FOCUS DC News Wire 9/25/13

 

 

Paul Public Charter School has achieved excellent results with much less private money than other high-performing charter schools in DC. Can it serve as a model for other charters that don't want to rely on philanthropy? Apparently not.

 

The DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) has ranked Paul in the top tier of charter schools in DC. But compared to other top-ranked charters, the amount of private funding the school receives is astonishingly low. Over the past 3 years Paul, a middle school, has received an average of only $132 per student per year. Another top-ranked charter, KIPP DC, took in literally over 27 times that amount. The private contributions are in addition to public funding of about $9000 per student.

 

Paul has been able to keep its operating expenses low by being frugal, creative, and responsible with its funds, according to its CEO, Jami Dunham. But when it comes to things like building expenses, Paul faces the same funding problems as many other charters. The $3000-per-pupil facilities allotment from the DC government isn't enough to cover its needs.

 

Started as a DCPS junior high

 

The school, which is located in the Brightwood neighborhood in Ward 4, started life in 1930 as a DCPS junior high school. In 2000, it became the first and only DCPS school to convert to a charter school, keeping its name, its building, and its firebrand of a principal, Cecile Middleton.

 

Although there was neighborhood opposition to the conversion, Paul PCS started out with certain advantages: it had an experienced leader who knew exactly what she wanted to accomplish, and it had ample physical space.

 

While the abundance of space has allowed for extracurricular offerings like football and dance, it's also required a good deal of maintenance. Generally, the school looks great. But the athletic field and basketball court are far from pristine, and some parts of the massive building aren't air-conditioned.

 

Dunham says that the school has spent $3.5 million on building renovations, which included installing student lockers and an elevator. The renovations were done more than 3 years ago, prior to the period included in the $132-per-student figure. But because that figure only reflects Paul's operating budget and not its capital budget, the $3.5 million wouldn't have been factored into it anyway.

 

Now Paul is embarking on another large capital project, the addition of a wing to accommodate its new high school. The money for that project will need to come from private sources.

 

This isn't a problem limited to Paul. According to Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), a charter advocacy group, charter schools get significantly less public money per pupil than DCPS schools: $1700 less per student in operating funds and $7000 less in facilities funds. FOCUS has been making a perennial push for funding equity between DCPS and the charter sector, which it says is required under DC law.

 

DC is now at last beginning to lease some of the many mothballed former DCPS schools to charters, but often those buildings require substantial renovation, or even demolition, before the charters can make use of them. And charter schools don't necessarily get a credit against their rent for capital improvements.

 

More focus on fundraising

 

Partly as a result of its decision to expand, Paul is now becoming more like other charters in focusing on raising funds. It has looked to an organization called Charter Board Partners to recruit board members with the skills and connections it needs to grow. Dunham has taken on more responsibility for fundraising in her role as school leader. And in June, the school brought on a full-time development director who is laying the groundwork for a $2 million capital campaign.

 

Even when it comes to operating expenses, it's not clear how much longer Paul will be able to rely on its barebones budget. Dunham says that one area where she's been able to economize in the past is teacher salaries. Unlike many other high-performing charters, Paul has a traditional rather than an extended day, so teachers work fewer hours and are paid less. Despite the low salaries, Dunham says teachers have generally stayed on because they value the instructional freedom and familial atmosphere they find at Paul.

 

But lately, she says, it's "getting to be more difficult to hire and retain teachers" because of higher salaries elsewhere, including at DCPS. Generally, Paul has been frugal more by necessity than choice, and it's a situation that the school is clearly working to change.

 

Paul is a school that seems both nurturing and challenging, with many features that other schools might want to emulate. While its test scores are high, with 61% of its students proficient in math reading and 81% in reading math, the school also ensures that kids have opportunities to engage in performing arts and athletics. Its school culture is structured but not overly rigid, and its high school will be the first in the area to be part of the Asia Society's International School Studies Network. And unlike other top charters, Paul doesn't have a waiting list. But it's not quite the "miracle" charter school it at first appears, functioning almost entirely on public money.

 

When charter schools were young and scrappy and experimental, perhaps it made sense to have them reliant on private philanthropy. But does it still make sense at a time when almost half the kids in the DC public education system are in charters? What happens to those kids if that private funding goes away?

 

DCPS has just spent $122 million rebuilding Dunbar High School, which is half empty. Meanwhile, DC charter schools that have long waiting lists and do a better job of educating high-poverty students have to engage in massive fundraising to retain good teachers and keep their buildings in decent shape.

 

Something seems to be wrong with this picture.

 

 

The chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee on Tuesday accused city officials of manipulating scores on the city’s 2013 standardized tests.

 

The issue arose at a monthly breakfast for council members and Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), during a briefing in the wake of a Washington Post report that revealed city officials scored the tests — newly aligned to tough Common Core standards — in a way that allowed them to announce historic gains in both math and reading.

 

A different grading scale, which teachers and specialists developed for the new tests, would have yielded a gain in reading but a decline in math. The Office of the State Superintendent for Education declined to use that scale after seeing how it would affect scores.

 

OSSE officials said they wanted to preserve the ability to compare scores across years and to avoid shocking the system with a new grading scale just two years before the city is scheduled to introduce a completely new test.

 

Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large), who said his staff has been scrutinizing the decision during the past six weeks, saw it as a politically motivated effort to inflate schools’ progress.

 

“OSSE was content with misleading the public,” said Catania, who interrupted the session several times to challenge officials’ version of events and to question Gray’s “fist-pumping ceremony” announcing test score gains in July.

 

Gray’s spokesman, Pedro Ribeiro, said the mayor had no hand in the decision about the scoring of the tests. He called Catania’s accusations “absurd” and argued that the council member is the one motivated by politics.

 

“He’s more likely to find the Loch Ness monster than he is to find some conspiracy here,” ­Ribeiro said. “What you have here is a decision made in good faith by career bureaucrats making decisions in the best interest of the District.”

 

The back-and-forth over the city’s testing program — the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, or D.C. CAS — offered a preview of a council committee hearing scheduled for Thursday on the same subject.

 

Catania said he will press OSSE to publish test results that would have been reported under the grading scale officials rejected. He also is pushing for disciplinary action against OSSE employees who were involved in the decision.

 

Catania said he sees the decision as a “form of cheating” meant to derail the seven education bills he introduced in early June, when he argued that D.C. schools aren’t improving fast enough and need an overhaul.

 

“The council has a right and obligation to ask questions,” ­Ribeiro said. “What the council does not have a right to do is to accuse people of cheating.”

 

The controversy could have a lasting effect on bills that emerge from the education committee. Catania, who has often cited D.C. CAS scores as a proxy for school performance, said that digging into the inner workings of testing has changed his views on how scores should be used.

 

“To have decisions about whether or not schools stay open, about whether or not teachers get raises, about whether or not children advance — to have them all built on a system that is so subjective is an overreach,” Catania said.

 

He said he does not support retreating from tests altogether but would like to see tests serve as “one of our many tools to evaluate the success of our system, and not the be-all and end-all.”

 

“We cannot view them as the Holy Grail,” Catania said. “It’s become very easy for us to believe that tests equal quality, and they do not, in my opinion.”

 

 

Before the official start of the Washington Latin’s Grand Opening on Monday I caught up with David Catania, chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee, and asked him what he thought about the Washington Post story that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education maintained the old DC CAS standardized test when officials saw that a revised exam would result in lower student scores.

 

He explained that the article did not even begin to explain what happened. Mr. Catania commented that OSSE staffers had worked for two years along with consultants to revise the DC CAS according due to the new material on the exam tied to Common Core standards. However, Mr. Catania revealed, when OSSE determined that test scores would go down, the organization, at the last minute and against the recommendation of the consultants hired to design the standardized test, kept last year’s DC CAS.

 

He went on to relate that it was silly to believe that the stated motivation for maintaining the previous year’s examination was to be able to track student progress from one year to the next. Mr. Catania asserted that the consultants explained to OSSE staff that this could not be done because the material covered on the assessment was no longer the same.

 

I asked the councilman when he first became aware of the OSSE decision. He replied that he learned about it in early August but that he could not say anything at that time because he needed an opportunity to thoroughly investigate the matter before making some extremely serious accusations. He did mention that he was able to obtain all of the internal emails on the subject from OSSE employees.

 

Finally, I asked him what he thought about these high stakes tests determining whether schools stay open or are closed, teacher ratings, and charter school PMF Tier rankings. He remarked, as he does today in Emma Brown’s Washington Post story, that it has reached a crazy point when the tests are being used in this way. The problem, Mr. Catania stated, is that the definition of proficiency is subjective not objective. He clarified that had the recommended test been administered along with the revised grading scale DCPS would have seen a slight increase in reading scores but a significant drop in math results. The overall change, Mr. Catania concluded, would have been a slight 0.5 percent increase in DC CAS scores from the previous year. But he said the impact is important because it prevents us from taking what we have learned about improving our students’ ability to read and applying the same lessons to the subject of math.

 

The D.C. Council will be taking up the subject of this year’s DC CAS examination tomorrow.

 

 

In most school districts with charter school options, parents must navigate a complex web of charter school applications, deadlines, and lotteries specific to each individual school—but that is changing in a handful of cities across the country.

 

To combat the confusion and make applying to charters easier and more transparent, a small but growing number of school districts, as well as charter school organizations, have rolled out new programs such as universal enrollment systems and common applications to centralize and streamline the process.

 

Among those efforts:

• Denver launched a centralized enrollment system called SchoolChoice in 2010 for all district-run and charter schools in the 85,000-student system.

• In New Orleans, the Louisiana Recovery School District, in partnership with the Orleans Parish School Board, debuted a universal enrollment system called OneApp for charter and district-run schools in February 2012 and is now entering its third year of a unified lottery system serving the city's 44,000 students.

• The Newark and District of Columbia school systems are making plans to implement universal enrollment systems for their district-run and charter schools for the 2014-15 school year.

 

"The promise of a marketplace of schools is also a promise that kids and parents can navigate that marketplace," said Armen Hratchian, the vice president for K12 schools at Excellent Schools Detroit, a coalition of education organizations and philanthropies aiming to improve education for all students in that city, where educators are also having conversations about a shift toward more centralization. "[Right now], there's no single place, time, or process for parents and kids to select and enroll in schools, so we're not really maximizing choice."

 

How It Works

In a universal enrollment system, there is one application, timeline, and lottery for all the schools that participate, including both district-run and charter schools. Parents rank their schools in order of preference, then an algorithm, which takes into account certain preferences (such as geographic location or where siblings attend school), generates one single, best offer for each student.

 

Such a system makes it much easier for parents and students to understand their options, said Gabriela Fighetti, the executive director of enrollment for the Louisiana Recovery School District, and makes it easier for schools to plan for their upcoming school year.

 

Before OneApp, parents had to keep track of dozens of applications and deadlines, and "at the end of that process, you could've gotten into more than one school, or you could've gotten into no schools," said Ms. Fighetti.

That caused an enormous amount of churn in the beginning of the school year as students scrambled to figure out which school they wanted to attend, making it hard for schools to know exactly how many students they would end up with.

 

Overall, said Ms. Fighetti, "you can give many more families a better offer if no family is holding multiple seats."

 

Getting Charter Buy-In

But convincing charter schools, which are public schools that are generally granted greater autonomy and flexibility than typical district-run schools, to join in a centralized process of enrollment isn't an easy task.

 

None of the cities that are currently using a universal enrollment system—with the exception of Denver—have 100 percent participation from all the charters in their districts.

 

Even in Denver, it was a hard sell, said Tom Boasberg, that district's superintendent.

 

"That first year, it wasn't clear if all the charters were going to wish to be a part of it," he said. "But the system was high quality and attractive enough that all schools elected to be part of it."

 

As Newark works to put the final details on its universal enrollment system, charters there have some concerns about a common enrollment system run by the district, said Mashea Ashton, the chief executive officer of the Newark Charter School Fund, which is helping to design the new system.

 

Although the current district leadership has been receptive to charter schools, she cautioned that "if there's a change in leadership, how reliable will this system be if it lives within Newark Public Schools? That's a question we're all wrestling with," she said.

 

But for the most part, charter schools see the move as positive, said Ms. Ashton. She hopes the centralization of the enrollment process will help dispel accusations about a lack of transparency in charter lotteries and admissions policies.

 

The Newark district will be issuing a memorandum of understanding to all schools about the new process there at the end of September, and all charters that want to be a part of it will have to opt in by late October, said Gabrielle Wyatt, the 37,500-student district's deputy director of strategy and innovation.

 

The district has talked to and gotten tentative buy-in from 92 percent of the charters in the district, she said.

 

Facilitating Choice

Rather than completely overhauling the enrollment system, charter schools in some districts, such as the 1.1-million-student New York City public schools, have instead opted to create a common application to simplify the process for parents.

 

"Our main purpose was to make it easier in a choice environment for parents to choose," said James Merriman, the chief executive officer of the New York City Charter School Center, the independent group that oversees the common application there.

 

The application has been in use since the 2010-11 school year, although not all charter schools in the city participate, he said.

 

For the most part, it is the independent charter schools that may not have much time, manpower, or money to spend on marketing and promotions that have benefited the most, said Mr. Merriman.

 

The charter schools still run their own lotteries and manage their own waiting lists, but the common application allows parents to sign on, enter their child's information once, and submit it to multiple schools.

 

Although that makes it easier for parents and provides smaller charter schools with more visibility, the application could make it harder for parents and students to understand the unique culture at each of the schools, he said.

 

"There's a sense among charters that they're trying to brand who they are, and there's some unease that in a common application you lose that sense of parents really understanding what the school experience is like," said Mr. Merriman. "The more you try to integrate charters into enrollment systems that are congruent with the district, the more possibility you [will] lose that sense of autonomy."

 

In the District of Columbia, 85 charter schools signed on to a common timeline to ease the burden on families, said Sujata Bhat, the project manager for My School DC, the citywide initiative that aims to bring a universal enrollment system to the 45,000-student school system.

 

Implementing the common timeline was the first step in building a universal enrollment system, which is expected to roll out for the 2014-15 school year.

 

My School DC will be unveiling the application in mid-December, said Ms. Bhat, and the initiative marks "the first time we've had a cross-sector partnership" between the district school system and the city's charter schools.

 

 

Schools in the nation's capital end up the guinea pigs for many new education programs and policies, but now they will get a stronger say in research to figure out which of those experiments really work.

 

The Education Consortium for Research and Evaluation, or EdCORE, is bringing together a set of research organizations with a presence in Washington to partner with district and charter schools, policymakers, and community groups to study how the District of Columbia's often-changing education programs affect its students and teachers.

 

"What we're aiming for is a Chicago-style consortium with the added benefit of a set of independent programs focused on improving outcomes in the city," said Heather Harding, the executive director of the consortium, housed at George Washington University.

 

Chicago has had such a research consortium since 1990, and similar research enterprises have emerged in other cities, including Baltimore, Houston, and New York City.

 

The Washington partnership involves researchers from several institutions, including the American Institutes for Research, the RAND Corp., Mathematica Policy Research, Policy Studies Associates, Quill Research Associates, and the Community College of the District of Columbia.

 

Washington has long been home to top research organizations, and its schools are among the nation's most frequently studied for everything from new charter models to teacher evaluations to curricula.

 

In 2007, the Public Education Reform Amendment Act dramatically changed how Washington schools operate. It gave control of the city school district to the mayor—instead of an elected school board—and established a separate state education agency. It created the mayorally appointed post of schools chancellor (filled first by Michelle A. Rhee, now the founder of the advocacy group StudentsFirst).

 

The law also required a comprehensive five-year evaluation of both the city's district and charter schools, but a plan for the evaluation was not developed until 2011.

 

Political Tap Dance

EdCORE is still in the early stages of development: It does not yet have a website and is still drawing up its research agenda, Ms. Harding said. It expects to launch formally by the end of the year.

 

So far, EdCORE is more a confederation of research groups than a centralized organization such as those established in some other cities.

 

EdCORE researchers are building bridges across choppy political waters. Many of the policy changes to be studied—such as new teacher-evaluation system and school clsures—remain controversial. And the politics of the District of Columbia are complicated by a mix of city and state functions and a unique federal role.

 

That environment can make it hard to sustain research partnerships with schools, said Gina Burkhardt, the executive vice president and education director of the air, one of the EdCORE partners.

 

"In D.C., every time leadership changes, you have to renegotiate how these networks happen, [how] relationships happen, and how resources are put into place," said Ms. Burkhardt, who is also a trustee of Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.

 

For example, as the consortium noted in its first report to the city auditor, both the school district and Washington's charter schools projected rising enrollment and financial needs in fiscal 2011, but education spending ultimately was cut during a "particularly strained" budget process "fueled in part by a primary election in which the D.C. council chairman was challenging the mayor, public disagreements over budget numbers, ... and negotiations over a new teacher contract."

 

Several urban research consortia emerged in response to similar policy overhauls elsewhere.

 

San Diego's consortium was created in part to study the effects of the district's short-lived "Blueprint for Student Success" initiative, which included block scheduling and extended days.

 

The Consortium on Chicago School Research, considered a gold-standard model for research partnerships, began as an effort to study new school governing zones created by a decentralization plan.

 

"Instead of doing lots of isolated studies, … one study can inform the other studies," said Elaine Allensworth, the executive director of the Chicago consortium.

 

"So if I'm doing research on leadership, that's going to be informed by research that's going on about curriculum and research on teacher professional development in the same schools. … That makes the research more useful," Ms. Allensworth said, and could help get disparate education officials and community leaders involved.

 

Moving Forward

Ms. Harding, a former research director for Teach For America, said she is used to conducting research in highly charged political environments, and said doing so depends on building trust.

 

"I think you need to have a fair amount of transparency," she said. "You need to have all your cards on the table going into a project."

 

For example, EdCORE is now evaluating how Washington brought special education students back from private to district schools, following court criticism of how special education students historically have been evaluated and served.

 

Thomas B. Parrish, the deputy director of air's education and human-development program, who is working with the consortium on the special education project, said researchers have been meeting regularly with district staff members to decide what special education topics would be the most helpful for the district to study.

 

"We had already gone in and pointed out 200 pages of problems with special education financing, and we didn't want to do that again," Mr. Parrish said. "We didn't want this to be a 'gotcha.'"

 

A report issued last spring by the New York City-based William T. Grant Foundation called for more researchers and districts to set up ongoing relationships focused on original analyses and problems of practice that are useful to the district, the community, and researchers.

 

"Consortia can help districts build a kind of capacity that the district is very unlikely to build on its own," said John Q. Easton, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the federal education research agency, and the former head of the Chicago consortium. "It becomes a much broader civic conversation about the district and its problems and the solution to those problems."