- Residents Press Council on Education Reform [FOCUS is mentioned]
- Developer-School Teams Vie for Stevens [AppleTree Institute, Dorothy I. Height Community Academy, and Eagle Academy PCS are mentioned]
- D.C. Schools Get Relief from No Child Left Behind
Residents Press Council on Education Reform [FOCUS is mentioned]
The Northwest Current
By Elizabeth Wiener
July 18, 2012
Amid turmoil at city hall, a large crowd of parents and education activists waited in line at a D.C. Council education hearing Friday, most to say they want the council to jump back into the charged issue of public school reform.
Speaker after speaker asked Council Chairman Phil Mendelson to re-establish a separate committee on education, to make sure that the long-vacant post of school ombudsman is filled, to immediately complete an evaluation of the 2007 school reform effort, and to wade into the ever-touchy subject of public school closures and, perhaps, charter
school openings.
Ward 6 Council member Tommy Wells said he supports school reform and sees much progress. But, like many speakers, Wells said he fears education here is devolving into a “parallel system” of charter schools and neighborhood public schools. And the outlook, he said, is that the charters will flourish and neighborhood schools — “the schoolsyour child can walk to” — will fade away.
“The network of neighborhood schools is part of the strength of Ward 6 — you know you’re in a neighborhood with good, walkable options,” Wells said. “But charters don’t see themselves as neighborhood schools, so we’re consigned to a parallel system.
One day we may be talking about only 10 or 20 percent of our children in public schools, because all the rest are in charters.” The marathon 10-hour hearing was called by Chairman Mendelson, who was recently thrust into the role of chairing the council’s Committee of the Whole, which has overseen education and a host of other issues during the past few years.
Mendelson said he wanted to hear from citizens about their priorities for education for the remainder of the year. The new chairman has also said he wants to limit further shake-ups this year, but that he believes education is important enough to eventually merit its own council oversight committee and experienced staff to run it.
The arrival of more than 50 witnesses underscored a point many of them made in testimony: Since the abolition of the school board and establishment of mayoral chancellor control, many parents feel their voices haven’t been heard. Several pleaded for specific schools to remain open.
Sequnely Gray, a parent at the recently combined school of Bruce-Monroe Elementary at Parkview in Ward 1, said Bruce-Monroe was torn down amid promises it would be rebuilt. Instead, the children were moved to Parkview, and the Bruce-Monroe site turned into a park “that will become condos,” she predicted.
“Our children are already displaced,” and now a new Districtwide study of “low-performing schools,” performed by the Illinois Facility Fund, lists the combined school as a candidate for closure or replacement by a charter school. “All we asked is to be at the table,” Gray said.
A new mother from Southwest, Lucy Rojansky, said she simply wanted to know the fate of Amidon-Bowen Elementary, the last traditional public elementary left in that quadrant.
She said she was encouraged by some reports that improvements are under way, but she’s been unable to get clear information on what the public school system is planning for the building or the school itself.
“It’s right around the corner from my house, and I’d love to send my child there,” Rojansky said.
Some had specific complaints regarding their children. Howard Wilson said he’d been called to the principal’s office at Bancroft Elementary in June, and told that because of his daughter’s “alleged tardiness,” she would have to return to her neighborhood school. Wilson cited multiple doorways and poor attendance records at Bancroft, and the fact that his fifth-grader took medication before school, which occasionally made her late.
After repeated appeals to other school officials, he got the same answer — “return to her neighborhood school.
We were never asked why my daughter was late.” Wells noted that the case is exactly the type the Office of Ombudsman — required under the school reform law but abolished after its first occupant, Tonya Kinlow, resigned — was designed to resolve. “We haven’t received any due process,” Wilson said.
Others had broader concerns about racial disparities, saying students in the eastern part of the city haven’t fared well under school reform. “Education in D.C. is an apartheid system,” said Maria Jones, a Ward 5 parent.
“Schools in [wards] 5, 7, 8 are consistently underfunded, and surrounded by aggressive charters trying to close them,” she said, while schools in the “wealthy wards” have been identified as “worthy of investment.”
“Parents scramble for places in schools west of the park,” Jones said, but this year many have been told that out-of-boundary placements are limited. She said she knew of “four kids with high grades denied entrance to Hardy” Middle School in Georgetown, while “schools in Afro-American neighborhoods are closed.”
The January 2012 Illinois Facility Fund study, based largely on test scores, came under fire. The study recommends closing the “lowest performing” public schools and recruiting the “highest performing charter school operators” to run them.
Suzanne Wells of the Capitol Hill Public Schools Parent Organization said there seems to be a rush to close public schools and open charters without coordination. In her neighborhood, she said, “four new charters were approved, while DCPS claims it needs to ‘rightsize.’
Two separate school systems are expensive to support.” Mary Levy, a longtime expert on school budgeting, said she supports charters, but fears the system of neighborhood schools is disappearing in favor of “citywide charters.
If we no longer give families a choice of neighborhood schools, we need to talk about it,” she testified. Levy also said the council reneged on its promise to complete an evaluation of the school reform effort by this September, instead delaying the report until 2014.
She predicted the results would not be pretty. “Reform works very well in wards 3 and 6, but the achievement gap — between black and white students, between whites and Latinos — has widened,” she said.
Several charter advocates had their own complaints. Robert Cane, director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, said charters are still not treated equally despite “wildly successful” results in raising student achievement and an ever-increasing share — now 41 percent and rising — of total enrollment.
Cane invited the council to be more involved in ensuring uniform funding for charter and traditional public school students, and making it easier for charters to
use closed or underused public school buildings. Cane dismissed concerns about running two parallel systems, saying the big problem is that “we don’t have enough quality seats.”
Declining enrollment at the less successful public schools increases the pressure to close them. Ward 1 Council member Jim Graham said he recently attended graduation at Cardozo High School, where an expensive modernization and expansion project is already under way.
“We have this great high school, but when I attended graduation, they had 87 graduates,” he said. Enrollment data at traditional public schools shows the stark disparity. Wilson, Deal and virtually all public schools in Ward 3 are bursting at the seams, with enrollment exceeding capacity.
But in other parts of the city, some senior highs can’t fill even half their seats.
For example, according to audited enrollment figures for the past school year, Coolidge, with a capacity of 1,240, had 547 students; Roosevelt, capacity 1,060, had 497; Cardozo, capacity 1,100, had 477; and Dunbar, capacity 1,100, had 514.
Developer-School Teams Vie for Stevens [AppleTree Institute, Dorothy I. Height Community Academy, and Eagle Academy PCS are mentioned]
The Dupont Current
By Brady Holt
July 18, 2012
A series of community presentations has highlighted the similarities among four developers’ visions for redeveloping open space on the grounds of the vacant Stevens School, while also demonstrating the differences among five wellregarded educational proposals for the historic school building.
The Stevens School, located near the corner of 21st and L streets, was a public elementary school that officials closed in 2007, citing low enrollment.
Residents have since pointed to a neighborhood population boom as evidence that a community-serving school is needed in the area, and they successfully scuttled an earlier city plan to sell the site to a developer of rental housing.
Now, four development teams are vying for the rights to construct an office building on the school’s L Street basketball court and other open space, in exchange for funding the renovation of the historic Stevens building for a school.
Five schools — three public charters, one traditional private school and one special-needs private school — are in the running to acquire the building.
Many residents and community leaders are still digesting the hours of presentations from last Tuesday and Wednesday, which will be discussed tonight at the Foggy Bottom/West
End advisory neighborhood commission meeting. “My big takeaway was that we have a wonderful dilemma in that we have just some really great options for the neighborhood as it relates to the education piece and really high-caliber developers,” commissioner Rebecca Coder said in an interview.
“So for us at this juncture there are probably more questions than answers,” insofar as the community must find ways to choose among the proposals.
The five competing educational-use proposals are: a pre-kindergarten charter school from the AppleTree Institute; preschool through fifth grades from the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School; child care, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten from the Eagle Academy Public Charter School; kindergarten through fifth grade from the GEMS Team private school; and a special-education school from Ivymount Schools targeting students with autism.
Coder said all five proposals were strong, despite the commission’s earlier stance that the property should remain a public school. The GEMS plan impressed her on three fronts — it does not require public financing to move forward, and it promises to provide need-based scholarships to D.C. students and an International Baccalaureate curriculum — but she said she’s unsure whether the commission will alter its public school preference.
And although questions regularly emerge about some charter schools’ long-term sustainability, Coder said she was pleased that the three charter schools seeking Stevens have lengthy track records at other locations in the District.
For the open-space portion, all four development teams — Akridge and Argos; Donohoe Development Co. and Decca Development Corp.; Lincoln Property Company and Mosaic Urban Partners; and MRP Realty and CGS Urban Partners — are proposing high-end glassy office buildings with ground-floor retail space.
The selected developer would also likely be able to purchase and demolish the adjacent Humane Society of the United States headquarters at 2100 L St. to make way for a larger new building.
The MRP team says it also has access to combine the property with a K Street building, allowing it to build a 130-foot-tall building instead of the 110 feet cited by the others, as K Street properties have a higher height limit than those on L.
MRP also said its building would be “trophy” quality, one step up from the others’ promised “class A” — the biggest difference among the four competing office proposals.
Otherwise, the developers highlighted their experience working in the District, from recent to long-term.
Each pointed to successful projects, including both offices and school renovations, and examples of working successfully with neighbors.
Representatives from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, the Department of General Services and the Office of Planning will select a preferred school and developer.
That recommendation is due in late August or early September, with the property to be awarded in September or October contingent on D.C. Council approval, officials said. Developers said they anticipate breaking ground in early 2014 and completing the project by the end of 2015.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
July 19, 2012
D.C. schools won relief from the federal No Child Left Behind law, giving local campuses more time to boost math and reading performance and high-school graduation rates, officials from the U.S. Department of Education announced.
Under the waiver, the District has committed to having 74 percent of students proficient in math and 73 percent proficient in reading on standardized tests by 2017. Currently, about 45 percent of D.C. students pass muster in either subject. Had the waiver not been approved, the District would have been expected legally to bring 100 percent of students to proficiency by 2014.
The local public and charter school systems also are aiming to increase the four-year high-school graduation rate from 59 percent to 78 percent by 2017.
The District was never at risk to lose federal funding over No Child Left Behind. But D.C. state schools superintendent Hosanna Mahaley has said the city could focus more specific efforts on lowest-performing schools if it weren't forced to follow all of No Child Left Behind's procedures.
"Schools want the opportunity to innovate and develop tailored solutions to the unique educational challenges of their schools and communities, and our flexibility application will allow them to do just that," Mahaley said.
The U.S. Department of Education had expressed "significant concerns" with the District's waiver in a May letter to Mahaley from Michael Yudin, the deputy assistant secretary for policy and strategic initiatives.
Yudin said the city's poor history of accounting for federal grants, which has made the D.C. school system "a high-risk grantee," and the District's issues complying with special education laws gave his department pause.
"Clearly D.C. has come a long way since the initial submission," Yudin told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. He said his colleagues were impressed that the District had reduced the number of special-education students being sent to private schools because the public schools couldn't handle them.
The number of special-education students in private placements has dropped from 2,200 when Mayor Vincent Gray took office to about 1,700 currently.
The Washington Examiner reported Monday that parents and attorneys in the District were concerned that their children were being pushed into neighborhood schools unequipped to handle them, as D.C. seeks to save money and boost the public school system's reputation. Parents of a severely handicapped 19-year-old -- with the mental age of an 18-month-old -- say their child is being forced into Dunbar Senior High School.
A federal education official authorized only to speak on background said, "We're definitely thinking about and will continue to monitor D.C. closely."
Maryland and Virginia were previously approved for relief from No Child Left Behind, and are among the 32 states with waivers as of Thursday.
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