FOCUS DC News Wire 1/29/14

 

 

The District should boost funding for public education by more than 15 percent — or at least $180 million a year — to ensure that schools have the resources they need to improve student achievement, according to a study commissioned by the D.C. government.

 

The study calls for raising the city’s basic per-pupil allocation from $9,306 to $11,628, largely to provide better classroom technology and enough teachers, administrators and support workers. It also calls for additional money for students at risk of academic failure and students learning English as a second language and recommends changes meant to ensure equity between charter and traditional schools.

 

Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s budget proposal for the next school year will be based on the study, administration officials said. But it is likely the recommendations will have to be phased in over a period of several years to accommodate the hefty price tag.

 

Gray’s budget proposal is to be released in April, and it is not clear which priorities will be funded first nor how much the administration will direct to education.

 

Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith said she wants to focus resources on the biggest gaps between current and recommended funding, including programs for high school students, students learning English as a second language and students in a new “at-risk” category.

 

At-risk students are defined as those who are homeless or in foster care or who qualify for food stamps or the welfare program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. High school students who are more than a year older than they should be for their grade level also qualify.

 

More than 30,000 of the city’s 80,000 students fit that definition. A bill the D.C. Council adopted last year called on the administration to spend more money to help those students. The bill was sponsored by David A. Catania (I-At Large).

 

In a letter to Gray on Tuesday, Catania asked the city to commit to fully funding the at-risk initiative in fiscal 2015, as the District anticipates hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue in coming years. He called it an essential move for closing the city’s achievement gaps between poor and affluent children, among the largest in the nation.

 

The study recommends that each at-risk student receive the base allocation plus $3,906, which would mean a total expenditure of about $120 million per year. Other jurisdictions that use a similar model for funding at-risk students provide less funding for them. Smith said it’s still not clear how much funding the Gray administration will recommend.

 

The study is the result of a 2010 D.C. law that requires an examination of the per-pupil funding formula used to distribute taxpayer dollars to schools. Two outside consulting firms looked at spending patterns of successful District schools and hosted panel discussions with dozens of city educators.

 

The consultants also examined whether the District has been meeting a legal requirement to uniformly fund its charter and traditional schools. They concluded that it has not because, unlike charters, the traditional school system receives heavy subsidies from other city agencies that provide legal services and help with contracts, procurement and facilities maintenance.

 

“These funding disparities are contrary to D.C. law,” the study said.

 

Charter advocates, who have complained that the District’s funding is unfair, cheered the conclusion.

 

“This is the first time ever that the government has admitted that there is inequitable funding in any way, shape or form,” said Robert Cane, executive director of the pro-charter advocacy group ­FOCUS. He said the key question is whether the Gray administration will follow through with the study’s recommendations.

 

The study recommends funneling all money to schools using the per-pupil formula. But it also suggests that on top of the recommended new $180 million investment, the District may need to continue spending $40 million to subsidize the school system’s maintenance costs.

 

Smith said that subsidy is likely to shrink over time but may never go away because of the fundamental difference between traditional and charter schools. The school system is legally obligated to serve all children, she said, and must maintain extra space across the District and be ready to accept students at any time.

 

 

THE STUDENTS who ended up at the Options Public Charter School are the ones no other school wanted. That probably explains why the shortcomings of the school, the city’s oldest public charter, were so long overlooked. It underscores the dilemma D.C. school officials face in trying to figure out the future of the school and its vulnerable students.

 

“Educational option of last resort” was how Josh Kern characterized the school in recent testimony before the D.C. Council. Mr. Kern is the court-appointed receiver who has overseen the school’s operations in the wake of allegations of fiscal mismanagement by Options’s former leaders. Last fall, the D.C. attorney general alleged in a lawsuit that millions of dollars of taxpayer funds were diverted in a contracting scheme, and the D.C. Public Charter School Board voted to start the process of shutting the school down.

 

But the District’s traditional public school system said it wasn’t equipped to immediately absorb Options’s 380 students. Most of them have severe emotional or learning disabilities and have bounced around other schools. Many are homeless or have been incarcerated.

 

That these students are most at risk makes all the more shameful efforts to profit off them, particularly since Options also broke its promise of providing a “high-quality, unique educational experience.” Only 15.8 percent of its students who took the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System in 2013 scored proficient in reading, and 20 percent scored proficient in math. Some students never received required special education services while others were apparently given instruction structured not around their needs but rather what would bring the school the most reimbursement. How Options received a 15-year renewal of its charter in 2011 is a question that should cause soul-searching among public charter board members.

 

Of immediate concern, though, are the students who have no good choices if the school closes precipitously. It is encouraging that public charter and school system officials are discussing possible collaborations aimed at minimizing the harm to students. One idea on the table would be to keep Options open in the short term as a charter but have D.C. Public Schools — which is generally seen as better equipped to deal with students with special needs — run it. Longer-term, officials must address whether locating needy, high-risk students at a school of last resort is the best way to serve them, or whether it simply gets them out of sight.

 

 

DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson is working on a plan to improve the quality of the system's middle schools. But there's been a debate about how best to educate this age group for years. What can we learn from it?

DC isn't the only place in the country fretting about middle schools. In New York, newly appointed schools chancellor Carmen Fariña is focusing on this sector as well, predicting that "if we get middle school right, the rest is going to be a piece of cake." And one former Louisiana superintendent has called middle schools "the Bermuda triangle of education."

 

"Middle school has been this overlooked, forgotten period for too long," says Lynsey Wood Jeffries, chief executive officer of Higher Achievement, a nonprofit that works with middle school students.

 

While it may have been overlooked in some ways, educators have been experimenting with changing grade configurations for this cohort for over 50 years. Until the early 20th century, kindergarten-through-8th grade schools were the norm. Junior high schools, serving 7th and 8th grade separately, became popular during the 1950s.

 

Then in the '60s, middle schools that started at 6th or sometimes 5th grade became trendy. More recently there's been a movement back to K-8 schools (DCPS calls them "education campuses"). But none of these configurations seem to have provided the magic formula.

 

A tough group to educate

 

To hear some tell it, 11- to 14-year-olds are just a tough group to educate, obsessed with their places in the pecking order, their identities, and their swirling hormones. One former middle school teacher told Ira Glass of This American Life that he came away from the experience "think you're sort of wasting your time trying to teach middle school students anything." When Glass asked if perhaps these kids should just be sent off to work for a few years, the former teacher said, "Yeah!"

 

The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss proposed something similar a couple of years ago, suggesting that we "create middle-school education environments that would allow kids to learn skills in unconventional ways and that would give them far more time to engage in physical activity outside the classroom."

 

The difficulties of dealing with this population may explain why middle schools have high teacher turnover. Another problem is that few teachers are certified specifically to teach middle school, although many have credentials geared to elementary or high school teaching.

 

And, as a New York Times series on middle schools that ran several years ago pointed out, academic and behavioral issues that exist at other levels can be magnified in middle school. The work gets more demanding, so students can fall farther behind than they do in elementary school.

 

In high school, students are often tracked by ability, but middle schools don't do that as much. And in high school, troublemakers often play hooky. In middle school, they still show up for class.

 

But others see middle school as a time of tremendous possibility. Brain science has shown that neurologically, this period sees an amount of growth that is second only to early childhood. Whatever activities kids this age pursue leads to a certain amount of "hard-wiring" in the brain. And they're old enough to be interested in exploring the world around them and capable of complex thinking.

 

K-8 versus middle schools

 

Much of the academic research on middle schools has focused on grade configurations: specifically, whether students do better in a K-8 environment or a stand-alone middle school. The verdict has generally been in favor of K-8 schools. All transitions are hard for students, and one that comes at this age may be particularly hard.

 

One study found that switching to middle school causes a sharp drop in students' test scores that persists through high school, as compared to students from K-8 schools.

 

But researchers also caution that school configuration isn't determinative. You can have a great middle school and a so-so K-8 school. (Other countries, by the way, use completely different configurations. In Germany, students go to one school through 4th grade and then on to secondary school. In Finland, students attend the same school from 2nd grade to 10th.)

 

While a K-8 configuration can make things easier, and parents often prefer it, some studies conclude that what's more important is what goes on inside the school. And one study of Philadelphia schools concluded that the K-8 advantage pretty much disappears when the student population is high-poverty and predominantly minority.

 

What goes on inside the school

 

Researchers have identified a number of key "effective practices" for middle schools. They include things like setting measurable goals for students on tests, holding teachers and administrators accountable for student progress, and expecting parents to share in the responsibility for a student's learning. Others have recommended small learning communities, professional development for teachers geared to the middle school years, and cooperative learning.

 

Four years ago, the New York Times series said that "almost every kind of experiment" was under way in the city's middle schools, including dividing middle school into themed academies. Apparently, none of them was the magic bullet.

 

None of the recommendations or experiments is particularly revolutionary, at least compared to the idea of sending middle school students out to work. And rather than focusing on adolescents' social and emotional needs, they're at least equally geared towards academics.

 

That makes sense. After all, middle schools need to prepare students to do high-school-level work, and they won't get there without focusing on academics. According to one account, the original impetus for creating middle schools was to nurture kids' emotional development more than junior highs were doing. But it then became apparent that kids weren't actually learning much in middle school.

 

Ideally, there should be a way to both provide kids with the developmental experiences they need at this age while at the same time inculcating the content knowledge and fostering the higher-order thinking skills they'll need in high school.

 

Higher Achievement's Lynsey Jeffries suggests that middle schoolers need what she calls "voice and choice:" a say in what goes on in the classroom and a variety of options to choose from, both academically and in terms of extracurricular activities. She also says it's important to give them real-world experiences that will help them connect school with their future: taking them to workplaces, for example, where they can see doctors, lawyers, or other adults in action.

 

What does all this mean for DCPS's middle school plan? We'll tackle that in a future post.

 

 

Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation informs us that January 23rd marked the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush signing into law D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarship Program. That is an amazing accomplishment considering the sustained efforts by unions, the Obama Administration, and our local newspaper to shutdown the private school voucher plan.

 

I remember as if was yesterday the small celebration held at the Institute for Justice headquarters on the night the legislation became law. My friend Kaleem Caire joined us representing Fight for Children. Its founder and chairman Joseph E. Robert, Jr. had devised the three sector approach which provided funding for the vouchers as well as traditional and charter schools as a mechanism for getting the legislation through Congress. In this way, and in an instant, he eliminated the tired liberal argument that vouchers divert money from the regular public schools. We can also never forget the ferocious efforts of Virginia Walden Ford to provide a quality education for her children and for numerous other kids in the nation's capital who lacked the chance to attend a quality school.

 

Ms. Burke points out that 98 percent of the over 1,600 voucher recipients this year would have attended an under-performing neighborhood school if it wasn't for the scholarship. The education analyst also reminds us that 91 percent of OSP students have a four year high school graduation rate compared to charter school students at 79 percent and DCPS at 58 percent for this statistic.

 

I especially like this comment by Ms. Ford about the program:

 

“In each of the fights to bring school choice to the states and the District of Columbia,” she notes, “there have been strong parent voices. We have seen many parents, for the first time, become partners of change, excited about how their children are learning and what lies ahead."

 

Onward we go.