I had the great fortune to attend a luncheon last Wednesday hosted by the Center for Education Reform held at the stately National Press Club.  The reason that an overflow crowd of about 300 people gathered together was to hear from CER founder and chief executive officer Jeanne Allen about a subject I wrote about a year ago.  Last May, I opined that the pace of school reform has stalled in Washington, D.C.  Ms. Allen has observed that this is not only true in the nation’s capital but around the entire United States.

For example, Ms. Allen informed the audience that following the release 40 years ago of the Reagan administration’s Nation at Risk study with its devastating findings regarding the condition of educational instruction taking place at American schools there were 36 reform laws passed over the nine years between 1991 and 2001.  However, she passionately explained, today one in three third grade students are not proficient in reading, and it appears that no one seems to care.  Of course, what she was stating is perfectly obvious.  If you have followed this cycle’s Presidential election contests at all you will see that the one area that both the candidates on the right and the left can agree on is that education reform in our public schools is an afterthought.

Ms. Allen and her 23 year old organization desperately want to change this dire situation.  To dissect the current environment further, and to make recommendations for improvement, the program proceeded from the CER CEO’s opening remarks to a fascinating panel discussion featuring John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable and former governor of Michigan; Donald Hense, chair, founder, and CEO of Friendship Public Charter School; and David Levin, president and CEO of McGraw-Hill Education.  Anytime you have the opportunity to hear my hero Mr. Hense speak he will not disappoint and this was certainly the case five days ago.  “We have  turned our movement over to people who have not done anything for the last 100 years,” Mr. Hense calmly explained.  “The charter authorizer here in D.C. now perceives itself as the school board. They are involved in everything and all that we do is regulated. We have lost ourselves. We [school reformers] thought we were done and so we hugged each other and applauded. Meanwhile the traditional schools have rearmed.”  He called for expanded school choice whether that means creating options for parents by nonprofit charter management organizations, for-profit CMO’s, or the use of private school vouchers.

The solution for what ails school improvement from the Center for Education Reform’s vantage point is contained in its manifesto that was released at the session entitled “A Movement at Risk.”  It recommends providing greater flexibility in the ability of schools to make decisions for themselves along with the funding to make this a reality, more consumer oriented school choice, and expanded transparency in the information about school performance across the country.  Whether these public policy proposals will improve academic performance of students is, of course, difficult to tell at this point, but based upon the energy and commitment from the people in the room sincere efforts at fixing public education reform are about to be rebooted.

A week ago Monday I attended a perfectly hosted event by the CATO Institute celebrating the life of Andrew Coulson.  For ten years Mr. Coulson was the director of the organization’s Center for Educational Freedom.  He died at the age of just 48 on February 7, 2016 from a brain tumor.

Mr. Coulson was best known for his book Market Education: The Unknown History which he wrote in 1999.  Executive vice-president David Boaz reminded those in attendance that Bill Gates quit school to form Microsoft while Mr. Coulson left Microsoft to reform schools.  I knew him for his pioneering effort to better understand the real cost of educating children attending DCPS.  Most people assumed as true that the number was around $15,000 a student a year.  Mr. Coulson showed that the statistic was really double that amount.  No one was ever able to refute his claim.

Mr. Coulson started his career in public policy at the Mackinac Center.  There he worked with Joe Overton, a friend of mine who was another pioneer in the school choice movement.  Mr. Overton passed away at age 43 in 2003 when a plane he was piloting crashed to the ground.  His revolutionary work in education revolved around the use of the Universal Tuition Tax Credit as an alternative to the often negative perceptions associated with private school vouchers.  But I knew Mr. Overton best for the steady ethical advice he provided to me about my own career.

The same illness that overcame Mr. Coulson claimed the life of Joseph E. Robert, Jr.  For years it appeared that it was only Mr. Robert’s indomitable will that led to the continued operation of the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the federal plan that provides private school tuition for kids living in poverty in Washington, D.C.  We may never really understand why this man who was able to generate so much income during his 59 years decided to give so much of it away to those less fortunate than himself.

Besides the commonalities that all three of these men’s existences ended much earlier than they should have, and that each fought for better educational opportunities for the most vulnerable individuals, they also shared an often all-encompassing love of life.  We saw an excellent example of that in a video presented at the CATO tribute regarding Mr. Coulson in which you could hear him laughing throughout the five minute presentation.  I had the chance to play tennis with Mr. Overton who demonstrated the identical outlook evident in his strong will to win. Anyone who had the chance to attend one Fight Night Gala witnessed firsthand the same quality in Mr. Robert.

It is in honor of these gentleman’s bold legacies and their enthralling love of life that we must continue to fiercely advocate for equal opportunity in public education for those who are the poorest among us.

Charter schools have seen tremendous growth in the United States.  For example, in 2014 more than 2.6 million children attended a charter.  According to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools this number has more than doubled since 2007.

Sounds good?  Well not really.  Also in 2014, 49,751,000 pupils attended their neighborhood school.  This means that educational choice was only available to 5.4 percent of families.  If you consider other choice programs such as vouchers, educational tax credits, and educational savings accounts the picture is even worse.  According to the CATO Institute, 287,298 scholars took advantage of one of these programs a couple of years ago which translated into about 0.6 percent of all students in the United States. The reason that these numbers look so bad is that so many of these offerings are so small.  For example, I wrote not too long ago about Maryland passing a school voucher law.  That’s good news.  But as CATO’s Jason Bedrick points out, “roughly 1,000 low-income Maryland students could receive a voucher next year, which is great for them, but doesn’t do anything for the other 99.9 percent of Maryland’s 880,000 district school students.”

Here in the District kids are much more fortunate.  44 percent of students, almost 39,000 attend charters.  That compares to about 49,000 attending DCPS.  While this statistic may be impressive the percentage of those in charters has not increased in years.  It is almost as if some parents were fortunate enough to take advantage of choice while others are shutout.  This year’s charter school waiting list is estimated at 8,600 scholars.  The total wait list for all schools in the District is 2,100.

We also have a voucher program in the city for kids living in poverty.  About 1,200 young people receive a scholarship to a private school.  Only 1.4 percent of children get this option.

I don’t really understand what’s going on here.  We talk about streetcars and statehood, homeless shelters and affordable housing.  But if it’s societal ills you really want to fix, then let’s educate our children.  We know that school choice was the fountainhead that led to the significant improvement in the number of quality classrooms.  It’s past time to put this movement in overdrive.

The school choice movement lost a hero recently when the CATO Institute’s Andrew Coulson died on February 7, 2016 at age 48 after a 15 month fight with brain cancer.  He was a fierce advocate of allowing parents to make the decision over the private or public school their children should attend, favoring tax credit funded scholarships for kids over vouchers as a means of keeping government out of the education business.

I did not know Mr. Coulson.  However, we did communicate by email several times during his many years as director of CATO’s Center for Educational Freedom.  His major accomplishment from my point of view was his groundbreaking revelation of what it really costs to teach pupils in our traditional public schools.

Mr. Coulson explained that when making this calculation all expenses need to be taken into account such as employee retirement plans and capital construction costs, funds that are many times excluded in this type of financial analysis.  For example, way back in 2008, he revealed that while D.C.’s Uniform Per Student Funding Formula amount was $8,322, the actual expense was $25,000 a kid once his methodology was taken into account.

The Washington Post’s Perry Stein writes today that Chancellor Kaya Henderson has requested a $910 million fiscal year 2017 budget.  Utilizing Mr. Coulson’s math, and doing some back-of-the-envelope estimations, if Ms. Henderson’s receives the money she is asking for DCPS will allocate about $29,000 annually for every enrolled child.  This is a quantity, Mr. Coulson would assert, equal to about the yearly tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school where President Obama sends his children.

For this amount of public money, and after 20 years of public school reform, we have student proficiency rates in reading and math at 25 percent, a statistic significantly lower for those living in poverty.  I can now hear Mr. Coulson proclaiming loudly, “Isn’t it about time we tried something new?”

The Washington Post’s Michael Allison Chandler wrote an article recently blaming school choice in the nation’s capital as a reason that the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhood Program is not working the way it was designed.  She writes about the $25 million plan in Northeast D.C.:

“But the children of Kenilworth-Parkside aren’t all benefiting from the ‘Promise Neighborhood’ program. Less than a third of the 1,600 students who live there attend neighborhood schools; the rest are enrolled in 184 others, scattered across a city that has embraced school choice more than almost any other.”

Promise Neighborhoods were the brainchild of Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder Geoffrey Canada who created the first one in New York City.  What is so interesting about this fact is that after he came up with the notion to provide family support to low income individuals he realized, as he explained to CityBridge co-founder Katherine Bradley, that he would not be able to make true progress in turning around the lives of kids until he opened a school.  He then created the Promise Academy Charter.

The impact of school choice has had a major positive impact on the very students that Promise Neighborhoods are trying to help.   As FOCUS discovered regarding the 2014 DC CAS results:

“The most interesting public charter school news is the widening gap between how well public charters and DCPS students who qualify for free or reduced price school lunch are doing. The gap is now over 15 percentage points in math and almost 13 percentage points in reading. To put this into perspective, if DCPS were able to match DC charters’ performance with economically disadvantaged students, about 2,000 additional poor children within the District would be able to read and do math on grade level.

Among African American students, charters now outperform DCPS by almost 17 percentage points in math and 12 percentage points in reading. Again, if DCPS were able to match charter performance, there would be about 2,000 additional African American students able to read and do math on grade level. For special education students the gap widened to almost 10 percentage points in math and over 5 percentage points in reading. Again, if DCPS were able to match charter performance, there would be about 250 additional special education students able to read and do math on grade level.”

If we would have to give up these gains because school choice complicates Promise Neighborhoods then guess which program should go?

The Washington Post’s Emma Brown has a follow-up story today about the recent Washington State Supreme Court decision finding that charter schools are not public schools because their governing boards are not elected by local citizens.  Her piece characterizes the competing arguments over whether these alternative educational institutions truly fit the definition of a public school.  I believe the whole controversy misses the point.

Everyone wishes that traditional neighborhood schools provided the high quality education that children deserve.  But just look at what happened here in Washington, D.C.  Over time the school bureaucracy became completely detached from the children it was serving.  The result was that very little teaching actually occurred in classrooms.  Much more common was the presence of violence, gangs, and illegal drugs.  It became safer for parents to keep their kids home than to send them to school.  The buildings themselves were rotting from years of neglect.  When students did show up their textbooks were missing, as in many cases was the instructor.

In the 1950’s Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman wrote that if we provided every child with a voucher to attend the private or public school of their choice parents would once again become the customer of school systems.  This is exactly what charters have accomplished in this town.  What is so exciting about the turn of events is that this sector is being responsive to those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum.  Many charters in the nation’s capital are taking low income kids who enter schools years behind grade level and bringing them up to academic proficiency and beyond.  These individuals in the past might have landed in jail or perhaps been killed as a result of violent activity.  As Dr. Darrin Woodruff, the chairman of the Public Charter School Board remarked when I interviewed him, “charter schools are changing peoples’ lives.”

I say forget the phony controversy over whether charters perfectly fit the public school paradigm.  Instead let’s be eternally grateful for the competition they have provided that has resulted in all schools, traditional and charter, rising to levels of performance never seen before in this country.  I think this should be more than enough.

Twenty five years ago I leveraged practically every cent our young family had and missed my younger child’s fourth birthday to attend a conference on libertarian political theory held at Dartmouth College organized by the CATO Institute.  There, I asked executive director David Boaz whether private school vouchers should initially be introduced to assist those living in poverty or whether their adoption should be offered to each public school student.  He advised that they should first be provided to low income students so that more of the general public would rally around their use.

Much has changed, in a positive way, for public education reform since that time.  The Friedman Center for Education Choice estimates that there are now 25 school voucher programs in 14 states and the District of Columbia that enroll over 148,000 kids.  In addition, the same organization reveals that currently 3,000 students take advantage of educational savings accounts in five states, with another 202,000 pupils benefiting from 20 tax-credit scholarship arrangements found in 16 localities.  Finally, the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools details that during the 2013 to 2014 school term over 2.5 million students attended charter schools.

Recently, Nevada passed an educational savings account plan available to almost all families, independent of income.  The editors of the Washington Post claim this is too much. “By subsidizing families who do not need aid, the state wastes public money that would be better directed to low-income students in academically struggling schools.”

The problem for the Post is that wealthy parents can afford to send their children to private schools so, according to the newspaper’s editors, it is not right to reimburse them up to $5,000 a child for the cost.  But this is actually an antiquated view of how public education is funded in America today.

For example, in the nation’s capital we provide all public school students essentially a scholarship to attend the traditional public or charter school of their choice equal to the amount dictated by the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula.  Could you imagine the outrage if we told taxpaying citizens that they had to cough up the money to send their children to some of our high performing facilities just because of how much they make?

This issue becomes even more relevant considering what took place just a few days ago in Washington State.  Their Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional, because, according to the Associated Press “charter schools don’t qualify as ‘common’ schools under Washington’s Constitution and can’t receive public funding intended for those traditional public schools.”  The decision creates chaos for the 1,200 kids already enrolled in the nine charters that have been established.  Our local charter school support organization, Charter Board Partners, opened a Seattle office in 2014.

The ruling by the Seattle Supreme Court came after a year of deliberation and was based upon the fact that charters are run by a non-publicly elected board of directors.  Instead of seizing on a particular governance structure or whether affluent families can take advantage of educational savings accounts we should re-focus our attention on the benefit of our children.  We should allow families to send their kids to the school of their choice.