Teacher Quality Illustrated

May 21, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

No, that title does not refer to a new glossy magazine for education wonks. It’s the title I’m giving to the following totally unscientific (N=2) but really amazing story that happened to my mother last week.

My mother is a retired teacher living in a mid-size Indiana exurb, where she does volunteer work at the local museum and art center. Last week she was tapped to take a couple of third grade classes around the town and talk about the town’s history.

The first group was out of control and spent the entire trip picking up leaves and throwing them at each other. Their teacher did nothing either to address their behavior or get them to pay attention to the historical talk. She was essentially on vacation.

“This is Lincoln Park,” said my mother as they entered Lincoln Park. “Does anyone know who Lincoln was?”

Silence.

“Abraham Lincoln?”

More silence.

And then, a hand goes up.

“Does he live here in [name of town]?”

My mother comes back exhausted and demoralized. She announces to the head of the art center that she’s through dealing with kids whose teachers can’t even be bothered to keep them in line on a field trip – or to teach them who Abraham Lincoln is.

“But you have another group you’re supposed to take today.”

Out my mother trudges to take the next group, which is already romping around on the lawn outside. This is another third grade class from the same school, serving the same population. The only difference is their room assignment, which is probably close to random.

Seeing my mother appraoch, the teacher claps her hands once.

The entire class falls silent, stops what they’re doing and pays attention. When asked, they organize to set out on the trip. They pay attention at every stop on the trip, and throw no leaves.

“This is Lincoln Park,” said my mother as they enetered Lincoln Park. “Does anyone know who Lincoln was?”

Not only do they know, but – with no prompting from the teacher – they begin to rattle off everything they’ve absorbed about Abraham Lincoln.

“He came through our town once on the back of a train.”

“Yeah, they say he wasn’t planning to stop, but there were so many people he stopped and made a speech.”

Then one child says:

“Every year on President’s Day, my father brings us to Lincoln Park so we can say ‘thank you’ for Abraham Lincoln because he did so much for us.”

On the way back, my mother compliments the teacher and tells her she has a real gift.

“It’s my first year,” she responds.

Taken aback, my mother can only respond that she hopes it’s the first of many.

It later transpired that it was only her first year of teaching in public school; she had two years of experience in private school before that. But under the state’s teacher-union contract, her two years in private school aren’t recognized (as is the case for some private schools in some states), so she’s paid like a first-year teacher.

I do not suggest that we can generalize anything from this story, or from any other story, or even from any number of stories (the plural of anecdote is not data). But I insist that we can, and ought to, generalize from scientific studies, especially when we have a large number of them and the findings are fairly consistent.

The studies on teacher quality find:

  1. While demographics matter for student outcomes, other things also matter – a great deal – and teacher quality is one of the most important things that matter.
  2. Years of experience, which are one of the two primary determinants of teacher pay, are not strongly associated with improved student outcomes, particularly after the first few years. (Neither are teaching credentials, the other major determinant of teacher pay.)

Yes, I know that the kid whose father takes him to Lincoln Park every year has a good family environment. But the kids in the other class have good family environments, too – this is a high-income exurb in Indiana we’re talking about.

I just thought that, in addition to being a lot of fun (“Abraham Lincoln? Does he live here in town?” Yeah, he and Tom Jefferson own the big antiques store on Main Street, right next to Billy Shakespeare’s used book shop), the story illustrated what we know from the science about teacher quality in a striking way.

Oh, and here’s another point worth making: Now that America’s public school system has apparently decided not to name schools after important civic figures any more, it’s all the more important that we hire teachers who will make sure their students know who Abraham Lincoln was. Either that, or public schools will continue to lag behind private schools in teaching students good democratic values.

5 Comments | civic values, teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Carey vs. Coulson

May 20, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Education Sector’s Kevin Carey has been going after the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson with hammer and tongs. Read the back and forth here, here and here.

Even though Carey is on the other side of the ideological fence from me, I am a big fan of his higher education writing. The story here is that center-left Carey receives mail from the Cato Institute (intended for a previous resident) and is more than a little freaked out by them. Carey writes:

The struggle for a single-perspective organization like Cato is staying principled while retaining efficacy and legitimacy. In other words, while it’s all well and good in theory to stick to your intellectual and ideological guns, as a rule most people don’t like being objects of scorn and ridicule, or (if they’re in the think tank business) having the doors to the corridors of power slammed in their face. So they make compromises to stay part of mainstream conversation. Cato’s education policy proposals reflect this.

I gather from this that Carey believes that what the Coulson really wants to do is to abolish public schools, and have only adopted the mantra of tax credits as a fig-leaf of respectability for Cato. This clearly isn’t the case however, as Coulson laid out his vision of private education years before going to work for the Cato Institute in his book Market Education.

The Cato Institute, of all the right of center Washington think-tanks, clearly has a high tolerance threshold for scorn and derision. Sticking to your guns also has its uses. Cato, for instance, didn’t jump aboard the NCLB or the Iraq War bandwagons even when they were all the rage in right of center circles. I’m guessing they are pretty comfortable with those decisions now, regardless of what I or anyone else thought/thinks.

Carey asserts that Coulson’s ideal system of schooling is “un-American and basically absurd.” It would certainly seem that way to a man of the left. It’s good to debate what an ideal system of schooling would look like, as we can all agree that the one that we have now is far from ideal.

The use of the term un-American goes off the rails in my opinion. It seems like an attempt to ideologically dismiss an opponent without actually considering their perspective or evidence.

It’s also worth noting that Americans paid some of the lowest taxes in the world in the 1770s, but that didn’t stop them from fighting a bloody Revolution in order to secure their freedom. The Founding Fathers weren’t terribly pragmatic. I don’t recall demands for seats in Parliament as a reasonable solution to the “No Taxation without Representation” problem.

We can argue about whether or not the Cato Institute puts out absurd proposals. As a “small l” libertarian, I certainly don’t always agree with them. I exclusively attended public schools, my mother taught in a public school, my sons attend a public school, and I am proud to serve on the board of a public charter school. I’m not against public schools, but I am fiercely opposed to dysfunctional public schooling. Like Carey, I believe that public schools are permanent and I hope we make them work better for kids. We should all be members of the Joe Williams anti-crappy schools coalition.

The Cato Institute can be accused of being fundamentally opposed to public schooling. I’d guess that they would happily plead guilty to that, but un-American? That’s a bridge too far.

3 Comments | tax-credit scholarships | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Ask Reid Lyon – Reading First Implementation

May 19, 2008

(Guest post by Reid Lyon)

“The implementation of Reading First has been a hot topic, especially since the release of the recent impact study. Has the implementation of the program been successful?  What were the most important issues that arose regarding the implementation of Reading First? What lessons have been learned?”

 

With respect to whether the implementation of the program has been successful, the short answer is it depends.  Amber Winkler, the research director for the Fordham Foundation, recently reported in the Gadfly that Reading First is “perhaps the best-implemented education program in federal history.”  This may be true in some states, but not in others.  Dr. Winkler highlights Georgia, Oregon, and California as states that got the implementation process right.

 

On the other hand, Texas and several other states made successful implementation unbearably difficult.  In Texas, for example, a process was initially in place to award districts Reading First funding if their proposals were rated above a particular score by the grant review group.  Proposals from districts scoring below a threshold value were to be resubmitted following technical assistance to equip the district with in depth understanding of Scientifically Based Reading Research (SBRR) and to incorporate those concepts in their resubmission along with assessment and accountability requirements.  For some reason, a decision was made to award all districts Reading First funding irrespective of the quality of their applications.  Moreover, eligible districts received Reading First funding before any technical assistance was in place and before any baseline reading assessments could be administered for program evaluation purposes.  Not good.

 

But there is a great deal more involved in the implementation of a complex program beyond ensuring the quality of grant applications, and few states and districts had their hands around all of the essential conditions that must be in place to embed and bring to scale an initiative as intricate as Reading First.  At first blush, it would seem that the existence of a converging body of evidence relevant to reading development, reading difficulties, and reading instruction would have facilitated implementation fidelity.  But a substantial research base, bipartisan political support, and hefty funding only go so far.  The devil is in the details, and strategies for implementation at the federal level and in many states either were not appraised of the details or simply felt, as in Texas, that the money had to flow immediately no matter what, reflecting education’s love affair with entitlement programs.

 

One detail that gets right in your face immediately when you are implementing a program as complex as Reading First is that you have to manage coordinated systems change at federal, state, district, school and classroom levels.  Complexity theorists like W.L. Miller and his team use the metaphor of a jazz band when discussing how individuals within an effective system perform their own tasks in concert with others in achieving a desired goal.  Each contributor is responsible for certain tasks, but always listening to the other members of the orchestra to determine how their own actions contribute to the whole. This is tough to do when the band members come from different generations and different musical perspectives.  Getting into the groove takes a good deal of practice and a willingness to expand one’s thinking.  These are not features that characterize public education.   Basically, any evaluation of a program like Reading First must drill down into how this coordination played out and how long it took.  

 

Another common-sense detail that was not planned for in the implementation schedule was the fact that many hard-working folks in schools and classrooms who have gotten used to doing things in a certain way were being asked to change their routines and to try something new. In some cases this meant a decision was made to stop certain programs and replace them with others that many were unfamiliar with. When this occurs, teachers and leaders must have confidence that what is being implemented provides advantages to students over existing practices – and, in many instances, the case for this was not made prior to implementation.  While this may seem a bit fluffy, it is important to understand that public-school educators are under a constant barrage of new magic bullets, fads, and aggressive textbook company representatives all selling materials “based on SBRR.”  Implementation experts will tell you that without teacher and leader buy-in, any program, no matter how effective, will not realize its potential.  Fortunately, the majority of those leading and teaching in Reading First districts and schools saw the clear advantages offered students by the program as they observed poor readers become good readers.  But this took a while. 

 

In my interactions with many Reading First programs over the past six years, I did notice some common conditions that were in place when implementation fidelity was strong.  In addition to the details noted above, strong implementers embraced data and accountability for results.  States like Alabama integrated robust professional development with continuous coaching and feedback for both teachers and leaders.  Instructional programs were selected not only on the basis of their alignment with SBRR but because they were practical, useful, and beneficial to students.  Teachers were treated as self-determined professionals and responded by taking ownership and responsibility for their parts in the jazz band.  And building-level leadership ensured that teachers and coaches had the necessary time to plan, review student data, and collaborate in differentiating instruction for individual students based on their performance data.

 

The lessons learned are many, but I can think of three big ones.  Let’s start with the way Congress and the feds typically expect complex programs to be in place, in full operation, as soon legislation is passed.  Reading First embodied so many new concepts and requirements that, in my view, the first year should have been spent in providing technical assistance and professional development to states and districts even prior to the submission of Reading First grants.  I can’t tell you the number of times I saw the thousand-yard stare following my mention of SBRR, progress monitoring, data-driven instruction, or comprehensive reading programs.  We are talking significant mismatch between the requirements of the legislation and the background knowledge of many grant applicants; not to mention that the grants were competitive – a novel concept in education formula funding.

 

And if you were on the ground during the first two years of the program, this is what you would typically observe:  Teachers were first learning to understand, administer and use the results of assessments to inform instruction.  As they were learning these new concepts, they were also taking part in state reading academies to learn more about  the foundation of SBRR (in 5 areas of reading in k-1, in 4 areas  of reading in 2-3). In addition, as they were learning and using new assessments and taking part in professional development academies and workshops, they were simultaneously learning how to use a new approach to instruction and how to integrate core program instruction with additional interventions when required to meet individual student needs. This was done at the same time they were learning about center activities, grouping students for instruction and aligning and using supported classroom libraries.

 

It is important to ask whether any program that has added this amount of new learning to a teacher’s other responsibilities – including going to IEP meetings, attending parent conferences, preparing for their instruction in math, social studies and science, serving on school-wide committees and a host of other tasks – could demonstrate substantial gains after three years.  Give me a break.  What is amazing is that despite this unbelievable load, Reading First coordinators, teachers and their leaders rose to the occasion and have done and are doing a superb job.

 

Lesson Number One: Take a year to develop the infrastructure essential for program implementation. 

 

Lesson Number Two: During this first year,  make sure that all involved at every level understand the essential conditions that have to be in place to coordinate and implement a massive and unique program and to anticipate the need to customize some of its features based on individual district and school characteristics.

 

Lesson Number Three – and this is for the Department of Education: The next time Congress gives you $25 million dollars a year for six years to carry out an ongoing evaluation of a program, for God’s sake design and implement the evaluation commensurate with the initiation of the program.  This was no time to carry out a delayed and abbreviated evaluation when the complexity and uniqueness of a program demanded comprehensive, continuous and systematic feedback to ensure improvements in implementation where needed.

Leave a Comment » | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

I’ll Have What Florida is Having

May 18, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In a recent article for the Goldwater Institute, I found that Florida’s Hispanic students outscore Arizona’s statewide average on fourth grade reading exams. Some readers emailed and wanted to know if this could be attributed to the fact that Florida’s Hispanic population is predominantly Cuban. The short answer is no, because the Hispanic population was also predominantly Cuban in the 1990s when scores were much, much lower.

Other inquiries involved questions about student poverty. Statewide averages for low-income students for Arizona and Florida are broadly similar, but I decided to investigate using the NAEP data. What I found was extraordinary.

Using the data analysis features on the NAEP website, you can get fourth grade reading scores broken down by both race and income. It is not only the case that Florida’s Hispanic students outscore the statewide average in Arizona, Florida’s low-income Hispanic students outscore the average Arizona student.

Arizona is not alone in this. Florida’s Free and Reduced lunch Hispanics also outscored the statewide average for all students on 4th grade reading of California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada and New Mexico. They tied the statewide average for Alaska and South Carolina, and fell one scale point below Oregon and West Virginia.

In 2007, a family of four needed to earn $20,650 to qualify for a free lunch, $38,203 for a reduced price lunch. Nationwide, approximately 80 percent of free or reduced lunch children qualify for a free lunch.

Median family income in California, by comparison, is $64,563.

I appeared on a conference panel recently, and a fellow panelist noted the difference between a problem and a condition. A problem, she said, was something you tried to fix. A condition was something you had given up on and just grown to accept.

Low academic achievement for low-income and minority children is a problem not a condition. Florida under Jeb Bush put in testing and accountability with real consequences, implemented parental choice, reformed reading instruction, curtailed social promotion, liberalized teacher certification, and put in merit pay.

The results speak for themselves. To paraphrase that famous line from When Harry Met Sally: I’ll have what Florida is having.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the historic vote by Florida Democrats to expand the Step Up for Students tax-credit program.

34 Comments | competitive effects, instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Get Lost 4

May 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

While Jay’s travelling, I’ll be providing your weekly descent into Lost geekdom.

This may seem like a strange thing to single out, but what I liked most about this episode was the return of the real Hurley. Last week I was a little miffed when Hurley decided not to go into the cabin. That’s not the Hurley I know: the one who’s driven to find answers about the malevolent force that’s killed his grandfather and ruined his life – and who has consistently shown himself to be physically brave in his pursuit of his quest. (“I can make it. I can get out of the way. I’m spry.”) This week I felt like we saw the return of the real Hurley.

This Hurley!

Okay, that thing in the woods – maybe it’s a monster. Maybe it’s a pissed-off giraffe. I don’t know! The fact that no one is even looking for us? Yeah, that’s weird. But I just go along with it, because I’m along for the ride. Good old fun time Hurley. Well guess what?

NOW I WANT SOME FRIGGIN’ ANSWERS!

(HT LostTalk.net; you can see the original in all its glory at 6:00 here)

The really great thing about Lost is the amazing character portrayal. They’re not stereotypes. You feel like you know these people. Think about how hard that must be for the writers given the number of characters they’re juggling.

Second order of business. I believe this was the first time that the “flash backward/forward” storyline followed more than one character (or two closely related characters like Jin and Sun or Boone and Shannon – remember them?). I spent most of the episode thinking, “this isn’t working.” They were trying to do too many things, and the narrative didn’t gel.

Of course, at the end we saw why they were doing it. They were trying to set up the season finale with a feeling of epic scope – half a dozen plotlines all coming to a head at the same time and in the same place. Focusing on one character’s story would undermine the big closing montage of everyone trudging through the jungle towards The Orchid (it felt kind of like the Lost version of the “One Day More” number in Les Mis, or “Tonight” in West Side Story). So by the end I wasn’t disappointed with it, but on the other hand I don’t think they achieved what they were going for.

A side point that occurred to me: Earlier in the season, we established that the Oceanic Six cover story claims that eight people survived the crash and two never made it off the island. At the time I assumed that Claire had to be one of them, in order to explain the presence of her baby, Aaron. But now it transpires that the cover story claims Aaron is Kate’s. So now we don’t know the identities of both of the people who (according to the cover story) survived the crash but not the island.

On the other hand, the mystery of why Jack was reluctant to pursue Kate on account of Aaron has been resolved. Aaron is a constant reminder of his father’s failings, and as the show’s producers put it in a season 1 episode title, all the best cowboys have daddy issues.

Final note: the preview of the season finale claims (or perphas suggests, I don’t remember the exact words) that we will see the rescue of the Oceanic Six. Lost previews have lied many times before. But if this one’s accurate, does that imply that seasons five and six will take place in “the future,” i.e. 2005? Or will we see the rescue in a flash-forward?

See you in two weeks!

2 Comments | Lost | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Real Case for NCLB

May 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

My column on NCLB is on Pajamas Media this morning. A sample:

When you set aside all the implausible multi-year plans, toothless sanctions, easily evaded school choice requirements, and other window dressing, NCLB boils down to one simple commercial transaction: the system got a big cash payoff, in exchange for which it agreed to give standardized tests and release up-to-date information on how students are performing.

Before NCLB, many states didn’t give standardized tests at all, or didn’t release the results in a timely and publicly useable format. Now they all do. And all 50 states now participate in the Nation’s Report Card, a single national test of a representative sample of students, which allows researchers to conduct cross-state comparisons.

This transparency represents an incredible boon. The amount of empirical research done on education has been growing at a breathtaking rate. Before NCLB, education was a fringe element at best in economics, political science, and other social science disciplines. Now it’s everywhere. A lot of that research is due to the data made available by NCLB.

4 Comments | NCLB | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Catholic Schools Can Survive

May 15, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation recent presented a study of the future of inner city Catholic schools reached mostly dreary conclusions. Catholic schools face a number of problems, but there is a bright spot that Fordham missed where Catholic schools are flourishing, even the inner city schools: Arizona.

I began to investigate the state of Catholic schools in Arizona when Education Next published the article “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?” This article posed the provocative question: Will charter schools finish off inner city Catholic private schools? Preliminary evidence suggests that charter schools are actually threatening to help close inner city Catholic schools. A RAND Corporation study focusing on the impact of charter schools in Michigan found that private schools were taking a bigger hit from charter school competition than public schools on a student for student basis. “Private schools will lose one student for every three students gained in the charter schools,” the study concluded.

Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education Leadership Program at the University of Notre Dame asserted that charter schools “are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn’t cost anything?” Inner-city Catholic schools are in a deep and tragic crisis, especially in Michigan. Sadly, Michigan’s constitution essentially forbids private school choice of any sort, and the Diocese of Detroit has witnessed a 20 percent decline in enrollment since 2002 and currently faces another round of school closures. Overall, 29 Diocese of Detroit schools have already closed.

A fully scaled system of charter schools for inner-city areas may represent an existential threat to inner-city Catholic schools already struggling with the loss of religious staff and the movement of parishioners to the suburbs. In many inner city areas, Catholic schools have been the only high performing schools for decades. Catholic schools have an especially strong record in successfully educating disadvantaged students and sending them on to college. It would be tragic and absurd to help drive these schools out of business by publicly funding student attendance to both public and charter schools, but not to private schools.

Writing in the Journal of Catholic Education, I detailed a more hopeful example than Michigan: Arizona. Total charter school enrollment is 12.5 percent higher in Arizona than in Michigan, despite the fact that Michigan’s population is far larger than Arizona’s. Arizona, however, has two factors working for it that Michigan does not. Arizona has both a growing student population and private school choice programs (two tax credit programs and two voucher programs).

Catholic education is anything but wilting in Arizona. Between 2004 and 2006, schools in the Diocese of Phoenix saw a two percent increase in enrollment against a national decline. Two new Catholic schools opened in the 2006-2007 school year, with four more scheduled to open. Marybeth Mueller, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Phoenix stated that the tax credit program has been “critical to keeping financially struggling families in the Catholic school system.” The tax credit programs provide about half of the states Catholic school students limited financial assistance.

Arizona private school attendance has increased outside of the Catholic schools as well. Despite the opening of hundreds of charter schools, the percentage of Arizona children attending private schools increased by 23 percent between 1991 and 2003, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Parents must pay public school taxes even if they do their fellow taxpayers the service of placing them in a private school at their own expense. If parents decide to seek an education they find a private for their children, they effectively pay twice- once when they pay taxes, another when they pay tuition and fees. Both tax credits and school vouchers can reduce this double payment penalty, expanding access to private schooling. In the process, competition will improve the performance of public schools by expanding competition for students, and (in states like Arizona) reduce public school overcrowding.

Arizona and Michigan have both enjoyed the large benefits of charter schools. The starkly different trends in private schooling suggest strongly that choice supporters must redouble their efforts on the private choice side.

3 Comments | charter schools, tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

That “Wizardry” Teacher Firing – There’s More to the Story

May 15, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Recently, a lot of people linked to this story:

A substitute teacher in Pasco County has lost his job after being accused of wizardry. Teacher Jim Piculas does a magic trick where a toothpick disappears and then reappears. Piculas recently did the 30-second trick in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes. Piculas said he then got a call from the supervisor of teachers, saying he’d been accused of wizardry. “I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'” he said. Piculas said he did not know of any other accusations that would have led to the action. The teacher said he is concerned that the incident may prevent him from getting future jobs.

Quite a few bloggers and (especially) their commenters used this as an opportunity to bash their favorite targets: Parents are stupid, conservatives are stupid, Christians are stupid, stupid people are stupid, etc. A handful of people even managed to ask whether maybe the school officials bear just a tiny fraction of the responsibility.

Unfortunately, when describing the story, most bloggers and even most media outlets failed to include this information:

Local education officials, however, deny that Piculas was sacked for wizardry, citing a number of other complaints made against the teacher, such as not sticking to lesson plans and allowing students to use school computers.

Oops.

His dismissal form and the formal letter informing him that he would not be hired again also state that he used inappropriate language in class and put a student in charge of the class. And that reference to letting students “use school computers” turns out to mean that he allegedly let kids wander away from class and use the computers when they were supposed to be at their desks working.

Always click through those links before posting!

Nor did many people mention that the same school district that allegedly fired a substitute teacher for performing one magic trick has been hiring a professional magician to come in and perform for the kids for years, and after this story broke, they’ve reassured him that they still want him to come do his show. That tends to discredit the storyline some are peddling that Pasco County has been taken over by crazy right-wing extremists.

It’s not even clear whether any parental complaint about wizardry was actually filed. Most media reports I’ve seen have reported as fact that a parent complained to the school about wizardry, but the only evidence for this “fact” seems to be the claims of the fired substitute himself.

Tampa Channel 10 initially reported that the district claimed that the reason for the firing wasn’t “just” wizardry. That’s better than most media outlets, which didn’t report the district’s side of the story at all. But the claim that the problem wasn’t “just” wizardry didn’t come from a quote; the reporter put that word into the district’s mouth. As noted above, other outlets reported simply that that district denied wizardry was an issue. All the direct quotes and documents from the district seem to back that interpretation rather than the characterization in the initial Channel 10 report. And when Channel 10 did a follow-up report, the district said performing magic tricks is not against school policy, and the teacher’s magic trick was “insignificant.”

It is, of course, theoretically possible that there really was a parental complaint about wizardry, and that a dim-witted local school official decided to fire a substitute based on one parent’s crazy complaint, and that the district made up a bunch of accusations against the substitute after the fact in order to cover up what had happened (all of which is alleged by the fired substitute).

If so, I can only say that the schools in Pasco County are amazingly responsive to their parents. Do you suppose they have a big phone bank to call every parent at home every night and get approval for the next day’s lesson plan and lunch menu?

Kudos to Tampa Channel 10, which seems to have done the most follow-up work on this story, and to the few other media outlets doing their jobs.

2 Comments | civic values, journalism, scandal, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

School Choice Dead?

May 14, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

A couple of weeks after Greg Anrig proclaimed the death of the school choice movement we see an expansion of the Step Up for Students program pass with strong Democratic support in Florida, and today, the Governor of Georgia signed a similar tax credit into law, and a voucher program for New Orleans passes with a large bipartisan majority 60-42 in the LA House.

Don’t look now, but a choice bill is out of committee in New Jersey.

Andy Rotherham predicted that Anrig would regret writing the article. Let none doubt the prophetic powers of the Eduwonk.

7 Comments | politics, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Georgia Enacts Nation’s 23rd School Choice Program

May 14, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has signed the legislation sent to him last month creating a tax-credit scholarship program in Georgia. It’s the nation’s 23rd school choice program.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Further proof, if further proof were necessary, that school choice is politically more successful than ever.

One thing that’s really gratifying about this program is that it has no demographic restrictions at all. Any student enrolled in Georgia public schools (K-12) is eligible for a private school scholarship. The days of limited choice are numbered.

Having swung from a win in Louisiana to a win in Georgia, all eyes now swing back to Louisiana, where a legislative vote today will determine whether a voucher bill moves forward. Gov. Bobby Jindal recently signed into law an education tax credit in the state.

Details on the new Georgia program, as they will soon appear on the Friedman Foundation’s online program guide:

GEORGIA

Tax Credits for Student Scholarship Organizations

Enacted 2008

Georgia provides a credit on both personal and corporate income taxes for donations to Student Scholarship Organizations (SSOs), privately run non-profit organizations that support private-school scholarships. Individual taxpayers contributing to SSOs may claim a dollar-for-dollar credit of up to $1,000, and married couples filing jointly may claim up to $2,500.  Corporate taxpayers may claim a dollar-for-dollar credit worth up to 75 percent of the taxpayer’s total tax liability. The program is capped at $50 million in tax credits per year.

FAST FACTS

·         All Georgia public school students eligible

·         Both individual and corporate taxpayers may donate

·         Program capped at $50 million

Scholarship or Voucher Value:

SSOs may determine the amount of each scholarship, as in most other states with tax-credit scholarship programs.

Student or School Participation:

No information on participation is available yet.

Student Eligibility:

All Georgia students enrolled in public schools are eligible to receive scholarships. SSOs may set their own eligibility guidelines. Taxpayers may not make contributions earmarked for a particular child.

Legal Status of Program:

No legal challenges have been filed against the program.

Regulations on the Program:

SSOs are required to be non-profit organizations that allocate at least 90 percent of their revenue to private-school scholarships. No more than 25 percent of an SSO’s revenue may be carried forward into the next year before it is spent. SSOs must undergo annual audits by certified public accountants, file audits and fiscal reports with the Department of Revenue, may not use a donor’s money to support that donor’s child and may not restrict their scholarships to a single school. Participating private schools must obey anti-discrimination laws.

Research on Program:

Currently no research items tied to this program.

 

News on Program:

Currently no news items are tied to this program.

 

Governing Statutes:

Georgia Code, 20-2A and 48-7-29.13.

3 Comments | tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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