NEWS
- D.C. government office released students’ personal data to a reporter
- How do schools respond to competition? Not as you might expect.
- Larry Hogan’s plan for charter schools hits a roadblock
D.C. government office released students’ personal data to a reporter
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
March 25, 2015
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education is planning to notify parents Wednesday that personal information about students was inadvertently sent to a reporter, education officials said.
District officials released an Excel file in response to a Freedom of Information Act inquiry from the Web site Buzzfeed, that included audited enrollment data about individual students and information about suspensions and expulsions.
Personal information was redacted, and the file was locked when it was sent, but education officials later realized that the file could be unlocked.
Briant Coleman, a spokesman for OSSE, said the information was only sent to one media outlet, and staff there agreed not to unlock the file.
The information that could be accessed includes names, dates of birth, grade levels, gender, ethnicity, special education status, as well as information about suspensions, expulsions and truancy status.
Officials said they are investigating the matter and working to improve security procedures overall.
In a separate incident, the same news outlet notified D.C. Public Schools earlier this year that personal information on special-education students had been publicly available online since 2010.
The personal data was included in training documents for special-education providers in 2010 and 2011. The documents, including one that was more than 300 pages long, were inadvertently posted to an internal Web site that was not secure, officials said. The documents included passwords for online mailboxes where documents, such as parent complaints and attorneys’ letters, can be filed and stored.
The site was shut down, and log-in information for the database was changed.
How do schools respond to competition? Not as you might expect.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 26, 2015
The school-choice movement is built on the philosophy that competition forces schools to improve.
But new research on New Orleans – arguably the nation’s most competitive school market — suggests that school leaders are less likely to work on improving academics than to use other tactics in their efforts to attract students.
Of the 30 schools examined in the study, leaders at just 10 — or one-third of the total — said they competed for students by trying to improve their academic programs or operations. Leaders at far more schools — 25 — said they competed by marketing their existing programs, including with signs, billboards, t-shirts, home visits and incentives for parents to refer potential students.
Seventeen school leaders said they added extracurricular or niche programs, such as arts-integration or language immersion programs, in order to distinguish themselves from the competition. And leaders at 10 schools exercised some sort of student recruiting or screening, even though almost all of them were supposed to be open-enrollment schools where such selection practices were not permitted.
“These school leaders do not always respond to competition in the ways that policymakers hope,” said the study’s author, Huriya Jabbar, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
The study was released Thursday morning by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, a partnership that is based at Tulane University and is attempting to inject objective and useful information into what are often pitched debates over education policy. The alliance includes representatives from Louisiana charter schools, Louisiana teachers unions, local school boards and other education organizations, and its funders include the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.
Many previous studies have attempted to assess the effect of such competition on schools by measuring student achievement gains on standardized tests. Competition has exploded in Washington, D.C. in recent years as the number of charter schools has grown, forcing even the traditional schools to get into the mix, selling themselves to local residents. At the same time, students’ math and reading proficiency rates have risen in both D.C. charter and traditional public schools.
But Jabbar argues that it’s impossible to fully interpret changes in student achievement without also understanding how choice actually works — how increased competition, that is, translates into change. She says her results suggest that New Orleans officials should do more to ensure that children have equitable access to schools and that schools have the supports they need to get better at what matters most: Teaching students.
“If schools, like firms in other markets, can choose to compete in ways other than improving their products — even in ways that violate district policies — a more significant role for a central authority may be warranted,” Jabbar wrote. “Without some process to manage the current responses to competition like student selection and exclusion, New Orleans could end up with a less equitable school system.”
Jabar noted that the city’s new centralized school-assignment process, called OneApp, could help reduce schools’ efforts to filter out undesirable students. The idea that there should be a stronger central authority is likely to draw resistance from a charter-school sector that counts schools’ independence among their biggest advantages.
This is the second in a series of reports by ERA-New Orleans. The first, released in January, examined how families choose schools and found that academic quality is not always the most important factor. Other features, such as location and extracurricular activities, play a key role in determining how parents — especially low-income parents — choose schools.
The alliance hopes to inform education policy not only in Louisiana but in the many cities around the country that have adopted the market-based reforms that have been so prevalent in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina leveled the traditional public school system in 2005. More than nine out of every 10 students in New Orleans attend charter schools, a greater share than any other U.S. city.
Larry Hogan’s plan for charter schools hits a roadblock
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
March 25, 2015
MARYLAND GOV. Larry Hogan’s plan to make it easier to establish charter schools has run into trouble in the General Assembly. The public education systems in much of Maryland are among the best in the country, so it is not surprising that lawmakers are wary of making changes. What legislators need to realize, however, is that public charter schools not only offer new possibilities to students but also can function as a useful complement to traditional schools. Lawmakers need look no further than the neighboring District to see how two school sectors can work in parallel to further students’ interests.
Senate leaders have signaled plans to gut an initiative by Mr. Hogan (R) that would remove the barriers making it difficult for public charters to operate in Maryland. According to The Post’s Ovetta Wiggins, a key provision that would give charter operators the ability to hire and fire staff and set working conditions faces fierce opposition from the state’s teachers union, a powerhouse in Maryland politics. That organized labor would seek to protect its own interests is to be expected, but lawmakers shouldn’t be so shortsighted.
They should recognize the positive educational changes that can come from the synergy between public charter schools and traditional school systems. “The best of both worlds,” wrote leaders of the D.C. Public Charter School Board in a recent Post commentary, describing how each sector pushes the other to be better and to cooperate whenever possible. The result for both traditional and charter schools has been booming enrollments, increased graduation rates and improving test scores. Both sectors serve roughly equivalent percentages of students who have special needs or come from low-income families or are English language learners. Moreover, the autonomy granted to charters has resulted in a wealth of choices in educational models, including college prep, legal and civic studies, dual-language immersion and, set to open next school year, a charter geared to serve children in foster care . As Scott Pearson and John “Skip” McKoy of the D.C. charter board wrote, “This creates a mix of schools, no one of which is right for every child, but the whole of which provides many options for parents to find the right fit for their child.”
Mr. Hogan is right to want to make Maryland more hospitable to charters. Giving them room to experiment and space to operate free of union constraints and one-size-fits-all rules is critical. We urge lawmakers to support the governor in bringing needed reform to an outmoded law that doesn’t serve the educational interests of the state.
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