NEWS
- We visited 18 schools in 90 days in D.C., and this is what we learned.
- D.C. Public Schools plans to offer international trips to middle schoolers
- California charter schools vulnerable to fraud, report says
- GOP lawmaker: I’m short votes for No Child Left Behind rewrite
We visited 18 schools in 90 days in D.C., and this is what we learned.
Medium.com
By Amy L. Kovac-Ashley
March 23, 2015
Parents all over Washington, D.C., are awaiting the results of the public school and public charter school lottery, which are expected to hit in boxes Friday. The anxiety level is high. For months — and in my case, years — parents have been poring over school data, researching curricula, visiting school buildings to meet with principals, teachers and parents and asking questions of other parents on listservs, on the playground and at community meetings throughout the city. We all want to get our children into the “best” school that is the “right fit.” And it all comes down to putting together a list of 12 schools in ranked order in the hopes that our lottery number and/or other preferences will get our children into a school we actually want to send them to.
As a former education reporter, I found this process both intriguing and maddening. I’ve covered extremely challenged school districts like the one in Paterson, New Jersey, where the state took over the district in 1991 and only in 2014 started to return part of the business of running the schools back to local control. And I have seen some amazing schools and districts in New Jersey, New York, Virginia and Maryland. Much of what I learned as a reporter about covering schools — and by this, I mean really covering the schools themselves, not just the administrators or school board officials — I learned by going into schools and classrooms and actually witnessing learning taking place (or not).
So I applied that experience to our quest for the “right” school for our 3-year-old son, which meant creating a master Google spreadsheet with every school we wanted to visit and all of the dates of the planned open houses and tours. My husband and I visited most of them together but also had to divide and conquer a bit when a work meeting or volunteer obligation prevented us from attending as a couple. All in all, we visited 18 schools from late November to late February. We put together our final list of 12 schools in the last few days before the March 2 deadline.
We focused most of our attention on the preschool programs at each of the public and charter schools we visited, but we also inquired about the older elementary grades as well, since we ultimately would like to go to one school and stick with it. After all of those visits, I figured I’d share what we learned, both about the process and about some of the schools in the nation’s capital.
But before we get started, a few caveats (especially for those out-of-towners — D.C. residents, feel free to skip below): There are two main lottery applications for schools in D.C. — the one for preschool (starting at age 3) up to eighth grade and the one for grades 9 through 12. We entered the lottery to get a spot in the preschool program for 3-year-olds. Not all 3-year-olds or 4-year-olds are guaranteed a spot in a school, even in the school they are zoned to attend. Only in kindergarten is there a secured spot for students in the District. But once a student gets into a school, he or she can stay in that program up through the end of the school even if the school is not one he or she is districted to attend. The charters have open lotteries, and the only preferences they give are to siblings and children of their staff (we found the latter in some but not all the charters we visited). The public schools have the same sibling preference, as well as for students who are “in bounds” for their school.
Now, on to what we learned, in no particular order:
1. There are some amazing schools in the District of Columbia. Really amazing. Yes, it’s an urban district with lots of unevenness and inequality — some painfully obvious — but there are many schools that are thriving and excelling. For example, one of the first schools we walked into was Peabody Elementary School on Capitol Hill, and I was very impressed with what we witnessed. From the outdoor garden to the music class, it felt like a warm, friendly building where children would grow and be challenged.
2. But for all my excitement at places like Peabody, I did wonder aloud to my husband, “Why can’t all of D.C.’s kids go to a school like that?” The inequities of the system are real. Some of them are due to old buildings or school leadership that doesn’t demand and provide excellence or general poverty or parents who aren’t or can’t be more involved in their children’s education or a whole host of other issues all combined. But it still hurts to know that not every child can go to the excellent schools that the District has to offer.
3. PTAs are providing enormous amounts of extra funding and other types of aid to schools throughout the District. Many of the schools we visited have signature fundraisers that they put on every year in the hopes of buying a new kiln, supporting a gardening program, updating the school library, etc., etc. This is both invigorating and frustrating. It’s wonderful to see parents come together to support their children’s education, and I expect one day that we will be heavily involved with our son’s school’s PTA. But what about parents who don’t have extra money or extra time to give? What happens to schools without those extra resources? How can we as a city support ALL schools with resources for the arts as well as for writing, reading, math, social studies and science?
4. Demand for the city’s language immersion schools is high and only growing, as many parents want to see their children gain valuable skills and knowledge about other cultures in this globalizing world. We are keenly interested in these schools and this model of teaching and ended up putting many of these schools near the top of our list, even though the chances of getting in are so thin. I hope District leaders — and others throughout the country — pay close attention to this demand and find ways of trying to meet it.
5. At both charters and publics alike, we often heard the refrain of “Our school is more difficult to get into than _______________,” where the blank was filled in with the name of the Ivy League school du jour. Some of these elementary schools receive hundreds if not thousands of applications, with just a few spots to fill. (We tried our best not to even entertain the idea of going to places like Brent Elementary, where it seems a family must win the actual lottery to afford a house that is in bounds for the school.) The largest number of seats for incoming 3-year-olds that we saw was in the low 60s. Most were in the 20s and low 30s, and that is before the schools take into account the sibling and other preferences. After hearing about the difficult odds, parents in the open house sessions murmured and whispered among themselves. And at the end of the sessions, these same administrators would smile and say, “We invite you to apply for our school and to put us in the No. 1 spot.” While inviting to hear, it also made us wonder whether some schools are trying to goose the numbers of applications, so they can continue to tout their desirability to future parents.
6. School data — or the lack thereof — can make you start to twitch. My husband, a statistician, eagerly dove into the data that he could find about the results of past lotteries to help us figure out where we’d have the best chance of getting in. (We have no sibling or other preferences for 11 of the schools we chose, and we put our zoned school, which is still struggling to find its way, last on the list.) But even with all his expertise, we still couldn’t get a great grasp on the numbers because many of the charters don’t supply that information. And that’s just the information about the lottery. We had to ask basic questions at every school — publics and charters alike — about things like whether there is a full-time school nurse, whether there is a separate library in the building with a dedicated librarian, etc. For the most part, all of the public schools had these things, but many of the charters did not (especially the newer ones). Regardless, we shouldn’t have had to ask for this information. All of these things should be made available publicly in a place where everyone can peruse and compare easily and quickly. No one should have to go into a school building to figure out these basic things.
7. About the charters: Overall, of the charters we visited, we believe they are offering a solid education and a caring environment to students. It’s unfortunate that the public schools don’t have the flexibility to do similar things, but there are great schools of both types. However, I firmly believe that if the charters receive public money they must be just as accountable and transparent to the residents of the District and their children as the public schools. It was dispiriting to hear one charter administrator speak with some level of hubris as if her school answered to no one, least of all the parents of the children in her school. (That only happened at one place we visited, thankfully.) We as parents and citizens in the District should demand more transparency from the city and Congress about the charter schools whose budgets come, at least in part, from our tax dollars.
8. The whole process of visiting schools is heavily weighted in favor of the wealthier residents of the District. My husband and I both took off time from work — which we later made up in various forms of working late or on weekends — to attend the open houses. We are grateful that our jobs allowed us the flexibility to do so. Only some schools offered visits after working hours. For anyone who works a job on a shift or with little flexibility, visiting these schools would not have been an option. The schools need to do a better job of finding other ways to open their doors to potential parents.
9. The entire experience of preparing to make our list of 12 schools became rather emotional at times, even with our intentions of sticking to the data and trying to dispassionately compare schools on a variety of measures. When I mentioned earlier that I had started my research years ago, I wasn’t exaggerating. I went to a public meeting more than three years ago when my son was barely 6 months old about the school system and the lottery, and I’ve been watching ever since how the lottery has changed and the school boundaries have shifted. So I guess it should have been no wonder that I had a lot of pent-up anxiety about the lottery that flared up intermittently — usually right after a school visit when my husband and I were comparing notes — once we were going through it ourselves.
10. Through all of our visits and research, I kept coming up against the whole idea of the “school choice” movement. Yes, we did make choices about which schools to put on our list. Yes, with the charters and publics taken together, the city offers a variety of different models and philosophies. (We really liked the Montessori schools, for example, but they aren’t for everyone.) And yes, there are some truly excellent schools in the District. But ultimately, our ability to get into those schools is mostly due to chance, not choice.
D.C. Public Schools plans to offer international trips to middle schoolers
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 24, 2015
The District’s public school system plans to offer middle-school students the opportunity to travel internationally, officials announced Tuesday, part of an effort to expand opportunities in grades where the city has faced struggles.
The chance to travel, funded through a multimillion-dollar campaign by the D.C. Public Education Fund, will be available starting next year to eighth-grade students who are taking or have completed a foreign language course, said Jessica Rauch, president and executive director of the fund.
International travel is part of a package of expanded middle-school offerings — including career exploration, summer enrichment and home-visiting programs — that Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) highlighted Tuesday during a week-long series of events leading up to her first State of the District speech.
At a news conference at Brookland Middle School, which is scheduled to open in August, Bowser said the middle-school years can change the trajectory of students’ lives. They also are “important years for the trajectory of our city,” she said.
Many District families leave the school system when their children enter fifth or sixth grades, and Bowser made improving middle schools a centerpiece of her campaign. The mayor did not unveil any major policy or funding announcements but said strengthening middle schools will be a priority in the city’s budget.
D.C. Public Schools directed extra funding to middle schools this school year to provide every school with a complement of classes in algebra, foreign language, art, music and physical education, as well as extra opportunities for field trips. Next year, the schools chancellor plans to make a similar infusion into academic programs and extracurricular offerings in comprehensive high schools while maintaining funding for middle schools and working to expand the career and enrichment programs.
Construction is nearing completion at Brookland Middle School, which will focus on arts and world languages. The light-filled facility has multiple performance spaces, an outdoor classroom on the roof of the new gym and space set aside for public art installations.
Opening day was moved back by a year because of construction challenges and early concerns about recruiting enough students.
On Tuesday, Principal Norah Lycknell, who will be transferring from Janney Elementary in Ward 3, said that Brookland’s budget was originally built on a projection of 224 students. But the citywide enrollment lottery yielded a higher number of applicants, so she expects to draw closer to 300 students in the first year. The building’s capacity is 560.
Brookland will draw students from multiple education campuses that serve students in preschool through eighth grade.
Bowser said she grew up a few minutes away from the school and attended Brookland when she was in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. She said she plans to have a similar event soon at a rebuilt MacFarland Middle School in Petworth, another neighborhood where parents are eager to see a stand-alone middle school with a range of programs.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said middle school is the “age of exploration,” and she supports investing in more opportunities for students to explore different careers, college opportunities and cultures.
“Right now, some of our middle-grade students take trips,” she said. “We want all of our middle-grade students to do that.”
California charter schools vulnerable to fraud, report says
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 24, 3015
Journalists, auditors and other investigators have turned up more than $80 million in charter school fraud in California to date, according to a new report by a coalition of left-leaning organizations, which argues that lax oversight of the state’s charter schools is leaving taxpayer dollars vulnerable to abuse.
California has more than 1,100 charter schools that serve more than a half-million students — far more than any other state in the nation. They receive more than $3 billion in public funds each year. But state and local officials don’t have a rigorous enough system to ferret out misuse of those dollars, according to the report, which says that oversight relies too heavily on audits paid for by charter schools and complaints by whistleblowers.
“Despite the tremendous investment of public dollars and the size of its charter school population, California has failed to implement a system that proactively monitors charters for fraud, waste and mismanagement,” says the report.
It was released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group that is allied with teachers’ unions and has published several studies of state-level charter-school fraud; the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Institute, an organization that works on issues including housing and education; and Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization.
The report recounts some of the charter school scandals that have come to light in California. In 2012, for example, state auditors found that the American Indian Model Charter Schools (AIMS) – an Oakland school that had won national recognition for the achievement of its low-income students — had paid its founder, his wife and their various businesses about $3.8 million. The audit was initiated after a whistleblower raised concerns.
More recently, in 2014, state auditors found that a Los Angeles charter school — the Wisdom Academy of Young Scientists Charter Schools (WAYS) — had made payments totaling $2.6 million to the school’s former executive director and her family members and close associates.
“There simply isn’t enough oversight to prevent a huge amount of fraud in the charter sector, and that’s unacceptable,” said Hilary Hammell, a lawyer for Public Advocates. “That’s unacceptable because it’s vulnerable youths and their families who suffer when money that should be spent on kids at the school level instead goes elsewhere.”
The California Charter Schools Association responded with an extensive statement that called into question the motives of the report’s authors, arguing that they had turned up no evidence of a substantial problem. Many of the examples of fraud cited in the report were old and resulted in charter revocation, overhauls in school management or changes to state law, the association said.
“We agree that inappropriate use of public dollars intended for public school students should be prevented,” the statement says. “We believe that the system that California has very carefully and thoughtfully implemented does just that.”
California school system superintendents who suspect fiscal mismanagement at charter schools can request an “extraordinary audit” from a state agency known as the Financial Crisis and Management Assistance Team. But that agency — or some other oversight body — should be auditing all charter schools on a regular basis, according to the report, which argues that absent such a systemic review, misuse of tax dollars is going undetected.
Charter schools are required to submit a number of financial documents to oversight agencies and local school superintendents, including annual audits performed by private auditors. The report’s authors argued that those audits are not designed to catch fraud, while the California Charter Schools Association questioned why charter schools should have to undergo state audits when traditional public school systems do not. “To assume that there is a greater risk at charter schools than school districts, particularly in light of all the real time oversight on financial reports, is simply unfounded,” the association said.
“The report not only provides no evidence of a systemic issue, it does not do justice to the system already in place and that is actually more rigorous for charter schools than for other LEAs in the state (e.g., school districts),” the association said.
Some critics of previous reports about charter-school fraud released by the Center for Popular Democracy have also argued that those reports did not offer equal scrutiny of fraud within traditional public school systems. Others have pointed out that the center counts teachers unions — which have been critical of the charter sector — among its allies and supporters. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is a member of the center’s board.
GOP lawmaker: I’m short votes for No Child Left Behind rewrite
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
March 24, 2015
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the chairman of the House education panel, said Tuesday that he is still a “handful” of votes short to pass his GOP bill to replace No Child Left Behind, the main federal education law.
Kline made those comments in an interview Tuesday morning after briefing the Council of Chief State School Officers, which represents top education officials in every state. Kline has spent the past month trying to drum up support for his legislation amid defections among conservative Republicans, who say the plan does not go far enough to shrink the federal influence on K-12 education.
The bill also faces stiff opposition from Democrats, who say it would divert federal dollars from high poverty schools to more affluent schools and exacerbate unequal educational opportunities.
“No bill is better than a bad bill,” said Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on Kline’s committee, describing his views to the state education leaders on Tuesday.
President Obama, who met with the state education leaders for about an hour at the White House on Monday, has threatened to veto Kline’s bill, known as the Student Success Act.
Kline said he wants the House to pass a bill to keep the momentum going. “I know absolutely that the Student Success Act is not the legislation that will go to the president’s desk,” he said. “It’s going to take compromise. That’s a pejorative word around here, but that’s what you have to do.”
No Child Left Behind, which Congress passed in 2001, was due for reauthorization in 2007. Elements of No Child Left Behind — such as the requirement that every student be proficient in math and reading by 2014 — were unrealistic, yet the law required states to face increasingly harsh penalties if they weren’t met. The Obama administration has issued waivers to free 42 states and the District of Columbia from most aspects of the law, but in exchange they had to agree to adopt policy changes favored by the administration, such as the requirement to tie student test scores to teacher evaluations. That has led critics to accuse the administration of federal overreach.
But Congress has made little progress on replacing No Child Left Behind, frustrating the state education chiefs visiting Washington this week.
“They need to do their job and pass a law,” said Terry Holliday, Kentucky’s commissioner of education, one of several state officials who seemed depressed by the gridlock they found at the Capitol.
Virginia Barry, New Hampshire’s education commissioner, said she was disturbed by what feels like a “lack of vision for the future” in Washington. “The public is looking for all of us to break through that,” she said.
Kline’s bill, which passed the House education committee on a party line vote, was pulled from the House floor in late February when votes seemed uncertain and as members grew consumed by a separate debate over funding for homeland security. Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, urged members to vote against the bill and has not wavered in its opposition.
Kline said Tuesday that he is hoping that GOP leaders return the bill to the floor for a vote after Congress returns from Easter recess in April and that he will have persuaded enough members to get it passed. He said he had to “educate” several lawmakers who did not realize that if they took no action on his bill, No Child Left Behind would remain in effect. Many education officials, governors and lawmakers from both parties agree that No Child Left Behind does not work and unfairly burdens schools with onerous federal requirements.
But there is disagreement about the proper balance of power between federal and state interests.
Meanwhile, the Senate has been working in a bipartisan way on a new education bill, led by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Alexander, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told the state education leaders that he and Murray expect to release their bill for a committee markup the week of April 12.
Alexander urged the state education leaders to lobby their delegations and push for a solution. “It’s time for you to get a result,” he told them. “It’s time to get rid of No Child Left Behind and get rid of waivers in 42 states.”
“Hopefully, the House will pass its version and we’ll go to conference and the president and [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan will have their say and we’ll get a bill that can be signed in a bipartisan process through and through,” Alexander said.
Alexander said he saw two main issues that need resolution — whether a new law should keep the mandate that students take standardized tests every year in math and reading and how much flexibility states should have in holding schools accountable for educating students.
Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), the former superintendent of Denver Public Schools who serves on the Senate education committee, said he sees three principles at play in negotiations over a new law: the federal role in guaranteeing equal educational opportunities for disadvantaged students, holding states accountable for educating all children and sparking innovation in the nation’s classrooms.
It is clear that the federal government needs to cede more control to states and local school districts, Bennet said.
“When I ran the Denver Public Schools, I can remember asking myself, why are the people in Washington so mean to our kids and our teachers?” he told the state leaders, who gathered at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “And then I came here and realized they’re not mean. They just have no clue. There is no place in the universe you can be sitting and be farther away from what happens in our classrooms than this very building where you’re sitting now.”
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