FOCUS DC News Wire 1/30/2014

 

 

Many of the District’s traditional schools have fewer children than they were originally designed to hold, driving up the cost of maintenance. Meanwhile, the city’s fast-growing charter schools often struggle to find suitable real estate.

 

The solution, according to a study commissioned by the city government: Push traditional schools to share space with charters, city agencies and community-based organizations.

 

Such “co-locations” exist in a few places in the District. In Southeast Washington, for example, Malcolm X Elementary houses its own students as well as those from Achievement Prep Public Charter School. In Northwest, Sharpe Health is home to both a DCPS special-education school and Bridges Public Charter School.

 

But the District has been far less aggressive about sharing public school space than some other cities, notably New York, where the number of charter schools co-located with traditional schools grew quickly under former Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

 

Now the District is poised to begin pursuing co-location more aggressively, according to Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, whose office commissioned the D.C. government study. “It’s something that we support and that the chancellor is really interested in,” Smith said, referring to D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson.

 

Co-locations aren’t always welcomed or easy: Put two schools with different cultures and missions into the same space, and there’s almost sure to be some tension. Co-locations need “substantial oversight and management” in order to work well, the study notes, and the District would have to build its oversight capacity from the ground up.

 

Co-locations do offer a way to use large public buildings more efficiently, but there are important questions about how much extra space D.C. traditional schools actually have.

 

According to the government’s study, D.C. school system only needs 7.4 million square feet, or about 70 percent of the 10.6 million square feet of school building space in its current portfolio.

 

But that calculation doesn’t account for the way space is actually used in the District’s historic school buildings, said Mary Filardo, a facilities expert at the 21st Century Schools Fund. The older buildings have larger hallways, stairways, lobbies and mechanical rooms than newer school buildings, for example, as well as large theaters, full-service kitchens and vocational education spaces.

 

Cutting the school system’s space to 7.4 million square feet would leave each of the system’s 45,000 students with less than 170 square feet, the average recommended for new buildings. That is “not a workable space allocation for our existing facilities and particularly not for projected growth,” Filardo said, pointing out that population projections suggest that the school system needs to be able to absorb thousands children in the coming decade.

 

“Co-location would have been an option more responsibly pursued before the 2008 and 2012 school closings; and if there were policies in place that enabled the city to manage charter growth and locations,” Filardo said.

 

It currently costs about $96 million to maintain and operate all of the school system’s space; the school system pays part of that bill, but the Department of General Services kicks in about $45 million.

 

The city is now seeking to minimize that infusion, in part because charter schools do not receive a comparable subsidy, and the law requires both sectors to be equitably funded. Co-located charter schools and organizations would chip in for school system maintenance, thus reducing the cost to the city.

 

 

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Emma Brown focused an article on one aspect of the Deputy Mayor for Education's Adequacy Study that was released Tuesday. The report calls for increased use of charter school co-locations with traditional schools as a means of providing each system more efficient utilization of space. The securing of facilities is a tremendous problem for charters and it is an issue no one across the country has been able to satisfactorily solve. Ms. Brown points out that Achievement Prep and Bridges Public Charter Schools currently share buildings with DCPS.

 

In New York City co-location of charters with regular schools is common and it has led to highly emotional fights and law suits as the schools involved have pushed for more room. But these problems have resulted mainly from charters being given space for free, a situation that does not exist in this town. Here in the nation's capital the expanded use of co-location could be a boon for the local charter school movement.

 

The change could expose parents to the high quality offerings of the charter school portfolio. Even if a charter is not rated as a D.C. Public Charter School Board Performance Management Framework Tier 1 it often resembles more of a private school than a traditional one. In general the physical appearance of the space will be neat and organized, the class size will be small, teachers will be enthusiastic, and discipline will be maintained. But most importantly, the parents and children will be the customer. All of these factors could lead to traditional school parents who are exposed to the charter experience to sign up for these alternative schools. Or perhaps a different reaction will evolve.

 

The co-location of schools could lead to an increase in competition for students. Chancellor Henderson is proud of her product and is making every effort to improve academic quality. The sharing of space might very well accelerate the numerous positive advances initiated under her watch.

 

Whatever the outcome it appears one thing is certain. Children will be the winners in regard to their public education in Washington, D.C.

 

 

The Education Department on Wednesday reversed a long-standing policy and will now allow public charter schools that receive federal grants to give admissions preference to low-income children, minorities and other disadvantaged students.

 

The move is designed to try to preserve racial diversity in schools that are attractive to wealthier families. Schools will be able to conduct a “weighted lottery” that gives preference to certain groups.

 

“We’ve heard from states, school operators and other stakeholders across the country that weighted lotteries can be an effective tool that can complement public charter schools’ efforts to serve more educationally disadvantaged students,” said Dorie Holt, a department spokeswoman.

 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools had been asking for the change for nearly three years, said Nina Rees, the group’s president.

 

“At the core, this brings the federal statute in line with what a lot of states have put into place to help attract more English-language learners, special education students and low-income students to charter schools,” Rees said.

 

In cities such as Denver, New York and the District of Columbia, a handful of well-regarded charter schools have been attracting wealthier families, making it difficult to maintain a balance between rich and poor, white and minority, said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the right-leaning Fordham Institute and author of “The Diverse Schools Dilemma.”

 

“Once the word gets out, many middle-class parents who want diverse schools end up flooding the lotteries, and then it’s not so diverse anymore,” Petrilli said. “If you can’t weight the lottery, the school ends up being predominantly white and middle class.”

 

Most of the nation’s charter schools are overwhelmingly low-income and high-poverty, and many aim to serve those students.

 

Charter schools are publicly financed but privately run, mostly with non-unionized teachers. About five percent of public school students attend charters; in the District, 44 percent of the city’s public school students attend charter schools.

 

Decades of research into school integration policies show that, on average, students learn more in schools that are economically and racially diverse than they do in segregated schools, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Century Foundation.

 

In 2010, Kahlenberg tracked students living in low-income housing in Montgomery County and found those who attended integrated schools had stronger academic gains than those attending high-poverty schools.

 

“When charters become strong, desirable and oversubscribed, middle-class families with better access to information tend to be the ones who flood the lottery, and the composition of the school changes,” Kahlenberg said, noting that E.L. Haynes and Capital City charter schools have attracted a significant number of middle-class families.

 

Allowing a weighted lottery could bring some charter schools closer to the original vision conceived by Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers.

 

Shanker proposed charter schools in 1988 as diverse laboratories of innovation that could transcend urban racial boundaries because they would draw from across a city, Kahlenberg said. But federal policy has stood in the way, Kahlenberg said, because it has required charter schools to have blind lotteries in order to receive federal start-up funds.

 

To truly achieve a mix of students in charter schools, Kahlenberg said federal and state governments should allow schools to weight lotteries in favor of whatever subgroup of student is under-represented at the school. High-poverty schools could set aside seats for middle-income families, or all-black schools could make room for white, Latino and Asian students, he said.

 

In the past fiscal year, the Education Department gave $242 million in start-up funds to charter schools. The money is typically used to fund a new school during its first two years. About 1,200 schools were using the federal funds in fiscal 2013.

 

 

It’s enough that they face enormous challenges, including blindness, dyslexia and severe emotional disorders. Now, the more than 350 special-needs children at Options Public Charter School must suffer cavalier charter officials who apparently have little regard for their academic futures.

 

Problems for the students intensified in October when D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan filed a civil lawsuit against several of Options’s managers and a former board member; the managers were accused of diverting millions of dollars from the school to two for-profit companies they owned and operated.

 

Protecting the public’s money is important. Wisely, Nathan worked with the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) prior to filing the lawsuit and requested that the court appoint a receiver to ensure “the best interests of the school would be protected.”

 

By contrast, the PCSB’s actions have been unconscionable. As if dealing with widgets — not some of the city’s most vulnerable children — the board quickly voted to close the school; under pressure, closure was delayed until next year.

 

Scott Pearson, the PCSB’s executive director, said in a written statement to me this week that Options students “are our top concern.” He said that “no final [closing] decision” has been made and the board is working “to find a solution which is best for the students, has them in the right educational environment and causes them the least disruption.”

 

That’s all spin. Based on testimony last week before the D.C. Council’s Committee on Education and Libraries, the closing of Options is essentially a done deal. Stunningly, the charter board started the closure process before the court receiver had finalized his evaluation of conditions at the school. Before there was an analysis of each student’s educational needs. Even before the board knew a “definitive” number of children considered most severe, or Level 4.

 

That’s making children a top priority, right?

 

Pearson told the council that the PCSB’s hands were tied. The School Reform Act mandates revocation, he argued, when there is a “pattern of financial mismanagement.” But the law doesn’t provide a specific timetable. In fact, the board could secure a new operator or assume direct control of the school. It apparently is happy strapping D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) with responsibility for the students.

 

Nathaniel Beers, DCPS’s head of special education, made clear, however, that “if [Options] closed tomorrow and all the kids came to DCPS, we would have a crisis in our neighborhood schools.” So, as committee Chairman David Catania (I-At Large) noted, “The only individuals suffering are the students.”

 

What’s new? In the public-education pecking order, children with special needs frequently get short shrift, forced to fight government officials, often in court, for every resource and every small advantage.

 

“We’re not doing a great job with our special education kids, generally,” Catania told me days after his meeting. He has been working with Judith Sandalow of the Children’s Law Center to develop a plan to improve the system. Catania expects to introduce legislation in February that could incorporate some of Sandalow’s recommendations.

 

“Options wasn’t particularly good. We had concerns before this. [Still,] we need to step in quickly and figure out a solution,” Sandalow told me. She praised the city for improving services to younger children. But, she said, it hasn’t done as well with older students, particularly those with severe emotional issues, like many of the teens at Options.

 

“A lot of our kids have been traumatized at home or in their community,” Sandalow added. “The city needs a good mental health system to reduce the number of kids who need high-end services.”

 

The PCSB’s willingness to toss aside Options students, like a worn winter coat, is appalling — but typical. This year, it’s expected to close two other schools, including the Arts and Technology Academy in Northeast, where more than 600 students are enrolled.

 

Is the PCSB dumping children to improve its schools’ ratings? In 2013, Stanford University researchers found, “The charter sector [nationwide] is getting better on average not because existing schools are getting dramatically better. It is largely driven by the closure of schools.” The District has closed 35 charter schools since 1996.

 

Interestingly, the PCSB voted in 2011 to extend Options’s charter. But Pearson told the council last week he thought that review wasn’t “thorough.” Is the lawsuit his opportunity for a do-over?

 

The malfeasance described at Options was allegedly made possible, in part, by the PCSB’s finance officer, who is a named co-conspirator in the lawsuit. But that possible organizational culpability hasn’t inspired the PCSB to do right thing.

 

The D.C. Council should step in: It should amend the School Reform Act to require the PCSB to identify appropriate alternative placements within its sector for every student affected by closures — just as DCPS does when it closes a facility.

 

Of course bad schools need to be closed. But the current process doesn’t work. It allows the charter board to abandon the city’s children with impunity.

 

 

Students from local schools took two of the four prizes in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Constitution Day mural contest.

 

Argyle Middle School in Silver Spring won third place and Paul Public Charter School in Washington took the honorable mention award in the Wall of Rights Mural Contest. The contest asked middle school students to design a mural that highlights the U.S. Constitution and the rights that it guarantees.

 

Hasten Hebrew Academy in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Sanford Middle School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, won first and second prize, respectively.

 

About 150 Argyle students helped design a 10-foot-by-20-foot mural,said Casey Siddons, a social studies teacher who organized the project.

 

Siddons said projects such as the mural help build excitement for social studies topics that might otherwise not interest kids.

 

“We go the extra mile to make it engaging and make it relate to their lives,” he said.

 

Argyle won $5,000 for its entry, and Paul won $2,500.

 

Siddons said he hopes to use the money to buy tablets to use in social studies classes.

 

The ACLU is planning another contest for this year’s Constitution Day, which is September 17.