- Charter options
- D.C. Council rolls back sales tax rate, adopts 2014 budget
- Academic achievement gap is narrowing, new national data show
- Big disparities are alleged between boys’ and girls’ sports in District public schools
The Northwest Current
By Davis Kennedy and Chris Kain
June 26, 2013
Six years after District officials overhauled governance of the city’s public schools, Mayor Vincent Gray and D.C. Council members are looking at ways to improve student performance and access to quality schools. Next week, the D.C. Committee on Education will begin a series of public hearings on various proposals introduced by Mayor Gray and at-large
Council member David Catania, the committee’s chair.
These bills demand a serious look prior to adoption — due both to the urgent need to improve educational opportunities and to the risk that even well-intended ideas could disrupt current reform efforts.
Nonetheless, we do believe that some of the legislative proposals could help accelerate the educational reforms of recent years. One idea in particular stuck out for us in the mayor’s lengthy policy speech last week: “We must make it easier for charter schools that want to be neighborhood schools.”
The debate over the creation of a neighborhood preference for charter school enrollment is both contentious and long-standing, but the mayor’s proposal is much more specific. It would create an option for a charter school to offer a neighborhood preference for nearby students. Schools chartered by the chancellor — a power that would be granted by another section of the bill — could become “schools of right in high-need neighborhoods.”
Not all charter schools would be eligible to gain that authority. Under the mayor’s proposal, the neighborhood preference would have to benefit students from neighborhoods designated as “having a critical gap between the demand for high quality educational opportunities and the availability of such options.”
The case-by-case review of a school’s request would involve the deputy mayor for education, the executive director of the Public Charter School Board, the chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools and the state superintendent of education.
We support the thrust of the mayor’s proposal. It seems to fit with a fundamental aspect of charter schools — allowing educators the greatest freedom possible to serve their students. We would encourage the addition of a hybrid model to allow a proportion of neighborhood students while keeping a citywide lottery in place for others. We would also like to hear why neighborhood preference should be allowed only in areas with a
shortage of high-quality seats.
While the multiagency review seems like overkill, some oversight is absolutely necessary. Granting neighborhood preference to too many charter schools would alter the framework of both the D.C. Public Schools and the city’s charter school network. But granting the authority in limited cases is an experiment worth undertaking.
The Washington Business Journal
By Michael Neibauer
June 26, 2013
The D.C. Council agreed on Wednesday to roll back the District's sales tax rate from 6 percent to 5.75 percent, returning the rate to its pre-recession level.
On the heels of the chief financial officer's latest revenue estimate, which forecasts $86 million more in 2013 and $92 million more in 2014 than previously projected, the council adopted the city's 2014 spending plan, by a 12-1 vote, with a bounty of new spending items.
The sales tax was last hiked in 2009, when the District faced massive shortfalls. The increase was scheduled to sunset in 2012, but the higher rate was maintained for two additional years and played a key role in the District's much stronger bottom line. With the reduction, the District's sales tax will be the lowest in the region.
A last ditch effort to invest more money in public education failed by a 7-6 vote. Councilman David Catania, I-At large, chairman of the Education Committee, blasted his colleagues for killing his amendment.
"Shame on the members," he said. "It's about political will, and where is ours?" asked Catania, the one council member to vote against the budget. "It doesn't exist."
Catania did offer an amendment that was accepted. The council authorized United Medical Center to spend $2 million of its capital budget to build a pediatric asthma management center, which will be operated by Children's National Medical Center. Demand for pediatric asthma services has ballooned, Catania said, from 15,000 to 40,000 in a matter of a few years.
The approved budget also provides:
- $11 million to add 200 early childhood infant and toddler slots.
- $2 million to increase subsidies for Senior Service Network grantees.
- $2 million to expand the school-based mental health program.
- $3.1 million for a 100 percent student Metrobus subsidy.
- $797,000 to expand the Metrobus and Metrorail subsidy to include students up to 21 years old.
- $4 million for a new School Technology Fund, to be distributed on a per-pupil basis based on fall 2012 enrollment.
- $2.8 million to upgrade the DCStars system in D.C. public schools.
- $4.5 million for arts grants.
- $4 million to expand adult literary and career education programs.
- $1 million for University of the District of Columbia "accreditation activities."
- $2 million for the Film D.C. Economic Incentive Fund.
- $1.6 million for a new field and fence at the Dwight Mosley/Taft Recreation Center.
- $1 million to improve the Shaed Elementary School field.
- $3 million to enhance the local rent supplement program.
- $421,000 for Department of Transportation agency operations.
- $6.3 million to renovate UDC's Bertie Backus facility.
- $480,000 to fund a study of the automated traffic enforcement program.
"The council has charted a responsible course consistent with my original budget that will help move the District forward," Mayor Vincent Gray said in a statement.
The amended Budget Support Act, fashioned by Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, also reserves $18 million to offset future tax code changes that might be recommended by the Tax Revision Commission. The Anthony Williams-led panel is expected to release its proposals in January, three months into the next the fiscal year.
That's not to say council members are willing to wait that long. Councilman Vincent Orange, D-At large, introduced legislation Wednesday to reduce the income tax rate by 2 percent for low-income and middle-class earners — to 2.5 percent and 4.5 percent — and to drop the top rate from 8.95 percent to 8.5 percent.
The Washington Post
By Lindsey Layton
June 27, 2013
The nation’s 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds are posting better scores in math and reading tests than their counterparts did 40 years ago, and the achievement gap between white students and those of color still persists but is narrowing, according to new federal government data released Thursday.
The scores, collected regularly since the 1970s from federal tests administered to public and private school students age 9, 13, and 17, paint a picture of steady student achievement that contradicts the popular notion that U.S. educational progress has stalled.
“When you break out the data over the long term and ask who is improving, the answer is . . . everyone,” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that works to close the achievement gap between poor and privileged children. “And the good news, given where they started, is that black and Latino children have racked up some of the biggest gains of all.”
The data, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend study, come from tests given every four years in math and reading. The most recent results, from tests 50,000 students took in 2012, show that 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds did better in both math and reading than students who took the first reading test in 1971 and the first math test in 1973.
Although the younger test-takers made significant progress, test scores of 17-year-olds remained relatively flat. But the 17-year-olds who struggle the most — those in the bottom percentiles — did show gains in 2012 compared with 40 years ago.
The trend lines of progress over the decades show ups and downs. But for 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds in math and reading, and 17-year-olds in reading, there has been an uptick in test scores since 2004, when No Child Left Behind, the main federal K-12 education law, began taking effect.
No Child Left Behind required school systems to publicly report test scores for the first time, including information about how minorities, English-language learners and special-education students were performing. Observers say that transparency laid bare racial disparities and put pressure on school districts to help their weakest performers.
The law also set aggressive goals for academic growth and spelled out consequences for schools that failed to meet them. In recent years, school districts and states have complained that those goals were unrealistic, and the Obama administration has issued waivers to most states and the District of Columbia to free them from the most onerous requirements of the law. Efforts in Congress to update the law have stalled, with Democrats arguing the federal government must continue its oversight of public education and Republicans saying the federal role should shrink.
Data released Thursday show that blacks and Hispanics made more significant progress than white students in their scores since the 1970s, narrowing the achievement gap.
On the reading tests that are scored on a scale of zero to 500, the gap between 9-year-old whites and blacks was nearly halved, from 44 points in 1971 to 24 points in 2012. The gap on the same test between Hispanics and whites shrank from 34 points to 21 points.
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The Washington Post
By Brigid Schulte, Emma Brown and Roman Stubbs
June 27, 2013
At Wilson High school, freshman athlete Helen Malhota spent last fall seeing some girls’ soccer games bumped from the nicer artificial turf fields in favor of boys’ football practice. In the spring, she passed the baseball team playing on a field next to the school as her coach and parents drove heavy softball equipment to a public park and she and her teammates jogged the mile and a half there and back.
“It was so unfair,” she said. “It makes me feel that the world hasn’t changed that much. Even though people say, ‘Oh, sexism is over, women get equal opportunities.’ It’s not true.”
At each of 15 traditional public high schools in the District, girls who want to play sports have fewer opportunities to play than boys and often have lower-quality facilities, fields, uniforms, lockers and coaching.
The disparity in traditional District high schools between the percentage of girls enrolled in school and the girls who participate in sports is not only larger than that of any other public school district in the Washington region, it is wider than many other similar urban districts such as Detroit and Boston, federal data show. And the steep gaps in some District schools such as Roosevelt, Ballou and Phelps are far higher than those in a number of schools that the U.S. Education Department has investigated recently for civil rights violations.
On Thursday morning, after several years of unfruitful negotiating, the National Women’s Law Center filed a formal complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights charging District public schools with violating Title IX, the federal law that outlaws sex discrimination in schools and school sports.
The problem is widespread nationally “but these gaps in the District are really steep,” said Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel with the National Women’s Law Center who has worked on Title IX issues for 15 years. “At Roosevelt, the gap is 26 percent. That’s a huge red flag. ”
The Office of Civil Rights confirmed that it is already investigating another Title IX athletic discrimination complaint against DCPS that was filed in May 2012. DCPS spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said school officials couldn’t comment on the specifics of the complaint but said they looked forward to “correcting the record.”
“Over the past several years, we have pursued an aggressive agenda to help ensure our female student-athletes are able to compete in a variety of athletics,” she said.
The gaps in girls’ sports participation in D.C. high schools range from a low of 5 percent at majority female Banneker to 19 percent at Wilson to 26 percent at both Ballou and Roosevelt, according to 2010 data that the law center obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Nine of the District’s 15 traditional high schools have gaps exceeding 10 percent.
The complaint does not include Ellington, an arts school that does not have a sports program; the city’s alternative schools; or the 40 percent of the system’s students in charter schools, Chaudhry said, because there are no sports equity data available for them.
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