NEWS
- At-risk funding in the District: A school-by-school breakdown
- A Public Charter School Is Trying to Model Itself After a Private School: Is That a Good Thing? [Monument Academy PCS mentioned]
- New parents are fleeing D.C. and some say it’s because of education
At-risk funding in the District: A school-by-school breakdown
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chanderl
February 6, 2015
The D.C. Council approved more than $40 million last year to meet the needs of students who are considered at-risk in D.C. Public Schools.
Some 40 percent of the city’s public school students are considered “at risk,” according to a new category being used in the District. That includes students who are in foster care or homeless, who are receiving welfare benefits or food stamps, or who are performing at least a year behind in high school. The extra funding — $2,079 per eligible student — is supposed to help schools mitigate the effects of poverty that can interfere with a student’s ability to learn.
According to the law, the money is supposed to follow the student. But in the first year, the funds were not strictly allocated according to enrollment in D.C. Public Schools, because of a time crunch in the budget cycle. Instead the extra money was used to support Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s priorities, including improving middle schools, refining literacy instruction in low-performing schools and boosting student satisfaction, efforts that officials have said reached a lot of at-risk students.
A new interactive Web site created by D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute and Code for D.C. gives a snapshot of how much funding each school received. (Code for D.C. is a group of volunteer data scientists who use public information to address civic challenges.) The tables show that some schools with high numbers of at-risk students got relatively little funding, while others with small numbers of at-risk students got more. Mann Elementary in Ward 3, for example, has two students considered at-risk but received $30,000 for a student satisfaction grant.
As the next budget is being developed, Soumya Bhat, education finance and policy analyst for the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, said she is concerned about competing priorities. Henderson has said she plans to focus new funds on high schools next year, and many people want to see extra spending in middle schools continued.
“We know there are a lot of priorities,” Bhat said. “But we definitely think schools with the largest concentrations of at-risk students should see their share.”
This table shows the school-by-school breakdown. To see the full interactive with information for every school, go to http://atriskfunds.ourdcschools.org.
A Public Charter School Is Trying to Model Itself After a Private School: Is That a Good Thing? [Monument Academy PCS mentioned]
The Huffington Post
By Sam Chaltain
February 5, 2015
Yesterday Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) stuck his foot in it when he suggested that not all charter schools are, in the end, public.
"There are some private charter schools, are there not?" Alexander said at a Brookings Institution event about school choice.
In fact, charter schools are publicly funded, privately run entities, although the extent to which they err on the public or private side of the equation has become grist for an increasingly contentious public debate about the future of American public education.
That debate matters greatly. After all, charter schools exist to inject more creativity and autonomy into perhaps our most sacred public trust: our public schools. Yet there's also another side of the debate that is much less contentious and much less talked-about: the extent to which public charter schools can learn from, and then export, some of the best ideas that undergird our nation's most outstanding, innovative private schools.
It was this question that led Marlene Magrino and Emily Bloomfield, the founding principal and executive director, respectively, of Monument Academy, a new, not-yet-opened charter school in Washington, D.C., to spend a few days in the bucolic Pennsylvania countryside late last fall.
Magrino and Bloomfield's school is designed to be a residential boarding school for children who have experienced stress and trauma -- especially young people who are either in foster care or in contact with the child-welfare system. As a startup school, they have no students, no staff, and, until last month, no building. What they do have is a well-thought-out idea about how to provide the requisite supports and services that can help their targeted student population learn and grow. And so they were in Pennsylvania to observe the inner workings of the Milton Hershey School, a private boarding school that works with children with acute financial and/or social needs, a school with more than a century of history, nearly 2,000 students, and an endowment of nearly $6 billion, making it one of the wealthiest schools in the world.
At first blush, such a visit could quickly feel like a fool's errand -- or an inadvertent lesson in discouragement. When you have nothing and you're trying to make something, does it help or hurt to see an example of someone else who has everything?
But Bloomfield and Magrino didn't spend their time traversing Hershey's lush campus and endless resources feeling overwhelmed; they spent it taking notes on what design principles could most easily be borrowed in order to improve their nascent public project.
"I started thinking about this school after getting involved in trying to close the achievement gap," Bloomfield explained. "What I saw was lots of charters that were doing good work, but there were still all these kids who were falling through the cracks. And a lot of those children were either homeless or in the foster care system.
"That led me to wonder: How might we create a public school that could give those kids the sort of round-the-clock treatment and support they needed to become successful? And that question led us here."
Magrino, fresh from a tour of the school's expansive auditorium, agreed. "This hall will probably be the size of our entire school," she said. "But being here is helping me think about how to maximize the spaces that we will have, and how to make do with less in order to provide our kids with as many opportunities as possible.
"This school has a dance studio. Will we have a dance studio? No. But setting up electives like tap dancing aren't expensive. Can we sponsor a band? Probably not. But we can probably afford to establish a choir. We can match the people, and we can match the practices, even if we can't match the money. It's thinking about what's most important and then figuring out how to make that work on our scale and with our resources. So it doesn't make me wish for things we don't have. It makes me think about how we can choose wisely about where we're putting our resources."
Monument will open its doors for the first time in August 2015, with an inaugural class of just 40 students. Its ability to translate the essence of a model like Hershey, and to make it available to increasing numbers of underserved young people, remains to be seen. But its willingness to try is precisely the sort of bet the charter experiment is designed to incentivize people into making.
So let's keep guarding against the proliferation of for-profit entities in the charter space, insisting on financial transparency, and demanding that charters and districts find ways to work collaboratively. And let's start seeing how well some of our most celebrated models of private education can be transported into our most sacredly held public spaces.
In the end, having some public charter schools with the right amount of private in them might actually be a good thing.
New parents are fleeing D.C. and some say it’s because of education
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
February 5, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Parents of young children are more likely to leave Washington, D.C., than other demographic groups, and some blame education.
Middle income-parents with children younger than 4 are more likely than rich or poor parents to move out from the city, a study by the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer found.
Looking at tax data from 2001 to 2012, researchers Ginger Moored and Lori Metcalf found that while the population has increased, the rate of parents leaving stayed the same. The study found 48 percent of parents who had their first child between 2007 and 2011 left the city by the time the child turned 5. In comparison, 40 percent of all other filers left D.C. during that same time.
New parents with incomes between $43,000 and $99,000 were more likely to leave than those who made more or below that amount, the study found.
Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas Fordham Institute, an education think tank, said it’s likely parents are leaving for better school districts.
“When you look at the economics of education today, it makes sense to move to the suburbs and use public schools than stay in the city and use private schools,” he said.
He and his wife moved from Takoma Park, Md., to Bethesda, Md., for the better school district, he said.
Petrilli said while it wasn’t the only reason for the move, it was the most important factor.
Parents moving for a better education isn’t unique to D.C. A national study by the U.S. Department of Education found 27 percent of parents in 2007 moved to specific neighborhood for the school.
Petrilli said the best way to keep middle class parents in the city is to offer them more choice in education.
About 44 percent of students in D.C. attend a charter school. But, as Petrilli noted, many charter and private schools here either serve low-income areas, where public school students often test well below the national average, or are in wealthier neighborhoods. As the city becomes more gentrified, he said, the best thing is for schools to work with parents to create a better quality education for students.
“That is something that is a challenge, but that can be managed well,” he said.
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