- Public, Charter Students to Compete for City Sports Titles
- Parental Choice is the Best Reform to Education
- Maryland wins ‘No Child’ Waiver
Public, Charter Students to Compete for City Sports Titles
The Washington Examiner
By Brian Hughes
May 29, 2012
On Wednesday, Mayor Vincent Gray will announce that the District will award its first true citywide high school championships in sports like football, with public and charter schools competing for the same crown.
With the creation of the District of Columbia State Athletic Association, the District will award titles in boys' and girls' cross-country, boys' and girls' soccer, and boys' football in divisions I and II, beginning in fall 2012.
Public schools, charter schools and area independent schools will compete in the inaugural D.C. state championship games. The announcement will not cover winter and spring sports like basketball and baseball.
The move comes after Gray appointed gay rights activist Clark Ray, a former D.C. parks and recreation chief, as the first districtwide athletic director, part of his effort to unite DC Public Schools and charter schools on the playing field.
In announcing the new position, Gray said it was critical to ensuring charter schools -- which enroll 40 percent of the city's public school students -- could compete alongside DCPS in events like the Turkey Bowl.
The Turkey Bowl has been a Thanksgiving Day tradition in the District for the past 42 years, pitting the city's top two football teams against each other.
Local sports fanatics have long decried the lack of a championship for all high school athletes in the District, saying it kept the community from crowning a true champion on the field, limited exposure for those with athletic aspirations at the collegiate level and deprived others of what has become a sports rite of passage for high schoolers nationwide.
Under the current system, charter schools must apply for a sanction to play any team outside the DC Public Charter School Board's purview. That has become an issue, charter leaders say, when teams are set to play in an out-of-state tournament but DCPS' computers go down -- or DCPS loses the papers -- and the team can't play.
Gray will make the announcement Wednesday, alongside Ray and DCPS Athletics Director Stephanie Evans.
Parental Choice is the Best Reform to Education
The Washington Examiner
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth
May 29, 2012
The school year is almost over, but the year's debate over education reform has only just begun.
President Obama, who has opted out of DC Public Schools by sending his children to Sidwell Friends, is trying to end funding for Washington D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides scholarships to 1,600 low-income students to attend schools of their choice.
A similar 2011 attempt was blocked by Republican House Speaker John Boehner.
In contrast, last Wednesday Governor Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, announced his support for school choice before a group of Hispanic leaders at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. "Imagine if your enterprise had a 25 percent to 50 percent failure rate in meeting its primary goal," Romney said. "You would consider that a crisis. You would make changes, and fast. Because if you didn't, you'd go out of business. But America's public education establishment shows no sense of urgency. Instead, there is a fierce determination to keep things the way they are."
And New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan, speaking at the Manhattan Institute's Alexander Hamilton dinner last week, cited society's problems of crime, unemployment, homelessness and despair, and pointed to Catholic schools as "the one gritty institution that has shown to be effective in ameliorating these ills." Although his schools have to struggle for every dime, he said, "we do it twice as good at half the price."
The graduation rate for private schools averages between 98 percent and 99 percent for Catholic schools. But the graduation rate for public school children who started high school in 2006 was 75 percent in 2010, the latest year available. Data for 2011 will be announced next month.
Upward economic mobility is now more strongly tied to the quality and quantity of Americans' education than at any time in history. While there have been large increases for spending for public education, many segments of American society still have low academic achievement. Schools are failing to give children the education they need, and American children lag behind their international counterparts on many standardized tests.
The key to economic mobility is to improve students' academic performance, both in elementary and secondary school, so that they can embark upon and complete rigorous high-return college programs, or even vocationally oriented community college credentials.
With the importance of education to economic mobility, why don't more parents send children to schools of their choice? One reason is that they cannot afford to do so.
Vouchers are opposed by public school teachers unions, which spend large sums lobbying against school choice.
The National Education Association, the largest teachers union at 3 million members, and the American Federation of Teachers, with its 1.5 million members, make a vociferous case against vouchers. Required filings of these unions with the Labor Department reveal that these unions spent at least $127 million in 2011 on political activities and lobbying, and $110 million on contributions, gifts and grants.
Their officials are paid well to protect public school teachers' interests. Union bosses are enriching themselves from taxpayer dollars, through union dues extracted from teachers' paychecks. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel received 2011 compensation of $460,000, and Vice President Lily Eskelsen received $372,000.
Teachers unions have consistently used their power to protect poorly performing teachers and schools, to the detriment of children. They're against merit pay, they make it difficult to fire incompetent teachers and they're against allowing parents to choose the best schools for their children.
By sending his kids to Sidwell, the president hasn't allowed teachers unions to control his educational choices. He should not be stopping other parents from having the same opportunity.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth (dfr@manhattan-institute.org), former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
Maryland wins ‘No Child’ Waiver
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
May 29, 2012
The Obama administration granted Maryland and seven other states waivers from the most onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind, the main federal education law, but declined Tuesday to approve similar requests from Virginia and the District.
That means 19 states will no longer have to abide by the law’s toughest requirements, including that schools prepare every student to be proficient in math and reading by 2014 or risk escalating sanctions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Virginia, the District and 16 other applicants can still win approval.
“We’re still working with everybody,” Duncan said. “These were [eight] applications that were further ahead and were absolutely ready. But this is a rolling process, and we’ll keep going. We hope to have another round of announcements in a few weeks.”
In addition to Maryland, federal officials granted waivers Tuesday to Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island.
The Obama administration issued the first batch of waivers to 11 states earlier this year in response to complaints from teachers and school administrators across the country that the nation’s main education law is outdated and punitive.
Duncan said states are getting waivers because Congress has failed to revamp the 10-year-old law despite broad agreement on Capitol Hill that it is in need of an overhaul.
“We’re thrilled,” said Bill Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education. “This gives us some realistic targets when it comes to proficiency and allows us to remove some of the unfair branding of some schools.”
About one of every five public schools in Maryland is considered “failing” under No Child Left Behind — a damaging characterization, Reinhard said.
“Many of these schools are terrific but may have some trouble in one area or another with some students,” he said. “These schools would have gotten a scarlet letter when they didn’t deserve anything like that.”
Under the waiver, Maryland will no longer have to show that 100 percent of students tested are proficient in math and reading by 2014. Instead, schools will have until 2017 to cut in half the number of students who are not proficient. Maryland will also have greater freedom to determine whether schools are progressing toward that goal and what kind of action to take if a school isn’t improving quickly enough.
In addition, the waiver will allow Maryland more freedom in the use of federal dollars to educate poor children. Under No Child Left Behind, the state was required to spend a portion of such money on tutoring, whether or not it led to better results for students, Reinhard said.
“A lot of the tutoring programs were not successful, and we never felt it was a good idea to spend money where our studies showed us it wasn’t working,” he said.
In exchange for relief, the administration is requiring states to adopt changes that include meaningful teacher and principal evaluation systems, make sure all students are ready for college or careers, upgrade academic standards and lift up their lowest-performing schools. Historically, the federal government has left such decisions to states and communities.
In April, federal education officials wrote to Virginia and the District, detailing concerns about their waiver applications.
They told Virginia to create a more rigorous accountability system, expressed concern about the way Virginia planned to calculate high school graduation rates and said the state’s strategy did not do enough to hold school systems accountable for the performance of subgroups such as poor students, those learning English and racial minorities.
In their critique of the District’s request, federal officials said they were concerned by the city’s history of mishandling federal grants and its troubled record of compliance with special education laws. The officials also voiced concern about how the Office of the State Superintendent of Education — the District’s version of a state education department — will hold accountable the city’s 53 public charter schools.
Virginia and the District tweaked their plans and resubmitted their requests in the past week.
Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, said the changes Virginia has made are in line with accountability systems in states that have received waivers.
Congress has been trying to rewrite No Child Left Behind for five years, but lawmakers have been unable to agree on the appropriate role of the federal government in local education.
“We prefer a bipartisan rewrite of No Child Left Behind,” Duncan said. “Obviously, that’s not where Congress is right now. . . . Children can’t wait. Teachers can’t wait. We’re moving forward right now.”