Giving parents a choice, giving children a chance.
Read all about it! The latest CSF newsletter is hot off the presses. 
Click through to the Fall 2012 newsletter to read:
You can read and download the newsletter here.
Season’s Greetings and Happy Reading from Children’s Scholarship Fund!
Children’s Scholarship Fund is honored to note that our co-founder John T. Walton is one of 50 philanthropists who comprise Philanthropy Roundtable’s newly-launched Hall of Fame.
The list of donors honored also includes household names such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and J.P. Getty as well as some lower-profile philanthropists. But each of the individuals highlighted was chosen by Philanthropy Roundtable because he or she “changed the nation and the world.”
Please take a moment to read the Hall of Fame profile of John Walton by author Naomi Schaefer Riley and learn about the valuable contributions he made, not only by co-founding CSF, but by investing in a wide-ranging portfolio of education reform and parental choice efforts (and encouraging others to join him) with the goal of “an all-out revolution in education.”
Just before last week’s screening of Won’t Back Down, CSF debuted our new motion graphic video, The Children’s Scholarship Fund Solution.
Watch the video to see how CSF is tackling the education crisis and how CSF scholarships are empowering parents to choose better schools for their children, putting them on the path to a better future.
Click above to watch the new CSF video.
This past Thursday, Children’s Scholarship Fund brought together CSF parents, teachers, school administrators, supporters, and friends to a preview screening of Won’t Back Down. The new movie stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as two determined mothers, one a teacher, who will stop at nothing to give their children a better education.
What a great occasion to celebrate giving parents a choice and giving children a chance!
Today, the American Center for School Choice is launching its National Commission on Faith-Based Schools.
The ecumenical commission of leaders, which includes CSF President Darla Romfo, plans to collaborate and inject the importance of full parental choice in education into the national dialogue. According to an ACSC press release, the Commission’s two immediate tasks will be to: 1) expand public understanding and appreciation of the role of faith-based schools in American education, especially in low-income communities; and, 2) address the need for expanding publicly funded school choice to increase a family’s ability to choose from among a full range of options, including a faith-based school.
“At Children’s Scholarship Fund, we believe parents are the first educators of their children and they should be empowered to choose the school that best fits their child’s needs, whether it is a faith-based school, an independent private school, a charter school, or a traditional government school,” said Ms. Romfo. “The wide variety of faith-based schools in this country have been offering quality education alternatives to generations of Americans for decades, and I hope the Commission on Faith-Based Schools will help them to continue their valuable work for decades to come.”
Just one day after Condoleezza Rice referred to America’s K-12 education crisis as the “civil rights issue of our day,” both Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush called for increased parental choice in education at the RNC convention last night.
Mitt Romney even paraphrased CSF’s tagline (as he did a few months ago in Philadelphia), saying, “When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance.”
Earlier in the evening, Jeb Bush touted the gains made from the school choice programs he enacted in Florida, and advocated offering more educational choices of all kinds, saying, “The sad truth is that equality of opportunity doesn’t exist in many of our schools. We give some kids a chance, but not all. That failure is the great moral and economic issue of our time.”
You can read the full transcripts of the Romney and Bush speeches.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke movingly about the need for education reform and increased parental choice at the Republican National Convention last night, referring to the crisis in K-12 education as “a grave threat to who we are” and “the civil rights issue of our day.”
Here is an excerpt of the education portion of her speech:
“We have been successful too because Americans have known that one’s status at birth was not a permanent station in life. You might not be able to control your circumstances but you could control your response to your circumstances. And your greatest ally in doing so was a quality education.
Let me ask you, though, today, when I can look at your zip code and can tell whether you are going to get a good education – can I really say that it doesn’t matter where you came from – it matters where you are going. The crisis in K-12 education is a grave threat to who we are.
My mom was a teacher – I have the greatest respect for the profession – we need great teachers – not poor or mediocre ones. We need to have high standards for our students – self-esteem comes from achievement not from lax standards and false praise. And we need to give parents greater choice – particularly poor parents whose kids – most often minorities — are trapped in failing neighborhood schools. This is the civil rights issue of our day.
If we do anything less, we will condemn generations to joblessness, hopelessness and dependence on the government dole. To do anything less is to endanger our global economic competitiveness. To do anything less is to tear apart the fabric of who we are and cement a turn toward grievance and entitlement.”
Earlier this year, Dr. Rice and former NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein led an independent task force that produced a Council on Foreign Relations report on education and national security. The report (which can be downloaded here) found that U.S. students are lagging in international rankings and young people are increasingly unprepared for the workforce and the military, creating a national security risk as well as weakening America’s global competitiveness.
