Here’s Where School Choice Bills Stand as Congress Restarts

Here’s Where School Choice Bills Stand as Congress Restarts

School choice programs the Trump administration wants in next year’s budget haven’t gotten traction, at least with House lawmakers. (We still don’t know yet how the Senate feels.) But those aren’t the only choice plans Congress has the chance to consider. So how are these doing?

We checked in on the progress of a few, relatively high-profile pieces of legislation on Capitol Hill designed to expand school choice in various ways, and to various degrees. Here’s a status report for each.

  • H.R. 610, Choice in Education Act: This bill was introduced by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, in January. It would create vouchers using federal funds. It was introduced in the House education committee in January, but lawmakers haven’t acted on it since…

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Here’s What States Are Doing With Their ESSA Block Grant Money

Here’s What States Are Doing With Their ESSA Block Grant Money

UPDATED

For decades, district leaders have been clamoring for more say over how they spend their federal money. And when the Every Student Succeeds Act passed back in 2015, it looked like they had finally gotten their wish: a brand-new $1.6 billion block grant that could be used for computer science initiatives, suicide prevention, new band instruments, and almost anything else that could improve students’ well-being or provide them with a well-rounded education.

But, for now at least, it looks like most district officials will only get a small sliver of the funding they had hoped for, putting the block grants’ effectiveness and future in doubt.

The Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, ”or Title IV of ESSA, ”only received about a quarter of the funding the law recommends, $400 million for the 2017-18 school year, when ESSA will be fully in place for the first time…

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Indiana Submits ESSA Plan to Governor

Indiana Submits ESSA Plan to Governor

Click here to read the ESSA plan that was submitted to Governor Holcomb.

Indiana ESSA Plan – First Draft

Directions: We encourage you to read individual sections of the ESSA draft in the first column, and then click on the corresponding section survey to respond to the section draft.

ESSA Sections ESSA Section Surveys (CLOSED)
1 – Long Term Goals 1 – Long Term Goals Survey
2 – Consultation 2 – Consultation Survey
3 – Assessments 3 – Assessments Survey
4 – Accountability and School Improvement 4 – Accountability and School Improvement Survey
5 – Supporting Excellent Educators 5 – Supporting Excellent Educators Survey
6 – Supporting All Students 6 – Supporting All Students Survey
  • Click here for the full Indiana ESSA Consolidated Plan draft.
  • Click here to read a summary of the findings from our community meetings.

The Department of Education has recorded an informational webinar which is available on the IDOE website, titled Equitable Service to Non-Public Schools and an Overview of Changes in the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. This webinar goes into detail about the IDOE’s plan for ESSA, as well as changes with ESSA, with specific respect to non-public schools. 

Both public and non-public schools will learn more about their rights and responsibilities with the new law and will understand the role of IDOE in this process. At the end of the presentation, please be sure to fill out the questionnaire as we will be posting FAQ’s as part of the ongoing ESSA discussion. 

Trump Administration’s School Choice Plans: Four Questions to Ask

Trump Administration’s School Choice Plans: Four Questions to Ask

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took over the Education department, first and foremost, to move the ball forward on school choice, her long-time passion. She’s been in the job less than six months, but already, time may be running out to get a sweeping school choice initiative over the finish line, at least this year.

One big reason: There have been broad, school choice proposals floated, but no details.

The Trump administration has been signaling for months that it may push for a federal tax credit scholarship program, allowing individuals and companies to get a break on their taxes if they donate to a scholarship-granting organization. That could help low-income or special needs students cover private school. But it’s July, and there aren’t specifics on that. (Sources say that there could be details soon, however.)…

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Here Are Seven Education Items on Congress’ ‘Honey-Do’ List

Here Are Seven Education Items on Congress’ ‘Honey-Do’ List

A bill to reauthorize the federal career and technical education law is so popular that it recently got unanimous approval from House lawmakers. Is there any other big K-12 bill that will get the same kind of love? Don’t bet on it.

That doesn’t mean federal lawmakers don’t have a “honey-do” list when it comes to education policy. True, the Every Student Succeeds Act covers a lot of the ground when it comes to public schools. (We’re still watching for when #FixESSA starts trending on Twitter, however.) But we’ve put together a list of policy issues that the 115th Congress could address, at least in theory. Scroll down to see them in detail, or click a policy issue in the menu below to jump to that one.

Budget
Higher Education
School Choice
Student-Data Privacy
Education Research
Career and Technical Education
Juvenile Justice

  1. Budget: It might be the thing Congress tackles first on this list. Remember, the current budget deal only runs through Sept. 30…

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REPORT: State Legislatures Opting in to Opting Out

REPORT: State Legislatures Opting in to Opting Out

By: Michelle Croft and Richard Lee
ACT Research and Policy

Despite (or because of) the federal requirement that all students in certain grades participate in statewide achievement testing, stories of parents opting their student out of the testing gained national attention in the media in the spring of 2015. Ultimately, twelve states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin—received a notice from the U.S. Department of Education that they needed to create a plan to reduce opt-outs due to low participation rates.

When statewide testing came in spring 2016, there were more stories of opt-outs, and information about districts failing to meet participation requirements will follow in the coming months.3 Early reports from New York indicate that 21% of students in grades 3–8 opted out in 2016, which was slightly more than the prior year. (See attached PDF below for reference information.)

Participation Rate Requirements

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (both the No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds authorizations) requires that all students annually participate in statewide achievement testing in mathematics and English in grades 3–8 and high school as well as science in certain grade spans. Ninety-five percent of students at the state, district, and school level must participate; otherwise there is a range of consequences.

Under the No Child Left Behind authorization, the school would automatically fail to meet Adequate Yearly Progress if the school—or subgroups of students within the school—did not meet the participation rate requirement. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides states with greater flexibility to determine how to incorporate the participation rate into the state’s accountability system. However, in proposed regulations, the state will need to take certain actions such as lowering the school’s rating in the state’s accountability system or identifying the school for targeted support or improvement, if all students or one or more student subgroups do not meet the 95% participation rate.

Michelle Croft is a principal research associate in Public Affairs at ACT. Richard Lee is a senior analyst in Public Affairs at ACT.

Email research.policy@act.org for more information. © 2016 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. MS489

http://www.org/policy-advocacy

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REPORT: State Pre-K Funding for 2015-16 Fiscal Year: National Trends in State Preschool Funding. 50-State Review

REPORT: State Pre-K Funding for 2015-16 Fiscal Year: National Trends in State Preschool Funding. 50-State Review

Emily Parker, Bruce Atchison and Emily Workman
Education Commission of the States

This report highlights significant investments made by both Republican and Democratic policymakers in state-funded pre-k programs for the fourth year in a row. In the 2015-16 budget year, 32 states and the District of Columbia raised funding levels of pre-k programs. This increased support for preschool funding came from both sides of the aisle–22 states with Republican governors and 10 states with Democratic governors, plus the District of Columbia.

In contrast, only five states with Republican governors and three states with Democratic governors decreased their pre-k funding.

Overall, state funding of pre-k programs across the 50 states and the District of Columbia increased by nearly $755 million, or 12 percent over 2014-15. While this progress is promising, there is still work to be done to set children on the path to academic success early in life. Still, less than half of preschool-aged students have access to pre-k programs.

Increasing the number of students in high-quality preschool programs is broadly viewed as a way to set young learners on a path to a secure economic future and stable workforce. This report includes several state examples and an overview of the pre-k programs they have in place. Data tables on total state pre-K funding and state pre-kindergarten funding by program are appended. [Megan Carolan contributed to this publication.]

Download (PDF, 1.13MB)

Education Commission of the States. ECS Distribution Center, 700 Broadway Suite 1200, Denver, CO 80203-3460. Tel: 303-299-3692; Fax: 303-296-8332; e-mail: ecs@ecs.org; Web site: http://www.ecs.org

NATIONAL: Beware of School Voucher Doublespeak

NATIONAL: Beware of School Voucher Doublespeak

Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos delivered a much-anticipated speech about her plan to shift massive amounts of valuable taxpayer money away from public schools to pay for private school vouchers. That’s not exactly how she framed her ideas as she addressed the American Federation for Children (a pro-school privatization group chaired by DeVos until she was tapped to be Education Secretary). Instead, DeVos said the plan—details still to come—would amount to the “most ambitious expansion of school choice in our nation’s history.”

“School choice” is of course the go-to euphemism school voucher advocates use to sugarcoat a failed and unpopular idea. The general public has long been opposed to vouchers, and their academic track record is pretty grim.

Voucher devotees like DeVos know this, which is why the term “school voucher” has been ditched in favor of less offensive, appealing terms.

Take for example this line from DeVos’ speech to the AFC. Praising Indiana’s large-scale voucher program, she promised to “empower states and give leaders like Eric Holcomb the flexibility and opportunity to enhance choices Indiana provides its students.”

In that one sentence alone, DeVos offers up four favorite euphemisms used to rebrand voucher legislation: “empower,” “flexibility,” “opportunity” and, of course, “choice.”

The Trump-DeVos budget would slash the federal investment in public education programs by a whopping 13.6 percent, while providing $1.4 billion in new spending on school voucher expansion. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The intent is to obscure the fact that these spruced up proposals still produce the same result: less taxpayer money for public schools, more taxpayer money for unaccountable private schools that can, and do, discriminate.

The Trump budget request for fiscal year 2018 unveiled on May 23rd makes it clear that DeVos intends to deliver on this threat. NEA President Lily Eskelsen García calls the outlined education budget a “wrecking ball” to public education in service of a school privatization agenda.

“DeVos and Trump have made failed private school vouchers a cornerstone of their budget,” said Eskelsen García. “Vouchers do not work and they take scarce funding away from public schools—where 90 percent of America’s students enroll—and give it to private schools that are unaccountable to the public.”

As the details to DeVos’ plan become clearer in the coming weeks, expect to hear more about “opportunity,” “flexibility,” “tax credits,” “savings accounts,” “scholarships”—everything except “private school vouchers.” Here are a few programs touted by DeVos that, despite being smoothed out around the edges, are still at their core schemes to funnel taxpayer dollars from public schools to fund private and for-profit schools.

‘Tax Credit Scholarships’

These programs, which could be a centerpiece of the administration’s plan, currently exist in 17 states with more potentially ready to follow suit.

A tax credit scholarship incentivizes individual taxpayers or corporations to donate money to non-profit organizations that bundle the funds and disburse them (less their cut for administrative expenses) as private school vouchers. Donors are able to claim the donations as credits against their state tax liability and often can also claim those same donations as deductions to reduce their federal tax bill.

Advocates avoid legislative battles over the cost of a direct voucher program by using wealthy taxpayers as middlemen, says Carl Davis of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

“Rather than include line-items in state budgets for spending on school vouchers, lawmakers ask taxpayers to undertake such spending on the state’s behalf, in return for a generous tax giveaway,” Davis recently wrote in The American Prospect.

Far from philanthropy, the individuals who make these donations can often get more in return than they gave by also claiming a federal charitable tax exemption—what Davis calls “double-dipping.”

Davis and others label these programs “neo-vouchers” because they still, through a more circuitous route, transfer taxpayer money to private schools.

‘Education Savings Accounts’

school vouchers ESAsAnother “back-door voucher” is an Education Savings Account (ESA). With ESAs, a portion of a state’s per-pupil education funding is put into an account that parents can tap into to pay for approved education expenses. This includes private school tuition and fees, textbooks, test prep services and tutoring, as well as a variety of other services, with no oversight over student outcomes.

In March, Arizona eliminated eligibility requirements from its existing ESA program. Initially aimed at students with disabilities and dubbed “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” the program is now open to virtually all students, and, as caps ease, could include as many as 30,000 public school students by 2020. The program allows parents to take 90 percent of the money that would have gone to their school district and spend it as they see fit. The program, says Arizona State Senator Steve Farley, is nothing more than an “ESA voucher debit-cards-for-all scheme.”

‘Opportunity Scholarships’

The Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program is the first and only federally funded school voucher program in the country. Created by Congress in 2004, the program provides vouchers to 1,100 low-income D.C. students, some of whom were already attending private school. Secretary DeVos would like to expand the program, ignoring a recent study that found that participants who used vouchers scored lower than their public school peers in both reading and math.

Lawmakers in North Carolina appropriated the term “opportunity scholarship” when they enacted a voucher program in 2013. The program was funded at $17.6 million in 2015-16, and up to $24.8 million in 2016-17. Meanwhile, public school funding in North Carolina has been slashed. In 2016, the state spent more than $12 million on these “scholarships,” which are expected to serve 32,000 students by 2026, at a cost of $134 million annually.

Tell Betsy DeVos: Your Voucher Plans Harm Students
Betsy DeVos’ goal as Secretary of Education is to slash funding for public schools, using voucher schemes to funnel taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools.A well-resourced public school in every neighborhood is our best bet for setting every student up for success. Email DeVos today. Tell her to focus on investing in public schools.

While there are no data to support the claim that voucher programs increase the opportunities for low-income children to attend higher-performing schools, there is considerable evidence that voucher programs increase the “opportunity” for more affluent families to receive public subsidies for private education. In Indiana, home to the largest voucher program in the nation, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended public schools, so Indiana taxpayers are subsidizing private school education for many students whose families could already afford it.

This slow but steady expansion of voucher programs is being duplicated elsewhere. It’s become a familiar story: voucher bills are rebranded and targeted towards specific populations—low-income students or students with special needs, for example—to make them more politically palatable. Once the legislation is implemented, eligibility requirements are soon eased, and funding is increased. Meanwhile, funding for public schools is further eroded.

“For too long, these schemes have experimented with our children’s education without any evidence of real, lasting positive results,” says Eskelsen García. “Improving public schools requires more money, not less, and public money should only be used to help public schools.”

National News: Here’s what DeVos said today on Capitol Hill

National News: Here’s what DeVos said today on Capitol Hill

There were few fireworks Wednesday as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos testified before a House appropriations subcommittee on the Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposal. DeVos deflected much of the skepticism she received and continued to push the administration’s support of school choice.

President Trump’s proposal, which has drawn sharp criticism from educators and lawmakers alike, calls for $1.4 billion to expand school choice — namely vouchers and charter schools — but slashes $10.6 billion from after-school programs, teacher training and federal student loans and grants.

In her opening statement, DeVos said Trump’s budget proposal would return power to states and school districts and give parents a choice in their child’s education.

Democrats, including New York Rep. Nita Lowey, accused DeVos of taking money from public schools to fund school choice.

“We’re not proposing any shifting of funding from public schools to private schools,” DeVos responded. “In fact, all of the proposals set forth in the budget commit to fully funding public schools as we have.”

“If you’re pouring money into vouchers, the money is coming from somewhere,” Lowey said.

Many Republicans, while upset about proposed cuts to career and technical training programs, expressed support for DeVos.

“We are beginning to see the early stages of a much-needed, robust discussion about how we begin the process of getting our federal budget under control,” Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said.

Democrats questioned DeVos about whether she would allow federal funds to go to private schools that discriminate against particular populations.

Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts brought up Lighthouse Christian Academy, a school in Bloomington, Indiana that receives $665,000 in state vouchers and denies admission to children of LGBT parents.

“Is there a line for you on state flexibility?” Clark asked.

“You are the backstop for students and their right to access quality education. Would you in this case say we are going to overrule and you cannot discriminate, whether it be on sexual orientation, race, or special needs in our voucher programs?” Clark added. “Will that be a guarantee from you to our students?”

DeVos sidestepped the question.

“The bottom line is we believe that parents are the best equipped to make choices for their children’s schooling and education decisions,” DeVos said. “Too many children today are trapped in schools that don’t work for them. We have to do something different than continuing a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach.”

DeVos’s appearance before Congress was her first public seating since a rough confirmation hearing before the Senate back in January.

Source: NPR

Bill Would Repeal Law GOP Used to Scrap Obama’s ESSA Rules

Bill Would Repeal Law GOP Used to Scrap Obama’s ESSA Rules

A bill that would repeal the means Congress used to overturn regulations for the Every Student Succeeds Act has been introduced by three Democratic lawmakers, including one possible presidential hopeful for 2020.

The legislation, introduced Tuesday, would get rid of the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn recently enacted federal regulations, like those that President Barack Obama’s administration wrote to govern accountability and state plans for ESSA. It was introduced by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who could be a candidate for the White House in three years, and Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., also introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives.

Earlier this year, Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., introduced a resolution under the CRA to overturn those regulations, and President Donald Trump eventually approved it. Arguably, it’s the most consequential action Trump has taken with respect to K-12 education since taking office in January

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