Morning Shots

People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of two new school choice programs in Arizona. If they succeed, they’ll block an innovative plan to help some of the most at-risk children in society.

In July, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, signed into law two new school choice programs aimed at two groups of children that need better choices: students with disabilities and foster children. The foster children program would be the first in the nation.

The liberal groups now suing to derail these programs say that the new programs violate the state’s constitution because some students might choose to attend parochial schools – a charge they have levied against other school choice programs across the country.

But Tim Keller of the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that defends school choice programs, explains that the programs don’t violate the state constitution. “The program is not created to benefit private or parochial schools,” he noted. “The program is designed to benefit children. And these children are in desperate need of aid.” Moreover, Arizona’s constitution has never been interpreted to forbid the state from improving educational options, such as by providing school choice.

How the Arizona Supreme Court will rule is uncertain. In 1999, the court upheld the state’s scholarship tax credit program in the face of a similar constitutional challenge. But this is the first time that it will consider the constitutionality of a school voucher program.

Two things are certain: The ruling will impact thousands of Arizona children and has the potential to affect many more across the nation. The challenges facing children with emotional, physical, or mental disabilities are well known. But foster children are too often overlooked. The new program was designed to address their unique needs.

By

Read More …

Canada has had government-run education for 150 years. To think what this means, it is instructive to compare the automobile industries in East and West Germany between the years 1945 and 1989. Both countries started off at essentially the same economic level in the aftermath of World War II, which (thanks to Allied bombers) was literally ground level.

Forty-four years later, East Germans were lucky to own a Trabant, a car so dirty and dangerous it achieved cult status before disappearing from East German roads a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  A Trabant was powered by an anemic and smoky two-stroke engine, and its body was made out of a sort of laminated cardboard.  A West German 1989 BMW, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced and well-made cars in the world. Even the lowliest car made in West Germany – for example, an Opel or a German Ford – had excellent comfort, performance, and reliability.

Canada’s government-run school systems are the educational equivalent of the East German car industry.  But there is a key difference. 

The problems with the Trabant were obvious because of the contrast with West German cars. But the problems with Canadian education are not as obvious, because there is no modern country with a wide-open competitive approach to schooling.

Every developed country in the world has government-controlled school systems.  Of course, some jurisdictions (for example, Alberta, BC, Sweden, and the Netherlands) have slightly more consumer choice among schools than the rest.  And these jurisdictions have slightly better educational results. 

But the differences are slight.  It’s like saying that a Lada was a better car than a Trabant.  Neither was very good.

Although there is no modern-day equivalent of the West German car industry, some did

Read More …

The Holy Grail of public education has always been to close the minority/white educational achievement gap.  For a while, that seemed to be happening; especially after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, black Americans’ standardized test scores improved significantly compared with those of whites.  However, between 1988 and 1994, black reading scores fell dramatically, a decline that mirrored the greatest deterioration in the quality of America’s public schools, and since that time those scores have remained flat-line.

The early 1990s saw the birth of publicly-funded schools of choice, including both private schools supported by government scholarships, and charter schools, which are community-run public schools of choice.  Despite the lower per-student spending in these schools of choice, and despite accepting less-prepared and largely ethnic minority students whose families were the first to flee public schools, these schools have shown  significant improvements in test scores and dramatic decreases in dropout rates.  

At first, defenders of the public school establishment disputed the data.  As that data has become more and more convincing, the ranks of the defenders of the status quo have thinned.

Among the last and most influential defenders of the public schools has been the New York Times, which only last summer published its first article acknowledging the success of school choice in improving the lives of minority families.  However, on Sunday, November 27, in a powerful and lengthy lead article in its Sunday magazine, even the New York Times signaled that it had come over to the side of the reformers.

This astounding article acknowledged the success of many charter schools in closing the black/white achievement gap, and singled out the KIPP (“Knowledge is Power Program”) charter schools as having the best shot at closing that achievement gap.  These schools, which enroll largely minority kids, were nurtured in

Read More …