School Choice

A divided state Senate has approved the nation's broadest school "choice" bill and sent it to the House and an uncertain future. The measure would give state vouchers of as much as $900 to parents choosing to send a child to a school, public or private, other than the public school they'd normally attend. While other states have some form of "school choice," none is as generous as the Pennsylvania proposal. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Frank Salvatore, R-Philadelphia, passed yesterday, 28-22, after a day and a night of sometimes bitter debate.

A glance at some recent newspaper stories and editorials on school choice would lead one to believe the school choice movement is a Catholic conspiracy being engineered by a sinister group of red-robed figures who take their orders from the Vatican. Some in the local media apparently believe the school choice movement is some sort of papal plot to take over education in Pennsylvania. As a Protestant Philadelphian, I feel it is important to address the notion that the push for school choice is primarily a Catholic movement.

Few organizations are as consistently liberal as the Anti-Defamation League, especially when it comes to matters of church and state. The ADL devotes an entire page on its website ( www.adl.org ) to church-state separation, and it wants the "wall" between the two to remain as high and impenetrable as possible, believing that to lower it would have a negative effect on both. Which makes it remarkable that the executive committee of the ADL's Philadelphia chapter has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution endorsing vouchers that would allow children in underperforming schools in poor neighborhoods to escape to schools that would give them a safer environment to learn in and, thus, a better education.

The educational choice movement is gaining ground. Yesterday, President Bush was in Philadelphia at the Archbishop Ryan High School promoting the provision of $1,000 vouchers to low- and moderate-income parents. The administration's endorsement comes in the wake of state efforts. California's Choice in Education League has announced that it has enough signatures to put a state school voucher referendum on the ballot. In March, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the right of poor Milwaukee parents to choose private schools paid for with tax dollars.

Just recently, the Philadelphia Compact commissioned a poll on where Philadelphians stand on school choice and vouchers. The results were not significantly different from prior studies. In past results, offered by Temple University, Millersville State University, state Rep. Dwight Evans and the Commonwealth Foundation, the polls showed that from 60 percent to 75 percent of African- Americans and Hispanics support vouchers, particularly poor urban residents. Not until the Gallup National Poll in 1998 showed that a majority of white Americans support school choice did the issue start to get serious attention in certain professional communities.

The United States education system is governed by the political process. Public elections and lobbying work to establish where schools will be built, what will be taught, and which teachers will be hired. As a result, our elementary and secondary education system contains all the inefficiency and stagnation symptomatic of government bureaucracies. Low quality, high costs, a lack of innovation, and perverse incentive structures plague our education system. Thousands of reforms and billions of dollars worth of tinkering with the system have failed to improve the lot of students.

It is about time we address head-on the root cause for our social problems such as poverty, crime, drugs, etc. More money for welfare, prisons, condoms, and treatment might temporarily help those who suffer but it won't make a dent in solving the basic problems. Only education will. Then there is unemployment, partly brought on by foreign competition. If our work force were better educated, our country would be more competitive. Just like we used to be. But education is ineffective in this country.

Only a few weeks remain before our lawmakers in Harrisburg adjourn for the summer. A very critical issue remains on their calendar, and each moment that a decision is delayed, the future of another child and another family is threatened. I urge everyone in our community to ask their legislators to consider and support the education reform plan now before them.For many of us, the school choice initiative proposed by Gov. Ridge offers hope for struggling school districts and a more promising future for our children and families.

Last week, I spent two days at Harvard listening to education policy experts debate tuition vouchers, only to decide that no one there caught the essence of the issue as neatly as Mayor Street's spokesperson Barbara Grant a few days before I went. Explaining why it didn't matter that four of the mayor's appointees to the school board had sent some or all of their children to private school, Grant said, "You can't blame any parent trying to make the best choice for their child. " Indeed, you can't.

The school board figures $50,000 is what it costs them every year for a teacher, and in March, during the last hectic days of a very tough budget year, each $50,000 meant something. In the end, 17 teaching positions were slashed, including two high school English teachers, three elementary-school gym teachers and three teachers from the elementary talented-and-gifted program. When they left, the primary grades' program ended. Now comes a crisis of a different sort, involving that same figure, the same job, the same budget.

By Robert Maranto The best book about public schools is not about schools at all. Jeffrey Race's War Comes to Long An tells the tale of a province viewed in completely different ways by the North and South in the long Vietnamese civil war. The communists and government forces had different names for the same towns, had safe havens and danger zones that were mirror images of each other, and had completely distinct views of what the war was...

Meeting with African American leaders at the governor's mansion last year, Gov. Christie told a story from his student days at the University of Delaware. An African American friend, hoping to give the young Christie a sense of being black on a largely white campus, took the future governor to the historically black Delaware State University. Christie stood out. He got stares. And so, the boy from the white North Jersey suburbs got a small sense of his friend's daily existence. Michael Blunt, the African American mayor of tiny Chesilhurst borough in Camden County, recalls being moved when hearing the story.

THE DEED is done. Amid some of the most well-orchestrated and well-attended protests from parents and activists in recent history, the School Reform Commission last week voted to close down nearly two-dozen schools and consolidate a dozen others. The next question: What can the SRC and Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. do to prevent more closings in the future? More to the point, what can parents, teachers and public-education advocates do to prevent them? Before we get to answers, we have to look at the problem.

By Michael Moroney It is no secret that our education system needs reform, but what direction to take and how to get there present a formidable challenge. Countless studies have shown that our children's math and science skills are dangerously below average. Test scores for eighth-grade Pennsylvania students have remained stagnant since 2005, and in 2011, about 61 percent of students scored basic or below basic on standardized tests. Schools continuously report failing test scores while our federal government pours unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money into an ineffective system.

Three Camden students seeking to transfer out of their poorly performing district on the state's dime, with a petition that is seen as an effort to enable school choice in the city, will have to wait for a final decision. That's the result of the New Jersey education commissioner's siding with an administrative law judge's decision to deny swift relief to the students. In the petition, filed in October, lawyers for the three children and their parents asked the state to waste no time in reassigning Keanu Vargas, 12, a seventh grader at Pyne Poynt Family School; Freddy Hernandez, 5, a first grader at Davis Elementary; and Emmanuel Roldan, 8, a fourth grader at Dudley Elementary, to better-performing parochial or other schools not part of the Camden School District, claiming the boys were losing valuable time academically.

Three Camden students seeking to transfer out of their poorly performing district on the state's dime, with a petition that is seen as an effort to enable school choice in the city, will have to wait for a final decision. That's the result of the New Jersey education commissioner's siding with an administrative law judge's decision to deny swift relief to the students. In the petition, filed in October, lawyers for the three children and their parents asked the state to waste no time in reassigning Keanu Vargas, 12, a seventh grader at Pyne Poynt Family School; Freddy Hernandez, 5, a first grader at Davis Elementary; and Emmanuel Roldan, 8, a fourth grader at Dudley Elementary, to better-performing parochial or other schools not part of the Camden School District, claiming the boys were losing valuable time academically.

Christmas in mid-October Strolling through the garden section of a big-box store, I was amazed to see many lighted Christmas trees (at $199.99 each) and to hear an ongoing and very loud rendition of "Jingle Bells. " This display constitutes a total ignoring of fall and its natural beauty, as well as all of the wonderful events, activities, and holidays that will occur in the next two months. This is really a not-too-subtle attempt to develop a purposely extended commercial Christmas selling season that will distract attention and interest in such happenings as Halloween, the World Series, the presidential election, Thanksgiving Day, the observance of Pearl Harbor Day, and even Hanukkah.

WHAT SHOULD the penalty be for two Philadelphia parents caught sending their child just to a neighboring school district just over the Philadelphia border? In the spectrum of law enforcement, what is the appropriate punishment for these parents trying to get their elementary-school-age daughter a better education in a suburban school district? Should the daughter be removed and the parents warned? Should she be removed and the parents fined? Should the daughter be removed and the parents forced to pay back to the taxpayers of Lower Moreland Township $10,753, which is the cost of tuition for an out-of-district child attending Lower Moreland schools?

Joe Watkins has worked for a U.S. president and a senator, has served as an investment company manager, and twice ran for statewide office. In 2010, Students First, the pro-vouchers and charter-school political action committee he headed, made the largest total contribution from a single source to one candidate in Pennsylvania history - $3.3 million to Philadelphia Democrat Anthony Hardy Williams. Watkins, 59, lives in Philadelphia, where he's the pastor of a North Philadelphia church.

The Chester Upland school board voted unanimously Thursday night to work with state-appointed Chief Recovery Officer Joe Watkins in crafting a recovery plan for the financially distressed Delaware County district. Watkins was selected as chief recovery officer this month by Pennsylvania Education Secretary Ron Tomalis under new legislation that gives Watkins broad power to recommend closing schools, renegotiating the teachers' contract, making budget cuts, privatizing school management, and turning schools into charters.