Friday, May 20, 2005

EDUCATIONAL CHOICE: SHOWDOWN IN FLORIDA

On June 7, the Florida Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could decide whether Florida continues to lead the nation in true education reform or joins the ranks of states where "reform" means business as usual. The question the justices will be asked to decide is whether the state constitution prohibits the state from giving scholarships to parents whose children are stuck in failing public schools so they can transfer those kids to private schools of their choice.

Opponents claim the program results in impermissible "aid" to religion because it allows scholarship recipients to send their children to religious as well as nonreligious private schools.

A major problem with that argument, however - and one school choice opponents have steadfastly refused to squarely address - is what implications that argument has for Florida's three dozen other social and educational aid programs that, just like Opportunity Scholarships, allow participants to freely choose among religious and nonreligious providers. On the education side alone, more than 200,000 Floridians receive publicly funded scholarships through a variety of state aid programs, all of which permit scholarship recipients to attend religious schools if they choose. This includes more than 100,000 college students using Bright Futures and other higher education scholarships, nearly 15,000 K-12 students attending private schools through the McKay Program for Students with Disabilities, and 12,000 K-12 students in the Corporate Tax Credit program.

Moreover, starting this fall, anywhere from 90,000 to 150,000 pre-K students are expected to enroll in the new universal pre-kindergarten program, and, like Opportunity Scholarship recipients, they will enjoy a full range of religious and nonreligious options.

Besides educational aid, many state and local agencies contract with organizations such as the Salvation Army to provide a wide range of services including prison counseling services, drug rehabilitation, and aid to the homeless. Likewise, religious hospitals receive public money through the Medicaid program. Does that count as "aid" to the churches that run those hospitals? Fortunately, the answer to that question is "no."

Florida has a long history of neutrality when it comes to allowing religious organizations to participate in all manner of social and educational aid programs. Why doesn't it count as aid to religion when a Bright Futures scholarship recipient decides to attend a school like Hobe Sound Bible College or Florida Christian College? It's because the "aid" is to the student, not the particular school he or she happens to attend. Same thing with Medicaid; even though state money ends up going to a religious institution, the aid is to the patient who chooses that hospital, not the hospital itself or the church that runs the hospital.

The same is true of Opportunity Scholarships. When the state gives parents an educational lifeline - when it gives them, for the first time in their lives, a choice of where to send their children to school - that is aid to those parents and their children. It is not aid to whatever schools they happen to choose.

School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Nothing more starkly divides the haves and the have-nots in this country than the question of who has the ability to ensure educational excellence for their children by choosing where they go to school, and who must simply take whatever their local public schools have to offer, no matter how clearly inadequate. Florida is on the right side of that debate and the right side of history. While many states promise all students a high-quality public education, only Florida delivers by saying to parents, "If we can't get the job done, we'll give you a scholarship so you can find someone who will." Now that is accountability.

The Opportunity Scholarship program is a true education reform that has already enriched the lives and future prospects of hundreds of children. And, as verified by a new Harvard study, it is also a means of injecting into education a little healthy competition - something from which public schools have been all but immune until now.

Source





BRITISH PARENTS SLOWLY GIVING UP ON STATE SCHOOLS

Particularly in London

More parents are turning their back on the state system and choosing to educate their children privately, as record numbers of independent students go on to university. While the overall number of pupils attending independent schools has dropped for the first time in a decade, figures published yesterday show that girls now outnumber boys at independent day schools and that the number of privately educated British children is up. The implication that parents do not trust the state system coincides with several leading universities revealing that they would take more state pupils provided they could charge the highest rate of tuition fees.

Although dozens of schools charge fees of more than 20,000 pounds a year, 620,000 children - or 7 per cent of all school pupils - are now privately educated, according to the latest census by the Independent Schools Council. Although the total numbers attending ISC schools are down by 3,250 pupils from 504,830 in 2004, the combined drop in overseas pupils and the end of the assisted places scheme equates to a real rise of 1,837 more British pupils attending private school. Jonathan Shepherd, the general-secretary of the Independent Schools Council, said that more girls now attended day school than boys for the first time since 1982, and that although overall numbers have dropped 0.6 per cent, this was against a demographic dip of 1.2 per cent.

More importantly, Mr Shepherd insisted that with a record 92.2 per cent of independent school-leavers going to university, rising to 95 per cent among girls, the ISC had found no evidence of universities discriminating against them. "We continue to take a number of people in our schools from disadvantaged backgrounds, so it would be a tragic irony if by giving them help they find another hurdle at university," he said. "However there is no evidence, apart from anecdotal here and there that this is happening. The evidence is on the contrary that more of our students are going on to university than before."

In 1997 the Government abolished the assisted places scheme, which had helped to pay the private school fees of around 100,000 pupils from less well-off families. Now, just under a third receive some form of assistance with fees, usually in the form of bursaries. More worrying, Mr Shepherd said, was that 60 per cent of A grades at A level in modern languages were achieved in private schools, a trend that was "uncomfortably high" and reflected in both sciences and engineering.

But it is precisely because of this, said Priscilla Chadwick, the leader of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, that universities cannot afford to discriminate. "A lot of students are doing a majority of subjects which universities value enormously, in sciences and languages, and these in particular contribute to the admissions to universities," the principal of Berkhamsted Collegiate School in Hertfordshire, said.

Although the 1.5 per cent drop in boarders was "disappointing", it was blamed largely on the 10 per cent drop in pupils from China, Hong Kong, Russia and the US who had been put off by the doubling of visa fees. That rise was in addition to flights home and the average annual cost of boarding fees of 19,000 pounds, which included an average fee increase of 5.8 per cent for last year alone.

In London around 20 per cent of parents send their children to private school, compared with a national average of seven per cent. At Westminster School, Tristram Jones-Parry, the head master, has said that in the past few years applications from girls has risen from 180 to 240. "They have become more aware that these days you don't just float into a decent university. You need top grades at both A level and at least five or six A* grades at GCSE, and I think girls are becoming aware of that at an earlier age," he said. Twenty-five years ago, the male-female ratio at university was 60:40, but in recent years that has changed to 56 per cent female, to 44 per cent male.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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