FOCUS DC News Wire 8/19/13

 

 

At tonight's monthly meeting of the D.C. Public Charter School Board five schools are on the agenda for consideration of charter agreements. Charter agreements contain terms these charters will need to meet in order to continue operating. They are not without controversy.

 

You see at previous meetings these schools already received approval by the PCSB to operate for another 15 years. So you might ask, as I did, why the charter agreements don't come before, or as part of, the deliberation to allow these schools to continue. It turns out that reaching consensus between the Board and schools about what should be included in these documents is not so simple. At least four out of the five schools have engaged legal assistance in negotiations with the PCSB regarding the specific conditions. This means that, unfortunately, public money is most likely being spent on attorneys instead of on students.

 

The D.C. charter advocacy group FOCUS has already heard from schools complaining that the board's demands included in the agreements exceeds their legitimate authority. It was this group that pushed to have the contracts divorced from the actual renewal; apparently the fear was that schools would be forced to acquiesce to the new language in order to obtain their 15 year license to operate.

 

Some think that the charter agreements don't hold any weight. After all, it is the written charter that contains the operating guidelines for these alternative schools, which are normally updated through the amendment process. However, it is clear from the law that the PCSB has the right to issue them, and their aggressive use is what brings us to the current state of affairs. As of this writing the Board indicates in the background documentation for tonight's meeting that the agreements are still being negotiated.

 

 

 

Starting and maximum teacher salaries are higher in the D.C. school system than in nearly every charter school. The wide range of compensation and working environments shows how the city has become an experiment in school choice not just for parents seeking the right education for their children, but for teachers seeking jobs.

 

Some charter schools declined to report salary data. Charters are treated as nonprofit organizations instead of public entities under D.C. law, and therefore are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Notes: Friendship, D.C. Prep and BASIS DC declined to provide salary information. Richard Wright PCS and William E. Doar Jr. PCS provided incomplete information. DC Scholars Academy provided salary ranges: minimum salaries from $45,000-$50,000, maximum from $75,000-$82,000 and average from $50,000 to $55,000. Some salary ranges include teachers-in-training who work in classrooms alongside lead teachers.

 

 

 

 

Richard Bettencourt was beaming about his new office desk at Washington Latin Public Charter School last week, only because it signifies how far he has come as the Northwest Washington school’s athletic director. When he took the job six years ago, his office seat was a silver trash can, and he would prop his laptop on his legs with his back resting against a radiator in a small office. He later graduated to a folding chair after he got too sore.

 

Bettencourt is flexible and always on the move, both essential job requirements in building a small charter school’s athletic department. He has done that to the extent that 90 percent of Washington Latin’s middle school and high school student population will be participating in sports this fall, he said. But in those six years, Bettencourt also has envisioned something more for public charter athletic directors in the city.

 

So in April, Bettencourt spearheaded an open forum about creating a new athletic league that would include all D.C. charter schools, giving each athletic director a voice in the scheduling and rule regulation of the city’s charter school athletics. The meeting, according to Bettencourt and others, was a hit. And the Public Charter School Athletic Association, born in May, has a chance to be even more popular when it rolls out its first league competition this fall.

 

“The conversation was becoming more and more that the charter schools and their athletic directors should have a little more control,” said Bettencourt, who is the league’s president. “We weren’t handpicking who was in the association. We really wanted to forge a new path for all the charter schools in the city.”

 

The new league will boast 22 charter schools, which at the high school level will include Friendship Collegiate, Cesar Chavez, KIPP, Maya Angelou, National Collegiate, Options, Perry Street Prep, Capital City, Thurgood Marshall and Washington Latin. About “95 percent” of charters have committed to the organization, according to Bettencourt, with some schools migrating away from the Washington Charter School Athletic Association. The PCSAA will debut this fall with boys’ and girls’ varsity soccer, cross country and girls’ volleyball, with all sports competing for championships in late October.

 

“Now that they have an umbrella for all the charters and you know that charters are growing in terms of number, it’s certainly best for our organization that they all be under one umbrella and continue to grow as one organization,” said Michael Williams, the D.C. State Athletic Association’s program coordinator of athletics.

 

The formation of the new association coincides with significant growth in charter school enrollment in the city over the past few years. Charter schools enrolled about 43 percent of the city’s students in 2012, a 2 percentage point increase from 2011 and a sign that the academies are growing at a faster rate than D.C. public schools.

 

“We keep growing. As the charters get larger in the city, athletics is also growing,” said Cesar Chavez Athletic Director Ernesto Natera, who also acts as the PCSAA vice president.

 

 

 

There are plenty of disputes in the world of D.C. education policy. But there also are a few universally held truths, including that the city’s aging Dunbar High School — a dingy, dark and nearly windowless high-rise — was not built to inspire learning.

 

“That building was built like a prison,” Principal Stephen Jackson said.

 

Now the 1970s-era behemoth stands empty, awaiting demolition as Jackson and an array of D.C. officials and alumni — including Mayor Vincent C. Gray, Class of 1959 — prepare to cut the ribbon Monday on a new Dunbar next door.

 

The $122 million building, constructed around a central armory with soaring windows, is light-filled and airy. It appears full of promise for a school once known as the nation’s preeminent black public high school but one that has struggled in recent decades.

 

Founded in 1870 as the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, Dunbar was the country’s first public high school for African Americans. It produced generations of black leaders in fields such as law, education, science, engineering and civil rights.

 

But as schools were integrated and middle-class families moved to the suburbs, Dunbar didn’t escape the problems that beset so many inner-city schools. By 2012, about six in 10 students graduated on time and fewer than one-third were proficient in reading and math.

 

The new building — at First and N Streets Northwest, the site that housed Dunbar from 1917 until 1977 — is meant to inspire students in part by connecting them with the past. The theater features a restored Steinway piano, first used a century ago at Dunbar. The armory is home to a striking image of the school’s namesake, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

 

And the names of influential alumni are inscribed in hundreds of silver floor panels embedded throughout the school: Charles Drew, the pioneering physician; Edward Brooke III, the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate; and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s delegate to Congress.

 

Some of the panels have been left blank, a message to students that they, too, can do great things.

 

“We let students know that this empty plaque could be you someday,” Jackson said.

 

The new Dunbar, like many of the D.C. school buildings that have been rebuilt in recent years, boasts all manner of energy-efficient features, from geothermal heating to solar panels.

 

There is a gleaming gymnasium, an eight-lane swimming pool and a weight room. Classrooms are stocked with flat-screen televisions, interactive whiteboards and digital projectors.

 

But the most important feature of the new building might be the simplest: walls.

 

The old Dunbar was built in the mid-1970s without walls to separate classrooms. The “open” concept, popular at the time, turned out to generate chaos, din and distraction for generations of teachers and students.

 

In the coming months, there is sure to be discussion about whether and how Dunbar will be able to fill its new space. The school is built to house 1,100 students — far more than the 500 who attended last year.

 

But for now, the Dunbar community is celebrating. School officials and alumni have planned a week-long dedication with daily tours and events, starting with the ribbon-cutting at 3:30 p.m. Monday and including a speech by comedian Bill Cosby on Wednesday afternoon.

 

“A hundred years from now, they’re going to be talking about what we’re doing here,” Jackson said. “It’s great to be a part of history.”

 

 

For many liberals, “choice” begins and ends with abortion. This inconsistency is where advocates of education reform should challenge the defenders of the status quo, which nearly everyone agrees has failed miserably.

 

“The education-reform movement … brings knives to gunfights,” Robert Enlow, president of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, conceded in an interview last week at The Washington Times. “We’ve got to learn to play much more hard ball … We just haven’t done that very well.”

 

The reformers should take their cue from Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. He ridiculed Matt Damon, actor, Hollywood A-list liberal and tedious opponent of school choice, for enrolling his children in a private school when he moved to Los Angeles from New York. “Matt Damon refuses to enroll kids in Los Angeles public schools,” Mr. Bush said in a Twitter attack. “Choice OK for Damon, why not everyone else?” Touche.

 

Mr. Damon — whose new science-fiction movie “Elysium” is rife with class warfare — says he’s an advocate for public schools for everybody, umm, ah, just not for his children. “Sending our kids in my family to private school was a big, big, big deal,” Mr. Damon said, replying to Mr. Bush’s tweet. “I’m trying to get the one that most matches the public education that I had, but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system.” 

 

Since “progressive education” is perfumed code for “liberal indoctrination,” we can’t imagine why Mr. Damon can’t find what he’s looking for in Hollywood.

Mr. Enlow says he doesn’t “begrudge famous people” like Mr. Damon choosing private schools, but he thinks it’s “immoral and abhorrent that everyone doesn’t have that same choice.” His foundation, named for founders Milton and Rose Friedman, is dedicated to promoting school choice as “the most effective and equitable way to improve the quality of K-12 education in America.” The foundation compiles “The ABCs of School Choice,” described as “the comprehensive guide to every private school choice program in America.”

 

The foundation counts 47 school-choice programs now available across the nation, enabled by either vouchers or tax credits, and 21 of them were either begun or expanded over the past three years. Since 2011 alone, statewide voucher programs have opened in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and most recently North Carolina, where Gov. Pat McCrory on July 26 signed the Opportunity Scholarship Act. This program will offer qualifying low-income families 2,300 scholarships worth $4,200 each to enable a child to go to a private school.

 

The programs in Louisiana and Indiana are “the big kahunas” of school choice, foundation spokeswoman Susan Meyers says, because after the third year, the caps on the number of participants will be removed.

 

Although each of the five states with new school-choice programs have Republican governors, Mr. Enlow says the Louisiana law enacted by the legislature passed with the assistance of “a ton of Democrats.” The Texas Public Policy Foundation hailed the North Carolina law as a nonpartisan triumph: “School choice should not be a Democrat/Republican issue. It should always be about doing what is best for students.”

 

A universal voucher program, says Mr. Enlow, “would benefit the rich hardly at all, the middle class somewhat, and the poor disproportionately,” noting that support for such programs is “astronomical” among low-income families and “phenomenal” among blacks and Hispanics. If so, this gives the Republicans a potent weapon in the debate, and Republican candidates should use it, particularly if the liberals bring guns.

 

 

The Common Core, a set of standards for kindergarten through high school that has been ardently supported by the Obama administration and many business leaders and state legislatures, is facing growing opposition from both the right and the left even before it has been properly introduced into classrooms.

 

Tea Party conservatives, who reject the standards as an unwelcome edict from above, have called for them to be severely rolled back.

 

Indiana has already put a brake on them. The Michigan House of Representatives is holding hearings on whether to suspend them. And citing the cost of new tests requiring more writing and a significant online component, Georgia and Oklahoma have withdrawn from a consortium developing exams based on the standards.

 

At the same time, a group of parents and teachers argues that the standards — and particularly the tests aligned with them — are simply too difficult.

 

Those concerns were underscored last week when New York State, an early adopter of the new standards, released results from reading and math exams showing that less than a third of students passed.

 

“I am worried that the Common Core is in jeopardy because of this,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “The shock value that has happened has been so traumatic in New York that you have a lot of people all throughout the state saying, ‘Why are you experimenting on my kids?’ ”

 

Supporters worry that opposition could start to snowball as states face new exams in 2014-15.

 

“The danger here is that you have two kinds of problems going on,” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that works to close achievement gaps. “One is a Tea Party problem, which doesn’t have deep roots but does have lots of political muscle behind it, and then you’ve got a bit of anti-test rebellion coming from the left. The question is what’s going to happen if they both get together. That’s the more terrifying prospect.”

 

The standards, which were written by a panel of experts convened by governors and state superintendents, focus on critical thinking and analysis rather than memorization and formulas.

 

The idea is to help ensure that students generally learn the same things in public schools across the country.

 

One goal is to reduce high remediation rates at colleges and universities and help students compete for jobs that demand higher levels of skills than in previous generations.

 

According to some estimates, about 40 percent of students entering college must take remedial courses before they can enroll in credit-bearing classes. Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York, said the system spends about $70 million a year conducting catch-up courses for students.

 

The Obama administration promoted the Common Core by giving priority to states that adopted “college and career ready” standards when it awarded grants under its Race to the Top program. By last summer, 45 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the standards.

 

But even many who support them are wary about how they have been adopted. David Cohen, an English teacher at Palo Alto High School in California who described the standards as “reasonable,” said that among colleagues, “the resistance and the anger and frustration are still coming largely, but not entirely, from the process.”

 

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly emphasized that states, districts and teachers have broad flexibility to devise their own curriculums and lesson plans based on the standards.

 

Speaking about the Common Core to the American Society of News Editors in June, Mr. Duncan said: “The federal government didn’t write them, didn’t approve them, and doesn’t mandate them. And we never will. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or willfully misleading.”

 

Last year Kentucky became the first state to give new math and reading tests based on the Common Core, and as in New York, the levels of students deemed proficient fell sharply compared with a year earlier.

 

Such results have spooked teachers watching from afar, particularly as more states are moving to evaluate teachers in part on student test scores.