Month: August 2019

Perhaps charter school isomorphism should be expected in D.C.

mlerner10 School Choice Leave a comment

It is impossible for anyone who supports an educational marketplace in the nation’s capital not to begin the day with a smile when a Washington Post story appearing this morning by reporter Perry Stein begins with the headline, “DC Kicks Off the School Year with a New School – And More Choices.” The article focuses on the Allison family that selected the new Bard High School Early College for their daughter Taylor. The Post reporter describes Bard as a “campus in Southeast that promotes a rigorous liberal-arts curriculum and lets students graduate with a high school diploma and a two-year associate degree.”

Because Ms. Taylor lives in Shaw she will be taking two Metro lines and a bus to reach this facility.

Keep in mind that Bard is part of the traditional school system. But its offerings look like a charter. This is what over 20 years of school choice has brought to Washington, D.C., and I have to say it is a beautiful situation.

Charters may not be knocking it out of the park when it comes to standardized test score results, and we have certainly discussed here the reasons for the current academic status of the sector. But these alternative schools that teach 47 percent of all public school students have accomplished one of the major goals when they were created: They have forced DCPS to get much better than it was. Competition for students has succeeded in raising scores on the PARCC’s reading and math examinations for the last four years. As the DC Public Charter School Board has pointed out, its pupils have seen a steady increase in results since 2006.

I bring all of this up first because it is great news, but also because of a talk I heard the Center for Education Reform’s CEO Jeanne Allen give in 2016. She decried the isomorphism that she stated was beginning to characterize the nation’s charter schools. She defined isomorphism as “the process that forces one unit in a population to resemble others who face similar environmental conditions.” Her complaint is that charters are now resembling the neighborhood schools that they were meant to reform. But today I’m wondering whether this is the natural outcome of a maturing of the charter school movement. In other words, isomorphism has arrived and we could have predicted that this would be the case.

The downside of the current state of affairs is that not all children in the District are learning today in a quality school. Actually this is the sad reality for thousands of students. So the fact that charters may look like regular schools and the regular schools may mirror what charters are doing does not take away from the fact that we still desperately need expanded school choice. We are only at average proficiency rates of 30 percent in reading and math. That’s right, 30 percent. When our educational leaders say that there is still much work that needs to be done, they are expressing the understatement of the century.

The path we are on is the right one, but it is like watching someone run in slow motion. We desperately have to pick up the pace. Today.

D.C. Mayor Bowser fails AppleTree Early Learning PCS

mlerner10 Charter School Facilities Leave a comment

Today, the editors of the Washington Post follow-up on their column from June pointing to the travesty regarding AppleTree Early Learning PCS’s inability to secure a location for its Southwest campus that had been operating on the site of a DCPS facility. They write:

“Monday marks the start of a new academic year for the District’s public schools. Sadly, one school that won’t be opening its doors to students is the AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter. Thanks largely to the indifference of D.C. government, the school is without a facility for its highly acclaimed preschool program. That means 108 children, mainly African American and from economically disadvantaged families, won’t be able to benefit from a program that focuses on closing the achievement gap before kindergarten.”

The controversy was previously written about here. The location was taken away from AppleTree because of a renovation planned for DCPS’s Jefferson Middle School. If this project had been delayed by a year, then AppleTree could have been able to continue to teach at this site until its permanent home was ready next school term. Instead, the city turned its back on the charter school by its refusal to either allow it to continue at its present venue or find it an alternative.

This extremely depressing situation comes in the larger context of the Mayor holding onto over a million square feet of excess DCPS square footage that should be turned over to charters according to the law.

We now understand what is taking place here. If Ms. Bowser were to provide surplus buildings to charters, then the share of students attending these alternative schools would almost certainly go up. During the 2018 to 2019 school year, charters taught 47 percent of all public school students, equating to almost 44,000 pupils. Together with her Deputy Mayor of Education’s plea that the DC Public Charter School Board not approve the recent 11 applications it received for new schools, there is a concerted effort to make sure that charters do not exceed the fifty percent market share compared to the traditional schools on her watch.

I spoke not too long ago about the work of the Denver School of Science and Technology PCS’s reliance on emphasizing particular values in its successful effort to close the academic achievement gap. Here’s what the school’s CEO Bill Kurtz commented on the subject:

“We’re not just about compliance. We’re actually about building a values-driven culture with all of our students, so that they all understand what it means to live a set of values. They may not choose our values over time, but hopefully they will learn to choose a set of values that will guide them in the way that David Brooks would say are the eulogy values, the values that really matter in how you live your file – what you care about when you look back on your life.”

We hope that starting today both charter and DCPS schools that are opening their doors will focus on academics while helping to promote the values that will lead their children to a highly successful future. Mayor Bowser should follow this example and do the right thing when it comes to facility issues facing our charter school sector.

The D.C. charter school experiment is over

mlerner10 Standardized Test Scores Leave a comment

Yesterday, the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education released the 2019 PARCC standardized test results and the findings could not be more disappointing. Coming off an anemic year in 2018, charters failed miserably in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the traditional schools. We will be concentrating today on the percentage of students that scored a four or above on the examination, meaning that they are judged to be career or college ready, which is a measure of proficiency. Let’s delve into the details.

For all students in English Language Arts, charters saw an increase compared to 2018 going from 31.5 percent to 34.2 percent, a 2.7 percent change. However, DCPS students gained 4.8 percent, increasing from 35.1 percent to 39.9 percent. For black students, charters had 29.2 percent of pupils in the four plus category, a jump of 2.6 percent from last year’s 26.6 percent. DCPS had a slightly lower proportion of students in this group at 26.8 percent but the improvement over last year was larger at 3.9 percent. Hispanic students in charter schools were proficient at a rate of 33.8 percent, 1.5 percent compared to last year, while DCPS experienced a 7.4 percent increase in this subgroup’s results coming in at 39.4 percent.

For at-risk students, the proficiency rate in charters is 22.2 percent, similar to DCPS at 20.6 percent. However, again DCPS gained at a faster clip improving by 3.6 percent compared to 1.9 percent for charters. For English Language Learners, charters actually decreased its score by 1.5 percent to 14.0 while DCPS rose in this category by 2.0 percent to 22.2.

In Math the patterns are basically the same. Overall, charters improved from 2018 by just 0.3 percent to 28.7 percent proficient. DCPS improved to 32.4 percent, going up 1.9 percent from the previous year. Black students scored better in charters in this subject at 24.4 percent, compared to 18.1 percent for the regular schools, but for Hispanic students the trend was reversed with charters at 24.5 percent and DCPS at 33.0 percent. In charters, at-risk students came in at 18.6 percent proficient, an upward change of only 0.1 percent from last year. DCPS scored at 14.6 percent, improving by 1.2 percent from 12 months ago. Interestingly, for homeless students in math, charters actually experienced a 3.9 percent decrease for those recording a four or higher, going from 22.0 percent in 2018 to 18.1 percent, while DCPS increased 2.8 percent in this category to 12.8 percent. Again, for English Language Learners, DCPS tops charters at 25.9 percent versus 15.3 percent, respectively.

In case anyone wants to know, the academic achievement gap in the nation’s capital remained essentially the same as last year at 63.9 percent.

How can we tell just how devastating these results are as a group for the charter sector? We need to look no farther than the comments by Scott Pearson, the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, contained in an article that appeared yesterday by Perry Stein regarding the 2019 PARCC assessment:

“Pearson also noted that English-language learners are performing better in the traditional public school system — a trend that has endured in recent years. He says he has encouraged charter leaders to learn from the traditional public system’s strategies in working with English-language learners.”

Excuse me, charters are supposed to learn from DCPS how to teach English Language Learners? Isn’t this one of the areas where charters are supposed to excel? Is this what we have come to, charters turning to the regular schools to figure out how best to educate its students? It is truly a sad day.

There are many reasons that charters are failing to perform when it comes to the PARCC. The facility issue is still proving to be a significant drain on the attention span of school leaders. The financial challenges, especially around teacher salaries, are not helped by the substantial inequity in funding compared to DCPS. The pressure placed on these schools by the PCSB in the way of accountability through the Performance Management Framework, and other regulatory burdens, makes it almost impossible for them to be the centers of innovative learning envisioned when they were created.

Charter schools have been charged with siphoning students away from the traditional school system, which results in loss of funds for our neighborhood schools. With test results such as these, it is logical to ask whether they should continue to exist.

At-risk student lottery preference in D.C. school lottery is a bad idea

mlerner10 Charter School Expansion, PCSB Leave a comment

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Perry Stein wrote a story about the controversy over Washington Latin PCS’s application before the DC Public Charter School Board to replicate next year.

The only problem is that there never should have been controversy over this issue. Latin clearly meets the charter board’s criteria for a ceiling enrollment increase through its consistent attainment of Tier 1 status for both its middle school and high school and due to the fact that its student wait list is around 1,500 pupils. The charter board, under its own rules, should have given the green light to expansion without six pages of conditions imposed on this institution.

The charter school bargain has always been expressed as autonomy in return for accountability. Washington Latin exemplifies this standard.

If there was ever a definition of mission-creep we have found it in the work of the PCSB.

The charter board was highly critical of the low proportion of at-risk student who attend the school. But as they like to say at Latin “words matter.” This is straight from the school’s website:

“Unlike the majority of public schools, Washington Latin serves a diverse student body; our demographics mirror those of the city. We believe that all students can learn and deserve access to a rigorous, quality education. As a public school, we have civic and moral obligations to accept all students who come to us for an education. We consider a truly integrated school community to be the only way to accomplish our classical education model, helping students develop the ability to discuss ideas and make moral decisions within a diverse community.”

The school’s goal has always been to have a diverse student body. If you visit Latin you will see it for yourself; I don’t believe there is a charter in this town that is more of a melting pot of young people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. It works intentionally toward this goal. As a former board member of the school I have lost track of how many bus routes it runs in order to pull students from each Ward of the District.

Scott Pearson, the PSCB’s executive director, believes that the solution to gain even more diversity at Latin is to provide an at-risk student preference in the My School DC Lottery. Ms. Stein quotes him as stating:

“If we are really serious about equity and if we are serious about making sure that our least advantaged families have the ability to go to our high-performing schools, we need to do more.”

I agree, we do need to do more. But the answer is not to discriminate against certain children gaining admission to some of the city’s highest performing schools due to the color of their skin or their economic status.

No, there is a much more superior solution than tinkering with the lottery. We need to open more charter schools. But the charter board, the same one that is so critical of the tremendously difficult work being done at Latin, seems to make it as arduous as possible to replicate or open new schools.

I’ve talked so much about the obstacles that it puts in place that I don’t really want to repeat them here. But I do want for a minute to provide a taste of what I envision for the District’s educational landscape.

For those of us involved in public school reform, we desperately desire a quality seat for every child. Yet, today, we have numerous low performing traditional schools, many with proficiency rates in reading and math in the single or low double digits. These need to be immediately turned over the charters. I don’t care if they are given to our home-grown versions of these schools or we bring in charter school networks from outside of our city. As charters proliferate by taking over the buildings of DCPS sites or by co-locating in the empty hallways of the humongous number of under-utilized regular schools, we will provide a stellar education to all of those beautiful children that we categorize as at-risk.

But doing this will take courage. It will be the political fight of the century. I am optimistic we can get this done in our lifetimes. Perhaps we need to begin with baby steps. One simple way to get started is to have a unanimous unambiguous vote by our charter board to have a school like Latin replicate.

To close the academic achievement gap D.C. charters should follow example of the Denver School of Science and Technology

mlerner10 Charter Schools Leave a comment

I cannot believe it has already been three years since I attended the Amplify School Choice conference sponsored by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, now the Franklin News Foundation. There, I joined 50 education bloggers as we studied the charter school movement in Denver, Colorado. I came away from the two days of sessions pondering whether Washington D.C. should adopt a charter and traditional school compact like the one in the city I was visiting.

However, a conversation over breakfast last week with a couple of local charter school supporters clarified for me how much my focus has now changed. After years of charters being treated like second-class citizens in the nation’s capital, as demonstrated, for example, by the lack of access to closed DCPS facilities and inequitable funding compared to the regular schools, my interest in the development of a compact has waned. The main takeaway now from my trip was the visit the writers made to one campus of the high-performing charter network of middle and high schools called The Denver School of Science and Technology. At our meal my friends reminded me of a book they had previously provided to me for information on charter schools entitled Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne. Therefore, when I returned home, I immediately turned to the index and found the pages about DSST.

My memory of this trip was of being thoroughly impressed with the charter’s chief executive officer Bill Kurtz. The way I recalled it, Mr. Kurtz showed Powerpoint slides that demonstrated his charter school’s narrowing of the academic achievement gap to 12 points when the difference between standardized test scores for affluent children and at-risk pupils for reading and math in the traditional schools was 45 percent. In my mind, I remembered Mr. Kurtz attributing his success to the values his staff instills in his students. Was I correct in my recollection or had time altered my impression of the information that had been shared on that day?

Here’s what Mr. Osborne writes about DSST:

“Bill Kurtz says it all begins with the core values. DSST builds them into everything it does. Staff evaluations focus on how people are living the values. Student report cards give grades on values, triggering conversations with students and parents. Jeff Desserich, then director of Stapleton High School, told me, ‘I had a kid who had all A’s and B’s, and I’m having a conference with his dad, and all the A’s and B’s is good, but we can see that courage is pretty low, like two out of five. So that can really frame our conversation around what should the student’s development plan be – to speak up in class more, or taken on a leadership role or something.’

New students get a home visit, where deans and teachers talk about the values and attend summer school, which is part culture and academics. Every year all students go through a ceremony at which they sign their allegiance to the core values” (pages 172 to 173).

The author quotes Mr. Kurtz as commenting on this subject:

“We’re not just about compliance. We’re actually about building a values-driven culture with all of our students, so that they all understand what it means to live a set of values. They may not choose our values over time, but hopefully they will learn to choose a set of values that will guide them in the way that David Brooks would say are the eulogy values, the values that really mater in how you live your file – what you care about when you look back on your life” (page 173).

The academic results at DSST, in response to this emphasis on values, are simply astounding. According to Mr. Osborne,

“DSST excels even when one only measures proficiency, despite the fact that 69 percent of its students come from poor families. Among students eligible for subsidized meals, DSST had two of the three highest-scoring schools in the state on the ACT test in 2016. In 2014 its low-income tenth-graders had higher proficiency rates in math, reading, and writing than middle-income students in DPS-operated schools (italics in original text). In 2015, with a third high school open, DSST schools outperformed 87, 90, and 96 percent of Colorado’s public high schools, measured by the percentage of students at or above proficiency on the new PARCC tests. These are numbers an expensive private school would be proud to have, yet in the three DSST schools, respectively, 72, 69, and 53 percent of the students were low income” (page 175).

The values that DSST promotes are respect, responsibility, integrity, courage, curiosity, and doing your best. Perhaps D.C.’s charters should follow DSST’s example.