Voucher Advocates Want Public Dollars For Private Schools

House Bill 944, which would create a school voucher program in North Carolina, looks set to sail through the House and on to the Senate. Supporters, which include Rep. Marcus Brandon (D) of High Point, are calling it “Opportunity Scholarships” but the only opportunity that's being offered is for our tax dollars to pay for private schools. Thanks, but no thanks.

Brandon joined Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, and others last week at a school voucher rally held at War Memorial Auditorium. Parents and students from religiously affiliated schools from across North Carolina were in the audience but voucher advocates seem to be targeting High Point residents in particular with their rhetoric, including a recent guest column in the High Point Enterprise written by Allison.  

In the column, which you can read here, Allison makes the same tired arguments we've heard for decades. “Private schools will save the day! Just don't ask how,” is a good summary of the column.

For example, Allison uses misleading data to make it appear low-income students are performing worse than they actually are in Guilford County public schools. Allison cites a five-year average for low-income student performance on end-of-grade tests. That makes it appear that less than half of those students pass their EOGs.

The numbers Allison doesn't cite are 2012 EOG scores, which show across the board improvement for low-income students, with 63 percent of students passing. And he certainly doesn't talk about the academic growth that those students experienced.

Every year many of our students, low-income and otherwise, begin school well behind their peers academically. And each year trained, licensed, professional public school teachers begin their work with students where they are and have success moving them forward. Growth is charted and measured. Learning happens. Not all of those students will catch up to their peers within the school year but that's an argument for funding more time with those teachers, not sending them to a private school with almost no oversight or mandates.

Also, note that Allison doesn't explain how private schools manage better results for low-income students. Maybe he left that out because the data shows they don't. In fact, studies have found students do worse than they did in their public schools.

What a voucher system will do is pull money away from public schools, giving it to private schools, some of which will no doubt pop up overnight. Those private schools will then spend our tax money with little to no oversight, teaching whatever they like. Simply put, vouchers will create chaos, an unaccountable mess and leave children behind. Our children deserve better than that.

Public Schools Offer Flexibility, Choice

By Margaret Arbuckle

Executive Director, Guilford Education Alliance

Free public education that is available to all students is one of the magnificent civil rights of our country. Our society’s commitment to provide this opportunity, built on principles of democracy and what is best for the common good, is the foundation for our economic prosperity and our civil society.

For generations, education was provided through a standardized curriculum that all were expected to achieve. But thankfully, throughout the decades, public education has evolved to meet the needs of individual students and the larger needs of our society as we have moved from agrarian to manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, and as our citizens have become more diverse.

Art For The Sake Of Art

On Stage! is tonight and we couldn't be more excited. This the seventh year Guilford Education Alliance has produced the talent show and it's set to be one of the biggest. There are more than 500 students scheduled to perform from schools all over the county, ready to show off their abilities in the visual and performing arts. And don't think we're overselling it when we say the stars of tomorrow will be on stage at War Memorial Auditorium tonight. These kids will really bowl you over with what they can do.

Guilford Education Alliance has always taken the opportunity to promote the importance of arts education during On Stage! We support Guilford County Schools' efforts to encourage our children's involvement in the arts with magnet programs like the Penn-Griffin School for the Arts in High Point and Morehead Elementary, as well as general arts education in all of our schools.

Supporters of arts education will point out data connecting student achievement and involvement in the arts. A 1998 UCLA study found that arts education has a tremendous impact on the developmental growth of children across socio-economic groups. Arts education advocacy group Americans for the Arts claims children who participate in the arts for at least three hours, three days each week are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement and participate in a math or science fair and three times more likely to read for fun and volunteer in their community.

Those are some wonderful figures but they're easy to question. Is it painting or the violin that encouraged a student's love of books or are all three passions emblematic of a larger focus on education by the child's sphere of influence?

That's essentially what two researchers working with Harvard's Project Zero found in 2000. Project Zero is a research entity dedicated to improving arts education. The 2000 study, which you can read more about in this New York Times article, found that art classes did not improve overall academic performance.

Not surprisingly the findings caused an uproar among educators and supporters of the arts. There's plenty of research conducted before and since that 2000 Project Zero study that refutes its findings. But what the study's authors, Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, argued was that trying to connect students participation in the arts and their academic performance is unfair to the arts. Instead, Winner and Hetland asserted, arts education should be supported because of its own intrinsic value.

You could bury the Project Zero findings under a mountain of contrary research but the reasoning behind the effort shouldn't be dismissed. Isn't, after all, the accomplishment of braving an early freeze to play clarinet in the marching band for a crowded high school stadium worth supporting on its own? Do we have to prove that an eighth grader's love of photography has something to do with why she's so good at math or can we encourage her passion for an art form simply because it brings her joy and a chance to express herself?

At On Stage! Tonight you will see and hear a wonderful sampling of the skill and talent our public school students are learning and honing in classes across the county. You will also see smiles, bright, hopeful eyes and earnest effort. There isn't a better summary for what education looks like.

An Argument Against Free Reign For Charter Schools

For more than two decades many in North Carolina fought the wrong-headed notion that the free market is the ideal tool for education reform. Those in the state that battled advocates of charter schools and vouchers were able to turn back the tide that flooded other states like Minnesota and cities like Washington, D.C. and Chicago. So you would think the battle was won, with volumes of research data now available of such programs in the United States and abroad proving that charter schools at best provide no better academic performance than their public school counterparts and at worse set their students back, often failing financially in the process.

Why is it then that we find ourselves staring down what is arguably one of the most aggressive pro-charter schools legislative agendas not only in North Carolina's history but the nation? Senate Bill 337 would, among other things, create a separate governing board for charter schools, eliminate the requirement that all teachers be licensed and maybe the most unbelievable, eliminate background checks for charter school employees. Oh, and if your public school district has a building it isn't using, the school board would be required to lease it to a charter school for a buck.

The Senate Education Committee will take the bill up today and if approved it will head off to Appropriations.

The bill is being championed by Sen. Jerry Tillman of Archdale and backed by Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger, who represents our fair community as well as his home district of Rockingham County. So be sure to click their links for contact info to share your thoughts.

There is a ton of info already out there about what the bill would do and why those elements are a terrible idea. From the Charlottee Observer and Raleigh News & Observer. You can also read here about how Tillman is also winning the fight to create a separate state school board to govern charters.

What we need to think about is this free market idea. Here's what Tillman told the News & Observer last week about why the bill works.

"...the market only works where you have choice. If you don't have anywhere else to go, you have no choice and the marketplace can't work," Tillman said.

This idea that market economics can be applied to public education shows a complete misunderstanding of both education and economics, which is scary considering Tillman retired from the public school district. Marc Tucker is a national leader in standards-driven education reform and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy which does a wonderful job of dispelling the myth of free market education reform in this Washington Post piece from late last year.

Tucker notes that, among other major factors, the free market theory doesn't work because at its core is the assumption that parents will choose to send their child to a school with the best academic record. This isn't the case. Academic performance falls behind safety, proximity to the family's home and even how well the school's athletic teams perform, according to Tucker.

“If [parents] have met teachers at that school that seem to really care about their children, take a personal interest in them and seem to be decent people, they are likely to place more value on those things than on district league tables of academic performance based on standardized tests of basic skills, especially if they perceive that school to be safe and it is close to home,” Tucker explains.

And what about academic performance? Education reform, after all, is supposed to be about ensuring that every child receives the highest quality education possible.

Tucker notes that studies show that students who perform well continue to perform well in charter schools, average student performance is unchanged but most disconcerting is that students who are low performing do even worse in charter schools. Charter schools widen rather than close the performance gap, the exact opposite of what public education reform is meant to do.

In that same News & Observer interview Tillman goes on to say, “Public schools, for the main, are doing a super-good job,” noting that dropout rates across the state are at record lows. But, he continues, there are still places where progress isn't being made.

There is no doubt that shifts in our economy and culture has played a role in lowering the dropout rate. Those factors are nothing compared to the monumental effort public school districts put into addressing the problem. An effort, importantly, backed with resources from the state; this could change with the state cutting resources.

If you read Tucker's piece, and you absolutely should, you'll see he outlines common qualities among nations with public school systems that produce high academic achievement, including Singapore, Finland, Australia and Canada. Here are a few that should be highlighted:

• They have much less poverty among their children.
• They have much more equitable systems of school finance.
• They pay their teachers much better than we do.
• They insist teachers are well prepared both in the subject they will teach and the craft of teaching.

Guilford Education Alliance does not oppose charter schools, but it does believe that a safe public school, whose oversight and governance are transparent and regulated and that is staffed with qualified educators is the best choice any child can have. Because unlike charter schools operating in a free market, failure isn't an option for our public schools.