- School choice is saving public education [FOCUS mentioned]
- Henderson outlines DCPS spending priorities, commits to smoother budget process
- Council Should Delay Action on Old Hardy
School choice is saving public education [FOCUS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Robert Cane
December 2, 2013
The following is a guest commentary by Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS).
Recently, noted education historian-turned-school reform critic Diane Ravitch was in Washington D.C. to promote her latest anti-reform book, flamboyantly entitled “Reign of Error.” In it, she asserts that urban public school systems are “not broken,” and that the solutions that have been proposed for this non-problem, among them mayoral control and autonomous public charter schools, are elements of a vast conspiracy to undermine traditional public education. Traditional urban education is suffering from the ills of society, most prominently poverty and segregation--but, otherwise, things are getting better.
Ravitch’s book, though fundamentally misguided, asks some interesting questions; the nation’s capital, however, is an odd place to promote it. Our system of neighborhood schools, and an elected Board of Education, presided over the virtual collapse of public education in D.C. By the mid-1990s, when the D.C. School Reform Act, D.C.’s charter school law, was passed, D.C. Public Schools was a byword for failure. About half the system’s students dropped out before graduating. The schools were unable even to provide a safe environment for students. And enrollment fell from about 150,000 to approximately 80,000 over the previous 30 years.
Ravitch blames school choice for undermining public education. But the exodus of District parents and students from the traditional school system underscores a point that Ravitch misses entirely. Before charter schools, choice already existed for affluent parents, who exercised it by moving into the few D.C. neighborhoods with good public schools; paying for their children to attend private schools; enrolling them in parochial schools; or moving to Fairfax or Montgomery counties to access suburban public schools.
The parents who had no choice but to live with the District’s then-dysfunctional status quo were largely poor and overwhelmingly of color. Today, these formerly underserved parents have a choice, just like the well-off: taxpayer-funded, tuition-free public charter schools. These schools now educate 44 percent of D.C public school students. Charters are able to choose their own instructional methods, hire and fire teachers as needed, and control their finances while being held strictly accountable for improved student performance. And they have proved their value to D.C. residents who depend upon a public school education—especially the city’s most disadvantaged and underserved students.
District public charter schools’ on time high-school graduation rate is 21 percentage points higher than the D.C. Public Schools’ average. D.C. charter students also outperform their DCPS peers on the city’s standardized math and reading tests in all Wards except Ward 3, where there are no charters. Charters’ superior academic performance is even more pronounced in wards seven and eight, where charter students score on average 19 percentage points higher in reading and 25 points higher in math on D.C.’s standardized test.
D.C.’s public charter schools are nonprofits and are held accountable for results by the D.C. Public Charter School Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor. Not only have the charters created a lifeline for children from some of the city’s most underprivileged neighborhoods, including access to safe schools and college; they have been the inspiration behind the long-overdue reform of DCPS, which is 208 years old. Losing enrollment to charters—after low-income parents were finally permitted to exercise choice—the D.C. council finally ended the reign of the Board of Education that had presided over decades of decline. Yet, perversely, Ravitch hails local education boards as the key to ensuring community accountability over the school system.
The results of the charter-inspired DCPS reform have included an improvement in the test scores of DCPS students and a decision to make the mayor accountable for the performance—or lack thereof—of D.C.’s traditional school system. New collaboration between DCPS and the city’s thriving public charter school sector also has been made possible. This year, tens of thousands of District parents will participate in a common lottery, making it easier for them to find a good public school, whether charter or traditional. Overall enrollment in public schools is now increasing—the opposite of the trend before D.C. embarked upon education reform.
Far from being antithetical to American values, as Ravitch claims, education reform is delivering a high-quality public education to increasing numbers of children growing up in District neighborhoods otherwise bereft of opportunity. D.C.’s public charter school educators are proponents of action to reduce poverty—but they don’t believe that such impediments to student success should be used as an excuse for sub-standard public schools. The investment in public education that education reform has provided is transforming the District’s schools into the equalizers that everyone who believes in public education wants them to be.
Henderson outlines DCPS spending priorities, commits to smoother budget process
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 27, 2013
Improving middle schools is one of the D.C. school system’s three main spending priorities for next year, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced Tuesday night, kicking off a budget process that she said has been redesigned to be more collaborative and less contentious than in the past.
The other two priorities are lifting achievement in the system’s 4o lowest-performing schools, probably through longer school days or a longer school year, and increasing students’ satisfaction with their schools by addressing complaints ranging from bullying to dirty buildings.
Henderson said she wanted to share her thinking about the budget now — months earlier than usual — to elicit feedback from parents and communities, who have long complained that they feel left out of major spending decisions.
“We don’t want to be at odds,” Henderson said, speaking at an annual budget hearing that officials have generally used to listen to testimony but not to share information. “Our desire and our intention and our commitment is to do this process differently.”
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who was in the audience Tuesday, said the public should expect the school system’s budget — long criticized as opaque — to be more transparent. “I don’t want anybody to feel like they don’t have enough information,” he said.
School system officials usually wait until spring — when they get an overall budget allocation from the mayor — to share details with schools about the following academic year’s spending plan. That gives parents and principals little time — sometimes only a matter of days — to react to and challenge decisions that can have a dramatic impact on programs and offerings.
Now Henderson and her staff have laid out a timeline meant to share more information earlier with parents, schools and education advocates.
Schools will get enrollment projections and preliminary budget and staffing allocations in January. The preliminary numbers may change, depending on the District’s revenue and the fate of legislation that would send schools extra money to educate at-risk children.
But Henderson said that schools will have baseline numbers from which to begin planning, and that officials will pass on additional information as soon as it becomes available.
In the meantime, officials have set up an online survey and discussion platform to hear parents’ input on the three priorities Henderson laid out Tuesday.
Fewer than a dozen people signed up to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, which parents said was not widely advertised. Those who testified spoke about the need for renovated buildings, a commitment to protecting schools from major budget swings and investments in the kind of academic programs that will attract families and help the traditional system compete with growing charter schools.
Several parents testified about their frustration with past budget cycles.
“I’m going to be excited to see how this process is different than previous ones,” said Laura Marks, a Capitol Hill parent.
Last year’s budget was built around new scheduling requirements at elementary schools, which were meant to ensure that all students received a minimum amount of instruction in math, language arts, foreign language, art and physical education.
Now Henderson wants to bring that philosophy to the middle grades, identifying and funding a basic set of academic offerings that should be available to all students in grades six to eight.
In the following year, the focus will be on ensuring a basic set of offerings at all high schools, she said.
Council Should Delay Action on Old Hardy
The Northwest Current
By Tricia Braun, Virginia Gorsevski, Tilman Wuerschmidt, and Claire Swift
November 27, 2013
On Oct. 28, Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith announced the formation of a task force to make recommendations on revising D.C. school boundaries. This review is timely.
Every public school in Ward 3 is currently overcrowded. The current attendance boundaries have not been analyzed comprehensively since the 1970s. After decades of declining enrollment, the number of students in D.C. Public Schools is growing again, and in Ward 3 our local schools can no longer handle the number of students who wish to attend them. The D.C. Office of Planning is projecting enormous growth in the city’s school-age population over the next decade — a 45 percent increase, almost 40,000 new students. The commission’s recommendations are due in September 2014.
One solution to the crowding may be to reopen schools that closed when enrollment was dropping. However, there is only one such building in Ward 3 that is not currently being used as a public school. That is the old Hardy School on Foxhall Road (not to be confused with the similarly named Hardy Middle School on Wisconsin Avenue). When this school was closed in 1996, the city wanted to sell it, but neighbors insisted it be available for future use as a public school if the need arose. Since 1998 it has been leased to private schools with a series of five-year lease extensions.
The same week that Deputy Mayor Smith announced her task force, with little fanfare the D.C. Council began the process of declaring the old Hardy School surplus. Legislation is pending to authorize a lease extension that will keep the school in private hands for an additional 50 years after the current lease ends in 2018.
The three Ward 3 schools closest to the old Hardy School are Mann, Stoddert and Key, and they are among the city’s most crowded schools. We are neighbors of the old Hardy School and have served in volunteer leadership positions at Key Elementary. We have seen firsthand the impact that crowding has on the quality of education at our school.
The Hardy building could play a major part in reducing the overcrowding issues facing these three schools and should be factored into the review process. It may well be that overcrowding can be addressed without needing the old Hardy School. If that’s the case, we will know within 10 months. But until the city can provide a clear road map, it would seem irresponsible to tie up this property for 55 years.
Given these facts, we — joined by 20 past PTA presidents and Local School Advisory Team members — ask that the council hold off on any disposition of the old Hardy School until the boundary review is completed and the recommendations have been made public.