- ‘One City,’ But Two School Funding Standards [FOCUS is mentioned]
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Extremes Show Disparity Between Schools
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Good Teachers Spread Throughout the District
‘One City,’ But Two School Funding Standards [FOCUS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Alice Rivlin and Mary Levy
January 27, 2012
Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s “One City” campaign raised the hopes of many District residents. Finally, many concluded, we will have an administration that makes healing our city’s divisions a priority. Mr. Gray (D) declared himself keen to realize his goal in education by adhering to two principles:
First, ensuring that city spending on public schools is equitable, so that students enrolled in D.C.’s public schools can expect the same investment of public resources whether they attend public charter schools or the traditional system.
And second, that public funding for education meet the needs of students across the city, in our most vulnerable neighborhoods as well as in our most comfortable.
When the mayor was chairman of the D.C. Council, it created the Public Education Finance Reform Commission to identify how to achieve these two aims. It is due to make its recommendations Tuesday.
District law is designed to ensure equal public funding. At the heart of the law is the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. The formula is to ensure that students receive the same public funding regardless of the type of D.C. public school they attend.
But this equality has not come to pass, as the city has increasingly resorted to funding traditional public schools outside the formula. The city also has violated principles of equity, which require that we give each of our schoolchildren an equal chance to succeed, regardless of which public school they attend.
A report prepared by one of us for Friends of Choice in Urban Schools and the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools found that the total amount of city spending that District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) receives above what the funding formula provides has ranged from $72 million to $127 million annually over the last four to five years. Several fiscal bad habits have contributed to such massive sums.
The city appropriates money on top of the formula funding for DCPS, but not for charters, which educate 41 percent of students enrolled in city public schools. For example, $25.2 million is pending before the council to cover current DCPS overspending. Charter schools lack the luxury of such backup. On top of that, other government agencies provide DCPS with free services, such as maintenance and legal services. And for the purpose of allocating public funds, DCPS is allowed to use projected enrollment figures, which often prove overly optimistic. When that happens, DCPS retains the funds. Charters must use actual enrollment counts. All of these practices contravene District law.
The unfairness extends to school facilities. Charters are not provided a school building upon opening but receive a per-student facilities allowance to buy, lease and renovate what is often office, retail or warehouse space. Many charter schools are crowded and lack gyms, cafeterias and playgrounds or athletic fields. DCPS capital spending has increased in recent years, but the charters’ per-student facilities allowance has been cut.
The circumstances in which our public schools work do not justify huge public-funding disparities. Charters and traditional public schools serve broadly similar student populations, and the formula provides extra funding for any special needs students. Both are tuition-free by law and must take all applicants. The principal difference is that DCPS must take enrollments after the official October count date, which determines funding. We have never been able to obtain data on DCPS net enrollment changes after that cutoff. If evidence showed a significant increase, we would recommend creating a reserve to cover the cost of late-enrolling students.
Both DCPS and charter schools have reported higher student scores on standardized tests during the past six years. Both serve large numbers of disadvantaged students who need concentrated support, both in instruction and social services. Both are subject to big cost increases in areas such as teacher salaries and utilities.
School reform can help us build “One City. ” But to do so, we need to respect our duty to uphold fairness and equality and invest in every District child enrolled in public schools.
Alice Rivlin is vice chairman of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools. Mary Levy is the author of the recent report “Public Education Finance Reform in the District of Columbia.”
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 29, 2012
Extremes show disparity between schools
Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, the Woodley Park campus where former Chancellor Michelle Rhee sent her children, has more good teachers than any other school in D.C. Public Schools.
An analysis by The Washington Examiner shows that most teachers rated "effective" or higher are spread fairly evenly throughout the city, but extremes highlight the usual paradox of school reform, where the most involved parents and best resources -- like teachers -- are in schools that need them much less than their counterparts.
Oyster-Adams has 60 teachers who DCPS rates as effective or "highly effective" based on their Impact evaluations, or about one good teacher for every 11 students in the preschool-3 school.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Garfield Elementary, home to only five teachers who DCPS says are at least "effective." That's roughly one good teacher for every 50 students in the preschool-5 Southeast school.
Scott Thompson, DCPS director of teacher effectiveness strategy, said he was not aware of any extenuating circumstances at Oyster-Adams or Garfield. However, teachers who focus on English-language learners may not have their own classrooms, possibly increasing the number of teachers at Oyster-Adams, Thompson said.
Jamie Mayo, a parent at Garfield and a 2007 graduate of DCPS, said she believes the school's teachers are doing their best, and that her children are receiving an equal education to those at Oyster-Adams, even though only 10 percent of Garfield students can read proficiently, as per the 2011 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System.
"When I took the test, I kind of got lost, and I'm not going to say it's the teachers' fault when kids get lost taking the DC CAS," she said.
At Oyster-Adams, parent group co-chairwoman Deon Woods Bell said they are "very lucky." Great teachers have smoothed her experience with DCPS's rocky special-needs program.
"When you have a highly effective teacher, they can rise above all of that, and make the experience for a student kind of seamless," Bell said.
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown, who has introduced legislation to incentivize more top teachers into low-income, underperforming schools, said these extremes in ratios of effective teachers emphasize the gulf between affluent and poor schools.
"If you just think about it, close your eyes, and don't think about the location, don't think about the kids at all -- but took a stranger to those two schools, or showed them video -- they could tell you right away which school had highly effective teachers," he said.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 29, 2012
Good teachers are spread fairly evenly throughout the District, according to an analysis of teacher evaluations by The Washington Examiner, despite the enormous achievement gap between classrooms in affluent Northwest areas and poor Southeast communities.
On evaluations, teachers are classified as "ineffective," "minimally effective," "effective" or "highly effective." Much of the attention on improving underperforming schools has focused on the disproportionately large number of highly effective teachers in Ward 3, the city's whitest and richest area.
But when the B-level, "effective" teachers are grouped in with the superstars, the picture shifts: There are more combined effective and highly effective teachers per student at Ward 7's Davis Elementary -- which was recommended for turnaround or closure last week in a report commissioned by the mayor's office -- than at Janney Elementary, a sought-after, high-performing school in Tenleytown.
There are, of course, outliers. The five worst effective-teacher-to-student ratios are all in Ward 8. Johnson Middle has one effective teacher for every 28 students, while flagship Ward 3 middle school Alice Deal has a good teacher for every 16 kids.
And struggling Ward 8 elementary Garfield has only five teachers who merit the "effective" rating, to Oyster-Adams' 60 in Woodley Park. But most schools' ratios fall surprisingly close together.
DCPS officials say the numbers are proof that they have good teachers in all their schools, at a time when the school system is working with the D.C. Council to incentivize highly effective teachers to relocate to low-income, low-performing schools.
Because teachers' evaluations are tied to their students' test scores and behavior during classroom observations, officials say teachers are reluctant to practice at the schools that need them the most.
But DCPS says an even more important piece of the puzzle is improving the effective teachers they already have in struggling schools. Scott Thompson, director of teacher effectiveness strategy for DCPS, said the system has brought coaches into schools to work with each teacher for six-week stretches, helping them zero in on their weaknesses and jump to the "highly effective" level.
While "highly effective teachers are really knocking it out of the park," Thompson said effective teachers are still "strong and consistent, explaining content clearly, and good at pushing students to understanding."
However, the data raises questions about which teachers the evaluation tool labels "effective," the most common rating for DCPS' 4,116 teachers at 69 percent -- 16 percent were rated highly effective on last year's evaluations, 13 percent minimally effective, and 2 percent ineffective.
If there are 11.2 effective teachers per student at Ward 4's Cardozo High School, but only 16.3 at Ward 3's Wilson High School, then why can less than 28 percent of Cardozo's students read proficiently?
"If you have a bunch of schools that are failing, you have to question whether those teachers are truly effective," said David Pickens, executive director of D.C. School Reform Now.
Some of the schools with the highest numbers of effective teachers are chronically underperforming. At Eastern High School, no students scored "proficient" or "advanced" on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reading exam last year. It's an underenrolled campus, with 25 effective teachers for just 167 total students.
DCPS points to the other factors that contribute to a child's experience in the classroom -- chiefly poverty, which can mean hungry students and uninvolved parents.
On Tuesday, the D.C. Council is scheduled to discuss the Community Schools Incentive Amendment Act, a bill that aims to provide lessons on nutrition and literacy for parents, as well as after-school tutoring and medical services for students.
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