NEWS
- DC's charter schools boost learning for poor and minority students [FOCUS mentioned]
- Why Charter Schools Work – Or Don't
- No Girls Allowed: The Merits and Flaws of an All-Boys Public School
- Internal Emails, Documents Between D.C. Mayor, Schools Chief on Closings Revealed
DC's charter schools boost learning for poor and minority students [FOCUS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
March 30, 2015
DC's charter schools do a better job than its traditional public schools when it comes to educating low-income and minority students, according to a recent national study. But the study indicates that white and Asian students fare better in the traditional sector.
The study ranked DC's charter sector sixth in the nation among 41 urban school districts for its positive impact on student learning.
Overall, students in charter schools have had bigger gains in both reading and math than similar students enrolled in the DC Public School system, especially when it comes to middle school math. And while charter schools are still far from closing the achievement gap, it's smaller for charter students than for those enrolled in DCPS.
The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), looked at data from the 2006-07 through 2011-12 school years. It matched "virtual twins," students with similar backgrounds and test scores, some of whom went to charters and some of whom stayed in the traditional public school system.
Researchers then compared rates of growth for the "twins" in each sector, as measured by increases in standardized test scores.
Nationally, the CREDO study found that students in urban charter schools gained the equivalent of 40 additional days of learning in math and 28 additional days in reading.
It's harder to quantify the gains on the local level, which the CREDO report frames in terms of standard deviations (SDs) rather than days of learning. But overall, charter students had gains of 0.09 SDs in math and 0.13 SDs in reading over their DCPS counterparts.
Results for different demographic groups in DC
Generally, the strongest positive results were for students who were poor and black or Hispanic, as compared to white non-poor students in DCPS. Charter students who were eligible for free and reduced price lunch, a frequent measure of poverty, were only 0.02 SDs below non-poor students in math. The equivalent gap for low-income DCPS students was .09.
The charter sector also improved the performance of Hispanic students and students learning English as a second language, as well as students who qualify for special education services, although the gains were not as large.
White and Asian students in the charter sector didn't fare as well. Both groups actually did worse than their peers in DCPS, by 0.06 SDs in reading and about 0.10 in math.
There are two possible explanations for that, according to Anne Herr, director of school quality for FOCUS DC, a charter advocacy organization. One is that the sample sizes are small. White students make up 12% of DCPS's student population and just 5% of the charter school population.
It's not clear how many Asian students attend DC's public schools, but the number is low. Last year, Wilson High School was the only one in the District with ten or more Asian students scheduled to graduate.
The other reason is that the DCPS schools with large numbers of white students are generally high-performing, so the base of comparison is much higher.
The negative results for white students in charter schools are consistent with CREDO's nationwide data. Nationally, those students lost the equivalent of 36 days of learning in math and 14 in reading, compared to their peers in traditional public schools.
The CREDO study praised DC as one of four cities that had few low-performing charters and also a majority that outperformed traditional public schools in both math and reading. The other three cities in that category were Boston, Detroit, and Newark.
Another recent report labeled DC's charter sector the healthiest in the nation. Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS DC, says the two studies prove the value of DC's charter schools.
"I don't see how people can try to ignore anymore that the DC charter movement is thriving," Cane said. "It's a combination of some really brilliant people who have started schools and a really good authorizer that's willing to close schools that are not closing the achievement gap. We also have a very good law that gives charters a lot of freedom of action."
Reasons to question data on charter success
While Cane has a point, some would counter that charters enjoy certain advantages that high-poverty DCPS schools don't: for example, a self-selected group of students that is more likely to be motivated, and the option of denying admission to students who arrive midyear.
And while DC may rank sixth in the CREDO study, it lags pretty far behind the top charter sectors. Boston ranked number one in both reading and math gains, with 0.324 SDs in math and 0.236 in reading. The comparable figures for DC were 0.134 and 0.097.
And, of course, given that these are comparative measures, even a charter sector that isn't doing a great job can look good against the background of a low-performing traditional school system.
Another cause for concern is that charter success, both locally and nationally, is greater in math than in reading, and seems to stall at the high school level. In DC, the highest gains were in middle school math, with charter students gaining 0.23 SDs. For middle school reading, the figure was only 0.02.
The gains for DC charter high schools weren't statistically significant, but at the national level high schools provided their students with the equivalent of 32 additional days of learning in math and only 9 in reading. As in DC, the highest gains nationally were in middle school math, with 73 additional days of learning.
It's generally easier to raise the performance of low-income students in math, probably because math doesn't require the background knowledge and vocabulary that reading comprehension does. But literacy skills are arguably more important, since they're fundamental to understanding all other subjects—including, to a certain extent, math.
While it's not clear from the report why gains drop off in the higher grades, one likely reason is that high-school-level work requires more sophisticated reading, writing, and analytical skills. And it's possible that even high-performing charter middle schools haven't really been preparing their students to handle them.
With the advent of the Common Core and its more rigorous standardized tests, which students in DC and elsewhere are taking for the first time this year, those deficiencies may soon become apparent at lower grades as well.
DC has much to be proud of in its charter schools, and many low-income students have received a better education than they otherwise would have thanks to their existence. But the achievement gap is fundamentally a literacy gap, and the jury is still out on how much progress the charter sector has really made in closing it.
Why Charter Schools Work – Or Don't
U.S. News and World Report
By David Osborne
March 16, 2015
Nothing frosts me more than Diane Ravitch and her friends’ charge that charter schools amount to “corporate reform.” This is such nonsense. The charter movement was launched in the 1990s by public activists and state legislators – most of them Democrats – while business conservatives were busy pushing standards or vouchers.
The critics also love to repeat that charters perform no better than other public schools. This statement may have been true in 2009, if one accepts the critics’ favorite study, from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes or CREDO. But a closer look at those results reveals a deeper truth. Where charter authorizers do their jobs, charters vastly outperform traditional public schools, with far less money. Where authorizers fall down on the job, letting failing charters live on just like traditional schools, the average charter performs no better, and sometimes worse.
The original charter idea was to open the public school monopoly to competition from new schools, operated on contract by other organizations: nonprofits, teacher cooperatives, universities, even for-profit businesses. The charter was usually a five-year performance contract, laying out the results expected from the school. Charter authorizers – typically school districts or state boards of education – would reject charter applications from groups that did not appear equipped to succeed, and they would close schools if students did not learn as promised.
This approach is largely a reality in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and Washington, D.C. But any good idea can be implemented poorly. In Arizona two statewide authorizers handed out 15-year charters like candy but lacked the capacity to oversee the more than 500 schools that sprung up. The result: CREDO's 2009 and 2013 studies both found charter students gaining academic ground more slowly than their socioeconomic peers in traditional public school.
Texas experienced similar problems and results. In 2003 Ohio gave non-profit organizations both the right to authorize charters and a financial incentive to do so, opening the floodgates to mediocre schools.
In Massachusetts, by contrast, the state board was careful who got a charter and closed schools where kids were not learning. CREDO found that the typical charter student in Boston gained the equivalent of 12 extra months of learning in reading and 13 extra months in math every year, compared to demographically similar students in traditional public schools. Charter students in New York City gained “an additional one month of learning in reading" and in "math the advantage for charter students is about five months of additional learning in one school year."
New Orleans, with 92.4 percent of students in charters, is probably the fastest improving city in America. Graduation rates, ACT scores and college-going rates have all soared. If current trends continue, in fact, New Orleans may become the first major city to outperform its state. CREDO found that charter students in the city gained more than four months of additional learning in reading and five months in math, compared to their peers in traditional schools.
In Washington, D.C., where Congress created a Public Charter School Board, 45 percent of public school students attend charters. Among cities tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (which do not include New Orleans), D.C. is now the fastest improving. CREDO found that charter students gained the equivalent of 72 days of extra learning per year in reading, 101 in math, compared to traditional public students.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with charter leaders in Boston, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. I have yet to meet my first “corporate reformer.”
No Girls Allowed: The Merits and Flaws of an All-Boys Public School
The Atlantic
By Nora Biette-Timmons
March 30, 2015
When Washington, D.C.’s school district announced earlier this year that it was launching an initiative to empower males of color, the press conference was filled with successful boys and young men whose stories exemplified the results that the district hopes to achieve for this student population—one that’s widely known to struggle academically.
A Latino teen spoke about becoming bilingual, reciting an impressive list of extracurriculars; another student proudly wore a University of Connecticut sweatshirt, reflecting his higher-education ambitions. Meanwhile, Kaya Henderson, the chancellor for the district’s schools, recounted the story of one recent D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) graduate who was accepted to five Ivy League colleges. (He chose Harvard.)
Rather than reiterate a stereotypical narrative about low academic achievement among minority male students, the upbeat press conference focused on the strengths and potential within this cohort. The Empowering Males of Color Initiative, as it’s being called, is slated to devote $20 million, 500 volunteers, and a boys-only college-preparatory high school to creating more of these success stories.
But whether the plan will amount to an effective—and fair—solution is up in the air.
Based on the numbers, a targeted effort to increase academic achievement for boys of color seems warranted: 43 percent of D.C.’s public-school students are black and Latino males, and the high-school graduation rate for boys is 49 percent, compared to 66 percent for girls. (Nationally, the graduation rate is 78 percent for boys and 85 percent for girls.)
To help it set up the proposed boy’s school, D.C. is turning to Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies—a well-known charter-school network for boys that touts its track record of sending 100 percent of its graduates to college. When it opened roughly a decade ago, the inaugural Urban Prep campus was the nation’s first all-boys charter high school; today, the network includes two additional Chicago locations. Aside from its focus on college prep and single-sex education, Urban Prep uses a curriculum that is, according to its website, "culturally relevant" to the experiences of its student body. "Everybody in the country wants Urban Prep to open an academy in their city," said Henderson, who, it’s worth noting, attended Georgetown with Tim King, the network’s founder.
How exactly the new all-boys institution will fit into D.C.’s public-school system is still largely open to question. Although the school will operate under the DCPS umbrella, Henderson promised Urban Prep that it will have flexibility in developing the new program. (Unlike the Urban Prep campuses, the new all-boys school in D.C. will be a regular public school; charter schools in D.C. are governed separately.)
Still, Robert Simmons, the district’s Chief of Innovation and Research, emphasized in an interview that the new campus—which will be located east of the Anacostia river, in D.C.’s lowest-income neighborhoods—won’t stray far from the way regular public schools in the district are run. According to Simmons, its expectations will be similar to those applied at the six other selective high schools in the district. And despite the "nuances" in Urban Prep’s model, he said, the new campus will be different from other D.C. public schools only in its college-prep curriculum. Simmons, however, declined to elaborate on what the final product will look like, noting that Urban Prep is spearheading the design and has yet to publicize details on the plan.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear at this point how the application process will work. Speakers at the nearly hour-long press conference highlighted efforts to exclusively target minority students, but by law public institutions can’t enroll kids based on their race or ethnicity—and Simmons was quick to point out that "any boy can apply."
How the all-boys model will pan out is also uncertain. Single-gender public schools are rare, and most exist within a charter-school framework, as Urban Prep does in Chicago. In the regular public-school realm, some jurisdictions have toyed with the idea of creating single-gender classrooms or piloting single-sex schools on an experimental basis.
But proposing a regular public school for boys without a corresponding option for girls is highly unusual in the U.S. and risks violating Title IX, the law that requires gender equity at public education institutions.
The American Civil Liberties Union has already written a letter to D.C. officials asking for further information about the Urban Prep network and how Washington’s public-school system plans to adhere to Title IX in its initiative. DCPS, however, has not responded to the letter—and as of now it doesn’t plan to. If the district does refuse to voluntarily provide the requested information, the ACLU is prepared to use the available legal routes and submit a Freedom of Information request. "We really want these answers before we say, 'you can’t do this,'" Monica Hopkins-Maxwell, the executive director of the the ACLU’s D.C. chapter, recently told me. "If it’s done in a certain way, it may not violate Title IX."
Simmons reasoned that D.C. has "equivalent academic options for girls" at the district’s selective coed high schools, which typically require students to take a test for admission and are tailored around specific academic interests. But he declined to elaborate on how, exactly, those options will compensate for the all-boys school and ensure the district avoids violating equal-treatment laws. Simmons deferred to the D.C. Attorney General, Karl Racine, who is currently reviewing the plan and will soon release an opinion on its legality.
But the legality of the proposal is not the only issue at hand. Little consensus exists among researchers about the educational impact of limiting student populations to specific genders or races. "There’s all this evidence accumulating to suggest that diversity is important to learning," said Richard Kahlenberg, an education researcher at the Century Foundation who helped design the relatively new tiered-admissions system used by Chicago’s selective public schools. "And it seems to me that gender is an element of that question."
While some research reveals the positive outcomes associated with single-sex education, a 2011 story in Science magazine debunked many of the neurological justifications often cited to promote single-gender schools, calling these claims "pseudoscience." The article also examined how effective all-boys schools are in increasing academic achievement, using Urban Prep as an example to emphasize that the positive impacts of single-sex education are debatable:
Underperforming children in [single-sex] schools often transfer out prematurely, which inflates final performance outcomes. An example is Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, a school whose high college admission rates have led to praise as a success story for [single-sex] education. However, when graduation rates at Urban Prep and similar schools are computed relative to freshman enrollment, they are comparable to those of other area public schools.
A 2014 analysis published by the American Psychological Association examined 184 studies concerning same-sex education and drew similar conclusions. The authors separated these reports into two categories: those that had control groups and those that didn’t. Notably, only the studies that lacked a control group (and were thus less reliable) produced results in favor of single-sex education, the distinction often very slight. Studies that used control groups found few remarkable differences between single-sex and coed schooling and, in some instances, showed that coed schools produced notably better results—especially in terms of girls’ achievement.
Indeed, many experts stress that the evidence is limited on the benefits of single-sex schooling. As Lea Hubbard, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, who’s studied the effects of gender, race, and income on education, recently told me, single-gender education is not a "magic bullet … You have to have a lot of other things that make up quality education."
In other words, the limited scientific agreement on whether single-sex education is helpful, harmful, or something in between—along with the varying research on other types of student diversity—means it’s difficult to deduce whether the D.C. proposal is a good idea. Even its backers acknowledge the plan’s uncertainty: "The jury is still out," Simmons said. "But the jury currently says that it doesn’t do any harm."
Internal Emails, Documents Between D.C. Mayor, Schools Chief on Closings Revealed
The Washington Informer
Barrington M. Salmon
March 30, 2015
A local grassroots group that has vigorously fought against several controversial school closings in D.C. released Monday thousands of closure-related documents that detail behind-the-scenes strategizing by schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, former Mayor Vincent C. Gray and city officials.
Empower DC obtained roughly 6,500 emails, as well as a 240-page deposition of Henderson and other internal DCPS documents, that show the planning by Henderson, Gray and other stakeholders, and the resulting pushback and fallout.
Some of the documents, particularly emails between senior staff, place them in a sometimes unflattering light as school officials attempted to put a positive spin on the closings and quell a rising tide of anger among parents.
"What I've learned from these emails is that they closed the schools on the backs of young students to get $64.5 million for bonuses to pay white teachers," said Johnny Barnes, Empower DC's lead attorney. "There's an exchange between Henderson and Gray, in one of the moves they were making, where Gray told her not to tell anybody because it could be problematic."
"I'm not sure Gray really knew all the details but when they talked about the result, they said 'don't tell anybody.' We know that the private sector was very heavily involved. They created the rationale for the closings. It's interesting. the U.S. Department of Education seemed to be telling DCPS to make the problem go away. It was a problem in terms of Title VI and equal protections."
Barnes said the documents clearly show a chancellor and school system discriminating against black and brown DCPS students as part of a cynical plan which closed schools east of the Anacostia River and threw neighborhoods and communities into turmoil.
Henderson vigorously disputed this characterization in the deposition and subsequent media interviews, saying that the schools she closed were under-enrolled and underfunded.
Her primary purpose was and is to leverage resources in the best way possible to educate children who weren't getting the quality academic foundation or what they needed to excel. Henderson also said that DCPS absorbed the cost of the Washington Teachers' Union contract into its budget and never considered closing schools to finance those costs.
"The question for me wasn't how many [students] are black and how many are white," she said in the 2014 deposition. "The question was which schools were under-enrolled and where could I provide resources in a different place to give kids who weren't getting what they needed what they needed.
"In fact, I would venture to say that part of my sense of urgency was the fact that children who look like me were not getting the same opportunities as children in other parts of the city," Henderson said. "And so when looking at ways to reorganize our resources to get those children a better academic program or what have you, consolidation was the smartest strategy for us."
Daniel del Pielago, Empower DC Education Organizer, said it's impossible to separate the school closings in the District from gentrification.
"We know what's going on: neighborhood destabilization. There's a shake up, changing neighborhoods. This is what D.C. looks like," he said. "Fifty-four thousand people have moved here since 2010, most are overwhelmingly white, single and wealthy. Black and brown students don't get the same as white students. We know inequity is real.
"They've always invested in keeping white schools alive while doing nothing for black schools," del Pielago said. "This inequity is so obvious but white supremacy ensures that laws are set up to almost make it impossible to prove intent."
In March 2013, Empower DC and its members filed a lawsuit to block the closure of 15 DC public schools. Judge James Boasberg threw out their injunction seeking to halt the closures entirely, but he allowed the lawsuit to move forward on several counts, including that of disparate racial impact. The closures ultimately displaced 2,642 children, of which only two were white.
Barnes said DCPS's plan is obviously discriminatory when public schools east of Rock Creek Park are closed because of under-enrollment, while schools west of the park and near Capitol Hill were kept open when their enrollment numbers dipped significantly several years ago. Rock Creek Park in Northwest is a historical dividing line in the District between whites and blacks, the wealthy and the working class.
"We undertook this lawsuit because we know that corporate education reform is hurting our communities, particularly Black and Brown communities where school closures have taken place," del Pielago said. "These emails show how external, education privatization organizations are having a significant influence on DC education policy behind the scenes, in particular pushing for closures, the proliferation of charter schools, etc."
As part of the discovery phase of the lawsuit, Empower DC received thousands of internal DCPS emails related to school closures and the depositions which came from questioning four senior school officials, including Henderson under oath.
After initially proposing the closure of 20 schools in the District, Henderson, with input from former Mayor Gray, announced that 15 schools were on the chopping block, leading to protests, marches and angry confrontations with parents.
DCPS has hired or consulted with organizations, groups and entities such as the Federal City Council, the Illinois Facilities Fund, Education Resource Strategies and experts from the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution and the 21st Century Schools Fund to help it create the framework for identifying the schools to be closed and using best practices to move the shuttering process forward.
The lawsuit is the tip of the iceberg in a high-stakes power struggle between parents and DCPS over the direction of the city's traditional public schools. Educators and education advocates nationwide have been watching the case closely since the District is the first city where opponents of school closings filed a lawsuit.
In Chicago, angry parents and frustrated teachers took to the streets to protest the decision of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and school officials to close 54 elementary schools in an effort to save $1 billion over 10 years. The backlash has jeopardized his re-election efforts as he faces an April 7 run-off.
Much like the complaints in D.C., critics and opponents of Emanuel's plan accuse school officials of not soliciting parental input, putting students at risk by moving them to schools in rival neighborhoods and they add that the proposal will not improve the schools.
The battle for public education's heart and soul is being waged in other cities, including Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia and New Orleans. Del Pielago, Barnes and a chorus of critics in D.C. and elsewhere, continue to insist that businesses that create tests, the thicket of corporate interests behind school reform and charter schools are about making money. In that quest, they say, those who describe themselves as pro-reform advocates are taking advantage of minority communities and hollowing out public education.
"This is all about the money," del Pielago said. "We're not seeing communities having access or input into the decision-making process. We're hearing this around the country. But a lot of threads are unraveling. The way this corporate education reform is going, it's not working. There's a great deal of resistance. We're working with folks around the country who are committed to fighting. There are very high stakes — either we lose or we keep neighborhood schools."
Barnes said an appeal is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals and said Empower DC officials are planning to meet with D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine.
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