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Violence and charter schools
By Kavith Cardoza
Friday, November 6, 2009

A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2007 almost 15 percent of high school students in the District had missed at least one day of school within the previous month because they felt unsafe in the building or in transit - that's the highest rate in the nation. Metropolitan Police Department officers patrol regular city schools, but not charter schools. And with more than a third of students now attending charter schools... that difference is starting to stand out. Kavitha Cardoza reports.

To listen to the story, click here: http://wamu.org/audio/mc/09/11/m1091106-29999.asx

The Current
LETTER: D.C. puts developers in front of students
By Sam Broeksmit
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The District has just issued a request to redevelop the Franklin School building on 13th and K streets NW. Wouldn’t you think the best use of the “school” is as a school? The District thinks not.

Earlier in the year, the District followed the letter of the law that requires surplus school buildings like this to first be offered to public charter schools. Two charter schools, including the one my child attends, worked hard and spent a lot of money to develop a proposal for Franklin, only to have it rejected because it did not include a large enough budget for renovations.

Yet our school was allowed to be in the building for only one hour and had no way to fully evaluate the property. The District withheld information from studies it had commissioned to estimate those renovation costs, and then officials used that information to reject the charter school proposals and declare them “nonviable.”

Now we are hearing that developers are being “begged” to bid.

This continues a disturbing trend of favoritism of developers over students, as evidenced by a similar fiasco over the rejection of charter school applications for the Grimke School at 10th Street and Vermont Avenue NW.

Shouldn’t schools be used as schools? Why should city tax dollars that fund charter schools be spent to buy private property when excess city school properties abound? Shouldn’t the city support students over developers? The law says they should. Their actions say they don’t.

Sam Broeksmit
Mount Pleasant

The Washington Examiner
Use schools for kids, not condominiums
By Robert Cane
Sunday, November 1, 2009

A wealthy developer vows to raise $1 million to fund a challenge to Mayor Adrian Fenty. Why? The word on the street is that the Florida-based real estate mogul is unhappy that Fenty did not take up his bid for the Stevens school building in Northwest D.C.

Nonetheless, the historic Stevens school building, once a beacon of hope for underprivileged District children, is now set to become home to luxury apartments and restaurants, the mayor’s office recently announced. The same fate also awaits Capitol Hill’s historic Hine Junior High school building, which will be converted into classy office space and high-end residential and retail units.

Stevens is named for Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. congressman for 13 years and chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War and the national hero who proposed the 14th Amendment that finally ended slavery.

Stevens also is a local hero. A devout believer in social justice, Stevens left $50,000 — more than $800,000 in today’s money — to establish the Thaddeus Stevens School at 1050 21st St., one of the first publicly funded schools for African-American children in the nation.

Why is D.C.’s government determined to turn buildings that have traditionally served the District’s most vulnerable children into fashionably converted space catering to the well off? To the shame of the Fenty administration, the reason is decidedly not because every D.C. child has a decent school building in which to learn.

In fact, thousands of District schoolchildren are without an adequate school building, uncomfortably located in warehouse, retail and office space, or church annexes and basements. Often their schools lack basics such as playgrounds, playing fields, gymnasiums, auditoriums and cafeterias.

The D.C. public school children being crammed into inappropriate industrial and temporary sites attend the increasingly high-performing charter schools. Meanwhile, the D.C. government is spending more than $2 billion on traditional city-run public schools.

This disparity does not arise because there are too few school buildings to go around. In fact, there are more than enough for all public charter schools and traditional public schools with room to spare. The city-run schools’ ever-declining enrollment led Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to empty out 24 school buildings last year. More closures are almost certainly on the way.

But, as with the Stevens school building, most of these properties are destined to fall into the hands of commercial real estate developers, destined to serve D.C.’s wealthier residents. Time and time again, charters are either not invited to bid for buildings or their bids are not seriously entertained.

The city government then offers the school buildings to developers who can offer a higher price. D.C. government has continued to do this despite passage of a 2004 law stating that charters have the right to make offers on buildings before developers can.

Public charter schools are a significant part of public education in the District, educating 38 percent of all public school students. Thousands of children are on waiting lists trying to get in, and some charters have nearly 30 applicants for every place.

The popularity of these charter schools is no surprise. They have excelled at educating students from low-income families. Charter middle and high school students in D.C. with a majority of economically disadvantaged children are nearly twice as likely to be proficient in reading and math as their peers in regular D.C. public schools.

Thousands of D.C.’s economically disadvantaged students grow up in neighborhoods in which one in two adults is functionally illiterate. In the proud tradition of Thaddeus Stevens, surely these at-risk children deserve school buildings more than developers.

Robert Cane is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, which promotes school reform in the
District of Columbia via high-quality public charter schools.

Washington Business Journal
D.C. ranks No. 2 on charter school list
By Jeff Clabaugh
Friday, October 30, 2009

More than a third of public school students in D.C. attend a charter school, ranking D.C. as No. 2 in the nation in terms of percentage of charter school students.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which released city-by-city data, says 36 percent of D.C.’s public school students were enrolled in a charter school in the ’08-’09 school year, up from 25 percent in the ’05-’06 school year. D.C. charter schools had 25,729 students, ranking the city sixth in the nation based on total number of students.

New Orleans ranks No. 1 based on percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, at 57 percent. Detroit was number three at 32 percent.

The rest of the 10 largest charter school cities are Kansas City, Mo.; Dayton; Youngstown, Ohio; St. Louis; Flint, Mich.; Gary, Ind.; Phoenix; and Minneapolis.

Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia are the top three based on total number of students attending charter schools.

On Wednesday morning, the students at Brent Elementary School on Capitol Hill gave class presentations about their firefighter, shark and princess costumes. In the afternoon, they paraded to a neighboring park to the applause of their parents.

But in between, they took part in much more serious business: a head count by independent auditors that will help determine whether D.C. schools have stanched decades of enrollment decline, a development that many believe would have deep importance as a marker of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's changes.

"We made a big push" to get students into classrooms Wednesday, said Brent Principal Cheryl Wilhoyte. "We had several parents with ill children call in and say, 'When do you need them?' " Officials at several other schools called homes the night before auditors did counts at their schools to remind students to show up.

The counts have big implications for the system. Enrollment in traditional D.C. public schools stood at 106,156 in 1979. Last year it was just 44,681. It has dropped every year in between, except for 1992, as parents moved to the suburbs or enrolled their children in charter schools.

Rhee is aiming to stop the bleeding, and this year she might have succeeded: Preliminary figures show that enrollment is up, to 45,322. But that number will be measured against the audit firm's count, which is being conducted, school by school, over the next few weeks.

The numbers at each school affect how many educators principals can hire, as well as how much money they have to spend on materials and the basics of teaching. Schools receive $8,945 to $11,629 per student in D.C. funds, depending on grade level, as well as additional federal dollars, most of which are determined by need. Under-enrolled schools risk being stripped of staff, as some were during layoffs earlier this month, or being shut down.

At Brent, enrollment has grown from 247 last year to 277 this year, according to preliminary numbers. Schools with enrollments of 250 or more get extra staff resources for amenities such as art, music and gym.

Wilhoyte, formerly superintendent of the Madison, Wis., public schools, said the waiting list of kids who wanted to get into the school swelled to 350 this year from 30 the previous year.

"It's come a long way," said Brent PTA President Daniel Holt, who has sent his children to the school for four years. Enrollment ballooned after a neighborhood group stepped in to spruce up the building and help the teachers. "It's a desirable school," he said.

Three auditors came to the school Wednesday. First they reviewed the school's attendance records. Then they counted the students -- twice by head, once by name -- and placed reading "I Count!" along with the child's name on each of their chests. Students who were asleep at nap time got the stickers on their backs.

"I want to make sure everyone gets a sticker, so when I call your name, just raise your hand, okay?" said Taleeya Green, one of the auditors from the firm Thompson Cobb Bazilio & Associates. Students who wanted to move the stickers to their sleeves, their eyes or the floor were gently corrected. Green said the stickers helped prevent double counts.

The final, audited results will come out in the first quarter of next year.

Educators from charter schools said it would be promising if D.C. public schools stabilized.

"That has to be considered a good sign," said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a charter advocacy organization. "We definitely do not look at the 45,000 kids [in traditional public schools] and say they could be charter students."

Cane has reason for celebration himself. According to an unaudited count announced this month, charter enrollments increased 9 percent from last year, to 27,953 students. That means about 38 percent of public school students in the city attend charter schools.

At Brent, efforts to boost enrollment and attendance seem to have succeeded. "Our parents completely mobilized," Wilhoyte said. If Rhee gets her way, more and more students will wear those stickers every year.

Today’s educators, in ways that weren’t always true in the recent past, believe that young minds and bodies need the proper “fuel” to stay sharp and ensure optimal performance. Recent studies have shown that proper nutrition improves learning and memory in school children. Today, not all learning institutions in the District understand the connection between nutrition and education.

D.C. Prep Academy Public Charter School in Northeast does.

The school offers students healthy meals through Revolution Foods, which specializes in offering organic foods to children, and focuses on wellness through activities such as physical education and educating the children about nutrition.

No surprise, then, that on Tue., Oct. 13, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose D.C. Prep to commemorate National School Lunch Week and launch the Department of Education’s Fueled and Fit: Ready to Learn campaign.

In addition to the Secretary, Jozy Altidore and Oguchi Onyewukey, members of the U.S. Men¹s National Soccer Team, joined a D.C. Prep physical education class for a brief, but epic, soccer matchup. The contest ended in a tie.

Faculty and students were proud of their hard work and accomplishments and pleased to be recognized by President Barack Obama’s cabinet member for education. One teacher commented that the visit by Secretary Duncan meant so much to the children because his praise was tangible evidence that what they were doing mattered.

As a result of years of hard work by the school’s founder, Emily Lawson, faculty and children, students at the D.C. Prep Middle School have posted some of the best academic results of any public school in the city.

D.C. Prep's Edgewood Middle School Campus has closed the achievement gap between Black and White students by a remarkable 50 percent. Its students have exceeded the District of Columbia’s average in standardized public school tests by 18 percent in reading and 20 percent in math.

More than 95 percent of D.C. Prep¹s students are African American and about three in four qualify for free or subsidized school lunch. D.C. Prep’s middle school’s economically disadvantaged children have been particularly successful. They are nearly twice as likely to be proficient in math and reading as their peers in regular public schools.

Now completing its sixth year, D.C. Prep has built an outstanding early childhood, elementary and middle school program and demonstrated uncommon success in student achievement, parent satisfaction and organizational development. With its dual focus on rigorous academics and character development, D.C. Prep is ensuring that its graduates have the skills, knowledge and attitudes necessary for success in competitive high schools and college.

D.C. Prep's third campus opened in August 2008. In its inaugural year, the school enrolled preschool and prekindergarten students and will "grow up" a grade each year until eighth grade.

In June 2009, D.C. Prep graduated its third eighth grade class. One hundred percent of these students were accepted at independent, parochial, selective public and charter schools where the rigor, culture and focus are on college matriculation.

Over the next decade, D.C. Prep wants to expand to 10 schools, bringing a high-quality public education to thousands of preschool, elementary and middle school children in the District’s historically under-served neighborhoods. If these plans are realized, it’s estimated that D.C. Prep will enroll 10 percent of public school students in Wards 5 through 8.

The D.C. Prep elementary and middle schools Duncan visited are located in renovated warehouse space, a feature common among many D.C. charters as a result of the city government’s preference for selling unused school buildings to developers.

D.C. Prep is just one member of the city’s thriving public charter school movement, which has helped facilitate citywide improvement in academic achievement.

A recent poll, commissioned by a number of school reform organizations, found that the District’s registered voters placed a high degree of confidence in charters: 74 percent approved of charters. Seventy-six percent rated the D.C. public school system as either “poor” or “fair.”

Reflecting the poll results, enrollment in D.C.’s public charter schools, which are tuition-free and non-selective like regular public schools ,continues to grow. On the same day as Duncan’s visit to D.C. Prep, the Public Charter School Board announced that the current public charter school student population, in 56 schools nearly 90 campuses, increased to nearly 28,000, ¬ approximately 38 percent of the total public school enrollment in the District.

The fate of the District’s charter school students seems bright as they prepare for their future. But, in the meantime, they’re anxiously awaiting the lunch bell.

Barbara High is the Senior Community Organizer at Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, and is a longtime D.C. parent, school and community activist, including with the Hyde Public Charter School in Northeast D.C.