FOCUS DC News Wire 2/5/2014

 

 

The deadline for D.C. high school students to enter the city’s new enrollment lottery for both traditional and charter schools has been extended one day because of a technical glitch with the lottery Web site, officials said.

 

The deadline for students to submit their online applications for admission to city high schools was originally Monday at 11:59 p.m. But users began encountering problems with the Web site at about 2:30 Monday afternoon, said Sujata Bhat, project manager for the lottery.

 

“Some applications continued to be submitted, while other applicants experienced slowness on the site, or saw an error message,” Bhat said. “There was no impact on any applications that had already been submitted.”

 

Lottery officials extended the deadline 24 hours to 11:59 p.m. Tuesday and notified parents of the change via a notice on the Web site and e-mail and text messages.

 

The deadline for early childhood, elementary and middle school students to enter the enrollment lottery is March 3.

 

For the first time this year, most charter and traditional schools have joined in a unified lottery meant to streamline an enrollment process that can be chaotic and confusing for families and school administrators alike. Previously, the traditional school system and each charter school held separate lotteries.

 

 

The D.C. Council on Tuesday tentatively approved a new taxpayer-funded college scholarship program, voting unanimously despite lingering concerns among members that the initiative could endanger a popular federal program that helps city residents pay for higher education.

 

If the council gives final approval next month, the new D.C. Promise program would provide the city’s low-income high school graduates with up to $7,500 per year for college.

 

“We have to ensure that we are investing in our young people,” said David A. Catania (I-At Large), who introduced the bill and is considering a mayoral bid. “We are a jurisdiction with the resources to do this, to dream for our young people a future that is better than that which we have.”

 

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) warned the council that passing Promise could torpedo congressional support for a federal scholarship program that’s unique to the city and has become key to how thousands of families budget for college.

 

If the District can pay for its own college-access program, Norton argued, congressional appropriators might see no reason to continue spending tens of millions of dollars a year on the federal program, known as the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant, or TAG. After Tuesday’s vote, she reiterated that the threat to TAG is real.

 

“I will fight to save DC TAG,” Norton said in a statement. “If D.C. residents lose DC TAG funding for now or in the future, I know that they will hold the Council accountable to replace whatever funds are lost.”

 

TAG provides most D.C. high school graduates with up to $10,000 to attend out-of-state public schools or up to $2,500 to attend a private university in the Washington area or a historically black college. The program aids more than 5,000 students each year, and it has brought more than $317 million to 20,000 students since its inception in 2000. This year, Congress appropriated $30 million for the program.

 

TAG is available to all D.C. high school graduates from families that earn less than $1 million per year. Promise funds would be doled out on a sliding scale and reserved for students from families with less than 200 percent of median income — about $215,000 for a family of four. Students could be eligible to receive money from both programs.

 

The threat to TAG was the only question looming over Catania’s proposal, and it triggered an hour-long debate Tuesday during which the fate of Promise seemed far from certain. Lawmakers discussed not only the effect on TAG, but also whether the city should base policy decisions on possible congressional reaction.

 

Mayoral candidates Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) and Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large) offered the most vocal opposition to Promise, saying that passage of the bill would mean uncertainty for students currently receiving TAG money.

 

“If we pass this bill, we jeopardize the TAG program,” said Evans. “Are we willing to take that risk?”

 

Several council members, including mayoral candidate Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), countered that the city can’t allow its decisions to be dictated by threats from a fickle Congress.

 

“This is a home-rule issue. This is a statehood issue,” said Anita Bonds (D-At Large). “It is about us in the District of Columbia doing all that we can to help our young people.”

 

Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) called the choice between the two programs a “false choice,” adding that TAG funding is often uncertain in today’s partisan Congress. “I don’t want to subject what we do with our D.C. students to the whims of those on Capitol Hill,” McDuffie said.

 

In response to Norton’s concerns about Promise, Catania agreed this month to revise the proposal, reducing the maximum award from $12,000 to $7,500 per year and specifying that the Promise funds may be used only for non-tuition expenses such as books or room and board at TAG-eligible schools.

 

The changes mean that the total cost of Promise would be about $7.8 million in its first year, topping out at about $20 million per year, or about two-thirds of the annual cost of TAG. It’s not clear that the lower cost would placate concerns on Capitol Hill.

 

“If that bill becomes law, the committee would certainly look closely at it when senators gauge the amount of federal money that should be set aside for the existing college tuition assistance program,” said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for the Senate Appropriations Committee.

 

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) committed to meeting with Norton to address her remaining concerns, but said the city must be able to offer more aid to make college affordable. “DC TAG, as wonderful as it is, is not enough,” Mendelson said.

 

For D.C. Promise to become a reality, lawmakers must pass it and fund it in the city budget. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) indicated his support, writing in a letter to the council that while there are still questions about the overall cost of Promise, he wants to ensure that each city child has “equal access to a vigorous education.”

 

 

What's in store for DCPS's middle schools? The possibilities include greater communication with feeder elementary schools, equalizing offerings for middle-grade students at all K-8 and stand-alone middle schools, and an application-only middle school in Ward 7.

 

DC has long had a dearth of desirable DCPS middle schools. With a review of boundaries and feeder patterns under way, many District parents are anxiously awaiting the release of a DCPS plan to improve those schools.

 

Last week, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson appeared at a DC Council hearing and provided insights into some of the issues she's considering. In a previous post we looked at two of those issues: why Henderson wants to implement a plan on a District-wide basis rather than piecemeal, and whether future feeder patterns might include both DCPS and charter schools.

 

Today we'll take a look at some other themes that emerged from Henderson's dialogue with Councilmembers.

 

Vertical integration

 

Councilmember David Catania, chair of the education committee, has been pushing DCPS to revise its management structure. DCPS divides its schools up horizontally for administrative purposes, so that each instructional superintendent oversees a cluster of schools at the same grade level: elementary, middle, or high school.

 

Catania thinks it would make more sense to cluster these schools vertically instead, by feeder pattern. That, he says, would facilitate communication between principals of elementary schools and their destination middle schools, and as a result entering students would be better prepared to do middle school work.

 

At the hearing, Catania pointed to the KIPP charter system as a model of this kind of vertical integration and argued that much of the charter organization's success was due to that factor.

 

Henderson agreed that principals within a given feeder pattern need to communicate, but she said those conversations are already taking place within DCPS's current organizational structure.

 

The way to ensure that students are prepared for the next level, she argued, is to standardize academic offerings across a grade band. That's what DCPS has recently done for its elementary schools and will soon be doing for middle schools. In the past, she said, principals had more autonomy in deciding which classes to offer, which has led to unevenness in students' preparation. Catania seemed unconvinced.

 

Catania is putting an awful lot of weight on vertical integration. Clearly, there are other factors in KIPP's success, and no doubt DCPS elementary school principals are already well aware that many of their graduating 6th graders aren't performing at grade level. It couldn't hurt for them to hear that from a middle school principal, but it's probably not going to be enough to move the needle.

 

On the other hand, simply standardizing the curriculum for all elementary or middle schools won't ensure that all students will be at the same level by the time they leave. To increase the chances of that happening, low-income and at-risk students will need additional support.

 

As Henderson mentioned at the hearing, it will help if additional funding is channeled to those students, as a study has recently recommended. Catania has also introduced a bill calling for greater funding for at-risk students.

 

But, as both Catania and Henderson acknowledged, communication between feeder and destination schools needs to happen one way or another. And it's probably most important where a special program crosses school lines, such as the International Baccalaureate program that's being launched at Eastern High School and two of its feeder middle schools.

 

K-8 education campuses vs. stand-alone middle schools

 

DCPS has 15 kindergarten-through-8th grade "education campuses." It also has 11 middle schools, serving 6th through 8th grade. (Eight DCPS campuses with other grade configurations also include 6th- to 8th-graders.)

 

There's been a lot of research lately comparing K-8 schools with stand-alone middle schools, and the consensus is that generally, students coming out of K-8 schools do better academically. But researchers caution that other factors may be more important to student achievement, especially at high-poverty urban schools.

 

Councilmember Muriel Bowser asked Henderson if she favored one model over the other, and Henderson said she didn't. "I feel like I've watched communities all over the country struggle with one thing or the other with no right answer," Henderson said.

 

Bowser and Henderson agreed that some families are avoiding K-8 education campuses because the academic and extracurricular offerings at those schools aren't as robust ("although," Henderson added candidly, "I would argue that sometimes we don't even have the academic programs in our stand-alone middle schools"). With fewer students in the middle grades in K-8 schools, and less money attached to those grades as a result, it's more expensive to provide a variety of options.

 

On the other hand, some parents prefer the K-8 model, which they may see as safer and more nurturing. And Henderson agreed with Bowser that parents should have the choice. She also committed to giving K-8 students in the middle grades the same options that students at stand-alone middle schools will have, no matter the cost.

 

Once the offerings are equalized at both kinds of schools, she said, it's possible that one model will "rise to the top for us, and then we'll go with that."

 

Programming changes:

 

Equalizing the offerings for all middle-grade students seemed to be one thing that everyone who spoke at the hearing agreed on. Catania termed the level of programming at some middle schools "shocking," and Henderson seemed to agree.

 

Henderson said she'd like offerings such as algebra and a foreign language to be available at all schools serving the middle grades, although she didn't specify the exact menu she will propose. But both she and Catania also acknowledged that some middle schools will have few students capable of handling more advanced work.

 

"We may have some empty algebra classes at the beginning," Catania said, and Henderson later told Bowser that standardizing the curriculum across all schools will mean "every space is not going to be full." But the notion is that, as Catania put it, "if you build it, they will come."

 

Another idea Henderson mentioned, as she has before, is an extended school day or year for low-performing middle schools. She also said DCPS is "moving forward" with a parent-initiated plan to establish an application-only middle school in Ward 7, which Catania said could serve as a feeder school for the application-only Banneker High School.

 

It's doubtful that these ideas will allay the anxieties of parents who fear that redrawn boundaries will exclude them from the Deal or (possibly) Hardy districts and relegate them to a lower-performing middle school as soon as the year after next. But, short of somehow replicating Deal and its demographics overnight, it's not clear that anything will.

 

 

Yesterday, the D.C. Council in a unanimous vote approved education committee chairman David Catania's Promise act despite threats from Congress that if college costs can be paid for locally there is no need for Federal money. The fear is that the move will spell the end of the Tuition Assistance Grant (TAG) which has, according to the Washington Post's Emma Brown, assisted more than 20,000 students since 2000 at a cost of approximately $317 million.

 

But instead of the House of Representatives simply taking back these dollars I have another idea. Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor should simply redirect the expenditure over to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Fund. This tiny $20 million a year program would more than double when the $30 million a year in TAG allocations are added to it. Currently, about 1,700 students take advantage of vouchers to attend the private school of their choice. What a boon it would be to the educational marketplace in Washington D.C. to add about 2,000 more scholarships.

 

“We have to ensure that we are investing in our young people,” Ms. Brown quotes Mr. Catania as commenting on his legislation. The nation's capital current spends about $1.2 million a year on the traditional schools and another $600,000 a year on charters. With all of this we have a 2013 DC CAS overall student proficiency rate of 51.3 percent.

 

It is time to go in another direction. Let us use the opening the education chairman has provided to bring school choice to a new higher level.

 

The Promise program still needs further final approval by the Council and funding in the city's Fiscal Year 2014 budget. The Mayor has said he supports the plan.

 

 

It wasn’t all that long ago that Jake Scott was a sophomore at Suitland High School, going nowhere. The youngest of 17 children in a family where no one went to college, he had one thing going for him: He was a big, strong guy, big enough to play on the football team.

 

One day a classmate asked him to think about joining the wrestling team, which needed someone in Scott’s weight class.

 

Scott checked out a practice and fell in love with a sport that few African Americans even consider. His GPA went from 2.0 to 3.9. He earned a scholarship to American University and rose to become the 10th-ranked college wrestler in the United States in the 191-pound class. He became a math teacher and the head wrestling coach at Montgomery Blair High School. He has written a children’s book and has been featured in the media for setting math instruction to rap music.

 

Now he is back in an inner-city gym with a bunch of adolescents who two months ago didn’t know a single-leg takedown from a wrestling singlet.

 

“Wrestling was, for me, a life changer,” Scott said. “I grew up in Capitol Heights, Maryland, and had my fair share of run-ins with hard times and bad actions. It was wrestling that saved me from the streets. So this is personal for me.”

 

Personal means working at Cesar Chavez Prep charter school in Columbia Heights, where Scott is one of four coaches leading the new Wrestling to Beat the Streets DC program for sixth- through ninth-graders. The team is only the second in District public schools, charter or traditional.

 

The school is 72 percent Latino, an ethnic group that is even less a part of this white, blue-collar sport than blacks are. Many come from the same difficult circumstances that Scott faced; 94 percent are poor.

 

“The fact that they can go to a competition and have their hand raised and do well . . . is huge from a life-changing perspective and from a self-esteem standpoint,” said Jordan Lipp, another former American University wrestler and a coach in the program.

 

On Jan. 25, nine members of the team competed in their first match and came away with seven medals. One youngster was still wearing his bronze at practice Thursday, Lipp said.

 

“I get to take my anger out,” said 12-year-old Marc Anthony Rondon at a practice last week when I asked him what he liked about wrestling. Rondon had placed third in the 99-pound division at the tournament several days earlier.

 

“It gives me something to do and keeps me out of trouble,” said Unique Henson, a 15-year-old ninth-grader who wrestles at 135 pounds.

 

Scott gathered about 20 boys and five girls in a circle around him that day as he and another coach, Max Meltzer, a former Bullis and Harvard wrestler, taught them a lesson about maintaining their balance while throwing an opponent off his. The tactics are important, but at this stage, the main lessons are physical conditioning — practice can include 100 push-ups and endurance exercises such as carrying another wrestler across the floor — and life skills: discipline, accountability, respect and hard work, Meltzer said.

 

“On a football team,” Scott said, “there are 10 other guys on my team, 11 other guys on the other team and three or four referees who we could blame our shortcomings on. With wrestling, it’s you, your opponent and one referee. The chances of your mistakes falling through the cracks are very slim.”

 

Beat the Streets wrestling began in New York, the idea of Mike Novogratz, an investment banker and former Princeton wrestler. It has spread to other cities, including Baltimore and Los Angeles. After the New York organization staged exhibitions in Times Square and at Grand Central Station last year, Washington wrestlers decided to form a chapter here and began meeting to decide where to start.

 

One of the men involved was Scott Forrester, whose company was completing the construction of a new gym at Cesar Chavez. The school also had an internal champion for the idea, Vice Principal Bob McCarty. Both are former wrestlers. The school seemed a natural place for the first chapter.

 

Robert Brams, a former Muhlenberg College wrestler and a Patton Boggs lawyer who represented USA Wrestling’s successful bid to help get wrestlingback into the 2020 and 2024 Olympic Games, became president. The Washington chapter is trying to raise money and awareness for a planned expansion in the fall, including the possibility of a program that would be open to any District student, Brams said.

 

One day after practice began in December, Scott sent the team out for a three-minute water break. At the time limit, one wrestler was back. Scott sent him to collect the others and told him to not to return until everyone else had.

 

“Most kids, they don’t feel responsible for someone else,” he said. “You’re giving them an opportunity to exercise some leadership.

 

“Wrestling is what taught me about discipline and punctuality and not making excuses.”