FOCUS DC News Wire 11/20/13

 

 

Two charter school operators, including a Texas-based organization whose business practices have drawn scrutiny, have won permission to open schools in the District next fall.

 

The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted at its meeting Monday night to give conditional approval to Harmony Public Schools, which operates the largest charter chain in Texas, and Democracy Prep, known for its no-excuses approach to educating inner-city children in New York.

 

Harmony plans to establish an elementary school focused on science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM — that will grow one grade each year until it serves children in kindergarten through grade 12. Eventually, the organization hopes to operate several elementary and middle schools feeding into one stand-alone high school, Harmony Superintendent Soner Tarim said.

 

Members of the District’s charter school board said they were impressed by the hands-on and project-based learning they observed when they visited Harmony schools in Texas.

 

“I saw a lot of active learning, not just sitting and listening to the teacher,” Darren Woodruff, a charter board member, said. “That was impressive and something that is really needed in the District of Columbia.”

 

Harmony’s strong academic record helped it win a $30 million Race to the Top grant from the Obama administration last year. But its business practices have raised concerns. In 2011, the New York Times examined Harmony’s contracting practices and raised questions about whether the charter network used taxpayer dollars to benefit a social and religious movement led by Fethullah Gulen, an influential Muslim preacher from Turkey. Harmony officials deny any connection with Gulen.

 

Naomi DeVeaux, deputy executive director of the District’s charter school board, said the board’s staff examined the allegations against Harmony and found no cause for concern.

 

She said a wide range of people spoke highly of Harmony, including officials at the U.S. Education Department and the Texas Education Agency and members of Texas’s State Board of Education.

 

Six of the charter board’s seven members voted in favor of Harmony’s application. The seventh, Sara Mead, abstained because Harmony has been a client of her employer, the nonprofit consulting firm Bellwether Education Partners.

 

“This is a tremendous opportunity to educate children in the nation’s capital,” Harmony spokeswoman Julie Norton wrote in an e-mail. “Nationwide, there’s a need for STEM education and we’re excited and committed to providing a model in STEM education excellence for students in Washington, D.C.”

 

Harmony has not said where the D.C. school will be located.

 

Democracy Prep plans to open an elementary school in Ward 7 or 8, starting in fall 2014 with preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds and kindergarten.

 

The organization built a reputation for lifting test scores among poor children in Harlem and now operates nine campuses in New York and New Jersey. D.C. charter board members said they valued Democracy Prep’s experience in bringing struggling students up to and beyond grade level in math and reading.

 

Democracy Prep also has experience in king over and turning around low-performing schools. That is a rare and valuable skill, said board member Emily Bloomfield, suggesting that at some point Democracy Prep may be a candidate to take over a struggling D.C. charter.

 

“It’s something we’re always looking for when other schools are not successful,” she said.

 

Five members of the board voted in favor of Democracy Prep. Mead abstained because of her employer’s relationship with the organization. Barbara Nophlin voted against approval, saying that she was unimpressed with the Democracy Prep schools she visited. She described the classrooms as “very regimented, very rigid, lots of dittos.”

 

Alice Maggin, a spokeswoman for Democracy Prep, said the organization is “thrilled” to be coming to Washington.

 

 

The majority of the District’s charter schools and all of the city’s traditional public schools plan to participate in a single, unified lottery to determine enrollment for next fall, a shift education officials hope will streamline what has often been a frustrating and chaotic process for families.

 

The new lottery also aims to give more certainty for school administrators, stabilizing rosters earlier in the year and minimizing an annual waiting-list shuffle that has had students switching schools throughout the summer and into the school year.

 

“The more people who get seats early in the process — because then they can plan and are not going out of their minds — and who get seats at schools they’re excited to go to, the better for everyone,” said Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, whose office is coordinating the lottery.

 

Until now, some families won admission to multiple schools while others were shut out entirely. The unified lottery uses a computer algorithm to maximize the number of students who get into at least one school they want to attend.

 

It’s a simple concept that’s beginning to take hold in such cities as Washington, where the rise of charter schools has created more choice and more uncertainty for parents. But it’s a complicated problem to solve, particularly when there aren’t enough seats in sought-after schools to go around.

 

Alvin Roth, an economist, shared the 2012 Nobel Prize for solving just this kind of problem. He designed the programs that match thousands of medical residents with hospitals, kidney donors with recipients and New York City students with high schools.

 

Roth is now a professor at Stanford University and chairman of the board of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which used his ideas to build algorithms for school lotteries in New Orleans and Denver and is creating the District’s system.

 

The institute aims to build “strategy-proof” school lotteries that are fair, efficient and transparent and can’t be gamed by even the most determined parent. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation is funding the work for the District’s lottery. “Each city is unique,” said Neil Dorosin, the organization’s executive director. “The problems they face in enrollment and choice are not unique.”

 

In the past, each of the District’s charter schools had its own application process and ran its own lottery to determine enrollment when demand exceeded slots. The traditional school system conducted a separate lottery for admission to preschool programs, selective high schools and out-of-boundary schools.

 

Some students were admitted to more than one school, while others languished on waiting lists that continued shifting even after the first day of class each August.

 

Under that system, parents could apply to dozens of schools, then wait to see where their children were accepted before deciding where to enroll. Now, parents can apply only to a maximum of a dozen schools and need to decide earlier, before the lottery, where they really want their kids to go.

 

The unified lottery represents a new level of collaboration among traditional and charter schools, which compete for students and resources. The effort is voluntary, but the vast majority of schools — accounting for 95 percent of all seats for preschool through 12th grade — are participating. The 14 charter schools that don’t will continue to require separate applications.

 

Families can find details about the new lottery at myschooldc.org, a centralized clearinghouse for information about school enrollment. Starting Dec. 16, parents will be able to fill out an application on the Web site that lets them rank their preference among up to 12 schools.

 

After the application deadline — Feb. 3 for high schools and March 3 for elementary and middle schools — the algorithm will click into action.

 

It will match each child with his or her highest-ranked school possible based on how the child’s lottery number and extra preferences, such as those offered to siblings of current students, stack up against others seeking a seat at that school.

 

“The best way for a family to interact with this is to list the schools they want in the order they really prefer them,” Dorosin wrote in an e-mail.

 

Dorosin said the program works to match students with their highest-ranked choices to the extent possible, meaning that ranking schools in their true order is the best way for parents to ensure a more desirable school. Parents should not put schools at the top of their list because they think their children have a better chance of getting into them; officials said that if parents reach for a popular school and their children don’t get in, that doesn’t hurt the chances of getting into schools lower on their list.

 

Lottery results will appear online March 31. Students will be waitlisted only at schools they ranked higher than the school to which they are offered admission. That’s another reason families should rank preferences honestly, Smith said.

 

“There is no benefit to putting choices in anything other than the order of where you most want to go,” she said, adding that outreach and communication efforts to parents will ramp up in coming weeks.

 

Kara Cruoglio and Mike Zakriski, parents of a rising preschooler, said the lottery change has kicked their school-research efforts into overdrive.

 

“I was prepared for the old way, so it’s a little bit jarring, two months before go time, for everything to change,” Cruoglio said. “But I’m optimistic that it’s going to help more people get spots.”

 

They were among a steady stream of parents who on Saturday morning filled Dunbar High School’s atrium, where representatives of traditional and charter schools set up booths to advertise their offerings during a fair organized by the Ward 5 Council on Education.

 

“Our original plan was to apply to literally everywhere and then make a decision later,” Cruoglio said, adding that she feels “like we have to get as much information as we can upfront.”

 

Families who miss the first round of the lottery or don’t get any seats can enter a second round in May, which will follow the same basic rules.

 

Smith led the development of the new process along with representatives from the traditional school system, the D.C. Public Charter School Board and three charter schools, Achievement Prep, Friendship and KIPP DC.

 

The budget for the project is about $1.4 million for the first year, most of which comes from private funders such as the New Schools Venture Fund. Officials said they expect the cost to drop significantly after the first year. They are considering whether and how to move long-term management of the lottery out of the deputy mayor’s office and into another agency or nongovernmental organization.

 

 

The new common application and lottery system for DCPS and most charter schools has launched its website. You can't apply or enroll yet, but you can start learning about how the process will work.

 

The website, My School DC, is being rolled out in three phases: Learn, Apply, and Enroll. Families will be able to apply to schools through the site beginning December 16. There are two different deadlines for applications: February 3, 2014, for high schools, and March 3 for preschools through 8th grade.

 

Families will find out which schools they've been matched with and where they've been wait-listed on March 31. They will have until May 1 to enroll, which they'll do directly through the school rather than through the website.

 

Sujata Bhat, project manager for the system, says there's no advantage to applying early and urges families to take time to consider their options. School profiles on the site provide basic information and links to other sites with additional information. The profiles also list dates for schools' open houses.

 

All in all, 193 schools are participating in the common process. That includes all DCPS schools and all but a handful of charter schools. Families applying to one of the non-participating charter schools can also apply to other schools through the common system.

 

Parents who want to send their kids to their "as of right" school don't have to apply through the website. Starting in kindergarten, students have the right to attend the DCPS school whose boundaries include their address.

 

In some cases, elementary schools feed into middle schools and high schools that don't draw from the same boundaries. Students also have the right to attend schools within their "feeder pattern," even if their addresses fall outside the schools' boundaries.

 

Also, any child who is currently enrolled at a school can remain there without submitting an application through the website.

 

But families need to apply through the website if they want their children to attend:

 

 

The goal of the common system is to help ensure that as many students as possible get into schools they want to attend. Families can list up to 12 schools in order of preference, on a single application, and each student is assigned a random number.

 

A computer algorithm then tries to match the student with her first choice, then her second choice, and so on. If the student gets into her fourth choice, for example, she'll be waitlisted at her first, second, and third choices.

 

The system should make the application process simpler for families and make it easier for them to find schools they want. The website lists all 193 schools alphabetically, but it also has boxes that can be checked to narrow the search.

 

For example, parents can search for schools in a certain ward that serve first-graders and offer dual language programs. They can also search by school name or by address.

 

The common process should also make things easier for schools, especially charters. Some schools have experienced a "September shuffle," with students leaving and arriving as they get into schools off waiting lists. Some families have accepted offers from more than one school and then switched after a week or two.

 

Preferences and specialized schools

 

The lottery won't be completely random. Some schools offer preferences to certain applicants, such as siblings of current students. And some DCPS schools offer preferences to non-"as of right" students who live nearby, including applicants for PK3 and PK4. Those preferences will be respected in the lottery.

 

In addition, students applying to one of the 6 specialized DCPS high schools will need to satisfy the school's individual requirements before gaining admission. For example, a student applying to Duke Ellington School of the Arts would need to successfully audition before being entered into the lottery for the school. The application deadline for high schools is a month earlier than for other schools to allow time for students to satisfy these eligibility requirements.

 

Bhat said that she and others working on the program will be doing their best to get the word out and explain how to use it in the coming months. They will be training DC government employees at libraries, community centers, and other agencies that come into contact with parents.

 

While there is no cell phone app for the website, it's designed to resize itself to display properly on a smart phone. However, Bhat recommends that families use a computer to fill out the actual application.

 

It's also possible to enroll over the phone by calling a hotline. Translators will be available for non-English-speakers. The website itself is translated into 5 languages other than English.

 

Once they've submitted an application, parents can log back into the system and change their choices at any time before the deadline. Bhat also urges families to log back in if their contact information changes.

 

A second round of the lottery will be held for families who either missed the first round or didn't get into any of their first-round choices. But Bhat warns against waiting until the second round to apply, since many slots will already have been filled, and round two applicants will be behind others already on waitlists. In addition, families who received a match in round one will not be eligible to participate in round two.

 

The My School DC website generally appears easy to understand and user-friendly, given the complexities of school choice in the District.

 

Some charter schools that opted out of the common system expressed doubts about participating in a program that's untested. But Bhat and her team have been working with the Institute for Innovation in Public Choice, which has designed common application systems for several other school districts.

 

The chair of its board is Alvin Roth, a Harvard economist whose specialty is designing matching programs such as My School DC. Last year he won the Nobel Prize for his work.

 

So while there's no guarantee that the application and lottery process will go smoothly, it comes with a pretty good pedigree. And it's almost sure to work better than the system, or lack of system, it's replacing.

 

 

Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson told a DC Council committee on Friday that DCPS hasn't succeeded in attracting families to its middle schools and suggested that the District should just funnel middle school students to charter schools. What was she thinking?

 

The Council's Committee on Education held a roundtable hearing last week on the plan to revise DCPS boundaries and feeder patterns. According to the Washington Post, many parents at the packed hearing complained about the weakness of middle schools in the District.

 

DCPS elementary schools have been relatively successful in attracting middle class and affluent families, but those families generally peel off once their children reach the middle grades.

 

According to the Post, Henderson suggested that "perhaps the city should figure out how to funnel children to charter schools in the middle grades, arguing that 'they know how to do middle school really well.'"

 

Councilmember David Catania, chair of the committee, reportedly bristled at that suggestion. He told Henderson that it was her responsibility to figure out how to improve DCPS middle schools, declaring that he wasn't "about to outsource middle schools to charters."

 

It's true that many high-performing charters have focused on the middle school years as crucial. The KIPP charter network started with middle schools and then expanded downward and upward, as have several others. And it's true that compared to DCPS, these schools have done a better job with low-income students.

 

So I can imagine others making the suggestion that DCPS should just throw up its hands on middle schools and let the charters do the job. I just didn't expect to hear that from Henderson.

 

It was only a few months ago that Henderson was touting the improvement that DCPS middle schools showed on DC's standardized tests this year. "Students in middle grades saw the largest gains," a DCPS press release crowed back in July, with increased proficiency rates of 5 percentage points in reading and 4 in math. At the time, Henderson said she hoped the improvements would help stem the attrition of families from the system after elementary school.

 

Two middle schools, Kelly Miller and McFarland, had double-digit gains in reading and math on the tests, achieving their highest proficiency rates ever. Henderson held Kelly Miller up as an example of the power of an extended day program, which she hopes to expand to other schools. Its principal, Abdullah Zaki, recently was awarded the title of Principal of the Year. (McFarland, on the other hand, was closed at the end of the last school year, a move that in retrospect may have been a mistake.)

 

It's odd that Henderson would all but admit defeat at a time when it's beginning to look as though she might be able to turn the tide. It was a misstep that caused gleeful ripples among her detractors, and out of character with her usual determined optimism.

 

"We're DCPS," goes the catchphrase you can hear at the end of almost any DCPS-produced video. "We can do this." And now she's saying we can't?

 

 

THE DC CHILDREN and Youth Investment Trust Corp. is making news again. The nonprofit organization first gained notoriety as the enabler in the scheme by former D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D) to defraud the city. Now it has been chided by federal auditors for its poor administration of the D.C. school voucher program. The critical report raises new questions about the efficacy of the group and whether it is an acceptable vehicle to deliver services to youth.

 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found major flaws in how the local agency manages the federally funded program that gives vouchers to poor children to attend private schools. The DC Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp., which took control of the voucher program in 2010, “does not effectively oversee participating schools, has not implemented effective policies and procedures, and is unable to efficiently manage day-to-day program operations,” investigators wrote. The audit pointed up such basic failings as the release of a schools directory nine months after the start of the school year. The trust is allowed to use a percentage of the federal appropriation to administer the program.

 

Ed Davies, the trust’s executive director, said the group had inherited numerous problems from the previous administrators of the voucher program. He said improvements have been made. But the audit covered May 2012 to September 2013; particularly troubling — given the trust’s checkered past — was the failure to file timely financial reports, resulting in what the GAO characterized as “no opportunity for formal oversight of federal dollars.”

 

The trust was established in former mayor Anthony A. Williams’s administration as a way to leverage public dollars to raise private dollars for services to help the city’s youth. The reality, though, is that the vast majority of its budget is public money, a combination of local and federal dollars. Mr. Davies and a spokesman for the Gray administration said that the trust has undergone changes — both in leadership and in fiscal reforms — since the scandal that allowed Mr. Thomas to steal more than $350,000 in city funds.

 

The people most hurt by the trust’s shortcomings are the low-income, minority students who stand to benefit from the voucher program. The GAO findings should prod the D.C. Council to undertake its own examination of what the trust delivers for the public’s dollar.

 

 

The editors of the Washington Post today highlight an extremely negative report prepared by the Government Accounting Office regarding the administration of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program by the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation. The trust is well known to many because it was through this organization that former D.C. Councilman Harry Thomas was able to funnel more than $350,000 meant for sports programs for young people to himself.

 

But the leadership of the trust has changed and the accusations made by the government agency frankly do not match my observations. The GAO study finds poor oversight and administration of the OAP by the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation. Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton writes, "The execution of the voucher program has been rocky, with inadequate safeguards over the millions of dollars in federal funds, insufficient information for parents and a student database that is riddled with incomplete information, the GAO said."

 

I would ask anyone with doubts about how the program is being administered to simply friend the Trust on Facebook. You will then see the almost daily messages regarding information on how to sign up for the scholarships, which schools participate, the qualifications for families to receive a voucher, and even such mundane things as problems with their telephone lines.

 

Ms. Layton states that the GAO report echoes her own findings regarding the OSP. Here's one ridicules conclusion she has reached. "The Post found that hundreds of students use their voucher dollars to attend schools that are unaccredited or are in unconventional settings." Really. The same exact thing could be written about city's highly celebrated charter school system that for over a decade has been forced to teach children in church basements, store fronts and warehouses. Many charter schools throughout the early years of their existence are unaccredited.

 

Here's another one. "The Post identified a number of schools that were heavily dependent on tax dollars from the voucher program, with more than 90 percent of their students paying with federal vouchers."

 

Guilty as charged. A central tenant behind the theory of school choice is that once vouchers are available for use by students a market will develop to accept children taking advantage of the program. When I was chairman of the William E. Doar, Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts we were seriously considering creating a private high school solely for the enrollment of those participating with the OSP.

 

Instead of trying to kill a program they obviously don't like the Federal bureaucrats should spend five minutes on the Opportunity Scholarship website. There they could see for themselves statistics such as parental satisfaction with the program at over 90 percent, high school graduation rates at 97 percent, high school students that went on to college at 91 percent, and perhaps most importantly, the percentage of students that would have attended a school designated as in need of improvement under NCLB at 99.7 percent. In fact, the city should be using all of its energy to expand this important program that now helps 1,500 underserved students a year.