FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

June 28, 2006

--DCPCSB Grants Conditional Approval to Three 2007 Schools, Rejects Eight
--BOE Denies Six Applications; Votes to Impose Moratorium, Consider Giving Up Charter Authority
--Council Chair Candidate Wants City-Wide Moratorium on Chartering
--National Charter School Figure Calls for Recasting of Charter School Debate

DCPCSB Grants Conditional Approval to Three 2007 Schools, Rejects Eight

The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted on June 19 to grant conditional approval to three of the 11 applicants who had sought permission to open charter schools in the fall of 2007. The three are Meld/Even Start, a year-round high school/early childhood boarding program that will serve adolescent parents and their children; Phillips, a special education school for students ages four through 14; and Hope Academy, a Ward 8 middle school that will focus on leadership and academic achievement. The petitions of eight other applicants were denied; in prior years, some of these undoubtedly would have received “first-stage clearance,” a category eliminated this year by the Board that enabled flawed but promising applications to be resubmitted after extensive reworking.

All three of the successful applicant groups participated in the FOCUS charter school startup program; one FOCUS group saw its application denied.

At the June 19th meeting the DCPCSB also voted to approve or conditionally approve four existing schools’ expansion requests. KIPP D.C. was approved outright to add a pre-k through 4th program and a college preparatory high school program (fall 2007); Carlos Rosario International was conditionally approved to add a family literacy program (fall 2006) and a nurse training program (fall 2007); Capital City was conditionally approved to add a high school program (fall 2007); and conditional approval also was given to D.C. Preparatory Academy’s request to add a preschool-3rd program (fall 2007).

Finally, the Board voted to begin the charter revocation process against Sasha Bruce Public Charter School [7th-11th, opened in 2000] and to pull the conditional approval of Colin Powell International Public Charter School, which had been scheduled to open this coming fall. According to a Board press release, Sasha Bruce has engaged in financial mismanagement, while Colin Powell’s founders have “failed to demonstrate a readiness to open.” Two other 2006 schools, Septima Clark and Washington Latin, received their official charters at the meeting.

A total of five new schools will open in the fall, along with a KIPP D.C. expansion campus.

BOE Denies Six Applications; Votes to Impose Moratorium, Consider Giving Up Charter Authority

Meanwhile, the Board of Education, which also runs the D.C. Public School system, declined to move forward any of its six 2007 charter school applicants. The Board also declared a moratorium on future chartering, the third since 2000, and set a July 18th hearing to permit the mayor and Council, “parents and other community stakeholders to comment on the role of the Board of Education as a chartering authority and the responsibility the Board has for the 17 charter schools that it currently overseas [sic].” FOCUS has learned that at least five of the nine Board members are ready to vote after the hearing to get out of the chartering business.

Although over the years the BOE has chartered some of the District’s strongest public charter schools, its record as an authorizer has been less than stellar. It was forced to close many of the schools it chartered — unwisely — in the early years of the movement (the first D.C. charters opened in 1996). Its charter school operation throughout has been characterized by inadequate staffing, high turnover, and less than effective oversight. And the BOE charter school office is now under investigation by local and federal law enforcement agencies for possible financial improprieties.

D.C.’s charter school law, the School Reform Act, empowers the BOE and the DCPCSB to grant charters and also grants to the D.C. Council the authority to establish a third authorizer, which authority it has not exercised. Passed by Congress for the District, the SRA would have to be amended by Congress to permit the BOE to give up its chartering role; the Congress, presumably, also would have to decide what is to be done with the 17 charter schools the Board currently oversees.

FOCUS supports the creation of a new authorizer to replace the BOE should it decide to give up its chartering responsibilities, and will work with the BOE charter schools and with local and congressional officials to achieve consensus on a replacement authorizer.

Council Chair Candidate Wants City-Wide Moratorium on Chartering

According to an article in The Dupont Current [June 21, 2006, p. 1], Ward 7 Council Member Vincent Gray, a candidate for council chair, “would support” a moratorium on further chartering in the District. Gray is quoted by the Current as saying that “’[t]here are questions about [some charter schools’] financial management and performance. I think we could stop and look at how the schools in place are performing.’” According to the paper, Gray’s opponent, Council Education Committee Chair Kathy Patterson, does “not support a citywide moratorium on new charter schools at this time,” instead favoring “a more thorough review of charter schools.”

In October of 2004, the Council’s lawyers, in an opinion requested by Ms. Patterson, informed the Council that it lacked the authority to amend the congressionally-passed School Reform Act to impose a moratorium. The SRA permits the creation of up to 20 charter schools per year.

Responding to a question in a candidate questionnaire developed by COPE and the Washington Teacher’s Union, Gray last month came out in favor of requiring charter school teachers to be credentialed. In response to the same question, Patterson correctly noted that D.C.’s charter school teachers are exempt from local certification requirements but must meet the “highly qualified teacher” standards of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The responses of Patterson, Gray, and the five mayoral candidates to the COPE/WTU questionnaire are attached to this Bulletin.

National Charter School Figure Calls for Recasting of Charter School Debate

Ted Kolderie, one of the founders of the national charter school movement and also one of its best thinkers, has written an article in which he urges an end to the debate about whether students learn better in charter or traditional public schools. Instead, Kolderie wants the question to be “which kinds of schools are succeeding with what sorts of kids?” His thoughtful analysis is set out below.

“Chartering is about innovation, schools are about learning

“Several things in recent days have underscored how important it is now to think and talk with greater rigor about what too many of us have for too long been referring to as ‘charter schools’. Journalists and academics and policymakers will be able to think clearly about this new sector of public education only as we make clear there are two things involved - the policy of chartering and the schools chartered - and that the success of the policy and the success of the schools are two separate questions requiring two separate answers.

“About the policy, ask: 'What kinds of schools get created?’

“This country has a huge problem with learning in existing schools, traditional schools.

· Quite a large proportion of the kids are not learning well in the conventional model. Albert Shanker when president of the American Federation of Teachers used to suggest it might be 80 per cent. Let's say 40 per cent. In the cities it could be higher.
· We truly do not know what will work with these kids. Lots of people think they know; clearly the New York Times thinks it knows. Most want to keep conventional school and just do it better. Put in a rigorous program and kids will learn. Have well-trained teachers. Have orderly schools. Set high standards. Make sure kids learn. Wonderful. Easy to state; not easy to do. Good luck.
· Almost certainly most of the kids not learning and not motivated to learn in conventional school will need other kinds of school. The trouble is: We don't now know what those 'other kinds' should be.
· So we will have to try different models to find what works. This is what we normally do when we don't know for sure what to do. Watch to see which models work and for which kids. Do more of what succeeds; stop doing what doesn't. It will be a program of experimentation.

“Both the critics and the supporters of the states' decision to unbundle public education need to get back to seeing chartering as this effort to find new models and new methods for the young people now not learning well. It is a trial-and-error process. The laws - now in working form in 25 or more states - are enabling laws. They do not themselves create schools: They make it possible for people to create schools. The questions are: Do people use these laws? In what ways? To create what different approaches to learning?

“A reasonable evaluation today would show that some of the laws do this fairly successfully, that some are struggling, and that some are failures. Similarly, some schools succeed and some schools fail. Like any other essentially R&D program, chartering can be succeeding though not all of the things-being-tried are succeeding.

“Put another way: Chartering, as a policy, does not produce learning. Chartering produces schools. The schools produce learning. To evaluate student learning we have to understand what kind of school a school is.

'Do students learn?’ is a question to ask about the schools

“For years there was understood to be a standard model of school. We have all seen the pictures, or remember the buildings with long hallways and doors with little windows through which we could see the desks in rows and the teacher standing at the board, instructing a class in one subject or other. Perhaps this old notion of school has led people to assume that a 'charter school' must also be some kind of school.

“In truth a chartered school is not - in any pedagogical sense - a kind of school. Kids don't learn anything from charters. A charter is a permission to start a school; in another sense is an empty organizational structure, as a building is an empty physical structure.

“So the question whether kids learn better in 'charter schools' or in 'district schools' is a nonsense question; is like asking whether plants are more nutritious than animals. Any reasonable person will ask: ‘Which plants and which animals did you have in mind?’ When people ask how well kids learn ‘in charter schools’, we need to respond: ‘Which schools did you have in mind?’ Kids are going to learn from what its organizers put into the school: the teachers and the curriculum and the pedagogy and the books, materials and technology. So to answer the question about learning we have to know what kind of school it is, that the students are enrolled in.

“The chartered schools differ. There is no standard plan. Organizers may take whatever approach to learning they think might work; are free to use whatever model of organization they prefer; are free to install whatever school-culture they think might better motivate kids. A wide variety of schools has in fact appeared - as every evaluator affirms. Some use a known model of learning; some experiment. Some have teachers talking to kids in groups; some have kids working independently. Some use courses; some are project-based. Some are low-tech; some are high-tech. Some have principals and employ teachers; others have no leader, and operate as partnerships in which professionals make decisions collegially. Most are nonprofit; some are commercial. Some are autonomous unit operations; some belong to a centrally-managed group.

“Student learning needs to be related to the different kinds of schools-chartered. The differences matter. There are high schools in which a teacher sees 16 students a day and schools in which a teacher sees 160 a day. KIPP schools are different from non-KIPP schools. Many of the new schools chartered are focused on the kids not learning in conventional school; some are not. We need to ask: Which kinds of schools are succeeding with what sorts of kids?

“For this to happen we need research to serve the country better. This dreadful political back-and-forth over 'charter schools' goes on today because nobody knows what the schools-chartered are as schools. The debate is left to partisans on both sides, trying to connect student learning to the status of the school as chartered or not-chartered. Those who support chartering are as much at fault as those opposing it. We need to push research hard to identify and describe the approaches to learning; the differences in governance and school culture.

“Powerful forces are driving the states' new-schools policy

“The forces driving chartering are too powerful to be suppressed.

· State policy leadership cannot bet everything on the old district public-utility model improving enough and quickly enough. To succeed with the kids who have never learned well in traditional school the states must have the new-schools sector as well.
· Both the state and the students need to find new forms of school that might work better; need the R&D program that chartering represents.
· Families in the cities especially, captive to the local district, need and deserve the choice available to families with money: Choice is essential on equity grounds.
· Students, like most adults today, want to be able to customize; want and need to be able to match their learning to their individual abilities and interests in the way they now customize the rest of their life. Students differ; school needs to differ. This is a good idea, for those looking for improved learning: Motivation matters.
· States have to find a new model of school that is economically sustainable in a way the traditional labor-intensive model is not.
· The rapidly-developing digital electronic technologies are bound to work a major transformation in learning, in school; making available an enormous world of organized information. Lots of young people are quite skilled in using these technologies. This transformation is simply irresistible.

“All this means that chartering, the states' program for new-school-creation, is here to stay. It would be helpful if it could operate with less controversy so it can scale up faster. This can happen, if we get beyond the meaningless notion of 'char-ter schools' and ask ourselves the right questions about why we need to create new schools and about how to know if the policy and the schools are succeeding.

“It is seriously time to understand that with chartering the states have created not a kind of school but a process for developing new kinds of school; that creating different kinds of school is now imperative for a country seriously proposing to educate all children, and that the question of how well students are learning is a question to ask about the particular kinds of schools created.”

By Ted Kolderie, Education|Evolving, May 16, 2006

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
1530 16th Street, NW #104
Washington, DC 20036
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(202) 667-3798 fax
www.focusdc.org