- Study: Charters get less funding than traditional public schools [KIPP PCS mentioned]
- Report: D.C. public schools get about $13k more per student than charters [FOCUS mentioned]
- Catania hires law firm to help craft D.C. school legislation
- Parents, activists say chancellor’s budget undermines D.C. schools
- Injecting integrity into D.C. schools testing
- McDuffie presses inspector general for more information on D.C. schools cheating probe
- D.C. Council, residents criticize school-funding formula
- D.C. public school funding misunderstandings [BASIS DC mentioned]
- Teachers unions scour charter schools for new memberships
Study: Charters get less funding than traditional public schools [KIPP PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 17, 2013
Public charter schools received significantly less funding than traditional public schools in five cities, including the District, between 2007 and 2011, according to a new study released Wednesday. When it comes to per-pupil spending, the District had the largest gap, with public charter schools getting $16,361 per student in fiscal 2011 and traditional public schools getting $29,145, about $13,000 more per student, according to the study.
Those amounts represent total funding, include federal, state, and local tax dollars and private support from foundations. The study, funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation, analyzed private and public dollars spent to educate students in the District, Denver, Newark, Los Angeles and Milwaukee. It is scheduled to be published in the Journal of School Choice this year.
Charter schools are publicly financed but operate independently of local school systems. They are usually nonunionized. The amount of public dollars they receive is generally determined by the state and varies widely. In fiscal 2011, traditional D.C. public schools received, per student, 43.9 percent more total dollars — private and public — than charter schools. Traditional public schools also received substantially more in the four other cities studied: in Newark, the difference was 39 percent; in Los Angeles, 34.7 percent; in Denver, 19.4 percent; and in Milwaukee, 31.4 percent. Larry Maloney, the lead researcher, said his analysis suggests that although the number of charter schools is growing, when it comes to funding, states have created a two-tier public education system. “I look at a student attending a public school as a student attending a public school,” said Maloney, who is president of Aspire Consulting. “But we are now developing a funding mechanism that treats students differently, based on the public school they attend. If you attend a [traditional] district school, you’re much more likely to have access to more funds.”
Critics of public charter schools have long suggested that they have an economic advantage over traditional public schools because they have attracted financial support from philanthropies. The Walton Family Foundation, for example, spent more than $158 million in 2012 to help support charter schools in 16 cities, including the District. More than 40 percent of public school students attend a charter school in the city, making it second only to New Orleans in terms of charter penetration. But Maloney said his analysis shows that foundations have been reducing their contributions to traditional public schools and charters. In 2007, the D.C. public school system received 1.9 percent of its budget from private sources; that dropped slightly, to 1.6 percent, in 2011. Meanwhile, public charter schools got 10.2 percent of their budgets from foundations in fiscal 2007, which dropped to 6.3 percent in fiscal 2011, Maloney found.
“I was surprised in the decline of [private] revenue,” he said. “That’s what charters have relied on to close the gap, and it appears they no longer can.” D.C. law requires equal per-pupil allocations for public charter and traditional public schools. But traditional public schools receive additional local tax dollars for facilities and support services that charters do not. For example, the city’s capital construction agency contributed $314 million to D.C. public schools for facilities in fiscal 2011, money that was not available to charter schools. Maloney said large, nationally prominent charter operators such as KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) still receive a significant amount of financial help from private foundations. But smaller, individual charter schools have been getting less help from private donors, especially since the 2008 recession, he said.
The Washington Examiner
By April Burbank
April 17, 2013
The District's charter schools received about $13,000 less in funding per student in fiscal 2011 than traditional public schools, according to a reportreleased Wednesday bythe Walton Family Foundation. The foundation is a philanthropic nonprofit that supports education reform and is a donor to DC Public Schools. In 2010, the organization was one of four donors that helped fund performance-based bonuses for teachers under a new contract.
"D.C. is a classic example of how severe the disparity is between D.C. public school expenditure and charter school expenditure," said Ed Kirby, the Walton Family Foundation's deputy director of K-12 systemic reform investments.
Although the gap in per-student funding shrank slightly from 2007 to 2011, traditional public schools received about $29,145 in funding per pupil in 2011 compared with $16,361 per pupil at charter schools. The numbers include all funding for the schools, including construction costs. Led by Larry Maloney, of the University of Arkansas, the researchers analyzed data dating to 2007 in an attempt to track the effect of the 2008 recession on public school funding.
The District had the biggest disparity of the five cities tracked by the report:Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., and the District. On average, researchers found a $4,000 funding disparity between the traditional and charter public schools. Those numbers were based on an analysis of federal funds, other public funds and nonpublic funds. By law, the District has a mechanism to provide equitable funding to all students, with a funding baseline of $9,124 per student -- $9,306 in fiscal 2014 under Mayor Vincent Gray's budget proposal. Maloney said the District's baseline funding formula is "one of the fairest in the country," but public schools have other advantages over charter schools, such as access to facilities.
"What you see in many cases for charter schools is that they have to lease a facility rather than purchase a facility that's been designed to their needs," Maloney said. In D.C., that means that some charter schools often have to operate out of storefronts and other spaces that have been adapted for education. Barnaby Towns, a spokesman for a number of D.C. charter school operators, said the report appeared to come to the same conclusions as a report released in January 2012 by the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools and Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. In that report, D.C. education finance lawyer Mary Levy found that DC Public Schools receive assistance from city agencies that charter schools do not get, including facilities access, maintenance and legal assistance. Charter schools fund their facilities through a separate per-pupil facilities allowance. The DC Public Schools office, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education and the DC Charter School Board said Wednesday afternoon they had not had enough time to review the report to comment on it.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 17, 2013
The chairman of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee is using private donations to hire an outside law firm to help him craft a package of school-related legislation that would aim to lift student achievement and address points of friction between the city’s traditional andcharter schools. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) said he wants to improve upon “uncoordinated and often haphazard” efforts to retool public education in the city since the advent of mayoral control in 2007. Catania said he hopes to introduce a comprehensive bill this year that would address a broad variety of education issues, some of which are likely to provoke controversy. Major targets for Catania include streamlining enrollment lotteries for parents, adjusting how schools are funded and allocating more dollars for poor children, setting performance targets for schools and consequences when they consistently fall short, and outlining a way to decide the fate of vacant school buildings.
“We are on the verge of having an extraordinary public education system in the District that is comprised of charter schools and traditional public schools, but there are certain items that are prohibiting” that success, said Catania, who has referred to his effort as “Reform 2.0.” “The most recent round of school reform wasn’t school reform as much as it was a change in management,” Catania said, referring to an era of change that began when Michelle A. Rhee became the city’s first mayor-appointed chancellor of schools. “What I’m looking at is how we have reforms cascade into classrooms,” said Catania, who has been critical of the pace of school improvement under Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D).
Gray “welcomes the conversation” with Catania and hopes to work with the council member to avoid duplicating efforts, spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said. “Some of the things he’s talking about are things that we’ve been working on for a while now,” Ribeiro said, pointing to an ongoing study of school funding and efforts to create a common charter-school lottery date. Catania has retained lawyers in the D.C. office of Hogan Lovells, an international firm with wide areas of practice in government and industry, including K-12 and higher education. The lawyers will research school policies that have succeeded around the country, help determine what might work in the District and translate that into legislative language.
Catania, who assumed the helm of the newly constituted Education Committee in January, said he, his colleagues and their staff need the extra assistance because they lack expertise in public education and its thicket of local and federal laws and regulations. “It really is an effort to help compress our learning curve,” Catania said. “There is a sense of urgency for me in getting education reform on the right track.” It is not uncommon for council members to seek pro bono help from outside lawyers, but Catania set up a paid relationship with Hogan Lovells in an effort to accelerate the work. He is looking to raise $300,000 from private donors to pay the legal bill
For complete article, see link above.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 17, 2013
Budget cuts that Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has proposed would undermine traditional schools that are struggling to improve and to compete with charters, according to parents and activists who testified Wednesday before the D.C. Council. “It’s the ‘Hunger Games,’ school edition, ensuring a slow, resource-starved death for schools,” said Valerie Jablow, one of several Capitol Hill Cluster School parents who spoke against the cuts. Members of the council’s education committee appeared sympathetic to the complaints. “I do not support and will do everything I can to reverse these destabilizing effects. I reject the notion that we cannot do better,” said the committee’s chairman, David A. Catania (I-At Large), who said he was particularly concerned about middle-school cuts. The squeeze comes in part from a revised approach to projecting the number of students who will enroll in each school. Funding is based on those projections, and in recent years, officials have consistently anticipated more students than actually showed up for class.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said that this year he felt an obligation to set more realistic enrollment targets, which means many schools will receive less money. Stuart-Hobson Middle School, which is part of the Capitol Hill Cluster, will have to cut Spanish as a core subject, according to parents protesting the reductions. The school also stands to lose a librarian, technology teacher and two special education teachers. The school’s enrollment this year is 371 — nearly 50 students short of projections, according to budget documents. Next year’s enrollment is projected at 375, which will translate into a loss of about $500,000 from its budget. “People are going to the charters because they feel we are being abandoned,” parent Marc Smith said.
Parents described being blindsided by a decision to broaden the definition of “small schools.” Small schools — which receive less funding for librarians and other non-instructional staff — are those with fewer than 300 students. That threshold is rising to 400, a change that will affect more than two dozen schools. Schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said that raising the small-school threshold will help add 250 classroom teachers to the system. “We made a deliberate decision this year to invest in classroom and related arts teachers at elementary and education campuses,” she said. The changes come as Henderson gives principals less latitude in spending and scheduling decisions. That approach is meant to funnel more of the system’s $818 million operating budget into instruction and to ensure equitable offerings at schools across the city, schools officials said. All elementary schools are required next year to offer foreign language, art, music and physical education, although many of those positions will be part time in small schools. Not all parents are thrilled by that mandate; to meet it, their elementary schools might have to cut other programs. Middle and high school advocates said the focus on younger children leaves older students in schools with large class sizes and few electives. Henderson did not testify Wednesday. She will field budget questions from council members at a hearing on May 2.
The Washington Post
The Editorial Board
April 17, 2013
“THE FUTURE of school reform in the District depends on having assessments that are beyond reproach.” That was the explanation D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) gave for his introduction of legislation that would strengthen the integrity of public-school testing. Mr. Catania’s focus on the future is a much-needed, constructive approach to concerns about possible cheating. Mr. Catania, chair of the council’s education committee, will hold a hearing Thursday onlegislation that would make cheating on standardized tests illegal and establish some test-security protocols for the city’s traditional and charter public schools. The District has no laws or regulations focusing on test integrity or security. If the legislation is passed, Washington would join 10 states that have laws on the books.
The hearing comes amid renewed attention into allegations of cheating on standardized tests during the tenure of former chancellorMichelle A. Rhee. Several investigations have been conducted into student testing by the public school system. All — including inquiries by the D.C. inspector general and the U.S. Education Department’s inspector general with the participation of the U.S. attorney — concluded that no widespread cheating occurred. But the public airing of a 2009 memo from a schools consultant about possible cheating is seen by critics of Ms. Rhee as a smoking gun that widespread cheating occurred and was covered up. The memo, which was known to investigators, contained no proof of cheating and warned that “much of what we think we know is based on . . . incomplete information.”
Mr. Catania has said he will ask Chancellor Kaya Henderson and Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby, both set to testify Thursday, about the memo. But The Post’s Emma Brown reported that the council member has ruled out a full-scale investigation as duplicative and not useful at this point. Without question, a better use of the council’s resources would be to assess the protections put in place by school officials when issues about the assessment tests arose five years ago. Results from the tests (“before” and “after” scores are used to measure progress) now make up 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.
Opponents of school reform seize on any allegation of cheating — clearly the exception and not the rule for educators dedicated to getting students to learn — as an argument to eliminate standardized testing. It’s wrong-headed thinking that would return public education to the days when schools didn’t know that 30 percent or 50 percent or even 70 percent of their students weren’t proficient in basic reading and math — and were under no pressure to do anything about it.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 17, 2013
D.C. Council Member Kenyan McDuffie on Wednesday renewed his criticism of the city’s inspector general for conducting an “anemic” investigation of test-cheating allegations in D.C. Public Schools. In a strongly worded letter to Inspector General Charles Willoughby, McDuffie (D-Ward 5) requested permission to review confidential files compiled during that investigation. The probe lasted 17 months, focused on one school and found no evidence of widespread cheating.
“I am gravely concerned that your investigation did not reach further than Noyes Elementary School,” said McDuffie, a former prosecutor and chairman of the council committee that oversees the inspector general’s office. McDuffie’s request came days after thepublication of a 2009 memo that warned school administrators that teachers in as many as 70 schools might have cheated on standardized tests in 2008. Chancellor Kaya Henderson and her predecessor Michelle Rhee both said they didn’t recall receiving the memo, which an outside consultant prepared. School system officials said the memo was based on incomplete information and the memo itself — based on an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets — cautions that more information would be needed to draw firm conclusions. But McDuffie said the document raises questions about whether D.C. officials have adequately investigated long-standing suspicions of cheating.
“While I do not wish to make inflammatory accusations, the discovery of this memorandum creates doubt that your investigation thoroughly and expansively examined the allegations,” McDuffie wrote. McDuffie first raised questions about Willoughby’s cheating investigation in January. The council member made clear in his letter Wednesday that he was unmoved by the inspector general’s explanation for limiting the probe to one school. Two other investigations — by a DCPS-hired company and a federal inspector general — also found no evidence of widespread cheating, but neither examined the tests from 2008. Teachers and principals at schools that made large test-score gains that year were awarded thousands of dollars in bonuses.
McDuffie said there is an “alarming disparity” between the cheating probe in the District and a cheating probe in Atlanta, where officials interviewed 2,000 people before indicting 35 teachers and principals on cheating charges. Willoughby could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday evening. He will face council members Thursday morning when he testifies during a hearing on test integrity in the D.C. schools. Also scheduled to testify are Chancellor Kaya Henderson; Jose Alvarez, chief of staff for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education; Abigail Smith, the Acting Deputy Mayor for Education; and John “Skip” McCoy, chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
April 17, 2013
The District's funding of schools based on the number of students they enroll is flawed, D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania said Wednesday. All of the city's public schools, both in DC Public Schools and the charter schools, receive money through a formula that is based on the number of students enrolled at each school. This funding method is common in school systems across the country, and in jurisdictions like Montgomery County, where enrollment at public schools has been booming, per-pupil funding methods have been at the center of budget disputes. But in the District, enrollment growth is not keeping pace with projections. As a result, many schools are seeing their budgets drop despite Mayor Vincent Gray's promise of a 2 percent increase in the number of dollars per student -- at the base level, an increase from $9,124 to $9,306 per student.
The decline prevents the schools from providing the academic programs that would benefit students, Catania said. "This will not stabilize DCPS."
He suggested the city adopt a formula that allows more funding for schools with higher percentages of students who are not native English speakers or come from low-income families, who often need additional support to keep up in math and reading. For those schools where enrollment — and as a result, the budget — is slated to increase, the additional funds will be spent largely on meeting new systemwide requirements, rather than paying for programs the school's leadership wants, Catania said. "What money does get there, the principal is completely hamstrung in how it gets spent." For example, DCPS is adding foreign language teachers in elementary schools this year, said Valerie Jablow, a parent at the Capitol Hill Cluster School, meaning other services get cut.
The budget cuts also disproportionately affect middle schools, Catania said, echoing concerns of dozens of residents who testified at a public hearing Wednesday on Gray's proposed DCPS budget. Because of cuts at Stuart-Hobson Middle School, one of the campuses of the Capitol Hill Cluster School, Mary Melchior, vice president of the Ward 5 Council on Education, said she is looking for charter and private schools for her own children. Hardy Middle School is slated to have its budget cut more than $500,000 -- 12 percent, according to the school's Parent Teacher Association. Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh said she is concerned that the cuts at Hardy would send students to non-DCPS alternatives. "It could not send a worse message," Brian Cohen, Hardy's PTA president, said of the cuts across the middle schools. "There's no sense of where they [in Chancellor Kaya Henderson's office] want DCPS middle schools to be in five years and how to get there."
D.C. public school funding misunderstandings [BASIS DC mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
April 18, 2013
Let's start today with the article by the Washington Post's Emma Brown regarding the Public Charter School Board's rejection of a proposal by Basis PCS to increase its enrollment for next year by 35 students. Her article on the subject contains this assertion: "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."
So how would Ms. Brown propose that revenue for charters be determined? A school establishes its budget and hires staff based upon its enrollment. If parents decide after the October 1 student count to withdraw their children then I doubt that all of these pupils came from one class. In all likelihood the ones that leave are distributed among the student body. Therefore, is a charter supposed to receive less funding and fire teachers because some instructors may have lost a few individuals? This is operationally impossible.
The reporter's suggestion is especially unfair considering that the allocation of money for DCPS facilities for years has been based upon student enrollment estimates, not an actual count. Mayor Gray is now trying to change this system but based upon yesterday's D.C. Council hearing this suggestion is not going to go very far. “I do not support and will do everything I can to reverse these destabilizing effects. I reject the notion that we cannot do better,” Ms. Brown quotes Council Education Chairman Catania asserting in the face of parent complaint that the traditional schools are seeing their budgets cut.
But lower spending on the traditional schools is exactly what this city needs. Although DCPS has claimed that it allocates about $18,000 a term per pupil, the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson for years has been saying the number is approximately $29,000. No one believed him. This figure has now been confirmed in a new study by the Walton Foundation that puts the amount at $29,145.
All of us should really be giving charters a standing ovation considering the academic achievement they are recording while spending $17,000 less per student than DCPS. Just imagine what they could do for even money.
But don't worry. Mr. Catania is going to fix all of this. Yesterday it was revealed that he is about tohire lawyers from Hogan Lovells to help him create a new plan to reform education in the nation's capital. Never mind that the School Reform Act put the traditional schools under Mayoral control And I guess he gives no legitimacy to the notion that charters are under the authority of the PCSB. I grasp that when you live in Washington, D.C. you consider turning to attorneys a natural step. I say we are headed for a complete mess.
The Washington Times
By Cheryl K. Chumley
April 16, 2013
National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — are pushing to organize in charter schools in several cities around the nation. The Wall Street Journal reported that the efforts are particularly underway in Chicago, San Diego and Philadelphia.
Labor leaders say they are trying to make inroads into charter schools because teachers are complaining about low pay and subpar working conditions, Newsmax reported. Political watchers, however, suggest a different reason: Union membership has hit record lows, and leaders are scrambling to find new sources of funding. An estimated 12 percent of the nation’s charter schools are unionized.
So far, Chicago’s charter schools have opened their doors to the idea of unionization. The United Neighborhood Organization in that city is giving the AFT contact information for 400 teachers and agreeing to a union meeting on school grounds, Newsmax reported.
Mailing Archive: