In yesterday’s Washington Post article by Aaron C. Davis and Jenna Portnoy regarding the inaccurate letter sent by 13 D.C. Council members, a majority,  to U.S. House Representative Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, opposing expansion of the city’s private school scholarship program for low-income children, a quotation from Councilman Charles Allen stood out:

“I don’t think vouchers work, and I don’t think it’s right to take public tax dollars and put them into private religious schools,” he said. “And I think everybody agrees that we should not be having Jason Chaffetz and House Republicans serve as the local school board.”

With this comment it appears that Mr. Allen would also call for an immediate end to the federal DC Tuition Assistance Grant program.  As you may remember, DC TAG provides up to $10,000 to students in the nation’s capital to cover the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition to public universities across the country.  It also offers up to $2,500 per academic year for attendance at private colleges in the city and at private historically black colleges and universities.  The plan was developed by former local Congressman Tom Davis, who my wife and I helped elect when he first ran for the Virginia 11th District seat as coordinators of his campaign in Reston, Virginia.

Mr. Davis was driven to provide this tuition assistance to D.C. scholars because of the lack of choice of quality public colleges and universities within the District. The money allocated to DC TAG is just slightly more than that provided for the Opportunity Scholarship Program at around $17 million annually.  A primary difference, of course, between DC TAG and the OSP is that the first Congressional grant does not provide equal funding to D.C.’s traditional school system and public charter schools as does the SOAR Act within which the OSP legislation resides.

Mr. Allen emphatically states that he does not want public money to go to private religious institutions.  But among the participants in DC TAG are Catholic and Georgetown Universities, both of which are sectarian.

I know some people accuse politicians of being hypocritical, but this is truly not my desire today.  However, a little consistency is really not too much to ask.  If Mr. Allen is so strongly against providing a private school education, exactly like the one President Obama’s kids have enjoyed to pupils living in poverty, then it is only right that he fight with all his might against DC TAG.

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight & Government Reform is scheduled to take up re-authorization of the SOAR Act, which contains within it the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.  In response, yesterday D.C. Councilman David Grosso, chairman of the education committee, penned a letter along with seven other council members to Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the house committee, opposing expansion of the private school voucher program for children living in poverty beyond those already participating.   The letter contains several inaccurate claims.

In the first paragraph the authors write, “. . . the voucher program should be phased out because participation in the program and similar initiatives has not only failed to improve students’ academic performance, but worsened it, as found in a series of recent studies.”  Let’s look at some data.  Here in the nation’s capital for the 2015-to-2016 school year the percentage of pupils enrolled in the OSP graduating from high school was 98 percent.  This compares to a 72.9 percent high school graduation rate for charters and a percentage of 69.2 percent for those attending DCPS.

The misinformation contained in the letter by Mr. Grosso only gets worse.  It states, “We appreciate your interest in providing support to public education for our constituents, but we strongly believe that financial resources should be invested in the existing public education system – both public schools and public charter schools – rather than diverted to private schools.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The federal legislation, through the Three Sector Approach, provides $15 million a year for vouchers plus an equal amount for DCPS and charters.  Money for the scholarships does not take away revenue for the other sectors.  As Michael Musante, director of government relations for FOCUS, states in a Washington Post story by Aaron Davis and Jenna Portnoy that appears today, “it was hard to fathom why ‘any Council member would put at risk a future $225 million dollars in federal funds over five years given to the District alone with little to no strings attached.”

I could go on all day, but I’ll draw your attention to one more line from the document.  The letter reads, “. . . if fully funded, the authorization would provide many more dollars per student for vouchers than is allocated per student in public schools and public charter schools.”  Mr. Grosso has to know that this claim is simply false.  According to its fiscal year 2017 budget DCPS is spending an average of $18,554 per student.  Charters get an average of $9,682 per pupil through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula plus an additional $3,124 per kid enrolled to pay for facilities for a total of $12,806.  Alternatively, the OSP scholarships are currently set at $12,679 each for high school students and $8,452 for elementary and middle school scholars.

A telephone call to Mr. Grosso’s spokesperson to discuss these discrepancies was not returned.

Both Mayor Muriel Bowser and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson recognize the value of the Opportunity Scholarship Program to our city and that is why they are urging Congress to re-authorize the program.  It is the ethical action to take for the benefit of the most vulnerable children in our community.  There is no time to waste.

Jami Dunham, the chief executive officer of Paul Public Charter School, announced on March 2nd that she has resigned from her position effective at the end of the 2016 to 2017 school year.  Ms. Dunham has been in her position for a decade.  I interviewed the Paul CEO back in 2014.

In her announcement, Ms. Dunham states that she and her husband made the decision for her to leave her job last November so that she could spend more time with her family.  She stated that she is proud of the accomplishments at the charter over the last 10 years which include:

• The expansion of Paul into a high school, and a beautiful campus modernization that celebrates our scholars.
• Our international studies program, which has enabled our scholars to travel to Japan, Costa Rica, Zambia, Jamaica, Paraguay, Panama, London, Ghana, Cuba and Italy.
• The improvements we have made to our teacher compensation package. Over the past two years we implemented the first phase of our two-part plan and increased teacher salaries to the 50^th percentile among all DC charter schools.  For the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years, we implemented merit-based pay to increase base salaries. As I announced in January, this month we expect to roll out the second phase of this package with the issuance of contracts for the 2017-2018 school year. The second phase of this plan will move the average salary of our teachers from below the 30^th percentile to at least the 50^th percentile.

The news comes as word spread that teachers at Paul are seeking union representation after expressing that their displeasure with working conditions and a lack of responsiveness to their concerns by management.  Rachel Cohen of the American Prospect reported that 75 percent of teachers at Paul have signed a petition to join the new collective bargaining unit.

Roberta Colton, the chairman of the school’s board of directors, explains the process for the selection of a new CEO:

“The Board of Trustees is prepared to have a seamless and smooth transition from Jami’s leadership to our next CEO. The Board has a Succession Plan that was developed a couple of years ago and is already being applied to begin the search process. We have begun putting together a Search/Transition Committee to be comprised of five voting Board members, one or more key staff members, a teacher, and a member of the Executive Leadership Team. Sterling Ward, Board Vice Chair and Paul alum, is serving as chair of the Committee. To date, he has appointed five Board members to the Committee. Now that Jami’s pending departure has been announced, the next step is to begin filling the open positions in order to complete the search committee team.

Additionally, the Board sought bids from a number of search firms well-versed in the DC Charter School community to help us identify qualified and interested candidates for the position of our new CEO. The Committee is now in the process of finalizing its engagement of one of those firms. As part of its process, the selected search firm has interviewed both parent Trustees and intends to interview several faculty members to solicit their thoughts about the qualities and experience they would like to see in the new CEO.”

It will be interesting to see the impact of Ms. Dunham’s decision on the move toward the formation of a new teacher’s union at the charter.

As predicted, the number of pupils participating in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is going up, by a lot.  Serving Our Children, the group selected in 2015 to administer the private school voucher plan, is wasting no time taking advantage of the strong support of school choice of the new occupant of the White House and the recently confirmed woman heading the U.S. Department of Education.

SOC has determined that in the past the Department of Education has been misinterpreting the legislation contained in the SOAR Act in two critically important ways.  First, brothers and sisters of those already admitted into the program should have been provided with a sibling preference for admissions.  My understanding is that this preference is extended not only to blood relatives of those using a voucher but to anyone living in the same household as a OSP student.

In addition, and extremely importantly, kids who are already attending a private school that meet the residency and income requirements are also eligible to receive an OSP award.  Finally, there is one more crucial change in management.  The scholarships will now be granted on a rolling basis.  Gone will be the day of the grand announcement of who got in and who did not make the cut.

These modifications have already had a drastic impact.  On Friday, February 24, 756 parents who completed the application requirements were notified that their scholars had received an OSP scholarship for the 2017 to 2018 school year.

But Serving Our Children is not done here.  The organization is now contacting participating private schools to request that they increase the number of OSP kids being admitted.  Then there is the legislative side.  Look for Congress to now quickly reauthorize the SOAR bill for another five years.  There is also some talk of making this legislation permanent.

The bottom line is that many more low-income parents are about to be provided with choice about where their children can get a quality education.

News broke yesterday afternoon that the teachers at Paul Public Charter School intend to form their own union entitled the District of Columbia Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (DC ACTS) under the umbrella of the American Federation of Teachers.  This would be the first time a charter in the nation’s capital elected to become part of a teachers’ union.  Rachel Cohen of the American Prospect reported that 75 percent of teachers at Paul have signed a petition to join the new collective bargaining unit.  It is not a positive development.

Perhaps it is fitting that this effort is happening at Paul PCS, the only traditional school to become a charter.  As the story goes Cecile Middleton, the principal of Paul Junior High when it was under DCPS,  became so frustrated that she had to go through the central office to do simple things like get a light bulb changed, that she decided to form her own school.  Josephine Baker, former executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, explains in her book The Evolution & Revolution of DC Charter Schools, that it took the leaders of Paul three application cycles of the PCSB to get the project off the ground.  Then, in 1999, the union came in:

“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).

Ms. Cohen indicated in her story that there were two primary factors that led to the charter school teachers currently at Paul embracing a union.  From her article:

“The first is that administrators brought in a consultant at the start of the 2015-2016 school year to launch a committee with teachers dedicated to discussing school improvements.  After a series of meetings, teachers submitted a list of proposals to their administration, including such recommendations as more transparent staff evaluations, caps on class size, and increased time for teacher planning.  But the suggestions went nowhere.”

Then at the conclusion of last year’s term the well-respected high school principal was not offered continued employment and the staff could not get an explanation for the change.  The instructors banded together to reverse the decision but apparently their viewpoint was ignored.

Four year history and government teacher Dave Koenig expresses the sentiment of the employees, again from Ms. Cohen’s piece:  “In my time here I’ve seen people who are really good, dedicated teachers shown the door because they have personality conflicts with someone above them.  I’ve also seen really good people leave on their own because they feel underappreciated or overworked to the point of developing [a] nervous breakdown.”

WAMU’s Martin Austermuhle explains that conversion to union representation is not a given:

“Though charter schools are publicly funded, they are exempt from the D.C. law requiring the government to enter collective bargaining agreements with public employees. An organizing effort in 2012 by the Washington Teachers’ Union — which represents teachers in DCPS — fizzled due to legal and political obstacles.

A decision last year from the National Labor Relations Board means the teachers’ attempt to unionize will come under the federal law that applies to private sector workers. That gives the school’s management two choices: willingly recognize the teachers’ request for a union, or call an election in which staff would have to vote on whether to unionize.”

If the drive goes through these teachers will be in for a tremendously rude awakening.  In my experience injection of a union creates silos between the front line staff and management.  Modifications to the work environment, from everything from working hours, pay, benefits, and evaluations, must be contractually negotiated.  As I related to Mr. Austermuhle, it is certain to diminish the ability for the charter to rapidly react to the needs and desires of students and parents.

Still, and we have to realize that we are hearing only one side of the story, when management does not effectively listen to staff it invites the introduction of union activity.  The move comes in the aftermath of the Public Charter School Board’s executive director Scott Pearson, publicly inviting unions into our schools.

The Ward 4 charter currently enrolls approximately 767 students in grades Pre-Kindergarten 3 to the twelfth grade.  Both the lower and upper schools are ranked as Tier 2 on the Performance Management Framework.