- New D.C. charter school highlights debate over planning [Harmony PCS mentioned]
- New D.C. Charter School Prompts Complaints From Henderson Over Planning
- The fight is on over expansion of D.C.'s charter school movement [Harmony PCS mentioned]
- The Washington Teachers’ Union should let its members weigh in on a longer day
- Phil Pannell for the State Board of Education
New D.C. charter school highlights debate over planning [Harmony PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 5, 2014
A new science-themed D.C. charter school plans to open its doors this fall across the street from a traditional school that serves the same grade levels and has the same academic focus, highlighting a lack of coordination that has drawn increasing scrutiny in recent months.
As charter schools flourish, they often are competing with neighborhood schools for the city’s students, and the two sectors barely communicate about their plans. The move by Harmony School of Excellence-D.C. into a building across the street from Langley Elementary came as a surprise even to Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who learned about it on Twitter.
Henderson called Harmony’s move an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars and a sign of a choice that the city is going to have to make: Does the District want to plan for the coexistence of charter schools alongside a system of traditional neighborhood schools? Or does the city want to continue with a laissez-faire approach that Henderson said could give rise to a “cannibalistic environment” in which “somebody gets eaten”?
“Either we want neighborhood schools or we want cannibalism, but you can’t have both,” Henderson said, adding her voice to a growing chorus of people who have called for joint planning between traditional and charter schools and perhaps a limit on the number of independent charter schools in the District.
“A citywide conversation about how many schools do we need, and how do we get to the right number of schools, as opposed to continuing to allow as many schools to proliferate as possible, is probably a necessary conversation to have at some point,” Henderson said.
Charter schools do not have to specify or propose a location when they apply to the D.C. Public Charter School Board for approval. The board considers applications on their merits, without taking into account the impact on existing schools; once a school is approved, it goes about finding a home, and then must notify the board of its location before opening its doors to students.
Charter board officials and advocates have long argued that location can’t be a factor in school approvals because real estate is so hard to find that schools often don’t have much choice.
Officials with Harmony, a Texas-based chain that specializes in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, said they conducted an extensive search and found just one workable place for their new elementary school: an old parochial school building on T Street Northeast, in the city’s fast-gentrifying Bloomingdale neighborhood.
The building is directly across the street from Langley, another STEM-focused elementary that was recently renovated and that has been working to build interest among young families living nearby.
Soner Tarim, superintendent of the Harmony charter network, said he hadn’t realized that Langley was a STEM school. He said that the dearth of other options led him to sign a lease for the building, and he believes that — because charter schools enroll students from across the city — most of Harmony’s students will come from outside of Langley’s attendance zone and outside of Ward 5.
“I’ve never spent this much time during my 14 years of charter schooling” on securing real estate, Tarim said. “This was the most intense search.”
Also across the street from Harmony are the recently renovated McKinley Tech middle and high schools, both of which are STEM-focused. Tarim eventually plans to expand Harmony into a K-12 STEM school, but he said older grades will have to be placed elsewhere because the building is too small to accommodate them.
The issue of joint planning has attracted more attention in recent months amid the push to overhaul traditional public school boundaries for the first time in four decades. Parents and politicians have questioned how the District can redraw school maps — and thoughtfully plan for the future — without considering charter schools, which enroll nearly half of the city’s schoolchildren.
The advisory committee overseeing the boundary overhaul has recommended that the District address the lack of coordination between the two sectors, but — facing resistance from charter advocates — stopped short of making specific recommendations.
Charter advocates say the District could help guide charters’ locations by releasing some of the many surplus school buildings that sit empty, and they said they were open to sharing more information with the school system.
But they are firmly opposed to ceding their independence to government officials in the name of joint planning.
“Yes, there is room for better communication and information-sharing as each sector — DCPS and charter schools — makes decisions,” Scott Pearson, the charter board’s executive director, wrote in a Washington Post letter to the editor in May. “But protecting a traditional school is no reason to keep a great charter school from opening its doors.”
A charter board spokeswoman said Pearson was not available for an interview for this article, but she pointed to a May board meeting during which Pearson said he is encouraging newly approved schools to meet with the city’s deputy mayor of education to describe their facilities plans.
Henderson said that she envisions a process that would allow city and charter board officials to identify which neighborhoods most need new, good schools and which neighborhoods would benefit from specialty programs. The charter board would then use those priorities in determining which new schools should be approved, she said.
“The citizens deserve better, with the dollars that they entrust us with, than this random, haphazard stuff,” Henderson said. “I think this mayor, this deputy mayor, myself, we all support charter schools . . . but I don’t think anybody signed up for the kind of uncontrolled expansion of schools, without rhyme or reason.”
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, said it is not surprising that the chancellor of the traditional school system would want a say in which charters are approved and where they’re allowed to open.
But “nobody outside the charter school sector should have a veto power over where our schools locate,” Edelin said. “Charter schools are autonomous and free from that kind of control from the government, and that’s a requirement of their success.”
Responding to Henderson’s characterization that charters are cannibalizing the school system, Edelin said that “competition should be good for the neighborhood.”
The school system’s struggles to maintain enrollment are “not just because there’s a charter school nearby,” she said. “It’s because they’re seen as better, and parents are voting with their feet.”
New D.C. Charter School Prompts Complaints From Henderson Over Planning
WAMU
By Patrick Madden
July 7, 2014
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson says better planning is needed to prevent a "cannibalistic environment'' between charter schools and traditional public schools.
Henderson's comments to The Washington Post came in response to news that a science-themed charter school plans to open this fall across the street from a traditional school that serves the same grades and has the same academic focus.
Henderson says she learned about the charter school's planned opening on Twitter. She says there needs to be "a citywide conversation about how many schools do we need .. as opposed to continuing to allow as many schools as possible to proliferate.''
Charter schools don't have to say where they plan to be located when they apply to the D.C. Public Charter School Board for approval.
The fight is on over expansion of D.C.'s charter school movement [Harmony PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 7, 2014
We pick up today right where we left off last week with DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson complaining about the lack of coordination with her system when a new charter school is about to open. She is upset that Harmony PCS, which has a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math, is set to open across the street from Langley Elementary, one of her facilities that offer the same concentration for the identical school grades.
However, now Ms. Henderson's rhetoric on this subject has reached a new feverish pitch. The Washington Post's Emma Brown quotes the Chancellor as remarking, “Either we want neighborhood schools or we want cannibalism, but you can’t have both."
I frankly don't understand why she would react in this manner. A long time charter school supporter, Ms. Henderson must know that the competition for students charters provide is what has directly led to positive change in the traditional schools. Moreover, if she, together with her predecessor Michelle Rhee, have brought so much improvement to DCPS then why would she be so concerned about a charter opening near one of her locations? Wouldn't the families in the community simply keep their kids enrolled in the neighborhood school? Does she know something we don't?
Well it didn't take me long to figure out what that something is. The problem for the Chancellor is that Langley Elementary, which serves 417 students, 99 percent of which qualify for free or reduced lunch, scores below the D.C. average when it comes to standardized test results. The DC CAS report for the 2012 to 2013 term show a math proficiency rate of just 44 percent, 9 points below the city's mean of 53 percent. In reading the school's proficiency percentage is 46, 3 points below the state average.
Harmony PCS has an extremely different track record. The charter network teaches over 25,000 students on 40 campuses throughout Texas. Among Harmony's accomplishments are a 100 percent college acceptance rate and a student dropout count that numbers zero. From the school's website:
"In 2006, Harmony Science Academy Houston, our original school, received the Title 1 Distinguished School Award from the US Department of Education for outstanding performance in the categories of exceptional student performance for two or more consecutive years and closing the achievement gap."
Since 2007 Harmony charter school have scored each year above the Texas state average in math, science, reading, and social studies.
We are all involved in school reform for the children. Therefore, if it works out that Harmony can do academically what Langley cannot, then the perfectly appropriate action by the Chancellor, as hard as this would be, would be to turn over her school to the charter.
The Washington Teachers’ Union should let its members weigh in on a longer day
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
July 6, 2014
THE D.C. school system’s experiment with a longer school day has produced encouraging results. Seven of eight schools with extended-day programming for the 2012- 2013 school year showed improvement in math and reading. As a group, students with an extended day posted gains on achievement tests that far outstripped those in schools with traditional hours.
None of that, though, seems to matter to the Washington Teachers’ Union. Nor does the fact that teachers in these schools willingly signed on to the new hours or that they were paid for their extra effort. For reasons that are impossible to fathom, the union is resisting — unfortunately, with some success — plans to expand this initiative.
Giving public school students more instruction time is a priority of D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. She set aside $5.1 million in next year’s budget for the effort. But, as The Post’s Emma Brown reported, the union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, is blocking the initiative by urging teachers not to approve the change and by preventing the issue from coming to a vote.
Let’s emphasize that last point: The union that is supposed to represent the interest of teachers won’t allow a vote in which teachers would decide for themselves, school by school, if they want a longer school day that would benefit students and for which they would be paid. A provision in the teachers’ contract, which expired in 2012 but is in force until a new agreement is reached, allows individual schools to adopt nontraditional scheduling if two-thirds of teachers approve.
It is a sensible approach that recognizes that not every school may need the extra hours and that schools should have flexibility in designing a schedule that best meets the needs of their students. As successful public charter schools have demonstrated, extra instructional time can help lift the achievement of poor and struggling students. Nonetheless, the union is opposed. Union President Elizabeth Davis claims it is “being cautious not to be [a roadblock] to reform.” We sure would hate to see what happens when it is being incautious.
Ms. Henderson called the union’s opposition “shortsighted” in that teachers whose students make gains because of extended learning stand to earn bonuses. We suggest that teachers’ jobs might also be in play, since the more students who are attracted to charter schools, many of which have longer school days, the less need there is for teachers in the traditional school system.
Teachers have rightly argued they should be treated like professionals, that they should be listened to and that they should be fairly compensated. It’s a case they need to make to their own union representatives.
Phil Pannell for the State Board of Education
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
July 4, 2014
EDUCATION CONTINUES to be the most important issue facing the District of Columbia, and nowhere are the challenges greater than in Ward 8. That’s why voters there would do well to pay attention to the candidates vying to represent them on the State Board of Education in a special election this month.
The July 15 election will fill the unexpired term of Trayon White, who resigned to take a job with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, and it has attracted scant notice. That is typical of elections held off-schedule, but the low profile of the reconfigured school board is also a factor.
There is no question that the elected school board lost power when education governance was changed in 2007 to give the mayor authority for operating the public school system. Still, the board’s role in setting standards and shaping policy remains important to continuing education reform.
Two candidates are vying for election. The winner will serve out Mr. White’s term, which expires in 2016. Ward 8 voters are fortunate because both hopefuls — civic activist Phil Pannell and teacher Tierra Jolly — have solid credentials and thoughtful ideas. Ms. Jolly, a Teach for America alumna who went on to teach in Ward 8’s Kramer Middle School and now at Bishop McNamara High School in Prince George’s County, has valuable firsthand insights that could help inform education policy. She has appealing ideas about vocational education and, as someone who grew up in Ward 8, she understands its challenges.
But we give the edge to Mr. Pannell, whom we endorsed in his two previous bids for the board, believing that he has a more expansive view on policy and that his longtime activism in Ward 8 would help him focus attention on local schools. Once an executive assistant to school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Mr. Pannell understands the role of the board and how policy can make an important difference. His work in starting and supporting a parent-teacher association at Ballou High School has made him a champion of efforts to improve parent engagement. Equally important is his full-throated support for charter schools.
All registered voters in Ward 8 can vote in this nonpartisan election.