FOCUS DC News Wire 2/25/2014

 

 

The disparity in boys' and girls' sports in the District of Columbia's school system has long been a known issue, and the past six months have highlighted the lingering problem. The National Women's Law Center filed a federal complaint with the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights in June, alleging that the District's public school system had violated Title IX. And while that complaint is still under investigation, District school officials settled another Title IX complaint in October ” and now local lawmakers are eyeing legislation to create an equal playing field for girls across the city.

 

In November, the District of Columbia State Athletic Association made its own move to help keep the city's schools Title IX compliant, hiring Marie Rudolph as a senior women's administrator and Title IX coordinator. Rudolph will spearhead the intensive data collecting effort the DCSAA plans to undertake, including in the city's charter and private schools.

 

This is the first Title IX coordinator that we've had for statewide athletics, so in that sense, it's pioneering, DCSAA Athletic Director Clark Ray said. It is certainly something other states have all across the country. So it's not that we're being creative here in the District of Columbia. We are following suit and making sure that we can represent our student athletes.

 

Ray had been eyeing Rudolph for the position for two years, he said, hoping to bring her background in politics and sports to the forefront once it was created. A Colorado native, Rudolph co-founded the Military Bowl and has worked with Washington female sports advocate Janice Dove Johnson on the Sankofa Project, which puts on the National Title IX Holiday Invitational Conference and Classic in January.

 

Her hiring came just five months after the NWLC filed its complaint, which found that nine of the District's 15 traditional high schools have gaps exceeding 10 percent in boys-to-girls sports participation.

 

The DCSAA hopes to make inroads by cultivating female sports coaching, and Rudolph has been charged with organizing coaching clinics in volleyball in March, as well as in girls' soccer and softball later this spring.

 

[Title IX] was particularly important to [Mayor Vincent C. Gray], it's been important to Clark as he continues to fill out the office, Rudolph said. I wouldn't say that the District... needs more work than other jurisdictions around the country. Some may argue with that. But until we have the data, we really can't say for sure exactly where we are among the other urban [areas] or other cities across the country.

 

The DCSAA expects to have baseline data collected by the end of the fiscal year, Ray said, which will simply outline how many boys and girls compete in sports at each of the city's schools. But the office is preparing for an even more massive data collecting effort should District lawmakers pass a bill introduced in September by D.C. Council Member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), which would require the city's public and public charter schools to report how much they spend on boys' and girls' sports, as well as publicly disclose the number of male and female participants and the quality of their equipment, fields and facilities.

 

The bill would also require the mayor to adopt a five-year plan, which would include Title IX coordinators at each school and a new NCAA coordinator to help prepare prospective college athletes.

 

The DCSAA's creation of Rudolph's role represents a step forward, said Neena Chaudhry, senior legal counsel for the National Women's Law Center, who helped craft the NWLC's complaint in June. Chaudhry, who has been examining Title IX issues since 1997, said that a lack of transparency with girls' sports data has long plagued the District's school system. With nearly half of the city's student population now attending charter schools, collecting that information from schools that have not previously been tracked is critical, she said.

 

I think it's a step in the right direction to hire a Title IX coordinator and looking at these issues. And we are encouraged that they are doing that, Chaudhry said. It's also just a real opportunity and we hope that they will use their position to bring some uniformity to the information that is collected, and to really actually help get the information out there.

 

 

D.C. Council members on Monday quizzed State Superintendent of Education Jesús Aguirre about an unreleased audit showing that city officials cannot account for nearly $10 million in federal taxpayer dollars meant for a tuition assistance program that helps D.C. students pay for college.

 

The audit, first reported by The Washington Post, also describes weak internal controls at Aguirre's agency, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which manages the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program, known as D.C. TAG.

 

Aguirre described the audit, dated Sept. 30, 2013, as a draft with findings that are premature. But he acknowledged that he and other officials have not figured out how much money should be in TAG's accounts.

 

What I'm hearing is that you really aren't going to be able to challenge some of these underlying assumptions, which are that you can't account for these dollars, said David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the council's Education Committee. Whether it's a final draft or not, you still won't be able to account for these dollars.

 

TAG provides District students with up to $10,000 apiece for out-of-state public schools and up to $2,500 per year for historically black colleges and private schools in the Washington area. Congress has appropriated $317 million for the subsidy since its inception in 2000, helping more than 20,000 students pay for college.

 

The auditors questioned two large expenditures ” $5.5 million in fiscal 2004 and $4 million in 2008 ” that they said could not be explained by officials at OSSE or the city's Office of the Chief Financial Officer.

 

TAG funds left unspent at the end of each year can be carried over to the next, so uncertainty about expenditures in one year can cascade into the future. City officials have estimated the carry-over from 2012 to 2013 to have been between $2.6 million and $22 million, the audit says. The auditors urged the two agencies to agree on the correct amount as soon as possible, but that hasn't happened.

 

Though the audit was completed in September, OSSE did not share it until late January or early February, said Deloras A. Shepherd, associate chief financial officer. Asked why OSSE waited so long to share the information, Aguirre apologized.

 

I don't have an answer for that, he said.

 

Amid the uncertainty about how much money was available for students, OSSE officials last year requested and received more than $9 million in local tax dollars to supplement its congressional appropriation. TAG has never had to turn away eligible students for lack of funds.

 

Catania and fellow Education Committee member David Grosso (I-At Large) expressed exasperation that the agency had asked for extra funds without anyone from OSSE or the Office of the Chief Financial Officer knowing how much money should actually be in TAG accounts.

 

Who's running this operation? Catania asked.

 

It blows my mind, Grosso said. This is really a head-scratcher.

 

TAG did not end up using much of the $9 million last year, and $7.9 million of it was rolled over to this year. That money will go toward filling the gap between this year's congressional appropriation of $30 million and TAG's estimated budget of about $33.7 million, officials said.

 

Catania is pushing for a locally funded scholarship program called D.C. Promise, which D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has warned could discourage Congress from continuing to fund TAG.

 

Catania said Monday that the city cannot rely on TAG's federal appropriations alone to meet the need for college aid.

 

Aguirre agreed. There is a point in time in the next year or two that we will be short on funding, he said. As you stated, essentially the federal allocation hasn't kept up with the cost of tuition.

 

Catania said he expects OSSE to submit a final audit and an agreed-upon carry-over figure before its budget hearing in the spring.

 

 

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Emma Brown had a report about millions of dollars in funds that could not be accounted for in a draft audit of the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program. As you remember, D.C. Tag is the legislation created by Virginia Congressman Tom Davis to provide financial help to students living in the nation's capital to defray costs of attending public colleges in other areas of the country. The money can also be utilized for tuition for private schools of higher education in the District and to enroll in traditional black universities.

 

The discrepancies to which Ms. Brown refers involve $5.5 million in 2004 and $4 million in 2008. Now, I'm sure it was exciting to obtain a copy of an unofficial audit but for all of us non-profit managers out there we understand the value of this tool. An audit is conducted to access the health of a financial system and to improve that system based upon the findings. Since the money for D.C. TAG comes from the Federal government, and is therefore public, we dislike to see problems uncovered. However, the primary purpose of an audit is not to punish but to become stronger. Using the document as a stick provides incentives for people to hide information from those conducting the review, or even worse, from not completing the exercise at all.

 

Of course, the timing of the story is really meant to cast doubt on whether another scholarship program should be passed by the D.C. Council. The Promise program, which would provide up to $7,500 in college tuition assistance to D.C. kids, and which is the brainchild of D.C. Councilman Catania, is to go before the body for final approval next month. Ms. Brown has written that passage of Promise could entice Congress to cut off DC TAG funding because it will become obvious that the city has sufficient dollars on its own to support students going to college.

 

The negative news about DC TAG and the Promise plan come on the heels of stories highly critical of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. So now I get the pattern. Spending on public education is fine as long as it is on neighborhood schools. Charters in the reporters view are O.K. but the process for enrollment is messy, there are waiting lists, and closing them causes disruption.

 

I really wish that neighborhood schools was all that is needed. But in D.C. and many large urban cities the traditional schools for decades have not been worth attending. School choice and competition for students has finally changed all that. For those who write about education my advice is to get over it.

 

 

Donald E. Graham is chairman of Graham Holdings Co. and a former publisher of The Washington Post. He is chairman of the D.C. College Access Program and a member of the boards of the D.C. College Success Foundation and KIPP D.C.

 

This week the D.C. Council's education committee plans to conduct a performance review of Chancellor Kaya Henderson. District residents might want to follow Henderson's appearance before the council.

 

The evaluation will tell us a great deal ” not about Henderson (on her, the results are in) but about the council members performing the evaluation, particularly those who wish to be mayor.

 

For those who have followed the D.C. Public Schools for a long time, the district's upward movement in test scores seems almost miraculous. The accompanying chart below shows the performance of D.C. fourth-graders on the past four Nation's Report Cards, as the National Assessment of Educational Progress is known. The chart comes from the CityBridge Foundation, which has much more such information on its Web site.

 

The importance of test scores can certainly be overrated, but for many years D.C. results all sat in one place: the bottom. There was a time when, on these same federal tests, the District had the country's worst-performing school system. Our schools were struggling, no one seemed to have the answers, and no other city showed a model of sustained improvement.

 

Now there is such a city and ... it's Washington, D.C.! Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called the D.C. results a pretty remarkable story. Our students have shown steady, large-scale improvement on not only the federally administered NAEP tests but also on the city's DC-CAS tests and, to a lesser extent, on the SAT, where progress is crucial. DCPS's gains in reading and math were larger than those of any other city, the large-city average, and the national average, CityBridge's leader, Katherine Bradley, said of the 2013 NAEP results.

 

In previous decades, residents who cared about students longed for one thing: a leader who would make the schools gradually better and start the necessarily years-long process of making D.C. public education truly outstanding.

 

That leader is here. Such substantial improvement has been demonstrated that one can only wonder what is possible in the next few years, assuming that the same leadership is kept in place. In fact, when one considers that the District has truly remarkable charter-school educators producing impressive results alongside the public schools, the outlook for education in the District has never been better.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Longtime D.C. residents know the answer: D.C. politicians. The sight of a successful school superintendent seems to infuriate the city's elected political leaders. In the old days, the elected school board could be counted on to make a successful school leader's life miserable until he or she left. Now the D.C. Council, which to its great credit voted for mayoral control of the schools in 2007, has lurched back into the breach and wishes to provide oversight (that is, distraction and bad advice) to an able chancellor.

 

To do this, one has to ignore the obvious (D.C. schools are improving as fast as any in the country) and focus on the equally obvious (there is still a need for substantial improvement ” and no one is saying so more loudly than Henderson).

 

Test data show that most D.C. fourth-graders are still performing below grade level ” something that must and can change. But look also at the 2007 scores. Would you have believed then that D.C. schools could improve in six years' time as they have? They had not done so before. What other city has done as well?

 

While the District has struggled over the past 40 years, it has been surrounded by many high-performing suburban school systems. Most of these have enjoyed excellent leaders for long periods. Mike Hickey was the Howard County superintendent for 16 years; Jerry Weast led Montgomery schools for 12; Ed Hatrick just announced his retirement after a 22-year run in Loudoun County; the late Ed Kelly led Prince William for 18. Meanwhile, the District has had seven superintendents in the past 18 years, not counting a couple of long-service interims. No, having just any superintendent for 15 years won't solve the city's problems. But rotating them every two or three years ensures that the problems never get solved.

 

If you wonder why D.C. Council members might be slow to support Henderson, here are a few good guesses:

 

1. The D.C. teachers union, like those in big cities everywhere, longs to reclaim the control it used to have over the school system. Its campaign contributions and volunteer workers go to those who oppose Henderson (although under her, relations with the union are much improved). Watch and see if your council member is more influenced by improving schools or by union campaign support.

 

2. Several D.C. Council members, like a branch of the Flat Earth Society, insist in the face of mountains of evidence that no progress is being made in the city's public schools and that the amazing results in the high-performing charters aren't really happening. As to why politicians believe this, see (1) above.

 

3. The school system provides a rich trove of patronage and power when it isn't run by a strong leader. Former mayors and school board members planted their allies in its jobs. Kaya Henderson will not stand for that. The council's education committee chairman, David Catania, a bully for whom no strong leader would ever work, is not a patronage junkie but is the council's leading would-be micromanager.

 

For the majority of DCPS students ” those who come from very low-income families ” the stakes couldn't be higher. For 15 years I have been chairman of the D.C. College Access Program. We have worked to increase the number of D.C. public school graduates going to college and heard them explain what's at stake ” college is their one chance to escape the tough circumstances they were born into. They want a different and better life, and education is their best opportunity.

 

For 15 years D.C. residents have prayed for improved academic results from our high school students. If those results come, scholarship money will rain down. We aren't there yet. But we have the greatest opportunity ever for a much-improved DCPS. All we have to do is keep Kaya Henderson and her team on the job. D.C. voters: Tell your council members to get out of the way and let the D.C. educator continue to do her job.

 

And don't dream of voting for a mayoral candidate who doesn't support her.

 

 

BERKELEY, Calif. ” THE writing is on the chalkboard. Over the next few years, America can count on a major expansion of early childhood education. We embrace this trend, but as health policy researchers, we want to raise a major caveat: Unless we're careful, today's preschool bandwagon could lead straight to an epidemic of 4- and 5-year-olds wrongfully being told that they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

 

Introducing millions of 3- to 5-year-olds to classrooms and preacademic demands means that many more distracted kids will undoubtedly catch the attention of their teachers. Sure, many children this age are already in preschool, but making the movement universal and embedding transitional-K programs in public schools is bound to increase the pressure. We're all for high standards, but danger lurks.

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics now endorses the idea that the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. can and should begin at age 4, before problems accumulate. In fact, Adderall and other stimulants are approved for treatment of attentional issues in children as young as 3.

 

Early intervention for children with A.D.H.D. could provide great relief. Children who go untreated have major difficulties in school and with their peers, and they have higher-than-normal rates of accidents and physical injuries.

 

The problem is that millions of American children have been labeled with A.D.H.D. when they don't truly have it. Our research has revealed a worrisome parallel between our nation's increasing push for academic achievement and increased school accountability ” and skyrocketing A.D.H.D. diagnoses, particularly for the nation's poorest children.

 

For example, we found that in public schools, A.D.H.D. diagnoses of kids within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, compared with under 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. There was no such trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

 

By age 17, nearly one in five American boys and one in 10 girls has been told that they have A.D.H.D. That comes to 6.4 million children and adolescents ” a 40 percent increase from a decade ago and more than double the rate 25 years ago. Nearly 70 percent of these kids are prescribed stimulant medications.

 

Families and physicians must take special care in medicating very young children. Today's push for performance sets us on a troubling trajectory. A surge in diagnoses would mean more prescriptions despite guidance from professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommend that behavioral therapy rather than medication be used as first-line treatment for children under 6.

 

Too many kids are identified and treated after an initial pediatric visit of 20 minutes or even less. Accurate diagnosis requires reports of impairment from home and school, and a thorough history of the child and family must be taken, to rule out abuse or unrelated disorders.

 

Yes, this would be more time consuming and costly in the short term. But just like investing in preschool, spending more today on careful diagnosis and treatment of A.D.H.D. will lead to lifetimes of savings. As the early childhood education movement builds, let's make sure we proceed with caution. We should fundamentally rethink how we diagnose and treat A.D.H.D., especially for our youngest citizens.