The Special Needs of Georgia's Voucher Advocates

"Private schools are private schools, they are not obligated to take all these students. There's nothing in the law that requires them to do that." --Jeff Gagne, Overseer of the new Georgia voucher program

A significant cluster of all those children that conservatives do not want to leave behind is comprised of individuals with special needs. Since NCLB became law, these children, not to be left behind, have been forced to take tests that were not made for students with special needs and that, furthermore, do not assess learning that was supposed to accrue from these students' individual educational plans (IEPs). And because no NCLB subgroup's failing scores can be left behind, hundreds, if not thousands, of schools have been added to the federal failure lists because of entirely-predictable shortcomings of special needs students to score high enough to make AYP.

Enter, stage Right, parents and their legal advisors from the conservative think tanks to argue that public schools are not meeting the needs of their special needs students, and that, therefore, the parents of these children should be given vouchers to enroll their children where they can get the special attention they deserve. Remember the tests?

That was January, and now it is July, and Georgia has a brand new law that allows parents to receive a school voucher for their special needs child that is redeemable at any approved private or public school, religious or otherwise. Over a hundred private schools (50 of them religious) have already been approved by the state, and conservatives are high as a kite. In order to not get in the way of the sacred, invisible hand of the marketplace or God, as the case may be, the State has not intruded with bureaucratic requirements for these approved schools, such as certification requirements for teachers, the presence of programs for children with special needs, or regional accreditation (as required by public schools). Most importantly, however, these children now placed in private and religious schools no longer need to take the tests, remember the tests?, because the private schools, by virtue of being private, are not required to be accountable. The invisible hand, or the not so invisible one reaching into the taxpayers' pockets, will take care of all that accountability business.

Coming on the heels of the resegregation decision by SCOTUS, Georgia's voucher advocates have had most their special needs met now. Wealthier parents will be able to have their children classified special ed, declare they are not being served, and head off to the local Baptist academy with a fresh voucher. Poorer parents will have their children, who have been dragging down their schools' test scores, classifed for them and given the choice of a segregated religious school or a segregated secular private school. And that's the kind of choice that the choice advocates are shouting hallelujahs for. From Jim Wooten in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

. . . .The truly significant lesson from the week’s education news is that the marketplace has shown a willingness to embrace concepts that educrats think radical and that their interest groups and unions have resisted forever.

A successful introduction is not, however, success. Johnson [Georgia Senate sponsor of the Bill] and other supporters managed to resist attempts to saddle potential competitors with all the rules and regulations that cover traditional public schools. Critics note, for example, that private schools aren’t required to have curriculums tailored to special-needs children, or to hire certified teachers or those trained in special education. True enough.

They note, too, that competitiors are free to accept or reject applicants. True enough.

And hallelujah.

What’s happening here is that the locus of authority is tranferring from government to parents. For the first time in well over a century, the earth is moving in a direction that empowers parents — all parents, not just those with money.

For choice to be real, providers of education services should never, ever, be required to take every applicant. If they can’t serve a child’s particular needs — either because he’s disruptive, not up to grade, or deemed to have problems the school’s not equipped to address — they should be free to reject him.

When enough like-needs children exist, creative educators and entrepreneurs in the free market will create new schools. . . .

The freedom to "accept or reject applications" does not just apply to the white Georgia country clubs of a bygone era.

Cross-posted at Schools Matter.

A higher education mess

Since I'm here in my office anyway, on a Saturday, I thought I'd take a brief break and describe some of the politics of Florida higher education... by video. Yes, Education Policy Blog is now including vlogging! I'm curious whether the video panel below will show up on RSS aggregators...

New Bush Version of NCLB: Privatization 2.0

From an earlier post at SM:

. . . .when it became apparent in 2001 that a school voucher provision would not be included in NCLB, the White House’s inside man in the Senate, Sen. Judd Gregg, rallied support among disappointed Republicans. In doing so, he offered this glimpse into the Rovian education strategy to bring down public schools and, in the process, dump billions into the laps of tutoring concerns run by corporate and fundamentalist supporters:

“Well, the supplemental services [tutoring] are a foot under the door for vouchers. They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly, and we’ll finally be able to show that the schools aren’t doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing” (Debray, 2006, p. 96).

And, of course, this strategy is working. More and more schools, teachers, and children are being labeled as failures each year as we move inexorably toward impossible test targets that were cynically crafted to produce failure, rather than success. . . .

Well, the dependable water carrier, Senator Gregg, is back with the Administration's version of NCLB 2.0. It comes with all the previous privatization features intact, but the strategies have been fine-tuned and intensified. Despite the allowance for "growth models" in all fifty states, which the media will no doubt portray as a good, flexible compromise, the demand for steady test score increases toward the impossible 100% proficiency test target by 2014 remains unchanged. The unyielding and unreachable proficiency target by 2014 makes growth models irrelevant to the continuing and expanded list of sanctions that are included in 2.0 in order to hasten the privatization goals. From Education Week:

. . . . The Senate bill was introduced July 12 by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a former Senate education committee chairman and another architect of the NCLB law.

The measure, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-N.C., would echo some of Rep. Miller’s ideas by introducing more flexibility into the accountability system at the center of the law.

It would permit all 50 states to participate in the Department of Education’s growth-model pilot.

. . . .

The bill would retain the deadline of the 2013-14 school year for bringing all students to proficiency. . . .

In the new and improved privatization plan, the menu of sanctions for failure to meet AYP (replacing staff, private management, charter conversion, state takeover) remains in place, but two more options have have been added that will make privatization through outsourcing much simpler, administratively: school closure and mayoral takeover. Gone from NCLB 2.0 is the "Other" restructuring menu item, which most systems with below-the-cut-score-schools have thus far opted for as they try to survive.

Call and write Congress to insist they say NO! to reauthorization and YES to helping us save public education and make it better. Ask your Senator or Representative if schools in Chicago can honestly be held accountable for the same world-class standards as schools in Grosse Point, MI, given the kind of Third World realities of our cities, brought to light here by Bob Herbert's latest column:

The colorful playground outside Frederick Funston Elementary School has swings and sliding boards and a heartbreaking makeshift memorial for the 13-year-old girl who was shot to death in the playground a few weeks ago.

“It’s difficult out here,” said a woman who sat on a bench, watching her two small boys scampering around the playground.

What she meant was that there was nothing particularly unusual about schoolchildren getting blown away in Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods. Since September, when the last school year started, dozens of this city’s public school students have been murdered, most of them shot to death. As of last week, the toll of public schoolchildren slain in Chicago since the opening of the school year had reached 34, including two killed since the schools closed for summer vacation.

“That’s more than a kid every two weeks,” said Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the city’s school system. “Think about that.”

The girl killed in the playground was Schanna Gayden, who, according to the police, was shot in the head by a gang member who was aiming at someone else. Blair Holt, a high school junior, was shot to death on a city bus. Another teenager was killed as he walked home from a library.

Lazarus Jones, a 13-year-old computer-lover who was looking forward to beginning high school in the fall, was jumped by several members of a gang and beaten to death. Twelve-year-old Laura Joslin was stabbed to death, police said, by an 18-year-old girl on Thanksgiving Day. Victor Casillas, 15, was killed in a drive-by shooting.

And so on.

This should be a major national story, of course, and it would be if the slain children had come from more privileged backgrounds. But these are the kids that most of America cares nothing about — black, Latin and poor.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper covered the story. He said of the kids, poignantly: “Their names should be known. Their lives should be honored. Their deaths should be remembered.”

But that was an exception. Outside of Chicago, very little reporting has been done on this horrifying wave of murders. The truth, of course, is that Chicago is not alone. It may be jolting, even in our blood-drenched society, to have so many students from one school system killed over the course of a single school year. But most people know (and take for granted) that boys and girls growing up in America’s inner cities often have to deal with conditions that can fairly be compared to combat. . . .

Ask your Congressperson if these realites are enough to justify turning these urban children's struggling schools into privately-managed prison camps with no public oversight. Ask them.

Cross posted at Schools Matter.