A hint of hypocrisy: Parental choice only for the powerful

A new survey shows that 38% of members of Congress have at some point made the choice to send their children to private school.  (Nationally, only 11% of U.S. students are currently in private schools.)  The Washington Post points out the incongruity of making this decision for your own family while preventing low-income families from having the same choice–which is exactly what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and DC OSP opponent Sen. Dick Durbin seem to be doing.  Read the editorial here.

Williams: Education, “by any means necessary”

Too often education reform is seen as a nearly decades-long process whose best ideas are always to be found in the future.

Former DC mayor Anthony Williams, the father of the DC Opportunity Scholarships Program, reminds us that the poor state of U.S. education is not just a political issue, but an issue of justice. As such, it demands urgency.

In an editorial in the Washington Post, Williams and former DC Council member Kevin Chavous challenge officials to use any means necessary to improve education quality and equality:

Ensuring that every American child receives equal access to high-quality education represents our last civil rights struggle. By any objective measure, the educational offerings we provide for our children, particularly children of color, do them a disservice. …

The reality of our children’s deficits demands much more than we have given them. Platitudes, well-crafted speeches and the latest three-to-five-year reform plan aren’t good enough. We must find ways to educate every child now, by any means necessary.

It was that spirit that led us, as elected officials of the District in 2003, to promote the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.”

Read their entire editorial here.

Shirking the burden of proof

Last week, after the release of positive research findings on the impact of the DC OSP, the Chicago Tribune called out its own senator and the Secretary of Education:

Sen. Durbin, Secretary Duncan, the evidence is piling up on your desks. The burden of proof is squarely on you to prove why, after so few years, we should stop—and stop evaluating—a program that is showing certifiable prospects of changing the futures of disadvantaged kids.”

(Read the entire editorial here.)

This week, the Secretary’s department seems to have dismissed that responsibility.  In explaining the DoE’s recent decision not to admit new students into the program for 2009-2010, a spokesperson for Duncan told the Washington Post that he does not want to have new students begin a program that is in jeopardy, presumably so as not to disrupt their education too much.

This reasoning shows not proof but politics.  No one wants a child’s education to be unnecessarily fractured or disjointed, but the DoE’s decision will only be adding disruption for many families, especially given its timing.  Consider the following:

1. The DoE decision to decline new applicants came just one week after families with newly-eligible children had received letters encouraging them to apply for the scholarship.

2. The decision came after the DC public school “out of boundary” lottery was closed, and after the top charter schools were filled, leaving parents with even less choice than usual in their children’s education.

3. If rising kindergarteners aren’t able to join their siblings as scholarship recipients, families will face a difficult decision: try to juggle having children at two different schools, or remove older siblings from their preferred school and send all to the DC public school they had been trying to leave.  For those trying to make ends meet, running between multiple schools is often not just inconvenient–it’s an impossibility.

4. The decision came one week after the release of positive research findings about the DC OSP’s effect on student reading, leaving one to wonder exactly what kind of proof of success would be enough.

5. The decision disrupts the process that even Congressional opponents of the OSP had agreed on in the omnibus bill: continue the scholarships (including new applicants) for 2009-2010, and hold hearings this spring to examine the evidence for reauthorization.  Apparently giving the program a fair hearing is not what the DoE intends–at least, that will be the clear message coming from this abrupt discontinuation of new scholarships.

The faces of opportunity

No matter what the issue, there’s always a danger that public policy discussions will take place in isolation from those who will be affected most by policy decisions.  So it is reassuring that the stories of several children receiving the DC OSP have been highlighted recently in the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington.

Today, read about Julio, a fifth-grader at St. Thomas More School, whose mother Vonette has seen him flourish thanks to the Opportunity Scholarship.  See the Catholic Standard’s webpage to find out how Vonette has been fighting to keep the scholarship.

Earlier installments in the series:

Read about Brenda and Katherine, two sisters whose Opportunity Scholarships allowed their family to choose the safer, more structured environment of Sacred Heart School.  More at this page.

Tsion and Meckias, the children of refugees who fled the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, have found increased motivation at St. Anthony’s School.  Find their story here.

And Ronald, an Archbishop Carroll High School sophomore, credits the Opportunity Scholarship for his success at becoming the DC deputy youth mayor for legislative affairs.  Read about his experience and goals for the future in this article.

Stay tuned to this blog for more profiles of the families and children who will be helped most directly by increased parental choice–or whose lives will be most disrupted if the DC OSP is not reauthorized.

DC scholarships undercut by “abrupt decision”

Just one week after the release of positive findings about the effects of the DC Opportunity Scholarships Program, Department of Education officials in charge of the program have declared that no new recipients will be enrolled for the 2009-2010 year.  This decision comes despite the fact that Congress, in the same omnibus bill that was intended to let the scholarships die quietly, had still provided for the program to accept new applicants for one more year while Congress was considering re-authorization.

Apparently the Department of Education and Secretary Duncan are hoping for a swifter end to the program.  While the decision not to enroll new students will not be the final word on the issue–and students previously enrolled will be able to continue for the 09-10 school year–it’s a clear sign that the DoE is trying to kill the possibility of re-authorization before this spring’s promised Congressional hearings even begin.

As the Washington Post noted in its editorial, “It’s clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents’ needs, student performance and program effectiveness don’t matter next to the political demands of teachers’ unions.”  Read the editorial here.

Will proof be enough?

The buzz continues about the recent DC OSP research study, which found that students receiving the scholarships have made significant gains in reading.  We’re still waiting to see exactly how government officials will respond to the findings, though it appears many opponents are ready to dismiss the proven gains.

Some observers are getting impatient.  After the Wall Street Journal questioned whether or not Secretary of Education Arne Duncan purposefully withheld the research findings until after Congress had finished debating the voucher program, a Denver Post columnist did some investigative journalism of his own.  He slams Secretary Duncan for ignoring–and allegedly burying–the study:

When I had the chance to ask Duncan — at a meeting of the Denver Post editorial board on Tuesday — whether he was alerted to this study before Congress eradicated the D.C. program, he offered an unequivocal “no.” He then called the WSJ editorial “fundamentally dishonest” and maintained that no one had even tried to contact him, despite the newspaper’s contention that it did, repeatedly.

When I called the Wall Street Journal, I discovered a different — that is, meticulously sourced and exceedingly convincing — story, including documented e-mail conversations between the author and higher-ups in Duncan’s office. The voucher study — which showed progress compounding yearly — had been around since November and its existence is mandated by law. So at best, Duncan was willfully ignorant.”

See the full article here.  Matt Ladner, of the Goldwater Institute, writes on Jay Greene’s blog of the DOE’s “shameful attempt to bury and spin the report,” even if Secretary Duncan did not deliberately withhold it.

Greene himself, who is chair of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, maintains some optimism that the Obama administration will be influenced by the positive research findings.  For those of us not well-versed in educational research methods and interpretation, Greene provides an experienced perspective on the new DC OSP findings in a National Review Online article.

Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields asks the first lady to examine the results of the DC OSP evaluation and provide leadership in supporting it:

The president and the Democrats say they killed [the DC OSP] because there was no proof that it worked. But now there is. … No one begrudges the president and the first lady their choice of a good school for their children. They can easily pay for whatever they choose. However, if Mrs. Obama, as the nation’s mom in chief, keeps her silence as others kill a program enabling choice for those who can’t easily pay, she invokes the ghost of Marie Antoinette – the children cry for the bread of knowledge, let them eat stale cake.

Find the full article here.

Secretary Duncan: Do what works

In his recent speech on education reform, President Obama made this promise to us:

Secretary Duncan will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”

On the Senate floor, Dick Durbin of Illinois told us:

Allowing the program to continue through end of next school year (2009–2010) will give Congress a chance to examine all the evidence to determine whether or not this program works.”

And in 2003, when debating the original authorization of the OSP, Senator Diane Feinstein of California said:

Let’s try it for 5 years, and then let’s compare progress and let’s see if this model can work for these District youngsters.”

Now that the research is in, we know: it works.

Please write the President, Secretary Duncan, Senator Durbin, Senator Feinstein, your elected representatives – and perhaps most importantly, Mayor Fenty – and let them know that you expect them to support this program, particularly now that we have evidence that it works.

WSJ: Sitting on results a “moral disgrace”

The Wall Street Journal issued a scathing editorial yesterday that called the Department of Education’s delayed release of a research report that demonstrates significant benefits to students in the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program “a moral disgrace.”  The WSJ editorial board described how the Department of Education was almost certainly “sitting on” the results when the program was debated in Congress last month:

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year…A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan’s department didn’t want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin’s campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.”

Please let Secretary Duncan and Mayor Fenty know that the research matters, and that you expect President Obama to live up to his pledge to consider only what works when making decisions about children’s educational futures.

More research supports the OSP

The year 3 results of the Department of Education study of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program were released on Friday afternoon.   The study found that students who received scholarships “were performing at statistically significant higher levels of reading” – demonstrating the equivalent of 3.1 months of additional learning – nearly half a year of additional learning.

Many members of Congress have indicated that they would be deciding their vote on reauthorization based on the results of this study.  On the Senate floor, Dick Durbin argued that he wanted to put the program through the reauthorization process in order to see if it works.  Even President Obama has said, “If there was any argument for vouchers, it was, ‘Let’s see if it works.’ And if it does, whatever my preconception, you do what’s best for kids.” Unbelievably–and in apparent contradiction with President Obama’s argument that we should support programs that work–Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suggested that these gains do not support reauthorizing the program.

This research,though, is clear – OSP kids are learning, and they are learning more than their peers who stayed in public schools.  The program works.

Let President Obama, Secretary Duncan, Mayor Fenty, Senator Durbin, and your representatives know that you expect them to vote for what works by supporting the reauthorization of the DC OSP.

The parent perspective

One of the central tenets of the school choice movement is that parents should have the right to make decisions about their children’s education.  In fact, this tenet is so central that many have begun referring to the movement as the “parental choice” movement.  We hope, then, that proponents and opponents alike will listen carefully to the experiences and hopes of parents as they consider this issue.

One such parent is Victoria Owens.  The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program gave her the freedom to make choices about which school her sons attend, and, unsurprisingly, she seems to have made an excellent decision.  Read her opinion of the OSP in this letter to the Washington Post.