- A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools [DC Prep PCS, KIPP DC PCS, Mundo Verde PCS, and Richard Wright PCS mentioned]
- D.C. residents appear to support neighborhood schools
- Catania seeks to harness connections with parents for mayoral bid
- Truancy, absenteeism a chronic problem in D.C. schools
- Is School Choice Strengthening Our Communities, Or Tearing Them Apart? [Mundo Verde PCS and Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- Former D.C. charter school leader sentenced to prison for stealing school funds
A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools [DC Prep PCS, KIPP DC PCS, Mundo Verde PCS, and Richard Wright PCS mentioned]
The New York Times
By Motoko Rich
April 25, 2014
WASHINGTON — DC Prep operates four charter schools here with 1,200 students in preschool through eighth grade. The schools, whose students are mostly poor and black, are among the highest performing in Washington. Last year, DC Prep’s flagship middle school earned the best test scores among local charter schools, far outperforming the average of the city’s traditional neighborhood schools as well.
Another, less trumpeted, distinction for DC Prep is the extent to which it — as well as many other charter schools in the city — relies on the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart.
Since 2002, the charter network has received close to $1.2 million from Walton in direct grants. A Walton-funded nonprofit helped DC Prep find building space when it moved its first two schools from a chapel basement into former warehouses that now have large classrooms and wide, art-filled hallways.
One-third of DC Prep’s teachers are alumni of Teach for America, whose largest private donor is Walton. A Walton-funded advocacy group fights for more public funding and autonomy for charter schools in the city. Even the local board that regulates charter schools receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
In effect, Walton has subsidized an entire charter school system in the nation’s capital, helping to fuel enrollment growth so that close to half of all public school students in the city now attend charters, which receive taxpayer dollars but are privately operated.
Walton’s investments here are a microcosm of its spending across the country. The foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants nationally to educational efforts since 2000, making it one of the largest private contributors to education in the country. It is one of a handful of foundations with strong interests in education, including those belonging to Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft; Eli Broad, a Los Angeles insurance billionaire; and Susan and Michael Dell, who made their money in computers. The groups have many overlapping interests, but analysts often describe Walton as following a distinct ideological path.
In addition to giving grants to right-leaning think tanks like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Walton foundation hired an education program officer who had worked at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business-backed group. Walton has also given to centrist organizations such as New Leaders for New Schools, a group co-founded by Jon Schnur, a former senior adviser to President Obama’s transition team and to Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.
In 2013, the Walton foundation spent more than $164 million across the country. According to Marc Sternberg, who was appointed director of K-12 education reform at the Walton Family Foundation last September, Walton has given grants to one in every four charter start-ups in the country, for a total of $335 million.
“The Walton Family Foundation has been deeply committed to a theory of change, which is that we have a moral obligation to provide families with high quality choices,” said Mr. Sternberg. “We believe that in providing choices we are also compelling the other schools in an ecosystem to raise their game.”
The supporters and critics of charter schools, many of them fierce, cannot be easily divided into political camps. Supporters include both Republicans and Democrats, although critics tend to come more from the left. In Washington, where the charter system has strong backing in City Hall, supporters have been more successful than in New York, where opposition from teachers unions and others has kept charter school enrollment to about 6 percent, despite growth in the past decade.
The size of the Walton foundation’s wallet allows it to exert an outsize influence on education policy as well as on which schools flourish and which are forced to fold. With its many tentacles, it has helped fuel some of the fastest growing, and most divisive, trends in public education — including teacher evaluations based on student test scores and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.
“The influence of philanthropy in terms of the bang for the buck they get is just really kind of shocking,” said Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
A separate Walton foundation that supports higher education bankrolls an academic department at the University of Arkansas in which faculty, several of whom were recruited from conservative think tanks, conduct research on charter schools, voucher programs and other policies the foundation supports.
Last year, the Walton Family Foundation gave $478,380 to a fund affiliated with the Chicago public schools to help officials conduct community meetings to discuss their plan to close more than 50 schools at a time when charters were expanding in the city.
And Walton played a role in a recent battle in New York, giving a grant to a charter advocacy group that helped pay for advertisements attacking Mayor Bill de Blasio after he denied public space to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a network in which students have gotten high scores on standardized tests.
While charter schools and vouchers may benefit those families that attend these schools, there may be unintended effects on the broader public school system.
Grant recipients say Walton injects entrepreneurial energy into public education and helps groups eager to try new ideas move more quickly than they could if they relied solely on publicly managed bureaucracies. Thousands of children, they say, attend better schools because of options Walton supports.
“The supply of new models and new ideas is really important, and so I think it’s a very positive thing,” said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, of the Walton investments. Neither Dr. Pianta nor the Curry School have received funding from Walton.
Critics say that Walton backs schools and measures that take public dollars — and, some say, the most motivated families — away from the existing public schools, effectively creating a two-tier educational system that could hurt the students most in need.
Although Walmart opened its first two stores in the nation’s capital just last December after a protracted battle over the retailer’s wages, the Walton Family Foundation has played a role in steering the direction of public education in the city for more than a decade. Since 2000, the foundation has invested more than $80 million here, not only in charter schools but also in support of taxpayer-funded vouchers for students to attend private schools. It poured millions into a controversial overhaul of tenure, the implementation of stricter teacher evaluation systems and the introduction of performance pay in the district’s public schools.
Walton also supports measures that labor leaders say undermine union protections for teachers. Like-minded Walton recipients are working together in many cases, so there are few dissenting voices.
“When lots of charter schools open up, it’s like a new Walmart store moving in,” said Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado in Boulder. “You could look at it and say, ‘Well, the schools in a community are losing families because of healthy competition the same way that the hardware store is losing customers because of healthy competition.’ But that doesn’t take into account the long-term harms to the community, which are probably greater than any short-term benefit.”
In addition to the foundation’s activities, many individual members of the Walton family have made millions of dollars in campaign donations to candidates for local school boards and state legislatures who support causes funded by the foundation.
Walton’s largest recipients include the Charter School Growth Fund, which helps charter school networks expand ($101.6 million since 2000); Teach for America, which recruits high-achieving college graduates for two-year teaching stints in poor districts and now places about a third of its corps members in charter schools ($67.2 million); KIPP, one of the country’s best-known and largest charter school networks ($58.7 million); the Alliance for School Choice, a national advocate for private school vouchers ($18.4 million), whose board includes Carrie Penner, a member of the Walton family; and GreatSchools Inc., an online schools information database ($15.5 million.)
Last year, the foundation announced a two-year, $8 million grant to StudentsFirst, an advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chancellor in Washington who oversaw many of the policy changes funded by Walton in the district’s public schools. StudentsFirst now pushes for the extension of many of those same policies in states across the country, contributing to the campaigns of lawmakers who support the group’s agenda.
“What they’re doing in terms of education is they’re trying to create an alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American democracy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.
Although the foundation’s leaders say they are focused on helping children in poverty or stuck in low-performing schools, some of their actions support concepts regardless of whether poor children benefit. In 2012, for example, Walton gave $300,000 to the Douglas County School District in Colorado to help it fight a lawsuit brought by opponents of a voucher program. The median income of families in the district, where the public schools are high performing, is more than $99,000, according to census data.
Walton supporters say the foundation is not blindly supporting the expansion of charters. Two years ago, Walton announced a $5.2 million grant to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to support an initiative under which the group would push state and local regulators to close about 900 low-performing charter schools around the country, while opening another 2,000.
“Any foundation that invests the money has to ask themselves, is their money impacting the system as a whole?” said Dennis Van Roeckel, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union.
Walton’s Mr. Sternberg, who started his career in Teach for America and founded the Bronx Lab School, a public school in New York City, does not apologize for Walton’s commitment to charter schools and vouchers. “What’s the argument there?” he said during an interview. “Don’t help anybody until you can help everybody?”
He said the foundation was focused not on ideology but on results, a word he repeated many times.
In Washington, for example, the group has given more than $5.8 million to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, whose members are nominated by the mayor to regulate the opening and closing of charter schools. The board has used Walton’s grants to help develop accountability measures for all charter schools in the city. When critics complained that charters were pushing out difficult students, the board began reviewing and publishing data on expulsions and midyear departures. Scott Pearson, executive director of the board, said charter schools in the city had halved expulsions since the board began releasing statistics.
“D.C. is a better place today than it was 10 years ago because of the reforms that have played out here,” said Mr. Sternberg, who was an official in the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He pointed to recent increases in scores on national tests by both public and charter school students, saying that neighborhood schools had responded to competition from charters. “And maybe in very small part, because of Walton’s role,” he added.
Walton has become a go-to source for many charter schools seeking start-up grants. In addition to funding large networks like KIPP, which is expanding in Washington, the foundation has given grants to several stand-alone schools.
The Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts, housed in a building across the street from the Washington Navy Yard in the southeast part of the city, received $250,000 from Walton in 2011. The school used the money to buy computers for students, as well as chemistry lab equipment and recording gear for the school’s media studio.
All of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized free or reduced price lunches. According to Marco Clark, the founder and head of the school, one in five students have special needs and one in 10 have been involved with the criminal justice system.
On a recent morning, the range of academic abilities in the school was apparent. In an advanced placement world history class, 11th-graders gave rapid-fire answers to questions about Native American tribes, with the teacher asking “Why?” to gauge whether students were merely regurgitating memorized facts. Upstairs, in an eighth-grade reading class, several students asked the teacher for help in understanding a passage about the world’s largest harp. One boy struggled to eke out what he thought was the main point. “It about how can orchastra works,” he wrote.
Several students noted that they had come from schools in which they either did not feel safe or were not learning much. Dr. Clark acknowledged that the school was still working to raise test scores, and had added extra math and reading classes.
“Those who want to criticize any philanthropy group for giving money to kids to change their futures,” said Dr. Clark, “there’s something wrong with them.”
Some parents said they felt torn between the interests of their children and those of the city. Marcus Robinson, the owner of a pet supply and grooming business, said he had attended public schools in Washington and wanted his children to do the same. But his daughters Lourdes, 8, and Maja, 6, attend Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, a start-up that received $250,000 from Walton.
Mr. Robinson was concerned that the schools in his northeastern neighborhood had trouble coping with students who had behavioral problems. He also liked the dual language approach at Mundo Verde, where students work in small classes on projects related to the environment and sustainability. A relaxed atmosphere permeates the classrooms, and a yoga teacher and nutritionist are on the faculty.
“Charter schools are a bit of a disservice to the public schools,” Mr. Robinson said. “It puts the onus on public schools to take on the people and children that other schools don’t want. But in the meantime, between everyone fighting about it, I did not want my kids to be caught in the limbo.”
D.C. residents appear to support neighborhood schools
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 25, 2014
D.C. residents appear to overwhelmingly support maintaining the District’s neighborhood schools instead of moving to a lottery-based system, according to data presented at a public meeting Thursday night.
But Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith cautioned against reading too much into the data, emphasizing that much of the information came from survey responses provided in writing by residents of Northwest Washington.
Of about 300 responses submitted, more than 170 came from residents of wards 3 and 4, which include some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Just 23 responses came from wards 7 and 8, east of the Anacostia River.
“We’re sharing the data because we want people to see it, but we should not assume it’s representative of views across the city,” Smith told hundreds of parents who gathered at Coolidge High School in Northwest for a community meeting about proposals to overhaul school boundaries and student-assignment policies.
Two additional meetings are planned for Saturday, at Dunbar High in the central part of the city and at Anacostia High in Southeast. Smith said she and her team plan to reach out to communities whose voices have not been heard, with the aim of using the feedback to prepare a final proposal that city officials hope to release to the public in June.
“We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff out there, and we want to continue to shape it and refine it,” Smith said.
One of the three proposals would tinker with the current boundary system, in which students have a right to attend their neighborhood schools or can enter a lottery to seek admission to out-of-boundary schools. But two proposals would fundamentally change the way students are assigned to schools, introducing lotteries — citywide at the high school level and at a smaller-scale for younger students — in place of neighborhood schools.
The idea of losing the right to attend schools based on home address triggered immediate opposition, particularly from parents who are happy with their neighborhood schools and in many cases bought homes based on the promise that their children could attend them.
Mayoral candidates Muriel Bowser, the Democratic nominee, and David I. Catania, an independent, reacted to the proposals with skepticism.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) plans to announce a final proposal in September, but it would not become effective until fall 2015, which means that the next mayor will decide how and whether to move forward with changes.
City officials are pressing to redraw attendance zones and rethink how students are assigned to schools. They contend that decades of shifting demographics and school closures — coupled with the rising popularity of charter schools — have left the city with an unworkable system. Some city schools sit nearly empty while others have serious overcrowding.
At Thursday’s meeting, parents were not asked for further comment on neighborhood schools and lotteries; they have already made their feelings clear, Smith said. Instead, parents were asked to comment on topics about which public sentiment has been more muddled, including how much the city should invest in new specialized programs and selective schools.
Such offerings — including the application-only School Without Walls and dual-language instruction programs — have been a matter of debate recently. Ward 7 residents have sought to establish a selective middle school east of the Anacostia River, and Dunbar High School graduates have been considering a proposal to convert that school into a selective-admissions institution.
Deena Shetler, a parent at Janney Elementary in Northwest, said specialized and selective programs might help fill city high schools that have undergone expensive renovations but are nevertheless under-enrolled.
But Ron Hampton, a longtime advocate for and former employee of Roosevelt High, said increasing the number of selective programs would siphon off more students from struggling neighborhood schools.
“That doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to fix the school system and it’s the neighborhood schools that need fixing,” Hampton said. He added that he believes students benefit from diversity not only of race and class but also of motivation and academic ability.
In a first round of community meetings, nearly two-thirds of survey respondents supported establishing more selective high schools; an even greater number — 83 percent — said they would support establishing magnet programs within neighborhood high schools.
Parents also weighed in on the coexistence of traditional and charter public schools, including whether there should be a cap on charter school growth and whether charter schools should feed into traditional schools and vice versa.
Many parents continued to question proposals to establish new lotteries, and the room erupted in applause after Deborah Raviv, a Janney mother, used her time at the microphone to invite others to sign a petition in support of maintaining neighborhood schools.
Catania seeks to harness connections with parents for mayoral bid
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 26, 2014
D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) pledged to visit each of the city’s more than 200 traditional and charter schools when he took the helm of the council’s education committee in January 2013.
In addition to those visits — he passed the halfway mark earlier this year — Catania has spent many weeknights speaking about education with PTAs, civic associations and other groups that tend to be small but filled with voters. Meantime, he has introduced and helped pass education legislation on issues ranging from truancy to social promotion to funding for at-risk students.
Now Catania is looking to harness that work and the connections he’s made with moms and dads — many of whom have welcomed the council’s deeper involvement in schools — in service of his campaign for mayor against Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser. He is planning to announce Sunday the formation of Public School Parents for Catania, the latest sign of a push to turn education into his campaign’s signature issue.
“What people can expect, if I am elected mayor, is an intellectually curious person who will be relentless in raising standards and expectations,” Catania said. “It will be the entire focus of this government.”
As an independent, Catania faces a steep challenge in his bid to overcome the city’s overwhelming Democratic bent. A Washington Post poll conducted in March showed voters preferred Bowser to Catania, 56 to 23 percent.
It’s not clear to what extent public school parents, who are a small minority of D.C. registered voters, support Catania and can help him chip away at that margin. But in an earlier Post poll conducted in January, parents were more likely than the general public to give him a favorable rating.
Bowser, too, has promised to focus on accelerating school improvements, particularly among the city’s struggling middle schools. But she hasn’t been as immersed in the city’s education debates as Catania has been recently, and her critics say she speaks with less specificity about what is ailing city schools and what her solutions would be.
Catania’s “depth of knowledge of the entire system and the complex set of challenges it faces is really impressive,” said Alice Speck, a Ward 1 parent of two charter-school students. Before the mayoral primary, she invited Catania and many of the other candidates to her home for conversations about education with parents, educators and activists.
Speck is one of three chairmen of the new group; the others are Brian Cohen, a Ward 3 parent of students at Stoddert Elementary and Hardy Middle; and Katrina Branch of Ward 8, whose children attend Stanton Elementary. Beginning with a core group of about two dozen parents, they hope to recruit 1,000 others across the city to work for Catania’s election.
Cohen said he was impressed with Catania’s efforts last year to reverse deep budget cuts at Hardy and other city middle schools. He described himself as a “dyed in the wool Democrat” who had no qualms about voting for Catania, a former Republican turned independent. Some parents say they need to hear more from both candidates about their vision for the future of education in the District.
“Council member Catania is a laser beam. If he is pointed in the direction you want, that is great. If not, less so,” said Matthew Frumin, a Ward 3 Advisory Neighborhood Commission member and advocate for stronger neighborhood schools, who said he had watched Catania’s views on education evolve over the past year.
“Exactly where council member Catania would hope to point his laser beam as mayor hopefully will become crystal clear during the course of the coming campaign.”
Catania said Friday that he would push to ensure that schools receive extra funds for each at-risk student and that principals have the independence to decide how that money should be used.
He also would establish a new accountability system that would force low-performing traditional schools to publicly develop and implement turnaround plans. Under a bill that Catania introduced last year, and that he said would serve as a template for his efforts as mayor, schools that fail to improve over time could eventually be turned over to outside operators.
Bowser’s campaign manager, Bo Shuff, said last week that she was not available to answer questions about her education platform.
Over the past year, she has frequently spoken of “Alice Deal for All,” a promise to replicate the city’s most sought-after traditional middle school. She has not detailed how she would achieve that goal, but has said she would seek to accelerate middle-school investments and bring successful aspects of Deal to other schools.
In a written summary of Bowser’s views, Shuff said she would focus on investing in “brink schools” that are on the cusp of success and would seek to expand successful initiatives, such as a longer school day for struggling schools, anti-bullying programs and attendance initiatives.
She would also push the school system to explain how it is spending funds for at-risk students, and she would seek to require that charter schools offer a neighborhood admissions preference for children who live nearby.
Neither candidate has committed to keeping Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
Truancy, absenteeism a chronic problem in D.C. schools
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown and Keith L. Alexander
April 26, 2014
When students at the District’s Simon Elementary show up for school on time, they reach for a numbered index card. It’s their ticket for that day’s attendance raffle.
The prizes are small — a ruler, a calculator, a bag of candy — but they are enough to trigger shrieks of celebration each morning in the cafeteria, and administrators hope they also are enough to help nudge more children through the front door of the schoolhouse. The reward program is one of the more visible parts of a much broader effort to tackle rampant truancy at Simon and other schools across the city.
Last school year, about 15,000 D.C. Public Schools students — 32 percent of all students in pre-kindergarten through high school — missed more than 10 days of classes without a valid excuse, according to school system data released in January. Nine thousand of those students missed more than 20 days without an excuse.
Total absenteeism in the traditional schools, including absences excused for reasons such as an illness, is even worse. Last school year, DCPS officials said, nearly 40 percent of the city’s students missed at least 18 days of school, a level of chronic absence tightly linked to academic failure. Half of those students were absent for the equivalent of seven weeks during the course of the 36-week school year.
Truancy in the District has long been a significant problem, one that city officials say has dragged down overall school performance and graduation rates, and has sent students into academic tailspins from which they never recover. But it has drawn new attention and urgency since the disappearance of 8-year-old Relisha Rudd, a girl who loved school but who accumulated more than 30 absences at Southeast Washington’s Payne Elementary before a school social worker alerted police last month.
In suburban school systems outside Washington, Relisha’s absenteeism might have been astonishing. But in the District, it was astonishingly normal.
“In some of our schools, the number of kids who have the same number of absences as Relisha is astounding,” said Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. “It’s a problem.”
It is impossible for even the most effective educator to change a child’s trajectory when that child doesn’t show up for class. Research has shown that children who miss more than 10 percent of the school year — 18 days of the District’s 180-day year — are far more likely to struggle academically and eventually drop out.
The problem is worst among the school system’s high school students, but it is also a serious issue among its youngest children. Nearly one in five students in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten missed more than 10 days of school without an excuse — absences that often contribute to gaps in knowledge that widen over the years.
“Everything we know about early attendance suggests that it’s critically important to lay the foundation” for future academic success, said HyeSook Chung of D.C. Action for Children, a nonprofit group that has analyzed attendance data from the city’s schools. “We think the parents just aren’t prioritizing, because they just don’t see value. They think of pre-k as babysitting.”
The school system has hired more staff devoted to reducing absenteeism and has intensified its focus on attendance as a key element of evaluating schools and principals. There are signs of progress, especially at the elementary level, where at the end of the first semester of this school year, the rate of chronic truancy had dropped 27 percent compared with the same point last year. Total absenteeism also has begun to drop.
But even with the improvements, children still miss an enormous number of class days, raising questions about whether the District has found an effective approach to reduce absences.
“How do you go after the kids who are not in school? It becomes an insurmountable problem,” said Henderson, who credits the D.C. Council with forcing the school system to confront its truancy crisis but says schools cannot solve truancy on their own.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who has focused on truancy as a way to identify and help children at risk of entering the criminal justice system, said that the city still has a long way to go but that it has made notable progress. Four years ago, he said, children weren’t declared chronically truant until they reached 28 unexcused absences, and the school system had no useful data on the scope of the truancy problem. “All that’s changed,” he said.
Now, because of new laws, the District’s schools must track and report unexcused absences and must take clear steps when children reach certain thresholds: at five unexcused absences, school staff must hold a meeting to identify why the student is missing school and what can be done about it; at 10 unexcused absences, the family must be referred to the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency.
The laws have also tightened the definition of chronic truancy to include students who miss at least 10 days of school without an excuse, and have specified that children should be marked absent if they miss more than 20 percent of the school day.
Officials in high-truancy schools are overwhelmed and often struggle to meet the new requirements, Henderson said. As of early January, fewer than 40 percent of the system’s chronically truant students had been referred to child welfare as required by law, according to school data.
The new expectations have “made us more vigilant and have helped us to focus on attendance,” Henderson said. “But I am worried that I have people whose entire job is the compliance and paperwork . . . and I think that does not then allow us to do the deeper things that engage students.”
Courts also have become more involved, with the number of truancy prosecutions spiking more than tenfold in the past five years.
City lawyers say that they only prosecute as a last resort. The cases can be dismissed if parents complete community service and ensure that their children go to class.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Kimberley S. Knowles dismissed one such case Friday. The mother of a habitually truant 7-year-old had spent 10 hours volunteering at a day-care center, and her child’s attendance had improved.
Outside the courtroom, the woman’s court-appointed lawyer, Wole Falodun, said that in his experience, absences often pile up because working parents leave their children in the care of other adults who fail to ensure that the kids get to school.
“Most of the time it’s economics,” Falodun said. “The parent is working and whoever they have in place making sure that their child goes to school does not follow through.”
Truancy has complex roots, according to educators and social workers, who say that older students often feel frustrated by their inability to do grade-level work, while younger students miss class for all kinds of reasons. Some parents don’t want to send their children out in bad weather, and others rely on older students to babysit for younger siblings. Some parents are chronically ill, or they are homeless or lack reliable transportation.
Malik Thompson said he missed months of ninth grade after his brother, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was struck and killed by a Metro train about four years ago. Thompson said he eventually received a letter saying he had been “unenrolled.”
“I was going through shock and depression,” said Thompson, now 18. He tried two other D.C. schools before withdrawing to finish his diploma through a home-school program. He said he thinks that he would have reacted differently if he felt he had allies at his school.
“What happened to me was unique but not exceptional,” Thompson said. “Schools at the end of the day should really be communities, so people feel attached to the school, so they’re willing to share and open up and get support.”
National attendance experts cite New York City as a model for how communities can address poor attendance, pointing to a massive effort that then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched in 2010.
While the District has focused largely on attacking truancy, New York has targeted students who accumulate large numbers of absences of any kind, excused or unexcused. A citywide task force designed an approach that made a significant dent in absenteeism at 100 pilot schools, especially among poor and homeless children, and is now being rolled out to schools across the city.
Under that model, schools track all absences and analyze data at weekly meetings. They work with outside agencies to connect families with social services, and they offer incentives and public recognition for excellent attendance. Perhaps most important, they find one-on-one mentors for chronically absent students.
Hedy Chang, a national attendance expert who has worked with school systems including the District’s, praised New York’s approach as one that allows for earlier and more meaningful intervention, before a child’s chronic absence turns into chronic truancy.
“It’s much less expensive to make sure that your kids are there starting in kindergarten and have a chance to do well, and don’t end up being a challenge in middle school,” Chang said. “We’re missing this opportunity to take a far more cost-effective approach to make sure that more kids don’t fall through the cracks and have a chance to succeed.”
D.C. Council member and mayoral candidate David A. Catania (I-At Large), who wrote two recent truancy-related laws, said he doesn’t disagree. “Absolutely I believe we should move beyond truancy to total absences, but the situation was so dire that we had to start somewhere,” Catania said.
School system officials do not publish chronic absence data but say they are beginning to study it. They do publish in-seat attendance, a measure of schoolwide absenteeism that includes all absences. But high in-seat attendance can mask the severe absenteeism of individual children.
D.C. schools are using some of the same techniques that worked in New York, including incentives and recognition. And thanks to a new program administered by the Justice Grants Administration, dozens of elementary and middle schools are linked to community-based organizations that can help find and address the root causes of the most difficult truancy cases.
Simon Elementary partners with the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative, which sends a representative to weekly attendance meetings meant to identify which students need extra attention.
“We’re really on top of our families and trying to figure out exactly where the obstacles are,” said Simon Principal Adelaide Flamer, who tracks each classroom’s weekly attendance on a spreadsheet showing how many days each student has missed.
Morning raffle prizes are just part of the effort to stem Simon’s truancy rates, which spiked to more than 30 percent two years ago. That rate fell to 22 percent last year, and this year the school appears on track for much greater improvement.
Photographs hang in the lobby showing students who had perfect attendance for the month. Each day, staff members reach out to parents of absent students, and an attendance team of teachers and support workers meet weekly to discuss how to help struggling families get their children to school.
The toughest cases are turned over to the family collaborative, whose employees make home visits to learn what city and social services a family might need. One such visit uncovered a plumbing problem that kept the family from washing clothes; the children were missing school because they had no clean uniforms.
Now the plumbing problem has been fixed. “The children are coming to school now,” Flamer said. “That was a real success story for us.”
Is School Choice Strengthening Our Communities, Or Tearing Them Apart? [Mundo Verde PCS and Community Academy PCS mentioned]
Education Week
By Sam Chaltain
April 23, 2014
Yesterday, I had one of those days that make me wonder long and hard about how we are reforming our schools and redefining our notions of community - and what those changes augur for the long-term.
It began with a groundbreaking ceremony for a third-year charter school, Mundo Verde Bilingual, which was moving into a century-old school building that had been unoccupied for years. While workmen busily hung sheet rock and tucked away wiring inside - it was April, after all, and the site would need to be ready for a full slate of students by late August - scores of elementary-age students, public officials, parents and community members stood or sat in the shadow of the building's handsome façade. The energy and the excitement was palpable, and the sense of possibility was contagious. Here was regeneration at work. Here was a city sowing the seeds of its own rebirth.
Right?
I confess I had a special interest in this site because the school that was moving here was one of the two I followed for a year in order to write my newest book. And I remember well the day back in 2011, when Mundo Verde's executive director, Kristin Scotchmer, parked her car at the corner of 1st and P streets NW to visit it for the first time. Not that long ago, this neighborhood was a part of the city she (and I) would have known almost nothing about. Yet now, as she stepped out to visit the potential future home for her school, she was imagining what it would take to move in.
To our right, we heard the sounds of children at play. We walked over to get a closer look and saw two signs in front of the square, sturdy school that dominated the block. One proclaimed the school's current occupant, the Dorothy Heights Community Academy Public Charter School. The other, still etched in stone over the school's front doors, gave its original name: Armstrong Manual Training School. First built in 1901, it had been designed to teach practical, manual skills in honor of the philosophy of Booker T. Washington. Kristin and I watched as a stern-faced African-American woman provided careful watch over the carefree movements of the children. Behind them, the sky was cluttered with cranes towering over a sea of new construction projects, many of which have now - three years later - given way to still newer reclamations.
Kristin crossed the street in search of the school she had come to inspect. She walked past the Faith & Hope Full Gospel Holiness Church, where a homeless man was curled up in the fetal position outside the front door. She walked a few steps further and the din of jackhammers and children's voices disappeared. It became completely silent; we were the only people on the street.
Kristin looked one way, past the canopy of trees, and saw a faded, rust-stained sign: SLATER SCHOOL. Many of its windows were broken, and much of the red brick exterior had begun to crumble. She walked further and found a fully restored playground, just past a ten-foot-tall chain link fence. All of its slides and jungle gyms were freshly painted, and the wall just beyond it had been dressed up with a colorful mural of a carousel. But there were no children here to give it life.
Kristin walked further to inspect the second abandoned school on the block, which abutted the other side of the playground. First built in 1891, the Langston School had become a homeless shelter in 1997, but for the past several years it had been completely vacant. The building was too unstable to allow prospective tenants to enter it, so we studied it from the outside. You could see why we weren't allowed in - it was extremely run-down - but its original charm was still apparent, including the large stone-carved Star of David at its center.
Still alone, Kristin searched for the city official who would usher her into the one school she would tour, directly across the street from these two. Formerly known as J.F. Cook, it had been among the twenty-three DCPS schools closed in 2008 for low enrollment under then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In its final year of operations, 13 percent of Cook's students were proficient in reading and 14 percent in math.
Like Slater and Langston, Cook was originally built as a sort of two-block campus to serve nearby post-Civil War African American settlements. Kristin peered through a chain link fence to admire its large red front doors; separate entrances framed either side, one for BOYS, one for GIRLS. Her guide arrived and they walked around the back to enter.
Inside, it was evident how much damage had been done since it closed down; all the sinks in the building had been stolen, along with all the copper piping. Condoms littered the floor, and pools of water confirmed the shoddy state of the roof. But as she walked the wide hallways, three years ago, Kristin fell in love with the ways it felt like a school. By the time she entered its open auditorium and sat in one of its old wooden seats, Kristin was doing the inner calculations of how it could be rebuilt. That concrete exterior could become a vegetable garden and the greenspace for our outdoor classroom. That second floor could handle all of our plans for expansion. The walk from the New York Avenue Metro station is only four blocks. And the move would position us to become a positive part of the changes taking place in the neighborhood.
Yesterday, all of those dreams were slowly becoming manifest, right before our collective eyes. In the presence of such a vision, it's hard not to feel that creating space for this sort of creative energy is precisely what we need. And yet the truth that exists alongside that one is that there was another school here, just six years ago, and it, too - because all schools do - was filled with hopes and dreams.
I wondered about the stories of the building's previous tenants, and of the ways in which things like school closings and school choice are redefining traditional notions of what makes a neighborhood and what makes a community, when my day concluded with a panel discussion of school choice policies in D.C. at the New America Foundation (you can watch the video below).
In many respects, D.C. is the tip of the spear in this new national movement around school choice and school reform. We are the city where Michelle Rhee got her start, where universal preschool is almost a reality, where almost half the students attend charter schools - and where only 25% of the kids in the traditional district attend their actual neighborhood school. It is a rapidly evolving, inchoate, intra-city migration, full of new ideas and neighbors and old tensions and taboos.
Can schools like Mundo Verde help revitalize our sense of civic unity and overall school quality? I think they can. Was a school like the building's previous inhabitant deserving of being shuttered? Its test scores and enrollment figures would suggest so; but what else was happening there, I wonder? What was lost when its students fanned out across the rest of the city? How was this neighborhood affected by its loss, and how will Mundo Verde's arrival affect it further?
The point is not to answer these questions clearly, I think, but to recognize the dialectic of this sort of change - that for something new to grow, something else must die. And so we would be wise, alongside the excitement and the hope, to remember what was here before, and what was lost.
Visit link to view video.
Former D.C. charter school leader sentenced to prison for stealing school funds
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 24, 2014
The former executive director of a D.C. public charter school was sentenced to nine months in prison Thursday after admitting to embezzling $29,000 in school funds, according to U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr.’s office.
Monique S. Murdock, 45, co-founded the Nia Public Charter School in Southeast Washington in 2006. She wrote five checks from the school account, totaling $29,000, to a foster child in her care and then transferred all but $100 of that money to an account in her name, according to court records.
Nia has since been closed for poor performance by the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Murdock admitted her actions in November, when she entered a guilty plea in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Murdock also acknowledged using a government-issued purchase card to buy gift cards worth more than $11,000 while working as director of an Army day-care center in Virginia, court records show.
She has agreed to make restitution payments of more than $40,000 to the federal government, including the Education and Defense departments.