In practice, few Florida students have actually received the promised vouchers. In the first year that students were eligible to receive vouchers under the program, a total of 53 students from two schools statewide got tickets to go elsewhere. In 1999, there were 78 public schools that received a failing grade based on their FCAT scores. If those schools got the same grades in 2000, they would have been sanctioned with vouchers. Miraculously, by year two of the A-Plus program, every school in Florida (including the 78 schools that had a failing grade the year before) managed to pull test scores up enough to avoid the voucher sanction.
Apparently, the public school establishment in Florida sensed an end to their monopoly and reacted accordingly. Dr. Jay P. Greene, an education researcher at the Manhattan Institute, recently analyzed FCAT test scores covering the initial two years of the A-Plus program. He found that "schools that received F grades in 1998-1999 experienced increases in test scores that were more than twice as large as those experienced by schools with higher state grades."
All of this suggests that the public school establishment will react to the threat of a club, particularly the voucher sanction. But, beyond the minimal threshold of sanction, inertia seems to set in. The never-mentioned tragedy is the fact that, despite improvement, hundreds of thousands of students are still attending inferior schools.
Imagine the frustration of Florida parents with children in those mediocre schools who are now denied the opportunity of a real education for their children simply because an 18-point improvement earned a formerly failing school a D grade? The average failing school did improve but still showed an average score of only 272 out of a possible 500 points. That is the effective equivalent of a doctor being wrong in her diagnosis almost as often as she is correct. Will it soothe those parents to know that President Bush plans to continue with Title I spending of $10 billion a year to ensure that their failing local school, and others like it around the nation, will improve from 50 percent of students failing a standardized test to 47 percent failing the same standardized test? Will they rest easy knowing that average reading test scores will possibly improve from the 39th percentile to the 42nd? Will such results persuade inner-city parents, and all parents for that matter, that truly robust school choice is not a necessary option in the United States?
Failing History
President Bush's proposed program is just the latest attempt to fix Title I. The program has been reformed several times over the last 30 years. Completely absent from the reform debate are the Department of Education's own Title I program evaluations, which demonstrate that after spending more than $150 billion, the program has not improved achievement for disadvantaged students.
Aside from that, education reform is so focused on poorly performing schools and students that education for average and above-average students doesn't even make it to the radar screen. Even if the purest form of Bush's education plan was implemented and the sanctions were enforced, most schools will still be mediocre and most parents will still have few options between their state-mandated public school or paying private school tuition on top of public school taxes.
Real education reform would give parents a way to find a better quality education now, instead of waiting years for their failing or simply mediocre public school to improve. Until the federal government allows real education reforms -- such as universal tax credits or actual vouchers that are at least equal to the federal portion of per-pupil spending -- it will have little impact on the educational experience of students who need better schools while they're still in school.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to settle for the status quo because El Cerrito Elementary School and others like it around the nation can claim they have made adequate yearly progress (second-grade reading scores average in the 42nd percentile instead of the 38th!). My son Jacob would still be forced to attend a school that is not considered failing even though reading scores average well below the 50th percentile. For most parents and students, whether eligible for Title I or not, the Bush plan is, at best, too little, too late.
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