FOCUS DC News Wire 4/15/13

 

 

11 campuses seek enrollment boosts [Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS, E.L. Haynes PCS, Capital City PCS, Two Rivers, KIPP D.C. PCS, Excel Academy, DC Prep, Paul PCS, and Inspire Teaching Demonstration PCS mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Rachel Baye

April 14, 2013

 

Just over 3 percent of applicants got into Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School this year, making the D.C. elementary and middle school more selective than Harvard University. E.L. Haynes Public Charter School is slightly more competitive than Columbia University. The Ivy League school admitted 6.9 percent this year, while E.L. Haynes admitted 6.8 percent. As the city's public charter schools grow more popular, the difficulty of securing a spot in top-performing schools has become exasperating for parents. "It's been so frustrating and so overwhelming all at the same time," said Melanie Colburn, whose 3-year-old son has been waitlisted at 10 charters. On the waitlists at Capital City and Two Rivers, two of her top choices, her son is number 298 and 366, respectively. The uncertainty has led Colburn to keep her son at his private school. "I'm not the kind of person to take chances, and I can't wait until September -- personally, for peace of mind, I'm not going to play the game."

 

The city's 57 charters on 102 campuses enroll 34,673 students, 43 percent of the students in the District's public schools. Meanwhile, the traditional DC Public Schools system plans to close 15 underenrolled schools, a move city leaders say pushes more families to charters. Charter schools are trying to keep up with the growing demand by adding more seats. On Monday, the D.C. Public Charter School Board is scheduled to review requests to increase enrollment at 11 schools, nine of which the board's staff has recommended approving. KIPP D.C. Public Charter School, a top-performing school with campuses nationwide, plans to add 586 seats, including 250 at a new campus in Ward 5. With 3,041 students enrolled, KIPP has a waitlist with 2,500 students, up from 1,700 two years ago and 500 students two years before that. Other charters are planning smaller bumps -- Excel Academy plans to add 20 students -- or adding grades. D.C. Preparatory Academy plans to add 100 seats, most in a new fourth-grade class at its Benning Road middle school campus. Paul Public is adding 135 students, including 110 10th graders. Four new charter schools are slated to open in the fall. And at a hearing last week, the charter board heard from nine applicants that want to open schools in 2014-2015. The board has approved Rocketship Education DC to open two schools in 2015. But just as schools are opening, others close, said charter board spokeswoman Theola Labbe-Debose, preventing the city from being oversaturated and keeping demand high. Of the 95 charter schools approved since 1996, 35 have closed.

 

For the remaining schools, the admissions cycle began in January with open houses and the packed D.C. Public Charter School Expo. Schools could continue to see a revolving door of students until a few weeks after school has started. "Basically everyone applies to basically all the charter schools," said Steve Sipos, whose son is in the first grade at Inspire Teaching Public Charter School and on the waitlist at Capital City. "You get waitlisted at all of them, and then as people move into the ones ahead of them, people keep moving around and doing a kind of dance." Pre-kindergarten is especially competitive since DCPS does not guarantee seats in neighborhood schools until kindergarten, Sipos said. Charters give siblings of enrolled students the first shot at open seats, increasing the pressure. At Stokes, every pre-kindergarten seat was filled by siblings, causing many of the roughly 1,000 applicants to walk away unhappy from Thursday night's lottery drawing. "At least nobody cried," said Linda Moore, the school's founder and executive director. "The last few years ... lots of people left crying -- parents and students."

 

 

Sidwell Friends alumni aim to open public charter school in the District [DC Prep, SEED PCS, and KIPP College Prep mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

April 13, 2013

 

Sidwell Friends, the elite private school known for educating the children of presidents and members of Congress, has lent its support to a group of former students and faculty who are seeking to open a public charter school in the District. The aspiring charter founders say they want One World Public Charter School to give middle-school students from across the city an opportunity to experience — for free — the caliber of education that costs $34,268 a year at the independent Quaker school. Tom Farquhar, Sidwell’s head of school, spoke in favor of One World last week at a D.C. Public Charter School Board hearing. “These are extraordinary people,” Farquhar said, “and they have demonstrated in their lives prior to this an extraordinary commitment to the children of our community.” Charters have drawn leaders from high-flying college-prep schools before: A graduate of National Cathedral School started the high-performing D.C. Prep charter network, while a Sidwell alumnus co-founded the SEED School, a charter boarding school. But it’s unusual for a brand-name private school to publicly endorse a start-up charter and to agree, as Sidwell has, to explore opportunities for a continuing relationship. Should One World win approval next month to open its doors in fall 2014, a public vote of confidence from the school that educates President Obama’s daughterscould give it an immediate competitive advantage in a crowded District school marketplace. “Using an established institution in the city that everybody knows undoubtedly is a pretty effective way to connect with parents,” said Don Soifer, a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “It’s a potential cachet that is definitely of value.”

 

Some critics say that the proposed charter could draw the most motivated students away from the city’s traditional schools, accelerating a trend that they say is hindering those traditional schools’ efforts to improve.

“I’m concerned about this move toward hypercompetition,” said Daniel del Pielago, an organizer at the community group Empower D.C., which opposes the expansion of charters. “It’s not ‘Let’s make our public school system, our community schools, a lot better.’ It’s ‘I’m going to get my kid into this one really high-performing school.’ ” One World’s founders seek to have the school along 16th Street in Northwest, about three miles east of Sidwell and in a ward where the only traditional middle school, MacFarland, is slated to close in June because of low enrollment. The school hopes to enroll 300 diverse students, including those living in poverty and those who could afford to pay full freight at Sidwell but would prefer a public school. Students would take both Spanish- and Chinese-language classes. They’d have art classes nearly every afternoon for 90 minutes. To graduate from eighth grade, they’d complete a “passion project” — an independent investigation of a topic of their choice — and they’d have opportunities to travel abroad.

 

“The only difference between low-income kids and Sidwell kids is the exposure — exposure to arts, to music, to active dialogue, to questioning the world,” said Marta del Pilar Lynch, a One World co-founder who graduated from Sidwell in 1991. “That type of child can be cultivated whether you’re on Section 8 housing and getting food stamps or whether your family has $200,000.” Democratizing access to a Sidwell-quality school is an appealing idea to the charter board, but members said it’s too early to judge One World’s chances of approval. The board must vet One World’s plans to ensure that the founders have the wherewithal to execute their vision. Charter board Chairman John H. “Skip” McCoy said he will be looking for evidence that One World’s founders are equipped to teach all of the D.C. students who might walk in the door, including those who have grown up in poverty or are years behind in reading. Charter schools are open to children citywide and use lotteries when demand exceeds space. “You’re not going to be able to pick who you get, and obviously, the backgrounds will be quite different than what you get at Sidwell,” McCoy said. Board members also said it’s far from clear what the proposed school’s association with Sidwell means. One World’s application refers to a “partnership” with Sidwell that would include advice in writing curriculum and training teachers, among other things. Founders referred again to that partnership at Monday’s public hearing on their proposal. Sidwell officials said they have not agreed to any formal arrangement but are interested in considering ways to be involved with the charter school if it is approved. “At this point, it’s unclear what direction that might take,” said Ellis Turner, Sidwell’s associate head of school.

 

One World’s founders also wrote in their application that they had received letters of support and endorsement from five well-known D.C. figures, including Donald E. Graham, the Washington Post Co.’s chairman and chief executive. But Graham has not written a letter, and he declined to comment on whether he intends to write one. Three of the four others said to have written letters also have not done so, One World founders said in response to questions from The Washington Post. They said the inclusion of the names in the application was an error. The founders include Lynch, who has worked as an administrator at other D.C. charter schools and, more recently, at a school in her father’s native Trinidad and Tobago. Other founders are Sidwell alumna Kimberly Yates, who taught in community colleges, universities and abroad before becoming a reading specialist at KIPP College Prep, a D.C. charter school dedicated to preparing low-income students for college. Rickey Payton, a former Sidwell choral music teacher who now runs a performing arts academy in Silver Spring, would direct One World’s arts offerings.

 

Richard Lodish, who recently retired after more than three decades as principal of Sidwell’s lower school, also would be part of the new charter. Lodish — who began his career teaching in Cleveland in the late 1960s and helped start a charter school in Oakland, Calif., while on sabbatical a decade ago — has agreed to serve without pay for two years as One World’s part-time executive director. Besides One World, eight other applicants have submitted proposals for new charter schools to open in fall 2014, including two Montessori schools and three alternative high schools for at-risk youths. The charter board, which is scheduled to vote on those proposals May 20, usually approves just a few of the applications it considers.

 

Students leaving mid-year raise questions for charter school [BASIS DC mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Rachel Baye

April 14, 2013

 

D.C. charter board staff are recommending that Basis Public Charter School should not be allowed to add 35 seats next year because a large number of students are leaving in the middle of the school year. The Ward 4 school, which opened this year, is currently allowed to enroll up to 468 students. But at the beginning of October, the number of students at the middle school was 443, and a more recent count shows 417 students enrolled, according to documents the school provided to the charter board. A representative of Basis did not return requests for comment.

 

Basis also has a small number of special needs students compared with other public schools in the city, said charter board Deputy Director Naomi Rubin DeVeaux. Only 5 percent of the student body are special needs, compared with an average of 12 to 14 percent elsewhere. That and the mid-year drop represent "some troubling early data" for the school, which is in its first year, the charter board staff explained in a memo prepared for Monday's board meeting. The school is already slated to add 43 students next year, including 26 in a new ninth grade, which will bring the enrollment cap to 511. The staff has recommended denying the school's request to increase that cap to 546 because of the issues. Basis was one of 11 charter schools that asked to increase enrollment in the fall.

 

 

Public Charter School Board should tell Council to stay out of their business [KIPP DC mentioned]

The Examiner

By Mark Lerner

April 15, 2013 

 

Recently, D.C. Councilman David Gosso introduced a bill to allow newly created charter schools to provide a neighborhood preference in admissions to those in the community in which they are located. The legislation is clearly aimed at permitting KIPP to side step an argument being used inopposition to the school's proposal to open a high school in Southwest. Some have said that if the charter is permitted to locate in this area it will not serve local students because of the random lottery system under which over-subscribed charters fill vacant spots.

 

While I'm sure Mr. Gosso has good intentions in mind the Public Charter School Board should vigorously oppose the plan. In this city only the PCSB has control over the school system that now educates 43 percent of all public school children in the nation's capital. The Council does have some limited role in deciding how charters operate, for example, if there are matters impacting the health or safety of D.C.'s youth. However, this issue is far from these concerns.

 

If KIPP wants to have a neighborhood preference for its school then it should approach the PCSB and ask for permission. The bill sets a dangerous precedence for diluting the authority of this body. Newly elected chairman McKoy must stand up to the Council and say in no uncertain terms that it needs to stay out of their organization's business. If not, the group down at the Wilson Building will find an unlimited number of topics regarding charters requiring their urgent attention.

 

Should charters also be neighborhood schools?

Greater Greater Education

By Rahul Mereand-Sinha 

April 12, 2013

 

At-large councilmember David Grosso has introduced a bill to allow DC charter schools to give priority to students in their neighborhood for admissions. Supporters say it will strengthen neighborhoods, while opponents worry it would further disadvantage children from poorer areas.It's not a new idea. Denver, New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Philadelphia all provide this sort of preference. In DC, a task forceconsidered the issue last October, and then-Chairman Kwame Brown advocated for the idea last May. The issue cuts across usual political divides in the city, with advocates and detractors in every area and constituency. Contributors on Greater Greater Washington have differing views about the proposal; in a pair of articles, Steve Glazerman argued it would undermine charter schools, while Ken Archer defended the concept. After receiving support from Councilmember Tommy Wells, Chairman Brown, and Deputy Mayor for Education DeShawn Wright, the idea seemed to gain popularity. DC leaders formed a task force to consider the matter, with members from the council, the mayor's office, the Washington Teacher's Union, DC Public Schools, and the charter schools. This past December, after reviewing testimony and having four public meetings, the task force decided that while charters near closing DCPS schools ought to offer priority to displaced children, in general charters should not be allowed to prefer children from their neighborhoods. When the report was released, opponents criticized the report and the panel itself forignoring the arguments for preference. Critics charged the task force largely decided against preference on the grounds that many schools already end up with a disproportionate number of students from their surrounding community.

 

The case for preference

The report's authors said they didn't see much demand from the public for this policy, but their own data shows the reverse. Despite randomly selecting students, charters still end up with disproportionate numbers of neighborhood kids. This demonstrates that parents generally want their children to attend school nearby. It isn't simply an issue of wanting a shorter commute. The passion we see from school closure opponents reveals how residents—and especially parents—see schools as anchors of the community. As DC education shifts toward having about half of students in charters versus DCPS, the charters cannot be just special schools that serve those with a particular, unusual interest. These are general attendance schools, and should be just as responsive to parental needs as are the DCPS schools they are replacing. Having a social community at school is also not simply a luxury. It's vital that children feel that most of their friends are in the school they're being asked to travel alone to attend. Truancy, for instance, is linked to being socially unengaged or independent of one's school. While charters now tend to draw children from families with the strongest interest in education, over time charters will be educating a wider cross-section of students. Some students will be committed enough to specialty programs to journey across the city, and will find closer friends when they arrive. However, many of the more marginal students, most vulnerable to truancy, will see the mandate to cross the city as an irritation when their friends live a short walk away. Third, educational options require public support. Without neighborhoods feeling they have a stake in (and benefit from) DCPS schools becoming charters, the opposition DC has recently seen to school closures will arise every time DCPS considers consolidating schools and leasing their surplus sites to charter programs. These residents aren't being unreasonable. If their children cannot reliably access the school, a building that was an amenity is being taken away from them without any compensating service being offered. Finally, and most significantly, charters offer the possibility that residents of a community might band together to build programs that meet their needs. Currently, even if they do so on their own, their children many not be able to attend. Community engagement in public education is vital, and neighborhood charter schools provide the avenue for these neighborhoods to directly participate in their own uplift. Unless charters can offer neighborhood preference, charter schools will remain the province of national non-profit chains and donor-backed specialty programs.

 

The case against preference

None of these arguments takes away from the single greatest argument that opponents of preference (including the task force) have identified: Neighborhood preference can further enshrine educational resource disparities between wealthier and less well-off communities in the city. While many charters are located in Wards 4 and 5, there are few across the Anacostia River. Any neighborhood preference regime would have to accommodate these communities. There are other arguments against preference, but this is by far the most compelling. Without some resolution, the position of children in Wards 7 and 8 would be strictly worse than before, as Ward 3 DCPS schools fill up with in-boundary students, and charters fill with neighborhood kids. One idea would be to give a different sort of preference to children in any neighborhood cluster that lacks a school and meets a certain threshold of poverty. Some percentage of seats could be set aside in each charter where neighborhood preference would not apply, and where these children would have preference relative to others.

While some concession like this must be a part of preference, the principle of neighborhood charter schools is a good one. A version of Grosso's bill deserves to move forward into law.

 

 

D.C. report: Teachers in 18 classrooms cheated on students’ high-stakes tests in 2012 [Arts and Technology Academy, Community Academy-Amos I, Hope Community-Lamond, and Meridian PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

April 12, 2013

 

Teachers in 18 District classrooms cheated on high-stakes standardized tests last year, according to a report released Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. The findings come one day after journalist John Merrow published a 2009 document that raised questions about whether the District adequately investigated past cheating allegations. School officials maintain that no widespread cheating has occurred, pointing to multiple investigations over the past two years that found only isolated violations. They said Friday’s report is more proof that there is no systematic problem in the District. “The majority of the schools are playing by the rules,” said Jose Alvarez, chief of staff for the state superintendent of education.

 

But D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) — who has criticized previous investigations — said the violations might be a sign of a wider problem. He urged the District to consider whether one of its signature reforms — tying teacher evaluations to test scores — might be motivating adults to cheat. Beneath the back-and-forth is a debate about whether standardized tests, increasingly used to judge teachers and schools, are a reliable indicator of student progress. D.C. test scores have come under increasing scrutiny since revelations that more than 100 schools had unusually high numbers of erasures of wrong to right answers from 2008 to 2010. Such erasures are an indication that cheating may have occurred, but they are not proof. The District’s annual standardized test, known as the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, was given to students in 2,688 classrooms last spring. The OSSE flagged 41 classrooms in 25 schools for extra scrutiny based on odd patterns, such as wrong-to-right erasure marks, unusually big gains or drops in students’ scores, and unusual score patterns.

 

Then a management consulting firm, Alvarez and Marsal, visited schools and interviewed students, teachers and administrators. (Jose Alvarez is not connected with the consulting firm.) The 18 classrooms found to have critical violations were in 11 schools: seven traditional schools and four charter schools. The test-tampering included providing students with answers, reading test questions aloud and encouraging students to reread specific questions. Scores on the 2012 tests at those schools will be invalidated. For six of those schools, that will trigger additional oversight of academic programs and interventions for struggling students. The seven traditional D.C. public schools at which cheating was detected are two preschool-eighth grade campuses — Brightwood and Winston — and five elementary schools: Beers, Hendley, Kenilworth, Langdon and Miner. The four charters are Arts and Technology Academy, Community Academy-Amos I, Hope Community-Lamond and Meridian.

 

Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said the board will ask each school to explain how it will address the violations. The charter board will address further actions against schools at its May 20 public meeting. D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said she would take appropriate disciplinary measures after reviewing OSSE’s report. “We do not tolerate cheating at DCPS,” Henderson said. “We take every allegation of testing impropriety seriously, investigate accordingly and take personnel action when warranted.” But some question whether Henderson and her predecessor, Michelle A. Rhee, have pursued cheating allegations aggressively enough.

 

In 2009, a consultant for D.C. Public Schools warned that it might have had widespread cheating on standardized tests the previous year, according to a memo obtained by Merrow and published Thursday on Merrow’s blog.

The four-page memo, marked “confidential,” was written by consultant Fay G. “Sandy” Sanford and addressed to a senior staffer of Rhee’s. It contains no proof that cheating occurred, but it said erasure-rate data indicated that nearly 200 teachers at 70 schools could have been “implicated in possible testing infractions.” The public release of the document has raised questions about why Rhee decided not to investigate test scores in 2008 — her first year on the job, when many schools made impressive gains. Subsequent investigations by private consultants and local and federal inspectors general found no evidence of widespread cheating, but they also did not fully examine the 2008 scores. Neither Rhee nor Henderson recalled receiving or discussing the memo. A spokeswoman for Henderson said that the testing company found that there was not enough information available to conduct a further investigation.

 

Cheating found at 11 D.C. schools [Arts and Technology Academy, Community Academy-Amos I, Hope Community-Lamond, and Meridian PCS mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Rachel Baye

April 12, 2013

 

The District is invalidating standardized test scores of 18 testing groups at 11 schools after "serious test security violations" were discovered, signifying that cheating likely occurred at the schools, officials announced Friday.

The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education hired the consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal to look at 2012 math and reading scores on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (CAS) standardized tests across all 243 public schools.

 

The investigation flagged incidents of significant score increases or decreases from previous years, wrong answers that were changed to right answers and wide variation in student performance in a single classroom or school at 25 public schools, including 10 D.C. Public Schools and 15 public charter schools. Of the 25, 11 had serious violations in 18 testing groups -- which could be single classrooms or groups of classrooms, overseen by one test administrator. Four had moderate violations -- "anomalies with defined violations but not test tampering" -- and one school had a procedural problem. Nine turned up no violations.

 

The schools with some classes' test scores being invalidated are Beers Elementary, Brightwood Education Campus, Hendley Elementary, Kenilworth Elementary, Langdon Elementary, Miner Elementary, Winston Education Campus, Arts and Technology Academy Public Charter School, Community Academy-Amos I Public Charter School, Hope Community-Lamond Public Charter School and Meridian Public Charter School.

Friday's announcement comes on the heels of the revelation that D.C. officials were aware of possible widespread cheating in 2009, under then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. An internal memo, obtained by PBS's John Merrow, shows an analyst's findings that 191 teachers at 70 schools may have replaced their students' wrong answers with right ones. The District's investigation at the time resulted in one teacher being fired.

 

Catania does not plan to call for full-scale re-investigation of 2008 cheating allegations

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

April 14, 2013

 

The chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee said Sunday that he has no plans to launch a full-scale investigation into allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests in 2008, during the tenure of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Council member David Catania (I-At Large) said that he intends to find out why the scope of a prior cheating investigation was limited to one school, but much of his focus will be on improving the integrity of future tests, which are used to evaluate schools and teachers. Catania’s statement came three days after the public airing of a 2009 memo indicating that as many as 191 teachers in 70 D.C. public schools may have committed testing infractions in 2008.

 

The memo, based on an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets, contained no proof of cheating and warned that there wasn’t enough information to draw firm conclusions. But it stoked questions about whether Rhee and other school officials, including current Chancellor Kaya Henderson, were aggressive enough about responding to suspicions of cheating. Rhee and Henderson both said they did not recall receiving the 2009 memo, and school system officials pointed to multiple investigations — including by local and federal inspectors general — that found no evidence of widespread cheating.

 

Catania said that in light of the 2009 memo, he is “bewildered by the narrow scope” of ainvestigation by the D.C. Inspector General, which lasted 17 months and focused only on one school. But he said a full-scale reinvestigation of the five-year-old allegations “would be impractical and would yield little in terms of accountability.” “Among other things,” he said, “simply identifying and interviewing the hundreds of witnesses would overwhelm the Council’s limited staff and resources.” It makes more sense to focus on tightening test security and strengthening efforts to identify cheating in the future, the council member said. Catania introduced a bill earlier this year that would make cheating on standardized tests illegal and would put some test-security protocols into the law. The council will hold a hearing on that bill on Thursday.

 

The hearing will also include discussion of a report released Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which found that teachers in 11 schools cheated on 2012 standardized tests. The older cheating allegations are also likely to come up. “I do intend to seek answers regarding the narrow scope of the Inspector General’s investigation in light of the recently released 2009 memo,” Catania said. “I also intend to question DCPS officials about the contents of the 2009 memo.”