FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

November 14, 2006

-- Fenty’s Education “Pre-Transition” Team Recommends Early Removal of State Education Agency Functions From DCPS
--BOE Asks Congress to Allow It To Relinquish Chartering Authority; Wants to Beef Up SEA To Be More Helpful to Charters

Fenty’s Education “Pre-Transition” Team Recommends Early Removal of State Education Agency Functions From DCPS

Throughout his campaign, mayor-elect Adrian Fenty promised that one of his first actions would be to appoint a deputy mayor for education. If Fenty follows the recommendations of the “pre-transition” team working up his education program, one of the first tasks of his new deputy will be “managing the transfer of State Education Agency functions from DCPS (by mid January 2007).” State Education Agency [SEA] functions include the notorious Office of Federal Grants Programs (OFGP), whose policies and practices frequently have made D.C.’s charter school leaders apoplectic over the last 10 years [See Bulletin, February 28, 2006, at http://www.focusdc.org/news/news.asp?View=Bulletins].

For all of those years FOCUS has led a campaign, fervently supported by the charter schools, to get OFGP away from the school system, which has not been able to rise above its serious conflict of interest in managing a program that disburses funds both to itself and to its competitors. In recent months, OFGP’s failures have drawn the attention of the D.C. Council, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Senate D.C. Appropriations Subcommittee, which recently ordered the Board of Education to hire a consultant to come up with legislation to separate the SEA from DCPS [See Bulletin July 20, 2006, at http://www.focusdc.org/news/news.asp?View=Bulletins]. Not surprisingly, the separation is being resisted by DCPS and the school board (see “BOE Asks...” below).

The pre-transition team also recommends that the deputy mayor for education have the following responsibilities of interest to the charter schools:

--Overseeing the State Education Office, Early Care and Education Administration, School Health program, Mental Health Programs for Schools, DC Public Library, Department of Parks & Recreation.

--Identifying the “measures of an excellent public school system: for example, 80% on-time graduation with 92% daily attendance within seven years.”

--Establishing a Pre-K –16 Council to forge collaboration among nonprofits, universities, community organizations, government agencies, and the schools.

--Auditing spending and monitoring performance of the District’s traditional public, charter, and private voucher-receiving schools and all schools receiving federal program funding.

--Monitoring the progress of DCPS’s $2.3 billion school modernization program.

--Creating a school inspection program to ensure that all students in the public schools are in safe and healthy facilities.

--Insisting on proper facilities maintenance and taking necessary measures to ensure the health and safety of all public school environments.

--Setting ambitious goals for increasing the graduation rates of all public schools.

--Establishing a citywide identification system that provides accurate data about school attendance, transfers, and graduation and drop-out rates (to be in place by March 2007.)

--Relocating state special education functions to a citywide service center and/or to State Education Agency for monitoring and enforcement.

--Establishing a multi-year budget process for the public schools that prevents mid-year deficits that can cause disruptive teacher and administrative lay-offs and lobbying the Congress to approve such a multi-year budget.

Although many of these steps, if taken, would be unobjectionable to the charter schools, multi-year budgeting would be objectionable if it decoupled school system funding from enrollment. [See Bulletin, May 16, 2005 at http://www.focusdc.org/news/news.asp?View=Bulletins]. And any attempt by the deputy mayor of education to monitor the performance of charter public schools likely would violate the School Reform Act, which vests oversight authority in the chartering boards.

BOE Asks Congress to Allow It To Relinquish Chartering Authority; Wants to Beef Up SEA To Be More Helpful to Charters

The Board of Education voted 5-2 yesterday to approve a resolution “[requesting] that the United States Congress, the Secretary of Education, the Mayor, and the council of the District of Columbia relinquish [sic] the Board of Education’s chartering authority.” The Board is named as a chartering authority in the School Reform Act, D.C.’s charter school law, which was passed by the Congress in 1996. The Board also is named as a chartering authority in a law passed by the Council around the same time and still on the books, though all of D.C.’s charter schools have been chartered under the Congressional act, which takes precedence.

In the resolution the Board noted that it and the chief state school officer (who also serves as the superintendent of DCPS) were “moving to enhance capacity as a State Education Agency as it relates to charter schools.” The Board also resolved to create a working group “to create recommendations that will enhance the [Board’s] capacity as a State Education Agency as it relates to charter schools.”

D.C.’s Board of Education currently wears three hats: DCPS school board, state board of education, and charter authorizer. The charter authorizer hat has never fit the Board properly (nor has the state board hat, for that matter), and, in consequence, over the years it has declared three year-long moratoria on creating new charters. Much of the time it also has done a slipshod job of overseeing and supporting its charter schools which, like those of the other chartering board, are independent of and compete with the school system for students and the funding they bring. During the last several months the Board also has been dealing with allegations of financial improprieties in its charter schools office, which is being investigated by both local and federal officials.

In spite of the Board’s failings, many of the its 18 charters objected to the Board’s giving up its chartering authority and, in a meeting with Board members last week, urged the Board to delay consideration of the resolution. Some of the Board’s charters have argued that the Board, as the only publicly-elected (currently half-elected, half-appointed) body involved in education, should not forsake its responsibility for charter public schools. Additionally, the Board’s charter schools are justifiably concerned about who will take on the Board’s oversight role, about which subject there has been no public discussion by the Board.

The promises to beef up the Board’s state functions were added to the resolution in response to these concerns, but no information has been provided as to how the Board’s notoriously dysfunctional and DCPS-oriented state operations can be changed to provide effective support to charter schools over which it no longer has any authority. What’s more, it appears more and more likely that some or all of the Board’s state functions will be transferred to the mayor’s State Education Office or elsewhere.

Under the School Reform Act the D.C. Council has the authority to appoint another chartering board; the Congress also could do so.

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