- Jonetta Rose Barras: New Education Committee Needed Now – Not Later
- As Number of Charter Schools Grows, Enrollment of Disabled Students Lags
- Auditors Confirm: DC’s Pre-K, While Laudable, is Not Universal
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Congressman Boehner and Senator Lieberman Save Opportunity Scholarship Program
Jonetta Rose Barras: New Education Committee Needed Now – Not Later
The Washington Examiner
By Jonetta Rose Barras
June 20, 2012
During his half-victory-lap last week, interim D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson simultaneously complained about the pace of education reform and acknowledged a separate oversight committee is needed. But he continued to advocate against making such a move, at least for now.
"The council has gone through three reorganizations during this council period, which is unprecedented," he said during a series of media appearances. "I think between now and [the November general election], we should work with what we've got."
Mendelson has announced he will run in November for the permanent job, left vacant when Kwame R. Brown was forced to resign after pleading guilty to bank fraud.
Prior to 2007, the council had an independent education oversight committee. Then, the legislature passed the Public Education Reform Act, which gave the mayor control of the entire public education apparatus.
Vincent Gray, then-council chairman, placed education under his Committee of the Whole, asserting every member could be part of the oversight process. Council rules already allowed any legislator to participate in any committee -- although only assigned committee members can actually vote.
Truth be told, Gray consolidated education under him because it was a powerful political platform. That's the same reason Brown retained the structure when he assumed the job 18 months ago.
Mendelson has said he first wants to "right the ship, which is quite unsteady." If the legislature is the ship, it is sinking largely because of lawmakers' unethical conduct and for failure to provide consistent, aggressive and thorough oversight of executive branch agencies.
There are myriad reasons why a separate oversight committee for education is needed now -- not in January, as Mendelson has suggested.
According to the reform act, a "comprehensive evaluation" of public education must be conducted by Sept. 15, 2012. This five-year mandatory assessment seems to be tied to reauthorization. The council must determine "whether sufficient progress in public education has been achieved to warrant continuation of the provisions and requirements of the act or whether a new law and new system should be enacted."
The evaluation is more extensive than the regular annual assessment required under the law. It must be conducted by a third party.
That mandate, coupled with Deputy Mayor for Education De'Shawn Wright and DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson's stated school closings agenda, provides more than sufficient fuel for council action.
There also is the matter of Mendelson's campaign for chairman, which could either serve to distract from rigorous oversight or unduly ensnare important education reform issues in high political drama.
A legislator not currently running for office should be tapped to serve as chairman of the new education committee. Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells, a former Board of Education member, might be a good choice. He has helped his constituents push through critical reforms in their neighborhood schools. At-large Councilman David Catania has demonstrated an ability to conduct muscular oversight, producing notable results.
Mendelson may not agree with my suggestions. But his failure to take action could doom education reform -- and his career.
As Number of Charter Schools Grows, Enrollment of Disabled Students Lags
The Washington Post
By The Associated Press
June 19, 2012
As the number of charter schools expands nationwide, one group of students that is enrolling in those schools at a lower rate is children with disabilities.
Eight percent of students at charter schools had disabilities in the 2009-2010 school year, compared with 11 percent at traditional public schools, according to a Government Accountability Office report being released Wednesday.
The difference could be a result of several factors, including fewer parents of special education students choosing to enroll their children, charter schools discouraging disabled students from attending, and constraints on resources making it difficult for charter schools to meet their needs, the report found.
“We know that in many instances the charter schools are breaking down all the old stereotypes about who can learn and who can’t learn, whether they’re poor or minority or students with disabilities,” said Rep. George Miller, senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee. “And we want to make sure that the students with disabilities get a chance to participate in that revolution, if you will, that’s taking place.”
Charter schools, which are funded by taxpayers but operate independently of many of the laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools, have seen enormous growth over the last decade. More than 2 million students now attend charters, and the Obama administration has encouraged their expansion through initiatives like Race to the Top, the $4 billion grant competition. Many states lifted caps on the number of charter schools permitted in order to increase their chances of winning.
Advocates have praised charters for being an innovative alternative to the traditional neighborhood school, but there have been persistent concerns over accountability, access and quality.
The GAO report found significant disparities among states.
About 6 percent of students in New Hampshire charter schools had disabilities, for example, compared to 13 percent at the state’s traditional public schools. In Virginia, the number of special education students in charter schools was 11 percentage points higher than in traditional public schools. Overall, however, there were lower rates of special education enrollment at charters in all but eight states: Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wyoming.
Researchers also found there were a higher percentage of charter schools with 20 percent or more disabled students, possibly due to an increase in the number of charters that focus solely on students with disabilities. That trend is something that has many special education advocates concerned. They worry it will lead to increased segregation and could have a negative effect on how much disabled students learn.
Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said she’d like to provide schools with more assistance on special education, but said she believed the lower rates were mostly the result of parental choice.
“If they’re not selecting charter schools it’s a reflection of where parents decide to send their kids and not so much a reflection on charter schools, in my opinion,” she said.
Some charters are known among parents as “disability friendly” and have a larger pool of applicants with special needs, while those with harsher discipline policies applied to disabled students end up receiving significantly fewer, said Rodney Estvan, an education policy analyst for Access Living, an organization aimed at helping the disabled community in Chicago.
“We see very little evidence at this point that the schools are simply refusing to enroll these kids,” he said. “But we do see schools where after the kid is there for a year or two, there is a counseling-out process.”
Raquel Regalado, a member of the Miami-Dade school board, which oversees the nation’s fourth largest school district, said the charter school where she enrolled her daughter for kindergarten refused to let her child attend after she was diagnosed with autism. She’s said she’s heard from many parents with similar stories.
“The problem was they didn’t want to open the door to other special needs children,” she said.
The U.S. Department of Education is conducting five compliance reviews regarding special education students and charter schools, and has received 263 complaints over the last three years. The investigations look at recruitment and equal opportunity access, among other areas. The department plans to issue new guidance on special education at charters soon.
“The guidance issued by the last administration is still good law in lots of cases,” said Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights, referring to the Bush administration. “Some of it is outdated given the burgeoning charter movement.”
Several academic experts who study charter schools said the figures reported by the federal report were in line with what they expected to see.
“I think it reveals one of the things charter schools have to address and take seriously if they’re to make a persuasive argument that they are for all kids,” said Tim Knowles, director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute.
Knowles noted that some charters work hard not to designate students as special needs, which in some cases is positive, as there is evidence certain groups, such as African American boys, have been disproportionately labeled as special needs students when in fact they are not. In other cases, there may be students who need extra services but are not getting them.
Regalado, whose daughter is now enrolled in a traditional school, said the burden lies with local and state authorities to increase accountability, and with charters to put more resources toward special education.
“This excuse that the charter can’t do it because they’re too small or it’s one institution ... you look at the corporate makeup and you look at their reserves and you know that simply isn’t the case and that they’re taking advantage of the system,” she said.
The GAO report recommends Education Secretary Arne Duncan take measures to help charters recognize practices that could affect the enrollment of disabled students by updating existing guidance.
“This is a little bit of a wake-up call, a reminder that there’s more to be done here,” Miller said, “but I think the help can be provided on both sides of the ledger.”
Auditors Confirm: DC’s Pre-K, While Laudable, is Not Universal
Greater Greater Washington
By Ken Archer and David Alpert
June 19, 2012
DC's Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) disputed our report last week that auditors believe the District has not reached universal pre-K. But parents are being turned away across the city, and the auditors confirmed that pre-K, while it has grown significantly, is still not universal.
In a statement, OSSE suggested a fairly simple definition of "universal pre-K":
Regardless of income, if you are a parent of a District of Columbia child of pre-K age and wish to enroll them in a pre-K program, a pre-K slot is universally available in the District of Columbia for you.
However, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that children of pre-K age who wish to enroll are not finding slots. The auditors legally tasked with determining whether DC has universal pre-K don't think it is. And OSSE is not measuring what it needs to measure to really determine whether its pre-K programs have enough capacity.
OSSE is not measuring how many children apply and get turned away
One sensible way to measure how pre-K capacity compares to demand would be to figure out how many kids applied for pre-K but were offered no placement at all. However, OSSE is not measuring this.
From kindergarten onward, any child is guaranteed a spot at the local neighborhood school. Parents can apply for "out of boundary" slots at another school, but often there isn't room. Still, there's always room at the local school, and they will add new classrooms if needed to accommodate the kids who live in-boundary.
That's not how pre-K works. Instead, parents apply for up to 6 of the 85 DCPS pre-K programs by lottery, and the other 70 charter and community-based programs all have separate applications and lotteries of their own. A child could apply for a few programs and get turned down at all of them, and never know if there is a slot somewhere else.
OSSE could collect data on all of these lotteries, identify how many distinct children are applying, and report a number reflecting the total demand for pre-K. But they do not. OSSE did not respond to multiple requests about its audit methodology.
OSSE is not measuring enrollment at the start of the school year
Another way to get some better data on pre-K would be to calculate the enrollment and the number of available slots at the start of the school year. If all programs are full, we'd know there is not enough capacity.
Even if they're not full, some kids still might have applied only for full programs, or they might live in one part of the District and only find available slots clear across town, but it would provide better information.
OSSE is not measuring this either. Instead, OSSE instructed its auditor to measure the number of available pre-K slots in May, at the end of the school year. A few kids leave the program during the year, meaning there are inevitably a few open slots by then.
In their statement, OSSE argues that because there were some unfilled slots, there must be more supply than demand, and thus pre-K is "universal." The logical fallacy is clear. No matter how many people get turned away, if one person drops out mid-year leaving an extra slot, there must be no problem since there are empty slots.
This is similar to arguing that there must be no problem with housing capacity in DC, because there are a few housing units being listed on Craigslist, and therefore every single person who wants to live in DC must be able to, even if some of those units are only temporarily empty because someone just moved out.
Auditors agree pre-K is not universal, and have suggested ways to get better data
The auditor of pre-K capacity, ChildTrends, confirmed last week that their conclusion in the 2011 pre-K capacity audit is that the District has not achieved universal pre-K. Further, they say in the 2011 audit that the practice of measuring capacity in May is flawed:
Since the pre-K audit was conducted near the end of the school year, these vacancies may be attributed to the fact that many schools do not maintain their waiting lists during the last few months of school. Therefore, if a vacancy opened in the middle or end of the year, schools may not have necessarily notified families about these vacancies. Or, families may not have wanted to relocate their children at the end of the school year even if they were notified about availability.
The 2008 legislation requiring that the District achieve universal pre-K mandates an annual audit of the "number of children for whom pre-K is not available and whose parents would send them to pre-K but for the lack of availability."
ChildTrends has suggested surveying parents to better understand how many kids are being turned away. The 2011 audit says, "The number of children seeking access to pre-K for whom pre-K is not available would ideally be determined through a household survey of parents of 3- and 4-year-old children living in the District." (p. 16) The 2011 audit says this was not done "due to time and budget constraints." However, the 2009 audit made the exact same recommendation. (p. 36)
Alternately, OSSE could better track the lotteries. DCPS has a centralized, de-duplicated database of applicants to its 85 pre-K programs. OSSE could require that publicly-funded charter and community-based pre-K programs report their applications so that OSSE can compile a single list of distinct applicants to public pre-K programs, then report statistics such as how many total children applied, compared to the available seats, and how many received no placement anywhere.
OSSE didn't reply to questions about these alternative audit methodologies last week. Let's hope that OSSE agrees to halt the 2012 pre-K capacity audit and conduct it with one of these two methodologies. The 9 elected members of the State Board of Education, which advises OSSE, should ask OSSE to do the same.
OSSE's statement is vague and undermines their argument
While refusing to answer detailed questions, OSSE's statement mostly gave many platitudes about how pre-K enrollment has grown and how committed they are to "sharing best practices and coordinating data to both ensure and validate the access, enrollment, development and protection for the District's youngest learners just beginning their educational journey."
They do, however, cast aspersions on the accuracy of our report, saying, "While OSSE applauds media efforts to hold our agency accountable and investigate pre-K capacity and enrollment throughout the District, we must also insist the data on which we are measured is timely, accurate and factual."
We agree. That's why all of the data in the earlier article came directly from the audit reports. OSSE provides different, higher numbers for pre-K enrollment. Ironically, if one accepts their enrollment number and continues to use the capacity number in the audit (the only one available), then pre-K enrollment jumps to over 101% of capacity:
Capacity (audit) 9,967
Enrollment (audit) 9,891
Capacity utilization (audit) 99.2%
Enrolled (OSSE) 10,077
Capacity utilization (OSSE/audit) 101.1%
In other words, if we were to correct any math from the last article with OSSE's numbers, the conclusion supports even more strongly the conclusion that pre-K is over capacity.
Pre-K is a success, which is the reason to expand it
OSSE seems very sensitive to any criticism of pre-K, touting its many successes. Indeed, bringing pre-K to more children has been a tremendous achievement, one DC should be very proud of.
It is precisely because of this success that DC needs to expand the program. Many parents are finding themselves turned away, but OSSE seemingly insists that cannot be happening, and leaves money budgeted for pre-K expansion unspent. Only if DC can accurately measure the unmet demand can it begin to satisfy it and incorporate it into the budget.
Congressman Boehner and Senator Lieberman Save Opportunity Scholarship Program
DC Charter Schools Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 19, 2012
Private school vouchers are again alive and well in the nation's capital after U.S. House Speaker Boehner and Senator Lieberman reversed the second attempt by the Obama Administration to end the scholarship program.
When we last talked about this subject the Department of Education, as it had years ago, limited the program to current participants and the President's fiscal year 2013 budget provided no funding for the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Yesterday, Mr. Boehner and Lieberman announced that they had reversed these decisions and came to an agreement with Secretary Duncan to fully implement the plan as Congress had directed.
I asked someone with close ties to the school choice movement for the reasons behind the change in heart. He said that the Administration probably realized it had exceeded its authority in putting heavy restrictions on who could participate. However, I find the second explanation more relevant. My source said that the President did not want this to become an election year issue.
The winners are the disadvantaged children of Washington, D.C.