FOCUS DC News Wire 7/2/13

 

 

The D.C. Council on Wednesday confirmed two Gray administration nominees to the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which is responsible for authorizing new charter schools and closing poor performers. The new board members are former charter school leader Barbara B. Nophlin and retired Army colonel Herb Tillery, who now oversees a college scholarship program. Nophlin fills a vacancy on the seven-member board left when former member William Marshall stepped down in 2011. Tillery is replacing outgoing board member Brian Jones. The council also confirmed the reappointment of current board member Sara Mead, a policy analyst with particular expertise in early childhood education.

 

 

Suzanne Wells, a parent leader who helped revitalize neighborhood schools on Capitol Hill, appealed this week to the D.C. Council’s Education Committee to cut the number of charter schools allowed to open annually. “Ten [a year] may have made sense in 1995,” she said. “Twenty years later, when 43 percent of the students in the District attend charter schools, [it] no longer makes sense and must be reduced if the city wants to maintain a strong system of neighborhood public schools.” Her request is moderate. Many parents and education activists want a moratorium on new charters, which operate independently of the government but are taxpayer-funded.

 

Nationwide there are more than 6,000 charter schools, serving about 2.3 million students, according to a report by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). That’s an 80 percent increase since 2009, when the group released its first study. Charters in the District showed significant gains over their traditional public school counterparts, according to CREDO. Generally, however, the sector has a lot of room for improvement. Two issues threading CREDO’s analysis raise serious questions about charters, and those concerns should be incorporated in the education reform debate that was ignited by legislative proposals introduced last month by D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee.

 

Consider that CREDO researchers found, among other things, “The 2009 and 2013 charter school impacts on math learning gains are significantly lower than their respective TPS [traditional public school] counterparts.” Further, it says, “students at new schools have significantly lower learning gains in reading than their TPS peers.” The “starting-score reading average for all schools in 2013 is higher than the 2009 average.” But those are “heavily influenced,” wrote researchers, by charters that have been around for the past four years. It’s a numbers game.

 

If new charters are struggling, producing results not much better than those from traditional schools, why not consider slowing charter growth? CREDO found performance gains were affected by school closures. The nation has seen 193 close since 2009. The District closed 35 of 95 charters authorized to open since 1996. “To be precise, schools that closed since the 2009 report posted an average of 72 fewer days of learning in reading and 80 fewer days of learning in math before closure,” the report said.

 

“The charter sector is getting better on average,” wrote researchers, “but not because existing schools are getting dramatically better. It is largely driven by the closure of bad schools.” Leaders of the D.C. Public Charter School Board have made no apologies for the closures. CREDO researchers encourage shutting down low-performing schools. How would D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) fare if Chancellor Kaya Henderson were allowed to close low-performing traditional schools? Have traditional schools been adversely affected by that process? What has happened to children sometimes left midyear without an academic home?

 

Theola Labbé-DeBose, communications director for the charter school board, told me that the board hired an enrollment specialist to help track children and aid parents in finding charter alternatives. But if DCPS has to provide a report on the effect of school closures, why not have charters do the same? District officials have not required a comprehensive study of charters. Next week, the city is expected to release a legally mandated assessment of education reforms covering business practices, human resources and academic and student achievement; charters were not included. City Auditor Yolanda Branche declined to elaborate on the assessment, which was conducted by researchers from the National Research Council and EdCore. “The information will be relevant, substantive and helpful,” said Branche, adding the law does not require the evaluation of the charter network.

 

Labbé-DeBose noted that the charter school board is subjected to council oversight and independent financial review, which provide a “clear and transparent” view of charters and their activities. “But we do understand the value of having an outside perspective.” The board invited the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to conduct a review of its operation. That report is expected this month. “They gave us pretty high marks,” Labbé-DeBose said. That’s all good. But that association is part of the charter system. If the District wants a full understanding of and appreciation for all of its public education system, an independent evaluation of charters must be conducted. Moreover, an assessment of the impact of charter closures on District students, neighborhood schools and the DCPS also must be provided. There are two sides to every tale. Thus far, District residents are getting tidbits of only half the story.

 

 

Charter school students are outpacing their peers in regular public school districts in reading and performing at about the same level as traditional public school students in mathematics, according to a new multistate study by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes. The study, which analyzes charter school performance in 25 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City, found that students attending charter schools gain the equivalent of an additional eight days of learning in reading over the course of a year compared with regular public school students. In math, charter school students experience about the same amount of learning gains as their regular public school peers. Both findings indicate an upward trend in performance for charter school students, when compared with the research center's 2009 survey, which looked at charter school student performance in 16 states and found that those schools lagged behind their regular public school counterparts in both subjects. The new and expanded study shows that a quarter of charter schools outperformed regular public school districts in reading, and 29 percent did so in math, while 19 percent performed significantly worse in reading and 31 percent performed significantly worse in math.

 

The study also found academic gains in both subjects in the 16 states studied in the 2009 report. Researchers credit the gains to closures of poor-performing charters and an overall drop in performance in the regular public schools. The Stanford researchers drew comparisons between charter school students' and regular public school students' performance through a "virtual-control method" in which charter school students were compared to demographically and academically matched "virtual twins" who attend regular public schools where the charter students would otherwise have been enrolled.

 

 

It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to D.C. high school athletics that there is unequal support for male and female students. The issue has for years drawn scrutiny from the D.C. Council and  complaints from parents and student athletes.

 

But a new report from the National Women’s Law Center is a muchneeded reminder of how far our schools must come — not only to  achieve compliance with the federal Title IX provision, but also to provide the invaluable opportunities of high school athletics to both genders.

 

The report, and the associated complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, states that there are roughly  700 fewer athletic opportunities for girls than boys in D.C. Public Schools’ senior high programs. Girls teams also regularly must make do with inferior facilities and lesser coaching, the report suggests.

 

Clearly these conditions cannot continue. High school sports help motivate students to stay in school and succeed academically, they teach discipline and motivation, and they provide physical fitness opportunities. Participation in sports has even been linked to decreased drug use and teen pregnancy rates. These are hardly benefits that should be reserved just for boys.

 

The question, of course, is how to achieve the appropriate — and federally required — parity. Over the years, coaches and school officials have pointed to a lack of facilities and insufficient funding for athletics. We encourage the D.C. Council to take a close look at the resources the city provides, and whether new investments or budget shifts can help close the gender gap. If the District’s schools need more fields and more coaching staff, that would be a worthy investment.

 

School system spokesperson Melissa Salmanowitz has offered allusions to “correcting the record” about Title IX compliance, and she wrote in an email that the system is “proud of the steps we have taken to create opportunities for our female student-athletes.” But there can be little doubt that D.C. schools have not taken all the necessary steps.

 

“Athletics is more than an extracurricular activity; it is an opportunity to be part of something bigger and to learn leadership and other life skills,” Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, says in a news release about her organization’s findings. “Time is of the essence: the District needs to do right by its female students and level the playing field.” We heartily agree.