FOCUS DC News Wire 9/9/13

 

 

1. Will the Gray Administration figure out how to solve the funding inequity issue between charters and DCPS?

 

The Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Education Smith have promised that the shortfall in public funding for charters compared to traditional schools, estimated to be around $100 million annually, is being studied and a report will be issued as early as this month. Mr. Gray ran for office on the promise of funding equity between the two systems, and since the election a couple of years ago there has been extremely little progress on this issue. The most interesting aspect of the question is if the Administration fails to live up to thier commitment what will be the reaction of the charter sector? Will some strong step be taken such as bringing the matter to court or will these schools that now educate 43 percent of all public school students just crawl into a corner to complain?

 

2. Will the D.C. Public Charter School Board stand up to the efforts of others to regulate charter schools?

 

The Mayor talks about neighborhood preferences, guaranteed student feeder relationships between traditional elementary schools and charter middle schools, and coordination of facility locations between the two school sectors. Mr. Gray, along with Mr. Catania, the chairman of the Council's education committee, calls for a common lottery and waitlist between charters and the traditional schools. Will the time come when the PCSB exerts its authority to say that it is the legal body that regulates charters and tells other public leaders to step aside?

 

3. Will charters reach the 50 percent mark of the public school student population?

 

There are a sufficient number of charter school seats to achieve this milestone. However, DCPS Chancellor Henderson, embolden by the recent DC CAS scores of her sector, is making a positive and aggressive case for families to stay within her system. The rapid growth of charters has sent a shock wave across the political class that favors the traditional appoach to public education. Once charters achieve this level of enrollment the reaction will be pure panic. It will be extremely interesting to see if legislative steps are attempted to reduce or end the growth of these alternative schools.

 

4. Will Chancellor Henderson be given chartering authority?

 

Mr. Gray has proposed that the Chancellor be given the ability to charter her own schools, a power she has sought. Across the country competing authorities has been shown to help improve the quality of charter schools. However, there is fear in the local charter sector that Ms. Henderson will not set up the same system of autonomy and accountability established by the PCSB. Some believe that this plan is simply a ploy to bring in high performing charter operators to take over failing traditional schools. If this is truly the case then the proposal should be rejected because it would actually harm the overall D.C. movement.

 

5. What will become of empty school buildings?

 

The Washington Post's Emma Brown poses the question this morning and it is an excellent one. The Deputy Mayor announced last May that 16 vacant school buildings will be turned over to charters or community organizations even though Chancellor Henderson had strongly opposed this move. Those of us in the charter movement are holding our breath to see if the decision was a momentary period of politicians coming to their senses or a real change in policy that will be faithfully followed going forward. After all, as FOCUS has pointed out for years, the law is extremely clear that charters must receive right of first offer for all surplus DCPS buildings. Another crucial aspect of this debate is whether charters can get access to the millions of dollars per year now being spent on traditional public school modernization. This is a vital part of the equity issue that must be resolved without delay.

 

 

1. Will the Gray administration overhaul school boundaries? If so, when? And how?

 

Parents and prospective home buyers have been asking these questions for nearly a year, but answers have been slow to come.

 

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced last fall that by June, she would overhaul school boundaries for the first time in decades, with changes effective in the 2014-15 school year. The prospect triggered panic and pushback in some quarters , especially among residents who feared being cut out of two overcrowded and desirable Northwest schools, Deal Middle and Wilson High.

 

Schools officials said in January that they would convene a task force to gather input and make recommendations. But a task force has yet to be named. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) promised in June that the politically delicate boundary changes are still on the way, but he offered no time frame. The council — aiming to give parents time to adjust — has passed a law that would put off any changes until a year after new boundaries are finalized.

 

2. How will the combined charter/DCPS enrollment lottery work?

 

Gray administration officials are working with D.C. Public Schools and charter schools to come up with a combined enrollment lottery for the 2014-15 school year, an effort to streamline the choice process for families and schools.

 

Details about how such a lottery would work haven’t been made public yet, and it’s not clear how many charters — which are not required to participate — will embrace the cooperative lottery instead of continuing to go it alone.

 

No matter what, families are still going to have to be pretty lucky to get into the most sought-after schools.

 

3. Can DCPS hold onto its students?

 

When Henderson decided to close 13 under-enrolled schools in June, she said the success of that effort would be judged in part by whether officials could persuade the students from those closing schools to enroll in another DCPS school instead of moving to charters.

 

Activists who protested the closures argued that they would accelerate a “downward spiral” for the school system, driving students out of the system, leaving more buildings half-empty and vulnerable to closure, and accelerating the tilt toward fast-growing charters.

 

Henderson set a goal of retaining 80 percent of students from closed schools; as of the first week of September, 71 percent had enrolled in DCPS schools. The final number won’t be known until after the official October school census.

 

4. What will become of empty school buildings?

 

Gray administration officials announced in May that 16 surplus DCPS buildings would be released for short- or long-term lease by charter schools. That was welcome news for the charter advocates who have long criticized D.C. government officials for holding onto empty buildings or handing them over to private developers. But others were less pleased, arguing that the buildings should be put to use in other ways, including as community centers or magnet DCPS schools.

 

At least four buildings are out for bid to charters. D.C. officials confirmed that three charters have applied for the old Winston Education Campus, east of the Anacostia River in Ward 7: D.C. Prep, Eagle Academy and a partnership between Rocketship, an elementary school, and AppleTree, which focuses on early childhood education. Also in the mix are three schools in Northeast: Young, Shaed and Hamilton.

 

5. What will the D.C. Council do?

 

The D.C. Council faces a stack of school-related legislation thanks to education chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large), who introduced seven bills in June, and Gray, who is pushing a controversial measure that would give Henderson the power to create her own charter schools.

 

The bills have given Catania and Gray — both potential 2014 mayoral candidates — a high-profile battleground for political sparring. But they also have the potential to make sweeping changes to how public education works in the District. Debate will intensify after the council returns from its summer recess in mid-September.

 

 

The District has allocated $2.8 million to help city high schools plan for nine new “career academies” meant to help students gain the skills they will need to enter the workforce after graduation, Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Wednesday.

 

City officials hope to open the academies to students in the fall of 2014. They will offer internships and training in one of three career tracks: hospitality, engineering and information technology. All three are areas in which the District needs workers, officials said.

 

“Our goal is to be able to get people to work and reduce our unemployment levels over time,” said Gray (D), speaking to a crowd of high school principals and other D.C. education officials at Cardozo Education Campus, one of the grant recipients.

 

Like many D.C. high schools, Cardozo offers some career and technical education through academies. But there has been a broad call to beef up such training to ensure that students can leave high school ready to work.

 

A 2012 law required the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education to convene a task force dedicated to reimagining the city’s vocational education. The career academy planning grants emerged from that task force.

 

Most of the money will go to eight schools — six traditional and two charter — to each hire at least two administrators, tasked this school year with developing and planning for the academy. Each academy will also receive $85,000 for staff training and marketing to students.

 

About $239,000 will go to the National Academy Foundation — which helps schools across the country establish career academies — to provide D.C. schools with technical assistance.

 

The funds are good through fiscal 2014, and future funding will depend on annual budget cycles.

 

The other grant recipients include Columbia Heights Education Campus, Dunbar High, Phelps ACE, Wilson High and McKinley Technology High, which won grants for two academies. The two charter recipients are Friendship Collegiate Academy and Friendship Tech Prep.

 

Donald Hense, chief executive of the Friendship school network, welcomed the initiative as “a sign of a more serious focus on things that are important to careers in Washington.”

 

D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), who has been Education Committee chairman since January, is pushing a bill to increase per-pupil funding for students enrolled in certified vocational education programs. Catania called the career academy initiative “anemic” compared with the number of young people who have either dropped out of high school or are unemployed.

 

“If this city can find $150 million to build a soccer stadium, we can certainly find money to make a commensurate investment in our young people,” Catania said, criticizing Gray for not moving to improve career education until the third year of his term.

 

“Mr. Catania has been a council member for 15 years. Where has he been on education?” Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said, describing the academies as “a small component of a much larger system” of career education opportunities. Ribeiro called Catania’s criticism “artificial controversy.”

 

 

Mayor Gray yesterday announced the creation of 9 Career Academies within public high schools. The Academies will operate as schools-within-schools and provide career-specific internships and occupational training integrated with regular high school coursework.

 

The Academies, based on a model found nationwide, are expected to boost academic and occupational outcomes of high school students. But Councilmember David Catania, chair of the DC Council Education Committee, questioned the modest scale of the initiative, and a study casts doubt on the extent of the Academies' impact.

 

The largest study of Career Academies concludes that they raise earnings for some participants and increase the chance that graduates will marry and raise children. But they do not raise graduation rates.

 

The Career Academies are a recommendation of a Career and Technical Education Task Force that issued recommendations to Mayor Gray last December. Students accepted at a participating high school will be eligible to enroll in the Career Academy at that school.

When asked why no DCPS high schools east of the Anacostia River are participating, DCPS spokesperson Melissa Salmanowitz replied, "All DCPS schools were invited to apply. In the future, we hope to explore supporting more academies in more schools and industries."

 

Each Career Academy will have 75-100 students, according to State Superintendent of Education Emily Durso. The Academies will last from 9th or 10th grade through 12th grade.

 

The initiative is small from a funding perspective, only $2.7 million for the planning year, with future funding dependent on annual budgets. Eight Academy Directors and 9 College & Career Coordinators will be hired at a cost of $1.9 million. No additional teachers will be hired.

 

Councilmember Catania called the funding "paltry" in an interview with WAMU. Catania told the Washington Post that "if this city can find $150 million to build a soccer stadium, we can certainly find money to make a commensurate investment in our young people."

 

Why don't Career Academies have more of an impact?

 

But if the District wants to improve career pathways for high school students, it's not clear what we should spend more money on.

 

The largest study of Career Academies concluded not only that they don't increase graduation rates, but also that the boost in future earnings was limited to males in the group. And that boost was 17%, or $3,700 per year. These are hardly the dramatic outcomes many have expected from effective career and technical education in high schools.

 

The study, by education research organization MDRC, is fairly reliable. It is better than many education studies in that it tracked the same group of students over a period of time. And it compared students in Career Academies to students who applied to those programs but weren't admitted for lack of space, thus helping to ensure that the two groups studied weren't fundamentally different due to self-selection.

 

The Career Academy approach teaches basic education courses in the context of occupational training. When this approach has been used with adults who lack basic literacy skills, the academic and occupational outcomes have been far better than when the subjects are taught separately. So why isn't the same true for high school students in Career Academies?

 

One possible explanation is that the classes for adults put a basic education teacher and an occupational skills trainer in the same classroom, an expensive method. Career Academies simply retrain an existing teacher to integrate occupational skills into academic curriculum.

 

Is career and technical education in high school a good idea? Are Career Academies the right way to provide it? I don't know the answers to these questions, but they seem to be the ones that education officials in DC should be focusing on.

 

 

The first paychecks of the new school year for 349 D.C. Public Schools teachers were late or included insufficient funds, according to school system officials, who attributed the problem to timekeeping errors.

 

Teachers were supposed to receive their first checks on Friday, Sept. 6. But for nearly one-tenth of the school system’s teachers, payroll time was either entered incorrectly or not entered at all by employees responsible for reporting that information, according to spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz.

 

Officials worked to correct the problem immediately, Salmanowitz said, and supplemental checks, for the balance owed to teachers, were available starting Saturday afternoon. Checks not picked up by Sunday afternoon will be delivered to teachers at school on Monday, she said.

 

Teachers are “the backbone of our system and they should never have to worry about their paychecks,” Salmanowitz wrote in an e-mail. “We deeply regret that this error occurred and apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.”