- No End in Sight to School Funding Unfairness [FOCUS OpEd]
- Neighborhood Admissions Preference for Charter Schools to be Studied
- National Science Test Shows Only Slight Improvement
- Most Area Students Can't Pass Federal Science Exam
No End in Sight to School Funding Unfairness [FOCUS OpEd]
The Northwest Current
By Robert Cane
May 9, 2012
Amid D.C. Council deliberations over Mayor Vincent Gray’s $77 million supplemental spending package, the District’s public charter schools have been left reeling. A recent series of political maneuvers will dearly cost the students of these publicly funded schools.
Rumors spread before the council’s vote on the mayor’s supplemental package. Among the more serious included a suggestion that charter schools’ quarterly payments from the city might be stopped unless the council voted on the spending package.
Sadly, this is merely the latest example of adults playing politics with children’s education in the District.
Recently, in an announcement made hours before the mayor spoke at an annual gathering of D.C.’s public charter school community, his office announced $9.4 million for charters to cover “spending pressures” — wrongly implying charters had overspent their funds.
In fact, the money was already owed to charters under an automatic funding formula through which the city funds them and traditional public schools. The mayor misleadingly categorized this money as a “supplemental” increase to charters’ budgets, despite the fact that the city would have to pay it anyway.
Some $2.8 million would have been provided to charters because their enrollment of special-education students increased this year. A further $6.6 million was earmarked for higher-than-expected summer school enrollment. When student enrollment increases, the city has to increase funding, as schools receive money according to the number of students they enroll.
The real reason for miscategorizing these funds appears to have been to provide political cover for the mayor’s proposal to supplement the D.C. Public Schools budget to offset $25.2 million of actual overspending. Unlike charter schools, which have to cut back if they overspend their budgets, the school system routinely exceeds its appropriation. Eventually the council approved a supplemental appropriation for D.C. charter schools of $6.971 million.
Under D.C. law, city funds to all public schools are supposed to be paid via a funding formula designed to ensure that students at both types of schools are funded equally. Instead, the mayor sought to increase public education funding by $25.2 million, and allocate 100 percent of that money to D.C. Public Schools.
These shenanigans will widen the city funding disparity between charters and traditional public schools, which has increased over the years as the city has increasingly resorted to funding the school system outside the legally mandated funding formula. What makes this more depressing is that Mayor Gray promised to close the city’s funding disparity. Over the past five years, District charter students received between about $1,500 and $2,500 less annually than their D.C. Public Schools peers in city funds.
Charter schools are a lifeline upon which D.C.’s disadvantaged students depend. Their high-school graduation rate is 80 percent compared to 53 percent for D.C. Public Schools.
The administration claims it has raised city funding for charter facilities from $2,800 per student to $3,000. But only $2,800 is guaranteed in city funds: the same amount guaranteed by his predecessor in his final year. Before Mayor Adrian Fenty cut this allowance, it was $3,109 per year.
In his budget, Mayor Gray proposes to fund the$200 difference from a federal program that is intended to support D.C. Public Schools and D.C. charter schools, as well as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which funds scholarships for low-income District students. Yet this $200 per-student portion of charters’ funds could disappear, following the mayor’s decision not to allocate any of this money to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program this year. If Congress retaliates by pulling federal funding, charter students would lose.
As an indicator of the unfairness that the city’s public charter school students face, the mayor proposes to set facilities funding for D.C. Public Schools at $7,992 per student — over two and half times what the city provides charter students.
The city’s charter students need the D.C. Council’s help in closing this funding gap. The budget negotiations are council members’ chance to force progress toward what the mayor promised but hasn’t delivered.
Robert Cane is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools.
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
May 10, 2012
District officials are moving closer to changes in the law that would allow charter schools--currently open to all eligible students citywide-- to grant admissions preference to families in surrounding neighborhoods.
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown has included in the FY 13 budget legislation provisions for a task force to study the issue and report its recommendations by Oct. 1. The budget comes up for the first of two council votes on Tuesday.
Right now only siblings of current students and offspring of founding board members get preference in charter school admissions. If enrollment exceeds available space, admission is decided by lottery. Brown said the robust growth of the city’s charter school sector--now serving 41 percent of the city’s public school population on 98 campuses--makes it increasingly difficult to justify excluding families who live nearby. The issue is likely to become even more urgent in neighborhoods where underenrolled traditional public schools may be closed next year and possibly replaced with charters.
“I think everyone knows that the current system as a model is not going to work as we continue to move forward,” Brown said in an interview Thursday.
The task force would be headed by D.C. Public Charter School Board Chairman Brian Jones or a designee. It would also include D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright, State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley (or designees) and two charter school leaders. Wright has expressed support for the idea of neighborhood preference.
Brown said the preference could be established by setting aside a certain number of seats in schools, or weighting the lotteries in some way.
Some charter leaders are leery, concerned that it would erode their autonomy. At a budget hearing last month Scott Pearson, executive director of the charter board, was guarded in his comments. But some schools are said to be interested, and Brown said that the time is right for the change, which has been implemented in New Orleans and Chicago.
“This is a pattern that is taking place throughout the country,” Brown said.
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
May 9, 2012
National tests measuring science knowledge among eighth-graders show slight improvement compared with those of two years earlier,but one-third of all students still lack a basic understanding of the physical, life and earth sciences, according to a federal study made public Thursday.
The tests showed that black and Hispanic students had made slightly more progress than white students, making a tiny dent in the persistent achievement gaps between the racial groups.
The gender gap also has proved stubborn, with boys continuing to outperform girls in the science test, a trend consistent with results from 2009, the previous year the test was given.
Despite barely significant increases in performance among most every group, scores remained flat for top-performing students. Just 2 percent of all students tested were considered advanced.
Private school students outpaced public school students nationwide. And students who reported that they regularly performed hands-on science projects in class scored higher than students who less frequently did that kind of class work.
The study is based on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The tests are given in different subjects and periodically to fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders across the country.
The tests, often called The Nation’s Report Card, are the only continuing and nationally representative assessment of what students know.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the slight increase in test scores and narrowing of the achievement gap were promising but that the country has a long way to go. “This tells me that we need to work harder and faster to build capacity in schools and in districts across the country,” Duncan said in a statement. “We have to do things differently; that’s why education reform is so critical.”
Gerry Wheeler, interim executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, was blunt. “This is dreadful,” he said.
Wheeler said No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law, is partly to blame, because it emphasized reading and mathematics at the expense of science. “As a country, we’ve backed off on science,” he said. “We even have members in elementary schools who say, ‘My principal told me to stop teaching science.’ ”
It is difficult to say how the 2011 results fit into a larger trend line of student performance. The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the test, changed the framework for the science exam two years ago, making comparisons to tests prior to that impossible.
In Virginia, students scored higher than the national average and posted higher scores in 2011 than they did in 2009. The performance gap between white students and blacks and Hispanics did not change between 2009 and 2011.
In Maryland, students performed the same as the national average for public school students. The average Maryland scores were four points higher in 2011 than in 2009 but the percentage of students performing at the proficient and basic levels did not change over the two years. The performance gap between white students and other racial groups, as well as between poor students and those from more affluent families, did not significantly change between 2009 and 2011.
One bright spot in Maryland is the fact that the gender gap seems to have largely disappeared. On average, boys and girls scored alike on the science test, and the same percentage of males and females were deemed basic or proficient. But a greater percentage of boys than girls were deemed advanced.
Students in the District turned in the worst performance in the region, performing significantly below the national average. The achievement gap between whites and blacks was nearly twice as wide as the national average, and the gap between white students and Hispanics was also wider than the national average. D.C. schools did not participate in the voluntary testing in 2009, so no comparisons to earlier results can be made.
The results come as corporations, the military and the federal government are growing increasingly concerned about U.S. students and their mastery of the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and math.
President Obama, who hosted a science fair at the White House in February and spoke about the need to improve science and technology education in his State of the Union address, wants to train 100,000 new math and science teachers over the next decade. He intends to contribute federal dollars to a $100 million program led by the Carnegie Corporation to create more science teachers.
Those efforts are not enough, Wheeler said. “The message is getting lost at the local level, and that’s where the change has to happen,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s pretty much a scatter gun thing — there’s no united effort to bring these children forward.”
Compared with 2009, the average science scores in 2011 were one point higher for white students, three points higher for black students and five points higher for Hispanic students. There were no significant changes in scores for Asians.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
May 10, 2012
Most eighth-graders in the District, Virginia and Maryland did not pass a federal science test in 2011, even as they increased their scores slightly over those from 2009.
In Maryland, only 32 percent of students showed "proficiency" or higher on the 2011 Nation's Report Card, the results of which were released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education. The picture was only slightly sunnier in Virginia, where 40 percent of students understood with proficiency scientific concepts such as the collision of tectonic plates.
Students in the District ranked last in the nation, as just 7 percent passed the federal test, with an average score of 112, well below the national average of 151 for public schools.
Nationwide, just one-third of eighth-graders made the grade on the science test.
"When you consider the importance of being scientifically literate in today's global economy, these scores are simply unacceptable," said Gerry Wheeler, interim executive director of the National Science Teachers Association.
Virginia ranked 13th in the nation, while Maryland -- whose average score was just one point above the national average -- ranked 30th. Both Maryland and Virginia made progress over 2009, with Maryland improving from 148 to 152 points, and Virginia jumping from 156 to 160. Scores improved in just 16 of the 47 states that participated in both 2009 and 2011; the District wasn't allowed to participate in the 2009 science testing because of its small population.
"Without question, today's report is a sobering reality check," said D.C. State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley. "Science proficiency is critical for eighth-grade students' high school, college and career readiness, and these results reflect a deficit that we will work diligently to overcome."
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said she was "deeply disheartened," while Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said he was "deeply troubled." Both pledged to better implement the District's science standards, which topped the nation's in an independent report.
Bill Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education, noted that Maryland's four-point jump is among the bigger increases in the nation.
"But we know we have a long way to go to make certain all of our students are prepared in science and the other [science, technology, engineering and math] disciplines," Reinhard said.
Across the nation, only 54 percent of students could identify the atoms in a water molecule, while 15 percent could give a complete answer regarding an experiment about the life cycle of mosquitoes.
While math and reading have long been the bread and butter of American testing, science has surged in importance as the nation looks to keep up with technological advancements abroad and fill jobs focused on these fields.
Jeniffer Harper-Taylor, president of the Siemens Foundation, said that STEM-related job openings have grown at triple the rate of unrelated jobs in the last 10 years.
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