Education Reform 2003 to 2017: Modest Success/Epic Failure so What’s Next?

July 23, 2018

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Having had some time to reflect upon the 2017 NAEP, let’s take stock of things. In this we should keep in mind our broad ignorance between policy changes and state NAEP trends- and the same goes for average school quality. NAEP gives regular 4th and 8th grade scores in math and reading, and all 50 states have participated since 2003. 8th grade scores are more likely to reflect school quality than 4th grade scores in my opinion, as the students have more years of schooling. I’m not sure what to make of positive 4th grade score trends that do not result in higher 8th grade scores for instance. So this in essence a window into what we have to show for American K-12 reform 2003 to 2017 in 8th grade math and reading by state:

So what to make of the above chart? The below chart eliminates a lot of clutter by only including the states with statistically significant gains in both math and reading 2003-2017:

 

So 19 out of 50 states demonstrate statistically significant gains in both 8th grade math and reading. Notice also the absence in the second chart of mega-states Illinois, New York and Texas (although it is good to see California and Florida making it in). Texas has as many K-12 students as the 20 smallest states combined and annually adds approximately a Wyoming public school system sized number of new students. Florida has half as many students as Texas and California is still larger than Texas.

Since we don’t know the relationship between policy and academic trends, we are limited in the conclusions we can draw with confidence. Having said that, policies that have been broadly applied across all 50 states apparently suffer from severe limitations in their ability to move the needle academically. All 50 states for instance have adopted state academic standards and accountability exams, but most states have failed to move the needle on 8th grade scores. Even if we were feeling incredibly generous and made the wild assumption that none of the second chart gains would have happened in the absence of testing, a failure rate of 62% after 14 years is a far cry from leaving no child behind.

Mike Petrilli and Peter Cunningham recently offered up “where do we go from here” think pieces. I think Mike has some interesting ideas, but Peter’s call for a vast increase in spending is broadly unrealistic imo given the nation’s trillions of dollars in unfunded pension and entitlement liabilities, 10k Baby Boomers per day reaching the age of 65, etc. In normal times, Mike’s incremental adjustments might make a lot of sense, but we don’t live in either normal times, or in times that are going to allow some Great Society on Steroids increase in K-12 spending.

A much more difficult scenario may loom whereby the district system continues to resist reform, reformers continue to push reforms the public does not care for, and severe funding needs for increased health care spending leads to a broad reduction in per pupil spending.  State constitutions guarantee K-12 funding, but whether or not they will be creating schools that the vast majority of parents will continue to entrust with their children, I don’t feel as confident about. There are hopeful signs in the NAEP from state charter sectors:

…but the rate of charter growth has slowed substantially nationwide. Of particular disappointment are the last several state charter laws to pass that produce very few charter schools. Even states with relatively fast growing sectors have large wait lists. There are alas limits to what we can realistically hope for from a charter movement that has to a large degree lost its way by prioritizing cartel behavior over the interests of children on wait lists imo.

The private choice movement enjoyed a strong run earlier in the decade, but has since ran into political headwinds. Many private choice programs exist, but most remain modest in scale. The case for private choice remains as strong as ever, and the need will continue to grow, but the looming state funding crisis is coming fast. In four years, half of the Baby Boom generation will have reached the age of 65, and by 2030 all of them will be there. They have called dibs in advance on all plausible funding increases and a whole lot more.

So what is next? An increasingly likely scenario in my mind is that state district systems retain their flaws but loses a significant part of their funding and that choice systems continue to fail to meet existing much less expanded demand. In such a scenario an increasing percentage of families may decide to fend for themselves. Call them home-schools, home-school co-ops or micro-schools, my spidey-sense tells me that we should expect to see a great many more of them in the years ahead. I’ll write more about this in a follow-up post.

7 Comments | Age Demographic Change, charter schools, Education Savings Accounts, Homeschooling, tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Two Minute Hate-Florida Science Edition in Hillbilly 3-D Satanovision!!!!!!!!!!

June 8, 2018

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Orlando Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie displays double-plus good duck-speaking two-minute hate in what has to be one of the most impressive displays of over-confident bias I’ve seen in many, many moons. In fact, this column is nominated for the Two-Minute Hate Hall of Fame! Some of Florida’s media have grown suspicious of science in instruction in Florida’s private choice program. Oh dear. Here’s a couple of excerpts:

Some of these schools — 80 percent describe themselves as “Christian” — use textbooks that claim people lived with dinosaurs. Heck, Noah had a couple in the ark. Some say God saved North America from Catholics and gave them South America instead. Others teach that slaves who “knew Christ” had “more freedom” than nonbelievers who weren’t captive. Babble. Just sheer babble.

The only reason these fringe “Christian schools” are getting away with sucking up millions in education funding is that Florida legislators are afraid of offending them. Elected types are so terrified of the instant howling about “Christians” being “persecuted” that they never seriously considered demanding the course of study in voucher schools meet the same standards taught in public school. They’re just happy to buy votes with millions in cash. Your tax dollars.

Folks, these are neither real schools nor, scholars will argue, are they Christian. They’re just money-making little engines for benighted fraudsters whose only other chance at a paying job is the Sears hardware department.

Do fundamentalists want their kids to learn a bunch of hillbilly science? Handle venomous snakes? Learn that God looks down on Catholics, that America would still have slavery except “some power-hungry individuals stirred up the people”? Knock yourself out. Just don’t expect anyone else to pay for it, and stop calling it “education.” It’s not. It’s more like a 12-year sentence to some anamorphic Sunday school class from hell with no time off for good behavior.

So, there is a problem with all of this. Despite a fog of name-calling (hillbilly from hell!) and questioning of motives (profiteering hillbillies from hell!) Ritchie does not present a whit of evidence that private school students learn less science than public school students.

Fortunately, the National Center for Education Statistics runs a project known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) which can shed light on this subject. Also known as the “Nation’s Report Card” this source has a huge amount of highly respected academic data, including some on Science, in private schools, among parents without college degrees.

NAEP does not provide private school science scores by individual state, but it does by region. We will therefore focus on the South, and the private school scores of students whose parents did not graduate from college. If you are going to find flat-earther profiteering red-neck science with Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, or whatever it is Ritchie imagines, this ought to be the place to look.

NAEP tracks four types of Science achievement: Earth Science, Physical Science, Life Science and Overall Science. The 2009 8th grade science exam allowed us to look exactly at what Ritchie denounces: students whose parents did not graduate from college, who attend private schools located in Southern states. How did these kids perform in the various NAEP Science categories compared to their public school peers?

 

You see the same pattern by the way if you compare southern scores for students whose parents did graduate from college in public and private schools in the South. Or if you do these comparisons in Western, Northeast, or Midwestern students. Across four measures of science and four regions of the country and separately for non-college and college educated parents (32 comparisons in all) private school students demonstrated a higher score a mere 32 times out of 32. Most relevant to our present discussion however are the four comparisons in the above chart, among southern students without college educated parents.

Since the author brought up Protestant schools (snake-handling!!!!) it is worth noting that only 15% of Florida tax credit students attend Catholic schools. Unlike other regions of the country, the denominational distribution in American southern states does not lend itself the private school sectors dominated by Catholic schools to the extent seen in other parts of the country. It’s also worth noting that as the state with the (by far) the nation’s largest tax credit program, the nation’s largest voucher program when these data were generated (2009) we can safely assume that Florida kids are over-represented in the Southern sample. Back in 2009, southern private choice programs were few and far between in number and small in size outside of Florida.

In recent years changes in the federal free and reduced lunch program has made it increasingly unreliable as a proxy for family income. This is all the worse among private schools, who often have difficulty accessing the program. We will therefore make use of parental education as an imperfect proxy for family income. Nevertheless, when hunting for hillbilly kids with snake-handling parents suckered by profiteering private school swindlers being taught that the Sun rotates around the Earth in science class, you would be hard-pressed to find a better place to look.

NAEP has private school scores for 8th grade Science from 2011, 2009, 2000 and 1996. The 2011 figures provide no numbers for students whose parents did not college graduate parents attending private school by region, but did provide numbers for college graduate parents in both public and private schools. Private school students had higher scores in three of four regions (one point advantage for public schools in the Northeast). The 2000 and 1996 data do not include a regional variable, but in the national comparisons both students whose parents did not graduate from college attending private schools and college grad private school parents had higher scores than their public school peers in both 2000 and 1996. So I think this basically puts the score at 39 to 1.

Comparisons like the one above do not prove that private schools are better at teaching science than public schools in any way, shape or form. They do however cast substantial doubt on the notion that they do a hugely worse job at teaching science than public schools. If private schools are running profiteering-hillbilly-from-hell science classes, what pray-tell is going on in the public schools?

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Posted by matthewladner

We’re Going STREAKING! Down to the Federal School Choice Quad!

March 30, 2017

“It is just you Frank!” “There is more coming…”

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The American film classic Old School features a scene in which Frank the Tank (Will Ferrell) believes himself to be leading a streaking crowd. Frank learns in an awkward fashion that there is no crowd following him when his wife and her friends spot him on the road. The relationship between that scene and this Greg Toppo article should be readily apparent when you read it. 

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Posted by matthewladner

Kevin Carey Flashes Back to 2009 for a Wild West tax credit tale

March 3, 2017

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Kevin Carey is at it again- this time by flashing back to eight year old allegations about the Arizona tax credit program as a dire warning about the dangers of a federal tax credit. When these stories ran in 2009, here is what I had to say about it here on the Jayblog:

When presented with this type of information, the first instinct of some will be to deny it, to hunker down, to accuse our enemies of far greater misdeeds, or to otherwise try to put lipstick on a pig. Good luck with that.  It is blindingly obvious to me that Arizona’s tax credit is system is a good program overall that suffers from specific weaknesses that can and must be addressed.  Otherwise, writing articles like this one will become the journalistic equivalent of using a shot-gun to shoot fish in a bucket.

Since then, things have improved substantially, but Kevin did not get the memo. Here are a few items that Kevin left out:

Subsequent to 2009, the state enacted new legislation to require STOs to both consider financial need in the granting of scholarships, and to report to the Arizona Department of Revenue on the family income of recipients. When you examine the Arizona Department of Revenue Reports, you find that approximately 80 to 90 scholarship funds went to middle and low-income students. This not only is a more progressive distribution than many public schools and school districts, it beats the living daylights out of another Arizona tax credit for public school kids that overwhelmingly goes to advantaged public schools. Quite frankly it is likely that a large majority of private choice funds were going to middle and low-income children before the state required reporting. It’s just nice to have an Arizona Department of Revenue report that confirms it.

Carey wrote “Some states, like Alabama and Indiana, limit tax credit vouchers to low- and middle-income families, or to students who were previously enrolled in public school. But others, including Arizona, do not, subsidizing private education for the well-off.” Two of Arizona’s credits are means tested, and two are not. One of the two that is not means tested exclusively serves children with disabilities. I’ll be for completely means-testing private choice programs the very instant that Kevin gets means-testing passed for district schools. Until such time, let’s note for the record that the Arizona private tax credit programs serve provide far fewer dollars to “well off” kids than say, Scottsdale Unified. Someone please wake me up when the Times runs a breathless expose about rich kids getting exclusive access to fancy and abundantly funded public schools.

In addition to the state taking action, donors apparently expressed their displeasure with what they read about in the East Valley Tribune as well during the next donation cycle (see page 8.) If donors don’t like the way scholarship groups run their business, they have the option of not donating, or donating to other groups. 2010 was a rough year for scholarship groups. Decentralized accountability strikes again!

Reasonable people can disagree about the degree and extent of oversight and other devilish details in a program like this. Even we in the Wild West have to make adjustments on occasion, and the democratic process is ultimately pretty good at hashing these sort of things out. I’ll be happy to make my donation this April to help a low-income parent choose a school for their child.

 

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Posted by matthewladner

Do tax-credit scholarship programs drain money from district schools?

November 15, 2016

(Guest Post by Marty Lueken)

Perhaps the most-cited criticism of educational choice policies is that they “siphon” resources from district schools. High-quality research reveals numerous benefits stemming from educational choice, including benefits for participants, positive competitive effects, and fostering civic values. Policymakers, however, are concerned about the fiscal impact on district schools. A new report, The Tax-Credit Scholarship Audit, finds that such claims about “siphoning” are unfounded.

This report follows up on an earlier report, The School Voucher Audit, which examined the fiscal impact of school voucher programs. In the report, I estimated the fiscal impact of 10 tax-credit scholarship programs in seven states (AZ, FL, GA, IA, IN, PA, and RI) on state governments, state and local taxpayers, and school districts combined. There are currently 21 tax-credit scholarship programs operating in 17 states. Programs with less than three years of data were not included in the analysis. This sample includes the largest tax-credit scholarship programs in the country. These programs accounted for 93 percent of all scholarships awarded in 2013-14, the final year included in the analysis.

Here’s a summary of the results:

Participation

Since the first tax-credit scholarship program was established in 1997, more than 1.2 million scholarships were awarded to students through 2014. Participation in tax-credit scholarship programs has grown every year since 1997. Participation in these programs grew, on average, by 20 percent each year since 2000.

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Tax-credit scholarship programs require time to establish. Looking at the programs by year in operation, the number of scholarships awarded more than tripled after their fifth year in operation, from 28,000 to more than 95,000.

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Educational choice programs are popular and continue to expand, though not to the detriment of the current district school system, as critics argue. Even in states where eligibility for school choice programs is expansive, we haven’t seen a mass exodus of students from district schools. Moreover, the best evidence on the effects of school choice on district schools shows that district schools improve in response to competition.

Fiscal Impact

Depending on assumptions about the number of students switching from district or charter schools to private schools and the share of students who receive multiple scholarships, I estimated that these 10 tax-credit scholarship programs saved taxpayers between $1.7 billion and $3.4 billion since Arizona enacted the first such program in 1997. That equates to between $1,650 and $3,000 in savings for each scholarship recipient.

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This paints a starkly different picture from the “siphoning” argument that school choice critics like to make. Context is useful when discussing the fiscal impacts of these programs. For all the controversy that sometimes surrounds school choice programs, the fact is that these programs make up a very small share of states’ K-12 revenues. The cost of the taxpayer subsidies for the programs covered in the report range from 0.1 percent each for Rhode Island and Indiana’s programs to 1.5 percent for Arizona’s four programs.

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When critics claim these programs are costly or drain funds, they usually focus on just the cost of the taxpayer subsidy without giving any consideration to savings. But that tells only one part of the story. It’s also true that districts are no longer responsible for educating students that leave via these programs. In the short-run, they incur variable cost savings. My analysis accounts for this and even takes a more conservative approach to estimating variable costs than in other work by economists.

These savings don’t usually show up in budget reports, however, though public officials make choices—whether implicitly or explicitly—about what they do with the savings. As I note in the report:

“When school choice programs are enacted, however, it is usually the case that savings do not automatically materialize as reductions in K–12 expenditures because public officials must actively make decisions to reduce such expenditures. When students leave public schools, officials have more room in their budgets to allocate resources for educating students that remain in those schools.” (pp. 15-16)

Government officials have many options regarding what to do with these savings. They can reinvest them in district schools, which means more resources for the fewer number of students who remain in them, or they can also reallocate those savings to other public services. They can also choose to hold all or some of the funds rather than spend them. They can subsequently lower property taxes or save and invest these funds. Typically, however, it’s not clear how these freed-up resources are used.

It is a worthwhile policy goal to provide and expand quality educational options so that parents can match their children to the education provider that works best for them. Tax-credit scholarship programs offer one way to help achieve this goal by providing avenues for states to attract capital and invest in their state’s education system without harming taxpayers or students.

 

Martin F. Lueken, Ph.D. is the Director of Fiscal Policy and Analysis at EdChoice.

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Posted by Jason Bedrick

The Legal Battle for Choice in Georgia

November 4, 2016

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(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

Georgia’s tax-credit scholarship helps more than 12,000 students attend schools of their choice rather than their assigned district school. Predictably, defenders of the government education establishment sued to block parents from exercising educational choice. Thanks to the efforts of the state attorneys and the Institute for Justice, which intervened in the case on behalf of several parents of scholarship students, a lower court ruled against the challengers earlier this year. However, the challengers appealed and the case is now before the state supreme court.

Yesterday, the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the case urging the Georgia Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the tax-credit scholarships. Cato’s legal eagle, Ilya Shapiro, has more at the Cato-at-Liberty blog:

We urge the court to affirm the determination that the tax-credit program does not violate the state constitution, focusing on the fact that it does not involve spending public funds for any sectarian purpose. Because the program makes no expenditures from the public fisc, it cannot violate the No-Aid Clause. Taxpayers choose to donate voluntarily using their own private funds and receive a tax credit for the amount of the donation; no money ever enters or leaves the treasury.

The challengers attempt to get around this fact by claiming that the credits constitute anindirect public expenditure, but this argument relies on a budgetary theory known as “tax expenditure analysis” that finds no support as a legitimate means of constitutional interpretation under Georgia (or federal, or any other state) law. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this type of reasoning in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn (2011).

The argument that the program constitutes an unconstitutional gratuity is likewise incorrect because the tax credits are not public funds, and the government cannot give away that which it does not own. Even if Georgia were giving up something of value, it would not be a “gratuity” because the state receives a substantial benefit in return: increased educational attainment, plus the secondary effects that increased competition and a more educated citizenry create.

The Georgia Supreme Court should affirm the lower court’s decision and uphold the state’s Qualified Educational Tax Credit Program—ensuring educational choice for Georgia families, regardless of how much money they make.

 

 

 

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Posted by Jason Bedrick

Setting the Record Straight on Florida’s Tax-Credit Scholarships

August 30, 2016

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(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

Opponents of school choice spend a great deal of time and energy perpetuating all sorts of easily debunked myths about choice programs. In Florida, the state teachers’ union has worked very hard to spread two such myths about the state’s tax-credit scholarship program, which Mark Pudlow of the Florida Education Association calls a “scheme”:

“It’s a scheme because this tax credit voucher [sic] was enacted by the Legislature to circumvent a previous state Supreme Court ruling saying that public money could not go to fund vouchers,” he said. “So the Legislature set up a scheme that would allow certain types of taxes to be ‘donated’ to the groups administering the voucher program. So instead of paying taxes to the state, they were forgiven their tax obligation if they donated the exact same amount of money to the voucher administrators.”

Fortunately, the Daily Commercial gave Ron Matus of Step Up for Students, Florida’s largest scholarship organization, the opportunity to set the record straight:

“The union kept saying the tax credit scholarships were done to circumvent the ruling,” he said. “Their timeline is off. The fact of the matter is the tax credit scholarship program was passed by the legislature and signed into law in 2001, five years before the Supreme Court ruling. The opponent keeps arguing the program drains money from public schools. Every single study that has been done over many years by multiple different parties that has looked at the fiscal impact says it does not harm public schools or drain money from public schools.”

The Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability estimated the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program saved the state $36.2 million in 2008.

Government Accountability stated that while the program “reduces the amount of tax revenues received by the state, it produces a net fiscal benefit.”

This academic year, Step Up for Students will provide more than 90,000 tax-credit scholarships to students so that they can attend the school of their choice. Additionally, they will administer nearly 6,000 education savings accounts. Florida also has a second scholarship organization, AAA Scholarship Foundation, so it’s likely that more than 100,000 Florida students will receive tax-credit scholarships this year.

As Step Up demonstrates, scholarship organizations do much more than just cut checks. They also can provide parents with vital information about their educational options, help connect parents and schools, and–when necessary–they can organize to defend the scholarships from outside attacks. As Jay noted in a recent post, politically viable policies require “constituents who can then be mobilized to protect and expand” them. School choice policies generate those constituents, and as Step Up has amply demonstrated, scholarship organizations can mobilize them.

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Posted by Jason Bedrick

Lawsuit Losers’ Ostrich Act

August 17, 2016
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Anti-school choice plaintiffs pretending that the court didn’t reject their arguments on the merits.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

As I reported on Tuesday, a Florida appellate court threw out a challenge to the state’s tax-credit scholarship program. In response, one of the plaintiff groups, Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), published a disingenuous and factually challenged blog post whining about the case being dismissed and pretending that the court didn’t actually address the merits of the case. I’ll address their assertions in order:

A Florida court just threw out an appeal brought by Americans United and its allies challenging a school-voucher-like program that provides taxpayer support for religious organizations. As disappointing as that outcome is, it’s doubly frustrating to see a second Sunshine State court fail to even consider the merits of the case.

The program provides tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations that help students attend any private school, religious or secular, so that’s not quite an accurate description of the program.

Moreover, as I will explain below, the court did consider the merits of the case. Although courts often avoid addressing the merits of a case when rejecting the plaintiffs’ standing to bring the case, here the court directly addressed the central issues in the process of dismissing the case on standing.

In case you’re not familiar with tuition tax credits, they are a type of voucher scheme that allows individuals or corporations to donate money to a middle-man “scholarship” organization in exchange for a generous tax credit. The “scholarship” group then writes a check for tuition at a private school. It’s essentially a way to launder government funds through a private entity.

What an odd use of scare quotes. Are these somehow not scholarships? Let’s consult the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines a “scholarship” as “an amount of money that is given by a school, an organization, etc., to a student to help pay for the student’s education.” So yes, AU scare quotes notwithstanding, these are bona fide scholarships.

But are they “laundered government funds”? According to the unanimous Florida appellate court, the U.S. Supreme Court, and every state supreme court to address the question, the answer is a resounding “No.” The courts all held that a private individual or corporation’s money is their own, and not the government’s, until the government has actually collected it. When people keep their own money through tax deductions, tax credits, or tax exemptions, it remains exactly that: their own money.

Does the AU believe that all churches run on “laundered government money” because their donors receive tax deductions or because they receive 100% property tax exemptions? No? Interesting.

The overwhelming majority of private schools participating in the tax credit program are religious, which goes against the Florida Constitution’s “no-aid” clause, which says: “No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof 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.”

Again, as the court ruled, it’s not government money, so the historically anti-Catholic Blaine Amendment (“no-aid” clause) is not implicated. Moreover, the percentage of schools that are religious versus secular is constitutionally irrelevant. The law is religiously neutral. What matters is only that families may choose either religious or secular schools. It makes no constitutional difference whether the majority select one type or the other, or whether the market (responding to demand) supplies more of one type or another.

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected AU’s religious bean counting, including in the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision more than a decade ago:

Respondents and Justice Souter claim that even if we do not focus on the number of participating schools that are religious schools, we should attach constitutional significance to the fact that 96% of scholarship recipients have enrolled in religious schools. They claim that this alone proves parents lack genuine choice, even if no parent has ever said so. We need not consider this argument in detail, since it was flatly rejected in Mueller, where we found it irrelevant that 96% of parents taking deductions for tuition expenses paid tuition at religious schools. Indeed, we have recently found it irrelevant even to the constitutionality of a direct aid program that a vast majority of program benefits went to religious schools. See Agostini, 521 U.S., at 229 (“Nor are we willing to conclude that the constitutionality of an aid program depends on the number of sectarian school students who happen to receive the otherwise neutral aid” (citing Mueller, 463 U.S., at 401)); see also Mitchell, 530 U.S., at 812, n. 6 (plurality opinion) (“[Agostini] held that the proportion of aid benefiting students at religious schools pursuant to a neutral program involving private choices was irrelevant to the constitutional inquiry”); id., at 848 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment) (same) (quoting Agostini, supra, at 229). The constitutionality of a neutral educational aid program simply does not turn on whether and why, in a particular area, at a particular time, most private schools are run by religious organizations, or most recipients choose to use the aid at a religious school. As we said in Mueller, “[s]uch an approach would scarcely provide the certainty that this field stands in need of, nor can we perceive principled standards by which such statistical evidence might be evaluated.” 463 U.S., at 401. [emphasis added]

The SCOTUS majority goes on to note that the other side’s obsession over how many private schools have a religious affiliation ignores that they are but a tiny slice of all the available school choices, including the secular district schools that the vast majority of students attend. Students do not lack secular options.

Returning to the AU blog post, the author claims:

The program also violates the state constitution by taking money away from public schools.

No, the appellate court specifically and repeatedly rejected this argument, noting that any reduction in aid to the district schools is entirely speculative. As the appellate court detailed at length, the AU and their allies proved unable time and time again to demonstrate any harm that the district schools incur from the scholarship program.

Despite those problems, two Florida courts have now kicked the case on standing – that is, the right to sue – saying that the plaintiffs, which include interfaith religious leaders as well as educators, don’t even have the right to bring this case. As a result, neither court weighed in on the actual facts of the case.

Incorrect. As noted above, like the district court before it, the appellate court addressed the main issues that plaintiffs raised:

  1. Does the scholarship program violate the Blaine Amendment? A: No, it relies on private funds so the Blaine Amendment is not implicated.
  2. Does the scholarship program unconstitutionally create a parallel system of public schools? A: No, this is a privately funded and privately administered program, not a separate government school system.
  3. Does the scholarship program harm the district school system? A: No, there is no evidence of any harm to the district schools.

The AU and their union allies don’t like the answers that the appellate and district court gave, so they simply pretend that they didn’t give them.

Since the court didn’t weigh in on the facts, here are some other things to consider: Sometimes “school choice” advocates claim low-income students need government assistance to escape “failing” schools. But here, some parents openly admitted that the public school options available to them are actually good.

Here we have a straw man argument. The question isn’t whether the district schools are “good” but rather whether they’re the best fit for all the kids who happen to live nearby. Even a school that performs very well on average can’t be all things to all students, which is why the system should empower parents to choose the schools that align with their values and work best for their children.

So why do they want help paying private school tuition? The short answer is that many of them want education infused with their faith. […] That’s perfectly fine. But Florida taxpayers should not be forced to contribute to the religious education of any child.

Again, as the court ruled, these are private funds. No taxpayer is forced to contribute to a scholarship organization. If a taxpayer doesn’t want to support religious education, they need only refrain from donating to the scholarship organizations, which is certainly their right.

By contrast, all taxpayers are forced to pay into the district school system, even if they have moral objections to what is taught there. If the AU really cared so much about coercion, they should support entirely privatizing education so that no one is forced to subsidize an education with which they disagree.

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Posted by Jason Bedrick

Case Dismissed Again: Another Victory for School Choice in Florida

August 16, 2016

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(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

It seems Friday’s update on pending school choice lawsuits came a few days too soon. Today, a three-judge panel of appellate court judges in Florida has unanimously dismissed the teachers’ union’s lawsuit against the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing because they were unable to prove that they were harmed by the program and because the program is privately (not publicly) funded.

No doubt the thousands of parents and students who rallied earlier this year, calling on the union to #dropthesuit, are smiling today.

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Three out of three appellate judges agree with these scholarship kids: #dropthesuit.

I expanded upon the decision at Cato-at-Liberty, but I’ll leave you with the the judges’ conclusion:

Appellants failed to allege that they suffered any special injury as a result of the operation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program and failed to establish that the Legislature exceeded any constitutional limitation on its taxing and spending authority when it authorized the program. At most, Appellants quarrel with the Legislature’s policy judgments regarding school choice and funding of Florida’s public schools. This is precisely the type of dispute into which the courts must decline to intervene under the separation of powers doctrine.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!

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[h/t Travis Pillow at RedefinED.]

UPDATE (Aug. 17, 2016): See here for my discussion of one plaintiff group’s response to the ruling.

 

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Posted by Jason Bedrick

Case Dismissed: Victory for School Choice in Florida

May 24, 2016

case-dismissed

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

The legal attacks on school choice programs are dropping like characters in a George R.R. Martin novel. Last week, a Nevada judge dismissed a case against the state’s education savings account program. Today, a Florida judge dismissed a case against several of the state’s school choice programs.

The Florida lawsuit originally concerned whether the state was adequately funding public education, but in 2014 the plaintiffs amended their suit to challenge a wide range of policies, including state accountability statutes, charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, and the McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities. Last year, a judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the private school choice programs, but this ruling also rejects their substantive claims that the choice programs somehow harm the traditional district school system:

[T]he Court finds no negative effect on the uniformity or efficiency of the State system of public schools due to these choice programs, and indeed, evidence was presented that these school-choice programs are reasonably likely to improve the quality and efficiency of the entire system. […]

Plaintiffs’ specific allegations regarding the constitutional implications of three of Florida’s choice programs- charter schools, the FTC Program, and the McKay Program- are similarly unsupported by the weight of the evidence. […]

The Court has already held that Plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the FTC Program, and the Court further concludes that the weight of the evidence does not support their speculative allegations that the FTC Program diverts state funding or has any material, detrimental effect on Florida’s system of public schools.

The weight of the evidence similarly does not support Plaintiffs’ allegations about the McKay Program, which is limited to “Students with Disabilities” and requires eligible students to have an individual educational or accommodation plan under federal law. […] As indicated by the Florida Supreme Court, parental decisions to send individual children with special needs to private school do not implicate the uniformity of the broader public school system- regardless of whether some of those parents accept scholarship funds from the State.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!

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This decision constitutes one more legal stake in the heart of the canard that educational choice programs harm students attending traditional district schools. As Jon East pointed out at RedefinED yesterday, judges presiding over a separate anti-choice lawsuit in Florida cast a gimlet eye on similar claims during oral arguments last week:

[Florida Education Association] attorney Lynn Hearn: “The loss of $300 million at a minimum to the Florida public school system … is absolutely a fact.”

Presiding Judge Lori S. Rowe: “In your complaint, you haven’t actually alleged that there is a $300 million loss to the Florida education budget, have you?… In fact, the $300 million you’re referring to are the funds that flow into the scholarship program, correct?”

Attorney Hearn: “Well, that’s where the number arrives from, your honor. But we absolutely do allege that that amount has left the public schools in favor of the scholarship program. That’s because of the way the Florida schools are funded. They are funded on a per-student basis. So, during that year, 2013-14, there were 60,000 students who left the Florida public school system.”

Judge Ross L. Bilbrey: “But doesn’t that mean there are 60,000 fewer students that the state has to pay to educate?”

Attorney Hearn: “It does your honor. But the funding of students in our public schools is, uh, we’re not funding widgets, the funding formula for students is not a perfect correlation to the variable cost of funding that student.”

Judge Rowe: “But exactly what is the special injury you are articulating here? You haven’t alleged that any individual student is suffering. You haven’t alleged that per-student funding has been reduced. You haven’t even alleged that the education budget has been reduced.”

Essentially, the union wants to argue the district school system has some special claim on students–and therefore the public funds attached to those students–without openly making that claim. After all, the district school system can’t suffer a “loss” unless they somehow owned those funds to begin with, but parents have no such obligation to enroll their children at their zoned district school, or any district school for that matter. They feel entitled to those children and the corresponding funding, but they know they can’t make that claim explicitly because, well, it’s ludicrous. That’s why the union is having such a hard time articulating any special injury–and why they’re likely to lose that lawsuit as well.

For more information on today’s decision, see Travis Pillow’s write up at RedefinED.

*****

UPDATE: Supplementing his opinion, the judge issued a 179-page Appendix for Findings of Fact which, among many other things, explains that Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program relies on private (not public) funding and explains that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate any injury resulting from the program:

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (the ―FTC Program‖) allows Florida taxpayers to apply for tax credits ―to make private, voluntary contributions‖ to fund scholarships for children attending eligible K–12 private schools.767 Plaintiffs allege that the FTC Program violates the uniformity and efficiency requirements of Article IX, Section 1(a) by diverting public funds to private schools that are not subject to the same requirements as schools within the State‘s system of free public schools.

The Court has previously found that the FTC Program, which allows third parties to obtain tax credits for making private donations, does not involve public funds, legislative appropriations, or the State‘s ―provision‖ for a ―system of free public schools‖ under Article IX. Because the private donations that fund the FTC Program are not legislative appropriations, the Court has previously determined that Plaintiffs lack taxpayer standing to assert a challenge to this program under Florida law.

Plaintiffs have also failed to prove any special injury that would allow them to challenge the FTC Program. […]

[A]ny connection between the FTC Program and appropriations to support Florida‘s system of free public schools—not to mention the overall quality of that system—is purely speculative. There was no persuasive evidence presented that the FTC Program has any direct or indirect impact on public-school funding or on the uniformity, efficiency, safety, security, or quality of Florida‘s public schools. […]

Even if tax credits resulted in a decrease in the number of students attending the public schools, local school districts are not responsible for educating students who attend private schools.

The appendix is also is chock-full of citations of some dude named Jay Greene. Here’s a taste:

3rd Grade Retention Policy

Florida‘s third-grade retention policy also is supported by academic research. Dr. Jay Greene, a professor of education and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, has extensively studied the effect of Florida‘s policy. Dr. Greene‘s studies, which are published in a peer-reviewed journal, concluded that Florida‘s test-based retention policy significantly improves the academic achievement of students who are retained.239 Plaintiffs did not present any evidence countering Dr. Greene‘s findings.

Resources & Results

Plaintiffs allege that the overall level of funding in Florida is not sufficient to provide a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of public education.784 Plaintiffs assert that the performance outcomes for certain groups of students indicate that school funding is insufficient.

Plaintiffs, however, have not met their burden of proving a causal relationship between the level of resources available to schools in Florida and student outcomes. Indeed, as described below, the weight of the evidence presented on that issue establishes a lack of any causal relationship between additional financial resources and improved student outcomes. […]

In addition to Dr. Hanushek, Defendants presented findings of Dr. Jay Greene, a professor of education and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Greene statistically analyzed school district-level variables throughout the state of Florida, including per-pupil spending, teacher characteristics, and discipline rates, and found no relationship between these variables and student outcomes.

Specifically, Dr. Greene examined school district per-pupil expenditures and percentages of students proficient on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (―FCAT‖)797 for grades 3 through 10 in reading and math; grades 5, 8, and 11 in science; as well as highschool graduation rates, for school years 2007–08 to 2012–13. The analysis revealed no connection between higher amounts of funding available in school districts and better student performance.

Dr. Greene also conducted regression analyses of spending and performance data, controlling for student demographic differences and prior levels of achievement across school districts. The demographic characteristics that were controlled included the proportion of minority students, proportion of students receiving free or reduced price lunch, the proportion of students classified as English language learners (―ELL‖), and the proportion of students with a disability who had an individual educational plan (―IEP‖), as well as academic outcomes in the prior year. The purpose of these analyses was to examine whether school districts would have better student outcomes if they had more resources, assuming school districts had the same demographic composition and prior year‘s academic outcomes. Dr. Greene‘s regression analyses revealed that there is no pattern between the level of spending in Florida school districts and student performance on the FCAT or high school graduation rates.

Teacher Experience

In addition, Dr. Greene evaluated the assertion by Plaintiffs that teacher qualifications and experience characteristics impact student performance, and that districts with high-minority and low-income student populations have a lower percentage of qualified, experienced teachers. Consistent with his other findings, Dr. Greene found no statistical relationship between the proportion of novice (first-year teachers) or ―highly qualified teachers, as defined by the Florida Department of Education, and student performance on the FCAT or high school graduation rates. Likewise, Dr. Greene found no statistical relationship between the percentage of minority and low-income students in a district and the proportion of novice or highly qualified teachers.

Suspension Rates

Dr. Greene also addressed Plaintiffs‘ assertion that high suspension rates are attributable to a lack of school district resources and lead to lower student performance outcomes. As above, Dr. Greene conducted regression analyses that controlled for student demographic characteristics and prior student outcomes. Dr. Greene found no relationship between the rate at which students are given out-of-school suspensions in Florida school districts and FCAT reading, math, or science proficiency, or graduation rates.

Court’s Conclusion re: the Evidence

The Court accepts Dr. Greene‘s conclusions and finds that they corroborate other evidence in the case showing the lack of causal relationship between the level of resources available in Florida schools and student outcomes, as well as evidence showing that the level of resources available is sufficient for a high quality system.

Although Plaintiffs bear the burden of proof in this case, neither Plaintiffs‘ expert witnesses nor their school-district witnesses presented analyses or studies rebutting the work of Drs. Hanushek and Greene. In fact, the weight of the evidence shows that despite budget cutbacks associated with the Great Recession, student performance continued to improve in the period 2007–08 to 2014–15.

 

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Posted by Jason Bedrick

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