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The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on five general themes:
Basic school choice information
Combining committed parents and honest education officials with sound research, offers a recipe for school-choice success!
Mothers of special-needs children express support for proposed scholarship program.
Best practices from other states
It took a coalition of school-choice supporters 20 years to bring educational liberty to Iowa. Will it take that long to enact a school-choice policy in Kentucky?
Political leaders and school officials team up in Germany against home-schooling parents by holding to a remnant leftover from an evil regime.
Objections to school choice that form the misguided arguments against more educational alternatives.
Paying teachers according to performance attracts talented candidates and quality results.
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
Research looking at the achievements of charter schools in Massachusetts offers a much different picture than a recent national study questioning charters’ effectiveness. And it certainly defies the recent claim by the Lexington Herald-Leader that “charter schools have been an educational bust.”
A new study commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Education (MDE) shows that students in a large share of the state’s charters – which are publicly funded, independently run schools – performed as well or better than their counterparts in the district’s traditional public schools.
According to the Boston Globe, the study found that nearly 60 percent of the charter-school students fared about the same as their peers in regular schools on state MCAS exams in English and math, while 30 percent performed ‘significantly higher.’” Only 10 percent of the schools “fared worse” than the regular public schools. Such a performance can hardly be described as “an educational bust.”
The MDE’s research simply confirms what many parents in the Bay State already know: School choice works. Without parental support, school choice could not have thrived as it has for 13 years in Massachusetts, which now has 57 charter schools; two new charters opened this fall.
The study represents the kind of solid independent research that has even honest education officials supporting the success of charters in Massachusetts. For example, associate education commissioner Jeff Wulfson used the report to negate the state teachers union’s claim that the study is flawed because charter schools’ demographics don’t “necessarily” mirror the cities in which they are located.
Wulfson pointed out the dramatic improvements demonstrated by black and Hispanic charter-school students who previously performed poorly in regular public schools.
Sound research, committed parents and honest education officials are helping ensure that Bay State parents retain the educational liberty they need to charter a better education for their children.
Kentucky’s families deserve the same kind of liberty.
Sources:
“Massachusetts Charter School Achievement Comparison Study: An Analysis of 2001-2005 MCAS Performance,” Massachusetts Department of Education, August 2006.
“On exam, charter schools get edge,” by Maria Sacchetti, The Boston Globe, Aug. 31, 2006.
Each month, the Kentucky Alliance Digest features a look at school choice from a parent’s perspective. This month’s testimony is from Diane M. Kennedy and Rebecca S. Banks.
As authors of “The ADHD-Autism Connection,” we have witnessed the success that special-needs children experience when schools address their most pressing social, emotional and educational needs. For instance, charter schools with programs targeted specifically for special-needs children are having a tremendous impact nationwide.
However, as mothers of children diagnosed with ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, bipolar and mood disorders, we knew the Jefferson County Public Schools would be hard-pressed to accommodate our children’s most urgent social, emotional and behavioral needs. These needs must be met before learning can ever take place.
So we turned to private schools. In Jefferson County, the annual cost of a private-school education for a special-needs child can range from $3,500 to $11,000 or more – a price tag that is out of reach for many Kentucky families.
But far more costly in terms of a child’s quality of life is our discovery that most of these schools do not take the multidimensional approach required by children with special needs. Such an approach accommodates individual learning styles and interests while providing training in basic social, behavioral and communication skills necessary to succeed in life.
We also discovered that very few educational alternatives exist for children with special needs, especially for older children. Even the few private programs that target this population are ill-equipped to meet the changing emotional, social and educational needs of children as they mature.
Because no competition exists, these programs have little reason to improve or to change.
As mothers of special-needs children and as authors who understand the challenges these children face, we urge – no, we implore – all Kentucky parents to support Rep. Stan Lee’s attempt to create the Students with Special Needs Scholarship Program. The quality of life for thousands of gifted, yet challenged, children depends upon having access to educational environments that are tailored to meet their special needs.
Parents interested in contributing their story can e-mail it to jwaters@bipps.org.
A 20-year campaign to bring school choice to Iowa resulted in passage earlier this year of a scholarship tax-credit bill allowing some of the state’s most impoverished families to escape the public-school monopoly.
The Educational Opportunities Act (EOA) received overwhelming bipartisan support among Iowa’s legislators and was signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Tom Vilsak, who became the second Democratic governor in the country to sign a school-choice bill in 2006.
Iowa’s program establishes a 65-percent tax credit for individuals who make contributions to approved school-tuition organizations (STOs). These groups then distribute scholarships to families with incomes at 300 percent or below of the federal poverty level, allowing parents to enroll their children in better schools.
Apparently, Iowa policymakers expect support for the policy to grow, as indicated by the fact that the cap, which is just $2.5 million this year, will grow to $5 million next year. The Sioux City, Iowa Catholic Diocese has already created a scholarship organization so more students may attend Catholic schools and allow charitable taxpayers to receive a tax break.
The program is similar to an idea offered in Kentucky by Reps. Jim Gooch and Mike Harmon, who co-sponsored legislation during the 2006 General Assembly that would set aside millions of dollars for student scholarships and provide needed improvements at public schools.
Scholarship tax-credit programs are among the most creative school-choice approaches in the nation today. They lower taxes for hard-working citizens while at the same time offering families – usually lower-income ones – the opportunity to provide a better education for their children.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t take Kentucky policymakers 20 years to figure out that commonwealth taxpayers and families deserve the same scholarship tax-credit opportunity that citizens in other states now enjoy.
Sources:
“Iowa enacts new scholarship tax credit program,” Milton D. and Rose Friedman Foundation, June 2, 2006.
“Diocese creates tuition foundation,” Sioux City Journal, Sept. 18, 2006.
Similar Kentucky bill filed in 2006 can be viewed here: http://www.kentuckyvotes.org/2006-HB-630 and http://www.kentuckyvotes.org/2006-HB-231.
While Germany has turned away from most of the tenants of the Third Reich, it’s still enforcing a remnant of that regime yet today – the prohibition of home schooling. It has been illegal for Germany’s parents to home school since the Third Reich abolished the practice in 1938.
Even today, home-schooling parents are frequently harassed and even arrested by German authorities, who forcibly escort some children to government schools while removing others from their homes altogether. Parents have been jailed and charged huge fines; once one of these fines is paid, another can be levied immediately.
Some parents appeal their cases; others leave the country.
Fritz and Marianna Konrad argued in a complaint filed with the European Human Rights Court in 2003 that what was being taught in the government schools conflicted with their Christian beliefs. However, the court – as these courts often do – sided with the state.
Katherina Plett was arrested on Sept. 7 at her Paderborn home for failing to send her children to public school. Her husband then fled with their 12 children to home-schooling friendly Austria.
Home schooling is important to these families for two primary reasons. First, Germany’s education system, which ranks almost last among 28 nations evaluated in a recent Italian study, does not provide the quality of education these parents want for their children. Second, parents who decide to home school complain that what is taught in German schools violates their religious beliefs and even often contains explicit sexual content.
All parents – whether in Germany or America – should have the freedom to choose where their children will be educated. Governments, including school officials and teachers unions, who would deny that liberty are – even if unconsciously – aligned with one of modern history’s most oppressive rulers.
– Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
Sources:
“Germany knocking on doors, again” by Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily, Sept. 25, 2006.
“Attacks on German Homeschoolers Continue," Home School Legal Defense Association, May 5, 2004.
“’Homeschooling Illegal’ Declares German School Official,” Home School Legal Defense Association, Jan. 7, 2005.
“Classic Homeschooling Magazine,” April 2006.
Uniform annual pay raises usually do not attract the most talented workers, whether in the public or private sector. This is especially true when it comes to our public-education system.
A new Cato Institute report says across-the-board pay policies tend to attract “more weak teaching applicants … and dysfunctional hiring processes prevent the best applicants from being chosen from an enlarged applicant pool.”
However, the nation’s teachers unions continue to treat the idea of paying teachers based upon performance rather than longevity in the system as pure heresy.
“The single salary schedule is the fairest, best understood and most widely used approach to teacher compensation – in large part because it rewards the things that make a difference in teacher quality: knowledge and experience,” states the National Education Association’s Web site. “Pay for performance plans are costly to taxpayers and difficult to administer.”
Not so fast, according to education researcher Marie Gryphon, whose new study of teacher incentives finds:
• Teachers are chosen and compensated on the basis of criteria set by teachers unions and other entrenched interests. Because those criteria do not focus on the qualities that define good teachers, they often favor less-qualified candidates over applicants whose skills could dramatically improve educational outcomes for their students.
• Across-the-board salary hikes may lower the overall quality of the teaching workforce, because they may attract more low-quality applicants.
• School choice provides teachers and administrators the incentive needed to employ only the best teachers and provide them with the incentives to stick with the profession.
In conjunction with a statewide school-choice policy, giving administrators the flexibility to hire and retain the best teachers will help them earn the trust of parents committed to giving their children the best education possible.
Sources:
“Giving Kids the Chaff: How to Find and Keep the Teachers We Need” by Marie Gryphon, Cato Institute, Sept. 25, 2006.
“Myths and Facts about Teacher Pay,” National Education Association.
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