- D.C. charter board rejects request from BASIS to expand [BASIS, Carlos Rosario, DC Prep, KIPP DC, Next Step, E.L. Haynes, Education Strengthens Families, Excel, Paul and Washington Yu Ying mentioned]
- Teachers in Florida sue state claiming job evaluation system is unfair
D.C. charter board rejects request from BASIS to expand [BASIS, Carlos Rosario, DC Prep, KIPP DC, Next Step, E.L. Haynes, Education Strengthens Families, Excel, Paul and Washington Yu Ying mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 16, 2013
The D.C. Public Charter School Board on Monday rejected a request from BASIS DC to expand, citing concerns about the high number of students who have withdrawn from the charter school since fall.
BASIS, an Arizona-based chain of charter schools known for its rigorous academic demands, won approval to open doors in the District in 2012 despite questions about whether its model would work for struggling D.C. students. At BASIS schools, middle-school classes are accelerated and students must take and pass a heavy load of Advanced Placement courses to graduate from high school.
The school received city funding for 443 students, the number it had enrolled on Oct. 5. Since then, 43 students — almost 10 percent — have left the school. Seven of those who left were students with disabilities.
Board members said the high rate of attrition raises concerns about BASIS’s ability to serve all children, but the departures from BASIS also touch on broader debates about how D.C. education is funded and whether traditional neighborhood schools end up serving as a safety net for students who leave or are expelled from charters midyear.
The city’s funding rules allowed BASIS to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in per-pupil allotments for the students it lost after Oct. 5, while the schools that received those students got no additional money.
Paul Morrissey, head of school for BASIS, said attrition is often high in the first year of operation of a BASIS school, but enrollment stabilizes as students and families learn what the program demands. Nearly 25 percent of students withdrew from a BASIS school in Peoria, Ariz., during its first year of operations, he said.
“When a BASIS school comes into a new market, there are students who understand and know what the workload is and what it takes to be successful at BASIS, and there are students who are not prepared to do that kind of work,” Morrissey said.
The BASIS charter agreement allows the school enrollment cap to automatically rise by 43 students to 511 next year, accommodating the addition of ninth grade. School officials asked the charter board for permission to enroll an additional 35 students, saying they need to bring in more money to make loan payments and to pay rent on their Penn Quarter building.
The BASIS lease was structured so that this year’s rent, about $1.1 million, will nearly double next year to $2 million.
Charter board members largely dismissed the argument that the school needs more money, instead asking for an educational justification for the requested enrollment increase. BASIS officials said they had to hire more staff and implement more programs than they had anticipated in order to support struggling students.
Morrissey, the head of school, argued that the board should approve the enrollment increase on the strength of the nonprofit BASIS charter network’s national and international reputation. But board members were more interested in the school’s performance in the District.
“I don’t think we know enough about the success of your program, at least here in D.C., to approve your request for growth at this point,” Vice Chairman Darren Woodruff said.
The board also turned down a request from Creative Minds to increase its enrollment by 12 students. Like BASIS, Creative Minds is a first-year school.
The charter board granted nine more-established schools permission to expand, increasing their enrollment next year by a combined total of more than 1,300 students.
The nine schools that won permission to expand are: Carlos Rosario, DC Prep, KIPP DC, Next Step, E.L. Haynes, Education Strengthens Families, Excel, Paul and Washington Yu Ying.
Teachers in Florida sue state claiming job evaluation system is unfair
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 16, 2013
Teachers in Florida filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday, claiming the state’s new teacher evaluation system is unfair because it partly rates their job performance on test scores of students they don’t know and subjects they don’t teach.
The lawsuit — backed by local teachers unions and their parent organization, the National Education Association — marks the first time teachers have brought a legal challenge to new evaluation systems that base compensation and job security on student scores.
Filed in U.S. District Court in Gainesville, the complaint names the state education commissioner, the state Board of Education and three school districts.
Alice O’Brien, general counsel for the NEA, argued that the Florida evaluation system violates constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection. The union is seeking an injunction to halt the system, which the state legislature approved in 2011.
“Seven accomplished educators in Florida are pushing back against an arbitrary, unfair, irrational evaluation system,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the NEA, the nation’s largest union. In a conference call with reporters, he said legal action could follow in other states.
Tony Bennett, Florida commissioner of education, said Tuesday that Florida’s performance pay law “helps us recruit and retain teachers,” but he said there is another piece of legislation under consideration that would call for evaluating teachers only on the students and subjects they teach.
He said the department of education wants to work with teachers and Florida families as they “ensure a fair and appropriate assessment that best rewards the success of our great teachers.”
Since 2009, 36 states and the District of Columbia have required that teachers be evaluated in part based on student scores on standardized tests. The idea has received a boost because of Obama administration policies, particularly Race to the Top.
Under federal law, every state tests students annually in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. That omits large numbers of younger and older students as well as other subjects, including art, music, science, health and social studies.
When rolling out new teacher evaluation systems, school districts have faced a predicament: How do you judge teachers who educate students in grades that are not tested or in subjects the tests don’t cover? How do you use math and reading scores to evaluate an art teacher?
Officials in Florida, Tennessee and the District decided to evaluate those teachers by using test scores of other teachers’ students.
The Florida complaint cites the case of Kim Cook, a 22-year educator who teaches first grade at W.W. Irby Elementary in Alachua County. Because Irby is a school for children in kindergarten through second grade, its pupils are too young to take the state’s standardized test, known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
When it came time to rate the Irby teachers this year, the local school board decided that Cook and other teachers would be judged by the test scores of all fourth- and fifth-grade students in another elementary school.
“I never met or instructed the students at Alachua Elementary,” said Cook, one of seven teachers who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The fourth- and fifth-graders at Alachua did not perform well on the standardized tests. Since 40 percent of Cook’s evaluation depended on those test scores, she was initially given an “unsatisfactory” rating at the same time her colleagues honored her as Teacher of the Year.
State lawmakers are considering changes to the evaluation system — to require that teachers be evaluated on the performance of their own students — but union officials said that legislation is not moving quickly enough.