FOCUS DC News Wire 1/28/14

 

 

Yesterday, the Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith released the final version of the D.C. Education Adequacy Study. The initial draft was made available last October. The 197 page report may be the most comprehensive analysis of any subject area ever produced by occupants of the Wilson Building. Just as Ayn Rand deconstructed the filed of philosophy and then created a new vision of the universe by tightly interweaving all of its theoretical branches into a perfectly logical whole, Ms. Smith has achieved the same regarding the financing of public education. Whether you want to read about recommendations for technology in the classroom for various grade levels or the number of square feet required for classrooms based upon student age, it is all there.

 

Of course, most groundbreaking for our local charter school movement is the recommendation, now put down officially on paper for the first time, that all funding for public schools, whether traditional or charter, go through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. As most of us already know this has been the law for over a decade but in practice DCPS has received about $100 million a year in revenue outside of this mechanism. But going forward items such as legal services, technology, nurses, mental health support, procurement assistance, building maintenance, custodial services, and utilities would be provided for in the UPSFF. The only exceptions would be money to pay for crossing guards and Student Resource Officers. The executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools Robert Cane clearly recognizes the significance of this change:

 

"The Adequacy Study report represents a huge breakthrough for the charter school movement in D.C. The report, commissioned by the D.C. government, acknowledges what FOCUS and the charter schools have been saying for seventeen years: that charter and DCPS kids should and must be funded equally and that the government has failed to do so. Instead, the report acknowledges that the government annually provides DCPS students with tens of millions of dollars more funding than charter school students. Mayor Gray has a great opportunity to make things right, and to fulfill his campaign promises, in the FY 2015 budget he's working on now. Will he do so?"

 

Mr. Cane has put his finger on the one issue that may come between the goals of the Adequacy Study and reality. For the one thing that has changed between the two versions of this report is the cost. Three months ago the additional expense to bring equality to DCPS and charters was $137.7 million. Now we are up to $181.6 million for the current school year only. The Study's authors state that this figure represents "an amount equal to just more than 15 percent of total current local education spending for SY 2013–2014."

 

Ms. Smith, in her introduction to the report, states that funding equity can only be accomplished using a phased-in approach. As the Mayor develops his Fiscal Year 2015 budget we will be able to clearly determine how serious he is in correcting the financial injustices of the past.

 

 

The District is on track to overhaul school boundaries and feeder patterns for the 2015-16 school year, city officials told the D.C. Council on Monday, but there are far more questions than answers about what the changes will be and how they will affect city families.

 

Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, who is leading the committee that will recommend boundary changes, said her team has spent the past two months gathering feedback from parents through focus groups across the city.

 

Parents’ top priority is equitable access to quality schools for all children, Smith said. But families also want predictable access to schools and stronger neighborhood schools that children living nearby have a right to attend, she said.

 

The challenge is to translate those values and others, including a preference for diverse schools, into a workable and concrete policy. The boundary committee expects to put together several policy options before unveiling them for community input in March.

 

Smith plans to release a draft proposal in May and will hold large-scale community meetings before Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) announces a final plan in September.

 

“We want to make this process as inclusive and as transparent as possible,” Smith said.

 

The boundary overhaul is the first in four decades and comes as officials grapple with overcrowding in some areas, half-empty schools in others and how and whether to include fast-growing charter schools in plans for distributing students equitably.

 

It’s a process that could limit access to some of the city’s best-regarded schools and is likely to affect school demographics and real estate markets. The prospect of change has stirred anxious debate among parents, many of whom fear that the boundary changes will cut them out of desirable schools.

 

Smith said her team is making an effort to reach out to a broad cross-section of parents, but the focus groups have not been representative of the city. Almost all the people who have attended had a college education, and more than three-quarters had graduate degrees. Only 7 percent of the participants live in Wards 7 and 8.

 

Several D.C. Council members, noting that many families have purchased homes based on current school boundaries, raised concerns Monday about undermining parents’ confidence by sending their children to less-desirable schools. Wouldn’t it make more sense, they argued, to improve academic programs — and make more schools acceptable to parents — before redrawing the map?

 

“The concern that I’m hearing is by redrawing boundaries and feeder patterns, we may be drawing people out of options that they see are stronger. Are we putting the cart before the horse?” said Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large).

 

Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said that while schools are improving quickly, the city can’t wait to fix its confusing and antiquated boundaries.

 

“We don’t have the luxury of doing one or the other, or one before the other,” Henderson said. “We have to do both at the same time. We have to improve programmatic quality and innovate at the same time that we’re figuring out how to distribute” students across the city, she said.

 

Henderson said she aims to improve the city’s long-struggling middle schools, for example, by ensuring that all of them have quality programming. But she said the city should also think carefully about how to harness the success of charter middle schools.

 

Henderson drew wide criticism late last year when she praised charter schools’ success at the middle school level and said that the District should consider funneling middle-grade students into charters.

 

“Parents want good options, so we should figure out how to get as many good options in front of families as possible, not giving up on one system or the other,” Henderson said.

 

The boundary committee is studying student-assignment policies in other cities that have considerable school choice, including Boston, San Francisco and Seattle. Meeting minutes posted online show some of the specific questions they are considering — for example, if a D.C. student enrolls in a charter school or out-of-boundary school, should that student give up his or her right to the neighborhood school?

 

But much of the discussion has been more general. Smith and Henderson declined to answer council members’ questions about specific schools or neighborhoods, repeatedly saying that “everything is on the table.”

 

“This is an opportunity to remake a system of public schools in the city that parents can be proud of, will choose for their families,” Henderson said. “We’re taking the time to do that. We want to create a system that is right and is lasting.”

 

Smith said there will be “significant grandfathering” to allow students to stay in their current schools after the boundaries are redrawn. But she said the committee has not decided whether students will be guaranteed access to the middle schools and high schools they currently feed into, or whether younger siblings also will be allowed to attend schools to which they are currently assigned.

 

 

Fourth-grade students in Virginia, Maryland and the District have among the largest gaps in reading proficiency in the country when broken down by income level, according to a report released Tuesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

 

Virginia and Maryland were among nine states singled out for having particularly large disparities, based on an analysis of the 2013 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

 

In Virginia, only 21 percent of fourth graders from low-income families were considered proficient in reading, compared to 56 percent of fourth graders from higher-income families. And in Maryland, 24 percent of fourth graders from low-income families were proficient, compared to 58 percent from higher income families.

 

The District, an entirely urban jurisdiction, had the nation’s largest gap with only a 13 percent proficiency rate for children from low-income families compared to 61 percent for those from wealthier families.

 

Reading proficiency in fourth grade is considered a crucial indicator of future academic success. Many recent policy initiatives have been targeted at improving reading skills by the end of third grade, since that is the year educators say students transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

 

Nationwide, only 20 percent of fourth graders from low-income families were proficient, compared to 51 percent of wealthier students.

 

Fewer high quality early learning opportunities, inferior schools, and family stress are among the reasons cited for the lagging performance by students living in poverty.

 

On average, fourth-grade reading performance has improved significantly in the past decade across the country, but better-off children made bigger gains, and the gap widened in almost every state.

 

“We want all of Virginia’s children to succeed in school,” said Virginia's new Secretary of Education Anne Holton in response to the report. “Our higher income students have achieved notable gains. We must focus our attention on making sure those gains are shared across all income groups.”

 

 

Republicans are positioning “school choice” — sending public dollars to charter schools, vouchers, virtual schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools — as a way to address income inequality in this election year and connect with low-income, minority voters.

 

Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a former education secretary, and Tim Scott (S.C.), one of only two African Americans in the Senate, will propose far-reaching “choice” legislation on Tuesday that would take the $24 billion in federal money spent annually to help educate 11 million students in poverty or with disabilities and convert it into block grants to the states, among other changes.

 

The federal money, which represents about 12 percent of total education funding, could be used for a wide variety of public, online or private schools — including religious schools. On average, each student would receive about $2,100.

 

In a departure from the accountability era ushered in by the No Child Left Behind law under President George W. Bush, states would not have to report whether public schools are succeeding or failing, or follow federal strategies to improve their weakest schools.

 

Public schools would still be required to test students annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and report on student achievement by school and categories such as race and poverty.

 

The idea of using federal money for private school vouchers and other education alternatives has long floated around Republican policy circles, but the recent spurt in charter schools and new voucher programs in states has revived the notion. As midterm elections approach, Republicans are emphasizing an issue they think will be popular with voters.

 

In the past year, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) has introduced similar legislation and traveled the country to highlight charter schools and voucher programs while Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), a tea party favorite and potential presidential candidate, has pushed vouchers, charters and the idea that students should be able to attend any public school in a community, regardless of neighborhood and property lines.

 

Critics, including many Democrats, teachers unions and groups such as the National School Boards Association, say “choice” sounds good but can pour tax dollars into private hands with little accountability and uncertain educational outcomes.

 

“School choice is a well-funded and politically powerful movement seeking to privatize much of American education,” said Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director of the National School Boards Association, which has joined lawsuits challenging vouchers in several states. “We’re not against public charters, and there are some that are well-motivated. . . . But our goal is that public schools be schools of choice. We need to invest and support public schools, not divert money and attention from them to what amounts, in many cases, to experiments.”

 

Gentzel pointed to charter schools’ mixed record and said there is little evidence that students who attend private schools with vouchers learn more than they would in public schools.

 

“While the growth of charters has allowed the emergence of some terrific schools, it’s hard to make the case there’s been an explosion of school quality in the 20 years that charters have been around,” said Frederick Hess, a political scientist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who is moderating a forum Tuesday with Alexander and Scott about their legislative proposals. ”

 

The notion of sending block grants to states is troubling, said Charles Barone, policy director for Democrats for Education Reform. “What you hear a few years after a block grant is awarded is how many recipients didn’t spend the money wisely,” Barone said. ““The fact is the feds do [targeted education funding] better than the states.”.”

 

To date, the only federally funded voucher program is the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship, created by Congress in 2004. The government has poured about $152 million into the program, which has helped about 5,000 students pay tuition at private schools in the District. The majority of those students attend Catholic schools, and the vouchers do not cover tuition at many of the city’s elite private schools.

 

The execution of that voucher program has been rocky, with inadequate safeguards for the millions of dollars in federal funding, insufficient information for parents and a student database that contains incomplete information, according to the Government Accountability Office. A Washington Post investigation last year found that the 52 D.C. private schools approved to participate in the voucher program are subject to few quality controls and offer widely disparate academic experiences.

 

The Obama administration supports public charter schools but opposes vouchers, saying public money should not be used for private schools. Several Republican-controlled states have embraced vouchers since 2010, propelling forward an idea that had once been moribund.

 

The vast majority of U.S. students — 90 percent — attend public schools. Of that group, about 5 percent attend charter schools. Public charter schools are financed with tax money but are independently run, and in most cases, their teachers are not unionized.

 

Republicans are lining up behind school choice for several reasons, Hess said.

 

The idea fits neatly into the GOP political philosophy and allows lawmakers to say they’re doing something about education without increasing budgets. It also lets the party easily tap into groups that promote school choice at the state and federal level, Hess said.

 

In fact, this is National School Choice Week, a promotion funded in part by charter school organizations, several right-leaning think tanks and foundations, Democrats for Education Reform, as well as an advocacy group founded by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.

 

Finally, “school choice” allows Republicans to connect with low-income, minority voters, a demographic that abandoned the GOP in droves in 2012, Hess said. Minorities in urban areas want choice, and many like the idea of vouchers, he said. “Even on vouchers, African American and Latino legislators and parents are going to be excited,” Hess said. “It’s a natural opportunity for Republicans.”

 

While middle-class, suburban voters like the idea of choice for poor urban students, they are less enthusiastic about proposals to foster school choice by eliminating boundary lines, he said. “When you start talking about school boundaries, people who bought a house because of the school system get very nervous and people who don’t have kids are enormously worried about their property values,” he said. “That’s the real stumbling block — trying to convince suburban and middle-class families they should want this.”