- D.C. charter schools sue city, alleging unequal funding [FOCUS, Eagle Academy PCS, and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- D.C. charter schools sue city over funding inequity compared to DCPS [FOCUS, Eagle Academy PCS, and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Lawsuit Claims D.C. Underfunded Charter Schools To The Tune Of $770 Million [Eagle Academy PCS and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Parents Rail Against D.C. School Closure Ruling
- Stop blaming black parents for underachieving kids
D.C. charter schools sue city, alleging unequal funding [FOCUS, Eagle Academy PCS, and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 30, 2014
An organization that represents more than three dozen D.C. charter schools filed a federal lawsuit against the District on Wednesday, alleging that the city has failed to provide uniform operating funds for charter and traditional schools as the law requires.
The D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools argues that the city has spent about $2,150 less per charter student each year since 2008 than it has for students in the D.C. public school system.
In all, the city has given charter schools an estimated $770 million less than it should have since fiscal 2008, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court. The association and two other plaintiffs, Eagle Academy and Washington Latin public charter schools, say they turned to the courts as a last resort.
“We have not wanted to sue. We have wanted to work this out through other means, but it has not been possible,” said Ramona Edelin, the association’s executive director. “We just want the law settled. The law says that charter school students should receive equal and uniform funding to those in DCPS, and they do not.”
Spokesmen for Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey S. DeWitt, who were both named as defendants, referred questions to Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan.
Ted Gest, a spokesman for Nathan, said city lawyers reviewed the complaint and believe it is “without merit.” Nathan previously addressed charter advocates’ concerns in 2012, opining in a letter that the city’s additional spending on the traditional school system is legal.
The lawsuit follows years of school-funding debates that have pitted charter advocates against government officials and traditional-school advocates, who have maintained that traditional schools always will be more expensive to operate because of their mandate to serve all students and their role as community centers.
Both types of schools receive approximately $9,000 to $50,000 per student, depending on grade level and the level of need for special services. But millions of additional taxpayer dollars flow to the traditional school system outside those per-pupil payments, according to charter advocates and an independent commission’s report to the D.C. Council in 2012 and a government-commissioned study on school funding released in January.
“These disparities are contrary to D.C. law” and “have become a significant source of tension between the two sectors,” said the report, known as the D.C. Education Adequacy Study.
Charter school advocates who had long considered filing a lawsuit over inequitable funding were heartened by the study’s direct acknowledgment of their situation, Edelin said. They decided to hold off on filing the lawsuit, hoping that Gray would address the problems in his fiscal 2015 budget proposal, released in the spring.
Although the spending plan did take some steps toward equity, charter advocates said they were upset that Gray — who was elected in 2010 after promising funding parity for charters — didn’t go further.
“We feel like we’ve tried everything possible to get a solution to this politically,” said Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS, a pro-charter group that helped recruit plaintiffs for the case. “I really believe they know they’re not doing the right thing, but they haven’t been able to stand up and do what’s right.”
Congress opened the door for charters in the nation’s capital when it passed the D.C. School Reform Act of 1995. The act required the city to set up a “uniform formula” to fund charter and traditional schools equally on the basis of enrollment.
Charter leaders say that the city’s funding structure has passed more money to traditional schools and has shortchanged the 44 percent of city students who are enrolled in charters, including by making it difficult for schools to pay competitive teacher salaries.
The lawsuit is the latest sign that despite recent efforts to improve cooperation between traditional and charter schools in the District, there are many unanswered questions about how the two sectors — which compete for students and resources, and which operate under different sets of expectations and constraints — should coexist.
The complaint filed Wednesday lays out several ways in which traditional schools receive taxpayer support that isn’t available to charter schools, echoing the arguments that charter advocates have presented in years of D.C. Council testimony and newspaper op-eds.
Much of the extra resources come in the form of in-kind services from other city agencies, such as facilities maintenance by the Department of General Services or legal representation by the Office of the Attorney General. D.C. Public Schools received about $66 million in such in-kind support during the 2014-2015 school year compared with $5 million for charters, according to the adequacy study.
DCPS is paid on the basis of its projected enrollment; when the school system overestimates its population, as has often been the case, it does not have to return the money it received for students who never came to class. The city also has provided supplemental appropriations to help cover DCPS cost overruns and has covered the school system’s debts and pension payments directly.
Charter schools are financed with quarterly payments based on the number of students actually enrolled during the city’s official student census each October.
Abigail Smith, the deputy mayor for education, has previously said that while the city can and should shrink its subsidies for traditional schools, those subsidies might never go away completely because of fundamental differences between the two sectors.
The traditional school system must maintain enough space and staff across the city to serve any student who shows up throughout the year, for example, while charter schools don’t have that same obligation. Although DCPS may fall short of its enrollment projection in the October census, it sees a net influx of students throughout the year, schools officials have argued; charter schools see a net outflow, according to a 2013 city study, but they are allowed to keep the per-pupil payments even for those students who withdraw.
Some city leaders and advocates for traditional schools argue that it doesn’t make sense to fund both sectors equally when charters, by definition, are free from many of the rules that apply to DCPS, including the requirement to use union labor.
But the plaintiffs say that those are policy arguments that ignore the black-and-white requirements of the law. Their complaint hinges in part on the city’s unique legal status as a federal district subject to congressional oversight: They argue that the local government doesn’t have the power to pass laws and implement policies that contradict the equal-funding mandate in the School Reform Act.
The District’s lack of self-determination is a sore spot for city leaders who have chafed at what they see as Congress’s meddling in local affairs. The issue has been laid out publicly with the effort of Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) to roll back a city law decriminalizing marijuana.“We’re not anti-home rule,” said Cane, of the pro-charter group FOCUS. “We all live in the District and we all get home rule, but what we have here is a problem of fairness. The District is operating in an unfair way.”
D.C. charter schools sue city over funding inequity compared to DCPS [FOCUS, Eagle Academy PCS, and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 30, 2014
Two sources from a charter school support organization within the nation’s capital have informed me that a short time ago a lawsuit was filed in Federal court against the city, Mayor Gray, and the city's Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Dewitt by charters regarding the sector’s inequitable operations funding compared to DCPS. The legal action seeks the following:
“A declaratory judgment that the funding practices that result in DCPS receiving more in local funds on a per student basis than public charter schools receive are illegal under the uniform funding requirement of the School Reform Acts; and
Injunctive relief – an Order from the Court directing the District of Columbia to cease these non-uniform funding practices.”
Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS) has been the facilitating the lawsuit which includes as plaintiffs the D.C. Association for Chartered Public Schools, Eagle Academy PCS, and Washington Latin PCS. (I serve on Washington Latin’s Board of Governors.) The suit is being funded by FOCUS’ Legal Advocacy Fund. The attorneys for the plaintiffs are the Stephen Marcus and Wilmer Hale Firms.
Here’s some background regarding the reason this matter has ended up in court. The School Reform Act was created by Congress in 1996 to allow the formation of charter schools in Washington, D.C. The legislation mandates that all public school operations funding for both DCPS and charters be provided using a “uniform dollar amount” tied to the number of pupils enrolled. The District, the lawsuit alleges, is breaking the law by providing DCPS with $72 million to $127 million a year outside of the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF). Since the fiscal year 2008 the dollars that DCPS has received over that which charters have been paid for operating expenses are estimated to be more than $770 million. This has occurred through four mechanisms:
1. The city pays DCPS for the number of students it estimates it will enroll each year. When the number then comes in lower than expected the city does not take back the dollars. Charters are paid only for the actual enrollment count,
2. DCPS receives supplemental funding outside of the UPSFF that charters do not. For example, the lawsuit states that in Fiscal Year 2012 DCPS received more than $25 million as part of the Emergency Adjustment Act for operating costs for things like “staff salaries, food services, and after-school programs,”
3. Through the annual budget process DCPS is provided with money outside of the UPSFF through actions such as “Intra-District Transfers, Line Items and Pension Payments.” For example, DCPS receives free funding for legal and facility maintenance. Since 2008 DPS has been given more approximately $316 million for these services alone that charters have had to fund out of their per pupil operating funding, and
4. DCPS receives subsidized services that charters do not. The example provided in the legal complaint refers to a contract the Metropolitan Police Department has with DCPS to be responsible for security services. DCPS does pay MPD for this job but the contract is much more expensive than the amount the traditional school system contributes. The MPD simply covers the cost difference through which DCPS has gained $12 million in funding outside of the UPSFF.
FOCUS, the Association, and individual charter schools identified these funding discrepancies years ago; but efforts to work with multiple administrations and the D.C. Council to right this wrong have proved futile. The charter movement was encouraged, however, by the release toward the end of 2013 of the public education financing report known as the Adequacy Study by the Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith. The Study concluded that the funding of charters compared to DCPS was “inequitable.”
Ms. Smith committed to fixing this issue, although she admitted it would take many budget cycles to completely remedy the problem. Then when the Mayor’s 2015 budget was released it contained the same unfair funding structure that has existed all along.
This left the charter movement with really no other course than to take legal action.
FOCUS's executive director Robert Cane commented about the complaint:
"FOCUS and the public charter schools have been petitioning the D.C. government for more than a decade to obey the law and stop underfunding charter school students. Three successive administrations, including the current one, have ignored our entreaties. Filing suit is the only way left to the charter schools to get the funding for their students that they are entitled to and deserve."
Lawsuit Claims D.C. Underfunded Charter Schools To The Tune Of $770 Million [Eagle Academy PCS and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
July 30, 2014
A charter school advocacy group has filed a federal lawsuit against D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt alleging that the city's government funds the two public school systems unequally.
In the lawsuit, the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools says that the city is violating the law that requires that traditional and charter schools be funded at the same level. Charter school advocates have complained for years that the D.C. government has violated that obligation.
"After more than a decade of trying every other means, through meetings, data and demonstrations and getting nowhere as a last resort, we’re asking the court if they’ll settle the law," says Ramona Edelin, director of DCACPS.
Forty-three percent of the city's 80,000 public school students attend charter schools.
Edelin says D.C. pays traditional schools based on estimates of the number of students they will enroll, rather than the actual number the system enrolls. Also, she says government agencies provide DCPS with free services, such as healthcare and security, that charter schools don’t always receive. And finally, she says DCPS also receives additional funding for operating expenses outside the per-pupil funding formula.
"By our count the amount of underfunding is $770 million since 2008, but we’re not asking that that money be paid, we’re simply saying, ‘Please settle the law,'" she says.
Two charter schools, Eagle Academy and Washington Latin, have joined the lawsuit.
Parents Rail Against D.C. School Closure Ruling
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
July 30, 2014
Despite a federal judge’s ruling that the mandated closings of 15 neighborhood schools in January 2013 had nothing to do with race, a group of African-American parents whose children have been affected, vow to keep the matter front and center.
Sequnely Gray, who’s had two children displaced in Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s aggressive education reform efforts, said she and several other parents who filed a lawsuit challenging the discriminatory impact of the closures, take issue with Judge James Boasberg’s July 18 ruling and plan to appeal.
“In just about every neighborhood where a school has closed, it has been in a predominantly black community,” Gray, 33, said, stressing that most of the closings took place east of the river in wards 5, 7 and 8. “That’s blatant racism,” she said. “It’s interesting that when you look at the demographics for how they closed the schools, they’re mostly in neighborhoods where charter schools have popped up. I mean this stuff is self-explanatory.”
Meanwhile, Boasberg who ruled in favor of Henderson and Mayor Vincent Gray in the original case, said recently that issues of school privatization are best decided by the voters in the city’s upcoming mayoral election, rather than by the courts.
However, officials for the grassroots organization Empower DC, said in a statement immediately following Boasberg’s ruling that while the judge acknowledged that the closures impacted black students disproportionately, he denied any evidence of racism.
Empower DC, which promotes self-advocacy among the District’s low- and moderate-income residents, retained local civil rights attorney Johnny Barnes to file the original lawsuit in March 2013 to block additional school closings that had already displaced more than 2,000 students.
"We were not surprised by this ruling, as the judge signaled his posture from the outset. We however are not deterred and will appeal,” said Barnes, 66. “The rise of school closures in black communities, the undue influence of private funders who profit from school privatization – this is Brown v. Board 2.0. There are disputed facts in this case and the judge should have allowed them to be considered by a jury."
More than a year later, amid unwavering parental and community push back, school officials have started to rethink a handful of the closings.
To that end, a proposal surrounding the ongoing school boundaries issue suggests reopening Ferebee-Hope Elementary in Southeast along with MacFarland Middle in Northwest and three other buildings.
Camolee Williams, whose two children attend schools outside of their community, said she’s all for reopening schools in her neighborhood if classes will be smaller.
“If they did that, a lot less students would be struggling,” said Williams 45, who lives in Southeast but sends her children to schools in Northwest.
“That’s because there were so many schools in our community that had been dealing with low test scores,” she explained. “As for reopening certain schools, it’s not the fact of officials admitting that they moved too fast closing some of the schools, but now that they see the whole situation more clearly, it’s time to rectify it.”
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Stop blaming black parents for underachieving kids
The Washington Post
By Andre M. Perry
July 30, 2014
Mayors, teachers unions, and news commentators have boiled down the academic achievement gap between white and black students to one root cause: parents. Even black leaders and barbershop chatter target “lazy parents” for academic failure in their communities, dismissing the complex web of obstacles that assault urban students daily. In 2011, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg exemplified this thinking by saying, “Unfortunately, there are some parents who…never had a formal education and they don’t understand the value of an education.” Earlier this year, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman diagnosed that city’s public schools’ chief problem: the lack of “active, radical involvement of every parent.” And even President Obama rued last week that in some black communities, gaining education is viewed as “acting white.”
Clearly, there is widespread belief that black parents don’t value education. The default opinion has become “it’s the parents” — not the governance, the curriculum, the instruction, the policy, nor the lack of resources — that create problems in urban schools. That’s wrong. Everyday actions continuously contradict the idea that low-income black families don’t care about their children’s schooling, with parents battling against limited resources to access better educations than their circumstances would otherwise afford their children.
In New Orleans this month, hundreds of families waited in the heat for hours in hopes of getting their children into their favorite schools. New Orleans’ unique decentralized education system is comprised largely of charter schools and assigns students through a computerized matching system. Parents unhappy with their child’s assignment must request a different school in person at an enrollment center, with requests granted on a first-come, first-served basis. This year, changes were made to the timing and location for parents to request changes. A long line began forming at the center at 6 a.m. By 9:45 a.m., it stretched around the block. By 12:45 p.m., officials stopped giving out numbers because they didn’t have enough staff to meet with every parent.
Research backs up the anecdotal evidence. Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research recently found that African Americans are most likely to value a post-secondary education in becoming successful, at 90 percent, followed by Asians and Latinos. Whites, at 64 percent, were least likely to believe higher education is necessary for success.
When judging black families’ commitment to education, many are confusing will with way. These parents have the will to provide quality schooling for their children, but often, they lack the way: the social capital, the money and the access to elite institutions. There is a difference between valuing an education and having the resources to tap that value.
A study released this month found 26 percent of ACT-tested students were college-ready in all four subject areas. Among low-income students, college-readiness dropped to just 11 percent. The study determined that it was poverty, not motivation or attitudes, that contributed to the lower performance. “Nearly all ACT-tested students from low-income families in the United States aspire to go to college — at an even higher rate than students overall — but many lack the academic preparation to reach this goal,” the ACT noted.
Privileged parents hold onto the false notion that their children’s progress comes from thrift, dedication and hard work — not from the money their parents made. Our assumption that “poverty doesn’t matter” and insistence on blaming black families’ perceived disinterest in education for their children’s underachievement simply reflects our negative attitudes towards poor, brown people and deflects our responsibility to address the real root problems of the achievement gap. Our negative attitudes about poor people keep us from providing the best services and schools to low-income families.
This thinking hurts not only children, but entire communities. Low expectations extend beyond the classroom into homes and neighborhoods. The greatest tragedy of the New Orleans school enrollment fiasco isn’t just that parents had to wait in long lines. It’s that the school district assumed parents wouldn’t show up. Officials assumed grandma wouldn’t be there before dawn. They assumed Ma wouldn’t take off work with child in tow. This is a sign of deficit thinking — the practice of making decisions based on negative assumptions about particular socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups. The enrollment center was understaffed because officials assumed applying for school wouldn’t demand a larger venue, like the Mercedes Benz Superdome. An aside: The Superdome hosts the Urban League of Greater New Orleans’ annual Schools Expo.
When it comes to providing a better education for black children from low-income families, I worry less about poor folks’ abilities to wait in long lines and more about the school policies, the city halls, the newspaper columns and the barbershops that are plagued with deficit thinking.