- Three charter school operators apply to open doors in the District
- Proposed new schools would give D.C. charters majority of public school students
- D.C. Council holds 2nd hearing on school closures
- D.C. school closures: Accountability must trump loyalty
- Half of D.C. schools targeted for closure were winners in June
- Work begins on $35.7M charter school building Southeast D.C. [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Residency fraud still plagues D.C. schools
Three charter school operators apply to open doors in the District
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 19, 2012
Three experienced charter-school operators have applied for fast-track approval to run 10 campuses serving thousands of students in the District, D.C. Public Charter School Board officials said Monday.
The applications come as the city’s traditional public school system prepares to close 20 schools because of under-enrollment, which is likely to give the already fast-growing charter sector an opportunity to continue expanding.
Two operators are applying to open in fall 2014, said charter school spokeswoman Audrey Williams.
Nexus Academy, which currently partners with Connections Education to run schools in Michigan and Ohio, aims to enroll 600 students in Washington. Virginia-based K12 Inc., which operates full-time virtual schools around the country, wants to open a 550-student school in the District.
The third applicant — Rocketship Education, a California-based charter chain — hopes to open eight campuses between 2015 and 2020, Williams said. Those campuses would eventually serve more than 5,000 D.C. students.
All three charters would offer “blended learning” models in the District, combining face-to-face teaching and online education. The charter school board is scheduled to decide whether to approve their applications by February.
Executive summaries of each of the three applications will be posted online soon, Williams said.
The charter board established the expedited approval process this summer in an effort to encourage proven charter operators to come to the city.
Prospective charter operators who lack experience will be able to apply by March for May approval. Those approved through that process also would be able to open as soon as fall 2014.
Charter schools currently serve more than 40 percent of the city’s public school students.
Four charters that were approved last year to open in fall 2013 are in the midst of securing facilities.
Sela, the city’s first Hebrew immersion public charter, announced Monday that it will move into a building in the Takoma neighborhood at 6015-6017 Chillum Place, NE.
That building formerly housed Young America Works, a charter school that was shut down in 2010 for chronic poor performance.
Sela officials said in a written statement that they would renovate the building to allow for “multiple playground spaces and lots of natural light infused classrooms.”
The school is enrolling students in pre-k, kindergarten and first grade for next fall. It plans to eventually expand to eighth grade.
Community College, an adult education school, is exploring two lease options in Ward 8, according to a school board member.
Ingenuity Prep, a preschool-8th grade school that blends traditional instruction with online learning, aims to open in Ward 8, according to school officials. It will have an extended school day and year.
Officials with Somerset Preparatory Academy did not immediately respond to an e-mail about whether they have secured a building.
Somerset will be a 6th-12th-grade school run by a management organization that has previously opened charter schools in Florida, Texas, Arizona and California. Somerset’s application said school officials would seek a facility in either Ward 4 or Ward 8.
Proposed new schools would give D.C. charters majority of public school students
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
November 20, 2012
The Washington Post's Emma Brown reveals today that three experienced charter school operators are preparing to open in the nation's capital. Using the charter board's recently adopted fast-track approval process, two of these organizations are planning to begin classes in the fall of 2014. In all the new schools hope to add 6,150 seats. If successful, this would bring total enrollment in the charter sector to 41,169. Assuming the additional students would come from the traditional schools, which is a safe bet since Chancellor Henderson is now planning on shuttering 20 facilities, the student body of DCPS would drop to 39,685. Charters would then for the first time become the majority school system in the nation's capital educating 51 percent of all public school students.
These figures, of course, do not include expansion plans for already established charters.
Ms. Brown identifies the new entrants as Rocketship Education, a California-based network that hopes to eventually educate a million children across the United States. Their focus is on closing the achievement gap for underprivileged students. According to the Post reporter, Audrey Williams, PCSB Government and Public Affairs Manager, has indicated that Rocketship is planning on creating eight campuses between 2015 and 2020 which will teach 5,000 students.
Another new school mentioned is Nexus Academy, which currently runs five blended on-line and classroom high schools in Ohio and Michigan. Nexus will open in Indianapolis in 2013. This charter is focused on college prep and provides Honor Level and Advanced Placement courses in an affiliation with Connections Education. Nexus Academy's enrollment target is 600 pupils.
Finally, K-12, a provider of on-line education headquartered in Herndon, Virginia will add 550 students to the charter school population. The mission of K-12 is to "to provide any child access to exceptional curriculum and tools that enable him or her to maximize his or her success in life, regardless of geographic, financial, or demographic circumstance." This operator, like the others, combines computer and classroom instruction.
Ms. Brown indicates that the PCSB will vote in February on the new applications. This is extremely encouraging news.
D.C. Council holds 2nd hearing on school closures
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 19, 2012
Update 9:37 p.m:
Mendelson adjourned the hearing after nearly eight hours of testimony. The chancellor left around 5 p.m. but her staff stayed until the bitter end, as did about a dozen parents and activists.
Update 9:25 p.m:
We’re on the last panel of witnesses, and we’ve heard impassioned pleas from parents to keep certain schools open — notably Garrison, Francis-Stevens, MC Terrell and Marshall. But the two council members remaining on the dais — Mendelson and Catania — seem more interested in dealing with systemic issues driving low enrollment across the city.
Mendelson read from written testimony from a parent who said she had received tons of postcards from charter schools seeking her family’s business. But she’d never been wooed that way by DCPS. “If we are going to compete with charters for students, we have to make our schools more attractive to parents,” the parent wrote.
“I’m struck by that,” said Mendelson, adding that one problem with the chancellor’s plan is that it doesn’t do enough to persuade parents that their kids will be better off once the consolidations are complete.
DCPS principals and teachers should all feel as if they have a stake in attracting kids to their schools, Mendelson said.
Catania agreed: “It’s not beyond the pale to ask principals to have enrollment plans, to do their part to make the schools as attractive as possible,” he said.
Update 8:42 p.m:
Residents of Ward 5, where many schools were closed in 2008, are skeptical that this round of closures is going to go any differently than the last.
Nakisha Winston, PTA president at Langdon Education Campus, said the school system failed to provide enough resources four years ago to help elementary schools successfully transform into K-8 schools.
The new K-8 schools didn’t offer algebra, foreign language or gym locker rooms for middle-school kids, she said. They didn’t have toilets sized for teenagers.
“Given our previous experience in Ward 5, I am not confident that DCPS will provide the additional resources” necessary to make transitions smooth, she said.
Shirley Rivens Smith, another Ward 5 resident, challenged the notion that Kaya Henderson is more open to community input than her predecessor, Michelle Rhee.
“She may not be as bad as the othe chancellor — she smiles better,” Rivens Smith said. “But I don’t see anything different.”
Update 8:01 p.m:
Six hours into this hearing, we’re on Speaker #28 out of 51.
Many have called for a moratorium on school closures until the city develops a comprehensive vision for public education. That’s not realistic, said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.
“I don’t know how we improve the system if we don’t deal with the fact that there are facilities that are severely — I’d say grossly — under-enrolled,” Mendelson said.
“To simply have a moratorium while we get a better picture of the big picture, I don’t see how that helps,” he added. “I don’t know how we turn the corner without coming to grips” with schools like Ron Brown Middle, which is operating at about one-fifth of its total capacity of more than 1,000 students.
Update 7:38 p.m: Three experienced charter-school operators have applied for fast-track approval to operate 10 campuses serving thousands of students in the District, D.C. Public Charter School Board officials said Monday.
The news — one more sign that charter schools could continue expanding quickly in Washington — comes more than five hours into the D.C. Council’s hearing on plans to close 20 of the city’s traditional public schools.
More details here.
Update 5:44 p.m.: DCPS is shaped in part by churn. Major churn. More than one in five teachers leave the system each year, and turnover among principals is even higher.
Since 2008, 146 principals have turned over, said Aona Jefferson, president of the Council of School Officers, the principals’ union.
Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, wants DCPS to bolster stability by guaranteeing that teachers displaced by school closures, and who are rated “effective” and “highly effective,” will be able to follow their students to new schools.
DCPS isn’t guaranteeing anything.
“One of our bedrock principles is that our school principals need to have the authority to decide who teaches in their buildings. That said, we will continue to do everything we can to facilitate the placements of our strongest teachers,” DCPS spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz wrote in an e-mail last week.
“If they aren’t able to find placements, these teachers will have options, as is outlined in the WTU contract, such as staying on for one additional year to secure a placement or taking a buyout.”
Update 4:44 p.m.: Nearly three hours into this hearing, council members are still quizzing Chancellor Kaya Henderson. Members of the public, who signed up to speak but have yet to weigh in, are growing restless.
Same thing happened at last week’s hearing, when the back-and-forth between the chancellor and the council ate up more than two hours, and parents began leaving before they were called to speak.
Folks are already frustrated by the timing of these hearings. The deadline to sign up to testify was last Tuesday — just one hour after the school-closure list was made public.
“The feeling I get is that they’re checking a box, more or less, to get parental input,” Kevin Sampson, a parent at Garrison who tried to sign up to speak and was turned away.
Update 4:23 p.m.: One of the huge undercurrents of the debate over school closures is what they will mean for the District’s balance of charter schools versus traditional public schools.
Among the signs that charter-school enrollment will continue to grow quickly: Chancellor Kaya Henderson “absolutely” wants to put charter schools in some of the buildings left vacant when DCPS schools are closed, she said in response to a question from council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6).
Henderson has repeatedly said that she will push the D.C. Council in January to grant her the authority to authorize new charter schools. If she gets it, she said, she’d support neighborhood admissions preference for those schools.
Currently, charter schools enroll students from across the city, conducting a lottery when there is more demand for seats than seats available. That gives every kid in the city an equal shot at excellent charter schools, but also means that families can be rejected from schools across the street from their homes.
Update 3:38 p.m.: Parents at Garrison Elementary and Francis-Stevens Education Campus have rallied loudly in support of their schools, both of which are in Ward 2 and are slated to be closed.
Council members were clearly sympathetic to those parents at last week’s hearing, leading to a question that has cropped up several times at this second hearing: Should schools be saved based on the size of their outcry?
No, said D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, pointing out that many parents care deeply about their schools but don’t have time to demonstrate publicly because they work multiple jobs or have other commitments.
“I want to make sure that this is not a case of the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” she said.
Council members Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) and Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7), who represent less-affluent areas of the city that include nine of the 20 schools slated to be closed, agreed.
“If there’s going to be consideration for Garrison staying open, there has to be consideration for our Ward 7 schools to stay open,” Alexander said to applause from members of the public in the hearing room.
Update 3:15 p.m.: D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson opened her remarks by acknowledging the fear of what has come to be called the “downward spiral” — the idea that school closures will drive enrollment losses in DCPS, leading to further closures.
Henderson said she believes the school system can increase enrollment if it carries out the closures intelligently, reinvesting money saved into strengthening academic programs that attract parents. Without the closures, she said, all schools will suffer as costs rise and the system is forced to to make cuts.
“If we do nothing, we can guarantee that downward spiral,” she said.
D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large) pressed Henderson to offer more specifics about how much money will be saved and how those savings will be spent.
Henderson declined to offer a total dollar figure but said the savings would generally be enough to provide a librarian and five additional teachers at each DCPS school.
Original post: D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson will be the first to testify about her school-closure plan during today’s D.C. Council hearing, the second public forum on her proposal to shutter 20 city schools.
Henderson faces twin challenges as she tries to sell her plan, as I described in this article: persuading skeptical parents and politicians that a smaller school system will be stronger, and that she will avoid mistakes her predecessor made during the most recent round of closures.
She will answer questions posed by Chairman Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) at the end of last Thursday’s marathon hearing. Among the questions:
Henderson says DCPS must close under-enrolled schools to operate efficiently. But many charter schools successfully operate small schools. Why can’t DCPS also operate small schools?
How will DCPS avoid enrollment losses that followed the 2008 closures?
Some parents have called on DCPS to cut its central office staff before shuttering schools. How does Henderson respond?
Many activists and council members have called for a comprehensive plan for public education in the city — particularly for how DCPS and charter schools should work together. What is Henderson’s response?
I’ll be updating regularly as the hearing proceeds.
D.C. school closures: Accountability must trump loyalty
The Washington Post
By Kevin Chavous
November 19, 2012
Many years ago, when I was a member of the D.C. City Council, I attended a community meeting at a junior high school scheduled to be closed. At the meeting, Julius Becton, then superintendent of D.C. Public Schools (DCPS), laid out logical and common-sense reasons for the proposed closing. Among them was the poor academic performance of the kids at the school. Still, parents were outraged at the prospect of their children’s school closing.
Following the meeting, I spoke with several parents about the issue, but each summarily dismissed the logic behind the superintendent’s arguments. One irate parent summed up everyone else’s feelings by saying, “He can say this school is a bad school if he wants to, but it’s still our school! We are going to fight to keep our school open!”
I thought about that meeting when I heard the news earlier this week that current DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson wants to shut down 20 underperforming D.C. public schools. I instinctively knew that her announcement would be met with vitriolic community opposition. African Americans are intensely loyal, even if that loyalty doesn’t always serve their needs. Such loyalty is understandable given this country’s history of racial oppression and segregation.
For many young people, neighborhood public schools were the only gateway to economic empowerment. Today, however, the sad reality is that far too many of these historically significant public schools are not serving our kids well — and some need to be shut down. It’s tough, however, when people don’t know what they don’t know.
Like it or not, accountability matters in K-12 education. So does quality. And sometimes, the resistance to change in an underperforming school is so strong that the only way to change the culture is to start from scratch.
Henderson believes that these 20 schools aren’t serving kids and need to be closed, and I trust her judgment. It’s paramount that we are willing to reward and duplicate the performance of high-quality schools, but also that we be willing to close schools that perpetually underserve our kids — often the very kids that are most in need of quality instruction.
But accountability in our schools is only one side of the large and expansive education-reform coin, one that must be coupled with educational choice to truly pay dividends for our children in the long run.
These 20 schools that are closing will theoretically mean an escape for the children who used to attend them, but an escape to where? Although school closures are taking place in six wards, the reality is that they disproportionately affect kids in Northeast Washington and east of the Anacostia River, the very area that I used to represent, and where I know there needs to be significant improvement to the neighborhood’s public schools.
If school closures simply mean overcrowding already overburdened schools with more children and fewer resources to go around, we’re doing no better than when those underperforming schools were around in the first place. We must provide families with a legitimately better-quality option in lieu of where they were, and it’s also not fair to overburden teachers and students at the schools that are likely to see a new influx of students from the soon-to-be-closed schools.
For some, the answer is the robust number of high-quality public charter schools operating throughout the city. But “some” also includes parents whose kids may be able to benefit from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which is helping nearly 1,600 children attend private schools in the District. The truth is that we can’t simply stop at charter schools. As I wrote in last Sunday’s Washington Post, in order to best serve the students displaced by school closures, we need to put the full slate of educational options on the table.
On one hand, we do students a service by removing them from schools that are failing them. But what good is that effort if we don’t give them a choice to go along with their newfound freedom?
But we also need a more community-oriented informational campaign to help our parents understand the possibilities associated with quality schools and expanded educational choice. The knee-jerk opposition to Chancellor Henderson can be ameliorated, in part, by including parents in the discussion and allowing them to be part of the vision. Ultimately, the goal is making sure we educate our kids effectively — right now, not just in the future. For that to occur, some bad schools must close. Our task is to motivate folks to understand that loyalty to a school building is not as important as the educational services taking place inside.
Half of D.C. schools targeted for closure were winners in June
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
November 18, 2012
Four months before DC Public Schools named Thurgood Marshall Elementary a school it needed to close, it named Marshall a winner.
Marshall applied for and won a $300,000 "Proving What's Possible" grant, which urged schools to form creative plans to improve their test scores over the next five years. Marshall, a Ward 5 neighborhood school, would use the money to implement astronomy, robotics and agriculture programs. The school had just cleaned out its planetarium and was in the market for a projector.
"While we received many outstanding grant proposals, we chose the most compelling, and I am excited to see these plans in action this fall and track progress throughout the year," Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said in June.
But last week, Henderson released a list of 18 neighborhood schools she wanted to close by next year. Nine of the schools were "Proving What's Possible" grant winners, receiving $1.35 million from the school system to test new programs, extend their schooldays and partner with universities.
"We were kind of blindsided by this," said Leslie Jones, a Marshall parent. "Last year we reopened our planetarium, and the mayor's office was going to give us money to get a projector."
Jones said she plans to protest the shuttering of Marshall at the D.C. Council's second hearing on the proposed closings Monday. At the first hearing, on Thursday, several parents questioned why DCPS had invested these schools' improvement plans only to seemingly give up on them.
Malcolm X Elementary won $250,000 to extend its schoolday, in the same vein as many successful public charter schools. Spingarn High received $200,000 to purchase "Renaissance Learning programs" and 75 computers.
Henderson's spokeswoman, Melissa Salmanowitz, said the list of proposed closings was not finalized until early November.
"DCPS spent months combing over data and figures to determine which schools made the most sense to propose for consolidation. It's unfair and untrue to say anything we did was shortsighted," Salmanowitz said.
The school system chose the 20 total schools because they were underenrolled, many unable to attract students due to low performance. The "Proving What's Possible" grant also was geared toward schools that needed to improve their test scores.
Work begins on $35.7M charter school building Southeast D.C. [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Business Journal
By Michael Neibauer
November 19, 2012
Friendship Public Charter School has started work on a new $35.7 million school building adjacent to the St. Elizabeths campus in Southeast D.C., where 11th and 12th grade students will be dual enrolled in both the charter's technology prep program and in college.
Turner Construction Co. and Architects Inc. were enlisted to renovate the existing Friendship Technology Preparatory Academy at 620 Milwaukee Place SE and to construct a new academy building at 2707 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE a half mile away. The new building will be located on the site of an abandoned McDonald's.
Friendship's Tech Prep is a college preparatory S.T.E.M. school — the academic focus is on science, technology, engineering and math. Students earn both a high school diploma and credits toward a bachelor's or associate's degree. It currently accepts students in the sixth through 10th grades. The expansion to the 11th and 12th grades will take place over the next two years, growing total enrollment to 620 students.
Tech Prep opened in 2009 with 200 sixth and seventh graders.
The expansion project will be financed with charter school revenue bonds. Wye River Group served as Friendship's financial adviser, Robert W. Baird & Co. as the lead underwriter.
Friendship Public Charter School educates nearly 8,000 students on 11 campuses in D.C. and Baltimore.
Enrollment in D.C. charter schools is roughly 32,000, while D.C. Public School enrollment idles near 45,000 after a years-long collapse. DCPS announced Nov. 13 that it would close and consolidate 20 more of its school buildings, opening the door to further charter school growth.
Residency fraud still plagues D.C. schools
The Washington Times
By Tom Howell Jr.
November 19, 2012
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson stood before a room of high school athletes in a swanky Verizon Center dining room Monday and reminded them of their hard work, good grades and effort to “do what was good and right” in the run-up to their showdown in the annual Turkey Bowl.
What Ms. Henderson and other officials didn’t bring up was the underlying factor that put Anacostia in the city’s public high school football championship on Thanksgiving Day against Dunbar High School. The young men from Anacostia will play despite losing a playoff game, 40-20, against Woodrow Wilson because officials say Wilson used a player from Maryland and had to forfeit the two games in which he played.
The incident is hardly an isolated one. Residency fraud is a recurring problem in D.C. Public Schools, and city and school officials are turning up the heat through legislation, litigation and swift action against violators.
“One of the things they’ve been trying to do is make sure the rules are uniformly and properly applied across the city,” Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Monday, after news of Wilson’s disqualification spread over the weekend. “This is not the first situation this year.”
The decision to disqualify the Wilson team follows a similar situation last month at H.D. Woodson High School that led to the firing of the football coach after a player was deemed ineligible because of residency issues. Also last month, D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan sued a Maryland woman and a city resident who works at a D.C. public charter school on claims they conspired to let an out-of-District student attend McKinley Technology High School without paying tuition.
On Friday, the D.C. Public Charter School Board announced it will investigate residency fraud at its schools by contracting with external licensed investigators “to make sure that students who truly reside in the District are able to get the education they deserve.”
Although D.C. schools are showing signs of progress rehabilitating their persistently poor academic reputation, anecdotal evidence suggests residency fraud is often a matter of convenience for some parents, who unlawfully enroll their child in a city school because a grandparent or a caretaker lives nearby. WRC-TV (Channel 4) reported Monday that the principal at Wilson appealed his school’s disqualification on just those grounds, arguing that the primary residence of the student in question is with his grandparents in the District.
The D.C. Council passed a bill in January to increase fines for violating D.C. school residency rules and to refer cases to the attorney general. The bill also required the office of the state superintendent of education to lead investigations into residency fraud.
A 2011-2012 enrollment audit could not verify the residency of 198 out of the school system’s roughly 45,000 students. Seventy-two of those students were paying tuition to attend city schools.
Across the border, Prince George’s County officials say they have seen an uptick in students from the District and other surrounding areas attempting to enroll in their improving academic and athletic programs as Maryland becomes a recognized leader in public education, system spokesman Briant Coleman said.
“It definitely cuts both ways,” he said.
Ms. Henderson said she could not talk about the specifics of the cases out of Wilson and H.D. Woodson but assured reporters Monday that schools officials have a “robust” audit system to review residency documents.
“Our expectation is that adults will follow the rules so that our kids get to play,” Ms. Henderson said, adding, “Anytime we understand that somebody may not be a resident, we go out for a full investigation, which is why we are superconfident in what happened in this particular case.”
School officials took a closer look at Wilson player Nico Jaleel Robinson, 17, after he was arrested at his home in Greenbelt last month in connection with a series of robberies in College Park, a source familiar with the situation said. The teen, whose residence makes him ineligible for sports in D.C. Public Schools, played in two league games.
Before Monday’s luncheon, Ms. Henderson confirmed that the decision by DCPS “came about because, with the arrest, we learned of his residence in Maryland.”
See link above for full article.