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Since the paper probably won't publish it, we wanted you to see the letter to the editor that a school administrator sent in response to the latest anti-choice editorial in the Florida Today, Our View: Voucher boondoogle.

Social conservative group seeks answers from judge candidates, Associated Press. 

The Center for Education Reform, Education Reform Newswire.

 An excellent article in the Wealth of Nations section of the National Journal, The Lure of Education, by Clive Crook, senor writer of the magazine.

Thank you for Stepping Up For Students,

Michael A. Benjamin

Executive Director, F.A.C.E.

Florida Alliance for Choices in Education

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Florida Today Editorial

Our View: Voucher boondoogle

Taxpayer dollars should be used to fund and improve nation's public schools

What, no celebration?

Public schools are generally doing as good or better than private schools in educating students, according to a study conducted by the Education Testing Service for the U.S. Department of Education.

You'd think that good news might elicit some accolades from an agency charged with overseeing problematic No Child Left Behind mandates to significantly improve public school students' achievement by 2013.

Nope.

The news was released minus banners or balloons and with no comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings earlier this month.

The study analyzed reading and math scores from 2003 in grades four and eight at thousands of public and hundreds of private schools.

Here's what it found:

·  Once test scores are adjusted to take into account variables such as income level, race, and parents' education level, differences in student achievement are near zero and of no significance.

Public school students, except for in eighth-grade reading, generally match the performance of private school peers. The exception was in 4th grade math, where public school students did better.

·  The report also compared Catholic, Lutheran and what it calls conservative Christian schools to all public schools.

No significant differences were noted except in Grade 8 mathematics. There, students at Lutheran schools did best, significantly better than public school students, while those attending conservative Christian schools did worse than public school students.

Sounds like even-steven to us.

After ETS -- a private, nonprofit that develops and administers millions of achievement tests such as the SAT -- delivered its ideology-free analysis to education officials, they stamped it with a caution downplaying its usefulness.

We smell a skunk.

If the report is of such "limited utility," why waste taxpayer dollars on it?

Perhaps we'd have heard a different tune if the report's conclusions had been more favorable to private schools.

As it is, they fly in the face of claims by "school choice" proponents' that private schools do a better job than public ones, and thus should be funded with taxpayer dollars, through vouchers.

That didn't stop Spellings from announcing a new $100 million plan for national school vouchers called "opportunity scholarships" on July 18, flanked by GOP leaders.

We've argued before that vouchers are the wrong approach to improving education for American children. They divert taxpayer money from struggling public schools.

In the case of Florida voucher programs, that money has been handed to private schools that aren't held accountable or required to meet standards imposed on public schools, including taking the FCAT.

Now it turns out the rationale private schools merit government funding because they perform better is largely conjecture.

The Bush administration -- and Florida lawmakers who stubbornly support vouchers -- need to back off the losing proposition and focus instead on bolstering public education

RESPONSE

Dear Editor:

letters@flatoday.net

Your July 27 editorial calling for the end of vouchers based on the ETS study that found that public school and private school students perform about equally misses the point. The purpose of vouchers is not to send children to "better" private schools, but to give low-income parents the same educational options middle class and wealthy parents enjoy, thus spurring all forms of education to improve or risk losing students. Wealthy and middle class families have always had the option to move to a neighborhood with better public schools or enroll their children in private schools. It is only poor children, without vouchers, who are trapped in chronically underperforming schools.

Furthermore, vouchers do not divert taxpayer funds away from public schools. The Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program awards only $3,500 for private school tuition, while public schools spend about $8,000 per student per year. The Collins Center found that equals a taxpayer savings of $600 million over ten years, which can be re-invested into public education. As for the claim that voucher programs are unaccountable, the Florida legislature passed a strong voucher accountability bill this year that requires standardized testing for voucher recipients and safety and financial compliance for participating schools. Who lobbied for the passage of this bill? The private schools and voucher parents!

Why would they do such a thing? Because they know these programs have been shown to improve public schools ("When Schools Compete: The Effects of Vouchers on Florida Public School Achievement," Jay P. Greene, Ph.D. and Marcus Winters) and their goal is to ensure a quality education for every child.

Sincerely,

Mark Siler

Principal, West Melbourne Christian Academy

3150 Milwaukee Ave

Melbourne, Fl. 32904

321-725-3743

Social conservative group seeks answers from judge candidates

BILL KACZOR

Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - The Family Policy Council wants Florida judicial candidates to answer questions on such hot-button social topics as gay marriage, school vouchers and abortion although a judicial canon urges them to avoid commenting on political issues.

The group plans to publish the responses in a voter guide to be distributed mainly through churches although it also will be available on the Internet, said John Stemberger, its president.

"It's clear that certain judges may not like this," Stemberger said at a news conference Monday. "The public is demanding it."

Stemberger also is leading a petition drive to get a proposed state constitutional amendment on the 2008 ballot to ban gay marriage although already prohibited by state law. He has endorsed Florida Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher over his main opponent for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Attorney General Charlie Crist, because Crist is unmarried.

Florida's judicial canons prohibit candidates from discussing cases, controversies or issues that are likely to come before the courts. Otherwise, they can make public statements on political issues although it suggests they avoid doing so.

The Family Policy Council is conducting its "Florida Judicial Accountability Project" for the first time this year, but judges usually receive a number of questionnaires from various groups, said Cal Goodlett, staff attorney for the Supreme Court's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee.

"Judges are different than legislators or executive branch officers," said 1st District Court of Appeal Judge Robert T. Benton II, the advisory committee's chairman. "Their job is to determine what the law is and apply it evenhandedly."

That's even if a judge has a philosophical difference with how the Legislature has written a law, Benton said.

He said a judge who does make public comments on an issue may be disqualified from cases related to that subject.

The Family Policy Council last week sent questionnaires to more than

350 judicial candidates for county, circuit, appellate and Supreme Court seats.

Supreme Court justices and appellate judges do not run against opponents. Voters instead decide if they should be retained or removed. None has ever been removed but if that happens, the governor would appointed a replacement.

Benton is not up for retention and declined to say whether he would respond to such a questionnaire.

He pointed out, though, that justices and appellate judges have a clear track record because they decide cases on many issues that published in books and available on the Internet.

The Family Policy Council questionnaire asks if candidates agree or disagree with Supreme Court's opinions on several issues.

They include decisions striking down a law requiring parental consent before a minor can get an abortion and one of the state's three voucher programs, which all students to attend private schools at public expense.

Others are rulings that upheld laws prohibiting gay adoptions and assisted suicide and requiring the state to prove a suspect "surreptitiously" entered a building to obtain a burglary conviction.

Another question asks if candidates believe the Florida Constitution now recognizes a right to same-sex marriage.

"Theoretically, a person who was a liberal Democrat and totally disagreed with our organization's primary values still could find this voter guide very useful," Stemberger said. "It is just going to be objective reporting."

© 2006 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.bradenton.com

CER Newswire

Vol. 8, No. 35

July 18, 2006

CHOICE

GARDEN STATE LAWSUIT. "Quality education is a civil right, and we can't wait any longer." Those were the words of Reverend Reginald Jackson, a leading black pastor in New Jersey who is just one of a large group of voucher supporters backing a new lawsuit filed in Newark Superior Court. The lawsuit against the state and at least two dozen school districts is demanding that the state and districts provide the families of 60,000 students in nearly 100 failing New Jersey schools the money to attend the private or public school of their choice. "This is about forcing through the judicial branch what is not being provided through the public schools of the state," said Jackson. Other court decisions on the issue in New York, Texas, and California have ruled that more money should be spent on the failing public schools, rather than giving the most underserved students - black and Hispanic kids - the opportunity to attend a school that will give them a future. As Clint Bolick, the president of the Alliance for School Choice, pointed out in a Wall Street Journal editorial, the previous court's ruling was anything but logical. "Suppose you purchased a car whose warranty promised 'thorough and efficient' transportation, and it turned out to be a lemon. If you sued to enforce the warranty, would the court order a multibillion dollar payment to the auto maker in the hope that someday it would produce a better product? Of course not: It would order the company to give your money back so you could buy a different car."

NOT JUST IN JERSEY. The demand for more choice and opportunity for young black students is not unique to New Jersey. Across the country, members of the education community are trying to tackle what they call the "most pressing issue facing African Americans in the post-civil rights era: the plight of the black male." In Philadelphia, David Hardy, a prominent black education reformer, will be opening Southwest Philadelphia Academy for Boys Charter School this fall. And in New York, a panel of high-profile academics convened at the "Winning Strategies for Young Black Men" forum to discuss ways to close the gap among black boys and white students. Among the scholars was former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who is now the dean of Howard University's Law School. He and the other panelists pointed to the direct correlation between incarceration and school dropout rates. There are answers to these problems and New Jersey, the nation's top scholars, and David Hardy are offering them for anyone who will listen.

UNIONS

BUYING FRIENDS. At the National Education Association's (NEA) annual meeting in early July, they declared that one of their main goals this year would be to rewrite the No Child Left Behind Act. According to a new report by Education Sector, the NEA is enlisting some help in their effort to change the law. The NEA has given more than $8 million to various groups that have criticized or opposed the No Child Left Behind Act. Education Sector senior fellow Joe Williams analyzed the federal tax forms filed by the NEA and found that the union gave at least $8.1 million to education, civil rights and public policy groups such as the National Conference of Black Mayors, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Harvard Civil Rights Project. The bulk of the money, $7.65 million, went to a lobbying group called Communities for Quality Education, who like the other groups, has been critical of NCLB.

Copyright 2006 National Journal Group, Inc.
THE NATIONAL JOURNAL

July 15, 2006

SECTION: WEALTH OF NATIONS

LENGTH: 1478 words

HEADLINE: The Lure of Education

BYLINE: Clive Crook

I am just back from the Aspen Ideas Festival, an event organized by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, one of our sister publications. It is a grand gathering of what Britain calls the Establishment: a convergence of the intellectually dominant, the politically prominent, and the financially over-endowed. One of the things that struck me there, as the lectures, panels, and conversations ranged across everything from elementary particles to American competitiveness, was how often education was invoked as the answer to ... well, to everything.

I don't suppose this is new, either in America or elsewhere. "Better education" is something all sides agree on, as a remedy for almost anything. Stagnant real wages for the middle class? Better education. The decline of civility in public life? Better education. The obesity epidemic? Better education. The China and India challenge? Better education.

In Britain, where I used to live, education was the consensus answer not only to the country's economic problems, and all those other things just mentioned, but also to the strife in Northern Ireland, to the tensions in the Muslim ghettos of Northern England, and to the "yob culture" of itinerant football hooligans. In his first election campaign, Tony Blair said that his top three priorities in office would be "Education, education, education." Good slogan. It didn't turn out that way -- but at the time, who was going to disagree?

And the issue has not just been serving rhetorical time. Things have happened. In America -- as in Britain -- the past 25 years have seen a torrent of educational reforms, and school systems have been deluged with cash. Per-pupil spending in the United States is way up, compared with 20 years ago. Educational systems have been in a decades-long state of permanent and well-financed revolution, with issues such as organization, management, curriculum, training, accountability, and the rest perpetually in motion. Everything has been tried, it seems. And, apparently, nothing works. After more than 20 years, you only have to consider [insert policy issue here] to realize that the country still cries out for better education.

 Standards of achievement in schools have flatlined for years. In math and science, American high school students are among the poorest performing in the developed world. Remembering that the money spent has vastly increased, the productivity of the system has collapsed. If you measure it by national test scores divided by per-pupil spending on education, school productivity was two-thirds higher in 1970 than 30 years later at the end of the 1990s.

Summing up, the orthodoxy to emerge from all this is (a) better education is the answer to all our problems, and (b) improving education is extremely difficult to do (see how hard we tried?).

I think this is wrong on both counts. We do know how to improve education, and, politics aside, it is not even that difficult. That is the good news. Unfortunately, if we ever get around to it, we will find that most of the problems we were trying to solve will refuse to go away. Improving education is enormously desirable in itself. Especially at the bottom of the skills pyramid, it requires no ulterior justification. We should do it. But for society at large, it is not the panacea that so many people take it to be.

What, then, is this easy method for improving education? Competition among schools.

Americans have a strange attitude toward competition. They take it for granted -- much more than most foreigners -- that competition is vital to ensure the highest standards in almost any kind of endeavor. But some things -- such as education and health care -- are then deemed "too important" to be left to the market, too important to be thrown open to competition. This makes no sense. I for one would far rather have my car or my shoes or my breakfast cereal issued to me by officials in the D.C. government than to have those officials in monopoly control of the school my children attend or the hospital my kids get taken to when they are sick. Some things are just too important to be sheltered from competition. Education is one.

There is no great mystery, no great controversy over the facts. Competition among schools raises standards. The United States has been experimenting, far too timidly, with two ways of creating educational competition: vouchers and charter schools. Economists have been tracking these initiatives. Their findings are in: The schemes work. And this is not just because charter schools are better than public schools (though often they are), or because vouchers let low-income parents opt out of failing public schools (which they do). It is also because, under pressure, the existing public schools get better. Amazing! Who would have guessed? A charter school opens, or a voucher program gets started, and before you know it, the neighborhood public schools are offering extra classes after school, Saturday morning openings, new tutoring and mentoring schemes. Why didn't we think of this before?

There is another gain, even more important. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new educational ideology concerning reading captured K-3 teaching in this country (as in Britain). This new teaching method, called "whole language" or "reading by reading" and a variety of other things, deplored the old-fashioned phonics-based approach ("a is for apple," "c is for cat") as repressive and as inconducive to children's instinctive creativity. Children should not be taught to read; they should discover reading.

In the right setting, that approach can work. With clever children, it can work really well. But for children with no books or backup at home, and for less bright kids, it is usually a disaster. As a result of this new enlightenment, a plague of illiteracy settled on both countries. The children taught, or not taught, that way are now young adults, in many cases their entire education blighted, struggling to make their way in the world. For many years I was married to a woman who specialized in teaching children (almost always from poor families) who had been taught not to read by schools, and who had been deemed failing pupils; she was able to turn almost all of them around quite quickly by means of rendition to "a is for apple." The gratitude of the parents was heartbreaking.

Just this year, by the way, 30 years on, Britain's government announced as official policy that phonics works best for the teaching of reading.

Why do I bring this up? My point is that in a competitive school system, that revolution would never have happened. Parents were skeptical (if not incredulous) about it from the start. In a competitive system, some schools might have tried it -- which is fine. Experimentation is good. But they would have done badly and been quickly found out. The market would have rejected a dud product. Only in a state-monopolized culture could such a folly be perpetrated nationwide and then, in the face of mounting evidence of failure, persist for decades.

School systems in this country are run to protect the interests of producers (teachers and educational bureaucrats), not consumers (parents and children). That is what happens when you declare something "too important to leave to the market." Please, no more hand-wringing about how hard it is to fix education. If anybody truly wants a solution to the problem, it is there in plain sight.

Which brings me to my second point -- that it would be a mistake to expect too much from improving the schools, desirable (and eminently achievable) though this may be. Some of the ills we look to the schools to cure are instances of cultural sickness, and I doubt that better schools can repair the culture on their own. We have a popular culture in this country, and in the West in general, that exalts stupidity, meaningless fame, misogyny, incivility, and outright criminality. I have no idea what to do about that. "Improve education" strikes me as inadequate to the task.

So far as economics is concerned, the data are still contested and the analysis has not settled down -- but I doubt that lack of education is holding back the American middle class. The current wave of technology-driven advances in productivity (and, to a much smaller extent, outsourcing) is impinging for the first time on educated white-collar workers in services, as opposed to the skilled or semiskilled blue-collar workers who felt the brunt of earlier labor-saving innovation in manufacturing. Better schools are not going to deflect very much of that pressure, or to save very many of those jobs. What might make a difference is a completely different approach to the whole idea of education -- one that helps people to change course midcareer, and that does more than pay lip service to the idea of lifelong schooling. This would be worth discussing. But that debate has hardly even started.

-- Clive Crook is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, where "Wealth Of Nations" appears. His e-mail address is ccrook@nationaljournal.com.

LOAD-DATE: July 14, 2006

8,000 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 qualifyingFlorida 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

Alachua, Baker, Bay, Bradford, Brevard, Calhoun, Clay, Columbia, Duval, Escambia, Flagler, Franklin, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Gulf, Hamilton, Holmes, Indian River, Jackson, Jefferson, Lafayette, Lake, Leon, Liberty, Madison, Martin, Nassau, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, Orange, Osceola, Putnam, Santa Rosa, St. Johns, Seminole, St. Lucie, Suwannee, Taylor, Union, Volusia, Wakulla, Walton,  and Washington

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

Broward, Charlotte, Citrus, Collier, Dade, DeSoto, Dixie, Glades, Hardee, Hendry, Hernando, Highlands, Hillsborough, Lee, Levy, Manatee, Marion, Monroe, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Sarasota, Sumter