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By Deisha Merriweather
Wall Street Journal
October 22, 2014

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I had been held back twice, disliked school, and honestly believed I’d end up a high-school dropout. Instead, three months ago, I earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of West Florida in interdisciplinary social science with a minor in juvenile justice. I am the first member of my family to go to college, let alone graduate. But this didn’t happen by chance, or by hard work alone. It happened because I was given an opportunity.

The difference maker was a scholarship that allowed me to go to a secondary school that was the right fit for me. I was lucky to be raised in Florida, home to the nation’s largest tax-credit scholarship program, a “voucher” program that helps parents pay for private schools. Here’s the cool part: The scholarships are financed entirely by charitable contributions, which are offset by tax credits. So public funds are never touched. The program is serving 67,000 students this fall. Like me, all come from low-income homes. Most are black or Hispanic. And the evidence from rigorous studies shows that, like me, most of them were failing in public schools but are thriving in private schools.

Despite these facts, last month the Florida School Boards Association and the state’s teachers unions filed a lawsuit to kill the tax-credit scholarship program. Should the suit succeed, nearly all the 67,000 low-income students in the program will no longer be able to afford their schools. Most will be forced to attend the same public schools that failed them in the past. Although 40% of Florida’s K-12 students are now enrolled in something other than zoned schools—in magnet schools, for instance, or career academies—the only program the state’s unions and school boards are trying to eliminate is the one reserved for low-income students.

Florida leads the nation when it comes to how well low-income fourth-graders can read. Yet being No. 1 still means that only 27% are proficient. I don’t know why anyone would want to end anything that can better those numbers. But I would hope people who care about disadvantaged children would pause to hear stories like mine.

I grew up with my biological mother and we moved around constantly. This really took a toll on my grades—Ds and Fs were the norm. My poor grades and the fact that I was two years older than most of my classmates angered and embarrassed me. I was “disruptive” and fought with other students. Teachers tried to help, but nothing they did seemed to work. I felt no matter how hard I tried, the results would be the same. Learning became a nightmare—a punishment for being a child.

In the sixth grade I began living with my godmother, who thought it was important that I change schools. She knew of a local private school with an excellent reputation, Esprit de Corps Center for Learning in Jacksonville, Fla., but we couldn’t afford the $5,200 annual tuition. That’s when a friend told her about Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program, which enabled me to attend Esprit de Corps—and changed my life.

At Esprit de Corps, making honor roll is expected and academic success is celebrated. This environment was very different for me. But something clicked. My grades and self-confidence rose. I believed I could succeed and people there believed the same. Learning was no longer a nightmare, but a gift I greatly appreciated. I worked hard. In the end, I graduated with honors.

And yet, that’s not the end. A different school didn’t just make dreams come true for me. It allowed me to have dreams I didn’t know I could have. Last summer, after graduating from the University of West Florida, I volunteered at an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, where I learned firsthand about that country’s social-welfare system. This spring, I plan to continue my education at the University of South Florida, in its joint master’s program in social work and public health.

I’m not sure which professional road I will take. I have options now. But whatever it is, I know I want to create opportunities for children to have a shot at a bright future. Just like I had.

Rick Hess, Max Eden
Washington Post
October 22, 2014

Education, the polls say, is a perennial worry for voters. More than three-quarters of the public give America’s public schools a “C” or lower; 58 percent think K-12 education is on the wrong track; Gallup found earlier this year that 81 percent of Americans called “extremely important” for the president and Congress to address. And this year has brought plenty of education news to worry over: the Common Core Standards in math and English that became a matter of heated national debate this year; President Obama’s $70 billion proposal to expand pre-K; New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio costly pre-K expansion in the Big Apple; and the Vergara lawsuit in Los Angeles, where a state judge ruled that California’s teacher tenure system violated the rights of low-income and minority students. Given all this tumult, which of these reforms are Republican and Democratic candidates for governor or the U.S. Senate most aggressively championing this fall?

The answer: none of them.

A systematic analysis of campaign Web sites for the 139 major party candidates for governor or U.S. senator (there is no Democrat running for the Kansas Senate seat) shows that most hopefuls have little to say on any of these pressing questions.

Topics familiar to education reformers seem foreign to sitting and aspiring governors. Only three Republican gubernatorial candidates mention teacher tenure reform on their Web sites, while not a single Democratic candidate does. Just three out of 35 Democratic candidates mention the bipartisan cause of charter schools; perhaps even more surprising is that barely one-third of the Republicans do. In fact, just four Republicans gubernatorial candidates suggest that money should follow students to the school of their choice. Even on bread-and-butter topics, discussion is sparse: Only one gubernatorial candidate in 10 mentions community colleges, while just three out of 70 mention that they should be helping more students to graduate from high school.

On the Senate side, things are much the same. Only one candidate for the U.S. Senate even alludes to teacher tenure, and only two mention high school graduation rates. Despite the efforts of organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, no Democratic senate candidates mention charter schools. And for all the talk about preparing a 21st century workforce, only five Republican candidates talk about improving science, technology and math (STEM) education.

When it comes to the Common Core, the fact that so few candidates take a stance on the issue is glaring. Opposition to the Common Core may be a rallying cry for Tea Party conservatives, but less than one-third of Republican gubernatorial candidates criticize it. Democratic candidates favor the Common Core two-to-one — among the only three who ventured to express an opinion.

For all the talk about national pre-K, only 16 out of 69 would-be senators and 17 out of 70 gubernatorial hopefuls even mention it, and support for it skews overwhelmingly Democratic.

The one subject on which candidates reliably have something to say makes them sound like holdovers from the 1990s. Just over half the candidates for governor — for whom K-12 and higher education will prove to be the largest budget item — call for increasing education funding. This includes almost 55 percent of Republicans and fewer than 50 percent of the Democrats.

But even the calls for more funds tend to sound like he-said-she-said bickering rather than a real debate over priorities in an era of tight budgets. Rick Snyder, the Republican governor of Michigan, boasts that he increased funding by $660 per pupil, while his Democratic opponent, Mark Schauer, alleges that Snyder made “deep cuts” and vows to restore the funds. Rick Scott, the Republican governor of Florida, claims a $2.3 billion increase in state education funding, whereas his Democratic opponent, Charlie Christ, claims that Scott has cut spending. Pity the voter without an accounting degree who has to make sense of all this.

Politicians often campaign on promises and then struggle to keep them once in office. When it comes to education, in this election it seems that politicians aren’t even bothering to take a stance on the current reform debates. So, despite the buzz around education reform, there’s little reason to expect significant policymaking in the next two years. Ultimately, this shows that it will take more than a handful of high-profile stories on each coast to affect a sea change in education across the country.

Check out CER’s interactive web-based voter’s guide, Education50, to find out where state governor candidates stand on education reform!