- D.C. charters deserve the same funding as traditional public schools
- Washington Post editors support charter school lawsuit [FOCUS mentioned]
- D.C. Charter Schools Lawsuit Alleges Funding Disparities [Eagle Academy PCS and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Six reasons not to put too much weight on DC's standardized test results
D.C. charters deserve the same funding as traditional public schools
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
August 4, 2014
A STUDY by the D.C. government examining how public money is appropriated to students in the city’s traditional and charter schools concluded there were great disparities between the two sectors. Not only is this unfair but, as the study determined, it is “contrary to D.C. law.” How, then, can a spokesman for the attorney general’s office dismiss as “without merit” a lawsuit seeking redress? An even more perplexing question is why city officials who promised to bring fairness to education funding failed to act, thus necessitating this unfortunate court action.
A lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court on behalf of D.C. public charter schools by the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools alleges the city is in violation of a requirement that charter and traditional schools be funded by a uniform per-student amount annually. The formula, part of the 1995 D.C. School Reform Act establishing charters, is supposed to ensure that students at the same grade level or requiring the same level of special services receive the same public funds.
According to the suit, charter schools receive about $2,150 less per student than their traditional counterparts every year, resulting in a loss of $770 million since fiscal 2008. The disparities, which result from supplemental payments or in-kind services from other agencies to the school system, have been a source of tension. Charter advocates, as The Post’s Emma Brown reported, had long considered legal action but held off in the hopes — naive, as it turned out — that officials who had acknowledged the problem would do something about it.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who campaigned on a promise of eliminating the disparity, has been more supportive of charters than his predecessor, Adrian M. Fenty (D), but a fundamental imbalance persists. We don’t doubt that the differences between the two sectors complicate the question of how to reasonably finance schools, as some advocates for traditional schools argue. Charters are able to operate with more flexibility and mostly without union labor. But rather than penalizing a sector that has done more with less, officials should be devising ways to make charters whole without hurting students in traditional schools.
We can’t help but think the city might have forestalled this lawsuit if it had done more to help charters find facilities. It’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that the time and resources that will be expended by both sides in court would be better directed at finding a solution that ensures fair treatment for every student.
Washington Post editors support charter school lawsuit [FOCUS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
August 5, 2014
Today the editors of the Washington Post write in strong support of the lawsuit filed last week against the city in which charters charge that the traditional schools are receiving illegal supplemental funding outside of the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. The additional dollars provide DCPS with approximately $100 million per year that the alternative schools do not receive. The editors recognize that it is complicated to compare the two systems because of the difference in the way they operate and then conclude:
"But rather than penalizing a sector that has done more with less, officials should be devising ways to make charters whole without hurting students in traditional schools."
There is another interesting point made in the editorial. The editors conjecture that the legal action might have been prevented if the city had been more cooperative in turning shuttered DCPS facilities over to charters. When FOCUS first brought up the possibility of the suit over public funding I asked whether the movement should be instead addressing the millions of dollars in capital expenditures the traditional schools receive for building renovation to which charters do not have access. The answer was that it was preferable to address the UPSFF since this revenue issue is codified into law.
A victory in court would be groundbreaking in that it would bring equity and fairness to a school system that for the last 20 years has been pleading for both. I imagine that step two in this cause would be to tackle the problem of charters obtaining adequate classroom space. The city could do much to preempt this unpleasant battle by going ahead and turning over the current 23 vacant DCPS buildings that are now just sitting gathering dust.
D.C. Charter Schools Lawsuit Alleges Funding Disparities [Eagle Academy PCS and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
August 4, 2014
A lawsuit against the D.C. government has been filed on behalf of three members of a D.C. public charter schools association and two of its schools, alleging a significant gap in funding between the charters and public schools.
The lawsuit, filed July 30 against the District and lame-duck Mayor Vincent C. Gray, targets the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, Eagle Academy Public Charter School in Southeast, and Washington Latin Public Charter School in Northwest, whose officials demand an end to what they say is the city government's long-standing practice of illegally funding charter school students at a lower rate than their public-school counterparts.
The lawsuit covers the past eight years, when the practice allegedly deprived public charter school students of nearly $800 million.
"The legal action is a last resort. It does not seek damages for past underfunding, which totals more than $770 million just since fiscal year 2008," the plaintiffs said in a July 31 statement. "Instead, it asks the court to enjoin the D.C. government from continuing to flout the equal funding law. All public school students should have the same protections and resources from their government."
The plaintiffs, who maintain that the District government has continually ignored the fundamental requirement to equally fund schools, said each public charter school student has consequently been underfunded by as much as $2,600 annually.
In explaining that the District's charter schools — like the DCPS system — are public facilities, the plaintiffs noted that the charters educate almost half — or 38,000 — of all students enrolled in schools in the city. By comparison, DCPS enrolls about 45,000 students.
But charter officials say they've been shortchanged by the city, including agencies such as the Department of General Services, which has allegedly provided more free facility maintenance to regular public schools. Charter schools officials say they've had to struggle to keep up with competitive teacher salaries and other essential expenses.
The plaintiffs alluded to the D.C. School Reform Act of 1995, which established public charter schools in the District and subsequently changed how public education in the city is funded.
"Instead of funding schools, the government would fund students, and the same amount of public funding would attach to students sharing the same characteristics," the plaintiffs said. "So, for example, two third-grade students needing Level 1 special education funding would be funded at the same level, including when one of those students attended DCPS and the other a public charter school.
The plaintiffs claim that after more than a decade of meetings, protests and negotiations, the charter community will no longer tolerate inequitable funding.
In January, the District government released a study that concluded funding disparities between the two school systems are contrary to city law. The study called for increasing public school funding by more than 15 percent — at least $180 million a year — so that the schools would have adequate resources for improving student achievement.
The study's costly recommendations, which would be implemented over several years, include providing adequate resources for improving student achievement and raising the city's basic per-pupil allocation for both the charter and DCPS system from $9,306 to $11,628.
Recommendations also call for additional money for programs aimed at preventing academic failure among at-risk students and those learning English as a second language.
Six reasons not to put too much weight on DC's standardized test results
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
August 4, 2014
Every year DC announces, with much fanfare, the annual results of the standardized test that all DC public school students take, the DC CAS. Last year the scores were declared historic because they rose by 4 points. This year's scores barely budged, but there was still a big press event and much discussion of whether they show education reform has been working in DC. But how reliable are the test scores?
Here are 6 things to bear in mind when considering the DC CAS results:
Proficiency rates are decided by policy-makers. The scores that DC has released aren't actual test scores, but the percent of students deemed proficient. Proficiency is not an absolute. Rather, DC education officials pick a certain "cut score." Students who score above that level are classified as proficient or advanced, and those below are basic or below basic.
That means that proficiency rates are essentially a matter of policy. Last year, controversy erupted when DC officials rejected a recommendation from teachers to use a new grading scale that would have made it harder for students to be considered proficient.
DC officials have said they kept the old grading scale in order to ensure that scores from prior years would be comparable, but critics have charged manipulation and called for officials to release students' underlying scores.
Proficiency rates don't tell you about growth. If all you're hearing about is how many students are proficient, you don't know how many students have moved up from one category to another. For example, students who manage to move up from below basic to basic aren't counted.
Given that many students in DC schools are in the below basic category and are unlikely to jump straight to proficient, a focus on proficiency could mean a lot of progress is taking place under the radar. It also ends up giving credit to schools who start with a lot of high-achieving students rather than to schools that start with low-achievers and bring them up.
DC does track student growth at individual schools as well as proficiency rates, and both rates are available as part of a school's equity report. But for some reason the fanfare is all about proficiency rates.
Individual schools' scores can fluctuate wildly from year to year. The focus last week was on the overall proficiency rate for DC, or the overall rate for DC Public Schools as opposed to the overall rate for the charter sector. But DC officials also released school-by-school results. And, as Emma Brown pointed out in the Washington Post, some schools' scores went way up while others went way down.
For example, Drew Elementary gained 34 points in math and 18 points in reading, while Tubman lost 24 points and 14 points in those subjects. There may be reasons for these shifts. Tubman, one of DCPS's success stories last year, had a new principal this year. And statisticians might argue that these wild fluctuations cancel each other out when the scores are aggregated.
But for me, at least, the ups and downs raise questions about the reliability of the tests. Do schools really change that much from year to year?
Standardized tests only measure certain skills. Standardized tests can measure simple skills, like addition and subtraction, and they can measure how well students have absorbed and retained the facts they've been taught. But they're not very good at measuring higher-order analytical abilities.
That means that even students who do well on standardized tests often lack what MIT researchers have called fluid intelligence, including the ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically.
What are the implications of that finding for students who do badly on standardized tests? It's possible they possess analytical abilities that aren't reflected in their test results. But my hunch is that they're at least as much in need of learning higher-order thinking skills as those who test well.
The larger point is that standardized testing has led teachers to focus on drilling rather than on fostering the kinds of skills that are crucial for success after high school. In theory, that's what the Common Core will do.
The test questions may be badly written. In order to avoid having to rewrite questions every year, DC doesn't release the questions on the DC CAS. There are a few science and math questions from 2009 available online, but nothing on the literacy side, and nothing recent.
But if the DC CAS questions are anything like the sample questions for the Common-Core-aligned tests DC and other school districts will give starting next year, they may be part of the problem.
When I took an online practice test for the PARCC tests that DC will use, I found questions that were unclear, pitched at way too high a level, or that just made no sense. Apparently there are similar problems with sample questions for the tests produced by the other Common Core test consortium, Smarter Balanced.
Changes in test scores can result from demographic change. More affluent students tend to do better on standardized tests. So it's possible that increases in test scores in DC largely reflect an influx of relatively affluent kids into the school system. That possibility is bolstered by the fact that test scores haven't increased much for at-risk subgroups of DCPS students in recent years.
None of this means we should abandon standardized tests. We need some way to assess, on a large scale, how schools are doing, and right now it's not clear there's any other good way to do that. And test scores have served an important function in pointing up the disparities in the achievement levels of higher- and lower-income students.
But we should supplement the scores with other measures when possible. And we should take them, especially those that only reflect proficiency rates, with a large grain of salt.