Month: January 2024

At monthly charter board meeting, public pushes back

mlerner10 Charter Schools, Covid-19, PCSB, School Choice Leave a comment

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.

People are allowed to dream, aren’t they?

D.C. board overseeing charters spends $6 million a year on salaries

mlerner10 D.C. Council, PCSB Leave a comment

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.

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools backs lawsuit to block opening of a public charter school

mlerner10 Charter School Expansion, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, School Choice, Virtual Learning Leave a comment

Word came yesterday from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools that it has filed an amicus brief backing the efforts of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond to stop the opening of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Public Charter School. The Alliance’s senior vice president for state advocacy and support Todd Ziebarth, whose title in light of this action seems Orwellian, stated the following:

“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.