The latest: Kids who enroll in virtual or online charter schools now can continue their studies even if they move out of their original school district. The change idea came from Lance Izumi in his recent book, “Short-Circuited: The Challenges Facing the Online Learning Revolution in California.” Which also was turned into a video with the same title.

Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, read the book and wrote the idea into law as AB 2007, which Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed into law. For the next three years, the bill authorizes online charter schools to claim, for average daily attendance, students who reside “outside of the geographic boundaries in which the school is authorized to operate.”

The law is aimed at students who attend an online charter school in one district, then move out of it. Continuity with curriculum is not broken just because a student moves. Given that these are online programs, the students can be located anywhere.

AB 2007 replaced a similar proposed law from 2013, and this year received bipartisan support.

Izumi is the Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies and the Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank.

Last week, Grove sent a letter praising “Short-Circuited” to Sally Pipes, PRI’s president. Grove wrote:

“This book opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of online, or virtual, education.  However, it also revealed the cold reality that, as with traditional schools, our state government has placed destructive barriers in the path of these schools, and as a result, is limiting children from reaching their full potential.

“One obstacle explained by Mr. Izumi particularly stuck with me due to its arbitrary and archaic requirements – the law stating that students may only enroll in virtual schools that are based in the county or in an adjacent county to that which the student resides.  Even though nearly all of the instruction is online, this law restricts most California students from enrolling in any given virtual charter school – a restriction not found in other states.

“Thanks to your organization and the diligent work by Mr. Izumi, we are slowly but surely breaking down the barriers to the vast possibilities in online learning.”

Here’s the full text of the letter:

By Katy Grimes

Politics makes strange bedfellows. This we know to be true, but Latinos and Republicans should not be.

Many demographers predict Republicans will steadily pick up Latino voters as Latino assimilation increases, and Latinos succeed economically.

But one area is a natural for Republicans — education. Many Latino voters say education is a leading issue for them, even more than immigration. While Republicans usually vote correctly on school reform bills, thus far, they have not impressed Latinos in this area. But there is an easy fix.

“What Republicans need is an issue on which Democrats cannot outflank them and that will appeal to ordinary voters in populous Democratic strongholds,” said Lance Izumi, Director of Education for the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchdog’s parent organization. “Parental choice in education fits that bill.”

“Democrats cannot outbid Republicans on parental choice because their paymasters, the teachers’ unions, won’t allow them,” Izumi said. “President Obama claims to support education reform but opposes full-blown choice options such as voucher programs. His reasons, such as believing that money is better spent on increasing public-school funding and that voucher-scholarship programs don’t improve student achievement, are easily rebutted, as the empirical evidence shows otherwise. More important, the groups that Republicans are trying to win over support wider parental-choice options.”

Latinos are increasingly worried and very upset about how their kids are treated in the state’s public schools. At a hearing Wednesday about a bill to increase the frequency of teacher evaluations, hundreds of parents showed up to impress upon the Senate Education Committee just how important and serious the problem is. And these parents were from all walks of life, all ethnicities, all socio-economic classes. Many of these parents had driven to Sacramento from Los Angeles just for the hearing.

Unfortunately, they left the hearing more angry.

Teacher evaluations and other education reforms

SB 441 by Sen. Ron Calderon, D-Montebello, would have required school districts to regularly evaluate the performance of teachers and school principals.

School districts are currently required only to evaluate teachers as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” And these performance evaluations are not exactly pop quizzes; they are scheduled in advance so teachers will not be caught off guard.

Calderon’s bill would create four different evaluation grades, and would increase the frequency of evaluations for veteran teachers from every five years to every three years.

Izumi said many Latino families come from low-income areas where school choice is the only way that they are going to be able to achieve that American dream of graduating high school and going on to college. While the Democrat-sponsored DREAM Act focuses on the illegal-immigrant slice of the Latino population, choice options such as vouchers to attend private schools are accessible to all segments of the Latino community. In other words, Izumi said parental choice is the true dream act for all.

Outflanked, but not irrelevant

California Republicans may be outflanked by a Democratic supermajority, but they can be loud and actively supportive of school choice, as well as other education reforms, such as Calderon’s bill requiring more frequent teacher evaluations.

Unfortunately, Calderon’s bill was killed by teachers union and Senate Democrats. But there will be other opportunities as California schools continue to fail so miserably. Republicans should align themselves more closely with education reform issues, and in doing so, will be speaking the same language as all parents.

By Katy Grimes

At the California Democratic Party Convention this past weekend, Democrats killed efforts led by other Democrats to call for much needed public school reforms.

During the 2010-11 school year, more than 720,000 students in California’s public schools were suspended or expelled. In 2009-10, more than 400,000 students in California public schools were suspended at least once.

Are there really that many discipline problems in California’s public schools?

While many different public policy groups have been busy providing research focused on the higher rates of the suspensions and expulsions of minority students, the sheer numbers of suspensions indicate a growing problem, but not necessarily with misbehaving students.

“Too many schools have implemented overly aggressive policies,” Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, said. Dickinson is the chairman of the Assembly select committee which heard testimony from experts last week about what is going on in California schools, and how delinquency prevention can take place.

After the hearing, I asked Dickinson about the suspension problem, and he acknowledged that many teachers aren’t dealing with the problems. He said most are just making the problem student someone else’s problem by suspending them.

But missing from the list of experts and speakers were teachers. Teachers are the front line of defense in dealing with real disciplinary problems, and should have been present at the hearing to discuss why so many students are being suspended.

“Schools need to figure out what is the institutional change they want,” said Lance Izumi, director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchdog.com’s parent think tank. “Are suspensions just the easy way of doing things?”

The current picture

Many of today’s schools sound more like prisons that healthy bastions of educational learning.

Elijah Muhammad, a student at Sacramento City College, told the committee in 2011, while still in high school, that he was falsely charged with assault and put in jail. Once he was cleared of the assault charges, he tried to go back to his high school, but the administration would not let him. He ended up graduating from a continuation high school, and is now a college student.

He said he tried to speak with the administration about his unique situation, but no one would even meet with him. He was treated like a criminal.

Gabriel Browner, a student at Grant Union High School, said that at his high school, the students are targeted by teachers, who suspend the same students over and over. And Browner told of an interesting and vindictive twist: in-school suspensions.

Browner said if a student is disciplined with an in-school suspension, they attend suspension in another room in the school, but are not allowed to make up class work or tests. Students can have up to three in-school suspensions before an out-of-school suspension is issued.

Browner said many of the teachers are vindictive, and the suspensions are bullying tactics. He said teachers abuse “willful defiance,” the catchall behavior label for any disruption in classrooms.

Some experts believe the in-school suspensions were created to save the school funding which is based on Average Daily Attendance per pupil. The schools get the money only if a student attends class.

Zero tolerance is being abused

After the 1999 shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School, many schools adopted policies that required harsh penalties for even minor misconduct. This was done with the hope that schools would somehow become safer.  “Zero tolerance” became the school rallying cry.

The term “willful defiance” is currently under scrutiny, as its vague definition is what has allowed teachers to suspend so many students for any behavior that disrupts class.

Experts argue it is a catchall phrase that needs to be eliminated because of the overuse for even trivial offenses. And many experts say it is disproportionately used against African-American and Latino boys, and harms the students who need most to stay in school.

Dickinson has authored AB 420 to limit the use of willfully defying authorities or disrupting school activities as a reason to suspend or expel students.

Prevention is the key

Rosalinda Hill and Maisie Chin, co-founders of Community Asset Development Re-Defining Education, CADRE, said it took many students and their families speaking up about the suspension policies to bring this problem to a head.

In lieu of holding just parents accountable, CADRE works with and organizes parents to be able to dig in to the obstructions parents find, as well as the often poor treatment of their children.

But what CADRE found is that students aren’t just receiving suspensions, many are “pushed out” of school.

Dickinson asked Chin how the state might pay for the changes. Chin said there is profiting off of the suspensions because of the many programs created.

Chin said educators instead have to stop looking at these issues as programs, and recognize schools have to develop students as human beings, and not just teach to the tests.

Dr. Robert Ross, President of The California Endowment,  a health foundation created “to address the health needs of Californians,” said his organization recently conducted a poll, which found:

* Four in five voters believe that California school discipline policies need changing.

* Californians voice high levels of support for preventive approaches to school discipline, such as teaching character development and conflict resolution from a young age and teaching positive behavior and skills for managing emotions and making better decisions.

* The survey shows 85 percent of respondents said teachers should have more tools to manage discipline in their classroom, with large majorities supporting expanding student access to counseling services, mental health and substance abuse services.

* Voters understand the serious consequences that can occur when children are suspended or expelled from school.

* Students favor counselors over armed guards in schools.

Ross said schools need more mental health care as well as nurses available to students.

The next step

The next hearing held by the Assembly Select Committee needs to have the CTA present.

“The clash over education had been building throughout the three-day convention, underscoring a larger debate taking place in education circles,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “A spokeswoman for StudentsFirst said the party failed over the weekend to discuss any concrete steps to improve education.”

The suspension issue isn’t just a discussion of race; it’s a bigger issue of California public schools adequately educating all of the students in attendance, and not just the compliant ones.

By Chris Reed

Lance Izumi does a great job in the Orange County Register of documenting how President Obama’s push for universal preschool is a retread of actor-director Rob Reiner’s failed, scandal-scarred push in California — right down to citing the same shaky study to justify changing the lives of vast numbers of families.

“Both Reiner and Obama pointed to supposed research showing that for every tax dollar invested in government-run preschool several times that amount would be saved by higher graduation rates, lower teen pregnancy and reduced violent crime. The trouble is that there is no such long-term evidence for children of all income backgrounds.

“Reiner and his campaign made much of a RAND Corp. study that purported to show what universal government-run preschool would have cost and student-outcome benefits. However, even RAND admitted that there was only one study done on the long-term impact of preschool on non-poor children. According to RAND, this study found that non-poor children attending preschool ‘were no better off in terms of high school or college completion, earnings, or criminal justice system involvement than those not going to any preschool.’ In other words, President Obama’s argument for universal government-run preschool is totally baseless.”

Surveys say: No long-lasting benefit despite hype

And guess what? Much broader and more scientific studies sharply undermine the case for Obama’s and Reiner’s crusade, as Izumi lays out:

“Further, even evidence of the impact of preschool on low-income children is mixed. True, after longitudinal study, a few preschool programs have shown positive results, but there are critical caveats.

“First, the reasons for the positive results are tied to very specific elements, such as long-term parental involvement, and there is no guarantee that such elements will be included in Obama’s program. Further, some of these ‘positive’ studies are based on tiny sample sizes and have never been replicated.

“Finally, there’s a lot of data to show that whatever beneficial impact preschool has on poor children fades away after a few years.”

But what’s striking to me is that even though RAND acknowledges the weakness of the study that’s being touted by the president and his Hollywood pal, the Santa Monica-headquartered think tank is back on the pulpit pushing for universal preschool. A search on its website turns out lots of hits that suggests universal preschool is part of RAND’s agenda.

Silly me. I thought think tanks were supposed to be both ideological and empirical.

A whiff of ugly paternalism

And do I detect a slightly ugly whiff to our liberal elites’ eagerness to help poor families — often minorities — in raising their kids? This is coming from the same educrat wing of the Democratic Party that increasingly implies that teachers can never help broad swaths of students. I’m always struck when I read the comments sections of education blogs by how ready teachers are to argue that some kids just can’t be helped.

I am not a Pollyanna. I know students have varied skill sets. But it’s worth remembering that a central rationale for “No Child Left Behind” was a cliche — “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — that has some real truth to it. If teachers assume individual students — or categories of students — aren’t reachable, they don’t reach.

Is their paternalism now broadening out to suggest that there may be categories of parents who are so incompetent that they need government-supplied role models to save their 3- and 4-year-olds?

Could be. There is a grim history to liberals’ condescension and contempt for the downtrodden they allegedly care most about.

By Katy Grimes

Gov. Jerry Brown announced last week that he will be pushing online education, and made provisions for this in his 2013-14 budget proposal.

The governor has already started lobbying the California State University and  University of California regents to expand online courses for college students.

Brown said in his budget proposal press conference on Thursday that he wants to be able to reach more students, and save costs.

But there’s a giant problem with California’s online education restrictions.

State rules bar teachers with out-of-state licenses from teaching online courses to California students, requiring that all teachers can only have California teaching credentials.

According to Lance Izumi, J.D., Senior Fellow with the Pacific research Institute, and author of Short Circuited: The Challenges Facing the Online Learning Revolution in California, the National Education Association, the parent organization of the California Teachers Association, says there should be “an absolute prohibition against the granting of charters for the purpose of home-schooling, including online charter schools that seek home-schooling over the Internet.”

The California Federation of Teachers, in model contract language, says: “No employee shall be displaced because of distance learning or other educational technology.”

In other words, it’s all about the teachers.

Izumi explained that online education also must meet the CFT and CTA student-teacher ratios for independent study.

California limits students who attend an online, virtual charter school, to take the courses within the county in which they reside. Why take online courses at all if you can drive, bike or walk to the school?

California has the most burdensome government regulations in the Western United States for online learning, Izumi found in Short Circuited. “The union still wants to protect classrooms and the teachers who staff them,” Izumi wrote.

In 2005, the California Federation of Teachers issued its revised contract template titled, “A Framework for Contract Negotiations Related to Educational Technology Issues.”  According to Izumi, it is still being used, and is referenced on its website.

The following language is from this contract template:

Policy rationale: Contracting out bargaining unit work can take the form of a district contracting with an independent contractor to produce course software. A district could contract with a company to produce certain course offerings or could offer courses over the Internet that have not been developed in-house. In each case, someone else is doing the bargaining unit’s work. 

A.Model Contract Language 

No employee shall be displaced because of distance learning or other educational technology. The use of distance education technology shall not be used to reduce, eliminate, or consolidate faculty positions within the district. 

No work normally performed by any member of the faculty bargaining unit shall be contracted out without the express agreement of the Federation. 

No distance education sections shall be instructed or conducted by persons not employed within the faculty bargaining unit. 

No distance education or technology-related work shall be performed by other than members of this bargaining unit. 

No member of the bargaining unit will be displaced because of distance learning or computer-aided courses as long as workload in credit courses is available in traditional modes. 

Izumi’s book reveals the endless education possibilities in online learning. And kudos to Gov. Brown for saying that he supports online education. But, if he truly supports online learning in California, there are real reforms in the education code, and within the CFT and CTA, which must take place before Brown will truly be furthering student learning through online education.

Throwing more money from the state budget at online education won’t help students as long as the teachers unions are waiting in the wings to lap it up in fat contracts.

This video was made by Izumi, and focuses on the challenges and advantages of online education and virtual learning.

By John Seiler

A state government employee posted thousands of times on the Sacramento Bee’s Web site during work hours. Taxpayers subsidized his cyber-goldbricking.

CBS News just ran a story on it with interviews of Lance Izumi, our colleague at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank.

Unfortunately, there’s no embedding of the video. But click here for the CBS site to watch it.

By Katy Grimes

The Joint Legislative Audit Committee hearing last week was a mini civics lesson in what is going on in state politics, and what bad policy the state’s special-interest groups and labor unions are continually pushing.

When special interests and their compliant legislative counterparts don’t get their way and their bills are killed, they double down to find another way to influence and change policy. Often, the JLAC Committee is the answer for a backdoor approach at achieving the goal.

One of the gems at the hearing was an attempt by Assembly members Betsy Butler, D-Torrance, and Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, to push for an audit of the California State University Extension Education program. Butler and Dickinson are both darlings of the California Faculty Association, a union of 23,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches who teach in the California State University system. Butler and Dickinson regularly do bidding for the CFA through the bills they author.

The fight for CSU extension

“Of all the states, one would expect that the impact of technology on the delivery of educational services would be greatest in California, home to Silicon Valley and major high-tech companies,” Lance Izumi, J.D. wrote in “Short Circuited: The Challenges Facing the Online Learning Revolution in California.” “Yet when it comes to harnessing the technological revolution as it applies to education, it turns out that California is lagging in many respects.”

Extended and Continuing Education brings education and training opportunities to people in local communities throughout the state, across the country, and even around the world, and offers flexibility for students. And, for those on a tight budget, it costs much less than University of Phoenix or the University of Southern California Extension schools.

The CSU Extension Education website reports that the program offers:

* Online and off-campus credit degree programs;

* Professional development certificate programs and courses;

* Courses for personal enrichment; and

* Access to university courses without university admission.

There are programs for working professionals, displaced workers, career changers, military and veterans, international students, stay-at-home mothers wanting to finish a degree, and many other situations.

And amazingly, CSU’s Extension education program is self-supporting; student fees cover all expenses necessary to conduct the program.

So why would the program need an audit? The answer lies in AB 2427 by Assemblywoman Betsy Butler which, if passed, would have required that CSU provide an annual report on CSU Extended Education courses on a system-wide and campus-by-campus basis, including information on student demographics, fees, the number of courses and types of courses. AB 2427 is stuck in the Senate Appropriation Committee, placed on suspense, and essentially killed, for now.

According to the California Faculty Association, which was pushing the bill, extension fees far exceed the cost of the same classes in the regular university.

Understanding something about the union,helps understand the motive for a move like this.

According to Izumi, the director of education at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank, “the union wants to protect traditional classrooms and the teachers who staff them.”

“A key concern is that online education could lead to non-bargaining-unit members teaching courses,” Izumi wrote.

Izumi found that the California Federation of Teachers and other teacher and faculty unions oppose online education whenever and wherever they can. And Izumi pointed out that this opposition is even written in the CFT and CFA contracts:

“Contracting out bargaining work can take the form of a district contracting with an independent contractor to produce course software,” he said. A district would contract with a company to produce certain course offerings or could offer courses over the Internet that have not been developed in-house. In each case, someone else is doing the bargaining unit’s work.”

The contract specifically states that “no distance education or technology-related work shall be performed by other than members of this bargaining unit,” and “no member of the bargaining unit will be displaced because of distance learning or computer-related courses…”

“Like a medieval potentate, the union seeks to build a wall around its fiefdom and grant itself veto power over any change that would adversely affect union members,” Izumi said. “If technology is to enter the classroom, it must be under union control.”

Audit time

The audit request was granted by the JLAC Committee, and will be performed by the Bureau of State Audits, under the direction of Elaine Howle, the non-partisan and very professional California State Auditor.

It’s not difficult to find what the crux of the audit really is, buried down at the bottom of the list of issues to be investigated: “To the extent possible, determine whether Extended Education courses are replacing regular state-supported courses.”

Online education and Extension Education schools are here to stay. Extension programs with an online component thrive in other states because the goal is not union domination, but flexible education for students.

“Online learning is not just the wave of the future; it is the tidal wave of the future,” Izumi wrote. “It is past time for policy makers in California to tear down the government-made breakwaters that have diminished the full impact of this tidal surge.”

By Lance T. Izumi

Last week, I wrote about Governor Jerry Brown’s weighted-student-formula proposal, which attached a base state-funding amount plus various supplemental amounts to individual students that would then be collected by school districts.  The plan sought to increase funding flexibility for school districts, which now face an array of earmarked categorical programs that force districts to spend a significant percentage of their funding on state-mandated priorities.

Brown’s fellow Democrats in the Legislature, however, couldn’t stomach the governor’s mild reform of the funding process and eliminated weighted-student-formula from the Legislature’s budget package that came out at the end of the week.

An aide to Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, said the Legislature’s action was taken because of concerns that, while Brown’s plan gave spending flexibility for districts, it did not contain accountability for results.  This criticism has some merit.  Brown’s original budget proposal in January didn’t contain any specific accountability provisions, although Brown had indicated that he planned to add a performance component to his weighted-student-formula plan sometime in the future.  Democratic legislative leaders, however, missed the more important problem with Brown’s plan.

As I pointed out, the real problem with Brown’s plan is its failure to make funding truly portable with students.  Brown sent funding to school districts, instead of backpacking dollars with students so that they could take funding to the individual school, public or private, of their choice.  Giving students and their parents this choice through vouchers or other similar portable-funding options would create incentives for all schools to improve their performance in order attract education consumers.

In their critique of Brown’s plan, Democratic legislative leaders are as guilty as the governor in failing to recognize the absence in the public school system of any significant market incentive to improve its own performance.  This blind spot prevents lawmakers from proposing a better alternative to Brown’s proposal.  The public is therefore left with a warmed-over status quo.

— Lance T. Izumi is Koret senior fellow and senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank.  He is the author of Obama’s Education Takeover (Encounter Books, 2012).

By Lance T. Izumi

Around the country, governors like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana have led successful fights for new education-reform laws that eliminate or restrict teacher tenure, re-think old-line seniority protection rules and give parents the ability to choose the public or private school that best meets the needs of their children.  In contrast, California Gov. Jerry Brown eschews a grand redesign of California’s dysfunctional public education system and seems satisfied merely to play small ball and tinker around the edges.

To be fair, some of the governor’s moves, though far from earth shattering, are commendable.  For instance, in his recent May Revision to his 2012-13 budget proposal, Brown seeks to eliminate a number of state education mandates that have created funding inflexibilities for local schools.

His main “reform” proposal, however, which seeks to re-structure education funding through a so-called weighted-student-formula mechanism, is a pale effort that will do little to remedy the poor incentives built into the current public education system.

The first problem with Brown’s version of WSF is that it fails to incorporate some of WSF’s key commonly accepted features.  Under WSF theory, a base-funding amount from the government is attached to each student, with additional amounts added for factors like low-income family background or English-language-learner status.  This sum of funding follows the student to the school that he or she decides to attend.  This portability of funding allows individual local schools to receive funding directly, bypassing inefficient district bureaucracies and creating competition between schools for students and the funds attached to them.

UCLA business professor William Ouchi, a leading WSF researcher and exponent, says that because funding goes to individual schools, principals “have the autonomy to decide how to allocate money for resources that include teaching staff, other employees, and extra services.”  The principal is empowered to become an entrepreneur.  Further, Ouchi says that a WSF system empowers parents “to choose the school they feel is best for their children.”  Giving parents choice “creates a market-driven system within the public schools that will support approaches that serve students best.”  Jerry Brown’s WSF plan does none of these things.

No competition

True, Brown’s WSF plan would attach base funding plus supplemental funding amounts to students, but the funds would be collected by school districts, not by individual schools, which undermines WSF’s big selling points of bypassing bloated politics-driven bureaucracies, empowering school principals, giving greater choice to parents and increasing competition between schools.  In essence, Brown’s plan is just a variation on the way the state funnels money to school districts.  The districts will have more flexibility on how they spend their dollars, but the anti-change incentives inherent within the system will remain basically the same.

Further, Brown conditions the implementation of his WSF system on the passage of his tax hike proposal on the November ballot.  Given the lukewarm support for the proposal in the polls, the defeat of the recent tobacco tax initiative, and the state’s continuing bad economy, it is far from certain that the governor’s tax increases will win.  If his tax plan loses, Brown would delay implementation of WSF.

Even if voters approve his higher taxes, he would phase in WSF implementation over a lengthy seven-year period.  In other words, don’t expect a quick shake-up or quick results.  As even a recent sympathetic report by Policy Analysis for California Education acknowledged, “It is a long way from this policy proposal to a fully-functioning weighted pupil funding system” that meets the objectives of a fairer, more rational and more transparent K-12 school finance system in California.

Same Education Code

In addition, Brown’s WSF proposal includes no meaningful revamping of California’s 12-volume education code.  As Reason Foundation education director Lisa Snell has noted, even under WSF, “unlike an actual market system in education, public schools are still strapped with myriad local, state, and federal regulations.”  The Legislative Analyst’s Office underscored the absence of regulatory reform in the governor’s proposal when it proposed an alternative plan that called for, among other things, removing state restrictions on contracting out education-related services.

Also, as I pointed out in my 2007 “California Education Report Card,” published by the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank, “WSF must operate within the confines of local teacher union contracts, which may make it much less easy to make important staffing decisions.”  Not surprisingly, Jerry Brown, who signed the 1975 Rodda Act, which established teacher-union collective bargaining, makes no effort to scale back the wide scope of current union contracts.

Ultimately, the best way to make funding truly portable with students is to give parents vouchers or other school-choice tools.  Parents could then send their children to the public or private school of their choosing, which would foster competition between schools, and result in better school and student performance and higher parental satisfaction.

These choice programs are also significantly less costly than the regular public school system.  Louisiana, for example, expects to save money as it dramatically expands its voucher program to cover up to 380,000 students.  John White, Louisiana’s superintendent of education, notes that while the state spends about $8,500 per pupil to educate regular public-school students in New Orleans, it spends only about $4,500 for every student in the city’s pilot voucher program.

Lisa Snell rightly observes: “Is it really necessary to stay within the bounds of the existing public school system and complete the difficult task of changing the system from within?  A better alternative would be to move to a direct-financing mechanism through vouchers, tax credits, or charter schools — an arrangement under which per pupil funding immediately empowers parents and leads to the most decentralized schools of all, with 100 percent local budget control.”  Other governors have come to this realization and have enacted wide-ranging voucher and other school-choice programs.  It’s past time for Jerry Brown to have his Damascus moment, too.

Lance T. Izumi is Koret senior fellow and senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute.  He is the author of Obama’s Education Takeover (Encounter Broadsides, 2012). YouTube about the book:

This week in an op-ed for The New York Times, I argued that parents of children with special needs, such as those with hearing impairments, should be empowered to choose the school, public or private, that best fits the needs of their children.  I then cited recently enacted laws in North Carolina and Ohio that give tuition tax credits and vouchers to parents of disabled children, including deaf students, which they can use at private schools. I also gave the example of a specific parent of a child with deafness who strongly supported the North Carolina law.

In response, I received a shocking e-mail from a California advocate for the deaf. The full letter is below.

“Basically your article could be compared to having Caucasians writing what they think is best for African American children.  It is also like having the Nazis to write that they think is best for Jewish children,” wrote Julie Rems-Smario, the executive director of the Oakland-based DeafHope, a non-profit organization seeking to end domestic and sexual violence against deaf women and children.

Really?  Because I have hearing, my writing that parents of deaf children should be empowered to choose the best type of schooling for their children is actually like a Nazi telling Jewish parents what’s best for their children?

Not only is such an accusation offensive beyond belief, it also demeans deaf children and their parents.  Does Ms. Rems-Smario believe that parents of deaf children are incapable of making intelligent educational choices?  If so, with friends like these, the deaf community does not need enemies.

AUGUST 4, 2011

Here’s the full letter, verbatim:

Dear Lance Izumi, 

I encourage you to visit the California School for the Deaf to see what is really happening with our deaf students.   The reason why so many of those children are not doing well is because they were sent to us (California School for the Deaf, Fremont and California School for the Deaf, Riverside)  from public schools who had FAILED them by denying them their native language, American Sign Language (ASL), during their formative years.   They havebeen given a second chance at our schools, but it is very difficult to make up what they missed during pre-school and elementary school.  The successful children at our Deaf schools are those who grew up with signed language and ASL since birth just like any hearing children growing up with verbal language since birth.  Their languages are not taught…rather the languages are acquired from being in an accessible language-rich environment. 

The long-term affects show it is more expensive to put our children in public schools without signed language. They will forever need our rehabilitation funds paid for with everyone’s tax dollars.  Give a Deaf child signed language from birth, role models, social opportunities 24/7, and accessible education, this child will contribute to society as a whole human being with the ability to pay taxes just like anyone else. 

Basically your article could be compared to having  Caucasions writing what they think is best for African American children.  It  is also like having the Nazis to write that they think is best for  Jewish children. I don’t think you intended the arrogance that came across in the writing in your blog because people often overlook Deaf people as a cultural and linguistic entity.    It is time for our hearing allies to INVOLVE Deaf people from the heart of the Deaf  before writing about us.  Let’s meet soon so I can give you the Deaf perspective about this. 

Who am I?  I am a semi-lingual Deaf woman who graduated from a public school in California .  I was often used as a poster child of Deaf oral education to recruit hearing parents with Deaf children.  Thus, I have the first-hand experience of public school Deaf programs run by hearing teachers; Looking back, I can now say that that I would not wish this on ANY Deaf child.  With my “PhD” in life experience, I know more than the doctors do, I know more than the hearing teachers do, and I also know more than the audiologists do.  Thus,  I ask you to please work with the Deaf community to find out what is really the best for the Deaf babies.  Those Deaf babies you are writing about will grow up and tell you in 20 years the same thing I am trying to tell you now . Please help me break this vicious cycle! 

Julie Rems-Smario

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