- DCPS school closing list expected Tuesday
- D.C.'s education emergency
- D.C. charters high school graduation rate at 76.7 percent, DCPS at 61 percent [Friendship-Collegiate Academy, SEED, Washington Math Science and Technology, Thurgood Marshall, IDEA, Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- DCPS graduation rate up slightly; but well short of goals [Washignton Latin, Friendship-Collegiate Academy, SEED, Washington Math Science and Technology, IDEA, Hospitality, Mary Angelou-Evans, Options, Cesar Chavez- Capital Hill, Cesar Chaves- Parkside Upper PCS mentioned]
- D.C. releases high school graduation rates
- D.C. Charter School Rankings Show 20 Schools 'High Performing' [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Late budget shift adds money for schools
- School and city officials address truancy rates in District
- DCPS refers nearly 100 kids to child-protective services
DCPS school closing list expected Tuesday
The Washington Post
By Mike DeBonis
November 8, 2012
On the national level, President Obama and members of Congress are pivoting off the election right into a high-stakes issues: how to avoid drastic “fiscal cliff” spending cuts. In District politics, Mayor Vincent C. Gray and D.C. Council members are doing their own pivot — to school closings.
Two D.C. Council members, Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and Kenyan McDuffie (D), said they expect D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya K. Henderson to publicly reveal the closure list Tuesday. They and two other members, Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7) and Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), said they’d been briefed by Henderson either generally or specifically on her closure plans, but all declined to give specifics about the briefings.
“I will allow the chancellor to make the announcement,” said McDuffie. “It’s really going to depend on the schools that are closed, and the reasoning and the rationale for the closure. I am going to need to see that, and the community is going to need to see that, before I provide any more comment.”
Mendelson said Henderson has generally indicated she’ll be targeting underenrolled schools, which is not much of a surprise. “I know there are some schools that are grossly underenrolled,” he said. “It’s hard to justify keeping those schools open. … If you want librarians and art teachers in every school, you have to have a population sufficient to pay for it.” With those concerns in mind, he said, school closures are “not dead on arrival.”
In terms of the politics of the school closures, much will depend on the geographic distribution of the schools. A DCPS-commissioned study released in January identified neighborhood clusters in wards 4, 5, 7 and 8 high in underenrolled, underperforming “Tier 4″ schools thought to be a particularly high risk for closure. It may also depend on what types of schools will be closed: Unlike in 2008, Henderson may well seek to close a high school, which tend to have larger student bodies, more community support and “brand equity,” and more active alumni bases than lower-level schools. (Given their underenrollment, poor student performance and lack of recent modernization, Ward 5′s Spingarn and Ward 4′s Coolidge and Roosevelt are thought to be at greatest risk.)
Every council member said they were looking forward to Henderson making her case as to why particular schools should be closed. McDuffie said some in his ward are “on edge” given the rapid-fire process undertaken in the last round of school closings five years ago. At that time then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee proposed closing 23 schools — seven of them in McDuffie’s Ward 5 — accompanied by an ill-conceived plan to hold 23 simultaneous hearing on the closings rather than a few larger ones.
The D.C. Public Schools have not detailed plans yet for community meetings that will almost certainly accompany the new round of closings. Expect to hear more about those Tuesday.
Even the best explanation and the best process and the most meetings won’t placate everybody, Alexander added: “There’s never going to be satisfaction. There’s always going to be disappointment when schools close, no matter what.”
D.C.'s education emergency
The Washington Examiner
By Jonetta Rose Barras
November 8, 2012
The District continues to have a public education emergency.
Many charters could be considered mediocre. A significant number of traditional schools have been labeled low performers; some of those, undoubtedly, are on Mayor Vincent C. Gray's and DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson's facilities closure list, expected to be released within days.
Taxpayers should revolt. More than $1 billion of their money is being spent annually on two systems -- neither of which can claim true excellence.
"We have work to do as a community," Skip McCoy, vice president of the public charter school board told me, following a press conference where the group released its 2012 performance reports. Currently, there are 57 schools on 102 campuses -- 64 of which received numerical scores, pushing them into one of three tiers.
Only 20 of the 64 reached Tier 1 -- the category for the highest-performing schools. That's two fewer than last year.
Thirty-five schools were in the mushy Tier 2, with scores between 35 and 64.9 percent. The last nine were in the abysmal Tier 3, where scores ranged from 14 percent to 34.8 percent.
"We're pleased with the high performers. [But] there is work to do even with Tier 1 schools," added McCoy. A charter could score as low as 65 percent and still reach Tier 1.
When I was in school, 65 percent was unsatisfactory -- unless, of course, grading was on a curve. That seems to be what's happening with the charter board's evaluations.
Things aren't much better at DCPS. Gray and Henderson had pledged in a five-year academic plan to bolster the system's 40 lowest-performing schools. Now advocates are questioning whether the executive expects to achieve that goal through school closures.
"Is closing [schools] their solution," asked Daniel del Pielago, an organizer with the nonprofit Empower DC, which has been working with parents and a coalition of organizations to prevent the closures. It also has filed a federal Title VI complaint, alleging such action would disproportionately affect communities of color.
The D.C. Council is expected to hold a public hearing next week on DCPS-related issues including closures and legislation introduced by Ward 3's Mary Cheh to examine school boundaries.
"We think there should be a moratorium on closures," continued del Pielago. "There has been no evaluation of mayoral control and no analysis of the impact of the last round of closures."
When then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools in 2007, they promised facility and academic improvements. Buildings have been renovated. But there appears to have been academic disinvestment. Moreover, the legally mandated evaluation has been pushed to 2013.
Empower DC and other advocates have begun training and preparing parents to testify at the council's Thursday hearing. They have promised to do whatever is necessary to stop the closures, including going to court.
Even if they can't stop the closures, they may get an answer to the question they have asked for the past five years: What were the benefits of previous closures?
D.C. charters high school graduation rate at 76.7 percent, DCPS at 61 percent [Friendship-Collegiate Academy, SEED, Washington Math Science and Technology, Thurgood Marshall, IDEA, Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
November 8, 2012
Yesterday the D.C. Public Charter School Board reported the four year high school graduation rate for the schools its oversees at 76.7 percent, a slight drop from last year's statistic of 79.8 percent. PCSB Executive Director Scott Pearson attributed the decline to greater precision concerning the recording of data. The high school graduation rate for the traditional school system stands at 61 percent, up a couple of points from 2011.
Commenting on the charter school findings board chair Brian Jones stated, "Among the noteworthy results this year - more than half of the 888 students who graduated from public charter schools in four years reside in Wards 7 and 8 - in neighborhoods with some of the highest rates of poverty in the city."
In fact, one school stands out as being especially impressive in this regard. Friendship Public Charter School's Collegiate Academy graduated 90.7 percent of its high school students within four years, up five points from 86 percent twelve months ago. 74 percent of the student body of at Collegiate qualify for free or reduced lunch. Most impressively, 100 percent of these graduating seniors where accepted to college.
Other charters demonstrating extremely notable rates include SEED at 87.3 percent, Washington Math Science and Technology at 87.1 percent, Thurgood Marshall Academy at 77.8 percent, and IDEA with a four year high school graduation rate of 78.5 percent.
Washington Latin, the school at which I serve as board president, had the highest graduation rate of all non-selective public schools at 93.2 percent.
DCPS graduation rate up slightly; but well short of goals [Washignton Latin, Friendship-Collegiate Academy, SEED, Washington Math Science and Technology, IDEA, Hospitality, Mary Angelou-Evans, Options, Cesar Chavez- Capital Hill, Cesar Chaves- Parkside Upper PCS mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
November 8, 2012
The number of students who graduated from D.C. Public Schools in four years increased by three percentage points to 56 percent last year, but the system's chief said DCPS would have to pick up the pace and make stronger gains to meet its goals.
"I take it as an indication that we are going in the right direction but it's no reason to be celebrating," Chancellor Kaya Henderson said Thursday after the city released the numbers.
D.C. Public Schools has set a goal of having 75 percent of its freshmen graduate within four years by 2017, as part of its "Capital Commitment" five-year strategic plan.
(See link above for chart.)
"A three-percent increase is not going to get me there," Henderson said.
Last year was the first time the school system calculated its "on-time" graduation rate, which looks at the number of students who start with the school system in the ninth grade, rather than just calculating how many seniors graduate in a given year.
It was a sobering moment for the school system, whose graduation rate didn't seem so terrible at 73 percent under the old method. Instead, 53 percent of students graduated within four years in the 2010-2011 school year, a number which increased to 56 percent in 2011-2012. The number of four-year graduates for alternative schools increased by 12 percentage points.
Meanwhile, on-time graduation in the city's public charter schools decreased last year, from 80 percent to 77 percent. Statewide, the graduation rate increased from 59 percent to 61 percent.
Although the charters' number is well above D.C. Public Schools' average, Henderson pointed out that some of the city's charter schools kick out students who don't attend summer sessions or miss a certain number of days of school. These students come to Henderson's school system, and are reflected in DCPS' graduation rate.
Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said the downturn in diplomas was due to "more stringent" data collection over last year, the first year of the new rate.
"While we welcome the increased rigor, we also recognize that it had some effect on school graduation percentages," Pearson said.
Washington Latin Public Charter School had the highest rate among the city's charters, with 93.2 percent of students graduating on-time last spring. Friendship Public Charter School's Collegiate Academy was close behind, with 90.7 percent of students earning diplomas within four years.
It was D.C. Public Schools' magnet programs, however, which boasted the highest graduation rates in the city. Benjamin Banneker Academic High School graduated 98 percent of its students within four years, followed by Duke Ellington School of the Arts at 96 percent and School Without Walls at 92 percent.
D.C. releases high school graduation rates
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 8, 2012
The on-time graduation rate for all D.C. high school students ticked up two points to 61 percent this year, according to data released Thursday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
That’s a far less dramatic change than last year, when the rate dropped nearly 20 points after the federal government began requiring the city — and all states — to calculate graduation rates with a new and more rigorous formula.
The District’s citywide average masks a big difference between its two school sectors.
D.C. Public Schools ticked up three points to 56 percent this year. Meanwhile, public charter schools’ average graduation rate fell slightly but, at 77 percent, remains quite a bit higher than DCPS.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson said the two systems can’t be fairly compared. Charter schools can require commitments from students, she said — such as attending summer school or extended-day programs — that traditional public schools don’t have the ability to demand.
And DCPS schools often end up serving the students who didn’t want to (or couldn’t) keep up with the rigorous expectations of some charter schools, she said.
Assertions that charter schools benefit from self-selected student populations is a matter of frequent and heated debate. OSSE is in the midst of studying data that show how students move between DCPS and charter schools, and maybe their report — expected soon — will shed some light.
D.C. Charter School Rankings Show 20 Schools 'High Performing' [D.C. Prep and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
November 8, 2012
For the second year, the D.C. public charter school board released its internal school performance rankings. The performance management framework, which measures a variety of factors including attendance, improvement in test scores and re-enrollment rates, is meant to be an easy guide to monitoring a school's performance.
Twenty D.C. charter schools have been ranked Tier 1 schools, meaning they received a score of more than 65 percent on a variety of these metrics. They're considered high performing schools. A total of 35 schools made Tier 2, meaning they met minimum standards.
Nine schools are ranked Tier 3, scoring below 35 percent. If a school is ranked Tier 3 for three years, it may be closed. The charter school system has 57 schools on 102 campuses.
D.C. Prep remains the top ranked public charter school in D.C. overall two years in a row. Washington Latin has the highest re-enrollment rate and the highest graduation rate. The full list of rankings is available on the charter school board's website.
Late budget shift adds money for schools
The Northwest Current
By Elizabeth Weiner
November 7, 2012
An 11th-hour budget shift by District officials has added nearly $14 million to the coffers of charter and public schools — including money for major technology upgrades at 32 underperforming public schools. But the late changes and lack of detail left some D.C. Council members fuming.
The council, by a 9-2 vote last Thursday, approved “reprogramming” of some $25 million in unspent funds from fiscal 2012, to include $6.9 million to charter schools for facilities or other needs and $6.9 million to public schools for technology improvements. The shift also allotted $6.5 million to Metro, $1.5 million for parks and recreation facilities, and $1.2 million to the Oak Hill juvenile detention center.
Aides to Mayor Vincent Gray said the last-minute shifts came because unspent funds couldn’t be calculated until the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, while city law requires that money not reprogrammed by Nov. 1 go back into the city’s reserves. Gray has also touted recent initiatives to fund charter school modernization with local dollars, and to upgrade many park and recreation
facilities — both efforts that will be boosted by the extra dollars.
But the council, in a two-hour debate, clearly felt left in the dark. Members hadn’t received precise figures until late the day before their rescheduled Nov. 1 legislative meeting. And they were particularly concerned about the $6.9 million in Internet-access improvements proposed for 32 public schools, some of which have already undergone major renovations.
“Are you telling me they’ve upgraded the HVAC, the electric, but they forgot to connect to the Internet?” said Ward 4 member Muriel Bowser.
“We’ve already assigned funds to provide these services,” said at-large member David Catania. “We’re going to essentially give them the money twice.” But D.C. Public Schools spokesperson Melissa Salmanowitz later told The Current that the $6.9 million
investment will accelerate needed Internet infrastructure improvements, “focusing primarily on our lowest-performing schools,” to provide reliable services for all students.
The money will pay for “new and better components, like jacks, ports, wires and systems … that actually use far less electricity,” Salmanowitz wrote in an email, providing “hundreds of new wireless access points in our schools.” She said some schools that received only Phase I modernizations still don’t have adequate information technology capacity, while others modernized more than five years ago have equipment that is now out of dateSchools set to receive upgrades include H.D. Cooke Elementary and the Columbia Heights Educational Campus in Ward 1, as well as 30 other schools in wards 5, 7 and 8.
Council members had fewer concerns about the additional local dollars for charter schools, noting that charter leaders often complain they don’t get the same level of funding — for operations or facilities — as traditional public schools.
But some members argued that any surplus city dollars should go first to a “wish list” of unfunded priorities created by the council and Gray last spring. The wish list included social and human service programs, such as assistance for the homeless and children living in poverty — groups hard hit by budget cuts during the recession. “We already have priorities. They are in the law,” Catania said.
Catania and Bowser voted no on the funding shifts, and Marion Barry of Ward 8 was absent. The rest voted to support the proposal.
School and city officials address truancy rates in District
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 8, 2012
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said Thursday that the school system’s high truancy rates amount to an educational “crisis,” as D.C. officials disclosed that more than 40 percent of the students at Ballou, Anacostia, Spingarn and Roosevelt high schools missed at least a month of school last year because of unexcused absences.
“We are in a crisis situation,” Henderson said at a D.C. Council hearing on anti-truancy efforts. In addition to the social problems that plague families and contribute to absenteeism in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, she said, many older students are years behind grade level in reading and have given up.
“Why would I want to go to school if I can’t read the book, I can’t do the work, I’m 17 and in the ninth grade?” she said. “It should be no surprise to us that students we have failed for many years are now failing to come to school.”
Henderson outlined some efforts the school system is making to reduce the rates, but she said there is a need for far more progress.
The impact of the poor attendance was underscored by the release Thursday of the school system’s four-year graduation rates. Schools with the most truancy had some of the lowest on-time graduation rates. At Ballou, half of the student body graduated on time. At Anacostia, 40 percent graduated on time.
The school system’s overall graduation rate ticked up three points to 56 percent — an improvement, but one that will have to accelerate if Henderson is to meet her goal of graduating three-quarters of students on time by 2017.
The D.C. Council has increased pressure on Henderson to address the city’s long-standing truancy problems.
“No matter how much money we spend on educating children, if they are not in school they are not going to learn,” said David Catania (I-At Large), who along with Chairman Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) has been one of the council’s strongest voices demanding change.
In response, the school system is complying with a law that requires it to call the Child and Family Services Agency when students younger than 13 have more than 10 unexcused absences. Last year, elementary school principals referred only one in five students with such attendance problems; now that number is up to 95 percent, Henderson told the council.
The school system also has strengthened partnerships with neighborhood collaboratives, which reach out to truant high school students to determine what is causing the absences. And Henderson has spent $800,000 on extra social workers at high schools with the worst attendance.
The efforts appear to be making a difference: The number of students with more than 10 absences by the beginning of November has fallen compared with last year.
But the numbers remain stubbornly high, especially for freshmen. About one in six freshmen — and 25 percent of those who are repeating the grade after failing last year — have missed at least two weeks of class this year.
Henderson said the city needs more alternative high schools, more career and technical education, and a focus on literacy to change those trends.
Council members urged the chancellor not to neglect younger students’ poor attendance, which — if not addressed — could lead to problems later on. Nine elementary or K-8 schools had at least 10 percent of students miss more than a month of classes last year.
“We’ve got to be focusing more on the younger grades . . . or else we’re continuing to grow new cohorts that are harder to deal with,” Mendelson said.
Catania called for prosecuting parents “who have essentially relegated their children to a diminished future” by failing to get them to school.
“What if we had theft as a crime but you were never arrested or prosecuted for that?” he said. “What would the city look like?”
The council did not address truancy rates at the city’s charter schools, where average graduation rates ticked down this year to 77 percent, still significantly higher than the city’s traditional public schools.
Henderson urged the council to continue to “hold our feet to the fire” on improving truancy rates.
“The council’s relentless focus on truancy has helped to focus us and ensure that we are monitoring and addressing this issue in a way that we frankly had not been doing before,” Henderson said. “I can’t reach my academic goals if the children are not in school.”
DCPS refers nearly 100 kids to child-protective services
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
November 8, 2012
DC Public Schools officials have referred 96 students who are 13 or younger to child-protective services for missing 10 or more days of school this fall without an excuse, Chancellor Kaya Henderson said Thursday.
The move represents a "culture shift" within DC Public Schools on truancy, as the school system in the past largely ignored the city law that requires them to alert the Child and Family Services Agency when an elementary or middle school student is chronically truant. Last year, only 21 percent of those students were referred by DCPS; this year, the 96 referred students represent a 95 percent compliance rate.
In high schools, where the school system must alert the courts when a student misses 25 days without an excuse, the referral rate has jumped from 7 percent to 82 percent.
"The simple fact that someone other than a teacher or principal is calling is making parents take note in a way they haven't before," Henderson told the D.C. Council at a hearing on truancy reduction efforts Thursday.
Unexcused absences have fallen this school year. The number of students with 10 to 19 unexcused absences dropped from 627 by November 2011 to 243 so far this year.
But while D.C. Council members applauded Henderson for making the city law a reality -- mainly by explaining to principals that most students would not be removed from their homes -- others pushed for more accountability measures for parents.
At-large Councilman David Catania questioned why D.C. did not criminally prosecute the parents of truant children. Per city law, a parent can be fined $100 and hit with five days of jail time if a child misses two days of school without an excuse.
He said he did not believe two days should warrant an arrest but sought to set a larger number of absences such as 15 or 20.
Cory Chandler, the deputy attorney general of family services, said she did not believe that the threat of criminal prosecution for parents had been linked to increased attendance but that she would bring it up with Attorney General Irvin Nathan.
"Why shouldn't the parent have a consequence just as serious as if the child is being beaten by the parent? [In both cases], they're scarred as a result," Catania said. "But what you are allowed to do is sentence a child to a life of diminished expectations, and no one thinks that's serious enough to hold parents accountable."