FOCUS DC News Wire 2/4/2014

 

 

HERE’S HOW most reformist politicians try to operate: They find something that doesn’t work and offer possible solutions. Even if, as is often the case, their efforts come up short, there is at least some merit in trying to fix a problem.

 

D.C. Council member and mayoral hopeful David A. Catania (I-At Large) seems to embrace a different approach: Take something that is working reasonably well and offer proposals that threaten to undo that success. In the year since he assumed control of the council’s education committee, Mr. Catania has loosed a barrage of proposals that seek to substitute his judgment and priorities for those of school officials, endangering in the process important progress that’s been made in school improvement.

 

His latest brainstorm, a new program of college scholarships, threatens one of the District’s most successful initiatives, according to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.).

 

Ahead of Tuesday’s council vote on Mr. Catania’s D.C. Promise proposal, Ms. Norton sent a sharply worded letter to the council, detailing concerns that if a flush District government has the money to provide its own scholarships, Congress would withhold funding for the popular D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant (TAG) program. TAG offers subsidies to District students attending out-of-state public universities, universities in the Washington area or historically black colleges.

 

“I write now because if the current Promise bill passes, whether or not funded, the Council should be prepared to fund at least any current DCTAG students who may lose DCTAG funding and to fund future students, if necessary,” she wrote in a rare rebuke of local officials.

 

Mr. Catania, backed by D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), counter that the Promise scholarship is dissimilar from TAG and will supplement, not supplant, the federal program. Mr. Catania said he plans to offer further revisions to the proposal to deal with Ms. Norton’s concerns.

 

Making college more affordable, particularly for low-income students, is a laudable goal, but there are too many questions about Mr. Catania’s proposal. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute warns that the costly initiative would make it difficult to fund other pressing education priorities. The group also noted that most Promise programs around the country are privately funded, a route that should be explored for the District. The council should table this legislation and return to the drawing board for an approach that doesn’t risk a program that already — at federal expense — makes college more accessible and affordable for D.C. families.

 

 

When we last left D.C. Councilman David Catania's Promise proposal to fund college for students in the nation's capital up to $60,000 for families earning $215,00 a year or below there was some doubt that the legislation would make it into law. The main obstacle was that Congress, turned on to the notion that the District is now awash in surplus money, would end its own D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant (D.C. TAG) plan that for years has provided limited tuition for kids attending out of state public universities, private colleges in the city, and historically black institutions of higher learning.

 

Well, that's exactly what happened. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton wrote a letter to the Council stating that if it passed the Promise plan the cash from the Federal government would vanish. In response to her concerns Mr. Catania has scaled back his generosity somewhat, and now the Washington Post has said that the entire idea should be junked.

 

But there is a more fundamental reason that the bill should not be passed by the Council today. It was just last week that Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith released the final version of the highly comprehensive Adequacy Study. Her fine attempt to finally bring funding equity to the traditional schools and charters comes with a cost of $182 million for one year alone. Because total local dollars available for spending are not unlimited all of our efforts should be concentrated around solving one of the greatest injustices to exist around public education in this town.

 

Anyone following Mr. Catania on Twitter knows that he has been advocating for the Promise scholarships on almost a daily basis, pointing out that similar programs are successful in many jurisdictions. What he has failed to mention, and what the Washington Post editors reveal, is that other places these college affordability plans are privately funded. This is the avenue that we should take here in the District.

 

 

There’s a tug of war taking place in the nation’s capital, and school-choice advocates should push forward with all deliberate speed.

 

On the surface, the tug appears to be over money. That is to say, if D.C. leaders pass legislation Tuesday to help college students pay for school, then they risk losing federal tuition money.

 

At least that is how Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting congressional delegate, interprets the pending measure.

 

A maker and reputable interpreter of laws, Ms. Norton, a Democrat, has been on the wrong side of school choice before, however.

 

In fact, I think she’s using the wrong stick to even gauge whether funding will be gained or lost if the bill she’s concerned about wins D.C. Council approval.

 

Titled the D.C. Promise Establishment Act of 2013, the measure calls for using income-based guideposts to help D.C. graduates pay for post-secondary technical schooling and college.

 

Council member David A. Catania’s bill could work in tandem with the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant, or D.C. TAG, which Congress created in 1999 to offer students with few higher-education options in the city the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at public colleges and universities. A major difference is that the D.C. Promise eligibility ceiling is $283,272.

 

There are other key differences.

 

As Mr. Catania points out, “individuals from families with up to $1 million in annual income can participate in D.C. TAG, as well as students who graduated from high schools outside the District. Moreover, D.C. TAG assistance is primarily directed at public, four-year institutions, whereas the D.C. Promise can be used at all accredited institutions of higher education, as well as accredited career programs.”

 

That Mrs. Norton and other federal appropriators think D.C. Promise and D.C. TAG are competitors is interesting, considering the former targets poor D.C. kids who matriculated D.C. schools while the latter does not. Indeed, D.C. TAG encourages D.C. kids, including wealthy ones, to attend schools outside the District.

 

Ms. Norton said recently that House and Senate appropriators do not want the federal government to pay D.C. TAG if it and D.C. Promise have “similar funding levels.”

 

Fortunately, in a letter, Mr. Catania and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson tried to allay Ms. Norton’s concerns about the potential of competing financial aid programs in a letter last week.

 

See, while the supporters of D.C. TAG and D.C. Promise don’t say so, both programs are, for all practical and applicable matters, school voucher programs.

 

Both programs use public funds to bridge a financial gap — whether it’s to a public college or a private school — just like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was created by Congress to lift the boats of poverty-stricken kids.

 

 

 

A former owner of The Washington Post has joined a prominent Democratic fundraiser and former Republican Cabinet secretary to launch the nation’s largest college scholarship fund for students who entered the United States illegally when they were children.

 

Donald E. Graham has created “TheDream.US,” a $25 million fund that aims to award full-tuition college scholarships to 1,000 students in the next academic year.

 

“I’m not wise enough to know what is the right immigration policy for the United States of America,” said Graham, who contributed an undisclosed amount to the fund, as did his brother, Bill. “I know these students deserve a chance at higher education.”

 

While some private colleges offer scholarships to undocumented students and 17 states now allow them to receive in-state tuition rates at public colleges, undocumented students — “dreamers,” as they have become known — are not eligible for Pell grants and other types of federal financial aid.

 

Each year, an estimated 65,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools.

 

“It seemed terribly unfair that literally everyone else in the [high school] class could get access to federal loans and, if low-income, could get Pell grants, and the dreamers couldn’t get a cent,” said Graham, who in 1999 founded the District of Columbia College Access Program, a nonprofit organization that helps D.C. high school students get into college and pay for it. Graham’s company sold The Post last year to Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos.

 

Graham came up with the idea for the scholarship fund six months ago, after conversations with Henry R. Muñoz III, one of President Obama’s most successful Latino fundraisers and finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee, and Carlos Gutierrez, who served as commerce secretary under President George W. Bush.

 

“We were introduced by a mutual friend,” Muñoz said of Graham. “When I met him, he pulled up to my hotel driving not a terribly nice car, he had a plastic watch. I thought, is this guy for real? We spent the whole day talking about educational access [for dreamers] and what we could do. He called me after and said, ‘I’m serious about this.’ ”

 

It’s been easier raising money for the scholarship fund than for immigration reform, Gutierrez said. “People to whom I’ve spoken, primarily Republicans, former public servants or activists, when I explain this idea, they immediately say, ‘Yes, sign me up,’ ” he said. “People get it.”

 

The group has received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Patty Stonesifer and Michael Kinsley, among others.

 

That’s enough to provide $25,000 each to 1,000 dreamers in the program’s first year to attend a small group of colleges that the organization has pre-

approved. The colleges are located in New York, Texas, Florida and the District. Several are community colleges and one is online: Mount Washington College, owned by Kaplan, part of Graham’s company, Graham Holdings.

 

“This is not a scholarship program for every dreamer. We do not have the money to pay a whole lot of people’s tuitions to highly selective colleges,” Graham said, noting that many elite private universities have scholarships for undocumented students. “Our mission is work-related programs at low cost but relatively high quality.”

 

The fund is designed for those who want to study nursing, teaching, computers and business, he said. A scholarship recipient who graduates from one of the community colleges with an associate degree can reapply for scholarship money to complete a bachelor’s degree at another school, said Candy Marshall, president of TheDream.US.

 

According to the Obama administration’s college scorecard, several of the group’s pre-

approved colleges reported relatively few students finishing degree programs on time.

 

At Bronx Community College in New York, for example, just 8 percent of full-time students graduated from the two-year school within three years, while 13.4 percent transferred.

 

Graham said that the scholarship recipients are more likely to defy those odds because dreamers are “extremely motivated.” He said that the pre-approved colleges agreed to provide the scholarship recipients with extra help, including a designated academic counselor.

 

“We’re not just about getting kids into college, we’re about getting students out of college,” Marshall said. “You could do this and just give them $25,000 to go to the college of their choice. But we don’t want to put students in situations where we’ve started them in college and they’re working three or four jobs to try to pay for the rest, and they don’t succeed.”

 

The fund has awarded scholarships to 28 dreamers, including Araceli Mendez, 21, who came to the United States with her parents from Mexico when she was 7. Mendez, who lives in Brooklyn, graduated from high school in 2010 and has spent three years cleaning homes to try to save enough money to attend college.

 

“I applied to college,” she said. “I did my application and got in and everything, but tuition was very expensive. I couldn’t go.”

 

With a scholarship from TheDream.US, Mendez started classes last week at Manhattan Community College. She wants to be a pediatric nurse or pediatrician.

 

“There’s no stopping me now,” she said. “It’s important to never stop dreaming. Go for your dreams, don’t let anything stand in your way, because everything’s possible.”

 

 

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has hired Kenneth Slaughter, a prominent labor-relations lawyer, to serve as her senior adviser.

 

In the newly created position at D.C. Public Schools, Slaughter will work on labor and D.C. Council relations as well as “broad strategy,” Melissa Salmanowitz said in response to a request for a job description. He will earn $150,000 for the full-time job.

 

Slaughter arrives just as the school system restarts contract negotiations with the Washington Teachers’ Union, whose members are working under a contract that expired in 2012. The two sides were reportedly close to reaching a contract agreement last year, but talks broke off in July when Nathan Saunders — then president of the union — lost his bid for re-election.

 

The school system is also working toward a deal with the principals’ union, known as the Council of School Officers, whose members have been working on an expired contract since 2007. In October, the CSO rejected a contract proposal that members called unacceptable, particularly a provision that would have required principals to pay a $5,000 penalty if they waited until after Feb. 1 to announce their resignation. The school system, meanwhile, would have retained its ability to fire principals without cause each May.

 

Slaughter was previously a partner in the Washington office at the prominent law firm Venable, where last year — as a representative of the D.C. Office of Administrative Hearings — he opposed an organizing effort by the city’s administrative law judges.

 

He also helped win a plea deal for Howard Brooks, a former campaign aide to D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray. Brooks pleaded guilty to one felony charge of making false statements to the FBI regarding Gray’s 2010 mayoral campaign.

 

Slaughter is a trustee of the SEED Public Charter School and has served on the board of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington. He is also an honorary board member at Venture Philanthropy Partners, a nonprofit that invests in Washington-area organizations that serve low-income children, including charter schools.

 

“I am a proud DCPS graduate, who believes that the most important challenge of our times is to ensure that all of the District’s young people receive a high quality education,” he said in a statement to The Washington Post. “It is a great honor to help support the Chancellor and her great team of educational professionals engaged in this exciting work!”