The Kansas City Star reports that some charter schools in Missouri have emerged victorious from the latest round of litigious bouts with the Kansas City public school district.

Since passage of a 2005 law with provisions for direct funding of charter schools, the Kansas City school district has fought a battle against what it sees as an unfunded mandate. Prior to the law, charter schools in the area were funded indirectly. The money trickled down from the state to public school districts, and then finally to charter schools. The 2005 law streamlined this process, allowing states to dip from the pool of revenue typically reserved for district schools and fund charter schools directly:

District schools receive local tax dollars, but charter schools do not, said Khris Heisinger, attorney for the Missouri Charter Public School Association, which is named in the lawsuit. [...]

“They want to spend all the local money and get the same state money they had been getting,” Heisinger said of the school district.

It is conceivable that this policy could help district schools as well.  Faced with a shrunken revenue pool, Kansas City schools will be forced to focus on what works, and cut out what doesn’t. Regardless, the recent Cole County court ruling in favor of charter schools and the streamlined funding process is a positive step forward in compensating for the disparity of available resources between district and charter schools.

This is from an article about charter schools in Portland, Ore.:

School board members in Portland worry that a large influx of charters could foster a two-tiered public school system, pitting small neighborhood schools with more disadvantaged and minority students against charter schools that typically attract more middle-income and affluent white students.

I haven’t seen demographic data for Portland’s charter schools, but I was surprised by this assertion because most charter students nationwide are not white and affluent.

Reading through the rest of the article, I can imagine why the pattern would be reversed in Portland. Portland’s public school district turns down charter application right and left — a couple have opened, despite the district’s disapproval, after appealing to the state.

Of the charters that made it through the application process, several center around trendy hands-on learning philosophies. That’s fine, but such schools appeal disproportionately to well-off parents. Disadvantaged families generally prefer structured academics and extra classroom time, not free exploration. Those aspects of KIPP charter schools have attracted inner-city minority students wherever they open, but there isn’t a single KIPP school in the entire state of Oregon!

Increasing charter school diversity is an admirable goal. To achieve it, Portland will have to allow a wider variety of charter schools to compete. It wouldn’t hurt to advertise charters to minorities, either. Look at these statements from the opening of the article:

Southwest Charter School sits squarely in the center of the city, just steps from the Willamette River, off a busy street in a commercial district, with almost 200 kids enrolled. But most people don’t know the public school exists.

That’s no accident.

Portland Public Schools doesn’t mention Southwest Charter in its literature or on its Web site.

Is it any surprise that disadvantaged students are left out of schools that are kept under wraps? I don’t know whether it’s appropriate to feature charters on the district website, but there are other ways to spread the word so charters’ existence will no longer be a secret.

Combest has a rundown of stories about Gov. Jay Nixon’s budget cuts. I think this is a excellent use of the line-item veto, and a good example of why the line-item veto is needed at the federal level. I’ll leave the full details of the cuts to the linked news articles, but, in short, Nixon used the line-item veto to cut $105 million and delay $325 million in spending. He will also be eliminating about 200 government jobs, on top of the 1,200 jobs cut in the original budget passed by the legislature.

I say, good for the governor. This is exactly the type of use for which I think the line-item veto was intended. As I understand it, the General Assembly will now vote on veto overrides for those cuts, but thanks to the line-item veto, the entire budget goes forward. (I am wearing my practical hat right now.) Hopefully, none of the cuts will be overridden — but, if they are, that just shows how the line-item veto can work within the Constitution.

I deeply hope the president gets the line-item veto some day. I don’t share concerns about too much executive power in this case, because the Congress could still override any individual veto. But I am pretty sure I will have some disagreement among the commenters.

Monday night, Keith Olbermann designated Missouri state Rep. Cynthia Davis as his “Worst Person in the World,” while labeling Missouri voters as “idiots” and “buffoons.” What raised Olbermann’s ire enough to place Davis at the same level he’s used for brutal dictators? Davis wants to cut back on free lunches to poor children over the summer, especially for children over 16. The state spends about $5.80 per child per day for a free lunch and breakfast, but Davis has said she thinks that kids at age 16 should get jobs and work to pay for their own lunches. Olbermann attacked her lack of compassion and called her an “inhuman monster.”

Granted, Davis went about addressing the issue clumsily, saying, “Hunger can be a powerful motivator.” She does, however, make a valid point (which went unmentioned on blogs and in the Post-Dispatch) that parents still receive the same amount of food stamps even if their kids are receiving free food from other government programs, and that it should be the parents’ job — not the state’s — to teach children about nutrition. She also suggests that funds might be better spent in an effort to teach parents the value of nutrition so that they can instill this knowledge in their children at home, rather basing such programs in schools.

It appears that Davis wants to reduce government welfare spending, but this may not have been the best issue to tackle. At least, she could have attempted to formulate a more elegant argument. Considering that the state spent $7 billion on primary and secondary education in 2006, the $10 million cost of the school lunch program is small potato chips. Davis tries argue against unencumbered welfare expansion, but with a few minced words she destroyed what should have been a powerful message.

Decreasing the state’s dependence on welfare programs is a worthwhile priority, but starting with children’s programs is not likely to garner positive attention. There are, however, other ideas that could work as more pragmatic solutions to combat welfare expansion: Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that every American adult should be given $10,000 per year ($3,000 of which must be used on health insurance — one appealing alternative to the health care reform proposals currently in vogue), and that welfare programs should simultaneously be eliminated. By giving people an option (and money to use), Murray’s plan would put decision-making in the hands of individuals. At this point though, it’s important for Missourians to look at what can be done to reduce welfare expansion gradually within the state, without focusing first on cutting the type of programs that lead to being demonized and dismissed.

One could argue that the program’s $10 million budget should not be spent by the government at all, but if the government is going to spend the money (and it will), it’s probably better that it feed poor children than for it to become another drop in Metro’s leaky budget or any other economy-draining public program.

Economists have long been wary of unions and the distortion their presence imposes on markets.  In theory and often in practice, labor unions benefit “insiders” at the expense of those outside the union.  Unions are criticized for artificially inflating the wage rate above the market level, thereby reducing a firm or industry’s demand for labor and consequently reducing employment, contributing to dead-weight loss, and increasing prices for consumers.

Knowing this, I have come to generally regard teachers’ unions with some reservations. Then I see this. Apparently, 700 teachers of the New York City Public School system — those who are accused of misconduct and are waiting to appeal their case — are sentenced to communal “rubber rooms” during the workday, where they are free to engage in personal activities unrelated to education and still draw compensation from state coffers:

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

New York is not the only city with a variation of these rubber rooms; the Los Angeles school district employs similar practices when handling issues with 178 of its teachers.

Regardless of the prevalence of this practice, the image of teachers being given a $65 million subsidy anywhere to play board games is stunning. This is clear evidence of union power run amok — no longer serving the best interests of children, but rather of those protected by the system. To my knowledge, Missouri’s school districts do not suffer from such extensive waste, but we would be wise to be wary of ceding such market power.

Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute had to publish a correction regarding his calculation of the per-pupil spending taking place in the District of Columbia’s public schools. He had previously stated that D.C. was spending $26,555 per student. Since then, the DCPS has admitted that their enrollment numbers were inflated by four thousand students — meaning that the actual amount of money the school district spent per student is between $27,400 and $28,900.

Keep in mind that students in D.C.’s public schools routinely rank dead last in academic achievement.  Also keep in mind (as Coulson noted) that students in the D.C. voucher program are being educated for no more than $7,500 each.  And, three years into the voucher program, the voucher students are reading two grade levels ahead of their peers back in the traditional public schools.

So, D.C. has two significant approaches to public education, one of which is horrifically expensive and demonstrably ineffective, and the other of which is dirt cheap and shows great promise. Which one do you think is getting shut down?

Andrew Coulson writes at Cato@Liberty about the regulation that invariably accompanies public education funding. He predicts that regulation will catch up with charter schools and halt their progress. He sums up his opinion thus:

If you want to know what charter schools will look like in a generation or so, just look at the public school status quo.

I agree that money brings state directives with it (which is why I’m surprised by this call for state funding of private schools on the Panama City Renaissance School blog) but I think charters will have a lasting effect on the U.S. education market. By the time new regulations are written, charters will have changed people’s expectations about what schools are like, and there won’t be any going back to the one-size-fits-all schoolhouse.

In districts where charter and traditional public schools compete, parents are becoming comfortable with the idea that they don’t have to send their kids to a school based on geography. They can choose a school based on academic specialty or other preferences. (And in cases where parents do want to send their children to the closest school, that school could turn out to be a charter.) Charter school parents also know that if the school disappoints them, they can go right back to the traditional district.

As choices flourish, I think we’ll see children learning from different kinds of schools in the same day. A child might attend a charter school, take an online course through a traditional district in the afternoon, and then head to a private tutoring center for homework help.

Unions may influence contracts at charter schools, but they won’t change the fact that parents choose charters, combine them with other options, and can also choose to leave — characteristics of charters that are just as important as the structure of their contracts. And online charter schools are so different from brick-and-mortar schools that traditional teachers union procedures won’t always be applicable to them. Unions won’t be able to turn online schools into traditional ones no matter how much they tinker with contracts, which is why they’d like to shut down the online schools in Oregon.

When you introduce choice and competition into the education market, people with a vested interest in traditional districts don’t take it lying down. (I’m not referring to teachers’ unions alone; almost anyone who can gain from waste and mismanagement, including local farmers, will fight against reforms tooth and nail.)

With that in mind, I’m following events in Oregon to see whether choice will survive there. Portland is ending its practice of 30 years that allowed families to choose public schools outside their neighborhoods. Students will still be able to attend magnet schools, of which there are 15 in total, counting both elementary and high schools. (Two new magnet schools are set to open under the district plan.)

I can’t tell how the changes will affect language immersion programs. These programs take place in regular district schools, but draw students from throughout Portland. It would be great if they could be converted to magnets. However, a few extra magnets won’t offset all the choices that will disappear when intradistrict enrollment ends.

The other education policy debate playing out in Oregon involves online charter schools. Both the Oregon House and Senate have approved a moratorium on online schools. The bills would require that no new online schools open this year, and that enrollment in the existing ones has to stay the same. The ostensible reason for this moratorium is to give regulators time to think about online schools, but how would a few more students signing up prevent regulators from doing that? And, given that most states have online schools (through charters, districts, or state departments of education) it doesn’t make sense to say that Oregonians are rushing into uncharted territory and must be stopped for their own good.

I look forward to finding out how Oregonians react to these attempts to restrict their educational options.

Joe Knodell, opining in the Springfield News-Leader today, is hopeful about the progress of education reform in the state. Knodell, a former superintendent and current consultant for the Missouri Education Reform Roundtable Foundation, cites the recently passed Missouri Senate Bill 291 as a harbinger of future, serious discussion and action on education reform in Missouri.

S.B. 291 calls for the Joint Committee on Education to study open enrollment and how it would affect students. Were Missouri to adopt a system of open enrollment, families would no longer be confined to schools within their district boundaries and would be permitted to apply to the school districts of their choice. Knodell argues, and I agree, that students deserve schooling based not on arbitrary geographical lines but on where students would be best served. Open enrollment would introduce much-needed competition into the educational system, as schools and their districts fight to attract and retain students. When schools compete, students win.

S.B. 291 contains other stipulations, as well, ranging from support of charter schools to increased school transparency, as well as establishing virtual schools and a parents’ bill of rights — issues that the Show Me Institute has discussed since its inception. It’s heartening to see Missouri shift toward more and more measures that are rooted in competition and choice.

Combest pointed out this morning that the Post-Dispatch has run an article about the state auditor’s concern about the city of St. Louis paying for a set of nurses to serve three dozen Catholic and Lutheran schools. The audit revealed that this practice has been going on for about 20 years, and that it is part of a “‘memorandum of understanding’ between the Archdiocese of St. Louis and the Lutheran Elementary School Association.” It appears that this sort of public support is not being offered to any of the other private schools, and that the public schools have to pay for nursing services out of their own operating budgets. While it might be helpful to have some additional information regarding this program, it appears to be a plain violation of the Missouri Constitution as well as a potential violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Article I, section 7, of the Missouri Constitution reads:

[N]o money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion [...] and that no preference shall be given to nor any discrimination made against any church, sect or creed of religion, or any form of religious faith or worship.

Article IX, section 8, says:

Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other municipal corporation, shall ever make an appropriation or pay from any public fund whatever, anything in aid of any religious creed, church or sectarian purpose, or to help to support or sustain any private or public school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other institution of learning controlled by any religious creed, church, or sectarian denomination whatever[.]

To be perfectly clear, these constitutional provisions are problematic in their design, because they were initially intended to discriminate against Catholics who, unhappy that their tax dollars were being devoted to public schools that promoted Protestantism and denigrated Catholicism, claimed it was only fair that they should get to use public funds to create their own schools. Incensed at the prospect of publicly funded Catholic schools, many states — including Missouri — adopted constitutional measures that would prohibit such a possibility. Thus, the basis for these provisions was religious discrimination, and one of the open questions in constitutional law is whether a state constitutional provision rooted in religious discrimination might itself be invalidated under the First Amendment.

But, as time has passed (and particularly as public schools abandoned the prayer, hymn-singing, and Bible readings that had previously been common), Missouri’s constitutional requirements have come to stand first for a more general principle that religious groups (and particularly religious schools) should never be given any special favors. Some Missouri Supreme Court cases suggest that the constitutional problem might evaporate if the city were to adopt a more general program that provided nursing services to all schools and their students, although Missouri courts have previously been willing to use these constitutional sections to eliminate even aid programs that made no distinction between public and private schools.

But, if the city of St. Louis has forged a special deal to provide Catholic and Lutheran schools — and only Catholic and Lutheran schools — with nursing support, as the auditor’s report suggests, the city would certainly seem to be impermissibly playing favorites among religious groups.

From this article in the L.A. Times, it looks like Green Dot has somewhat improved a troubled California high school. If progress continues, I’m sure other cities will consider handing over problematic schools to charters.

Charter management can help existing schools by bringing in new staff and updating policies. But, ideally, charter schools should start from scratch. That way, charters are free to try radically new approaches. A charter that takes over a high school has to make do with tweaking a flawed model.

Besides, charters that move into existing schools don’t have to advertise to parents like those that are built from the ground up. That may be easier from the charter’s point of view; unfortunately, it doesn’t spur competition between schools or match students to schools based on their interests and learning styles. Green Dot has divided the Los Angeles high school into several academies in the same building, but that’s a far cry from a competitive market.

Edudiva responds to Caitlin Hartsell’s standards post by arguing that Missouri’s education standards don’t come up to the difficulty level of the MAP tests. She predicts that joining the coalition of states will improve our standards, and that we have nothing to lose:

We won’t look bad when compared to states with easy assessments when they upgrade their tests. We won’t need to “dumb down” ours; instead, the rest of the country will need to catch up to our assessments.

This is wishful thinking. If other states wanted to improve their tests, they could do that right now without joining a group. A coalition of states won’t necessarily bring everyone up to the level of the best state. It will create new standards, which will be some kind of compromise among all the different participants. States with the worst standards may get a boost; other states might very well dumb down their standards, or they could leave the coalition — in which case, what will have been the point?

The discrepancy between state standards and MAP test content is clear evidence that standards don’t matter. We often hear about teaching to the test or schools engaging in excessive test prep. Standards are rarely mentioned outside of the context of the MAP. Standards don’t drive district behavior; this is apparent from the wide range of outcomes among districts, all of which are held to the same state standards.

We’ll see a similar result from national standards. One set of standards will apply to all 46 or 47 states that join, but outcomes will still vary greatly as some states apply them better than others, or ignore them entirely.

As Sarah Brodsky pointed out in her post on Friday, Missouri is one of four states so far that have opted not to join the “Race to the Top” education initiative that requires conforming to a national standard. While the governor may be only postponing the decision until a new commissioner of the state’s Department of Education can be consulted, Missouri would do well to avoid participating in this program entirely.

Missouri has higher education standards than do many other states as it is; adopting national standards would simply entail an increased use of standardized tests, resulting in more wasted classroom time. Getting the program started would also require a great deal of additional funding: Texas estimates that it will cost $3 billion to implement.

Adopting a federal standard would be the first step toward relinquishing the state’s constitutionally granted control of its public education system.

Missourians already know what their students should be learning, and have thus far created a fairly rigorous set of statewide standards. And, as it is, fewer than half of Missouri’s students are meeting or exceeding the MAP standards Adopting lower national standards instead would only provide a misleading inflation of achievement metrics.

Why should Missouri surrender its authority to meeet the educational needs of its children simply in order to conform to a national standard that would provide no measurable benefit?

From an editorial in the Kansas City Star:

Charter schools and lab schools would have a framework within which to experiment.

This is put forward as an argument in favor of uniform education standards across states — that a national standard will help charter schools experiment better!

I can’t imagine how any government standards would do that. But even if I’m wrong, and standards are an important ingredient in innovation, charters already have the state standards to work from. Currently, charters can choose from 50 different standards and pick whichever ones would help them innovate best.

(How does that work? They look at the traditional district standards and say, “This is what we need to not follow if we want to experiment?”)

Besides a benevolent desire to help charters experiment, which assistance no charter I know of has requested, standards enthusiasts are motivated by cold, hard cash. I call it “Race to the Tax Dollars;” Arne Duncan calls it “Race to the Top.” A Post-Dispatch editorial describes the matter with customary candor:

More than $4 billion in federal stimulus funds are being devoted to a national “Race to the Top Fund” to support innovation and leadership in the nation’s public K-12 schools. Some $350 million of that will go to states that have signed onto the new standards.

Notice that bribing all states to do the same thing is called “innovation.” I think this is the kind of innovation standards supporters have in mind for charter schools.

This Post-Dispatch article quotes several archaeologists who are unhappy with a high school dig that’s taking place on private property. The teacher who’s supervising the work doesn’t have the credentials he would need if he wanted to use a federal grant. The criticisms look like a thinly veiled attempt to keep out competition:

Mark Raab, acting president of the Missouri Association of Professional Archaeologists, said he’s thrilled students are getting exposure to archaeology, but adds that the question lies in whether it’s being done to the highest professional standard.

Of course, any work done by high school students is not going to meet the highest professional standard. They’ve only recently started working in the field.

As for the teacher’s credentials, these students are fortunate to have a teacher with any archaeological training; it’s unreasonable to insist that a high school teacher study archaeology full time for 12 months straight, as the federally funded archaeologists are required to do. This teacher worked on excavations over two summers, when school was out. And there’s no guarantee that he would make better decisions if he had more degrees.

If every high school dig had to meet the most exacting standards, high schoolers simply wouldn’t be able to experience archaeology.

There are some cases in which allowing a lower standard for educational purposes is inappropriate. For example, I argued that people should not be allowed to own dangerous wild animals, even though restricting wildlife ownership to zoos will mean that some people miss out on opportunities to learn to care for the animals. The danger to other people outweighs the potential educational benefits.

But, in the case of the high school archaeological dig, the only ones who stand to lose from suboptimal work are the property owners — and they’re OK with it. If they want to call in top archaeologists, that’s their prerogative. And, if they want to turn the dig over to a teacher and his students, they’re free to do that.

The article puts it this way:

There is no standard process to follow if a high school group wants to dig on private property.

That’s how it should be.

The St. Louis Beacon and Kansas City Star both have stories about a recent study from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that analyzes charter school performance nationwide, with specific results for Missouri. The news is not all good. According to the report, Missouri is one of only five states to show significantly higher learning rates in charter schools than in traditional public schools. According to the Beacon:

In other findings about Missouri, the report found that:

• In general, new charter school students experience an initial drop in both reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools, but they experience no significant drop in reading and math in later years in charter schools.
• In general, blacks and Hispanics in charter schools achieve significantly more in reading and math compared to their counterparts in public schools.
• Poor students in charter schools perform significantly worse in both reading and math than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
• Both special education students and English language learners receive no significant advantages from attending charter schools compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.

So, according to this report, children in Missouri who attend charter schools experience an initial drop in reading and math, but later, reports the Star, “a Missouri student attending a charter school could expect to learn ’significantly more in reading and math than they would if they went to a traditional public school in the same community.’”

This study is another data point to add to the case for charters. Nationwide, however, the study found that many individual charter students fared worse than comparable students in traditional schools.

The beauty of charter schools is that they are not all one beast. They offer a variety of options for different types of students, and students with different needs. Let’s relish the bad results as a learning opportunity for other charters, now and in the future, and relish the good results here in Missouri as a sign that charter schools offer a viable alternative to troubled traditional public schools.

I leave you with a statement from The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, quoted in another article about the CREDO study:

“The CREDO report confirms what several other studies previously indicated: in states and communities where there are high standards for school quality and authorizers are performing their duties well, students in public charter schools are making solid academic progress. Where large numbers of schools have been created without a rigorous application process and adequate authorizer oversight, the results are unsatisfactory,” said Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

“We are encouraged by the ground-breaking results being achieved by many public charter schools across the country,” said Smith. “However, if high-quality performance is to become the norm for public charter schools, we need to ramp up our efforts to replicate what’s working as well as enhance our work to ‘remove the barriers to exit’ and make it easier to close chronically low-performing charters.”

Here’s another piece of evidence that school choice has become, more than ever, an issue favored by people of all ideological stripes. Juan Rangel, CEO of Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization, has an article in the Huffington Post arguing in favor of using stimulus funds to expand charter schools:

Governments should devote stimulus funds to charter school expansion and encourage public private partnerships to ensure efficient use of the funds. Charter schools have illustrated the ability to improve the quality of education in the communities they serve. Yet, across the nation, these schools struggle to finance new construction or capital improvements.

I’d rather that the current federal stimulus program didn’t exist at all — the best thing government officials could do to jump start the economy would be to cut both spending and taxes to the bone — but as long as the spending is going to happen, providing kids an escape route from failing public schools is a pretty good cause.

For the past few days, the L.A. Times has run a three-part debate about charter schools. It’s written in a point-counterpoint format by Lisa Snell, director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation, and Ralph E. Shaffer, professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly Pomona.

Be sure to read each of the three installments:

• How much freedom do charter schools deserve?
• Who do charters educate?
• Are charters a drain on traditional public schools?

This is the kind of debate that’s actually worth having — one that relies on data and careful argumentation, rather than bluster and hand-waving.

Please stay tuned to Show-Me Daily for updates regarding our third annual celebration of The Friedman Legacy of Freedom, which will be held at Washington University and will be cosponsored by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Our featured special guest speaker is Kevin Chavous, a prominent lawyer, politician, and school reform champion who has authored the book Serving Our Children: Charter Schools and the Reform of American Public Education.

Here’s an interview with Chavous that we’ve linked to before, in which he explains how school choice became such an important issue for him while serving on the D.C. City Council.

The California legislature is considering whether to extend its inter-district public school choice program. I completely agree with this statement from the L.A. Times editorial supporting choice:

The best possible education for students should take precedence over attendance boundaries.

It would be great if Missouri were to follow suit, create districts of choice, and allow families to choose public schools without regard to street addresses.

St. Louis has the Voluntary Inter-District Transfer Program, but it doesn’t go far enough. For one thing, the eligibility requirements restrict choice to certain groups. Why shouldn’t a white, Asian, or Hispanic city student have the same choice as an African-American student to attend a suburban school? The situation is reversed in magnet school admissions, in which African-Americans are reduced to the lowest priority level. These admissions distinctions reflect someone’s idea of the “right” racial mix for certain schools — an idea that I find very distasteful, to say the least. Restricting educational options by racial group is even more repugnant than limitations based on address. It also makes no sense in a diverse city that’s home to many multi-racial families.

In addition to the race issue, the Transfer Program is inadequate because it doesn’t present parents with enough choices. Parents can choose to participate, but once they do they have little say in which suburban school their children will attend.

It would be difficult to institute a broad public school choice program in Missouri, because districts are wary and parents are used to the way things are. One small step would be to streamline the magnet school admissions process, doing away with tiers and racial preferences. Allow any child from the city or county, regardless of race, to enter the magnet school lottery on an equal footing with other students — or to enter a lottery for other SLPS schools. SLPS could then have the distinction of being Missouri’s first true district of choice.

I came across this story about charter school advocates being heard by the House Education and Labor Committee in Washington, D.C.

One of the wonderful points of focus in this piece highlights the benefits of charter innovation, which can then be adopted by other schools. This is precisely the sort of progress promised by charter school advocates.

Particularly encouraging is the following quote:

“Outstanding charter schools are proving that low-income and minority kids can achieve at the highest levels, graduate from college and thrive as adults,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chair of the committee.

With the data on the side of charter advocates, the movement toward more charter schools is happily gaining inertia.

It was about 54 years ago that famed economist Milton Friedman first wrote “The Role of Government in Education,” his argument for an expansion of parental choice in public-funded education:

Government, preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, non profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units.

About a year before his death, Reason interviewed Friedman about the education reform legacy he had instigated:

I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used. We need a system in which the government says to every parent: “Here is a piece of paper you can use for the educational purposes of your child. It will cover the full cost per student at a government school. It is worth X dollars towards the cost of educational services that you purchase from parochial schools, private for-profit schools, private nonprofit schools, or other purveyors of educational services. You may add from your own funds to the voucher if you wish to and can afford to.” (I try to avoid calling government schools public schools because I think that’s a very misleading term.)

As to the benefits of universal vouchers, empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas. There’s nothing that would do so much to avoid the danger of a two-tiered society, of a class-based society. And there’s nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force.

Friedman also expanded on his arguments in favor of school choice in the 1980s PBS television series “Free to Choose.” The episode of this series dealing with education is available online, broken into six separate video clips. The first is embedded below:

Be sure to watch the rest, too! It’s well worth the time of anybody who cares about improving educational opportunities for all children.

Over at the New York Times, Harold O. Levy, former New York City schools chancellor, outlines “Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools”:

1. Raise the age of compulsory education.
2. Use high-pressure sales tactics to curb truancy.
3. Advertise creatively and aggressively to encourage college enrollment.
4. Unseal college accreditation reports so that the Department of Education can take over the business of ranking colleges and universities.
5. Produce more qualified applicants, beginning by encouraging an appropriate home environment.

The plan holds fast to the trend set by many recent “pop” education reform plans: well-intentioned and wildly insufficient. Levy is vague when it comes to articulating policy mechanics, and is more than a little idealistic about implementation, yet he does succeed in  identifying three great values for guiding education reform of any kind: choice, transparency, and the importance of continuing investments in human capital.

To his credit, Levy does make note of one specific policy initiative that I love: scholarships for early-graduating high-schoolers equal to the state’s per-pupil spending, for every year till they have reached the age limit of compulsory education. Similar programs have been tried out in Texas and Arizona, with successful results and enthusiastic participants.

I imagine that such policies would:

• promote the growth of students who feel restrained by the pace of their curriculum;
• extend greater financial opportunities to students wishing to continue investing in their human capital;
• free up seats in overcrowded high schools, allowing teachers to focus on smaller classrooms filled with students who may prefer or require a slower pace of teaching.

Those potential gains could warrant serious discussion about the use of such programs in Missouri, and how they could aid students. Feel free to comment!

Caroline Hoxby, Ph.D., the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University, spoke about "The Promise and Performance of Charter Schools" on May 5, 2009, in a lecture cosponsored by the Show-Me Institute and Saint Louis University's John Cook School of Business. Hoxby is also a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, the director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The embedded video below is a playlist consisting of five separate parts. After each individual part has finished playing, the playlist should automatically load the subsequent part until the sequence has finished.

You may also choose to view any individual part on its own:
Part 1 (9:22) | Part 2 (9:20) | Part 3 (9:13) | Part 4 (9:57) | Part 5 (10:01)

During Hoxby's trip to Saint Louis, she also spent a few minutes speaking with the Show-Me Institute about some of the key points contained in her lecture. In this interview, Hoxby explains the benefits of charter schools, outlines the challenges that charter schools currently face, points out the reasons for success in many charters, and more.

The embedded video below is a playlist consisting of two separate parts. After the first part has finished playing, the playlist should automatically load the second part.

You may also choose to view either individual part on its own:
Part 1 (9:08) | Part 2 (7:59)

This same interview can also be viewed in seven separate sections, each addressing a different educational question:

What are the benefits of charter schools?
What are the challenges that charter schools face?
How do traditional public schools and charter schools compare?
What are the reasons that some charter schools succeed?
What constitutes adequate funding for public schools?
What are the current barriers to school choice in the United States?
How does collective bargaining affect quality teacher retention?

More and more states are taking action to rescue children from failing public schools. From a WMGT article:

Parents will now have more say in where their kids can go to school in the fall. That’s because of a recent bill that passed in the Georgia house. House Bill 251 makes it easier for parents to transfer students to the school of their choice.

The article also includes video of the TV station’s news clip about this bill, so be sure to head over there to watch.

As Milton Friedman pointed out in Capitalism and Freedom, teachers have a lot to gain from a competitive education market. First of all, they can earn more money when schools compete. Talented teachers, teachers who are knowledgeable about subjects like math and science, and teachers who are willing to work extra hours or teach disadvantaged students will earn more in a competitive system.

This New York Times article provides a good example. It reports on a a new charter school set to open this year in New York that will pay teachers $125,000, plus bonuses based on performance. This doesn’t look like the typical teachers’ union contract:

To make ends meet, teachers will hold responsibilities usually shouldered by other staff members, like assistant principals (there will be none). There will be no deans, substitute teachers (except for extended leaves) or teacher coaches. Teachers will work longer hours and more days, and have 30 pupils, about 6 more than the typical New York City fifth-grade class. [...]

Teachers will not have the same retirement benefits as members of the city’s teachers’ union. And they can be fired at will.

These teachers won’t have the same free time or job security as their counterparts in the traditional district, but they also won’t have to wait decades for a good salary.

And the benefits of competition aren’t just about money. It’s important to match teachers with the right schools. For instance, someone who’s enthusiastic about elementary language immersion probably shouldn’t be teaching at the environmental sciences high school. Precise matching is possible when specialized schools compete; it’s harder within a district that assigns teachers by seniority and students by street address.

In addition, teachers should feel respected and supported by the administration they work with. Too often, teachers in district schools are told that they can’t expand successful initiatives or try anything new. (That was the response to the first KIPP classroom.) We’ll see that less often in a more competitive system, because teachers will be free to take their good ideas and leave for competing schools.

Jonathon Braden at the Columbia Daily Tribune’s Homeroom blog reports on Sylvan Learning Center closings in Columbia and Jefferson City. This is a feature of private-sector education that we might not notice when times are good, but that’s apparent during recessions: Private schools and tutoring centers that can’t attract enough students end up closing. Public schools don’t. There are budget cuts, teachers are laid off, summer school is canceled — but the school stays.

I think that difference explains away the “mystery” set forth in this piece at TCSDaily. Why has state spending on education failed to make things better? The answer is not educational “fads” or teachers who are “nitwits,” as the article suggests. You can find them in private schools as well as in other sectors, so their existence can’t account for the inefficient use of public education funds. The problem is that the traditional districts have no mechanism to get rid of them, and no incentive to support the best teachers and expand practices that work.

Any organization contains some good and some bad. Private tutoring centers have to identify and reward the good — otherwise, they go out of business. Traditional districts that aren’t threatened by an exodus of students have no incentive to distinguish the good from the bad. If they expand their worst practices and ignore the best ideas, they’ll still get money to keep doing the same thing.

Or, at least, someone doing marketing for them has read the writing on the wall. I just watched the elementary school commercial for SLPS, which is available on the district’s website. It touts “magnet schools and choice schools.”

I’m not thrilled about the magnet schools’ complex, racially biased admissions process, but I love choice schools. Parents should have the option to choose schools within the traditional district, and I’m sure many will. SLPS needs to recognize this and focus on offering attractive choices for parents. It needs to move away from the “one address, one school” model that determines which school you attend based on your street rather than on your preferences. And it needs to  learn from charter schools, and try to understand why parents like them so much.

One positive development is the SLPS virtual school, which opened in 2008 to students throughout the St. Louis area — including those who attend charters. It would be interesting if many students attend charters during the school day, then go back to SLPS for online classes after school.

Public education didn’t work for me.

The schools I attended were “great,” or so I’m told. My elementary and middle schools were heralded as model schools of the district and the region, and each produced impressive student results as measured by test scores. My high school was ranked by Newsweek as one of the top 300 schools in the country and produced respectable graduation and college enrollment rates, as well as enviable advanced placement scores.

I started out well enough, but by the time I entered high school, I was of that breed of students that elicit a teacher’s dread. “Over”-intelligent, undermotivated, rebellious, and insufferable. I never credited my progressively worsening underachievement with a specific flaw of the institutions; the system just wasn’t a good fit for me. In it, I felt restrained by the slow pace of the teaching, and repressed by rules that I saw as limiting creativity and independent learning. When I finally left during my junior year of high school to enroll in the University of Missouri’s excellent Center for Distance and Independent Study, my effort improved, “outside” learning accelerated, and I was able to grow — both intellectually and as a person — far more than I could have while “trapped in the system.”

My rambling boils down to a simple observation. School choice proponents and critics alike spend a great deal of research and time arguing about school choice and how it affects students in poorly performing schools. It’s important to remember that improving school choice will afford students from all types of educational backgrounds the opportunity to determine the type of institution that would serve as their very best fit. The society as a whole could be improved if we simply cared that students get the specific education they need for the specific growth they seek.

Over at Cato@Liberty earlier today, Andrew Coulson commented on how school choice is becoming an increasingly post-partisan issue, as politicians from both sides of the aisle increasingly realize that allowing parents to choose the best schools for their children results in both better opportunities and better actual educational outcomes:

Christopher J. Christie just decisively won New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial primary, but had to veer away from his middle-of-the-road plan and venture into some traditionally conservative territory to do it, according to news accounts. Will that be a problem for him in the general election? Not necessarily. As NorthJersey.com’s Charles Stile observes, Christie’s ardent support for private school choice is not the polarizing stance it once was: these programs “once championed by conservative ideologues, are being embraced by urban Democrats.”

As we’ve been saying at the Center for Educational Freedom for some time now, the post-partisan age of school choice is well within sight, and draws closer every day. The last politicos to see that will find themselves on the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of voters in both parties.

We’ve seen this same phenomenon in Missouri, with prominent Democrats like Kevin Chavous (who is a partner at a law firm with offices in St. Louis and Kansas City) and Rodney Hubbard leading the charge to bring real educational choice to Missouri’s children.

Here’s an interview with Chavous, in which he explains how school choice became such an important issue for him while serving on the D.C. City Council:

And here’s part two: