Carefully Targeted Voucher/Tax-credit Scholarship Programs

A lot of what I write about relates to charter schools, but by no means do I think charters are THE solution – they're one of the 100 1% solutions that are necessary.  In many cities and states, there are few/no charters schools and the public schools are terrible, so what alternatives are available?  In many cases, the answer is Catholic schools.  I think it's nothing short of insane to, for example, spend nearly $20,000/student for a NYC public school that's failing miserably, while a Catholic school right down the block shuts down due to lack of funds despite achieving real success with the same students spending only $5,000/student.  Thus, I am a big supporter of carefully targeted voucher/tax-credit scholarship programs like the ones in Florida which my friend John Kirtley has been instrumental in championing.  With John's permission, I'm sharing an email he sent to his board and supporters about why it's so important to support these programs:

Private schools, especially faith based schools, are an essential part of this mix. There are some underperforming poor children who will only respond to the environment of a private, even faith-based school. There are many poor children for whom such schools are the only available option to their assigned public school. People don't realize how plentiful these schools are, though they are threatened.

We believe it is morally wrong to deny a poor parent access to this option. This is especially true when, as in many urban areas, this option is much more plentiful than charters.

Imagine a single mother in Jacksonville, Florida. Your sixth grader is falling behind and you fear they will not make it. There is a private school affiliated with a church on your block. It has a 90% high school graduation rate and 90% of its students got college. Tuition is low at $4,500 per year, but it's more than you can afford. There is no charter school within miles of your neighborhood.  What do you tell her? That she shouldn't be able to send her child to that school? That she should wait until there is a high quality charter school in her neighborhood? Her response will be: "If I wait, my child will be lost".

Now consider this: Jacksonville, a school district of over 120,000 kids, has five charter schools, and not all of them serve poor kids. Jacksonville has ninety private schools serving poor kids under the state's tax credit scholarship program.  Why should that plentiful option be taken off the table for poor parents in Jacksonville, and every other city? Why should poor parents have to wait—often until it's too late—until a charter school shows up near them?

 

John also makes the same point I've made about why it's politically smart to put vouchers on the table:

 

if you fight for full parental empowerment, which includes all options, you can actually make more progress creating a safe political environment for broad education reform.  If you choose to fight for charters only, you sacrifice assets that can be used in the fight for broader educational reform--and actually make your job harder…

 

… Full parental choice is the "tip of spear" for ed reform.  If you can get legislators to support full parental choice for low income parents, it creates a "safe harbor" for all other reforms. Charters are easy after that.

 

Finally, John writes about how he's completely changed the political equation around the tax-credit scholarship program:

Skeptical? Consider our experience in Florida. In 2001 Florida's environment was as partisan and poisoned as can be as it pertained to parental choice. The Florida teachers' union even ran a hand-picked candidate against Jeb Bush in 2002, making the repeal of his small choice program their signature issue. There was a lockdown in the Democratic party against choice. It would have been very easy to say, "let's abandon full parental choice and just focus on charters". Yet we were able to turn this around.

In 2001, the tax credit program passed with only one Democratic in favor. In 2009, in a horrible budget year, half of all Democrats in the House, a third of Democrats in the Senate, all of the Hispanic Caucus and a majority of the Black Caucus voted to expand it.  The Senate Democratic leader was a co-sponsor of the bill.

How did we do this? Through political investment and grassroots organizing.