- D.C. mayor’s race seen as pivoting on candidate most trusted on school reform
- Shining Stars under-enrolled after scramble for location [Shining Stars PCS mentioned]
- What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it
- Some see the DCPS-charter relationship breaking down, but charter leaders disagree
D.C. mayor’s race seen as pivoting on candidate most trusted on school reform
The Washington Post
By Aaron C. Davis and Emma Brown
September 1, 2014
The campaign for D.C. mayor enters the final fall stretch this week with new evidence that the quality of public schools — and how voters feel about them — could decide what is widely seen as the city’s most competitive general election in at least two decades.
Independent candidate David A. Catania, an at-large D.C. Council member, has been talking about school accountability for months. Last week, the Democratic candidate, council member Muriel Bowser (Ward 4), joined in — making it clear that both candidates now agree that the race could be won or lost over the school issue.
“It’s absolutely the issue that will decide my vote,” said Chealsa Branch, standing outside Lafayette Elementary, one of the District’s top-rated schools, where her daughter began kindergarten last week.
Nearly eight years after then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) launched a dramatic crusade to improve D.C. schools, how to do so remains the city’s most vexing public policy question and one of its most perilous political quandaries. The city has had a new emphasis on testing, a housecleaning of teachers, school construction, a steep rise of charter schools — and has seen school performance improve. Yet the debate rages about what to do next.
All of which may explain Bowser’s caution on the subject. Her jump into the education debate last week marked a departure from the past five months, when she had mostly avoided public policy discussions after winning her party’s nomination. For Bowser, in fact, the beginning of the school year looked a lot like the beginning of her campaign.
Bowser picked up trash around a struggling elementary school. She spent the first day of classes shaking hands with parents and students. And then she made one of her most forceful pronouncements on education policy, criticizing a plan to realign school boundaries and promising to come up with her own plan if elected.
Catania has relentlessly criticized Bowser for lagging behind on policy prescriptions, and her actions over the past week could give him more fodder. Her criticism of the boundary plan grew more forceful as the week went on — an example of her struggle to express the principles underlying her positions on education. She alienated some parents, who have accepted the current boundary plan as a way to bring consistency to what has been a haphazard school-assignment process and are weary of the uncertainty that new reform proposals bring.
Yet looming over the nitty-gritty of the schools issue is the reality that the city, where winning the Democratic primary has always been tantamount to winning the mayoralty, has never seen a truly competitive general election for mayor. And it remains uncertain whether it has one now. The central question of the campaign is whether Catania’s energetic bid for the school vote can surmount his disadvantages as a non-Democrat. But if there’s one issue catching voters’ attention this year, it’s the quality of the city’s schools.
Reform fatigue?
Joe Clark, watching his son line up for his fourth day of kindergarten, agreed that education is the top issue but said he is skeptical about what politicians have to say about it.
“My issue is that every time we elect a new leader, they want to reform some aspect of education — there’s no consistency, no stability, no continuity,” Clark said. “The result of that, I think, is that it doesn’t help the overall education of our kids.”
Bowser weighed in on the boundary plan last Monday, four days after Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) adopted it. She said one aspect of the proposal — drawing districts along geographical boundaries such as Rock Creek Park and the Anacostia River — would be “problematic.”
A day later, Bowser issued a news release saying the entire plan was “not ready” and would “exacerbate educational inequality.”
Bowser appeared to be disagreeing with Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, whom she has vowed to keep on as the face of education reform in a Bowser administration. Henderson has praised the boundary plan; now, the chancellor will begin implementing the plan with the awkward — and costly — possibility looming that her next boss could call it off halfway into the school year.
In an interview, Bowser raised fresh questions about her confidence in Henderson by saying that she didn’t expect the chancellor to be involved in the boundary issue in her administration. The candidate also risked alienating the parents and reformers who spent 10 months on the plan when she questioned the transparency of the process.
“I thank them sincerely for their service,” Bowser said. “But let’s be clear — we’re not really clear on the process they used. ”
The boundary issue is the hot topic this week, but it is a window into the larger challenges D.C. schools face: improving school performance; narrowing achievement gaps between black and white students, and poor and affluent students, that are among the largest in the country; and keeping families happy who have the choice of moving or putting their children in private or charter schools.
Despite some of the highest per-student funding in the country, the District’s schools have lagged behind most states and urban areas for a long time, though there has recently seen some test-score improvement. The system is also fighting to keep students — and, in some cases, actually recruiting them — to address the exodus of middle-class families, particularly when students hit middle school.
Bowser has only slowly offered specifics on those larger issues. Early on, she staked her education platform to middle-school improvement. Her drumbeat that every student deserved to go to the best school in the city — she called it “Alice Deal for all,” a reference to the city’s top-performing middle school — helped propel her to victory in the primary. But the slogan also drew derision from opponents who demanded specifics and didn’t hear any.
Asked this summer for details, Bowser said she wants to transform at least four middle shools and ensure that the city dedicates money for renovations. She also said she would push for greater involvement from parents and community organizations.
During the run-up to the Democratic primary, Bowser criticized the pace of school improvement under Gray and was noncommittal about Henderson.
Later, Bowswer explained that her decision to keep Henderson was meant to preserve continuity and signal her faith in the high-profile and often controversial education reform efforts that Henderson and her predecessor, Michelle Rhee, brought to the city.
“I think what people really don’t want to see is the stop-pause-change in how we move our schools, because just inevitably that means we’re stopping progress,” Bowser said. “I think what is striking is how the majority of people in the District seem to feel that the schools are moving in the right direction.”
Stressing accountability
Catania has remained constant on many school issues, including the boundary plan, which he said he would pause for at least a year.
His rationale, which Gray and Henderson have criticized, is that school quality has to get better across the board before boundaries change. It would be wrong, he said, to force parents who now have a right to send a child to a higher-performing school to instead accept a lower-performing one.
Catania was not a notable player in D.C. education until 18 months ago, when he became chairman of the council’s Education Committee. He has drawn accusations that he is a micromanager who thinks he knows more than others about the issue. But his in-the-weeds work on education policy, including the equivalent of about two months spent visiting more than 140 of the city’s 200-plus schools, has attracted some grass-roots support for the District’s first white, gay, independent mayoral candidate.
Unlike Bowser, Catania has not committed to keeping Henderson as chancellor.
He has introduced more than 10 wide-ranging education bills. Several have become law, including one that increases funding for each at-risk student by thousands of dollars.
One bill that did not pass offers a glimpse of Catania’s broader vision for change: It calls for a new system for judging the performance of traditional schools, communicating that judgment to parents, and forcing change in schools that consistently fail to meet targets.
D.C. Public Schools “does not have an accountability infrastructure at the moment with any consequences whatsoever,” Catania said in an interview.
Catania’s bill would bring a charter-like framework to the city’s traditional public schools. The District’s Office of the State Superintendent for Education would grow in power, serving more like a state’s education department, with more ability to take action when schools don’t meet expectations.
Using student test scores, attendance rates, graduation rates and other data, OSSE would design a method to determine which schools are underperforming. Those schools would be required, with the help of parents, teachers and other members of the community, to develop turnaround plans.
If, after implementing the turnaround plan, a school continues to fail to meet targets for several years, OSSE could require the chancellor to take one of several actions, including turning the school over to a charter operator, converting it into an “innovation school” free from city regulations that Henderson views as restrictive, or closing it.
Catania said that while closing schools is not his aim, he continues to believe in the basic thrust of his bill — that schools need to be fairly evaluated, that there need to be clear consequences for those not producing results, and that there has to be an outside monitor to enforce those consequences.
Another candidate for mayor, former D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz, who is running as an independent, is more openly skeptical of the city’s current education policies. But Schwartz said that there is a sense of progress and that she would keep Henderson. Her main pitch to voters is her long experience with schools, first as a special-education teacher and later as a two-term member of the old D.C. Board of Education. Her children attended D.C. public schools.
Schwartz said a detailed position paper on education is forthcoming from her campaign.
In the meantime, parents — and voters — will be paying close attention.
Helen DeVinney watched with nervous excitement as her twin girls entered Lafayette last week. A former researcher on school reform who moved to the District only recently, she summed up the sentiment of many parents: “D.C. doesn’t have a very good reputation. We’ll be watching pretty carefully to see if we can stay in D.C. as the grades progress.”
Shining Stars under-enrolled after scramble for location [Shining Stars PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
August 28, 2014
Last spring, Shining Stars Montessori Academy had a wait list with more than 200 names on it. This week, since school started, the wait list has been whittled down and the school is under-enrolled.
In between, school officials and families went on a real-estate roller coaster ride, when negotiations for two buildings fell through at the last minute. They found themselves without a home nearly two weeks before school was to begin.
The charter school was able to secure a two-year lease at a location near the Maryland border, but many families got lost along the way.
“The uncertainty is what impacts parents, and rightly so,” said Regina Rodgriguez, executive director of the school.
The school has 120 students enrolled, close to its target of 124 students, Rodriguez said. But some students have dropped out in the first days and others have not yet arrived for the school year. Rodriguez is hoping to enroll about 10 more students, particularly in the lower primary grades.
Charter advocates say the challenges Shining Stars experienced are an extreme but familiar example of the struggles charter schools face when trying to find facilities in the District. The city recently announced that it is planning to make four surplus D.C. school buildings available for charters to lease this fall in time for the next school year.
Rodriguez is eager to fill her classrooms and rebuild her school community. Enrollment is also key to balancing her budget.
“We are a small school. Our per-pupil allocation really drives everything,” she said. One fewer student can translate into fewer books or one less workshop for parents, she said.
In late June, lease negotiations for a building in Petworth fell through, after the owner accepted a more lucrative offer from another charter school at the last minute. School officials scrambled to find another location and announced in early August that they planned to lease a building on Wisconsin Avenue in Ward 3.
A few days later, they found out that their negotiations for that building, owned by the International Union of Operating Engineers, had also fallen apart.
Rodriguez said she was in the car with her director of operations on her way to sign the lease and discuss transition plans when they got a call from the real estate representative saying the meeting had been canceled.
The owners did not want to lease the building after all. They wanted to find a buyer.
“We pulled over to the curb and just sat there and said this cannot be happening again,” she said. “It was almost unbelievable that this transpired, lightning striking twice.”
They returned to another building they had considered that was still available. They have a two-year lease there. Rodriguez said she will discuss with her board and her families what they want to do in the longer term.
Ebony Washington, a Columbia Heights mother of two, said she had been with Shining Stars since the school opened, but she decided to leave amid the turmoil this summer.
“I found a more stable school,” she said. “It was a sad decision for me.”
Her older child was already attending a different school and she was able to get her daughter enrolled there, too. “I’m a working parent, and I need to make sure that the school is accessible to me.”
Another former Shining Stars parent, Tabitha Bennett, said she was able to get into Capitol Hill Montessori, a D.C. public school, through the lottery. She said she was disappointed in how school officials communicated the problems with their search.
Some parents read rumors online that the Wisconsin location had fallen through before they heard from the school directly, she said.
“The community is so close. For them not to communicate with us, it was upsetting,” she said.
Kamina Newsome, director of operations for the school, said school officials spent “every ounce of energy” they had trying to secure a new location after they lost the second building.
“We had already made two other announcements to parents thinking that we had” a deal, she said. “We did not want to announce anything without a binding agreement.”
What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it
The Washington Post
By Emily Badger
August 29, 2014
BALTIMORE — In the beginning, when they knew just where to find everyone, they pulled the children out of their classrooms.
They sat in any quiet corner of the schools they could claim: the sociologists from Johns Hopkins and, one at a time, the excitable first-graders. Monica Jaundoo, whose parents never made it past the eighth grade. Danté Washington, a boy with a temper and a dad who drank too much. Ed Klein, who came from a poor white part of town where his mother sold cocaine.
They talked with the sociologists about teachers and report cards, about growing up to become rock stars or police officers. For many of the children, this seldom happened in raucous classrooms or overwhelmed homes: a quiet, one-on-one conversation with an adult eager to hear just about them. “I have this special friend,” Jaundoo thought as a 6-year-old, “who’s only talking to me.”
Later, as the children grew and dispersed, some falling out of the school system and others leaving the city behind, the conversations took place in McDonald’s, in public libraries, in living rooms or lock-ups. The children — 790 of them, representative of the Baltimore public school system’s first-grade class in 1982 — grew harder to track as the patterns among them became clearer.
Over time, their lives were constrained — or cushioned — by the circumstances they were born into, by the employment and education prospects of their parents, by the addictions or job contacts that would become their economic inheritance. Johns Hopkins researchers Karl Alexander and Doris Entwisle watched as less than half of the group graduated high school on time. Before they turned 18, 40 percent of the black girls from low-income homes had given birth to their own babies. At the time of the final interviews, when the children were now adults of 28, more than 10 percent of the black men in the study were incarcerated. Twenty-six of the children, among those they could find at last count, were no longer living.
A mere 4 percent of the first-graders Alexander and Entwisle had classified as the “urban disadvantaged” had by the end of the study completed the college degree that’s become more valuable than ever in the modern economy. A related reality: Just 33 of 314 had left the low-income socioeconomic status of their parents for the middle class by age 28.
Today, the “kids” — as Alexander still calls them — are 37 or 38. Alexander, now 68, retired from Johns Hopkins this summer just as the final, encompassing book from the 25-year study was published. Entwisle, then 89, died of lung cancer last November shortly after the final revisions on the book. Its sober title, “The Long Shadow,” names the thread running through all those numbers and conversations: The families and neighborhoods these children were born into cast a heavy influence over the rest of their lives, from how they fared in the first grade to what they became as grownups.
Some of them — children largely from the middle-class and blue-collar white families still in Baltimore’s public school system in 1982 — grew up to managerial jobs and marriages and their own stable homes. But where success occurred, it was often passed down, through family resources or networks simply out of reach of most of the disadvantaged.
Collectively, the study of their lives, and the outliers among them, tells an unusually detailed story — both empirical and intimate — of the forces that surround and steer children growing up in a post-industrial city like Baltimore.
“The kids they followed grew up in the worst era for big cities in the U.S. at any point in our history,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University familiar with the research. Their childhood spanned the crack epidemic, the decline of urban industry, the waning national interest in inner cities and the war on poverty.
In that sense, this study is also about Baltimore itself — how it appeared to researchers and their subjects, to children and the adults they would later become. In the East Baltimore neighborhoods where Monica Jaundoo lived as a child, she told of the lots she was warned away from where junkies lingered, scattering their empty capsules and syringes. She did not realize until she returned as an adult, with her own children, that those places were playgrounds.
Alexander and Entwisle did not set out to follow these children for what would become whole careers and lives.
“You’d have to be crazy at the outset to say ‘we’re going to do this for a quarter-century,’ ” Alexander says. He is tall — no doubt even more so from the vantage point of a first-grader — with wire-rimmed glasses and a neatly trimmed white beard. On a Friday this summer, he was packing up his office on Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus in Baltimore for the smaller quarters of a retired researcher.
When he arrived in the sociology department in 1972, Entwisle was a fixture there. Together, they planned to study how children navigate one of life’s first major transitions, from home to school. They wanted to follow them from first grade into second, and at the time, that idea was novel. Child psychologists were then studying children this young. And sociologists were then interested in teenagers. But few researchers believed then that the context of these early years was crucial for everything that comes next — or that you could learn much about it by asking children themselves.
Entwisle and Alexander identified children from 20 of the city’s public elementary schools for what they called the Beginning School Study. Once the project was underway, they realized some of the hardest parts were behind them: identifying the random sample, securing the consent of parents and the cooperation of schools. Why not keep going For one year more? Then another?
By the fifth grade, the children had scattered into the city’s 105 public elementary schools. The conversation topics evolved over time, from report cards and dream jobs to drug use and job prospects. The longer the study went on, with semiannual and then yearly interviews through high school, the more remarkable its two foundations became: The researchers managed to find the children again and again — and then get them to talk about the very things that made them hard to find.
“We saw these kids grow up,” Alexander says. “They weren’t just anonymous numbers. In a typical survey project, you knock on doors, you make calls, you ask questions, you get your answers, and you go away. This wasn’t like that. We were with these kids a long, long time.”
They sent each child a birthday card every year, signed by everyone who worked on the Beginning School Study (its name stuck even as its subjects moved on). It was a small gesture with an added benefit. When the cards bounced back undelivered, they knew they had to work to find the child the next year.
The findings, meanwhile, accumulated in dozens of journal articles. Alexander and Entwisle helped establish that young children make valuable subjects, that their first-grade foundations predict their later success, that more privileged families are better able to leverage the promise of education. Also, disadvantaged children often fall even further back over the summer, without the aid of activities and summer camps.
“When I got to Hopkins,” says Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist in the department, “I realized the things I knew about education inequality I knew because my colleagues had published it.”
We like to think that education is an equalizer — that through it, children may receive the tools to become entrepreneurs when their parents were unemployed, lawyers when their single moms had 10th-grade educations. But Alexander and Entwisle kept coming back to one data point: the 4 percent of disadvantaged children who earned college degrees by age 28.
“We hold that out to them as what they should work toward,” Alexander says. Yet in their data, education did not appear to provide a dependable path to stable jobs and good incomes for the worst off.
The story is different for children from upper-income families, who supplement classroom learning with homework help, museum trips and college expectations. Alexander and Entwisle found one exception: Low-income white boys attained some of the lowest levels of education. But they earned the highest incomes among the urban disadvantaged.
They were able, Alexander and Entwisle realized, to tap into what remains of the good blue-collar jobs in Baltimore. These are the skilled crafts, the union gigs, jobs in trades traditionally passed from one generation to the next and historically withheld from blacks. These children did not inherit college expectations. But they inherited job networks. And these are the two paths to success in the Beginning School Study.
“One works well for the middle class,” Alexander says. “The other works well for white men.”
The Beginning School Study amasses a devastating time-lapse of the layers of disadvantage that burden children as they move through life, as teen mothers are born of teen mothers, as parents without degrees struggle to help their children obtain them. It’s tempting to conclude that not much can be done about a problem so deeply rooted. And yet, outliers rise from the study as well.
“You knew they were tracking people and figuring out what you were doing with your life,” says John Houser, who, like Jaundoo and Washington, emerges as an outlier to the study’s broadly discouraging findings. “When I was older,” he says, “I felt good saying, ‘Hey, I went to college. I’m not stuck in that shitty . . . neighborhood that I grew up in.’ ”
Rough sledding
Danté Washington points to the alley behind his boyhood home, the four-story East Baltimore rowhouse where his mother still lives. He played basketball there using a makeshift crate. The brother of his childhood best friend was also killed there by a man trying to rob him. “In this area,” he says, “hearing a gunshot is like hearing a truck down the street.”
The brick homes here, with their high ceilings and classic stone stoops, could exist in an upper-income Baltimore enclave. But the home next to his mother’s is boarded up, as is the next one. A balloon tied up in the park across the street marks a site of mourning. On a Friday afternoon, stoops are full of men, not home early from work, but because they had nowhere to go.
Most of the children Washington grew up with are still here. “When you grow up in an environment where there’s not a traditional next step after high school, the kid is stuck with a question mark,” he says. “ ‘Okay, what should I do now? Should I work? Should I sell drugs?’ ”
Washington was raised here by a single mother. His father died of liver problems when he was 12. He graduated on time, a mediocre student in and out of modest trouble. His childhood temper is hard to conjure from his kind manner.
Washington had a son when he was 17, and he has worked nearly every day since. He worked at Au Bon Pain, then MCI, and for many years since, at a publishing company in sales and business development. When the Johns Hopkins researchers last interviewed him, he only had a high school degree. But in 2013, he finished a bachelor’s in business, earned at night at Strayer University. He owns his own home and, notably as he drives through his old neighborhood, a Lexus.
He wants to become a financial adviser, so that he can talk with people in communities such as this one about the things no one discusses here: retirement, equity, savings.
Looking back at the forces that nudged him on this path, a few seem significant. His mother was always employed, in an administrative job with the school district. Leaving school was never an option. He was put in a series of high school programs for students interested in business, including one where he spent his summers — that crucial time — on the campus of Morgan State University.
Houser grew up in a parallel low-income but white neighborhood. His parents were married, his father a sprinkler fitter. Neither had more than a high school degree, but they were persistent about schoolwork. “It’s funny,” he says, “because you think about this later on in life — that’s the deciding factor.”
Among about 30 friends in his childhood circle, he is the only one who went to college. He has a bachelor’s of fine arts from Frostburg State University and a longtime job as a graphic designer. He laughs now at the early photography he tried in high school, artsy photos of drug needles from the neighborhood.
It’s harder to pinpoint what directed their lives of other outliers away from the broad findings of the Beginning School Study. Jaundoo, who was expelled from a series of schools for fighting, had her first child at 20, not 17. Those few years can make a vast difference between finishing high school and not, between earning work experience and having none.
Today, she has a certification to run sleep studies in a medical lab, and she raises her two children in Baltimore County outside of “the city.” She describes herself as a girl who dreamed of having the money to take a cab everywhere. “I never mentioned having my own car,” she says. “My expectations were just so low.”
Ed Klein’s path is perhaps less instructive. He grew up in a poor white neighborhood and was selling drugs with his mother by age 12. After dropping out of high school and spending five years in prison, he picked up the other work he had done as a kid, tinkering on game consoles and computers.
“I don’t like saying this, but it was like I substituted the dope dealing for computers,” he says now, “because it was the only thing in my position — no high school diploma, no work experience — that would give me pretty much the same income as a dope dealer.”
Today he has a computer repair shop and a business handling IT for local companies. He earned his high school degree and eventually a college one, too. Each of these lives suggests an alternative to the long shadow, along lines that another generation of sociologists will understand even better.
“It’s real. It happens,” DeLuca says. “That’s not random.”
A study in intervention
By this summer, all of the names and identifying details had been painstakingly redacted from the hundreds of files in the Beginning School Study offices. Each child had one, containing the handwritten interview forms and school notes going back to the first grade.
In July, these paper records were boxed up too, shipped to a library at Harvard, where they will be scanned for future researchers, the physical copies shredded. With the identities of the children gone, no one will be able to reopen the study, to interview Jaundoo and Washington again at 45 or 60 (the subjects quoted here agreed to speak by name through the university). But other researchers will no doubt think to pose different questions of the data collected from their lives.
“There’s a sense in which this could have gone on forever,” Alexander says. “Except it couldn’t. We were wearing down.”
As he retires, Alexander feels that they followed the children long enough to learn something meaningful about their lives as independent adults. Occasionally, people ask him whether the study itself became an intervention. Did the presence of these curious researchers alter the course of any child’s life?
Alexander suspects that the forces they documented — the family backgrounds, the problem behaviors and the economic prospects — were much more powerful than any annual conversation.
“If it were that easy to reroute peoples’ life paths,” he says, “we should be doing it all the time for everyone.”
Some see the DCPS-charter relationship breaking down, but charter leaders disagree
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
August 29, 2014
Shortly before the advisory committee on school boundaries and feeder patterns released its final proposal, the DC Public Charter School Board's representative resigned in protest over one of the committee's recommendations. Does that move reflect a deepening rift between the charter and traditional public school sectors? It depends on who you ask.
There's been a lot of brouhaha surrounding the committee's recent recommendations, their adoption by Mayor Vincent Gray, and their repudiation by both of his likely successors. The resignation of Dr. Clara Hess, the PCSB's official representative on the committee, has gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle.
But in interviews, members of the committee candidly expressed anger and dismay at Hess's resignation, seeing it as one more step in the apparent deterioration of the relationship between DC's charter sector and DC Public Schools.
"Everybody was disappointed," said Faith Hubbard, a member of the committee who lives in Ward 5. "It was like, all this work we did over a year, and you want it to come down to this?"
Others disagree that the once cordial relationship is breaking down. "I think actually relations between the sectors are better than ever," said Scott Pearson, executive director of the PCSB. "And I think the level of collaboration will continue to grow."
Priority for at-risk students
The recommendation that prompted Hess's resignation focuses on "at-risk" students, a new designation that includes kids who are homeless, in foster care, eligible for food stamps or welfare benefits, or a year or more below grade level in high school. The category includes 43% of DC students.
Beginning this school year, the DC government will provide additional funding to schools based on the number of at-risk students they enroll.
The committee recommended that all public schools, including charter schools, with fewer than 25% at-risk students give priority to such students for 25% of the seats they allocate through a lottery each year.
Pearson said the committee hadn't sufficiently analyzed the impact of that recommendation. The committee did produce data showing how many schools would be affected (19 DCPS and 13 charter schools) and how many seats at each school would be set aside for at-risk students (between two and 38).
But Pearson said the committee should also have analyzed whether at-risk students would displace others who are economically disadvantaged but don't fall into the at-risk definition.
PCSB's authority to bind charters
More fundamentally, Pearson said the PCSB did not have the authority to agree to a recommendation that would bind individual charter schools. There were no representatives of individual charter schools on the committee.
Hubbard argued that it would have been impossible to have representatives of all DC charter schools on the committee, just as it was impossible to have all DCPS schools represented. There was one representative from DCPS, she said, just as there was a representative from the PCSB.
But Pearson said those representatives were not equivalent, since all of DCPS is a single Local Education Agency, while each charter operator is its own LEA.
Part of the problem was that the committee didn't begin focusing on charter schools until fairly late in its 10-month process, so there wasn't time to canvass charter leaders on the at-risk issue. The committee's initial mission was to redraw boundaries and feeder patterns for DCPS schools.
But at community meetings on the first round of proposals in April, parents repeatedly called for comprehensive planning that would include both sectors, according to committee members.
Pearson said those meetings, held at DCPS schools and organized according to DCPS feeder patterns, didn't adequately represent charter school parents. Committee members responded that parents often switch back and forth between sectors, so there was more charter representation than was apparent.
"To say charter parents weren't represented in the process is erroneous and is convenient if you don't like what came out of it," said Eboni-Rose Thompson, a Ward 7 resident who was on the committee. Thompson has also been a contributor to Greater Greater Education.
The DCPS-charter relationship
The more important question, especially now that the future of the committee's recommendations is uncertain, is what the disagreement means for the DCPS-charter relationship. Thompson and Hubbard were pessimistic, feeling that a generally positive process had ended on a sour note.
But Pearson was more upbeat, pointing to another recommendation that calls for a task force to be set up by the end of December that will focus on collaboration and planning across school sectors. The PCSB still supports that recommendation, he said.
His perspective was echoed by Emily Bloomfield, a committee member and former board member of the PCSB who is in the process of launching a new charter school.
"I'm very optimistic about collaboration partly because I've seen more of it over time," Bloomfield said, citing the common school lottery and an annual school fair that used to be limited to charter schools and now includes DCPS.
But those who have called for collaborative planning generally envision a process that would impose some limits on charter growth and location. As Pearson has made clear, the charter sector is adamantly opposed to any limits that aren't voluntary on its part.
Hubbard feels that attitude will be a problem for the task force that the recommendations call for. "Charters have been allowed to grow without much oversight," she said, "and this task force is going to infringe on that. Anytime, they could say: we're going to take our ball and go home."
Both Hubbard and Thompson, an alumna of a charter school, say that things have changed since charters were a small part of the educational landscape. Now that they educate nearly half of DC's students, Thompson said, charter autonomy shouldn't be seen as sacrosanct.
"Now it should be about how we ensure we're making a good faith effort to serve all students," she said, "and not just buying into words that sound attractive like 'innovation' and 'autonomy.'"
Perhaps, as Thompson predicts, the DC Council will soon be ready to impose limits on charter growth, although so far there have been few signs of that. Or perhaps, as Bloomfield suggests, charter operators will be willing to voluntarily adjust their plans in exchange for a better way of obtaining suitable buildings from the DC government.
What's clear is that many in both sectors share a sense of mission about improving the quality of education for DC's low-income students. But they don't always agree on the best way to achieve that.
Let's hope the task force, which is scheduled to begin meeting before Gray leaves office, will provide a better forum than the advisory committee for hashing out differences between the sectors. Unlike the committee, the task force will most likely include representation from charter school operators, and it will be clear from the outset that its mission is cross-sector planning and collaboration.