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The school choice movement in Utah got a boost Monday (see Tribune story) at a conference put on by Education Excellence Utah that was well attended by state legislators. Keynote speaker was Scott R. Jensen, a pioneer of the school choice movement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Jensen served as speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly and chief of staff to Gov. Tommy Thompson and helped push through legislation providing education vouchers for mostly low-income youth in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee now has nearly 15,000 students in the school choice program in 120 private schools. Jensen said Milwaukee families love the program. Some families have children split among public schools, private schools and charter schools, depending on the needs of each child.
The Milwaukee program has proven that “the market works,” Jensen said. More than $100 million in private money has been invested in private school construction, mostly in low-income neighborhoods. Some bad schools will pop up, he said, but they will soon be weeded out because parents won’t patronize them. The graduation rates of the voucher students are now higher than the rates of the students in the very elite public schools, he said. The pressure and competition from the private schools has greatly improved the public schools, Jensen said, which are now less bureaucratic and more responsive to parents. The first five years of the program were slow, he said, but then it really took off and Milwaukee now has a rich diversity of educational opportunity.
Paul Peterson, a professor at Harvard University who has done a lot of research on the school choice movement, said the big beneficiaries of voucher or tuition tax credit programs are children from low-income, single parent, mostly minority families, not the white, suburban kids from middle-class families. In families involved in a school choice program, the parents are more likely to be involved, children are more likely to do their homework, and there is more discipline, higher expectations and more orderliness in the private schools attended by low-income children.
Rep. Jim Ferrin, who is sponsoring tuition tax credit legislation in the upcoming session, said Utah faces an enormous school funding crisis, and a school choice program can be part of the solution. Public schools will benefit financially, he said.
With a supportive governor and seemingly strong legislative support, a tuition tax credit program appears to have its best chance ever to be enacted into law this year.
The Promise of Big Broadband
Two recent Wall Street Journal stories show the need for the ultra-bandwidth that will be provided by UTOPIA and iProvo. The first story talks about how very cheap “thin client” computer terminals that don’t do anything but provide access to the Internet will soon be practical because the Web is becoming the new “computer platform.”
Numerous companies are building Web applications that replace the programs and software residing on individual computer hard drives. People will be able to subscribe, for a monthly fee, to all the computer software, storage and other services they need, and it will all be out on the Web, not stored on their hard drives. Everything will be kept up to date because upgrades will be made centrally instead of on individual desktops, and security will be greatly improved.
However, ultra-fast Internet connections will be necessary for “Web computing” to be successful. iProvo and UTOPIA will offer such blazingly fast speeds that pulling something from a Web server (such as using a Web-based word processing service or e-mail program) will be like using a program on your own hard drive.
The second story was about video blogging. More and more Web sites and blog sites are offering video as well as text. These sites are becoming like mini-television stations. With the kind of speed offered by UTOPIA and iProvo, full-motion, high-quality video becomes viable and instantly accessible. School Web sites, for example, can post videos of sports events or school plays, and parents and grandparents can view them at any time. Local governments and civic groups can record their proceedings and make them available on-demand.
Reader Response
Thanks to Rep. Brad Last for sending along this nice note:
“The Utah Policy updates are a great way for me to scan the news and try to keep up on what is happening in the state. There is so much going on it is hard to keep up, but I appreciate your efforts to provide this summary of the political scene.
“Thanks also for the nice words about my colleague, Steve Urquhart. He has been excited about this ‘blogging thing’ for quite a while and now he has really lit the candle. I'm not worried about him spying on me because I trust his judgment.”
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