The announcement is fitting and completely in sync with Mayor Muriel Bowser’s schizophrenic view of the District of Columbia. Allow me to explain.
Last Friday I attended the D.C. Policy Center’s conference regarding the release of their study entitled “State of D.C. Schools, 2022-23: Challenges to pandemic recovery in a new normal.” The entire meeting came across as bizarre to me. All in attendance, including educators, local education leaders, and policy people, were in a tremendously good mood. It seemed that everyone was congratulating themselves and each other on the tremendous job being done to teach young people in our city. The opening remarks were provided by Ms. Grant and she stayed throughout the hour-long conference. I had not had the opportunity to observe the State Superintendent in action. I have to say I was impressed. Her words were highly enthusiastic and she remained that way upon returning to her seat. Sitting a few rows behind her I saw the Superintendent shaking her head affirmatively to all that she heard, while often using hand motions or clicking her fingers to show her complete support for the comments of panalists. At various points I thought she might just fly above the room. When I came home I actually commented to my wife that I could not imagine someone over this government agency being so animated as much of what OSSE does revolves around data collection and grant compliance.
There was absolutely no hint by Ms. Grant or others that she had accepted a new position. There was also little regard for the 2021 to 2022 PARCC standardized test results that demonstrated 31 percent of students in D.C. are proficient in English Language Arts, while 19 percent of students are proficient in math. My mood soured as the disconnect between the dismal state of academic achievement in the nation’s capital and the euphoria of the audience looked like a scene depicted in a surrealistic painting.
I have had time recently to watch online Mayor Bowser at various events around town. Her optimistic outlook seems an insult to what many are experiencing recently in the District. Allow me to give you an example. On my way to the Martin Luther King Library to join the Policy Center event, I arrived at 9 a.m., a half hour before the library opened. It allowed me to witness all the people sleeping in front of the structure . As I walked around the block looking for someplace to eat breakfast I saw building after building of vacant storefronts. The smell of marijuana filled the air. The streets were almost completely void of pedestrians. Considering all the crime that has been taking place in the city I was afraid to be there. The only way to describe the scene in comparison to before the Covid pandemic is night and day.
It is probably best that Dr. Grant is moving to Cambridge. I wonder how much longer she could have kept up the ruse.
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced yesterday that she is proposing in her fiscal 2025 budget a 12.4 percent increase in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. The change, according to the Mayor’s press release regarding the jump in funding, will bring the foundation amount schools get to educate a child to $14,668. In the same document Ms. Bower demonstrates the irresponsibility of this move:
“Over the past five years, DCPS has added nearly one school-based staff member for every newly enrolled student, with the number of full-time employees growing by 18% compared to a 2% increase in enrollment.”
Is this any way to run an organization?
I can guess as to why schools are desperate for this cash. As part of the pandemic emergency, schools were flooded with an extra billion in taxpayer dollars. As a natural response to a handout, schools added personnel. Now that this revenue stream is disappearing, they have no way to pay for the extra staff.
The public school bureaucracy has never seen a revenue increase it did not like. Here is a typical response from the DC Charter School Alliance’s Arial Johnson:
“As our schools will soon face a funding cliff with federal dollars running out this year, we applaud Mayor Bowser’s historic proposed increase to the UPSFF and her steadfast commitment to investing in our city’s education system. We’re especially grateful for her commitment to ensuring the ongoing costs of educator raises are covered and her focus on supporting the students most in need by increasing the UPSFF weights for students designated at-risk, alternative students, and adult students.”
A city with a 33.7 percent student proficiency rate in English and a 21.8 percent student proficiency rate in math does not seem to prove the hypothesis that more money will solve our academic ills. And if history is any guide, it will not result in the intended impact. Below is a chart by the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson demonstrating the inverse relationship between spending and test scores in American schools from 1970 to 2010.
Unfortunately for our town, I only expect these trends to continue.
The following is written testimony Josh Boots provided to the DC Public Charter School Board regarding the adaptation of its new draft Performance Management Framework called Aspire:
Thank you for the opportunity to submit written testimony regarding the new draft Performance Management Framework (PMF). I serve as Executive Director of EmpowerK12, a mission-driven education data nonprofit here in DC, and as a board member at Center City PCS, a network of six PK-8 schools. I provide this testimony solely as a concerned DC citizen with deep insight into charter school operations, what makes schools effective, and DC school accountability systems, including as a member of the original PMF development task force in 2010. The proposed draft PMF for PK-8 schools is largely duplicative of the state’s accountability system, which will generate confusion among our stakeholders and families while also creating an extra compliance burden on charter school staff. I offer 3 recommendations for moving forward at the end.
For the new DC school report card accountability system, Center City’s data manager must validate that OSSE has correctly identified the student universe and appropriately calculated up to 148 metrics per school that make up the overall score. PCSB’s draft PMF will not just duplicate that amount of work; it will complicate and confound the accountability compliance process by using slightly different business rules for the universe of students and student groups included as well as how metric performance is calculated by using different floors and targets. With the two additional school specific measures (I fully support their inclusion as a component of a new PMF) and 8 student groups for each, the grand total number of PMF metrics Center City’s data manager must verify for each school will be 164 metrics.
Let’s say the data manager takes 5 minutes per metric to confirm whether the list of students PCSB included in the calculation is accurate and another 5 minutes to verify the underlying numbers for each student and aggregated metric value are correct. This means they spend 10 minutes per metric for a grand total of 28 hours just to validate the 164 metrics in the proposed PMF for one school; this time estimate for PMF validation assumes each metric’s universe and calculation match perfectly. When metrics differ from expected values, a time multiplier goes into effect for figuring out why numbers do not match, submitting and responding to PCSB tickets, and then re-validating everything again when tickets are closed.
For Center City’s six campuses, the data manager might spend up to four entire work weeks validating PCSB PMF data, in addition to the four weeks required to validate OSSE’s slightly different accountability system metrics. This leaves their staff with substantially less time to support school leaders and teachers with using data to improve.
Meanwhile, DCPS’s data team, lacking this duplicative accountability tool verification requirement, can spend an extra month doing data work that moves the needle forward for their schools and students. It might be more than one extra month of data support compared with the charter sector average because while a minimum of 69 charter LEA data managers are needed to validate PMF and OSSE data, DCPS likely only needs a few data folks to validate half the amount of accountability metrics for all their schools, allowing their team to spend even more time analyzing and coaching educators about student data for improvement purposes.
The proposed PMF does not represent the only source of compliance burden charter schools face. With more regular attendance, discipline, and special education collections, the number of metrics and frequency by which they must be validated has increased nearly every year, often with changes in calculation methodology from year-to-year and limited automation in the process deployed by PCSB to improve its efficiency, validity, and reliability. The percentage of errors in the validation process attributable to PCSB has not decreased over time because PCSB has not invested enough of its budget in a modern data technology platform to make compliance activities more accurate and automatic, reducing the validation time burden placed on schools.
This decision has manifested in a multi-fold increase in charter schools’ time spent on compliance back-and forth activities with the authorizer rather than on improvement efforts in their schools and classrooms. Changes in math and reading growth data suggest this approach may have negatively impacted the entire sector’s performance over time. The charts below show the average median growth percentile for charter schools compared with DCPS in the PARCC/CAPE era. The new PMF will exacerbate the sector’s compliance validation burden and limit schools’ capacity to use data to improve.
Compliance and accountability are important tools for ensuring our students receive the best possible education. We should hold the same high standard for the efficient and effective administration of compliance activities conducted by PCSB staff as we have in our standards for charter school student outcomes. The proposed PMF adds to the inefficiency and compliance burden already inherent in PCSB’s current oversight practice, which will likely impact schools’ ability to deliver what I care about most: giving historically underperforming student groups a life filled with opportunity that an effective education affords.
How the PCSB Board Can Facilitate Improvement
Adopt the state’s new equity-forward accountability system as a significant component of the framework, eliminating a burdensome duplicative compliance activity. Keep the part about mission specific goals as it makes the sector unique and communicates each school’s value beyond math and reading. Find ways to include growth for all students, including K-3 and high schoolers. The policies that rely on the PMF could dictate a minimum average score on the DC report card and percentage of mission specific and K-3/HS growth goals met.
Require PCSB staff to update their data architecture and transparently post the code utilized for every metric calculation and compliance activity through GitHub (or similar interface), so data experts across the sector can collaborate and ensure a strong codebase that reduces the amount of time spent error correcting data in the future.
Invest in new technology, algorithms, and process policies that make compliance activities more efficient and effective, then look for ways to reduce the authorizer fee so that schools have more resources to improve student outcomes.
Ms. Whitted described an extremely toxic environment at the charter in which there are frequent fights between staff and students, leading many to feel “hopeless, helpless, voiceless, and unsafe.” She spoke Monday evening because, she stated, she “is concerned about our charter.”
The testimony contained many other highly negative charges. Ms. Whitted remarked that teachers are disrespected and overburdened, often substituting without compensation for colleagues who have resigned en masse. She revealed that other substitute teachers transition into full-time positions, harming the quality of instruction. She added that the school lacks basic supplies and equipment. Instructors, she remarked, are buying their own resources from their “inadequate salaries.” The teacher described an environment of fear and intimidation leading to student enrollment plummeting. She concluded by claiming that there is no student council or government, and efforts to expand the parent organization to one that includes parents and students was rejected by administration, leading to “a grassroots movement for change.”
GGA opened in 2020 and instructs students in grades nine through twelve. The charter’s most recent annual report for the 2021 to 2022 school year details an enrollment of 155 children in the ninth and tenth grades. Some alarming statistics contained in this document include a 23.2 percent student suspension rate, 26 students withdrawing midyear, and a teacher attrition rate of 40 percent. The school’s approved budget for this school year reveals a negative $610,000 net revenue, with $220,000 of that being comprised of interest and depreciation.
In my experience of observing D.C.’s charter school movement, complaints of one teacher during a public meeting may mean that there is a disgruntled staff member. It could also represent something much deeper, a true problem focused around the education of our kids. Ms. Whitted’s complaints need to be taken seriously and investigated by the DC PCSB.
Yesterday, I attended perhaps the most exciting policy forum around public education that I have been to in decades. Sitting on the CATO Institute’s Hyack Auditorium stage were five educational entrepreneurs who have created highly innovative microschools. Three of the participants were able to take advantage of the existence of Educational Savings Accounts in the states in which they are located to fund their endeavors. ESA’s are dollars provided by states to parents for educational services for their children outside of those provided by the local neighborhood schools.
There is a new educational choice movement on fire in this country, much of it ignited by the closure of regular classrooms during the pandemic. According to CATO, “In 32 states plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, many families can use school choice programs to select the learning environment that works best for their children.” I pictured Andrew Coulson, the former long-term director of CATO’s Center for Educational Freedom who passed away in 2016 at the age of 48 from a brain tumor, smiling ear to ear from above as he watched the event.
One of the panelists was Jack Johnson Pannell. Mr. Pannell had formed an all-boys charter school in Baltimore focused on helping those living in poverty. A friend introduced him to the universal ESA’s available in Phoenix. He decided to relocate his school across the country, establishing it as a Christian all-boys private school.
It was most likely not a difficult decision. By going the private school route this educator avoids all of the bureaucracy and regulation associated with chartering. In the audience was Shawn Hardnett, founder and executive director of D.C.’s Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys Public Charter School. His eyes lit up as Mr. Pannell spoke, and why shouldn’t this be the case? His school had its five year review by the charter board recently and, for all its excruciatingly difficult work and the right to continue operating, here’s what it received:
“Statesmen PCS will develop and implement an academic improvement plan. At a minimum, the plan must include specific strategies the school will use to improve academic outcomes for all students. The plan must also include a description of how the school will measure its academic progress toward meeting its goals. Statesmen PCS will report on its progress implementing the plan in its annual report every year leading up to its 10-year charter review.”
“Additionally, Statesmen PCS will develop and implement a procurement contract compliance improvement plan. At a minimum, the plan must include strategies the school will use to improve internal procedures for both bidding and submitting procurement contracts. The plan must also include a description of how the school will measure the plan’s success. Statesmen PCS must comply with DC PCSB’s Procurement Contract Submission and Conflict of Interest Policy and Data and Document Submission and Verification Policy. Should DC PCSB recognize noncompliance, it will engage Statesmen PCS’s board about needed improvement or take additional action as appropriate under each policy.”
A shocking alternative to the energy I found at the CATO conference was observing Monday night’s monthly meeting of the DCPCSB. The sessions are held virtually, a reminder of the horrible days of the pandemic. The connection via Zoom made it clunky and awkward to connect sequentially the over 20 people who volunteered to speak as part of the public comment period. Almost all testified passionately against a proposal by the Mary McLeod Bethune Day Academy PCS’s plan to relocate its 16th Street, N.W., campus to Takoma Park Baptist Church located on Aspen Street, N.W. Apparently, the school failed to communicate or miscommunicated the move to those living in the area around the Church, including the ANC. The District’s charter movement is almost 30 years old but I found the entire two hour get together to be a replay of those that I first attended in 1999.
So, while listening to the back and forth discussion between members of the board and the school, I thought about the day that ESAs would come to the nation’s capital. Imagine a parent going on My School DC and picking a private school for their child instead of the regular one in their neighborhood. Then in the mail would come a credit card pre-loaded with almost $13,000 in educational dollars to pay for a year’s tuition in one of the 135 private schools that at one time operated as charters.
Data from the DC Public Charter School Board Transparency Hub demonstrates that it spends over $5 million a year in employee salaries to administer the charter sector. The data, however, is from the year 2022. It lists 47 staff members. A review of the current organizational chart shows a total now of 56 employees. With an average annual salary of almost $107,000, again from 2022, this would mean that the line item for labor expenses, without benefits, reaches just about $6 million.
The DC Public Charter School Board now has 0.8 employees for each of the 69 LEA’s under its jurisdiction. How do we assess if this number is the right amount of staff members per school?
One way would be to look for information from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. The most recent data from 2020 shows that across the country authorizers that oversee LEA’s have four schools per authorizer. If this was the case in DC., then the DCPCSB would have a little over 17 staff members.
It is interesting to consider whether Washington, D.C. taxpayers are getting their money’s worth with all of these staff members and salaries. A charter school has not been shuttered for years, and it has been quite a while since a new one has been approved. Charter school standardized test scores proficiency rates for the 2022-to-2023 school year are actually lower than those of the traditional schools, including the category of economically disadvantaged students. Moreover, the share of total public school students that the charter sector instructs has been stuck at 48 percent. One other point that needs mentioning is that the charter board’s major decisions are made by members appointed by the Mayor who serve as volunteers.
There are incentives for increasing both the number of staff members and salaries of those working for the DCPCSB. The Uniform Per Student Funding Formula has gone up by at least four percent each budget cycle and last year the charter school facility allotment increased by three percent. These jumps have been supported by the board. This expansion in revenue for schools means more dollars for the PCSB since its revenue comes from a one percent fee on the income of each charter, although the group’s budget information for 2021 demonstrates that schools received a ten percent discount on this charge.
The D.C. Council provides oversight for the DCPCSB, but since the city no longer supports its budget there is not much of an incentive to questions its spending. I doubt that the individual charter schools would push back against the organization’s budget since it is their regulatory body. Moreover, from years of watching DCPCSB meetings, the board members generally defer to staff on the matters before them.
Another interesting finding for me is that the 2023 DCPCSB Annual Report contains no financial information.
I contend that more questions need to be asked regarding the DCPCSB annual budget.
“Since the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s approval of a charter contract for a religious charter school, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has stood firmly in solidarity with the Oklahoma Attorney General to declare religious charter schools unconstitutional and to affirm that all public schools must maintain their status as public, non-discriminatory, and non-religious for all.”
“To this end, we filed an amicus brief with the Oklahoma State Supreme Court to proactively highlight that the Board’s actions to approve, contract with, and oversee the religious charter school violate the Establishment Clause.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Ziebarth, he is misunderstanding the United States Constitution’s First Amendment. But you do not have to take it from me. We now have a long line of Supreme Court cases that have given the green light to public funds going to religious institutions, most recently in Carson v Makin in which parents in Maine sued to be able to send their children to a Catholic high school in a rural area where traditional public schools are not located. As in this instance, just like in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002; Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc., vs. Comer in 2017; and Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, the words of Chief Justice John Roberts in Espinoza rings true, [The blocking of the use of taxpayer dollars] “discriminated against religious schools and the families whose children attend or hope to attend them in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the Federal Constitution.”
Mr. Drummond goes on to remark, “All charter schools are public schools. The National Alliance firmly believes charter schools, like all other public schools, may not be religious institutions or discriminate against any student or staff member on the basis of sex, gender, race, disability, or religious preference.”
Agreed. Also concurring with this opinion are the founders of St. Isidore. The school’s website under admissions declares, “It is the policy of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School not to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, or disability in its programs or employment practices as required by Title VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.”
In light of the explosion of school choice plans across the country, this effort by the National Alliance to limit individual freedom appears antiquated. If the mission of the group as it asserts “is to lead public education to unprecedented levels of academic achievement by fostering a strong charter school movement” is no longer relevant, then it should go ahead and close up shop.
An article yesterday by the Washington Post’s Lauren Lumpkin stated that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are trying to unbalance the three-sector approach to federal school funding in the District of Columbia to steer more money to private school vouchers. Remember that the three-sector approach has been in place since 2004, and was championed by Joseph E. Robert, Jr. , the Washington D.C. area philanthropist who passed away in 2011. It provides an equal amount of dollars to traditional and charter schools in addition to the scholarship plan. According to Ms. Lumpkin’s piece,
“Now, however, Republicans want to increase the voucher program’s share from $17.5 million to $26.25 million and cut D.C. public schools’ piece to one-sixth of the $52.5 million pot of funding — posing a funding crunch for the 50,000-student district.”
The justification for changing the formula is that costs to educate children have gone up dramatically in recent years. According to John Schilling, an educational consultant who for years worked at the American Federation for Children, “The Opportunity Scholarship Program desperately needs more funds. . . There’s tremendous demand for the program, and the reason the program needs more money is because it’s been flat-funded.” Mr. Schilling goes on to explain that due to inflation each scholarship is larger in size, which has translated into a lower number of children who can take advantage of them.
However, this move is fraught with risk. In the District, Mayor Muriel Bowser has been a consistent supporter of the Opportunity Scholarship Program. This makes logical sense in that it brings thousands of dollars each year to the regular schools and charters. But if DCPS loses this revenue I could see the chief executive changing her mind. In 2017, when the SOAR Act that funds the OSP was up for Congressional renewal, a majority of the D.C. Council wrote Congress opposing the voucher program and arguing that it should be shut down. President Biden has stated that he wants to end the program in fiscal year 2023.
My view is that if Republicans want to increase the dollar amount of the scholarships, they should also provide an equal amount to charters and DCPS to maintain the three-sector approach.
I remember when six Catholic schools in the District of Columbia converted to charter schools to become Center City PCS. At the time there was uniform agreement among education policy makers that these facilities, being public schools, would have to cease religious instruction. I took the opposite view.
We now have a consistent legal precedent at the level of the U.S. Supreme Court of allowing public money to flow to parochial schools, the most recent case being decided last year in Carson v. Makin. The particulars of this decision, as is equally true of the details of the other cases on this issue, are not particularly relevant to my argument as I know full well that the public will just rationalize the rulings as those coming from a conservative dominated bench. So let’s try another line of reasoning.
For a year and a half I worked Holy Cross Hospital, located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Holy Cross is a Catholic Hospital whose mission is, “We, Trinity Health, serve together in the spirit of the Gospel as a compassionate and transforming healing presence within our communities. We carry out this mission in our communities through our commitment to be the most trusted provider of health care services.” It is common to see the cross mounted in the building’s hallways and patient rooms, and many meetings began with a prayer to Jesus Christ.
The hospital accepts Medicare and Medicaid patients whose healthcare is paid for with government funding. During the height of the Covid Pandemic, it received the same federal financial assistance as did hospitals throughout the country. Is any of this revenue unconstitutional because these transfer of taxpayer dollars runs afoul of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits an establishment of religion? Of course not. In no way does this government funding promote Catholicism as the dominant religion in the United States.
The same is true when it comes to education. Tuition may go to Catholic schools through private school vouchers, charter enrollment, or through education savings accounts, for but there is no correlation of this activity to the role that the Anglican Church played in English society around the period of the American Revolution.
About 30 years ago the private school voucher plan was passed in Milwaukee and the arguments for and against the program were going strong. David Boaz was speaking at the CATO Institute and he explained his support for school choice this way: He said that criticism of government money going to parochial schools as an establishment of religion is the same as saying that people who use food stamps at Safeway are singling out this corporation as the dominate grocery store in this country. This line of thought makes little sense.
The lawsuit challenging the opening of the online St. Isidore Charter School by the Oklahoma City Archdiocese is a wasted effort. In this instance, as in others involving religious educational institutions, the money is being used to support the children.
A few days ago Alex Koma of the Washington City Paper had a detailed article published regarding charter schools in the nation’s capital and their request for increased funding to match the newly ratified teachers’ union contract. The agreement, which the D.C. Council approved yesterday, provides a total of a 12 percent raise in teacher salaries that goes back retroactively three years to the start of contract negotiations. The D.C. Line’s Chris Kain pointed out that the new labor agreement ends on September 30, 2023 and includes, on top of the pay increase, a four percent retention bonus. As Mr. Koma pointed out, now charter schools want access to the same funding. His article includes this paragraph:
“’To ask public charter school leaders and teachers to continue serving students well with significantly fewer resources than DCPS exacerbates the inequity between the sectors and our most under-resourced students and their peers,’ Ariel Johnson, executive director of the DC Charter School Alliance, writes in a Dec. 19 letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Council. Sixty of D.C.’s 68 charter school operators signed onto the letter.”
However, there is a major problem with the tone of the letter sent to Ms. Bowser. The Charter Alliance, while pointing out that the traditional schools are receiving $38.7 million more than the charters in the 2023 budget, or $800 more per student, fails to stress that equivalent funding for both education sectors is the law under the 1995 School Reform Act.
In retrospect, I should have not been surprised. In a conversation I had some time ago with the founding executive director of the Alliance, Shannon Hodge, she asserted to me that there was no legal requirement that the same level of funding go to DCPS and charters. Never mind that FOCUS, the previous incarnation of the Alliance, engineered a lawsuit against the Mayor over the unequal, immoral, unlawful money that DCPS has received compared to charters which was estimated to be between $72 million and $127 million a year. I guess we should be happy that the variance has come down substantially, if this estimate is to be believed.
While this appears to be straightforward matter please remember that we are talking about Washington, D.C. where politics is always a factor. In this case, as Mr. Koma discussed, the union does not want charters to get the benefits of their contract negotiations without being part of the bargaining unit. It fears that this will provide further incentive for charter school teachers not to join the union. Newly elected Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin apparently buys into this argument, as well as expressing a concern that if the charters get extra money they will not spend it on salaries.
My hero Pat Brantley, Friendship’s PCS’s CEO, has already committed, according to the City Paper, to dedicate additional revenue to teacher salaries. Although Ms. Brantley is being nice, she did not need to make this promise and in fact, she should not have taken this step.
I feel that the charter schools in Washington, D.C. have become too cooperative.
The piece by Mr. Koma concludes that Council Chairperson Phil Mendelson is open to providing matching dollars to charters.
Parents Have School Choice Kids Win 
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