- D.C. releases new boundaries proposal with emphasis on neighborhood schools
- Still waiting for ideas that will help schools
- After lottery's second round, about 2,500 students are still not matched with schools
- Ideas floated for future use of Fillmore School
- With California tenure ruling, a Democratic divide
- SIMMONS: With Cantor leaving, don’t give up on school choice
D.C. releases new boundaries proposal with emphasis on neighborhood schools
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 12, 2014
D.C. officials on Thursday put forth a new proposal for public school boundaries that would maintain a system of neighborhood schools while providing a pathway for children, particularly those who are disadvantaged, to gain access to schools outside their immediate communities.
The proposal would redraw the city’s boundaries for elementary, middle and high schools in an effort to adjust for decades of school closures and demographic change that created a patchwork of overlapping attendance zones, leaving some schools overcrowded while others were underused.
It also attempts to create a more coherent, consistent and predictable school system, part of an effort to keep the city’s families from fleeing to charter schools or the suburbs, particularly at the middle school level, when many families have been choosing to exit. The shifts, which align with Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s recent efforts to bolster offerings for middle-grade students, would come with three new neighborhood middle schools and one new selective middle school open to students across the city.
Tens of thousands of children would see their attendance rights change if the proposal is adopted. It would usher in particularly dramatic shifts among middle and high school boundaries and would significantly shrink the attendance zones for Alice Deal Middle and Wilson High, Northwest schools that are two of the city’s most sought-after and have boundaries that are political lightning rods.
Eastern High’s boundary also would shift significantly, with students east of the Anacostia River — another political fault line — reassigned to Anacostia High.
The city’s re-commitment to neighborhood schools comes in the wake of enormous resistance to a previous set of proposals released in April, which had considered replacing neighborhood schools — which students have a right to attend based on their home addresses — with lottery admissions.
“We believe strongly that this document reflects public input,” said Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, who heads an advisory committee that is working to overhaul city school boundaries for the first time in four decades. “Overwhelmingly, what we heard was people wanted a guaranteed system of right.”
Even with the most controversial elements of a policy change now off the table, the newest suggestion for an overhaul is likely to generate fierce debate. School boundaries in any city are more than lines on a map; they shape communities and real estate markets, and they are often fraught with tensions over race and class.
The new proposal now goes out for another round of feedback, starting with three public meetings next week. The advisory committee plans to send a revised set of recommendations to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) in August, and Gray is expected to announce the final policy in September, with changes taking effect in fall 2015.
But it is unclear whether Gray’s decisions will take hold after he leaves office in January, as it will be up to his successor to implement the changes. Two of the people vying for his job, Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser and independent candidate David A. Catania, rejected the initial proposals, saying none of them could be adopted as written. Carol Schwartz, who announced her independent candidacy this week, has said the process should be halted until a new mayor is in place.
Politicians and parents have repeatedly questioned whether it makes sense for the city to spend so much energy overhauling boundaries when so many schools are in need of improvement. Smith acknowledged that school quality varies widely across the city, but said that the committee concluded that a smart revision could help strengthen schools and families’ connections to them.
“We are on an unsustainable course, and we can either bury our heads in the sand or say, all right, how can we devise a way forward?” Smith said.
Thousands of students across the city currently have rights to attend more than one elementary school, an artifact of past school closures. Others have school assignments that don’t align with one another: A student’s assigned elementary school might feed into a middle school that is different than the middle school attendance zone in which that student lives.
The proposed boundaries would do away with those multiple and overlapping rights, giving each student the right to attend one elementary, one middle and one high school. Students in schools that offer specialized programs, such as dual-language instruction, would also have the right to feed into middle and high schools that offer the same specialized program.
New assignments would take effect beginning in 2015, but it would take years for new policies to fully kick in because of grandfathering provisions meant to minimize disruption for individual families. Children in second grade or younger next year would be subject to the new middle school assignments.
The most profound changes would happen at the middle school level, where about half of students would see their rights change if the proposal is adopted.
Those shifts are mostly because the city’s K-8 schools — which offer limited academic and extracurricular options for middle-schoolers and have struggled to attract families — would be converted to elementary schools, with older students assigned to three new neighborhood middle schools.
The proposal also adds an application-only school east of the Anacostia River at the old Ron Brown Middle School building, an effort to begin to spread specialized programs more equitably across the city.
Most high school boundaries would also shift significantly, with some of the biggest changes at schools in the fastest-gentrifying parts of the city, such as Cardozo and Roosevelt. Cardozo’s zone, which currently extends far into Northeast Washington, would become an entirely Northwest school, encompassing wealthier neighborhoods around Dupont Circle and downtown that are currently zoned to Wilson.
Some of the most controversial changes are likely to be those that affect access to Wilson and Deal. Wilson’s attendance zone, which currently covers nearly one-third of the city, would shrink to an area almost entirely west of Rock Creek Park, the whitest and most affluent part of the District.
Several neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park, such as Crestwood, would be cut out of both Deal and Wilson, an idea that Bowser, who represents that area on the D.C. Council, has previously said she will not endorse.
Besides redrawing boundary maps, the advisory committee issued 39 separate policy recommendations that also could have far-reaching effects.
Those recommendations include provisions meant to address vocal concerns from some parents that reinforcing a system of neighborhood schools only exacerbates the city’s segregated housing patterns. The proposal would set aside 10 percent of the seats in every school for out-of-boundary students; at-risk students would get priority at the city’s most affluent schools.
Starting in 2018, an additional 10 percent of the city’s sixth- and ninth-grade seats also would be set aside for out-of-boundary students, an effort to create new entry points into middle and high schools.
The committee also recommends that the school system guarantee access to pre-kindergarten for families assigned to Title I low-income schools, which account for the majority of traditional schools across the city. Currently, pre-kindergarten admissions are entirely by lottery.
That change could have the effect of drawing more families — including middle-class families — into their neighborhood schools, opening the possibility that they might then stay in the traditional school system.
The proposal also says that some schools recently closed for low enrollment, such as Ferebee-Hope, Kenilworth and Marshall elementaries, should be reopened to offer all students adequate access to a walkable school.
“Families want a city-wide system of neighborhood public schools that is invested in equitably and that provides predictable and fair access to high quality schools in communities everywhere in this city,” the committee wrote in a letter introducing its proposal.
The debate over boundaries in recent months spurred many parents and activists to argue for greater coordination and planning between traditional and charter schools, saying that it makes little sense to shake up boundaries without considering the impact of current and future charters.
The committee acknowledged that concern and called on the city to address the need for joint planning in the future, but stopped short of recommending specific changes.
Still waiting for ideas that will help schools
The Northwest Current
By Stephanie Maltz and Chris Sondreal
June 11, 2014
On or about June 12, the second set of school boundary, feeder pattern and student assignment policy proposals will be released for public review and comment.
It has been eight months since this process was announced and just two months since the first trio of options was released. We are left with just a handful of months for our lame-duck mayor to take action on the recommendations. So what’s going to happen?
After months of closed-door meetings with the D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, and Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith’s appearance at countless community meetings, we feel we can safely say we’ve seen the largest exercise in civic engagement in our city in recent years.
Was the deputy mayor listening to the public? Will all the survey and other informal data that has been collected be considered? Will the minimal feedback from wards 7 and 8 — where the plurality of D.C. students reside — have an impact? We still don’t know.
We sincerely hope that this process has pulled back from choice sets and returned to the deputy mayor’s original three ideas that, in her own words from October 2013, reflect “what families want” — namely clarity, predictability and access to highquality school options.
We hope that the controversial choice sets — which would turn all school admissions into minilotteries — are gone, and that in their place we will see an emphasis on improvement of school quality citywide.
In our view, the recommended plan of action must clear a number of hurdles to be acceptable:
■ The proposal should not be one-size-fits-all. For instance, while some communities reject the idea of the “education campus” (a facility that combines elementary and middle or middle and high), Ward 2’s School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens embraces the arrangement. Capitol Hill’s School Within a School draws students from across the city — as opposed to a single neighborhood — and the school community there seems to prefer it that way. Successful experiments like these should be changed only with caution and buy-in from a sufficient number of stakeholders.
■ The proposal needs to advance school quality citywide. As we said on these pages in April, we call on the deputy mayor and her consultants to improve schools across the city to create more equity and to breathe enthusiasm into moribund neighborhood public schools. Although people flock to Ward 3 because its schools offer great educational opportunities, the city’s own data shows that people citywide would prefer to go to their neighborhood school. Success is going to require major long-term investment and vision.
■ The proposals need to help D.C. Public Schools function as an integrated system of schools. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the plan also must recognize the need for alignment between neighborhood elementary schools and the middle schools and high schools they feed. Programmatic elements and curricula must be aligned and coordinated. Principals need to be brought together under individual superintendents to assure the system is coherent as a whole.
Finally, whatever the final draft proposals are, we strongly recommend that D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson — who has been, to date, mum on the process — quickly report her institution’s ability to adopt the deputy mayor’s proposal. (After all, Josephine Bias-Robinson, her chief of family and public engagement, sits on the advisory committee.)
The school system needs to provide estimated budget impacts and an implementation timeline before the proposals proceed. This information is crucial because, frankly, D.C. Public Schools has an image problem.
Many parents distrust its bureaucracy, so the system needs to put its best, most trusted people on the front line on this — its principals. Proven leadership with evidence of past success in turning a dysfunctional, disconnected school system with pockets of success into a thriving one with a standard of success will be essential for whatever comes next.
We do recognize that government has a role in making decisions about school boundaries for which it might be impossible to find consensus; however, we find the process to date to be a public relations exercise with little basis in data or impact analysis
We are headed into uncharted but potentially exciting new territory. We encourage people to look beyond traditional school versus charter ideology and become engaged in a discussion about what is best for our entire city.
After lottery's second round, about 2,500 students are still not matched with schools
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
June 13, 2014
The results of the second round of DC's school lottery are out: 58% of applicants were matched with schools, and of those 86% got one of their top three choices, according to DC officials.
Although the percentage that got one of their top choices is about the same as in the first round, the percentage that got matched at all is significantly lower. In the first round, 71% found a match. The difference in match rates isn't surprising since fewer seats were available this time around, said Sujata Bhat, executive director of My School DC, the entity that runs the lottery.
About 6,000 students entered the second round, as compared to over 17,000 students in the first round.
The lottery included most charter schools, as well as DCPS schools that are selective or specialized. In addition, students applying for DCPS preschool programs or out-of-bounds slots at neighborhood schools could enter the lottery.
About 5,000 students were not matched to any school after the first round. The second round was open to those applicants as well as to those who didn't participate in the first round.
Only about 18% of applicants in the second round were unsuccessful applicants from the first round, according to Bhat. That amounts to a little over 1,000 applicants. The remaining 5,000 or so were entering the lottery for the first time.
The 2,500 or so students who didn't get matched this time around can now apply through the My School DC website for any schools that interest them. Information about schools that still have openings is posted on the site.
Some highly ranked charter schools still have slots open. Paul PCS Middle School, for example, has 76 openings in 6th grade and 86 in 7th. Washington Mathematics Science Technology has 35 slots available in 9th grade and 37 in 10th. And Achievement Prep has 25 in 4th grade and 15 each in 5th and 6th.
Below is a chart showing the data on the second round by grade level.
As schools take applicants from their waiting lists, Bhat said, some families that haven't yet been matched will receive offers.
Students who receive a slot through the lottery are not automatically enrolled in a school. They must first submit paperwork directly to the school. Some of them fail to do that, creating openings for those who have been waitlisted.
Bhat said that data about the ultimate rate of successfully matched students won't be available until October, when final enrollment figures will be available.
Later this year an independent audit will evaluate the year's lottery, the first of its kind to be held in DC. But My School DC is already planning some changes for next year.
Bhat said the biggest change is that My School DC will manage waiting lists centrally instead of having schools do it themselves.
"This will bring more transparency to the system for parents," she wrote in an email, "and also help to reduce roster shuffling."
Bhat said that My School DC is also planning to improve the application and to conduct better parent outreach. This summer My School DC will gather parent feedback on the application and the overall process through focus groups and surveys.
You can also submit feedback on the lottery via email at feedback@myschooldc.org.
Ideas floated for future use of Fillmore School
The Northwest Current
By Kat Lucero
June 11, 2014
What’s to become of the old Fillmore School, the late-19th-century building at 1801 35th St.?
George Washington University announced in May that it plans to sell the property that has served as the Corcoran College Art + Design’s Georgetown/Burleith home for over a decade. The university recently finalized a deal with the Corcoran to assume ownership of the downtown art school and gallery.
What’s to become of the old Fillmore School, the late-19th-century building at 1801 35th St.?
George Washington University announced in May that it plans to sell the property that has served as the Corcoran College Art + Design’s Georgetown/Burleith home for over a decade. The university recently finalized a deal with the Corcoran to assume ownership of the downtown art school and gallery.
Parts of the Fillmore property, which is comprised of a 26,000-square-foot building and a parking lot, are adjacent to Hardy Middle School, which is expected to experience high growth in the near future. It’s also within walking distance of Stoddert Elementary School, which is already at capacity despite a recent renovation and expansion.
“It’s incumbent for us to try to get that building back to address school capacity issues,” said Matt Frumin, a member of the D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, which has been deliberating with the city to amend the school system’s boundaries and enrollment policies.
Brian Cohen, a Glover Park advisory neighborhood commissioner and parent of a Hardy Middle School student, agreed.
“Given the fact that it’s a school building, it has a potential to help with some of the overcrowding issues that the city is trying to address. I think that the city should keep its options” open, he said. He noted that the draft proposal to shift school boundaries calls for removing the Burleith neighborhood from Stoddert’s boundaries, which the school’s PTA opposes.
Frumin, who has brought up the idea of using Fillmore as a school with city officials, said this concept could “be part of the next phase of the discussion this summer” regarding boundaries and admission policies.
The 1893 Fillmore School used to be part of the D.C. Public Schools system. The elementary school closed in the 1970s, but the city kept the facility open to house arts classes, leading to the creation of the Fillmore Arts Center. The award-winning program still exists, serving more than 3,500 students from several Northwest public schools, but it is now located within Hardy’s building. The city sold the Fillmore building to the Corcoran for $1.5 million in the 1990s, and since then the historic red-brick building has hosted undergraduate and graduate classes.
In 2010, the Corcoran came close to selling the property to EastBanc, a development company that was planning to convert it into 14 condo units while adding town houses on the parking lot. But the sale — reported at $6 million to $9 million — fell through after Corcoran and EastBanc weren’t able to agree on terms, according to a Corcoran spokesperson. EastBanc doesn’t have plans to revive the project at this time, according to a spokesperson.
George Washington University’s May announcement of the final merger agreement said the university wants to consolidate all Corcoran courses at the 500 17th St. campus across from the White House.
“Any profit from the sale [of Fillmore] would go toward the renovation of the Flagg building or the operation of the GW Corcoran School,” wrote Maralee Csellar, a university spokesperson.
With California tenure ruling, a Democratic divide
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 12, 2014
When a California judge struck down tenure and other job protections for teachers this week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) both applauded, revealing fissures in the once-solid alliance between labor unions and the Democratic Party.
“It’s a pivot point but one that’s been coming for a long time,” said Charles Barone, a former aide to Miller who is policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group formed in 2007 that promotes many ideas opposed by unions.
On Tuesday, a Los Angeles judge ruled that tenure and other job protections central to union contracts violate students’ civil rights to an education under the state constitution as the worst teachers are sent into schools populated by poor, minority children.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case, Vergara vs. California, called it a landmark decision and said they intend to challenge tenure in a state-by-state campaign.
A spokeswoman for Duncan said he supports giving tenure to teachers who measurably help their students learn but that California’s policies did not give allow for meaningful assessments.
As Duncan and Miller celebrated the ruling, other Democrats attacked the verdict.
“If critics of teacher unions are concerned about the quality of education students may be receiving, then we should be doing more to provide teachers with opportunities to enhance their skills, not strip them of their workforce protections,” said Rep. Mark Takano (Calif.), a former teacher who received $10,950 from the National Education Association in 2012, making the union the third-biggest donor to his congressional campaign.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sent a sharply worded rebuke to Duncan on Thursday.
“You added to the polarization,” Weingarten wrote in a letter to Duncan. “And teachers across the country are wondering why the secretary of education thinks that stripping them of their due process is the way to help all children succeed.”
In California, the divisions within the Democratic Party are on display in the race for state school superintendent.
The incumbent, Tom Torlakson, a Democrat, is a former legislator with strong union backing. Torlakson, who was named as a defendant in the Vergara case along with Gov. Jerry Brown (D), said after the ruling that “teachers are not the problem in our schools, they are the solution.”
Brown has declined to comment on the ruling.
Torlakson is being challenged by another Democrat, Marshall Tuck, who was president of Green Dot, a chain of public charter schools. Green Dot is one of a few charters with unionized teachers.
Tuck sided with the plaintiffs, calling the state’s teacher protections “a broken system.” He and Torlakson will face off in November.
Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said fractures within the Democratic Party over education policy began in earnest with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.
The signature education law of President George W. Bush was written in part by Miller and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) despite opposition from the teachers unions, which were against the law’s requirements for standardized testing and penalties for teachers and schools that did not make adequate academic progress.
The divisions have only grown with the Obama administration’s embrace of charter schools, the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers and other policies often favored by conservatives.
“The rift between the teachers unions and the so-called ‘New Democrats’ has been evident for some time,” Henig said. “Miller went off the unions’ favored course on No Child Left Behind, and Duncan has been at odds with the conventional union position almost down the line on charters, test-based accountability, etc. The Democratic Party is more internally divided on education than it is on most major issues.”
From New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, high-profile Democrats have been battling teachers unions, a dynamic inconceivable a generation ago.
Miller said he does not favor eliminating tenure for teachers. “But the way the system is constructed in California is broken, and it needs to be fixed,” he said.
He said new laws are needed that protect teachers from arbitrary firings but also ensure that ineffective teachers are easily removed from the classroom. “I’m not saying it’s easy,” Miller said, “but it’s doable.”
SIMMONS: With Cantor leaving, don’t give up on school choice
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
June 12, 2014
There are so many reasons soon-to-be-former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost in Virginia’s Republican primary on Tuesday that it’s impossible to list them all in this space. So, in the interests of time and space, suffice it to say voters decided to kick him to the curb.
A professor from Randolph-Macon College will likely replace Mr. Cantor, as both the Republican and Democratic contenders for his 7th District seat teach there.
But while most of the media focus on who will take Mr. Cantor’s seat, I’m concerned about who will push, prod and cajole to ensure school choice doesn’t flounder.
Choice is but one aspect of education reform.
Consider the scandal at the Veteran's Administration.
Once federal lawmakers received the hard, cold facts about our ailing servicemen and women being shuffled around on waiting lists and/or tangled in red tape, what did they do?
The right thing.
Within weeks of media exposes and daily news stories revealing the mismanagement and bureaucratic laissez-faire at VA facilities across the country, Capitol Hill, moving with all deliberate speed, drew up legislation, debated it and passed bills that are now expected to be reconciled and on President Obama’s desk by month’s end.
It’s a budget buster, for sure — calling for spending at least $35 billion in new funding for additional facilities, doctors and nurses, among other things.
The key point here is that they broadened health care options for vets, who no longer will be tied to one-size-fits-all VA facilities — and well they should have since more than 57,000 veterans have been waiting 90 days or better just to get an initial appointment at VA centers.
That vets had to wait is unconscionable.
And so is the fact that too many schoolchildren — our schoolchildren — are still stuck in failing schools while Washington devises (and revises) wait-and-see plans.
Let our children go.
Washington moved with warp speed to give vets more options, even amid criticism that they were trying to privatize veterans’ care.
Various tea party groups have various platforms or various issues. Some I agree with, some I do not.
I do, though, stand with the Tea Party Patriots on this item: Education funding should follow children, not bureaucrats.
Mr. Cantor carried water for the three-pronged approach of traditional public schooling, public charter schooling and vouchers for nonpublic schools.
He will be replaced in Congress. But what about the children and their options?
Will school-choice support wane?
It’s time to push the issue — at warp speed.