FOCUS DC News Wire 2/6/2014

 

 

A COMPREHENSIVE new study on school funding in the District validates the long-held suspicion that public charter school students have not been funded equitably compared with their peers in the traditional school school system. The study also acknowledges that this is contrary to D.C. law. What remains to be seen is whether anything will now be done to correct the imbalance in how the city’s education dollars are apportioned.

 

The D.C. Education Adequacy Study, released last week, is an in-depth analysis of the city’s Uniform Per Student Funding Formula and was commissioned by Mayor Vincent C. Gray. In addition to examining the equity of funding between charter and system schools, the study examined the costs of providing an education that meets more demanding learning standards and serves the highest-need students. Among the recommendations: more technology to support blended learning, an extended school day and school year for at-risk students and summer bridge programs for entering ninth-graders.

 

The timing of the release of the report — on a Friday at 6 p.m. with no news release — seems to suggest the administration wants to temper expectations. Indeed, a letter that accompanied the report, from Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, cited the “large price tag” — an estimated $180 million a year — that would be needed for full implementation of the report’s recommendations; it also noted that “priorities will have to be phased in over multiple years.”

 

But the study’s finding that D.C. Public Schools “receives significantly more funding than the public charter schools, in total and on a per-student basis” should spur action. Public charter school reform, now in its 18th year, has produced more high-performing schools than the traditional system. Charter school students, who account for 44 percent of public school students, have outperformed their peers in traditional schools. Unfair funding — in particular, disadvantages in getting adequate facilities — has been an impediment to schools replicating their success in a city that is thirsting for more high-performing classrooms.

 

Mr. Gray, to his credit, has worked to remove some of those obstacles, finding homes for some high-quality charters. The budget he will soon propose for next year will present yet another opportunity to make progress in the fair treatment of public charter schools.

 

 

Today, the editors of the Washington Post stand up for charter schools in the nation's capital by highlighting the findings of the Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith's Adequacy Study which found that this system unlawfully receives millions of dollars per year less funding than DCPS, and they call for this to be immediately remedied. The column also points out the problem that charters have in obtaining permanent facilities which they accurately recognize is holding the movement back. However, on this issue the school system which now educates almost 37,000 students, or 44 percent of those attending public schools, receives no resolution.

 

Yes, the report calls for turning over more surplus traditional school buildings over to charters, and the Mayor deserves sincere gratitude for making this a reality. My own Washington Latin Public Charter School moved into the old Rudolph Elementary this term. It also recommends increased co-locations of charters with regular schools. But on the subject on the facility allotment the Deputy Mayor for Education's thoroughly comprehensive review states that more analysis on this subject must be done sometime in the future.

 

The charter school facility allotment has not been increased in years. Mayor Fenty reduced the amount from $3,109 per student when he was in office to $2,800. The city then used Federal three sector funds, a scheme Joseph E. Robert, Jr. devised to pass the Opportunity Scholarship Program that also includes dollars for DCPS and charters, to bring it up to $3,000. In 2012 Mayor Gray committed to maintaining this level relying solely on local revenue. There it has stayed since with no talk of the amount ever going up.

 

But at $3,000 per student it is exceedingly difficult to obtain space in the highly competitive Washington, D.C. commercial real estate market. This is what forces charters into substandard buildings. But not only is it almost impossible to lease adequate room. If a school is fortunate enough to be granted the right to utilize a surplus DCPS facility the allotment is not nearly sufficient to renovate classrooms that have often fallen into disgusting disrepair after years of neglect.

 

Charter schools are public schools just like DCPS, and therefore should be treated equally. The Adequacy Report for the first time for the D.C. government recognizes this in print. Now the implications of this fact should be fully realized by finally solving the charter school facility problem.

 

 

The 2012 scores for the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, were sobering for the United States ("Global Test Shows U.S. Stagnating," Dec. 11, 2013). Compared with their peers in 33 other countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American teens ranked 26th in math, 21st in science, and 17th in reading.

 

But the solution may be more complex than some of the enthusiasts for standardized testing suppose. The 15 years I spent developing a bilingual-immersion program in an underserved urban neighborhood convinced me that immersion students score better on standardized tests than those taught in only one language.

 

The students at our public charter school in Washington are taught to think, speak, read, write, and learn either in French and English or in Spanish and English. Some 69 percent qualify for federal lunch subsidies. Yet our school is classified as high-performing by the city's public charter school board, and students significantly outperform both the city-run and charter school average on the city's standardized math and reading tests.

 

Research finds benefits of foreign-language instruction beyond language proficiency, turning on its head the old prejudice that language skills take up time that otherwise could be used to master core disciplines such as math, reading, and science. A 1994 study in Kansas City, Mo., for example, found that, over time, public school students who were second-language learners had better test scores than their peers who were not. A more recent (2003) statewide study of elementary school students in Louisiana also found this. And research from Yale University in 1983 also suggests that bilingualism fosters the development of verbal and spatial abilities.

 

 

 

DC Councilmembers voiced anxiety about an impending change in school boundaries at a hearing last week. But instead of redrawing boundaries, maybe we should replace them with school choice zones.

 

Three education policy analysts recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for "controlled choice zones" in parts of DC. They suggested that in certain gentrifying areas, students should no longer be assigned to their closest neighborhood school.

 

Instead, families would list their preferences within a certain zone, and an algorithm would match them with one of their preferred schools while simultaneously taking family income into account. The objective would be to ensure that all schools within the zone have a mix of socioeconomic groups.

 

The concept is intriguing, but why limit it to certain neighborhoods? We should consider extending it to include all students enrolling in public schools in the District, in any part of town and any time of year.

 

The San Francisco plan, modified

 

Currently, DC students have a right to enroll in their in-boundary DCPS school at any time. They can also apply to enroll in out-of-boundary DCPS schools or charter schools through a lottery. Under a District-wide controlled choice model, there would be no more school boundaries.

 

San Francisco has a city-wide controlled choice model, with no school boundaries and algorithmic school placement. But the city isn't divided into zones, so conceivably a student could be placed at a school on the other side of town.

 

This system aggravates many San Francisco parents, but the resulting educational diversity has created one of the highest quality urban school systems in the country.

 

That's because research has shown that a balance of socioeconomic status produces the best educational outcomes, both overall and for students at each socioeconomic level.

 

There's already evidence of that in the District. The top elementary school in terms of student growth is not Janney, Mann, or another school populated entirely with students from within a wealthy boundary. It's Hyde, whose students are evenly split between affluent Georgetown families and out-of-boundary lottery applicants.

 

Obviously, the central political hurdle to this system is getting people to give up the right to buy their way into a good school district. But the only way to provide diverse schools is to eliminate the property right to the school closest to your house and place students using an algorithm. There's no way around it.

 

But that doesn't mean we have to adopt the San Francisco system. With controlled choice zones, we could have many of the educational benefits of greater diversity without the anxiety of possibly being placed in a school far from home.

 

Benefits of District-wide controlled choice

 

The authors of the Post op-ed suggest that parents be allowed to choose any DCPS or charter school within a given zone. They limit their proposal to "strategic parts of the city (namely, Capitol Hill, Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Dupont/Logan Circle, and Petworth)."

 

This would promote greater diversity, resulting in school quality and test score growth. And it would create a system that values strong neighborhood schools, regardless of whether they are charter or DCPS.

 

However, expanding controlled choice zones to the entire District would deliver several additional benefits. Imagine if the lottery website allowed you to prioritize all of the elementary schools within 2 miles of your home, middle schools within 2.5 miles of your home, or high schools within 3 miles of your home.

 

Again, these schools would include both DCPS and charter schools. If the radius runs up against the District line, you could extend the radius in the opposite direction to compensate so as to have the same amount of choices. The algorithmic placement of students within these zones would generate the following additional benefits:

 

No parents would have to watch kids from across town attend a nearby high-performing charter school that didn't admit their own kids.

More affluent families moving east would be integrated into existing schools, raising the performance of all students.

If this enrollment system includes mid-year enrollees, students who move to town or are expelled from a school mid-year would be placed using the same algorithm. Charters would thus grapple with the same mid-year enrollees as DCPS.

Students wouldn't be allowed to transfer within their zone during the year, putting a stop to the practice of "counseling out" students with greater educational challenges.

This proposal isn't as far-fetched as it may seem to some. Chancellor Henderson has floated the idea of creating multiple District-wide high schools open to all, in addition to more District-wide magnet schools. And the three leading challengers to Mayor Vincent Gray in the Democratic primary—Councilmembers Muriel Bowser, Tommy Wells, and Jack Evans—have all committed to supporting neighborhood preference in charter school admissions.

Some may object that confining students to schools within one zone would limit choice, making zip code one's education destiny. But the reality is that most students already travel within the distances I'm suggesting.

 

In fact, a DC government task force cited the short commuting distances of charter students as a reason that neighborhood preference in admissions is unnecessary.

 

Furthermore, what if the choice one wants is a diverse school? Under the District's current system, families don't always have that choice. Schools that begin to attract affluent students can quickly "flip" from overwhelmingly low-income to the opposite.

 

Will all zones in DC benefit?

 

Another objection is that some zones in DC wouldn't have nearly enough non-poor students to create the diversity this plans aims for. However, it's precisely in these poorer parts of town—Wards 5, 7, and 8—that the plan would deliver the most support.

 

Because the plan would force charters to share the burden of mid-year enrollees and would stop mid-year "voluntary" transfers, enrollment numbers in DCPS schools in high-poverty areas would stabilize.

 

Also, as more affluent families move into these parts of town—a trend that many consider inevitable—this model ensures they will be integrated into existing schools for the maximum benefit of all students. There will be no more "flipping" of schools.

 

Some affluent families may not move into poor neighborhoods because they don't want to share in the work of supporting community institutions. The result will be a slower migration into these neighborhoods, but one that is more equitable for all and prevents displacement of long-time residents.

 

Finally, the controlled choice model would solve the intractable problem of overcrowding at Wilson High School. DCPS officials seem hesitant to solve the problem by returning Ellington High School in Georgetown to its original function as a neighborhood high school drawing students from Hardy Middle School.

 

That has left parents in Ward 4 whose elementary schools feed into Deal Middle School and Wilson particularly nervous. DCPS may decide to route those students into a less desirable feeder pattern.

 

And if that happens, it could generate a federal civil rights lawsuit, as school officials will have drawn boundaries that reflect racial and socioeconomic fault lines in the District. In fact, it was just such a civil rights lawsuit in San Francisco that led a judge to require the controlled choice model they have today.

 

Let's consider adopting the controlled choice model for DC. It works because it prioritizes both school choice and neighborhood schools. What do you think?

 

 

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and her top deputies are holding a series of earlier-than-usual budget meetings with principals, teachers and parents, the beginning of what Henderson says is an effort to improve what has often been a contentious and frustrating budget-planning process.

 

“We’re trying to do this a little bit differently this year,” Henderson said at the first meeting, held last week at Southeast’s Hart Middle School. “We are asking you, before we make any commitments, to help us understand your concerns and priorities.”

 

Teachers and parents have long complained that the central office makes key spending decisions in isolation, without input from the people who work in schools and understand the on-the-ground implications of those decisions.

 

Complicating matters, each spring schools’ Local School Advisory Teams — or LSATs, groups composed of parents, teachers, school staff and community members — only get a few days to digest and appeal the budget they’re handed.

 

DCPS officials said that while that timing is dictated by factors outside their control, they want to start in earlier on the conversation about what schools need and want.

 

“If we do this right, the numbers will come and we will have already done our planning,” Henderson said at the Hart meeting, where LSATs from nine middle schools gathered to talk about what they wanted to see out of next year’s budget.

 

DCPS officials took notes as each school team discussed what they would do if their budget increased by 10 percent and what they would do if money was no object. Henderson urged them to “dream big” because — given that both the mayor and the chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee are pushing to invest millions more in schools — all signs point to bigger budgets next year.

 

The conversations showed the huge differences in the challenges middle schools face across the city. One school’s big dream was to establish a study-abroad program and get a dedicated bus for field trips, while other schools said they need a summer “bridge” program to orient rising sixth graders and more mental health support to meet the needs of troubled children.

 

A Hart parent said the school has lost more than a dozen positions over the last two years even though enrollment is virtually unchanged, resulting in unwieldy class sizes of more than 30 students and large caseloads for special education teachers.

 

“Dreaming big means give us those positions back,” said one teacher from Hart, which is located in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

 

The state of the city’s long-struggling middle schools has drawn a lot of attention from parents and lawmakers in recent months, and Henderson has said that improving middle schools is one of her top three spending priorities for next year.

 

“I was inspired by what I was hearing,” she said as the Hart meeting drew to a close, “and I am going to fight like the dickens to get as much of it as I can.”

 

Some LSAT members said they were heartened by the meeting and by the chancellor’s approach to budgeting this year, while others quietly questioned how and whether it would have an impact on spending decisions.

 

DCPS officials have posted notes from the Hart session, as well as subsequent sessions with LSATs from elementary schools and K-8 education campuses, online at engageDCPS.org, a Web site they are using to collect feedback on the budget process. The last LSAT meeting is scheduled for Feb. 13.