This discussion was part of a conference hosted by the Education Writers Association at georgetown university. Its just over an hour. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming to this panel. Im eric, Deputy Director at ewa. Today we are going to discuss an issue that has been getting just a little bit of attention these days, School Choice and especially private School Choice. I know that there is all sorts of forms of School Choice in this country and a lot of conversation about charters in particular, as well. Given so much of the recent conversation and the recent president ial election i think this is where we are going to do our primary focus. We will allow a little time for other issues if you have questions and so forth. So School Vouchers and other voucherlike programs, voucher cousins, if you will, have been growing in number. The cousins would be like tax credit scholarships and Education Savings Accounts. The latter is what one proponent called the cool new kid on the block. As most of you know President Trump and his secretary of education are big fans of School Choice and secretary betsy devos loves to talk about choice and has made it really the center piece of her education agenda. That said, these are complicated times in washington. So the president s billion dollar class plans are by no means certain to become law even in a gopled congress. We had a panel yesterday on the politics where that was one of the points made. It is probably good to bear that in mind that for all of the talk its not at all clear what we might see at the federal level. There is still good reason to be here. As i think the panelists will tell you, most of the action is at the state level on this anyway and will probably continue to be so. Its been a busy legislative session in states already this year. There were big debates. One of our panelists, were you in texas recently . He was in texas where there has been a lot of debate. I dont know that they ever got past the debate in texas. Florida, arizona, arkansas, oklahoma are few examples of the states where there have been efforts to either create new programs or expand existing ones. Keep in mind, also, that the 2000 elections didnt just bring in donald trump. The gop also made gains in states and now hold what is sometimes called political trifecta with 25 states where the Republican Party controls the governorship as well as both chambers of the legislature. That is likely to give further momentum to some of these even while this is not always a clearly partisan issue. Or not. Clearly, though, i think that is probably going to build some momentum. So our goals today are to help you better understand the current landscape of private School Choice and what is on the horizon and how journalist kz do a better job of keeping the public informed on initiatives and their impact in the communities. Swegzs such as who do the programs serve . What impact do they have for families and communities . How should public and policy makers judge success and failure. What should journalists keep in mind as they cover proposals and as they monitor and explain existing programs. So many of these are new or they changed, maybe they have expanded in one way or another and can be complicated to keep track of and not so easy to carve out a lot of time when you are covering major School Systems in addition. That can be a challenge for local reporters. Remember the depaitails matter lot. Who is eligible and how much money it is worth. Which schools prarpt. To what extent are families using funds . Certainly with Education Savings Accounts there is a whole menu often. Are most families able to get into schools that they want . And are there many schools that dont participate and why . What kind of accountabili abila measures are included. One other is transparency. What is required of the schools and programs so that journalists and other people can understand what is going on. Meanwhile, i want to at least say a little bit about Charter Schools especially because in light of the election i want to point to two particular outcomes of note. One of them was in massachusetts where voters rejected a plan to raise that States Charter cap. In a counter narrative there was a School Board Runoff election in l. A. That just finished up. That actually tipped the balance toward a coalition of Board Members who support Charter Schools. So that may well bring new momentum to charters in l. A. Which is already i think the city with more kids in Charter Schools than anywhere else in the country. Before we dive in i want to offer one last piece of context. I gave the political reality check before about the Trump Administrations agenda and how that is going to be complicated to get through congress. But another piece of this that is always important to remember is the number of students we are talking about at least in the current situation. I want to thank ed choice for helping collect these numbers. They have great data about how programs work, their design, where they are, what is happening. Its a great place to get that kind of information. But currently when you look at vouchers and voucher style programs across states you know you might guess one, two, three Million People participate. It is about 450,000. That compares to about 50 million kids in Public Schools today. So its a very small piece of the pie currently obviously a lot of work is looking to expand that. So im joined by a terrific lineup of people to help us talk through and think through these issues more including to my left maggie garret, cochair of National Coalition for Public Education which is an Umbrella Group for more than 30 National Organizations that have been fighting against voucher programs both in the political rina and in the legal arena. And they represent that coalition represents Teachers Unions, school Board Members, aclu and others. Maggie is the legislative director. She keeps a close eye on what is happening across the country. And her group has been involved in political advocacy and legal efforts to overturn vouchers. That is one of the issues that im sure will come up today. We have executive Vice President of 50 can and executive director of new york can. Busy guy. Dont let that get out. And these are both organizations that promote School Choice among other issues. His Network Works on the ground to monitor and influence state and local decisions and work with families and others. Next we have Samuel Abrams who directs National Center for privatization in education at Columbia University where he studies School Choice and keeping an eye on developments. You may find him quoted on news on the subject. You have robert enlow. He is the president and ceo of this National Nonprofit research and advocacy group. They track voucher and voucher style programs very closely. As i mentioned they have some helpful resources that just kind of describe the landscape in a nonpartisan way. Here are the programs and what they do and so forth. So with that one other thing before we jump in is that we have another conversation at 3 30 where we will turn tables and let journalists talk about their coverage of School Choice especially private School Choice. If you want to dive in and hear their perspective on what to watch for, tips for getting information and questions to ask that would be a nice compliment to what we have here. Despite what i said at the beginning about the trump agenda having a tough time, i want to start there to say a little bit about that. Im not going to do this for each question. For this one i ask each of you to spend a minute or two giving your quick view of trumps plans, what you make of it and what you think will happen. Hi. Thanks for having me. So i represent the National Coalition for Public Education at americans united. I am disappointed though not surprised in the trump devoss plan for education. What i think is particularly troubling is that instead of spending time on figuring out how to support Public Schools and how to work with the kids 90 of the students are in Public Schools. Instead of having a plan that works with those students, they are solely focussed on how to spend taxpayer dollars to spend it to private schools that dont have the same accountability and dont serve all students and can reject students based on different characteristics. I would be more pleased if the focus was on Public Schools and the most kids and schools that have to accept all students. But instead what they have been doing is use sort of the pulpit to talk about vouchers around the country, tuition tax credits. We have a budget that is decreasing funds for Public Schools, increasing funds for private schools. One of the programs would give millions of dollars to study and expand private School Vouchers. I think that is particularly troubling especially when you look at what they just did with the d. C. Voucher for those of you following that, the only federally funded voucher in the country and just renewed that again. One thing that is really interesting is that instead of saying it has been studied for years. The studies are showing that students are performing worse academically than the other students. Instead of when they renewed that saying lets keep studying it, they said i know you are using the Gold Standard now. My thinking is it is not working out for them because studies are showing it is not improving academically. They are saying you have to use experimental studies for your voucher program. I think looking at that so you can no longer use Gold Standard for d. C. Voucher and looking at the budget saying we want to expand and study vouchers, knowing that they want to use quasiexperimental studies makes me suspicious. What are the studies going to look like under the Trump Administration . I think one thing to clarify, this is not it passed just the house . The budget . The d. C. Voucher was put in the spending bill. It has been renewed. It is a done deal. Good morning. First thing i would like to do is thank all reporters who have covered me in a balanced way that are in this room. I would like to thank georgetown university, this Outstanding Institution of Higher Learning run by a religious order that lots of people attend with public funding. I think the irony on that should not be lost. As far as budget is concerned other than the fact that i think it is dead on arrival once it gets to the congress it is especially like sprinkles of things i really like and an ocean of things i dont like. I, for one, have approached this entire episode since it started in november as an uncomfortable safe harbor in which to try to make some progress for kids really getting the short end of the stick based on zip code, color of their skin or the amount of money their parents make. I think we will have an actual discussion when it gets there. I would like to point out that the majority of the money in the choice portion of the budget is to promote public School Choice. So i dont know if you are against that then thats cool. I for one actually i think private schools have a deep and Important Role to play in helping us solve problems that our kids face. I am a good schools advocate. I think if we align Public Policy in a way of where you live, help you get to a great school instead of being assigned to one that doesnt work for you that is one we should all be supporting. On that point just to kind of build on your observation about the contents of what the president has proposed i think is it 250 or 300 million for implementation of vouchers and some research dimension that has been unspecified. There is a lot of blanks to fill in in all of this. There is a piece where they want to ramp up Charter School funding which already gets a pretty good chunk of change about 300 million. I think they wanted to take it up to 500 million. Meanwhile they are talking about somehow carving out a billion dollars in title i program for disadvantaged students to create incentives for some sorts of public School Choice. I think there are a lot of questions around that and political feasibility for all sorts of reasons including the way money is distributed and so forth. So it is going to be interesting to see how that discussion, what happens with that discussion. So sam eric, thank you for having me here. Its an honor. I would like to build on what darryl said that the billion dollars in this proposal is for public School Choice. Its supposed to follow students from one Public School to another. That by itself didnt surprise me in the proposal. What did surprise me was there was only 250 million set aside in this Education Research program to Fund Vouchers and Fund Research in vouchers. I expected a lot more. That was my gut response. I was thinking something more along the lines of race to the top where obama allocated 4. 35 billion back in 2009. 19 states took slices of that with the provision that states lift cap on Charter Schools and determine teacher pay according to teacher performance on standardized tests. I thought and perhaps this is where trump and devoss will go, is that they will allocate more than 250 million to states with the condition that states come up with some kind of Education Savings Account program or Tuition Tax Credit Program. I thought they would incent states like that. That may be down the road. It may be too early for that. That was my gut response. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thing about being last is you get to say yes to a lot of stuff. Look, lets first of all before we talk about the budget have a reality check here. Federal spending on education is 9 to 11 of the total. Majority of funds is at the state and local level. We spend roughly 7 750 billion n america in k12 education. When we are talking about 250 million in some cases that are rounding. The billion dollar proposed in the budget is significantly higher for public School Choice than it is for private School Choice. So i look at the budget this way. There is sprinkling of good stuff and a lot of stuff that makes me worry. In reality is once it goes to the congress it is not going to withstand the pressure. I dont think any president ial budget has with stood the pressure and stayed the same. Lets keep that in mind. No budget from the president ever goes over unscathed and stays unscathed. We will see a lot of challenges. We have a lot of questions to answer about the budget. What do these proposals look like in details . We are spending a lot of time arguing about the ideology rather than the proposals themselves. As we begin to see them we can hopefully have nonpartisan dialogue about this. Talking about what might be good and what might not be good. Those of us who dont think the cuts are a good idea and those of us who think the Choice Programs and the growth in the charters are a good idea. Its a bit of a mixture. The reality is it is only a small portion of what we spend on k12 and it is not going to withstand congressional oversight. Related to d. C. It was approved for three more years. If you look at the bulk of the studies on the program done by the former administrations research department, you find positive effects particularly in attainment. Children graduating higher rates and going to college at higher rates. Most recent study is first year study. Well see what happens in the third year. Most programs in the study you find in the third year. When you look at d. C. Scholarship program renewed for three years and we should look at the bulk of the studies before we say it is good or bad. So there have been five studies and hasnt been around for one year. Last year is called one year study because it studied one year of schools in the program. The prior studies showed no statistically significant improvement of reading and math. Some people point to the fact that in the third year there was improvement in reading. If you look at the d. C. Voucher what it says is there was no statistically significant improvement of reading or math. The latest study looking at one year of students shows they perform