NEWS
- D.C. auditor finds improvements in financial oversight of charter schools [Community Academy PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
- Graduation rates up in D.C. public schools, down for charter schools [Washington Latin PCS, KIPP DC PCS, and IDEA PCS mentioned]
- D.C. Students Benefit from Mix of Charter and Traditional Schools
- Obama meets with city school chiefs, outlines education spending priorities
D.C. auditor finds improvements in financial oversight of charter schools [Community Academy PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
March 17, 2015
Financial oversight of public charter schools has significantly improved in recent years, but agencies monitoring the schools need to continue improving how they track contracts and enrollment verification, according to a D.C. auditor report released Tuesday.
The report recommended major changes to how the city pays charters, suggesting that payments reflect actual enrollment throughout the year rather than projected enrollment or one-time audits. It also called for the D.C. Council to consider legislation that would require private management companies to provide more information about their finances.
“Having transparency in how we use all public school dollars is critically important,” Jennifer Niles, deputy mayor for education, said in a news conference after the findings were released. “While there has been great progress and, overall, significant transparency, there is still more work to do.”
The audit examined financial documents and transactions between fiscal 2011 and 2013, monitoring the flow of more than $1.5 billion in local tax dollars. Auditors looked at a broad scope of financial oversight functions, including how the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) certified summer-school enrollments and whether the D.C. Public Charter School Board was monitoring whether each charter school carried insurance.
Concerns about financial transparency at charter schools have been amplified in recent years, with the D.C. attorney general filing two lawsuits related to payments made to for-profit management companies that run D.C. charter schools.
In one suit, court documents show that the founder of Community Academy Public Charter School, Kent Amos, paid himself more than $1 million to lead the school via a management company. The other lawsuit involves three former leaders of Options Public Charter, a school for at-risk teens. They allegedly diverted funds to two for-profit management companies they ran.
The charter board in both cases gave schools favorable ratings for their financial performance during oversight reviews. Charter board officials said their watchdog abilities were limited because they could not see the private company’s financial records.
To help with oversight, the report by the Office of the D.C. Auditor urged the D.C. Council to require that for-profit management firms provide the same level of financial information that nonprofit organizations provide. D.C. Council members David Grosso (I-At Large) and Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) introduced a bill last month to achieve that goal.
The report also recommended adjusting payments to charter schools for transfers that occur after the annual October enrollment audit. Per-pupil city funding is awarded to charters based on the October audit, while D.C. public schools receive funding based on projected enrollments. Critics say the system encourages traditional schools to inflate projections and charter schools to let go of students later in the year. Niles said she wants to adopt a system that offers positive incentives.
“We want to reduce mobility during an individual school year as much as possible,” she said.
The report noted that the charter board has made significant improvements to its oversight, introducing an online database that makes it easier to file and track financial records. Early on, auditors could not find evidence that all annual financial and compliance reviews were conducted. The report also found missing documentation regarding charter school contracting; charters are required to enter a competitive bidding process for contracts of more than $25,000.
The charter board said in a response to the report that it has improved its oversight of contracting since 2013 and hired a specialist last year to more thoroughly monitor charter school finances.
In its review of OSSE, the audit found that the state-level agency was doing a good job of overseeing special education payments to schools and that students were receiving the level of service that their schools were being compensated to provide. But it said the agency did not verify summer-school payments to see whether schools were enrolling the number of students they were paid to serve.
Graduation rates up in D.C. public schools, down for charter schools [Washington Latin PCS, KIPP DC PCS, and IDEA PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
March 17, 2015
D.C. Public Schools’ graduation rate increased last school year by two percentage points, to 58 percent, but the city’s public charter schools recorded a drop of nearly seven points, to 69 percent, according to new data.
The citywide average for the Class of 2014 — 61 percent — was almost unchanged from the year before, according to data from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). The city’s graduation rate remains far below the national average of 81 percent.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said she was pleased but “not thrilled” with the incremental growth. The graduation rate for the city’s public school system has increased five percentage points in four years.
“Still too few of our young people are graduating,” she said.
Charter schools enroll a smaller share of the city’s high school students, which means that significant changes at individual schools can have a more dramatic effect on the overall graduation rate. There were major declines in the graduation rates at two charter schools that closed or were at risk of closure last year— and two of the city’s most reputable charters also had double-digit declines — pulling the overall charter rate down.
Roosevelt High School in Petworth is one of three DCPS schools that had a double-digit increase, improving its four-year graduation rate from 48 percent to 62 percent. Principal Ivor Mitchell said the progress is the result of multiple changes in school culture and routines, including increasing participation in Advanced Placement courses, introducing individual conferences with students and expanding opportunities to make up credit through after-hours programs.
At a college and career center at Roosevelt, five full-time counselors or staff members spend their working hours pushing students to graduate, tracking their progress on spreadsheets and chasing them down in hallways to urge them to fill out their financial aid forms or get to class.
“They are always in your head, on your back,” said Tommy Thompson, 18, a senior who plans to graduate and study business administration at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida.
The four-year graduation rate is calculated by following a cohort of students who started as freshmen and graduated with a regular diploma four years later, during the 2013-2014 school year. It accounts for students who transfer in or out of a given school.
Administrators say the rate reflects the number of students earning degrees but also how well schools track down students who leave, since a school must show that a student has reenrolled in another school, whether across town or in another country. Any students whom schools cannot track down are counted as nongraduates.
OSSE also reported a five-year graduation rate for the District: 68 percent last year — 63 percent for the traditional school system and 80 percent for charter schools.
Naomi Rubin DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said that many charter schools with declines had admitted more students who were missing credits and were not ready to graduate in four years, although they are on track to graduate in five.
Among high-performing charters, Washington Latin and KIPP had declines of 11 points and 10 points, respectively, to 85 percent. Lindsay Kelly, a spokeswoman for KIPP, said the school increased the rigor of its program. She added that officials expect the five-year graduation rate for the 2014 cohort to be closer to 90 percent.
Last year, Booker T. Washington’s graduation rate dropped significantly, from 64 percent to 49 percent, in its final year before the school closed due to poor academic performance. There was also a major drop at Hospitality High Public Charter — from 76 percent to 32 percent — in the year before it relinquished its charter.
IDEA Public Charter School’s rate fell from 75 percent to 48 percent. Head of school Justin Rydstrom said he believes that the drop is a reflection of poor record keeping and tumult at what he called the “worst” point in the school’s history. The charter board moved to close the school in 2012, but the school won approval to pursue an aggressive turnaround instead.
The city is focusing new attention on reducing the large number of high school dropouts. A report released in September found that graduation rates varied widely by school.
The rate at Columbia Heights Education Campus, a selective high school, rose from 73 percent to 84 percent, and H.D. Woodson High’s graduation rate went from 44 percent to 60 percent, a change its principal attributed to an increased focus on attendance, schoolwide assemblies on graduation and new opportunities for credits.
Among the city’s comprehensive high schools, graduation rates ranged from 39 percent at Anacostia to 76 percent at Wilson High School. Banneker High School, a selective school, had a 100 percent graduation rate.
Henderson said the slow pace of improvement in the overall graduation rate “makes the case” for a $13 million investment in improving the city’s high schools next year. Her budget calls for enough staffing to offer at least six Advanced Placement courses and 20 elective courses at every comprehensive high school. Many schools have been lacking enrichment opportunities such as marching band, yearbook and debate.
Henderson said she plans to look at the successful schools to borrow best practices to boost graduation rates elsewhere.
D.C. Students Benefit from Mix of Charter and Traditional Schools
InsiderOnline
By Scott Pearson and John H. "Skip" McKoy
Summer 2015 / Vol. 15, No. 3
Charter schools are revolutionizing public schooling in Washington, D.C. In just 18 years, charter schools have grown from an initial 5 to 112 schools today, managed by 61 nonprofit organizations. This school year, charters will serve nearly 38,000 students—44 percent of all public-school students in D.C. And these schools, which consistently outperform D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) overall and across all subgroups, offer students a tremendous variety of quality educational opportunities.
As the executive director and the board chairman of the District of Columbia’s independent chartering body, we are often asked whether we favor a “New Orleans” future for D.C., where charter schools eventually serve virtually all public-school students.
Our response may surprise some, but we do not. Rather, we see students and families in the District of Columbia better served with two thriving and successful sectors: charter and traditional public. Here’s why.
When Congress passed charter school legislation for Washington, D.C., in 1995, our public schools were a national disgrace, characterized by decrepit buildings, a meddling school board, patronage-based employment, sky-high truancy, and some of the nation’s lowest graduation rates and test scores. Enrollment in DCPS had fallen by nearly half from the mid-sixties, from 150,000 to just over 75,000 students.
The arrival of charter schools in 1996 offered parents another way out of a failing urban school system. No longer would they have to move to neighboring Maryland or Virginia in search of better public schools. For the first several years, charter schools added students as DCPS bled and cycled through a revolving door of leaders. After 10 years of charters and following the election of Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2006, DCPS was down to just 50,000 students, with charters claiming 20,000 students.
But something else happened. In part because of the growing popularity of charter schools, major reforms were made to DCPS:
· The district spent more than $2 billion on facilities improvements.
· Mayoral control replaced the elected school board.
· A path-breaking labor agreement ended seniority-based placement and tenure.
Most significantly, DCPS benefited over the past eight years from the uninterrupted strong leadership of two excellent chancellors—first Michelle Rhee and today Kaya Henderson. Two mayors and the city council gave these leaders the political cover, generous funding, and, perhaps most important, the time to make the improvements in people, systems, curriculum, and culture that are needed to turn around a failing institution.
Charter advocates have long hoped that competition from charters would spur improvement in traditional schools. In Washington, D.C., this has actually happened! Last year, DCPS was the fastest-improving major urban school district in the country. Charter schools keep improving as well due to the efforts of talented teachers and leaders, and the charter board’s aggressive closing of low performers.
Some have attributed these gains to a gentrifying city. But we see improvements across charters and DCPS for students in every group, including black (see Figure 1), Latino, low-income, and those with disabilities.
City residents are taking notice. Charters keep growing, but now DCPS is growing as well. For the first time since the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, total public-school enrollment in D.C. is rising.
We now have a virtuous cycle: growing enrollment and improving results in both the charter and traditional sectors.
Having two strong sectors is good for the city. It’s also good for charter schools.
Neighborhood Schools
One of the arguments for maintaining the traditional sector is that a lot of people like having neighborhood schools of right. They are usually close by, often walkable. They help create a community of neighbors. When the schools are good, they boost home values and attract new residents. Because admission is guaranteed, they take the anxiety out of school choice.
Neighborhood schools have also been associated with de facto segregation, as they reflect the demographics of their neighborhood. But integrated schools can be fostered by reserving slots for out-of-boundary children, and by the presence of a robust set of citywide schools of choice.
If charter schools took over the whole city, there would be tremendous pressure for them to become fully, or partly, neighborhood schools of right. That’s what we see in New Orleans, where half of the slots are reserved for neighborhood children and schools must accept new children at any time during the year.
We would rather not see that happen to D.C. charters. It would change their fundamental character as schools of choice, limit their educational and operational flexibility, make them harder to close for low performance, and open them to wider and wider regulation.
Turning charters into neighborhood schools could constrain their educational approaches. Charter schools that are immersive bilingual, have a military theme, offer a no-excuses culture, or promote a Waldorf philosophy where children do not begin reading until age seven all might be considered inappropriate for a neighborhood school that is the default choice for all neighborhood children.
Moreover, neighborhood schools are often heavily influenced by local community members, as opposed to parents, with concerns that can at times distract a school from the single-minded focus that we see in truly great schools.
And neighborhood schools take on a permanence that is out of keeping with the charter model. If a charter school is a neighborhood school, it may be more difficult to move the school out of the neighborhood, to a larger building, for example. And, from an authorizer’s perspective, it may be more difficult to close a low-performing neighborhood school because of the added community and political dimension involved.
New Orleans, of course, offers no true neighborhood schools of right. The solution there is to have large school zones within which certain students are given preference. That denies communities true neighborhood schools. But worse, it imposes new burdens and restrictions on charter schools.
For example, every charter school in New Orleans has been effectively deemed a school of right. Each must offer the same number of seats in every grade, and admit new students whenever a vacancy occurs, at any time of year (what some refer to as “backfilling” seats). This significantly limits the flexibility of charter school design and consequently reduces the choices available to parents and students. Immersive bilingual programs, for example, are more difficult to maintain with new monolingual students arriving midyear. D.C. has a highly successful college-prep charter high school that depends on a rigorous 9th-grade academy that prepares students for the rigors of grades 10 through 12. This model also works less well with students arriving midyear or after the 9th grade.
“Aha!” a charter opponent might say. “You are defending charter schools’ structural advantage over traditional schools. Why should only traditional schools bear the burden of being schools of right?”
Perhaps we are. But in a robust system of choice, parents should have real choices of high-quality alternatives, not various pastel versions of the same basic offering.
We should say that many D.C. charters embrace being open to all grades: some admit students midyear, and most have a mission to serve the city’s most disadvantaged students. The D.C. approach permits all sorts of models and allows many paths to success. Under a New Orleans scenario, only a few of these paths are allowed.
Two-Sector Advantage
The New Orleans model has other drawbacks. As charters approach 90 percent market share, the authorizer has standardized discipline rules, “spread around” special education students rather than offering them full choice, and imposed common admission procedures. All of these contribute to the homogenization of charter schools and limit the very essence of what makes charter schools so promising.
We are seeing some of this in Washington, D.C., too. Just in the past three years, new rules were enacted specifying how charter schools must evaluate their teachers and mandating prescribed systems for addressing truancy. ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) waiver rules were applied to D.C. charters, rather than exempting them as they were in many states. And there have been countless legislative proposals that would require charter schools, for example, to hire specific types of teachers, communicate with parents in specific ways, or limit their choice of which students to promote from grade to grade.
Having two strong systems reduces the pressure to regulate charter schools as though they were the only public schools in the city. It raises the odds that charter schools can retain the freedoms and flexibilities that underpin their success, and it provides families with more choice as they select among charters, a local neighborhood school, and other specialized DCPS options.
As the charter authorizer, our job is to keep our strong focus on quality—closing low-performing schools, helping promising schools improve, encouraging our best schools to expand, and applying rigorous oversight to approve only the most-promising new applicants. Our goal is not to “flood the zone” but to carefully and thoughtfully build a charter sector of unimpeachable quality that, along with DCPS, keeps improving and adding more families to the District.
Of course, it is easier to support a two-sector solution when we have a strong and successful traditional public-school system as a partner. If we were talking about a city with toxic education politics and a hopeless traditional school system, we might have a different view. But for Washington, D.C., we believe two strong sectors—charter and traditional—offer the best prospect that families will have many quality educational choices for their children.
Obama meets with city school chiefs, outlines education spending priorities
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 16, 2015
President Obama on Monday praised recent academic gains in the nation’s urban public school systems and warned of a fight if the Republican-led Congress fails to provide adequate funds for the neediest students.
House and Senate Republicans are expected to unveil their budget blueprints this week. Obama said that if funding remains at sequester levels, the federal government will be spending less on pre-K through 12th-grade education than it did in 2000.
“The notion that we would be going backwards instead of forwards in how we’re devoting resources to educating our kids makes absolutely no sense,” Obama said at the White House after meeting with a group of urban school superintendents. The president also spoke about focusing dollars on the lowest-performing schools, ensuring that teachers have the resources they need to meet higher academic standards, and continuing to test children each year.
If the Republican budget does not include those principles, Obama said, “then we’re going to have to have a major debate.”
He spoke shortly after his meeting with members of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of urban school systems that has its annual conference in Washington this week. They discussed not only the federal budget but also the pending revision of No Child Left Behind, the main federal education law.
As Congress works to rewrite the law, a key sticking point has been how to allocate Title I funds, which are meant to provide additional services for poor children.
Democrats favor the current policy, in which Title I funds are directed to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. Republicans are seeking “Title I portability,” which would allow the money to follow a child to a different school.
The Obama administration has said that portability would devastate schools in the poorest neighborhoods. On Monday, superintendents said they appreciated the president’s position.
“Will we continue to want equity for all of our children and all of our schools, or will we turn back the clock so some children don’t have as much?” said Barbara Jenkins, superintendent of Florida’s Orange County Public Schools, which includes Orlando.
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the chairman of the House education committee, previously responded to criticisms of Title I portability with this statement:
“Encouraging good schools to serve more low-income students is the right thing to do. Ensuring low-income children receive the best possible education and their fair share of federal assistance is the right thing to do.”
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