidwell Friends School. Two years later Mr. Clinton vetoed a bill that would have allowed low-income D.C. parents to use public funds to send their children to private schools. (A subsequent version of that program was signed into law by George W. Bush.)
And today presidential candidate Mrs. Clinton continues to stridently oppose school choice. In a speech to the National Education Association she vowed "never to abandon our public schools" -- speaking apparently as a politician, not a parent.
John Edwards, Mr. Populist, decries that "America has two school systems -- one for the affluent and one for everyone else." He should know. When he joined the U.S. Senate he sent his children to a religious school because, according to USA Today, the D.C. "public schools are deeply troubled." Mr. Edwards, however, opposes private school choice for low-income families on the curious grounds that this would "drain resources" from public schools. By such logic Mr. Edwards himself "drained" approximately $132,000 from the D.C. public schools.
Al Gore, who may yet join the presidential race, has said empathetically, "If I was a parent of a child who went to an inner-city school that was failing, I might be for vouchers, too." But he isn't, and so he is not. Mr. Gore sent all of his children to elite private schools in the nation's capital, like the one he attended growing up. But he militantly opposes school choice for low-income families.
There is only one Democratic aspirant who sent his children exclusively to public schools, and he was also the only one who signed a school choice bill into law in his own state: former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who withdrew from the race when his candidacy failed to gain traction. And there is only one candidate -- Sen. Joe Biden -- who has both sent his children to private school and supported school choice for others.
The mystery man is Sen. Barack Obama, who sends his child to a private school in Chicago yet once referred to school vouchers as "social Darwinism." Still, he says that on education reform, "I think a good place to start would be for both Democrats and Republicans to say . . . we are willing to experiment and invest in anything that works."
Well, school choice works. Every study that compares children who applied for school choice scholarships and received them with those who applied but did not shows improved academic performance. More important, every study that has examined the effect of school choice competition has found significantly improved performance by public schools.
Given their track records it is doubtful how many candidates will agree with Sen. Obama's professed openness to experiment. But as he might say, we can always have the audacity to hope.
Mr. Bolick is president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice and senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute.
Copyright 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
February 27, 2007 Tuesday
Main Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. 9A
LENGTH: 740 words
HEADLINE: Let vouchers help kids, not pain schools
BYLINE: JIM WOOTEN; Staff
BODY: Lanetta Estrada is a special education teacher in the public school system of Miami-Dade County, Fla.
She came to Georgia last week to tell state legislators why they should pass the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act, which is being fought here by the alphabet-soup organizations that congregate to defend their public school turf.
She stood before a House education subcommittee as a teacher --- and as the mother of a 10-year-old autistic son. Her story of his journey through public school, and of her growing awareness that despite her "utmost respect and admiration" for her fellow teachers, "my school was not the best place for my son."
Like most special education parents, she devoted enormous time and effort to finding out what her son needed. Her research led her to the decision to remove her son, Lucas, from "the school I loved." She applied for one of Florida's McKay scholarships, the program on which the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act is patterned. "I was scared," she said. "I loved my school. After all, this is my job. I prayed that this was the right decision." She enrolled her son in a private school specializing in disabilities. "At this school, he is now reaching his full academic and emotional potential," said Estrada.
"The bottom line is that the Florida McKay Scholarship program has been a blessing for me and my son and for 17,000 other children and families in Florida," she said.
Estrada was one of a string of teachers, parents, alphabet-soup lobbyists and others who argued for and against bills sponsored in the Senate by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) and in the House by schoolteacher and state Rep. David Casas, (R-Lilburn). Casas and Johnson have different ideas about the extent to which private schools should be subject to state regulation in taking special needs students on scholarships or vouchers, whatever one prefers to call these and the HOPE stipends that currently go to private schools.
This effort, along with charter school legislation initiated by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Acworth) and a bill by state Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) to offer educational tax credits to individuals and corporations, marks this as the most reform-minded legislatures yet.
Nothing being offered is revolutionary in the sense that it is particularly daring. It's patterned, by and large, on programs elsewhere. It's noteworthy simply because Georgia has been so resistant to altering the status quo, except by the means endorsed by the traditional interests that dictate public policy --- the unions and alphabet organizations representing public school groups. None of them are bad people or bad organizations. They are, like every other industry confronted by a changed marketplace, eager to limit and manage the competition --- and for decades, they've done that.
The trick now --- and it was evident in last week's debate --- is to avoid planting poison pills in the special needs scholarship act. On regulation, for example, the alphabet organizations know that the quickest way to eliminate the appeal of scholarships to potential private sector competitors is to package them with paperwork, with rules and regulations that make it too time-consuming and expensive to admit scholarship kids. It's paper choice --- existing on paper, but not in reality.
That was part of the problem with No Child Left Behind's choice provisions, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings acknowledged here earlier this month. Parents of poor children in persistently nonperforming public schools could go elsewhere. They had choice, but some systems made that information difficult for parents to access or understand. Choice, then, was chance.
As the House and Senate work together to advance reform, it is essential that choice and scholarships for parents of special needs children not become, or be seen as, an indirect way of regulating private schools. The intent should be to actually give parents options and to trust them to buy the education services they believe their child needs from any willing and able provider.
It's up to the parents, not the government, to decide --- just as Lanetta Estrada did --- which approaches will best serve the needs of their children. The goal here is to empower parents, not to regulate the competition.
* Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
jwooten@ajc.com
LOAD-DATE: February 27, 2007
6,000 New Scholarships Available for Low-Income K-12 Students
Florida P.R.I.D.E. and Children First Florida, Florida Corporate Tax Credit scholarship funding organizations, will award approximately 8,000 new scholarships for the 2006-2007 school year to Kindergarten through 12th grade students who qualify for the Federal Free and Reduced Lunch Program. Applicants must be currently enrolled in a public school, unless they are entering kindergarten or first grade. Those who qualify may receive up to a $3,750 scholarship for tuition at an eligible private school of their choice or a scholarship for up to $500 for travel expenses to an out-of-district public school. The scholarships provide a fresh start for students who are not succeeding in their current school setting.
This year, $70 million in scholarships will be awarded to qualifying Florida students until funding is exhausted so applicants are encouraged to apply as soon as possible. Income limits for scholarship recipients are determined by household size. For example, a family of four can earn no more than $37,000 to qualify. To apply, log on to www.floridapride.org or call (813) 258-2700 for Florida Pride and www.scholarshipfunding.org or call (904) 247-6033 or (407) 702-2607 for a Children First Florida application.
The Florida Corporate Income Tax Credit scholarship program provides K-12 scholarships that currently allow over 14,000 low-income Florida students to attend an eligible private school or out-of-district public school. One hundred percent of corporate contributions go directly to funding scholarships – not a single penny can be used for administrative costs.
Children First Florida - Serving Orlando, Central Florida, Jacksonville and Panhandle
P.O. Box 49099
Jacksonville Beach, Florida 32240
(904) 247-6033 or (407) 702-2607
cforster@scholarshipfunding.org
Florida P.R.I.D.E. - Serving Tampa Bay, South Florida and Marion County
P.O. Box 1670
Tampa, Florida 33606
(800) 782-9140
info@floridapride.org
School Year 06 - 07 Income Eligibility Guidelines
Persons in Household
Annual Household Income
2
$24,420
3
$30,710
4
$37,000
5
$43,290
6
$49,580
7
$55,870
8
$62,160
9
$68,450
10
$74,740
11
$81,030
12
$87,320
13
$93,610
For each additional person, add
$6,290
Effective from June 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007
Florida Alliance for Choices in Education (F.A.C.E)
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