- D.C.’s Public Charter School Students Deserve Funding Equality [Washington Latin PCS and Eagle Academy PCS mentioned]
- D.C. anti-truancy program is getting more kids to school
- On the School-Choice Barricades
- Common Core 2.0: Common Core by another name
D.C.’s Public Charter School Students Deserve Funding Equality [Washington Latin PCS and Eagle Academy PCS mentioned]
The Afro
By Ramona Edelin
September 3, 2014
Recently, the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, Eagle Academy Public Charter School and Washington Latin Public Charter School filed in court to require the District of Columbia government to end its practice of underfunding charter school students. For the past eight years, DC has deprived its public charter school students—44 percent of D.C. students enrolled in public school—of between $2,600 and $1,600 per student per year. Those are city dollars, which their peers in DCPS received, but District public charter school students did not. The inequity is illegal.
This lawsuit follows years of advocacy by the District’s public charter school community to try to persuade the D.C. government to follow the law, which demands that DCPS and D.C. charter students be funded according to the same criteria. Two government-sponsored reports during the past three years have publicly acknowledged the inequity and one has specifically cited the illegality of current funding disparities.
Charters are public schools that offer a tuition-free education to District-resident children. Charters must accept all applicants without screening, provided they have the places to seat them. These public schools also are required to fully accommodate special education students and those for whom English is a second language. Additionally, public charter schools must obey all health and safety regulations, and civil rights laws.
Public charter schools are free to offer their own school culture and curriculum, while being held accountable for improved student performance by the D.C. Public Charter School Board, whose members are appointed by D.C.’s mayor. They are performing well, and meeting the City’s mandate to close the achievement gap between students of color and White students in DC. They should be rewarded for their success – not punished!
These public schools’ biggest impact has been made east of the Anacostia River, where public charter students outperform their peers enrolled in D.C. Public Schools, the traditional system, in Wards Seven and Eight by 19 and 28 percentage points respectively. Charter high school graduation rates are 21 percentage points higher than those of their DCPS equivalents, ensuring that a higher share of charter students are accepted to, and can graduate from, college.
This illegal funding inequity adversely impacts some of our city’s poorest and most at-risk students. Of the charter students whom the District government underfunds, 78 percent are African-American, compared to 68 percent in DCPS; and 12 percent of DCPS students, but only five percent of charter students, are White. Some 80 percent of District public charter school students are eligible for federal school lunch subsidies—a higher percentage than those attending DCPS who are similarly disadvantaged.
The Uniform Per Student Funding Formula law, passed by the D.C. Council, was designed to ensure equal resources from the government for all public school students. For example, under the formula, every third-grader needing level one special education services receives the same local public funding, whether she or he attends a DCPS or a D.C. public charter school.
To uphold the basic fairness enshrined in the law, we have gone to court because as the government continues to underfund its public charter school students, those students lose between $130 and $75 million annually. In fact, over the past eight years, the underfunding amounts to over $770 million—a huge amount.
The District’s public charter schools have helped build a lifeline through high school and college to professional careers for many of our most disadvantaged students. Will the DC government invest in this tremendous, life-altering success and treat all public school students equally?
D.C. anti-truancy program is getting more kids to school
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 9, 2014
A single mother who is sick or dealing with car repairs. A child who’s staying with neighbors because his parent is in jail. A mother who works nights and weekends and takes her child out of school during the week to go shopping and spend time with her.
These are the kinds of scenarios that lead children in the District to miss school with alarming frequency, city officials say. Case workers during the past two years have begun working with D.C. families to figure out what is causing their attendance problems and how they can help.
The program, Show Up, Stand Out, is having some success, according to an evaluation of the first year’s results released Tuesday during an event at Browne Education Campus.
Nearly 80 percent of the families involved in the program during the 2012-2013 school year improved their childrens’ attendance.
“Parents love their children and want what’s best for them, but it’s hard for some parents to get their children to school consistently,” said Melissa Hook, the director of the Justice Grants Administration, which has spent $3.5 million in local funds on the truancy prevention program. The program pairs case workers from community organizations with public schools.
The D.C. anti-truancy initiative grew from a pilot program with
17 schools in 2012-2013 to 45 schools during the last school year. This year, seven community organizations are partnering with 60 elementary and middle schools — including eight charter schools — and the city plans to promote school attendance with the new slogan on city buses and billboards.
Chronic absenteeism is a growing concern nationally, and research shows that missing too much school leads to higher failure and drop-out rates.
D.C. officials have seen improvements in attendance as schools have ramped up anti-truancy efforts in recent years.
The portion of D.C. public school students ages 5 through 17 who had 10 or more unexcused absences dropped from 27 percent in 2012-2013 to 18 percent last school year. The D.C. Public Charter School Board reported a similar drop — from 19 percent in 2012-2013 to 15 percent last year.
That still leaves more than 13,000 students who are chronically truant, not including thousands more who rack up excused absences.
“Our job is to educate young people, but we cannot educate them if they are not sitting in their seats,” D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said at the event Tuesday.
Henderson said help from community partners is “critical” to efforts the school system is making to improve attendance.
According to D.C. law, if a child has reached five unexcused absences, a school support team, including administrators, teachers and social workers, meets to develop a plan to help the child’s family improve attendance. About 9,000 such meetings took place last year, up from 1,000 the year before, Henderson said.
It is then that partner organizations get involved. Case managers work with families to see what support they need. Help could come in the form of a SmartTrip card, a carpool with another family, a referral for housing or employment, or a conversation about why attendance is important to their child’s success.
Nearly all — 98 percent — of the parents or guardians involved in the program were single parents, most of them women with two or three children, according to the evaluation released Tuesday.
Kimberly Lightner was one of them. She was living in transitional housing last year and struggling with depression when her daughter began to arrive late and miss whole days of school at Daniel A. Payne Elementary in Southeast. The school social worker connected Lightner with a case manager at Catholic Charities, who helped her find an apartment and develop a manageable morning routine.
This year she is finishing her degree at the University of the District of Columbia and her daughter is doing well in school.
“I am so grateful,” Lightner said through tears.
Another Payne Elementary student last year, 8-year-old Relisha Rudd, disappeared in March with a janitor at her homeless shelter after 30 absences from school — more than 10 of them unexcused.
School officials said they had been in touch with Rudd’s family, though they did not contact the child welfare agency. A school social worker alerted police after she went to the shelter to investigate why Rudd had not been coming to school. The case refocused attention on truancy, a persistent problem for the city’s schools.
Phil Mendelson (D), chairman of the D.C. Council, said that the city is shifting its approach to addressing truancy.
“In the past, we’ve treated it as something wrong, to be punished,” he said, noting that it instead should be something that “tells us that something is going on.”
On the School-Choice Barricades
The Wall Street Journal
By Allysia Finley
September 5, 2014
'It's like a tale of two Americas on school choice," says Kevin Chavous. There's the status quo that includes the teachers unions and their allies. "And then there's the other America"—those "who have to suffer every day because their kids aren't getting the education they deserve."
By his lights, school choice is a war between the "haves" and "have-nots." "The only people fighting educational choice are the people who have educational choice," notes the former Washington, D.C., councilman.
Mr. Chavous ought to know, because for four years he has battled on the front lines of education reform as a founding board member and executive counsel for the nonprofit American Federation for Children (AFC). The organization publicly lobbies for school choice, and in particular focuses on private-school scholarship programs that typically receive less charitable support than do charter schools. Its political action committee battles to elect pro-choice lawmakers in the states.
You might say Mr. Chavous and his operation, with about 30 employees, are the shock troops for school choice on the other side of the barricades from the unions. The National Education Association has more money (some $1.4 billion in revenue) and three million members.
But Mr. Chavous has the political power of an idea—education opportunity for all—and school choice is clearly making inroads nationwide. In 2000 four states had private-school choice programs with 29,000 kids. Today, 19 states boast programs that enroll more than 308,000 children.
"This year, 2014, we saw the largest single-year growth in enrollment in programs in the history of school choice," he says. The fastest-growing state is Indiana, which is expected to award 30,000 scholarships this year, up from 590 in 2010. "And the momentum's not going to stop."
AFC and its 501(c)(3) sister organization, Alliance for School Choice, have been the movement's boots on the ground, mobilizing support and repulsing attacks by the teachers unions. Mr. Chavous says that one of the most important things he does is enlist "messengers."
"We have to get the trusting voices that people listen to," he says. "One thing I do when I'm talking to Democratic legislators in states that are considering [choice programs], particularly African-American legislators, is match them with their African-American colleagues who have been through this in other states."
He has also drafted celebrities who, he says, don't approach the issue with "political baggage." For instance, he recruited former basketball stars Lisa Leslie, a three-time MVP award winner in the WNBA, and Jalen Rose, now an ESPN analyst, to record public-service announcements backing school choice. Other messengers include black civil-rights and church leaders. Last year Mr. Chavous helped organize a rally in Memphis with a keynote speech by the city's most prominent minister, Rev. Dwight Montgomery.
Unions tell parents "that this is a Republican conspiracy," Mr. Chavous says, or "that you all are trying to destroy neighborhood schools." When low-income, working families are "told bad things, they initially fight. But when they understand what this is all about, I've heard so many parents tell me, 'Well, you didn't tell us . . . I can get a scholarship to the Catholic school, this private school that I've been wanting to send my kids to for years, if this passes.' "
School-choice opponents, he says, use a "playbook," which entails, among other things, outright lying. A typical accusation is that choice advocates are bought by the billionaire Koch brothers. Opponents also claim that vouchers don't work, but then struggle to explain the high demand among parents who they then claim don't know what's best for their kids.
There have been few controlled studies, Mr. Chavous notes, but data generally show that the children who receive scholarships benefit educationally. In Washington, D.C., he says, "90% of these kids are going to college. That's 50 points higher than public schools." In Florida and Louisiana, academic growth among voucher recipients is on par with their public-school counterparts despite students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
In any case, he says, "If schools aren't working or are doing crazy stuff, we can always take them out of the program, which is what [state superintendent] John White is starting to do in Louisiana."
School-choice foes often target rural Republicans vulnerable to union pressure, Mr. Chavous says, "because their cousins, their wives, their sisters all are employed or have ties to what is often the largest employer in their county: the school districts." Some politicians don't want poor children attending their own children's schools, which is why state legislators often seek to restrict choice programs to cities.
Unions used this strategy to defeat a voucher bill in Tennessee last year. Leading the opposition was GOP House Rep. Dennis Roach of Rutledge. Mr. Chavous's operation fought back by targeting Mr. Roach in the Republican primary last month and he lost to businessman Jerry Sexton.
The move against Rep. Roach is part of a wider offensive this year to influence primaries across the country. All six candidates AFC endorsed in Oklahoma's legislative primaries won, and all 11 of the candidates it backed in Arizona prevailed. The group has also backed candidates in primaries in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Though it lacks the unions' millions, AFC can wage a serious fight with its annual budget of $15 million. The organization is funded by 1,300 individual donors and more than 75 foundations, but it is principally backed by the DeVos family of Michigan. Betsy DeVos, the wife of Amway billionaire Dick DeVos, is chairman of the board.
AFC also works closely with the Institute for Justice to defend school choice from union assaults in court. "We've seen it in Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio," he says.
A case in point: Last week the Florida Education Association, the Florida School Boards Association, the state PTA and the state chapter of the NAACP filed a lawsuit to shut down Florida's tax-credit scholarship program, the country's largest. More than 70% of Florida's 70,000 scholarship recipients are members of a minority group, and the average income of a family of four is $25,000.
"Florida, for us, is a watershed," says Mr. Chavous, noting with some resignation that ultimately the case will be "in the hands of its Supreme Court, which is full of politics." Yet he is optimistic—school-choice proponents have prevailed in most state Supreme Court cases over the past dozen years. The watershed case was the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Zelman v. Simmon-Harris that vouchers for religious schools don't violate the Constitution's ban on favoring one religion or another as long as they go to parents rather than the schools.
The unions' last resort is enlisting the Obama administration. Last year the Justice Department sued to block Louisiana's voucher program on grounds that it violated 40-year-old federal desegregation orders. It was a peculiar argument: The state-wide program, which Mr. Chavous helped persuade black Democratic legislators to support in 2012, provides scholarships to students from poor families who attend schools graded C or below. Ninety percent of the beneficiaries are black.
"It's interesting that DOJ has decided to pick up the baton and try to bootstrap some tenuous and frankly nonsensical segregation argument as a way to end the program," Mr. Chavous says.
Louisiana placated a federal judge overseeing the case by agreeing to release more data on the program. But Mr. Chavous says he has heard that the Justice Department has been collecting evidence about Wisconsin's voucher program, so another lawsuit may be coming. "I just see this as a pattern," he says.
There was a time when Mr. Chavous, who calls himself a "recovering politician," was the sort of person teachers unions recruited to their side. In 1992 he was elected to represent Washington's eastern Ward 7, a predominantly black section with some "challenging" neighborhoods.
He says he began visiting city jails and perceived "the direct link between education, crime, homelessness, jobs, drug abuse, poverty." Finding that "85% of our inmates were high-school dropouts," Mr. Chavous says, he began to inspect the city's broken public schools.
He was among the first Democrats nationwide to embrace charter schools. And he paid the price during a 1998 mayoral bid, when he says the union ran ads that said in essence "Chavous hates your kids." He recalls being asked by his 7-year-old son, "Dad, why don't you like my teacher?" Mr. Chavous finished second in the Democratic primary to Anthony Williams —who as mayor from 1999 to 2007 became one of Mr. Chavous's staunchest school-choice allies.
In the 2000s Mr. Chavous worked to bring vouchers to Washington, drawing more fire from the teachers unions and prompting an irate phone call from then Sen. Ted Kennedy. He won the voucher fight but the unions exacted their revenge by ousting him from the City Council in 2004. The program flourished but then the Obama administration moved to cut it in 2009. Mr. Chavous mobilized protests.
"I will never forget walking down K Street during rush hour and this bus driver pulls over," he says. "He opens the door and says, 'Chavous, oh, man, I support you. I support Obama too, but he's wrong. He shouldn't be taking scholarships from them kids.' " In 2011 the Obama administration agreed with the new Republican House to restore voucher funding for five years.
Where does he expect the next inroads for vouchers? Without hesitation, he says: "Illinois. We have a couple of African-American legislators in the Senate who are ready to jump out in front."
But the key, he says, will be electing Republican Bruce Rauner as governor in November. Mr. Chavous also believes Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel may soon get on board. "Rahm Emanuel—it's no secret—is considering how to get these kids out of these bad schools and into these quality schools," he says. "I've run into several African-American leaders who run private schools in Chicago who are hungering to get more of these kids into their program."
He also sees "some opportunities" in New York state, though ultimately Mr. Chavous considers the entire country ripe for better school options. "This is really the fight for the soul of America," he says. "Parents are tired of the status quo offering promises of change that don't take place."
Common Core 2.0: Common Core by another name
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
September 10, 2014
As the national debate over the Common Core K-12 academic standards rages on, most of the states that originally adopted them are standing by the standards, though they’re calling them something different.
A new survey by the Education Commission of the States, a non-partisan organization that tracks education policy, shows that many states have ditched the “Common Core” name but have kept the standards and slapped on a new moniker that doesn’t carry as much political freight.
Nineteen states have come up with a new name that includes anything but “Common” or “Core.” There’s the “Wyoming Content and Performance Standards.” Or “Ohio’s New Learning Standards” or the oddly phrased “Maine Learning Results.”
Forty-three states and the District of Columbia have fully adopted the Common Core State Standards, which spell out the skills and knowledge in math and reading that students should possess from grades K through 12. Four states – Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia – never adopted the Common Core. Minnesota adopted the reading standards only.
Two states — Indiana and Oklahoma — passed laws to pull out of the Common Core, and four more might repeal the standards: Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and South Carolina.
The standards, created in 2010 by a bipartisan group of governors and state school officials with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are designed to inject some consistency in academic standards, which have varied wildly from state to state.
The standards are not curriculum. Decisions about exactly what is taught and how are left to individual states and school districts.
The Obama administration has been a strong supporter of the standards, offering incentives to states that adopted them. That has led to complaints, especially from Republican governors, that the federal government coerced states to adopt the Common Core.
As the Core standards have been rolled out in classrooms across the country, they have been attacked by critics on the right as federal overreach, and on the left, by progressives uncomfortable with the role of the Gates foundation and new tests associated with the standards.
Support among educators is mixed, but unions have been particularly concerned about new evaluation systems in most states that call for teachers to be evaluated in part on how well their students perform on new Common Core tests. The unions have been pushing for a pause in consequences attached to the new tests. The Obama administration has said it will consider requests from states that want a one-year delay in decisions about personnel or students based on the new tests.
In the past year, nine governors have signed executive orders relating to the Common Core, according to the Education Commission of the States. In most cases, governors re-asserted their state’s right to make decisions about K-12 education. In the case of Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), signed an executive order to try to pull Louisiana out of the Common Core, but his state board of education and superintendent of instruction have refused and are fighting it out in the courts.