- Small percentage of displaced students enrolling in D.C. public schools
- 86 percent of kids in closing D.C. schools haven't re-enrolled
- Op-Ed: A school for tomorrow being built in today's Ward 8 [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Hosanna Mahaley Jones, D.C. state superintendent of education, to resign [Hospitality High PCS mentioned]
- Catania's reforms, part 1: School funding and autonomy
- Northeast D.C.’s Educare a preschool model for the nation
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 11, 2013
Only 13 percent of students from closing D.C. schools have signed up to stay in the traditional school system next year, Chancellor Kaya Henderson said Tuesday, raising questions about whether the school closures are driving families into charter schools. Henderson said that enrollment numbers could be low because students are waiting to turn in paperwork for schools they intend to attend. But she acknowledged that the school system must intensify its efforts to market itself to families over the summer.
“At the end of the day, the success of our consolidation effort will be judged largely by our ability to enroll students this upcoming year,” she said, testifying before the D.C. Council’s education committee Tuesday. Henderson is closing 13 underenrolled schools this month, displacing more than 2,000 students. She set a goal of persuading 80 percent of those students to enroll in designated receiving schools. Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large) pressed Henderson and her staff Tuesday, asking them to produce evidence that they have reached out to parents as aggressively as they promised to do.
Missing enrollment targets next year will mean reduced funding, programming and staffing the following year, Catania said, creating “another rendezvous with instability, the likes of which drive people from DCPS.” Of 17 designated receiving schools, eight have filled less than one-third of their available seats for next year, according to school system documents. Only five have filled more than half their projected seats. Citywide, traditional schools have filled half of their projected seats for next year.
Henderson said that many families wait until later in the summer to turn in enrollment forms for neighborhood schools, which they have a right to attend no matter when they show up. But some families haven’t signed up for other options because they “are refusing to accept that this is going to happen,” Henderson said, referring to the school closures. Council Member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) said recruitment might be slow because schools with low proficiency rates, including many traditional schools in Southeast, just aren’t attractive to parents who have many other choices.
“It’s hard for me to market something that can’t be marketed,” Barry said. Henderson said she would provide the council with monthly updates on student recruitment efforts.
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
June 11, 2013
Only 14 percent of the students who attend closing DC Public Schools have re-enrolled in the school system for the fall, schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said Tuesday. By comparison, roughly 40 percent of the school system's overall enrollment had submitted the paperwork to re-enroll in the 2013-2014 school year by May 30, according to a presentation Henderson gave at the D.C. Council on Tuesday. The school system predicts 55 percent of its 45,557 students will have submitted their enrollment forms by the end of June, compared with 54 percent of students at the same point last year, and 91 percent by the end of August.
It is not clear how many students are abandoning DCPS for public charter or private schools. Students tend to continue moving from school to school even after the new academic year starts. The school system plans to close 13 schools next month, displacing 2,168 students. Displaced students who choose to continue at their home schools -- rather than attend another DCPS school out of boundary or leave DCPS for a public charter or private school -- are slated for seats at more than a dozen other DCPS schools.
Of the receiving schools, nine have enrolled roughly 30 percent or less of their projected 2013-2014 student populations. A 10th school, Johnson Middle School ?-- which was taken off the list of closing schools in January -- has enrolled 18 students, less than 10 percent of its anticipated student body. Since the schools are the students' "home" schools, meaning they are not required to apply or be selected for the school in a lottery process, they are not required to submit enrollment forms to their new schools by a specific deadline, so long as they are enrolled in time for school to start.
But at Tuesday's hearing, D.C. Councilman David Catania, chairman of the Education Committee, worried that the delayed enrollment would create "another rendezvous with instability" for the school system. Schools are funded based on the number of students enrolled, so a significant difference between projected and actual enrollments could mean huge budget cuts. It also could determine whether the school qualifies for a full-time librarian or art teacher.
Members of the Council's Education Committee urged DCPS to do whatever it takes to make sure students are enrolled on time. According to Henderson, some principals and teachers have already begun canvassing neighborhoods. "At the end of the day, the success of our consolidation effort will be judged largely by our ability to enroll students this upcoming year," Henderson said.
Op-Ed: A school for tomorrow being built in today's Ward 8 [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Donald Hense
June 11, 2013
Last week, the board of trustees of Friendship Public Charter School and I broke ground at the site of what will become the campus of the Friendship Technology Preparatory Academy. Construction of the academy will be complete when the new school year begins in August 2014. This $22 million investment is taking place in the Congress Heights neighborhood of the District's Ward 8, an area long underserved by D.C.'s public schools. One in five Ward 8 adults is unemployed; one in two children lives in poverty; and one in two adults is functionally illiterate.
Built on the site of an abandoned McDonald's restaurant --now demolished -- the new state-of-the-art facility will include a high-tech SMART lab, which enables students to complete projects across a wide array of subject areas using the latest technology. The new building also will include a robotics lab, two chemistry labs, two biology labs and a greenhouse. The school will introduce students to 21st century skills in environmental sciences, engineering and technology, including computer-aided design, 3-D printing and gaming.
Tech Prep, like many District public charter schools, has had to renovate buildings, at great expense, that were not built or designed to be schools. The current Tech Prep facility is a former Boys and Girls Club -- less than adequate as a school space. The new building, which is on the same block as the existing campus, will stand opposite Friendship's Southeast Academy, which serves students from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, meaning that the combined campuses will serve every grade level at the same location.
Like the new building, Southeast Academy was an important boost for neighborhood regeneration. We created a schoolhouse there in 2005 by renovating and adding on to an abandoned Safeway store. Friendship's schools border the western portion of the old St. Elizabeths Hospital, where construction of new headquarters for the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security is under way. We are looking forward to building mutually rewarding relationships with this new technological hub in support of the school's focus on STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math.
Every 11th and 12th grade student will be dual-enrolled at Tech Prep, which, as a charter school, is tuition-free and open to all District residents, and in college -- at no cost to themselves, an important benefit in this low-income community. Students will earn both a high-school diploma and credit toward a college degree. The new building, designed and built by Turner Construction Co. and Architecture Inc., will serve 650 students sixth through 12th grade -- more than three times as many as when the school opened in 2009. The project is funded by public charter school revenue bonds.
Tech Prep is a college prep STEM school with a focus on environmental sciences; accordingly, the new building is LEED certified.
We hope that the new school will build on our efforts at our more established charter high school, Collegiate Academy. Collegiate's Ward 7 campus today has a 91 percent on-time high school graduation rate -- well above DC Public Schools' 56 percent rate -- and higher than the average even of Virginia and Maryland public high schools. Fully 100 percent of Collegiate's graduating class is accepted to college. Nearly 250 students graduate annually, in a neighborhood where public high schools are notorious for their dropout rates.
We believe in providing the academic rigor, mentoring, emotional supports, school culture and funds for college that are routinely available to students who attend private, suburban public and academically selective schools. Ward 8 is desperately short of the good public schools its children need and deserve. Our multimillion-dollar investment in this severely disadvantaged area will build a school for tomorrow for the children who live in Ward 8 today.
Donald L. Hense is founder and chairman of Friendship Public Charter School.
Hosanna Mahaley Jones, D.C. state superintendent of education, to resign [Hospitality High PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 11, 2013
The District’s state superintendent of education, Hosanna Mahaley Jones, is stepping down to help her husband recover from a heart attack. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) announced Mahaley Jones’ departure Tuesday.
“I applaud Hosanna for her leadership,” Gray said in a statement. “I thank her for her service to all of our residents, and send my best wishes and prayers to her and her family.”
Gray said he would launch a nationwide search for a replacement to lead the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, an agency responsible for policies that affect learners from early childhood to adult education in both traditional and charter schools. OSSE’s duties included administering federal grants and college tuition assistance, conducting the city’s annual school enrollment census and overseeing the administration of standardized tests.
Mahaley Jones, who was chief of staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan during his tenure as chief executive of Chicago’s public schools, has led OSSE since 2011. Under her leadership, the agency won a waiver from the most burdensome provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law. OSSE also succeeded in regaining control of its own school buses and winning the dismissal of a 17-year lawsuit over the transportation of D.C. special education students.
But the young agency, established in 2007 under the same law that established mayoral control of the city’s schools, has often struggled to find its footing. Charter school advocates have resisted OSSE’s efforts to establish citywide policies on discipline and other issues, arguing that charters are not subject to most city regulations. And high staff turnover has hampered OSSE’s ability to meet goals under the city’s $75 million Race to the Top grant, according to federal officials.
Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children’s Law Center, praised Mahaley Jones for laying the groundwork for OSSE to be stronger and more effective. But Sandalow said the agency is failing to meet the needs of some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, including illiterate adults and special-needs children younger than 3. Mahaley Jones has been largely absent from her post since late winter, when her husband of 18 months, who lives in Chicago, fell ill. Her last day at OSSE is scheduled to be July 26.
Gray named Emily Durso, assistant superintendent for post-secondary education, to lead the agency on an interim basis while the mayor searches for a permanent replacement. Durso has served on the boards of directors of the University of the District of Columbia and Hospitality High, a D.C. charter school. Durso’s professional experience has largely been outside the field of education. She has been president of the Hotel Association of Washington and vice president of marketing for Techworld Trade Associates.
Greater Greater Education
By Rahul Mereand-Sinha
June 11, 2013
Four days ago, Councilmember David Catania announced 7 proposals to restructure DC Public Schools' operations. I'll look at each of his proposals in turn, starting in this article with a proposal to change how much money each school receives, and who controls it. Presently, DCPS gives funds to each school based on the size of its student body. With a few exceptions, every school receives an equal amount of money per student. Councilmember Catania wants to change the equation and instead give more money per student to schools that offer vocational programs, have low graduation rates, or whose students come disproportionately from low-income households. Catania would also give principals more control over school budgets. They would get a significant amount of autonomy over how to spend their money, like charter school principals do.
Proposal would increase funding at struggling or vocational schools
Catania is proposing an idea which other school districts around the nation refer to as "weighted student funding." It assumes that some students need extra resources in order to have the same opportunities as other students, and provides those students' schools with extra funds to supply those resources.
The reasons for this extra need are not complicated. Schools with a poor track record often have to fight a culture of failure both on campus and off, especially with students from disadvantaged households. Children from families struggling with poverty face a variety of extra difficulties and often need special attention to help them focus on school amidst those other challenges. Meanwhile, vocational schools require special equipment and specially trained teachers, and those naturally lead to higher costs.
Many school systems use this approach, occasionally called the Seattle model, to help disadvantaged children keep up with their more privileged classmates. Boston, Denver, and Baltimore already have, or are in the process of implementing, weighted student funding. Governor Jerry Brown of California has proposed this approach as well.
Locally, Montgomery County Public Schools has employed this approach since the 1999-2000 school year, while Fairfax County uses a similar system under the Priority Schools Initiative, though they distribute the extra funds as fixed grants, rather than on a per-student basis. An NEA report from 2005 is cautiously supportive of weighted student funding, suggesting that while oversight and implementation difficulties may arise, the general effect was positive.
Bill would give principals more autonomy
In recent years, school administrators have complained of micromanagement and high overhead costs at the DCPS central office. Catania's bill would require 80% of all funds that come from city revenues (as opposed to federal Department of Education support) to go to principals directly, so they can design their own programs and determine their own budgets.
This autonomy goes hand in hand with the weighted funding. The extra funds and autonomy will enable principals to rapidly upgrade their teaching staff and explore ways to transform what's not working in their schools. Principals understand the needs of their students better than the central office; with resources and flexibility, they might find the recipe to reach students that no one has yet discovered how to help.
These changes could give DCPS schools the same array of programs and variety of approaches that charter schools enjoy while still having one consistent, system-wide curriculum. It's hard to determine how much freedom the bill would actually give each school until the plan is put into action. Nevertheless, it may give families who would otherwise send their kids to a charter school a reason to stick with DCPS, which has been losing students for years.
Will inflexibility doom these changes?
Some worry that giving schools extra funding or more budget flexibility won't result in meaningful changes if they're still subject to rigid rules. Teaching DCPS's detailed curriculum takes up most of the school day, so how much will principals be able to vary what the schools teach?
Contracts between DCPS and the teacher's union specify specific salary levels based on seniority. A principal cannot simply offer an outstanding teacher extra money to come to a school in a more dangerous neighborhood, with more difficult educational challenges. Experienced teachers, who will get paid the same no matter what DCPS school they work for, then use their seniority to avoid teaching at struggling schools. Without the flexibility, what good is providing these principals money they cannot spend?
This also could place a costly administrative burden on each school. Curriculum questions, hiring decisions, and budget management all involve skills that staff at individual schools don't typically have. DCPS centralized these tasks long ago to ensure that experienced officials made these decisions thoughtfully in a way that's not too expensive. Will much of the extra money just go to overhead within the school instead of overhead in the central office?
A 2009 study raised these issues, and is skeptical that attempts to use weighted student funding to increase equity will succeed. This contradicted the earlier NEA study, and it had the benefit of collecting more data over a longer period. However, the later study only covered schools in Texas and Ohio, which may have had other factors that rendered weighted student funding ineffective.
Will weighted funding invite abuse?
One of the challenges of education reform is that changes often result in conflicting or perverse incentives to do the wrong thing. Efforts to measure teacher performance with exam scores tempted some teachers to cheat with their students' test papers.
Will weighted school funding create an incentive for teachers and administrators to show poor performance, thus earning them extra money from DCPS? While no one will seek to avoid educating their students, it's possible that some schools may prefer to pursue projects that make them more attractive to lower-income students who come in with lower test scores.
If schools actually seek out disadvantaged students and make them the focus of educational decision-making, that could be a great outcome. It's not, though, if schools design programs to appeal to these students, but don't target them as well to correct their educational deficiencies. Or if a promising program would alienate these students, leading them to transfer to a more welcoming environment (and taking with them their funding bounty) is it possible a school might drop the idea, rather than take that risk?
Schools might also become far stricter on discipline in the later years, as each disruptive student not only makes their mission more difficult by their presence, but also potentially costs them resources that might go to more "deserving" students if the troublemaker somehow manages to graduate. While this may seem far-fetched, so would the prospect of teachers erasing and re-bubbling answers to the assessment tests seem unlikely back in 2007.
Risks do not remove the need for change
While the potential problems listed above need to be addressed, it's difficult to disagree with the NEA that both weighted student funding and school budget autonomy deserve a chance to succeed. It may be more efficient to allocate teachers centrally, but central planners only have limited quantitative data and less sense of the culture of the school. Principals can better tailor their hiring (and spending) to each student body.
Meanwhile, almost no one thinks all students cost the same amount to educate the same amount, so why should the funding formula make that assumption? Hopefully this bill will either be amended, or DCPS will take supporting action, to resolve the potential problems that exist with inflexible union contracts that will otherwise prevent any positive change from coming from this bold proposal.
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 11, 2013
Danae Queen, 2, ran down the sun-streaked hallway ahead of her mother, made a beeline for Classroom 160 and pounded on the door with her small hands. “She loves coming to school,” said her mother, Ashanit Collins, 24, as Danae burst into the classroom, scurried across the floor and climbed into the lap of her teacher, Damicka Bryan. “Hi, Miss Damicka!” the little girl chirped.
Welcome to Educare, a state-of-the-art $16 million preschool that education officials consider a model for the nation. It is part of a national network of high-quality early education facilities aimed at low-income children and funded with private and public money. Located in the Kenilworth-Parkside neighborhood in Northeast Washington, Educare is marking its first anniversary Wednesday with a visit from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who are promoting the Obama administration’s proposal to dramatically expand early childhood education.
The president wants Congress to double the federal tobacco tax — hoping to raise $75 billion in 10 years — to double the number of 4-year-olds in preschool from 1.1 million to 2.2 million. And he is seeking an additional $15 billion to educate babies and toddlers. “We’re getting close to significant improvements in early childhood learning and particularly to the country recognizing it as an important period of life,” said J.B. Pritzker, a Chicago venture capitalist and one of Educare’s primary funders.
As with other Educare facilities across the country, architects designed the District location with an emphasis on creating space for very young children. The building is filled with floor-to-ceiling windows and light wood floors and walls, and it is painted in blues and greens. Along the halls, windows are set at children’s eye levels. The facility forms a ring around an outdoor atrium with artfully arranged plantings. Two sparkling multipurpose rooms with raised ceilings provide space for children to ride tricycles, play with hula hoops, tumble on mats. There are three adult staff members for every eight children, and the lead teacher must have a bachelor’s degree.
Currently, 116 children from 6 weeks old to age 5 are enrolled in the free, full-day, year-round program. The facility is expected to reach full capacity of 171 children when its next session begins in July, said Mary Jane Chainski, a senior manager for Educare. Funding comes from a combination of private, local and federal dollars, money aimed at giving low-income youths access to the kind of education that might otherwise be available only to children from wealthier families.
Kenilworth-Parkside is an isolated pocket of high poverty in Ward 7 surrounded by the Anacostia River, Interstate 295 and a decommissioned Pepco electrical plant. About half of the residents live below the poverty line, nearly 90 percent of the families are headed by single mothers and the neighborhood has some of the highest teenage birth rates in the country.
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