- Why the New York Times Failed [Achievement Prep, KIPP DC and Center City PCS is mentioned]
- District Wins Special-Ed Appeal
-
Examiner Local Editorial: D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Applications Soaring For a Reason
Why the New York Times Failed
Education Week
By Sara Mead
December 5, 2011
If you want evidence of the sorry state of journalism and public discourse around education reform in the United States today, look no further than this op-ed piece by Natalie Hopkinson in Sunday's New York Times.
Hopkinson, a D.C. resident, argues that the difficulties her families had faced in finding a stable and quality school in D.C. for her middle-school aged son offer an indictment of "the direction that education reform is taking in this country." Too bad the piece contains factual errors and never cites a single data point, beyond Hopkinson's own experience, to back up this bold contention.
Look, I have tremendous sympathy with the situation Hopkinson and her family find themselves in: While the expansion of charter schools and improvements in DCPS have expanded the number of decent options available to D.C. families, children in our city lack access to high-quality educational options.
But while the struggles Hopkinson describes are very real, her attribution of them to education reform is misguided.
To begin with, it's not as if everything was hunky-dory in D.C. before the current wave of education reform. There was a time when D.C. high schools, such as Dunbar, were the best in the country for African American students, but those exemplars coincided with segregation that perpetuated grave educational inequities for the city's African American youngsters. As the city fell apart in the 1970s and 1980s, so did its schools, and by the time Congress handed oversight of the city's governance to a Financial Control Board in 1995, the state of the schools was so bad that the elected school board was stripped of its powers. Frustration with the city's poor schools also helped fuel the growth of the charter school movement beginning in the late 1990s. And from 2003-2007, D.C.'s students scored dead last among 11 cities participating in the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment.
Nor are the educational inequities Hopkinson mentions between affluent families "west of the park" and poor, working, and middle-class families in other parts of the city anything new. "West of the Park" schools like Janney, Murch and Lafayette have always offered better quality options, in part because they serve largely white, affluent student populations whose parents fundraise extensively to supplement spending.
What's changed is that, while buying expensive homes within the boundaries of these schools was once one of the only ways D.C. families could access higher-performing schools--putting them out of reach of the vast majority--now families in many other parts of the city have access to quality charter school options, including some of the city's highest poverty and most crime-ridden neighborhoods, such as Achievement Prep and KIPP schools in Ward 8, or the Center City school in Trinidad.
And don't take my word for it: Look at the data. District of Columbia students have made dramatic improvements in NAEP TUDA since 2003. While they still rank near the bottom of urban districts, they're no longer dead last, and if recent trajectories continue, they won't be there for long. Both DCPS and charter schools also made progress this year on the D.C. CAS state assessment.
Hopkinson is also dead wrong when she states that "The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed." Charter schools do not consistently perform worse than DCPS schools. The current portfolio of charter schools includes both some of the city's highest performing schools as well as some very low-performers and a large number of schools roughly on par with DCPS. But charter schools are making real gains in student performance--outstripping DCPS this year--and over the past two years the DC Public Charter School Board, on which I serve, has moved aggressively to close down half a dozen low-performing schools. But the New York Times apparently didn't find it necessary to look at this data before publishing Hopkinson's column.
Contrary to Hopkinson's assertions, all the available evidence suggests that the past decade of reform efforts has improved, not worsened the quality of educational options available to D.C. students. That's not to discount the very real and legitimate frustration of parents like Hopkinson. While D.C. has made substantial progress to date, it's not enough. Moreover, some of the transitions necessary to improvement--such as closing undersubscribed schools that drain resources but are still to small to offer a quality education--are going to be messy and painful for some students, teachers, and families. And if you're kid is one of the kids caught in the transition that just really, really, sucks. But the solution is not to continue postponing the pain by maintaining a status quo that is never going to be adequate. It's to better support children and families impacted by transitions, and also to expand the supply of high-performing school options. While D.C. has many good school options today, most of the best schools--charter or DCPS--remain wildly oversubscribed. But the problem here is one of scarcity of high-performing options relative to demand, not the creation of the options themselves. And the solution is to work to grow the number of high-performing options (both by creating new schools and improving existing ones), while also continuing to close down low-performers.
That's one of the reasons that I spend a great deal of time when I'd rather be doing other things serving, on a purely volunteer basis, on the board that oversees charter schools in Washington, D.C. I know a D.C. where all families have access to high-quality schools is possible, I see we've made progress but it's not enough, and I know that the board's work authorizing quality schools and closing down low-performers is critical to getting us there.
District Wins Special-Ed Appeal
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 5, 2011
The District has won a significant battle in its 16-year war to lift a federal court injunction for failing to make tuition payments for special education students.
The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. District Court must revisit a decision denying the District's bid to eliminate court supervision.
The injunction is part of the Petties vs. D.C. class-action lawsuit filed in 1995 by parents whose children had been placed in private schools because the District's public schools couldn't provide adequate special-education services.
Parents were outraged that the city was failing to make timely payments to the private schools, as required by federal law. At least one private, the Chelsea School, threatened to disenroll 42 students because the District wasn't paying up, and hadn't indicated an intention to pay at all.
The court placed a preliminary injunction in March 1995, saying that the District's failings "has placed plaintiffs' education in constant jeopardy."
But 16 years later, the appellate court ruled that that District's current record of success needs to be a weightier consideration toward lifting the supervision; the District Court was concerned that settlements between parents and the city would be disrupted if the injunction were lifted. The parents did acknowledge, however, that much progress had been made in 16 years.
Between October 2009 and September 2010 --the year leading up the denial of the District's motion -- the Office of the State Superintendent for Education paid 98.9 percent of its invoices on time, and D.C. Public Schools paid 94.8 percent on time. Both agencies have adopted written policies and procedures for these payments, among other steps.
The appellate court notes, "actions taken by the District of Columbia appear to have remedied the systemic payment problems that existed in 1995."
Attorney General Irv Nathan said the "broader significance of the ruling is that the district courts in this circuit will need to pay closer attention to the current circumstances to determine whether long-standing decrees such as this one should be modified or ended."
The District pays for 1,545 students to attend private schools for special-education services, at an average daily cost of $212.20 per student.
Fred Lewis, a spokesman for DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson, said, "All the evidence shows that the District has made tremendous progress in its payment system to private providers of special education services."
Without court supervision, the schools' payments would theoretically proceed as normally -- just without monitoring from the federal government. What happens next would be a real test for Henderson, Mayor Vincent Gray and the rest of the schools' leadership, said local political analyst Chuck Thies.
"The proof will be in the pudding, and it's something you can't get wrong, because the cost to the children and families is unthinkable," Thies said.
Examiner Local Editorial: D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Applications Soaring For a Reason
The Washington Examiner
By Editorial
December 5, 2011
President Obama, Mayor Vincent Gray and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton -- all of whom opposed congressional efforts to restore funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program -- have some humble pie to eat. Since Congress revived the moribund voucher program in April, enrollment is up 60 percent. That's because more than 92 percent of the predominantly black and Hispanic applicants would otherwise have been forced to attend inferior public schools in need of improvement as defined by federal law. Too many of those students would never make it to graduation.
Obama, Gray and Norton said they wanted to kill the OSP, which provides up to $12,000 per student for tuition at qualifying private schools, because the program produced only "modest" effects on overall student test scores. However, a federally mandated evaluation done by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences found that OSP students made the second largest academic gains of any program studied. That's quite a bang for the $400 million spent since OSP was originally approved by Congress in 2004. They also ignored how the federally funded voucher program has been a life-changer for thousands of underprivileged D.C. youngsters, which is why three quarters of District residents support it.
The final 2010 report on the OSP found that 21 percent more participants graduated from high school than among other DCPS students. A similar finding was replicated in Milwaukee, where voucher recipients earned 12 percent more high school diplomas. Graduation is not only a prerequisite for admission to a two-year technical college or a four-year degree program, it also correlates with higher levels of employment, personal wealth, and even life expectancy - and lower levels of criminal behavior and other social pathologies.
Thanks to OSP, D.C.'s traditional public and charter schools have received hundreds of millions of federal dollars for students they did not have to teach. And since vouchers cost about half as much per student than public schools, the program has also meant more money was available for public schools. As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters noted in these pages last month, "Vouchers are one of the few policies that lead to educational improvements, while saving taxpayer dollars." But low-income District parents are flocking to OSP again for another reason: It offers their children a rare shot at a better life. Democrats who tried to shut their educational lifeline down for good should now apologize for standing in these school house doors.