Public support for vouchers in Indiana? Look again

The Indianapolis-based Foundation for Educational Choice is pulling out the stops to convince the state legislature to approve a school voucher program. The program would provide taxpayer money for parents to send their kids to private schools.

On Monday, the foundation (formerly the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation) released results from a public-opinion survey purporting to show there is strong public support for vouchers in Indiana. In fact, it shows no such thing.

The survey found that 68 percent of Hoosier respondents said they were not familiar with vouchers. In other words, they had no opinion. So the poll-takers helpfully explained: A voucher system allows parents “the option of sending their child to the school of their choice, whether that school is public or private, including both religious and non-religious schools,” with funding re-allocated from the local school district to pay full or partial tuition.

Sounds fairly harmless, doesn’t it? With the explanation, 66 percent said they liked the idea. But what if the question were phrased differently? Or if a few follow-up questions were asked. Should you pay taxes to help wealthy parents send their kids to $30,000-a-year private schools? Should schools that get tax dollars be able to teach religious beliefs? Any religious beliefs?

The annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of the public’s attitudes toward education used to ask about support for vouchers, but it apparently suspended the question in 2009 and 2010. In the 2008 nationwide poll, it asked respondents if they “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Forty-four percent favored the idea; 50 percent opposed.

The Foundation for Educational Choice has conducted surveys since 2005 in states where it has campaigned for voucher programs. The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado reviewed 10 of its state surveys and concluded the results were “suspect” because of low response rates and the public’s lack of familiarity with the voucher issue. “These problems were exacerbated by potentially biased wording of questions, which may have resulted in more responses favorable to vouchers,” authors Anthony Gary Dworkin and Jon Lorence wrote.

The foundation’s campaign is, of course, timed to build support for a proposal by Gov. Mitch Daniels to enact a voucher program in Indiana. Daniels wants to limit vouchers to low-income parents, but folks who responded to the foundation survey thought the system should be open to everyone.

We won’t try to fact-check everything on the foundation’s website, but it might want to pay more attention to its media coverage section. It attributes an editorial praising Daniels’ school voucher campaign to the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. The J-G has a liberal editorial policy and would be unlikely to back Daniels on vouchers. In fact, the editorial cited by the foundation is from the conservative eddy page of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

Do teachers have 20 times more impact on achievement than any other factor?

Making the case for their plan to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent Tony Bennett have been saying that a teacher’s influence on student achievement scores is 20 times greater than any other factor, including class size and poverty.

Does that sound like a bit of an exaggeration? It does, and it is.

Bennett floated the claim in a Dec. 8 presentation outlining his school-reform agenda to the Indiana Education Roundtable. Daniels has repeated it in media interviews, including with WANE TV in Fort Wayne and the Louisville Courier-Journal.

But it seems that no one has bothered to check it out. We did, and here’s what we found.

Bennett’s presentation attributes the information to Daniel Fallon, an official with the Carnegie Corp. And Fallon did in fact make the claim in a 2003 speech. He based the idea on a research paper presented in 1998 by University of Texas-Dallas professor John Kain. But the “20 times greater” statement doesn’t show up in the paper.

Unfortunately, John Kain died in 2003. So School Matters sent a message to the Texas Schools Project at UT Dallas, asking whether his data supported the Fallon-Daniels-Bennett claim.

We promptly received a thoughtful and thorough reply from Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution,

More news on Daniels-Bennett education agenda

Thanks to Niki Kelly, Statehouse reporter for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, for a clear and comprehensive story about the education reform proposals that Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett put forward last week.

Kelly focuses on the most potentially controversial elements in the Daniels-Bennett agenda: 1) publicly funded vouchers to pay for students to attend private schools; 2) changes in the way teachers are evaluated; and 3) financial incentives for students to finish high school early.

Bennett and Daniels provided details about their proposals for the 2011 legislative session Wednesday to the Indiana Education Roundtable. You can watch a video of Bennett’s presentation, view PowerPoint slides, and read the Department of Education news release and summary of the proposals.

The agenda includes:

— “Identify and reward great teachers and principals” – merit pay, an end to seniority-based teacher tenure, restrictions on union contacts, etc.
— “Real accountability and flexibility” – more aggressive state action and fewer union restrictions on low-performing schools.
— “High quality options for families” – more charter schools, state funding for students to attend private schools, scholarships for early high-school graduation.

The Education Roundtable (local members: Indiana University President Michael McRobbie and elementary teacher/Republican activist Danny Shields) endorsed two elements of the agenda: new teacher evaluations and early graduation.

Daniels’ education agenda: Is thoughtful debate too much to ask?

In case you missed it, Gov. Mitch Daniels laid out his ideas for reforming Indiana’s K-12 education system earlier this month in a guest column in the Indianapolis Star.

The list goes like this:

— Base teachers’ pay and job tenure on how well their students learn.
— Free schools from unnecessary state rules and teacher contract restrictions.
— Expand parent choice and allow more charter schools.
— Encourage students to finish high school early and pay them if they do.

These are interesting ideas, but Daniels presents them with such bombast that he seems to be begging for a fight, not a discussion.

Making the case for merit pay, he writes: “If there is one fact that every expert and all the data confirm, it is that the single most important predictor of a child’s academic success is the quality of the teachers he or she encounters.”

To quote just one expert who disagrees, the education historian Diane Ravitch: “The single most reliable predictor of test scores is poverty, and poverty, in turn, is correlated to student attendance, to family support, and to the school’s resources.”

That’s not to say that poverty should be an excuse for a lack of learning, or that teachers aren’t important. But ignoring such an important factor doesn’t contribute to honest debate — nor does glossing over the difficulty of being able to identify

Election is over, and it’s payback time

The week after an election is probably a good time to recall the immortal words of Henry Adams, the American historian and diarist: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

In other words, if you backed the wrong side last week, get ready to duck.

Take a look at the money disbursed this election season by the Indiana Political Action Committee for Education, the political arm of the Indiana State Teachers Association. It spent close to $1 million by Oct. 9, most of it in contributions of as much as $50,000 to Democratic legislative candidates.

But most of those candidates lost. Republicans won control of the Indiana House by a 59-41 margin. In the state Senate, the margin is so lopsided that the handful of Democrats don’t even need to show up for Republicans to do business.

Conveniently enough, any hypothetical payback of the ISTA would align nicely with the Republican agenda of weakening the ability of teachers’ unions to block reforms such as merit pay and the gutting of tenure protections.

National updates: Ed Jobs deadline, ‘turnaround’ money chase

Mitch Daniels and other governors have until Sept. 9 to apply for their states’ share of $10 billion from the Education Jobs Fund created last week by Congress, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The House voted 247-161 on Aug. 10 for the funding to save teachers’ jobs, which had already been approved by the Senate. President Barack Obama signed the bill the same day it passed. (It also included $16 billion for state Medicaid expenses.)

Indiana will get $207 million in Ed Jobs funding, enough to keep 3,600 teachers from losing their jobs, according to the Democratic campaign group Organizing for America.

Indy Star on pre-K, Daniels on education, Duncan on charters

Some interesting reading on education topics …

Sunday’s Indianapolis Star featured a front-page story about Indiana’s lack of support for early childhood education. The paper followed up with a Wednesday editorial. The Star reports that Pre-K Now, a national advocacy group, rates Indiana as one of the eight worst states for public pre-kindergarten programs. “It’s one of the few states where leadership has not made the smart investments other states have thought were important,” says Pre-K Now director Marci Young.

Karen Francisco, in the Learning Curve blog at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, writes about the attitudes toward public education expressed by Gov. Mitch Daniels in his recent Weekly Standard profile. The profile got national attention for Daniels’ comment that Republicans should strike a “truce” on social issues if they want to win elections. Francisco’s headline: “No truce with public education.”

The U.S. Department of Education website posts U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remarks on July 1 to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools. Duncan offers a bit of tough love but makes clear he speaks as a member of the family. “There are a couple of things that I think we have to do much better, frankly, as a movement,” he says. That’s right, “we,” not “you.”