Month: March 2018

Time to alter Mayoral control of public schools in D.C.

mlerner10 DCPS Leave a comment

Yesterday’s Washington Post included a long article by Emma Brown, Valerie Strauss, and Perry Stein regarding the recent controversies swirling around District of Columbia Public Schools.  It included this discussion regarding Mayoral control of DCPS:

“Critics of the District’s reform experiment argue that the scandals are a signal that mayoral control contributed to the problem because there is no independent check on the impulse to make the schools — and thus the elected boss — look good. They argue that it’s time for public debate on whether mayoral control should be scrapped or modified.

But advocates for the current system argue that mayoral control has allowed for agile decision-making and an unusual level of continuity of leadership in the school system.

Bowser said that the scandals have revealed weaknesses best fixed with tinkering — not a return to an elected school board like the one that oversaw city schools in their bad old days.

‘We have had two systems. This one works better,’ Bowser said in an interview. ‘Trust me.'”

I guess it was the final statement by Ms. Bowser that crystallized my thinking on this subject.  Yes, Mayoral control is superior to the school system answering to the whims of an elected school board.  However, in simplifying the reporting structure and creating the position of Chancellor that reports to the Mayor, we have not completely removed politics from the equation.  Since the city’s chief executive is chosen by the voters, then politics will always be part of the picture.  To believe otherwise is naive and unrealistic.

D.C. adopted Mayoral control after New York City took the same path.  But I would argue that the results there are also mixed.  There were tremendous improvements and tough decisions made under Michael Bloomberg.  However that progress has been slowed, and in some cases reversed, now that Bill de Blasio is in charge.  With this arrangement there is much too much power in the hands of one individual.

Therefore, we must divorce the long-term best interests of the traditional public schools from someone whose job is dependent on votes.  The one way to accomplish this goal is to look at the DC Public Charter School Board as an example.  Here is a body whose members are nominated by the Mayor, and confirmed by the D.C. Council, that has managed through the years to adhere to one goal in mind: to improve the quality of the schools it oversees.  Because its members are elected to a four-year term that can be renewed, its composition extends beyond the control of any one Mayor.  Since these volunteers are not elected, it frees them to do the right thing without having to worry about losing their jobs.  The Chancellor, who the Mayor would continue to select, would report to this new entity.  

We don’t have to throw out Mayoral control of the public schools to fix the current problem-filled situation.  We only need to remove politics from the task of teaching our children.

 

 

 

D.C. students are being held accountable; the adults not so much

mlerner10 D.C. Council Leave a comment

The Washington Post’s Perry Stein reported on Tuesday about the students caught up in the inflated graduation rate mess that has engulfed DCPS:

“Taahir Kelly, a junior at Roosevelt in Northwest Washington, said he never knew accruing 30 unexcused absences in a course would automatically result in a failing grade. He has eight older brothers who graduated from the school, and they also did not realize that such a policy existed, he said.”

Tragically, there are going to be many Taahir Kellys this year.  Last week DCPS announced that the 2018 high school graduation rate is expected to be 42 percent.  Last year it was 73 percent.  That is a lot of students who, with three months remaining in the school year, are finding out that their future path is about to take a detour.  Again from the Post article:

“Kelly said he and his friends think the school’s attendance policy is reasonable. But they object to the sudden enforcement and believe the city should have waited until at least next year to adopt the tougher policy.”

The grownups in the traditional school system have let these young people down, pure and simple.  By setting low expectations and failing to hold these children accountable, they set them up for failure.  They have reignited the school-to-prison pipeline.

All I can really think about at this moment is Dr. Howard Fuller’s words at this year’s FOCUS Charter School Conference:

“On Feb. 1, 1960, 58 years ago today, four Black students from North Carolina A&T sat down at a lunch counter and demanded to be served. And by doing so they changed the course of history. And here we are in 2018: four Black students sit down at a lunch counter where they are welcomed and can’t read the menu.

Here is my question – quoting Beyonce from “Drunken Love” – How did this shhhhh happen?  It has happened because there is no real political commitment in this country to create excellence and equity for Black and brown children, particularly poor Black and brown children. And furthermore it has happened because we have allowed it to happen and continue to do so today. We talked about leaving no child behind a few years ago and now we are talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a few years there will be some new buzz words. We have conferences, give out awards, and praise ourselves for being awesome but where is the anger. Where is the outrage that year after year we continue to allow them and us to fail far too many of our neediest students.”

Three people that I am aware of have lost their jobs after it was discovered that over 30 percent of kids received high school diplomas who should not have been allowed to graduate.  This includes Jane Spence, the DCPS chief of secondary schools, who has been placed on administrative leave; Ballou High School principal Yetunde Reeves, who has been reassigned; and assistant principal Shamele Straughter, also been placed on administrative leave.  But both the Chancellor Antwan Wilson and the Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles were able to stay in their positions until the latest controversy erupted about the transfer of Mr. Wilson’s child from one school to another while avoiding the lottery.

Today, the Post’s Peter Jamison revealed that Mayor Muriel Bowser is refusing to testify under oath in front of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee about Mr. Wilson’s discretionary school placement of his daughter.  Ms. Bowser has asserted she learned of it on February 12th from the D.C. Inspector General.  Mr. Wilson now states that the Mayor was first told that his child was attending Woodrow Wilson High School last October. Councilmember Grosso, who, when he found out about the school transfer initially, said he was going to hold an emergency Education Committee meeting, now has stated, according to Mr. Jamison, that he “preferred a public hearing but might settle for some alternative.”

I’m completely out of patience and I feel that both Ms. Bowser and Mr. Grosso have to go.  If you want to know how I came to this conclusion, recall what Dr. Fuller remarked about charter schools at the 2017 FOCUS Charter School Conference:

“The strength of the charter school effort is not just our existence; it is understanding the purpose of our existence.  I support charter schools as long as they work for our children. If they don’t work, then they have no value. Work for me is more than test scores: It’s treating our kids with respect; It’s understanding all of the issues that impact them before they ever get to school; It’s confronting the issues of race and class in our facilities and in our behavior towards our children; In the rules and regulations that we set up in so many instances to control our children because we are unable to manage them. It’s recognizing that as Paul Tough said in his latest book, that poor children are capable of deep learning.”

These people have abandoned their responsibility to our children.

 

 

Tragedy at D.C.’s traditional schools; Mayor Bowser to blame

mlerner10 D.C. Council Leave a comment

Yesterday, we received the answer to a question that has been floating above the news that DCPS Chancellor Antwan Wilson had circumvented a policy he himself had created and signed when he moved his daughter from Duke Ellington School of the Arts to Woodrow Wilson High School without going through the lottery.  After his action was exposed by the media it was Jennie Niles, the Deputy Mayor for Education and former founder and executive director of E.L. Haynes PCS, who was immediately forced to resign by Ms. Bowser.  The move appeared odd because Mr. Wilson was allowed to stay in his position.  “My decision was wrong and I take full responsibility for my mistake,” the Washington Post’s Perry Stein and Peter Jamison report him saying at the time.  The Mayor immediately reacted to his admission with the assertion, “I have confidence in his vision and leadership.”

Now we can comprehend, as revealed by the same two Post journalists, the reason the Mayor tried to protect Mr. Wilson.  It turns out that she was informed by Mr. Wilson what he had done four months before he was let go.

With the exception of Ms. Niles, we are not dealing with the most honorable people here. As soon as word got out about Mr. Wilson’s policy violation against discretionary school placements by public officials the former Chancellor blamed the Deputy Mayor and his own wife.  From the original Washington Post story about Jennie Niles vacating her job:

“A few weeks into the academic year, the family decided the arts magnet school was a poor match, and Wilson approached Niles. The administration official said Wilson, knowing strict rules govern school placement, had his wife speak and coordinate with Niles.  Wilson’s daughter was transferred to Wilson High, a high-performing neighborhood school in Northwest D.C. with a wait list.”  The wait list at Wilson is more than 600 students.

In the aftermath of Mr. Wilson receiving his $140,000 severance package, one half of his annual salary, he clearly feels free to set the record straight about his discussions with the Mayor.  In an interview with The Washington Post he claimed that he related to Ms. Bowser last September that he was working with Ms. Niles to have his child exit Duke Ellington.  He also stated that he told her the following month that she was now enrolled at Wilson.  According to the former  Chancellor, in the days before February 12th, when D.C. Inspector General Daniel Lucas informed the Mayor that he was investigating the student’s transfer, the Mayor would inquire of Mr. Wilson how his daughter was doing at her new school when they would run into each other at events.

Ms. Bowser denies all of it.  From the Post story on February 16th announcing that Ms. Niles had stepped down:  “Bowser said she was not aware the chancellor’s daughter had transferred to Wilson High. A spokeswoman for Bowser said the mayor’s chief of staff and top advisers were also unaware.”  Then again yesterday:  “In a brief interview Monday, the mayor again denied she knew about the school transfer. ‘I in no way approved of a transfer or knew about an illegal transfer,’ she said.”

The Washington Post quotes the Mayor as stating that “the decision by Wilson and Niles to move the girl to a new school in the way they had was ‘inexplicable’ and ‘indefensible.'”  Yes, that is true.  But what is equally inexplicable and indefensible is misleading the public about what you knew and when you knew it.  No wonder DCPS is handing out diplomas to kids who don’t deserve them and letting students into D.C. schools who don’t live in the District without having them pay tuition.  When dishonesty starts at the top, it tends to run downhill.

D.C. four year high school graduation rates clearly show the power of charter sector

mlerner10 Charter Schools, DCPS Leave a comment

With the trifecta of controversies recently experienced by D.C.’s traditional school system, it is easy to miss an obvious point about the condition of public education in the nation’s capital:  we desperately need more seats for children in our city’s strong performing charter schools.  My reasoning behind this conclusion is straightforward and compelling.

Last week it was announced that the new estimate for the DCPS 2018 four-year graduation rate will be around 42 percent.  Kate McGee of WAMU presents the background:

“DCPS says it’s releasing this data for the first time to increase transparency after an investigation found that one-third of last year’s graduates received diplomas even though they didn’t meet all the graduation requirements.

‘We are focused on making sure the students who graduate have earned their diploma and the students and communities feels that way as well,’ said Michelle Lerner [no relation], Deputy Chief of Communications for DCPS.”

The low statistic comes after the Office of the State Superintendent of Education just last November claimed that the four-year adjusted cohort high school graduation rate for DCPS was 73.2 percent.  This figure was only slightly lower than the charter school rate of 73.4 percent.  However, we know now that 34 percent of seniors attending the regular schools should not have been given diplomas.  If we subtract the 34 percent from the originally published OSSE rate we get a true percentage of 39.2, exceedingly close to the recent estimate of the size of the graduating class in 2018.

Moreover, as was documented by the OSSE study looking into this mess, the matriculation scandal did not occur at charters.  If this sector’s four-year graduation rate remains the same this year as in 2017, although we certainly hope it will improve, the astonishing reality is that there will be a 31.4 percent delta between the number of pupils that graduate in four years from a charter high school compared to the number that graduate in four years from a facility that is a part of DCPS.

Charters will therefore graduate one-third more of their students.  In addition, these schools will most certainly greatly exceed the DCPS graduation rates for important at-risk subgroups of students.  When the DC Public Charter School Board released its graduation statistics last year it made the following observation:

“For five consecutive years, public charter high schools have consistently exceeded the four-year citywide averages for: African American (72.6% graduated), economically disadvantaged (74% graduated), and Hispanic (79.2% graduated).”

We now know that the charter board was greatly underestimating the groundbreaking and astonishing achievements of the schools it oversees.  It is therefore not in anyway an exaggeration to state that if you are a parent sending your child to a high school in the nation’s capital the choice of whether to choose a charter or traditional school has become a potentially life-changing event.

The problem is that there are not a sufficient number of quality charter high school seats.  For the 2017-to-2018 school year, the PCSB has estimated that there is a 1,600-student wait-list.

As Miss Bowser selects a new Deputy Mayor for Education and a new DCPS Chancellor, and as the City Council grapples with how to restructure its relationship with the Mayor in order to prevent the recent problems from re-occurring any time soon, it is imperative that charters must expand to serve as many of our kids as possible.  In this case the numbers really do tell the story.