- D.C. mayoral candidates sound off on future of charter and traditional schools
- Elect candidates who support kids, learning [DC Scholars PCS mentioned]
- Getting more poor kids into college won’t fix income inequality
D.C. mayoral candidates sound off on future of charter and traditional schools
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
October 23, 2014
D.C. mayoral candidates faced a math problem of sorts Wednesday night at the campaign’s only major forum devoted to education: In 1966, the District had about 147,000 students in 196 schools. Now, there are 86,000 students in 213 neighborhood and charter school buildings, yet the city continues to open charter schools.
Is this path sustainable?
The three leading candidates differed on details, but there seemed to be a consensus on the need for more planning.
Charter schools are nearing parity with traditional schools — accounting for 44 percent of the public student enrollment and occupying about the same number of buildings — and the next mayor will have to manage a highly unusual hybrid system of city schools that compete for students and resources.
There is little coordination and few restrictions on where, what kind or how many schools open. That has frustrated some officials and parents, who worry about redundant spending and programs, and there are concerns that, without intervention, charter schools will overwhelm neighborhood schools.
The three candidates agreed Wednesday night that better coordination is a priority, though they had different ideas on how to accomplish it.
D.C. Council members Muriel E. Bowser (D-Ward 4) and David A. Catania (I-At Large) emphasized voluntary measures to encourage cooperation. Independent candidate Carol Schwartz went further, saying that, if necessary, she would pursue an amendment to the federal Education Reform Act to require coordination.
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“I think we can ask Congress to tweak that bill,” Schwartz said.
The forum, at the Thurgood Marshall Center in Northwest, was organized by a coalition of education advocates and organizations that signed on to a list of principles they say would move the city closer to a goal of quality traditional public schools in every neighborhood.
It was a rare opportunity for voters to hear the mayoral candidates talk in detail about their visions for education. Bowser, who has declined most invitations to debate, made an appearance at the last minute.
The moderator, Natalie Hopkinson, opened the event by describing her experience as a parent in the District. Her family’s assigned elementary school was closed twice, she said, and the family spent five years on a waiting list for a charter school and has crisscrossed the city looking for good schools.
“We’ve tried parochial, charters, everywhere but our own neighborhood school,” she said.
The candidates had about 30 minutes each to repond to questions, and they filled out written surveys beforehand.
(The surveys are posted online at wapo.st/1024survey).
Catania said that as mayor, he would convene charter and traditional school leaders “from a place of trust.” He talked about bringing advocates together to push for better special education, which led to reform measures the D.C. Council passed this month.
“I don’t believe in putting an artificial hold on charters while [D.C. Public Schools] struggles to improve itself,” Catania said. “We need to put DCPS on equal footing, and DCPS needs to compete.”
Bowser said she would promote voluntary collaboration with the help of incentives, including surplus school buildings that charter schools are eager to lease. But she did not preclude resorting to a legal remedy. “I am willing to do whatever it takes to best leverage our public school dollar,” she said.
The conversation included the growing achievement gap, the high rate of teacher turnover and student mobility.
Schwartz touted her background as a former special education teacher and a public school parent. She reminded the audience that in 2007, she was one of two D.C. Council members who opposed the mayoral takeover of schools. “We are a city deprived of democracy,” she said.
To address the achievement gap, she proposed an “all-out call to service for retired educators” who would volunteer to tutor students individually.
Catania described his study of the school system, including nearly 150 school visits, since he became chairman of the council’s Education Committee. He cited legislation to curb social promotion and to increase funding of schools that serve students with the greatest needs.
Catania said that the country “went a little bonkers . . . with testing” and that tests should be more reflective of “additive,” or growth, measures, which evaluate how much students have learned during a school year instead of just determining whether they are working at grade level.
Bowser emphasized her commitment to keeping Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson in her job. “The best way to protect the investments we have made — over $1 billion in seven years — is to have strong, consistent leaders at the top,” she said.
She said that the school system has succeeded in attracting families with children in the early grades and that it now needs to focus on middle schools. She said she would open four more neighborhood middle schools and work to improve extracurricular offerings and academic programs.
After the forum, Deborah Menkart, executive director of the nonprofit Teaching for Change, said she was dismayed that the candidates seem so focused on expanding choice, which she believes could undermine neighborhood schools. “It’s a runaway train,” she said.
Elect candidates who support kids, learning [DC Scholars PCS mentioned]
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
October 23, 2014
There is a candidate running for a high office in the nation’s capital who wants a “moratorium on school closings and new charter schools.” I won’t name the candidate because the focus should not be on the candidate, but on the fact that such a stance is anti-children.
Yet, here we are, a little more than week until Election Day and the school board races and candidates aren’t burnished on our radar screens.
For shame.
2015 will mark a historic moment in the nation’s capital, as it will be the 20th anniversary of the year that Congress and the Clinton White House approved the D.C. School Reform Act, which established public charter schools and granted authorization for the new public schools to the city’s elected Board of Education. The law was auspicious, pushing D.C. children into innovation classrooms that focused on teaching and learning instead of bureaucracy and union-controlled red tape.
With four school board seats on the Nov. 4 ballot and one member elected over the summer, the stakes are high. Now is the time for voters and other stakeholders to ensure that members of the incoming State Board of Education are focused on teaching and learning.
Ward 5 candidate Mark Jones, who also is a school board president, is neither anti-children nor anti-charter schools.
Stephanie Lilley is another such candidate. A parent of three school-age kids, Ms. Lilley is a former charter school board member who is running in Ward 3 — home of some of the most highly rated schools in the city. She knows what it takes to turn a school around, she knows what a great school looks like, she knows what a failing school looks like and she told me “the parent-teacher-student connection is vitally important to academic achievement.”
And, critical to finding ways to push more kids up the ladder, Ms. Lilley is a reformer.
She almost blew me away when she said, “I’m trying to get [the old] Fillmore in Georgetown school reopened.” I say almost because the feat is not impossible, but because the very political shenanigans that forced the city to allow charter schools remains at play with Fillmore.
See, the D.C. government sold Fillmore in 1998, just as education reform and charter school interest began taking root. Indeed, D.C. leaders were so ambivalent to school reform that city officials tried to stifle growth by refusing to sell or share buildings and facilities with charters, which were forced to use churches and office space as classrooms, and develop tight-lined financial plans to open and sustain fiscal integrity. Traditional schools had no such accountability standards.
Flash forward. In 2007, the mayor was given control of public schooling and the D.C. Council got control of the purse strings. The chairs and the deck changed, but teaching and learning practically remain the same.
Sure magnet schools, charter schools and schools with considerable parental involvement pushed forward. For example, at Stanton Elementary, a D.C. Scholars Public Charter School in the heart of Southeast, where test scores are dramatically rising, and where home visits, committed faculty and enrichment programs are the norm.
Still, as academically successful as some charters are, the children who attend them still get the shaft.
“The sad reality is that the D.C. government has been underfunding charter schools for years, and now parents of charter school students are suing to force the D.C. government to provide these students the funding they are supposedly guaranteed by law,” as Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, recently said in our Commentary pages.
Moreover, charter schools have to fight tooth and nail for facilities. Again, the Fillmore school is illustrative. The city sold the building to the Corcoran art Gallery, which in turn got into a court fight with the news owners, George Washington University, which in turn want sell to Fillmore to the highest bidder. (Can you see dreamy condos popping up on 35th Street?)
All the while, however, Ms. Lilley and charter school reformers — with a financial proposal on the table — want to turn Fillmore back into a neighborhood school.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who is a lame duck, could intervene at his alma mater. But I doubt it.
So it’s up to voters. It’s up to voters to elect leaders who will fight on behalf of children who, through no fault of their own get stuck with the short stick.
The ballot isn’t overrun with those types of candidates, and if more of the same old-same old end up the victors, I’m afraid we’ll end up with a moratorium on education.
Come to think of it, that’s precisely where we were until Congress and Bill Clinton intervened in 1995.
Getting more poor kids into college won’t fix income inequality
The Washington Post
By James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley
October 23, 2014
If you want to address income inequality, fix higher education. That seems to be the current thinking in Washington, where President Obama has urged college administrators to better serve low-income students.
Some colleges have been following that guidance. The University of Chicago has been praised for its new campaign to recruit low-income students — a strategy that reduces the financial paperwork in the admissions process, and guarantees low- and middle-income students summer employment while no longer expecting them to work during the academic year. And in April, Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system, sent letters to 5,000 high-achieving, low-income California high school students encouraging them to apply, noting that the UC schools cover tuition and fees for students whose families make less than $80,000 annually.
Even college ranking systems are doing more to take price and student debt loads into account. Last month, the New York Times ranked colleges that have taken steps to enroll an economically diverse student body. At the top of the list were Vassar, Grinnell and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By next fall, the White House is expected to introduce a ranking system that measures campuses’ tuition and financial aid programs.
The fact that relatively few students from low-income backgrounds attend college is responsible in large part for the lack of upward mobility in the United States today, reporter David Leonhardt wrote upon the release of the New York Times’ rankings. With their oodles of endowment money, colleges may seem like a fat target.
But they aren’t the real problem; K-12 education is.
Getting more poor kids to college is not a new idea. The effort began in earnest as far back as the 1960s, when the federal government set up scholarship programs to help low-income students attend college. It’s been about a decade since Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford replaced “early decision” admissions with “early action” programs that allow prospective students to apply early but don’t require them to commit. This change can be helpful for less-privileged students who want to compare financial aid offers before promising one school that they’ll attend. A number of the Ivies have also eliminated loans from financial aid packages, and some promise to keep tuition at zero for low-income students. Yale, for example, offers a free ride to students whose families earn $65,000 a year or less.
But so far, nothing seems to have had a significant impact. According to research published last year by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard: “The vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective college. This is despite the fact that selective institutions typically cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the two-year and nonselective four-year institutions to which they actually apply.” Indeed, right after Harvard implemented a policy in 2004 that no student whose family income was less than $40,000 would pay a cent to attend, the university gained 20 additional low-income students in a class of 1,600. That income ceiling has since been raised to $65,000 .
Of the 70,000 or so low-income students whose grades and test scores make them eligible to get into the top 10 percent of colleges, only about 20,000 apply, according to Richard H. Sander of the UCLA School of Law. Hoxby and Avery suggest that this is because qualified low-income students typically don’t come into contact with college counselors or other adults who have attended elite institutions. It’s an interesting observation, but it leads to the obvious question: Why are there so few high-achieving students in low-income schools? And why are there so few teachers who have gone to selective colleges working at our most impoverished schools?
Under the current system, teachers have more school choice than students do. Rather than sending the most qualified AND experienced teachers to educate the kids who need them the most, we do the reverse. As The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews has noted, a 2002 study found that more than a quarter of New York City public school teachers had degrees from the least selective institutions (ranking 1 on a scale of 1 to 5).
Teach for America, which draws many applicants from top-tier universities, is the exception here. For the 2014-15 school year, it had 50,000 applicants and accepted about 5,300 of them. It’s a safe bet that the majority of the other 45,000 did not find their way into inner-city classrooms anyway. These are smart young people who are willing to go into poorer schools and work with kids who are years behind where they should be. But without the structure and prestige of Teach for America, they are probably less willing to become part of a system that is rife with mediocrity.
All you have to do is look at a high-performing charter school or private school in a poor neighborhood to realize that there is nothing about low-income kids that makes them incapable of doing well in school. A critical mass of these students do well, and in addition they come into contact with well-qualified guidance counselors and other adults who have gone to elite schools. KIPP, a network of charter schools in 20 states and the District, has created pipelines with Georgetown, Brown and Duke, among others; the universities don’t guarantee admission but are actively recruiting KIPP students. Last year, the University of Pennsylvania accepted 14 low-income students from the KIPP charter network alone, according to a KIPP spokesman.
Which brings us to the real hole in the debate over income inequality in this country: the problems plaguing our K-12 education system. Fifty years ago, it was possible for a child to grow up in a home where neither parent had a college degree, and still attend a decent public school, go to college and become a professional. Seventy-five years ago, it was possible to grow up in a home where no one spoke English and still attend a decent public school, go to college and join the middle (if not upper) class. Despite the quotas that were in place, making it difficult for racial and ethnic minorities to attend the most elite schools, state colleges were well within reach and provided a rigorous education for working-class kids. A high school graduate knew how to read, write and perform basic math. Any college professor will tell you that’s not always the case anymore.
Today, for most low-income kids, college is merely a fantasy. If you finish high school, you are probably unprepared to attend a good four-year university, even if you could get in. And if you do, you will probably need multiple remedial courses. About half of students entering the California State University system do, for instance.
According to 2011 research by Sean Reardon of Stanford University: “The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years.” One of the factors Reardon points to is greater residential segregation by income, noting that such divisions are “closely linked to school-attendance patterns.”
There are many problems whose blame lies squarely with our universities, including the dumbing down of academic standards and an overemphasis on political correctness, leading to a less free-thinking society. Between the ever-rising price tag of tuition — and the fact that most low-income students don’t realize they won’t pay that sticker price — and the ever-expanding number of silly essay questions, students can be easily intimidated into not reaching high enough.
But colleges are not ultimately responsible for keeping poor students from moving up the income ladder in this country. For all the publicity that policies like the University of Chicago’s receive, they are hardly making a dent in the real problem. The shameful state of our primary and secondary schools cannot be fixed with a few changes in the college admissions process. By then, it’s too late.