FOCUS DC News Wire 6/10/13

 

Gray sends D.C. Council a proposal to give chartering authority to schools chancellor [Achievement Prep PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

June 7, 2013

 

It’s official: Mayor Vincent C. Gray on Friday transmitted legislation to the D.C. Council that would give Chancellor Kaya Henderson the authority to approve new charter schools.

 

Gray (D) announced his intention to seek chartering authority for Henderson during his weekly radio address Sunday, and the bill has been under legal review since.

Gray has said that chartering authority can be uses as a tool to turn around struggling schools and spur rapid student achievement gains. It would, for example, offer a legal pathway for the high-performing Achievement Prep Public Charter School to take over Malcolm X Elementary, as Henderson has proposed.

 

But some critics wonder why Henderson, who already has broad authority to manage the city’s traditional schools, needs to bring in outside operators such as Achievement Prep to trigger improvements. Others question whether a school system leader, responsible for managing a large bureaucracy, is equipped to approve charters — and able give offer them total autonomy.

 

Council Member David A. Catania (I-At Large) is also seeking to give the chancellor the ability to open schools free from municipal regulations and teacher union contracts. But Catania’s proposal to allow for “innovation schools” — part of a package of education legislation he introduced this week — stops short of giving Henderson chartering authority. Innovation schools, while not necessarily neighborhood matter-of-right schools, would still be part of the traditional system.

 

Here are the main elements of Gray’s bill:

 

• With only two exceptions, DCPS-chartered schools would be “identical” to schools chartered by the D.C. Public Charter School Board (“PCSB”) and operate with the same independence, according to Gray’s transmittal letter to Chairman Phil Mendelson.

 

• The two exceptions: Test scores posted by DCPS-chartered schools will be included in DCPS proficiency rates, and DCPS charters will be able to elect to guarantee access to neighborhood kids. The attendance boundary for a DCPS charter school would be determined by the chancellor.

 

• Charter schools can currently choose to offer preference in enrollment lotteries to children of founders and siblings of current students. Gray is seeking to add three new preferences, including for children of full-time employees at the charter school, students with disabilities and students who live near the charter school.

 

The latter preference would apply to children living within an attendance zone established by the charter authorizer — either the D.C. Public Charter School Board or the chancellor.

 

• Some charter schools are “dependent” on DCPS for special education, which means that the traditional school system is liable for ensuring that those charters must comply with federal law in delivering services to students with disabilities. Gray’s bill would require all charter schools to take on that liability for themselves.

 

• Currently all charter schools fork over 0.5 percent of their annual budgets to the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which uses the money to fund its operations. The bill would raise that administrative fee to 1 percent. Catania has proposed the same increase in his package.

 

The District’s old school board had chartering power until 2007, when then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty took control of the city’s traditional school system. Now the independent D.C. Public Charter School Board is the only entity that can authorize new charter schools in the city.

 

David Catania’s education power grab

The Washington Post

Editorial Board

June 8, 2013

 

WITH MANY District students not proficient in math or reading, it is hard to fault D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) for wanting to focus attention on the need for improvement in public education . Some of the ideas that fuel his wide-ranging legislative effort may have merit. But the imperious way he has tried to seize control of the education agenda — setting himself up as an opponent of Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) — is cause for concern.

 

Mr. Catania last week unveiled legislation, which he characterized as a “blueprint for the future of public education,” that would reshape education policy. The seven bills, affecting both the city’s traditional and charter public schools, target school funding, accountability, assessments and other areas. Mr. Catania, entering his sixth month as head of the council’s newly constituted education committee, said he hoped to spur better education outcomes, particularly among poor students. “Everything we’re doing here, I might have it completely wrong. But at least I’m trying,” said Mr. Catania, who is critical of what he sees as stagnation of the school reform launched in 2007 with mayoral takeover of the public school system.

 

The proposals, crafted with the assistance of a law firm hired with private donations, will require careful scrutiny and debate. There are interesting ideas (such as how to better target money toward students who need the most help) and some that seem to duplicate policies already in the works (such as the move to a common school lottery). Others renew the worry that the council is seeking to reconstitute itself as the old school board in dictating policy that undermines the authority of the mayor and ties the hands of school officials.

 

The uncharacteristically tart reaction of D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson — “I just don’t believe that these seven proposals are going to move us to where we need to go” and “we have to ask ourselves, what is the role of the legislature?” — underscore that concern, as does the way in which the legislation evolved. Mr. Catania has called the development of the bills a collaborative process in which stakeholders were consulted. That doesn’t square with what some participants described as a sham with him calling all the shots. The Post’s Emma Brown, who sat in on sessions, reported that attendees were not fully briefed but instead were asked to respond to a series of questions to gauge support for disparate parts of the plan. It is telling that Mr. Catania did not meet one on one with the mayor, and his continued snubbing of Abigail Smith, Mr. Gray’s highly qualified deputy for education, is childish.

 

Mr. Catania, who hasn’t ruled out a run for mayor, allowed to us that there are things he might have done differently. He recently extended an olive branch to the administration by offering to make the mayor’s proposal to give chartering authority to Ms. Henderson part of the hearings he plans on his legislation. He promised there would be full debate with nothing set in stone. That’s good to know, given that council members were clamoring to sign on as co-sponsors of the bills without having bothered to read them. It’s important that the council tread carefully. Lengthy, political distractions are not what the system and its children need.

 

 

Gray and Catania propose increase in PCSB revenue by over 70 percent

The Examiner

By Mark Lerner

June 10, 2013

 

Last week the Washington Post's Emma Brown revealed details of the legislative bill D.C. Mayor Gray will send to the Council to allow DCPS Chancellor Henderson to become a charter school authorizer. Contained in the act is this tidbit as stated by Ms. Brown, "Currently all charter schools fork over 0.5 percent of their annual budgets to the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which uses the money to fund its operations. The bill would raise that administrative fee to 1 percent." The reporter also mentions that D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania has included the same language in his education proposals.

 

As you remember last summer the PCSB increased the amount charged to the schools they regulate by $500,000 by altering the 0.5 percent of total school revenue they collect to include Federal grant money. At the time I called instead for the D.C. Council to increase its share of PCSB funding beyond the approximately $950,000 that it currently provides. However, the PCSB did not go this route.

 

Now our political leaders are suggesting that the PCSB needs an additional $3.2 million, which equates to a total budget increase for the organization of slightly over 70 percent.

 

At the meeting last year in which PCSB executive director Scott Pearson first proposed a funding increase he said that the average charter school authorizer across the U.S. charges 2.5 percent of total school revenue, so at the new level of 1 percent his organization would still be significantly below this level. Still, I wonder what level of regulation these new dollars would bring. I'm looking forward to the PCSB providing a justification for such a large increase in revenue.

 

 

Backed by Marriott and Hilton, Hospitality High School moves to a permanent location [Hospitality High PCS and Maya Angelou PCS mentioned] 

The Washington Post

By Abha Bhattarai

June 9, 2013

 

Crystelle Moe, 19, has always liked to cook.

 

But it wasn’t until she began attending Hospitality High School, a public charter school backed by some of the region’s largest hotel companies, that she realized she could make a career of it.

 

“The first time I heard about this school, I didn’t know what it was,” said Moe, who graduated in May. “I thought it was about hospitals. But the teachers got us involved and the more I learned, the more I began to love it.”

 

In the fall, Moe will head to the University of Maryland Eastern Shore to major in hospitality management and minor in culinary arts.

 

Since its opening in 1999, more than 2,000 students have graduated from Hospitality High School, the first industry-specific public charter school to open in the District. About 60 percent of the school’s graduates have ended up working at hotels and restaurants. More than 75 percent enroll in college.

 

“Career opportunities in hospitality are amazing, but unfortunately the industry is often overlooked,” said Edward Baker, general manager of the W Washington D.C. hotel, who serves on the board of Hospitality High School. “To be able to introduce teenagers to the industry and hopefully inspire them to have a career here later is really a great opportunity.”

 

On Wednesday, the school celebrated the opening of its first permanent location.

 

The move had been years in the making. Hospitality High School was first proposed in the 1990s, when the current convention center was being built. In recent years, the school has operated out of the third floor of Roosevelt High School in Petworth.

 

It took about two years to find, buy and renovate the current building, which formerly housed the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, on the corner of 9th and T streets NW, said Tiffany Goudout Williams, executive director of Hospitality High School. The building has about 20 classrooms, an industrial kitchen and a hospitality suite that includes a mock lobby where students can practice their skills.

 

“For many years it has been thought that it would either be college or a career,” Michael Durso, chairman of the school’s board, said at last week’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. “There’s really no reason our young people cannot choose to do both. Our high school has been working to dispel that myth.”

 

The area’s hospitality associations and hotel giants — Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International and others — have made sizeable investments in the school. Marriott donated $500,000 for the purchase of the new property. Hilton is investing $100,000 toward the renovation of a new kitchen. In all, members of the Hotel Association of Washington D.C. have pooled together more than $1.4 million for the charter school.

 

There are more than 120 hotels in Washington, with another 23 under construction, according to Destination D.C., the marketing arm of the District. That adds up to tens of thousands of jobs — more than any other sector in the area, except for the federal government.

 

“Our industry is the most labor-intensive industry in the country,” said Richard Marriott, chairman of the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation. “We have a tremendous need for educated and talented young people. There is a limitless amount of opportunity in the hospitality industry.”

 

It was that need that sparked the idea for the charter school, Williams said.

 

“Hotels were coming to us saying they were getting two-thirds of their managers from outside the city,” she said. “So we thought, why not educate the citizens of the District for these jobs?”

 

In addition to course work in lodging management, culinary arts, and travel and tourism, the charter school also connects students with summer jobs, internships and shadowing opportunities

 

“Many of our students have struggled at traditional schools,” Williams said. “But they thrive here because we’re connecting education to real life.”

 

Today, the school’s alumni have degrees from a range of schools (Montgomery College, Temple University, Michigan State University) and work at hotels such as the Capital Hilton, Wardman Park Marriott and Gaylord National.

 

Many current and former students said they valued the school’s small classes (most are capped at 17). Others said the curriculum gave them the opportunity to try out their interests before picking a career path.

 

“Once you get out of high school, you have to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life,” said Kortney Washington, a rising senior. “I was like, let’s just see what hospitality is like. I wanted to try something different.”

 

Washington says she has always wanted to be a lawyer. Now, after three years at Hospitality High School, she would still like to be a lawyer, but one who specializes in hospitality issues.

 

“That’s my plan A,” she said. “My plan B is to work at a hotel.”

 

 

Prince George's County woman to plead guilty to stealing from D.C. charter school [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Naomi Jagoda

June 9, 2013

 

A former temporary employee at the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy in D.C. is expected to plead guilty to stealing more than $75,000 from the place where she once worked. Darlene Ford, of Suitland, was charged in April with theft from a program receiving federal funds. Her plea agreement hearing is scheduled for Monday in federal court in D.C., court records show.

 

The Chavez Schools has campuses located in the Capitol Hill, Columbia Heights and Kenilworth-Parkside neighborhoods. According to a charging document, the entity received at least $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Education. Ford was a temporary employee at the Chavez Schools during the early part of 2010 and had been placed at its finance department by a temporary accounting staffing firm, according to a charging document. At the Chavez Schools, Ford was responsible for processing vendors' invoices for payment, maintaining accounting records to ensure that vendors were paid in a timely manner and presenting vendor invoices and supporting documents so that the finance director could sign the checks to pay the vendors.

 

But from January to March of 2010, Ford made out 10 checks from the Chavez Schools' Bank of America operating account to fictitious vendors. The checks were then cashed and used for the personal gain of Ford and/or her friends and associates, according to the charging document. Ford carried out her scam by accessing the Chavez Schools' accounting system and changing the names on pending checks from entities that had actually done work for the schools to the names of fictitious vendors. After she made the changes, she signed the checks, forging the signature of the head of the schools' finance department. The checks to the fictitious vendors totaled $75,350, court papers state.

 

Ford is the second former D.C. charter school employee to be accused this year of stealing money from an educational institution where she worked. In January, Monique Murdock, former executive director of the now-closed Nia Community Public Charter School, was charged with embezzling $29,000 from the school, according to a court filing.

 

How to survive our education battles

The Washington Post

By Jay Mathews

June 9, 2013

 

The latest fashions in the American education system are, as usual, inspiring raucous debate. I try to take sides in these arguments. Isn’t it my job to explain who’s right? But I wonder.

 

There is much chatter, for instance, over education historian Diane Ravitch’s fiery assault on Ben Austin, founder of the Parent Revolution organization. The California “parent trigger law” Austin sponsored just cost a Los Angeles principal her job. Fifty-three percent of parents at the Weigand Avenue Elementary School in the city’s Watts neighborhood signed a petition to fire Irma Cobian after three years of low scores. The school board obeyed the law and let Cobian go.

 

But 21 of the 22 teachers at the school said they were so upset at the firing that they would seek transfers to other schools. Ravitch called Austin “loathsome” for ruining “the life and career of a dedicated educator.” Ravitch said “there is a special place in hell” for those who administer and support Austin’s “revolting organization.”

 

We are also embroiled in a national argument over the new Common Core standards — and associated curricula — being installed in 45 states and the District. It would take at least a semester course to understand the jargon in that fight. But some combatants, among them former George W. Bush administration official Williamson Evers, have been clear. They say the new standards are an intrusion by the federal government into local school decisions.

 

I am against the parent trigger. Most parents lack the time, energy and expertise to determine what has to be done to fix their schools. They can be easily manipulated by cynical outsiders, as has happened in some of the parent trigger clashes. If they are unhappy with their school, the better move is to switch to another one, perhaps a charter.

 

I am leery of the Common Core. The educators who drew up the new standards are smart, conscientious people, but research indicates that changing standards and curricula rarely bring improvement in learning. A few curricula, such as Success For All and Direct Instruction, have proved to raise achievement. But even successful programs go out of fashion when policy makers are jazzed by the hottest new methods.

 

Is that a bad thing? Sometimes the new stuff is better. Even if it isn’t, putting the brakes on change for change’s sake is so much at odds with the American character, it would be a waste of time to try.

 

We have been fiddling with our schools for two centuries. Nearly all of us attended school, so each has an opinion on what needs improvement. Some quarrels, like use of phonics, are several decades old.

 

What we rarely acknowledge is that our schools have gotten better over time. Test score averages have not risen much lately, but that is only one measure. A bigger slice of our young population — including the poor or disabled — is learning more. Dropout rates are at historic lows. The sophistication of high school classes is breathtaking to those of us who grew up in the middle of the last century. Foreign experts note that Americans have won 48 percent of the Nobel prizes in science, medicine and economics. They study our schools to see how we have inspired such creativity.

 

I may not think Ben Austin’s parent trigger will fix many schools, but it does force educators to pay more attention to family complaints about classes that don’t work. The Common Core standards may not transform learning, but they give great teachers a chance to try more challenging lessons.

 

We’re Americans. We’re never satisfied. That national trait can be aggravating, but it has gotten us very far. We should celebrate our educational battles, even if our language sometimes gets out of hand.

 

Who’s Minding the Schools?

The New York Times

By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

June 8, 2013

 

IN April, some 1.2 million New York students took their first Common Core State Standards tests, which are supposed to assess their knowledge and thinking on topics such as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and a single matrix equation in a vector variable.

 

Students were charged with analyzing both fiction and nonfiction, not only through multiple-choice answers but also short essays. The mathematics portion of the test included complex equations and word problems not always included in students’ classroom curriculums. Indeed, the first wave of exams was so overwhelming for these young New Yorkers that some parents refused to let their children take the test.

 

These students, in grades 3 through 8, are taking part in what may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history. By the 2014-15 academic year, public schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia will administer Common Core tests to students of all ages. (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have so far held out; Minnesota will use only the Common Core English test.) Many Catholic schools have also decided to implement the Common Core standards; most private, nonreligious schools have concluded that the program isn’t for them.

 

Many of these “assessments,” as they are called, will be more rigorous than any in the past. Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there’s little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability.

 

It is the uniformity of the exams and the skills ostensibly linked to them that appeal to the Core’s supporters, like Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Bill and Melinda Gates. They believe that tougher standards, and eventually higher standardized test scores, will make America more competitive in the global brain race. “If we’ve encouraged anything from Washington, it’s for states to set a high bar for what students should know to be able to do to compete in today’s global economy,” Mr. Duncan wrote to us in an e-mail.

 

But will national, ramped-up standards produce more successful students? Or will they result in unintended consequences for our educational system?

 

By definition, America has never had a national education policy; this has indeed contributed to our country’s ambivalence on the subject. As it stands, the Common Core is currently getting hit mainly from the right. Tea Party-like groups have been gaining traction in opposition to the program, arguing that it is another intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans by a faceless elite. While we don’t often agree with the Tea Party, we’ve concluded that there’s more than a grain of truth to their concerns.

 

The anxiety that drives this criticism comes from the fact that a radical curriculum — one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents — was introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about the Common Core.

 

WHAT became the Common Core began quite modestly. Several years ago, many organizations, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, whose members are top-ranking state education officials, independently noticed that the content and scoring of high school “exit” tests varied widely between states. In 2006, for instance, 91 percent of students in Mississippi passed a mathematics exit exam on the first attempt, while only 65 percent did so in Arizona. At the same time, students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress often differed from the state results.

 

This was not just embarrassing: it looked unprofessional. The governors and the school chiefs decided to work together to create a single set of standards and a common grading criteria. Private funding, led by some $35 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allowed the coalition to spread its wings. Aligning tests became an opportunity to specify what every American child should know.

 

In 2009, an education consultant named David Coleman was retained to help develop the program, and he and other experts ended up specifying, by our count, more than 1,300 skills and standards. Mr. Coleman, a Rhodes scholar and the son of Bennington College’s departing president, is known as a driven worker as well as for his distaste for personal memoir as a learning tool. Last year, he was selected to lead the College Board, which oversees A.P. exams and the SATs.

 

Of course, the 45 states that have decided to implement the Common Core did so willingly. While federal agencies did not have a role in the program’s creation, the Obama administration signaled to states in 2009 that they should embrace the standards if they hoped to win a grant through the federal program known as Race to the Top.

 

For all its impact, the Common Core is essentially an invisible empire. It doesn’t have a public office, a board of directors or a salaried staff. Its Web site lists neither a postal address nor a telephone number.

 

On its surface, the case for the Common Core is compelling. It is widely known that American students score well below their European and Asian peers in reading and math, an alarming shortfall in a competitive era. According to the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, the United States ranks 24th out of 34 countries in “mathematics literacy,” trailing Sweden and the Czech Republic, and 11th in “reading literacy,” behind Estonia and Poland. (South Korea ranks first in both categories.) Under the Common Core, students in participating states will immediately face more demanding assignments. Supporters are confident that students will rise to these challenges and make up for our country’s lag in the global education race. We are not so sure.

 

Students in Kentucky were the first to undergo the Common Core’s testing regimen; the state adopted the standards in 2010. One year later, its students’ scores fell across the board by roughly a third in reading and math. Perhaps one cannot blame the students, or the teachers — who struggle to teach to the new, behemoth test that, in some cases, surpasses their curriculums — for the drop in scores.

 

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