NEWS
- Mystery callers try to ensure that DC charters admit special needs students [BASIS DC PCS mentioned]
- White House pushes back against GOP on funds for poor school children
Mystery callers try to ensure that DC charters admit special needs students [BASIS DC PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
February 13, 2015
Nationally, public charter schools serve fewer students with special needs than traditional public schools do, and some charge that charters are screening such students out. But for the past three years, DC's Public Charter School Board has been deploying a "mystery caller" program to prevent that from happening here.
Over the past couple of months, DC parents and guardians have been calling around to charter schools to get information about applying for this fall. But they're not the only ones. Staff members of DC's PCSB, which oversees the District's charter schools, have been calling schools as well.
Equipped with a suggested script and a cell phone, PCSB staff pretend they're calling about a child in their care who has an unspecified learning disability and isn't being well served by the school she's currently attending. They ask what they need to do to apply to the school they're calling and whether they need to submit any information about the child's disability.
The answers to those questions should be: apply through the My School DC website, and don't submit any information relating to the disability or even indicate that the child has one. Nor should school personnel say anything discouraging, such as that the school across the street might be a better fit.
If school staff give inaccurate answers, they get a second call a few weeks later. If they still answer incorrectly, and if the answer seems to result from discrimination rather than ignorance, the PCSB may set in motion a process that could ultimately lead to the school losing its charter.
That hasn't happened yet, according to Rashida Young, the PCSB's Senior Equity and Fidelity Manager. Usually, school staff just need training or coaching to understand what the law requires. And the situation seems to be improving: out of about 100 schools called annually, the number that failed the second round of calls was ten two years ago, eight the next year, and only two last year.
"After doing this for three years," Young said, "I think people are getting the message."
Aside from being effective, the PCSB's "mystery caller" program is inexpensive and easy to implement. It's attracted attention from charter authorizers around the country, and at least one state—Massachusetts—has copied the idea.
DC has an advantage over many other areas because nearly all charter schools now participate in a common application process. That means the PCSB doesn't have to scrutinize each school's application form to make sure they're not asking prohibited questions.
Charters may still discriminate after enrollment
That's not to say DC has solved the problem of ensuring that charters are serving students with special needs. Although schools aren't allowed to ask any questions about disabilities at the application stage, they can ask those questions when it comes time for the student to enroll. And some charge that charters "counsel out" students with disabilities after enrollment.
Federal law requires that all public schools, whether charter or traditional, provide every student with a free appropriate public education. Schools must place the child in the least restrictive environment possible.
If the school can't serve a student well, it needs to arrange for another placement, possibly in a private school where the tuition would be paid by the District rather than by the charter itself.
The PCSB also checks for discrimination after enrollment, for example by monitoring suspensions and seeing whether disabled students are disproportionately represented. But the primary responsibility for enforcing federal law on special education rests with DC's Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
Last school year, 12% of DC's charter students had disabilities, as compared to 14% of students in DCPS. Nationally, the special education population in charter schools is 8 to 10%, versus 13% in traditional public schools.
But it's not hard to find disparities between certain charters and certain DCPS schools. At BASIS DC, part of a charter network known for its academic rigor, only 5.9% of students are classified as having disabilities. At Hart Middle School in Ward 8, which serves roughly the same grades, that figure is 26.7%.
Disparities may not be the result of discrimination
Does that mean schools like BASIS are discriminating? Not necessarily. True, BASIS itself has been the subject of government investigations after parents complained it wasn't providing required special education services, and the PCSB continues to monitor it.
And it's undeniable that charters have strong incentives to limit their numbers of special ed students. Test scores for that subgroup are generally lower, and they count as part of the school's overall performance—even if students have been placed in a private school because the school can't serve them.
On the other hand, it can be tricky to compare numbers of students with special needs across schools, because some schools are more likely than others to identify students as being in that category. Plus, while all schools need to make reasonable accommodations, students with disabilities and their parents may simply prefer not to attend a school that demands a lot in terms of academic rigor or discipline.
And it may be unrealistic to expect every charter school, however small, to deal with every kind of disability, which can include anything from mild dyslexia to serious autism to uncontrolled seizures. Even DCPS, with its economies of scale, has received a low rating from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education for its special education services.
But the law requires that charter schools admit all comers, regardless of disability, and the PCSB has been inventive in coming up with a program to help ensure schools comply. Still, it doesn't make sense to expect all charters to end up serving the same proportion of special needs students, or even to expect parity between the charter sector and DCPS.
What's important is to ensure that children with disabilities get the best education possible, in whatever setting works for them.
White House pushes back against GOP on funds for poor school children
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
February 13, 2015
The Obama administration on Friday said legislation passed this week by Republicans on the House education panel would rob vital federal dollars from the nation’s poorest schools and redirect them to wealthier schools.
“This approach is backward, and our teachers and kids deserve much, much better,” Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, told reporters on a conference call.
The administration is taking aim at a bill passed on Wednesday by Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The bill, called the Student Success Act, garnered no Democratic votes. The full House is expected to vote on it at the end of the month.
Both houses of Congress are attempting to write a new version of No Child Left Behind, the main education law that governs the federal government’s interactions with the nation’s 100,000 public schools. The 2002 law was due for reauthorization in 2007, but earlier attempts to craft a replacement fell apart as Democrats and Republicans argued over the appropriate role of the federal government.
No Child Left Behind, the result of bipartisan deal-making between President George W. Bush and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass), significantly expanded federal authority over local schools. Under the law, for the first time, schools were required to test every student annually in math and reading in grades K-8, and schools had to make “adequate yearly progress” — as measured by student test scores — or face increasingly heavy penalties. Under the law, every student was supposed to be proficient in math and reading by 2014 — a deadline that came and went with most policymakers agreeing it was unrealistic.
The resulting pushback against No Child Left Behind — especially from conservatives who want to shrink the federal footprint — has led many in the GOP-controlled Congress to try to shift power back to the states and curtail federal oversight of public schools.
The House bill would erase most methods the federal government now uses to hold states accountable for educating students. Under the bill, schools would have to measure student academic progress and report it by subgroup — race, family income, whether students are English-language learners or have disabilities — and issue annual report cards.
States would not be required to meet any particular benchmarks for academic achievement. They would have to intervene in high-poverty schools that are not improving by their measures, but the type of intervention and the number of schools would be up to the states, which would not be required to evaluate teachers.
Democrats argue that without federal oversight, states will return to the norm in earlier days, when some states ignored the achievement gap between poor and more affluent children, and neglected the needs of English-language learners and students with disabilities.
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House education panel and lead sponsor of the bill, said he wanted to convert several programs into block grants to allow the states greater flexibility to use federal money in the most efficient way.
The most controversial element of Kline’s bill is a proposal to change the way federal funds are allocated to help educate poor students.
Currently, public schools receive those federal funds according to a formula based on the number of disadvantaged students enrolled. Under the Republican plan, known as “Title 1 portability,” the money would “follow the child,” so that if a poor student transferred from a high-poverty school to a more affluent one, the federal money would follow the student to the new school. The provision would apply only to public schools.
The Obama administration said that proposal would devastate schools that serve the neediest students.
For example, Phoenix public schools have a poverty rate of 61.4 percent. The school system receives $8.5 million in federal Title 1 funds. Under the House committee plan, the school district would receive $3.8 million less, a nearly 45 percent drop in federal funds, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
The administration estimates that under the GOP proposal, 112 school districts serving approximately 33,600 students would lose more than 50 percent of their Title I funding. The government spent more than $14 billion in Title 1 money in the past fiscal year; the president’s proposed budget calls for $1 billion more for the program.
Kline responded that his legislation would offer Title 1 portability as an option to states; it would not be a requirement.
“Over the last six years, the Obama administration has dictated national education policy from the U.S. Department of Education,” Kline said in a statement. “The White House is using scare tactics and budget gimmicks to kill K-12 education reform, because they know a new law will lead to less control in the hands of Washington bureaucrats and more control in the hands of parents and education leaders.”
The Title 1 proposal in the House is similar to one proposed by Senate Republicans led by Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. But unlike the House, the Senate panel is writing a bipartisan education bill, and it is unclear whether the Title I proposal will be in the final version.
Muñoz would not say whether President Obama would veto any bill that contained the change in Title I distribution. She also took issue with the funding levels in the bill endorsed by the House committee, saying that the funding was inadequate and that most school districts have yet to recover to the funding levels that existed before 2012, when sequestration resulted in across-the-board federal budget cuts. A coalition of 115 national education groups complained this week that the Republican plan would harm the ability of schools to improve student achievement.
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