FOCUS DC News Wire 12/11/13

 

 

The District’s fast-growing charter schools now have the third-highest market share in the nation, enrolling a larger proportion of students than in every city except New Orleans and Detroit, according to a report released Tuesday.

 

Nationwide, charter school enrollment has grown 80 percent over the past five years, according to the annual market share report, produced by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Growth has been particularly strong in urban areas.

 

The report is based on data from the 2012-13 school year, when D.C. charter schools enrolled 43 percent of the city’s public school students, sparking questions about the future of the traditional public school system, which closed 13 schools for low enrollment.

 

The year before, the District tied with Detroit for the second-highest charter-school market share at 41 percent.

 

Detroit’s charter school population has since ballooned to 51 percent of the city’s kids. In New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina forced a rebuilding of public education, 79 percent of students are enrolled in charters.

 

Across the country, 32 cities had a market share of at least 20 percent, meaning that at least one in five students was enrolled in a charter school.

 

 

Supporters have billed it as the most important piece of legislation to emerge this year from the D.C. Council — bigger than raising the minimum wage to $11.50 and decriminalizing marijuana, and far more significant than voting to rename the Redskins.

 

A bill expected to clear its first hurdle Wednesday — and that a supermajority of council members have signed on to support — would provide a vast swath of the city’s poorest students with as much as $60,000 each to attend college.

 

In a city that spends more than $18,000 in tax dollars per student annually but only graduates six in 10 from high school on time, it’s the next big idea to fix the District’s broken education system, argues council member David A. Catania (I-At Large).

 

“This is about leveraging the considerable investment we have made in pre-K through 12th grade,” said Catania, chairman of the council’s education committee and the measure’s principal author. “This is about investing in homegrown human capital, not the least of which, at this point, is the notion that if you are from here, this city will make a promise to you to help you achieve your educational goals.”

 

How the city will pay for a program that Catania has estimated could cost as much as $50 million a year remains an open question. So, too, does the issue of whether Catania — who persuaded nine other council members to co-introduce the bill this fall — will be able to hold that majority together after announcing that he is exploring a run for mayor.

 

The legislation, which at first seemed jaw-dropping for its price tag, has taken shape in hearings packed with D.C. public high school students who sometimes cheered in support.

 

Under the latest version of the bill, which the education committee is scheduled to vote on Wednesday, the city’s public school students would benefit on a sliding scale from the new grants, which Catania has dubbed D.C. Promise.

 

Students from families of four whose parents earn up to $54,000 would receive the largest grants, but middle-income families also would benefit. The same size family with income of up to $215,000 annually would still be eligible for up to $15,000 toward the cost of a bachelor’s degree.

 

Promise money would become available to students only after they exhaust all other possible grant assistance, including federal Pell grants and the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program.

 

D.C. students’ highly prized TAG subsidy provides up to $10,000 a year to defray the cost of attending an out-of-state public university and up to $2,500 a year to attend a private university in the Washington area or a historically black college.

 

If there is a hitch in Catania’s plan among his council colleagues, it is whether Congress could decide to end the federally funded TAG program if it sees that the District can afford to cover the hefty Promise grants by itself.

 

“If the Promise Act looks like it will reduce the federal dollars, then I think we need to look closely at the costs and benefits,” said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who is among those who co-introduced the bill. Mendelson said this week that his vote ultimately would depend on an answer about the federal TAG funding.

 

 

 

Aaron Davis and Emma Brown of the Washington Post report today that the D.C. Council is about to approve a $50 million a year program to provide high school students that have attended ninth through twelfth grade in the nation's capital up to $60,000 toward a college education. Students enrolled in traditional, charter, and private schools, as well as those who have been home schooled would be eligible for the college vouchers as long as they are District residents. Money would be provided on a sliding scale based upon family income up to $215,000 a year.

 

What is exciting to think about is that if the bill passes and is signed by the Mayor it is possible that some children in Washington, D.C. will have their entire private school education from Kindergarten through college paid for through scholarships.

 

There are three potential roadblocks to this legislation becoming law. The Federal government, under a law called the DC Tuition Assistance Grant (TAG) originally created by Congressman Tom Davis, currently funds up to $10,000 toward the difference between in-state and out-of-state public school tuition or up to $2,500 every twelve months for tuition to a District private university, historically black college, or two year colleges. The new Promise grants, named by the bill's originator education committee chairman David Catania, would only be available after students had applied for Pell Grants and TAG money. Council chairman Phil Mendelson and councilman Tommy Wells are concerned that the Federal government would end the TAG program if it is seen that the District can provide financial support to college students on its own. They want this issue cleared up before they will vote in favor of the plan.

 

A second obstacle to the legislation is that three council members, Muriel Bowser, Jack Evans and Tommy Wells, are already running for mayor and may not want to give a victory to Mr. Catania, who is also considering entering the contest. Finally, Mr. Gray has already put forward a draft Education Adequacy Study that lays out his future spending priorities. The document does not include the Promise funding.

 

Whatever happens, it is encouraging to see so many politicians getting behind providing students with school scholarships. Perhaps going forward this enthusiasm will transfer to the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which costs about as half as much as Mr. Catania's bill as is targeted to serve low income children.

 

 

The main point of the whole raucous evening was spelled out on the blue-and-white sign given center stage at Eastern High School on Monday night: “Our voices matter,” it said. Teachers’ voices, it meant.

 

The several hundred District teachers and activists crowding the auditorium at the union-sponsored event made clear that they think the opposite is true, thanks to what they repeatedly called “so-called school reform.”

 

And in their frustration — over closed schools, ousted teachers and an evaluation process that they say is designed to “ridicule” them, they hooted, booed and shouted down the mayor and most of the mayoral aspirants who had come to answer their questions on a snowy night.

 

Those teachers who were using their indoor voices were drowned out, too.

 

“This is not what I thought it was going to be. I don’t like this rudeness,’’ an early childhood educator said of her colleagues, although she did agree with the points they were making. Or might have made if they hadn’t been undercutting their collective voice by behaving in ways that would surely have gotten them thrown out of their own classrooms for refusing to show the most basic respect.

 

As a result, the local event — one of 80 “National Day of Action” happenings across the country — turned into a group therapy session. A community organizer told the crowd to help with “visioning” a better future for D.C. public schools, but what followed was more like a two-hour primal scream.

 

The District’s shortcomings, however, were on full display as a few students called to the stage to read short passages tripped over word after word.

 

Sometimes, and quite understandably, those leading the exercise treated those in the audience like kids: “One, two, three, eyes on me,’’ one of the organizers called to quiet the crowd at one point.

 

It didn’t work, though.

 

The new president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, Elizabeth Davis, kicked off the mayoral “debate” portion of the program by asking Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) — who had the full backing of the teachers union when he ran against school-reforming incumbent Adrian M. Fenty (D) in 2010 — his criteria for choosing a public schools chancellor.

 

When he answered by praising the chancellor he chose, Kaya Henderson, who had served as a deputy to Fenty’s Michelle A. Rhee, the crowd booed loudly. She has deep roots in this community, Gray said.

 

“What roots?” someone in the crowd called. Even the mention of Gray’s late wife, whom he described as “a public school teacher until she had an untimely death,’’ didn’t quiet the roar.

 

Henderson “understands the importance of” something, Gray said, but it was unclear exactly what she understands the importance of because shouts of “No! No!’’ made him impossible to hear. “No! No!” they continued as he noted that test scores had gone up since he was elected.

 

When the bell went off, signaling it was time for Gray to sit down, he seemed more than glad to do so.

 

Like President Obama, who campaigned as a critic of the war in Iraq but then continued many of George W. Bush’s military policies once in office, Gray ran as a skeptic of the reforms being implemented by Rhee but continued them under Henderson, who also has closed more than a dozen schools and fired hundreds of teachers.

 

Eventually, the forum devolved into a free-for-all dominated by first-time candidate Christian Carter, whose firm was hired to produce the 2014 report on the District’s expenditures on children’s services, and Busboys and Poets owner Andy Shallal. They were the only two of the seven candidates on hand who seemed to again and again tell the crowd what it wanted to hear, judging from the response.

 

Maybe the biggest applause of the loud, loud night came when crowd favorite Carter said of the evaluation system that “you can’t even teach my child if you can’t feel comfortable that you’re going to have your job the next day!”

 

The roars of approval for job security turned to crickets when speakers mentioned, as Gray did, that students ought to be the focus of all of their efforts.

 

Most teachers probably agree with Gray in theory, at least, about the importance of putting students first. And the few hundred educators who turned out Monday night might only be the most vocal of the system’s some 4,200 teachers. But if they ever hope to regain their voices, and to really make them matter, they are going to have to do more than raise those voices in anger.