January 29, 2001

Testtimony of Robert I. Cane Executive Director, Friend of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS)
District of Columbia State Education Office Public Hearing
Short-Term Plan for the Assumption of Four Madated Responsibilities

Good afternoon. My name is Robert Cane. I'm the Executive Director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a non-profit D.C. grassroots organization that supports the District's public charter schools. Among its many activities, FOCUS provides leadership and staff support to the DC Public Charter School Coalition, which comprises all of the District's public charter schools. The Coalition serves as the central coordinating point for cooperative charter school activity in the areas of communications and government relations and also as an incubator for other charter school support services. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to testify.

As you know, public charter schools are public schools in every way. They are publicly funded, free, and open to all DC public school children without screening of any kind. The public charter schools now serve nearly 10,000 DC public school students -- 13% of the District's public school population.

The public charter schools were early supporters of the creation of a state education office for the District. It is our belief that a properly-defined SEO can solve the problems that the charter schools have experienced in dealing with a DCPS-based state office without upsetting the delicate balance of oversight and autonomy that underpins the charter school ideal and is embodied in the School Reform Act.

During the brief time I have available today I would like to comment on two of the four mandated responsibilities outlined in the draft plan. These are the enrollment and residency verifications, which I will discuss together.

Verification of Annual Fall Enrollment Counts and Promulgation of Rules for Verification of District Residency

Over the last two years, these linked processes, known collectively as “the audit,” have created near-chaos in D.C's public school funding. What would seem to be a relatively simple matter – determining how many enrolled students there are in DCPS schools and the public charter schools and how many of the enrolled students are District residents – has instead become a source of contention, discrimination, and delayed funding.

As to enrollment, both DCPS and the public charter schools have been able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the auditors that the students they claim actually are enrolled. However, as you point out in the Draft Plan, the auditors do a head count of all public charter school students but merely sample DCPS students (this year 9,800 public charter school students were counted; fewer than 4,000 DCPS students were). Not only does this discrepancy violate the law [Enrollment Integrity Act section 107 (e), D.C. Code ¤ 31-2906 (e)], it almost certainly leads to serious inaccuracies in the DCPS count. For example, according to the auditors the sampling would not pick up DCPS students who leave the system for a charter school or elsewhere but whose names have not been removed from the computer prior to the audit.

When it comes to proof of residency, neither DCPS nor the public charter schools have been able to sufficiently comply with the requirements. This year, for example, the audit found approximately 850 public charter school students and 4000 DCPS students to be out of compliance. If funding were to be withheld from these supposedly unverified students, the public charter schools would lose approximately $7 million dollars and DCPS would lose nearly $32 million dollars.

There are many reasons for these deficiencies, but two stand out. The first is the unique stringency of the proof-of-residency requirement. Nowhere else in the United States must a student produce the kind and quantity of residency documents D.C. requires in order that he or she be permitted the free public education to which he or she is entitled under the Constitution. Furthermore, no other D.C. entitlement program requires the amount of proof that our school children are required to provide. Of the 845 public charter school students found to be out of compliance, over half had produced two of the three required documents – still more than are required in many other jurisdictions. Another 9% had produced one document.

These onerous documentation requirements fall most heavily on the very poor, immigrants, and recent arrivals to the District. It is imperative that the Technical Working Group develop a scheme for proof of residency that brings the District in line with best practices elsewhere.

The second key reason that so many of our public charter school and DCPS students are out of compliance with the residency rules is the “gotcha” approach that has characterized past audits. Unbelievably, large numbers of students with full proof of residency in their files were held to be out of compliance because of minor technical errors that school principals were not permitted to fix, such as a missing signature, a missing parent name, or the failure to place a check next to a document on the verification form.

All of these minor errors could have been corrected if the auditors had been instructed to follow standard audit procedures. Instead, the audit was carried out as if the goal were not to determine which enrolled students were District residents, but rather to find out which principals had followed the rules to the letter and punish those who hadn't.

We believe that the transfer of the enrollment and residency verification functions to the SEO will have a salutary effect, and we look forward to working with you to ensure that all D.C. resident school children are welcomed into our public schools.

Thank you.