NEWS
- Getting the balance right
- Not the right balance between charters and traditional schools [FOCUS, DC Prep PCS, KIPP DC PCS, Achievement Prep PCS, Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, and Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Gov. Hogan’s charter bill is in trouble; Md. lawmakers striking key provisions
- Schools Wait to See What Becomes of No Child Left Behind Law
Getting the balance right
The Washington Post
By Scott Pearson and John "Skip" McKoy
March 20, 2015
Scott Pearson is the executive director and John “Skip” McKoy is the board chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
How many public charter schools should the District have? It’s a question that we hear often, in a city with one of the nation’s highest percentage of students attending public charter schools. Today, 44 percent of the city’s public school students attend one of the District’s 112 public charter schools.
Of all the nation’s school districts, only in New Orleans and Detroit do charter schools serve higher percentages. New Orleans turned nearly all of its public schools into charter schools. Would such a future be right for the District?
It may surprise some to hear this from leaders of the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB), but we don’t think so. We believe that the balance we have, with a thriving public charter sector and strong traditional schools, is about right.
Having a choice in the District has served students well. Twenty years ago, the city’s public schools were at rock bottom. Quality and outcomes had plummeted, truancy was epidemic, patronage took precedence over merit in school hiring and parents sought refuge in private schools or in the suburbs. By the time public charter schools were authorized in the School Reform Act of 1995, fewer than 80,000 students were in District public schools, down from 150,000 in the mid-1960s.
The introduction of public charter schools sparked an educational renaissance. Charters offered options that were intensely focused on quality and student achievement — a refreshing change for parents who had become accustomed to hearing excuses for failure.
As charters grew in popularity, D.C. Public Schools responded. With strong mayoral leadership and a passionate commitment to reform from D.C. Schools chancellors Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson, DCPS started emphasizing accountability. It gave parents more and better information about schools. It promoted teachers on the basis of classroom performance rather than seniority. Additional funding for facilities improvements helped to round out this new commitment to educational excellence.
The result: Student test scores in reading and math across both public and public charter schools have been rising, as are graduation rates. Indeed, by almost any measure, D.C. students are much better served than they were 20 years ago. And parents are taking notice. Enrollment across both sectors began growing three years ago. For the first time since the 1960s, total public school enrollment in the District is growing.
DCPS and charters have played an essential role in this turnaround. Charter schools offer a variety of educational models. College prep, dual-language immersion, science and technology education, legal and civic studies or hands-on, experiential learning are just a few of the choices available in D.C. public charter schools. This creates a mix of schools, no one of which is right for every child, but the whole of which provides many options for parents to find the right fit for their child.
Charter schools’ intense focus on quality, culture and accountability undergirds successful school reform efforts. As the only authorizer of charter schools in the District, PCSB takes seriously its responsibility to ensure that only schools meeting educational and management standards stay open. Poor performers that fail to improve are closed.
Charter schools also offer citywide enrollment, which tends to create more diverse student bodies than traditional neighborhood schools. Charters create communities around learning rather than geography. Both have value, and with two systems of public education, parents get to choose.
Strange as it may sound, choice is what parents would risk giving up if all public schools in the District became charter schools. That’s because charters would be expected to act more like neighborhood DCPS schools. As New Orleans has done, slots would be reserved for children living within a certain radius of a school. Charters’ flexibility in enrollment and relocation would be limited. Closing failing schools would become more difficult. Even if all the evidence suggested that a school wasn’t succeeding, local residents and political leaders may prefer to preserve what they view as an important neighborhood institution.
Ultimately, regulatory pressures would force charter schools to become more homogenous. This would reduce variety and limit choice, a powerful engine for school improvement.
Right now, the District has the best of both worlds: a vibrant charter sector that offers a wide range of learning models from some of the best school leaders and a strong, improving and growing DCPS that has responded to charter competition by revitalizing its commitment to quality. D.C. schools are nowhere close to perfect. But the current model, with two public school systems pushing each other to be better and cooperating whenever possible, is proving to be the right mix for the District’s schoolchildren.
Not the right balance between charters and traditional schools [FOCUS, DC Prep PCS, KIPP DC PCS, Achievement Prep PCS, Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, and Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 23, 2015
In yesterday’s Washington Post my friends Scott Pearson, chairman of the DC Public Charter School Board, and John “Skip” McKoy, a member of the PCSB and until last month its chairman, penned an editorial arguing that the current balance between the number of charters and regular schools in the nation’s capital “is about right.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let’s delve into the numbers. After 20 years of school reform the latest statewide academic proficiency rates in math and reading on the 2014 DC CAS are as follows: 54.4 percent in math and 49.9 percent in reading. This means that after all the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and sweat expended to improve public education in Washington, D.C., half of our students are still not performing at grade level in these subjects.
But these statistics hide some important differences between DCPS and charter schools, eloquently illustrated by an analysis of the results by Steve Taylor of FOCUS:
"The most interesting public charter school news is the widening gap between how well public charters and DCPS students who qualify for free or reduced price school lunch are doing. The gap is now over 15 percentage points in math and almost 13 percentage points in reading. To put this into perspective, if DCPS were able to match DC charters' performance with economically disadvantaged students, about 2,000 additional poor children within the District would be able to read and do math on grade level.
Among African American students, charters now outperform DCPS by almost 17 percentage points in math and 12 percentage points in reading. Again, if DCPS were able to match charter performance, there would be about 2,000 additional African American students able to read and do math on grade level. For special education students the gap widened to almost 10 percentage points in math and over 5 percentage points in reading. Again, if DCPS were able to match charter performance, there would be about 250 additional special education students able to read and do math on grade level."
I guess Mr. Pearson and Mr. McKoy are averting their eyes to the help that additional seats in charter schools could bring today to these populations of students.
Their article also presents a highly misleading conjecture of the influence politics would have if charters expand their market share beyond the current 44 percent of all public school children in our city. The authors’ claim that if charters teach primarily neighborhood kids they would be forced by the government to act as neighborhood schools with admission requirements. This would almost certainly never be the case.
At the end of 2012 a Neighborhood Admissions Task Force formed by Mayor Gray rejected the idea of a required enrollment preference for those living close to a charter. The conclusion was reached because many in this town understand that it is only school choice that has led to the improvements we have seen in public education. For the Mayoral takeover of the regular schools and Michele Rhee did not appear by magic. It took DCPS losing about 30 percent of its population to charters over an astonishing long 11 years before the traditional schools noticed something was not going its way. To reach the 90 percent DC CAS proficiency rates that some charters are achieving with students who qualify for free or reduced lunch we need more DC Preps, KIPPs, Achievement Preps, Thurgood Marshall Academies, and Friendships. To argue anything less is to give up on the fundamental civil rights struggle of our times.
Gov. Hogan’s charter bill is in trouble; Md. lawmakers striking key provisions
The Washington Post
By Ovetta Wiggins
March 22, 2015
Maryland senators are planning to strike key provisions of a bill proposed by Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to increase the number of charter schools in the state, dealing a major blow to the governor’s plan to provide parents with more education options.
Senate leaders said Friday that the measure that could make it to the floor this week will be vastly different from the one Hogan proposed. The governor’s sweeping charter reform plan would have given charter operators the power to hire and fire, to set admissions criteria and to receive more public funding.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) said senators formed a work group to study changes to Hogan’s bill. A similar work group in the House is headed by Del. Anne R. Kaiser (D-Montgomery. The Senate group is considering a measure that would offer charters some flexibility, give them more say in who can attend their schools and clearly define whether teachers at charter schools work for the local school boards or the charter schools.
“It’s progress,” Miller said.
But charter school advocates disagree. They have argued for years that Maryland’s requirements are some of the worst in the nation and have kept charters from opening in the state. They said the changes being considered by the senators will do little to encourage more charters in Maryland.
“I don’t see new schools being able to open,” said Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform, a national charter school advocacy group that is pushing for Hogan’s bill to remain intact. “The ones that have opened have done so with great resistance.”
The major stumbling block, advocates said, is the Senate’s plan to remove a provision that would have freed charter schools from adhering to state labor contracts. The state teachers union strongly opposes the move.
Under Hogan’s bill, charter school operators would have greater autonomy to hire and fire teachers, who under the current rules are employed by local school districts, not by individual charters. Teachers would be exempt from state certification. Charters would have a greater say over who attends their schools, with the option of giving preference to students based on geography or having a low family income. Charters would receive a guaranteed and higher percentage of per-pupil funding at the state, local and federal level. They also would be able to compete with traditional public school districts for school construction funds.
Charters would still have to be approved by local school boards, but the schools would be able to ask the State Board of Education for a “comprehensive waiver” from most laws that govern traditional public schools. The bill would not allow waivers of audit requirements, assessments that gauge student achievement or rules governing the health, safety or civil rights of students or employees.
Sen. Paul G. Pinsky (D-Prince George’s), vice chairman of the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, said the governor’s proposal turns the current law “upside down.” He said he hopes to make “minor” changes to the current law, not the “wholesale reversal” that he said Hogan seeks.
Pinsky expects the bill to allow charters to set aside seats for siblings and for it to clarify language regarding the state’s role in appeals of whether a charter can be established and of decisions made by the local school system. It also will clarify whether teachers with provisional certification can teach in charters, he said.
Tom Neumark, president of the board of trustees at Frederick Classical Charter School, said many advocates are asking “what’s the point of changing the law” if charters will not have greater access to public funding, be able to hire their own employees and have the ability to go to the State Board of Education to authorize opening a school. Such provisions “make the difference between a good law and a bad law,” he said.
Keiffer Mitchell, a special adviser to Hogan, said the Hogan administration and charter advocates have been working with senators to come up with a compromise that will help to expand the number of charters in Maryland.
Mitchell said Pinsky has offered amendments to the bill that look “to take the current law backwards. And that’s not what the governor wants, he wants to see charters expanded.”
Mitchell indicated that there is still hope for significant charter reform in Maryland. He said negotiations have not “begun in earnest” and estimated that a final decision on the bill will be made April 13, the last day of the 90-day legislative session.
Schools Wait to See What Becomes of No Child Left Behind Law
The New York Times
By Motoko Rich and Tamar Lewin
March 20, 2015
CLEVELAND — Ginn Academy, the first and only public high school in Ohio just for boys, was conceived to help at-risk students make it through school — experimenting with small classes, a tough discipline code and life coaches around the clock.
Its graduation rate was close to 88 percent last year, compared with 64 percent for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District as a whole. And it has enjoyed some other victories. There is the junior whose test scores are weak but who regularly volunteers at a food bank. And the senior proudly set to graduate this spring who used to attend school so irregularly that he had to be collected at home each morning by a staff member.
But under No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of the George W. Bush administration, the academy, which opened in 2007, was consistently labeled low performing because it did not make the required “adequate yearly progress” in raising test scores.
Nicholas A. Petty, the principal, said, “I wouldn’t say stop making us be judged by the tests at all, but get a better system that really monitors students on more of an individual basis.”
As Congress debates a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Petty may well see that happen.
The law, which was intended to make sure schools were educating children, particularly the neediest, ushered in an era of high-stakes testing to measure student progress. After more than a decade, the proliferation of tests, along with punishments for schools that failed to improve their scores, has angered parents and teachers. It has also set off protests and boycotts of testing.
Congress needs to find a way to “let 1,000 flowers bloom” and back away from a punitive approach to controlling schools, said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.
A rewrite of the law could collapse in partisan disarray as in past years. But it could also herald a new era of education, keeping some testing but eliminating prescriptive punishments for schools.
At the same time, it could allow some states to lower their academic standards, and others to reduce the amount of federal money flowing to schools that serve the poorest children.
No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan effort that was intended to help schools improve reading and math in the third to eighth grades. The law required that every child in the nation be proficient by 2014 in those subjects, as measured by standardized tests. Cascading punishments — beginning with mandated tutoring and going all the way to school takeover — were imposed on schools that failed to make sufficient progress toward this goal.
As Arne Duncan, the education secretary, put it in a speech this year, the law, formally a reauthorization of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act, “created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed or to reward success.”
As almost all schools began to fall into the failing category — and a partisan logjam kept Congress from reauthorizing the law when it expired eight years ago — the Obama administration began granting states waivers from its requirements.
Over the past three years, schools in all but a few states have been given waivers, allowing them to show success through measures other than test scores and eliminating the 2014 deadline for universal proficiency.
Those waivers, though, came with conditions. Among them were that states adopt academic standards like the Common Core, which defines what students need to know and be able to do between kindergarten and high school graduation, and that they agree to base teacher evaluations in part on test scores.
Parents have been rebelling against new tests based on the Common Core, and many Republicans, as well as a group from the left, see these requirements as a federal power grab in an area traditionally governed by the states. Those lawmakers are determined to keep the requirements out of the reauthorization. Leading Democrats and many civil rights groups, though, worry about giving too much control back to the states.
“The worry is that if you leave it to the states, they will drop the ball, as they did in the past,” said Martin West, who studies the politics of kindergarten through high school education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
No Child Left Behind required the public release of test scores by race, sex, disability and family income. The release of those subgroups’ scores is broadly considered a success, bringing transparency that focused attention on children needing the most assistance, and helping to shrink achievement gaps.
Before No Child Left Behind, 17 states had no accountability systems for their schools, and only two states looked specifically at how well their low-income or minority students were doing. And even after the law went into effect, some states wrote easier exams or lowered their passing scores to inflate the number of students deemed proficient.
Any new legislation will most likely still require annual testing and the public release of test scores of subgroups of children. But a new bill would also probably jettison the system of punishments for schools that fail to improve scores, giving states broad discretion in handling low-performing schools.
Passage of a new law is complicated because of divisions within the parties, but also because the Republican majority in Congress would still need some Democratic support to overcome any possible veto by President Obama.
Last month, a Republican bill that would eliminate the adequate yearly progress requirements and forbid the federal government to push states into adopting the Common Core sailed through the House Education Committee. It was then scheduled for debate.
Mid-debate, though, the vote was pulled when it became clear it would not pass, with a number of conservative Republicans believing it did not go far enough in restraining federal authority over education. The vote has not yet been rescheduled.
Now Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking minority member, are writing a bill that they expect to have ready next month.
Another critical education issue is also playing out in Congress. Under the House bill, schools with the highest concentration of poor students could have received less federal money than under the current law. Mr. Obama has threatened to veto any law that would do that.
Mr. Duncan said the bill could lead to a loss of $3 billion in federal funding over six years for the neediest districts. Republicans disputed that figure because the change in federal funding would be an option, not a requirement, and Mr. Duncan’s figures were based on the administration’s proposed budget, not on actual spending.
The Philadelphia School District — which has cut 5,000 jobs and closed 31 schools in two years and faces an $80 million deficit for the next fiscal year — stood to lose $78 million in federal money under the House bill, according to administration figures.
At the George W. Nebinger School in Philadelphia, which teaches kindergarten through eighth grade, there is plenty of worry about whether the money will continue.
Anh Brown, who became principal of Nebinger two years ago, the same year Pennsylvania got its No Child Left Behind waiver, said her school was on a good trajectory. Scores on the state tests are still middling, but enrollment has risen to 330 students, from 268 in 2013 — Ms. Brown would like 400 — and attendance last year was 95 percent, up from 93 percent two years ago.
One recent morning, the art room was filled with the happy hum of first graders drawing Oaxacan spirit animals: One boy gave his beast red eyes — “demon eyes,” he said, with obvious relish — as the girl next to him drew a neat row of triangles across her creature’s chest.
But Ms. Brown pays for the art teacher’s salary with federal money, and if that money is cut, she will have to drop the position.
“I am concerned because I believe the arts are important,” Ms. Brown said. “They give children more reasons to come to school.”
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