Educators, sponsor disagree on success

SAN ANTONIO – The new school year has brought another test of a private foundation's five-year experiment with a voucher program in one of the state's poorest school districts.

Officials of the Edgewood School District and the plan's sponsor, the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation, say their disagreement on what the voucher program has meant continues unabated.

In the third year of the largest privately funded school voucher program in the country, nearly 1,200 children have swapped classrooms in Edgewood for area private schools, an increase of 28 percent over last year.

Although the addition of a prekindergarten program helped, the increase suggests that parents are more comfortable with the possibilities open to them through a school choice program, said Robert Aguirre, managing director of the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation.

"We are proud to have made school choice available to children whose educational options are limited," Mr. Aguirre said. "We've seen that the freedom to choose has a powerful effect on children and their families."

Edgewood officials stress that the foundation's idea of school choice comes at the price of weakening an inner-city school district by taking some of its students and focusing on outdated negative stereotypes.

At the same time, the district has recorded dramatic increases in student performance.

The foundation's privately funded voucher program, the first ever to target an entire public school district, pits conventional brick-and-mortar public schools with an assortment of private institutions, many of them church-affiliated.

The program began in 1998, offering tuition grants ranging from $2,000 to $4,000 to parents with children in the Edgewood district, which sits in a largely Hispanic neighborhood on San Antonio's West Side. The foundation's funding, $50 million over a five-year period, was mostly provided by Dr. James Leininger, a San Antonio physician-turned-businessman.

Edgewood officials have long criticized the foundation's Horizon scholarship program as an attack on the public school system.

"We estimate the CEO program has cost the district $5 million over the past few years," said Edgewood Superintendent Noe Sauceda, referring to lost state and federal matching funds based on district attendance. "With that kind of decrease, we can't attract and retain quality staff."

Edgewood had 14,587 students enrolled during the 1997-1998 school year when the foundation began issuing tuition vouchers. Last year, enrollment had declined to just above 12,000. This year, 12,500 students are registered, Mr. Sauceda said.

"We're starting to see our enrollment numbers increase, a sign that word is getting out that the changes we implemented a few years ago are making Edgewood better," Mr. Sauceda said.

Mr. Sauceda points with pride to the Texas Education Agency's "recognized" rating – the second-highest rating – for Edgewood schools. It signifies that the district had an 80 percent passing rate among students on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, and improved attendance and dropout rates.

Six years ago, Edgewood reported dropout rates of about 50 percent and only 38 percent of its students could pass the state's mandatory competency tests.

The district's successes are, in some part, due to the school choice the foundation offers, Mr. Aguirre said.

"Edgewood's recognition by the TEA is a tremendous testimony to the positive, wide-ranging effects of school choice," he said. "Let's put aside the discussion of how much money the district has lost and concentrate on how much better the students are doing. That's what success is really made of."

It's a point hotly contested by Mr. Sauceda.

"CEO did not account for our successes. Despite the improvements at Edgewood, CEO continues to focus in talks with parents on divisive and negative stereotypes of the educational opportunities we offer," he said. "How can they say they care about the Edgewood community?"

On Sept. 8, Mr. Aguirre and Mr. Sauceda met to discuss what common ground public schools and proponents of private vouchers might find. Both sides characterized the talks as merely the start of dialogue, not accord.

"It's more a matter of agreeing to disagree," said Mary Havel, a foundation spokeswoman. "But it's good that we're all sitting down to talk about the issues. Both Edgewood and CEO want to do what's best for the kids."

The foundation said it is providing tuition vouchers, which it calls scholarships, to 1,858 students, of which 1,137 are new recipients. The total represents a 28 percent increase over the 887 students receiving scholarships last school year, Mr. Aguirre said.

In 1998, the first year of operation, the voucher plan attracted 837 students.

Of the 1,858 students receiving vouchers, slightly more than half attend four schools, while the remainder are enrolled in 52 other private schools in San Antonio.

Christian Academy of San Antonio, a new school that opened near the Edgewood district this year, has 196 students enrolled on vouchers, the largest group.