- D.C. charter board releases data on waiting lists, open slots [Achievement Prep, Paul, Washington Mathematics Science and Technology, KIPP DC, Chavez Prep Two Rivers and Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
- D.C. charter school waiting lists shows strong demand for bilingual schools [Two Rivers, Washington Latin, KIPP, Mundo Verde, Elsie Whitlow Stokes, DC Bilingual, Washington Yu Ying, LAMB, William E. Doar and Basis PCS mentioned]
- Chronic absenteeism puts students in the District and elsewhere at academic risk
- Catania mayoral campaign seeks to galvanize parents [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]
- Editorial: Uniform curriculum
- Watch D.C.'s School Demographics Change Over the Past Decade
- Northwest parents prioritize neighborhood school access
- Editorial: Merger Mess
D.C. charter board releases data on waiting lists, open slots [Achievement Prep, Paul, Washington Mathematics Science and Technology, KIPP DC, Chavez Prep Two Rivers and Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 1, 2014
There are still more than 2,000 spots open at D.C. charter schools for the 2014-2015 school year, but most of the available seats are in low-and mid-performing schools, according to data that the D.C. Public Charter School Board released Thursday.
About 350 of the open spaces are in schools rated high-performing. Such “Tier 1” schools that still have space for students include Achievement Prep, Paul, Washington Mathematics Science and Technology, four campuses of the KIPP DC network and the Chavez Prep campus of the Cesar Chavez network.
The charter board also published waiting-list lengths at each school. There are more than 7,000 students on charter-school waiting lists across the city.
Two Rivers, an expeditionary learning school in the District’s NoMa neighborhood, had a waiting list of more than 1,700 names, the longest among all charters; the second-longest list belongs to Mundo Verde Bilingual, a school specializing in dual-language instruction, sustainability and expeditionary learning.
Waiting lists and open spaces at each grade level and each school are available online here. The charter board plans to update the data regularly over the coming months. Wait lists will begin shifting soon: Today is the deadline for students to enroll in schools to which they won seats in the first round of the citywide school lottery.
Students who did not enter the first round of the lottery, or who entered but did not win a seat, are eligible to enter a second round. The deadline for that round is May 15.
The charter board also published waiting-list lengths at each school. There are more than 7,000 students on charter-school waiting lists across the city.
Two Rivers, an expeditionary learning school in the District’s NoMa neighborhood, had a waiting list of more than 1,700 names, the longest among all charters; the second-longest list belongs to Mundo Verde Bilingual, a school specializing in dual-language instruction, sustainability and expeditionary learning.
Waiting lists and open spaces at each grade level and each school are available online here. The charter board plans to update the data regularly over the coming months. Wait lists will begin shifting soon: Today is the deadline for students to enroll in schools to which they won seats in the first round of the citywide school lottery.
Students who did not enter the first round of the lottery, or who entered but did not win a seat, are eligible to enter a second round. The deadline for that round is May 15.
D.C. charter school waiting lists shows strong demand for bilingual schools [Two Rivers, Washington Latin, KIPP, Mundo Verde, Elsie Whitlow Stokes, DC Bilingual, Washington Yu Ying, LAMB, William E. Doar and Basis PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 2, 2014
Yesterday, the D.C. Public Charter School Board released a list of the 368 seats that are currently available at the Performance Management Framework Tier 1 schools. But it is the schools with the waiting lists that are the real story. Leading the pack, as has been the case in the past, is Two Rivers PCS at 1,722 students, the elementary and middle school that I have written about on numerous occasions. Washington Latin PCS, where I serve on the board of directors, has a wait list of 785 pupils. The various KIPP PCS campuses are over subscribed by more than 2,300 students, although there are some that have a few slots remaining open.
There is also strong demand for the bilingual schools that make up the charter school portfolio. Mundo Verde, whose executive director I recently interviewed, has a wait list of 1,031 students. Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS's wait list is 890 kids. DC Bilingual is at 671, Washington Yu Ying is at 695 (I could not find a listing for the Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS.)
A couple of other school caught my attention. Basis PCS has 137 students on their wait list, although I would have imagined a school with this national reputation the number might have been greater. Finally, William E. Doar, Jr. PCS has an extra 100 students wanting to get in, a Tier 2 school which has had open slots in the recent past.
Chronic absenteeism puts students in the District and elsewhere at academic risk
The Washington Post
By The Editorial Board
May 1, 2014
RELISHA RUDD missed more than 30 days of school, some of them excused absences, before authorities suspected something was amiss. Chronic absenteeism is a troubling norm of public education in the District. Just as it served as a red flag of something terribly wrong in this still-missing 8-year-old’s life, it also is a powerful indicator of whether a child will succeed in school. That’s why it is important that city and school officials adopt a smarter approach to school attendance.
“In some of our schools, the number of kids who have the same number of absences as Relisha is astounding. It’s a problem,” D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson told Post reporters who examined the issue. Last year, according to The Post’s account, nearly 40 percent of students in traditional schools missed at least 18 days of school, a figure that includes both excused and unexcused absences. Half of those students were absent for the equivalent of seven weeks in a school year of 36 weeks. Analysis by the nonprofit DC Action for Children that looked at both charter and traditional schools called the situation a “crisis,” with at least one in five students having more than 10 unexcused absences in 2012-13.
Missed school days translate into academic risk. Research shows that students with a significant number of absences in kindergarten and first grade won’t be reading on grade level at the end of third grade, setting them up for difficulty in the years ahead. Absenteeism in sixth grade is a red flag that a student will drop out of high school. Students who live in poverty and are most at-risk academically have the highest absenteeism rates.
Much of the District’s effort in recent years has concentrated on truancy — or unexcused absences — and punish parents and students who don’t comply with school rules. It’s an approach largely dictated by legislation from the D.C. Council. But groups including DC Action for Children and Attendance Works say more effective strategies center on better measures to identify students who are chronically absent (both excused and unexcused) and to determine any broad patterns that need to be addressed systematically. New York City, which has a model program, found, for example, that providing safe transportation in areas with gang problems helped students get to school and that making inhalers available to students with asthma increased attendance.
The work must begin as early as pre-kindergarten to help establish a culture of school attendance. Schools don’t have to do this alone. In New York, city workers serve as mentors for chronically absent students, and in Oakland, Calif., housing authority workers make it part of their job to see students off to school. Parents, of course, play a huge role, and that’s why more should be done to show them how two, three or four missed days a month add up to a bigger deal than they may think.
Catania mayoral campaign seeks to galvanize parents [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]
The Northwest Current, pg. 3
By Graham Vyse
April 30, 2014
Independent mayoral candidate David Catania launched a formal effort to court public school parents this week, arguing that he is better positioned than Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser to accelerate education reform in the District.
At a Sunday news conference outside the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy campus in Southeast, the at-large D.C. Council member launched “Public School Parents for David,” with the goal of recruiting 1,000 supporters with children in D.C.’s school system.
Catania touted his accomplishments as chair of the council’s Edu- cation Committee, describing his record of passing legislation to pro- vide extra funding for at-risk youth and end “social promotion,” the practice of advancing students to higher grades even when they haven’t mastered material. He also noted that he had visited 134 of the District’s public schools and said he was confident these schools could improve with the right mayoral leadership.
Asked to differentiate himself from Bowser on education issues, Catania said the Ward 4 D.C. Council member had promised voters she would prioritize school reform but then failed to introduce a single substantive piece of legislation on the subject.
“She now insists that we should trust her. Well, trust is certainty based on past experiences,” he said. “We both have records. I have a record of keeping promises. I have a record of delivering.”
Ward 1 parent Alice Speck said she had hosted seven mayoral candidates in her home during this year’s Democratic primary campaign, but Catania was easily more impressive than any of them. “The District of Columbia needs its next mayor to be a seasoned expert on its biggest problem, which many of us believe is its schools,” she said at the news conference.
“I’ve heard nothing but empty platitudes from Muriel Bowser,” said Ward 3 parent Brian Cohen, a Glover Park advisory neighborhood commissioner. “I don’t see any evidence of a record and an ability to make the schools better. I’ve seen David in action. I’ve heard his ideas, and I’ve seen him turn his ideas into reality.”
Cohen gave the example of how Catania intervened when Hardy Middle School faced funding cuts. Hardy parents including Cohen had struggled to find a champion at the Wilson Building, but Catania was able to find savings elsewhere in the budget, and the funding was restored.
Other members of the “Parents or David” group also had personal stories about how Catania had affect- ed their communities. Ward 2 parent Chris Sondreal, a self-described “single-issue voter” focused on school reform, said he credits the council member with making him care about D.C. education issues beyond his own child’s school. He then echoed Cohen’s appraisal of Bowser’s approach to education.
“Her education policies are basically slogans,” he said. “They don’t tend to be policies or concrete ideas.”
Catania has said further reform requires alignment of school programming citywide. He has also urged efforts to close racial and gender gaps in on-time graduation rates and on standardized tests.
The Bowser campaign declined a request for comment on this article.
Editorial: Uniform curriculum
The Northwest Current, pg. 5
By Davis Kennedy and Chris Kain
April 30, 2014
D.C. Council member David Catania says creating a uniform curriculum should be the next effort in the city’s ongoing education reforms.
Mr. Catania’s views on the issue are noteworthy: Along with chairing the council’s Education Committee, he is running for mayor this fall, meaning his views on schools provide a sense of reforms he would institute as mayor.
On the question of curricula, we think he’s got the right idea. While we certainly wouldn’t want to see all students in a grade taught exactly the same material — there has to be room for different levels of ability — it’s logical to ensure that students with similar skill sets across the city learn the same fundamental content. That is, a standard honors course should tread the same concepts whether it’s at Wilson or Eastern High.
The council member discussed the concept in a recent committee hear- ing. He said Massachusetts, with its many high-performing public schools, has adopted a rigorous uniform curriculum, and he noted that the absence of such an approach here could be contributing to D.C.’s achievement gap, particularly as students arrive to high schools from various middle schools with different levels of preparation.
That’s true at the middle school level as well, with pupils coming from more numerous elementary schools, and even in the lowest grades, as some students transfer from one school to another.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has already been working toward creation of curricula, developing “scope and sequence” documents that pro- vide general guidelines on what to teach and when. We agree with Council member Catania that the next step is to develop full details.
Of course, that process will not be simple, and we expect much discus- sion on specifics. Should all ninth-graders read the same books? What about all Advanced Placement English students? How will teachers tweak plans for students who are struggling — or sailing? Will a teacher be able to employ creativity as freely? We also want to know how the city’s adoption of national “common core” standards will play in, and what the timeline will be. Explanation and discussion of these issues should be widespread, per- haps initially via town hall meetings and council hearings.
Watch D.C.'s School Demographics Change Over the Past Decade
Washington City Paper
By Aaron Wiener
May 1, 2014
D.C.'s public school landscape could soon change in a big way. The city is in the process of overhauling its school assignment boundaries and policies, and its proposals so far include radical measures like a citywide lottery for high school students that would upend the longstanding role that geography plays in the city's schools.
But really, the school landscape has already been changing significantly. Over the past decade, charter schools have poached a sizable proportion of the city's traditional public school population. After years of decline, enrollment at city elementary schools has begun to rise. An increasing number of white parents are sending their kids to the city's public schools. And public schools in the eastern part of the city have closed as charters have proliferated.
A new study by the Urban Institute converts the data on D.C.'s changing schools picture into a series of nifty interactives, maps, and charts that demonstrate just how different things are now compared to a decade ago. "The overall story is that big changes in D.C. are reflected in big changes in schools," says Austin Nichols, the lead researcher on the project, who himself went to D.C. public schools and serves on the boundary review committee.
But there's a whole lot more nuance than that. Exhibit A is this interactive map showing the changing enrollment at traditional public and charter schools across the city. Note how the sea of blue slowly turns red in the eastern two-thirds of the city:
For all the focus on neighborhood schools, the fact is that in some parts of the city, a high percentage or even a majority of public school students attend schools outside of their home ward—due to expansive boundaries, convoluted feeder patterns, and students opting for specialized, charter, or out-of-boundary schools. In Ward 2, which doesn't have any matter-of-right neighborhood high schools, only 34 percent of public school students went to schools in the ward in 2012, down from 56 percent in 2003. Ward 4 (see map above) has the highest total number of students attending out-of-ward schools: 3,091 Ward 4 residents go to school in Ward 1 (largely charter schools), and 1,505 go to school in Ward 3. Ward 3, whose schools have the best reputation, sends the fewest students to other wards.
Here, from a related blog post from the Urban Institute, is a breakdown of where Ward 4 students go to school:
Part of the change in the city is simply demographic. All across the city, birth rates are higher now than a decade ago, largely because the city's population is bigger. But in certain neighborhoods, it's much higher. Take a look at the number of births in the Columbia Heights/Petworth area in 2003, broken down by the education level of the mother. Green means no bachelor's degree, light blue means bachelor's degree, dark blue means a higher degree, and dark gray means no information:
Now look at the same map for 2011, and notice how many more blue dots there are—particularly dark blue dots:
The whole project is very much worth playing around with—check it out here.
See link above for interactive maps.
Northwest parents prioritize neighborhood school access
The Northwest Current, pg. 1
By Graham Vyse
April 30, 2014
Hundreds of D.C. residents have now attended meetings on Mayor Vincent Gray’s push to change school boundaries and student assignment policies, but city officials are worried by a lack of engagement in wards 7 and 8.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith began her second round of community working groups about these reforms last week, and she showed audiences public feedback data that came primarily from her first round of meetings. Smith reported that 296 of the 450 initial meeting attendees came from neighborhoods in Northwest or Northeast, while only 37 — a mere 8 percent of the total — came from east of the Anacostia River.
Speaking at Coolidge High School last Thursday and Dunbar High School on Saturday, Smith said her office will specifically reach out to wards 7 and 8, the home of 45 percent of D.C. Public Schools students. “That seems like a pretty significant voice we want to make sure that we hear from,” she said Saturday. “We think it makes sense to target communities that haven’t had as much of a voice.”
The deputy mayor’s data may not be representative of how the whole city is thinking about her reform process, but it does offer insight into opinions in Northwest, where many parents like their current in-boundary school and have invested in improving it.
For example, the notion of guaranteed access to neighborhood schools continues to draw overwhelming support. A right to “one elementary school based on your address” was endorsed by 85 percent of the total respondents.
Guaranteed access to “one middle school and high school based on place of residence” earned the backing of 79 percent. And huge majorities of respondents opposed reform proposals to eliminate a right to a specific neighborhood school such as “choice sets” or a citywide high school lottery.
At Saturday’s meeting, Dunbar teacher and education activist David Tansey said he under- stands why so many families would prioritize a school nearby.
“The greatest complaint I hear from parents is that they didn’t move to
the city to add to their commute,” he said. But Tansey also acknowledged the obvious: “Some people are really happy with the way their schools work, and some people aren’t.”
Still, the people who are happy appear to be more organized. A petition with more than 600 signatures from a group called D.C. Residents In Support of Neighborhood Schools is posted at greatdcneighborhoodschools.com. The petition declares that a loss of neighbor- hood school rights would penalize families putting down roots in the District, boost traffic congestion as a result of increased commuting and abandon the project of improving neighborhood schools, which many believe is beginning to bear fruit.
As she has throughout this process, Smith assured last week’s working group participants that they would have additional opportunities to weigh in on reform proposals in the coming months. She said the baseline goals of the process include not displacing any students from a school they already attend and ensuring that no fifth- or eighth-graders in the 2015-2016 school year lose access to the school they are headed to next. The phasing in of reform, beginning in 2015, will also include “significant grandfathering clauses,” Smith said.
Editorial: Merger Mess
By Davis Kennedy and Chris Kain
The Northwest Current, pg. 5
April 30, 2014
It’s not hard to understand why many in the School Without Walls High School community are concerned about last year’s merger with the former Francis-Stevens Education Campus.
The selective-admissions magnet located on the George Washington University campus has an extremely successful record, including recognition as a national blue ribbon school and the top scores on the city’s standardized test last year. Yet little about the consolidation seems focused on ensuring its continued success.
The main feature that school system officials have touted as a benefit to the high-schoolers is use of the small field next to the Francis campus and the extra classroom space there. But having to shuttle frequently from one campus to the other — a distance of nearly a mile — seems impractical and disruptive. Splitting the high school students between the two campuses is also inherently problematic.
On the other hand, parents at the new School Without Walls at Francis- Stevens say their pre-K-through-eighth-grade program is benefiting from the leadership of principal Richard Trogisch, who is now tasked with running both facilities. The merger was an alternative to closing Francis-Stevens, where enrollment is now up. All lower school students are now taking classes in Latin, and more field trips throughout the city are exposing pupils to a broader learning environment.
The improvements at the lower school are notable and important, and officials should work to sustain them. We can understand the view of lower school parents who see complaints from the upper school as fluff.
Nevertheless, it would be folly to move forward with an arrangement that provides a quality education at the lower grades only by detracting from an excellent upper school program. Chancellor Kaya Henderson will not get closer to her goal of a quality program for every pupil by dragging down one of her star offerings.
So what’s the solution? The wisdom of the merger — or whether there was any — seems unclear. But now that it’s done, we agree with the requests of over a thousand students, parents and others, who recently submitted a petition to city leaders. It calls for separate principals and budgets for the two facilities, as well as a promise that high-schoolers won’t have to take classes at the lower campus. School officials would do right by the Walls high school community, and serve their own interests, by agreeing to the requests.