India's School Choice Movement

India is pushing forward with a school choice campaign. They have noticed an increase in the quality of private schools and a decrease in the quality of the state run public schools. The article, "A Ticket to Better Education" sounds awfully familiar to the state of the education system in the U.S. Interesting...the U.S. is not the only place that seems to pump money into education with no positive upswing.
An excerpt from the Business.com article feels like something I could write about here! I suppose it is reassuring to know that people all around the world are thinking choice is needed.

You advocate school vouchers as part of the campaign. What are the advantages of these vouchers?
We started out four years ago trying to figure out how much money the government spends per child in government schools. No official figures were available. When we did our research, even while taking the official enrolment figures at face value (which are generally fudged), we were surprised by our discovery. The school education system seemed like a black hole where money was being heavily pumped, with no tangible results. With the amount that the government spends per child in cities like Delhi [Rs. 1,200 to Rs. 1,700] the child could be sent to extremely good schools. This reinforced our faith in the project. "Fund students, not schools," became our slogan to the government.

The vouchers provide not just choice to students but also equality of opportunity. With the vouchers, even poor parents have a choice about which school their children go to. If the parent does not like the school, she can take her child along with the voucher to another school. Under the voucher system, money follows the student. Schools — government or private — to get the voucher, have to compete and satisfy the poor parent. Parents decide and parents choose, not government bureaucracies.

Given their performance-based payment system, vouchers encourage competition among schools, thereby helping to improve the quality of education. We are convinced that the voucher system is the best way to improve the quality of education and bring about greater accountability in the public education system.

School Choice Rally: Sends Strong Mesage

The strong support for school choice programs is proven in Washington DC. The school choice rally last week was successful and productive. What else can be done to make the message any clearer? Parents and students demand educational options!

Charter Schools Can Help Open Doors

Charter schools are a great way of expanding options for our children. While I wish there were more options available for special needs children, at least charter schools can give those children more options to look into other than the traditional public schools that may not service their needs.
However, currently, only Kansas City and St. Louis are allowed to have charter schools.

Shouldn't Children Take Presedence over Unions?

The school choice debate has been further fueled by the presidential race, the strong opposition to choice by president Elect Obama, and the inability to promote real change within the schools. Democrats claim to be strong supporters of public schools and the children they serve. While they may now have more power now to stimulate serious change, they are still servants to the unions. The teacher unions have millions of members, millions of dollars, and strong lobbying means. The Democrats thrive of this group's backing and support. The party serves to support the jobs and the adults running the show, but in doing so, removes the possibility of real change. There are, of course, people within the party, who are willing to show strong support for change; Democrats for Education Reform has been growing and publicly stood up against the unions. Now, we will wait in limbo to see what our new president will do.

The Wall Street Journal's Change Our Public Schools Need lay out what needs to be done within the Democratic party in order for schools to really have change:

Democrats also have to get serious about school choice. The unions oppose it because they don't want one student or one dollar to leave the regular public schools, where their members teach. So the Democrats have been timid and weak in putting choice to productive use -- even though their constituents are the ones trapped in deplorably bad urban schools, whose futures are being ruined, and who are desperate for new educational opportunities.
If children were their sole concern, Democrats would be the champions of school choice. They would help parents put their kids into whatever good schools are out there, including private schools. They would vastly increase the number of charter schools. They would see competition as healthy and necessary for the regular public schools, which should never be allowed to take kids and money for granted.

Public School Improving Because of Choices

The one debate always given by school choice opponents is that school choice will derail the public schools. I have always known that not to be true; but as we all know, some people will never change their minds. Interestingly enough, not every school choice piece is designed in the same manner. While some offer private school as an option, others do not. Additionally, some use private donations to fund the scholarships, as in the case with certain tax credits. Opponents will claim it would help the children who choose to change schools, but not the ones that stay. The argument from choice proponents is that when children have choices, they relocate and get better education, AND the failing schools will have no option but to compete for their students....they would have to improve.
According the the U.S. News, Education Section, the city of Baltimore is experiencing great improvements because of the school choices families are given:

A Turnaround for Baltimore Schools
November 18, 2008 04:15 PM ET Jessica Calefati Permanent Link Print
Enrollment in the Baltimore City Public Schools system has increased for the first time in nearly 40 years at a point when many urban school districts are struggling to compete with the allure of private and suburban schools.
Andres Alonso, the school system's chief executive officer, says Baltimore City has about 82,000 students enrolled this year, 750 students more than last year. Though Alonso will not know the exact number until his estimates are certified by the state a few weeks from now, he says he is certain of an increase, however big or small. He attributes reversing the regular, steady enrollment declines of 2,500 to 3,000 students a year to the growing variety of school choice options available to parents.
Since he arrived in 2007, Alonso has used community outreach as a tool to improve the Baltimore City schools and increase enrollment. He says he has personally attended more than 100 PTA and PTO meetings to seek feedback about the schools from the community. When parents told Alonso they supported independently operated public charter schools, he responded by opening 25 such campuses. When parents indicated they were unhappy with the city's middle and high school options, Alonso opened six new schools.
"We understand that the traditional school setting does not work for many students, which is why this celebratory mood signals so much," Alonso says. "Parents are voting with their feet and showing us they support the changes we've made with their children in mind."
Alonso publicly expressed his excitement about the city's increased public school enrollment by throwing a party at M&T Bank Stadium earlier this fall in celebration of the achievement. The nature of the enrollment declines in Baltimore had been so huge and so consistent that Alonso considers what's happening now a "monumental" success.
"With parents feeling more ownership of the city's schools, they will be more invested in what we have to offer," Alonso says. "That said, I know it's on us to provide attractive options that offer advantages for their children."

Poor Families Deserve Choices Too

In lieu of my normal commentary, I am going to post this article. All children deserve great education, not just the few elite. This comes from Go San Angelo, written by Dan Lips, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
Poor families, not just elite, deserve school choice
Dan Lips Thursday, October 30, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama has joined a growing club of elected officials who oppose school vouchers for poor families while sending their own children to private school.
In the final presidential debate, the Illinois senator criticized Sen. John McCain's plan to award tuition scholarships to low-income families living in Washington, D.C. He was echoing the sentiment he expressed to the American Federation of Teachers this summer: "But what I do oppose is spending public money for private school vouchers. We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools, not throwing our hands up and walking away from them."
But Obama did walk away from public schools when the time came to enroll his own daughters. After serving on the board of a charity that gave tens of millions to public education, Obama decided that Chicago public schools weren't good enough for his daughters. He enrolled them in the private University of Chicago lab school, where elementary school tuition costs more than $18,000 per year.
No one should begrudge the senator trying to give his children the best education and opportunities possible. Avoiding the struggling Chicago public schools was a sensible decision. Illinois reports that 34 percent of Chicago students are scoring below state standards in reading. A recent independent report estimated that the city's high-school graduation rate was 52 percent.
But Obama should recognize the urgent need to give poor children - not just his own children - the opportunity to attend a private school. He should sympathize with the low-income families who care just as much about their children's future, but lack a senator's salary to send their children to private school.
To get a sense of just how many parents in his own hometown are desperate for school choice, Obama should consider the experience of the Children's Scholarship Fund.
In 1998, this non-profit organization announced that it would award 2,500 private school scholarships to disadvantaged kids in the Windy City. To be eligible, students had to be from families whose annual income was below $22,000 per year. Families also had to commit to a partial co-payment: $1,000, on average. Scholarships would be awarded for a four-year period, putting participating families on the hook for $4,000 in tuition payments.
In all, 59,186 children in Chicago - 26 percent of the eligible population - entered the lottery for scholarships. This means that some of the poorest families in the community were willing to commit $236 million out of their own pockets to get their children into private schools.
Obama is just the latest in a long line of politicians who speak passionately about the need to stay committed to public schools, while abandoning those same schools when it comes to their own families. In the 1990s, President Clinton vetoed legislation that would have given poor families in D.C. scholarships for private school, even though he had sent his daughter to the elite Sidwell Friends School. Vice President Al Gore also aggressively opposed vouchers during the 2000 campaign despite having sent his own children to private schools.
A recent survey of Congress found that 37 percent of representatives and 45 percent of senators had sent at least one child to private school. (Nationally, only about 10 percent of children attend private schools.) Yet many of the same members continue to oppose providing the same options for disadvantaged children.
These elected officials often try to demonstrate their support for improving public education by pledging to spend more tax dollars on more programs aimed at fixing schools. But these promises should be of little comfort to families who have no choice but to enroll their children in bad public schools today. Furthermore, years of rising school budgets have yielded little improvement in the nation's worst school districts.
After all, in Washington, D.C., the government spends $13,000 per student, yet half of its eighth grade students failed a national reading test. As Sen. McCain has proposed, disadvantaged children living in the District should be given the power to use their share of school funding to attend a safer and more effective school of their parents' choice.
Obama and many of his colleagues understand how important school choice is, at least when it comes to their own children. Do disadvantaged children deserve less?
Dan Lips is education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank.

Taking a Stance Against the Status Quo!

Jennifer Friedrich, running for the 157th House District in Missouri, had the courage to step up to the plate and challenge the status quo. With school choice being such a heavily debated topic, I find it endearing she feels she can stand up. The teacher unions and other interest groups can be incredibly intimidating...but she is taking that chance.
Now, to be honest, I don't know much about her other views, but I will commend her stance on educational options.

Taken from Sunday's SouthEast Missourian:
"Education should be a free choice including home schooling. This is another example of taxation without representation. Centralized control has given us an educational system that ranks below most western and many third world countries. The choice belongs to the family and the local community, not a big brother nanny state. Vouchers or other systems should be put in place to help home-schoolers, as they consistently rank highest in quality and results."

Re-examining Testing of Special Needs Children?

In the state of California, a student must pass a high school exit exam in order to earn a diploma.  That basic theory reminds me of a reform idea Jeb Bush used in Florida, which would not let children progress to the 4th grade if they were not reading at a 3rd grade level.  Previously, the children who could not read were not 'discovered' until the 10th grade.  Once a child is in the 10th grade, they are more likely to drop out than to learn to read at that point in the game. 

So California students must pass this test in order to officially graduate.  It makes sense...what is the point in giving them a diploma if in fact they have  not been sufficiently educated?  On the other side of this coin, I am against over regulation by the government and the power they seem to have in every area of our lives. 

For several years, special education students in California were exempt from taking these tests, but currently they are required to do so.  On one hand, a child should be educated properly in order to graduate but special education children show different ways of learning.  This past year, nearly half of the special education students failed this exam.  The parents and the children are mortified, depressed, and angered at the testing methods.  An article in a StudyMBA blog  as well as the Los Angeles Times depicts the parents frustrations with the testing methods. 

If this were happening in Missouri to my child in the public schools, I would be more angry with the schools and its teaching than the tests.  I know many Missouri public schools that cannot effectively educate special needs children.  The state should allow the parents of those children to find schools that can educate them. 

Have the parents in California faced this issue and concern?  Undoubtedly, the parents are upset when their child fails, but perhaps it is the school's fault???