- Study shows significant midyear turnover among D.C. students
- More questions about D.C. student mobility
- D.C. bill to crack down on truants' parents faces opposition
- Smart Cities: Strong Charters Will Soon Serve Half of DC Students [FOCUS, SEED, Maya Angelou, Cesar Chavez, Scholar Academies, E.L. Haynes, KIPP DC, DC Prep, Basis DC, Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, Paul Public Charter School, Two Rivers, DC International, K12 Flex, Connections Nexus Academy, Rocketship, Green Dot, and Friendship PCS mentioned]
- D.C.'s Doing Something Right: Number of Kids in D.C. Public Schools Keeps Rising
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 12, 2013
Thousands of students move in and out of the District’s traditional and charter schools during the middle of the academic year, according to a new report scheduled for release Tuesday, a significant level of student transfer that raises broad questions about how the city’s public education is delivered and funded.
The report, from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, analyzes the movement of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade during the 2011-12 school year.
More than 6,200 students left traditional and charter schools between October 2011 and June 2012 and didn’t re-enroll in any D.C. public school, according to the report. Officials said they don’t know where those children went: They might have dropped out, moved to another jurisdiction, entered a private school or started home schooling.
Another 4,600 students entered city schools, also from points unknown. Most of them enrolled in traditional schools, which saw a net gain of 338 children over the course of the year. Fewer enrolled in charters during the year, which posted a net loss of nearly 2,000 students. The numbers exclude adult students and students with disabilities who use public funds to attend private schools.
“This almost looks like our admissions are rolling,” said Jeffrey Noel, OSSE’s director of data management, who helped produce the report based on a citywide database that records student enrollments and withdrawals. “Do we have education programs that are designed for this amount of monthly exit and entrance?”
The report shows that students shuttle from charter to traditional schools and, on a much larger scale, enter and sometimes leave city schools entirely. The level of churn noted in the report highlights the system’s complex funding concerns and quirks, which critics say send millions more in taxpayer dollars to both charter and traditional schools than either should get.
Charter schools are funded based on the number of students enrolled each year on Oct. 5. The per-pupil payment could range from about $9,000 to about $44,000, depending on the child’s grade level and special needs.
A charter’s funding remains the same no matter how many students it gains or loses after Oct. 5. Even though charters lost nearly 2,000 students during the 2011-12 school year, the schools continued receiving tax dollars as if those students never left.
The traditional school system is funded based on enrollment projections that officials publish each spring for the following fall. Those projections are routinely higher than actual Oct. 5 enrollment, which means the school system regularly receives millions of dollars more than it would if it received funding only for students enrolled on that date.
Officials have long argued that they use the additional funds to accommodate students who enter midyear. In the 2011-12 school year, the school system projected about 2,000 more students than it officially enrolled. The OSSE study shows that while thousands of students did enter the school system during that year, thousands more exited — and the system saw a net increase of fewer than 400 students.
D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson said internal school system numbers show a larger increase in students. She said OSSE’s report identifies key questions about funding and student movement that she and other leaders — whom the mayor has tasked with developing a comprehensive plan for the future of D.C. education — should discuss.
“This identifies some important areas that we need to dig deeper into,” Henderson said. “It begins a conversation that to date has just been driven on anecdotes and provides some supporting data.”
Federal officials don’t collect comparable mobility data nationwide, but the proportion of students entering and exiting D.C. public education is about 50 percent higher than in Fairfax County. Studies have found that students who move between schools frequently are more likely to struggle and drop out than students with more stable academic careers.
“The level of mobility in this city is far higher than I think any of us imagined,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “We need to understand better who those students are and why they’re moving.”
Pearson said the report “bursts a number of myths about charters,” including the perception that charters push out large numbers of difficult students midyear, sending them into the traditional school system, which is required to take them. In 2011-12, 561 students — less than 2 percent of total charter enrollment — moved to traditional schools between October and June.
Still, that’s more than the 44 students who moved from the traditional school system into a charter school in the middle of the year.
OSSE’s report does not show how student movement varies by grade level or by school; it also doesn’t say how many students are moving from one traditional school to another, or from one charter to another. Officials said they have not completed that analysis.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 12, 2013
Thousands of kids are moving in and out of D.C. schools mid-year, according to animportant study released today by the District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
The report is the first of its kind in recent memory in the District, where there have been more rumors about student movement — especially between charter and traditional schools — than data.
My story in today’s newspaper touched on some of the questions the study raises. Here are some more that I couldn’t shoehorn into print, but are still worth noting:
Where are all those kids coming from, and where are they going?
More than 6,200 kids left charter and traditional schools during the 2011-12 school year. Another 4,600 kids entered city schools. During summer 2012, thousands more kids streamed in and out of the District.
No one knows for sure where those kids are coming from or where they go when they leave. They might have entered a private school or started home schooling; they also may have dropped out or moved to a school in Maryland or Virginia.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and D.C. Public Charter School Board Executive Director Scott Pearson both said we have to know more about these students, especially if we want to stem the dropout rate.
The numbers that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education compiled come from a citywide database of student information that shows enrollments in and withdrawals from D.C. public schools. The database doesn’t see beyond the District’s borders, nor into any private schools.
OSSE officials said they are pursuing data-sharing agreements with neighboring jurisdictions to better understand students who move across state lines.
Who is responsible for whether kids keep learning when they move mid-year?
A child who moves schools mid-year is often invisible, at least in terms of publicly reported standardized test results.
Every child who takes a test in the spring gets his individual scores back. But a student’s scores aren’t included in a school’s results unless that student has been enrolled for a full academic year — i.e., he was enrolled on Oct. 5 and was still enrolled in the same building when tests were administered in the spring.
A student who moves into the city mid-year from elsewhere will, similarly, not show up in the citywide results reported each summer, nor in sector-wide results for DCPS and charters.
It makes sense that schools shouldn’t be held accountable for kids they only taught for a few months. It’s also true that teachers — at least teachers I know — are motivated by far more than their kids’ standardized test results.
But in an educational world that increasingly relies on test scores to judge schools and teachers, the District’s mobility study raises questions about who is responsible for the achievement of mobile kids — especially those kids who switch schools most frequently, and might be among the neediest kids in their classroom.
When are students most likely to leave schools?
OSSE officials say they are confident in the overall picture of mobility that their study presents, but they caution that the monthly entrance/exit figures should be taken with a grain of salt.
That’s because changes show up when they were recorded by schools in the computer system, not when they happened in real life. So a student may have withdrawn in November, but that exit might not show up in OSSE’s report until January because of a record-keeping delay.
That quirk may be especially important in interpreting charter school exits.
Charters show a bump in exits in March and April, a fact that critics might say proves that they are “dumping” kids before standardized tests in the spring.
Pearson said he’s seen no evidence of that. He took the helm in January 2012 and soon thereafter, his new staff began a concerted push to get schools to clean up their enrollment books. The spring bump is an artifact of that push, he said, but many of the students had actually withdrawn from their schools earlier in the year.
Pearson also pointed out that the data shows that charters accepted more than 1,500 students during the school year. That contradicts popular wisdom, he said, which holds that charters refuse to take new kids after Oct. 5 — after which charters’ funding levels are locked in no matter how many students they gain or lose.
The Washington Examiner
Eric P. Newcomer
February 11, 2013
A public hearing Tuesday on a D.C. Council bill that would allow the city to lock up the parents of the city's worst truants will feature opposition from child advocacy groups and parents who see the bill as well-intentioned but flawed.
To avoid potential jail time, the bill would allow parents to indicate that they were unable to get their children to attend school, allowing the District to appoint government monitors to step in and try to get students to go to classes.
The bill would expand existing law to include children between 5 and 17 years old. Current law already allows the District to fine parents up to $500 and to jail them for two days if their children miss two days of school.
Councilman David Catania, who is a chief sponsor of the bill, said that he was not aware of any incarcerations based on the current law.
The proposal under discussion Tuesday would amend current law and give the city a better ability to enforce it, Catania said.
The new proposal -- which would set at 20 the number of unexcused absences in a year before the state can take legal action -- will likely draw criticism Tuesday from child advocates.
Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children's Law Center, said she plans to propose exceptions to the law during her testimony on Tuesday.
"A lot of kids have been failed by the school system and that's why they're not going to the school," she said, citing undiagnosed mental illness as one of many explanations. "Kids are truant for a really wide variety of reasons."
Before sending parents to jail, courts could require first-time offenders to attend parenting classes or carry out community service at their child's school, according to the bill.
Marc Smith, a parent at Capitol Hill Cluster School who is testifying on Tuesday, said he has major concerns about the bill, calling it "well-intentioned but very flawed." In particular, he is worried about forcing delinquent parents to do community service in schools.
"A school isn't exactly the place where you want someone serving a court-ordered sanction," he said.
Smart Cities: Strong Charters Will Soon Serve Half of DC Students [FOCUS, SEED, Maya Angelou, Cesar Chavez, Scholar Academies, E.L. Haynes, KIPP DC, DC Prep, Basis DC, Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, Paul Public Charter School, Two Rivers, DC International, K12 Flex, Connections Nexus Academy, Rocketship, Green Dot, and Friendship PCS mentioned]
Education Week
By Tom Vander Ark
February 10, 2013
"After a lifetime here, I find it hard to believe how much experiments, excitement, progress and change are taking place in Washington," said a veteran D.C. education reformer. "Just five years ago, the DC Public Schools were the worst performing public school system in the U.S. and...On the two NAPE tests since, we showed considerable improvement."
What happened? A combination of great charters, college scholarships, and tough reforms:
• Charters. A handful of charters (SEED, Maya Angelou, Cesar Chavez, Friendship) launched in after the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB) were formed in 1996. FocusDC summarizes the remarkable growth, "public charter schools now educate 43 percent of public school children in Washington, D.C.--a higher share than any other big city except New Orleans...over 35,000 students are enrolled at over 100 campuses." Because charters aregrowing at a 10 percent rate and DCPS enrollment is flat, they'll soon serve half of the student population.
• Scholarships. Don Graham launched DC-CAP in 1998 and Bob Craves launched DC College Success Foundation in 2004 (with a lot of help from Jim Shelton and the Gates Foundation) capitalizing on the DC-TAG law, which allows them to go to state universities with a federal scholarship for some of the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. Pre-DC TAG, about 700 students were headed to college. Last year almost 2,000 enrolled in a 2 or 4-year college.
• Reform. Michelle Rhee ran the school system for three-plus years. She blew up many established patterns and focused attention on learning outcomes. When Michelle's sponsor, Adrian Fenty, lost an election she was succeeded by her deputy Kaya Henderson. Her team remained in place and her priorities too.
"The combination of high school college counselors and industrial grade financial aid seems to be changing D.C. into a real college preparatory school district," said Bob Craves, one of the Costco founders who has devoted himself to running scholarship programs in Washington D.C. and Washington State. "The six high schools and middle schools in the toughest part of town, Wards 7 and 8, have transformed in the past five years to a culture of college awareness, preparation and with the help of college counselors, execution of a plan to research, plan and apply for college."
Despite the progress, D.C. has the nation's highest proportion of 4th and 8th graders in the "below basic" category--and the lowest in proficient/advanced.
District Blends. DCPS is a member of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools, a network of two dozen forward leaning districts.
DCPS brought the team that developed School of One to Hart Middle School. Washington Postsaid, "It cost $1 million to bring Teach to One to a single classroom at Hart this year, including $600,000 from D.C. Public Schools' central office for renovations, and $400,000 in donations from the CityBridge Foundation and the D.C. Public Education Fund." Chancellor Kaya Henderson said "If it works like we think it will, it'll be a game-changer." Jason Tomassini, Digital Promise has agreat trip report.
Kramer Middle School has a home-grown classroom rotation model in partnership with Florida Virtual School.
Elementary school students in many schools are using TeacherMate, a reading intervention program on iPod Touch devices. They can work with online volunteer tutors who work with them on reading fluency and comprehension. "DCPS schools have access to a suite of high-quality online math content aligned to the Common Core. Schools are at various points along a spectrum of blended learning, and are benefiting from the focus on student data; differentiated, small-group instruction; expansion of student learning beyond the classroom; and greater student engagement through use of technology," according to the district.
Scholar Academies , based in Philadelphia, has two D.C. campuses, a turnaround and a startup. Tomassini reports that Scholar "uses a variety of technology, including interactive whiteboards, laptops, iPads, and content from providers like DreamBox Learning and ST Math."
DCPS has by far the highest private placement of special ed students. To address this expensive solution, AdvancePath supported the development of a successful blended district special education program that saved the district a lot of money and graduated 35 students last year but it was closed in a vortex of convoluted district politics (I'm on the AdvancePath board).
More Great Charters. D.C. is home to some great charter schools. Friendship Public Charter Schools operates six charters and five turnaround schools in Baltimore and D.C. including Collegiate Academy and Tech Prep which feature AP classes, Computer Science, and football.
D.C. has some extraordinary school leaders like Jennie Niles, a force of nature at the blended, competency-based E.L. Haynes Public Charter School where she has created an incredible culture of innovation resulting in development of learning content platform LearnZillion, information platform SchoolForce and Capital Teaching Residency, a yearlong training program formed with KIPP that recently won a $10 million RTTD grant.
KIPP DC has three K-8 campuses and a high school featuring KIPP Through College, which helps students not only get into a four-year college but graduate within 6 years. Their first class graduates this year.
DC Prep currently serves 1,100 students on three campuses and will open four more schools.
SEED Foundation runs a residential charter--something every urban area should have.
BASIS DC is a new secondary school import from the nationally ranked Arizona college prep network.
Local observers are "totally impressed by Inspired Teaching Demonstration Public Charter School and Two Rivers Public Charter School, both of which just do their own thing--focusing on expeditionary learning and "whole child" education."
The most interesting school development news is the plan for DC International, a 6-12 IB school to be located on the Walter Reed campus and created by four language immersion elementary schools.
Paul Public Charter School, the only conversation charter, is expanding to a global high school.
Ingenuity Prep Public Charter School , a blended school set to open in Fall. It is one of four founding members of a national network of charter school organizations that will create an Opportunity Culture for teachers and extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students.
Green Dot is submitting an "experienced charter operator" application on March 1.
K12 Flex , Connections' Nexus Academy, and Rocketship have applications for blended learning charter schools (PCSB decision scheduled for 2/25). K12 supports an online K-8 school, Community Academy Public Charter School.
The high school graduation rate for D.C. public charter schools is 18 percentage points higher than DCPS despite higher levels of poverty. D.C. charter boards benefit from recruiting and training fromCharter Board Partners (see more on why I support them).
Center for Education Reform ranks D.C. first in the nation for its charter law. D.C. gets a high B rating on the Brookings Education Choice and Competition Index because of all the great charters and the small but controversial voucher program, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship.
Human Capital. There are 350 Teach For America corps members in D.C.--one in five low-income kids are taught by TFA members. There are more than 1,600 alumni in the area including 13 school system leaders, 33 school leaders and five elected officials.
Education Pioneers has 68 Fellows in the D.C. Metro Area working at more than 35 partner organizations. There are 200 alumni in the area and about 70% have finished graduate school and are working in education.
CityBridge Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund launched an Education Innovation Fellowship, a competitive one year fellowship that introduces a cohort of Washington, D.C.'s strongest teachers to the most promising innovations in blended learning. (See Don Soifer'ssummary.) Every metro area needs a teacher fellowship program like this!
Impact Orgs. Metro D.C. is home to dozens of national impact organizations including:
• American Institutes for Research: giant testing and research firm.
• Communities In Schools and America's Promise Alliance: building a web of youth and family supports for student success.
• Editorial Projects in Education (EPE): the publisher of EdWeek.
Catalog for Philanthropy features another dozen impact orgs serving students and families.
Katherine Bradley's CityBridge Foundation has been generous and innovative. Mario Morino chairs theVenture Philanthropy Partnership which supports charter schools, youth and family services. The DC Public Education Fund is also devoting a good bit of time and energy here. It's hard to raise local donations because there are not many foundations in town. Some national education philanthropies invest in D.C. because the projects gain national visibility.
The Philanthropy Roundtable is a D.C. based group that informs and convenes forward-leaning foundations. Council on Foundations is broad focused membership organization.
DC School Reform Now is a local advocacy group pushing talent, options, and equitable allocations.
Tomorrow we'll review all the national advocacy groups in D.C. and illustrate how the nation's capital is the center of the known universe for online learning.
Education Week
By Sara Mead
February 7, 2013
Exciting news for District of Columbia residents: Enrollment in D.C. public schools (both public and charter) rose 5% for 2012-13, the fourth consecutive year of enrollment gains following a long period of declining enrollments. D.C. school enrollment is now at the highest level in 20 years. Both DCPS and charter schools experienced increased enrollment.
Increasing public school enrollment in D.C. is good news for several reasons: First, it suggests that efforts to improve the quality of education in D.C.--through both DCPS reforms and the growth of quality charter options--are making the District's public schools more attractive to families. For many years, D.C.'s public schools were so bad that any parents that could moved their kids to the suburbs or private schools. The fact that more families are choosing to stay suggests that recent efforts to improve DC school options are paying off. Second, and more fundamentally, the last few years of enrollment results show that education in D.C. doesn't have to be seen as a zero-sum game in which charter school enrollment gains are DCPS' loss. If the District's public schools as a whole are becoming more attractive to families, both DCPS and charters can grow at the same time. That's the best possible outcome for D.C. families, and that's what appears to be happening.
Finally, increasing the number of kids enrolled in all of the District's public schools is critical because a sustainable future for the District requires that D.C. be not just a city that appeals to single and childless professionals. A thriving D.C. must also be a place that attracts and retains those folks after they marry and have kids, and, equally important, offers quality schools that enable kids from low-income and working-class families in the District to grow up into successful and productive adults. Over the past decade, rising gas prices, falling crime rates, and changes in social norms have made urban areas much more attractive places for Americans across the demographic and economic spectrum, but the poor quality of schools in many urban cities remains a major obstacle to the long-term urban renaissance. D.C.'s future as a world class city depends on continuing to improve the quality of our public schools for all kids.
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