FOCUS DC News Wire 12/19/13

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS) is now the DC Charter School Alliance!

Please visit www.dccharters.org to learn about our new organization and to see the latest news and information related to DC charter schools.

The FOCUS DC website is online to see historic information, but is not actively updated.

  • Despite D.C. public school gains, system trails behind large-city average
  • J.C. Hayward had ownership stake in Options case firm, attorney for D.C. says [Options PCS mentioned]
  • It's time to audit the PCSB over Options PCS [Options PCS mentioned]
 
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 18, 2013
 
D.C. Public Schools posted larger gains on 2013 national math and reading tests than any other major urban school system, but the District’s performance continues to trail the large-city average, according to a federal study released Wednesday.
 
The D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) system also continues to have the nation’s widest achievement gaps between white and black students and white and Hispanic students, according to the study, which shows that poor black children in the District continue to score lower, on average, than their counterparts in other cities.
 
The study is based on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading tests that are administered every other year to a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country.
 
The District’s gains — which reflect only the performance of traditional schools, excluding charter schools — come amid a period of rapid change that has made the city a nationally watched experiment in improving urban schools. Public preschool is now available to all children; the city has adopted new academic standards; demographics have shifted; and the traditional school system has gotten rid of teacher tenure, instituting evaluations that tie job security and pay to student test scores.
 
It’s difficult to say exactly how those different factors have contributed to the city’s gains, but Chancellor Kaya Henderson said the growth is evidence that the school system’s key policies are the right ones.
 
“We’ve raised the bar for students; we’ve raised the bar for teachers; and they have risen to the occasion,” said Henderson, speaking alongside Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) at a John A. Wilson Building news conference Wednesday afternoon. “The results from his test show that the things we’re doing in DCPS are working.”
 
Gray echoed that message, citing the public pre-kindergarten programs he has championed as an underlying reason for the gains. “The investments that we’ve made and the strategies that we’ve deployed, we think, are paying off and have paid off very well,” he said.
 
The school system’s progress mirrors citywide results released last month, which showed significant gains — among the District’s largest in the history of the national exams. Those results included D.C. charter schools, raising questions about how much the traditional school system — which has struggled to retain students in the face of charter competition — contributed to the growth.
 
The data released Wednesday, combined with additional data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, show that DCPS gains equaled or exceeded those of D.C. charter schools in each tested subject and grade level.
 
Education Secretary Arne Duncan singled out the District and two other cities, Los Angeles and Fresno, Calif., for their significant gains. These cities are “great examples for the rest of the country of what can happen when schools embrace innovative reforms and do the hard work necessary to ensure that all students graduate ready for college and careers.”
 
The data released Wednesday show that overall, achievement in large cities grew slightly faster than that of the country as a whole but continued to lag behind the national average.
 
The tests are scored on a scale of 0 to 500 points. Overall, urban school systems averaged gains of between one and three points between 2011 and 2013, continuing a decade of steady if incremental growth. But some cities stagnated while others slid backward, and achievement gaps generally did not budge.
 
“We must do more collectively to ensure that our minority students are achieving at high levels,” Duncan said.
 
The District’s school system was the only city to make statistically significant gains in both subjects at both grade levels, posting gains of five to eight points. Still, while Washington is no longer dead last among large cities, it is still in the bottom half, its scores tying or surpassing those of four to nine of the 21 participating cities.
 
The proportion of students who scored high enough to be considered proficient or advanced also trailed the big-city average. Among fourth-graders, one-fourth were proficient or above in reading and one-third were proficient or above in math.
 
The gains mask enormous achievement gaps in the District between black and white students — gaps that are about double the national urban average and are larger than those in every other big city, including New York, Chicago and Miami.
 
In fourth-grade reading, for example, black students averaged a score of 192 compared with white students’ 260, a difference of 68 points — four points larger than in 2011 and more than double the average urban gap of 34 points.
 
White students in the District scored higher than white students in any other large city. More than three-quarters scored high enough to be deemed proficient in fourth-grade reading, while only 13 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics met that mark.
 
Gaps between poor children and their more affluent peers also widened in 2013, although it’s difficult to interpret that shift because the way poor children are identified has changed since 2011.
 
The overall gains come amid demographic shift in the District that is beginning to trickle into the schools.
 
The proportion of white fourth-graders has approximately tripled over the past decade, to 13 percent, while the proportion of black students has fallen from 87 to 67 percent over the same period.
 
Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, an organization of urban school systems, said that demographics alone cannot account for the District’s growth. Subgroup data and the council’s analysis show that black students and Hispanic students made gains, he said. “Our takeaway is that all of the groups contributed to the growth, not just whites,” he said.
 
Henderson — who serves as a member of the executive committee that governs the Council of the Great City Schools — also pushed back forcefully against the idea that demographic changes contributed to the growth. “The gains are true gains,” Henderson said.
 
Charter schools, which enroll 44 percent of the city’s students, outperformed the school system by significant, double-digit margins in eighth-grade math and reading.
 
But the two sectors posted virtually the same average scores in fourth-grade math and reading, with the school system besting charters by just one point in both subjects.
 
The two sectors also made similar gains in every subject except eighth-grade reading: The school system gained eight points, while charters gained only two.
 
However, charter schools’ black students, as well as charters’ poor children and students with disabilities, scored higher on all exams than their counterparts in the traditional school system. Charters’ Hispanic students scored higher on three of the four tests. Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said those results are heartening.
 
There aren’t enough white students in charter schools to measure their achievement separately, so it’s not possible to judge the size of charter schools’ achievement gaps.
 
“We don’t have as many white kids, we don’t have as many high-income kids, so our overall comparison doesn’t look as strong,” Pearson said. “But we’re actually showing a lot of growth in the subgroups.”
 
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 18, 2013
 
An attorney for the District alleged in court Wednesday that local television news personality J.C. Hayward, who has been accused of aiding a scheme to divert millions of tax dollars from the Options Public Charter School to two for-profit companies, held an ownership stake in one of the companies.
 
Bennett Rushkoff, chief of the attorney general’s public advocacy section, made the claim during a D.C. Superior Court hearing on whether Hayward and other defendants should be dismissed from a lawsuit. Rushkoff said he plans to amend the complaint to include the new allegation against Hayward.
 
The District’s original complaint, filed in October, said the former managers of Options funneled at least $3 million to two for-profit companies they ran. The suit named Hayward as a defendant in her role as chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees.
 
As chairwoman, Hayward allegedly signed lucrative contracts with the two companies and helped incorporate one of them, Exceptional Education Services. Attorneys for the District have also alleged in court documents that Hayward served as a paid consultant for EES.
 
Hayward’s attorney, Jeffrey S. Jacobovitz, has argued that his client knew nothing about any alleged scheme and received only token financial reward for her work with the school, which serves about 400 at-risk students.
 
The new allegation is that EES, after being incorporated as a for-profit subsidiary of Options, came to be owned by school officials. Donna Montgomery, the chief executive of the company and of the school, had an 80 percent stake, according to Rushkoff, and Hayward had a 10 percent stake.
 
Rushkoff said he did not know whether Hayward still owns a stake in EES. But his allegation suggests that Hayward, in her role as Options chairwoman, may have approved payment to a company of which she was a part owner.
 
Jacobovitz, Hayward’s attorney, maintained that she did not knowingly do anything wrong.
 
“I’m not aware of J.C. currently owning 10 percent of EES,” he said in an interview. “I’m also not aware of any financial benefit that might have accrued to her even if she were an owner,” he said. He also said that all decisions she made regarding Options were reviewed and approved by attorneys at the time.
 
EES, which ran the Options bus transportation program and did its Medicaid billing, is being scrutinized by federal investigators who are looking into the possibility of Medicaid fraud, according to several people familiar with the case.
 
Jacobovitz argued in court Wednesday that his client should be dismissed from the case because the government failed in its original complaint — the only complaint now before the court — to prove that she did anything wrong. The government also is not seeking to place her assets in a constructive trust, as it is trying to do with the assets of other defendants, he said. That indicates, he said, that Hayward had not been found in possession of any ill-gotten gains.
 
Attorneys for the other four individuals named as defendants — the three former Options managers and a former administrator with the D.C. Public Charter School Board — also argued that their clients should be dismissed from the suit because the District had failed to show that they had broken the law.
 
Judge Craig Iscoe said he needs time to review the arguments before deciding whether to dismiss any defendants.
 
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
December 19, 2013
 
Although the D.C. Public Charter School Board voted Monday night to begin the charter revocation process against Options the news about the school is not getting any better. The next day Ken Archer of Greater Greater Education revealed that a 2102 Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) report on Options PCS's compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), the law that mandates services to special education students, found the following:
 
•Of 66 students whose IEPs required services related to behavior, only 9 received at least the minimum services they were entitled to.
•Of 24 students whose IEPs required speech therapy, only 2 had this service delivered in full or more.
•In March 2010, OSSE randomly sampled IEPs of 4 students age 16 or older to see if they included actual goals for the students to achieve, as required by IDEA, and found that none did. OSSE examined sample IEPs 4 more times over the course of the following year and each time found that none included any goals.
•In the 2011-2012 school year, Options lost 3 claims brought by students against the school for failure to deliver special education services. However, none of the changes demanded by hearing officers, known as Hearing Officers Determinations (HODs), were implemented by OSSE even though the deadline for all of them had passed.
 
Apparently, the PCSB took no action based upon this report. Today, the Washington Post's Emma Brown details that J.C. Hayward, the Options board chair and WUSA channel 9 news anchor, had a 10 percent ownership interest in one of the for-profit companies formed by executives of the school during the time that she signed off on lucrative financial contracts between the firm and the charter. This information has not been brought forward by the charter board.
 
It gets worse. On the same day of the PCSB vote Ms. Brown and Ann Marimow detailed that there is now a Federal investigation in progress regarding fraudulent Medicare billings regarding the school. The accusation is that Options paid students to ride the school's bus, transportation for which the government was billed. This act would constitute a bribe. The investigation also includes a suspicion that Options charged Medicare for student support services that were never provided.
 
What was the PCSB doing regarding Options PCS while all of this was going on? The regulatory body did conduct a Qualitative Site Review on December 6th and 12th of 2012 with the final report issued just last March to Ms. Hayward. Here's a taste of the findings:
 
"Through classroom observations and focus group discussions, the QSR review team confirmed that the school has implemented programs and provided resources to support students struggling academically to meet school goals, and that student participation in these programs is moderate. Observations and focus groups revealed that Options PCS primarily uses an inclusion model to serve special education students. Observers saw that every classroom had a content teacher and a special education co-teacher who supports the needs of the special education students (and other students), and makes modifications to homework, quizzes, and other work to meet the needs of all learners.
 
The observers saw active co-teachers in most of the classrooms. One QSR team member observed the school’s use of “The Academy,” which serves a subset of Options’ students with more severe behavior problems in a separate building. The Academy consisted of self-contained classrooms with more behavior support personnel than the main building. According to school administrators, students in The Academy attend core subject classes in the morning and have intensive behavioral classes in the afternoon. The principal shared that each year, some students (usually between one and three students) transition back to the main building as a result of an improvement in their functioning and behavior. Teachers in the focus group reported that the school provides flexibility in responding to student behaviors and that special education and content teachers collaborate regularly and systematically."
 
This generally positive review was issued a short period before Options was given a clean financial report card by the CHARM analysis, a financial snapshot of charters completed by the PCSB, OSSE, and the CFO. It was around then that approximately $3 million in public money was being diverted from the school to two for-profit companies.
 
The charges against Options PCS, and the apparent ignorance of these problems by the PCSB, strike directly at the heart of the oversight integrity of a schools system now educating 44 percent of all public school students in the nation's capital. There must be immediate steps taken to determine whether anything like this has taken place or is occurring at another school. It is time for Chairman Skip McKoy to order an audit of the PCSB to determine what else needs to be done to prevent these issues from every arising again in the future. The credibility of the governance of our charter school movement is now on the line.
 
Mailing Archive: