PARENTSFORCHOICE

New Hampshire Latest State to Support School Choice

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 04:17:00 +0000

School choice is on the verge of becoming law in New Hampshire. This seems to be a trend sweeping across states. Why? It's obvious. All states are cash strapped and realize that school choice programs always results in a revenue positive equation. States end up saving money by offering school choice as the $$$ they offer the student is only a portion of the variable cost of education.

The full story follows. Please play close attention to the idiotic quotes of the union hack at the end of the segment.

Legislation aims to allow businesses to back school-choice options

Tax credit sought for businesses that fund scholarships.

By Joey Cresta

jcresta@seacoastonline.com

November 13, 2011 2:00 AM

Legislation to create a tax credit program that would encourage businesses to donate money to fund school-choice options for New Hampshire students could be filed for the 2012 legislative session.

Members of the House of Representatives have already started work on new legislation as a result of the recommendation of a committee of legislators who met in September and October to study the implementation of an education tax credit plan.

State Sen. Jim Forsythe, R-Strafford, who was the committee chairman, said the tax credits would help provide parents with more school-choice options, including home-schooling, private schools and religious schools. If established, the credits would encourage businesses to make a donation to a scholarship organization for a 75- to 90-percent tax credit, Forsythe said.

The tax credits would be against the 8.5-percent Business Profits Tax, and possibly the Business Enterprise Tax, depending on how other reforms to the enterprise tax play out, Forsythe said.

The legislation can be found in other states, including Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona and, in Forsythe's opinion, would improve education in New Hampshire by providing opportunities for less-fortunate students to have options besides their local public school.

"Education is hugely important," he said. "I think this is very important to improve the quality of education."

The committee has recommended a total donation cap between $10 million and $15 million that could be expanded if the program grows large enough, and caps on donations of individual entities and the administrative expenses of the organizations that would administer the scholarships.

Other recommendations are that the $1,856 the state normally provides for a special-education student follow that student if he or she participates in the scholarship program and that costs of books and materials for home-school students be eligible for scholarships.

The program is proposed to be budget neutral or a cost savings to the state. Forsythe said if children move from public to private school as a result of a scholarship, then public schools would need less state funding.

The committee heard testimony about numerous studies of school-choice programs that indicated education improved after the program was implemented, Forsythe said. He said some studies also suggested public education improved as well because it fostered competition among schools.

There are some concerns with the program, such as how to ensure scholarships go to the truly needy and not to students already attending private school. Forsythe said there has been discussion of means testing to ensure a family is eligible for assistance, but the committee could not come to a complete agreement on it.

State Sen. Nancy Stiles, R-Hampton, also served on the committee. She said the program is different from voucher systems proposed in years past because the scholarships are not government money and therefore would not be subject to the same constitutional challenges as vouchers.

Stiles said she supports the program because student needs are so diverse that what works for one student may not work for another.

The state should strive for anything that could help a child reach his or her potential, she said.

"I look for every opportunity for every kid to reach their greatest potential," Stiles said. "I think we have good public schools (and) we have some public schools that are great, (but) there's always room for improvement."

Laura Hainey, a Rochester resident and president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said there are some serious problems with the program.

Hainey said she has concerns about transparency and accountability, particularly when it comes to sending money to religious schools and families that practice home-schooling.

She also said that while the issue is about providing school-choice, it is often the school that chooses the child and there is no guarantee the program would help the truly needy.

From Hainey's perspective, the program would not be budget-neutral because local school budgets would not fall as a result of one or two students leaving for a private school. And she raised concerns about businesses that would "double-dip" and use the donation as a deduction on federal taxes in addition to the state tax credit.

She said if there is real support for school-choice scholarships, it should be done through private donations.

"We'll continue to monitor it," she said. "If they can make it fair, we might consider it."

Forsythe said state Rep. Greg Hill, R-Northfield, has done considerable work on draft legislation with House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt, R-Salem. Forsythe said he has his own bill for the Senate, but if it mirrors Hill's legislation he will simply follow that version.

Pennsylvania School Choice Bill Proves Beneficial for Families and Private Schools

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:38:00 +0000

The passage of a school choice bill in Pennsylvania has proven to benefit both families and private schools, including Catholic schools. Although these benefits were expected, the major impetus for passage of this bill was slightly less altruistic. Bottom line, it saved the state of Pennsylvania money. It only makes sense where legislators and governor actually have some sense. The story:

Rally for School Choice Tuesday in Harrisburg

By mark gilger jr. (Staff Writer)

Published: November 14, 2011

Busloads of students, parents and educators from nine Schuylkill County schools will arrive outside the state Capitol Rotunda building Tuesday to support school choice and celebrate the Senate's approval of Senate Bill 1 during the REACH Foundation's Rally for School Choice.

"We want to show our support and thank the Senate," said Jennifer Daubert, director of development at Nativity BVM High School, Pottsville.

In addition to Nativity, the REACH Foundation said students and faculty from McAdoo Catholic Elementary, Assumption BVM, St. Ambrose, Trinity Academy, St. Jerome RegionRal, St. Nicholas, Marian High School and St. Joseph Center for Special Learning will also be at the rally from 1 to 2 p.m.

"We are very excited and looking for a huge turnout," said Otto V. Banks, executive director of REACH. "The reason for the rally is to push for the passage of Senate Bill 1 and support Gov. Corbett's education reform plan."

REACH stands for Road to Educational Achievement Through Choice. The nonprofit foundation was founded in 1991 and, along with its sister organization, the REACH Alliance, is dedicated to ensuring parental choice in education and coordinating efforts to pass school choice legislation.

"A quality education is the most important investment we can make and parents have the right to choose what schools meet their child's needs," said Matt Kerr, communications director for the Diocese of Allentown. "The point of the rally is to show our support for the legislation, thank the Senate and encourage more legislative efforts for school choice."

The foundation includes members from the business community, ethnic and religious organizations, parents and taxpayer groups, and is funded through contributions of citizens, churches and other foundations.

"We are empowering parents to make sure they have the right to make the best choice for their children and make sure that every child has the right to a good education," Banks said.

Senate Bill 1, the Opportunity Scholarship Act, was approved by the Senate by a 27-22 vote Oct. 26. The bill provides opportunity scholarships, expands the current Educational Tax Credit program and adds several charter school provisions.

"Pennsylvania really needs an overhaul on the education system. Something needed to be done," Banks said.

Opportunity scholarships will be available for both public and private school choice to low-income students at under-performing schools. The EITC program will receive a multimillion-dollar increase, eventually bringing the program to $125 million and potentially an annual increase of 5 percent thereafter.

Although statistics for Schuylkill County was unavailable, Banks said that in the Harrisburg area, students can receive up to $8,000 in opportunity scholarships. He said that critics say the amount is not enough to cover annual tuition rates, but noted that quality Catholic education at Bishop McDevitt High School, Harrisburg, has an annual tuition of $6,000.

Daubert said 300 letters in support of the bill were sent to the office of Sen. David Argall, R-29, the day it was approved.

"The EITC program had a significant impact on Catholic schools in the area," Daubert said. "Through the generosity of businesses, a Catholic education becomes a possibility for so many families."
mgilgerjr@republicanherald.com

Another Study Just Released October 19 Shows School Savings in Pennsylvania

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:30:00 +0000

By: Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation
October 19, 2011

Critics of expanding school choice in Pennsylvania often claim it will "cost too much" or drain precious resources. But in fact, school choice already saves Pennsylvania taxpayers more than $4 billion every year—more than $1,300 for every family of four.

In 2009-10, Pennsylvania school districts spent $14,300 per student. In comparison, public charter schools spent about $2,400 less per student, on average (and cyber schools more than $3,300 less), as documented in our recent policy points on charter school funding.

Private and nonpublic schools—which benefit from more than $200 million in state aid for student textbooks, transportation, and special needs students—enroll close to 300,000 students. About 40,000 of these students receive scholarships through the Educational Improvement Tax Credit, with the average scholarship amount being around $1,000. Even counting the the tax credit for private donations to scholarship organizations as a "cost" to taxpayers, private school choice saves more than $12,000 per child leaving a school district.

Homeschool students receive no taxpayer subsidy, saving taxpayers $14,300 for each of 22,000 homeschoolers. Even the proposed voucher program—less than half the amount, per student, of district spending—would represent significant savings for taxpayers.

If the 380,000 students attending schools of choice returned to district schools, at current spending levels, taxpayer costs for education would rise by $4.3 billion.

Total Taxpayer Savings from Students Attending Schools of Choice
2009-10 School Year
	Savings Per Student*	Number of Students**	Total Savings
Private and Nonpublic	$13,279	287,092	$3,812,403,692
EITC Scholarship Students	$12,235	38,646	$472,848,486
Home School	$14,301	22,000	$314,622,000
Public Charter (Total)	$2,367	73,054	$172,903,936
Cyber Charter	$3,366	20,406	$68,685,860
Total		382,146	$4,299,929,628
* Includes All state funding for nonpublic schools plus tax credits for EITC scholarships as cost; homeschooling enrollment estimated based on 2007-08 data
Sources: PA Department of Education, Summaries of Annual Financial Report Data; Public School Enrollment Reports, http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/data_and_statistics/7202

Big Year for School Choice

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:43:00 +0000

By Lindsey Burke and Rachel Sheffield

Posted August 19, 2011 10:08 AM
From the Editors

The Heritage Foundation

2011 has been a milestone year for school choice, setting the bar high for state legislatures across the country to increase families’ educational options. What began with a crucial re-authorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program continued with 12 states creating or expanding school choice options.

The movement toward educational freedom in 2011 was unprecedented; state after state moved away from the government’s public education monopoly and toward policies that put power in the hands of parents, and educational opportunity in the grasp of children.

Today, families in 18 states and the District of Columbia benefit from private school choice options. More than 200,000 children are benefiting from vouchers, tuition tax credit programs, and education savings accounts to pay for tuition at a private school of their parents’ choice. Millions more benefit from virtual education options, charter schools, public school choice, and homeschooling. But, although these options are proliferating, millions of children across the country are still trapped in government schools that fail to meet their needs, fail to provide them with a quality education, and in some cases, even fail to provide for their safety.

Congress and state and local leaders must continue the work of ensuring that every child has access to a safe and effective school.

School Choice in America
As of August 2011, 18 states and Washington, D.C., have policies that support private school choice:

Nine states—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—offer education tax credits to encourage businesses and individuals to make donations to organizations that provide tuition scholarships to students to attend private school.
Nine states and the District of Columbia have voucher programs: Colorado (Douglas County), Florida (special needs), Georgia (special needs), Indiana, Louisiana (New Orleans and special needs), Ohio (Cleveland, Ed Choice, special needs, and Autism scholarships), Oklahoma (special needs), Utah (special needs), Wisconsin (Milwaukee and Racine County), and Washington, D.C.
Five states—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, and Minnesota—offer tax deductions to reduce their state income-tax liabilities by taking deductions on education-related expenses, including private-school tuition.

A majority of states offer some form of public school choice:

Forty-six states have policies that permit public-school choice.[1]
Forty states and the District of Columbia have charter school laws that allow the creation of charter schools—public schools that are free from many of the regulations imposed on traditional public schools, but are held accountable to the same achievement measures as their traditional counterparts. This allows charter schools to be more flexible and innovative than traditional public schools.[2]

Many more families pursue options outside the traditional school public model:

Homeschooling is legal in every state.[3]
More than 1.5 million students participate in online classes.[4]

Continue here to read the full report: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/08/School-Choice-in-America-2011-Educational-Opportunity-Reaches-New-Heights

From the Heritage Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:33:00 +0000

The Future of School Choice

Todd Thurman

October 11, 2011

For decades now, spending on public education has been increasing significantly, while academic achievement has remained stagnant. What if, instead of pouring money into failing schools, we give the money to parents and allow them to spend it any way they see fit on their children’s education?
Well, in states like Arizona, education savings accounts (ESAs), which do just that, have become a reality and could be the future of school choice.

Heritage’s Lindsey Burke explains what it means for some residents of Arizona:

"In April 2011, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law SB 1553, creating Arizona Empowerment Accounts. The first of their kind, Empowerment Accounts allow parents—in this case, parents of special-needs children—to remove their children from the public-school system and receive the money the state would have spent on them in an education savings account."

This opens the door for many more educational opportunities for special needs children who deserve better than the schools they are forced to go through because of the district they happen to live in.
This is just the starting point for the true potential of ESAs. They could also be used to attend online schools, which offer a learning alternative to brick-and-mortar schools. Additionally, if the money is not used, parents can roll it over from year to year and can even save it to invest in a 529 college savings account for their children.

Other states, such as Florida and Utah, have also considered offering parents ESAs.
The Wall Street Journal called 2011 “The Year of School Choice,” because 13 states have enacted or expanded school choice options for families. This should send shockwaves to the Obama Administration, which is hoping for a reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.

But in order to free more states to explore innovative education options like ESAs, federal policymakers should allow states to completely opt out of No Child Left Behind and use funding in a manner that would best meet the needs of local children.

States like Arizona are leading the way with new ideas like ESAs, and the future of school choice options seems brighter than ever.

Higher Graduation Rates for School Choice Students

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:26:00 +0000

Higher Graduation Rates for Milwaukee Students
School Choice Students Continue to Lead the Way

By School Choice Wisconsin
Last Updated: January 10, 2011

Milwaukee—High school graduation rates in Milwaukee have risen steadily since 2003, with students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) more likely to receive diplomas than students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). These are the key findings in a new report by University of Minnesota Professor John Robert Warren, a national expert.

Based on seven years of data, Professor Warren estimates that the graduation rate for students in Milwaukee’s choice program was about 18% higher than for students in MPS. Had MPS achieved the same graduation rate as students in the MPCP, an additional 3,939 Milwaukee students would have graduated from 2003 to 2009. Based on findings in separate research reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the annual impact from these additional graduates would have been about $4.2 million in extra tax revenue and $24.9 million in additional personal income.

Warren’s research shows a general pattern of growth in Milwaukee graduation rates. From 2003 to 2009 the MPS rate grew from 49% to 70%. For the MPCP the rate grew from 63% to 82%.

The positive school choice results come on the heels of alarming news that the number of 9th graders entering the MPCP decreased in 2010-2011. Per-pupil funding cuts and increased regulation have threatened the sustainability of private high schools in the MPCP. The result has been a decrease in the number of freshman seats offered through the program, at a time when demand significantly exceeds the supply.

Currently, per-pupil taxpayer support for the MPCP is $6,442, less than half of the $15,034 spent per-pupil in MPS. The program now serves over 20,000 students.

Professor Warren notes that the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP), which is made up of researchers at the University of Arkansas, is conducting a detailed study of the choice program. He said their work might offer explanations for the higher graduation rates of choice students.
Professor Warren’s report is available at: http://www.schoolchoicewi.org.

Note to reporters:

• Questions about the study may be directed to John Robert Warren, Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, 612-624-2310 and warre046@umn.edu

Professor Warren received his doctorate in 1998 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His published scholarship reflects extensive examination of issues associated with the accurate measurement of high school graduation rates. In one key study, “State-Level High School Completion Rates: Concepts, Measures, and Trends,” he provides a comprehensive review of those issues and validates a rigorous method for accurately calculating graduation rates (See Education Policy Analysis Archives, Vol. 13, No. 51, December 23, 2005—http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n51/).

• Questions about the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program may be directed to Michael Ford, Vice President of Operations, School Choice Wisconsin, 414-319-9160 and ford@parentchoice.org

Another Study Showing Taxpayer Savings and Better Student Performance

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:23:00 +0000

School Choice Research: Taxpayer Savings and Parent/Student Satisfaction
Last Updated: February 26, 2008

DATE: February 26, 2008

RE: Longitudinal Study, Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

FROM: Susan Mitchell, President, School Choice Wisconsin

This summarizes information in four reports issued yesterday by academic researchers who are conducting an independent longitudinal study of school choice in Milwaukee. The reports are available at http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/SCDP/Research.html.

The reports represent initial findings from a five-year longitudinal study directed by some of the nation’s most knowledgeable scholars in the subject of educational choice. The study team includes University of Wisconsin Professor John Witte. The head of the team is University of Arkansas Professor Patrick Wolf. Officials from the Milwaukee Public Schools participated in developing the study design.

Fiscal Impact

The SCDP evaluation of fiscal impact represents the most comprehensive findings ever assembled on the issue. The conclusions of the analysis are consistent with numerous reports previously issued by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB), despite the continual misrepresentation of the facts by program opponents.

Taxpayer support for students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is a maximum of $6,501 per pupil. In 2006 (the most recent year cited in the research), per pupil spending in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) was $11,885.

Key findings include:

• Net taxpayers savings from the MPCP in 2006-07 totaled $24.6 million.

• The savings are unevenly distributed among taxpayers.

o Those who pay state income and sales taxes as well as property taxpayers in school districts outside the City of Milwaukee benefit. Ending or curtailing the MPCP would increase those taxes.

o There is an adverse impact on City of Milwaukee property taxpayers.

o Legislative efforts in 2007 to address the City of Milwaukee impact were inadequate.

In May of 2007, Mayor Tom Barrett and State Rep. Jason Fields advanced a plan, with bipartisan support, to end the so-called Milwaukee “funding flaw.” Key Milwaukee legislators blocked the Barrett-Fields plan.

Parent and Student Satisfaction

The research team conducted extensive surveys involving a representative sample of parents in the MPCP and in MPS. Both groups report levels of satisfaction above the national average. On a variety of measures, parents of students in the MPCP were more satisfied.

• The majority of parents — MPCP and MPS — cite educational quality as the primary reason for choosing a school. Teacher quality and safety are the next highest priorities.

• A majority of MPCP parents are “very satisfied” with: what is taught at their child’s school; school safety; what their child has learned; and information received from teachers about student progress.

• Nearly three times more MPS parents felt that weapons in their child's school were a serious problem (16.6% vs. 6.3%).

• Far more MPCP parents felt that fighting in schools was not a serious problem.

• Far more MPCP students strongly agreed with the statements, “My school makes sure that classrooms are safe and orderly” and “My school promotes a drug-free environment.”

The survey results also show that most Milwaukee parents, in both public and private schools, make active and informed school choices. The longitudinal research team finds that 77.9% of MPCP parents, and 74.1% of MPS parents report that their children are attending their first school choice. In MPS, 55% of parents report choosing a school outside of their residentially defined area. When MPS parents were asked why they did not apply to the MPCP, only 1 percent cited a lack of information about individual MPCP schools. These results are at odds with a widely publicized report issued last year. That report, which used no data from Milwaukee, concluded that most Milwaukee parents make uninformed choices and often accept “default” school assignments.

Participating Schools and Students

Key findings:

• 29% of teachers at MPCP schools have master’s degrees (compared to 43% in MPS). Teachers at MPCP schools are more likely to have five or more years of teaching experience than their MPS counterparts.

• MPCP schools have an average student to teacher ratio of 13.6, compared to 16.6 in MPS.

• More than 30% of the 122 schools in the MPCP have opened since the program began.

• MPCP schools serve disabled students. The survey of MPCP parents showed that 8.7% have children with special needs. This is particularly noteworthy given that private schools are less likely than MPS schools to label students with mild disabilities as special needs students. In addition, more than two-thirds of MPCP schools offer programs for students with learning problems. Opponents for years have claimed that schools in the MPCP serve few if any such students.

• The majority of students — 78% —in private schools that participate in the MPCP, including MPCP and private-pay students, are minority. The estimated average household income of MPCP parents is $23,371.

• Consistent with multiple findings in earlier studies, enrollment in MPCP schools is less segregated racially than in MPS.

• Of the 122 schools in the MPCP:

o 83.3% have music programs;
o 79.8% have art programs;
o 72.9% have after-school programs;
o 70% offer personal tutoring.

Academic Achievement

The initial reports draw no conclusions about the impact of school choice on academic achievement and high school graduation. Rather, the “baseline” reports describe (1) test scores for a scientifically selected, representative sample of MPCP and MPS students and (2) other scores of MPCP students on standardized tests. Future reports will measure changes among the comparison groups from the baseline and evaluate the impact of school choice.

The study team cautions that readers should not use baseline data to draw conclusions about issues of academic achievement and attainment. Future reports will provide information about these issues

The Story Behind School Choice Study

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:17:00 +0000

The results are more complicated than they are sometimes portrayed.

By John F. Witte and Patrick J. Wolf
Last Updated: May 29, 2011

The past few weeks have seen a lively debate surrounding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Gov. Scott Walker's various proposals to expand it. It is time for researchers to weigh in.

For the past five years, as mandated by state law, we have led a national team in a comprehensive evaluation of the choice program. Our study has applied social science research methods to carefully matched sets of students in the choice program and in Milwaukee Public Schools. Whenever possible, we have used measures that are applied consistently in the public- and private-school sectors, generating true apples-to-apples comparisons.

This is what we have learned:

Competitive pressure from the voucher program has produced modest achievement gains in MPS.

The three-year achievement gains of choice students have been comparable to those of our matched sample of MPS students. The choice students are not showing achievement benefits beyond those of the students left behind in MPS.

High school students in the choice program both graduate and enroll in four-year colleges at a higher rate than do similar students in MPS. Being in the choice program in ninth grade increases by four to seven percentage points a student's prospects of both graduating from high school and enrolling in college. Students who remain in the choice program for their entire four years of high school graduate at a rate of 94%, compared with 75% for similar MPS students.

However, the choice students who stick with the program throughout high school are a somewhat selective group. As veteran researchers, we put greater stock in the finding that students who start high school in the voucher program graduate at somewhat higher rates, whether they remain in a choice school or later switch to MPS.

Our research has confirmed the previous findings of the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau that the operation of the choice program saves the state money. The maximum value of the voucher, $6,442, is well below the amount of state and local government aid provided to educate each student in MPS.

Research has determined that only 10% of low-income inner city students - the kind of students currently eligible for the choice program - would attend private schools in the absence of a voucher program. That means the program is providing a subsidy to those 10% but saving much more money on the other 90% of students who otherwise would be educated in the more expensive schools of MPS. As a result, Wisconsin saved an estimated $52 million due to the choice program in Fiscal Year 2011.

Several commentaries on our studies have claimed that the reason MPS schools are more expensive than the private choice schools is because nearly 20% of MPS students are classified as having exceptional educational needs while less than 1% of choice students similarly bear that label. This is a flawed comparison.

Public schools have both strong incentives to classify students as requiring exceptional education, because they receive extra funding to teach such students and well-established protocols for doing so. Private schools have neither. A student with the same educational needs often will be classified as exceptional education in MPS but not so classified in the choice program.

We surveyed parents to get a consistent measure of the percentage of choice students who have a learning disability. Nine percent of choice parents said their child has a learning disability, compared to 18% of the parents of the carefully matched public school students in our sample. The proportion of students with learning disabilities in the choice program is about half that of MPS, but it is certainly not less than 1%, as the state Department of Public Instruction recently reported.

Recently, our research team conducted site visits to high schools in Milwaukee to examine any innovative things they are doing to educate disadvantaged children. The private high schools of the choice program graciously opened their doors to us and allowed us full access to their schools. Although several MPS principals urged us to come see their schools as well, the central administration at MPS prohibited us having any further contact with those schools as they considered our request for visits. We have not heard from them in weeks.

Our report on the private schools we visited, which will offer a series of best practices regarding student dropout prevention, will be released this fall. Should MPS choose to open the doors of their high schools to us, we will be able to learn from their approaches as well.

John F. Witte is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education and endowed chair in school choice at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville.

This column originally appeared in the May 29, 2011 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Why Republicans Kills School Choice Programs

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:12:00 +0000

The Daily Caller
By Shayan Menon
Published: 10:20 AM 07/19/2010

Chicago government schools are a disaster. Only 13% of 8th graders are proficient in math, 17% proficient in reading, the high school graduation rate is a little over 50%, and 6% of kids go on to get college degrees. In March, the Illinois Senate led by Reverend Senator James Meeks (D- Chicago) passed legislation to provide vouchers for kids in the worst Chicago public elementary schools to attend private schools.

When the measure reached the House in May, Chicago Democrat Representative Ken Dunkin pleaded: “I’m begging you. Help me help kids in my district.”

If passed, the legislation would likely have produced the nation’s largest voucher program. However, nearly 50% of all House Republicans helped the Democrat leadership kill the measure. Why?

Unfortunately, much of the GOP is controlled or intimated by the government school education establishment (the “Establishment”) with respect to education policy. Even if not owned by the Establishment, many GOP elected officials fear that merely uttering the words “school choice” would cause the teacher unions and their allies to organize to end their careers. Making matters worse, GOP candidates and elected officials are plagued by political and policy advisors who are misinformed about school choice or who are entirely sympathetic or beholden to the Establishment.

In addition, many Republican leaders are not properly educated about the application of conservative principles in education through school choice. Suburban and rural Republicans do not realize the significant cost savings associated with school choice and how dollars will not be taken away from the government schools in their districts to support school choice elsewhere. They also don’t understand that choice students are primarily served by private schools in their own communities and will not overrun the schools in their districts.

What can the GOP do?

First, the GOP can embrace the conservative principles of freedom in education. If grassroots GOP leaders asked parents whether they favor being able to use their tax dollars (say $11,000 per pupil) and choose for themselves between their mandated government school and a school of their choice (including religious and non-religious private schools), they would find that most favor freedom in education. Furthermore, Republicans need to get the facts on costs. Studies of school choice programs reveal substantial cost savings to taxpayers including those who do not have children in school.

Second, the GOP needs to educate its elected members about what school choice means in practical application. First and foremost, it does not lead to a flood of inner city children into suburban or rural schools. Since choice children have the option to attend high quality private schools in their own communities, why would they choose mediocre government schools in the suburbs or private schools outside of their communities?

Finally, the GOP can reach out to faith-based and community organizations, school choice organizations, younger teachers hurt by the government school monopoly, and businesses to galvanize and empower parents to fight for school choice at the ballot box. Black and Hispanic faith-based and community leaders are beginning to understand that it is their purpose and calling (not the secular inefficient government) to provide hope and a quality education to the least of these in the neighborhoods where they live.

GOP candidates and elected officials need to listen to conservative policy and political advisors on education policy to help these communities. By embracing freedom in education, the GOP will secure electoral majorities comprised of diverse voters including conservatives, libertarians, tea party supporters, blacks, Hispanics, businesses and young and high achieving teachers.

Ultimately, the GOP needs strong voices in the states like newly elected Republican Governor Christie in New Jersey. Governor Christie has unapologetically challenged the Establishment and advanced school choice. If all GOP leaders embraced Christie’s message, the GOP would revolutionize education policy by applying time tested free market principles.

Is the GOP listening? If not, they stand to lose this issue to black and Hispanic Democrats who are willing to take on the Establishment while the GOP remains unwilling to apply sound conservative principles for the benefit of disadvantaged children.

Shayam K. Menon is an attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C. and is a former director of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the U.S. Department of Education where he primarily worked on school choice matters.

More Evidence School Choice Actually Saves Taxpayer Dollars

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:59:00 +0000

Effective education reforms provide savings

Increasing school choice also improves student achievement

Jeff W. Reed

Monday, December 20, 2010

As Nevadans shop this holiday season, most will seek out the best deals and spend their money wisely to maximize tight budgets.

The State of Nevada could, and should, do the same for its residents, by adding some cost-savings items to its 2011 K-12 shopping list.

Governor-elect Brian Sandoval will have to cope with a $1 billion budget deficit when he takes office. With public education consuming a huge chunk of the state budget, cuts could be on the table. But they need not be too painful. Reapportioning state education dollars to school choice programs would allow the state to provide children with effective education while also producing cost savings for taxpayers.

School choice vouchers — and tax-credit scholarships distributed by nonprofit organizations — allow families to access part of the government funding allotted for their children, and use those dollars to send them to schools of their choice, private or otherwise. Although such proposals do cost money, they cost less than the amount spent on students in traditional public schools.

How do vouchers and tax-credit scholarships produce savings? A new school choice program enacted this year in Oklahoma shows how. Parents of disabled children there can receive vouchers worth either 95 percent of the state and local dollars currently "attached" to their child or private school tuition, whichever is less. The program is guaranteed to be fiscally neutral, with a strong possibility of even saving taxpayers money.

Other school choice programs across the country realize these savings with similar measures: Tax-credit scholarship programs, for example, might provide scholarships worth just a portion of private school tuition or cap the scholarship amount at a smaller percentage of total per-pupil expenditures. Florida's tax-credit scholarship program provided the state a net savings of $36.2 million in fiscal year 2008-09, according to the Florida Legislature's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability.

Nationwide, in 2007, Dr. Susan Aud of the Foundation for Educational Choice found that school choice programs in place between 1990 and 2006 produced $444 million in net savings to state and local budgets. That may not seem like a lot of money given today's billion- and trillion-dollar spending programs, but taxpayers need every cent they can get. And they also need every tax dollar received by government to be spent as effectively as possible.

In a 2008 study, Dr. Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas found that of "the ten separate analyses of...‘gold standard' experimental studies of voucher programs, nine conclude that some or all of the participants benefited academically from using a voucher to attend a private school." None conclude there is a negative effect.

Currently, there are 26 school choice programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia, serving some 190,000 students. Approximately 700,000 students' educational costs are being reduced by personal tax credits and deductions. None of these private-school choice programs are available to Nevada families. But they should be, because every parent deserves the right to decide how their child is educated. And, as evidenced by his campaign platform, governor-elect Sandoval agrees.

Although Nevada has a Republican in the governor's office and Democrats with majorities in the state legislature, Nevadans should know that school choice is not a partisan issue. To take just one of many examples, Oklahoma's voucher program for students with disabilities was passed by a bipartisan House and a Republican Senate, and signed by a Democrat governor. When kids' needs and interests are put first, such votes become very easy.

As the current economic crisis dries up Nevada's state budget, leaders should be looking for some streams in the desert. School choice not only would quench their thirst for savings, it also would lead families to an oasis of quality educational opportunities.

Jeff W. Reed is a state program director for the Foundation for Educational Choice, the legacy foundation of Milton and Rose Friedman, and a contributing writer for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

Where Do Public School Teachers Send Their Kids to School?

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:58:00 +0000

From Heartlander Magazine:

Public school teachers in urban areas are far more likely than city residents in general to send their children to private schools, according to a new analysis of 2000 Census data by researchers led by Denis P. Doyle, who previously analyzed 1980 and 1990 Census data.

While just 12.2 percent of U.S. families send their children to private schools, that figure rises to 17.5 percent among urban families in general and to 21.5 percent among urban public school teachers, almost twice the national average.

The difference in the choices made by public school teachers and the general public were especially striking in America's largest cities, where public schools are often the most troubled. For example, in the New York City area, 32.5 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools, compared to 22.7 percent of the general public. In Chicago, 38.7 percent of public school teachers, versus 22.6 percent of the general public, send their children to private schools. In Los Angeles, private schools are chosen by 24.5 percent of public school teachers and 15.7 percent of the public.
Also noteworthy are the differences in cities where school choice programs have seen their greatest successes. In Milwaukee, for instance, home of the nation's oldest publicly funded voucher program, 29.4 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools, versus 23.4 percent of the general public.

In Washington, DC, home of the nation's newest publicly funded voucher program, 26.8 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools, versus 19.8 percent of the public. One of the revelations that helped pass the DC voucher legislation was the disclosure in the news media that the politicians opposing school choice in that city did not enroll their own children in District of Columbia public schools.

"We can assume that no one knows the condition and quality of public schools better than teachers who work in them every day," note the authors of the new study. "If these teachers are more likely than the general public--which may not have nearly as much information or expertise in these matters--to send their own daughters and sons to the public schools in which they teach, it is a strong vote of confidence in those schools."

However, if public school teachers choose not to send their own children to the public schools in which they teach, "then we might reasonably conclude that those in the best position to know are signaling a strong 'sell' about public education in their communities," contend the researchers in the September 2004 study,"Where Do Public School Teachers Send Their Kids to School?" issued by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

In San Francisco, outspoken school choice opponent Jill Wynns, a school board commissioner, dismissed any effort to draw conclusions about the quality of public schools from the data. Wynns suggested many public school educators might choose a private school because of religious beliefs.
Wynns acknowledged her oldest son attended a private school. She denied any conflict between her public stance and her own actions, saying her son had been recruited to attend a private school through a summer program, with the small school having advantages for him.

"It was a choice I let him make; he created the opportunity," she told the San Francisco Examiner.
The Fordham study makes clear that--in the absence of publicly funded school choice--the ability to take advantage of such an "opportunity" is a function of income. For example, only 10.3 percent of families with incomes less than $42,000 choose a private school for their children, compared to 35.6 percent of families with incomes exceeding $84,000.

"We support a teacher's right to choose a private school," school choice advocate Howard Fuller told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "We simply ask them to support the same freedom for low-income families."

The authors note there has been little change in the data on this subject over the past 20 years. Doyle, the study's lead author, is cofounder of SchoolNet, Inc., a Web-based school improvement company. His coauthors are economist Brian Diepold and SchoolNet academic specialist David DeSchryver, who is also managing editor of The Doyle Report.

Financial support for the study was provided by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; the American Education Reform Council, formerly based in Milwaukee and now part of the Arizona-based Alliance for School Choice; and California Parents for Educational Choice.

Alan Bonsteel, M.D. (bonsteel@earthlink.net) is president of California Parents for Educational Choice, which has a Web site at http://www.cpeconline.org.

These Are the People That Oppose School Choice

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:17:00 +0000

Hopefully, now, you will understand why.

Thanks to the investigative reporting of the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV, it has been revealed that 2 union lobbyists worked 1 day as substitute teachers to have their years working as lobbyists counted towards a teacher's pension. For working a single day, they are not only entitled to receive millions in pension benefits, they also get to keep their 401(k) benefits from the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

These are the people we are up against when we bring up school choice. To them, it never is, nor ever has been, about what is best for children or taxpayers. The reason they entrench so firmly and oppose with such ferocity is that they do not want to lose one single dollar from the public trough they feed from. That is also why the dole out so much money in political contributions so that OUR elected officials substitute their duty of representing OUR interests with legislation that favors THEIR interests. You must understand and acknowledge exactly the fight we face and why.

2 teachers union lobbyists teach for a day to qualify for hefty pensions

State legislature opened a small window that they climbed through in 2007

Illinois Federation of Teachers lobbyists Steve Preckwinkle, left, and David Piccioli.

By Ray Long and Jason Grotto, Tribune Reporters

12:16 a.m. CDT, October 22, 2011

SPRINGFIELD ——

Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.

The legislation enabled union officials to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union employees after quickly obtaining teaching certificates and working in a classroom. They just had to do it before the bill was signed into law.

Preckwinkle's one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He's 59, and at age 60 he'll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.

His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.

His pay for one day as a substitute was $93, according to records of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System.

Over the course of their lifetimes, both men stand to receive more than a million dollars each from a state pension fund that has less than half of the assets it needs to cover promises made to tens of thousands of public school teachers. With billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System, which serves public school teachers outside of Chicago, is one of several pension plans that are in debt as state government reels in a fiscal crisis.

A spokesman for the Illinois Federation of Teachers emphasized that the lobbyists' actions were legal and that they made "individual decisions."

Even so, union President Dan Montgomery said the deal Preckwinkle and Piccioli landed "should never be allowed again." But the union, which provides its employees with a private 401(k)-type plan, is standing by the lobbyists' right to have access to the public pension.

"They entered TRS under the law and are participating members of TRS. As a TRS employer, the IFT is required to make the payments to TRS," the union said in a statement.

How did Preckwinkle and Piccioli become the only ones to take advantage of the change in law? Neither one consented to an interview.

Records, however, show that Preckwinkle applied for his first substitute teaching certificate four weeks before the legislation passed, then subbed at a Springfield school six weeks before the window to become eligible closed.

Preckwinkle even signed a witness slip in support of the legislation during a House committee meeting, although the teachers union says he lobbied for a different provision in the same bill, not the perk for union officials such as himself.

The revelation that one day of substitute teaching allowed officials from a state teachers union to tap into an ailing public pension fund is yet another example of how the Illinois pension system has been manipulated for political purposes and personal gain. A series of reports by the Tribune and WGN-TV have documented these pension games and how insiders have benefited.

Although the bill received bipartisan support, the benefit to union officials was sponsored by Springfield Democrats showered by IFT campaign contributions during the 2006 elections.

"The people that are on the inside and understand the process are going to be able to make the system work for their advantage," said Kent Redfield, who teaches political science at the University of Illinois Springfield. "That this legislation got a hearing and got considered and passed is a reflection of that close relationship between the IFT and the Democratic leadership.

"It feeds into the cynicism about all the deals, that it's an insider's game and that the system is rigged."

J. Fred Giertz, a University of Illinois economics professor and a trustee of the State Universities Retirement System, said teachers pensions for Preckwinkle and Piccioli undermine already meager public confidence in the state's retirement systems.

"It's outrageous," Giertz said. "The pension system was designed for schoolteachers and not for union employees to piggyback on at the end of their years."

Both lobbyists must make payments to the pension plan to purchase credit for their past union years, and they are required to pay compounded interest. Over the last five years, after the lobbyists joined the plan, the two men and their union have made standard payments into the fund.

Preckwinkle and Piccioli get to keep their 401(k)-styled retirement plan with IFT, although their union plan may be tapped heavily to help cover payments to the Teachers' Retirement System, according to union spokesman Dave Comerford.

The teachers union says Preckwinkle's salary has dropped recently with a restructuring of duties. Piccioli's earnings also fluctuate, and his estimated earnings this school year are closer to $151,000.

Preckwinkle, 59, stands to receive about $2.8 million by the time he turns 78, about $3.8 million if he retires next year and lives until he's 84. Piccioli, 61, stands to collect about $1.1 million by age 78, about $1.7 million if he lives until 84, according to an analysis by the Tribune and WGN-TV.

The Illinois Federation of Teachers and the lobbyists have made payments totaling $134,703 to the teachers fund to cover Preckwinkle's contributions to date and $98,701 to address Piccioli's contributions to the system. Records showed Preckwinkle still has to purchase most, if not all, of his prior years of union service, but Piccioli has paid for his.

The union said it does not help the two lobbyists pay for their prior years of union service that they can count toward the Teachers' Retirement System.

Despite the effort to qualify, Preckwinkle has yet to decide whether he will tap into the teachers pension fund when he retires, partly because he would owe a substantial lump sum to move forward, Comerford said.

The teachers union has a history of primarily supporting Democrats in Springfield, and that was the case at the time of this legislation as well.

Donations by the Illinois Federation of Teachers to Democrats dwarfed those to Republicans in the two-year 2006 election cycle. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who won the union's endorsement, got more than $515,000; Michael Madigan, the state party chairman, and his rank-and-file candidates got about $567,000; Senate Democrats got roughly $388,000, according to Redfield, an expert on campaign finance who analyzed the races.

Madigan spokesman Steve Brown dismissed the idea that the union's campaign contributions favoring Democrats might have played a role in the legislation that ultimately helped Preckwinkle and Piccioli, a former member of Madigan's staff.

"The only template … on legislation is whether it represents a common approach to a problem, policy or program," Brown said. "That's the only template that was used there."

Brown said similar provisions have been added as "common practice" to state pension laws over many years, but the speaker has said for the last 15 years that the state would not be on the hook for any new expenses to a pension system. That means a person seeking to buy years of service must come up with payments to the Teachers' Retirement System equivalent to employer and employee payments as if they were made on time — in addition to compounded interest, Brown said.

Yet for years the legislature failed to require the actuarially required contributions for the state's pension system, which now has tens of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities as a result.

The legislation that helped the lobbyists emerged during the November 2006 post-election veto session following Democratic victories in every statewide office and gains in the party's House and Senate majorities. The proposal was presented by then-Rep. Gary Hannig, a Litchfield Democrat who served as one of the top lieutenants for Madigan, the bill's House sponsor.

House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego, supported the measure in large part because of the provisions that helped rein in huge end-of-career salary increases that school districts gave educators to spike the size of their pensions, spokeswoman Sara Wojcicki Jimenez said.

One of six House opponents to the bill, Rep. David Winters, R-Shirland, recalled in an interview that lawmakers were unaware the legislation could be employed by the lobbyists to get into the Teachers' Retirement System. He said he voted against the proposal because he was wary that the legislation's major proponents included teachers unions, and that union-friendly Democrats had put together the bill.

"Given the detail that the speaker (Madigan) goes through on every bill — and I've heard their bill review is extremely intense — he knows each bill," Winters said. "He bloody well knew what was in there. You can't tell me the unions got him to put in a provision that he did not understand. He's a brilliant politician, and he knows what he's doing."

Madigan spokesman Brown said the speaker becomes sponsor of pension bills as a normal practice "for purposes of managing the issue" rather than having multiple sponsors. The speaker was not the "chief architect" of the legislation, Brown said, noting that Hannig tended to be the floor leader on financial matters.

In a fiscal analysis, the legislature's bipartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability maintained the changes proposed throughout the bill would have minor or minimal fiscal impact.

Like many pension packages, the legislation rolled together enough provisions to appeal to Democrats and Republicans. It passed the House 109-6 and the Senate 55-0, with one present. Blagojevich signed the bill into law in February 2007.

State officials said Piccioli got certified as a substitute teacher in early December 2006. Only weeks into January, Piccioli taught a middle school history class in the Springfield school district, according to the district; Preckwinkle taught a high school special education class. The teachers union said neither man had prior teaching experience.

A third longtime union employee with many years of union experience has worked briefly in a school system, according to the union and the Teachers' Retirement System, but only is counting time with the union in the years since the law took effect — not piggybacking past union time onto the public pension.

By getting in the day of substitute teaching, Preckwinkle was able to claim 16.4 years of prior union service toward his teacher pension. For Piccioli, the numbers are smaller. He claimed nearly a decade of prior experience with the union.

In addition, both may count the nearly five years they've been union employees since the law took effect, and they also can claim all future work at the teachers union as service toward their Teachers' Retirement System pension.

Despite the state's pension woes, the Teachers' Retirement System can be a good plan for individuals because it provides a defined benefit plan, meaning it guarantees specific payments when people retire. The union's 401(k)-styled plan's value goes up and down with the economy and the stock markets.

"You just have to assume that if somebody is willing to move into a system and pay quite a bit of money for it, they expect to get even greater return from it," Giertz said.

The Teachers' Retirement System doesn't typically lobby for such bills but examines their potential impact once they are passed. David Urbanek, TRS spokesman, said the law was written with no minimum requirements for how long a person had to work as a teacher.

"Like any law that's passed by the General Assembly affecting the pension code, we look at it to see how that will affect the entire membership," Urbanek said. "In this case, it didn't affect very many."

WGN-TV producer Marsha Bartel and WGN-TV reporter Mark Suppelsa contributed.

Maria High School: Another One Bites The Dust

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:19:00 +0000

Maria High School announced it would be closing. The following is the full story as reported by ABC News:

By Ravi Baichwal, ABC/WLS News October 7, 2011

An all-girls Catholic high school on Chicago's Southwest Side is closing.

The century-old Maria High School in the Marquette Park community will be converted into a public charter school in 2013. Enrollment has fallen over the years, but the school's students and faculty are still sad to see it go.

They are sad, but resigned, and maybe just a little excited that new life is going to be injected into an icon of the Southwest Side -- if the board of the Chicago Public Schools approves Catalyst Education's bid to turn same-sex Maria High into Catalyst-Maria, a co-ed facility that would have children from kindergarten to the 12th grade eventually gracing all of its halls.

The spit and polish of this century-old school reflects the values at the core of what's taught here: Relationships, results and love -- even if vast swaths of it are empty.

"It is a family," said Maria High School student council president Ashanti McCall. "it is weird to have males kind of violate that. It is going to be difficult."

Maria High School President Wendy Lynn came to head this school three years ago and has watched as enrollment dropped by one-third from 2007. There are only 207 kids in class this year. There were upwards of 1,400 a generation ago. "We see incremental progress in the fundraising, but our student enrollment is declining and I really think it has to be because of the economics," said Lynn.

See Full Story: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=8383594

Could this shuttering, and other Catholic closings that preceded it have been averted if parents in Illinois had a school choice option? School choice is already an existing option already available in many other states. Why not Illinois? The answer to that question will follow.

Attention: The 22 Illinois Republicans that Voted Down School Choice

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Public Elected Officials: Hispanics Want School Choice

By Israel Ortega
January 15, 2008

Here's a suggestion for a New Year's resolution for politicians -- listen to Hispanic Americans who support school choice. It's an issue of paramount importance to our country's children, and an issue where politicians' seem to be well behind the curve.

According to a recent poll conducted by the Ampersand Agency, 65 percent of Hispanic voters are more likely to vote for candidates who support school choice than candidates who do not. And according to the same findings, only 19 percent stated that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported school choice.

The survey is particularly compelling because it underscores that Hispanic Americans of all political shades favor school choice. According to the findings, 49 percent of the poll's participants identified themselves as Democrats, 21 percent as Republicans and 23 percent as Independents. With so many respondents identifying themselves as Democrats, the poll should also refute the idea that only conservatives favor school choice.

If the message for school choice is resounding, then why the disconnect between the voters and the public elected officials? The answer to the riddle may simply be that maintaining the status quo has been easier than challenging the powerful teachers unions and interest groups.

School choice essentially comes down to a matter of freedom. And when explained correctly, Hispanic Americans will overwhelmingly favor having families, rather than bureaucrats, decide which school is best.

Despite this, it's clear that the news is not getting back to Washington D.C., where the majority of Democratic members of Congress oppose school choice.

Adding to the cynicism is the fact that many of the same politicians opposing school choice are engaging in double-talk by sending their own kids to private schools. According to a recent Heritage Foundation paper, 37 percent of Representatives and 45 percent of Senators who participated in a survey indicated that they had sent their children to private school. And of particular interest exactly 52 percent of Congressional Black Caucus members and 38 percent of Congressional Hispanic Caucus members sent at least one child to private school.

The grim reality is that millions of Hispanic children are struggling in our public schools. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that a Hispanic child is twice as likely to drop out of high school as a white student. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, half of all Hispanic 4^th graders scored "below basic" in reading. Politicians have a moral obligation to help every child in America is prepare to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

Will 2008 bring about the much needed change to steer the conversation towards greater initiative to empower Hispanic American families for school choice? Let's hope so.

Israel Ortega is a Senior Media Services Associate at the Heritage Foundation.
First appeared in San Diego's La Prensa

Aggressivley Promoting School Choice Attracts Hispanic Voters

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:26:00 +0000

October 19, 2007

HOOVER DIGEST 2007 No. 4

Listen to Latinos

Should Republicans court Hispanic voters? Only if they want to survive.

By Clint Bolick.

The bitter debate over immigration has damaged the Republican Party’s effort to expand its base, particularly among Hispanic voters. The Republican share of the Hispanic vote grew in 2004 to about 40 percent nationally— only to decline precipitously to about 30 percent in the disastrous 2006 congressional elections. Whether America closes its borders or opens them, the number of Hispanic voters will increase, and future GOP electoral hopes may hinge on its success in attracting votes from a constituency with which it shares key values.

The most strident anti-immigration advocates deride such an effort as futile, arguing that Hispanics are natural Democrats and that efforts to court them will come at the expense of the GOP base. “It would make a lot more sense,” urges writer Sam Francis, “for the Stupid Party to forget about Hispanics as a bloc they could win from their rivals, start thinking about how to control immigration, dump the ads in Spanish, and start speaking the language of the white middle class that keeps them in office.”

That common prescription overlooks four important facts. First, even if not a single new Hispanic immigrant were to gain citizenship, which is highly unlikely, the number of Hispanic voters in the United States will continue to increase inexorably. Second, Hispanics are not strongly attached to either political party, and many Republicans have enjoyed significant success in attracting their votes. Third, even if Republicans fail to win a majority of Hispanic votes, the difference between a 30 percent share and a 40 percent share is enough to matter significantly in forthcoming elections. Fourth, Republicans can effectively recruit Hispanic voters by emphasizing common values, without sacrificing any principles in the process—even if those principles encompass tough border-control policies.

A SLUMBERING ELECTORAL GIANT

According to the latest census figures, 44 million Hispanics live in the United States and are by far the fastest-growing segment of the population. The Hispanic share of the electorate is growing at a slow but steady pace, with more than 9 million Hispanics (or 6 percent of all voters) participating in the 2004 presidential election. The 10 percent Hispanic swing from Republican to Democratic candidates between 2004 and 2006 may have spelled the difference in four congressional races that netted new seats for Democrats. In 2006, the Hispanic vote was perhaps crucial in four key swing states: Arizona (where 17.2 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic), Colorado (12.4 percent), Nevada (12.5 percent), and New Mexico (37.6 percent). Given the closeness of the national electoral map, the GOP will have to appeal mightily to Hispanics in Western states to have a chance at winning the presidency in 2008.

Hispanics today, however, do not exercise anywhere near their potential electoral clout. Even though they made up over 14 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for only 6 percent of the voters in 2004. There are several explanations for that: the large percentage of Hispanics who are not citizens, the large number of Hispanics who are below age 18 and thus ineligible to vote, low registration rates, and low turnout rates. Those who disdain GOP outreach to Hispanics may draw comfort from those voter statistics, but in fact they portray a slumbering electoral giant. As U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent turn 18, their share of the electorate will grow at a much faster rate than other groups. If participation increases among eligible voters, Hispanic influence also will grow. As a 2006 report by the Pew Hispanic Center found, “If [eligible] Hispanics had registered and voted in 2004 at the same rate as whites in their age brackets, Hispanics would have cast an additional 2.7 million ballots”—swelling their impact by more than 26 percent.

Future potential Hispanic voter influence is also magnified by immigration trends. Fully one-third of the Hispanic population in the United States either is applying or plans to apply for citizenship. A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center survey of Mexican migrants found that 59 percent plan to stay in the United States as long as they can, or for the rest of their lives.

All of this indicates that the growth of the Hispanic electorate is inevitable. What, then, should Republicans do about it?

FERTILE FIELDS FOR REPUBLICANS

At first blush, the climb to reach Hispanic voters appears steep: about half of registered Hispanic voters consider themselves Democrats; only about 20 percent are Republicans. (Those numbers are skewed by the large percentage of Cuban-Americans who are Republicans; support for the GOP is even lower among non-Cuban Hispanics.) What’s more, foreign-born Hispanic voters are even more likely than their native-born counterparts to register as Democrats. Hispanic voters favor Democrats over Republicans on a host of important issues: immigration (49 to 26 percent), health care (66 to 21 percent), the Iraq war (57 to 26 percent), education (62 to 23 percent), and terrorism and security (45 to 34 percent). But demographic trends portend some optimism for Republicans: among registered Hispanic voters ages 18 to 29, 34 percent are Democrats, while 21 percent are Republicans and 26 percent are independents. Among Hispanics planning to become citizens, only 22 percent call themselves Democrats, while 14 percent align with Republicans, and 35 percent consider themselves independents.

Considering their strong work ethic, devotion to family, and conservative social values, it’s no wonder that Ronald Reagan said: “Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.”

Other factors suggest Republican growth potential. A 2006 survey by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition found that 34.2 percent of registered Hispanic voters consider themselves conservative, compared with 25.8 percent who call themselves liberals. That trend is reflected in Hispanics’ positions on a range of issues. A sizable majority—53.6 percent—of registered Hispanic voters believe that the Hispanic community should emphasize becoming a part of American society over retaining its own culture. Given a choice between cutting taxes or raising government spending as the best strategy to grow the economy, 61.2 percent favor lower taxes whereas only 25.5 percent support increased spending. More than 60 percent say they would be less likely to support a candidate who supports gay marriage. A majority (52.8 percent) consider themselves pro-life rather than pro-choice (39.8 percent).

Most Hispanics are religious, and their divorce rate is low. Of course, the principal magnet attracting Hispanic immigrants to the United States is work, and entrepreneurship is prevalent in Hispanic communities here. Among Hispanic voters, 60.2 percent own their homes. Considering the strong work ethic, devotion to family, and conservative social values, no wonder Ronald Reagan quipped: “Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.”

After the 2004 presidential election, in which 40 percent of Hispanics voted to re-elect President Bush, the liberal National Council of La Raza commented that “a substantial proportion of Hispanics are ‘swing voters’ not bound to party affiliation” and that the “results should serve as a warning to those inclined to assume that Hispanics are part of the ‘Democratic base,’ and who therefore take the Latino vote for granted.” A substantial portion of the Hispanic vote appears up for grabs.

Former National Republican Committee chairman and Bush re-election campaign manager Ken Mehlman describes the stakes bluntly: “The majority party in the twenty-first century will be the party that reaches out to Hispanics.” Given the demographic trends, the GOP cannot afford to have Hispanics follow the lead of blacks, voting habitually and overwhelmingly for Democrats. At the same time, Republicans can’t afford to jettison their base, or to out-Democrat the Democrats on government giveaways. Fortunately, that does not appear to be what most Hispanics want.

To appeal to Hispanic voters, Republicans need to play to their strengths and avoid alienating rhetoric. Here are four concrete strategies to do just that.

STEP ONE: GET THE IMMIGRATION ISSUE OUT OF THE WAY

Nearly all political commentators agree that the plunge in Hispanic support for GOP candidates in 2006 was attributable in large part to the virulently anti-immigration message pushed by many Republican candidates. “The problem was as much about tone as substance—many Latinos are worried about illegal immigration,” observes the Manhattan Institute’s Tamar Jacoby. “Not only illegal immigrants but 30 million Latino voters heard Republicans saying, ‘We don’t like you.’ ” Pollster John Zogby agrees. “I found a considerable amount of agreement with the Republican Party on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and guns,” he says of a 2006 national exit poll of Hispanic voters, “but also a strong reluctance to vote for a party that promoted the anti-immigration Proposition 187 in California.”

Many Hispanic voters support efforts to deter illegal immigration. In 2004, for instance, 47 percent of Arizona Hispanic voters supported Proposition 200, which required proof of citizenship for government benefits; two years later, 48 percent supported making English the official language. But unsurprising, in light of the heated rhetoric on the issue, many Hispanics appear to view Republicans as hostile toward them. Zogby’s 2006 poll found that despite the convergence on social issues, twice as many registered Hispanic voters (54 to 28 percent) believe that Democrats represent their values better than Republicans.

Arizona painted a representative portrait. When stridently anti-immigration Republicans like representatives J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf were losing GOP congressional seats, U.S. Senator Jon Kyl, who strongly favors border enforcement but sponsored legislation that would allow a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who return home, was winning re-election with 41 percent of the Hispanic vote. How to explain the difference? “It’s about what kinds of innuendo you use in making your case,” explains Jacoby. “It’s about whether or not you’re imagining a shared future, and how constructively you’re planning for it.”

Indeed, most Hispanics—including illegal immigrants—support comprehensive immigration reform so long as it provides some path to citizenship. A 2002 poll of the Hispanic electorate found majorities supporting proposals to give illegal Latino immigrants a chance to obtain legal status, or a guest-worker program that would require them to return to their home countries. A large majority of Mexican migrants say they would participate in such programs.

So although most Hispanics may view Republicans who want to wall off the Mexican border as anti-Hispanic nativists, many are open to Republicans who propose constructive, if difficult, solutions.
In the 2006 congressional elections, as Jacoby points out, “Immigration was the dog that didn’t bark. It did not prove an effective wedge issue.” Even as “Republicans painted themselves into a xenophobic corner,” immigration failed to mobilize voters at the base to vote Republican.

Republicans can effectively recruit Latino voters by emphasizing common values, and need not sacrifice any principles—even if those principles encompass tough border-control policies.

The bottom line for Republicans, politically speaking, is that they need to resolve the immigration issue. It matters less how they do it than that they do it quickly, as long as they provide some path to citizenship, even an arduous one. The 2006 midterm elections proved that extreme rhetoric about securing the borders does not win elections for Republicans but that it can drive a growing part of the electorate into Democrats’ welcoming arms.

STEP TWO: GET RELIGION

Probably the key way for Republicans systematically to make common cause with Hispanics is through religion. Hispanics tend to be deeply religious, to practice socially conservative forms of Christianity, and to be politically influenced by their religion.

Two major studies—one in 2007 by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and one in 2003 by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies—shed great insight on the practice and influence of religion in Hispanic communities in the United States. More than 66 percent of Hispanics are Catholics, while 15 percent are Protestants. Only 8 percent are secular—that is, unaffiliated with a church, atheist, or agnostic. Hispanics are more likely than most Americans to say that religion is very important in their lives.

Most striking about Hispanic religious beliefs is their close affiliation with “renewalist” faiths—evangelical and charismatic. An outright majority of Hispanic Catholics describe themselves as charismatic or Pentecostal, compared to only 10 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics. Likewise, more than 50 percent of Hispanic Protestants are renewalists, compared to only about 20 percent of non-Hispanic Protestants. Moreover, conversion to Protestantism is large and growing.

Two-thirds of Hispanics say their religious beliefs are an important influence on their political thinking. Among the evangelicals, 86 percent say their religious beliefs are an important influence and 62 percent say they are very important. Yet fewer than one in four Hispanics have ever been asked by churches, religious organizations, or religious leaders to engage in a political effort, suggesting vast untapped mobilization potential.

Religiosity among Hispanics exerts strong ideological influences: among Hispanic Catholics who attend church at least once a week, 36 percent are conservative and only 18 percent are liberal; among evangelicals, 46 percent are conservative and only 10 percent are liberal. Notably, although Hispanics as a whole are far more likely than non-Hispanics to oppose abortion (57 to 40 percent) and gay marriage (56 to 42 percent), first-generation Hispanics are more conservative on those views than third-generation Hispanics.

Fully one-third of the Hispanic population in the United States either is applying for citizenship or plans to apply. Fifty-nine percent plan to stay in the United States as long as they can, or for the rest of their lives.

Religion thus appears to influence party affiliation among Hispanics, but Republicans have not reaped as many benefits in that regard as they have among non-Hispanics. Only 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics are Republicans, whereas 55 percent are Democrats, compared to 39 percent Republicans and 32 percent Democrats among non-Hispanic Catholics. Hispanic evangelicals are split at 39 percent each among Republicans and Democrats, while half of non-Hispanic evangelicals are Republicans and only 25 percent are Democrats. Here, national origin matters greatly: evangelicals of Mexican descent are especially drawn to the GOP, with 47 percent Republicans compared to only 24 percent Democrats, whereas Puerto Rican evangelical Democrats outnumber Republicans by 52 to 18 percent. Conservative religious adherents are much more likely to register to vote: 85 percent of conservative Catholics and 90 percent of conservative evangelicals are registered, compared to only 71 percent of liberal Catholics.

If Republicans can come close to attracting as many Hispanics with conservative religious beliefs as non-Hispanics, they will put the growing Latino vote solidly into play.

STEP THREE: AGGRESSIVELY PROMOTE SCHOOL CHOICE

Given the number of Hispanics younger than 18, the importance that most Hispanic families place on education, and the paucity of high-quality educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged Hispanic youngsters, the idea of school choice resonates among that group. School choice offers perhaps the most attractive issue on which Republicans can make serious inroads among Hispanic voters.

Education is one of the top issues of concern to Hispanic voters. Unfortunately, by a ratio of 43 to 19 percent, they think Democrats represent their views on education better than Republicans.

Republicans should appeal directly and passionately to Hispanic voters on school choice, and make their opponents’ hostility for school choice known.

But polls also find that upward of 60 percent of Hispanics support school vouchers. (Support for school choice among African-Americans is even greater.) A pathbreaking May 2007 national survey of 820 registered Hispanic voters by the Polling Company and the Ampersand Agency—polling firms affiliated with Republicans and Democrats, respectively—demonstrates the salience of school choice as a galvanizing issue. The poll found that education is the top priority for 43 percent of Hispanic voters and one of the top three priorities for 82 percent of those voters. Hispanic families generally rate their public schools highly, but 30 percent consider their children’s schools unsafe. If offered the chance to send their children to a private school or a public school in a different district, 75 percent said they would be interested, with 55 percent very interested.

Nearly 66 percent of Hispanic voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports school choice—including 35 percent who said they would be much more likely—compared with only 19 percent who responded that support for school choice would make them less likely to vote for a candidate. Among Hispanic Democrats, 63 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who favors school choice. Among voters who indicated they would be less likely to vote for candidates who opposed school choice, 70 percent said they would make such a choice even if the candidate were affiliated with their own party. That statistic demonstrates the enormous potential of the school choice issue for Republicans: more than 43 percent of registered Hispanic voters—including 38 percent of Democrats—say they would cross party lines to vote for a candidate who supports school choice over one who opposes it.

Almost all the Democratic candidates for president, as well as most congressional candidates, fiercely oppose school choice. Nearly all Republican candidates support it. Nothing should be a more obvious tactic for Republicans than to appeal directly and passionately to Hispanic voters on school choice, and to make their opponents’ hostility for school choice known.

STEP FOUR: REACH OUT FOR REAL

By a ratio of 52 to 16 percent, registered Hispanic voters believe that Democrats are in better touch with the Hispanic community than are Republicans. Outreach efforts featuring isolated Hispanic conservatives making superficial appeals are calculated to fail. Republicans need to take their message to Hispanic communities, directly and persistently, and to recruit and embrace Hispanic Republican candidates in meaningful electoral contests. As my friend and superstar Republican strategist Scott Jensen puts it, “You have to be present to win.”

Progress in both regards is uneven. Richard Nadler, president of America’s Majority, which is dedicated to expanding the demographic base of the conservative movement, reports that conservative “527” independent political action groups in 2004 sponsored 12,000 Spanish-language advertisements in six target states: Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. The ads highlighted Republican candidates’ support for traditional marriage, tax breaks for families and small businesses, school choice, right to life, military preparedness, personal savings accounts, and faithbased social initiatives. The share of Hispanics voting Republican in those six target states increased 7.6 percent from 2000, while their share in other states changed little. But in 2006, Republicans focused on their core voter base, which they felt required rhetoric that alienated Hispanics, and the Republican share of the Hispanic vote plummeted predictably.

History is litterd with examples of political parties triumphing when they reached out to immigrants, and perishing when they embraced xenophobia.

The dearth of Hispanic Republican candidates for contested offices could suppress Hispanic votes for Republicans. The 2008 GOP presidential field is decidedly white, and credible future Hispanic Republican candidates for national office have yet to appear on the horizon. A few states, such as Texas, Florida, California, New Mexico, and New York, have produced prominent Hispanic Republican officeholders. But in my adopted state, Arizona, in which Hispanics account for more than 17 percent of registered voters, there are virtually no Hispanic Republican officeholders, and recent history suggests that highly qualified Hispanics cannot win contested Republican primaries.

Research also reveals that Hispanics are much more inclined to vote Democratic if they live in heavily Democratic districts. In recent years, using the Voting Rights Act and plain old gerrymandering, Republicans have cynically fostered heavily minority voting districts in an attempt to carve out safe Republican districts. In the long run, Republicans must expose Hispanic voters to Republican messages if they have any hope of winning their votes. This means integration, not isolation, in district line-drawing.

History is littered with examples of political parties triumphing when they reached out to immigrants and perishing when they embraced xenophobia. Perhaps no better example exists than the aptly named Know- Nothings, who thrived for a time during the nineteenth century on anti-immigration fervor but quickly faded into oblivion.

Regardless of how the current immigration debate resolves itself, newcomers will continue to add to our population. Most immigrants are attracted to the United States not by our welfare state but by the promise of economic opportunity. That is true of Hispanics, who exemplify traditional Republican values of hard work, entrepreneurship, education, family, and belief in God. Many if not most are open to voting for Republicans. Given demographic trends that immigration policy is powerless to fully reverse, the Republican Party needs to attract as many of their votes as it can. Although the task is difficult, the party can draw comfort from understanding that attracting Hispanic votes does not mean abandoning its core principles, but embracing them.

Clint Bolick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and also serves as the director of the Goldwater Institute Center for Constitutional Litigation in Phoenix. Before joining the Goldwater Institute in 2007, Bolick was litigation director of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm that he cofounded in 1991, and president of the Alliance for School Choice, a national nonprofit educational policy group advocating school choice programs across the country.

Strong Support for School Choice among Chicago Parents

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:02:00 +0000

Illinois Policy Institute

1/26/2011

by Ashley Muchow

A Renaissance Schools Fund study was released today showing that parents of Chicago charter public school students believe the quality of education their children receive trumps that received in traditional Chicago public schools (CPS).

The results of the poll conducted by Richard Day Research show that parents with children attending Chicago charter public schools are very likely to recommend their child's school and note improvement in the quality of their child's education. Meanwhile, parents with children in traditional Chicago public schools seriously consider alternatives for their children and half would send their children to different schools if given the opportunity.

The 2011 poll of Chicago parents and residents revealed the following:

61 percent of CPS parents have seriously considered an alternative for their child. Nearly half (49 percent) of CPS parents would send their child to a different school if given the opportunity.
66 percent of charter school parents are very satisfied with the quality of education their child receives; only 37 percent of CPS parents polled are very satisfied with the quality of their child's CPS education.
78 percent of charter school parents think their child’s education is improving; only 47 percent of CPS parents hold the same opinion of their child's school.
74 percent of charter school parents are very likely to recommend their child’s school; only 42 percent of CPS parents would do the same for their child's school.
African-American parents voice the strongest support for school choice and charter schools. African-American residents want more choices (84 percent), compared to Hispanic (72 percent) or white (56 percent) residents.
56 percent of CPS parents and 54 percent of Chicago residents agree that charter schools help public schools perform better.

The upshot? Chicago's residents and parents agree -- charter schools are benefiting our kids and are helping all public schools improve. But while parents with children in charter public schools endorse their children's schools, CPS parents want more choice.

Today, the board of Chicago Public Schools is meeting to hear proposals for two new charter schools as well as four more campuses and additional enrollment for existing charter public schools in the city. Charter school supporters and critics are expected to attend the board meeting today, and both are hoping to influence what the board decides.

The charter community is ready to voice the importance of choice in the Chicago education system. But the Chicago Teachers Union is citing its own statistics: that 1 in 11 students left charter schools last year. We rebutted this claim quickly with our Education Fact Finder that presents the facts: charter schools retain students better than nearby public schools.

We can argue all day about the statistics that are used to fit each group's agenda, but one thing is certain: there is no stronger indicator of school performance than the opinion of the parents and students who are intimately impacted by the schooling itself. More than 15,000 students on waiting lists to get into Chicago's public charter schools.

Students and parents make the decision to send their kids to schools they perceive as better. When students and parents get to choose, the truth comes out. No union or approving school board can change the opinion of the individuals that are affected by a school's success the most: the students in the classroom and the parents that raise them.

Debunking Myth # 1: School Choice Will Drain Funds From The Public School System

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:29:00 +0000

The first outcry you will hear from the bureaucrats once you support school choice is that allowing students to opt out of the public education system will cause an inordinate drain of funds.

Think about that argument. We all know (or should know) that in every organization, there are fixed cost and variable costs. We cannot change fixed costs (i.e. the heating, electricity costs of an existing 2 to 4 story school structure). However, by the Illinois State Board of Education's own website, there are variable costs that rise or decrease per student.

So how does lowering a variable cost "drain" resources when for each student opting out there is a drop in variable cost. ?

The argument should have been laid to rest subsequent to a study conducted by Susan Aud, a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation. She examined the fiscal effects school choice programs had on state and local budgets from 1990 to 2006. Contrary to the "drain" myth, school choice programs resulted in $444 million benefit, $22 million to state budgets and $422 million to local school districts.

(A full text of the study can be found here: http://heartland.org/sites/default/files/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/21956.pdf).

The following study conducted by Robert Enlow revealed further examples of how school choice actually benefits state and local coffers.

By Robert Enlow:

"One of the most controversial aspects of school vouchers and education tax credits is their potential effect on public school finances. On one side, critics charge vouchers will “drain much-needed resources from our public schools,” as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) put it in remarks reported by The Washington Post. Since schools are mostly funded on a per-student basis, fewer students in public schools means less money in school budgets.

On the other side, choice supporters point to a growing body of research that finds exactly the opposite: Voucher and tax credit programs are a financial benefit to public schools. Critics also talk as though their charges have been vindicated by fiscal studies. “Vouchers have been shown time and again to drain dollars from public schools,” Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association, told the Associated Press last year. But what the research in fact shows is that enacting school choice would give the public school system exactly what it wants: more money to educate each student.

Schools Retain Excess Funds

Opponents claim school choice drains money from public schools so often that one may wonder how the opposite could possibly be true. The answer is simple: In a typical choice program, the amount of money spent on each participant is less than what would have been spent on that student if he or she had remained in a local public school. The excess funds can be plowed back into public school budgets and spent on the students who remain in public schools.

Projected Savings With School Choice Proposals
Location	Public School Cost (per student)	Proposed School Choice Cost (per student)	Total School Choice Savings

Baltimore	$8,900	$7,000	$9 million per year (before fixed costs)
Minneapolis	$13,600	$4,600	$16 million per year (before fixed costs)
New Hampshire	$8,100	$3,390	$9 million per year (after fixed costs)
New Mexico	$8,500	$1,750 (average)	$63 million over 10 years (after fixed costs)
South Carolina	$8,300	$4,000-$4,600	$594 million over five years (after fixed costs)
Utah	$6,500	$2,000	$26-$144 million per year (after fixed costs)

Local Funding Remains

Do those savings in fact benefit public schools? You might think they would end up in the hands of state legislatures, which might choose to use them for purposes other than education. But in fact, because of the way school finance is set up, a large proportion of the windfall pours directly into local public school budgets.

While school districts typically get most of their budgets from state governments, a substantial portion comes from local taxes. This local funding, unlike state funding, isn’t provided to school districts on a per-student basis. The amount of local funding doesn’t change when enrollment changes; the pie stays the same size no matter how many kids are getting slices. When enrollment increases, public schools have fewer dollars per student, and when enrollment falls they have more dollars per student.

When a student uses a state-funded scholarship or tax credit to move from public school to private school, the local school district loses one student’s worth of state funding. But under most school choice plans, it continues to receive the same amount of local funding as before. Given that it has one fewer student to educate, its funding per student has gone up.

In Arizona, Aud and Murray found, of the $8,500 to $9,000 Arizona spends annually on each student (depending on grade level), between $4,200 and $4,600 comes from the state (again depending on grade level) and the rest from local taxes. That means every time a student leaves through school choice, the school district retains about half the funding associated with that student.

Fixed Costs Still Covered

When confronted with numbers such as these, the most common response of school choice critics is that the figures don’t account for costs that don’t vary much with enrollment levels, such as building maintenance. But recent studies show schools’ fixed costs aren’t nearly big enough to cancel out the huge savings from school choice.

Cotton Lindsay of Clemson University found that even after accounting for fixed costs, a proposed tax credit program for South Carolina (offering $4,000 to $4,600, compared to public spending of $8,300) would save $594 million over its first five years.

In a Utah State University study, Roberta Hertzberg and Chris Fawson examined a tax credit proposal for private school scholarships in Utah. They found the program would save between $26 million and $144 million every year, even after accounting for schools’ fixed costs.

Two Friedman Foundation studies by Senior Fellow Brian Gottlob confirm those findings. Gottlob found tax credit scholarships in New Mexico would save $63 million over 10 years. In a study cosponsored by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, he found a proposed voucher program in New Hampshire would save $9 million annually.

Public Schools Keep the Money

“Because the state aid associated with each student migrating from public to independent schools is lower than the variable cost of educating each student in the public schools,” Gottlob wrote in the New Mexico study, “the migration of students to private schools will not financially harm school districts.”

Translation: When students leave via school choice programs, public schools benefit more from the reduction in their costs than they lose from the reduction in their funding. The state and the local schools save money, regardless of the fixed costs associated with educating a child.

It’s well known that private schools do a better job on smaller budgets than public schools do. Thanks to the efficiency that only a free market can provide, private schools offer not only an opportunity to give kids a better education, but also to save money that can be plowed back into the public school system."

At a time when the state of Illinois is bleeding red because of unfunded teacher and school administrator pension liabilities, you would think that our legislators and governor would act in a manner that not only benefits our children, but all of its taxpayers as well.

Debunking Myth # 2: School Choice Violates Separation of Church and State

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:19:00 +0000

A second argument raised against school choice initiatives, is that such policy violates the doctrine of separation of church and state. Well that argument has been laid to rest (at least temporarily) by a recent ruling of the United States Supreme Court. As reported by Fox News:

Supreme Court Upholds Arizona School Vouchers

By Lee Ross

Published April 04, 2011

| FoxNews.com

The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of an Arizona school voucher program that critics say improperly directs taxpayer funds to religious schools.

Monday's 5-4 ruling expands long-standing court precedents that citizens don't have standing to legally challenge taxes they don't like simply because they're taxpayers.

The minority on the court maintained that since the case involved claims of a violation of religious freedoms, that the Arizona plaintiffs didn't need to demonstrate a specific personal injury.

The decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by the court's more conservative members, preserves Arizona's school voucher program that is funded by tax credits offered to state taxpayers. Most of the students who use the voucher money attend religious schools.

Opponents of the Arizona system filed a lawsuit claiming the $500 tax credit, available to all individual taxpayers, designed to help pay for private education violates the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from establishing any religion in the United States. The high court in 1968 said taxpayers didn't need to show that they had been personally harmed when lodging an Establishment Clause claim.‪‪

Attorneys defending the system had argued that since the law only allows taxpayers to direct their own tax dollars to religious schools, the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue because their tax payments were not being used.‪‪

On Monday, the court ruled that taxpayers couldn't sue based on a general First Amendment complaint but rather need to show specific individual harm.

"The (Arizona) tax credit is not tantamount to a religious tax or to a tithe and does not visit the injury identified in (1968)," Kennedy wrote.

The distinction between a tax credit and an actual tax or appropriation from general income tax revenues was a key factor in the case, with Kennedy writing that "awarding some citizens a tax credit allows other citizens to retain control over their own funds in accordance with their own consciences."

Justice Elena Kagan, writing her first dissent, said the majority's ruling was arbitrary and threatens to eliminate all occasions when a taxpayer can object to governmental support of religion. "The novel distinction in standing law between appropriations and tax expenditures has as little basis in principle as it has in our precedent," Kagan wrote. She then added that Monday's ruling is an end-run around the high court's 1968 precedent.

Interestingly, both Kennedy and Kagan each claim fidelity to Founding Father James Madison in their writings.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate opinion, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas agreeing with the outcome of the case but saying that the 1968 ruling cited by Kagan and the other dissenting justices was not just inapplicable, but wrong itself. "I would repudiate that misguided (1968) decision and enforce the Constitution," Scalia wrote.

The ruling drew immediate praise from Arizona groups defending the voucher system.

"Parents should be able to choose what's best for their own children. This ruling empowers parents to do just that," Alliance Defense Fund Senior Counsel David Cortman said in a statement. "The ACLU failed in its attempt to eliminate school choice for hundreds of thousands of students nationwide and also failed to demonstrate that it had any constitutional basis for its clients to file suit in the first place."

But Steven Shapiro, legal director of the ACLU, decried the decision. "Today's decision ignores precedent, defies logic and undermines the role of the courts in preserving the core constitutional principle that government may not subsidize religion," he said.

Steve Jobs On School Choice: "Give Each Parent A Voucher"

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:16:00 +0000

From the Heartland Newspaper Article (Author Unknown): http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/10/07/steve-jobs-education-give-each-parent-voucher

Editor’s note: Steve Jobs, whom Apple announced has died this week, recorded an interview with the Smithsonian Institution in 1995, in which he outlined his ideas on technology and education, among other things.

Equal Opportunity, Not Outcomes

Steve Jobs: I'm a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don't believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life's not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education.

Maybe even more important than a great family life, but I don't know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that. But it pains me because we do know how to provide a great education. We really do. We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that.

I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail. I'm 100 percent sure that if it hadn't been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would have absolutely have ended up in jail.

Unions Destroy Meritocracy

I think it takes pretty talented people to do that. I don't know that enough of them get attracted to go into public education. … I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year?...

The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can't teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It's terrible….

‘Go to a Full Voucher System’

I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system…. One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents.

The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down.

I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.

Competition Sparks Excellence

Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing people buy in their lives is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually, and an average car costs approximately $20,000. And an average car lasts about eight years. Then you buy another one. Approximately two thousand dollars a year over an eight-year period. Well, your child goes to school approximately eight years in K through 8. What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About $4,400 [Ed: This was 1995. Now it’s around $11,000.]. Over twice as much as a car.

It turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. They are advertising to you like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people. So that everybody knows about all these cars and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.But in schools people don't feel that they're spending their own money. They feel like it's free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. A matter of fact if you want to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the $4,400 a year out of the public school and use it, you have to come up with five or six thousand of your own money.

Vouchers Mean Better Schools

I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for $4,400 dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students.

Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have 25-year-old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would.

The third thing you'd see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There's no question about it.

It would be rather painful for the first several years, but far less painful I think than the kids going through the system as it is right now. The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that's like saying "Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody's going to make a $10,000 car." I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the $10,000 car area.

It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain't so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46-year-old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn't be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:43:00 +0000

Educating Our Children: Catholic Schools Doing More With Less

By Anne Marie Riha

Published February 08, 2011

| FoxNews.com

Earlier this month, President Obama challenged high schools across the county to compete against each other in the second annual "Race to the Top” educational success program for the chance to have him give the commencement address at their graduation. Not included in the contest, though, are the more than 2 million students in America’s Catholic schools

If they could participate, the nation’s parochial schools would be fearsome competitors.

A 2009 comparison between public and Catholic school SAT scores show that public school students had an overall average of 496 points on the critical reading portion of the test while Catholic school students scored 533 points on the same portion. Catholic school students outscored their public school counterparts by an average of 23 points.

What makes the numbers more impressive is that Catholic high schools spend more than $2,000 less per pupil than public schools.

Explanations for the differences in achievement vary.

Students who attended Catholic schools say they were more disciplined and the approach to academics was more regimented. Bridget Ledford, who is a science major at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., says she doesn't think she would have gotten the grades she got in high school if she had attended a public school.

Ledford explained that her Catholic elementary school had a grading system where students received an A-plus or an A-minus and not just an A, subtle differences generally not applied in public schools until later years.

"There was a big focus on academics," Ledford said in an interview, emphasizing that she enjoyed the smaller classes.

But educators who have taught in both public and Catholic education systems say a Catholic school students' achievements are the result of more than just discipline, they begin with their parents’ choice to pay extra for education.

Karen Ristau, who is the President of the National Catholic Educational Association, says that parental choice sets the tone for the student because it "gives a child a real sense of security knowing that the adults are taking responsibility of the child's education."And Ristau says, that sense of responsibility continues with teachers. Ristau, who began her career as a public school teacher, says teachers are "choosing to teach [at Catholic institutions] instead of belonging to some big pool of applicants in a large district where people are just assigned to a school."

Another advantage that Catholic schools enjoy is flexibility.

Very few parochial school teachers are members of the powerful education unions at the center of so many of the fights to reform the public education system."When unions get involved in having contracts in schools, they tend to control everything from the operations, to who gets hired... and even the curriculum for that matter," Jeanne Allen who heads the Center for Education Reform told FOX News.

Education experts say the absence of teachers’ unions means Catholic schools can address problems related to curriculum or even class size immediately instead of getting permission from union leaders or renegotiating contacts. Ristau explains that teachers and principals in Catholic schools can address these issues by simply sitting around a table instead of waiting for "five committees downtown" to reach a decision.

Gone are the days when Catholic schools relied mainly on priests and nuns to teach children. There just aren't enough clergy members to shoulder the burden anymore. But, the dioceses that run the schools still have control of their own personnel decisions.

Catholic school teachers are less likely to have advanced degrees than their public school counterparts and generally don’t get the same levels of pay and benefits. But teachers still compete for Catholic teaching slots, a fact experts attribute to the chance to work in a more disciplined atmosphere with families that have made a the choice to seek a better education for their children. Plus, Catholics in the teaching field feel the spiritual tug of serving their church’s mission in the classroom.

Allen explains that Catholic school leaders are keenly aware that if parents don’t think they’re getting what they paid for, then they'll "vote with their feet" and leave the school. That, in turn, encourages careful hiring.

"If you know that at the end of the day that your job is to educate students and you have to educate within a certain mission that actually has a moral basis then you're going to make sure the people you hire are not only on board with your mission, but are effectively serving those kids,” Allen said.

Public school proponents argue that statistics showing Catholic school achievement don't tell the whole story.

Jack Jennings, who runs The Center on Education Policy, admits public schools lack higher test scores but he also says public schools have more disadvantages when it comes to the students in their care because Catholic or private school can be selective in the applications process.

"Catholic schools do not have to accept every student like the public school does. And Catholic schools don't generally provide services for children who are disabled...(Pleaseee...Do any of you know a Catholic elementary school testing for admission???...or rejecting "disabled" students???)," Jennings said. He says there is no difference in test scores when it comes to comparing "comparable kids" in both schools systems."The results are the same. There's no private school advantage," Jennings insists.

While Catholic schools generally don’t have the same kind of admissions requirements that elite private schools, do, the cost of a Catholic education can be a barrier for many families despite generous scholarship programs.

Despite the economic woes of the past couple of years, the cost of Catholic schools has not diminished. The average cost of tuition per pupil in a catholic elementary school is $3,383 while secondary education costs $8,182. Parents who choose to send their children to Catholic school still pay for a public school education with their state and local taxes. In 2010, the public education system spent approximately $10,614 per pupil.

This report is part of a FOX News continuing series on educational alternatives.

Indiana Vouchers Spike Enrollment In Catholic Schools

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:56:00 +0000

Indiana vouchers prompt thousands to change schools

By TOM COYNE
Associated Press

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) -- Weeks after Indiana began the nation's broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.

It's a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.

In at least one district, public school principals have been pleading with parents not to move their children.

"The bottom line from our perspective is, when you cut through all the chaff, nobody can deny that public money is going to be taken from public schools, and they're going to end up in private, mostly religious schools," said Nate Schnellenberger, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.

Not unlike taxpayer money now going to "faith-based" religious organizations, the vouchers
are benefiting Catholic schools. Only 6 of the 240 private schools eligible are secular.

Many of the Catholic schools were under threat of closing - one of the Catholic schools had
702 students at its peak in '53 -- with enrollment having fallen to 135 students most
recently. 213 students are now enrolled.

This is not only true of Indiana - voucher programs in other states are creating a "boom"
in Catholic school sign ups.

About 70% of the vouchers are being used to enroll at Catholic schools.

Case Study: Vouchers in Edgewood (a Suburb of San Antonio Texas)

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 02:51:00 +0000

Education Vouchers Benefit Edgewood Students

Brief Analyses | Education

No. 699
Thursday, March 25, 2010

by John D. Merrifield

Tuition voucher programs attempt to improve academic performance through school choice. Vouchers pay a set amount to schools chosen by the students' families. Some programs are federally funded (like the D.C. Opportunities Scholarship Program), funded by local government (such as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program) or privately funded.

Government-funded programs generally have strict eligibility requirements for students and often restrict the type of school a student can choose. For example, many government programs will not allow voucher students to attend a school with a religious affiliation.

From 1998 to 2008, the Children's Educational Opportunity (CEO) Foundation funded a $52.4 million voucher program for residents of the low-performing Edgewood Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas. The vouchers were available to any student in Edgewood whose family chose to participate, regardless of academic ability or income.
The evidence shows that the voucher students weren't the only ones who benefited. The students who remained in the Edgewood public schools benefited from increased funding resources due to increasing property values, and improvements in the public schools in response to increased competition.
Edgewood Voucher Program. The CEO vouchers ranged from $2,000 to $4,700 per year, depending on the student's grade level and whether the selected school was in the Edgewood district. If a student chose to attend a private school with tuition higher than the voucher amount, the student's family made up the difference.

The program remained open to all residents through the 2003-2004 school year. After 2003-2004, budget limitations forced CEO to restrict vouchers mostly to continuing students. Thus, after peaking in 2003-2004, when 15.9 percent of the district's 12,873 students used vouchers, participation dropped to 8.7 percent of Edgewood's 11,735 students in 2007-2008.
Effect on Voucher Recipients. A first-year evaluation of the program showed that participants were very similar to Edgewood students. In fact, in the initial year, participants and nonparticipants scored the same on standardized exams.

Unfortunately, for comparative purposes, voucher students took a different standardized test to gauge their progress than students who remained in the public schools. Therefore, there is no basis to estimate what the voucher users' achievement level would have been had they not participated in the program. However, the probability of graduating high school and attending college significantly increased among voucher students:

While Edgewood's four-year graduation rate peaked at 80 percent in 2004 (see below), the three private high schools that educated the majority of voucher users reported graduation and college attendance rates approaching 100 percent.
Indeed, a 2007 study found college attendance rates for voucher students were 91 percent and 93 percent in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
By contrast, as an indicator of interest, the proportion of district high school students taking college admissions tests barely topped 60 percent in 1999, 2000 and 2007.

Effect on Performance of Edgewood's Public Schools. The Texas Education Agency uses student performance on standardized tests to classify each public school as exemplary, recognized, acceptable or unacceptable. The second year after the vouchers were introduced - the 1999-2000 school year - was the first year that Edgewood had an exemplary school. In fact, Edgewood went from zero exemplary schools to three in 1999-2000. From 1998 to 2008, the number of recognized Edgewood campuses tripled from three to nine, and the single unacceptable campus was reclassified as acceptable.

Furthermore, Edgewood significantly increased its high school graduation rate. The district's graduation rates were compared to a number of other districts with similar demographics. An analysis found:

If Edgewood's high school graduation rate had increased at the average rate for comparable school districts, it would have risen from 57 percent in 1998 to 63.2 percent in 2004.
Instead, Edgewood's graduation rate rose to 80 percent in 2004 (the peak year of voucher program participation), and, thus, nearly 17 percentage points of the increase is attributable to the voucher program [see the figure].

While these advancements cannot all be directly credited to the voucher program, the timing suggests the program did play a role in improving Edgewood's performance.

Effect on Edgewood's Property Values and Population. From 1998 to 2007, the average assessed value of Edgewood residential property rose $22,779, of which probably $6,000 to $7,000 can be attributed to the voucher program's existence. The number of single family dwellings in Edgewood grew 7.4 percent from 1998 to 2008.

As a result, Edgewood's property tax revenue increased, netting the district an extra $10.6 million. Because local property tax revenue is a factor in the Texas school funding formula, per pupil spending for the Edgewood district increased, benefitting nonvoucher students.
The sudden increase in the number of residences and property values indicates the desire of parents to move to the district in order to qualify their child for the voucher program. While the exact number is unknown, many voucher students previously attended non-Edgewood public schools, moving to the district specifically for voucher eligibility. Other families would undoubtedly have left Edgewood had the vouchers not existed.

Conclusion. Universal school choice programs like the Edgewood voucher program can have a strong economic effect on a community. Moreover, students benefit from having a choice in the school they attend - even if they remain in the public schools.

States, cities, counties or school districts can use universal voucher programs to attract families and businesses at no net fiscal cost, and also improve their public schools.

John D. Merrifield is a professor of economics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis

Catholic Schools: They Only Do Better Because They are Selective?

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:26:00 +0000

Really? Although old, here is a study he Heritage Foundation did in 1997 comparing public school performance to Catholic school performance amongst the poorest minority environments. Wonder who did better...

Why Catholic Schools Spell Success For America's Inner-CityChildren

June 30, 1997

Introduction It is said that economic empowerment today is linked inextricably to education. This means that Congress has the opportunity, over the next year, to give tens of thousands of America's most disadvantaged children a much brighter future. Attention from across the political and social spectrum is shifting to the astonishing success of inner-city Catholic schools in working with the very children the public schools have abandoned as uneducable. An abundance of recent research comparing public, private, and religious schools shows that Catholic schools improve not only test scores and graduation rates for these children, but also their future economic prospects-and at a substantially lower cost.

The school choice¹ measures now before Congress would give parents the option to send their children to public, private, or parochial schools of choice. Thanks to the growing body of research supporting Catholic school education, Congress can be certain that inner-city children would benefit from these measures. This research looks at the impact of Catholic schools on a range of outcomes such as grades, standardized test scores, dropout and graduation rates, college attendance, and future wage gains.
In a study published in 1990, for example, the Rand Corporation analyzed big-city high schools to determine how education for low income minority youth could be improved.² It looked at 13 public, private, and Catholic high schools in New York City that attracted minority and disadvantaged youth. Of the Catholic school students in these schools, 75 to 90 percent were black or Hispanic. The study found that:

The Catholic high schools graduated 95 percent of their students each year, while the public schools graduated slightly more 50 percent of their senior class;
Over 66 percent of the Catholic school graduates received the New York State Regents diploma to signify completion of an academically demanding college preparatory curriculum, while only about 5 percent of the public school students received this distinction;
85 percent of the Catholic high school students took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), compared with just 33 percent of the public high school students;
The Catholic school students achieved an average combined SAT score of 803, while the public school students' average combined SAT score was 642; and
60 percent of the Catholic school black students scored above the national average for black students on the SAT, and over 70 percent of public school black students scored below the same national average.

M ore recent studies confirm these observations. As parents, politicians, and concerned observers become aware of the benefits of Catholic schooling, particularly for the poor, the rhetoric demanding action builds. Syndicated columnist William Raspberry, a self-described "Reluctant Convert to School Choice," wrote recently, "It seems as obvious for poor children as for rich ones that one-size-fits-all education doesn't make sense."³ Furthermore, according to a recent survey conducted by Terry Moe, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and John Chubb, founding partner and curriculum director for the Edison Project, a stunning 83 percent of public school parents and 82 percent of inner-city poor parents want parochial schools to be included in the choice of schools to which they can send their children.⁴ The Popularity of Private School Choice
Lawmakers and educators should use the mounting research comparing the performance of students in private and religious schools with their public school counterparts to promote real change in the U.S. educational system.
Thanks to the growing popularity of school choice,⁵ three legislative proposals now before Congress would give inner-city low-income parents the opportunity to send their children to the public, private, or parochial school of their choice. These measures would empower parents to remove their children from violent or failing schools and send them to institutions in which they would be able to learn.

The American Community Renewal Act of 1997, introduced by Representatives J. C. Watts (R-OK), James Talent (R-MO), and Floyd Flake (D-NY), and Senators Spencer Abraham (R-MI) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), would create 100 demonstration "renewal communities" in low-income urban areas featuring pilot school choice programs.⁶
The District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997, introduced by Representative Richard Armey (R-TX) and Senators Dan Coats (R-IN), Joseph Lieberman, and Sam Brownback (R-KS), would give some of the poorest students in the nation's capital vouchers to attend the schools of their choice.⁷
The Safe and Affordable Schools Act, introduced by Senator Paul Coverdell (R-GA), includes school choice demonstration projects for children who want to escape unsafe schools and provisions to encourage states and localities to design their own school choice programs.⁸

C ongress can use the strong and widespread data available on the success of Catholic school education to strengthen and promote proposals that would increase significantly the educational opportunities and choices available to America's inner-city poor. Why Choose Catholic Schools?
Not only do Catholic schools offer a safe and cooperative learning environment, but they do so at a more reasonable and much lower cost than the public schools.⁹ For example:

Holy Angels Elementary School, a 110-year-old institution, is located in the Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood of southside Chicago, Illinois, where three out of four people live in poverty and violent crime is the rule rather than the exception. Yet Holy Angels has managed to become one of the strongest academic institutions in the country. According to a 1994 report published by the Chicago Public Schools, four times as many Holy Angels 8th graders scored above the national average in math on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than 8th graders attending the area's three public schools. In addition, of the 8th graders who scored above the national average in reading, twice as many were from Holy Angels as from the public schools. Tuition at Holy Angels is approximately $1,500 a year. ¹⁰
St. Gregory the Great Elementary School on West 90th Street in New York City serves only low-income black children from Harlem and Washington Heights. It outperforms all neighboring public schools and most of the schools in its district. In 1995, 62 percent of St. Gregory's 3rd graders were reading above the minimum standard, and 92 percent functioned above the standard in math. St. Gregory charges only $1,700 a year in tuition.¹¹
East Catholic High in Detroit, Michigan, where the principals saved for 12 years just to buy a school bus, has not allowed lack of funding to interfere with its students' academic achievements. The school serves low-income minorities almost exclusively and has been particularly successful in teaching students who were not performing well in public schools. Nearly 75 percent of its students go to college after graduation, and only 15 percent of parents paying the $2,000 tuition fee are Catholic.¹²

H oly Angels, St. Gregory the Great, and East Catholic High are typical inner-city Catholic schools. They overcome financial hardships daily to deliver astounding results because they possess the ingredients that make schools work well: (1) strong institutional leadership and school autonomy; (2) shared values among the staff about school goals; (3) a safe and orderly environment; and (4) core curriculum requirements and high expectations for all students regardless of background. Despite such examples of success, however, prejudice against allowing inner-city parents to choose Catholic schools for their children continues to linger among policymakers and the education elite. It often seems that just mentioning the term "Catholic schools" causes many opponents to conjure up images of medieval nuns using knuckle-rapping rulers on terrified children. Unlike many government-run schools, Catholic schools are strong on discipline, but the wholesome discipline at a Catholic school sends a clear message to students who consequently are able to learn in the school's safe and orderly environment. Researchers have agreed that the caring staff members at Catholic schools willingly devote their attention to the academic and emotional well-being of students.¹³
This difference is not lost on parents. In Cleveland, Ohio, inner-city parents immediately enrolled their children in Catholic schools during the Cleveland choice experiment,¹⁴ a popular full choice program that recently was struck down by a lower court after a successful first year of operation. Most of the parents in this program who enrolled their children in the Catholic schools were not Catholic. They selected Catholic schools because, on balance, they deliver impressive results.
Opponents of school choice often state that Catholic schools succeed because they can pick and choose students, they have more freedom to dismiss disruptive students, and their parents are more involved in their children's education. The evidence, however, proves otherwise. According to Lydia Harris, principal of St. Adalbert, a leading Catholic school in Cleveland, "There's no cream on my crop until we put it there. It's a myth that we take discipline problems and throw them out of school. It's the other way around. I get the kids the public schools can't handle."¹⁵ St. Adalbert is not alone. On average, Catholic high schools dismiss fewer than two students per year, and fewer than three students per year are suspended for any reason.¹⁶
In 1996, Sol Stern, a contributing editor at New York's City Journal, wrote about how Catholic schools worked to teach their predominantly low-income minority non-Catholic clientele.¹⁷ Stern concluded that "[Catholic schools are] constantly reminding us that the neediest kids are educatable and that spending extravagant sums of money isn't the answer. No one who cares about reviving our failing public schools can afford to ignore this inspiring laboratory of reform."¹⁸ This is a strong admonition to those in Washington, D.C., who can direct the future of education reform in the United States.
The success of these Catholic education "laboratories" has been well researched, and that research deserves Congress's attention. As John DiIulio, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, attests, "The Catholic-school story is as solid as you can make a case.... It's not even close to the warning zone, when it comes to sociological credibility." ¹⁹
Over 20 Years of Research: The Positive Impact of Catholic Schools
Over the past several years, Cardinal John J. O'Connor repeatedly has asked New York City to allow him to educate the lowest-performing 5 percent of its public school students. But even though Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responded positively, the city's board of education chose not to accept the cardinal's offer. Cardinal O'Connor may be speaking from personal conviction, but a substantial body of professional research supports his assertion that Catholic schools can do a better job of educating the country's poorest and most disadvantaged children. In fact, evidence that Catholic schooling benefits inner-city children has been mounting since the early 1980s.²⁰
General Characteristics of Catholic Schools
In general, studies show that Catholic schools by design foster the academic, religious, and moral development of their students. These schools frequently are characterized by parents as exhibiting a strong sense of community and as having an environment characterized by high academic standards, discipline and order, and a strongly committed and collegial faculty.²¹
Anthony Bryk of the University of Chicago Department of Education, Valerie Lee of the University of Michigan School of Education, and Peter Holland, the Superintendent of Schools in Belmont, Massachusetts, compiled empirical evidence on Catholic school organization and its effects for a study published in 1993. They based their findings on extensive field visits to seven high schools around the country that represented the diversity of Catholic secondary education, and on an extensive analysis of data collected for the U.S. Department of Education's comprehensive study of high school seniors and sophomores, High School and Beyond (HS&B).²² After studying the social and intellectual history of these schools and coupling their findings with information gathered by the National Catholic Educational Association, the authors generalized their observations to the Catholic school sector as a whole and found the following common elements:

More internal diversity with regard to race and income than the typical public school;
On average, an 88 percent acceptance rate for those who apply;
Less specialized staff and less complex school organization than in the large public secondary schools;
More advanced academic courses and fewer vocational courses, with 72 percent of Catholic school students studying an academic program and only 10 percent concentrating on vocational studies (in public schools, children are distributed approximately equally across the academic, advanced academic, and vocational tracks);
A focused curriculum and high standards;
A principal with discretion in hiring and firing staff;
A written code of conduct that includes a dress code, standards for social behavior among students and faculty, and a list of prohibited behaviors; and
A lower incidence of students' cutting class, refusing to obey instructions, talking back to teachers, and instigating physical attacks on teachers compared with public and other private schools.²³

Impact on Academic Achievement
The seminal work on Catholic school education and inner-city children was conducted by the late James Coleman, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. The results were widely reported in 1981 after appearing in summary form in The Public Interest.²⁴ Using data from the ongoing National Longitudinal Sample collected by the U.S. Department of Education,²⁵ Coleman found that Catholic schools not only helped children achieve academically, but also provided a more integrated school setting for students with a higher likelihood for dropping out.²⁶
In 1982, Coleman published High School Achievement: Public and Private Schools with Thomas Hoffer of the National Opinion Research Center²⁷ and Sally Kilgore, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The authors concluded that "Catholic schools, in comparison to public schools, produced higher cognitive achievement; that they were less racially segregated; and that variation across students in patterns of achievement was much less dependent upon family background."²⁸ In analyzing HS&B data, they found that Catholic school students-especially minority students-scored significantly higher on standardized tests even after controlling for differences in family characteristics.
Catholic schools send a higher percentage of their students to college than do public schools. For example, approximately 66 percent of the 1980 Catholic high school graduates had enrolled in a four-year or two-year college before the spring of 1982,²⁹ compared with fewer than 50 percent of the 1980 graduates of public schools.
Catholic schools also are more successful in preventing dropouts than are the public schools. For example, while 13.1 percent of white students drop out of public schools, only 2.6 drop out of Catholic schools. The dropout rates for black and Hispanic students in public schools are 17.2 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively, while the dropout rates for these ethnic groups in Catholic schools are 4.6 percent for blacks and 9.3 percent for Hispanics (see Chart 1).³⁰ The differences in achievement between minority and white students within each school are narrowed substantially in Catholic schools in comparison with public schools. Subsequently, Coleman concluded that Catholic schools are a better example of the "common school" ideal of American education than today's public schools.

Andrew Greeley, professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago, and his associates conducted much of the research on the outcomes of Catholic schools in a series of studies that began in 1966 with The Education of Catholic Americans and continued into the 1980s. Their analysis of HS&B data showed superior performance among whites, blacks, and Hispanics in Catholic schools in every single category, including math, science, and vocabulary. Greeley's Catholic High Schools and Minority Students, published in 1982, claims that "not only was the achievement of minority students in Catholic schools higher than that of minority students in public schools, but that these differences were the greatest for the most disadvantaged youth-those from poor families, those whose parents had a limited education, and those enrolled in nonacademic curricular programs."³¹
John Convey, a professor in the Department of Education at the Catholic University of America, evaluated studies on Catholic schools published between 1965 and 1991. He identified important indicators of effectiveness and concluded that, among other things, Catholic elementary and secondary school students, on average, scored better on tests of academic achievement than public school students. In Catholic Schools Make a Difference, Convey reports that, in a series of studies based on National Assessment of Educational Progress³² data, Catholic school students received consistently higher scores than public school students and that whites, blacks, and Hispanics received higher scores in Catholic schools in every single category (reading, science, and mathematics).

Recent Studies
The early studies comparing public and Catholic schools found that children in Catholic schools outperform children in public schools, but one of the main criticisms of these findings is that they fail to account for the possibility of selection bias.³³ This bias, opponents contend, leaves public schools with the low-performing students. Yet parochial schools appear to be most beneficial for those who need a good education: low-achieving, low-income, and inner-city minority students. Recent research continues to support the previous findings while attempting to control as accurately as possible for the occurrence of selection bias.
In a study published in 1995, William N. Evans and Robert M. Schwab of the University of Maryland School of Economics used two measures to evaluate the relative effectiveness of public and Catholic schools: the decision to finish high school and the decision to start college.³⁴ Using HS&B data and paying particular attention to selection bias, the authors found that attending a Catholic high school raised the probability of finishing high school and entering college for inner-city children by 17 percentage points. "This is twice as large as the effect of moving from a one- to a two-parent family and two and one-half times as large as the effect of raising parents' education from a high school dropout to a college graduate," observed Evans and Schwab. They also noted that Catholic schools have a particularly strong effect on students with the lowest probability of graduation-inner-city black pupils, students in urban areas, and students with low test scores.
In 1996, William Sander, professor of economics at DePaul University in Chicago, published the results of a study examining the effect of a Catholic grade school education on the test scores of whites, using data from HS&B.³⁵ Sander found that non-Catholics benefited the most from attending a Catholic grade school-even more than Catholics themselves. Looking at the effects of Catholic grade school education on 10th grade test scores and controlling for selection bias, Sander found an improvement in mathematics, reading, and vocabulary test scores of students after they had attended a Catholic grade school for eight years.
In 1995, Sander and Anthony C. Krautmann, an associate professor of economics at DePaul University, examined the effects of Catholic schooling on high school dropout rates and educational attainment for all races.³⁶ Paying careful attention to selection bias and using HS&B data, they found that Catholic schools had a significant negative effect on the odds of dropping out. Specifically, Catholic schooling reduced the odds of dropping out by at least 10 percent compared with public schools.
In 1997, Derek Neal, an associate professor in economics at the University of Chicago, published a detailed analysis of the effect of Catholic secondary schooling on high school and college graduation rates and future wages. To control for selection bias, Neal used data from the National Catholic Educational Association (which provides directories with the address and enrollment of every Catholic school in the United States), the Survey of Churches and Church Membership (which provides the total number of people in most religious denominations by county), and the 1980 census to construct measures of access to Catholic secondary schooling for each county in the United States.³⁷
Neal merged this information with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and found that African-American and Hispanic students attending urban Catholic schools were more than twice as likely to graduate from college as their counterparts in public schools: 27 percent of black and Hispanic Catholic school graduates who started college went on to graduate, compared with 11 percent from urban public schools. In addition, the probability that inner-city students would graduate from high school increased from 62 percent to at least 88 percent when those students were placed in a Catholic secondary school. Furthermore, when compared with their public school counterparts, minority students in urban Catholic schools can expect roughly 8 percent higher wages in the future.
The latest study in this area, conducted by University of Oregon economists David Figlio and Joe Stone,³⁸ attempts to minimize selection bias as much as possible. Unlike most authors who used either HS&B data or National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from earlier periods, Figlio and Stone used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS)³⁹ to measure differences between public and private schools in the performance of their students in mathematics and science.⁴⁰ They employed a rich set of variables (for example, race, religious affiliation, and where the parents went to school) to determine who decides to attend school in the public, religious, and non-religious private sectors. As a result, their findings are less likely to be merely symptomatic of the fact that higher-ability students tend to enroll in private schools.
Figlio and Stone found large, positive differences in test scores for black and Hispanic students who attended religious schools, an effect even more pronounced in urban areas. These positive effects are consistent with Neal's finding that Catholic schools have a significant positive effect on black and Hispanic student performance (measured as a reduced risk of dropping out), but have no substantial effect for the general student population. Figlio's and Stone's "religious schooling effect" was even stronger than Neal's findings for blacks and Hispanics in urban areas, particularly in large central cities.⁴¹ They also found that black and Hispanic students from the 8th to 12th grades gain the most from religious schooling because religious schools yield high academic results.⁴²
In addition, Caroline M. Hoxby, a Harvard economist who studied the effectiveness of school choice programs, found that competition from Catholic schools increased academic achievement at both public and Catholic schools.⁴³ Hoxby's findings led her to state that greater private and Catholic school competitiveness raises the academic quality of public schools and the high school graduation rates of public school students. Hoxby also found that public schools reacted to this competition by increasing teachers' salaries. Through choice, she concluded, students at both public and private (including Catholic) schools would increase the amount of time spent in school by about two years, and their math and reading test scores would improve by about 10 percent. Consistent with Neal's findings, Hoxby also noticed a wage increase of 14 percent for private school graduates.
Conclusion
The professional academic literature continues to illustrate that Catholic schools benefit inner-city children. Catholic schools offer strict academic and disciplinary guidelines, involve parents, and have caring teachers and administrators. Children trapped in inner-city ghettoes succeed in Catholic schools because these schools offer a quality education in a safe and caring environment.
In a recent article promoting vouchers for inner-city students, former Clinton White House adviser William A. Galston⁴⁴ and the Brookings Institution's Diane Ravitch⁴⁵ argue that "we cannot afford to write off another generation of urban schoolchildren."⁴⁶ As they point out, "in many lower-income urban areas, the traditional ideal of the `common school' is realized at least as well in Catholic schools as in the public schools; Catholic schools in the inner cities are typically not less, but rather more integrated across lines of race and ethnicity."⁴⁷
The Community Renewal Act, the District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997, and various school choice provisions of the Safe and Affordable Schools Act for the first time would allow low-income inner-city children to receive a quality education at a reasonable price. If they ignore the research and personal stories on the benefits of Catholic schools, federal and state policy makers will be turning their backs on America's poor children. As syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer has observed, the "great crisis in American education is...at the elementary and high school levels, where thousands of kids-particularly inner-city minority kids-are getting educations so rotten that their entire life prospects are blighted." What they need is "top-flight preparation during kindergarten through grade 12, so that [they] can get into the college of their choice meeting the same academic standards as their Asian and white counterparts."⁴⁸ Catholic schools offer this "top-flight" education-and at a bargain price.
¹ For information on school choice, see Nina H. Shokraii and Dorothy B. Hanks, "School Choice Programs: What's Happening in the States," Heritage Foundation F.Y.I. No. 138, April 21, 1997, and the Heritage school choice Web site at www.heritage.org/heritage/schools/.
² Paul T. Hill, Gail E. Foster, and Tamar Gendler, High Schools with Character (Santa Monica, Cal.: Rand Corporation, August 1990).
³ William Raspberry, "A Reluctant Convert to School Choice," The Washington Post, May 30, 1997.
⁴ Forthcoming book by Terry Moe and John Chubb, to be published by the Brookings Institution.
⁵ For example, according to a recent poll, 70.4 percent of blacks with an income of less than $15,000 a year support school choice. See David A. Bositis, "1997 National Opinion Poll: Children's Issues," Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, June 1997, Table 7.
⁶ Among the supporters of this bill are six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which opposed school choice until Representative Floyd Flake endorsed it.
⁷ Similar legislation offered in 1995 by Representative Steve Gunderson (R-WI) passed the House with bipartisan support but died in the Senate. The chief opponent in the Senate was Senator James Jeffords (R-VT), whose home state is one of only two that have school choice plans in place for children living in rural neighborhoods without public high schools nearby.
⁸ On May 23, 1997, by a vote of 51 to 49, the Senate passed an amendment to its balanced budget plan that would allow the use of federal funds to enable victims of school violence to attend a public, private, or religious school of choice. Although the voucher language is non-binding, it signifies support for choice in the Senate. This may be the first time a school choice plan has "passed" in the Senate.
⁹ In 1993/1994, tuition at elementary Catholic schools averaged $1,628, not including subsidies. See "Voucher Kids: How Private Money Rescues Thousands of Youngsters from the Public School Monopolists," Forbes, June 2, 1997. "The average private elementary school tuition in America is less than $2,500. The average tuition for all private schools, elementary and secondary, is $3,116, or less than half of the cost per pupil in the average public school, $6,857." See David Boaz and R. Morris Barrett, "What Would a School Voucher Buy? The Real Cost of Private Schools," Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 25, March 26, 1996.
¹⁰ Interview with Sister Helen Struder, principal of Holy Angels school, May 20, 1997.
¹¹ Sol Stern, "The Invisible Miracle of Catholic Schools," City Journal, Summer 1996.
¹² Susan Chira, "Where Children Learn How to Learn: Inner-City Pupils in Catholic Schools," The New York Times, November 20, 1991, p. B8; also based on interview with Rochelle Griffin, principal, East Catholic High, June 3, 1997.
¹³ A. Bryk, V. Lee, and P. Holland, Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
¹⁴ Until a ruling by the Ohio Court of Appeals on May 1, 1997, striking down the Cleveland choice experiment, Cleveland had the only school choice program in place that included religious schools. It was in operation for the 1996/1997 school year.
¹⁵ Roy Maynard, "Pro-Choice (on Education)," World, August 17, 1996.
¹⁶ Bryk et al., Catholic Schools and the Common Good.
¹⁷ Stern, "The Invisible Miracle of Catholic Schools."
¹⁸ Ibid.
¹⁹ Quoted in Joe Klein, "In God They Trust," The New Yorker, June 16, 1997.
²⁰ See Peter Rossi and Andrew M. Greeley, The Education of Catholic Americans (Chicago, Ill.: Aldine Press, 1966); Andrew M. Greeley, William McCready, and Kathleen McCourt, Catholic Schools in a Declining Church (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976); James S. Coleman, Thomas Hoffer, and Sally Kilgore, High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1982); Andrew M. Greeley, Catholic High Schools and Minority Students (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1982); James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, Public and Private Schools: The Impact of Communities (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1987); Hill et al., High Schools With Character; Bryk et al., Catholic Schools and the Common Good; John J. Convey, Catholic Schools Make a Difference: Twenty-Five Years of Research (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Educational Association, 1992); National Center for Education Statistics, A Profile of the American High School Senior in 1992 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995); National Center for Education Statistics, Two Years Later: Cognitive Gains and School Transitions of NELS:88 Eighth Graders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995); National Center for Education Statistics, High School Seniors' Instructional Experiences in Science and Mathematics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996); National Center for Education Statistics, National Education Longitudinal Study Descriptive Summary Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996); James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966); and Derek Neal, "The Effects of Catholic Secondary Schooling on Educational Achievement," Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1997), pp. 98-123.
²¹ Convey, Catholic Schools Make a Difference.
²² The High School and Beyond (HS&B) longitudinal study of U.S. high school seniors and sophomores was conducted for the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement's National Center for Education Statistics by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It was designed to complement an earlier study, the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS-72). HS&B studied high school students of the 1980s and looked at sophomores in addition to seniors. Adding the sophomores allowed for researchers to study not only dropout rates, but also changes and processes during high school. HS&B is considered by some to be a better measure of student achievements because it looks beyond grades to whether high school achievement translates into future employment gains or post graduate work.
²³ Bryk et al., Catholic Schools and the Common Good.
²⁴ James S. Coleman, "Public Schools, Private Schools, and the Public Interest," The Public Interest No. 64 (Summer 1981).
²⁵ Data are available for independent analysis from the U.S. Department of Education.
²⁶ Denis P. Doyle, "The Social Consequences of Choice: Why It Matters Where Poor Children Go to School," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1088, July 25, 1996. Catholic school sophomores scored 10 percent higher in science, 12 percent higher in civics, and from 17 percent to 21 percent higher in mathematics, writing, reading, and vocabulary. Catholic school seniors also consistently outscored public high school students: 10 percent to 17 percent higher in reading, mathematics, and vocabulary, and from 3 percent lower to 7 percent higher on three tests that measure ability more than achievement.
²⁷ A nonprofit social science institute.
²⁸ Coleman and Hoffer, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities.
²⁹ Ibid.
³⁰ Ibid.
³¹ See Bryk et al., Catholic Schools and the Common Good, p. 57; see also Greeley, Catholic High Schools.
³² Since 1969, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has conducted assessments of samples of the country's public and private school students at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. It has produced nearly 200 reports in 11 instructional areas about American students' academic performance.
³³ One widely held theory holds that children in Catholic schools have more caring parents because the simple act of placing children in private schools means they are more engaged in their children's education; thus, there is a selection bias which leads to higher academic achievement. Using more sophisticated databases and other research mechanisms, recent research attempts to control this bias by searching for other reasons parents place their children in religious schools (for example, proximity to home, religious beliefs, and racial composition of the school).
³⁴ William N. Evans and Robert M. Schwab, "Finishing High School and Starting College: Do Catholic Schools Make a Difference," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1995.
³⁵ William Sander, "Catholic Grade Schools and Academic Achievement," Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1996), pp. 540-548.
³⁶ William Sander and Anthony C. Krautmann, "Catholic Schools, Dropout Rates, and Educational Attainment,"
Economic Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (1995), pp. 217-233.
³⁷ Neal, "The Effect of Catholic Secondary Schooling on Educational Attainment."
³⁸ David Figlio and Joe Stone, "School Choice and Student Performance: Are Private Schools Really Better?" (University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty, forthcoming in 1997).
³⁹ The NELS is the third major longitudinal study sponsored by the NCES, after the National Longitudinal Study of 1972 and HS&B, that surveyed high school seniors and sophomores (HS&B) through high school, post secondary education, and work and family formation experiences. The two previous studies provided measures of educational success and reasons for academic success and failure. The NELS expands this knowledge by following children since 8th grade and updating the information through the 1990s.
⁴⁰ Researchers usually focus on math and science because schools keep better records on these subjects than on reading. Achievement in math and science is also a better indicator of post-schooling earnings.
⁴¹ Neal's data are for urban areas only.
⁴² Figlio and Stone, "School Choice and Student Performance."
⁴³ Caroline M. Hoxby, "Do Private Schools Provide Competition for Public Schools?" National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 4978, 1994; and "The Effects of Private School Vouchers on Schools and Students," in Helen Ladd, ed., Holding Schools Accountable (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1996), pp. 177-208.
⁴⁴ Galston is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs.
⁴⁵ Ravitch is a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Governmental Studies program.
⁴⁶ Diane Ravitch and William A. Galston, "Scholarships for Inner-City School Kids," The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 1996.
⁴⁷ Ibid.
⁴⁸ Charles Krauthammer, "Race and Classrooms," The Washington Post, May 23, 1997, p. A29.
⁴⁹ The author would like to thank Ryan Rogers, 1997 Heritage Foundation intern from the University of California at Davis, for assistance with the research for this paper.

Illinois School Choice Defeated by 22 Republicans!!

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 04:20:00 +0000

Disgrace!

By DOUG IBENDAHL • May 5, 2010

The Illinois House failed to pass a groundbreaking Illinois school choice bill Wednesday evening designed to give parents in underperforming Chicago school districts a voucher to cover educational expenses at nonpublic schools.

The measure had already cleared the Senate, but received only 48 votes out of the 60 required for passage in the House.

The effort on the bill (SB2494) was led by State Senator James Meeks, a Chicago Democrat. The bill was strongly opposed by the Illinois teachers unions – and unfortunately even many on the Republican side put those unions ahead of trapped children.

Many Democrats voted “no” too – but of course the Democrats have never touted vouchers as a crucial reform like the Republican Party has for decades.

There are 48 Republicans in the House – and 22 shamefully voted against the school choice bill. The Republican State Representatives voting “no” were:

Dan Brady	Sid Mathias	Raymond Poe	Jim Sacia
Rich Brauer	Bill Mitchell	Robert Pritchard	Skip Saviano
John Cavaletto	Jerry Mitchell	Randy Ramey	Jil Tracy
Sandy Cole	Don Moffitt	Dennis Reboletti	Jim Watson
Roger Eddy	Rosemary Mulligan	David Reis
Renee Kosel	Sandy Pihos	Chapin Rose

The voucher bill considered today represented a lifeline to poor children who face bleak futures as a consequence of the awful and dangerous public schools in the city of Chicago. The 22 people listed above disgraced themselves and our party today.

House Minority Leader Tom Cross did vote “yes” – but that has all the appearance of a disingenuous fig leaf. Cross didn’t speak on the floor in favor of the bill, and we in fact never heard a peep from Cross in advance of the vote. Nothing was done to rally support and it’s obvious now that Cross made no effort to get his caucus onboard.

An excellent school voucher program could easily have passed today. It failed for lack of sufficient Republican support.

Sorry you poor kids of Chicago. You may not be learning much in your public schools. But you just got a crash course in the old Tom Double Cross.

Doug Ibendahl is a Chicago Attorney and a former General Counsel of the Illinois Republican Party.

Why Illinois Republicans Voted Against School Choice For Our Children?

noreply@blogger.com (PARENTSFORCHOICE) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 04:07:00 +0000

I'll defer the answer to this question to someone else better informed:

A million reasons for House Republicans to oppose school vouchers

By DOUG IBENDAHL • May 11, 2010

Actually there were more than a million reasons, as I’ll explain below.

There are 48 Republicans in the Illinois House, and incredibly 22 of them voted “nay” last week on SB2494 – a bill that would have brought historic school reform to Illinois. (The names of all 22 can be found here.)

SB2494 would provide school vouchers for up to 30,000 children currently trapped in Chicago’s worst performing schools. Each voucher would represent a ticket to a better school and a brighter future.

SB2494 only needed 12 more votes to pass last week, so obviously the Republicans could have made it happen.

How could 22 Republicans possibly vote against a reform that the GOP has been cheerleading for continuously since the beginning of the Reagan Administration? It’s easy to come up with some reasons. Just follow the money and the endorsements.

Of the 22 who voted “nay” – all but three were endorsed by the Illinois Education Association prior to the February Primary Election. The IEA is the state’s largest teachers union.

On the money side, our research found that the 22 “nay” voters received a combined total of nearly $1.1 million dollars in political contributions from Illinois teachers unions over the years, with much of that coming in just the past five years.

And keep in mind, these are just the contributions given directly to the officials’ own campaign committees by the unions. The $1.1 million doesn’t include other union dollars funneled through other committees – like the House Republican Organization (HRO). HRO is the political arm of the House Republicans. House Minority Leader Tom Cross has Skip Saviano in charge of HRO as its Chairman.

The HRO received an additional $10,000 from the Illinois Federation of Teachers as recently as January 25th of this year. Oh yeah, HRO’s Chairman Skip Saviano was one of the 22 voting “nay” on SB2494.

And don’t forget, while Saviano controls a lot of campaign cash through the HRO – he still has his own campaign committee of course. And you guessed it – he picks up more contributions from the teachers unions there. By our calculation, Friends of Saviano has taken in over $95,000 from teachers unions over the years.

Full financial disclosure for the first half of 2010 won’t be due with the Illinois Board of Elections until July, so we won’t have a full picture until then. It will be interesting to see who got what leading up to last week’s vote. The month or so leading up to the November election would be another good period to check for contributions.

The Democrats receive even more money, but of course the Democrats aren’t the party constantly railing against the teachers unions. They’re pretty open about their allied relationship.

The Illinois Education Association is typically the largest teachers union contributor, but others include the Chicago Teachers Union, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the Illinois Principals Association.

Of the 22 Republican State Representatives voting “nay” – the “Top Ten” largest overall recipients of teachers union money have been (in descending order): Don Moffitt (over $125,000); Renee Kosel (over $120,000); Skip Saviano (over $95,000); Sid Mathias (just over $95,000); Jerry Mitchell (over $89,000); Roger Eddy (over $87,000); Rosemary Mulligan (over $75,000); Jim Watson (over $66,000); Dan Brady (over $65,000); and Raymond Poe (over $54,000).

When reviewing total contributions received, keep in mind that some State Representatives have been in office a lot longer than others.

One more Republican needs more coverage here. House Minority Leader Tom Cross’ campaign committee has received more than three times as much from the teachers unions as the lead guy in the Top Ten above.

Since Cross first entered the House in 1993, Citizens to Elect Tom Cross has taken in more than $460,000 from the teachers unions – most of that in the years since Cross became House Minority Leader in 2003.

And again, don’t forget, there is also the HRO which separately raises money for, and contributes money to GOP House candidates. Cross doesn’t have an official title in HRO, but as Minority Leader he for all practical purposes controls HRO along with his top lieutenant Skip Saviano.

Tow the Cross/Saviano line and you can expect HRO help in your House race. Bite the hand that feeds you and you’ll likely be on your own and at the mercy of a Democratic challenger – until the Republicans can find another Republican to run against you in the next Primary. That’s how party discipline is enforced – through the campaign coffers. Mike Madigan does it too of course, just more competently.

As one of the “Four Tops” in the General Assembly (along with Mike Madigan, Christine Radogno, and John Cullerton), Cross has a much easier time raising money than a plain old member of the House.

The Four Tops really run the show in Springfield, and most contributors want to give where they can get the biggest bang for the buck. The teachers unions are certainly no exception.

Yes, it’s true Cross voted “yea” on the voucher bill last week, but it really looks like he was just covering his behind – even as he exhibited no leadership to keep his caucus onboard. It all looks to me like Cross once again played a duplicitous, cynical game – all designed to bamboozle gullible reporters and Republicans.

Where were the letters to the editor and op-eds from Cross & Company urging passage of SB2494? Where were the email blasts with calls to action? Where were the press conferences? Where was Cross’ floor speech prior to the vote calling on his Republican members to hold ranks for the good of the kids?

I didn’t see or even hear about any of those things – obvious things that any legislative leader serious about passing such an important bill would do.

It’s also pretty absurd to say you were serious about trying to pass a bill – when your top lieutenant and the leader of your caucus’ political arm (Saviano) was always against it. Cross could call for Saviano’s resignation today from the Chairmanship of HRO if Cross was offended by Saviano betraying the children – not to mention the GOP Platform.

Don’t hold your breath.

As we’ve seen in other cases (like when Cross and Saviano want to torpedo SB600) – they can keep most of their caucus together when they want to. They simply didn’t want to in this case. The teachers unions and their cash mattered more than the kids.

Thousands of poor families in Chicago are very disappointed. Any hope they might have entertained about the GOP being serious about offering them a hand up has been crushed.

Last week’s vote was a travesty. But is it really a mystery? No, not when 22 House Republicans had over a million reasons for throwing poor families under the bus.

Doug Ibendahl is a Chicago Attorney and a former General Counsel of the Illinois Republican Party.