School choice is a growing movement in Wisconsin as parents increasingly take advantage of opportunities offered by the raft of recently passed laws that provide better education options for kids. In Oshkosh alone, 180 students left their local public school to either enroll in a school outside their district or take classes through one of the two virtual public charters operating in the state.

In total, more than 44,000 Wisconsin students took advantage of the state’s choice program that allows students to enroll in a public school outside their assigned home district. To school choice advocates, the numbers prove that parents have long been starved for options when it comes to choosing the best educational setting for their kids — and they’re embracing the opportunity to choose a school that fits best for their child.

But public school teachers and administrators are doing all they can to stop the choice movement from going in that direction. They say it crosses a line by mixing public dollars with private and for-profit education.

A measure in the proposed state biennial budget to expand private school vouchers, which currently only exist in the Milwaukee and Racine areas, has become one of the most controversial pieces of the bill. It would allow up to 500 lower-income students from anywhere in the state to receive tax dollars to help pay for private school tuition.

The concerns of anti-choice advocates are not new. Many fear and argue that public schools will degrade in quality if their funding is allowed to be siphoned off to other institutions via vouchers and tax breaks. In Oshkosh, members of the school board are already sounding an alarm by approving an emergency resolution in opposition to the voucher program expansion.

Yet stopping school choice in its track – especially in Wisconsin – would be like trying to get the horse back in the barn. Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, explained that the state has been moving in this direction since it approved open enrollment policies for its public schools in 1998.

The number of families taking advantage of the program has been steadily rising every year since then.

Voucher opponents say the growing use of open enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean there’s demand for public funding to attend private schools.

State Rep. Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, said he has heard from more constituents opposed to private school vouchers than from people who support them.

“There are talks going on all over the country and world on the future of public education regarding innovation, reform, the role of technology, teacher accountability. But, no one is talking about vouchers,” he said. “What Wisconsin is doing is an ideological experiment not grounded in research or evidence. It’s grounded in politics.”

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The battle isn’t quite over yet, but voucher supporters in Louisiana’s administration are dealing with the reality of their loss in the state Supreme Court by cutting its Course Choice scholarship program back to “pilot” status.

The decision, announced by Education Superintendent John White, means that the Department of Education will not ask lawmakers to fund the program directly, bypassing the now-closed avenue of funding vouchers from the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education money.

Danielle Dreilinger writes for The Times-Picayune that Course Choice, which was part of Governor Bobby Jindal’s 2012 education reform package, would have allowed any student from a public school rated C, D, or F to take outside classes with the cost being covered by the state. Students in well-performing schools would get more limited benefits – their courses would only be covered if not offered by their local school.

In the fall, more than 100 companies, organizations and schools signed up to offer Course Choice classes ranging from barbering to Bard Early College. The department chose 42 to participate. Each provider is limited to 250 Course Choice students. With an average course cost of $700, that would add up to a maximum of about $7 million.

The department had never given an enrollment cap or total cost because Course Choice was to be budget-neutral, shifting a portion of each student’s per-pupil allocation from the student’s public school to the Course Choice provider. But the state Supreme Court said earlier this month it was unconstitutional to transfer funds in that manner.

According to White’s announcement, the limit will now be set at 250 total enrollments per provider, which means students taking more than one course will count multiple times against a provider’s limit. Because of the change, students who already have approval to take an outside course will need to seek out a new one.

To ensure compliance, the state’s DOE will contact each student individually to make sure they’re still interested in participating.

According to NOLA.com, it’s possible that even with the cutback in the number of enrollments, the program might not hit the maximum as districts around the state are reporting a total of only 900 signups.

In fact, data released Friday by the department on the current accepted registrations suggest there is hardly any demand at all. No one was enrolled in classes from most of the 42 providers, including companies such as Sylvan Learning and the Acadiana Symphony.

Registering one student each were Accelerate@RET, Bossier Parish Schools, Connections, Edgenuity, Florida Virtual School, Lincoln National, Louisiana Public Broadcasting, Princeton Review and S.M.A.R.T. Start Ministries. Six more providers had two to six signups.

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The Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that the funding formula used for the state’s school voucher program is unconstitutional. The program, which was shepherded through the Legislature by the state’s Governor Bobby Jindal last year, was voided by a 6-1 decision because the Louisiana Constitution prohibits the use of public money to fund private schools in certain circumstances.

The issue appears to be that the voucher program is funded out of the state’s Minimum Foundation Program. The majority opinion said that the state constitution prohibits diverting money from MFP towards private schools once it has been allocated.

In addition, the court ruled that the MFP formula didn’t get the needed support from lawmakers, passing with only 51 votes when 53 were required.

The Jindal administration has pushed on with the voucher program despite the earlier court ruling. Roughly 8,000 students have been approved for vouchers in the coming school year. It remains unclear how the program will be funded now that use of MFP money has been struck down. State Education Superintendent John White was not immediately available for comment.

Jindal pledged to continue the program, with an add-on through the regular annual budget process. He’ll need backing from lawmakers to do so.

The Associated Press quotes a statement from Jindal expressing disappointment at the decision but promising to find a way to fund the program through an alternative budget process. Jindal said that making sure that parents have a choice when it comes to their kids’ education is important because they can’t afford the children’s “one shot” at a good education to be wasted.

The opinion, written by Justice John Weimer, goes to some lengths to emphasize that the judges were not taking a position on the effectiveness of the voucher program or its value. The decision was reached, according to Weimer, on strictly constitutional grounds.

The majority included Chief Justice Bernette Johnson and Justices Jeffrey Victory, Jeanette Knoll, Marcus Clark and Jefferson Hughes.

Justice Greg Guidry was the only dissenter.

“The majority overlooks the fact that, once a student leaves a district, the district is no longer entitled to the state’s share of the MFP for that student, and thus the district’s share of the MFP is removed from the MFP allocation to that district,” Guidry wrote.

It isn’t clear what the decision means for the voucher program in the immediate future. As of March, the program – called the Louisiana Scholarship Program – continued to draw a growing number of applicants all looking to take part. On March 29th, the Louisiana Department of Education reported that more than 7,000 new applications were received from families who were hoping to receive a check from the state to leave low-performing schools in their districts and enroll in a private school instead.

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has announced that nearly 8,000 students have been matched with voucher seats for the 2013-14 school year in the first round of applications, which represents an increase of 3,000 students over the program’s first year. Danielle Dreilinger, writing for NOLA.com, reports that there will also be a second round of applications running from May 6 to 24.

The state received almost 12,000 applications, counting the 4,700 students currently enrolled. Matches were made in 128 of the 134 participating schools, representing 32 parishes. The Department of Education has not finalized which schools will participate in the second round.

Jindal said that evidence from New Orleans, where the program was piloted in 2008, suggests that it works, with third grade proficiency levels rising in both math and English — 23 and 12 percentage points respectively. Performance scores for the program statewide will be released later this month, and Jindal cited high levels of parental satisfaction as justification for keeping the program, in addition to its increasing public popularity level.

“It’s no surprise that interest in the scholarship program is growing,” he said. Academic achievement in these schools has grown more than the state average and students are “doing better than they were at the schools they left.”

Superintendent John White is also a fan of the program, citing lower dropout rates for children in the voucher program compared to those students in public schools.

The scholarship program is about helping students improve, and White said he was “frankly baffled as to why someone would stand in the way of that.”

Parent Valerie Evans, whose son Gabriel is in 7th grade at Resurrection, said the program had been an answer to her prayers. “My son was able to leave a failing school and enter a great school,” she said.

Louisiana’s voucher program is funded through the government per-pupil allotment, with scholarships coming out at $3,000 less than that amount. Proponents of the program state this as an additional benefit with every student who takes advantage of the program directly saving the taxpayer $3,000.

Jindal noted that this saving will total $18m this year alone.

Not everyone is on board with the program, however, and there has been recent legislative resistance. A Baton Rouge district judge ruled at the end of last year that the program was unconstitutional on the grounds that it diverted public school funds to private schools. That decision is currently pending appeal in the state Supreme Court with Jindal confident that the ruling will go his way.

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Indiana is expanding its voucher program while at the same time pausing its adoption of the Common Core Standards, according to the measure passed by both the Senate and the House late last week. House Bill 1427 is now just short a signature from Governor Mike Pence from becoming law.

The bill, which is the revised version of earlier House Bill 1003, was one piece on a slate of new legislation passed by lawmakers late Friday as they rushed to finish up business before the legislative session finishes. The expanded voucher program extends voucher eligibility to students with siblings in the voucher program, those living in a local area of a school rated D or F and special needs students. The current program requires prior enrollment in a public school for at least two semesters after kindergarten before a student becomes eligible.

The author of the bill, Representative Robert Behning, predicts that nearly 200,000 extra students around the state will now become eligible for vouchers thanks to the newly adopted rules.

Under current law, families of four making $42,000 or less can receive up to 90 percent of the state aid set aside for their child’s public school education to pay tuition. State aid generally ranges between $5,000 and $8,000 per student depending on what school district the student lives in. Families making up to $62,000 can receive half of the state aid amount for private school tuition.

Critics of the bill have said the fast-growing program could quickly become a burdensome cost for the state. But advocates argue that it provides opportunity for children stuck in low performing schools or who fit better in private schools.

The support for the measure broke down predictably along party lines. Even as the final vote came closer on Friday night, Democratic lawmakers in both houses continued to voice objections. Representative Vernon Smith of Gary said that the public school system will not be able to easily absorb the shock of funds lost due to students taking advantage of vouchers. He called the program absurd and said that the state should take a second look at it instead of expanding it further.

Along with the voucher expansion, lawmakers also approved a measure that would halt the adoption the Common Core Standards in the state as of May 15th.

Common Core is a set of academic standards that Indiana and 45 other states have pledged to follow. Critics say Common Core standards fall short of Indiana’s well-regarded prior standards in some areas and take decision-making about what kids learn out of the hands of state policymakers and local communities.

But supporters argue Indiana could fall behind by backing out. Textbook publishers and standardized test makers, including those who make college entrance exams, are moving quickly to adapt to the new standards.

The bill requires public input meetings and a new vote on whether to continue implementing the Common Core by the end of 2014 by the State Board of Education, which originally approved common Core in 2010.

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An expanded voucher system that will give parents government money to take kids out of failing public schools is moving ahead in Arizona this week. The Arizona Daily Star reports that parents have until Wednesday to submit applications for the empowerment scholarship accounts that will award debit cards with $3,500 credit which is equal to 90% of the state’s per-student funding.

The funds are usable to either pay tuition at an alternative private or parochial school or towards homeschooling expenses and even tutoring – all with a caveat that the child will not be part of the state’s public school system. The voucher program is the expanded version of the one that’s been in effect in Arizona since 2011 that only covered students with disabilities.

The program was expanded to cover all schools rated D or F last year, which is more than 10% of all the schools in the state.

State education officials estimate there are about 65,000 students in traditional public schools and another 12,000 in charter schools that are graded D. No schools are currently rated F. Another 10,000 children of active-duty military are also now eligible.

And each student getting one of these scholarships eventually means less state funding for the school from which he or she came.

“It gives another option to those parents to take their children out of a D and F school,” said Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale. “Obviously, the school is not doing a very good job of teaching them.”

Lesko dismissed concerns about the voucher program impoverishing public schools, saying that the main concern was the quality of education and not the specifics of how it’s delivered. Understandably, the president of the state’s teachers union – the Arizona Education Association – isn’t quite as sanguine.

Andrew Morrill says that lawmakers are not considering how well schools throughout the state are positioned to absorb student losses that are not concentrated but spread out among several schools.

“You don’t get rid of a teacher,” he said. “Those are spread throughout the entire population. You don’t reduce the lighting in a building by 20 students’ worth.”

TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone said he doesn’t know what kind of impact the voucher program might have, but he doesn’t expect a mass exodus of students from the district.

“If parents really want to leave for a private school, this will help offset the cost, but I don’t believe it will be the impetus,” Pedicone said.

The more pressing concern for the Tucson Unified School District, which has consistently lost more than 1,000 students a year for several years, is working to reduce the number of D-rated schools – currently there are 18 – and providing a quality education in spite of ongoing state budget cuts, Pedicone said.

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Jason Bedrick writing on the Cato Institute’s Cato At Liberty blog explains that the New Hampshire’s nascent school voucher program has survived an attempt at its repeal by a 14-10 vote in the State Senate. The school choice program would allow corporations to receive tax credits for up to 85% of their contributions to scholarship programs that children could use to attend the school of their choice.

The credit for saving the program goes to Senate Education Committee Chairwoman, Senator Nancy Stiles who – despite opposing the program last year – felt that repealing it before knowing whether it will benefit students in the state was too rash. She pointed out that the opponents of the program should cool their jets in their attempts to kill it before they had actual data to back up their stance.

The legislative battle does not end here, however, since the NH House also repealed the scholarship tax credit program in the House version of the budget. Budget negotiations between New Hampshire’s Democrat-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate are expected to continue until about mid-June.

This is only the first hurdle the state’s voucher program must overcome before students can begin to take advantage of it. Also in the path of school choice is the recently filed lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union for Separation of Church and State and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union which claims that the program violates the separation of church and state by allowing public money to be spent on religious education.

Writing about the lawsuit at the time, Bedrick took the opinion of the lawmakers who drafted the bill – that in their view, the law didn’t run afoul of either the state or the federal constitution.

Overall, the path to school choice has been bumpy in New Hampshire. While lawmakers and the ACLU locked horns over vouchers, Representative Dan Eaton has held up the negotiations over the state’s charter school bill because he wants to use it as a “trump card” when it comes to talking about the state budget later on.

In his own words, Representative Eaton – who heads up the powerful House Finance Committee – says that the charter school bill is his “trump card” when it comes to getting concessions from his opponents in the budget reconciliation stage. It isn’t that he doesn’t agree with the measure or opposes it on political or ideological grounds. Oh no. It’s a cudgel with which to beat his House and Senate colleagues, as Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute points out, and if that happens to have a negative impact on New Hampshire students, so be it.

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According to Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson in EducationNext, the prototype for the school voucher programs was created in New York City in the mid-90s when Cardinal John J. O’Connor and Mayor Rudy Giuliani couldn’t secure public funding to allow NYC children enrolled in the worst-performing public schools to enroll in Catholic schools instead. To bring the program to life, a group of philanthropists created the New York School Choice Scholarship Foundation and distributed grants of up to $1,400 per student to 1,000 low-income students who were about to enter public school or were already enrolled in 2nd through 5th grades.

Since the program was oversubscribed almost immediately, the founders established a lottery system to determine who would get the scholarships. The winning families were guaranteed scholarships for the first five years in school for each one of their children.

And thus was born not only one of the first voucher programs in the country, but an unparalleled research opportunity for anyone interested in looking at long-term impact of vouchers. EdNext explains that the opportunity was not one that SCSF was interested in passing up, so it asked an independent research team to look at the difference in outcomes between families that entered the voucher lottery and won and those who did and lost.

Families who won the voucher lottery were told that scholarship renewal was dependent on participation in annual testing at a designated site other than the child’s school. Families who lost the lottery were compensated for participating in subsequent testing sessions, and their children were given additional chances to win the lottery. Those who won a subsequent lottery were dropped from the evaluation control group. Those families who won the lottery but who did not make use of the scholarship were also compensated for participating in subsequent testing sessions. The original evaluation identified, after three years, large positive effects of the voucher opportunity on the test scores of African Americans but not on the test scores of students from other ethnic groups.

Brookings had published the previous phase of the study which looked at academic outcomes when it came to achievement and graduation. Now Chingos and Peterson expanded their scope to see if participation in SCSF’s program had any impact on college enrollment rates.

The paper takes great care to outline the methodology used to study the college enrollment impact and concludes that for the entire population studied, the increase in college enrollment in the three years after high school graduation was only .7% – not considered statistically significant. However, as Chingos and Peterson explain, this small increase masks much more substantial impact when the results were broken down along demographic groups – especially for African-American students.

The SCSF-NSC linked data indicate that a voucher offer increased the college-enrollment rate of African Americans by 7 percentage points, an increase of 20 percent. If an African American student used the scholarship to attend private school for any amount of time, the estimated impact on college enrollment was 9 percentage points, a 24 percent increase over the college enrollment rate among comparable African American students assigned to the control group (see Figure 1). This corresponds to 3 percentage points for every year the voucher was used.

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According to a paper released by the Center for Education Reform, Louisiana is near the top of the list of states that give parents the most control over their children’s education, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. Since the last edition of the report was released by the pro-charter non-profit group, Louisiana has moved from 6th to 3rd on the “parent power index” putting it behind only Florida and Indiana.

The rankings are based on several criteria that make up the typical school reform agenda including the existence of a voucher program and a large number of charter schools. About 6% of Louisiana students attend charter schools currently statewide, although the number is much higher in New Orleans and other urban centers.

“States where parents have options to choose tend to yield higher growth rates in student achievement,” the study’s authors said in a statement. “(In) states where systems and policies in place limit choice, parental engagement is hindered.”

The center gave Louisiana extra points for its parent trigger law that lets parents vote to put perennially failing schools into the state Recovery School District, and for making information about schools easily available to the public.

This isn’t the first time that Louisiana found itself near the top of a rating system that measures how enthusiastically a state adopts policies of school choice. Earlier this year, it was ranked first in the nation by StudentsFirst, a non-profit headed by former Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee because of its new teacher assessment system that took half of its weight from the result of standardized student exams.

Critics say these report cards don’t measure how well programs are implemented, or how well students score on national measures like the ACT. In 2011, the most recent data available, the National Assessment of Educational Progress put Louisiana near the bottom for fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading.

The national charter alliance has listened: Next year, its ratings will factor in graduation, dropout and attendance rates, and academic performance.

The critics’ views are borne out by the fact that while Indiana – which tops the Parent Power Index with overall PPI of 87.0%, has a graduation rate of 75.8% and the average SAT score of 1470, Nebraska, which came in second to last had both a higher graduation rate – 76.6% — and higher average SAT score of 1745 but only has a 55.0% overall PPI.

CER concludes that in Nebraska, choice is sadly not an option – yet it doesn’t appear to have made their schools worse off as a result.

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After threatening to bury Governor Bill Haslam’s bill that would bring vouchers to Tennessee earlier this week, its Republican sponsor Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris made good on his promise and said that the measure won’t be brought to a vote this session. Norris gave “political gamesmanship” as the reason for his action.

In a letter to the Senate Finance Committee chairwoman, Norris placed a hold on the bill and said that he did not want to see it advance out of the committee. The bill would have limited the number of vouchers available in the state to 5,000 until the year 2016, and would have increased the limit to 20,000 thereafter.

Although vouchers enjoy broad support in the state, the measure drew controversy after attempts were made by other lawmakers to amend it in order to eliminate the voucher limit entirely. Haslam along with Norris have said all along that they will resist any attempt to meddle with the proposal as written.

“There’s no more time for any more gamesmanship,” the Collierville Republican said. “The governor has said from the beginning that he isn’t about that. He designed what he thought fit with his education reforms very specifically and wanted to proceed accordingly, and not to play games with it, not to see it become a political football.”

Norris said he received several amendments to Haslam’s bill on Wednesday, but he said most of them were “more about the adults than the kids.”

“In other words, it was more about … politics than education,” he said.

According to spokeswoman for the Tennessee Federation of Children Kimberly Kump, one of the rejected amendments sought to forge a compromise by limiting the voucher program to schools in Memphis and Shelby counties. This was done in response to expert testimony that limiting voucher programs only to low-performing schools would render them ineffective.

Kemp expressed disappointment that even such minor alteration in the measure was considered a step too far and resulted in short-circuiting the bill in its entirety.

A separate bill for a more expansive voucher program was withdrawn earlier this session, though supporters have said they wanted to amend the governor’s proposal to cover more students.

Before it was withdrawn, the rival measure would have increased the income limit for eligibility from about $43,000 to $75,000 for a family of four, and would have set no limit on growth.

One of the sponsors of that bill, Sen. Dolores Gresham, told reporters after announcing Norris’ decision to the committee that she was just “fighting for children to have better educational opportunities.”

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