- D.C.’s autonomy may be tested by suit over charter school funding [Eagle Academy PCS and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Charters Need Policy and Community Support
- High test scores at many charter schools may actually be "false positives"
D.C.’s autonomy may be tested by suit over charter school funding [Eagle Academy PCS and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
January 20, 2015
A lawsuit that seeks to equalize funding between charter schools and traditional public schools could be an important test of the District’s authority to govern its own budget and affairs.
An association of D.C. charter schools alleges that the city has failed to provide uniform funding to its two types of public schools, effectively underfunding charter schools by hundreds of millions of dollars in violation of the federal School Reform Act of 1995. Last fall, then-D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan asked a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that decisions the D.C. Council has made about school funding are within its powers delegated by Congress through the Home Rule Act two decades earlier, which gave the District broad authority to self-govern.
The plaintiffs say that the federal law is binding and the District’s authority to amend acts of Congress is limited to those passed before home rule.
As the District battles for self-determination on issues of gun control and legalized marijuana, advocates for statehood and greater autonomy are watching the schools case closely.
A ruling in favor of the charter schools “would really up the ante in the case to something far beyond this fight between [D.C. Public Schools] and the charter schools,” said Walter Smith, executive director of the D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. “It would be a blow to home rule and to democracy in the city.”
Newly elected Attorney General Karl Racine has inherited the case. A spokesman for his office declined to comment.
For most of the city’s history, Congress acted directly as the District’s local legislature. In 1973, Congress passed the Home Rule Act to “relieve Congress of the burden of legislating upon essentially local District matters.”
Congress waded into local lawmaking again two decades later with the School Reform Act, at a time when many viewed the public schools as being in a state of crisis. The law paved the way for charter schools to open in the District and required the city to set up a “uniform formula” to fund charter and traditional schools equally based on enrollment.
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In their lawsuit, charter advocates say the Home Rule Act did not give the District power to amend subsequently passed federal legislation.
“There is a tension for those of us who really are statehood advocates between what we would aspire to have for D.C. and what the Home Rule Act really does provide for,” said Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, which filed the lawsuit along with Eagle Academy and Washington Latin public charter schools.
Several pro-charter groups filed an amicus brief last week, stating that if D.C. officials can change the law, “they would have [also] been free to refuse to create public charter schools, to fund those schools, or to reform DC schools altogether.”
Nina Rees, president and chief executive at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement that funding equity is an “unresolved issue” for charter schools nationwide.
The District has argued that its authority under the Home Rule Act does not have a time limit and that decisions the D.C. Council has made about education funding have required “quintessentially local evaluation of the needs and resources of the District’s public school system.”
Some advocates for traditional schools signed on to an amicus brief in support of a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the School Reform Act has already been amended multiple times by the council, including in ways that financially benefit charter schools and that charter advocates supported. They also cited financial audits showing that the city’s charter schools collectively had nearly $200 million in unrestricted cash at the end of the 2012-2013 school year, a sign that current funding levels are adequate.
D.C. charter and traditional schools are funded primarily through a per-pupil formula determined by grade and the types of services each child receives. Charter schools also receive a facilities allotment. Currently, 44 percent of public school students in the District are enrolled in charter schools.
But additional taxpayer dollars go to the traditional school system, often through facilities maintenance or legal services from other city agencies.
The funding inequality was documented in a city-commissioned study last year, which stated that structural differences in the two types of schools drive differing costs. Traditional schools are part of a “system of right” and must maintain schools across the city at every grade level that can accept students at any time, the report said. Traditional schools also incur extra expenses through union contracts, which charter schools are not bound by.
What is a stake is a lot of money. The complaint alleges that the city has underfunded charter schools by an estimated $770 million since 2008. The charter schools are seeking a change to the formula for future funding, but not back pay.
For many people, the funding debates are being overshadowed by questions about local autonomy.
Josh Burch, a D.C. charter school parent and advocate for statehood, said it sets a bad precedent to take “a schoolyard fight to the principal.”
“It looks like we don’t know how to manage our own affairs. If we want to be a state, we need to act like it — managing our own schools and budget,” he said. “Otherwise, why not defer to Congress on marijuana, abortion and guns, too?”
Edelin said this case only came to the courts after years of failed attempts to get the D.C. Council and politicians to address the financial disparities.
“School leaders need this law to be settled,” she said.
Charters Need Policy and Community Support
Education Week
By Nina Rees & Todd Ziebarth
January 20, 2015
For charter schools to succeed, the schools themselves and the authorizers that approve and monitor them need to uphold the original grand bargain at the heart of the charter movement. Doing so includes closing those charter schools that don't succeed.
But the health of the charter school movement also depends on other factors, such as how well high-quality public charter schools are growing and whether they have the freedom they need to innovate.
Last year, our organization, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, released a "Health of the Movement" report that was the first to examine and rank state charter school movements on these factors. The analysis found that many states are meeting the goals set out for the charter school movement, and that these states can serve as models to help others raise their game.
The District of Columbia, which runs its schools as a state would, came out on top, followed by Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York. These jurisdictions demonstrated success across multiple measures.
Washington, D.C., actually outpaced the other top states by a significant margin, boasting a combination of strong academic performance, high charter school enrollment, effective quality control by its charter school authorizer, and a good level of innovation among the city's charter schools.
In states such as Oregon and Nevada, which placed near the bottom in the rankings, quality has been an issue, with charter school students demonstrating less academic progress than their peers in traditional public schools. Charters in those states also served a lower percentage of minority and low-income students than were served by other public schools.
Identifying states where progress is slowest isn't an exercise in public shaming. It's an effort to make sure the entire charter school movement delivers on its promise to parents and policymakers. When our schools aren't getting the job done, we should act quickly to fix them or close them, so that students aren't trapped in failing schools. In the nation's capital, about 4 percent of charter schools are closed each year. This suggests that Washington's overall charter school quality is very high, while the city's charter school authorizer remains vigilant about addressing poor performance.
Most of the states with the healthiest charter movements have strong charter school laws, as measured by the alliance's annual ranking of state charter laws. Having a supportive policy environment, with a robust commitment to quality and charter school autonomy, helps the movement thrive.
This may seem obvious, but what's interesting is that not every state at the top of the rankings has a strong law. New Jersey, Tennessee, and Rhode Island all have healthy charter school movements but flawed charter laws. At the same time, New Mexico, with the 12th-best charter law in the country, and Nevada, with the 13th-best, don't crack the Top 20 in the Health of the Movement rankings.
This suggests that supportive laws are necessary, but not sufficient, for the success of a state's charter schools. Quality authorizers, effective charter-support organizations, outstanding school leaders and teachers, and engaged parents and community members are all essential for a charter movement to thrive. Where these ingredients are present, the charter community can overcome a bad law, but where they are missing, the charter movement can struggle in spite of a good law.
In every state—even those at the top—policy leaders should strengthen their charter movements.
One of the biggest challenges facing charter schools is the disparity in funding between charters and other public schools. Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville reported last year that the average charter school receives 28 percent, or $3,800, less funding per pupil than traditional public schools. This gap in funding doesn't make sense since charter schools are also public schools. Students should be valued equally regardless of which public school they choose.
In addition to providing equal funding, policymakers can uphold their end of the charter school bargain by ensuring that charters have the autonomy to be innovative and creative in their school models and instructional techniques, removing caps that artificially limit charter school growth, and establishing more charter school authorizers that can approve new schools and provide rigorous oversight. With more than 1 million student names (including, admittedly, some duplicates) on charter school waiting lists across the country, the need for more high-quality charter schools is clear and urgent.
The Health of the Movement report confirms that many states are succeeding in delivering high-quality educational options to students. Yet other states are still trying to get the formula right. States that need to improve the health of their charter school movement can look to the example of places like the District of Columbia, Louisiana, and other top performers as they work to make a high-quality public education available to every student.
High test scores at many charter schools may actually be "false positives"
Greater Greater Washington
by Natalie Wexler
January 20, 2015
For years, many elementary schools serving low-income kids—particularly charter schools—have focused on teaching basic skills in reading and math. But now one nationally recognized charter leader says that to close the achievement gap, schools need a different approach. Will DC charters follow suit?
Last month, a leader of Achievement First, a well-respected charter network based in New York, candidly admitted that her schools had erred in cutting out subjects like history and science to spend more time on the so-called basics.
"One of the bigger mistakes I made as a practitioner when we first started," said Dacia Toll, co-CEO and president of the network, "is we thought, well, the kids are struggling in reading. So what do you do? You have more reading. And I realized that was exactly the wrong thing to have done, that in fact really rich hands-on science and sophisticated history, and reading in both history and science, is profoundly impactful in terms of equipping our kids to be successful."
The problem, Toll said at a panel on education convened by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in DC, is that reading comprehension is highly dependent on background knowledge and vocabulary.
The staff at Achievement First, as at other schools, had assumed that if you use a simple reading passage on any given subject to teach a student a skill such as "finding the main idea," the student will then be able to apply that skill to more challenging text on some other subject.
But—as you know if you're technologically challenged and have ever tried to understand the user manual for some newly acquired device—reading comprehension doesn't actually work that way. If you don't have enough vocabulary and pre-existing knowledge to make sense of a text, it will remain impenetrable.
In one study, researchers divided students into groups according to general reading ability and prior knowledge about baseball. They then gave all the students a passage to read about baseball. The result? Weak readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed strong readers who didn't.
Low-income students generally start school with significantly less vocabulary and general background knowledge than their middle-class peers. As they move up from one grade to the next, that gap widens.
And when schools focus on free-floating reading comprehension "skills," unmoored from any substantive or coherent curriculum, they do little to close it. By the time disadvantaged students get to the more demanding work of middle and high school, they may be hopelessly behind.
Common Core test results were a wake-up call
The idea that reading comprehension depends on background knowledge isn't new. Some commentators—most notably E.D. Hirsch—have been urging that argument for decades. But until recently, most education reformers either dismissed or ignored it.
Toll's admission nearly dumbfounded another panelist at the forum. "I'm just giddy sitting here," said Robert Pondiscio, a Hirsch disciple and a senior fellow at the Fordham Institute. "What you're saying is what I've been waiting for somebody to say for about 10 years now."
Toll said the "wake-up call" for Achievement First was the new Common Core State Standards and their accompanying tests, which are more rigorous than the standardized tests New York and other states have given in the past. When New York switched to Common Core-aligned tests two years ago, the results showed "the achievement gap is even wider than we thought it was," Toll said.
"Our schools, which were high-achieving under the old regime, are no longer," she added. She referred to those previously high scores on easier tests as a "false positive."
But a few schools in New York with low-income populations continued to get high scores even after the new tests came in. Those schools, which are part of the Icahn and Success Academy charter networks, placed more emphasis on curriculum, Toll said. The Icahn schools use the Core Knowledge curriculum developed by a foundation started by E.D. Hirsch. (In the video of the forum, Toll's comments appear at about 43 minutes in, and then again at about 58 minutes in.)
New York's experience may be replicated in DC
Because New York adopted more rigorous tests two years ahead of most other states, their school system may be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Schools in DC and elsewhere will begin giving Common Core tests this year, and their experience is likely to be similar.
One high-performing DC charter network, which preferred to remain anonymous, is already focusing on bringing more substance and coherence to its curriculum, beginning with the early elementary grades. Others may follow suit.
But deciding to shift the focus from skills to a content-based curriculum, while important, is only the beginning. The next question is what the curriculum should include and how it should build from one grade to the next. Once you've decided on answers to those tricky questions, you have to figure out how to teach that content in a way that engages disadvantaged kids and ensures they're actually absorbing it.
And even then, you may still have students who enter in later grades and lack the background knowledge others have acquired. Some of them may not even know English.
Beyond that, any improvement in test scores is unlikely to show up immediately, if at all. Because the United States has no national curriculum, the Common Core tests—designed to be given across multiple states—aren't tied to any particular content. Like the standardized tests they replace, they too will focus not on testing specific knowledge but on reading "skills," albeit more sophisticated skills.
So if your students have become experts in, say, ancient Egypt, and they're confronted on a standardized test with a passage about Amelia Earhart, will they still ace the comprehension questions?
Some educators say yes, arguing that habits of reading developed in the context of a meaningful curriculum will carry over to unfamiliar subjects. And it's encouraging that the curriculum-focused charter schools in New York scored well on that state's Common Core-aligned tests.
Even so, it's still not clear that a curriculum-focused approach can actually close the achievement gap. The Success Academy network may have had high scores on New York's Common Core-aligned tests, but last year none of the graduating 8th-graders at its flagship school scored high enough on city tests to be admitted to any of the city's elite public high schools.
But focusing on curriculum isn't just about improving test scores, important as they may be in today's world. As Toll noted, students deprived of knowledge aren't equipped to understand the kind of texts required for success in college and in everyday adult life, or even many newspaper articles.
"We've been at this now for two years," Toll said of her school's new focus on curriculum, "and I think it's the only thing that's moving the needle. And it moves really slowly. But I think it's really worth it."