The Great Fordham Toolkit Debate

By Whitney Marcavage
National Policy Director

Washington, D.C. - The American Federation for Children applauds the folks over at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for stirring up debate about academic accountability within private school choice programs via the release of their policy “toolkit” last week. It’s an important conversation to have.

As the only national educational choice organization that works to elect state policymakers who support parental choice, lobbies for high-quality legislation, and ensures that the laws work for kids, we’ve got a pretty good sense of the policy and political questions regarding accountability in private school choice programs.

Fighting fiction with fact & reality

By Kevin P. Chavous

Yesterday, Politico published “Vouchers don’t do much for students.” This misleading piece was based on cherry picking data and used talking points identical to those used by the NEA and AFT.

Every day, across America, in 18 states and the District of Columbia, nearly a quarter of a million children attend a school of their choice, many of those students are improving academically, and all have new options, new outcomes, and a new hope for a brighter future because of educational choice. While the outspoken opponents of educational choice and the story cited above try to protect the “system” and oppose parents from having the right to choose the best education for their child, the facts remain on our side.

Why school choice is succeeding

By Kevin P. Chavous

Michael Q. McShane wrote yesterday, “Why School Choice is Failing.” His thought provoking piece raised some very important points, but fails to illustrate how school choice is succeeding, the several solutions already in place to address his concerns, and how school choice advocates are laying the groundwork for even greater impact.

McShane’s issues boil down to three points: Filling excess capacity, encouraging high-quality schools to scale-up and creating new high-quality schools, the latter two McShane argues that school choice programs are “lousy at.”

The majority of us who are involved in the education reform movement are focused on advancing parental choice as central component of fundamental, meaningful, and impactful reform to provide children with better options that generate better educational outcomes. It’s both smart policy and a matter of social justice. However, when a child moves from a public school to a private school through an educational choice program, and receives the same failed outcome, that is not a success. And, this is where McShane has it right.

Strong Push for Accountability in Arizona School Choice Program

When Arizona enacted the nation’s first-ever education savings account program in 2011, parents and advocates celebrated another educational choice option for parents of children with special learning needs.

Now that the program has been greatly expanded this year to include children in failing public schools, children of military personnel, and children who are or have been in foster care—that’s an increase of hundreds of thousands of students students in the state who are eligible to participate in the program—both the state legislatures and other educational choice advocates are working to increase accountability measures in the program.

Under the original law, the program met two of eight accountability checks. The Alliance for School Choice measures the level of accountability in programs, and the program originally qualified in the following areas:

• Administrative: schools who accept a student using an ESA account must not discriminate
• Financial: allow the state to conduct annual audits via a random sample

 The Arizona Department of Education and the Goldwater Institute are working to increase accountability measures in the program—a positive step forward for the program.

The Goldwater Institute is pushing for legislation that would allow the Department of Education to conduct random quarterly and yearly reviews of accounts, establishing online and hotline fraud reporting services, and establishing a surety bond or insurance for account holders.

An Accountability Update

In addition to the progress in 2012—with five new programs enacted and six existing programs strengthened—the educational choice movement has seen a significant increase in accountability standards in private school choice programs across the country.

Among the programs that have seen new accountability standards:

• Louisiana’s Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program
• Among other requirements, a participating school that receives a low Scholarship Cohort Index score cannot enroll additional scholarship recipients for the next school year. Scholarship students attending a participating school labeled failing will have first priority admission to attend another participating school the following year. 
• Pennsylvania’s Educational Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit
• The new scholarship tax credit program for students attending Pennsylvania’s worst performing public schools requires additional reporting and transparency measures for Scholarship Organizations, including reporting the number of scholarships awarded to students from low-income families.
• Virginia’s Education Improvement Scholarships Tax Credits
• The scholarship tax credit program created in 2012 requires participating private schools to measure annually scholarship students’ progress in reading and math with a national, norm-referenced achievement test and report those results to the state.  Beginning in the program’s third year, those results will be published on the Department of Education’s website.

 Check out the Alliance for School Choice’s 2012 Private School Choice Accountability Update for more information on accountability standards in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG

Accountability in the Bayou State

Earlier this year, Louisiana expanded its voucher program statewide, allowing students from low-income families attending low-performing public schools to get a scholarship to attend the private school of their parents’ choice.  The program received overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature.  

But the support from families was even stronger. For the 2012-13 school year, more than 10,300 applications were submitted to the state Department of Education for a chance for a voucher. The Department of Education has announced that 5,600 students—including 1,700 renewing students from Orleans Parish—have been granted a voucher so far.  More scholarships are likely to be approved in the coming weeks.

And this week, the accountability standards for the voucher program have been approved by the state board of education.  The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 9-2 to adopt the accountability provisions proposed by state Superintendent John White.

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu praised the state board for adopting accountability provisions, writing:

"I am encouraged by the criteria's strong emphasis on public reporting of performance data and the fact that there are consequences for nonpublic schools scoring below an established cutoff point."

The American Federation for Children strongly believes that strong academic, financial, and administrative accountability standards are integral to the success of private school choice programs.  The most effective programs across the nation—in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and Florida—are also the programs with the strongest accountability provisions.

Luckily for students in the Bayou State, Superintendent of Education John White believes in strong accountability standards.  In an editorial published this week, White wrote:

But empowerment is just half of the equation. On the other side is an equally important concept: accountability. To be clear, I mean accountability not in the sense of more rules and regulations from Baton Rouge and Washington. I mean accountability for outcomes and achievement. I mean accountability for producing results. Empowered people, close to children, accountable for results: That’s a formula for improvement.

[…]

And as the [voucher] program expands statewide, it is important that the program and its schools be fully accountable for student achievement and for responsible use of the public dollar. That is why today the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) will vote on a plan for academic and operations accountability for private schools running scholarship programs.

"Accountability is the partner of choice"

Sometimes, it's best to let someone else's work speak for itself. This is one of those times.

We've routinely stressed the importance of accountability in creating and implementing strong school choice programs. Some on the other side accuse us of being less than committed to the goal, a charge that couldn't be less far from the truth. In reality, school choice cannot work unless schools and programs are accountable; otherwise, the very parents we seek to empower are left unable to exercise the control over their children's educational futures they deserve.

Terry Ryan, the vice president of Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, penned a pitch-perfect opinion piece in this past weekend's Columbus Dispatch that highlights the inextricably linked nature of these two issues.