NEWS
- ‘Fierce advocate’ for D.C. charter schools to step down [FOCUS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
- D.C. Charter School Board revokes charter for Community Academy [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS, Friendship PCS, and DC Bilingual PCS mentioned]
- DC Charter Board shutters Community Academy PCS [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS, Friendship PCS, and DC Bilingual PCS mentioned]
- Minority Report: Proposed School for Black and Latino Boys Faces Potential Title IX Challenge
- Map: Third-Grade Reading Proficiency Between 2007 and 2014
- How Gentrification Is Leaving Public Schools Behind [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
‘Fierce advocate’ for D.C. charter schools to step down [FOCUS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
February 19, 2015
Robert Cane, the executive director of an influential pro-charter school advocacy group in the District, has announced he is leaving his job after more than 16 years.
During his tenure at Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), charter school enrollment in the city has grown more than tenfold, from about 3,600 to more than 38,000, representing 44 percent of public school students in the city.
“It’s very hard for me to leave the charter school movement . . . to step out of the role I have had for so long. I’m so committed to what we have done here,” Cane said.
But the 67-year-old former West Coast lawyer said he plans to move to Nevada to be close to his extended family.
Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, called Cane a “fierce advocate” who has been “invaluable to the growth and strength of the charter school movement in D.C.”
Cane switched careers when he moved from San Diego to Virginia with his family in 1990. He went to the Curry School of Education, then worked as an assistant principal or principal in three traditional public schools.
“I concluded that real school reform for poor kids was not going to happen in public school systems” he said. He took interest in the young charter school movement in the District. In 1998, two years after the School Reform Act made way for the creation of charter schools, he became the first executive director of FOCUS, a fledgling organization with one other staff member.
Cane recalled that many of the early battles for charter schools, like the current ones, were about funding.
“We think we have it bad now . . . but back then it was ridiculous,” he said. He recalled that charter schools often needed short-term loans because the city’s payments were low, and they were at risk of closing. (FOCUS now is supporting a lawsuit waged by dozens of charter schools that is seeking to equalize public funding dollar-for-dollar with traditional charter schools.)
The organization offered training to new and aspiring charter leaders. Mary Procter, the founding chief of staff at Friendship Public Charter School, said she “lived” at the FOCUS office because it offered workshops about real estate and special education or finance.
With Cane at the head, FOCUS has also played a prominent advocacy role.
Cane can usually be counted on to oppose any policies that could infringe on the independence of charter schools, which are publicly funded but given greater autonomy by the law.
He recently spoke out against a bill sponsored by D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), the new Education Committee chairman, that would ban suspensions and expulsions for pre-school students, except in extreme circumstances.
“He’s a little mellower now in his manner, but his belief is still strong that charter schools are really important and their autonomy is really important,” said Procter, who is now a member of the FOCUS board of directors. “He fights back.”
Cane spoke before the D.C. Council’s Education Committee at an oversight hearing on Wednesday, describing some of the charter movement’s successes.
In an interview, he said Grosso is the fourth or fifth new education chair that he has worked with. “There is a tendency, regardless of who is the chair, to want to come in and pass laws and increase regulation,” he said. “We are keeping watch.”
The FOCUS board of directors is launching a search this week to find a new executive director. Cane said he will stay until they find someone, and he plans to remain as an adviser at least through 2015. “I am not disappearing,” he said.
D.C. Charter School Board revokes charter for Community Academy [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS, Friendship PCS, and DC Bilingual PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
February 19, 2015
The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted unanimously Thursday morning to revoke the charter of Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School, citing a pattern of fiscal mismanagement and a breach of fiduciary duties, a move that affects 1,600 D.C. students.
Scott Pearson, the board’s executive director, said in a statement that there was “substantial evidence” that the school had engaged in a pattern of fiscal mismanagement. “When that happens, the School Reform Act is clear that PCSB must revoke a school’s charter.”
Community Academy founder Kent Amos has been accused in a lawsuit of diverting millions of dollars from the school to a management company for his own financial benefit. In October, a Superior Court judge ordered that payments to the management company stop.
A. Scott Bolden, an attorney for the school, said that the board’s decision was “irrational, unreasonable and punitive” and that the board should not have acted on the basis of allegations in a pending lawsuit. Bolden has maintained that the school’s contracts with the management company are legal and that Amos was fairly compensated for his work. He said Amos can continue working for the school until the end of the school year.
Community Academy is one of the city’s oldest and largest charters, operating three schools and an online academy that serve 1,600 students. The schools will be allowed to operate through June 30, and D.C. officials said they have a transition plan for those students for next school year.
Many families had lobbied city officials to find a way to keep the schools open.
“While the vote will undoubtedly cause angst for the 1,600 CAPCS students and their families, the District of Columbia is ready to make sure that the needs of the students are met,” Jennifer C. Niles, deputy mayor for education, wrote to the school community.
The revocation of Community Academy’s charter will cause changes for its three campuses next school year, when different operators take over, but there should be seats for the charter’s students.
The Burdick campus — known as Amos 1 — at 1300 Allison St. NW will be operated next year by D.C. Public Schools and can serve all 590 students.
The Armstrong campus — known as Amos 5 — at 1400 First St. NW will be operated by Friendship Public Charter Schools and can serve all 523 current students. Friendship also will operate the online academy, with 123 students enrolled.
The Keene campus — known as Amos 2 — at 33 Riggs Rd. NE will be used by D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School. The charter school plans to bring in as many as 350 students from its Columbia Heights location, where its lease is expiring. The school can add as many as 90 students currently at Amos 2, and students at that school also are guaranteed spots at the new Friendship campus.
In her letter, Niles told families that she will work “diligently” to support them during the transition. “Your child’s education remains my number one priority.”
Enrollment specialists will help each family make a decision, but the plan allows for most to stay in the same schools, with different operators, if they choose. The new operators can decide whether they will rehire employees.
Two Community Academy schools occupy city-owned property, so the deputy mayor for education has authority over how they will be used. The agreement with D.C. Bilingual is for one year; any longer-term lease to a charter operator will go through a formal process that can take upwards of five months, Niles said.
Community Academy purchased the Armstrong campus through a bond, and Friendship has agreed to take on that debt.
Bolden said Community Academy had offered to relinquish its charter and transfer all of its assets to Friendship in lieu of revocation, but the board turned down the deal. He called the final arrangement a “land grab.”
Dedan Bruner, whose daughter is in preschool at Amos 2, said he is frustrated by the complex outcome and is concerned for his daughter’s teachers.
“My daughter being in that building was not what I love about the school. It’s the teachers,” Bruner said. “But now they are being told that, ‘Hey, good news is the kids will stay, but you will probably go.’ ”
DC Charter Board shutters Community Academy PCS [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS, Friendship PCS, and DC Bilingual PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
February 20, 2015
On Thursday morning, in a twelve and a half minute meeting, the DC Public Charter School Board voted unanimously to accept the staff's recommendation that the charter belonging to the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School be revoked for financial mismanagement. The school will close on June 30, 2015. This was an extremely sad day in the history of our local movement.
However, on the positive side it appears that much work had been done behind the scenes to secure a smooth transition for the 1,600 children now enrolled in CAPCS. As predicted here Friendship PCS will assume a significant part of the study body including 523 pupils at the Armstrong Campus and 123 kids form the Nicholson Campus/Online Academy. Also, as I suggested, DCPS is involved taking over 590 children at the Burdick Campus. One aspect that was not anticipated is that DC Bilingual is assuming 90 students from the Keene Campus and will relocate to this location with its 350 kids. Finally, students attending Keene are also eligible to enroll in Friendship PCS with a guaranteed seat. As I said there was obviously a lot of effort exerted by the PCSB, DCPS, and Jennie Niles, the new Deputy Mayor of Education, who announced the arrangements within minutes of the PCSB vote.
In a statement Donald Hense, the founder and chairman of Friendship PCS stated:
"Friendship Public Charter School welcomes the opportunity to serve the students at Community Academy Public Charter School's Amos 5 campus and to minimize the upheaval for families who are attending CAPCS schools by assuming the operations for these campuses. In addition to the opportunity for families to enroll their students under Friendship's management at these campuses, families with students at the CAPCS Keene campus may choose Friendship's Woodridge campus via the common lottery, which is online at myschooldc.org should they wish to secure a place."
In conclusion, it looks like with the closing of Community Academy PCS we have a perfect example of the public school collaboration so many people have been longing to see.
Minority Report: Proposed School for Black and Latino Boys Faces Potential Title IX Challenge
Washington City Paper
By Will Sommer
February 18, 2015
There’s no controversy over whether the District’s black and Latino boys need help. They score worse on standardized tests than their white counterparts. They’re less likely to attend school, and even when they do, they take longer to graduate.
Just how the District government should help them, though, has created a lot of controversy. Last month, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, backed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, announced a $20 million plan to help minority boys. A currently undisclosed amount of money from the “Empowering Males of Color” initiative will go to starting an all-boys school in Ward 7 or 8.
Who could object to that, right? As it turns out, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh. Three weeks after Henderson’s announcement, Cheh’s office published a letter she sent to Attorney General Karl Racine about Henderson’s new program. Her question for Racine: Is this even legal?
The sight of Cheh, who represents many of the District’s wealthiest (and whitest) residents, questioning a program meant to help some of its poorest isn’t what LL would call a good look. The dispute has opened a gap between Cheh and other councilmembers, and threatens to quash one of the first major initiatives of Bowser’s administration. It’s also one of the first tests for the District’s first elected attorney general.
Councilmembers whose seats aren’t as safe as Cheh’s, be warned: Don’t try this at home. The optics of a white councilmember from Ward 3 going after the Empowering Males of Color program should put to rest any questions about whether Cheh wants to run city-wide.
“‘Someone from Ward 3, where you may not have that many at-risk kids, well, why are you getting in this?’” Cheh says, paraphrasing her critics. “Well, I’m getting involved in this because I’m concerned about all the children that are at-risk, not just boys.”
Cheh thinks spending $20 million on minority young men is a great idea, she says. She just wants money for black and Hispanic girls, too. Without a similar program for females, Cheh suspects, the District could run afoul of Title IX, a section of federal law that mandates students’ genders can’t affect their educational opportunities.
“I think it’s pretty clear under the law you can’t just have special program and millions of dollars for one gender and not the other,” says Cheh, who teaches constitutional law at the George Washington University Law School.
Henderson declined to comment about Cheh’s letter, while Bowser administration spokeswoman LaToya Foster would only tell LL via email that they’re looking forward to Racine’s review.
That means the most heated reactions Cheh’s letter has provoked so far have come from At-Large Councilmember David Grosso and Ward 5’s Kenyan McDuffie. Three days after Cheh’s letter, McDuffie and Grosso, who chairs the Council’s education committee, published press releases supporting Henderson’s school plan.
McDuffie, who pushed Council legislation to give girls more athletic opportunities under Title IX, obliquely criticizes Cheh for not taking her questions directly to Henderson.
“If there’s anybody out there who has questions about a DCPS program, I think the first line of course would be to ask the chancellor and the representatives of DCPS,” McDuffie tells LL.
Cheh counters that McDuffie, who has a law degree of his own, hasn’t offered up legal arguments in favor of the program. In his letter to Racine supporting the program, McDuffie wrote that there are “reasonable disagreements” about part of the initiative.
“I asked Kenyan, because he’s a lawyer, ‘Did you offer a legal opinion to the attorney general?” Cheh says. “And he said, ‘No, I just offered a statement of support.”
(Indeed, McDuffie tells LL he’ll leave the actual legality of the initiative to Racine).
Another complaint about Cheh’s letter: that the public knows about it at all. Councilmembers who want a legal opinion from Racine can do it privately, raising questions about why Cheh opted to announce hers in a press release.
(For example, the identity of the people who asked for Racine’s opinion on a recent marijuana regulation hearing, which sent councilmembers scrambling to change the meeting into an officially “informal” discussion, has become one of the Wilson Building’s most amusing subplots. Racine’s office says staffers for three different councilmembers asked for the opinion, while Council Chairman Phil Mendelson isn’t so sure that’s accurate).
Cheh, who describes herself as “a little surprised” by the backlash to her letter, said she publicized it to increase the chances of getting funding for similar programs for girls.
“Why not have the attorney general decide whether this is legal or not?” Cheh says. “Do we just kind of bury our heads in the sand and not possibly have the opportunity to help at-risk girls?”
Publicizing her request for an opinion may work out for Cheh, but it puts Racine in the unenviable spot of choosing between shooting down a popular program or potentially helping the District violate Title IX.
Despite being the District’s first elected attorney general—and running a media operation fit for for a politician, complete with a press conference photo-op before he reported for jury duty last month—Racine hasn’t shown interest in currying favor with his opinions so far. (Robert Marus, a spokesman for Racine, declined to disclose Racine’s position on the minority youth program or say when the opinion will be ready.) His marijuana opinion irked politically active pot users and statehood types, while he stopped representing Bowser after she considered breaking with him and supporting a popular budget autonomy referendum.
Considering Racine’s track record, Cheh’s letter fretting over Henderson’s initiative could either crush a potentially worthy program or expand its reach by requiring the same spending on girls. If it delays the new school, though, Professor LL has a lesson plan for the students in the meantime: Head down to the Wilson Building. They won’t learn about reading or responsibility, but they’ll get a lesson in how the sausage gets made.
Map: Third-Grade Reading Proficiency Between 2007 and 2014
Washington City Paper
By Sarah Anne Hughes
February 19, 2015
This year, D.C. public and charter school students will take an assessment exam aligned with Common Core Standards for the first time. Gone is the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System, or DC CAS, used since 2006 to measure how students were performing in math and reading and later in science and composition.
While the tests were administered to children in the second to tenth grades, local education nonprofit DC Action for Children stresses the importance of scores for third-grade students. “Reading and math proficiency by the end of third grade can be a make-or-break benchmark in a child’s educational development,” the nonprofit said in a report. “If children do not achieve proficiency by the end of third grade, they are significantly less likely to graduate from high school.”
With that in mind, DC KIDS COUNT, a data project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation managed by DC Action for Children, recently mapped the District neighborhood clusters where third-grade students made the largest gains in reading between 2007 and 2014 and the areas that saw the largest decline. Turner Elementary School—a public school in the Douglas-Shipley Terrace cluster that saw a drop in reading proficiency—is one of several elementary schools where DCPS now employs an assistant principal of literacy and a reading specialist. Hours at Malcolm X Elementary School, located in the same low-performing cluster, and C.W. Harris in Marshall Heights, an area that saw a moderate decline, have been extended to provide additional instruction time in math and reading. The D.C. Public Charter School Board, meanwhile, plans to partner with the D.C. Public Library for a lending library pilot project aimed at improving student reading levels.
Visit link to see map.
How Gentrification Is Leaving Public Schools Behind [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
US News and World Report
By Joshua Rosenblat and Tanner Howard
February 20, 2015
WASHINGTON – Ellington Turner and his mother, Marlece, began to cry.
The seventh-grader had just gotten word that his school, MacFarland Middle School in Washington, D.C.’s fast-gentrifying Petworth neighborhood, would be closed following the 2012-2013 school year.
That year, MacFarland, the only public middle school in Petworth, was one of 15 Washington public schools scheduled to be closed.
For the Turners, and for some of their fellow Petworth residents, the neighborhood school had been a comfort, even though the students’ test scores often lagged behind D.C. averages.
“We didn’t have a voice in the closings of the schools. [The city] said we had a voice, but I think in the long run they knew a year in advance they were closing the schools, and we were blindsided,” Marlece said while recounting her experiences in 2012 on a radio show last May.
Since 2008, about 40 public schools in the District of Columbia have closed or have been targeted for shutdowns, in many cases in favor of charter schools. The chief reason, according to the District, has been low enrollment.
But coinciding with closings, the city’s population has been changing.
Washington, D.C., had been the first American city to have a majority black population. That majority held for more than 50 years before the city’s black population fell below 50 percent in 2011.
Over the past 20 years or so, the nation’s capital, similar to many American cities, experienced the urban phenomenon of gentrification: the movement of largely middle-class, often white Americans back into cities, often choosing areas with low living costs, typically populated with minority residents.
Petworth is one such neighborhood undergoing these changes. Locally owned coffee shops and freshly paved bike lanes dot the landscape, which has seen the percentage of its once heavily black population plummet over the past decade.
One of the least understood impacts of gentrification is its role in a neighborhood’s education system. While proponents of gentrification cite a range of positive impacts, including decreased crime rates and increased property values, the impacts on traditional neighborhood schools are murkier.
“We believe [the school closings] are all part of the bigger picture of what’s happening here in the city and among cities around the country that have high populations of people of color where neighborhoods are rapidly gentrifying,” said Daniel del Pielago, the education organizer for a group called Empower DC that specializes in rallying residents around community causes. “To us, what we’re seeing is that a lot of these schools that are being closed are in areas where gentrification is happening.”
In gentrifying Washington neighborhoods, for example, even successful public schools find it difficult to draw in the wealthier, typically whiter gentrified population. In Petworth, Barnard Elementary, listed as a “rising” school by Elementary and Secondary Education Act classifications, is only 3 percent white. Similarly, the neighborhood’s Powell Elementary, another good school, is just 2 percent white.
Neither neighborhood school, though, is indicative of Petworth’s population at large. Home to a growing number of young middle-class families, neither school is attracting many of the white students living nearby.
Instead, E.L. Haynes, a Petworth charter school that serves students of basically the same age as the other elementary schools, boasts more racially and economically diverse students.
The charter school movement, which began in the 1990s, is an educational reform effort that uses public money to fund privately run schools. In recent years, charter schools have grown in major cities such as New Orleans, Chicago and the District, as alternatives to their struggling traditional schools. Students often need to qualify to attend a charter school though lotteries – used in Washington – entrance exams or other requirements.
Schools with higher percentages of low-income students face a range of challenges that wealthier schools don’t. Schools with high percentages of students in poverty are likely to have less experienced teachers and higher staff turnover. And before teaching can even begin, those teachers must also cope with a range of issues relating to their students’ families’ low income, including lack of adequate clothing, food or housing.
Yet with many urban neighborhoods growing wealthier and more diverse, neighborhood public schools should expect to benefit. So why aren’t they?
In cities like Washington, with strong school choice opportunities, it’s often middle- and higher-income students that are most likely to take advantage of resources like selective enrollment schools, according to University of Chicago professor Micere Keels. That leaves many low-income students in socioeconomically segregated schools, without a critical mass of students needed to fund important capital investments such as school repairs.
De facto school segregation isn’t just concentrated in gentrifying neighborhoods. According to the National Coalition on School Diversity, white students comprise just over half of the nation’s public school students. But the average white student attends a school that is approximately three-quarters white.
Republican-sponsored legislation seeking to replace the 2001 No Child Left Behind law could leave struggling, low-income public schools with fewer resources. The proposed changes would allow Title I funding to “follow” poor students where they go to school, as opposed to the current system, which designates Title I funding for schools with greater than 40 percent low-income students.
The result, according to Democrats, would be a devastating loss of resources for public school districts with concentrated poverty. The Obama administration estimates that approximately 33,600 students in 112 school districts nationwide would lose 50 percent of their Title I funding under the GOP bill.
Research shows that students and teachers benefit from socioeconomic and racial diversity in education. All students are more likely to think critically about diversity issues, low-income students benefit from increased resources brought by wealthier families, and teachers can focus less on issues of student poverty and more time on teaching.
“In truly diverse schools, there’s not one racial culture that predominates the school culture,” said Susan Eaton, a Harvard professor who specializes in school equity. “It’s no longer black kids going to a white school, or vice versa, but an inclusive, diverse school-wide identity.”
Professor Keels, in a phone interview, said that neighborhood public schools must promote themselves better in order to draw in middle-class families that might otherwise choose to send their kids elsewhere. In the past, other strategies to desegregate urban schools such as Supreme Court-ordered busing in the 1970s, were met with strong opposition from white middle-class residents.
The idealistic view of sending your child to a neighborhood school as a civic duty has been lost, Keels said. Wealthier parents see school choice as their top priority, often resulting in students attending schools in different neighborhoods even with a successful traditional public school in their area.
“If kids grow up in their neighborhood school together, they have a much deeper appreciation for their neighborhood’s socioeconomic differences,” she said. “Treating neighborhood schools as a public good builds cohesion and benefits the community as a whole.”
After experiencing the loss of the “public good,” Marlece Turner has joined del Pielago and Empower DC, along with other parents affected by the school closures, in bringing a lawsuit against the city, claiming the school closings were a form of racial and socioeconomic discrimination.
The claims, del Pielago said, are representative of the issues facing urban school districts nationwide. In a battle over urban educational influence, he said, communities negatively impacted by gentrification need to “fight ... displacement and disenfranchisement.”
“This is not about my son,” Turner said. “This is about all the kids in the city.”
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