School’s in, but many parents turn outside for better education

Originally published in the Baltimore Examiner

By Alison Lake
Published on Wednesday, August 22, 2007
BALTIMORE - A wall will eventually sag or crumble if too many blocks are missing. The same thing can happen to a child’s education when he or she lacks too many skills. Because so many taxpayer-funded schools are not providing adequate instruction to children, parents must look elsewhere to help fill the gaps. This situation drives growth in the supplemental education market every year. The demand stems both from federal requirements and parents. No Child Left Behind requires that Title I schools not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provide tutoring to needy students. In spite of the NCLB mandate, many more children need supplemental education than receive it. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said states and school districts need to vastly improve how they advertise tutoring information to parents in an August 2006 report. Contracting and services mismanagement, for example, led to only 19 percent of eligible students in the 2004-2005 school year receiving extra help. In 2007, 2.3 million students were eligible for services. Many issues can contribute to students not using services, including living in rural or dangerous areas without many tutor choices, a lack of information about them and language barriers. Read More »

Fixing Baltimore's education crisis

Originally published in the Baltimore Examiner

By Christopher B. Summers
Published on Tuesday, May 15, 2007
BALTIMORE - In 1999, the Children's Scholarship Fund announced it would provide private-school scholarships to low-income families across the country. In Baltimore, 46,000 families applied for scholarships - approximately 44 percent of the eligible student population. Since the number of available scholarships was scarce, only 430 lucky students received scholarships that year. Where are those thousands of children? Most likely many dropped out of high school before graduation. According to one recent study in Education Week, the graduation rate in Baltimore City's public schools could be as low as 39 percent - one of the lowest among major cities in the country. Read More »

School Choice Options for Maryland

Education Tax Credits and the BOAST Tax Credit Proposal

Edited by Alison Lake
Published on Monday, March 12, 2007
In the 2007 Maryland state legislative session, a bipartisan coalition of legislators has introduced the Building Opportunities for All Students and Teachers, or BOAST tax credit proposal. This initiative is modeled after a similar tax credit program in Pennsylvania that has strong bipartisan support there. The legislation (Senate Bill 265) is sponsored by State Senator James E. DeGrange, Sr., a Democrat from District 32 (Anne Arundel County) and 17 co-sponsors. In the House of Delegates, the bill is sponsored by Delegate James E. Proctor Jr., a Democrat from District 27A (Calvert and Prince George’s counties) and 57 co-sponsors.The BOAST tax credit proposal would provide up to $25 million in partial tax credits to Maryland businesses that make contributions to support education. Specifically, the bill would allow businesses to make up to $15 million in contributions to non-profit organizations that fund tuition scholarships to non-public schools. Businesses would also be allowed to contribute up to $10 million to organizations that fund initiatives to improve public education. Businesses participating in the BOAST tax credit program would be able to receive a partial tax credit (worth 75 percent of the donation) for qualifying contributions. Read More »

Is It Time To Rethink Teacher Pensions In Maryland?

By Michael Podgursky, Ph.D.
Published on Tuesday, December 05, 2006
The Abell Foundation and the Maryland Public Policy Institute have released a joint study that challenges the claim that Maryland’s teacher pension system is hampering teacher recruitment and retention. The study, authored by University of Missouri economist Michael Podgursky, Ph.D., a specialist in the teacher labor market, finds that Maryland’s traditional teacher pension system was on par with peer states. His findings will likely be controversial; coming just months after the 2006 General Assembly approved an expensive increase in teacher pensions, and prior to a 2007 General Assembly in which the state’s teachers union is expected to push for an additional increase. More importantly, the study raises the question: If the teacher retirement plan is on par with other states, then why is Maryland really losing young teachers to other states? In “Is It Time To Rethink Teacher Pensions in Maryland?” Prof. Podgursky finds that in terms of simple income replacement rates, the traditional Maryland teacher pension system did appear to be among the worst in the nation. However, this measure does not accurately reveal the value of teachers’ pensions.Podgursky finds: “Given the high professional mobility of public school teachers, education policy makers should consider providing Maryland teachers with a defined contribution alternative to the current system — a plan that would ‘travel with’ mobile teachers.” Read More »

Focus Group Study: Foster Care Families, Children, and Education

Published on Thursday, November 30, 2006
The Maryland Public Policy Institute is working to spearhead initiatives that help children entrusted in the foster care system to simultaneously receive a high-quality education. Many of these children experience unstable and often abusive living conditions. Social service placement typically requires frequent relocations for these wards of the courts: home-to-home, community-to-community and school-to-school. At this time, The Maryland Public Policy Institute has enlisted the services of Baltimore Research to conduct research that will aid in gaining a better understanding of the impact of foster care on the education of those in its charge. Read More »

15 Questions Maryland's Teachers Should Ask Their Unions

By Tom Neumark
Published on Monday, November 06, 2006
It is election season again, and across the state local teachers’ unions are campaigning for the candidates featured on their Apple Ballot, which they will distribute to large numbers of voters this November. The Apple Ballot enjoys a somewhat privileged place in the minds of Maryland’s voters because of its claims to represent the views of teachers. But the union’s interests do not always coincide with the public’s interest in improving education, or even the interests of the teachers themselves. Just as the union issues questionnaires to political candidates prior to endorsing them, this paper in turn asks some questions of the unions. This should not be construed as “teacher bashing,” “anti-union,” or “anti-public education,” as unions sometimes label those who offer alternatives to their policies, but rather as a critical examination of whether teacher unionization and the policies unions support have benefited teachers and the general public. It is healthy for any organization—especially one that claims to have the public’s best interests at heart—to be challenged from time to time. The Maryland State Teachers Association and its affiliates have been asking candidates questions for decades. The time has come to ask them some questions as well. Read More »

Baltimore Students Deserve School Vouchers

Originally published on FoxNews.com

By Dan Lips
Published on Friday, August 25, 2006
Bad news just keeps coming for Baltimore City public schools. The city’s high-school graduation rate has slipped below 40 percent -- worse than every city in America except Detroit. State education officials recently labeled six Baltimore City public schools as “persistently dangerous.” Some 22,000 students languish in schools that have failed state benchmarks for six or more years. Unfortunately, Maryland state lawmakers appear unwilling to reform even the worst public schools in Baltimore City. During the last legislative session, Gov. Robert Ehrlich proposed a state takeover of 11 chronically failing public schools. The General Assembly not only approved a measure to delay changes for one year, it overrode Gov. Ehrlich’s veto of the legislation. Yet change could come to city schools if the Bush administration and some in Congress have their way. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently joined lawmakers on Capitol Hill to unveil a plan to give private-school scholarships to disadvantaged students in some of the country’s lowest-performing public schools. The Opportunity Scholarship Initiative would provide $100 million in grants to cities such as Baltimore with a high density of failing schools. The grants would be used to give low-income public-school students scholarships to attend private school or intensive after-school tutoring programs. Only students in the lowest-performing public schools would be eligible. In Baltimore, that would include more than 40 schools, attended by more than a quarter of the city’s public-school students. Read More »

Fostering education stability

Originally published in the Baltimore Examiner

By Alison Lake
Published on Monday, July 10, 2006
BALTIMORE - Thousands of miles away in Arizona, a small but significant program hatched here in Maryland became law in June. But Maryland’s 11,500 foster care children, 7,000 of whom are in Baltimore City, have yet to benefit from this program designed by The Maryland Public Policy Institute. Gov. Janet Napolitano, Democrat, personally signed into law a first-in-the-nation targeted school choice program for foster care children. Arizona’s $2.5 million scholarship grant program offers foster children scholarships worth up to $5,000 for tuition. Any child who has or is placed in the foster care system is eligible, and the students can use the scholarship to attend private schools. Read More »

Baltimore City Schools Takeover Signals The Need For More Choice In Education

By Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D.
Published on Monday, June 12, 2006
The 2005-2006 school year has been tumultuous for Baltimore City Schools, which prompts reflection about what policies should be enacted so the next school year can be better for children in Baltimore’s public schools.   “Nothing Has Improved”   Obvious frustration with Baltimore city’s school system reached its apex this year when Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced that the state department of education would take over seven of the city’s middle schools and four of its high schools that have been persistently failing for years and even decades. These schools are the particularly dysfunctional ones in a city where the majority of students are not getting a decent education. A quick analysis of the Maryland State Assessment (MSA) test scores for 2005 show this persuasively. Citywide, only 40 percent of Baltimore’s eighth graders are considered proficient or better in reading, and an even more heartbreaking 19.5 percent of these children are proficient or better in math. For comparison, 2005 statewide eighth grade reading and math proficiency rates are 66.4 percent and 51.7 percent, respectively. Read More »

Special children, special needs, big bucks

Originally published in the Baltimore Examiner

By Alison Lake
Published on Thursday, May 18, 2006
BALTIMORE - The ongoing and systemic failure of Baltimore City’s special-education system in public schools is an extreme but very real example of what happens when a public school district is allowed to underserve its students for decades. Under state management since summer of 2005, the city’s special education services have been ordered to provide 90,000 hours of makeup services from 2005 on top of what is due children in 2006. A state report also showed that 25 percent of city high school seniors in special education received diplomas last spring without meeting graduation requirements. Baltimore City’s school system is an excellent example of a situation where both mainstream and special-education students would benefit greatly from the opportunity to take their per-pupil money elsewhere to a better school. Read More »