NEWS
- D.C. charter board delays vote on revocation for Community Academy [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Friendship PCS takeover of Community Academy is a good idea [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Some D.C. Council members defend Henderson’s minority male initiative
- Nation’s high school graduation rate ticks up for second year in a row
D.C. charter board delays vote on revocation for Community Academy [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
February 12, 2015
The D.C. Public Charter School Board delayed a vote that was scheduled for Thursday morning about whether to revoke the charter for a network of city schools amid allegations that its founder diverted millions of dollars to a private management company for his own financial gain.
The board voted unanimously in December to begin revocation proceedings for Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter Schools, one of the city’s oldest and largest charter schools, for demonstrating a pattern of fiscal mismanagement. Board members said they intended to make a decision in time for students to apply to other schools through the citywide enrollment lottery, which closes in March.
The vote was rescheduled for Feb. 19.
The delay “will give us more time to determine what’s best for the students and their families,” John “Skip” McKoy, chairman of the charter board, said in a statement.
The case is still pending, and lawyers for the school and its founder, Kent Amos, maintain that the contracts with the management company were legal.
A Superior Court judge in October issued a preliminary injunction ordering the charter school to stop payments to the management company. The order cited federal tax returns showing that Amos received approximately $1 million from the company in 2012 and 2013.
Community Academy serves nearly 1,600 students in pre-school through eighth grade on three campuses in Wards 4 and 5 and in a full-time online program.
Many parents have urged the charter board to find a way to keep the schools open under new management.
Council member Vincent B. Orange Sr. (D-At Large) sent a letter to the charter board Wednesday night asking the board to consider a takeover solution in which Friendship Public Charter School Inc. would acquire the assets of Community Academy and assume operations.
The board has approved similar takeovers of charter assets in the past.
Friendship PCS takeover of Community Academy is a good idea [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
February 13, 2015
Yesterday the DC Public Charter School Board delayed a public hearing on the fate of the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School. It has now been rescheduled for Thursday, February 19th at 8:30 a.m. Following a January 27th hearing I called for the CAPCS board to be replaced, Kent Amos and the rest of the members of his former for-profit management employees to lose their positions at the school, and for TenSquare Consulting to be brought in perform a turn around.
However, also Thursday, the Washington Post's Michael Alison Chandler revealed that D.C. Councilman Vincent Orange has sent a letter to the PCSB asking that Friendship PCS be allowed to take over the assets of the troubled charter. At the January meeting a lawyer for Community Academy stated that his client had also suggested that Community Academy's operations be transferred to another entity.
Friendship would be an excellent fit to run CAPCS. Three of its campuses, Woodridge Middle, Camberlain Middle, and Southeast Academy Elementary are all Performance Management Framework Tier 1 schools. Academic results at the charter's six other campuses are rising. 95 percent of the students at Friendship graduate high school on time and 100 percent of its seniors are accepted to more than one college, most with scholarships. Its approximately 6,000 students share the same challenging demographics for instruction that are also present at Community Academy's sites. The founder of Friendship, Donald Hense, is a friend and hero of mine.
A tragically sad ending is coming to the life work of Ken Amos, a man who tried to do so much for those living in poverty in the nation's capital. But one tremendous way to honor the memory of what he wanted to achieve would be to hand over the keys of Community Academy to someone who shares his mission and passion to help the less fortunate among us.
Some D.C. Council members defend Henderson’s minority male initiative
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
February 12, 2015
Days after D.C. Council member Mary Cheh (Ward 3) asked the District’s attorney general to provide an opinion about the legality of Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to dedicate $20 million in extra funds to support minority male students, given questions about gender inequality, some of her colleagues are coming to the plan’s defense.
D.C. Council member David Grosso, chairman of the education committee for the D.C. Council, said in a statement Thursday: “I in no way believe that [D.C. Public Schools] moving ahead with their … initiative means that they will somehow abandon their commitment to ensuring that our young women also succeed.”
And council member Kenyan R.McDuffie (D-Ward 5) sent a followup letter to the attorney general to “applaud” the effort “to explore programming that meets the particular needs of one of our most underserved populations, young men of color.”
Council member Vincent B.Orange Sr. (At Large) said in an interview Thursday afternoon that he also strongly supports the initiative to support minority males.
“I think the movement across the country is to address the issue of boys of color being left behind and being incarcerated because they don’t have these opportunities,” he said.
In January, Henderson, alongside Mayor Muriel Bowser, announced the “Empowering Males of Color” initiative. She said the investment, which would be partially funded through private donations, is meant to improve outcomes for black and Latino boys, who make up 43 percent of enrollment and who lag behind other groups on multiple measures of performance.
Grosso said the data for minority male performance offer an “exceedingly persuasive justification for moving ahead with this program.” He noted that jurisdictions have historically targeted additional funds to improve achievement for groups that past discriminatory laws have disadvantaged, including special education students or at-risk students, a new category that the District is using that is supposed to receive extra funding.
A report posted on the D.C. public schools Web site shows multiple measures where minority boys are performing at the bottom, including reading and school discipline and student satisfaction. It also shows minority girls near the bottom in many areas. DC CAS scores show that proficiency rates for Hispanic and black boys are lower than those for other groups — 43 and 32 percent, respectively. But the proficiency rate for black girls is 46 percent. In math, proficiency rates for black boys were at the bottom — 37 percent. Black girls were second from the bottom at 45 percent, a proficiency rate 10 percentage points lower than Hispanic boys.
He found that in one of the few reported cases on the subject, a federal judge in 1991 ruled against a Detroit initiative to establish three boys-only public schools — established, as in the D.C. proposal, to address disparities in educational outcomes. The district judge in that case said he “acknowledges the status of urban males as an ‘endangered species’ ” but found that was “insufficient to override the rights of females to equal opportunities.”
But an all-girls public school that opened in New York City in 1996, the Young Women’s Leadership School, continues to operate after opponents reportedly could not find a boy who wanted to attend the school and thus had standing to sue.
Current Education Department guidance holds that single-sex public schools are permissible, but only if the same opportunities offered in those schools are offered to the other sex: “For example, school districts may not establish a single-sex school for one sex that provides the district’s only performing arts curriculum. Students of the other sex also must have access to a comparable school with that curriculum. It has been our longstanding interpretation, policy, and practice to require that the comparable school must also be single-sex.”
In 2011, school leaders in Madison, Wis., considered opening a college prep school with sex-segregated classes geared toward low-income minority students. While the courts or federal authorities never formally weighed in, the proposal was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and was ultimately abandoned. “The ACLU supports efforts in Madison to reduce racial disparities in education,” the group wrote. “However, coeducational classes are not the cause of the racial achievement gap, and schools and programs that segregate boys and girls are not the answer.
More recently, the ACLU has challenged single-sex programs in the Austin, Tex., public schools.
Nation’s high school graduation rate ticks up for second year in a row
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 12, 2015
The nation’s high school graduation rate ticked up for the second year in a row, according to new federal data released Thursday showing that 81 percent of the Class of 2013 graduated within four years.
That’s an increase of one percentage point since 2012 and two percentage points since 2011, making it the highest rate since states began calculating them in a uniform way in 2010.
“We can take pride as a nation in knowing that we’re seeing promising gains,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement, calling the 2013 graduation rate, the latest for which data is available, a “record-setting milestone.”
Duncan released the data the day after a revised version of the federal No Child Left Behind law passed out of the Republican-led House Education Committee on a party-line vote. The bill would give states far more latitude to decide how to hold schools accountable. The Obama administration argues that it would slow academic progress, especially for vulnerable students.
The Education Department did not release graduation rates broken down by race, gender, income and disability, so it’s not clear whether the nation made progress toward closing persistent gaps in graduation rates between subgroups of students. In general, poor children have been less likely to graduate than more-affluent peers, while black and Latino students have been less likely to graduate than white students.
Department officials said they will release subgroup data in several weeks.
State-by-state data shows that Iowa had the highest graduation rate, at 90 percent, and Oregon had the lowest rate, at 69 percent. In the Washington region, Maryland’s graduation rate was 85 percent, up one percentage point from 2012, and Virginia’s was 84 percent, up from 83 percent in 2012. The District, which is included in the data but, as a city, is difficult to compare against states, had a 62 percent graduate rate, up three points since 2012.
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