NEWS
In D.C., parents risk jail to get students into highly ranked schools [FOCUS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
July 23, 2015
D.C. has cracked down on parents lying to city and school officials about where they live, after an increase in tips that families from nearby Maryland and Virginia are illegally enrolling their children.
In the 2014-15 school year, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education saw a 43 percent increase in tips from the prior year.
It’s a result, the agency says, of increased public awareness.
Parents who lie about living in the district risk up to 90 days in jail and can be required to pay back tuition — up to $15,000 a year.
The city has sued two police officers who enrolled their kids in D.C. Public Schools while living outside the district.
The D.C. area is unique when it comes to school choice, and it ranks high for school-choice options. But school options in the surrounding area are limited. Education experts say the lack of school choice could be a leading factor in residency fraud.
“The problem is we haven’t created enough choices or made choice universal for everybody,” said Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform.
“Those two states that border D.C. are very similar in their demographics and their population, yet they have done absolutely nothing to provide choice for families,” she said.
The center ranked Virginia 41st and Maryland 39th in its 2014 charter school law rankings. D.C. was first.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education has handled illegal enrollment since the city passed the Residency Fraud Amendment Act in 2012. The agency hires a private investigator to look into tips it receives from schools, hotlines or online.
During the 2014-15 school year, the office received 88 tips and conducted 70 investigations. Of the 38 cases that were closed, only two students were found to live outside the city.
Residency fraud isn’t unique to D.C., however.
Jason Botel, executive director of school-choice advocacy group Maryland Can, said he knows of numerous cases of parents lying about where they live to get into a good school in Baltimore County. Botel, previously executive director of KIPP Baltimore, said he had some students whose families lied about living in the city so their children could attend his school.
The fact the counties near D.C. have few, if any, charter schools is only driving parents to find other ways to give their kids a good education.
“Maryland is a place where the surrounding counties spend less on education than D.C. does, especially for low-income kids, and there are very few public school choices.”
Irene Holtzman, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, said the best way to prevent residency fraud is for nearby counties to expand school-choice options.
“Where (students) live is determining where they go to school, and (neighborhood schools) may or may not be what they’re looking for or they may or may not be well-resourced to afford a (private school),” she said.
Maryland has reformed its charter school laws, and Botel thinks the changes will help enhance the choices available. But, he said, if lawmakers really want to expand choice they should allow nonprofits to hire teachers and principals. The law says teachers must be hired through the school district, making hiring difficult and, in turn, stifling innovation, Botel said.
Until policymakers start treating parents as consumers and stop zoning the public school system by zip code, Kerwin says, some families will continue to risk jail time so their children have the chance at a good education.
“Despite all the choices that have been created across the U.S., we still haven’t gotten to that marketplace that school choice promised,” she said.
Satisfaction levels vary for parents of new students at D.C. Public Schools
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 22, 2015
A survey of parents who recently enrolled their children in D.C. Public Schools showed that most were pleased with their school choice. Overall, 68 percent of the parents surveyed rated their school “above average” or “exceptional,” and 73 percent rated the teachers at their school “above average” or “exceptional.” The vast majority of parents said they would recommend D.C. Public Schools to other families.
There were wide variations in responses based on ethnicity, school level and location. Here’s a look at some overall numbers and breakdowns from the report. The school system hopes the data can help school administrators fine-tune their recruitment efforts in the future.
The survey of 1,400 parents who enrolled their children in the school system in the last school year was conducted by 270 Strategies, a political consulting firm for D.C. Public Schools.
White respondents rated schools more favorably. In all, 80 percent of white parents called their school “above average” or “exceptional,” compared with 61 percent of black parents.
Ward 3 respondents were “by far the most enthusiastic,” according to the report, with 56 percent of respondents rating their schools “exceptional.” In Wards 1, 4, 5, less than 30 percent of parents surveyed called the schools “exceptional.”
Elementary school parents had the highest opinion of the schools, with 71 percent rating their schools “above average” or “exceptional,” compared with 58 percent of middle school parents and 59 percent of high school parents.
Parents were also very positive about their teachers. Overall, 73 percent of parents said the teachers in their school were “above average” or “exceptional.”
White parents were more likely to rate teachers highly, with 49 percent of white parents rating their children’s teachers as “exceptional,” compared with 36 percent of black parents.
Elementary school parents rated their teachers most favorably. Seventy-eight percent of elementary school parents selected “above average” or “exceptional,” compared with 58 percent of middle school parents and 55 percent of high school parents.
Even though elementary school parents offered the most positive feedback, the majority were noncommittal about their future with the school system — reflecting the uncertainty that still remains at many transition points in the school system.
Overall, 54 percent of the respondents said they plan to have their child graduate from D.C. Public Schools. A quarter of respondents said they did not know or declined to answer the question.
Parents of black and Hispanic children were more likely to say they plan to stay. About 63 percent of black and of Hispanic parents said they plan for their child to graduate from the school system compared with 38 percent of white parents.
Ward 3 residents, while most likely to rate their schools “exceptional,” were less likely to commit to graduating from D.C. Public Schools. Just 39 percent of Ward 3 residents said they currently plan for their child to stay and graduate compared with more than 63 percent of parents in Wards 5, 7, and 8.
Funding for popular tuition assistance program gets Senate support
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 22, 2015
A Senate subcommittee on Wednesday worked to maintain funding for a popular D.C. college tuition assistance program that many parents are fighting to protect and expand.
The government appropriations bill, which will go to a full Senate committee on Thursday, would provide $30 million for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant (DC-TAG) program, matching the current year’s funding. The program, which provides as much as $10,000 a year to residents who attend college outside the city, was first approved by Congress 16 years ago.
Because the city lacks the range of public universities in most states — and the discounted in-state tuitions that go with them — the program aims to make attending college more affordable for city residents. It also was designed to offer an incentive to parents to stay in the District instead of fleeing to the suburbs, where students can get access to public school tuition at an array of colleges and universities in Maryland and Virginia.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) said she was “thrilled” that funding was not cut at this still-early stage, despite overall cuts in appropriations in the Republican-controlled House and Senate budget bills. She called the tuition program her top D.C. budget priority this year.
The Senate bill provides $10 million more than the House Appropriations Committee included, but $10 million less than the amount President Obama’s requested for fiscal year 2016. Final appropriations will not be approved until the fall.
Norton said the DC-TAG program is extremely popular and has succeeded in its goals. She said she has heard from people across the District — and from all income levels — who want to protect the program.
Since 2000, the program has helped more than 24,000 students pay for college. As of 2013-2014, the program had paid $383 million to more than 600 institutions.
The funding level that Congress ultimately approves will directly affect students who get the grants for the upcoming 2015-2016 school year. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education sent out 5,270 award letters for the upcoming school year, and costs could exceed $35 million, according to Jessie Harteis, deputy chief of staff for OSSE.
At the same time, parents have been pushing for the cap on the grants to be lifted. The $10,000 limit for annual awards has not increased since the law was first passed.
Nora Burke, a realtor and District parent, said the grants originally bridged the gap between in-state and out-of-state tuition costs, but 16 years later the gap has grown closer to $20,000 at many institutions — a financial reality she absorbed while college shopping with her daughter two years ago.
She started a campaign — “RAISE DC TAG” — with some other parents and said she has seen a large response.
“This program benefits every one in all wards,” she said.
Congress to once again fund DC TAG Program
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 23, 2015
The Washington Post's Michael Allison Chandler informs us today that Congress is working hard on re-appropriating funds for the DC TAG program, the plan that provides up to $10,000 a year for students to attend a public university outside of the District of Columbia. It also assists with tuition to private colleges in the nation's capital and for enrollment in traditional black schools of higher education. It appears that financial support would remain at last year's level.
But what this reporter fails to mention is the hysteria that our local representative Eleanor Holmes Norton created last year regarding the continuation of DC TAG in light of the passage of then Councilman David Catania's Promise legislation which offers up to $60,000 for paying for college. At the time his bill was being considered, the non-voting Congresswoman was going around proclaiming that if his bill went forward the body in which she serves would kill the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant. The only problem with her stark declaration was that there were no other members of the House that could collaborate her claim.
Ms. Chandler states that DC TAG has enjoyed wide success following its passage by former Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA). "Since 2000, the program has helped more than 24,000 students pay for college. As of 2013-2014, the program had paid $383 million to more than 600 institutions." It would be fascinating to have a follow-up story investigating the impact of the Promise grants.
States keep dropping out of the Common Core testing consortium known as PARCC, but the faithful are carrying on.
Hundreds of teachers and administrators from across the country have gathered this week inside the windowless ballrooms of a Marriott in Arlington, Va., to reflect on how the first year of PARCC testing went in 2015 and to plan for how to help it go more smoothly in 2016.
They are members of the PARCC Educator Leader Cadre, a group that has played a key role in helping schools get ready for the math and reading exams during the past several years. They have had their own frustrations with the online exams, including technical glitches that interrupted students this spring. But as they come to terms with the backlash from politicians, parents and other educators — which has turned PARCC into a dirty word in some circles — many fundamentally believe that it is a smarter test than the old bubble tests and will drive stronger instruction.
“I’m in my 40th year in education and this has been one of the best transitions I’ve seen,” said Emil Carafa, the principal of an elementary school in a small district east of Allentown, N.J., who said teachers are now less likely to lecture from the front of the room than they used to be. Learning happens in small groups as students wrestle with problems, he said, practicing the kind of critical thinking that the new standards and the new test demand.
“The whole structure of the classroom has changed due to Common Core,” he said.
Not everyone shares Carafa’s rosy view.
The tests from PARCC — the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — has come under fire for its length, for its technical glitches and for efforts by its test publisher, Pearson, to crack down on cheating via social media.
Some communities have come to see PARCC as a symbol of federal overreach (PARCC is one of two groups of states that got hundreds of millions of dollars to develop new tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards, but it is not a federal program), and some see it as emblematic of a destructive overemphasis on standardized testing in America’s schools.
The Common Core aims to create some amount of uniformity in terms of what children learn in the nation’s public schools, with an eye toward college and career readiness upon high school graduation. If students in all states were to take the same — or similar — exams, it also would allow for easier direct comparisons of student performance across the states. In 2010, more than two dozen states associated themselves with PARCC.
But fewer than half of the states originally part of PARCC — 11 states and the District of Columbia — were still on board when the online tests rolled out this spring. Since then, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio all have dropped out and just seven states and the District plan to give the test in 2015-2016, raising questions about whether the consortium is in danger of completely falling apart.
PARCC spokesman David Connerty-Marin insisted that it is not. “Of course it is sustainable,” he said, pointing to the old New England Common Assessment Program, which functioned for years with just four states and 400,000 students. Though there are fewer states now shouldering the costs of the exams, PARCC has pledged not to raise the price of exams next year, Connerty-Marin said.
And even though PARCC has shrunk, he said, the nation’s testing landscape is still much different than it was in 2014, when each state gave different tests, making it difficult to compare achievement across state lines.
“A few states will come and go, but this is the new normal,” he said.
Ohio educators attended this week’s conference even though their state dropped PARCC two weeks ago.
“Very frustrating,” said Carole Katz, a longtime math teacher and math coordinator, who had poured many hours into reviewing questions and perfecting different versions of the exam to administer to different students. But Katz and other Ohioans said that the change that has been ushered in by the Common Core standards will persist.
“We’re changing the test, but we’re not changing the concepts behind it,” said Char Shryock, a 28-year veteran of education. “It’s very much a branding thing. The PARCC brand got corrupted.”
Shryock, the curriculum director for Ohio’s Bay Village schools on Lake Erie, said teachers have learned how to teach the Common Core standards and how to help their students wrestle with real-life problems.
In more schools now, staff meetings dwell on instruction instead of supply closet inventories. Even PTA meetings are changing, she said, focusing on what and how students are learning instead of on who is bringing what to the next bake sale.
She predicts those changes will stick as Ohio shifts to a new exam, even if Ohio educators will no longer be able to easily see how their students are performing compared to their peers in other states.
“It would have been nice to be able to do that,” she said.
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