Author: mlerner10

OSSE recommends 3.5% increase in funding education in the District; Mayor budgets 1.5%

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There was outrage on Tuesday by many leaders of D.C.’s charter school movement as the Mayor released her proposed fiscal year 2018 budget that included a 1.5 percent increase in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula.  This despite the fact that for the first time in years Ms. Bowser put in a 2.2 percent increase in the per pupil facility allotment.  What’s the reason for the controversy?

The reason is simple.  In 2016, as is required by law to be done every 24 months, the State Superintendent of Education convened a working group to review the level of the UPSFF.  Participating in this body, among 13 others, were Irene Holtzman, the executive director of FOCUS; Scott Pearson, the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board; and representatives from KIPP DC PCS, Two Rivers PCS, Appletree PCS, DC Prep PCS, Friendship PCS, E.L. Haynes PCS, Next Step PCS, and St. Coletta PCS.  This is the group that came up with the push for the recommended increase.  It is fascinating to see the reason for their conclusion.  From the report:

“Increasing the base rate significantly, above the rate of inflation, continues to treat the Adequacy Study, the most recent, thorough and comprehensively researched examination of the UPSFF, as the “North Star” for guidance on the rate. By default, an increase in the base rate impacts the amounts in weights across the board.

An increase in the base rate provides: The greatest flexibility to meet the diverse needs of the greatest number of schools, and schools with varying demographic populations, including alternative schools, charter schools and DCPS schools. Funding for the single greatest cost for providing students a high quality education: the cost of salaries and benefits for the educator workforce. This includes, for example, the rising cost of healthcare and the interest of DC schools to have competitive compensation with surrounding jurisdictions.

  • A significant increase of 3.5% to the base rate specifically helps to:
    Further defray the costs of transition from the previous summer school weight to the implementation of the at-risk weight, especially given evidence that some LEAs and schools gained more funding from this transition than others.
  • Provide the most flexible funding for core program services, and is enough to help fill identified gaps in funding at DCPS. Ensure that there is adequate funding for all students, and ensure that funding distributed from the at- risk weight is better leveraged and remains a supplement for the needs of those students most at risk.”

Is is astonishing that after six months of work the Mayor would ignore the findings of the task force whose membership possesses so much expertise in the area of  school funding. But for me there was one silver lining contained in this document.  It refers back, as stated above, to the Adequacy Study as the “North Star” for “guidance on the rate.”  The Adequacy Study was groundbreaking in that it put in writing for the first time by the government that the traditional schools were receiving significant dollars in the neighborhood of $100 million a year, in dollars outside of the UPSFF which is against the law.  When then, will the FOCUS engineered lawsuit on the inequitable funding of charter schools be resolved?

Breakthrough – The Movie

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Last evening my wife Michele and I had the great privilege of heading over to the Columbia Heights Educational Campus auditorium to watch the first public showing of the film Breakthrough.  The event was co-sponsored by CityBridge Education and Stone Soup Films, the firm that produced the movie.  During the introduction we learned that Stone Soup is a Washington, D.C. company that develops all of its projects through the use of volunteers.  I would say this is just about the perfect organization to make a documentary that covers D.C.’s charter schools, a movement composed of hundreds of people contributing their time, money, and expertise for no financial remuneration.

The documentary follows three schools that were awarded $100,000 each through Citybridge’s “Breakthrough Schools: DC” challenge in 2014 to create new or redesigned transformational schools in the nation’s capital.  This was the initial year that these grants were made and Monument Academy PCS, Washington Leadership Academy PCS, and the Wheatley Education Campus were part of the first cohort of six winners.

So here’s the bottom line.  I basically watched the last 20 years of my life replayed before me on the big screen.  The audience saw Monument Academy, the first boarding school in the city for foster children, go through the amazingly complex struggle of securing a permanent facility.  The commercial spaces that were identified as possibilities all fall through and the charter is eventually awarded, with the help of Building Hope, a shuttered DCPS building, the former Gibbs School.  I went through similar hunts with Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy, the William E. Doar, Jr. PCS for the Performing Arts (now City Arts and Prep PCS) and Washington Latin PCS.  But the structure was in such a poor physical condition that Monument must practically rebuild it from the ground up, a repeat of what Washington Latin went through at its own expense when it assumed the old Rudolph Elementary.

We get a first-hand look at a Monument Academy parent information session held at a public library, since this is before the school had its own location that would allow it to hold meetings of this type. The picture captures the exceptionally tough questions and comments by those considering sending their own offspring to this new school.   Michele and I witnessed exactly the same scenario when we were trying to convince parents to sent their kids to WEDJ.

Breakthrough took the large audience for a closeup view of the charter approval process for Washington Leadership Academy before the DC Public Charter School Board.  I remember this as if it was yesterday as I observed and wrote about Seth Andrew’s team making a confusing and unstructured presentation one year; only to be followed by a revised application 12 months later that perfectly reflected the exciting vision for this groundbreaking charter that won unanimous approval by the board to begin operating.

The film is an accurate portrayal so it does not have a completely happy ending.  The Wheatley Elementary School’s attempts to implement a blended learning approach based upon competency-based student assessments.  During its first year of implementation only three classrooms end up adopting this new approach which results in its dynamic instructional leader for this effort, Tanisha Dixon, leaving the school at the end of the term.  It brought back in my mind the high all of us associated William E. Doar experienced when in our first couple of years we met the Annual Yearly Progress goals under No Child Left Behind only to find much later the three founding women departing and the hiring of Ten Square consulting group to get the school back on track academically.

All of this brings me to my final impression of the film.  This heroic work that many of us in this town have been doing to finally close the achievement gap is really really hard.  Thank goodness we have CityBridge Education, with Katherine Bradley as the fountainhead and Mieka Wick as chief executive officer, to provide financial assistance and many other avenues of support as public school reform reaches an entirely new level.  The organization’s goal is to create 25 new or reconstituted schools in the next five years.  I can’t wait to see the sequel.

Paul PCS will not have unionized teachers

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This past Friday, WAMU reporter Martin Austermuhle broke the story that last Wednesday, twenty-four hours before the teachers and staff at Paul Public Charter School were scheduled to vote, the American Federation of Teachers called off the move to form the affiliated District of Columbia Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff once it realized that the ballot measure would go down in defeat.  In an early article about this effort, Rachel Cohen of the American Prospect revealed that 75 percent of the educators had agreed to join DC ACTS.  Mr. Austermuhle, in his excellent reporting, quotes history instructor David Koening, the lead teacher behind the effort to unionize, as stating:

“Our organizing committee felt that we had the votes to win, and voted to go ahead with the election, but we did not have enough people who were wiling to be public with their support to convince the AFT that we were definitely going to win.”

This story is a tremendous lesson for managers everywhere.  The best way to avoid union activity at your place of employment is to carefully listen to your employees, and react constructively to the information they are providing.  Here are Paul CEO Jami Dunham’s comments about this point as quoted in the WAMU piece:

“Our board, our leaders, our administration definitely sought input and feedback and asked questions and listened and wanted to hear issues and concerns. . . I feel like that’s something we’ve always done. . . We had a renewed energy around it, because we wanted to make sure that we responded to our staff for them to feel heard and supported.  We made sure we listened.  We did a ton of listening.”

The school really dodged a bullet.  The union would have placed a major barrier between the staff and administration as is always the case whenever employees are represented by a third party.  It also would have also prevented the school from making rapid changes in its structure, systems, and processes to address the needs of its students since modifications would have had to be negotiated through a collective bargaining agreement.  Perhaps those working at Paul looked back and recollected the union activity in 1999 when Paul became the first and only DCPS school to convert to becoming a charter, as I previously illustrated and as explained by Josephine Baker, former executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, in her book The Evolution & Revolution of DC Charter Schools:

“The announcement of the approval of Paul’s application to convert to charter school status was the beginning of intense activity to thwart the conversion.  First, teachers’ union members of Paul’s faculty organized a student walk-out to protest the conversion. The students, who may or may not have cared about the implications of the school changing its governance structure, seemed to offer little resistance to the opportunity to ‘spontaneously’ leave their classes at the suggestion of their teachers.  At least one teacher who helped facilitate teacher signatures of the conversion petition reported being harassed by the teachers’ union representatives” (p. 49).

In addition, if teachers at Paul became unionized there is no telling which school would be next.  This news is especially important in light of the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board’s recent suggestion that a unionized charter would add to the diversity of its portfolio.

D.C. Mayor right on school choice; U.S. Education Secretary is not

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Last night, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser gave her third annual State of the District address and there was plenty in there for advocates of school choice to cheer.  In a strong direct refutation of a letter sent to Congress by 13 D.C. Council members, including David Grosso, the chairman of its education committee, that called for a phasing out of the Opportunity Scholarship Program that allows children living in poverty to attend private schools, the Mayor had this to say early in her remarks:

“We call on the President and Congress to uphold our 3-sector school funding approach that enhances PUBLIC EDUCATION funding in DC.” [Capitalization is in the original text.]

Of course, the 3-sector funds include equal dollars annually for the OSP, charters, and traditional schools.

Later on in her speech she returned to the subject of the District’s schools and commented on the charter sector:

“This year, I am also proud to further increase the public charter school facility allotment by 2.2 percent this year, and lock that increase in for the next four years. Adding millions more to the school facilities all across the District. As well as make available more public buildings for public charter school use.”

The raise in the per peril facility allotment does not reach the $3,250 floor that charter leaders had wanted, but at $3,193 it comes close.  Now Ms. Bowser just needs to add an automatic increase for inflation.  We are also going to hold her accountable for her promise to make additional surplus DCPS buildings available to those institutions that now educate 46 percent of all public school pupils in the nation’s capital.

While the D.C. Mayor hit the nail on the head regarding school choice, last Wednesday U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos missed it.  She was speaking at the Brookings Institution on the release of its 2016 Education Choice and Competition Index compiled by Senior Fellow Russ Whitehurst.  Denver, Colorado is the city at the top of the study’s rankings for having the greatest amount of school choice.  However, as the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss reports, Ms. DeVos did not agree.  From the Education Secretary’s prepared statement as provided by the Post:

“I am hopeful this report helps light a fire under [low-scoring cities] to better serve students. And while we may be tempted to emulate cities with a higher grade, I would urge a careful look.

The two-highest scoring districts, Denver and New Orleans, both receive A’s, but they arrive there in very different ways.

New Orleans provides a large number of choices to parents: All of its public schools are charters, and there is a good supply of affordable private schools. The state also provides vouchers to low-income students to attend private schools if they choose. Combined with its easy-to-use common application, New Orleans’ sophisticated matching system maximizes parental preference and school assignment.

Meanwhile, Denver scored well because of the single application process for both charter and traditional public schools, as well as a website that allows parents to make side-by-side comparisons of schools. But the simple process masks the limited choices.”

As I’ve written about many times before, I had the great opportunity to spend some time in Denver last summer as part of the Amplify School Choice conference sponsored by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.  There I learned first hand about the strong growth of charters in this city, and the way that the traditional public schools are held to the same accountability standards that charters face.  Here is what I wrote last August:

“Since 2005, according to Mr. Dan Schaller, director of advocacy for the Colorado League of Charter Schools, ‘DPS has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.’  Low performing charters have also been shuttered.  For example, during the 2010 to 2011 school year 25 percent of schools up for renewal were closed.  Today there are 55 charter schools in Denver out of a total of 223, teaching 18.3 percent of all public school students.

The results of these initiatives have been nothing short of amazing.  The Denver Public School system is now the fastest growing urban district in America.  The high school graduation rate has jumped to 65 percent in four years.  From 2004 to 2014, the proportion of students at or above grade level in reading, math, and writing has climbed from 33 percent to 48 percent.”

Also, as I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, there is a District-Charter Collaboration Compact in this city that has many features that should be emulated here in D.C. and other places across the country.  I strongly recommend that Secretary DeVos make a visit to Denver and see the miracles taking place there such as the outstanding education being provided to low income children by schools such as DSST PCS.

CityBridge Education to begin incubating new schools

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The exciting news came out yesterday that the CityBridge Foundation, transitioning as of January 1, 2017 to become the nonprofit CityBridge Education, will begin incubating and creating new schools and revolutionizing already exciting ones in alliance with the traditional and charter school sectors.  The organization’s aggressive goal is to “redesign or launch 25 innovative public schools within five years” in Washington, D.C. with the mission of “advancing equity and opportunity for all children.”

CityBridge Foundation co-founder, president, and personal hero Katherine Bradley has turned to recently named chief executive officer Mieka Wick to lead this charge.  I’ve worked with Ms. Wick for years at the CityBridge Foundation and frankly with her in this new role I have no doubt that success is the only possible outcome.

The effort is a natural outgrowth of the work of the foundation.  It has been providing financial and other support to promising charter and DCPS schools since its creation in 1994.  A list of partner schools can be found here.  In fact, Ms. Bradley was co-chair of the search committee that led to Kaya Henderson becoming chancellor.  Since 2013, CityBridge has been managing the awarding of grants to new or redesigned schools as part of Breakthrough Schools: D.C. modeled after the national Next Generation Learning Challenges competition.

It is also a natural outcome of the fact that here in the nation’s capital after 20 years of public school reform only 25 percent of students are scoring as college or career ready on the PARCC standardized examination.

So how will the group’s efforts become a reality?  From Wednesday’s press release:

“CityBridge Education will find teachers, leaders, and school teams with the ideas and the drive to create new, better models of school. Educators will be connected to structured design work, portfolio management, networks of talent, and the significant resources needed to launch or transform schools. We will build a cross-sector (district and charter) cohort of educators, regularly sharing their experiences (successes, as well as failures) in order to speed adoption of promising practices and transformative ideas. Our work will serve these innovative educators, all united in the belief that school can deliver results that honor the talent and potential inherent in children.”

There is one fundamental principle that will guide these efforts, and that is best explained by Ms. Wick:

“Although we expect a real diversity of schools in our portfolio, there is one principle animating all our school creation work: Our unifying imperative is equity. For far too long, schoolchildren in D.C. and other urban areas have been subject to a “narrative of disinheritance”—the persistent inequities of experience, resources, and perceived worth, based on race, class, or story. Great schools can disrupt and redirect that narrative. When designed thoughtfully, schools can be places where students—regardless of race or socioeconomic status—are secure, valued, and can stretch for significant accomplishment; they are places where love and justice thrive. Equitable schools always deliver academic results, but they do so in a way that develops in students key habits of autonomy, mastery, and independent thought. Only then, with schools that foster authentic human agency, can we say we have achieved our goal of intentional equity.”

It’s going to be an extremely interesting 60 months.

D.C. State Superintendent of Education to begin ranking charter schools

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Last Wednesday evening, the State Board of Education approved D.C.’s education plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act.  ESSA replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015 and under the new law this year each state and the District of Columbia must report to the U.S. Department of Education accountability measures for public schools.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education has been working on this plan for 15 months.  According to the organization:

“OSSE participated in more than 70 meetings and gatherings on DC’s plan and received feedback and comments from more than 110 local education agencies (LEAs), government agencies, consortia, and other organizations in the District of Columbia. During the public comment period, which lasted from Jan. 30 to March 3, OSSE received more than 250 written comments on the state plan and shared the plan with families, educators and community groups during a series of community engagement sessions co-hosted with SBOE in each of DC’s eight wards. OSSE consolidated stakeholder feedback and incorporated it in the revised plan, which the State Board of Education approved Wednesday.”

Schools will be ranked on a five star system, similar to what the federal government currently does with hospitals, with a five being best.  It is a move emulating that of Denver, Colorado under its Denver District-Charter School Collaboration Compact in which both the charter and traditional school sectors are evaluated utilizing the same data.  Support for the evaluation system comes from Mayor Muriel Bowser, Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles, State Superintendent of Education Hanseul Kang, DCPS Chancellor Antwan Wilson, and executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board Scott Pearson.

The Washington Post’s Alejandra Matos explains how schools will be judged:

“The bulk of the proposed D.C. rating formula is based on results from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career exams, or PARCC, which are linked to Common Core standards. For elementary and middle schools, the plan takes into account how many students met or exceeded academic standards as well as how much progress students made compared with the previous school year.

For high schools, the rating system will consider only proficiency on PARCC exams. The OSSE said it is working on getting baseline data for academic growth for high schools and will eventually include it in the rating system.”

State Superintendent of Education Kang fills in some of the details:

“The approved plan reduces the weight on testing for elementary and middle schools while prioritizing student growth. The final plan reduces the weight on academic achievement in the elementary and middle school frameworks from 40 percent to 30 percent, keeping the growth weight at 40 percent. Also in the elementary and middle school frameworks, OSSE increased the school environment domain by 10 percentage points from 15 percent of a school’s total score to 25 percent. The accountability system will also include a new measure for access and opportunities for the first time in the 2019-20 school year. The final plan commits to piloting school climate surveys and developing a high school growth measure for possible inclusion in the accountability system.”

Not known at this point is the future of the DC PCSB’s Performance Management Framework.  Since 2012, charters have been evaluated on a tiered system of one through three.  Mr. Pearson and deputy director Naomi Rubin DeVeaux when asked did not provide an answer.

Ashley Carter, At-Large Representative to the State Board of Education, had this to say about the scorecard:

“Today, I vote to approve the proposed DC state plan for the Every Student Succeeds Act put forth by the DC Office of State Superintendent of Education.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, which was passed with bipartisan support in 2015, aimed at getting accountability right, especially in areas where No Child Left Behind failed.

I have spent the first three months of my term on the board working tirelessly learning the plan, engaging in public discussion around the city, and submitting questions regarding specific areas of the plan related to ratings, testing weight, and climate.

After listening to public, school, and expert input and testimony over the past several months the original draft plan was revised in several areas. This revised plan, put forth today, effectively combines views of the entire city. Our city is diverse, so are our schools and collaboration is essential to move forward with one plan for the various schools in our city. I believe this plan does that.”

School rankings under the new system will come out in the fall of 2018 utilizing information from the 2017 to 2018 school year.

Two charter school students among GWU Trachtenberg Scholarship winners

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Yesterday, as has been the tradition since 1989, D.C. high school students learned that they were awarded full-ride Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Scholarships to the George Washington University.  G.W. President Dr. Stephen Knapp surprised these extremely fortunate young people in person in their classrooms complete with college acceptance letters.  Two of the ten students currently attend charter schools.

These are not easy scholarships to win.  The press release announcing the awardees states that “GW selects students based on high school academic performance, strength of curriculum, recommendations, leadership qualities, community service, extracurricular activities and achievements and standardized test scores, should they choose to submit them under the university’s new test-optional policy.”  The students are nominated by their high school counselors.  There are also interviews with the students in order to identify the finalists.

Student winners from charter schools include Joel Escobar of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for Public Policy – Parkside High School Campus.  Mr. Escobar plans to major in computer science.  He is the first in his family to go to college, and will graduate at the top of his class.  Mr. Escobar has been a supporter of those who have suffered domestic abuse, and he is also captain of the school’s soccer team.

Jenesis Duran was offered a scholarship and is currently attending Washington Latin PCS.  She is also captain of the charter’s soccer team.  Ms. Duran wants to study international relations and so will attend the Elliot School as did my wife.  She is currently both the school’s secretary and treasurer, and is active in the League of United Latin American citizens.

Eight other students were presented with this prize.  They include:

Cherisse Hayes from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts; Lorrin Davis from the Columbia Heights Education Campus; Ana Lopez also from the Columbia Heights Education Campus; Sydney Austin from the National Cathedral School; William Davis from Woodrow Wilson High School; Michael Degaga from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School; Emmoni Morrisey from McKinley Technology High School; and Adonte Yearwood from Eastern High School.

Students enrolled in accredited charter, traditional public, and private schools are eligible for the Trachtenberg Scholarships.  The money is awarded annually and then renewed based upon satisfactory academic results.  166 young people have been provided with these grants since the program started, which covers tuition, room and board, books, and any additional fees.  Impressively, about 92 percent of those students receiving the scholarships have graduated.

This will be the last year that Dr. Knapp will be giving out these awards as he is retiring.  He has told me that he always feels that this is his favorite day of the year.

D.C. has nation’s strongest charter school law says Center for Education Reform

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This morning, the Center for Education Reform released its 17th edition of its National Charter School Law Ranking & Scorecard.  As in 2015, the last time this report came out, Washington, D.C. is ranked at the top of the list primarily because of the independence and leadership of the DC Public Charter School Board.  But in many ways the document is a sobering analysis of the health of our movement across the country.  From the introduction by Jeanne Allen, CER’s founder and CEO:

“We are now well into the third decade since Minnesota passed the first state charter statute. The number of charter schools has continued to increase each year at a steady but relatively slow pace. But this past year, that growth abruptly came to a near halt. Overall, the nation’s nearly 7,000 charter schools still serve a fairly small percentage of the total number of students receiving public education, roughly six percent. Some states and cities have far more market share and point the way to what healthy expansive choice does for the whole of public education.”

Ms. Allen’s words are critically important for those of us who defend, and desperately want to see expanded, the ability of parents to chooose the best educational setting for their children.  Therefore, allow me to continue with her observations:

“CER noted in its 2015 report that while ‘…demand [for charter schools] continues to outstrip supply…’ there has been a ‘lack of progress made in state houses across the country over the past few years to improve the policy environment for charter schools’ and, more specifically, ‘… it is abundantly clear that little to no progress has been made over the past year…’

In recent years, there has been significant attention—especially, but not exclusively, among authorizers—on a perceived need to focus on charter ‘quality over quantity.’ The strategies discussed have included more stringent approval processes as well as ‘culling the herd’ during charter renewal to let only those schools deemed strong performers to continue.

This year, the movement crept to a near halt, a result of these very ill-conceived state policies and what is being termed ‘regulatory reload.’  There is widespread evidence of creeping regulatory intrusion in decisions regarding academic programming, curriculum, discipline and teacher qualifications. The problem, it appears, is policymakers who are given numerous recommendations and no longer know the difference between policies that advance the cause of effective charter schools and those that strangle them.”

D.C. is called out as particularly vulnerable to this trend of regulatory reload.  Again, from Ms. Allen:

“While still number one in our rankings, DC risks losing ground if it continues on a slow but slippery slope of allowing the city and its agencies to micromanage the authorizer’s processes. It’s also unique in that it has one authorizer that was created when the city did not have a ‘state’ board of education, and when the city was under the control of an independent board itself from the city council. That legacy of independence is now threatened by the restoration of city structures that have begun to assert various controls over chartering in the city. The law provides for the establishment of new entities for authorizing, such as universities. Pursuing additional authorizers would allow the existing DC Public Charter Board to stay on its feet, and create alternative innovations for opening and managing new schools.”

Reading this document brings me back to the debate over the future of Latin American Youth Center Career Academy PCS which this week the DC PCSB voted to begin revocation proceedings against.  It appears that the board is trying to fit this school, which serves those that others have abandoned, into some preconceived standardized model.  Here’s one more paragraph from the CER CEO’s study preface that makes it appear that she was at Monday night’s meeting in which the process was initiated to close the school:

“Charter regulation, approval and oversight should be transparent, predictable, and avoid micro-management of academics, discipline and staff hiring and termination. Regulation should be flexible enough to encourage charter schools designed to meet the needs of special populations by allowing them to meet requirements that are reasonable and appropriate for their students. And yet, it is precisely that regulation that is discouraging new charter school growth. With barely 6 percent of all public school students in charter schools nationwide, two percent growth over one year is totally unacceptable and an indication that something is amiss. Risk-averse, highly bureaucratic state and local actors are causing the stagnation. It comes not just from opponents, but from heavy-handed friends. Their heavy reliance on government to solve perceived issues of quality will bring charter schools to a screeching halt unless the policies they espouse reverse course.”

I hope those over at the DC PCSB are listening.

DC Public Charter Board votes to revoke charter of Latin American Youth Center Career Academy PCS

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At last night’s monthly meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board the body voted five to two to begin revocation proceedings against the Latin American Youth Center Career Academy PCS.  It has been a long road for this school in reaching this point and my feeling is that this story is far from over.

As you may recall the board first brought up the subject of charter revocation regarding LAYCCA last January as part of its five-year review.  However, due to the challenge to the PCSB’s findings by the school’s legal representative, attorney Stephen Marcus, the PCSB voted to delay its decision to the following month.  Then in February it again postponed a decision on this matter until the March meeting that occurred last evening.

A couple of points here.  I could not attend the session in person yesterday so this morning I tried to watch it online.  However, the video is for some reason only showing small portions of the proceedings.  Also, in the past I could depend on actions of the board being shared on Twitter but this practice seems to have stopped.

In any case, in one of the most carefully documented findings I have ever observed by the PCSB, the board found that “after reviewing all evidence submitted by the school and reassessing each goal using the business rules above, DC PCSB staff has determined that, of its seven academic goals, LAYCCA PCS met one goal, partially met one goal, and did not meet five goals. Based on the school’s failure to meet its goals and student academic achievement expectations, DC PCSB staff recommends that the DC PCSB Board revoke the school’s charter effective June 30, 2017.”  This is little changed from the board’s conclusion in January that the charter partially met two goals and did not meet five.

There are a couple of things that made this scenario different from other votes to shutter a school.  First is the unusual outpouring of strong support for LAYCCA.  Contained in the meeting materials are letters backing the school and making arguments against charter revocation from Maggie Riden, executive director of the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates; Brandon Todd, Ward 4 Councilmember; Brianne Nadeau, Ward 1 Councilmember; and Jack McCarthy, president and CEO of AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation.  There is even one from Mieka Wick, newly named CEO of CityBridge Education, addressing the $50,000 initial planning grant and “suite of supports” of up to $500,000 the school won through the Breakthrough Schools:  DC Challenge.  Ms. Wick writes:

“The LAYC Career Academy proposal was reviewed by our staff and a panel of local and national subject matter experts.  We are excited about the potential of LAYC Career Academy to demonstrate the design principles of personalized learning, intentional equity, and expansive measures of success.”

So here is why I don’t believe we are through talking about the future of LAYCCA.  The PCSB has listed five conditions that the school must meet if the board fails to vote to close it this summer.  Almost all of the deadlines are in April and May of this year.  Therefore, while the revocation process is occurring the school could and should continue to meet these criteria for continuing to operate.

Let’s sincerely hope that a suitable solution can be found for a charter that heroically serves adult students that are disadvantaged by the effects of homelessness, poverty, and incarceration.

Washington Post editors have long history of supporting school choice

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Over the weekend the editors of the Washington Post came out once again in favor of re-authorization of the SOAR Act that provides private school vouchers for low-income children in the nation’s capital.  The editorial board has supported school choice plans across the country for decades.  Here’s the background.

In 1999, I decided that I was going to get a school voucher plan approved for Washington, D.C.  The reason for my decision back then originated with my and my wife’s love for this city.  We met here as college students, settled in D.C. when we were first married, and then moved to Reston, Virginia to raise our family.  We knew that Washington would not be a great town unless it had great schools.

But the education system was a complete mess.  Little teaching was actually going on in the classrooms.  The facilities were literally crumbling.  Drugs, weapons, and gang activity was prevalent in the hallways.  As a political libertarian, I understood that only the competition for students would solve the seemingly intractable problems in the schools.  But I also recognized that no one would listen to me.  I needed someone with local credibility to get behind this policy solution.  I settled on the Washington Post’s Colbert King as the person to advance my proposal.  The reason that I selected Mr. King was that I observed from his weekly column that he too was passionate about the success of his hometown, and he  wrote from the perspective that people living in Washington, D.C. should solve their own problems.

It took me months of persuasion but there I was one morning sitting in the editorial boardroom of the Washington Post with Mr. King.  I had brought along with me Darcy Olson, now the CEO of the Goldwater Institute, but at the time the director of family and education policy at the CATO Institute.  We talked about school vouchers for an hour.

At the end of our discussion, during which I found Mr. King to be extremely kind and attentive, the Washington Post columnist explained that he could not get behind the concept.  He stated that he was worried about what would happen to the quality of the education for those who were left behind when others received private school scholarships.  Extremely disappointed, but invigorated by the chance to sit with Mr. King, I left the meeting.

But then something magical happened.  Unsigned editorial after editorial began appearing in the Post arguing in favor of proposals for school choice in various localities.  This was a drastic reversal of the newspaper’s previous viewpoint.  The change was recognized by Clint Bolick in his book Voucher Wars (CATO Institute, 2003).  In writing about the introduction of the nation’s first private school voucher plan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mr. Bolick  states:

“Ultimately, the Post concluded that because it wouldn’t help many children and was of doubtful constitutional validity, ‘choice is not the answer to the gross inequities that prevail among America’s schools.’  But the editorial conferred a strong and unexpected establishment imprimatur on our effort.  And only a few years later, the Post abandoned its reticence and become one of the nation’s most consistent and influential backers of school choice experiments” (p. 58).

To my amazement I would learn later that Mr. King was writing these pieces.

The Post columnist does not pen these opinions anymore; this job has now been passed on to someone else.  But the tradition strongly continues.  From Saturday’s piece:

“The organization that administers the federal school voucher program in the District has received 1,825 applications this year. The largest share, 25.6 percent or 468 applications, comes from Ward 8, east of the Anacostia River. The smallest, 0.8 percent or 15 families, is from Ward 3 in Northwest. It makes sense that demand is greatest where public schools are worst and families can’t afford private school or are unable to move to where the public schools are better. What doesn’t make sense is the desire — particularly among some D.C. elected officials — to try to kill off this program, thus denying low-income parents a choice that is taken for granted by those who are more affluent.”