- Under pressure, D.C. school system gets more aggressive about selling itself
- D.C. now has a real marketplace for public education
- D.C. considers special-education overhaul [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
Under pressure, D.C. school system gets more aggressive about selling itself
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 1, 2014
The District’s traditional public school system is sending principals out to knock on doors in a campaign to sell itself to city families, an aggressive move to boost enrollment and maintain market share after years of ceding ground to charter schools.
The move is a sign of the tremendous pressure on the District’s traditional public schools. Charter schools, which appeared less than two decades ago, now enroll nearly half the city’s public school students, and they continue to gain popularity. It is a trend that many believe threatens the long-term survival of the traditional school system.
To train principals in old-fashioned door-to-door canvassing, school officials have hired political campaign experts who helped Barack Obama win the presidency. These experts are also adapting data-analytic methods used to target voters in 2008 and 2012 to help identify those students most likely to bolt the school system and, therefore, most in need of personal attention.
“I’ve got to keep my school open and growing,” said Principal Kennard Branch of Southeast Washington’s Garfield Elementary, one of about 30 principals who left recent student-recruitment training sessions with plans to knock on hundreds of doors during the first weeks of summer.
In the waning days of the school year, these experienced educators found themselves assembling teams of volunteer door-knockers and tinkering with fliers meant to encourage parents to consider their schools. They also refined the sales pitch for those parents who had decided to send their children elsewhere.
“I know you said you committed to a charter school,” said Principal Andria Caruthers of West Education Campus, demonstrating for her team of volunteers how one might engage a family that appears determined to leave the school system. “I’m asking you, can you stop by the school tomorrow?”
Gone are the days when public schools could sit back and wait for students to show up on the first day of class. In this era of school choice, families have become consumers, and educators have become marketers as responsible for selling their academic offerings as they are for teaching and learning.
Nowhere is that shift more apparent than in the District, home to one of the most crowded and competitive school marketplaces in the nation, where a school’s budget — and continued existence — depends on the number of students it manages to enroll.
“We know that we have to fight for our students and win over hearts and minds because there are so many great choices out there,” said Christopher Rinkus, who oversees the school system’s enrollment efforts. “There’s a mind-set we’re working to change, that enrollment happens when it happens. . . . We’re in a climate where you can’t afford that mind-set.”
From 1996 to 2012, enrollment in the city’s traditional schools declined from about 75,000 to about 45,000. Although enrollment ticked up slightly in 2013, the school system still lost market share to charters, which now enroll 36,500 students, or 44 percent of the city’s public school population. Charter schools in the District educate a higher percentage of local students than anywhere in the United States other than Detroit and New Orleans, where traditional schools have been replaced almost entirely by charters.
Across the country, wherever charter schools have taken root, they are known for marketing themselves aggressively. Advocates for school choice, a philosophy that the Obama administration has embraced, say charter schools are forcing traditional school systems to think of families as customers.
“It means we’ve done our jobs,” said Kara Kerwin of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter advocacy organization.
But others say marketing efforts such as the District’s beg important questions about the unintended consequences of school choice, including whether the push to sell schools distracts from the goal of improving instruction.
“At a time of very limited school resources, do we want our resources diverted to marketing?” said Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We ask a lot of our principals. . . . Is door-to-door solicitation what we really want them to be doing?”
Some D.C. principals agree. “If you run a good program, parents will know. Word of mouth is very powerful,” said one principal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing supervisors.
Many principals in the District feel a responsibility to do whatever they can to boost enrollment. More students mean additional staff and resources that can help a principal build attractive programs.
“I don’t think I allow myself to go down the road of ‘Is it a good use of my time?’ ” said Caruthers, the principal of West, a K-8 school in Northwest Washington’s 16th Street Heights neighborhood. “I think it’s a reality of where we’re at in education right now.”
D.C. school leaders were trained in campaign-style recruitment techniques in late May and early June. Leading the sessions was 270 Strategies, a firm founded by two political insiders known for combining data analytics and massive grass-roots organizing to help elect and reelect the nation’s first black president. The second time around, in 2012, Mitch Stewart was Obama’s battleground states director, and Jeremy Bird was his national field director.
The school system paid $14,000 for five two-hour training sessions to introduce principals to the art of door-to-door canvassing. Jesse Boateng, director of Florida voter registration for Obama’s 2012 campaign, led the sessions, sharing tips from the campaign trail: Don’t spend more than five minutes at any one door, and if you‘re having trouble reaching a targeted family, go back but not more than five times.
“You’re delivering a very specific message and asking a very specific question to capture data,” Boateng said. “Canvassing is one of the most efficient campaign strategies ever. We know that.”
Boateng left principals with a sample door-knocking script, templates for marketing literature and spreadsheets for recording which families were contacted and how they responded. He pushed principals to focus on “the lowest-hanging fruit,” persuading the families of current students, who must re-enroll every year in the District, to fill out the paperwork.
The firm is analyzing five years of student data to create a model for identifying the students most likely to leave. The school system is paying $30,000 for that work, and officials hope the model will be ready in time to help principals plan their recruitment efforts next spring.
“Once we’ve managed to figure out how we get our kids to return to our schools, we can figure out how to market to new families,” said Rinkus, whose job is to ensure that the school system hits its enrollment target of 47,592 students in the fall, an increase of more than 1,000 students from the 2013-2014 school year.
Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for 270 Strategies, declined to say whether the firm gave D.C. schools a discount. He said the firm does not comment on contracts with clients.
Going through the city’s neighborhoods, some principals found themselves knocking on doors without getting a response. Others said that appearing on students’ doorsteps seemed to open the way for a stronger connection with families. Still others said they were welcomed by parents who had intended to enroll but hadn’t realized that doing so early would help secure teachers and resources.
“We were very well received,” said Izabela Miller, principal of Amidon-Bowen Elementary in Southwest, which was at 40 percent of its target enrollment before the first round of door-knocking in late June. Now the school is at 70 percent, and Miller and her volunteers are headed out for another round of canvassing this weekend.
Many principals said they planned to canvass more broadly in an effort to find and recruit new students. “I can still go up and down the street, maybe find someone looking to go to a charter school and persuade them to go to Garfield,” Branch said.
Branch has already come up with his own strategies for retaining students, and he has beat his enrollment targets every year. Starting in April, he offers a treat — a ice pop party or a movie — every Friday for students who have re-enrolled. In June, he puts on a day-long carnival, and only those students who have completed their enrollment paperwork are admitted to the choicest parts, such as the waterslide, the Ferris wheel and the dunk tank.
Most Garfield parents had re-enrolled before this year’s carnival day, and many others showed up that morning bearing last-minute paperwork. One of them was Danielle Wise, the mother of an 8-year-old.
“He said don’t forget to come to my school! Don’t forget to register me!” said Wise, who recently moved outside Garfield’s attendance zone but wouldn’t consider transferring her son.
Caruthers, the West Education Campus principal, and her team of volunteers — two parents, a kindergarten teacher, a counselor and a central-office employee — made their inaugural canvassing trip on a recent Saturday morning. Each was armed with a “walk list” of student names and home addresses, and they had smartphones with mapping apps, school fact sheets and door hangers to leave at houses where no one answered the door.
Students no longer lived at the first three addresses that Caruthers tried. But the next three doors yielded face-to-face conversations with parents and grandparents and — the next week — three sets of filled-out enrollment forms.
“We’re doing a lot of great things at West, and people should know that,” Caruthers said. “We need to make sure that we keep our kids.”
D.C. now has a real marketplace for public education
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 2, 2014
Milton Friedman would be smiling, which is something along with his wife Rose he loved to do. For today the Washington Post's Emma Brown has a story about D.C. principals being trained by individuals who helped elect President Obama to canvass door-to-door to attract families to their public schools. The training and the cold call marketing is in response to the competition from charters for students. Charter schools now educate over 36,500 children, 44 percent of all public school students.
In the 1950's economist Friedman wrote that if the goal is to make parents the customers in our public school system then issue a voucher that would allow them to send their kids to the private school of their choice. Well for about 17 years now children in the nation's capital have had a public school voucher which is now worth about $9,000, with another $3,000 added to that for facility funding if the decision is to enroll in a charter. Because the money follows the pupil there is now considerable financial pressure for institutions to attract as many students as possible.
The result, as school choice advocates predicted, is an increase in quality. Gone are the dark days of absent textbooks, crime infested hallways, and roofs falling onto gymnasium floors. We have a DCPS Chancellor arguing with her teachers' union to keep her schools open for longer hours so that her sites can emulate the academic performance of charters. Instead of parents being shunned from placing a toe within a classroom, in most cases they are now being welcomed with open arms.
As we come to the Fourth of July holiday all of this is a great civics lesson for our youth. The simple yet overwhelming power of freedom allows mankind to reach soaring heights. In this case, the ability of parents to pick the public school that is best for their children has led principals and teachers to engage with moms and dads and sons and daughters in a way educators and their administrators never could of imagined.
D.C. considers special-education overhaul [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 1, 2014
The District has made progress toward complying with federal special-education law, the U.S. Education Department reported last week, but the city continues to be one of a handful of jurisdictions that lag far behind expectations for serving children with disabilities.
In the parlance of the federal government, special education in the city “needs intervention.” But in the words of D.C. parents, advocates and politicians, special education is in crisis and requires systemic changes to ensure that the city’s 13,000 special-needs children are getting the services they legally deserve.
The D.C. Council is considering wide-ranging legislation that would speed the delivery of services and change the balance of power between parents and schools, handing families new tools in disputes over appropriate services for their children.
Parents and activists have said the legislation is essential, but city officials say some key provisions would take years to implement successfully, and school leaders object to other measures they say could lead to a spike in frivolous lawsuits.
The three bills were introduced by Education Committee chairman and mayoral candidate David A. Catania (I-At Large), who points to the low graduation rate of students with disabilities — 38 percent complete high school on time compared with 64 percent citywide — as evidence of the need for change.
“This is a crisis,” he said at a recent hearing. “It’s one that demands our attention.”
For decades, the District has struggled to provide adequate special-education services, and it has yet to fully emerge from court oversight. It has landed on the federal government’s “needs intervention” list for eight years running and is considered a “high-risk grantee” for federal special-education funds, its expenditures subject to additional oversight.
The city allows schools 120 days — more time than any state in the country — to complete special-education evaluations for children believed to have disabilities. City schools have made “marked progress” in complying with that timeline, according to the federal education agency, but still do not meet it in every case.
Catania’s legislation would cut the timeline in half, which advocates say is crucial to ensuring that children are helped as early as possible.
The current timeline lets young children languish without the help they need, falling behind academically and becoming increasingly frustrated with school, said Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children’s Law Center, which represents children with special needs and which helped draft Catania’s legislation.
“The timeline sets children up to fail,” Sandalow said.
Nathaniel Beers, chief of specialized instruction for D.C. Public Schools, said the school system supports shortening the timeline but would need until the 2017-2018 school year to comply with a 60-day requirement.
“Many of these changes will take significant investment and time for appropriate planning to implement them with fidelity,” Beers said.
The legislation also would expand the number of children younger than 3 who are eligible for special services, building upon an expansion initiated last year by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). Advocates say such early intervention can help children catch up to their peers before they enter kindergarten.
State Superintendent of Education Jesús Aguirre cautioned that the expansion would cost taxpayers close to $60 million a year, a cost Catania said he believes the city should bear.
Perhaps the most contentious parts of the legislation involve rewriting rules for disputes between parents and schools over appropriate services.
Many parents say that the city’s legal framework puts them at a disadvantage in such disputes, forcing them to bear the burden of proof — and the cost — in showing that a school has failed their children. In such cases, parents are often seeking to force the school system to provide additional services or pay for tuition at a private school.
The legislation would shift the burden of proof in such cases to schools and give parents — who now have to pay out of pocket for expert-witness fees — the ability to recover those fees if they prevail.
Molly Whalen, a D.C. parent and special-education activist, said she and her husband won their case against the school system but still had to pay $30,000 in fees. “This legislation would level the playing field so families don’t have to mortgage their homes to secure appropriate services for their children,” Whalen said.
But several charter-school leaders and attorneys for charter schools said that the change could prompt frivolous lawsuits. Martha Cutts, executive director of Washington Latin Public Charter School, said her school had to spend $3,000 fending off such a lawsuit, which the parent wasn’t aware an attorney had filed.
Catania said he is open to tweaking the legislation to tamp down the possibility of frivolous lawsuits, including setting limits on the fees parents can legally recover.
The Education Committee is slated to mark up the legislation July 10, before the council’s summer recess begins, and send the bills to the full council for a vote sometime in the fall.