FOCUS DC News Wire 7/19/13

 

 

Charter schools could soon occupy 4 campuses which housed DC public schools until the latest round of school closings. KIPP DC, part of the highly successful national chain of charter schools, plans to make a bid for one of them, the Hamilton school near Ivy City and Gallaudet. DC Public Schools (DCPS) and the DC Department of General Services (DGS) announced arequest for offers (RFO) for the campuses: Hamilton, Shaed Education Campus in Edgewood, Young Elementary School in Carver-Langston, and Winston Education Campus, in Hillcrest.

 

Existing public charter schools, or groups who have gotten conditional approval to create a public charter school, are eligible to bid. DC's goal is to locate high-performing charter schools in these communities. Of the 4 properties, only the Young campus is in an area with several existing, high-performing schools. KIPP DC met with residents at Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Peta-Gay Lewis's Single-Member District 5D01 meeting Tuesday evening to discuss its plans. A new KIPP school, the Webb campus in Trinidad, will open this summer and serve 300 students, but there are 3,000 students citywide on KIPP's waiting list. The Hamilton site would become a high school that could serve students coming from middle school at the Shaw, Webb, and Benning campuses. Any slots not filled by KIPP 8th graders would accept enrollment from students citywide.

 

The location is close to many of KIPP's existing middle schools, allowing it to feel more like a neighborhood school, officials said. Parents of students at the nearby Two Rivers public charter school also said they have heard it may vie for the Hamilton site as well. Schools have to apply by August 14.

 

 

For the first time since 2001, members of Congress began floor debate today in the House on a comprehensive bill to update the country’s main federal education law. “It’s been 12 years — 12 years,” said Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chief sponsor of the “Student Success Act.” “Neither party has been able to bring legislation to the floor in either body. We’ve been in a situation for years now where the Congress has abdicated completely its responsibility.” But it also marked the first time in recent memory that the House was debating an education bill that was partisan in nature, written by Republicans without any support from Democrats and with a veto threat issued Wednesday by President Obama.

 

“This is a huge step outside the mainstream consensus,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who is leading the opposition and mockingly referred to Kline’s bill as the “Letting Students Down Act.”

A final vote is expected Friday. Member after member rose to talk about the importance of quality public education, but they offered vastly different views about whether the bill on the floor would achieve it. Two lawmakers from Nevada, Republican Joe Heck and Democrat Dina Titus, said the bill was terrific and terrible, respectively.

 

The GOP bill would update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, created by Congress in 1965 to distribute federal dollars primarily to help children who are poor, disabled or English language learners. Those dollars represent about 10 percent of funding for public schools; local communities and states provide the rest. “It is fundamentally a civil rights law,” Miller said. “This bill guts funding for public education, abdicates the federal government’s responsibility to make sure each child has an equal right to a quality education.” The current version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, expired in 2007, but Congress has struggled to agree on an update.

 

Kline’s bill would sharply shrink the federal role in K-12 public schools and mark a departure from No Child Left Behind, which had significantly expanded federal authority in local school matters.

“We have sought to recalibrate the federal role, undoing the excesses of the past,” said Kline, whose bill is supported by the National School Boards Association. Several Republicans said they would have liked to delete the federal government’s involvement altogether. “Many of my Republican colleagues and I feel the federal government should be out of education,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), adding that the bill was “a step in the right direction.”

 

No Child Left Behind sets conditions and requirements for every public school receiving federal funds to educate poor students and those with special needs. The law defines academic progress and stipulates sanctions for schools that don’t meet that progress. It also dictates specific improvement strategies that the states must adopt for their weakest schools. Underpinning the law is a belief that states that receive billions of federal dollars each year must be made accountable to Washington.

 

 

 

School choice will be part of the debate when the U.S. House of Representatives takes upits version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, possibly as early as this week. The House Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., who has become much more active on K-12 issues lately, has introduced an amendment that would allow Title I dollars to follow children to the public school of their choice, including charter schools.

 

The amendment would help "the most vulnerable kids, including foster children and those with disabilities. It is a public school choice amendment for children to have an experience like this," Cantor said at a press conference at Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington. The school has the longest waiting list of any charter school in the district. The ESEA bill, which was written by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House Education Committee garnered only GOP support in committee. Leaders are reaching out to members today to get a sense of how they are likely to vote. So far, it looks close, advocates say. And it's noteable that leaders haven't officially scheduled the bill for a floor vote.

 

But Cantor says he is confident the bill can pass. And he thinks his amendment—and even the underlying legislation could gain some Democratic support. "I think we will have success in getting the [bill] across the floor because of the reform nature of this bill," he said. "I'm hopeful we can actually get bipartisan support on the bill itself because it is aimed at holding ourselves and our schools accountable" for every child's success, Cantor said. (Key Democrats, including Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., have slammed the bill as a huge step backward when it comes to accountability, particularly for vulnerable children.)

 

Kline, meanwhile, noted that the bill eliminates seventy "soda straw programs" and reduces the federal footprint. More on the selling points for—and potential opposition from—conservatives here. But back to school choice: Title I portability is a big watch word in GOP education circles these days. Gov. Mitt Romney made Title I and special education portability the center piece of his education platform back in the 2012 election. And Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, introduced a similar provision when that panel considered its own (Democrats only) ESEA renewal bill. (It failed in committee.)

 

A House Democratic aide criticized Cantor's amendment as difficult to implement, since the current Title I funding formula generally steers dollars to schools with high numbers of students in poverty, as opposed to being directed at individual students. And the aide noted that House Republican and Democratic language to reauthorize the charter school provisions of ESEA are virtually identical, since lawmakers worked together on a bipartisan bill a couple of years ago.

 

Folks had originally expected Cantor to introduce an amendment that would allow parents to take their Title I dollars to a private school, as well as a traditional public school or charter. But that idea met with big resistance from some moderate members of the House Republican caucus, advocates say. And two Republican lawmakers—Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah and Matt Salmon of Arizona—have introduced amendments that would allow students to bring their Title I dollars to private schools. Will Cantor's public school choice amendment be sufficient to help the bill garner support from conservatives? Stay tuned. Meanwhile, public school districts are already nervous about the potential impact of the legislation on their bottom line. The bill would freeze in place the funding levels set by sequestration—a series of across-the-board cuts to nearly every federal program put in place to help trim the federal budget. Check out this press release from Miami-Dade County schools.