- D.C. debates growth of charter schools [FOCUS, Rocketship, K12 Inc., Green Dot, and Democracy Prep mentioned]
- Charters shell out to renovate long-vacant D.C. school buildings [FOCUS, Washington Latin Public Charter School, and Mundo Verde Public Charter School mentioned]
- Book review: ‘Radical: Fighting to Put Students First’ by Michelle Rhee
- Holding States and Schools Accountable
D.C. debates growth of charter schools [FOCUS, Rocketship, K12 Inc., Green Dot, and Democracy Prep mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 10, 2013
It’s the latest sign that the District is on track to become a city where a majority of children are educated not in traditional public schools but in public charters: A California nonprofit group has proposed opening eight D.C. charter schools that would enroll more than 5,000 students by 2019.
The proposal has stirred excitement among those who believe that Rocketship Education, which combines online learning and face-to-face instruction, can radically raise student achievement in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Rocketship’s charter application — which is the largest ever to come before District officials, and which might win approval this month — arrives on the heels of Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s decision to close 15 half-empty city schools, highlighting an intense debate about the future of public education in the nation’s capital.
A growing number of activists have raised concerns that the traditional school system, facing stiffer-than-ever competition from charters, is in danger of being relegated to a permanently shrunken role. And they worry that Washington has yet to confront what that could mean for taxpayers, families and neighborhoods.
“Maybe we need an entire school system full of charters,” said Virginia Spatz, who co-hosts a community-radio talk show on D.C. education. “But we need to have that after public conversation, not by accident.”
Politicians appear to have heard the call. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) acknowledged in his State of the District address Tuesday that charters — which are publicly funded but independently run — are likely to soon educate half the city’s students.
“Certainly there are strengths to such an approach. But there are also challenges — challenges with which no city has yet grappled,” said Gray, who added that he has directed his education cabinet to develop a coordinated “road map for public education.”
Competition has forced both school sectors to improve, Gray said in an interview, and should be preserved. “I don’t believe in monopolies,” he said. “Anything that tips the balance too far in one direction or the other is not good for our children.”
D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), the influential chair of the council’s new education committee, also says the city has too long allowed charters and traditional schools to operate in isolation, without a vision for how they should coexist.
“Right now we have schools that pop up everywhere . . . competing against other established charter schools and traditional public schools,” Catania said. “I think we have a responsibility to help manage this process.”
Though he says he doesn’t want to slow charter expansion, Catania says he will push for “a momentary pause so that we can make sure that we’re all growing in the same direction.”
He says that lawmakers could influence charters’ growth by accelerating the closure of underperforming charters or — even more aggressively — by withholding $3,000-per-pupil facilities payments from new charters to discourage them from opening.
[For the complete article, visit link above.]
Charters shell out to renovate long-vacant D.C. school buildings [FOCUS, Washington Latin Public Charter School, and Mundo Verde Public Charter School mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
February 10, 2013
With its students divided among three campuses on 16th Street Northwest -- sharing facilities with churches on two -- it's easy to understand why Washington Latin Public Charter School is eager to lease a former D.C. public school.
The top-performing charter school is spending $23 million to move into Rudolph Elementary, vacant since it was closed in 2008 under then-D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, said Martha Cutts, Washington Latin's head of school. While part of the cost comes from plans to add a gym, library and theater, the rest is the result of the school falling into disrepair while it sat empty.
"People had gotten in there and smashed glass and stolen copper piping. It was a mess," Cutts said.
Kristin Scotchmer, executive director of Mundo Verde Public Charter School, described a similar experience when she walked through the former J.F. Cook Elementary School, which also has been vacant since 2008. The two-year-old charter recently submitted a bid to lease the campus in Ward 5 from the city.
"There were holes in the walls, the sinks have been cracked or are falling off the walls, the bathrooms are completely unusable," Scotchmer said. The repairs are expected to cost $8.5 million.
DCPS's failure to turn vacated school buildings around quickly and make them available to charter schools has long been a criticism from charter school advocates.
Legally, the District is required to give charters the first shot at closed DCPS buildings. That doesn't usually happen, said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. "The government should be eager to get the charter schools in the building and should be eliminating a lot of the red tape."
Of the 30 underenrolled, underperforming schools closed since 2008, six are vacant, according to DCPS. Including the 15 schools closed before 2008, DCPS has three more still-vacant buildings. Of the 45 schools already closed, 23 are being used by DCPS or a public charter school. Others are being used by city agencies, and two have been torn down.
Last month, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced plans to close 15 more schools. Though she has said she plans to keep all 15 in DCPS's inventory, she hasn't announced plans for 10 of them.
Buildings are often kept in case the school system needs them while another school is being renovated, or in case enrollment increases, said DCPS spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz.
But numbers released this week show charter schools vastly outpacing DCPS's growth rate, educating 43 percent of the city's public school students this year.
"The mayor's hoarding buildings to protect DCPS against the charter growth," Cane said. Salmanowitz called that accusation "unfair."
Thomas Porter, director of real estate for the nonprofit Building Hope, which helps charters find buildings, said that while the city has been resistant to leasing to charters in the past, the process has improved.
"Do we get as many facilities as we need for charter schools when we want them? I don't think so, but I think DCPS still makes a pretty good effort to dispose of buildings when they're no longer needed."
The Washington Post
By Jennifer Howard
February 10, 2013
If you are, have been or might soon be the parent of a school-age child in Washington, you have an opinion about Michelle Rhee, who ran the city’s public schools from 2007 to 2010. In a town full of divisive personalities, Rhee polarized opinion more than any other public figure I can remember, with the exception of a handful of officials. (Here’s looking at you, Marion Barry.) Either you admire her do-whatever-it-takes attempts to overhaul a system that had become a national embarrassment, or you loathe her as a powermad, union-busting, school-closing dictator who trampled over teachers, parents and public servants.
I’m a Washingtonian with school-age children who are not currently enrolled in D.C. Public Schools. I watched, closely but from the sidelines, as Rhee set about the overhaul she describes in “Radical.” Her supporters and detractors could probably agree on one word to describe her: formidable. There’s no whiff of regret in “Radical.” By her reckoning, Rhee came in to do a difficult and politically dangerous job, and she did it the way she thought it needed to be done.
[For the complete article, visit link above.]
The New York Times
By Motoko Rich
February 9, 2013
As Congress contemplates rewriting No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education law, legislators will tussle over a vision of how the federal government should hold states and schools accountable for students’ academic progress.
At a Senate education committee hearing on Thursday to discusswaivers to states on some provisions of the law, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, forcefully urged the federal government to get out of the way.
“We only give you 10 percent of your money,” said Mr. Alexander, pressing John B. King Jr., the education commissioner for New York State. “Why do I have to come from the mountains of Tennessee to tell New York that’s good for you?”
Dr. King argued that the federal government needed to set “a few clear, bright-line parameters” to protect students, especially vulnerable groups among the poor, minorities and the disabled.
“It’s important to set the right floor around accountability,” Dr. King said.
Despite repeated efforts over the last five years, Congress has failed to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Act, the law that governs all public schools that receive federal financing. The No Child version, passed in 2001, provoked controversy by holding schools responsible for student performance on standardized tests, dubbing schools that do not meet targets failures and requiring strict interventions like the replacement of a school’s entire teaching staff.
Since early last year, the Obama administration has granted waivers to 34 states and the District of Columbia, relieving them from what many argued was the law’s most unrealistic goal: making all students proficient in math and reading by 2014. In exchange, the administration has demanded that the states raise curriculum standards and develop rigorous teacher evaluations tied in part to student performance on standardized tests.
Critics have argued that the Obama administration has been too prescriptive in these waiver requirements, and that a new education law should leave most decisions about schooling up to states and districts.
Dictating education policy from Washington can engender unintended consequences. At the Senate hearing, Education Secretary Arne Duncan noted that 19 states had “dummied down standards” under the No Child Left Behind law. Critics also say the law has compelled educators to teach to the tests and set off a spate of cheating scandals.
In addition, huge gaps remain between the performance of poor and minority children and more affluent and white children. And while some states have raised scores on reading and math tests, others have shown little progress.
“Even with the rigor of No Child Left Behind, the difference in improvement by the states is vast,” said John E. Chubb, the interim chief executive of Education Sectors, a nonpartisan policy group. “The federal government has not found the right tools as yet.”
In one respect, the Obama administration’s waivers have actually loosened federal pressure by allowing schools to show that students are improving over time rather than requiring that they all hit an absolute benchmark.
In testimony before the Senate committee, Mr. Duncan said the waivers encouraged states to experiment and use other measures of progress, like graduation rates.
“The federal government does not serve as a national school board,” Mr. Duncan said. “It never has, and it never should.”
Still, spurred by efforts to qualify for the waivers and the administration’s Race to the Top grant program, 31 states now require that teacher evaluations be based in part on growth in student achievement on standardized tests, according to the Education Commission of the States.
Critics have complained that the policies have exacerbated the reliance on test results.
“We’ve tried testing again and again, and it hasn’t worked,” said Jesse Hagopian, a teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle and a leader of a group of teachers who are boycotting a test typically given in January. “It doesn’t cultivate the type of thinking we need, and it doesn’t bring in the resources that we need to make students successful.”
Senator Alexander, who as governor of Tennessee helped push through an early version of performance-based pay for teachers partly linked to student test scores, said the current federal push threatened to create more opposition to testing.
“Many superintendents and schools think that they are being forced to bite off more than they can chew,” Mr. Alexander said in an interview on Friday. “There’s this view that somehow you become smarter and more compassionate about children and education if you buy an airplane ticket to Washington.”
The Senate education committee passed a bill in the fall of 2011, but it has not come up for a vote in the full Senate. The committee chairman, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, helped shepherd a bipartisan version that did not require schools to evaluate teachers based on test scores.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Harkin said he would support requiring such evaluations, as long as other measures, like principal observations or student surveys, were included. “We need some standards out there that are national in scope,” he said.
Mr. Harkin’s home state has so far failed to secure a federal waiver because it does not impose teacher evaluations on districts. Jason Glass, the director of the Iowa Education Department, said the Legislature was considering a bill that would permit such mandates. But, he said, “the criticisms that the federal government may be overreaching here in imposing this on states is a legitimate question.”
Some education officials say it is only fair that the federal government hold them accountable.
“We take taxpayer money and convert most of it into salaries and benefits,” said John E. Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. “The quid pro quo for that sacred trust is that we guarantee that we will graduate students college and career-force ready.”
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