By Jonathan Butcher

American Indian students are more likely to live in poverty and face unemployment later in life. These children carry the burdens of geographic isolation and multi-generational poverty that are heavy to lift.

In my conversations with state leaders on ways to help students in chronically failing schools—ideas such as expanding eligibility for education savings accounts and allowing parents to petition to convert a failing school to a charter school—policymakers regularly cite the unique challenges presented by American Indian students.

Digital and online learning opportunities offer hope. As Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips explains in his new Policy Brief, Digital Learning: Improve Educational Opportunities for American Indian Students, online programs can be made available to any student and would increase educational opportunities in rural areas and on reservations.

Over 300,000 American Indians from 21 tribes call Arizona home, and American Indian students comprise 5 percent of the state’s K-12 population. These students score well below their white peers on the nation’s report card, often lagging behind other minority groups such as African American and Hispanic students. Among 4th graders, 70 percent of American Indian students score below the basic level. Only 8 percent can read at grade level.

Lips’ Policy Brief explains how policymakers can incorporate blended-learning programs into the classroom; provide a specific option for children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools to allow them to enroll in Arizona Online Instruction classes; expand private school choice programs to offer full or partial scholarships to American Indian students to enroll in virtual school courses; and create a Federal Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) Virtual School.

Reasonable people can disagree about what’s best for American Indians in the 21st century. But everyone agrees that more quality educational choices for children of any heritage are worth pursuing.

Jonathan Butcher is the Education Director for the Goldwater Institute.

Learn more:

Goldwater Institute: Digital Learning: Improved Educational Opportunities for American Indian Students

Arizona Department of Education: 2007 Indian Education Annual Report

Arizona Republic: Arizona’s American Indians

By Jonathan Butcher

In the first episode of The Cosby Show, Cliff Huxtable explains to Theo how to keep track of a budget. Using Monopoly money, they wrestle over the costs of living on your own. Finally, Theo pledges to survive with only the bare necessities and has $200 left over for the month. As Theo beams with pride, Cliff asks, “Are you going to have a girlfriend?” and then plucks the remaining bills out of Theo’s hand.

Two weeks ago, the real Bill Cosby offered a lesson in school finance in preparation for National School Choice Week: “[E]ducation is not a thing that big bucks happens to be the answer [to].” He says, “We have a moral and societal obligation to give our children the opportunity to succeed in school, at work, and in life. We cannot meet that obligation unless parents are empowered to select the best schools of their children.”

Shortly after Cosby made his comments, families around Arizona cheered Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Maria Del Mar Verdin’s ruling upholding the state’s one-of-a-kind education savings account program. Judge Del Mar Verdin wrote in her opinion, “The exercise of parental choice among educational options makes the program constitutional.”

For students with special needs, like Nathan Howard, the decision couldn’t have been better. His mother, Amanda, says that since Nathan started at his new school, a move made possible by the savings account, she has seen “such a huge difference.” For the first time he can almost speak in full sentences.

HB 2626, sponsored by Rep. Debbie Lesko and Sens. Gould, Klein, Melvin, Murphy, and Yarborough, would extend the opportunity for a brighter future to the 94,000 students in Arizona’s lowest-performing schools. The bill also offers hope to Arizona’s intellectually gifted students, another underserved population, as well as to students in military families.

HB 2626 is a tremendous step toward providing all students the best opportunity to succeed.

Jonathan Butcher is the Education Director for the Goldwater Institute.

Learn more:

Education Next: Challenging the Gifted

Goldwater Institute: Superior Court Upholds Education Savings Accounts

The Cosby Show: Season 1, Episode 1

National School Choice Week: Bill Cosby is IN for National School Choice Week

The Daily Caller: Bill Cosby on Education: More funding is not the answer

To celebrate National School Choice Week, the Goldwater Institute is highlighting five key areas of education reform. Today’s focus is tax-credit scholarship programs. For more information about the Institute’s groundbreaking work in this area, visit our Education Reform page.

By Vicki Alger, Ph.D.

Right now in Arizona more than 94,000 students are attending “D” schools, or schools that have chronically poor academic performance.

Rather than waiting for bureaucratic wheels to turn and their schools to improve, these children deserve an out. Arizona already has a pathway for them – it just needs to be widened a bit to give more children a chance.

That path is Arizona’s tax-credit scholarship program, which more than 31,000 low-income, special needs, and foster students are already using to attend private schools.

The proposal now working its way through the state legislature would allow couples to donate up to $2,000 (instead of $1,000) toward the scholarships, and would extend scholarship eligibility to children of military personnel. Moreover, anything couples donate over $1,000 would go specifically to students using the program for the first time.

These changes could help more kids escape failing schools and get on the path to academic success.

No child’s education should be limited by his family’s income or address. Expanding Arizona’s scholarship tax credit program just makes good sense for children.

Vicki (Murray) Alger, Ph.D., is President and CEO of Vicki Murray & Associates, LLC, a Phoenix-based education research and services company. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum in Washington, D.C., and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, where she is completing a book on the history of the U.S. Department of Education.

Learn More:

Arizona Department of Education: 2010-2011 A-F Letter Grades for All Schools

Arizona Department of Education: The New A-F School Accountability Letter Grade System

Arizona State Legislature: S.B. 1048

Harvard University: An Analysis of Arizona Individual Income Tax-credit Scholarship Recipients’ Family Income, 2009-10 School Year

By Robert Maranto, Ph.D.

To celebrate National School Choice Week, the Goldwater Institute is highlighting five key areas of education reform. Today’s focus is charter schools. For more information about the Institute’s groundbreaking work in this area, visit our Education Reform page.

When my wife, April, and I first studied charter schools in Arizona back in 1997, they had 222 campuses, a 3.3 percent market share, and heaps of criticism from folks who had never set foot inside of one. Fifteen years later they have 524 campuses, a 12 percent market share, and still plenty of critics.

Perhaps the most important change of the last 15 years, though, is that now we know. We know that charter school teachers feel more empowered than district school teachers. We know charter parents like their schools. Contrary to a popular myth that charters are more segregated than traditional schools, a study conducted by some of my colleagues at the University of Arkansas found that there are only small differences in the level of overall student segregation.

We know that charters spend less, and do about the same on student academic growth—with the dramatic exceptions of some Arizona charters where student achievement levels are among the highest in the country. Nationally, charters are funded at a level that is slightly more than half of what traditional schools receive, according to the Center for Education Reform ($6,585 compared to $10,771). In Arizona, charters receive 20 percent less than traditional schools. We know that charter competition has generally led traditional public schools to be more respectful of parents and teachers.

We know that charter schools like Mesa Arts Academy, Sonoran Science Academy, and the upstart Phoenix Collegiate prove that disadvantaged kids can learn. We know that charters like Tempe Prep and Basis prove a demand for world-class academics. We know that the Charter School of Sedona proves that teachers can run a public school, and do a darn good job of it.

But thinking back on the studies I’ve read and the schools I’ve seen, I keep coming back to one scene. In an arts-oriented charter school, a recent immigrant told me how much her life had improved since leaving her well-regarded district school. At her charter school, she wasn’t bullied for her accent or appearance. She no longer cried every day when she went to school; she no longer cried every day when she came home.

She is what the charter movement is all about. Traditional public schools do a good job serving many kids, but in many instances, they cannot serve that girl, or kids like a teenage me, who need a different option. In Arizona, her parents have 524 chances to find it.

Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Learn more:

​Goldwater Institute: Basis v. Horne (Charter school autonomy case)

Goldwater Institute: Comparison of Traditional Public and Charter Schools

Goldwater Institute: Does Charter School Attendance Improve Test Scores?

By Byron Schlomach, Ph.D.

To celebrate National School Choice Week, the Goldwater Institute is highlighting five key areas of education reform. Today’s focus is homeschooling. For more information about the Institute’s groundbreaking work in this area, visit our Education Reform page.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 1.5 million students in the United States were homeschooled in 2007. One estimate of homeschoolers in Arizona puts the number at over 35,000. When the University of Arizona considered instituting a minimum SAT score only for homeschoolers, the president of the university resisted. Homeschoolers were the least of his problems when it came to students achieving, since homeschoolers have a proven achievement record in colleges and universities.

Homeschooling has come a long way. When my wife and I started homeschooling our daughter in the early 1990s, it had not been that long since homeschool families were pursued by truant officers. Today, homeschooling is much more accepted and takes on many different forms. Homeschoolers create co-ops where parents with different skills and knowledge teach each others’ children. They organize book fairs, sports teams, choirs, and field trips (often getting special praise for good behavior). And, homeschooled kids pretty regularly win the National Spelling Bee.

Homeschoolers sacrifice a second income in making the choice to educate their children, even as they pay the taxes to support public schools, scholarships to private schools, and charter schools. Education savings accounts hold out the promise that at least some who choose to homeschool will be able to recoup some of the costs they bear for the public system, making homeschooling a viable education choice for more parents.

Byron Schlomach, Ph.D. is Director of the Goldwater Institute’s Center for Economic Prosperity.

Learn more:

A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling: Number of Homeschoolers in the USA

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine: Homeschooling Comes of Age in College Admission (PDF)

National Center for Education Statistics: 1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007 (PDF)

To celebrate National School Choice Week, the Goldwater Institute is highlighting five key areas of education reform. For more information about the Institute’s groundbreaking work in this area, visit our Education Reform page.

By Jonathan Butcher

Momentum is building around the country for “Parent Empowerment” — the movement to allow parents to petition, under law, for sweeping changes to their child’s school. Just last week The Wall Street Journal reported on the efforts of “fed-up parents” with students at low-performing schools in Southern California to “take an unusual step: fire the school.” Later this year Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight, Away We Go) and Holly Hunter (The Incredibles, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) will star in the feature film Won’t Back Down, depicting the efforts of parents to turn around a failing school.

California’s law, along with similar legislation in Texas and Mississippi, allows parents to vote to convert chronically low-performing schools to charter schools, replace school leadership and provide new directors with significant decision making authority, or even close schools entirely.

Ben Austin is the head of Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles-based parent group that started the movement in 2009, and he told me he is convinced we are living in a “revolutionary moment.” He said, “A grassroots movement sprung up over parents having real political power. Not parent involvement ‘old school’ like bake sales, but when parents are treated like grown-up political actors and are taken seriously.”

Austin’s resume includes a stint with the Clinton White House from 1994-99 and communications director for the 2000 Democratic National Convention Host Committee, so a parental choice-style reform such as Parent Empowerment might not seem like his forte. But he says, “The system fundamentally is failing because it’s not designed to serve kids. The only way we’re going to change things is to transfer political power from defenders of the status quo to parents.”

Arizona has been one of the nation’s leaders in education reform for over a decade, and lawmakers should seize the moment we are in to allow parents to take ownership of their child’s school. No matter which side of the aisle you are sitting on, we can all agree on the need to serve students, not protect a system.

Jonathan Butcher is the Education Director for the Goldwater Institute.

Learn more:

Parent Revolution

The Wall Street Journal: Parents Rebel Against School

IMDB: Won’t Back Down (formerly titled Learning to Fly)

To celebrate National School Choice Week, the Goldwater Institute is highlighting five key areas of education reform. Up first is Education Savings Accounts. For more information about the Institute’s groundbreaking work in this area, visit our Education Reform page.

By Clint Bolick

We like to joke around the office that the best way to determine if an education reform is worth pursuing is whether the special interests that defend the status quo challenge it in court. So we knew for certain we were onto something with the idea of Education Savings Accounts when they were hit with a double whammy: a lawsuit against them filed not only by the teachers’ union but by the Arizona School Boards Association. (Your tax dollars at work!)

Three years ago, the Arizona Supreme Court struck down school vouchers under Article 9, section 10 of the state constitution, which forbids the “appropriation of public money made in aid of any . . . private or sectarian school. . . ” The Court reasoned that because all of the voucher funds necessarily would be used in private schools, they constituted impermissible “aid.”

Education savings accounts (ESAs), on the other hand, can be used for a variety of educational purposes, from private school tuition to distance learning, home schooling, tutoring, educational software, community college classes, or college tuition. It’s tough to consider the accounts an appropriation in “aid” of private schools when none of the money is earmarked for them.

The legal challenge, now in its opening round in Maricopa County Superior Court, is vitally important to the future of systemic education reform. If we were designing a K-12 education system from scratch — with no preconceived notions yet mindful of the technology that enables us to deliver high-quality, personalized instruction to every child — surely it would not look like the bricks-and-mortar, one-size-fits all system to which most American children are consigned.

ESAs allow families to tailor educational services to their children’s individual needs. In 2011, the Legislature enacted ESAs for children with special needs. This year, we hope ESAs will be made available to children in poor-performing public schools. Just as the Goldwater Institute gave life to the idea of ESAs, so are we tenaciously defending them in court.

Clint Bolick is director of the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.

Learn more:

Arizona Judicial Branch: Cain v. Horne (PDF)

Goldwater Institute: Niehaus v. Huppenthal