- D.C. Public Charter School Board votes to close Arts and Technology Academy [Arts and Technology PCS mentioned]
- Eric Cantor and Bill de Blasio exchange fire over schools
D.C. Public Charter School Board votes to close Arts and Technology Academy [Arts and Technology PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 8, 2014
The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted unanimously Wednesday to close Arts and Technology Academy, a large Northeast Washington elementary school, for failing to meet its academic achievement goals over the past 15 years.
The nearly 630-student charter school will be allowed to continue operating through the end of this school year, but students who would have returned in the fall — most of whom live in the immediate neighborhood between the Capitol Heights and Benning Road Metro stations — must then find a new school.
While ATA had met four of its seven goals — including high attendance, a respect for learning and an ability to communicate through the arts — the charter board and its staff said the school failed to demonstrate adequate achievement in math and reading.
ATA’s standardized test scores have fallen during the past five years, and in 2013, only 36 percent of students were proficient in math and 38 percent were proficient in reading. For the second year in a row, the charter board rated ATA as a Tier 3 school — or low-performing school.
Traditional schools in nearby areas of the city post lower math and reading proficiency rates than ATA, and the charter school’s leaders said they are hopeful that they will be able to strike a deal that would allow another charter operator to take over the school’s recently renovated building and retain its students in the fall.
But it’s not clear that any other charter operator would be willing to continue ATA’s commitment to arts education, including daily arts classes and annual theater performances that parents and teachers say play a critical role in motivating students to learn.
Kimberly Smith, chairwoman of ATA’s board of trustees, said there are very few charter school operators that share that commitment to the arts. “It’s very tough,” Smith said.
Charter schools in the District operate under agreements that expire after 15 years and must be renewed for the school to continue operating. The law requires the charter board to deny renewal if a school has failed to meet the goals set out it in its original agreement.
“Whether our charters have an arts focus or a cultural focus — and we definitely celebrate the diversity of our schools — at the end of the day, I think we have to see the academic growth that we want for all of our students,” said Darren Woodruff, vice chairman of the charter school board.
ATA’s board of trustees — as well as D.C. Council member Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7) and dozens of parents and teachers — have pushed back against closing the school, arguing at a public hearing last month that ATA is a trusted community fixture that provides families in one of the District’s poorest neighborhoods with much-needed exposure to dance, music, theater and visual art.
Representatives from local arts organizations that have partnered with ATA, including the Kennedy Center and the D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative, submitted letters of support for the school.
“ATA is not just a school, it is a building of hope for a deprived community,” Yolanda Corbett, a parent member of the school’s board, wrote in testimony prepared for the hearing. “It helps us to know that children can dream of greater things in the midst of poverty, depression and the many other daily downfalls that challenge our community.”
Despite ATA’s low math and reading test scores, its students are performing better than students at traditional schools nearby. And those test scores, ATA leaders argue, reflect only the performance of students in grades three through five — who account for about one-quarter of ATA’s total population.
About three-quarters of ATA students are in preschool through second grade. Several years ago, the school began an effort to strengthen those early-childhood grades.
In 2013, the early-childhood program reached all of its academic and attendance goals, according to the city’s charter school board. More than 70 percent of those younger students were proficient in reading, and 92 percent were proficient in math.
ATA’s recently overhauled board of trustees, recognizing last year that the school was in need of academic intervention, hired a new principal, Allison Artis, with experience leading a high-performing school. Artis previously led the Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science, a Tier 1 charter school.
Smith, ATA’s board chair, said she was “incredibly disappointed” that the school’s positive trajectory did not sway the charter board’s closure decision.
“I believe we brought forth a solid position based on the history of the school and the progress we’ve made,” she said.
Woodruff said the improvements were too little, too late.
“Unfortunately for the school, unfortunately for us, the very effective team that we have assembled now at the school maybe didn’t get there early enough to show that growth over a longer period of time,” he said.
Eric Cantor and Bill de Blasio exchange fire over schools
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
January 8, 2014
Calling school choice the best route out of poverty, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took aim at New York City’s new mayor on Wednesday for his cooler stance toward public charter schools and warned that Republicans may hold congressional hearings on the education policies of Democrat Bill de Blasio’s administration.
In a speech at the Brookings Institution, Cantor (R-Va.) said that New York made great progress in offering choice to students under former mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), who grew the number of public charter schools from seven to 123 in 12 years.
Public charter schools are financed with tax money but are independently run, and in most cases, teachers are not unionized.
Bloomberg allowed charter schools to co-locate in underused city schools, which relieved charters from the cost of finding space in New York’s overheated real estate market. But the cohabitation created tension with traditional schools, some of which were squeezed out of their gyms and classrooms as adjoining charters grew.
De Blasio, who campaigned on the idea of improving all schools, wants to halt the co-location of charters. He said he might also charge rent to charters that receive significant funding from foundations and private interests.
“This move could devastate the growth of education opportunity in such a competitive real estate market like New York City,” Cantor said during his remarks at Brookings. “Just think of how many families will have their choices taken away if Mayor de Blasio pursues these policies.”
He added, “Our committees in the House will remain vigilant in their efforts to ensure that no one, no one from the government, stands in the schoolhouse door between any child and a good education.”
Megan Whittemore, Cantor’s press secretary, said that although the congressman believes education decisions are best left to local officials, he has no qualms about challenging New York City policies if he thinks they threaten school choice. “There should be more choices for students and parents,” she said. “But if there are politicians who are going to try to stop that, we would look into that.”
After learning about Cantor’s remarks, de Blasio returned fire.
“The Republican agenda in Washington doesn’t even scratch the surface of the inequities facing more than a million children in our public schools,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s a dangerous philosophy that turns its back on public education — and it has failed many times before. What public school parents want — and I know because I’m one of them — are real investments that lift up all our kids. That will take big, bold, progressive ideas. And that’s exactly what the people of New York City just voted for.”
On the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Cantor was among several high-profile lawmakers raising a GOP voice in the national discourse around poverty and policy. And the long-distance exchange with New York’s new mayor highlighted differences between conservatives and progressives around public education.
Cantor said Wednesday that he wants more “school choice” — allowing parents to pull students from weak public schools and enroll them in a better traditional, charter or private school, with tuition ideally paid with federal money. That is an emerging theme among Republicans and conservatives, who plan to push legislation on the state level this year.
Cantor began touting “school choice” last year, visiting public charter schools and parochial schools nationwide attended by low-income students who had received vouchers or state tax money to help cover tuition.
“America is in the midst of an education revolution,” Cantor said at Brookings, “with a shift toward more choice for families.” Five decades of investment and effort by the federal government to improve public education has not worked, he said, and students need an escape hatch from substandard schools.
“For many families, living in poverty spans generations,” Cantor said. “Parents and grandparents struggled to realize the American dream. School choice is the surest way to break this vicious cycle of poverty, and we must act fast before it is too late for too many.”
Cantor criticized the government’s approach to education reform as “too slow, too sporadic, and too ineffective. And while we wait, we are losing generations of kids.”
The vast majority of U.S. students — 90 percent — attend public schools. Of that group, about 5 percent attend charter schools.
On Wednesday, Brookings released a study that ranked the quality of school choice in about 100 school districts. New Orleans schools topped the list, followed by New York City. Washington, D.C., was seventh.
Cantor took President Obama to task during his speech — for Obama’s opposition to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, the only federally funded voucher program. The congressman said there is an “assault” on school choice in the District of Columbia.Since Congress created the program in 2004, the government has poured about $152 million into it, in which about 5,000 students have received vouchers to attend 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 the voucher program has been rocky, with inadequate safeguards over the millions of dollars in federal funding, insufficient information for parents and a student database that is riddled with 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.
During his remarks, Cantor promoted another idea that has been a favorite of Republicans dating to President Ronald Reagan: that federal money sent to high-poverty schools be allowed to follow the student if he or she moves to another school, regardless of whether it’s a private, charter or low-poverty school.
This idea of a “backpack” of federal funding that would follow such a student is part of an education bill that House Republicans passed in July, without any Democratic support and with 12 Republicans voting against it. The Student Success Act would give states and school districts more control over spending federal money and remove federal requirements that states set goals for student achievement.
Critics of the backpack idea, including the American Association of School Administrators, the National School Boards Association and teachers unions, say that Cantor’s plan could move federal funding from high-poverty to low-poverty schools. That would leave the high-poverty schools with the same operational costs but less money.
Obama has threatened to veto the House bill. Democrats on the Senate education committee passed their own version of an education bill last year without the “backpack” amendment. But the full Senate has not voted on the measure, and it is unclear whether it will.