FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

June 9, 2008

--Council Fires First Salvos in Campaign to Rein In Charters; Effect on Pending Catholic School Conversion Unclear
--Office of Property Management Invites Charters to Bid on Unavailable School Buildings

Council Fires First Salvos in Campaign to Rein In Charters; Effect on Pending Catholic School Conversion Unclear

Council Chair Vincent Gray and Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells joined forces last Tuesday in a legislative effort designed to slow charter school growth and possibly to prohibit funding for former Catholic school students. The two council members co-introduced one bill, the “School Reform Amendment Act of 2008,”[Amendment Act] and Wells offered and Gray accepted a “friendly amendment” to the Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Support Act entitled “The Public Charter School Board Fiscal Responsibility Amendment Act of 2008” [PCSB Act].

Both bills purport to amend the D.C. School Reform Act of 1995 [SRA], D.C.’s charter school law. The Act, considered the strongest charter school law in the nation, guarantees charter school autonomy from DCPS and from the D.C. government and mandates uniform per student funding of all public school students, both traditional and charter. The Congressionally-passed Act is intended to be the last word on chartering in the District: one of its provisions prevents the Council from enacting any legislation that duplicates or is inconsistent with the terms of the Act as written by Congress. Nevertheless, both acts would change the SRA in significant ways.

The PCSB Act

Under the SRA, the government is under an obligation to uniformly fund every student enrolled in a charter or DCPS school on October 5 each year. The annual education budget that is developed each spring is based on an estimate of the number of students who will be enrolled on October 5.

For fiscal year 2009 (school year 2008-2009), the estimate of the total number of public school students to be enrolled in DCPS or the charter schools is 72,390, budgeted at around $939 million. Unfortunately, this figure does not include the expected 600 former Catholic school students who will be enrolled in October. This means that the District may have to come up with around $7,000,000 not provided for in the education budget. On the other hand, it is quite possible that no additional funds will be needed: in most years the estimated number of students exceeds the number who actually enroll, sometimes by a substantial margin. Even if additional funds were to be needed, $7 million represents less than a 1% increase in the education budget and a miniscule percentage of the overall D.C. budget.

In any case, there is no excuse for the failure to budget for the former Catholic school students. Both the mayor and Council were aware that these students would almost certainly become the responsibility of the District in the fall, regardless of whether the PCSB approves the Catholic school conversion petition. If the petition is denied, these students, most of whom come from economically disadvantaged families, will enroll in existing DCPS and charter schools. Both the mayor and the Council, however, chose to ignore these facts in developing the budget.

Enter Ward 6 council member Tommy Wells. His one-sentence “friendly amendment” to the fiscal year 2009 budget would, according to the rationale appended to the amendment, “prevent potential charter schools from operating on unappropriated funds.” Taking these words at face value, the amendment represents an attempt to stop the Catholic school conversion (a “potential charter school”) in its tracks by not funding any of the conversion school’s students whose funding would cause the District to exceed the $939 million education budget.

The actual amendment, however, is much broader in scope: “Funds which have not been provided for in [the budget] shall not be distributed to any charter school” (emphasis added). Taking these words at face value, the amendment is even more insidious. It means that any charter school that enrolls the former Catholic school students would not be funded if to fund them would push the cost of public education above the budget figure; DCPS, however, would be funded for any of these students attending DCPS schools.

Council staff have told FOCUS that the intent of the measure is not to prevent the conversion but to force the mayor to find the money that might be needed to fund these students. But the Council and the mayor, both of whom were on notice about the closure of the Catholic schools, had months to work together to find the funds and include them in the budget. By this amendment the council appears to be playing chicken with the administration, to the potential harm of hundreds of disadvantaged students.

The Amendment Act

This Amendment Act, called “mean-spirited” in an editorial in today’s Washington Post, purports to change the SRA in major ways. It would:

1. Require the PCSB to establish a “formal policy” for evaluating schools seeking to expand;
2. Require existing charter schools seeking to add students or campuses to go through the same process currently required of startup charter schools;
3. Amend the definition of “charter” to include additional elements of the charter petition;
4. Require that all PCSB members be D.C. residents and take away the power of the U.S. Secretary of Education to recommend PCSB members to the mayor;
5. Mandate a 15-month waiting period between charter approval and opening;
6. Prohibit first-year charter schools from operating on more than one campus;
7. Take away funding each quarter from charter schools that lost enrollment during the previous quarter.

Leaving aside the question of whether the Council has the authority to amend the SRA in any of these ways, most of these provisions are unnecessary, based on faulty information, inequitable, or just plain baffling.

Reining In the Public Charter School Board

For example, the PCSB already has strict standards for evaluating expansion requests (#1 above) and a formal process for evaluating expansion requests (#2). Sensibly, that process is not the same as for startup charter schools. The founders of startup schools are unknown to the PCSB. The process for startups, therefore, is extremely onerous, involving the writing of a 125-page petition describing every aspect of the proposed school and the qualifications of the founders; criminal background, credit, conflict-of-interest, and resume checks on the founders; an in-depth, in-person interview of the founders by a five-member technical review panel; and a public hearing. When it comes to a request to add students or campuses, however, the Board is dealing with a known quantity, a school whose monthly financial statements and annual audited financial reports it has analyzed for years; a school at which it has conducted years worth of on-site visits, analyzed student performance data, and conducted special education compliance reviews, among other oversight measures. Forcing the PCSB to pretend that it knows nothing about these schools would impose on the board the kind of bureaucratic nonsense that school boards are infamous for.

As to #3, the sponsors of the bill evidently are unaware that the PCSB already incorporates into the charter the entire charter school petition, not just the elements sought to be added by the Amendment Act.

Finally (#4), the SRA as currently written provides that, when there is a vacancy on the PCSB, the mayor is to fill the vacancy from a list of names provided by the U.S. Secretary of Education. The SRA does not require that those appointed by the mayor be residents of the District, and now, as throughout the history of the Board, it is composed of a mix of D.C. and non-D.C. residents.

These provisions of the SRA are there because its drafters did not want parochial interests, such as shielding the school system from charter school competition, to dominate the PCSB’s thinking. Some members of the Council, however, have expressed outrage that people who don’t live in the District could create a “huge hole” in the District budget by permitting, for example, conversion charter schools to open within a few months of their charter approval (see discussion immediately below).

Slowing the Growth of the Charter Schools by Preventing the Catholic school conversion?

Provisions #5 and #6 clearly are a reaction to Council upset over the pending petition to convert seven closing Catholic schools into a seven-campus charter school opening in September. But the PCSB will rule on the petition on June 16, long before a hearing can be held or votes taken on the Amendment Act; and aides to Council chairman Gray said publicly and privately last week that the Catholic school conversion would not be affected by the legislation (but see discussion of PCSB Act above). If so, #6 would have little or no impact going forward, as only one PCSB-chartered school has ever opened with more than one campus (back in 1998) and no one other than the archdiocese is likely to want to open with more than one campus. Even if someone did, the PCSB, much more sophisticated today than in 1998, would not approve the plan.

Provision #5, however, is a different story. The PCSB requires startup charter schools to take a planning year between charter approval and opening. This makes sense for startup schools, which have to find a building, hire staff, finish planning the academic program, and so on. The planning year requirement makes no sense, however, for schools that already are up and running in existing buildings stocked up with strong teachers and administrators who can demonstrate a track record of academic success. What’s more, as in the case of the Catholic schools, requiring a planning year is tantamount to denial of the charter petition where the petitioning school will cease to operate about the time that the PCSB announces its chartering decisions. Where will its students and faculty go to wait out the entirely unnecessary planning year? They’ll be cast to the winds, and the school just approved for a charter will no longer exist.

Although provision #5 was written in response to the Catholic school conversion, it would apply as well to DCPS schools seeking to avoid closure by the Chancellor by converting to charter schools. It also would apply to any DCPS schools in restructuring under the No Child Left Behind Act that the Chancellor wants to convert into charter schools.

Solving a Non-Existent Problem by Mandating Funding Inequity

Provision #7 is a response to long-standing rumors, recently debunked by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, that the charter schools create a huge burden on DCPS by “dumping” students they don’t want after the annual enrollment audit in early October (all operational funding for both DCPS and the charter schools is based on the audited October count). The truth is that there is a great deal of movement into and out of DCPS and individual charter schools during the school year; it is also well known that all schools (and school systems) lose students in the spring. If legislation is needed, and it is not at all clear that it is, funding should be taken away from both DCPS and the individual charter schools if they lose students. By the same token, charter schools (or DCPS) that gain enrollment during the year should be given increased funding. But even if the inequity were removed, #7 would not be practicable. The October count on which current funding is based is audited by the District, at a cost of around a million dollars. Will the District audit each of the three other quarterly counts provided by the schools?

Office of Property Management Invites Charters to Bid on Unavailable School Buildings

By law, the District’s public charter schools are to be given a “right of first offer” on all empty DCPS school buildings and on unused space in operating DCPS school buildings. This right has been consistently ignored by mayors past and present and by the D.C. Council, forcing the majority of charter schools to seek space in church basements, former warehouses, and the like.

Now the Fenty administration has explicitly acknowledged the first-offer right in a “Notice of Schools Available for Disposition to Non-Governmental Entities” dated June 5, inviting the charter schools to exercise their right of first offer by bidding on five DCPS school buildings. The government, however, already has committed to using one of the five buildings as a homeless shelter, promised two more to specific charter schools, and agreed to permit part of another to be outfitted to serve as an “incubator” for new charter schools. Only for the one remaining building has “no use been determined,” according to a government spokesperson.

Under these circumstances, why these buildings were put out for bid is unclear, though the most likely reason is that the government was trying to retroactively achieve some sort of technical compliance with the first-offer legal requirement. The government had no such compunctions about another former school building that was designated last month for use as a police substation.

Only one of the five buildings that are the subject of the Notice is on the list of 23 schools being closed by the DCPS Chancellor. It is not known how many of the others will be made available for charter school bid, or when.

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
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