Urban Institute report on Florida’s tax credit scholarship program should have been an occasion for reflection. Instead it became a flawed bragging point.

I find it deeply frustrating when a student in my physics class who is filled with enthusiasm about pursuing an exciting career in a STEM field turns out to have been set up for failure by high school teachers and counselors who refused to insist that the student prepare properly for the rigor of a college STEM major.

When I’ve confronted high school educators who have done this to their students, I’ve gotten two sorts of responses.  One is a sense of contrition and a determination to do better.  When I asked an instructional leader at one high school why he had misled his students, he quietly responded, “I didn’t know” – and then immediately changed the advice his students were receiving so that they would be well-prepared in the future.

But the response of a leader at another school was quite different.  He argued that the watered-down math and science preparation his students were getting had always been good enough, and he was offended that I would say otherwise.

I thought about that second leader – the one who adopted a stance of defiant denial – when I read a report released by the Urban Institute about Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, the response of Step Up For Students (which is one of the administrators of the tax credit scholarship program) and the subsequent media coverage.  I know some very good people who work at Step Up, and my heart sank when I saw how they were spinning the Urban Institute report.

The Urban Institute report compares “the long-term outcomes of more than 10,000 low-income students who first used FTC vouchers between 2004 and 2010 with outcomes of students with similar characteristics who never participated”, according to an institute summary.  The report only tracked students who attended Florida’s public colleges and universities.

Students who received tax credit scholarships started college at a significantly higher rate than similar students who did not receive the scholarships.  Of those students who received the scholarships starting in elementary or middle school, 45% started college.  A similar group of students who did not receive the scholarships started college at only a 39% rate.  Among students who entered the tax credit scholarship program in high school, 48% entered college.  The comparison group had only a 42% rate for starting college.

Nearly all of those students started college in Florida’s State College System – the former community college system.  But that’s typical for this demographic.  There is nothing to criticize there.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the additional students who were coaxed into attending college through the tax credit scholarship program were not prepared to succeed there and did not graduate, even with an associate’s degree.  According to the Urban Institute summary:

Participation in the FTC program had only a small effect on students’ likelihood of earning a college degree. For students who entered the FTC program in elementary or middle school, there was an increase of 0.6 percentage points in associate degree attainment. There was no significant difference for students who entered the FTC program in high school.

The Step Up staff should have found these results sobering and taken a long look at what they are doing to find out what it would take to better prepare their students for success at the college level.  After all, high school preparation is critical for college success (for an example, see this on math preparation).  Problems in college are not always the fault of evil faculty members like me.

But instead, the staff posted on their blog, redefinedonline.org (and yes, I’m a regular reader) with the headline “FL private school choice students more likely to get to college, get degrees”.

The Miami Herald jumped on board, uncritically leading an article reporting on the study with “A new study by a Washington, D.C.-based think tank has found low-income students in Florida who attend private schools with the help of a controversial, state-approved voucher program are more likely to enroll in and graduate from in-state public colleges than their similarly situated peers who stick with public schools.”

Regular district schools, charter schools, tax credit scholarship schools all send many students to college who are not prepared to succeed there.  But as far as I can recall, the tax credit scholarship schools are first group to brag about it.

Instead of bragging, my colleagues at Step Up really need to take a long look in the mirror and figure out how to make their students more successful at the college level.  If they succeed in doing so, it will be the greatest triumph of the school choice movement to date and it will transform the way Americans think about education.

That would be something to brag about.