Author: mlerner10

William E. Doar, Jr. PCS to change name to City Arts & Prep

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Tonight at the monthly meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board a vote will be taken to change the name on August 1, 2016 of the William E. Doar, Jr. PCS to City Arts and Prep PCS.

The move makes sense since none of the creators of WEDJ are currently associated with the school.  Julie Doar-Sinkfield, Mr. Doar’s daughter, who was the first board chair and executive director, had a public battle with the charter in 2011 when she and the two original founders, Mary Robbins and Nadia Casseus-Torney, attempted to wrestle control of the school from its board of directors.  The issue made it to D.C. Superior Court with a judge issuing a restraining order blocking the three women from involvement with the charter before they decided to drop their effort.  WEDJ received legal assistance from Stephen Marcus, the same attorney who is now facilitating the FOCUS engineered lawsuit against the city regarding inequity charter school funding, and ironically, the lawyer who negotiated WEDJ’s original lease with the landlord at 705 Edgewood Street, N.E.

Despite all of the controversy I hate to see the change.  I was part of the founding group of the school who met in Ms. Doar’s basement apartment on Capitol Hill over a decade ago to write the charter.  She cooked dinner for us as we sought to develop the best charter school the nation’s capital had ever seen.  I went on to succeed Ms. Doar as WEDJ’s board chair for five years.

I never met Mr. Doar since he passed away in 1982.  But he was obviously a remarkable man.  Here is a small portion of his biography:

“During his lifetime, he took steps to initiate the desegregation of facilities at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital and is responsible for placing the first African-American doctor on its staff. He was a member continuously since 1945 of the United Bowling League of Brooklyn, the league most responsible for the integration of the American Bowling Congress. He helped to bring about the integration of the Nursing School at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and was responsible for placing the first black youth in the biology laboratory of that hospital. He worked with the late Congressman Adam Powell in integrating the stores on 125th Street in Harlem. With the New York State Employment Service he brought the discrimination at Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric to a halt with the cooperation of the NAACP.”

Mr. Doar was a member of the Kappa Beta Sigma chapter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity for over 48 years, holding a variety of leadership positions.  His involvement led in 1995 to the international headquarters of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity on Kennedy Street, N.W. to be named the William E. Doar, Jr. Building.

While I did not get the chance to know him I spent many hours with his wife.  I found Mrs. Doar to be the epitome of class and kindness.  She has a fantastic sense of humor which she expresses with a broad smile.  I especially welcomed that look when Julie would become completely frustrated when she couldn’t get people to do exactly as she wanted.

Julie, as well as Mary and Nadia, taught me so much about charters, regarding both pedagogy and governance.  The potential of these individuals to do good in the world was never more evident than on one of the annual faculty performances that we held as fundraisers.  We spoke of everything that was being accomplished at the school and everything that was still be be done.  We laughed at the joy being brought to us by those gathered in the room.

And we talked about William E. Doar, Jr.

 

Charter school restarts should be exempt from Tiering for 2 years

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Scott Pearson, the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, wrote an extremely interesting article recently on lesson learned by his organization when turning over management of a charter that is being closed to another school.  For many years now  when the PCSB shutters a charter it tries to identify a Performance Management Framework Tier 1 school to takeover the facility instead of finding new places for the pupils to attend.  It is a great move in that it minimizes disruption for families while significantly increasing the quality of what is taking place in the classrooms.

Mr. Pearson indicates that one of the traits that will increase the probability that a restart will be successful is to allow the board of directors of the closing school to select, within parameters, the incoming charter.  This is an engagement tool for those that are being in the unfortunate position of having to give up their institution.  Another important observation discovered through this process is that the new school should bring strong resources to the existing site.  This includes hiring an experienced principal and “flooding the zone” with extra resources to ensure success.  Furthermore, Mr. Pearson writes that the staff should avoid trying to expand their program to areas that they lack prior experience in carrying out.  In other words they should stick to what they know they do best.

One crucial issue the PCSB executive director has found with restarts is that there may not be a school agreeing to assume the task.  This was the case this year with Potomac Prep PCS.  When I interviewed Mr. Pearson a couple of months ago he explained to me that another school could not be found to take it over.  One impediment to a charter being willing to enter into a restart relationship could be the fear that the move will negatively impact their PMF score.  Therefore, to provide a strong incentive for a charter to boldly go into a restart situation, the PCSB should exclude this campus from PMF tiering for two years; the first year of operation at the new campus plus another twelve months.

Mr. Pearson admits in his article that one charter taking over another is a daunting job.  I content that by holding off grading on the PMF for two years for charters initiating a restart we could see far greater replication of some of our highest performing schools.

Scott Pearson should replace Kaya Henderson as DCPS Chancellor

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In today’s Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews writes an open letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser begging her to cancel the national search for a Chancellor to replace Kaya Henderson.  He writes:

“The alleged stars hired in these fantasy adventures usually have little familiarity with the administrators, teachers, parents, students and power brokers in the school district or have little knowledge of its history. They lack trusted allies. Some of the most valuable people they must work with resent their presence.”

I agree.  Fortunately, we have someone here in D.C. that can ameliorate all of these concerns. That individual is Scott Pearson, the current executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board.

What a perfect choice this would be.  In his five years at the job Mr. Pearson has demonstrated a laser focus on improving the quality of the schools his organization oversees.  In fact, almost all of the charters graded as Tier 3 institutions on the Performance Management Framework are no longer around.  According to the PCSB’s 2015 Annual Report “of 23 schools rated Tier 3 since 2011, 6 have improved and 19 have been closed.”  He is used to holding schools accountable for results and yet he is always conscience of the need to extend as much autonomy as possible.  In other words he is not a micromanager.

In addition, Mr. Pearson has proven himself to be a skilled administrator.  Under his direction, the PCSB has gained a reputation as being perhaps the best at what it does.  According to testimony given last year to the D.C. Council by past board chair John “Skip” McKoy “both the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools have recognized D.C. as the strongest charter sector in the nation, and PCSB as a leading authorizer.”

Mr. Pearson already has a strong working relationship with all the major stakeholders in public education in the nation’s capital.  The PCSB executive director has had a particularly good rapport with Ms. Henderson, consistently treating her with dignity and respect.  He has worked collaboratively with the Deputy Mayor for Education, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, and DCPS on highly successful projects such as the common lottery and the development of equity reports.

Finally, Mr. Pearson values the traditional schools.  In a 2015 Washington Post editorial written with Mr. McKoy he stated:

“Right now, the District has the best of both worlds: a vibrant charter sector that offers a wide range of learning models from some of the best school leaders and a strong, improving and growing DCPS that has responded to charter competition by revitalizing its commitment to quality. D.C. schools are nowhere close to perfect. But the current model, with two public school systems pushing each other to be better and cooperating whenever possible, is proving to be the right mix for the District’s schoolchildren.”

In making Mr. Pearson Chancellor we could get a true win-win situation.  Someone who knows and revers the major education players in the city, and at the same time, a leader who will try new ways in order to continue the rise in academic achievement demonstrated under Ms. Henderson’s tenure.

The decision for the Mayor is clear and simple.

 

 

 

Study on where charter students go to school points to need for more charters

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Last Thursday evening at the Donald Hense retirement and birthday celebration I had the honor of sitting next to Linda Moore, the founder and past executive director of the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School.  I always enjoy catching up with Ms. Moore because she is such a strong and personable leader in our local movement, an achievement symbolized by her 2013 election to the National Charter School Hall of Fame.  It has been five years since I interviewed her so I asked her how things were going at her school.  “Isn’t the wait list for admission getting up to about 1,000 students?” I asked.  No, she replied, it is now grown to 2,000 pupils.   The last lottery cycle, Ms. Moore explained, there were that many children for 20 available slots.  She added that the Stokes is now considering replication but no decision has been made.

This conversation brings me to the study completed last month by the DC Public Charter School Board which documents how far students travel to attend our schools.  It turns out that the distance is not very far.  On average kids travel 2.1 miles to class, a statistic that has not changed from the 2014 to 2015 term.  The title of the report is “Choosing Quality” but it really could have been called “Keeping Young People Close to Home.”  According to Tomeika Bowden, the PCSB communications director, students do not travel farther to attend schools with larger wait lists, nor do charters ranked as Tier 1 on the Performance Management Framework draw kids living far away from these institutions.

In other words, as we already knew, parents want their children to attend schools where they live.  There could be many reasons for this phenomenon.  For instance, there may be a greater sense of community for families when kids from the same geographic areas go to the same school.  As Scott Pearson, the executive director of the PCSB, pointed out to me during our conversation, parent schedules may make it extremely difficult for them to travel long distances for the educational needs of their offspring.  Finally, it is expensive to commute.  While pupils now ride free on buses and Metro, the same benefit is not realized by the adults.

The study’s conclusions say loud and clear that we desperately need quality charters on every street corner.  The findings have important implications as to the question of whether there should be a neighborhood admissions preference (there probably should be one on a voluntary basis) and whether we should be concerned about a charter opening in close proximity to a DCPS facility (we should not care).  The bottom line here is that if there was a sufficient number of charters a preference for those living nearby would become unnecessary.  The supply would meet demand.

Finally, as I’ve called for in the past, we must figure out a way to expand great schools quickly.  I don’t know about you but as a parent I think constantly about those that are blocked from having their children attend their preferred site.  We pride ourselves in the amount of school choice we have here in D.C., but with wait lists like the one at Elsie Whitlow Stokes, we are really providing no choice at all.

 

 

 

The Donald Hense retirement and birthday party

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Last Thursday evening my wife Michele and I had the pleasure of attending the retirement and birthday party for the founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of Friendship Public Charter School Donald Hense.  Mr. Hense retired this evening as CEO, as he continues his role as chair of the school’s board of directors.  Held at Washington, D.C.’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, it was as if someone had thrown open a powerful electric circuit feeding one of the Friendship Teacher of the Year ceremonies that Michele and I have had the honor to be guests of for many years.  In fact, just as with the Teacher of Year events, the television commentator and author Roland Martin was the Master of Ceremonies.  The night included speeches, roasts, song, poetry, and much laughter.  But I do not think any affair can really fully capture the legacy of this man that is bigger than life.

Mr. Hense had gotten to know Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was at Morehouse College.  Later, as the executive director of Friendship House, he saw first hand the problems facing those living in poverty.  “You cannot provide a child with a vision if the parent doesn’t know where rent or the next meal is coming from,” Mr. Hense realized. “How are parents with that kind of stress going to tell their children they can become the next president of the United States?”  He came to understand that schools were not preparing these kids adequately for college so he opened Friendship in the poorest areas of D.C.

Friendship PCS was founded in 1998 which makes it one of the first charters in the nation’s capital.  I would start my involvement in this movement a year later.  So allow me to give you a sneak peak into what this was like.  Charters were looked at as organizations that were trying to steal kids from the traditional public schools.  Distrust was rampant, with many accusing this movement of privatizing education by making it a for-profit business.  I remember like it was yesterday approaching a bank for a loan to acquire a building.  The official looked at me like I was crazy when I explained that the only collateral we had was students.

Friendship has grown to 11 campuses teaching over 4,200 children.  In addition, there are two partnership schools in Baltimore and one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  99 percent of Friendships student population is African-American with 75 percent qualifying for free or reduced price meals.  Three out of four pupils live in Wards 7 and 8.  15 percent are special education students.

Three of Friendship’s campuses are now classified as Tier 1 on the DC Public Charter School’s Performance Management Framework.  Friendship’s four-year high school graduate rate is around 95 percent, much higher than DCPS’s 64 percent and the overall rate of charters at 72 percent.

Over 95 percent of its 2,500 high school graduates have gone on to college.  Through Friendship’s efforts these students have been awarded over $40 million in scholarships.

Mr. Hense turned 74 years old on July 4th.  He summarizes his motivation for his exceptionally difficult work over the last 18 years this way:

“I believe the best thing you can do to get people out of poverty is to educate them. The most valuable skill in today’s economy, where jobs can be located anywhere there is an Internet connection, is knowledge. And knowledge, for the vast majority, is nurtured within our local public schools. We all share the responsibility to make a difference in the lives of our children. I know it can be done. We do it every day at Friendship.”

 

 

 

 

 

Kaya Henderson stepping down as DCPS Chancellor

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Shock waves reverberated throughout the nation’s capital yesterday afternoon when news came onto the Washington Post website that Kaya Henderson had decided to step down as Chancellor of the District of Columbia public school system.  According to the story Ms. Henderson was leaving her position after six years at the end of September, with a total of 10 years spent working for DCPS.  Mayor Muriel Bowser immediately named John Davis, the current DCPS chief of schools, as interim Chancellor beginning October 1st, while simultaneously declaring that she did not ask Ms. Henderson to go.  A national search will begin for a successor, with a replacement not expected to be named until the start of the 2017 to 2018 school term.

There were a few significant reasons that Ms. Henderson’s resignation was such a surprise.  Most people assumed that she would stick around until 2017 to see the conclusion of her five year strategic plan.  She is exiting at a period in which enrollment has increased in the traditional school system for four consecutive years.  Her pupils have demonstrated the strongest academic growth of any urban school district in this country.  New families are moving to D.C., drawn in part by improvements to the public schools.

But in the end I guess the pressure associated with her role overcame the rewards of her success.  She told the Post, “This is dog years on your life,” Henderson said of her job. “Leadership is about knowing when to pass the baton. I know that there are other people that can pick it up and run with it.”

I have been writing about public education in D.C. since 2009.  As a fierce school choice advocate I have advanced the position that all of Washington’s schools should be charters, writing that DCPS facilities that are under-performing be turned over to those that are rated as Tier 1 on the DC Public Charter School Board’s Performance Management Framework. I wanted the regular school system dismantled.

I did not just say this once but repeated it over and over again.  Then, at the end of 2015, I was granted an interview with Kaya Henderson.  It is not an understatement to state that after meeting her my life has never been the same.  Here was someone that was energetic, positive, direct, and kind who was determined with all of her might not to tear apart what she had to work with but to strengthen her schools from within.  She would accomplish this feat with dignity one teacher, one principal, and one student at a time.  Here is what I wrote about our session:

“What I do understand is that we have a superstar in our possession that we must all support. Recent public conversations about whether a new Mayor would retain the services of Ms. Henderson do not help anyone. She is an individual who is totally convinced in her heart and in her head that by working together we can finally provide all students with a quality education, no matter their background. For me, today, this is more than sufficient.”

Thank you Kaya, my friend.  You have helped so many children, not only in your own sector but because you have been such a strong competitor, you have pushed charters to improve.  I guess then it is the appropriate moment to leave.  You reached your goal.

 

 

 

 

“We have to go back to selling mix tapes out of the back of a car”

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Yesterday, the Center for Education Reform sent this tidbit from Dr. Howard Fuller who is attending this week’s National Charter School Conference.  The entire quotation is as follows:

“Charter schools are kind of like Snoop Dogg. Nobody ever thought he’d be mainstream.  Now charter schools are mainstream. But we have to go back to selling mix tapes out of the back of a car.”

His is of course echoing the call to arms that CER’s founder and chief executive officer Jeanne Allen offered a few weeks ago in which she advanced the argument that the school reform movement has become complacent and stale.  She was talking about change on a national level but she could have been referring to the situation right here in Washington, D.C.

I can even tell you the date that things started to go drastically downhill.  It was March 20, 2015.

Please consider that we have a FOCUS engineered lawsuit regarding the fact that charters receive about $100 million a year less in funding than the traditional schools but no one really seems to care.  In fact, if it wasn’t for the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools becoming a party to the legal action only two charters, Washington Latin PCS and Eagle Academy PCS would have joined the effort.  This is exceptionally sad.

There was a concerted campaign in this budget cycle to raise the charter school facility allotment from $3,124 a pupil a year where it has stood for years to $3,250. It didn’t happen, but no one really seems to care.

Charter schools are desperate for permanent facilities and DCPS is holding about a dozen empty buildings.  Is there an organized effort to have these spaces released so that they can be filled with kids learning in the classroom?  Not at all.  No one seems to care.

Meanwhile, we drive around town seeing the capital renovations to the traditional schools that seem to escape any type of budget cap.  It appears these DCPS palaces are everywhere. Charters are severely limited in the amount of money they can borrow from private sources to acquire and renovate buildings, if they are even permitted to obtain a loan that must be paid back.   But do we in our local movement even offer a whisper about this situation?  No.  No one seems to care.

It is not a surprise that charters have been frozen at teaching 44 percent of all public school students in the nation’s capital.  We are fortunate, considering the efforts of DCPS Chancellor Kay Henderson to attract families, that this number is not lower.  But stay tuned.  It could go down.  And then guess what?  No one will seem to care.

 

Walton Foundation to help fund charter school facilities in D.C.

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Today at the National Alliance for Public Charter School’s National Charter School Conference being held in Nashville, Tennessee, the Walton Family Foundation is to announce a $250 million initiative to help charter schools obtain and expand permanent facilities.  The goal of the program, according to Leslie Brody of the Wall Street Journal, is to add 250,000 seats in charters in 17 cities by 2027.  About 2.7 million students currently receive their public education in charters with over a million pupils on waiting lists.  In Washington D.C., charters educate almost 39,000 children with 8,500 trying to get in.  Excitingly, the nation’s capital is one of 17 cities that are being targeted by the Walton Foundation for charter school growth.

Ms. Brody goes on to explain that the great majority of the Walton funding will go to “low interest loans, offered by nonprofit lenders, for which charters will be able to apply.”  Of course, the obtaining of permanent facilities is the most significant obstacle charters face.  The search and acquisition of buildings often results in a needless distraction for charter leaders away from their focus on the academic progress of their scholars.  Many schools, due to the overwhelming difficulty in finding space, end up locating inappropriately and unfairly in church basements, warehouses, and storefronts.  The Wall Street Journal article quotes Marc Sternberg, director of Walton’s K-12 education program and one of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s deputy chancellors, as saying that the dollars will “level the playing field” for charters in many cities.

The Walton Foundation plan is to be administered by Civic Builders, a not-for-profit New York City developer.  David Umansky, the group’s CEO, states that the investment will allow charters to have broader access to commercial loans and other methods of borrowing.  The initiative comes on top of the $116 million the Foundation has given since 2003 to assist charters in gaining places in which to operate.

This morning’s revelation is not completely a surprise.  When I interviewed Scott Pearson, the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, a few weeks ago he informed me that a group of as many as 50 charter school stakeholders had been meeting to try and figure out a solution for the charter school facility dilemma.

The news comes on the 25th anniversary of the national charter school movement and during the 20th year of charters operating in Washington, D.C.  It could not arrive at a better time.  Our local sector has been stuck at teaching 44 percent of public school students for several years now and with more young families moving into the District there is an estimate that 50 new public schools will be needed within the next 10 years.

 

Student explusion and suspension rates should be part of D.C. charter school ranking

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Much has been written in the past week about a recently released study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education regarding how Washington, D.C. and New Orleans are handling public school student expulsions and suspensions.  The authors come to the conclusion that both rates have declined in the nation’s capital over the past three years primarily because of the release of Equity Reports that make these statistics publicly available for individual schools.  From the investigation:

“Since D.C. officials published the first School Equity Reports for the 2012–2013 school year, schools have shown some encouraging trends. Between the 2012–2013 and 2014–2015 school years, the average overall suspension rate across all city schools dropped from 12 percent to 10 percent, as shown in Figure 3. The suspension rate for students with special needs, the group of students most frequently suspended from the city’s schools, fell from 23 percent to 19 percent. The suspension rate for black students, the racial group most frequently suspended, fell from 16 percent to 13 percent. Strictly by the numbers, the city’s schools are suspending and expelling fewer students: the citywide expulsion rate fell from 0.22 percent (22 per 1,000 students) to 0.13 percent (13 per 1,000 students).”

Data from the DC Public Charter School Board states that the out of school suspension rate has gone from a four year high of 14.5 percent in the 2012 to 2013 school year to 10.7 percent in the 2014 to 2015 term.  Moreover, a four-year peak expulsion rate in the 2011 to 2012 school year of 0.8 percent dropped to 0.3 percent during the 2014 to 2015 school year.  These are impressive numbers.  In my interview with Scott Pearson, the PCSB executive director, he himself attributed the two-thirds decline in suspension proportions to making these statistics public.

Still, the CRPE questions whether these indicators could be even smaller if they were included in the tiering of schools that resulted from scoring on the Performance Management Framework.  I have to admit I like the idea.  This information should be incorporated into the PMF not simply because it could help drive down student suspensions and expulsions, but because it gives a fuller picture of the operation of the charter, just as I’ve argued in the past the report card should encompass a grade for board of directors governance and financials.  Parents and their children will benefit from the inclusion of these important school characteristics.

The fight over the performance of online charter schools

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Last week the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools issued a report critical of the academic performance of online charter schools. The organization states that as of August, 2014 there were 135 such full-time schools operating in 23 states and the District of Columbia educating about 180,000 students, a jump of 50 percent in the number of schools since 2008. Three states, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, enroll over half of all full-time online charter school students, and 25 percent of all online charter schools enroll over 80 percent of all students. 70 percent of online charter schools are run by for-profit companies.

Demographically, online charter schools enroll more white students than regular charter schools, fewer English Language Learners, a lower number of Hispanic students, and about the same number of black students.  They also serve a lower number of special education students and a higher proportion of kids living in poverty compared to brick and mortar charters.

Academically the two models perform much differently.  In Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) most recent study in 2015 regular charter schools added “40 additional days of learning growth in math and 28 days of additional growth in reading” a year compared to traditional schools.  Here in D.C. the results are significantly greater with Scott Pearson, the executive director of the Public Charter School Board, pointing out to me recently that students gain an extra 70 to 100 days of learning a year compared to those that go to a DCPS facility.

But this is not the case when it comes to online charter schools.  In the NAPCS examination conducted by three research groups, in a year “full-time virtual charter school students experience 80 fewer days of learning in math and 72 fewer days of learning in reading in comparison to traditional public school students.” The organization then offers a set of policy solutions to try and turn this situation around.

Jeanne Allen, the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, has attacked the report’s findings.  “Researchers agree that this view of the data is superficial and ignores who and what is gained by a particular kind of schooling approach. Many students who enroll in virtual charter school do so because of extenuating circumstances or because they simply are not served well in a brick-and-mortar learning environment. This report is troubling in that it suggests that the measure of a school’s effectiveness is an average of who gets tested, not who gets served and the conditions under which they enter or leave.”

But I have to disagree in this case with Ms. Allen. One of the researchers for the National Alliance study is CREDO, and their investigation is anything but superficial.  The Stanford University group does point out that when it first looked at the academic performance of charters in 2009 learning in these schools lagged compared to that going on in regular classrooms.  These authors speculate that the same pattern of improvement may come about as online schools mature.  Let’s all hope that this is the case.