- Funding inequity for charters compared to DCPS tops $220 million 2008 to 2012 [FOCUS, Friendship, Community Academy, KIPP DC, Cesar Chavez, Carlos Rosario International, Center City, Seed, Hyde Leadership, D.C. Preparatory Academy, and Options PCS mentioned]
- Capitol Hill education consultant helps parents navigate D.C. school choice [KIPP DC and D.C. Prep mentioned]
- Letters to the Editor: From Readers: Feb. 24, 2013: Charter schools are new form of segregation
- Report: Number of D.C. 'dropout factories' soars in last decade
- Dropout data difficult to discern
- Jóvenes latinos ayudan a abuelos en DC [ha mencionado Youth Build]
Funding inequity for charters compared to DCPS tops $220 million 2008 to 2012 [FOCUS, Friendship, Community Academy, KIPP DC, Cesar Chavez, Carlos Rosario International, Center City, Seed, Hyde Leadership, D.C. Preparatory Academy, and Options PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
February 25, 2013
In a brilliant move Friends of Choice in Urban Schools calculated the loss of public dollars charters received compared to the traditional schools for the fiscal years 2008 to 2012 using enrollment audits 2007 to 2011. The figures are based upon the Levy Reportwhich documented the supplemental appropriations, agency reprogramming, and free services DCPS gets but charters do not even though by law all schools are supposed to receive city money exclusively through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula calculated on the number of students served.
Mr. Cane, the FOCUS executive director, points out that the numbers do not include disparities resulting from the practice of funding DCPS for its estimated number of students while revenue for charters comes directly from the actual audited number of pupils If that practice had been taken into account the amount lost would have been significantly higher.
The total loss of city operating cash to charters for the years stated above is a staggering $221,184,423. The top ten losses include the following schools:
Friendship $31,374,960
Community Academy $12,906,673
KIPP $12,899,442
Cesar Chavez $11,458,783
Carlos Rosario International $8,389,630
Center City $7,546,280
Seed $7,043,949
Hyde Leadership $6,491,347
D.C. Preparatory Academy $6,481,793
Options $6,211,556
Many of these institutions serve an extremely high proportion of children who qualify for free or reduced lunch children who start out life with practically insurmountable barriers to academic success. Yet, when the public school funding inequity issue between charters and the traditional schools is brought to the attention of our Mayor and city council the subject is met with silence.
Capitol Hill education consultant helps parents navigate D.C. school choice [KIPP DC and D.C. Prep mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 25, 2013
When Capitol Hill mom E.V. Downey went into business as an education consultant, she thought she’d cater to parents angling for advice on admission to private schools.
Instead, almost all of her clients are clamoring for help getting their children into a good D.C. public school.
It’s a sign of the times in the District, where a thriving charter-school movement and acommitment to public pre-kindergartenhave given rise to more education options — and more parental angst and competition — than ever before.
“It’s just totally overwhelming,” said Margot Hodges, the single mother of a 4-year-old boy, who recently moved to Washington and discovered that she was already behind in the hunt for a school for next fall. She heard about Downey on a neighborhood listserv and signed up for one of her how-it-all-works lectures.
“It was just stunning to find out what was involved,” Hodges said. “I had no idea.”
The District takes pride in offering its residents one of the widest varieties ofschool choice in the country. Only about one-quarter of students attend their assigned neighborhood school; the rest choose out-of-boundary schools, magnets or charters.
Parents say they are grateful for the choice, but choice means choosing. And choosing is work: attending open houses, comparing curricula, trading gossip and trying to divine — from test scores and demographic data and other numbers — which schools might work.
In Washington, choice also means gambling. The most sought-after schools don’t have enough space to meet demand, and winning a seat in one often comes down to winning the lottery. Literally.
One lottery, for admission to out-of-boundary traditional schools, closes Monday night. Then there are separate lotteries for each of the dozens of charter schools that attract more applicants — often thousands more applicants — than they can accommodate.
All that responsibility and all that uncertainty makes for plenty of stress — and, for Downey, plenty of potential customers.
“It’s kind of like a counseling session,” Downey said, kicking off a lecture this month, one of more than a dozen she has done since September. “You can tell me anything. If you cry, it’s okay.”
She was only half-kidding.
Downey appears to be a rare breed, the product of a marriage between the city’s complex school landscape and a D.C. middle class with more money than time to figure it all out. More than 40 percent of the District’s 80,000 students attend charter schools, but students in the traditional system also make deliberate choices, as more than half do not attend their assigned neighborhood school.
Experts said they weren’t aware of similar public-school consultants in other parts of the country.
Jeanne Allen, president of the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, called Downey’s business “a sign of what we might see” in other cities as the school-choice movement continues to accelerate.
Most D.C. families don’t have the wherewithal to pay for school advice, raising questions about whether school choice highlights a divide between parents who have the information they need to navigate the system — and the ability to transport their kids across town to a better school — and parents who don’t.
For full article see link above.
The Washington Examiner
By Charles M. Bagenstose
February 24, 2013
Charter schools are new form of segregation
Re: "Councilman should welcome new charter schools," Local Editorial, Feb. 14
Parents haven't enthusiastically embraced charter schools. Rather, they were pushed into sending their children to charter schools by such tactics as reducing funds and resources to the black public schools and closing them.
The result is the rapidly developing segregated school system with underfunded charter schools for black children and well-funded and highly innovative public schools for white children.
D.C. Councilmember David Catania is correct in trying to stop this vile situation from proceeding.
Charles M. Bagenstose
Upper Marlboro
The Washington Examiner
By Matt Connolly
February 24, 2013
The number of "dropout factory" high schools in the District has shot up in the past decade, defying state trends nationwide, according to a report released Monday.
The "Building a Grad Nation" 2013 report, sponsored by a group of independent education research and advocacy organizations, found that fewer than 61 percent of ninth-grade
students make it to senior year in 13 D.C. high schools, up from only two in 2002.
While the list of individual dropout factory schools for 2011 was not released, independent advocacy group Alliance for Excellent Education keeps data for schools as recent as 2010. That year, D.C. also had 13 dropout factories, five of which were charter schools and eight of which were traditional public schools.
Maryland also saw a bump, with the number of dropout factories climbing from 17in 2002 to 22 in 2011. The results are in stark contrast to 38 states that showed improvement in the measure -- such as Virginia, which saw the number of dropout factories decline from 26 to 19 -- and four that stayed even.
The increase in low-performing schools may be partly due to an increase in schools in general, with more charters starting up in the District and some large Baltimore schools being split up into as many as four smaller ones, report co-author Joanna Fox said.
"There are a lot more high schools than there were," Fox said. "There's been a quite intense period of reform, which causes a little turbulence in the numbers."
Fox added that another underlying culprit could be poor record-keeping by past DC Public Schools officials.
"The numbers they were reporting to National Center for Education Statistics in 2002 may not have been accurate," she said. "The early numbers may be the ones that are more off. That's my initial guess."
Last year, DCPS outlined a five-year plan to increase graduation rates and combat dropouts. The plan calls for an intervention program to identify and help students who seem unlikely to graduate on time, along with summer programs for schools with struggling freshmen. The goal is to have the District-wide graduation rate reach 75 percent by 2017, up from 59 percent in 2011.
"DCPS is proactively working to identify and intervene with struggling students before they drop out, and reaching out to re-engage those students who have left school," DC Public Schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said in an email.
In Prince George's County, home to 12 of Maryland's 32 dropout factory schools in 2010, officials are focusing on attendance and classroom engagement.
"We are really looking closely at the lack of engagement in schools by many of our youth that are impacted by habitual absences," said Daryl V. Williams, Prince George's chief of student services. "We're looking at new courses that are interesting to students, that are rigorous and are aligned to real jobs that are out in our communities."
Those techniques can be successful if implemented properly, according to Education Sector senior fellow Peter Cookson Jr. There are less obvious factors, though, that can be harder to change, he said.
"My experience in visiting schools is that schools vary a great deal on the academic climate, the importance the principal and the teachers put on academic achievement," Cookson said. "It's not just a soft sort of feeling. It's measurable."
Mary Maushard, a spokeswoman for Johns Hopkins University's Center for Social Organization of Schools, said adult involvement is also key.
"A lot of these students feel that they're anonymous," she said. "If a student can connect with one adult in the high school, whether it's the coach or the music teacher or the cafeteria lady, sometimes it is enough to get kids to say it's worth going to school."
The Washington Examiner
By Matt Connolly
February 24, 2013
While school officials, politicians and researchers often clash over the correct policy to reduce dropout rates, the right way to measure those figures can be
just as controversial.
"Looking at dropout rates is a very tricky thing to do," said Jane Hannaway, a vice president at the American Institutes
for Research. "If a student moved from, say, D.C. to Prince George's County, they could easily be counted as a dropout."
Relocation is especially prevalent among low-income students, who are also often the most at risk of dropping out.
"Kids move around," said Education Sector senior fellow Peter Cookson Jr. "They go from school to school. Especially kids in poverty."
Some organizations use "promoting power" -- the percentage of freshman who make it to senior year -- which was developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Even those numbers, however, can be affected by anomalies like a large influx of students when a nearby school closes.
"We like to think of 'promoting power' as more of a check-engine light," said Jason Amos, a spokesman for the Alliance for Excellent Education. "There's a sign that there's something wrong with the school." Daryl V. Williams, chief of student services for Prince George's County Public Schools, said uncertainty over student departures and other small calculations can build up to a larger effect on the way districts and schools are perceived.
"We use the state's definition for dropouts: any student who leaves school for any reason except death before graduation, even if it's not known if a student is enrolled at another school or program," Williams said.
Jóvenes latinos ayudan a abuelos en DC [ha mencionado Youth Build]
El Tiempo Latino
Por Milagros Meléndez-Vela
22 Febrero, 2013
Los abuelos de Vida Senior Centers en Adams Morgan están felices. Las paredes del centro donde pasan la mayor parte de su tiempo están pintadas con colores vivos. Y lo mejor, es que fueron jóvenes latinos los que con brocha en mano transformaron el interior del edificio de tres pisos, ubicado en la Calvert Street, sin costo alguno más que los materiales.
Durante más de dos semanas, cerca de 30 estudiantes de la escuela charter Youth Build, del Latin American Youth Center, rotaron horarios para darle color al centro, que sirve a decenas de abuelos latinos.
Esto, como parte de una iniciativa de colaboración entre la Oficina del Distrito de Columbia para la Vejez, Youth Build y Vida Senior Centers.
El miércoles 20 de febrero, las autoridades de la ciudad lanzaron de manera oficial la iniciativa “Intergenerational Home Improvement” y escogieron a este centro para el anuncio. La vice alcaldesa de Salud y Servicios Humanos, Beatriz “B.B.” Otero felicitó a los jóvenes por su labor.
“Las paredes con un tono amarillo y púrpura reemplazan a las ‘verde hospital’ que antes tenían”, comentó a El Tiempo Latino, la vice presidenta de la junta directiva del centro, Eyda Meredith. “Estamos contentos con el trabajo. Sobre todo porque hubiera sido imposible para nosotros pagar el costo que demanda pintar todo el interior”, añadió.
Mediante esta iniciativa, los beneficiados –en este caso Vida Senior– sólo invierten en los gastos de materiales.
“Ésta es una sociedad muy interesante que la Oficina de DC para la Vejez está impulsando, uniendo a las generaciones”, expresó a El Tiempo Latino, el director de Vida Senior Centers, Luis Ángel Irene, quien por motivos de salud no pudo estar en el lanzamiento del programa.
“La sola presencia de los chicos irrumpiendo en la vida diaria de los abuelos, pintando en el centro, genera un nuevo ambiente”, indicó Irene, vía teléfonica.
Josefina Campos, una coqueta abuela española, así lo asegura. “Me ha encantado ver a los chicos trabajar aquí. Han traído vida al centro, no sólo por pintarlo tan lindo sino porque son jóvenes con energía. Los vamos a extrañar”, expresó Campos.
Los jóvenes también hablaron. “Me siento bien de colaborar en un proyecto que trae alegría a las personas mayores. Hemos estado trabajando en otros lugares también”, señaló Edwin Castillo, de 21 años, quien es uno de los 108 jóvenes que forman parte del programa de construcción de Youth Build.
Youth Build es una de las pocas escuelas alternativas que hay en DC para jóvenes entre 16 y 24 años, que han salido del sistema escolar tradicional. Nació como parte de un programa del Latin American Youth Center, creado en 1995.
Vida Senior Centers es la única organización de su tipo que sirve en exclusivo a los adultos mayores hispanos en el área metropolitana.
Fundada en 1969, cuenta con dos locales, incluido un edificio con 36 unidades de viviendas. “Allí viven 39 personas, la mayoría latinos”, dijo Irene. Pronto pondrán a funcionar un tercer local.
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