EDITORIAL: Advancing parental choice

Teacher unions and school choice — like oil and water, ammonia and bleach or toothpaste and beer — don’t typically go well together. But that may soon change in Nevada.

Thanks to a confluence of pragmatism, self interest and popular opinion, the leader of the Clark County Education Association said last week he’s open to a compromise that would advance Gov. Brian Sandoval’s Education Savings Account program.

This is a step forward that bodes well for progress at the 2017 Legislature.

“We want a session of accomplishment,” said John Vellardita, the union’s executive director. In a meeting with the Review-Journal on Wednesday, he noted that his organization’s top priority is to implement a weighted funding formula for the 2017 school year under which campuses receive additional financial support for students who present various challenges. But to achieve that goal, he revealed that the union may be willing to bend on the governor’s school choice initiative.

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A voice for school choice

Teachers unions and the education establishment reacted with predictable scorn to the nomination of Betsy DeVos as secretary of Education. 

But parents have reason to be optimistic, and for one simple reason: DeVos has been a champion for school choice across the country. 

Her support goes beyond mere lip service. She has worked to advance viable options for students and families, including charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax credit scholarships and education savings accounts. 

That support for education choice will be a welcome change of pace, particularly for poor children living in the nation's capital.

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Want Satisfied Parents? Empower Them to Choose

Parents are more satisfied with their child’s learning environment when they choose it. Indeed, as economist Tyler Cowen put it recently, “the single most overwhelming (yet neglected) empirical fact” about educational choice programs is that “they improve parent satisfaction.” A slew of new reports add a number of hefty boulders to the mountain of evidence.

Read more about it here. 

National School Choice Week to Host Record 20,000 Events From Jan. 22-28

Henry Eichner’s son may share his name and his disability, but Eichner was determined to not let him share his schooling experience. 

Eichner was bullied in his public schools for having muscular dystrophy. So Eichner enrolled Henry Jr. in a private school in Florida, a financial challenge for a single father.

Then one day he met Wendy Howard, a school choice advocate, at a networking event. Howard asked him if his son was attending his private school using the Florida state-funded Gardiner Scholarship Program, which provides funds for students with disabilities to use on private school tuition or therapy services. That was the first time Eichner had heard of the program.

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U.S. Education Abroad with International Connections Academy

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Though sixteen year-old American expatriate Christian Billman has lived in Recife, Brazil, for six years, in that time he has been able to fulfill all the educational requirements of a typical teenager in the U.S. and will soon graduate with a U.S. diploma, all from the comfort of his home in Brazil through International Connections Academy.

Of those who applied to college from the school’s 2016 graduates, 100 percent were accepted, photo courtesy of the International Connections Academy.

For the past several years, Christian has been enrolled in International Connections Academy, an accredited, online private school serving students in grades K-12 worldwide. The virtual school allows English-speaking students living abroad with expat parents to receive a high-quality education that meets U.S. standards, with only a computer and an internet connection.

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Cyber Charter Schools Grow In Popularity

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, a prominent supporter of charter schools, said the time has come to “make education great again,” at a recent rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But it is not clear an approach as newfangled as it is controversial - cyber charter schools - will be part of her plan.

Cyber charter schools merge two types of reform - the charter school movement and online learning. Like traditional charter schools, cyber charters are considered public schools that deliver instructional material to students online and are paid for with state funds.

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Opinion: Reimagining School Choice Debates

Should our school systems be uniform or plural? This question lies at the heart of school-choice debates in the United States. Most democracies — including the Netherlands, England, Sweden and Canada — fund diverse schools as a matter of principle. Educational pluralism is embedded in nations as different as Australia, India and Singapore. These countries do not cast common purpose to the wind; they regulate their schools’ curricula, admissions processes and hiring protocols. Education is considered a public good that may be delivered by civic organizations and the state alike.

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Parents are most satisfied when they choose their own school

In 2014, The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., launched an investigation into the state of special education in Mississippi. They uncovered a range of abuses and troubling trends, most notably that, on average, only 23 percent of Mississippi's students with special needs were graduating from high school. In many districts, that number was in the low single digits.

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Crye: Uniting Latinos behind school choice

n “Lost opportunity for charter schools,” Robert Pondiscio says education reformers should blame themselves for the failure of a ballot initiative last month to establish more charter schools in Massachusetts. The vote on “Question 2” wasn’t even close: 62% of voters were against it.  That’s embarrassing. Only one other ballot question was answered more decisively: 77% of voters were against “extreme farm animal confinement.” No more eggs from cramped chickens.

But that’s another story.

Pondiscio explains that education reformers have been “too enamored of our own civil-rights-issue-of-our-time rhetoric to worry much about building a constituency among the middle class.” In other words, we’re out of touch.

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Pro-school choice group's study argues grads have higher economic impact

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty Inc. is trying to add momentum to the push for Milwaukee charter schools with a study released Thursday arguing they have a substantial positive economic impact.

The study argues students attending voucher schools or participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program generate a higher economic benefit than those attending Milwaukee Public Schools. William Flanders, research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, or WILL, said the study lends weight to arguments for lifting income caps for students eligible for the choice schools program, or toward easing the process for private schools to buy vacant MPS buildings.

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