FOCUS DC News Wire 2/24/2014

 

 

The D.C. Public Charter School Board has adopted a new way to define “alternative schools” and judge their performance, taking an important step toward plugging a hole in the board’s system for identifying which city charter schools are serving students well and which need to either improve or be closed.

 

Under the charter board’s new policy, alternative schools are defined as those with a high proportion of students — at least 60 percent — who are at risk of academic failure, including those who have been incarcerated or expelled from another school, are homeless or in foster care, are pregnant or parenting, are two years older than they should be for their grade level, or are identified as having intensive special-education needs.

 

Three city schools appear to fit that definition: Maya Angelou Evans High, St. Coletta Special Education Public Charter School and Options Public Charter School. They and future alternative schools will work with the board to identify appropriate measurements for their students’ progress and achievement. The goal is to begin piloting the new evaluations in the 2014-15 school year and ultimately to rate alternative schools’ performance with the same performance tiers used to judge other schools.

 

“We do not want to lower the bar of expectations casually for any school, and we want all of these students to achieve as high as possible,” said Darren Woodruff, the board’s vice president, before a unanimous vote in favor of the policy last week.

 

Evaluating such schools has bedeviled charter school authorities across the country because of the tension between acknowledging the difficulty in serving students with such profound challenges and making excuses for schools’ poor performance.

 

“You have to have a way to distinguish between schools that are doing a good job and turning kids’ lives around and those that are just collecting public monies,” said Nelson Smith, a charter expert who headed a national working group tasked with studying how alternative charter schools can and should be judged.

 

Many states haven’t come up with a way to define and fairly evaluate alternative charters, Smith said. He said that puts charter authorizers — entities such as the D.C. charter board that approve new charters and close under-performing ones — in a difficult position.

 

“They may know that an alternative school is actually doing a pretty good job, but they may lack the instruments to measure that with,” Smith said. “Or authorizers know that a particular school is not doing a good job but may not have the evidence collected in any meaningful way to close it down.”

 

In the District, the existing schools likely to be deemed alternative — Maya Angelou, Options and St. Coletta — have been exempt from the rating system applied to other schools.

 

The D.C. charter board evaluates schools annually, assigning each a rating meant to help parents and policymakers understand how they are performing. Schools rated poorly year after year become candidates for closure. But Options and Maya Angelou — though required to live up to the goals in their charter agreements — have not been subject to those ratings, leaving them in a partial accountability limbo.

 

Options faces closure for fiscal mismanagement after a lawsuit alleging that three of the school’s former managers funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to two companies they owned. But there also have been questions about how well the school served its students, highlighting the need for a fair performance accountability system for alternative schools.

 

Charter board officials said the decision to pass an alternative-school accountability policy this month was unrelated to the Options allegations. They began working more than a year ago to develop an alternative-school evaluation system, but they delayed a final decision as they participated in Smith’s national working group on the issue.

 

“I think we were overly aggressive in thinking we could just knock this out,” Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director for the charter board, said in May, emphasizing the complexity of defining “alternative” fairly.

 

Under the D.C. charter board’s new policies, each alternative school will work with the board to come up with a way to measure students’ progress and achievement fairly, and those measures will be made public each year.

 

Those measures likely would include improvement over time on citywide tests, but they might also include achievement on other tests, such as the Scantron Performance Series or the SAT or ACT college entrance exams. They also could include metrics that gauge students’ engagement in school, such as suspension and truancy rates.

 

The framework is broad enough that it could apply not only to high schools, but to schools serving younger students, DeVeaux said in an interview Friday.

 

“We think there will be middle schools and there might even be an elementary school, and we do not want to change our policy in two years,” she said.

 

Heather Wathington, the chief executive of the Maya Angelou network of schools, said she welcomes the flexibility of the new system and the opportunity to be fairly judged.

 

“We’re delighted that we actually get a chance to show what we do,” she said, adding that traditional measures of evaluating schools, such as proficiency rates and four-year graduation rates, can be misleading when students arrive years behind.

 

Members of the charter board said they hope the new policy will encourage others to consider opening alternative schools now that they are assured that they will not be judged by the same measures as other schools with less-challenging populations.

 

“We recognize that we have children with these challenges and characteristics in D.C.,” said Woodruff, the charter board’s vice president. “So we need more, not less, schools that can meet their needs and do a good job.”

 

 

Hardy Middle School has launched an effort to attract more students from within its school boundaries. If the effort is successful, out-of-boundary students who see Hardy as a big improvement over their neighborhood schools may end up out of luck.

 

At Hardy Middle School in upper Georgetown, only 11% of students are in-boundary. Although the area around the school is overwhelmingly white and affluent, those demographics aren't reflected in the Hardy population. Only 7% of students are white, and 56% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

 

At Hardy's 5 feeder elementary schools, in-boundary attendance rates vary, but all are at least 3 times that at Hardy. At John Eaton and Hyde-Addison, the in-boundary rate is about 35%, while at Key, Stoddert, and Mann it's more like 85%.

 

Recently Principal Patricia Pride, in her first year at Hardy, has begun reaching out to parents at feeder schools by holding a series of meetings. And she's a member of a working group that includes PTA representatives from all of Hardy's feeder schools along with representatives from Councilmember Mary Cheh's office and high-level officials at DCPS.

 

The group's goal, according to an email the Mann PTA sent to parents at that school, is to "transform Hardy into a school of academic excellence that can attract families from all feeder schools." The group also seeks to ensure that Pride has "the resources, tools and backing from DCPS she needs to accomplish this goal." (Pride did not respond to requests for comment.)

 

According to the email, the group has focused on the following areas, with the hope of implementing changes beginning this fall:

 

Increasing the options for math courses so that they match those at Deal Middle School in Ward 3. Currently Hardy students who are ready for more advanced math classes need to go to Duke Ellington High School to take them.

Offering two "core language options for all students." Parents at the feeder schools have been asked to complete a survey and list their two top choices from among 6 options, including German, Latin, Italian, and Mandarin.

Strengthening the current School Enrichment Model, a program for gifted and talented students that uses a "themed approach to learning." The model will initially be offered as an afterschool program, but may later be built into the school day.

Hardy also now has a full-time librarian and has been upgrading its formerly out-of-date library.

A troubled history

 

Hardy has had a troubled history in recent years. In 2009 former DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced that she was removing longtime Hardy principal Patrick Pope, who had given the school an arts focus and was well-liked by the largely out-of-bounds and African-American families there. Rhee's remarks at a Georgetown citizens' meeting about "turning" the school led to accusations of racism. Correction: An individual who was at the meeting says that, contrary to media reports, Rhee spoke of "turning" local parents' perceptions of the school rather than the school population itself.

 

The next principal, who simultaneously served as principal of nearby Hyde-Addison, was at Hardy only half-time. That experiment didn't go well and was terminated in the middle of the school year.

 

A third leader, a retired principal from St. Louis, lasted a couple of years before retiring for personal reasons.

 

Pride has experience as a middle school principal at Jefferson and most recently was interim principal at one of Hardy's feeder schools, Stoddert, where she was popular with parents. She seems well positioned to inspire confidence in neighborhood families.

 

At around 400 students, Hardy may never be able to offer the range of academic and extracurricular activities available at Deal, where enrollment is over 1,100. But for families looking for a cozier environment, Hardy could become an attractive option if its academics are strengthened.

 

What happens to out-of-boundary students?

 

It certainly makes sense that families in the neighborhood should have a public middle school option they feel is viable. But if more in-boundary children start attending Hardy, one inevitable consequence is that fewer spaces will be available for kids from other parts of the city.

 

While Hardy's proficiency rates on standardized tests are about 20 percentage points lower than Deal's, they're higher than rates at schools in Wards 7 and 8. Quite a few of the students at Hardy travel from those wards, and no doubt those families will be unhappy about being relegated to lower-performing schools in their own neighborhoods.

 

Some DCPS middle schools have shown improvement recently, most notably Kelly Miller in Ward 7. But even there, the math proficiency rate is 14 points lower than at Hardy, and the reading rate 25 points lower.

 

Parents in other wards are also seeking alternatives, especially now that Deal is overcrowded and no longer accepting in-boundary out-of-boundary students. Last fall parents at Ross Elementary, a Dupont Circle school that has recently seen an influx of high-income families, asked DCPS to change their destination middle school to Hardy rather than Cardozo Education Campus. Henderson denied the request, sparking protests from parents. Henderson said the decision would need to be part of the ongoing boundary review process.

 

Faced with complaints about a lack of appealing middle schools, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson has said that she does not want to come up with piecemeal solutions to the problem. She has put off making changes at particular schools, or groups of schools, in favor of an overarching middle school plan that she is in the process of developing.

 

But obviously, Hardy and its principal have decided not to wait.