NEWS
- D.C. charter school closed for poor academic performance [Tree of Life PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- CHAVOUS: D.C. Underfunds Its Most At-Risk Students
- For one group of kids from Anacostia, a dream deferred is turning into reality
D.C. charter school closed for poor academic performance [Tree of Life PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
February 25, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Washington’s Tree of Life Public Charter School will close at the end of this school year for poor academic performance, as the D.C. Public Charter School Board voted unanimously not to renew the charter.
This was the 15-year mark of the charter so the board had to vote on whether to renew it for another 15 years.
The school changed its goals last year to include the D.C. Public Charter School Board’s Performance Management Framework — an annual rating that ranks schools into three categories. The rankings take into account attendance rates, re-enrollment and math and reading test scores.
Tree of Life serves 311 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade. It has ranked in the lowest rating for two out of the past four years, falling this year from the second highest to the lowest rating with a score of of 31.1 percent. Its goal was 41 percent.
The charter school did meet some of its academic goals for its prekindergarten through second grade students. However, charter board staffers said they were concerned the school’s early childhood program didn’t have a lasting impact on its students’ academic achievement. Students who attended the program scored lower than the city average in math and reading over three years.
“Particularly in the third grade, their proficiency rates are substantially less than other schools and that achievement gap persists among all the sub groups and among the population in general through the elementary grades,” said Sarah Medway, a charter agreement specialist for the board.
The report also noted the school has a low re-enrollment rate, with 30 to 35 percent of students not returning to the school each year.
John “Skip” McCoy, chairman of the charter board, said it was a difficult decision but if the school was making progress in kindergarten through second grade, it would have been reflected in third-grade test results, which it was not.
“Those results were disappointing to me,” he said.
The school asked the board to consider looking at the campus as two schools and renew its charter for prekindergarten to second grade, but the board declined on Monday.
Stakeholder concerns
Parents, teachers and school administrators lobbied the board to keep the school open at an informal hearing last week.
“The teachers at Tree of Life are helpful,” said Khalil Goode, a student at Tree of Life. “They will help you if you didn’t understand something. They give you the education that you need to succeed in life.”
Christopher Grant, a parent of three girls who attend the school, said he chose the school because he knew his daughters would be safe there.
“I chose this school because this school is not only just a place where they learn, this school is also a sanctuary where they come in and I know that they’re safe,” he said.
Patricia Williams, founder and executive director of Tree of Life, told the board that students in their early childhood development program outshined other students in the city, with 66 percent of kindergarteners scoring at or above the benchmark for reading. In math, 92 percent of kindergarteners scored at or above the highest rating.
“Since 1999, even before Tree of Life opened, we have had the best interests of our students and families at heart,” she said at the hearing. “We just want to continue to fill a critical need in our Ward 5 and surrounding communities by providing a high performing early childhood program and holistic support to families.”
This is the second school the board has closed in the past week. The other, Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School, had its charter revoked for mismanaging taxpayer money. The board has closed 12 schools in the past three years for poor academic performance.
The board votes on whether or not to renew a school’s charter every 15 years. Every five and 10 years, the board will review the school. The board is required by law to revoke the charter of a school if it has reason to believe the school is breaking the law, mismanaging money or not meeting its academic goals.
Tree of Life students will have the option to enroll in another charter through the lottery or attend a traditional public school. The application deadline for the D.C. lottery is March 1.
CHAVOUS: D.C. Underfunds Its Most At-Risk Students
The Washington Informer
Kevin P. Chavous
Februar 23, 2015
As this column is being written, the United States Congress is working in a rare bipartisan manner to reauthorize the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), which was started during the first Clinton administration and has been enthusiastically supported by his successors. The reauthorized CSP will provide necessary and vital financial support to the nation’s burgeoning national charter school movement.
While congressional Democrats and Republicans work to increase funding for these innovative schools, steps away from the Capitol, the federal district court is reviewing a lawsuit filed by D.C.’s public charter schools. At issue in the suit is the underfunding of D.C. charter schools – which educate 45 percent of District of Columbia public school students.
For too long, D.C. public charter schools have not received adequate nor equitable funding as required by law.
Recently, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Center for Education Reform and Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the plaintiffs—D.C.’s. charter school association and two individual charter schools. The stakes are high. District public charter school students are funded by between $2,600 and $1,600 less each year than their peers in the traditional public school system. This means that, over the past eight years alone, some of the most vulnerable children in America have missed out on well over $400 million in funding, a significant sum.
To place these numbers in context, it is important to understand whom D.C.’s public charter schools serve. Some 78 percent of District public charter school students are African-American, a higher share than the traditional public school system. And, more charter students are eligible for federal school lunch subsidies than their counterparts in city-run schools.
Across the Anacostia River, not far from where the congressional bill and lawsuit are playing out, as many as half the adults are functionally illiterate and crime, poverty and unemployment are widespread. But here public charters have made a real difference: charter students outscore their neighbors enrolled in D.C. Public Schools by an average of 24 percentage points on the reading and math tests required annually by the District.
Beyond the snapshot that standardized test scores provide, D.C. public charter schools have been spectacularly successful in giving children from low-income families a real shot at college. The on-time high school graduation rate for D.C. charters is 21 percentage points higher than in the traditional system, enabling many more charter students to be accepted to, and graduate from, college.
The District government does not contest that it underfunds public charter school students. Rather, in its answer to the charter schools’ complaint, it asserts that it has every right to provide more funding to school system kids than to charter school kids. Never mind that D.C.’s charter school law requires equal funding for similarly situated students, regardless of whether they attend public charters or traditional public schools. And, never mind that a 2014 government-sponsored report labeled the underfunding as illegal, and urged that the government change its policy.
Legal arguments aside, the success of public charter schools has meant so much to the District of Columbia. Before the District’s public charter school reform got started, the prospects for children growing up in poverty was dire. About half of public school students dropped out. D.C. became infamous for one of the worst public education systems in the nation. Student safety was not assured, and a government-issued report concluded that the longer children remained in the school system, the worse they performed academically.
Charters changed this. Not only have they brought better schooling to tens of thousands of D.C.’s most disadvantaged children, but also charters prompted important reforms in the government-run school system itself. After decades of falling enrollment, decaying school buildings, and rock-bottom test scores, competition from the burgeoning charter school movement led to a mayoral takeover of the schools, the hiring of a crusading school reformer as chancellor, and repair or replacement of dozens of school buildings. Test scores started to improve, and enrollment is now inching up.
You would think that the D.C. government, which is aware of these facts, would embrace the charter school reform. Instead, the government impedes the charters’ access to school buildings, tries to reduce their freedom of action, and seriously underfunds their students.
The charter schools’ lawsuit seeks no damages for the many years of underfunding, only an injunction against future bad behavior by the government. With a new mayor in office, and a new attorney general, there may be hope that the nation’s capital can finally provide the fair public school funding that the law requires.
Kevin P. Chavous is executive counsel and a founding board member for the American Federation for Children and board member of the Center for Education Reform. A noted attorney, author, and national school reform leader, Chavous is also a former member of the Council of the District of Columbia and a former chairman of D.C.’s Education Committee. Chavous, chair emeritus of the Democrats for Education Reform and a former chair of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, was responsible for enacting numerous education reforms in D.C.
For one group of kids from Anacostia, a dream deferred is turning into reality
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
February 25, 2015
In 1988, a DC philanthropist promised a group of low-income 7th-graders in the Anacostia neighborhood that he would pay for their college educations. What's happened to the kids since then shows that the presence of a caring adult can alter a child's life trajectory.
A thought-provoking new documentary called Southeast 67 will be screened at the DC Independent Film Festival this Friday. It traces the lives of some of the 67 kids "adopted" by Stewart W. Bainum, Sr., as part of the national I Have a Dream program. While it's not a simple success story, the film suggests Bainum's initiative ultimately helped many escape the multigenerational cycle of poverty.
Bainum, a hotel and nursing home magnate who died last year, randomly selected one half of a class at Kramer Jr. High School (now Kramer Middle School) in Anacostia to be his beneficiaries.
He hired two people to mentor and help the kids with their schoolwork through high school, and pledged to pay their college tuition if they graduated by 2000.
By 1994, 72% of the "Dreamers" had graduated from high school. That was significant. The graduation rate for the half of the class not chosen for the program was only 27%.
But the idea behind the program was that students would go on to college right away, and few did. Only six of the 67 earned a BA on time, according to an article in the New York Times, and 36 never used any of the tuition money that was available to them.
Growing up amid a crack epidemic
It's clear that designers of the program vastly underestimated the challenges facing kids in Anacostia at the time. It was the height of the District's crack cocaine epidemic, and violence pervaded the Dreamers' lives.
One of the two adults hired to mentor the Dreamers, Steve Bumbaugh, estimates that only 15 to 20 of the kids were abused at home or had parents who were crack addicts. But, he says in an oral history on the film website, "Every single Dreamer witnessed somebody being murdered. They were living in something I would describe as a low-grade civil war."
Obviously, tutoring alone wasn't going to be enough to ensure the success of kids living in such an environment. But Bumbaugh and his colleague, Phyllis Rumbarger, went way beyond tutoring—and even way beyond providing food, organizing basketball games, and rousing tardy students from bed, all of which they did.
Essentially, they gave many of the Dreamers the encouraging, reliable adult presence that was otherwise lacking in their lives. In some cases, they forced that presence on the kids. And as writer Paul Tough and others have detailed, research has shown that the presence of a caring adult in a child's life can counteract the effects of toxic stress caused by growing up in poverty.
Still, it wasn't enough to get many on the path to college immediately. One Dreamer in the film, Martece Gooden Yates, seemed to have it all together in high school. What no one knew—not even Bumbaugh and Rumbarger—was that her mother had become addicted to crack.
She couldn't go away to college, she says, because she was afraid her mother would OD. She did enroll at the University of the District of Columbia, but she was already pregnant by then and soon dropped out.
Tenille Warren, who I've written about before, was a talented artist and seemed to have a promising future. But she wanted to make money to get away from an abusive mother, so she took a job at Safeway.
And Antwan Green was one of ten Dreamers who went off to the conservative all-white boarding school in Ohio that was Bainum's alma mater. Green had no trouble making straight As there, but quit when an uproar broke out after a white girl invited him to a dance. He ended up dropping out of high school and dealing drugs.
Success can come later in life and extend to the next generation
You might judge these three, now in their late 30s, to be failures. But as the film makes clear, they're anything but. Yates is still married to the father of the child she gave birth to after starting UDC, and she's pursuing a nursing degree at Trinity University.
After Herculean efforts, Warren is now a student at the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
And Antwan Green, after narrowly escaping a long-term prison sentence, has a GED, his own trash-hauling business, and a stable marriage. And it's clear from both the film and his remarks at an invitation-only screening a couple of weeks ago that he's at least as thoughtful and articulate as many college graduates.
So while a college degree is clearly important these days, it shouldn't be the only measure of success. Even if it is, maybe you shouldn't impose a time limit on it. In addition to Yates and Warren, two other Dreamers are currently in college, and a total of nine have graduated, according to the Times article.
More significant, perhaps, is what is happening in the next generation. Nineteen children of Dreamers are in college, three hold BAs, and two are in graduate school. The film shows Antwan Green's college student son hunched over his books. Green predicts he'll get a Ph.D.
In an oral history on the film's website, Bumbaugh provides more texture for these statistics. In the past 10 years, he says, the Dreamers have been getting married, keeping the same phone numbers, staying at the same jobs—in short, building the kinds of stable lives their parents didn't have, and passing the benefits on to their kids.
It's impossible to know how the Dreamers' lives would have unfolded if they hadn't been chosen for the program. But, as Bumbaugh says, "All of these outcomes cannot be coincidental. They're so radically different, unfortunately, from the kids who were not in the program." For many of the Dreamers, he suggests, the program was able to help break a cycle of poverty going back many generations.
No doubt things would have gone even better for them if their environment had been safer and they'd had more access to things like "a goddamn doctor if they got sick," as Bumbaugh says. They needed, he argues, more than "a cheerleader telling them to be the best they can be."
But, as the life trajectories of many of the Dreamers show, cheerleaders—or at least, cheerleaders with the ability and dedication displayed by Bumbaugh and Rumbarger—can make a huge difference. Ideally, parents serve as those cheerleaders. But many parents are too stressed by poverty themselves to perform that role.
The question is: how do we find thousands more people like Bumbaugh and Rumbarger, and provide them with the resources to help the many kids who need them?
__________
FROM FOCUS
 |
Upcoming events
Click Here > |
__________