TALLAHASSEE RALLY 6/7/05

 

On June 7, the Florida Supreme Court could rule that Opportunity Scholarships 

violate the state constitution. If they do, other scholarship programs like McKay and Bright Futures are in danger. To prevent that from happening, we need your 

presence at our rally in front of the Supreme Court building.  Don’t let them act 

without knowing how many families it will effect!

 

Dear Friends,

 

A commentary by columnist Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel (School-jumping hasn't made better readers).

 

Prin. Mallard doesn’t like the state’s letter grades for schools (Students Use Vouchers to Leave School With ‘F’ Grade), and does not believe the threat of vouchers forced Edison to improve.

 

In (Are days numbered for school vouchers?), John Kirtley speaks out.  Hopefully, the writer will do a separate piece on the risk to Pre-K and Bright Futures.

 

 

Thank you for Stepping Up For Students,

 

Michael A. Benjamin

Executive Director, F.A.C.E.

Florida Alliance for Choices in Education

COMMENTARY: MIKE THOMAS

School-jumping hasn't made better readers

Mike Thomas
Orlando Sentinel Columnist

May 22, 2005

When three Orange County high schools got F grades from the state last year, I said: Do not be alarmed. This is not a crisis.

I was wrong.

There is a big one. And it revolves around low-income teenagers.

Most poverty still resides in black neighborhoods, so many of these kids are black.

The FCAT scores released last week show that only 4 percent of 10th-graders at Jones High are reading at grade level. This means that only about one kid in each classroom is an adequate reader.

Even worse, 83 percent of them flunked the FCAT reading test altogether. This puts them somewhere between illiterate and reading at an elementary grade level.

This comes even after the school got a high-energy principal, new teachers, support from the state, support from the community and a $50 million renovation.

After all that, Jones still is going backward.

The two other failing high schools -- Oak Ridge and Evans -- also are dominated by low-income students. Both saw a decline in the number of 10th-graders reading at grade level this year. Both saw an increase of kids who flunked the reading test.

At Oak Ridge, the decline in reading skills is as steep as it is at Jones. These schools look to be in a free fall.

Hundreds of parents from these schools have taken advantage of policies that let them move their kids to higher performing schools.

Many transferred to Edgewater High under a program that allows students from predominantly black schools to switch to predominantly white schools. They can't switch now because, partly due to the transfers, white kids now are in the minority at Edgewater.

The test scores reflect the influx of disadvantaged students. Five years ago, almost half of Edgewater 10th-graders could read at grade level. That has dropped to 28 percent this year.

If you look at high schools such as Winter Park, Dr. Phillips and Freedom, you can see a trend in which reading scores drop as students from failing schools transfer in.

Ironically, you also see a trend that scores also drop at their original schools. Although many of these kids are underperformers at their new schools, they often were the better students at their old schools. This appears to be a lose-lose situation.

The noble idea behind these transfers is to get kids into a better learning environment. Sad to say, that means a whiter environment.

For the kids who thrive, it is a wonderful opportunity. It also helps make amends for all those years these low-income schools have been neglected.

Unfortunately, many do no better at their new schools because the problem is less about the classroom than it is their unstructured lives.

The long-term hope is in the elementary schools, where a strong focus on reading is helping low-income kids close the achievement gap. Jeb Bush's accountability reforms are forcing districts to put resources into schools that had been long ignored.

The unanswered question is whether the progress these kids are making in lower grades can hold up as they enter the turbulent teen years, a problem that afflicts even the best students.

To that end, these test scores are discouraging.

Mike Thomas can be reached at 407-420-5525or mthomas@orlandosentinel.com.

Students Use Vouchers to Leave School With ‘F’ Grade

Principal Understands Families’ Departures, Works to Improve Site

By Alan Richard

Miami

See Also

Return to the story, “Court Showdown Over Fla. Vouchers Nears.”

Inside one of Florida’s lowest-rated public schools, classes once were too large, teenagers ruled the hallways, and some teachers didn’t give a lick.

That was the view of some students of Miami Edison Senior High School, a school that has performed so poorly on state tests in recent years that students can use Florida’s Opportunity Scholarships to leave and enroll in private schools if they prefer.

But the new leaders of this urban campus say just about everything at the school has changed.

 They even hope that Edison’s report card grade—three consecutive F’s, making its students eligible for the state tuition vouchers—also will improve when the state releases new grades in June.

First-year Principal Barbara Mallard says students had a right to be disgusted with the way things were. She estimates upwards of 200 students have been opting out of Miami Edison for private schools each year since students at the school became eligible for vouchers in 2002. Others may be transferring to other public schools, and some may be leaving school altogether.

“I can relate, and understand what those kids were saying,” Ms. Mallard said during a recent interview at the school. “What we saw [two years ago], we were appalled, to be perfectly honest with you.”

Ms. Mallard, a native New Yorker who doesn’t mince words, has tried to clean up the campus and sought to replace much of the faculty. She was brought in from elsewhere in the Miami-Dade district as the school’s vice principal two years ago as part of a new leadership team.

One-fifth of the school’s 109 teachers were new this year.

Roughly 90 percent of Edison’s students are Haitian or have parents who are. Almost every student comes from an economically modest background.

On the Rise

The school, built of stucco and painted white with bright red stripes, feels cold inside, with few windows in the corridors. Many of the inside walls could use fresh paint. “And it’s a hundred percent better than when I walked in,” Ms. Mallard said.

She said that students in the past complained of large classes for good reason. Edison now enrolls 1,300 students in grades 9-12, down from 2,400 in recent years.

Students say the improvements are clear.

“I came here to skip,” confessed 11th grader Orville Aiken of his early days at the school. “The atmosphere was different.” But he praised Ms. Mallard. “She’s a good principal,” he said. “She listens. She doesn’t take sides.”

“We have better teachers now,” said 10th grader Talisha Marcellus.

Eleventh grader Trillion Ingram added that when he first came to Edison, “there were a lot of kids [in the hallways], a lot of drugs going around the school a lot. There used to be graffiti all over, everywhere.”

To help Edison rise, the school receives extra staff training as part of a Miami-Dade County school improvement zone, a program begun by Superintendent Rudolph F. Crew, who became the leader of the 355,000-student district in 2004.

The school has added more social workers to work with immigrant families. Students attend class for an extra period each day, and some take intensive reading classes.

Even if the school’s grade improves when the results come out next month, students here will remain eligible for Opportunity Scholarships for another year—unless the state supreme court rules the program unconstitutional.

Ms. Mallard does not believe the threat of vouchers forced Edison to improve. She doesn’t like the state’s letter grades for schools, either. “There’s got to be a better way to say it,” she said.

Still, she added, “I won’t feel OK until we’re minimally a C.”

Article published May 28, 2005
Are days numbered for school vouchers?

TALLAHASSEE - For more than a decade, Jeb Bush has portrayed vouchers as a linchpin in an education revolution that would save Florida's schoolchildren from lackluster public schools. That legacy may not last past his final year in office.

After two defeats in lower courts, the Florida Supreme Court is the last stop on June 7 for the constitutionality of using taxpayer money to send children to religious schools.

And, saying lax oversight of the plan allows illegal fleecing of government money, lawmakers killed a major expansion of vouchers this year.

Last week, Bush downplayed the role of vouchers in rising FCAT scores among Florida's schools and students.

"The voucher element is a small part of a broad strategy to create a climate for rising student achievement," Bush said.

That's a shift from years of Bush's evangelical zeal for vouchers.

"Clearly, he's probably recognized that the luster has worn off the idea," said Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, who was a member of the Senate education committee when vouchers became law in 1999. "I think (vouchers) was his major thrust (then). His primary interest was getting vouchers statewide."

Before he ran for governor, Bush was co-chairman of Floridians for Educational Choice, a group pushing for taxpayer-funded tuition to allow children to attend private schools.

In his first year in office, lawmakers' approved "opportunity scholarships," allowing students at schools receiving an "F" grade to go to other public or private schools on the taxpayers' dime.

And when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 upheld the federal constitutionality of vouchers, Bush again exhorted their virtues, calling them "critical to the continued success of our schools."

Bush touted vouchers as "American as apple pie" early this year when he pushed for a plan - killed by the Florida Senate - that would have allowed nearly 200,000 students who repeatedly failed the reading part of the FCAT test to obtain vouchers.

Bush's momentum, which once seemed headed for a statewide voucher program for all students, has slowed to a near stop.

Rep. Joe Pickens, R-Palatka, supported the expansion of vouchers this year. But he said that in time, a more important legacy might be the growth of "distance learning" and "virtual schools" that allows students to obtain credit via their computers.

He said the symbolic impact of vouchers changed the state as much as anything.

"It was the spirit of enabling change and innovation that will be legacy more than any one item," said Pickens, chairman of the House education appropriations committee.

At the center of the upcoming constitutional question is Florida's "Blaine amendment," named after a 19th century speaker of the U.S. House who tried but failed to change the constitution to bar the use of public money in religious schools.

Instead, many states adopted such provisions in their constitutions in part, some say, due to anti-Catholic bigotry prevalent at the time.

One supporter of that theory is Jeb Bush, a Catholic, who said Florida's amendment "was put in for the wrong reasons."

Florida's Blaine amendment reads, in part: "No revenue of the state shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."

But constitutional expert Steve Gey, a Florida State University law professor, said it's not all that certain that anti-Catholicism is the root of Florida's constitution.

"There is no evidence (of that) in Florida," Gey said. "A lot of those claims that this is anti-Catholic are frankly political."

In the late 1960s, long after popular prejudice against Catholics had faded, Florida's lawmakers chose to keep the provision in the constitution after a committee had suggested it be removed.

Gey says the constitution clearly bars vouchers and wonders at the heated rhetoric.

"We're in the middle of not just a cultural war, but even worse, a religious war," Gey said. "There's a sense of religious institutions seeking actively to engage the government on their behalf. It's a very strange and a very dangerous thing."

Another expert on the Blaine amendments sees the argument differently.

"I think churches, like everybody else, should be able to feed at the public trough," said Frederick Gedicks, professor of law at Brigham Young University.

He said the Blaine amendments are discriminatory in that "religious groups are being singled out for different treatment solely because they're religious."

Gedicks also supports an argument central to the state's defense of vouchers: Since state taxpayers' money via Medicaid and other sources is frequently used at church-run hospitals, for example, how can that be constitutional if state vouchers for church-run schools aren't?

"I think those are legitimate arguments," Gedicks said. "Why (is the ban) only confined to education?"

Gey and others argue that faith-based schools include religious beliefs in their work while hospitals provide care with no dogma.

Florida offers three voucher programs. The original "opportunity scholarship" is only used by 719 children currently, due in large part to the fact that few schools have received two "F" grades in a four-year period to make the vouchers available to their students.

The "McKay scholarships" are popular even among many voucher opponents. More than 14,000 children with "special needs" or disabilities use the vouchers to choose a school with specific programs.

The third program, the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program, could continue even if the Supreme Court finds vouchers unconstitutional. The reason: Rather than providing taxpayer money directly to faith-based schools, the program gives tax breaks to businesses that donate money to private scholarship groups. That nuance may avoid any conflicts with the Blaine amendment. Currently, about 10,000 children are involved in the program.

But the creator of the CTC program, John Kirtley, said there are other popular programs at risk in next week's court hearing that lawmakers and others are ignoring.

He cites the popular Bright Futures scholarship program which allows Florida students to use state money to attend faith-based universities. And lawmakers agreed to give state money to private, public and faith-based schools to provide voter-mandated prekindergarten classes this year. Most of the 170,000 4-year-olds expected to take advantage of the new program this year are expected to attend faith-based programs.

Both Bright Futures and the prekindergarten program, Kirtley said, would be in jeopardy if the Supreme Court strictly enforces the Blaine amendment.

"Everyone who has their heads in the sand is about to have it yanked out," he said.