- How D.C. Became A Leader In Adult Charter Schools [Academy of Hope PCS, Carlos Rosario PCS mentioned]
- Charter board should waive PMF Tiers for 1 year
- Some area schools spend a lot less on poor kids than others
- Small Schools Work in New York
- DC Charter Friends Network Happy Hour
How D.C. Became A Leader In Adult Charter Schools [Academy of Hope PCS, Carlos Rosario PCS mentioned]
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
October 20, 2014
One of the largest nonprofits that served adult learners in the District, Academy of Hope, recently converted to a charter school. These adult charter schools are a trend where D.C. finds itself a leader.
For each adult who studies at a charter school, that school receives almost $7,000 from the D.C. government. That's compared to the $800 dollars nonprofits can receive for educating an adult.
Lecester Johnson, who heads Academy of Hope Public Charter School, remembers looking at the first payment from the charter school board.
"Essentially that first quarter payment was our entire last year’s budget. We were all in shock and awe," Johnson says. "What that money does is protect core academic programs."
But along with autonomy and funding comes accountability, says Allison Kokkoros. She’s with Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School, which is in its 16th year. She says every charter school has certain goals and they are graded based on their performance.
"There are stretch goals that look at the educational gains, the GED testing pass rate, look at average daily attendance, if they're doing career training look at the percentage of students who received career certification, whether your students received employment, and whether they stayed employed," Kokkoros says.
If charter schools don't meet their goals, they can be put in warning status and their charters revoked.
Terry Salinger with the American Institutes for Research says D.C. is a national leader in adult charter schools and has more than 10.
"Minneapolis has one, and they're thinking of opening another. These adult charter schools have been created by Goodwill Industries. Goodwill Industries in Austin is working to create another. Goodwill Industries in Florida could not create an adult charter school because Florida law prohibits it. California which has a very strong system of adult education is 'flirting' with charter schools, as it was explained to me," Salinger says.
D.C. is home to one of the most highly-skilled labor markets in the country, yet more than 60,000 adults who live here don't have a high school diploma.
Charter board should waive PMF Tiers for 1 year
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 20, 2014
As almost everyone knows who follows education policy in the District of Columbia, next spring students for the first time will take the PARCC examination which will measure their knowledge on the new Common Core State Standards. Standardized test scores make up a significant portion of the Public Charter School Board's Performance Management Framework scoring instrument. Because the test replaces the DC CAS, and teachers are currently learning how to align their instruction to the Common Core, it makes sense to suspend for one year rating charters utilizing the assessment.
The charter school movement prides itself on being independent of the traditional schools but on this subject we should follow the system's lead. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced last June that for the 2014 to 2015 term her teacher evaluation tool IMPACT will not include student test scores on the PARCC. Reflecting on the decision Ms. Henderson commented that "we . . . know that new assessments always bring delays and unexpected complications.”
Charters and parents have become dependent on the PMF Tiers, which are about to be released for the fourth consecutive year. The numbers drive the school parents choose for their children to attend. Evaluations of teachers and heads of school can be dependent on these results. They can also influence where boards of directors decide to allocate resources. In addition, the scores determine whether some charters are permitted to continue operating. It is increasingly the case that charters set their academic goals around the Performance Management Framework. Although the PCSB has proposed a Hold Harmless policy for the schools it regulates, I still believe schools should not be ranked at all in 2015.
Now don't get me wrong. I am for accountability as much as anyone. Although I am not in favor of the federal government's involvement in public education, I think No Child Left Behind played a vital role in for the first time publicizing how well a facility is doing educating their students. But the Common Core test and materials are so new that I think it would be unfair to hold schools' feet to the fire without first understanding why and how they landed where they did.
Some area schools spend a lot less on poor kids than others
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
October 17, 2014
Schools in the Washington region spend wildly different amounts on students per pupil, and districts vary a lot in how much extra they spend on low-income students. While more spending doesn't guarantee better quality, the discrepancies raise basic questions of fairness.
An interactive map from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank based in DC, allows you to find the per-pupil spending amount for any school inside the Beltway. This is the first time spending data for the area has been presented on a school-by-school basis, according to Michael Petrilli, president of the institute.
That's because individual schools within districts don't have their own budgets, Petrilli said on the Kojo Nnamdi Show Thursday. Districts allocate staff and resources to schools depending on factors like the number of students at each school and their needs.
The data is based on expenditures during the 2011-12 fiscal year. It includes both public and private funds, but not spending on capital projects like buildings.
A data summary that accompanies the map shows that average per pupil expenditures in the area range from about $10,000 in Prince George's County to close to $16,000 in DC Public Schools and Alexandria. DC public charter schools spend an average of just over $18,000 per student, the highest in the region.
Spending on low-income students
In a blog post analyzing the data, Petrilli and Matt Richmond focused on which District-area school systems spend the most on low-income students. Arlington County leads the pack, and Prince George's brings up the rear, they found.
Arlington spends over 80% extra on its low-income students, or about $21,000 compared to the $12,000 it spends on its more affluent ones. But Prince George's, which has many more low-income students, spends only about 2% more on them, or a little over $10,000.
DCPS falls somewhere in the middle for the region, spending about 21% extra on low-income students, although its spending floor is the highest of any school district in the region. (The "extra spending" figures are for elementary school students only.)
In the blog post, Petrilli and Richmond single out Montgomery County for particular scorn. Despite Superintendent Joshua Starr's claim to be a warrior for social justice, they say, Montgomery ranks third in the region for extra spending on low-income students. At about 32%, it's below both Arlington County and Fairfax County, which spends about 34% extra.
Low spending in Prince George's County
But, as Petrilli and Richmond point out, the big story here is Prince George's County's low level of spending on its low-income population. They point out that at one Prince George's elementary school, the amount spent per student is about half what DCPS spends at a school less than seven miles away.
Given the relatively low property tax base in Prince George's, Petrilli and Richmond argue that the state of Maryland should be doing more to fund schools there.
Of course, it's not clear what any of this means for educational quality. As the Fordham authors acknowledge, it's hard to establish a direct relationship between spending and educational outcomes. More money doesn't make much difference unless schools know what to do with it.
But it's also true that programs designed to close the achievement gap cost money. So while money may not be sufficient to accomplish that goal, it's almost certainly necessary.
And, as a recent report from the DC Fiscal Policy Institute details, low-income students need a host of services outside the classroom in order to succeed inside it. All of those cost money, too.
It would be useful to put school districts' differing rates of expenditure next to a comparison of student achievement. Are low-income students in Prince George's actually learning less than low-income students in DC or Arlington, for example?
That's hard to say right now, because each state gives its own standardized tests, and they're not really comparable. And the nationwide standardized test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, basically gives results at the state-wide level rather than by school district.
Perhaps after this year we'll at least be able to compare DC and Prince George's County, because both Maryland and DC will be giving the same Common Core-aligned test, known as PARCC. (Virginia will continue giving its own test.)
But whatever the test results show, one thing is clear: It's not fair for a low-income student in Arlington to get the benefit of $21,000 a year in school spending, while one across the river in Prince George's gets half that or less.
Small Schools Work in New York
The New York Times
Editorial Board
October 17, 2014
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been critical of the signature education strategy of his predecessor, Mike Bloomberg, a strategy that involved closing large, failing high schools and replacing them with smaller specialized schools that offer a more rigorous curriculum and a more personal brand of instruction. But over the last few years, the Bloomberg approach has been vindicated by an innovative, multiyear study showing that the poor, minority students who attend small specialized schools do better academically than students in a control group who attend traditional high schools.
The latest installment of the study, released this week by the nonprofit research group MDRC, contains even more impressive news: The disadvantaged students who make up a vast majority of the small-school enrollment are also more likely than those in the control group to enroll in college.
The challenge facing Mr. de Blasio and his advisers is how to build on this impressive foundation.
New York City started talking about small schools in the 1990s, but it did not begin translating this into actual policy until the early 2000s, when Mr. Bloomberg began aggressively closing down large, factory-style high schools. Some of these big schools had enrollments of 3,000 or more students and graduation rates of less than 40 percent.
By contrast, the new smaller high schools, typically in black or Hispanic neighborhoods, serve about 100 students per grade. More than 90 percent of the students attending these schools are black or Hispanic. Nearly 85 percent qualify for free or reduced price lunches. Three-fourths of them began their high school careers performing below grade level in reading or math. These smaller schools have several other things in common. They have a rigorous curriculum. They offer a personalized approach to education, with teachers responsible for keeping close tabs on the performance of their students. They are organized around themes — social justice, law or science. They get valuable support from community partners — colleges, cultural organizations or social service groups — that sometimes assist with funding, the hiring of new staff members or providing ways for students to connect their schoolwork with the world of work.
The multiyear study is tracking more than 21,000 students through their high school careers and into college. Among the startling results are these: Students at small high schools have a graduation rate of 71.6 percent, compared with 62.2 percent for their peers in larger schools. The small-school students are also more likely to graduate in four years and go straight to college. The gains are especially impressive among young black men, 42.3 percent of whom enroll in college as opposed to 31 percent of their peers in the control group. Young black women and young Hispanic men and women also matriculated at higher rates than their large-school peers.
The small high schools managed to achieve these gains at a lower cost per graduate than the traditional schools, partly because more students graduated on time and did not need a costly fifth year of education.
The teachers union supported the school closure strategy at first, even though it requires teachers to reapply for their jobs and, in many cases, move elsewhere. But it withdrew support when it decided that Mr. Bloomberg was unnecessarily ramming through closures. The de Blasio administration has said that it will first pursue an as yet undefined strategy to help improve schools before deciding to shut them down.
The administration is right when it says that every school can’t be a small one. But given the clear benefits that have accrued to the city’s most vulnerable students, Mr. de Blasio should not shy away from the option of shutting down big schools and remaking them from scratch, particularly in cases where the school has been failing for a long time and its culture is beyond repair.
DC Charter Friends Network Happy Hour
October 21, 2014, 6:00-8:00pm
BlackFinn Ameripub
1620 I Sreet NW
Washington, DC 20006