On Tuesday February 13 I attended a School Administrator's of Iowa Legal Conference to gain insight and updates on topics ranging from Social Media Legalities, Special Education Law, and Legislative Updates from this year's legislative session. There are some very positive things happening during this session that will definitely have a positive impact on our students. There are, however, still some legislative items that we need to continue to monitor like legislation about school charters or voucher programs. As I have written about previously, there is not data that supports school voucher programs or charter schools have a more positive impact compared to their public school counterparts. In fact, as was so eloquently pointed out by executive director Roark Hoarn, charter school and voucher programs will continue to move dollars and students out of rural Iowa because there are very few charter or private schools as you move further away from the urban areas of Iowa. Another interesting fact is that $52 million dollars of public property tax money already goes to help fund private schools so the question that begs to be answered is "yet more?" in response to their proposal to take yet more funds away from public schools.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the days and weeks that lie ahead during this legislative session. It's important for them to hear that we need equity in per pupil funding, in other words it's not fair/equitable that some students in the state are worth more than other students just because of where they live in Iowa, it's not equitable/fair that some districts like ours spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more just to get kids to schools, and how vouchers and charters will move more students away from rural Iowa.
As I've pointed out before, it's important to rely on data when making school-based decisions at all levels; our government should be doing the same.
***Charter Schools Effect Size = .2 which is very low on the effect size tree of things we could be funding (114th on John Hattie's list of effectiveness); Private Schools are about the same Effect Size at .23
"Nearly half the Charter Schools nationwide have results that are not different from the public school options and over a third, 37%, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools" (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2009, page 1)
