F.A.C.E. to FACE   F.A.C.E. BULLETIN     July 2, 2009 Dear Friends, The University of Florida report on the learning gains of CTC students was released Monday. It is good news. The report shows that the CTC students are keeping pace with students in public schools, even though they are poorer than the Free and Reduced Lunch comparison group, and were performing far worse than their public school peers before they came on scholarship. This is significant given the fact that the schools in the program are educating students for 57 cents on the public school dollar. The report demolishes the "creaming" argument that we are taking the best kids. Only one newspaper wrote a news story and only two newspapers, the St. Pete Times (not so good) and the Tampa Tribune (good), have written editorials thus far. Two excellent blogs follow… Thank you for Stepping Up For Students, Michael A. Benjamin Executive Director, F.A.C.E. Florida Alliance for Choices in Education www.stepupforstudents.com www.flace.org TRIBUNE EDITORIAL Vouchers providing options to the needy Published Wednesday, July 1, 2009 Teachers’ union representatives and others are chortling over the first academic assessment of Florida's voucher program. Students receiving the Florida Corporate Tax Credit Scholarships so they can attend private school are doing no better than similar students in public schools. But those quick to dismiss the voucher effort should take a closer look at the report, which shows the vouchers are doing exactly what they were intended to do: give poor, troubled students education options. What's wrong with that? It’s too early to accurately gauge the students’ academic progress, as the University of Florida economics professor who oversaw the report emphasized. It measured only first year test gains. Researcher David Figlio was handicapped by incomplete data for a baseline. But the study suggests voucher students are holding their own. When compared to state and national public school test scores, the voucher students’ scores are on par with similar students. More tellingly, the report indicates the voucher program is attracting students who are among the poorest and most academically challenged in the public school system. Those who take the vouchers tend to come from low-performing schools. This undermines critics’ claims that vouchers would attract promising students, who would likely succeed in public schools. The vouchers appear to be serving students who most need alternatives. The Tax Credit Scholarships offer tax credits to businesses that contribute to a scholarship fund, which provides vouchers. Only student who qualify for the federal lunch program are eligible. This past school year, 23,400 students participated. Two-thirds are minorities, and most are from single parent homes. The program is a good deal for taxpayers. Attending public school costs more. When local, state and federal costs, plus capital costs, are factored in, the average cost per student in public school is $12,000. In the voucher program, the maximum scholarship is $3,950, about 57 percent of the roughly $7,000 the state pays per public school student. And a scholarship parent pays on average $1,000 a year for their child to attend the private school. The program requires the parents and child to be motivated. By taking challenging students from poor-performing schools, the Tax Credit Scholarships are easing the burden on the public school system, not diverting resources. Vouchers are not working miracles, of course. And some early champions, to be sure, had goofy expectations. Ideologues in the Legislature acted as if private schools could do no wrong. While demanding strict accountability of public schools, they gave little oversight to private schools receiving vouchers. This resulted in a number of embarrassing news reports. But the state adopted the needed reforms, which included the just-completed academic report card. Participants do look to be staying in school and making progress. More studies will clarify vouchers' impact. But Floridians should be encouraged the state at least offers impoverished students a chance to discover the academic path that works best for them. St. Petersburg Times Study finds vouchers don’t make difference Backers and critics both spin the results By Ron Matus Times Staff Writer Supporters often say school vouchers are lifelines to low-income students trapped in subpar public schools. But academically, students using vouchers to attend private schools in Florida are doing no better and no worse than similar students in public schools, says a study ordered by the state Legislature. “We consider the report a validation of what we’ve always said,” said Mark Pudlow, a spokesman for the state teachers union. “There is no quick fix for struggling students.” Northwestern University economics professor David Figlio compared test scores of students in the voucher program, which served 23,259 students last year, to eligible public school students who opted not to participate. Figlio said it’s too early to draw hard-and-fast conclusions, and outlined some technical complications he expects to resolve with another year’s worth of data. But he said more data isn’t likely to change the bottom line. “I’m confident that it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to see huge differential positive test score gains from this program” or negative results either, he said after the report was released Monday. “My hunch is, when all is said and done … it’s going to be a wash in terms of test scores.” But voucher supporters said the findings prove private schools are educating voucher students as well as public schools, and for a lot less money. Per-pupil spending in Florida is about $7,000 a year. A voucher costs taxpayers $3,950. “The fact that we’re keeping (pace) and we’re spending 57 cents on the dollar is a good first step,’’ said Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, the Tampa nonprofit group that oversees the voucher program. But critics said the findings show vouchers have failed to deliver. And to a point, one voucher researcher agreed. Backers “promised the moon, and public policy almost never delivers the moon,” said Jay Greene, a University of Arkansas professor who has studied Florida vouchers. “It doesn’t mean that these programs can’t be a lifeline.’’ But don’t expect to see that instantaneously. The report comes as the tide in Florida’s decade-long vouchers war seems to be turning. In the last two legislative sessions, GOP supporters have successfully expanded the program, which offers businesses a dollar-for dollar tax credit in return for donations. And a growing number of Democrats have signed on. Voucher students don’t have to take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. But since 2006 the state has required that they take a comparable test Figlio compared test results from 2006-07 and 2007-08. Vouchers are available to any student who qualifies for free or reduced lunch. But he found that students who accept them are more likely to be minorities, and be poorer. And while in public schools, they tended to be among the lowest performers. The latter finding undermines an argument by anti-voucher critics. “Opponents have always said that you’re picking off the best and brightest,” said Rep. Will Weatherford, Rwesley Chapel, who spearheaded last year’s voucher expansion. Figlio does not offer an exact comparison. The 2006-07 data was incomplete, and the applicant pool appears to have been skewed by a high number of families who applied for free or reduced lunch even though they did not qualify. Higher-income families usually correlate to higher performing students. With those caveats, Figlio concluded that voucher students made slightly smaller gains than similar non-voucher students in reading and math, though the difference was not statistically significant. Monday’s report did not dissuade voucher parents, or pro-voucher lawmakers. “I know my daughter,” said Trinette Hicks, whose 9-year-old daughter, Tekoa, attends Southside Christian in St. Petersburg on a tax credit voucher. In private school, Hicks said, “She gets more attention.” Parents “are passionate about the value of their choice,” said Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville. But the new study’s results shouldn’t be ignored, said Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, a longtime voucher opponent. “If the kids aren’t doing better, then we really ought to reconsider why we’re doing it,” he said.   Jay P. Greene’s Blog With Help From Some Friends Tuesday, June 30, 2007 The Rush to Judgment David Figlio’s latest report on Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit (CTC) Scholarship program was released yesterday. I can’t find the report online but Ron Matus of the St. Pete Times sent it to me. I agree with almost everything said in the article. I even agree with Mark Pudlow, the spokesperson for the teacher union when he said: “There is no quick fix for struggling students.” The problem is that the standard for success when it comes to school choice is that it has to produce a quick fix or critics deem it a failure and declare: “we really ought to reconsider why we’re doing it.” No one demands that every other education policy produce huge gains in a single year or they should be “reconsidered.” Yes, promoters of policies may make unrealistic promises to get them adopted, but the standard for success should be long-term progress, not promises made by politicians. So let’s slow the rush to judgment and review what we really know about the CTC program. First, Figlio finds that 92.7% of all CTC students in private schools provided a usable standardized test to the evaluation. This shows widespread compliance with the legal requirements for those students to be tested to satisfy political concerns for accountability. Second, Figlio finds that the CTC program has largely targeted students who are significantly more disadvantaged than students remaining in Florida’s public schools — even significantly more disadvantaged than public school students receiving subsidized or free lunch. So, concerns that the program would cream off the best students appear unfounded. Third, and most importantly, Figlio’s report does not make any claims about whether students benefited academically from participating in the CTC program. He simply provides descriptive information on the academic achievement of CTC students as well as subsidized lunch students in Florida public schools. But we know that CTC students are even more disadvantaged than those public school students and Figlio makes no attempt in this report to control fully for those disadvantages. Figlio makes these points explicitly and repeatedly in the report: “it is important to recognize that they are not causal estimates of the effect of program participation on student outcomes. Causal comparisons require more complete modeling of the selection decisions into the scholarship program and fuller data from a baseline than is afforded using the 2006-07 school year test score collection. More compelling causal estimates of program participation will be possible following the collection of the 2008-09 school year’s test score data. The comparisons in this subsection should be interpreted as purely descriptive in nature.” Unfortunately, most people never pay attention to these warnings and rush ahead as if descriptive information is causal. Folks wrongly conclude that if CTC students make year-to-year test score gains that are about the same as subsidized lunch public school students, then they must not be benefiting from the program. Nothing in Figlio’s report supports that conclusion. To know whether CTC students are benefiting we would have to know how they would be doing had they remained in public schools. The best way to judge that is with a random assignment study where students admitted to the CTC program by lottery are compared with students who lose the lottery and remain in public schools. Unfortunately, that research design is not possible because there was no lottery. The next best thing would be to use a research design that approximated random assignment (like a regression discontinuity) or a rigorous quasi experimental design that controlled for all observed differences between the two groups. But Figlio didn’t do that in this report. He just provided descriptive statistics while promising a more rigorous research design next year. Of course, we might wonder why Figlio bothered reporting this descriptive information without a more rigorous analysis. I suspect that he was required to produce a report each year by the legislature, so he complied even though he didn’t have the information he needed for a causal analysis. And the descriptive information is useful. It suggests that choice was no miracle cure since the raw differences between CTC and public students in academic progress were not huge. Again, miracle cure is the wrong standard for judging a program’s success. The CTC program may well have attracted students who had been on a downward trajectory before they switched to a private school. And the CTC program may well helped those students level off and may, over time, enable them to make significantly greater progress than they would have made had they remained in public schools. This is what we’ve seen from rigorous evaluations of other choice programs, including the most recent evaluation of the DC voucher program. But these things require careful research designs and time to show themselves. Let’s give David Figlio more time to use a better research design so that we can actually say something about the academic effects of the CTC program.   Cato Institute Private School Productivity Off the Charts Posted by Andrew J. Coulson A new study of Florida’s tax credit scholarship program was announced yesterday, reporting test scores both for private school students in the program and for low-income public school students. The report notes that scholarship kids were much more disadvantaged than even the low-income public school students, and it wasn’t able to control for those differences, so it produced no really meaningful findings. In other words, it didn’t have the data to find out what impact the scholarships are having academically. By reporting the unadjusted test scores (and the lack of a significant difference between them for public and private school kids) it has raised some eyebrows. Jay Greene has a good explanation of why we should just wait until the study’s author, David Figlio, has some meaningful data before getting too excited. For me, a key point is that the scholarship kids are receiving a maximum of $3,950 while Florida public schools spent upwards of $11,150 per pupil in 2007-2008. Public schools are spending nearly three times as much per pupil and have nothing to show for it. Is Florida doing so well economically that they can afford to blow tens of billions of dollars for no reason at all? Every year? I had no idea…. Incidentally, I calculated the per-pupil spending figure myself from the published spending and enrollment data on the Florida DOE’s website. The St Petersburg Times story by Ron Matus quotes a public school figure of $7,000 per student, which is one of those make believe numbers that politicians and officials come up with that only represents a fraction of what is spent. I’d be surprised if the Times keeps reporting that number in the future, given how detached it is from reality. The Step Up For Students (SUFS)/Florida Tax Credit (FTC) Scholarship Program currently provides K-12 scholarships to over 23,000 low-income Florida students to attend eligible private schools or out-of-district public schools throughout the state. Income Eligibility Guidelines Income Eligibility Guidelines Number of people in household Total Annual Household Income for New Applicants Total Annual Household Income for Renewal Applicants 2 $26,955 $29,140 3 $33,874 $36,620 4 $40,793 $44,100 5 $47,712 $51,580 For each additional member add $6,919 For each additional member add $7,480

 

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