by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Nov 18, 2016
New research from EdChoice finds that Georgia’s scholarships for K-12 private school students have saved the state between $12 million and $85 million since 2011. Nearly two-dozen states have similar tax credit scholarship programs that allow individuals or businesses to make charitable contributions to K-12 private school scholarship organizations. The nonprofit scholarship organizations award scholarships to eligible students, and donors can take a credit on their state taxes that is equivalent to some or all of their donation.
EdChoice’s findings come at an important moment for state families because the state supreme court is considering a challenge to the program. Two years ago, the Southern Education Foundation supported four Georgia residents’ lawsuit to block state families from using the scholarships for their children. Recently, the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in support of the scholarships.
“We urge the court to affirm the determination that the tax-credit program does not violate the state constitution, focusing on the fact that it does not involve spending public funds for any sectarian purpose,” write Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald.
In Georgia, individuals and businesses can receive a dollar-for-dollar credit for their contribution to scholarship organizations up to certain limits ($2,500 for a married couple and businesses can claim no more than 75 percent of their tax liability). Since 2010, scholarship organizations have awarded more than 60,000 scholarships for students to use at K-12 private schools.
Teacher unions, school board associations, and other associations regularly challenge parent and student educational options in court. Fortunately for families, courts have upheld tax credit scholarships around the country, without exception. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the nation’s oldest such scholarships, in Arizona, in 2011.
The decision paved the way for students like Gabe Alba-Rivera to discover opportunities he didn’t know existed before his scholarship. In my 2014 interview with Gabe, he explains that he was born in Mexico and had little more than broken pieces of his school’s roof to draw hopscotch squares at recess. A bucket of water served two purposes when he used the bathroom—the first as his bathroom pass, the second to flush the toilet.
After moving to Arizona, Gabe used a tax credit scholarship—nearly identical to the scholarships available to thousands of students across Georgia—to attend Brophy Prep, where he was active in the school Robotics Club. Gabe earned a spot at MIT, where he studies 3-D printers.
Twenty-eight scholarship organizations serve Georgia families, and these groups awarded more than 13,000 scholarships last year. The state supreme court should uphold the lower court ruling and protect families’ freedom to choose the best learning opportunity for their child.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Sep 30, 2016
In 1952, Patrick Skene Catling wrote The Chocolate Touch, a retelling of the King Midas fable that reminds us we can have too much of a good thing. In Catling’s story, the main character finds that everything he eats turns to chocolate (with King Midas, everything he touched turned to gold). Hilarity, and nausea, ensues.
The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute’s latest report on the state’s HOPE and Zell Miller scholarships provides valuable findings about college scholarships and the students using the funds. The Institute’s recommendations, however, might give us too much of a good thing.
The Institute reports that a smaller percentage of low-income students use the scholarships (30 percent) than middle and upper-income students (42 percent). The authors are correct when they say that college tuition has “skyrocketed” recently—a finding that is true for colleges around the country. The authors also make a compelling point when they write, “Students need more options to gain valued skills and enter successful careers, regardless of their families’ background or bank account.”
Yet their solution will not solve the college cost problem nor the opportunity issues. The Institute suggests lawmakers find “an enhanced approach to financial aid that ensures students from all backgrounds…can gain the benefits of a college degree.”
If the Institute’s goal is to help qualified students—regardless of background or income—get help paying for college, such an objective may result in better candidates entering the workforce. But the report’s emphasis on sending as many students to college as possible should give taxpayers and students pause.
The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey has documented research that links increasing college tuition with increased levels of federal aid (similar to the “Bennett Hypothesis,” formulated by former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett). State lottery proceeds fund the HOPE and Zell Miller scholarships, but universities’ incentives remain the same: If scholarship funding is almost guaranteed, why lower tuition, especially if students can combine a scholarship with federal aid? Scholarships help students pay tuition, but this assistance does not create an incentive for schools to keep costs down.
Moreover, both scholarships require students keep their grades up in order to participate. The Institute says the merit-based awards are “disproportionately out of reach for students of modest means.” Yet the state should not lower the bar for this assistance because sending a student to college that is unprepared for higher education does not help that student.
Policy debates on college tuition and student opportunity intersect when unprepared students step on campus. If an undergraduate drops out without a degree, they find themselves in need of a job but without a degree to improve their prospects. According to an Urban Institute report, “Not completing a degree is a significant predictor of repayment difficulty and default,” as 43 percent of college dropouts that used college loans have debt levels of $10,000 or lower. A quarter of college dropouts that used loans have debt levels of between $10,000 and $20,000.
Sending everyone to college, even if they are unprepared, puts students from low-income families at great risk for debt later in life. Students with few resources that struggle in school and dropout of college will struggle to attain the American Dream even when well-intentioned policymakers try to help.
The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute’s report on scholarships provides a useful analysis of the kinds of students using state scholarships for higher ed. Furthermore, the Institute’s suggestion that the scholarships be available to students in their 20’s and 30’s may help nontraditional students that enter college later in life.
But in order to help more students succeed in their education and career, state lawmakers should give students better access to quality learning opportunities in K-12, like education savings accounts and encouraging the growth of high-quality charter schools. Meanwhile, policymakers should commit to helping students, no matter their socioeconomic status, make informed decisions about whether college is the right choice.
With the prospect of long-term debt, the idea of sending as many students to college as possible should make taxpayers—and students—nauseous.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Aug 12, 2016
A certain desert city’s tourism department hopes you can finish the phrase, “What happens in Vegas…,” a slogan that turns lucky 13 this fall. Yet when it comes to the changing landscape of student learning, what happens in the desert isn’t going to stay there.
At the end of July, the Nevada Supreme Court held hearings on the state’s nascent education savings account law. In 2015, Sen. Scott Hammond sponsored SB 302, and Gov. Brian Sandoval’s signature made all 450,000 Nevada public school students eligible to apply for an account. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to take children’s educational choices away shortly after the law’s passage. The group charges that the accounts violate the state constitution (a group of parents filed another suit taking away parents’ ability to choose how their children learn, saying that the accounts would be illegally funded from a state source dedicated to public schools).
Nevada’s account law is the first such law to allow all public school students the opportunity to use an account to buy a variety of educational products and services. Parental choice in education is no longer rare in the U.S., but many of the laws that give parents options between public and private schools are limited to students that meet select criteria. For example, Tennessee and Mississippi’s education savings accounts, also enacted in 2015, are only available to children with special needs. As many Georgia parents may know, the Peach State has a private school scholarship program exclusively for children with special needs, while Louisiana and Ohio have private school voucher options for children from failing schools. The situation is similar across more than two dozen states.
A ruling in favor of parents and children from Nevada’s Supreme Court would boost efforts in other states, such as Georgia, Texas, Delaware, and Missouri, to name a few, where lawmakers have considered the accounts in recent years. In 2011, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s first education savings account law and have expanded student access to the accounts since its enactment. Arizona children with special needs can apply for an account, along with children from failing schools, adopted children, and children living on Native American reservations, among others. Nevada is the first state to give every public school child this opportunity from day one.
Education savings accounts have also attracted national attention. Republicans included education savings accounts in their 2016 platform (as for Democrats, who the Wall Street Journal says has a built-in “get-out-the-vote operation known as teacher unions,” education savings accounts were noticeably missing from their party positions).
In March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced a bill to allow all children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools access to education savings accounts. Politico highlighted these students’ need for quality educational options in November 2015 with a feature headlined “How Washington created some of the worst schools in America.” Former presidential candidate and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a bill in January that would make all Washington, D.C. children eligible for accounts.
As a result, federal and state lawmakers across the country are watching what happens in Carson City, Nevada. Arizona’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of education savings accounts in 2011 after the state teachers union and other associations brought a lawsuit similar to the ACLU’s charges in Nevada (the Goldwater Institute defended the accounts alongside the Institute for Justice, the group defending Nevada’s accounts). A victory for students in Nevada would mark the second victory for the accounts over challenges that the accounts violate state constitutional provisions that block the use of public funds for private or religious schools.
Five states have passed the accounts so far, but the accounts are turning into a movement offering families flexible opportunities in education. The successes of these programs, and the lifelong knowledge and skills gained—won’t just stay in Vegas.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Jul 4, 2016
Six years ago, supporters of the national Common Core academic standards thought they had the formula to measure student success. Under the Common Core, states would agree to teach the same material in the same sequence to all students. The ensuing tests would measure all students according to the same material. We would track the results and compare student achievement across the country.
If only teaching children was so simple.
As centrally-planned policies are prone to do, the Common Core unraveled. South Carolina and Oklahoma left the standards citing, among other things, “federal intrusion” and vowed to replace the standards with better content. A group of states that agreed to offer the same test to students lost half of its state members by 2015. Three months ago, New Jersey had to postpone all student testing in grades 3-11 because the Pearson Education’s testing software malfunctioned.
Then came the Gates Foundation’s admission earlier this year that the Common Core isn’t ready and the “foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required.” The foundation’s mea culpa is significant because of the organization’s commitment to national standards and the associated financial support.
Despite this morass, some in Georgia still claim that alternatives to national standards and testing will cause more problems than pressing ahead with the Common Core. Most parents would agree that “whether they come from a civilian or military family, all children deserve to be held to high, consistent academic expectations that fully prepare them to succeed after high school.”
Yet there are other—and better—ways to do this than national standards.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education approved New Hampshire’s pilot project to administer the Common Core tests in fewer grades and use the SAT for high schoolers. Students will have ongoing projects during the school year to measure learning. Education leaders in states like Indiana are considering this alternative.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed HB 2544 this year, which allows public schools to choose from a “menu” of tests to measure student progress. Rep. Paul Boyer, chair of the House Education Committee, and Sen. Sylvia Allen, chair of the Senate Education Committee, led the legislative effort.
Schools should be allowed to choose from existing national norm-referenced achievement tests like the Stanford series of tests or the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. This way, schools could use a test that aligns with what they already teach—not curriculum imposed from somewhere else—and, because the tests are nationally normed, the scores could be compared across schools.
Critically, district and charter schools would have the same autonomy to choose what and how to teach while still measuring achievement in a comparable way across localities. The Common Core didn’t deliver, so Georgia lawmakers should be looking for solutions like those in Arizona and New Hampshire.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Jun 3, 2016
A school board member in New Jersey pleaded guilty to wire fraud. A “longtime educator” in Palm Beach County, Florida, resigned from a school board after authorities charged him with fraud and bribery. Nearly a dozen school leaders in Detroit accepted $900,000 in kickbacks in a phony scheme to provide school supplies. A manager of an audio/visual company in Utah pleaded guilty to fraud and theft in his dealings with a local school district.
And that was just in one week.
As we’ve documented on this blog, fraud is an unfortunate reality in our nation’s schools. For that matter, it’s an unfortunate part of providing quality services in across a variety of social needs. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the indictment of state and local authorities in Flint, Michigan surrounding the locality’s water crisis. Yet the paper lamented that federal officials—those getting their paychecks from Washington, D.C.—at the EPA and in the U.S. Office of Veterans Affairs were not being held to account for ignoring warnings at the Gold King Mine (where a flooded mine ruined a water supply in Colorado last year) and in medical malfeasance, respectively.
Fraud is a serious issue at all levels of government and enforcement is inconsistent, at best.
In 2009, Apple started advertising what was, at the time, breakthrough technology in its latest iPhone by saying, “There’s an app for that,” with “that” being whatever you needed. From finding a restaurant to playing the piano on your phone, developers were building mobile applications that allowed you to access virtually anything you needed at your fingertips. Today, programmers are building applications to help prevent fraudulent use of taxpayer money.
In some states, taxpayers can event submit photos or videos along with anonymous tips about misuse of taxpayer funds. The applications may cost as much as $10,000 to $20,000 to develop, but with the potential losses from fraud totaling in the hundreds of thousands or even millions in taxpayer resources, the upfront cost is worth it.
Furthermore, the next generation of parents and taxpayers, Millennials, are the generation that is most likely to carry and use a mobile device—making these apps a natural fit. The Pew Research Center reports that Millennials are the most likely generation to “use their cellphones in public places for a variety of reasons,” and Nielsen says Millennials “are the largest segment of smartphone owners.” This means the availability of such mobile applications is coming at an excellent time.
Is Your Mobile Phone a Smartphone?
Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services, March 2015,” http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/mobile-devices/2015-appendix-3-consumer-responses-to-survey-questionnaire.htm#Cross-tabulationsForConsumersUseOfM-C1548C7E.
While mobile apps won’t prevent fraud, such developments will help to limit the losses that bad actors cause. Research from the Goldwater Institute explains how mobile technology and education savings accounts, spending accounts that give parents choices for a child’s education, are both coming of age at the same time. Approximately 840,000 children across five states are eligible for the savings accounts. Georgia lawmakers considered legislation to create the accounts in the last session.
Millennial parents are the generation that grew up alongside mobile technology and are already using apps to get a ride from the airport or check a bank account. Flexible spending accounts that allow families to pay for online classes, public school services, private school tuition, or save for college should be designed so that parents can report fraudulent use of such accounts, check their child’s account balance, and make a purchase for a textbook, all with their mobile phone. In traditional schools and programs that give parents choices in education, taxpayers should be able to help protect students with easy, reliable ways to report misuse.
There’s no app for the American Dream, but mobile technology can help protect taxpayer resources and make sure education funding is used as it was intended—to help children succeed.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | May 25, 2016
Republicans included a non-binding referendum question in yesterday’s Primary Election ballot asking if voters support school choice, and 75 percent of voters declared their support for the concept of education dollars following the student.
The question was direct, clear, and as comprehensive as limited space would allow:
“Should Georgia empower parents with the right to use the tax dollars allocated for the education of their children, allowing them the freedom to choose among public, private, virtual and home schools?”
While these primary ballot questions are non-binding, they are a very effective way for a party to test support for an issue among their actual primary voters, not the “likely voters” approximated in poll samples.
These primary voters are the voters who will be especially important to those hoping to succeed Governor Nathan Deal in 2018 (here’s looking at you, Casey Cagle!).
Again, seventy-five percent of Republican primary voters said “yes” to school choice at the ballot. This overwhelming level of support for the ballot question is even more interesting when we consider that:
- More voters voted for school choice than voted in the U.S. Senate race–the race at the very top of the ballot. The question was a “down ballot” question, where there there is usually a significant drop-off of votes from the votes cast at the top of the ticket.
- The Georgia Association of Educators, the de facto teacher’s union in the state, long feared by politicians, publicly opposed and lobbied against the measure.
- The question won a majority of support in every one of Georgia’s 159 counties–rural, urban, big, small, wealthy, poor–it didn’t matter. School choice won everywhere.
Will Georgia Republican elected officials start listening to these voters, or continue to ignore them?
In recent years, legislators have been somewhere between skittish and unenthusiastic (to put it kindly) about considering school choice legislation. No less than ten education choice bills were introduced in the last two-year legislative cycle and all but one was killed by leadership and committee chairmen, and none received a vote on the House or Senate floor.
Why? Largely out of a perception that teachers will be against it, Superintendents will be against it, school boards will be against it. But does the education establishment represent those they serve? Apparently not.
Now that the voters have spoken, clearly and specifically, how will legislators respond? Will they listen to the people who elected them? Legislators have the opportunity to make good policy good politics — they can give kids the educational opportunities they need and deserve, while giving primary voters what they support and demand.
How will these state leaders respond to their district voters’ support for real school choice?
- Lt. Governor (and 2018 Gubernatorial hopeful) Casey Cagle: Hall County–75%
- Speaker David Ralston: Fannin County–76%, Gilmer County–74%
- Rep. Brooks Coleman, Chairman of House Education Committee: Gwinnett County–77%
- Same goes for Senate President Pro Tem David Shafer, also of Gwinnett
- Senator Lindsey Tippins, Chairman of Senate Education Committee: Cobb County–72%
- Senate Majority Leader Bill Cowsert: Clarke County–74%
2017 could be a big year for education. The Governor plans to move forward with plans to update the funding formula, providing more resources and flexibility to school districts. Will the Governor and leaders of the legislature listen to the people and include school choice in those reforms? If not, if they once again cower in fear of the education establishment and teachers’ unions, they may just have their base to answer to.
