- Should school choice work like bank choice?
- All D.C. charter schools shouldn't have to admit neighborhood kids first, panel says
- DC Charter Neighborhood Preference Task Force says no to neighborhood preference
- As students return to Washington area schools, an attention to normalcy
- 'School-to-prison pipeline' hearing puts spotlight on student discipline
- Report: DCPS scores have not improved with reforms
Should school choice work like bank choice?
Greater Greater Washington
By David Alpert and Ken Archer
December 13, 2012
A majority of public school students east of Rock Creek Park now attend charter or magnet schools, a fact that some consider a victory for school choice. If this trend continues, we'll have a system with no neighborhood schools at all, where everyone chooses a school from a menu, like you choose a bank. Is this an acceptable outcome?
The Brookings Institution ranked urban school systems on various factors around its system for letting parents choose schools. The District scored 3rd in the nation on the overall index, largely because many kids opt out of their default local school.
Grover Whitehurst, the report's author, told the Washington Post, "The thing that of course stands out about the District of Columbia is that 40, 45 percent of kids are in schools of choice—which is very high with respect to the rest of the nation."
Is this really a good thing?
It's better than leaving kids stuck in a bad school, sure. But this isn't a number we'd like to see go up indefinitely. Far better would be for most kids to want to choose their neighborhood school because it's a good school, while letting those who need or want a different or more specialized educational experience to make a different choice.
Charter schools have brought many educational innovations to DC and helped many kids. Unfortunately, the current track we're on is not to create high-quality neighborhood schools alongside high-quality charters and magnets, but just to eliminate one system in favor of the other.
Would that be a problem? Some proponents of education reform think that it would be just great to chuck our entire public education system and replace it with a collection of different schools, each competing for kids based on how good an education they can provide. That creates a strong incentive for schools to do better or get left behind.
Businesses cherry-pick the highest-margin customers
Would we want the market for schools to look like the market for banks, cell phone companies, or other businesses where you generally have an ongoing relationship with just one? This analogy shows some huge pitfalls for education if the objective is choice above all.
Most banks don't compete to get all customers. They compete primarily for the highest-margin ones: people who keep a lot of cash in their checking accounts, or charge a lot on a credit card. That's why these customers get big cash rewards or miles on credit cards, or perks like free checks, ATM withdrawal fee reimbursement, and higher interest rates.
Schools in the competitive market would have a strong incentive to get higher test scores, and to do so as cheaply as possible. The easiest way to do that is to try to attract the highest-performing kids and drive out the lowest-performing ones.
Test scores reflect a school's performance to some extent, but also the effect of parents and the community. At least right now, we don't have an effective metric that only reflects the effect of a school itself, and experts disagree on how to compare the progress of kid already ahead of grade level, with involved parents and extracurricular enrichment, against one from a kid starting well behind.
A purely competitive system will be a world where successful schools arbitrage flaws in the rating system and industry lobbyists convince legislators not to rejigger the formula in a way that pushes them to educate the more difficult kids.
Meanwhile, traditional neighborhood schools would end up being just a safety net system for any kids left over—the Medicaid of education. They would just serve those who have gotten kicked out elsewhere for disciplinary problems, those whose families lack the basic initiative to research and apply for other schools or the means to transport kids across town, and those whose parents went to the neighborhood school and feel nostalgic.
Charter schools were originally supposed to serve as innovation centers, free to try out new education approaches that, if successful, neighborhood schools could adopt. However, when the number of neighborhood schools is continually shrinking so dramatically, what schools will be left to adopt successful innovations?
While the DCPS's slow pace incorporating validated innovations into neighborhood schools is frustrating, the solution is not to create a two-tier education system with neighborhood schools as the educational safety net or destroy the neighborhood school system completely. For a parent of a child in a neighborhood with a bad local school, it's understandable to want to escape this failing system, but just writing these schools off will not serve DC kids, especially our neediest ones.
All D.C. charter schools shouldn't have to admit neighborhood kids first, panel says
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 14, 2012
The District should consider allowing charter schools that move into closed D.C. public school buildings to give admissions preference to children who live nearby, according to a task force convened by the D.C. Council.
But the city should not allow or compel other charters to give such a neighborhood preference, the 12-member task force wrote Friday in a report to the council.
“Neighborhood preference would not increase the number of quality seats” in high-performing schools, the report said, “but simply ration them based on the location of a student’s home.”
Charter schools now enroll kids from across the city, conducting lotteries if there is more demand than space. That gives students equal access to admission — but it can also shut them out of the school down the street.
Parents’ complaints led the council to create the panel, which met four times this fall. It included representatives from D.C. public schools, the executive and legislative branches of city government, the teachers union, and the charter school community.
Early on, task force members raised concerns that establishing an admissions preference for charter schools would defeat the goal of ensuring that school choice isn’t limited by Zip code.
Thousands of students in wards 7 and 8, some of the poorest parts of the city, currently go to charter schools elsewhere. They would stand to lose access to high-performing charters if neighborhood preference were implemented, the report said.
D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), who has been among the most vocal backers of a neighborhood admissions preference, said he would stop pushing for it. “I think for viable neighborhoods that will attract families with children, we must offer neighborhood elementary schools that families can walk to,” he said. “If the definition of charter schools is such that they can’t provide that, then we need to find a different way to provide it.”
Task force members representing the deputy mayor for education and the office of the state superintendent pushed for the recommendation to allow charters to opt for neighborhood preference when they move into closed DCPS schools.
That is especially important given the city’s current proposal to close 20 schools next year. Allowing students to stay in those schools would “ease the transition for students, families and communities impacted by these closures,” the report said.
DC Charter Neighborhood Preference Task Force says no to neighborhood preference
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
December 17, 2012
Last Friday, in a highly detailed 46 page report of their findings, the Task Force established by the D.C. Council to investigate whether charters should provide admissions preference to those who live close to a particular school decided it was not a good idea. A letter to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson from Task Force Chairman Brain Jones indicated that the 12 member group could find no reason to recommend a preference for the 2013- 2014 school year, but did say that it could support a time-limited voluntary admission preference for those charter schools replacing a shuttered DCPS facility. These conclusions matche those detailed to me in my recent interview with the Chairman of the DC Public Charter School Board.
There are a couple of main reasons behind the Task Force's judgment. First, most families already send their children to a charter near where they live. The study says that "thirty-five percent of public charter school students in 2011-12 went to school within one mile of their home; forty-nine percent went to a charter school in their ward. Similarly, in 45% of all public charter schools (44 schools), at least 50% of students come from within the ward. In 68% of public charter schools (66 schools), 40% or more of their students come from within the ward."
The body also created a simulation to determine the impact on children from a 100 percent admissions neighborhood preference. The outcome would be devastating to those underprivileged children most in need of a quality education. Those living in Ward 7 would lose 199 seats and those from Ward 8 would have 3099 spots taken away.
In the end the Task Force came to the exactly right conclusion. Charter schools have been successful due to the competition for students and anything that diminishes this market pressure will potentially injure the progress we have made. Now it is time for the D.C. Deputy's Mayor of Education's facility master plan group to decide to turn the 20 DCPS sites that are about to be closed over to charters.
As students return to Washington area schools, an attempt at normalcy
The Washington Post
By Caitlin Gibson
December 16, 2012
Parents, educators and students across the Washington region Monday morning will prepare for their familiar routines to start the week: Moms and dads packing lunches, children making their way to school, teachers settling into classrooms. But after the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., a “typical” Monday seemed unlikely, if not impossible.
For parents and schools staff, there is no way to avoid thoughts of the nightmare that unfolded Friday morning in an elementary school that could have been any elementary school, anywhere. Though an isolated incident, it was a reminder that unspeakable violence can shatter families, an entire community, with terrifying randomness.
Educators and psychological experts emphasized that maintaining a sense of normalcy at home and in schools should be a priority this week, particularly for the sake of young children who might feel anxious about returning to class.
“The important thing is to keep the routine,” said Georgetown University psychologist and childhood trauma expert Priscilla Dass-Brailsford. “Just making sure that children do go back to school is going to be important.”
Still, there will be evidence of the tragedy’s influence throughout the region’s school systems. Counselors and emergency response experts planned to circulate through area schools to help teachers and students process their thoughts and emotions about the shooting. Many campus flags will fly at half-staff. There will be moments of silence to remember the lives that were lost. Some local school systems said that they would heighten security for the week, with additional patrols and security personnel.
And in Fairfax County, police said cruisers will be stationed at every public school. Police emphasized that the additional police presence was not in response to a particular threat, but merely as a precaution.
Such powerful symbols, along with the presence of additional law enforcement personnel, are “a double-edged sword,” Dass-Brailsford said.
“I’m sure it will be very reassuring for the parents, but for the children and staff it’s going to be another reminder of what happened,” she said.
Kirsten Evans, PTA president at Westbriar Elementary School in Fairfax, said she has no reservations about sending her son, a third-grader, to school on Monday. She said she planned to talk to him about what happened in Connecticut before he goes back to class.
“You can never tell a child this is never going to happen, but what I’m going to tell him is that his teachers, those staff, everybody there, everybody is going to keep him as safe as they can,” Evans said, adding that she was profoundly moved by the heroic efforts teachers at Sandy Hook made to save lives. “I think our teachers would have done the same thing. As a community, we need to come together and really figure out ways to talk about this. We can’t hide it from our kids because, unfortunately, this is our world now.”
That world, for the time being, will include heightened security measures nearly everywhere. Schools officials throughout local jurisdictions reacted to Friday’s shooting with a flood of messages to their communities, expressing grief and reassuring families and staff that protocols are in place to help prevent such an incident here.
Full article can be found at the link above.
'School-to-prison pipeline' hearing puts spotlight on student discipline
The Washington Post
By Donna St. George
December 13, 2012
At a congressional hearing billed as the first-ever focused on ending the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Edward Ward emerged as a voice of experience.
Ward, a recent high school graduate from Chicago, recalled classmates suspended for failing to wear ID badges and security officers patrolling hallways. Arrests were so common that a police processing center was created on campus “so they could book students then and there,” he said at the hearing Wednesday.
Suspended students “would disappear for days,” Ward said, “and when they got kicked out, they would disappear for weeks.” He recounted the story of a cousin suspended so many times he dropped out.
Even as an honor student, Ward said, “I felt constantly in a state of alert, afraid to make even the smallest mistake.”
Ward testified about the violence and poverty of his neighborhood and the harshness of his school in a Senate hearing room crowded with students, parents, lawyers, educators and activists from Washington and far beyond — 250 people in all, with another 150 people in an overflow room.
It was a defining moment for the issue, which advocates call the school-to-prison-pipeline. It refers to get-tough disciplinary practices that steer students out of schools — through suspension, expulsion or police involvement — and into the criminal justice system.
Lately, the phenomenon is getting more attention.
On Wednesday, two administration officials, two congressmen and a panel of five experts — including Ward — described the problem, offering figures and studies, individual experiences and ideas for change.
More than 3 million students each year are suspended or expelled from school across the United States. Federal data, though limited, show that more than 240,000 students were referred to law enforcement.
“For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on constitution, civil rights and human rights, as he opened the hearing. “What is especially concerning about this phenomenon is that it deprives our kids of their fundamental right to an education.”
Durbin and others attributed much of the problem to the surge of zero-tolerance policies and police presence that took hold in schools in the 1990s and increased in the aftermath of the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. “A schoolyard fight that used to warrant a visit to the principal’s office can now lead to a trip to the booking station and a judge,” Durbin said.
The tough discipline of recent years has fallen hardest on African American and Hispanic students, federal figures show. In many cases, minor misbehavior that could be handled in other ways results in suspensions or worse, witnesses said.
“Police are arresting students for behaviors like talking back — that’s disorderly conduct. Or writing on desks — that’s vandalism,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization long active on the issue.
Full article can be found at the link above.
Report: DCPS scores have not improved with reforms
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 17, 2012
Third-graders in DC Public Schools have failed to show any gains in math or reading since aggressive school reforms began in 2007, according to an independent analysis of the city's standardized test scores.
The report, to be released Monday by the nonprofit DC Action for Children, also suggests the city's public charter schools do not outperform the traditional school system on the DC Comprehensive Assessment System exams.
"We are spending way too much effort and money in education reform not to see results," said HyeSook Chung, the organization's executive director. "If the data isn't lying, what are we doing wrong? Why aren't we seeing improvements in test scores, which everyone is obsessed with, if we are indeed making change, as the city claims?"
Elder Research Inc. conducted a statistical analysis of test scores from 2007 to 2011 by weighting schools' performance by the number of students who score "below basic," "basic," "proficient" or "advanced" on the exams. Schools were given one to four points for each student in the respective brackets, then averaged and aggregated. Chung says this allowed the researchers to create a more nuanced picture than the results released by the city each year, which have showed an upward trend by examining only whether students are proficient or not.
The group chose 2007 because many of former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's reforms began then with the passage of the School Reform Act. It chose the third grade because research cites third-grade proficiency as a key indicator of whether a student will graduate from high school. The third grade is also the first year that students take the exams.
On the one-to-four scale, DCPS' average weighted score in math has inched up from 2.15 to 2.2 from 2007 to 2011 -- an insignificant statistical move. Reading moved from about 2.25 to 2.2.
A spokeswoman for the school system deferred comment to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the agency that regulates DCPS and the city's charter schools. A spokeswoman for OSSE did not return phone calls seeking comment.
David Grosso, who will begin his term as an at-large D.C. Council member in January, said the report provides "good direction."
"We have to try to be more open and transparent about what's going on in the school reform effort," Grosso said.
The report also suggests that charter schools, which enroll 43 percent of the city's public school students, do not statistically perform better than DCPS. On the weighted scale, charters moved from 2.05 to 2.25 in math, and from 2.25 to 2.3 in reading.
Naomi DeVeaux, deputy executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, said she would like to see data on older students, as she believes charters help students improve their scores over time.
"Without knowing that, you can't judge a school," DeVeaux said. "How low did students come in? How low below 'basic' were they? And then what growth occurs?"