- D.C. mayoral hopefuls weigh in on proposals for school boundaries and access
- Why are so many DCPS schools listed as 99% low-income? It's not necessarily because they are.
- Bowser Meets With Henderson, But Won't Say If She'll Keep Her
D.C. mayoral hopefuls weigh in on proposals for school boundaries and access
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 9, 2014
Days after Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) released proposals to overhaul the District’s school boundaries and student-assignment policies, the two mayoral hopefuls in the November election said they would not support any plan that eliminates neighborhood high schools.
D.C. Council member and Democratic nominee for mayor Muriel Bowser said Gray’s proposals contain some “intriguing ideas” that deserve further exploration, such as replacing traditional neighborhood elementary schools with clusters, called “choice sets,” that would admit students via lottery.
But Bowser (Ward 4) said she would not support cutting neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park out of the feeder patterns for schools west of the park, namely Alice Deal Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School. Nor would she support converting high schools that serve specific neighborhoods into schools that would build their student body through citywide lotteries.
“Parents want predictability,” Bowser said.
D.C. Council member and mayoral hopeful David A. Catania went a step further, and saying that if elected he would “press pause” on the whole effort to redraw school boundaries and revise assignment policies, arguing that the city must first focus on improving schools.
Catania (I-At Large) said he would not support any plan that would reassign parents into lower-quality schools or that would leave parents with less certainty about which schools their children have a right to attend.
“Over the last seven years, we’ve been on a journey with school reform here. We’ve asked parents to take a leap of faith, to reinvest in public schools,” Catania said. “Anything we do to shock that fragile confidence sends people over the top. We have to be very careful.”
The Gray administration’s proposals would not only overhaul school boundaries for the first time in 40 years, but they also could fundamentally change how children are placed in schools, possibly using lottery admissions instead of giving students the right to attend their neighborhood schools.
While Gray is slated to announce a final plan in September, it would not become effective until 2015, after his term ends, leaving the real decisions about how to proceed in the hands of whoever is elected mayor in November.
The proposals already have triggered fierce debate among parents, who are sure to study the mayoral aspirants’ views closely as they decide how to vote. Some whose children are assigned to low-performing schools have welcomed proposals that expand chances to win admission to stronger schools.
Others, including those who are happy with their assigned schools, have vehemently rejected any proposals that would leave enrollment to chance. They say moving children around via lottery-based admissions would create transportation headaches and would not improve the city’s schools.
“I’m uncomfortable with all of this because it feels like a Band-Aid,” said Shannon Winters, who was one of hundreds of parents — many of them from Upper Northwest neighborhoods with thriving schools — who attended a community meeting on the proposals Tuesday night at Calvin Coolidge High.
“I would be much more comfortable if I looked through the packet and saw a plan for improving low-performing schools,” Winters said, triggering applause from the crowd. “I think it would be better for the city.”
Abigail Smith, the deputy mayor for education, says the city must address boundaries and student-assignment policies now. Decades of demographic shifts and charter-school growth have rendered boundaries increasingly unworkable, she argues, leaving some schools overcrowded and others half-empty. As neighborhood schools remain the ideal for many families, only 25 percent of the city’s children actually attend their assigned schools.
Asked whether the mayoral hopefuls’ reactions would change the timeline or direction of her work, Smith said she and her team “welcome feedback from all sources,” pointing out that at three community meetings across the city in recent days, parents have voiced support for elements of all three of the proposals. “There are also concerns with the proposals,” Smith said. “We are grateful for the high level of participation and interest in this work and look forward to continuing to engage the broader community to help us refine these options.”Catania said two of Gray’s policy proposals — “A” and “C,” both of which would replace neighborhood high schools with citywide lottery admissions — are “red herrings” that he cannot support.
“By transitioning to a lottery system, we’re not adding high-quality lottery spaces; we’re simply scattering students across the city,” he said. “Putting a student on the bus and sending them across town to an option that is no better than the one in their neighborhood is not the answer.” Policy option “B” retains much of the current system, with each student having one by-right elementary, middle and high school. But some families would lose access to Deal Middle and Wilson High schools, two of the most sought-after schools in the city. And the plan depends on building or reopening four middle schools and perhaps a new high school.
Catania said that, if elected, he would not move forward with that plan but would like to continue discussing some of its elements, including a provision requiring all schools to set aside a percentage of seats for students from low-performing schools or for students from low-income families.
He said that the number of crowded schools is relatively small and that the city can find ways to address that crowding without making far-reaching policy changes.“What I want to do is hit the pause button on all of this and say ‘let’s continue to talk about it,’ but while we talk about it, let’s advance ideas about how we’re going to improve quality across the city,” he said.
Bowser said she is encouraged by certain elements of the proposals, such as the elementary school “choice sets” and the building of four new middle schools, which she said would require much-needed investments in the middle grades.
“In order to live up to what’s in those scenarios, certainly funding and program commitments have to be made,” Bowser said. “Part of what we need to focus on is what the timeline is for making these changes. As I read it, none of this can happen until those investments are made.”
But she also expressed concerns about limiting access to Deal and Wilson and said she would not stand for new boundaries that eliminate “cross-park boundary and feeder patterns,” including current proposals that would strip swaths of Bowser’s Ward 4 — such as Crestwood and 16th Street Heights — of the right to attend schools west of Rock Creek Park.
“I don’t think any of the scenarios put forth get it exactly right, but I think there are some intriguing ideas in them,” Bowser said.
Why are so many DCPS schools listed as 99% low-income? It's not necessarily because they are.
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
April 9, 2014
Publicly available education data shows that many DCPS schools have a 99% poverty rate. But that figure is based on an average and doesn't reflect the actual number of poor kids at any particular DCPS school.
In the past, each DCPS school counted how many of its students were eligible for free and reduced-price meals (FARMs). Last year, DCPS began participating in a federal program that allows some schools to provide free lunches to all their students without determining how many are actually eligible.
The new method reduces the administrative burden on schools and allows more poor kids to get free meals. But it's made it harder to figure out how many poor kids there actually are, and it lumps an undetermined number of higher-income kids into the low-income category. That makes it harder to track the academic progress of low-income kids.
The new method, called the Community Eligibility Option (CEO), is a federal program available to any school district that includes at least one school where 40% or more of students can be identified as needy through certain measures. Those measures include whether they're receiving food stamps or other federal welfare benefits, are homeless, or in foster care.
The formula then multiplies that "direct-certified" percentage by a certain factor to get the percentage of kids eligible for FARMs. FARMs includes not only students on welfare, but also students whose family income is equal to up to 185% of the federal poverty guidelines. The FARMs figure is commonly used as a proxy for low-income status.
Charter schools can also participate in the CEO program, but generally they only have one or perhaps a few campuses. DCPS chose a group of 75 of its schools for the CEO program, and the average rate of direct-certified students for the group as a whole is 62%.
Under the CEO formula, that average gets multiplied by 1.6, and the result is 99%. And that explains why DCPS school profiles and school equity reports show the same percentage of FARMs students at many schools: 99.
Wide variation in underlying percentages
But according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which administers the FARMs program, there's actually a wide variation in the percentage of direct-certified students within the group of 75 schools in the CEO program. The number ranges from about 38% to 85%.
If you multiply 38% by 1.6, the result is much lower than 99%—60.8%, to be exact. So almost 40% of the students at that school are being classified as low-income when in fact they may not be.
Officials at DCPS and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) have the direct-certified percentages for individual schools but declined to release them. They did not provide a reason.
Dr. Sandra Schlicker, Deputy Superintendent at OSSE, pointed out that the previous method of determining FARMs eligibility often resulted in undercounting poor students. Parents didn't always bother to fill out the FARMs application, even if they were eligible, and school administrators were powerless to provide free meals to students who clearly needed them.
Even the direct-certified percentages may understate the extent of need, especially at schools with a large immigrant population. Undocumented immigrant families aren't eligible for the federal programs that often trigger certification. Grouping those schools with others that have a higher percentage of direct-certified kids enables them to provide free lunch to all students.
Beyond that, the CEO program clearly has other benefits. It relieves schools of the burden of dealing with the paperwork required under the old method. Under the new method, OSSE simply compares lists of children who are receiving federal benefits or are otherwise eligible for direct-certified status against lists of students at the CEO schools. And including all students at a school in the lunch program avoids stigmatizing low-income children.
Measuring the achievement gap
But education policy activists and researchers say the new method has made it hard to determine the size of the achievement gap between low-income and higher-income children.
Local and national standardized test scores compare subgroups using the FARMs percentage to determine the performance of low-income students. School reports also separate out suspension and expulsion rates for FARMs students.
HyeSook Chung, executive director of DC Action for Children, said in an email that "any evidence of low-income student performance in DC now comes with an asterisk, because there are likely more than a few non-low-income students being lumped into that category."
It's also become difficult to compare test scores and other data to information from previous years when FARMs kids were counted differently, she said.
The DC Council passed a bill last year providing additional funds for "at-risk" students. That designation could be used as a proxy for low income in the future, but, like the direct-certified designation, it's limited to a fraction of those counted under FARMs, only about 30% of students. The FARMs category has included more like 70% of them in the past.
Other problems with the method
The CEO program also makes it hard to track demographic changes that may be taking place at some DCPS schools, since there's no way of knowing whether more affluent kids are beginning to attend them.
And some critics of high-achieving charter schools that serve high-poverty populations have suggested that their success is due to lower FARMs rates than comparable DCPS schools, say 80% rather than 99%. But if a DCPS school is in the CEO program, it could actually have a FARMs rate significantly lower than the 99% figure attached to it.
This is a problem that will soon become more widespread. The federal government has been phasing the CEO program in gradually, with only 10 states and DC participating this year. But next year it will be open to all qualified schools and school districts nationwide.
It's great that more kids who need free meals are getting them, and school administrators are undoubtedly relieved that they no longer have to spend time identifying low-income students. But if we're going to understand how poor kids are actually doing in DC, and elsewhere, we're going to need to come up with some more accurate way of determining who they are.
At the very least, DCPS and OSSE could literally add an asterisk when they list a school as having a 99% FARMs rate, and use the footnote to let the public know just how it was calculated.
Bowser Meets With Henderson, But Won't Say If She'll Keep Her
WAMU
By Martin Austermuhle
April 7, 2014
Fresh off of her victory in Tuesday's Democratic mayoral primary, Muriel Bowser is already fielding questions on which agency heads she would keep — and one key figure in the city's school system isn't assured a job if Bowser wins November's general election.
On WAMU's The Politics Hour on Friday, Bowser said that she had met with D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson on Thursday, but refused to say whether or not she would keep her if she became the city's next mayor.
"What I'm going to do over the next weeks leading up to my next race, is have a lot of conversations, including with stakeholders, now, that I'm the nominee, in addition to parents and students and I think we'll be able to make a decision about that," she said, referring to Henderson's stated desire to stay onboard until 2017.
"We had a very good conversation about what she thinks the school system is doing well and what things that she thinks needs to change or happen faster. And as I've always said, she has a lot of great ideas. She's been good for our city. And that was the first conversation in my process," said Bowser, who is likely to face independent D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large) in the general election.
Catania, who chairs the Council's education committee, has also not said whether he would keep Henderson or not.
Henderson succeeded her former boss, Michelle Rhee, after Gray defeated then-mayor Adrian Fenty in 2010. In spearheading ongoing reforms in the city's public school system, Henderson has been praised for being more inclusive and overseeing the stabilization of enrollment and an uptick in test scores. Still, critics chide her for closing 15 schools in 2013 and say that the pace of test score improvements has been too slow.
On The Politics Hour, Bowser said that she and Henderson had disagreed over the closure of McFarland Middle School and Sharpe Health School, which are both in Ward 4. She also expanded on her "Alice Deal For All" campaign pledge, referring to the high-performing middle school in Ward 3. As WAMU's Kavitha Cardoza has reported, the pledge was criticized for being short on details.
"I think that Alice Deal for all, in my view, means that we should have middle schools across the city that have incredible offerings, academically, have incredible offerings in an extra-curricular environment, great leadership, great teachers and a way to bring parents into the schools. So people should not take that to mean that we pick up Alice Deal and we plop it someplace else," she said.
Bowser also responded to apparent friction between her and Gray in the wake of the primary. Gray never made the traditional concession call, and has so far refused to say whether he would back her in November.
"When the mayor's ready I know we're going to have that conversation. I appreciated a very genuine handshake that he offered to me this morning," she said, referring to a unity breakfast offered by the D.C. Democratic State Committee on Friday that both Gray and Bowser attended.
"I do politics and, you know, elections are tough. I have had some disappointments in people that I have supported in campaigns, too. So let's, you know, it was just — it's a very fresh few days after the election. So we're going to give it some time," she said of the relationship with Gray.