THE CURRENT
Local schools enjoy boost on spring DC-CAS scores
Jessica Gould
August 19, 2009

D.C. Public Schools and public
charter school students increased
their overall test scores by three
points in math and six points in
reading, according to the 2009 DC
Comprehensive Assessment System
results that the Office of the State
Superintendent of Education
released last week. The D.C. Public
Schools central office had released a
preliminary version of the citywide
data in July.

For D.C. Public Schools students,
the biggest jump came in elementary
school math, where 49 percent of
students tested proficient,
compared with 40 percent last year.

Forty-nine percent of elementary
school students are proficient in
reading, up from 46 percent last
year.

Test scores for secondary school
students also increased, but less dramatically.
Forty-one percent of secondary
school students are proficient
in reading, a slight increase
over last year’s 39 percent. And 40
percent of secondary school students
are proficient in math, compared
with 37 percent last year.

Charter schools, on the other
hand, showed the largest gains in
secondary school, where 53 percent
of students were proficient in reading,
up from 47 percent in 2008.
Fifty-seven percent were proficient
in math, compared with 48 percent
the year before.

Elementary-level charter school
students advanced slightly in reading,
from 45 percent in 2008 to 46
percent this year, and stayed about
the same, at 42 percent proficiency
in math, from 2008 to 2009.
The newly released numbers also
give insight into individual schools’
performances — showing dramatic
gains among a handful of Northwest
schools.

Specifically, Barnard, Eaton,
Marie Reed, Ross, Shepherd and
Stoddert elementary schools
showed double-digit increases in
reading and math proficiency over
last year’s scores. Wilson High
School’s scores also increased significantly.
According to Ross Elementary
principal Amanda Alexander, the
test scores are the highest they have
ever been at the Dupont Circle
school, where 77 percent of students
tested proficient in reading and 70
percent tested proficient in math.

She said an infusion of “time and
attention” into teaching practices
and student achievement led to the
improvements. In addition to making
frequent visits to classrooms,
Alexander said she also circulated
articles and books about pedagogy
to teachers.

At Cleveland Park’s Eaton
Elementary, 64 percent of the students
were proficient in math in
2008. This year, 80 percent tested
proficient. Reading scores also
increased, from 74 percent in 2008
to 86 percent in 2009.
Eaton principal Jacqueline
Gartrell said she is “thrilled” with
the scores and met with teachers on
Monday to discuss them.
Gartrell said weekly meetings for
teachers in each grade, ongoing professional
development and scrutiny
of data throughout the year contributed
to the gains.“I think it was a joint effort,” she
said. Gartrell commended Eaton’s
“really committed” staff and dedicated
“instructional supervisor” for
their efforts.

In Tenleytown, Wilson High
School principal Pete Cahall
emphasized that he is “pleased but
not satisfied” with the test scores.
In 2009, 72 percent of Wilson
students hit the proficiency target in
reading, more than the 62 percent
who met the mark last year. Sixtyseven
percent scored proficient in
math, compared with 60 percent in
2008.

Cahall said teachers worked hard
to prepare students for the kinds of
responses required for the test and
monitored test scores throughout the
year to keep tabs on their progress.
In addition, Cahall said, he
strongly encouraged teachers to
strengthen their relationships with
students, and he did the same. “I
wrote five personal notes to kids
every day,” he said. “Anything I
could grab on to, to give feedback.”
On Monday, he met with teachers
and ticked off a list of “celebrations,”
such as the results showing
that all “subgroups” advanced their
scores in reading.

Asian students showed a 25-
point increase, Hispanic students
showed a 14-point increase, English
language learners showed a 30-
point increase, and special education
students showed a 12-point
increase.

In math, African-American and
Hispanic students increased their
proficiency rates by 10 percent,
while students who qualify for a free
and reduced lunch increased their
proficiency by 4 percent.

But Cahall said Wilson still has
plenty of room for improvement, so
that all students are achieving, and
achieving equally.
For example, only 58 percent of
African-American students are proficient
in reading, and 53 percent in
math. Seventy percent of Hispanic
students are proficient in reading,
and 64 percent in math. Sixty-nine
percent of Asian students are proficient
in reading, and 77 percent in
math. Meanwhile, 94 percent of
white students are proficient in reading,
and 85 percent in math.

Cahall said he plans to use the
test scores as a launching pad for a
wide array of improvements. “What
we need to do is drill down to the
individual student,” he said. But
“eventually it all goes back to the
DC-CAS.”

For Oyster-Adams Bilingual
School principal Monica Liang-
Aguirre, the 2009 scores were also a
mixed bag.

For years, the school — with
campuses in Woodley Park and
Adams Morgan — has been a jewel
of the D.C. Public Schools system.
And the 2009 scores remain strong,
with 77 percent proficiency in reading
and 73 in math.
But for the past two years,
Oyster-Adams has failed to make
adequate yearly progress under No
Child Left Behind.

Last year, the school failed to
meet the benchmark because it did
not show adequate results among
two subgroups: English language
learners and students from lowerincome
families.

So, Liang-Aguirre said, teachers
worked hard to improve those
scores, and succeeded. Both subgroups
made adequate yearly
progress this year. “We were very,
very happy,” she said.
But this year, the school did not
meet adequate yearly progress for
special education students. Of the
25 students tested, only 16 percent
were proficient in reading, and 20
percent were proficient in math.
“They did not do well at all,”
Liang-Aguirre said.

This is the first year the school
has identified enough special-education
students for their scores to be
disaggregated separately, she said.
And with no baseline data from previous
tests for comparison, the
school was unable to make “safe
harbor” — an alternative to adequate
yearly progress for schools
that show a 10 percent reduction in
the number of students who are not
proficient.

Liang-Aguirre tried to appeal the
decision to the Office of the State
Superintendent of Education, but
upon closer review of the data, the
agency determined that the school
still did not make adequate progress.
Therefore, the school is now in
its first year of mandatory improvement
under No Child Left Behind.

According to Jennie Niles,
“there’s no magic bullet” when it
comes to enhancing student
achievement. Niles is the founder of
E.L. Haynes, a charter school in
Petworth where 80 percent of elementary
school students scored proficient
in math, and 66 percent
scored proficient in reading. The
school is in the second year of
mandatory improvement, having
missed the proficiency threshold in
reading among its special education
students.

“There’s nothing we do that any
school couldn’t do,” Niles said.

The Washington Informer
Revamped Curriculums Come to D.C. Public Schools
By Norma Porter
06 August 2009

D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced on Tue., July 28 that
13 public schools will introduce specialty programs that include science and
technology, arts and world cultures into their curriculums. The Chancellor
made the announcement at Malcolm X Elementary School in Southeast.

Flanked by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), Rhee said that she is broadening the
³portfolio² of schools by establishing special programs that often attract
families to charter and private schools.

³We want to offer the type of programs and initiatives in our DCPS schools
that first and foremost engage our students in learning, but second, really
excite, inspire, and compel our families and parents to want to send their
children to our schools,² Rhee said.

³This is what is so compelling about a lot of the private and charter
schools in the city and there¹s no reason why we can¹t provide those kinds
of programs within DCPS.²

In the last decade, enrollment in District public schools has declined as
parents opted, instead, to send their children to charter and private
schools. Last year, DCPS enrollment was slightly more than 47,000, Rhee
said, but this year she predicts that the enrollment number will be closer
to 45,000.

All 120 public schools were invited to submit applications for the D.C.
Catalyst Project. The application process required that parents, community
members and principals form teams and submit proposals detailing how the
school would integrate one of the themes in its restructuring plan.

Malcolm X Elementary School Principal Darwin Bobbitt, said his school
submitted a proposal for the science, technology, engineering and
mathematics (STEM) theme because the program was aligned with his goals for
the school and its students.

³We have been getting a lot of donations from private companies and trying
to get more computers and smart boards in our classrooms,² Bobbitt said.

³We want to give our children the opportunity to be on top of everyone else
in D.C. and the United States as far as technology, math and science. A lot
of our kids have a lot of potential, despite where they are from, and we
don¹t use that as an excuse. We really try to have them leaving out of here
prepared for the 21st Century.²

Residents in the Congress Heights community of Ward 8 said that they are
hopeful that a new science program might draw families back to Malcolm X
Elementary.

Robin McKinney, a DCPS bus driver and single mother of seven, said she has
raised all of her children in Congress Heights, but she, like many other
parents who live in the neighborhood, refused to send her children to
Malcolm X Elementary because of its reputation for low academic standards.
Instead, McKinney, 35, said she sent her children to Center City Public
Charter School, formerly known as Assumption Catholic School, in Northeast.

³None of my children ever attended Malcolm X Elementary School because the
criterion, as far as education, was very, very low. A lot of children in
this area don¹t attend the school. ?Many of the parents who live here will
bus their children to a charter school out of the area before they send them
to Malcolm X,² McKinney said.

³[However], with all of this new technology coming to the school, maybe this
will draw people in the community back to Malcolm X,² she said.

Parents, like McKinney, have noted the limited academic opportunities for
their children in DCPS and have enrolled their children in public charter
schools. DCPS enrollment has been significantly affected by the successful
charter school movement.

The new catalyst schools initiative is yet another effort to provide
challenging programs to parents in the hopes of bringing District students
back to the public school system.

Rhee said DCPS wants to expand programs offered at some of the most popular
schools sought after in the out-of-boundary application process, such as
Lafayette Elementary and Hardy Middle Schools in Northwest, that have arts
integrated curriculums, through the Catalyst School Project.

³Part of our theory is that we need to expand the number of schools who have
those kinds of compelling programs in them and this Catalyst School
Initiative is our attempt to make sure that we are growing those programs,²
Rhee said.

³We believe that every neighborhood school across the District should offer
incredibly compelling program and initiatives in it and this is a start in
that direction.²

STEM-themed schools will include Malcolm X Elementary School in Ward 8
(Southeast), Beers Elementary School in Ward 7 (Southeast), Burroughs
Education Campus in Ward 5 (Northeast), Emery Education Campus in Ward 5
(Northeast), Langdon Elementary School in Ward 5 (Northeast) and Whittier
Education Campus in Ward 4 (Northwest).

Arts-integrated themed based schools will include Ludlow-Taylor Elementary
School in Ward 6 (Northeast), Sousa Middle School in Ward 7 (Southeast),
Takoma Educational Campus Preschool in Ward 4 (Northwest) and Tyler
Elementary School in Ward 6 (Southeast).

World cultures theme-based catalyst schools will include the Columbia
Heights Education Campus in Ward 1 (Northwest), Eaton Elementary School in
Ward 3 (Northwest), and Payne Elementary School in Ward 6 (Northeast).

The upcoming academic year will be a planning year, Rhee said, but the
schools will begin to launch their respective themes into their curriculums.
The first three years of the catalyst project will be funded by the Philip
L. Graham Fund, the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation and the City Bridge
Foundation.

THE WASHINGTON  POST
A D.C. Schools Awakening
Hired Agents for Change Face Daunting Tasks In Turning Around Coolidge, Dunbar Highs
By Bill Turque
Sunday, August 2, 2009

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls it "the toughest work in urban education today" -- fixing neighborhood high schools filled with students who have languished in failing elementary and middle schools.

Ten of the District's 15 high schools are in some form of federally mandated restructuring under the No Child Left Behind Act because of persistent failure to meet annual achievement benchmarks on standardized tests. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is looking to outside organizations for help in turning them around.

This summer, Friends of Bedford, which operates a Brooklyn public high school that has become New York City's most successful, has taken control of Coolidge and Dunbar senior high schools. Friendship Public Charter Schools, which serves about 4,000 students on six D.C. campuses, is running Anacostia Senior High School.

Rhee has also started discussions with Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Schools, which operates Locke Senior High School in Los Angeles, one of the city's largest and most troubled schools, about working in the District. Barr recently toured Eastern High School on Capitol Hill, although District officials said discussions are in an extremely preliminary stage.

Anacostia, Coolidge and Dunbar are all stark examples of the challenge Duncan describes, places where scholarship and discipline flicker weakly at best. Fewer than a third of students read and write proficiently, according to citywide tests. A 2008 review of Dunbar by District officials said, "Evidence of effective teaching and learning was limited to a few individual teachers." On a single day in November, 19 girls were arrested for fighting.
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At Anacostia, where last fall five students were injured, including three with stab wounds, after a melee, District evaluators were told by a student focus group that teachers "make it easy" for them to pass. Coolidge classes were "consistently interrupted by students coming in and out . . . oftentimes to look for friends," according to a 2008 review.

Of the remedies available under No Child Left Behind -- which include wholesale replacement of teachers and administrators and even conversion to a charter school -- outside partnerships are among the least popular. Deep-pocketed players, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the for-profit Edison Project, have spent enormous sums trying to reimagine the American high school but have achieved mixed results at best.

Experts say one of the lessons learned is that starting a school from scratch is usually easier than taking control of an existing one, where political feuds, bureaucratic inertia and scar tissue from past reform attempts can make change difficult.

"You have to work against a prevailing culture that is a failed culture," said Thomas Toch, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington and an expert on school takeovers. "That's very hard to do if you can't bring your own people in and hit the refresh button."

Friendship and Friends of Bedford will face that challenge at Anacostia, Dunbar and Coolidge. Although they have autonomy on matters of curriculum, instruction and teacher professional development, the schools' staff members will remain school system employees, subject to District laws and union rules.

Rhee selected the two organizations in 2008 and gave them a year to plan the transition. Details are closely held. Neither Rhee nor Justin Cohen, her deputy in charge of the partnership program, would agree to an interview. Requests for copies of quarterly progress reports and evaluations were also denied.

Dunbar PTSA President Leon Braddell, who helped select Friends of Bedford and watched it prepare for the takeover, is optimistic.
"There will be some resistance," he said. "But you can't look at the test scores and say that the status quo is okay."

In a statement, Rhee spokeswoman Jennifer Calloway said, "Over the next three years DCPS expects to see significant increases in student achievement, with dramatic improvements in instructional rigor, school culture and climate and student engagement."

The reluctance of city officials to share some types of information might be linked to the problems Friendship has run into at Anacostia, where the charter group was not the first choice of community members who were consulted on possible partners.

"Nobody actually knows what they're doing," said Marvin Tucker, an Anacostia parent. "They haven't even tried to contact us."

Parents also questioned Friendship's credentials, citing problems at its high school, Collegiate Academy, which is in "corrective action," a lesser form of federal sanction, because of poor test scores.

District officials point out that Friendship Collegiate Academy still outperforms most District high schools and that test scores are only part of the picture. Founder Donald Hense said he understands that he is operating in an environment of mistrust and cynicism.

"The skepticism is going to exist until the families who send their children to Anacostia actually begin to believe that we are truly interested in their children," said Hense, who plans to divide the 950-student school into four "academies": two for ninth-graders, one for grades 10 to 12 and one for overage students requiring intensive attention.

Bedford is headed by George Leonard, a former biology teacher who founded the school in 2003 under New York City's "empowerment school" program, which granted him broad control over budget and other matters. His goal was a school culture that combined discipline with nurture. "An iron fist dipped in honey."

He established mandatory after-school tutoring for struggling students -- he confirms stories that he and his staff blocked the exits at 3 p.m. to keep students inside -- and compulsory Saturday sessions for SAT and state Regents exam preparation, running from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the weeks leading up to the tests. There is a "summer bridge" program to help incoming ninth-graders.

His approach to discipline includes the automatic suspension of any male student who curses or disrespects a female.

"The way we're seeing young ladies treated the last eight months has been unacceptable," said Niaka Gaston, a Bedford administrator who spent the past school year observing Dunbar and Coolidge.

Leonard's message to parents is double-edged. He said he has an open-door policy and counts on them to participate. At Bedford, for example, parents are expected to provide meals for the "nine-to-nines," the marathon test-preparation Saturdays in the spring. But he also told them at an orientation a few years ago: "Just stay out of my way and let me create the scholar, because you're usually the problem. I'll see you at graduation."

The formula appears to have worked. Leonard graduated nearly all of his first senior class on time in 2007, sending many of them on to colleges and universities such as Morehouse, Temple and the State University of New York. He clearly takes the District assignment as a personal challenge, especially Dunbar, the city's first black high school, which once educated its black elite.

A powerfully built man prone to flights of motivational oratory ("This project is so challenging it's going to make us great!" he exulted in a recent interview), Leonard, 56, said he knew he had accepted a daunting job. Just how daunting took awhile to understand. He said he wasn't prepared for the depth of the dysfunction.

Instead of engaging their classes, teachers sat silently at their desks as students filled out worksheets. Rates of absenteeism, for students and instructors, were appalling.

"This is a major challenge," he said. "The buildings are filthy, people are frustrated. There's no real encouragement. I feel a lot has been lost here."

He and his staff moved to the District last year, ceding full-time control of Bedford to others in his organization. They face the task of transplanting their school culture into dramatically different soil. Bedford was a small school -- 350 students to Dunbar's 900 and Coolidge's 650. In addition, he had some control over admissions at Bedford, but he will be obligated to take all eligible students within the Dunbar and Coolidge attendance zones.
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Leonard and his deputies said they are bringing values that can take root under any conditions.

"With time, I believe our relationship with DCPS is such that everybody will understand that we're not just talk," he said. "We have to show and prove."

The Washington Post

Tough Cuts in the District
The D.C. Council is facing up to hard times -- but students shouldn't be paying the price.
Friday, July 31, 2009

THE D.C. COUNCIL barred the public from its marathon work sessions on the city's budget. That's too bad, because what was going on behind those closed doors was a welcome example of public officials making hard decisions about the need to cut spending and raise taxes. Though we aren't keen about every decision, council members deserve credit for working to responsibly deal with the city's economic ills.

Faced with a $666 million revenue shortfall through October 2012, council members crafted a plan, to be voted on Friday, that aims to raise $50 million annually in new revenue while making $103 million in annual spending cuts; these come on top of measures already proposed by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D). Noteworthy are the council's actions to raise the gasoline tax by 3.5 cents, add 50 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes and increase parking fees for government workers. The budget crisis also caused the council to abolish all earmarks, a move no doubt hastened by publicity over Ward 8 council member Marion Barry's dubious use of the practice.

We wish the council could have avoided cuts to public education. The city's public charter schools, in particular, are bound to be hurt by the decision to freeze the per-pupil formula at current levels because of the hit they already took in facilities funding. It's worrisome to think that cuts affecting the classroom could slow the momentum of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's education reforms. But the proposed cut of less than $30 million is relatively minor when compared with the $1 billion the District spends on education, and council members are correct to argue that all city departments must share in the sacrifice brought on by these hard economic times. We question, though, the council's priorities in funding an expensive study of the schools and beefing up the bureaucracy of the state school board while curtailing summer school and making it harder for students to graduate. Also tucked inside the budget documents is troubling language that would dilute the mayor's authority over the schools; he vetoed it once, and we hope he does so again.

Notwithstanding those decisions, the council showed its mettle in refusing to take the easy way out of the budget dilemma by using, as Mr. Fenty had suggested, the city's rainy-day funds or one-time accounting moves. That would have pushed the problems into the future, when they could become even harder to solve. As council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) forcefully reminded his colleagues, it was exactly these kinds of budget gimmicks, along with unchecked spending, that caused Congress to place the District under a federal control board.

THE WASHINGTON INFORMER
Op-ed: Thurgood Marshall's Vision Alive in Anacostia 
By George Brown  
Thursday, 30 July 2009

Now that the test scores for D.C.'s public schools are out, I want to share one of the District's public school success stories with Washington Informer readers. Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School in Anacostia scored top among every public high school in D.C. that is open to all students regardless of academic ability. The test scores show that as the highest performing non-selective public high school in the city, Thurgood Marshall Academy is providing a high-quality public education in one of D.C.'s most underserved neighborhoods.

As Chair of the Board of Trustees at Thurgood Marshall Academy, I am more than a little proud of the school's achievements. Named for the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who was the grandson of a slave, son of a railway porter, and a product of the public schools, our school believes in the value of a quality public education for every child.

Thurgood Marshall Academy serves a student population that is 100 percent African American and in which three-of-four students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch.

In three short years, Thurgood Marshall Academy has seen a gain of 40 percentage points in math proficiency and a gain of 30 percentage points in reading proficiency. Our students are three times more likely to be proficient in reading and math than their peers in the neighboring high schools.

We have an 88 percent high school graduation rate and 100 percent of each of our five graduating classes has been accepted to college. Our students are half as likely to drop out of high school as their peers in the city-run schools, opening up a whole new world of opportunities for students who would otherwise fail to finish school.

Thurgood Marshall Academy's law theme extends much further than our name. Partnering with some of the most prestigious law firms in the nation's capital, our students' lives are enriched by being mentored and tutored by District attorneys who take time out of their busy lives to help our students realize their educational goals.

Our school's association with the law informs so many of our achievements and activities, such as the national and international success of our student debate team.
At Thurgood Marshall Academy, students are taught to begin planning for their adult lives at an early age.

Located in a neighborhood in which one in two adults is functionally illiterate, cut off from society's mainstream and denied access to so many opportunities, the building blocks for life, that our school provides, could not be more important to our children. One in two children in the community in which our school is located lives in poverty. One in five is born to a teen mom. A quality public school education is, as recent visitor to Thurgood Marshall Academy U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently said, “the only sure path out of poverty.”

We are proud of our record in dramatically raising the proficiency of our students in reading and math. More than that, we are meeting the more challenging and ambitious benchmarks set out for our nation's public schools by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. This nationwide school accountability law has set the target for all students in the nation to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, stipulating the progress that each public school should achieve each year to reach this goal.

Amid our success, we should not forget that Thurgood Marshall Academy would not exist at all without the public charter school reform that arrived in the District 13 years ago. Starting in a church basement before renovating the beautiful building the school now occupies in Southeast, our school was a pioneer in the movement to create strong D.C. independent public schools that are free to innovate and are held 100 percent accountable for student performance.

Thurgood Marshall Academy is committed to not only building on our own success, but also sharing our practices with other public high schools across the city. By doing so, we hope to help move the District closer to the point at which every D.C. child can get the quality public education that Justice Thurgood Marshall rightly believed to be their birthright as Americans.

George Brown is the chair of the Board of Trustees at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School.

The Washington Times

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

New poll reflects D.C. voucher support

A new poll shows D.C. residents want school choice and reform, and that they overwhelmingly support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Seventy-four percent of respondents to a poll commissioned by a coalition of groups said they favor or strongly favor the scholarship program, which aids poor families. That is the same number who favor charter schools. Moreover, support for the scholarships is higher - greater than 80 percent - for parents with school-age children.

"This poll just confirms what weve seen and heard from people across the city," former Mayor Anthony A. Williams, chairman and president of D.C. Children First, said yesterday. "Local politicians, Congress and the Obama administration need to take heed - this program is something our residents want."

The poll also queried respondents on ending the scholarship program, which allows parents to select a private school of their own choosing. Sixty-eight percent ppposed proposals to end the program, and 79 percent of parents opposed to ending the program.

The poll also showed that 61 percent of respondents said that the program should provide "as many scholarships as possible in order to meet demand."

"While Congress and the Obama administration are allowing fewer scholarships, this poll shows D.C. families want even more," said former D.C. Council member Kevin P. Chavous. "They need to wake up. This program needs to be continued and expanded, not shut down."

In addition to D.C. Children Frist, the poll results were released by the Alliance for School Choice, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Center for Education Reform, D.C. School Reform Now, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools , Greater Washington Urban League and the Heritage Foundation.

More than 1,700 children received scholarships tduring the 2008-09 school year. But more than 200 who had anticipated in the program have lost out because the federal government is blocking new participants. The decision was made after the out-of-boundary process and after the enrollment deadline for a majority of charter schools, officials with Children First said in its press release.

Allowing the students who lost to enroll is an urgent first step with the new school just weeks away, supporters said.

The Washington Times

Scores rising in the capital

District's charter schools show significant test gains

By Mark Lerner | Monday, July 20, 2009

Preliminary data compiled by the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education show that the test scores of students in D.C. public-charter middle and high schools increased significantly in the last academic year. Student proficiency in math increased 9 percent, and reading proficiency rose 7 percent. This compares to increases in math proficiency of 4 percent and reading proficiency of 2 percent in the city-run middle and high schools.

Overall, math proficiency among secondary-school students in the District's public charter schools is 57 percent (compared with 40 percent in the noncharter public schools) and for reading 53 percent (41 percent in the city-run schools).

At the elementary school level, the charter schools' gains were more modest than those of the city-run public schools, overseen by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who was appointed two years ago by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty.

Students at city-run public schools increased their reading proficiency 4 points and their math proficiency 8 points to reach 49 percent in both. Charter elementary schools' reading proficiency increased 1 percent in math and one-half of a percent in reading to reach 42 percent in math and 43 percent in reading. This reverses last year's results when charter elementary schools were slightly ahead of the city-run schools in student proficiency.

Charter advocates highlighted the strong increases in proficiency at the secondary level.

"The significant gains of D.C. public-charter middle and high school students indicates that the longer children stay in public charter schools, the better they do," said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. This result underscored findings from a recent Stanford University study, Mr. Cane said.

Addressing the charter elementary school results, charter advocates pointed out the somewhat different demographics of the District's public charter schools compared to their city-run counterparts.

"Charters are concentrated in underserved District communities, and the vast majority are located in high-poverty neighborhoods," said Mr. Cane. "Many city-run elementary schools are in the District's high-income Ward 3, but no charters are located there."

The D.C. Public Charter School Board, the charters' regulatory body, was impressed with the improvement in secondary school test scores.

"It's very encouraging to see such substantial gains in the secondary school population, which is the most difficult to bring to proficiency across the country," said board Chairman Tom Nida. The board is responsible for closing public charter schools in the District that it deems to be underperforming academically.

Mrs. Rhee also praised the performance of the secondary charter schools at a press conference held with the mayor at Drew Elementary School in Ward 7, although she has no responsibilities for charters. The mayor chose the school as the site for their announcement of the preliminary test scores for the regular public schools, following an 18-point increase in reading and a 28-point increase in math, raising proficiency to 31 percent and 34 percent, respectively.

One area of controversy in comparing averages for the District's public charter schools with their traditional public school counterparts concerns academic selection. D.C. public charter schools are nonselective by law, but a number of noncharter public schools are academically selective, including Banneker High School, School Without Walls and McKinley Technology High School.

Charter advocates believe that their inclusion in the average of the school system schools distorts the city-run average.

The correct data comparison is among all schools that do not select which students they accept, said Mr. Cane. "Among the District's nonselective secondary schools, African-American students and students from low-income families are nearly twice as likely to be proficient in reading and math as their peers in the city-run schools," he said. Low-income students are defined by the U.S. Department of Education as those qualifying for free or reduced-price school lunch.

Charter analysts nationally are impressed with the D.C. success.

"Charter schools authorized by the Public Charter School Board have high-school graduation rates higher than the U.S. average - which includes the nation's wealthy and rural counties - and 24 percent higher than DCPS' nonselective high schools," said Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, "and 85 percent of D.C. public charter schools' high school-age students are accepted to college."

The Washington Business Journal

Letter to the Editor
D.C. needs schools, not glitzy condos
- by Robert Cane

Big-name developers selected by the D.C. government recently presented their ideas for developing the shuttered Stevens and Hine school buildings. The D.C. government does not have the students to fill these buildings and many others because enrollment has been declining for decades. But this does not mean that the District has a school building surplus. Far from it. There are two types of public schools in D.C. — the city-run school system and public charter schools run by independent nonprofits.

The charter schools desperately need buildings like Stevens and Hine. Four charters bid for Stevens and another four for Hine under a D.C. law that says charters have the right to negotiate with the city to buy or lease surplus city-owned schools before developers can make offers on them. Tragically the city government rejected all eight bids.

The government’s rejection of the charter bids is not an isolated example. The city has consistently favored developers over charter schools. Because of this policy, many charters lack basic school facilities like playgrounds, gymnasiums, playing fields, auditoriums and cafeterias.

This tale of two potential uses for school buildings — the children of underserved communities who need them vs. the luxury condominiums, boutique hotels and tony gyms preferred by the city — is profound. These different uses mirror the divide in the District between the locations in which these glittering real estate prizes are situated and the neighborhoods in which so many public charter school children grow up.

Robert Cane is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools.