“For Choice to be Valuable, It Has to be Meaningful, Right?”

Today, the Florida House will vote on HB7067, this year’s voucher expansion bill, which aims to quadruple the current annual enrollment growth rate and place qualifying income thresholds on an automatic escalator for the state’s new, directly funded Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES). You can read more about the bill here and here.

For the record, the Family Empowerment Scholarship:

• shares the same funding source as the state’s public and public charter schools (FEFP), siphoning money away from other publicly funded schools
• has a current enrollment that would make it the 29th (out of 67) largest school district in Florida (if HB7067 passes, the FES could become Florida’s 17th largest district next year) 
• unlike its Corporate Tax Credit companion, it truly has zero academic oversight. While the state mandates that voucher students take a nationally norm referenced assessments in grades 3-10 (but not, necessarily, the same assessments required of other publicly funded Florida students), the state only monitors the results of Tax Credit voucher recipients (and, often, those results are pretty disappointing)

On Friday, 3/6/2020, HB7067 had its second reading on the House floor. After a “Delete-All” amendment to streamline the bill and align it with Senate Bill 1220, House Democrats offered a series of amendments (none were approved) and asked some excellent questions regarding academic performance standards and accountability measures, or lack there of, associated with the FES, which is directly funded through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), the primary funding source for Florida’s public (and charter) schools.

Miami Representative, Javier Fernandez, asked several questions exposing the lack of academic performance requirements for private schools participating in Florida’s voucher programs. (You can watch the discussion at 1:34:15.)

Fernandez reviewed the results in the most recent report issued by the Florida State Learning Systems Institute which provides an annual assessment of the Florida Tax Credit (FTCS) voucher program. (You can review all of the past LSI reports here.) Fernandez noted that, in Miami-Dade County, 54% of the FTCS participating schools reported negative academic gain scores for students enrolled in the program. Fifty four percent!

A recent report by the Orlando Sentinel highlighted the results of the annual Learning Systems Institute report:

Done by Florida State University researchers, the most recent study, like previous ones, showed that, on average, students using tax credit scholarships made about as much as progress in a year’s time as expected.

The study also calculated what researchers called “gain scores” for the small percentage of private scholarship schools — 418 out of 1,546, or 27 percent — that had at least 30 scholarship students in the grades that must take standardized tests.

Of the campuses with “statistically significant” scores, about 66 percent of them posted negative “gain scores,” meaning during the past three years their students fell backward in reading or math or both.

But there are no consequences for schools with low scores, nor is the information typically noted by state leaders who support Florida’s voucher programs.

Bill sponsor and House Education committee chair, Jennifer Sullivan confirmed that this new bill, HB7067, contains no new academic performance requirements for participating voucher schools.

Fernandez persisted, noting that some FTC participating schools, over multiple years, consistently report negative academic gain scores and wondered if Chair Sullivan might be “open to some amendments, potentially, that would require performance accountability standards for participating schools?”

Sullivan’s response: “I wouldn’t at this time.”

Fernandez suggested that “for choice to be valuable it has to be meaningful, right?” He noted that the academic performance at our public and charter schools is widely reported on through Florida’s current accountability system. He wondered whether parents enrolling their children in voucher schools were made aware of the academic performance of those schools as reported in the LSI report.

Chair Sullivan responded that voucher schools are required to give parents their child’s personal report card and, that students in the FTCS program, grade 3-10, are required to take a nationally norm referenced test approved by the Department and the results of that assessment must be provided to the parent of the student and to the independent research organization which compiles the annual LSI report Rep Fernandez had previously mentioned.

What Chair Sullivan did NOT say is that, unlike the FTCS program, participants in Florida’s newest voucher program- the focus of HB7067-  the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES), have similar annual testing requirements but their test scores are NOT reported to the LSI. FES participant’s must take the assessments but their test scores are ONLY required to be reported to their parent [f.s.1002.394(8)]. No one, at the state level, is tracking the scores of the FES participants, even though they often attend the exact same private schools as the Tax Credit Scholarship recipients!

Sullivan went on to suggest that, when it comes to voucher programs, all accountability should be up to the parents: “government is not heavy handed in what they’re requiring and so it is really up to the parent to be checking in on their progress, to meeting with their teachers, to know what’s going on.”

Fernandez noted that, if the Family Empowerment Scholarship program was its own district, the current enrollment of 17,626 would make it larger than half of Florida’s school districts (actually,  it would be 29th out of 67 districts). If HB7067’s enhanced enrollment accelerator is adopted, increasing next year’s enrollment cap to 46,000, the FES would be Florida’s 17th largest district. By 2022/23, the FES could exceed the size of the Tax Credit Scholarship, making it the larger than all but 7 other Florida school districts! Fernandez asked: “Given that and given what we require of our public schools and charter schools, would it not be prudent to actually have some academic performance standards as a requirement for this program to make sure we’re getting, again, positive education outcomes for these students?”

Chair Sullivan’s response: ” I think your question was that given that we’re increasing the amount of students, would I add more accountability measures in here, and I’m not going to.”

Sigh…

Look, from day one we have been in favor of a roll-back of the harsh, high stakes, test obsessed accountability requirements imposed on our public school children. We are NOT in favor of imposing such a system on a single extra student but the contrast between what is expected for these Family Empowerment recipients and the rest of Florida’s 2.8 million publicly funded school children is stark. Public school parents would love for that same government that Chair Sullivan praises for not being heavy handed with voucher recipients to get their boot off the neck of our public school children.

Article IX of the Florida Constitution defines the paramount duty of the state: to make adequate provision “for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.” As Jeb Bush repeatedly said, “What gets measured get done,” making it difficult to see how lawmakers can assure they have satisfied their “paramount duty” by creating programs without any measures of academic quality or expectations. Thank you, Rep. Fernandez, for bringing these questions to light.

HB7067 comes up for a vote in the House today. It is not too late to call your Representative and urge a NO vote. Massive expansion of a voucher program with no academic expectations or accountability is a bad choice.

SB1220, its companion bill is expected to be heard in the Senate this week. Now is the time to call your senator!  Find your legislators here.