- D.C. releases proposed school boundaries and far-reaching student assignment policies
- It turns out DC can learn from NYC about charter school facilities
- Congress Should Promote Charter Schools
D.C. releases proposed school boundaries and far-reaching student assignment policies
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 5, 2014
D.C. officials released a proposal for new elementary school boundaries Saturday, the first comprehensive overhaul of the politically sensitive partitions in four decades.
The proposed new lines — redrawn to adjust for schools that are overcrowded or underused and to address travel or safety issues — could affect thousands of families. But even more far-reaching than the reconfigured map is a set of three policy proposals the city also unveiled at a public meeting, parts of which could fundamentally change how students are assigned to traditional public schools.
One scenario is a refined version of the current arrangement, which gives families the right to attend their neighborhood schools from elementary through high school, with an option to apply for out-of-boundary slots elsewhere.
But the other proposals envision more radical changes, giving parents broader choice but also more uncertainty. Under one scenario, families moving into a new home would not know for sure which elementary, middle or high schools their children would attend because admissions would be based on a form of lottery.
That would be a notable shift away from traditional neighborhood schools in a city that has grappled with the question of whether such schools can thrive — or even survive — in the face of a fast-growing charter school sector.
Officials will settle on a plan after considering community feedback in coming months. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) is scheduled to release a final policy in September that would take effect in fall 2015. But Gray’s defeat in Tuesday’s Democratic primary has injected an element of uncertainty over whether his decisions will actually take hold. He will leave office at the beginning of next year.
D.C. Council members Muriel Bowser, the Democratic nominee for mayor, and David A. Catania, the independent she will face in the general election, have said they cannot commit to supporting Gray’s plan. Bowser, who stopped by Saturday’s meeting at Dunbar High School in Northwest, declined to comment on the three proposals.
“I’m going to read them first,” she said.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith addressed the issue Saturday when she presented the proposals to more than 120 parents and community members. She said staff and stakeholders have poured countless hours into thoughtful planning and intend to devote much more time in coming months.
“I would hope that anyone coming into the mayor’s seat will respect that process,” Smith said.
Officials planned to focus on redrawing boundaries. But Smith said they quickly realized that there were many larger issues facing the District, a city of dramatically uneven education options, with just one-quarter of students attending their neighborhood schools.
“Given how families are currently behaving, where there’s so much movement already, it seemed like the right thing to do: to step back and look at how we are approaching the broader questions of student assignment,” said Smith, who is leading a 20-member committee that will make recommendations to Gray.
The prospect of new boundaries and student-assignment policies has triggered enormous anxiety among parents across the city, who have flocked to meetings with questions about what the process might mean for their children and property values. In Washington, as in most jurisdictions, where students go to school is a matter fraught with race and class tensions. The proposals on the table almost certainly will generate significant debate.
The most intense disagreement may come from the conflict between creating more options for families by expanding lottery-based admissions and establishing predictability by guaranteeing rights to neighborhood schools.
“I think these changes are, in the short-term, built around the retention of young white people,” said Randall Chandler, a Northeast Washington father who sends his daughter across town to Hardy Middle School because he finds his local school lacking. “I’ve been here a long time, and I want my child to have access to a great education, too.”
Judson Greif, who lives across the street from Capitol Hill’s School Within School, a highly sought-after citywide school, has a different perspective. Greif’s son didn’t get into the school on his first try in the enrollment lottery. “Predictability is much greater than choice in terms of importance. That way you can plan,” he said.
Some families who bought homes in Upper Northwest because of access to good schools — especially Alice Deal Middle and Wilson High — have pledged to fight any proposal to replace that right with a lottery.
Two of the policy proposals contemplate giving children the right to attend pre-kindergarten at their neighborhood school. Currently, all pre-kindergarten enrollment is determined by lottery, which means families have no guarantee that their children can attend a school near home.
The right to neighborhood pre-kindergarten was popular with many parents at Saturday’s meeting. But it would come with challenges, especially figuring out how to shoehorn more students into already crowded elementary schools. Some see it as a step away from diversity in a city where housing patterns are segregated by race and class.
“The schools are going to be all black, all Hispanic,” said Nydria Humphries of Southeast Washington, who worries that it will be more difficult for children from east of the Anacostia River — where many schools are almost entirely African American — to get into integrated schools. “We want our kids to be able to get along with people of other races.”
The proposals also float the idea of four new middle schools, including an application-only school east of the Anacostia River. The others would be in the central part of the city, perhaps at the old Shaw Middle School, not named in the proposal and sitting empty; another in the southern part of Ward 4 in Northwest Washington, perhaps where the old MacFarland Middle is located; and another in the northern part of Ward 4.
Each plan offers some provision for setting aside a percentage of seats in each school for out-of-boundary students, something that does not currently exist. Students from low-performing schools — a term the city has not yet defined — would have, in many cases, preference for those out-of-boundary seats.
The Dunbar meeting was the first of six planned for this month. Smith said that the proposals are not set in stone and that it is important for parents to weigh in on which elements they do and do not support.
Here are outlines of the three policy proposals, which Smith’s office calls “policy examples”:
Policy Example A
Of the three proposals, this one departs most dramatically from the current system.
Preschool admissions would continue to be lottery-based, but elementary-school enrollment would be very different. Instead of having the right to attend an assigned neighborhood school, children would be entitled to a seat in one of three or four schools in a “choice set” near their homes, with a lottery determining admissions.
Charter schools could agree to join a choice set under this scenario, which means they would accept neighborhood children instead of conducting citywide enrollment lotteries. At least one school in each choice set would have to offer some kind of special program, such as Montessori or dual-language instruction — a feature that Smith says would force the school system to provide more such special programs in every part of the city.
Instead of feeding automatically from an elementary school into a middle school, children would have the right to attend one of the two middle-grade schools nearest their home address, with admissions based on preference but not guaranteed.
A citywide lottery would determine high school admissions, with students who live nearby a school or have a sibling already enrolled in a school getting preference at that school.
Policy Example B
This proposal most closely mirrors the current system, although there is a big shift in early childhood education: 3-year-olds from low-income families would have the right to attend their neighborhood schools, if preschool is offered there, and all 4-year-olds in the city would have that right, as well.
Students would have the right to attend one elementary school based on the newly proposed boundaries. Each elementary school would feed into one middle school and one high school. Students who gain a spot — via lottery — into an out-of-boundary elementary school would be able to continue with their classmates to feeder middle schools and high schools.
The boundary review was initially driven in part because of overcrowding at two coveted Northwest schools, Deal and Wilson.
Parents in several neighborhoods worry that redrawn boundaries could cut them out of Deal and Wilson. But almost all schools that feed Deal and Wilson would continue to do so under the one proposal that guarantees a right to a neighborhood middle and high school.
The exceptions would be Eaton Elementary, which would feed Hardy Middle and then Wilson, and Oyster-Adams Bilingual, a K-8 school that would send students to Cardozo High School. The scenario also considers the possibility of a new high school in Northwest to relieve the pressure on Wilson, the only comprehensive high school west of Rock Creek Park.
Policy Example C
This proposal is something of a compromise between the first two. It guarantees that 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds can go to their neighborhood schools for pre-kindergarten and gives children the right to attend one elementary school based on the new boundaries.
Middle-schoolers would enter a lottery to gain entrance into one of two or three middle schools near their homes. High school admissions would be conducted by citywide lottery, without any preference for students living nearby.
It turns out DC can learn from NYC about charter school facilities
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
April 7, 2014
A couple of weeks ago I asked whether the nation's capital could learn from a charter school facility task force that was formed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Well it turns out that State's legislation came up with a solution for finding these alternative school permanent homes that should be adopted here.
After the NYC Mayor rejected co-location in traditional public schools for three new Success Academy charters, while allowing five others to proceed, there was an outpouring of public opinion against the move. Charter supporters descended on Albany to voice their support for charters. The result was groundbreaking legislation that Governor Cuomo has backed and is committed to signing.
Going forward any new NYC charter school, or one that is expanding, will be guaranteed space in an existing traditional school or the city will have to pay rent to provide it a facility in a commercial building.
Groundbreaking.
The one oversight of the bill is that charters that currently pay rent are not covered under the new law. I put excellent odds on this to be corrected in the near future.
But why should this remedy be so unique? Charters are public schools like the traditional ones, and here in Washington, D.C. they deserve the same treatment most charters in New York are now going to receive. It makes little sense to provide charters with a facility allotment per student each year only to have this money go back to developers, or in the case of locating in shuttered DCPS buildings, back to the city in rent. As we elect a Mayor come this November let's see which candidate really supports charters by committing to providing them with the same commitment to space that those in the city to the north receive.
Congress Should Promote Charter Schools
The American
By Arnold Kling
April 6, 2014
There is bipartisan agreement that the American economy needs entrepreneurship. There is bipartisan agreement that our education system could stand some improvement. Charter schools are a development that addresses both of these needs. Entrepreneurs have been putting energy and innovation into the charter school effort, and we are starting to see positive results.1 Now is the time for Congress to provide funding to states to set up the apparatus needed to facilitate further charter school growth.
As of now, the progress of charter schools is very uneven. In some locations, such as Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and the state of Arizona, charters are educating a large portion of K-12 students. In other locations, such as Maryland and Virginia, charters are hardly a factor at all.
The legal environment determines whether charter schools thrive or are stunted. Some states inhibit educational entrepreneurship by making it difficult for founders to obtain accreditation or facilities. Some locations freeze the number of charter schools at a low level. Many require charter applicants to obtain approval from adversarial public school boards. Others restrict land use in ways that effectively make it impossible for a charter school to find facilities.
The recent battle over charter schools in New York City illustrates both the problem and a potential solution. Newly elected mayor Bill de Blasio attempted to exercise a personal vendetta against charter school operator Eva Moskowitz by trying to close her Success Academy charters. This backfired, leading to legislation, passed at the state level with support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, designed to protect charter school entrepreneurship while at the same time demanding rigorous evaluation of charter school performance.
Federal legislation could achieve a similar purpose. It would provide grants to states to support the administrative apparatus needed to ensure that charter school operators are given both a fair opportunity to offer educational alternatives and timely audits to ensure that they meet their responsibilities to students and parents. The grants should be sufficient to cover much more than the cost of this administrative apparatus. That way, recalcitrant states will have a strong incentive to adopt best practices for approving and evaluating charter schools.
The administrative apparatus includes:
- a body to evaluate charter applications promptly and reasonably. This requires staff to develop policies and procedures and to evaluate applications. This body should also have the authority to issue findings to schools concerning issues of malfeasance or poor performance. Finally, it will have the authority to shut down schools that are unable to correct serious deficiencies.
- an organization to work with local communities to enable charters to find facilities.
- an organization to audit charter schools, making sure that funds are not misappropriated.
- an organization to gather performance information on charter schools and to make this data available to parents so that they can make informed choices.
The federal legislation would be designed to encourage states to create an environment in which charter schools are easily launched and easily shut down. Making it easy to start a charter school ensures that entrepreneurial energy and innovation will not be stifled. However, the ability to shut down poorly performing charter schools is at least as important. The benefits of charter schools cannot be realized if low-performing charter schools are not quickly identified and their shortcomings addressed.
To receive funds under the law, a state would have to set up the apparatus described above, including an oversight board for charter schools. One mission of the board would be to encourage new entry and competition. The board should have a streamlined process by which charter schools can obtain accreditation and facilities with which to operate. That process should provide for a level playing field, not favoring government-run schools over charters schools, or national charter school companies over local entrepreneurs.
The other mission of the state board would be to establish criteria for evaluating charter schools and conducting such evaluations. New charter schools should be audited early and often. Once they become established, charters can be audited less frequently, although performance data should still be collected and published. While schools should have an opportunity to address adverse audit findings, the board should have the power to shut down schools that fail to take prompt action to deal with serious issues.
Of course, it is vital that the criteria for charter evaluation be focused on results, not on enforcing particular educational methods or techniques. The state board must respect the autonomy of charter schools and the choices made by parents.
There is a risk that government encouragement of charter schools could turn into a stifling embrace. However, carefully crafted federal legislation could serve to advance entrepreneurship in education.