Education Department slammed for charter school oversight — by its own watchdog office

Education Department slammed for charter school oversight — by its own watchdog office

The audit, titled, “Nationwide Assessment of Charter and Education Management Organizations” and conducted by the department’s inspector general (see below), looked at the relationship that several dozen charter schools have had with their own charter management organizations (CMOs). It found, among other things that there were “internal control weaknesses” related to the schools’ relationships to their CMOs that were so severe that the department’s own program objectives were at “significant risk.” And it says:  According to the audit, however, the department didn’t do enough to ensure that some of the charter schools it is funding have been able to reach the stated goals. It says in part: Vanessa Descalzi, senior communications manager for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement that the organizations takes “seriously” any concerns about how federal funds are spent, but also insisted that some CMOs have strong outcomes for low-income students.  And she criticized the audit itself, saying: According to the National Education Association, several of states and CMOs that have received federal funds this year for charter schools had previously won grant money and some problems were discovered. A post written by NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said: Florida, too, was a winner in the latest round of grants, winning $58.4 million for 2016 and possibly a total of $70.7 million. In Florida, for-profit CMOs rule in the charter world, and hundreds of charter schools have had to close amid financial problems and other scandals. You can read more:

A disturbing look at how charter schools are hurting a traditional school district

Charter schools have become a central feature of the school “choice” movement, itself a key part of corporate school reform, which seeks to operate public schools as if they were businesses rather than civic institutions. There are now thousands of charters — which are publicly funded but independently operated, sometimes by for-profit companies — enrolling a few million students in 43 states and the District of Columbia who make up about 6 percent of public school students across the country. While they are a small minority of the public school student population, outsized controversy surrounds charter schools in many communities, especially in states where lax oversight has resulted in financial irregularities and traditional public schools are negatively affected. There are so many issues surrounding charter schools that in October 2016, leaders of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, bucked intense pressure from charter supporters and ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on the expansion of charters and for stronger oversight of these schools. Here’s a cautionary post about the impact of charter schools in one school district in Pennsylvania, one of a number of states with extremely lax charter school laws. It was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She has been chronicling problems with corporate school reform for years, including with a series about troubled charter schools in California. On Jan. 11, the Senate education confirmation will hold confirmation hearings on Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire selected by President-elect Donald Trump to be the next U.S. education secretary. She is an unabashed supporter of charter schools and has worked in the past against strong oversight of the schools. Senators asking her questions may want to ask her about charter oversight and the dynamic around charters in Pennsylvania and the Bethlehem Area School District, as described by Burris.  By Carol Burris Bethlehem is a proud city with a tidy historic downtown that appears well-kept and well-intentioned. Income is below the national average, and unemployment is slightly higher, yet it is still in far better shape than neighboring small cities such as Allentown. The Bethlehem Steel Plant that once kept the economy robust closed down about 20 years ago. Now the small city is a small tech hub with tourism, major medical networks and local universities providing work for its nearly 75,000 residents. The public schools of the city do a fine job serving their majority minority students, of whom nearly 60 percent receive free or reduced-priced lunch. There are few dropouts, and an outstanding music program keeps kids engaged. Bethlehem’s two high schools offer AP courses, and SAT scores are consistently close to or above the national average, with most students taking the test. It has not been easy supporting the public schools, however, given the financial challenges of the city. In addition, the district suffered a financial crisis in 2008 and then reeled under massive cuts in state aid in the 2011-12 school year. But the worst hit of all has come from the continuing and increasing siphoning of district dollars to charter schools — a whopping $25 million this year alone.  All of the problems associated with charter schools, such as, siphoning of public school funding, increased segregation, scandalous recruiting practices and blatant profiteering can be found in charters in and surrounding America’s Christmas City.  Pennsylvania requires districts to pay the charter school a per-pupil tuition fee based on how much the district spends on its own students.  In Bethlehem’s case, its per-pupil charter tuition cost per general education student is $10,635.77 and $22, 886.44 per special education student. In addition, the charter school students receive transportation funding from the taxpayers for attending any charter school located in the district or within 10 miles of any district boundary. The argument that charter proponents make is that since the school is no longer educating the student, the per-pupil amount it sends to the charter represents real savings for the district. But anyone who understands school finance knows that assumption is ludicrous. If class size is reduced from 28 to 27, or even to 25, you still must retain the teacher and her salary remains the same. The school does not lose a principal, custodian, cafeteria server or school nurse, even when sizable numbers leave. You can’t lower the heat or turn off the lights because some students and their funding have left for charters. Joseph Roy is the superintendent of the Bethlehem Area School District (BASD). He helped put the district back on its feet after the 2008 fiscal crisis. This year, he was chosen by his peers as Pennsylvania’s Superintendent of the Year.  Roy talked about all of the things he could do for district kids if only that money came back. “What we have lost is a lot of the ‘equity actions’ that help students who need the most help,” he said. “If we weren’t spending so much on charters, we would have more academic and social supports for our students living in poverty. We would have more professional development focused on equity and literacy. We would have social workers. And, importantly, we would not have raised property taxes to the extent we have if not for the charter expenses. The local working-class people of BASD are shouldering the cost of charter schools due to the state’s lack of financial support and lack of desire to correct the problems.”   It is hard to understand why every taxpayer in Pennsylvania is not outraged at a legislature that repeatedly rejects sensible calls for reforms. When cash is flush and regulations are thin, those who seek to profit appear, and they ensure reform is thwarted. Bethlehem Area School District experienced this firsthand.   Bethlehem residents were outraged. The new charter school’s CEO, Lorraine Petrillo, immediately denied any involvement in the flier.       On the road away from Bethlehem, I stopped by the Innovative Arts Academy. I saw a teacher and two students hanging out on steps facing a large parking lot. The school banner was torn. A dumpster was placed in front of it. The teacher told me that school enrollment was now below 300. He said that he and the students were filming, what I don’t know. This year, well over $2 million from neighboring districts in the financially strained Lehigh Valley will go to the charter school. The Senate Education Committee plans to hold its confirmation hearing this week on Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. secretary of education. DeVos believes that the marketplace of charters and choice is better than the stability of the public schools of Bethlehem. If poor parents buy the hype of anonymous fliers, then buyer beware. In the world of DeVos, the cream rises to the top, and the strongest will survive. That is the founding principle of “school choice.” But what I learned in Bethlehem is both simple and clear. Pennsylvania’s politicians, like those in so many states, have neither the stomach nor the will to curb the abuses of charter schools as they drain the public school coffers. America must choose either a patchwork of online schools and charters with profiteers on the prowl, or a transparent community public school system run by citizens elected by their neighbors. A dual school system with the private taking funding from the public, simply cannot survive. Notes:

D.C. officials seek stronger oversight of charter schools after recent fraud allegations

Recent fraud allegations against leaders at two D.C. public charter schools have illuminated what city officials are calling a gap in their ability to effectively oversee the financial dealings of the fast-growing charter school sector. Following two cases in which the D.C. attorney general has accused charter school leaders of schemes to divert millions of tax dollars to private companies they owned, the D.C. Public Charter School Board is seeking legislative changes that would give it greater authority to examine the records of some of the organizations that manage the city’s charter schools. The charter board also is looking to tighten standards that charter schools must meet to sign contracts with “related parties,” such as school founders, school employees, members of the board of directors and their relatives. While the move indicates that the charter board wants more transparency, it also shows that city officials often don’t know how management companies are spending tax money that is meant for students’ benefit. Any new authority probably will be narrow: The charter board’s draft legislation, developed months ago, would allow it to examine the records of only a small number of companies. The notion of broad new oversight power probably would spark protest from some in the charter school movement, which is built on the premise that schools should operate free of outside interference as long as they produce solid academic results. ![Complaint](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/files/2014/06/dcchartercomplaint.jpg) Scott Pearson, the charter board’s executive director, said he doesn’t want new rules to be so onerous or invasive that they deter good charter operators. But “they’re using taxpayer dollars, and there should be a standard” for how those dollars are used, Pearson said. The D.C. attorney general in October sued three former managers of Options Public Charter School for allegedly funneling more than $3 million from the school to two for-profit companies they owned. In May, the attorney general sued the founder of another charter school, Community Academy, alleging that he enriched himself by creating a shell management company that was paid more than $13 million in taxpayer dollars for work largely performed by school employees. The charter board had given a clean bill of financial health to both schools in June 2013, finding “no patterns of fiscal mismanagement” at either, according to a charter board report. Defense lawyers in both cases have argued that the charter schools’ business deals were legal and no different than contracts that more than a dozen D.C. charter schools have with outside management companies to operate the schools in exchange for a fee. Several charter school management companies declined to comment on the board’s effort to seek additional oversight authority because legislation has not yet been introduced. Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, also declined to comment, saying that her members haven’t yet discussed the issue. Donald Hense, executive director of the Friendship charter schools, one of the largest networks in the city, criticized the D.C. attorney general’s most recent lawsuit as unfair and said the charter board’s desire for more authority is part of a pattern of overreach. And Kara Kerwin, president of the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, said she worries that giving the charter board more power “is a slippery slope.” “Allowing the legal process to take care of malfeasance is the proper way to go, as opposed to the charter board imposing more regulation,” Kerwin said. City taxpayers send more than $600 million to charter schools, and in return, charters — which are required by law to be nonprofit organizations — submit independent financial audits, annual budgets, large contracts and other financial data to the city charter board. The charter schools that have contracts with outside management organizations send fees that range from 2 to 100 percent of their operating budgets. The management agreements are something of a financial black hole, according to charter school board officials, who say they have limited ability to monitor how the tax dollars are used. When the management organizations are private for-profit companies, they are not subject to the same financial disclosure rules as nonprofits. There are at least four for-   profit charter management companies operating in the District now: Imagine Schools Inc., a Virginia company that runs Imagine Southeast and Imagine Hope Community schools for a fee of 12 percent of each school’s revenue; Academica, a Florida company that runs Somerset Prep Academy for a 5 percent fee; Community Action Partners, which collects a 6 percent fee to run the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School; and Basis Educational Group, an Arizona company that runs Basis DC for a 20 percent fee. Phil Handler, a spokesman for Basis Educational Group, said the company’s fee is relatively high because the company covers the salaries of the school’s top officials. Most of the management companies operating in the District are nonprofits, and two charter schools slated to open in D.C. next fall — Democracy Prep and Harmony — also are run by out-of-state nonprofits. Nonprofits must disclose some financial information with the Internal Revenue Service annually via Form 990, including the salaries of any employees who make more than $100,000. But charter board officials said that the publicly available information is not necessarily sufficient for strong oversight. St. Coletta Special Education Public Charter School transfers its entire $16 million budget to its management organization. As a result, the charter school’s public budget is stark, showing that the school spends zero dollars on personnel, office expenses and student services. The management organization, St. Coletta of Greater Washington, operates two schools under the same roof, a D.C. public charter and a private school that accepts tuition-paying students from Maryland and Virginia. Pearson said that while the board has no reason to suspect wrongdoing at St. Coletta, it’s difficult to know for sure that D.C. tax dollars are being used only to serve D.C. public school students. St. Coletta executive director Sharon Raimo said the charter school and the parent organization already go through multiple layers of financial review by independent auditors and the IRS, state education agencies, Medicaid oversight agencies and the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “I don’t know what else we could possibly give them that they don’t already have,” Raimo said, adding that she wasn’t afraid of additional oversight but that it would take more of her staff’s time. Last fall, the charter board proposed legislation that would give it access to the books and records of only a subset of management organizations: those that received more than half their income from D.C. charter schools or received more than 20 percent of any one school’s budget. Such expansion of oversight probably would affect only a few existing management organizations. Robert Cane, executive director of the pro-charter group Focus, said he could support such narrow expansion, but it would not be appropriate to demand financial records from management companies that run schools across the country and receive only a small fraction of their income from D.C. charters. The charter board’s existing draft legislation would require schools entering contracts with related parties to ensure that those deals are fair and that conflicts of interest are fully disclosed to the school’s board of directors. Currently, schools have to meet one of those two conditions to comply with the law. The charter board is working to refine the proposed legislation. D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large) said last fall that he was willing to work with the board to pass legislation and a spokesman for Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said Gray is also supportive. There has been no public movement on the issue, but the May lawsuit against Kent Amos, the founder of Community Academy, appears to have kick-started discussions again. “My sense is we’re both committed to resolving this, so I would be surprised if we don’t have some legislation by the end of the council term,” Pearson said.

Union-backed group calls for pause in federal money for charter schools

A labor-backed group is objecting to a U.S. Education Department proposal to expand federal funding for public charter schools, after the agency’s inspector general issued a scathing report that found deficiencies in how the department handled federal grants to charter schools between 2008 and 2011. The inspector general discovered some charter schools received federal dollars but never opened their doors to students, and the agency could not say where the money went. The department has given $1.7 billion in grants to charter schools since fiscal 2009, according to an agency spokeswoman. In its budget request for 2016, the Obama administration is seeking $375 million for the program — a 48 percent increase over current funding levels. Public charter schools are funded by tax dollars but managed privately and often are not unionized. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been a strong advocate for charter schools, a position that puts him at odds with teachers unions. The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, which includes the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union, wrote to Duncan on Monday, asking how his agency could seek to expand the charter schools program “despite mounting evidence of significant fraud, waste and abuse within the charter sector, and despite the warnings of your own office of inspector general that federal charter start-up and expansion funds are not adequately monitored or accounted for.” The inspector general found that the department had been lax in making sure federal dollars were spent in accordance with the law and failed to follow up when others flagged problems.For example, state officials in Florida found “serious deficiencies” in 2008, but it took the federal agency 29 months to react. And when it did, it deemed the Florida problems “resolved,” but the inspector general later found those same problems persisted. Federal dollars find their way to charter schools through two routes. In most cases, the federal government awards money to a state, and the state hands out grants to charter schools. In some instances, the federal government directly awards money to a public charter school. But the inspector general found lax oversight in both categories of charter school grants, with the federal agency failing to review the fiscal activities of charter schools that received federal dollars. In addition, the staff at the department in charge of the charter schools program didn’t have adequate training in fiscal and program monitoring, the audit found. “There is a heightened risk that grantees were not fully complying with program goals and objectives as well as federal laws and regulations,” the inspector general found. “As a result, there is increased risk that department funds were not used for the intent and purpose of the program.” The alliance is seeking a moratorium on new federal funding for public charter schools. Its letter to Duncan asks what specific actions the department has taken since 2012 to step up monitoring and accountability regarding charter school grants. Nadya Dabby, an assistant deputy secretary, said her agency has completed 14 of 17 corrective actions outlined by the inspector general and has added staff to the charter program to improve monitoring. Still, the federal role is largely focused on funding and not direct oversight of the grants, Dabby said. “It’s the responsibility of states to make sure they develop and submit plans for subgrantee monitoring,” she said. The inspector general looked at three states — Arizona, California and Florida — and found multiple weaknesses in the ways those states oversaw federal dollars sent to charter schools. California state officials were “unqualified to conduct onsite monitoring of charter schools,” the inspector general found. Of 13 state employees responsible for visiting charter schools, seven did not have the necessary experience and the state could not provide qualifications for two more, the audit said. Some of those state employees told the inspector general’s staff that they felt “awkward” conducting site visits because they didn’t know much about charters and fiscal matters. In the three states that were audited, the inspector general found that 26 charter schools either closed during the audit period or never opened their doors to students. The schools had received a total of about $7 million in federal funds. In Florida and California, there was no record of what happened to the equipment, supplies or anything else purchased with the federal dollars for schools that never opened, the audit said. “We weren’t holding states responsible for monitoring these programs,” Dabby said. “We had to make our standards clear to them in respect to fiscal oversight and also have them thinking very clearly about the quality of education offered to their students.” The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools wants the Department of Education to maintain a public database of charter schools that receive federal grants, the students served and the operational and academic performance of each school. Dabby said the department collects only the names of charter schools that receive federal funds and that states are expected to maintain the other information. She said agency officials have not decided whether to create the public database requested by the alliance.

D.C. auditor finds improvements in financial oversight of charter schools

Financial oversight of public charter schools has significantly improved in recent years, but agencies monitoring the schools need to continue improving how they track contracts and enrollment verification, according to a D.C. auditor report released Tuesday. The report recommended major changes to how the city pays charters, suggesting that payments reflect actual enrollment throughout the year rather than projected enrollment or one-time audits. It also called for the D.C. Council to consider legislation that would require private management companies to provide more information about their finances. “Having transparency in how we use all public school dollars is critically important,” Jennifer Niles, deputy mayor for education, said in a news conference after the findings were released. “While there has been great progress and, overall, significant transparency, there is still more work to do.” The audit examined financial documents and transactions between fiscal 2011 and 2013, monitoring the flow of more than $1.5 billion in local tax dollars. Auditors looked at a broad scope of financial oversight functions, including how the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) certified summer-school enrollments and whether the D.C. Public Charter School Board was monitoring whether each charter school carried insurance. Concerns about financial transparency at charter schools have been amplified in recent years, with the D.C. attorney general filing two lawsuits related to payments made to for-profit management companies that run D.C. charter schools. In one suit, court documents show that the founder of Community Academy Public Charter School, Kent Amos, paid himself more than $1 million to lead the school via a management company. The other lawsuit involves three former leaders of Options Public Charter, a school for at-risk teens. They allegedly diverted funds to two for-profit management companies they ran. The charter board in both cases gave schools favorable ratings for their financial performance during oversight reviews. Charter board officials said their watchdog abilities were limited because they could not see the private company’s financial records. To help with oversight, the report by the Office of the D.C. Auditor urged the D.C. Council to require that for-profit management firms provide the same level of financial information that nonprofit organizations provide. D.C. Council members David Grosso (I-At Large) and Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) introduced a bill last month to achieve that goal. The report also recommended adjusting payments to charter schools for transfers that occur after the annual October enrollment audit. Per-pupil city funding is awarded to charters based on the October audit, while D.C. public schools receive funding based on projected enrollments. Critics say the system encourages traditional schools to inflate projections and charter schools to let go of students later in the year. Niles said she wants to adopt a system that offers positive incentives. “We want to reduce mobility during an individual school year as much as possible,” she said. The report noted that the charter board has made significant improvements to its oversight, introducing an online database that makes it easier to file and track financial records. Early on, auditors could not find evidence that all annual financial and compliance reviews were conducted. The report also found missing documentation regarding charter school contracting; charters are required to enter a competitive bidding process for contracts of more than $25,000. The charter board said in a response to the report that it has improved its oversight of contracting since 2013 and hired a specialist last year to more thoroughly monitor charter school finances. In its review of OSSE, the audit found that the state-level agency was doing a good job of overseeing special education payments to schools and that students were receiving the level of service that their schools were being compensated to provide. But it said the agency did not verify summer-school payments to see whether schools were enrolling the number of students they were paid to serve.

Federal government puts the brakes on $32 million to Ohio for charters

More than a month after the Obama administration gave $32.5 million to Ohio to expand charter schools despite Ohio’s history of multiple scandals involving charters, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to state officials in which it said it did not realize the extent of concerns regarding Ohio’s charter schools. As a result, federal officials said they would place a new restrictions on the way Ohio can use the federal money, including a temporary hold that requires explicit approval from Washington before any of the dollars can be spent. In a letter to Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Richard Ross, the federal department explained that when the agency made the initial award in September, it had conducted “an expedited review” of Ohio’s record and believed the state could properly track the spending of federal funds. Ohio was among seven states that won grants under the Obama administration’s program to expand public charter schools. The District also won a charter school grant. But Ohio got the largest single award — $32.5 million — raising eyebrows because the state’s problems with charter schools are well-documented. The state has had charter school scandals involving fraud, poor academic performance, oversight failures and the July resignation of a senior official at the state education department after it was discovered he manipulated performance statistics to favor some charters. That official, David Hansen, was responsible for writing Ohio’s application for the federal grant. Ohio State Auditor Dave Yost and several others questioned why the Obama administration was awarding millions in federal dollars to a state with multiple charter school problems. Yost’s staff had released a special audit that found a pattern of charter schools inflating enrollment to pocket taxpayer subsidies for students who don’t actually attend their schools. Nadya Dabby, an assistant deputy secretary at the Department of Education, defended the decision in September. “Ohio has a pretty good mechanism in place to improve overall quality and oversight,” she said. “We believe Ohio has put practices in place, although there’s always room for them to grow.” But in the Education Department letter released Wednesday, an official wrote that “the Department has received additional information that raises continuing concerns regarding (the Ohio Department of Education’s) ability to administer its CSP SEA grant properly, particularly in the areas of oversight and accountability.” As a result, the department is asking Ohio to provide answers to a string of questions, including whether the state’s application contained information that is “out-of-date, inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading.” Until the state satisfies questions from federal officials, Ohio cannot use any of the federal dollars without explicit federal approval, the department wrote. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who had asked Duncan to place “stringent restrictions” on the money flowing to his state, said Wednesday that he was relieved that the Obama administration is increasing its scrutiny. “It is difficult to ask the federal government to withhold money that could — in theory — be put to good use, but the U.S. Department of Education did the right thing to slow down the process and ensure that these funds go to the children who need them the most,” Ryan said through a spokesman. “The State of Ohio will now see a new level of scrutiny that will make sure that these education dollars are spent properly, which is what our children deserve.” Charter school operators in Ohio include some of the biggest Republican political donors in the state, and legislation to tighten oversight of charter schools had been pending for more than a year, even as scandals continued to mount. Lawmakers finally passed a bill to beef up regulation in October and was signed into law on Nov. 1 by Gov. John Kasich (R). The law is aimed at eliminating conflicts of interest among for-profit companies that operate charter schools, prevents managers of poor-performing schools from opening new ones and requires that equipment purchased for public charter schools with tax dollars remains public property.

D.C. schools’ rate of expulsion raises questions

PUBLIC CHARTER schools in the District expel students at a higher rate than do the city’s traditional schools. Are the charters expelling too many, or the school system too few? The answer is a bit of both; both the charter and traditional schools should examine their policies and practices. Also important is whether the District provides sufficient learning environments for students who struggle in conventional settings. A recent report by The Post’s Emma Brown showed dramatic disparities between the number of students expelled by public charter schools and the public school system. According to The Post’s analysis of school data, charter schools, which enroll 41 percent of public school students, expelled 676 students in the past three years, compared to 24 for the public school system. The numbers don’t capture practices employed by the traditional system — including long-term suspensions, involuntary transfers or reassignment of out- of-boundary students to their home schools — that essentially result in separation of a student from a school. Also, there is wide variation among charters; a small percentage of charters account for most of the expulsions. Nonetheless, the charters have a rate that is more than three times the national average; that’s a matter of concern. Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, has rightly opened data about discipline to public examination and challenged schools, when their charters come up for review, to change practices. There’s already been an effect (Mr. Pearson reported a 25 to 30 percent drop this year), which argues against a move to put in place ironclad rules of discipline that would tie the hands of charter school officials. Such a move would, in any case, likely violate the federal law that established D.C. charters. One reason charters have become so popular in the District is parents’ belief that the schools offer a safer and healthier learning environment, with higher expectations about behavior and more rigor in discipline. That raises the issue of whether the public school system needs more flexibility in handling disruptive students. The District’s rate of expulsions is lower than the national average; the fact that only three students were expelled from the system during the 2011-12 school year raises additional questions. Unlike expelled charter school students, who, by right, can enroll in the public school system, those who are expelled from public schools have few options. The city needs better alternative schools, development of in-house intensive work and more medical residential settings to serve students who are unable to cope with a traditional setting. New Orleans is doing interesting work in this area; it’s something D.C. charters and traditional schools should collaborate on. It’s also time to eliminate the District’s outmoded method of determining school funding based on head count in the fall, which charter critics say provides little incentive to retain troublesome students throughout the year. Money for the education of a child should follow that child. ****

D.C. charter schools expel students at far higher rates than traditional public schools

The District’s public charter schools have expelled students at a far higher rate than the city’s traditional public schools in recent years, according to school data, highlighting a key difference between two sectors that compete for the District’s students and taxpayer dollars. D.C. charter schools expelled 676 students in the past three years, while the city’s traditional public schools expelled 24, according to a Washington Post review of school data. During the 2011-12 school year, when charters enrolled 41 percent of the city’s students, they removed 227 children for discipline violations and had an expulsion rate of 72 per 10,000 students; the District school system removed three and had an expulsion rate of less than 1 per 10,000 students. The discrepancy underscores the freedom that charters — publicly funded schools that operate independently of the traditional school system — have from school system policies. That autonomy defines the charter movement and gives its schools considerable latitude to decide what student behavior they will — and won’t — tolerate. Parents and activists say some charters expel excessively and with little oversight, shedding disruptive students who then end up enrolling mid-year in the traditional school system, which is legally bound to take them. The D.C. school system can compel students to transfer from one school to another. But unlike charters, the school system cannot truly expel anyone because of its mandate to serve all students. “Expelled” students are sent to an alternative middle school or high school for one year. The school system does not expel elementary students, officials said. Many charter schools — 60 out of 97 campuses — did not expel students in 2011-12. That same school year, seven expelled at least 10 students. YouthBuild, a school that targets high school dropouts and students older than 16, expelled 30 that year, nearly one-third of its enrollment. Friendship’s Collegiate Academy expelled 56 students, or 5 percent of its student body. Charter advocates deny that the schools are trying to push out challenging students. They point out that D.C. charters enroll a higher proportion of poor children than the traditional public schools and that poor children often come to class with greater needs than their middle-class peers. Charters are open to all students across the city, with admission by lottery if there is more demand than space available. “My goal is zero” expulsions, said Shawn Hardnett, an administrator for Friendship Public Charter School, which last year expelled 70 students across its six campuses, which are located in some of the city’s neediest neighborhoods. “At the same time, I have to be reasonable and wise about the fact that there are kids who are coming to our schools with behaviors that are very simply unacceptable and unsafe,” Hardnett said. The District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education in August proposed rules that would govern discipline policies at all public schools, including charters. They called for minimizing suspension and expulsion of children 13 and younger and outlined due process rights for students. Charter leaders mounted a vigorous opposition, saying the federal law that established D.C. charters frees them from such local mandates. City officials are now reviewing the proposed rules and may revise them. The school system adopted a discipline code in 2009 that allows for expulsion only when a student brings a gun or drugs to school, commits arson, attacks a fellow student or staff member, or does something similarly egregious and illegal. Leaders of charter schools with high expulsion rates argue that they remove students only when necessary, to keep their buildings safe and their classrooms conducive to learning. Some charter schools have policies that differ little from the school system’s; others have “zero tolerance” policies that allow expulsion for nonviolent offenses, such as skipping class, or for repeated minor infractions, such as violating dress codes. The discipline debate is part of a larger discussion about the rise of charter schools in Washington and across the country. Charter advocates see a movement that — without the rules and red tape that bog down traditional schools — has attracted parents in droves and lifted achievement in some of the most stubbornly poor and disadvantaged corners of America. “These high-performing charter schools . . . are going to dramatically increase the number of minority students on our elite college campuses and in higher education as a whole,” said Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a pro-charter think tank in Washington. “We should not have a policy that says that schools’ hands are tied if they have kids who are disrupting the learning environment, that there’s nothing they can do about it.” Critics see schools that don’t have the same legal obligation as the traditional school system to serve all students. Charter schools can write and enforce discipline policies that make it possible to remove students who are needy or challenging, said Suzanne Greenfield of Advocates for Justice and Education, an organization that offers free legal assistance to students facing expulsion. And, under current city rules, schools that expel students after Oct. 5 — the city’s official school census date — get to keep the thousands of dollars in funding they receive for each student. “It’s saying, if we decide your behavior is inappropriate for our school, we don’t have to take you anymore,” Greenfield said. “If you’re taking taxpayer money, why should you be able to do that? That’s the part that seems fundamentally skewed.” Greenfield said the D.C. school system is far from perfect and too often relies on suspensions, including long-term suspensions of up to 90 days, to deal with bad behavior. The city’s traditional public schools use long-term suspensions more often than charter schools, imposing nearly twice as many in the past academic year, according to school data. That year, 2011-12, 601 students were suspended from traditional schools for more than 10 days as punishment for a single incident; 327 charter school students received similarly long suspensions. But unlike expulsion, suspension does not allow a school to give up responsibility for a difficult child, Greenfield said. She pointed to the case of a homeless 6-year-old her organization represents. He attended three D.C. public schools in preschool and kindergarten before enrolling this academic year in first grade at a KIPP DC elementary campus, part of one of the highest-performing charter organizations in the city. He was expelled in September. (Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Co., is a member of KIPP DC’s board of trustees.) School records show that the boy was suspended for a day after throwing a kicking-and-hitting tantrum. His mother met with school staff members to devise a behavior-management plan for the child. A few days after returning to school, he ran into trouble again— curling up on the floor, wetting himself accidentally and throwing another tantrum. Records show that the episode began in a classroom, where he scratched a child, and ended hours later in the principal’s office, where he threw objects, punched, spit and screamed. Over the summer, the child had been found to have an adjustment disorder related to the stress and instability of living in poverty, his mother said in interviews with The Post, a diagnosis she divulged to school officials after the second tantrum. The Post is not identifying the family to protect the young boy. “Our appeal to them was to basically not make this another school’s problem, and get the student some help within this system,” said the family’s attorney, Timothy Riveria of Advocates for Justice and Education. The principal expelled the boy, and a panel of KIPP DC administrators upheld that recommendation, according to school records. The boy then enrolled at Payne Elementary in Southeast, the school closest to the homeless shelter where he lived. He attended that school until the family moved to Florida in late November. KIPP DC’s chief executive, Susan Schaeffler, declined to comment on the case because of privacy concerns. She said it is extremely rare for the charter network to expel an elementary-school child, with an elementary expulsion rate last year of one-tenth of one percent. “When expulsions occur, it’s safe to assume that’s a serious incident that we had to take action on because it was endangering the lives of other students or the student themselves,” Schaeffler said. “The parents are expecting us to do that, and that’s what we need to do.” Kenya King, a parent of four current KIPP DC students and one alumna, now at Penn State University, agreed. “As a parent, when I send my children to school, when I walk off and I wave goodbye and I hug them and I look back at them, I want to know that my child is safe,” she said. KIPP DC College Prep, a high school, expelled 17 students last year — or 5 percent of its enrollment, the second-highest expulsion rate in the city. The school tweaked its discipline policy in response and started meeting weekly with students to discuss behavior and celebrate successes. College Prep has expelled no students so far this year. It’s not clear how many students expelled from charter schools then enroll in traditional D.C. schools in the middle of the year; school system officials said they could not provide that information. D.C. officials said they track only expulsions that they are required to report to the federal government, which include those due to violence, weapons, alcohol or drugs. In the 2010-11 school year, the latest year for which that information was available, about one-quarter of charter school expulsions — 68 of 263 — fell into those categories, according to Jeffrey Noel, director of data management for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. The data do not explain why the other 195 students were expelled from charter schools, Noel said, just that the expulsions were for other reasons. Of the 68 students expelled from charter schools that year for violence, weapons, alcohol or drugs, Noel said nearly half enrolled in a traditional public school, about one-fifth enrolled in a charter school and one-third did not immediately re-enroll in any public school. Adele Fabrikant, deputy chief in the school system’s office of youth engagement, said it sometimes appears as if the system serves as a safety net for students who can’t make it elsewhere. “In some ways, it feels like we will always have to have a set of district schools, regardless of how successful charters are, because charters will always expel their students,” Fabrikant said. “There will have to be some network of schools that will serve those students.” Fabrikant also commented on why the school system does not expel children from elementary schools. “Research has shown that that kind of disciplinary response for children who are that young is actually ineffective,” Fabrikant said. “It doesn’t work to teach students to learn the valuable lessons that they can learn.” Altogether, city charter schools expelled students at a rate of nearly 1 out of 140 last year — or more than three times the national average, according to 2006 data, the latest available from the National Center for Education Statistics. “That for me is a cause for concern,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. But Pearson doesn’t think charters need a slew of regulations to change their habits. He hopes sunlight will do the trick: A few weeks after taking the charter board’s helm, Pearson released two years of discipline data. In August, the charter board published an additional year’s worth of numbers. It already has had a “profound effect,” with charter expulsion rates dropping 25 to 30 percent so far this school year, Pearson said. Schools are “taking a new look at their discipline procedures, and in many cases have modified their discipline procedures significantly to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions,” he said. Pearson said he doesn’t think charters should aim to match the D.C. school system’s expulsion rate, which is significantly lower than the national average. Such a low rate implies a philosophy, Pearson said, “that there is essentially no behavior that is so egregious, so disruptive to the school environment that it shouldn’t be handled through expulsion.” The District’s traditional school system has tightened its use of expulsion in recent years as concern has grown across the country that pushing children out of school too often pushes them into the criminal justice system. A principal seeking to expel a student or suspend the student for more than 10 days has to convince an administrative law judge that due process rights have been observed and that the expulsion is warranted. If unconvinced, a judge can throw the case out altogether or recommend a reduced punishment. The District’s expulsion numbers do not take into account students who are not expelled but who are compelled to change schools for other reasons. They include students who fail to meet the academic standards of selective high schools or who return to neighborhood schools because of excessive attendance problems at out-of-boundary schools. School system officials said they don’t track such transfers. The school system’s numbers also do not include “involuntary transfers” prompted by safety concerns such as fighting. Like expulsions, involuntary transfer cases are heard by an administrative judge. The school system said involuntary transfers are not tracked at the elementary level and were not tracked centrally at the secondary level until this year; there have been 12 so far this school year. Charter school leaders said they don’t have the same ability to transfer students to another school or an alternative setting, which might be one reason for their elevated expulsion rates. Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, said charter leaders should consider working together to establish an alternative school for students who have been expelled from charters. Students could “continue to be worked with, be cared for by professionals who understand their needs and can help manage the issues that they’re dealing with,” Edelin said. “I would be an advocate for such an alternative setting.” It’s impossible to know the total number of students who end up leaving charter schools in midyear because of disciplinary issues.Official expulsion figures do not tell the whole story, according to parents, activists and former teachers, because they don’t include students who are offered the chance to withdraw before they are officially expelled. Elsie Mayo, now 18, underwent expulsion proceedings from Thurgood Marshall Academy, a high-performing charter high school in Southeast, in December 2011. The school had put Mayo on disciplinary probation for going to school intoxicated, according to school records obtained from the family’s attorney. Then she talked back to a teacher and set off a false fire alarm. After a discipline hearing, it was recommended that she be expelled, records show. Her mother, Marsha Mayo, said she fought the expulsion to no avail. When officials offered her the option of withdrawing her daughter, she jumped at the chance. It was the middle of Elsie’s senior year, and expulsion would have affected her chances of winning scholarships and being admitted to good universities. Elsie finished the year at Anacostia High School and secured $70,000 in scholarships, her mother said. She is now a student at Simmons College in Boston, where she’s studying math and computer science. Thurgood Marshall officials declined to comment on Elsie’s case because of privacy concerns, but the school’s data show no expulsions for the 2011-12 year. Pearson said charter leaders recognize that midyear withdrawals are a concern and need more examination. “I would consider that sort of the next frontier of our efforts,” Pearson said. “It’s definitely something that happens, and it’s something that we need to understand.”

Report: Teachers in 18 D.C. classrooms cheated on 2012 tests

Teachers in 18 District classrooms cheated on high-stakes standardized tests last year, according to a report released Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. The findings come one day after journalist John Merrow published a 2009 document that raised questions about whether the District adequately investigated past cheating allegations. School officials maintain that no widespread cheating has occurred, pointing to multiple investigations over the past two years that found only isolated violations. They said Friday’s report is more proof that there is no systematic problem in the District. “The majority of the schools are playing by the rules,” said Jose Alvarez, chief of staff for the state superintendent of education. But D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) — who has criticized previous investigations — said the violations might be a sign of a wider problem. He urged the District to consider whether one of its signature reforms — tying teacher evaluations to test scores — might be motivating adults to cheat. Beneath the back-and-forth is a debate about whether standardized tests, increasingly used to judge teachers and schools, are a reliable indicator of student progress. D.C. test scores have come under increasing scrutiny since revelations that more than 100 schools had unusually high numbers of erasures of wrong to right answers from 2008 to 2010. Such erasures are an indication that cheating may have occurred, but they are not proof. The District’s annual standardized test, known as the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, was given to students in 2,688 classrooms last spring. The OSSE flagged 41 classrooms in 25 schools for extra scrutiny based on odd patterns, such as wrong-to-right erasure marks, unusually big gains or drops in students’ scores, and unusual score patterns. Then a management consulting firm, Alvarez and Marsal, visited schools and interviewed students, teachers and administrators. (Jose Alvarez is not connected with the consulting firm.) The 18 classrooms found to have critical violations were in 11 schools: seven traditional schools and four charter schools. The test-tampering included providing students with answers, reading test questions aloud and encouraging students to reread specific questions. Scores on the 2012 tests at those schools will be invalidated. For six of those schools, that will trigger additional oversight of academic programs and interventions for struggling students. The seven traditional D.C. public schools at which cheating was detected are two preschool-eighth grade campuses — Brightwood and Winston — and five elementary schools: Beers, Hendley, Kenilworth, Langdon and Miner. The four charters are Arts and Technology Academy, Community Academy-Amos I, Hope Community-Lamond and Meridian. Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said the board will ask each school to explain how it will address the violations. The charter board will address further actions against schools at its May 20 public meeting. D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said she would take appropriate disciplinary measures after reviewing OSSE’s report. “We do not tolerate cheating at DCPS,” Henderson said. “We take every allegation of testing impropriety seriously, investigate accordingly and take personnel action when warranted.” But some question whether Henderson and her predecessor, Michelle A. Rhee, have pursued cheating allegations aggressively enough. In 2009, a consultant for D.C. Public Schools warned that it might have had widespread cheating on standardized tests the previous year, according to a memo obtained by Merrow and published Thursday on Merrow’s blog. The four-page memo, marked “confidential,” was written by consultant Fay G. “Sandy” Sanford and addressed to a senior staffer of Rhee’s. It contains no proof that cheating occurred, but it said erasure-rate data indicated that nearly 200 teachers at 70 schools could have been “implicated in possible testing infractions.” The public release of the document has raised questions about why Rhee decided not to investigate test scores in 2008 — her first year on the job, when many schools made impressive gains. Subsequent investigations by private consultants and local and federal inspectors general found no evidence of widespread cheating, but they also did not fully examine the 2008 scores. Neither Rhee nor Henderson recalled receiving or discussing the memo. A spokeswoman for Henderson said that the testing company found that there was not enough information available to conduct a further investigation.

D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education enrollment audits, D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reports and graduation reports, when displayed as annual cohorts, show that charter high schools take advantage of their freedom from responsibility for educating challenging students by quietly transferring many more students than they expel. This may also help explain why charter lobbyists are opposed to becoming “neighborhood schools.” Reporter Emma Brown’s account of a mother agreeing to withdraw her daughter Elsie “to avoid having an expulsion appear on her record” and, unsaid, on Thurgood Marshall’s, is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Elsie’s ninth-grade class numbered 138; by April 2010 (18 months later), the 10th grade DC CAS testing cohort was 87 (28 boys; 59 girls!). Sixty-three students graduated in June 2012, 46 percent of the original ninth-grade cohort. Since most of the 75 missing students were removed from Thurgood Marshall’s responsibility by transfer — mostly to DCPS — it claimed a graduation rate of 78 percent, higher test scores and the acclaim of being “high achieving.” Between the October 2010 and 2011 enrollment audits, DC charter high schools’ ninth, 10th and 11th grade cohorts transferred over 1,350 students. It’s time for a serious investigation of this practice. Erich Martel, Washington The writer taught in the D.C. public schools from [[year]] to [[year]].

Charter love: Feds give $157 million to expand charter schools

The U.S. Department of Education announced Monday it would give $157 million to create and expand charter schools throughout the nation, despite criticisms by its inspector general in the past that the agency has done a poor job of overseeing federal dollars sent to charter schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made a passing reference to oversight problems during a media call with reporters. “Some have had to fold, some are struggling to find their way,” he said, referring to poor-performing charter schools. “We know we have to strengthen oversight… The good news is that the sector has proven it can improve.” With the addition of Monday’s grants, the department has awarded more than $3 billion to charter schools since fiscal 1995. Federal dollars find their way to charter schools through two routes. In most cases, the federal government awards money to a state, and the state hands out grants to charter schools. In some instances, the federal government directly awards money to a public charter school. But the federal government has not tracked how its dollars have been used by charter schools, nor has it studied their academic performance. Asked how taxpayers can be assured that federal dollars will be spent properly, Duncan said it was largely up to states and the public agencies that approve charter schools. “It’s so important that from the academic side and the fiscal side that [charter school] authorizers and states hold charters accountable,” Duncan said. “At the federal level, we don’t have a whole lot of leverage. But we can really challenge states.” The department sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to states, emphasizing the importance of financial accountability for charter schools receiving federal dollars. Duncan also said that his agency plans for the first time to publicly report some data, including the names of some schools that have received federal grants and their performance statistics. The agency’s inspector general issued a scathing report in 2012 that found deficiencies in how the department handled federal grants to charter schools between 2008 and 2011. The inspector general discovered dozens of charter schools received federal dollars but never opened their doors to students. The schools received millions in federal funds, but there was no record of what happened to the equipment, supplies or anything else purchased with the federal dollars for schools that never opened, the audit said. Public charter schools are funded by tax dollars but managed privately and often are not unionized. Duncan has been a strong advocate for charter schools. “We need more great public schools of all kinds,” he said Monday. “Too often, charter school successes are isolated and don’t have an impact beyond the walls of their own buildings...We’re helping [charter] schools to scale.” For Scott Given, the founder of the UP Education Network, which operates five charter schools in Massachusetts, the $2.2 million grant means his chain can grow to 20 schools by 2020. Unlike most other charters, UP Education takes over existing public schools that have been chronically underperforming, accepting all students. Up Education Network was among 12 charter organizations that won grants, including some well-known names such as Success Academy, the largest operator of charters in New York City, and the Noble Network of Chicago. Seven states and Washington, D.C. won grants, including Ohio, which got the largest single award of $32.5 million. Ohio has also been at the center of several recent charter school scandals, from the Ohio state auditor finding some charters had inflated enrollment figures to evidence that some state officials inflated evaluations of charters. Asked why the state with multiple charter school problems received the biggest federal grant, Nadya Dabby, an assistant deputy secretary at U.S. Department of Education, said she believed Ohio has improved its oversight of charter schools. “Ohio has a pretty good mechanism in place to improve overall quality and oversight,” said Dabby, although she could not provide details. “We believe Ohio has put practices in place, although there ‘s always room for them to grow.” With the addition of Monday’s grants, the department has awarded more than $3 billion to charter schools since fiscal 1995. In its budget request for 2016, the Obama administration is seeking $375 million for the program — a 48 percent increase over current funding levels.

A thumbs-up for DeVos, in other words

The Feb. 9 editorial “Do your homework, Ms. DeVos” restated The Post’s long- standing support for “school choice.” Vouchers are extreme forms of choice, routing taxpayer money to private schools, including religious ones. Let private schools use money from tuition, endowments and fundraising to sponsor scholarships. Public charter schools draw less criticism, but some refuse to follow basic guidelines that ensure adequate education for students. In 2015, The Post covered a report detailing “more than $200 million of uncovered fraud and waste of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector,” with the actual total “impossible to know because there is not sufficient oversight over these schools.” School choice has been a disaster in Detroit. After Hurricane Katrina, the public school system in New Orleans was replaced with charter schools that have not succeeded in preparing students for college or achieving equity for students with special needs. Charter schools and vouchers have allowed politicians to avoid the difficult work of rebuilding urban public school systems that largely serve black and Latino students. Instead, school choice allows them to use our children’s educations to peddle influence through crony contracts, keep citizens disenfranchised, bust unions and pander to religious extremists. Political and media advocacy for this system led us to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and a tomorrow with no national public education. In advocating school choice, the editorial might as well have sung Ms. DeVos’s praises. ****Greg Wahl** , Washington**

How messed up is California’s charter school sector? You won’t believe how much.

Ohio and Utah are known in education circles for having extraordinarily troubled charter school sectors, and the same is true in  Pennsylvania, where Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a damning report this year and declared his state’s charter school law  the “worst” in the nation. But there is another place with a scandal-plagued charter sector that gets less national attention than it should: California, which has more charter schools and charter school students than any other state in the nation, and where one billionaire came up with a secret plan to “charterize” half of  the Los Angeles Unified School District.  There was the scandal involving a charter school principal who also doubled as a National Basketball Association scout, traveling first class to basketball games around the country — and charging his travel expenses to his charter school. Don’t forget the one involving a charter school that closed in 2014 after state auditors found a number of issues, including indications that administrators funneled millions of dollars in state funds to the schools’ operator and her family and friends.  What these reveal is a state charter law that allows charter schools to operate loosely, with little if any accountability or transparency to the public. The charter lobby in California has successfully fought off legislative efforts to bring more accountability to the charter sector — at least so far. Now there is a bill awaiting the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown which would require more accountability and transparency from the state’s charters schools. Brown, who has been a supporter of charter schools, has not indicated what he will do, though California’s treasurer, John Chiang, has said the legislation is vital to make charter schools more accountable to the public. Brown, who started two charter schools when he was mayor of Sacramento, last year vetoed a bill that would have banned for-profit charters. This is the first of four posts on the state of charters in California. It was written by Carol Burris,  a former New York high school principal who is now executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Her four-part series will be part of an extended national report on charter schools that will be published by the Network for Public Education in 2017.  By Carol Burris    These examples (and there are many more like them) are not happening in Ohio or Pennsylvania, infamous for their “loosey goosey” charter laws. They are examples from the beautiful and blue State of California, where flowers and charters grow wild.     How many is enough when it comes to charters, given the scandals and problems, and the lack of  evidence of overall success? It appears as if there are more charters than California needs, but there are certainly not as many charter advocates want.  The term, “market share” refers to children.      AB 709 is on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk awaiting action.  The efforts of the California Charter School Association Advocates do not end with the opposition to bills such as those described above. CCSAA is a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars that influence California elections, both big and small. The primary function of a not for profit 501(c)(4), according to the tax code, is to promote the social welfare. Although a 501(c)(4) may participate in some political activities, such expenditures cannot exceed 50 percent of the organization’s budget.    Then there are the PACs that donate to the Super Pac, as well as the individual donors outside the state, such as John and Laura Arnold of Houston, $1 million; Michael Bloomberg of New York City, $425,000; and Stacy Schusterman of Tulsa ($75,000), who is the chairman of Sansone Energy and who also sits on the board of The Charter Growth Fund. Does this massive spending make a difference? Carl J. Petersen is a candidate in next year’s Los Angeles Unified School District 2 board election. He became a public education activist while fighting for his two daughters who are on the autism spectrum. Petersen had this to say about the influence of CCSA in Los Angeles:  And so the citizens of California stand at the crossroads. Do they follow the Broad Plan and trust in billionaires to shepherd the education of their children in loosely regulated charters? Or do they slow down and create responsible policies and rules that serve both the taxpayers and children of the state well?  —

A sign that D.C. school reform is working

THE CONCLUSION by the D.C. inspector general that there was no widespread or systematic cheating in the public schools during the early years of school reform comes as no surprise. The findings mirror those of other investigations into the issue and of subsequent tests — including those administered under unassailable security procedures — that affirmed the gains by D.C. students in reading and math. It is time to put to rest unfounded suspicions about supposed wrongdoing and acknowledge the progress of the city’s public school students. D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby, with an assist from the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General, released a report this month that examined allegations of possible improprieties in standardized reading and math exams administered from 2008 to 2010. Chancellor Kaya Henderson requested the review last year after questions were raised in a USA Today report about unusually high numbers of erasures from wrong to right answers. A private firm hired by the school system to investigate the matter found no widespread problems, but Ms. Henderson asked for another look out of an abundance of caution. Mr. Willoughby’s investigators focused their efforts on Noyes Education Campus, which had been highlighted in press reports. The investigation — which included interviews with current and former staff at Noyes, test monitors and parents — found one instance of one teacher who admitted to coaching students. Although the teacher, who was terminated in May 2011, said it “seemed” it was “understood” that this was how testing was done at the school, investigators found no corroboration. All the parents interviewed said that they believed that the scores their children achieved on the exams were indicative of their overall school performance and consistent with other test scores. Investigators catalogued a number of plausible reasons for the erasure marks. Finding so little at Noyes and lacking any credible evidence of systematic wrongdoing, the inspector general — much like two private firms separately hired to investigate cheating concerns — concluded there was “insufficient evidence” to warrant a wider probe. The report received a mystifying reception from officials representing those on the front lines of learning. Instead of cheering news of confirmed achievement by D.C. students, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Nathan Saunders, head of the Washington Teachers’ Union, seemed disappointed that no widespread cheating was found. Both faulted the inspector general’s methodology and urged even more investigation. The test scores Mr. Willoughby examined don’t exist in a vacuum. Other tests — including the non-cheatable National Assessment of Educational Progress and D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests administered under tightened security protocols — also have shown improvement. Why is it so hard to accept that children in the District of Columbia are making progress? Or that their teachers can produce results without having to cook the books? Some union officials don’t like using test scores to hold schools and teachers accountable, and they’d like to discredit former chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the reforms she ushered in. But can’t they give their own members a little credit for what they’ve accomplished in the past few years? **More on this topic:** The Post’s View: Evaluating the District’s teachers Richard Whitmire: What if Rhee had remained D.C. schools chancellor? The Post’s View: Rush to judgment on D.C. test scores Colbert I. King: Mythmaking over Rhee’s departure

Ohio and Utah are known in education circles for having extraordinarily troubled charter school sectors, and the same is true in  Pennsylvania, where Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a report this year and declared his state’s charter school law the “worst” in the nation. But there is another place with a scandal-plagued charter sector that gets less national attention than it should: California, which has more charter schools and charter school students than any other state in the nation, and where one billionaire came up with a secret plan to “charterize” half of  the Los Angeles Unified School District.  There was the scandal involving a charter school principal who also doubled as a National Basketball Association scout, traveling first class to basketball games around the country — and charging his travel expenses to his charter school. Don’t forget the one involving a charter school that closed in 2014 after state auditors found a number of issues, including indications that administrators funneled millions of dollars in state funds to the schools’ operator and her family and friends.  What these reveal is a state charter law that allows charter schools to operate loosely, with little if any accountability or transparency to the public. The charter lobby in California has successfully fought off legislative efforts to bring more accountability to the charter sector — at least so far. Now there is a bill awaiting the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown which would require more accountability and transparency from the state’s charters schools. Brown, who has been a supporter of charter schools, has not indicated what he will do, though California’s treasurer, John Chiang, has said the legislation is vital to make charter schools more accountable to the public. Brown, who started two charter schools when he was mayor of Oakland, last year vetoed a bill that would have banned for-profit charters. This is the first of four posts on the state of charters in California. It was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is now executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Her four-part series will be part of an extended national report on charter schools that will be published by the Network for Public Education in 2017.  By Carol Burris    These examples (and there are many more like them) are not happening in Ohio or Pennsylvania, infamous for their “loosey goosey” charter laws. They are examples from the beautiful and blue State of California, where flowers and charters grow wild.    How many is enough when it comes to charters, given the scandals and problems, and the lack of  evidence of overall success? It appears as if there are more charters than California needs, but there are certainly not as many charter advocates want.  The term, “market share” refers to children.      AB 709 is on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk awaiting action.  The efforts of the California Charter School Association Advocates do not end with the opposition to bills such as those described above. CCSAA is a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars that influence California elections, both big and small. The primary function of a not for profit 501(c)(4), according to the tax code, is to promote the social welfare. Although a 501(c)(4) may participate in some political activities, such expenditures cannot exceed 50 percent of the organization’s budget.    Then there are the PACs that donate to the Super Pac, as well as the individual donors outside the state, such as John and Laura Arnold of Houston, $1 million; Michael Bloomberg of New York City, $425,000; and Stacy Schusterman of Tulsa ($75,000), who is the chairman of Sansone Energy and who also sits on the board of The Charter Growth Fund. Does this massive spending make a difference? Carl J. Petersen is a candidate in next year’s Los Angeles Unified School District 2 board election. He became a public education activist while fighting for his two daughters who are on the autism spectrum. Petersen had this to say about the influence of CCSA in Los Angeles:  And so the citizens of California stand at the crossroads. Do they follow the Broad Plan and trust in billionaires to shepherd the education of their children in loosely regulated charters? Or do they slow down and create responsible policies and rules that serve both the taxpayers and children of the state well?  —    —

D.C. charter school allegations raise questions for city officials

D.C. PUBLIC charter school officials say that, as soon as they learned about alleged fiscal irregularities at the city’s oldest charter school, they took swift action. That’s true. But two issues remain: why the alleged abuses were not discovered sooner, and whether sufficient protections are in place to ensure that public funds are spent in the best interest of students. Suspicions by the D.C. Public Charter School Board about improper contracts at the Options Public Charter School resulted in a lawsuit by D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan , seeking a receiver for the Northeast school. The civil lawsuit, filed Tuesday in D.C. Superior Court, alleges that leaders of Options enriched themselves with at least $3 million in taxpayer funds intended to serve students. According to the suit, the school’s leaders created for-profit companies that entered into contracts with the school to deliver services at high prices. Charter school officials launched an investigation on Aug. 19, bringing in an outside accountant to do a forensic audit, notifying the attorney general and now, six weeks later, seeking to revoke Options’ charter. Officials insisted that their actions were unrelated to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by The Post’s Emma Brown. But the fact that she was seeking information about Options and the for-profit companies in requests dated July 10 and Aug. 8 raises the obvious question of whether there were earlier warning signs that school board officials should have spotted. The allegation that Jeremy L. Williams, former chief financial officer for the public charter school board who once served as interim executive director, assisted in the scheme is particularly troubling, since he was the official in charge of fiscal oversight. Mr. Williams’s attorney, Troy Poole, said he had no comment. Public charter schools, which currently enroll 43 percent of public school students, play a vital role in the District. They provide important educational choices for parents and, while education quality varies, charter school students perform above the D.C. average. So it’s important that officials ensure that the public monies going to charter schools are well spent. It’s particularly galling that Options, a school that is supposed to serve troubled and at-risk teenagers, may have misused its funding. The board, which by law reviews but does not approve contracts, has already moved to tighten its internal controls and toughen its conflict-of-interest policy. It’s encouraging that it has retained the outside accounting firm that audited Options to undertake a rigorous review of financial operations to determine if further changes are in order. **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: The District’s public education is on a healthy trajectory The Post’s View: School reform in D.C. should stay the course Kaya Henderson: Quiet, critical reform at D.C. Public Schools Mark Simon: Is teacher churn undermining real reform in D.C.?

Tony Bennett resigns Florida education post amid scandal

A national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education resigned as Florida education commissioner Thursday, amid allegations that when he ran Indiana’s schools, he changed the state grade of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor. In a resignation letter that surprised many, Tony Bennett dismissed the brewing scandal as “malicious and rooted in unfounded allegations” but said that it had created “a distraction from important work” and that he was leaving his post immediately. The move came two days after the Associated Press reported that it had acquired e-mails written by Bennett in 2012, while he was running Indiana’s schools, in which he directed his staff to change the state grade for Christel House Academy. The charter school was founded by Christel DeHaan, who has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett. The school, which had been kindergarten through eighth grade, added grades nine and 10 in 2012, and test scores from the new students were low enough to pull down the school’s rating from an A to a C on an A-to-F scale. At Bennett’s direction, staff used a loophole in regulations and removed the scores of ninth- and 10th-graders, bringing the school’s grade back up to an A. Bennett has said that changing the grade made the rating system credible because he knew Christel House to be a high-performing school. The Indiana State Teachers Association thinks otherwise. “It’s time to call the Tony Bennett letter-grading scandal exactly what it is — cheating,” union officials wrote in a statement. “There are no excuses for the actions taken by Bennett and his staff, as revealed in the string of e-mails, other than favoritism, cronyism, self-interest and hubris — none of which has a place in public school policymaking.” As Indiana schools chief, Bennett forged a national reputation in Republican education circles. He oversaw Indiana’s use of tax dollars for private school tuition — the largest expansion of vouchers in the country — and he became a leader of Chiefs for Change, a group of state education officials created by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) that promotes charter schools, vouchers, and other policy changes. He is also a champion of the K-12 Common Core standards in math and reading, which aim to create national guideposts for learning. “Tony started every day with the focus of creating a system that would equip kids to achieve their God-given potential,” Bush said in a statement Thursday. Bennett lost his November bid for re-election in Indiana to Democrat Glenda Ritz, a former teacher who was critical of many of Bennett’s changes, including a requirement that students must be proficient readers by third grade or cannot progress to fourth grade. After his loss, Bennett was quickly hired by Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who stood by him in recent days, telling reporters Bennett was “doing a great job.” Bennett’s departure from Florida comes at a precarious moment in the state regarding the Common Core standards. Legislative leaders are calling for Florida to reverse its position and withdraw from the standards; Bennett was seen as its strongest advocate within the Scott administration. Indiana had been rating schools since 1999, but it was under Bennett that the state switched to an A to F scale, which it used to determine the amount of state funding a school receives as well as whether it should be taken over by the state. Michael Petrilli, a former official at the U.S. Department of Education and executive vice president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said that Bennett’s resignation could prompt discussion about the value of A to F school grading systems. “I think there’s going to be a good conversation about whether boiling it all down to a single grade makes sense,” Petrilli said.

Financial review of D.C. charters includes new scrutiny of management contracts

The D.C. Public Charter School Board released its annual review of charter school finances this week, and for the first time, the board offered a snapshot of schools that have contracts with outside management companies, expenditures of taxpayer dollars that are difficult to track. At least 14 schools — about 25 percent of the city’s charters — pay fees to nonprofit or for-profit management companies, and those companies’ public financial disclosures vary widely, according to the board’s review. The schools pay management fees ranging from 3 percent to 100 percent of their total revenue. Several schools “have an operating agreement with a management organization that prevents the kind of transparency necessary to assure that schools are operating appropriately,” the board wrote. But the board’s executive director, Scott Pearson, said the majority of contracts do not present cause for concern. “In many cases, management companies can be a strong force for quality and choice in schools, because they allow for the transmission of best practices from one school to another and they allow for the sharing and centralization of costs,” Pearson said. “But we thought it was important that we put all the information out there that we have about each of these relationships so it could be publicly available.” The new scrutiny of management contracts comes after two lawsuits alleging that D.C. charter school leaders used outside companies to divert millions of taxpayer dollars into their own pockets. In both cases, defendants have argued that they did nothing wrong and that their financial transactions mirrored those of other city charter schools. During last year’s financial year, the board concluded that both of those schools — Options Public Charter School and Community Academy Public Charter School — had “shown no patterns of fiscal mismanagement.” That review, which emphasized the improving fiscal health of city charter schools, did not report on schools’ relationships with management companies, over which the charter board has almost no authority. Charters, which are required by law to be nonprofit organizations, receive more than $600 million in city tax dollars each year. In return, the schools are required to submit independent financial audits, annual budgets, large contracts and other financial data to the city charter board. But when charter schools pay outside management organizations, the charter board has little ability to monitor how those tax dollars are used. The board is seeking legislative changes that would give it the additional authority to examine management companies’ books and records. The board’s summary of schools’ contracts with outside companies shows that some schools pay not just management fees to outside companies, but also rent payments to affiliates of the same companies. Imagine Hope Community Charter School, for example, pays a 12 percent management fee ($1.7 million) to Imagine Schools Inc., a Virginia for-profit company that runs dozens of schools across the country. Imagine Hope pays an additional 19 percent of its revenue ($2.7 million) in lease payments to Schoolhouse Finance, an affiliate of Imagine Schools that specializes in real estate. Pearson said that although there have been instances elsewhere in the country of fraudulent rent charges for charter schools, the board is not concerned about Imagine Hope’s fees or rent payments. “In many cases, the management company has the financial resources to purchase the building and undertake the renovations, and it’s fully appropriate to charge a reasonable rent to the school,” Pearson said. The compensation of top executives at some management companies isn’t clear because of limits on the charter board’s authority to examine those firms’ expenditures. The salary of the chief executive of Imagine Schools is unknown, for example, while the chief executive of Schoolhouse Finance earns $390,000, according to the charter board’s review. In cases where executive compensation is known, salaries vary. For example, the chief executive of CentroNia, a nonprofit that serves as a management company for D.C. Bilingual, earned $141,000 in 2012, while the chief executive of the nonprofit that manages D.C. Scholars earned $220,000. The board’s annual financial review is meant to flag signs of fiscal distress to ensure that schools can make changes before they become insolvent. During the past four years, the number of high-performing schools has increased from 13 to 31, while the number of low-performers has fallen from 11 to five. “We used to have a situation where charter schools would run out of money in the middle of the year, and ever since we put this system in place, that hasn’t happened anymore,” Pearson said.

Feds didn’t carefully monitor $3 billion it gave for charters — and it just awarded $157 million more

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been called the most powerful education secretary for a reason. He has led a department that has been criticized for being “a national school board” because of its micromanaging states on some key education issues. Duncan talks a lot about “accountability” and the importance of making sure that schools are doing right by kids. When the department began its $4.3 billion Race to the Top funding competition among states, it made clear what its priorities for applications were, and when it offered waivers to states from the most onerous parts of No Child Left Behind, there were detailed strings attached. (And when Washington did not evaluate teachers by standardized test scores as the department wanted, it yanked the state’s No Child Left Behind waiver). But when it comes to its support of charter schools, the department hasn’t been doing all that much to manage the more than $3 billion it has given to charter networks and state education departments for the purposes of creating and expanding existing charters. And it just this week announced that it was awarding $157 million in new grants for charters. **State Educational Agency Grantees:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ****    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Replication and Expansion of High-Quality Charter Schools Grantees:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The largest recipient — getting $32.5 million this year with a recommended multi-year total of $71 million — is the Ohio Department of Education, which runs a charter school program that is among the most troubled in the country.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How troubled? A June story in the Akron Beacon Journal noted that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.” It also said: “No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” A Sept. 19 Beacon Journal story had this headline: “Blame and ignorance follow 200th charter school flop in Ohio.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[Troubled Ohio charter schools have become a joke — literally]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Education Department officials say that they only give grants to high-performing charter school operators but that they don’t have a lot of control over the states. On a press call about the new grants on Monday, Duncan said: And how are they challenging states? Along with the grants, the department is sending a “Dear Colleague” letter with “suggested” areas of state involvement with charter authorizers and operators. You can see it in full below. During the press call, a reporter asked why any money was going to Ohio for its charter sector. Duncan remained silent. Department Assistant Deputy Secretary Nadya Dabby responded: Yes, there is always room to grow, but Ohio’s legislature has failed to put good mechanisms in place to improve quality and oversight. It was supposed to earlier this year, but didn’t manage to get it done. _[Ohio’s effort to reform its ridiculed charter schools is a big fail]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And there’s more: According to the _Akron Beacon Journal_, Ohio’s winning charter grant application was put together with the help of David Hansen, who ran the school choice and charter school programs in the Ohio Department of Education until he was forced to resign in July after it was discovered that he had secretly given help to some charter schools to make them look better in state evaluations.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico My Post colleague Lyndsey Layton noted in this story about the new grants that the federal government doesn’t carefully monitor how charter schools use federal dollars, nor has it studied the academic performance of the schools. Layton noted a 2012 report by the Education Department’s inspector general that reviewed the very program through which Duncan just awarded $157 million and detailed significant deficiencies in how the department handled federal grants to charter schools between 2008 and 2011. The department says it acted on the inspector general’s recommendations.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But how carefully does the department actually monitor its grantees? Duncan’s press secretary, Dorie Nolt, said in an e-mail that charter program grantees are required to submit annual performance reports on their projects: She also noted that the Charter School Program’s technical assistance contractor facilitated a webinar for CSP grantees that discusses charter school closures and how to handle them, as well as another webinar designed to handle “issues regarding financial management and fiscal controls for their CSP grant funds.” But such monitoring pales in comparison to the heavy-duty monitoring the department has done on its Race to the Top grants and state proposals for NCLB waivers. According to a report released several months ago by the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The center also said in this post that Colorado, which wound up receiving a grant renewal from the Education Department this week, initially won a $46 million grant in 2010 “thanks in no small part to the lax ‘hiring and firing’ rules and the lack of certification requirements for charter school teachers — a reviewer contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to score the application noted.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In July, the Center for Media and Democracy reported that according to a PowerPoint presentation it uncovered: Here’s the PowerPoint:  Here’s the Education Department’s “Dear Colleague” letter:

Taxpayers paid for charter school property, but they don’t own it

Taxpayers paid for the furniture, computers and other equipment that students used at 10 Ohio charter schools. But the public doesn’t own the things it paid for, according to the state Supreme Court. The court ruled in a split decision Tuesday that the assets are instead the property of White Hat Management, the for-profit company that once managed the 10 schools. If the schools want their chairs and desks, they’ll have to buy them back, paying for them a second time with taxpayer dollars. That might seem incredible, but that’s what the schools agreed to in their contracts with White Hat, and the contracts have to be honored, ruled Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger, writing for the majority. “The schools were represented by their own legal counsel, and they agreed to provisions in the contracts,” Lanzinger wrote. Unless there is fraud involved, she wrote, “ ‘courts are powerless to save a competent person from the effects of his own voluntary agreement.’ ” Charter schools contract with for-profit management companies in many states, and the Ohio case illuminates a broader dispute over whether public money is still considered public — and therefore subject to public oversight — once it is transferred to a private entity. In the District of Columbia, for example, the attorney general has filed two lawsuits in recent years that allege that D.C. charter school leaders used for-profit companies to divert millions of taxpayer dollars into their own pockets. The D.C. Public Charter School Board, which oversees all city charter schools, has no legal right to examine the books and records of those private companies and says that it has little ability to monitor how those dollars are spent. In the Ohio case, the nonprofit boards responsible for the 10 schools signed contracts with for-profit White Hat and its subsidiaries in 2005. White Hat, one of the nation’s larger for-profit charter school operators, manages charter schools that serve thousands of students in three states. White Hat ran the schools’ day-to-day operations, including hiring teachers and buying equipment for classrooms and offices. In return, the company received 95 to 96 percent of the public dollars that each school received to educate students. Most of the schools did not fare well academically. By the 2010-2011 school year, two of the 10 schools had been closed for poor performance. The state considered one to be in “academic emergency” and four others to be on “academic watch,” according to court records. The schools parted ways with White Hat and then sued, alleging that White Hat refused to account for how it had spent the public dollars it had received — about $90 million from 2007 to 2010, according to court documents. As part of the complaint, the schools argued that they are entitled to the physical assets, such as books and computers, that White Hat purchased with public dollars. This week’s Ohio Supreme Court ruling means the schools are not entitled to those assets. But not every judge agreed. In a blistering dissent, Justice William M. O’Neill wrote that the majority’s opinion allowed a “fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” The contracts between the schools and White Hat were not enforceable, he wrote, because they permitted “an operator who is providing a substandard education to squander public money and then, upon termination for poor performance, reap a bonus, paid for by public money.”

What the public isn’t told about high-performing charter schools in Arizona

President Trump’s first federal budget proposal seeks a $168 million increase for charter schools, which is a 50 percent funding increase from the current level set by the previous Obama administration. For Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, charters are one tool in the school choice tool box that they say will be front and center of their education reform agenda. Charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated, sometimes by for-profit companies — have been proliferating for some 25 years and today there are thousands in the United States. While the few million students they enroll are a fraction of the number of young people who attend K-12 schools in this country, the charter movement has been a key part of the school choice movement and the education reform debate. Supporters of charter schools say they give parents an alternative to failing traditional public schools. Critics say they take vital resources away from traditional public schools and that many charters are poorly run. While some charter schools are well-run and high-performing, others aren’t, and some states that allow charters have little or no oversight. A 2016 audit by the Education Department’s Inspector General’s Office found that the department — which awards multi-million-dollar grants to states for the creation and expansion of charters — had failed to provide adequate oversight of some of its relationships with charter management organizations. This post details issues with charter schools in Arizona. It was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She has been chronicling problems with corporate school reform for years on this blog, and this post is part of her occasional series about troubled charter schools in California and other states. Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She was helped with this piece by Jim Hall, an elementary and middle school principal in Arizona for 23 years who, in 2014, founded Arizonans for Charter School Accountability. He is quoted in this post. Burris attempted to contact officials at the BASIS charter school network she writes about in this post but received no response.  By Carol Burris In the age of President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, many charter school advocates are quick to point out that they are not part of the school privatization agenda. They place the adjective “public” in front of “charter school,” to distinguish themselves from voucher schools, which are private schools that accept public funding for some students. This branding effort has been somewhat successful — especially with politicians and the press. But there are very big differences between what we have come to accept as public schools and charters.  They only thing truly “public” about charters, is that taxpayers foot the bill. Calling charter schools “public schools” because they receive public tax dollars is like calling defense contractors “public companies” because they also depend on public funding. One of the best illustrations of the “non-public” nature of charters is the much heralded BASIS charter schools that began in Arizona, a state with extremely lax charter laws. A close look at BASIS provides insight into how charter schools can cherry-pick students, despite open enrollment laws.  It also shows how through the use of management companies profits can be made — call hidden from public view. BASIS School Inc. began in 1998. Two economists, Michael and Olga Block, believed that students in the United States were not sufficiently challenged, and so they began BASIS Tucson built upon the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum and tests. That school was followed by BASIS Scottsdale in 2003. BASIS Tucson and BASIS Scottsdale became top-ranked schools on Newsweek’s “America’s Most Challenging High Schools” list, and later flew to top spots on the Best High Schools list of U.S. News & World Report.  There is no doubt that BASIS provides a challenging education. What is questionable is just how “public” their charter schools really are.    The proportional over-enrollment of Asian-American students and under-enrollment of Latino students in BASIS charter schools is startling. But differences in the students served do not end with race and ethnicity. In 2015-16, only 1.23 percent of the students at BASIS had a learning disability, as compared to 11.3 percent of students in the state. BASIS schools had no English Language Learners. And in a state in which over 47 percent of all students received free or reduced- priced lunch, BASIS had none.  Although BASIS may have some students from qualifying households, it chooses not to participate in the free or reduced-priced lunch program. The stark differences in school demographics between the 18 schools of BASIS and the state are the result of several factors — all within BASIS’s control. Linda Lyon is the president-elect of the Arizona School Boards Association. She has been observing the growth of BASIS schools for years. She believes that where BASIS chooses to open schools is based, in part, on the students it hopes to attract. “BASIS and other for-profit charters are really good at penetrating affluent markets where they can recruit already high performing students from district schools,” she said. “According to the U.S. Census, communities in Arizona with BASIS schools have poverty rates of only about 10 percent, median incomes of $69,000 and households that are mostly white.”  The barriers to enrollment do not end there. The “rigorous” curriculum of BASIS prevents prospective enrollees from transferring in after middle school. Students must take six Advanced Placement exams and pass at least one with a score of 3 or above, in order to graduate. However, they are required to take more AP classes than that, beginning in middle school. There are comprehensive tests that must be passed or students are retained. When I inquired about whether a tenth grader could enter BASIS, the two schools I contacted did their best to make it appear that it would be impossible. One of the reasons given was that ninth-grade students take either AP Calculus AB or AP Calculus BC — courses that are taken typically in grade 12 by strong, accelerated math students in most public and private schools. Even after getting into BASIS however, there is less than a 50 percent chance the student will stay to graduate. During each successive year, students leave when they cannot keep up with excessive academic demands. Like the “no-excuses” charter schools found in cities, the attrition rates at BASIS middle and high schools are extraordinarily high.  Of a cohort of 85 students who began eighth grade in BASIS Flagstaff during the 2011-12 school year, only 41 percent (35) remained to enter twelfth grade in 2015-16. In the flagship school, BASIS Tucson North, a seventh-grade class of 130 became a class of 54 by senior year.  The same pattern exists in every BASIS charter high school in the state. This is not just an enrollment decline due to students leaving BASIS after middle school. Attrition occurs throughout the middle and high school years.  Below is the attrition rate for the cohort of students that remained to become twelfth-graders at BASIS Tucson North in 2015-16.   All of the above, of course, gives advantage to BASIS charters in the “Best High Schools” ratings. For example, the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list now published by the Washington Post, makes its ranking determination based on the number of tests divided by the number of graduating seniors. By requiring AP tests throughout high school, in combination with having a very small senior class, BASIS schools become a shoe-in for top spots. Likewise, the US News & World Report’s final ranking is based on the number of AP tests taken and performance on those tests for graduating seniors only. The more elite the group of twelfth-graders, the better the rank. BASIS schools operate on a tournament model, where only the strongest survive. Ironically, however, the prize at the tournament’s end goes to the BASIS chain. The  “best high school” rankings that put BASIS near the top, are the catalyst that allowed the Blocks to build an empire.  That same year, according to the 2007 BASIS School Inc.’s 990, the couple spent over $46,000 on travel expenses.  The distance between Tucson and Scottsdale is 115 miles.  The latest 990 shows just shy of $60 million going from the non-profit to the for-profit corporation to provide services to BASIS schools.  BASIS general administrative costs alone amounted to nearly $12 million for less than 9,000 students, while the six largest public school districts serve a quarter million students for less than $10 million in General Administrative costs. “  I called the BASIS Educational Group twice to get answers about the financial status of BASIS. My calls were never returned.  So I turned to Arizonan Curt Cardine, a former East Coast superintendent and former charter administrator. Discouraged by the unethical practices he says he has observed in Arizona charters, he left the charter world and has spent the last three years conducting an extensive study of charter financial health and financing in Arizona. According to Cardine, “Once money goes to the BASIS Educational Group, the profits now belong to the for-profit to use as they please, including for expansion.” Cardine then analyzed the latest audit for BASIS and he sees trouble ahead for the charter chain. “The most recent audit shows that BASIS School Inc. is now running a huge deficit in their assets of over $13 million.  The charter schools’ net loss for the 14-15 year alone was $3,074,317.” Cardine said he was not surprised. “In the state of Arizona, the financial failure rate on charters is 42.79 percent. Over-leveraging is a huge problem,” said Cardine.  “Charters fail, but somehow folks leave making money. Charters like to say they are ‘for the kids, not the adults.’ That has certainly not been my experience — especially here in Arizona.”

California charter schools vulnerable to fraud, report says

Journalists, auditors and other investigators have turned up more than $80 million in charter school fraud in California to date, according to a new report by a coalition of left-leaning organizations, which argues that lax oversight of the state’s charter schools is leaving taxpayer dollars vulnerable to abuse.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico California has more than 1,100 charter schools that serve more than a half- million students — far more than any other state in the nation. They receive more than $3 billion in public funds each year. But state and local officials don’t have a rigorous enough system to ferret out misuse of those dollars, according to the report, which says that oversight relies too heavily on audits paid for by charter schools and complaints by whistleblowers.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “Despite the tremendous investment of public dollars and the size of its charter school population, California has failed to implement a system that proactively monitors charters for fraud, waste and mismanagement,” says the report. It was released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group that is allied with teachers’ unions and has published several studies of state-level charter-school fraud; the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Institute, an organization that works on issues including housing and education; and Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The report recounts some of the charter school scandals that have come to light in California. In 2012, for example, state auditors found that the American Indian Model Charter Schools (AIMS) — an Oakland school that had won national recognition for the achievement of its low-income students — had paid its founder, his wife and their various businesses about $3.8 million. The audit was initiated after a whistleblower raised concerns.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico More recently, in 2014, state auditors found that a Los Angeles charter school — the Wisdom Academy of Young Scientists Charter Schools (WAYS) — had made payments totaling $2.6 million to the school’s former executive director and her family members and close associates.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “There simply isn’t enough oversight to prevent a huge amount of fraud in the charter sector, and that’s unacceptable,” said Hilary Hammell, a lawyer for Public Advocates. “That’s unacceptable because it’s vulnerable youths and their families who suffer when money that should be spent on kids at the school level instead goes elsewhere.” The California Charter Schools Association responded with an extensive statement that called into question the motives of the report’s authors, arguing that they had turned up no evidence of a substantial problem. Many of the examples of fraud cited in the report were old and resulted in charter revocation, overhauls in school management or changes to state law, the association said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “We agree that inappropriate use of public dollars intended for public school students should be prevented,” the statement says. “We believe that the system that California has very carefully and thoughtfully implemented does just that.” California school system superintendents who suspect fiscal mismanagement at charter schools can request an “extraordinary audit” from a state agency known as the Financial Crisis and Management Assistance Team. But that agency — or some other oversight body — should be auditing all charter schools on a regular basis, according to the report, which argues that absent such a systemic review, misuse of tax dollars is going undetected. Charter schools are  required to submit a number of financial documents to oversight agencies and local school superintendents, including annual audits performed by private auditors. The report’s authors argued that those audits are not designed to catch fraud, while the California Charter Schools Association questioned why charter schools should have to undergo state audits when traditional public school systems do not. “To assume that there is a greater risk at charter schools than school districts, particularly in light of all the real time oversight on financial reports, is simply unfounded,” the association said. “The report not only provides no evidence of a systemic issue, it does not do justice to the system already in place and that is  actually more rigorous for charter schools than for other LEAs in the state (e.g., school districts),” the association said. Some critics of previous reports about charter-school fraud released by the Center for Popular Democracy have also argued that those reports did not offer equal scrutiny of fraud within traditional public school systems. Others have pointed out that the center counts teachers unions — which have been critical of the charter sector — among its allies and supporters. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is a member of the center’s board.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _This post has been updated._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Suspension and expulsion rates at D.C. schools continue to drop, report finds

There has been a steady drop in suspensions and expulsions at the District’s traditional public schools and public charter schools since the city started releasing detailed, school-level statistics on discipline beginning in the 2012-2013 academic year, according to a new study from the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The citywide expulsion rate dropped from 22 per 1,000 students to 13 per 1,000 students between the 2012-2013 and 2014-2015 school years, the report found. The overall suspension rate dropped from 12 percent to 10 percent; the suspension rate for special needs students dropped from 23 percent to 19 percent and suspensions of black students fell from 16 percent to 13 percent. Because there is no comparable data prior to the 2012-2013 academic year, it is impossible to conclusively determine whether these declines are related to the increased transparency or other factors. “City leaders expected that reliable data comparing schools would encourage schools to examine and, where necessary, change their own discipline policies,” according to the report. “City leaders also wanted to give parents the chance to consider schools’ discipline rates when making school choices, expecting that parents would steer clear of schools with high discipline rates.” Charter schools — publicly funded schools that operate independently of the traditional school system and account for nearly half of D.C. public school students — have historically had a higher expulsion rate than traditional public schools. When they expel or remove difficult students, those students often end up in the city’s school system, which is required to take them. A 2013 Washington Post review of school data found that D.C. charter schools expelled 676 students in the previous three years, compared with the 23 students that traditional public schools expelled. While some charter schools rarely expel any students, seven D.C. charters expelled at least 10 students during the 2011-2012 school year, according to the 2013 review. Naomi Rubin DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said the changes are happening “because school leaders have more information and better strategies to keep students in the classroom.” A spokeswoman for D.C. Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment. Nationwide, reports found that minority students are suspended and expelled at disproportionately higher rates than white students. In response, city school officials said in 2013 they would make this data across traditional and charter schools more transparent, and D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education included the information in annual “Equity Reports.” The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s report, which culled data from the “Equity Reports,” wrote that charter schools with the highest rates are now made aware of their status and can potentially face not having their charter renewed. The D.C. Public Charter School Board, however, has never revoked a charter because of discipline rates alone. Since 2013, expulsion rate declines at charter schools outpaced the declines in D.C.’s traditional public schools, according to the report. The report’s authors argue that the city should make the “Equity Reports” more accessible to parents so that they can use them while selecting a school. The authors caution that parents might interpret the data differently. “A high number of suspensions may signal to parents that the school strictly enforces a disruptive-free learning environment, which they could see as a positive,” the report says. “But it may also signal that the school is highly disruptive or that students are treated harshly, which they could see as negative.”

One more piece of Gray’s education record: OSSE

Friday’s story about D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s education record leaves out, thanks to space limits, plenty of details about strengths and weaknesses in the District’s schools policies. One area that may get more attention in the coming months is the Office of the State Superintendent of Education — the city agency responsible for monitoring special-education compliance, administering standardized tests and funneling federal grants to schools. Created in 2007 by the same law that brought mayoral control to the schools, OSSE is a low-profile linchpin in the city’s education reform efforts. But for much of its young existence, it has been wracked by leadership turnover and mired in management problems. The agency scored a major victory in 2012 when it emerged from court oversight of special-education bus transportation, but it has continued to struggle under Gray (D) as it did under his predecessor, Adrian Fenty. In the past year, the agency has been led by three different superintendents and has made headlines for failing to publicly disclose its scoring methodology for 2013 standardized tests; for paying a Chicago firm $90,000 to present at a one-day parent summit; and for persistently weak financial management of a popular federal college-aid program. “That OSSE is still reeling after all these years doesn’t say much good about the mayor,” said Robert Cane, executive director of the pro-charter advocacy group FOCUS, which often clashes with OSSE over regulations that FOCUS sees as violating charter schools’ right to autonomy. Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith said she believes that the current superintendent, Jesus Aguirre, will strengthen the agency. Aguirre joined OSSE in October after leaving his post as head of the Department of Parks and Recreation. “We all recognize that OSSE has a longer way to go” than other city education agencies, said Smith, who oversees the agency. Aguirre’s nomination barely squeaked out of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee. Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) and David Grosso (I-At Large) raised questions about Aguirre’s past, including his leadership of an Arizona charter school that was closed in part because of failure to comply with federal grant reporting requirements. Wells, Grosso and committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large) also questioned whether Aguirre is independent enough from Gray to carry out OSSE’s responsibilities — including monitoring the school system, also controlled by the mayor — without political interference. Catania, a frequent critic of OSSE, introduced a bill last year that would give the agency somewhat more independence from the mayor’s office, allowing the superintendent to be dismissed only for cause. Now Catania is running for mayor and has pledged to make education a central theme of his campaign.

New Orleans tries to mix charter schools with democracy

In the decade since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and swept away its public school system, the city has become a closely watched experiment in whether untethering schools from local politics could fix the problems that have long ailed urban education. Louisiana seized control of most New Orleans schools and turned them into charter schools after the devastating storm in 2005. More than 90 percent of the city’s children attend charters, which are publicly funded but privately run by unelected officials who have complete freedom to decide how to organize their programs, schedules, teachers and curriculum. Test scores and graduation rates have risen. And the state is poised to relinquish its oversight: The governor is expected to sign a bill that would return the 52 schools the state oversees to a measure of local control. Many charter-school advocates describe it as an inevitable next step in the city’s bold education experiment, one that could serve as a road map for other cities grappling with how to manage and coordinate a large number of charter schools. “If they can get that right, it will be really important for New Orleans and for the country,” said Neerav Kingsland, who worked for New Schools for New Orleans from 2006 to 2014, when it started dozens of new charter schools. “You can’t avoid democracy forever, nor should you.” Proponents of the bill, including many charter-school advocates, are calling it a “reunification” of New Orleans schools, putting the locally elected Orleans Parish School Board back in charge of the city’s schools but leaving control of individual operations in the hands of each charter school’s leaders. They say it is an important step in closing the wounds left by the state takeover without sacrificing the autonomies that they say have been essential for driving academic progress. “I do think this is the start of a healing process for a lot of individuals, to realize that the city is coming back together,” said Jamar McKneely, the chief executive of InspireNOLA Charter Schools. But some critics say that it is a whitewash, written to appear as though local control over public education will be restored — when the bill leaves most of the power in the hands of the unelected boards of directors who run each of the city’s charter schools. Karran Harper Royal, an advocate for special-education students and their families, called it a “Trojan horse.” “This is the kind of bill you get when the charter schools want to give the impression that schools are returning to local governance,” she said. “It feels like a very patriarchal view of communities of color, and white people deciding that black people, or people of color, don’t deserve democracy.” Although improving, the schools are far from excellent. And there are lingering questions about whether and how a bunch of independent schools — which are under pressure to meet academic targets to continue operating — can ensure access to education for all students, especially those with the greatest needs. Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) is widely expected to sign the bill, which was introduced by state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson (D) of New Orleans and was supported by the majority of the New Orleans state delegation. It outlines the transfer of schools from the state-run Recovery School District to the locally elected school board by 2019 at the latest. But the parish school board — which runs half a dozen schools and oversees more than a dozen charter schools — would be prohibited from interfering with school-level decisions about several issues, including instruction, schedules, staffing, contracting and collective bargaining. Instead, the district superintendent and board members would be responsible for reviewing schools’ performance and deciding whether they have met their targets and should be allowed to continue operating. The district also would take on other functions that state officials perform, such as running the city’s annual school enrollment lottery, which determines where children will go, and managing its centralized expulsion system. Henderson Lewis, a former New Orleans charter-school principal who serves as the superintendent of the Orleans Parish School Board, said that the charter movement has served the city well, providing students with a stronger education and a better shot at graduating from high school than before Katrina. Lewis, who helped write the language in the bill, said that the district is on firm financial footing and has shown during the past decade that it can hold charter schools accountable for meeting performance targets. “It’s time that schools return under local control,” he said. He acknowledged the desire among parents to be able to send their children nearer their homes, and he said he is working on proposals to that end. But he said that does not require returning to a traditional system of schools controlled by an elected board: “As far as going back to where we were pre-Katrina, we’re in a different place now in New Orleans, and that’s not the system of schools that we have.” Recovery District Superintendent Patrick Dobard — who played a key role in writing the plan — said the state never envisioned itself as the long-term steward of New Orleans schools. “The spirit of the original law was for the schools to be returned in some way to local control,” he said. Opponents of the plan for New Orleans also include some charter-school advocates who worry that the Orleans Parish School Board is not willing or able to serve as a regulator, rather than an operator, of the schools it stands to absorb. Perhaps the most common doubt is whether the elected board will be willing to make unpopular decisions to close schools that fall short of performance targets. The architects of the plan tried to insulate those decisions from politics: The Orleans Parish superintendent would be responsible for making a recommendation, and the school board would not be able to overturn it without at least a two-thirds majority. Critics say that is just one more way in which the bill removes public education from the voice of the people. Proponents called it an effort to depoliticize decisions that should be about what children need, not necessarily what voters want. The bill would enshrine the system of choice that has defined New Orleans education for the past decade: Students will continue to enroll in schools via a lottery instead of by neighborhood assignment. Advocates for such choice frame it as a way to ensure that all children have fair access to good schools, no matter where their families live or how much money they earn. But critics argue that eliminating neighborhood schools has undermined the most vulnerable students by uprooting them from their communities and scattering them to schools citywide. Harper Royal pointed to a 2015 Tulane University study estimating that there are more than 26,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither in school nor employed in the New Orleans metro area. They account for 18 percent of all the area’s young people, significantly higher than the national average of 13 percent. Such high numbers of disconnected youth — as well as high rates of child poverty and unemployment — should factor into how the city’s education experiment is evaluated, she said: “You have to look at how it is working in the lives of the people, and it isn’t.” She favors a competing bill that would have returned the schools to the Orleans Parish School Board without preserving the system of charter schools. That measure, written by state Rep. Joseph Bouie (D), died in committee this spring. Bouie said that the plan awaiting the governor’s signature impinges upon the constitutional authority of the school board by tightly regulating what it can and cannot do. He predicted that it would trigger legal complaints. “The community is in an uproar,” he said. “Right now there are groups in the community trying to organize to see how they can respond to it.”

Fairfax should judge a charter school on its own merits

WHEN APPLICATIONS for charter schools come up for review, the worry generally is whether the founders of the proposed school have prepared a sound educational philosophy and practices. So it’s a little odd, perhaps even perverse, that Fairfax County’s debate over what would be its first charter school is focused on whether the institution would be too successful. Such wrong-headed thinking overlooks student needs and stands at odds to a school system that sees itself as the cutting edge for education strategies. Eric Welch, a teacher at Fairfax’s J.E.B. Stuart High School, is spearheading the effort to establish the Fairfax Leadership Academy, a seventh-through 12th-grade school aimed at high-risk, low-income students. Borrowing ideas that have proven effective in boosting student achievement, organizers have proposed a full-year school calendar, extended-day schedules, intensive college preparation and small learning communities, with just 75 students in each grade. “All great ideas,” one school official told us. But opponents worry that the school would be so attractive that it would draw students and other resources from nearby Falls Church High School. Falls Church has issues that have caused it to be under-enrolled, but closing off viable, exciting education options — particularly for students who need them most — is no way to address the school’s problems. “I am a teacher, not a charter-school person,” Mr. Welch told us, relating how he came to the realization that the achievement gap that separates the county’s white and minority students would persist without new solutions. He sees the academy, which would have the flexibility to pilot ideas, as a pioneer for the school system in providing new strategies and resources to address that gap. So impressed was the Virginia Board of Education with the school’s application that it gave its unanimous approval in April. But state law gives ultimate authority over charter start-ups to local school boards, which — judging by the dearth of charters in Virginia — wrongly see the competition from public charters as a threat. If the Leadership Academy offers a useful new option, Fairfax school officials should embrace it — and if Falls Church needs help, they should address that issue, too. **Read more on this issue:** Kristen Amundson: Can a charter school proposal get a fair shake in Fairfax?

Takeovers of struggling charter schools offer families stability, and a culture clash

The line of parents waiting to attend back-to-school night stretched down the sidewalk, and many of them had no idea what to expect as they approached the historic school on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast Washington. Last year, the building housed Imagine Southeast Public Charter School, a school whose charter was revoked. But instead of closing its doors, the school’s former leaders brought in another operator — New York-based Democracy Prep — to turn the school around. Though students were allowed to stay in the same building, everything else about their school appeared to have changed, including a longer school day and a heavy load of daily homework. It’s a novel solution to an increasingly common challenge as charter authorizers push to close low-performing schools: What do you do with families that would be shut out? In the District, more than a third of all schools ever chartered have closed. Most shut down because of financial problems or low enrollment, but in recent years, the D.C. Public Charter School Board also has taken a more aggressive approach to holding charter schools to their stated goals. The board is enforcing the bargain they make at the inception of every charter for the independently run, publicly funded schools — that if they do not meet students’ needs, they will close. But shutting down can be a painful process for families who grow attached to their school communities and who do not always have better choices as fallbacks: Their neighborhood schools or taking their chances with a citywide enrollment lottery. Charter takeovers have been rare. Democracy Prep has successfully turned around schools in Harlem and Camden, N.J., and it is preparing to take over another school in the Bronx this year. But Robert Cane, executive director of the pro-charter advocacy group FOCUS, said it’s likely that the turnaround approach will gain traction nationally. “There’s a great reluctance to turn these kids out on the streets,” he said. Arts and Technology Academy, a large elementary school in Northeast, also opted to bring in a new operator this year instead of closing its doors when the charter school board voted to close the school last year. And a court- appointed receiver for Options Public Charter school, where the former leaders are entangled in an alleged financial scandal, has requested proposals for a new operator to take over the school for at-risk teens next year. Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, said it’s good to give families a way to stay put. But she said a takeover approach will not work in every case. Replacing a school’s operator makes charter schools seem interchangeable, like “any school will do,” she said. But charters, by their nature, have very different missions and instructional approaches that families buy into when they make their choice. “The whole point of charter schools is to match children with their passions and talents so they can be successful,” Edelin said. **** Arts and Technology Academy was founded with a focus on motivating children through the arts. When it lost its charter after 15 years for failing to meet academic achievement goals, the school’s leaders were concerned about what would happen to the charter’s 560 students. While proficiency rates on grade- level math and reading tests hovered in the 30s, performance at surrounding traditional schools was worse. Allison Artis, a principal at the school last year, said many of the families affected were longtime area residents.“Their number-one question was, ‘Will we have a school in the community?’ ” The school’s board of trustees selected KIPP DC, a high-performing charter network, to take over the school. The new operator committed to providing daily arts programming while shoring up its academics. About 70 percent of the students reenrolled. For KIPP — and Democracy Prep — the takeover offered a rare opportunity to walk into a ready-made school, complete with students and a fully furnished, light-filled building in a city where schools compete for students and high-quality facilities for charter schools are scarce. “All we needed was a coat of paint,” said Artis, who stayed on at the school as a KIPP principal. Imagine Southeast opened in 2008, a school run by an Arlington-based for-profit company that manages charters in a dozen states. It offered single-sex classes and, by many accounts, a family-friendly, supportive environment to more than 600 students in preschool through middle school. In its final years, the school had a lot of turnover and flux in staffing and administration as well as curriculum and behavior plans, said Carla Toliver, a former teacher at the school. “With people constantly cycling in and out, I was feeling like I did not know what I was going to walk into the next day,” Toliver said. She was relieved when a new operator restarted the school. “I thought, finally our scholars are going to get what they need,” she said. Democracy Prep markets itself as a rigorous, “no-excuses,” college preparatory school with an emphasis on civic education. Under the new operator, Imagine staff members had to reapply for their jobs. Eight were rehired, including Toliver and three other teachers. The rest of the teaching positions were filled through a national search. The school was repainted in Democracy Prep blue and gold, and lines of tape were affixed to the hallway floors to guide the students. Students are taught to walk along the lines with their arms against their sides and hands flat against their thighs. Students came back to a longer school day, classrooms named for universities, and new teachers who call them “scholars.” The new school kept some single-sex classrooms. “I don’t think using the term culture shock would be wrong,” said Democracy Prep spokeswoman Alice Maggin. On back-to-school night, kindergarten teacher Yolanda Johnson spoke of her classroom’s jam-packed daily schedule. Between 7:30 a.m., when students arrive for breakfast, and their 4 p.m. closing circle, they fit in about five hours of math and literacy, 45 minutes for science and social studies, and an hour for specials, such as technology and art. Instead of recess, they have quick “brain breaks” or “wiggle breaks.” “It’s a very, very long day, and the students are expected to work very, very hard,” Johnson said. “To be successful in college, you have to have discipline, so we are preparing them now.” When Democracy Prep leaders first came to talk to the new parents about the school’s approach, Yolanda Smith, a mother of two students at the school and the vice president of the former Parent Teacher Organization, was dismayed. Smith had fought for Imagine to stay open. She liked its single-gender classes and well-rounded curriculum, with arts and music programs and sports. “They had a lot of different things,” she said. “It was not just read, read, read, math, math, math.” So she decided to leave. In all, 80 percent of Imagine’s students reenrolled. Machelle Gantt’s two children were among them. “By the time I found out, it was difficult to move,” she said. “I said I would give it a chance.” Since the school year started, Gantt has had concerns about the strict discipline and the lack of recess. “I feel like all children need some kind of outlet to burn off the energy,” she said. But after the back-to-school presentation, she said she was pleased with the academics and the school’s high level of organization. “I’m a little more optimistic that things will work out,” she said.

Obama administration goes ahead with $71 million grant for Ohio’s scandal-ridden charter sector — but calls it ‘high risk’

In October, the U.S. Education Department announced $157 million in charter school grants, including a recommended $71 million to Ohio, despite the fact that its charter sector has long been, at best, a mess. At the time, many in the education world wondered why the department had given any money to Ohio, given that a newspaper had done an analysis revealing that the state’s charter sector had misspent tax dollars more than any other, including school districts, court systems, public universities, hospitals and local governments. When asked, federal officials admitted that they hadn’t quite realized just how scandal-ridden Ohio’s charter sector was, and decided that it would investigate. In June, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D)  asked the Education Department to review its grant-making process and said that if the grant was to be given, tough restrictions should be put in place, including an independent monitor. Then, on Sept. 14, the department said it would go ahead and release the grant with restrictions. According to a letter (see below) sent by the U.S. Education Department to  Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria, federal officials have completed a 10-month review and have decided to place the grant on “high risk status” but release the money to the state with unprecedented “high risk special conditions”  in place.  Steps the Ohio Department of Education must take, according to the letter, include:  The letter says in part: Held accountable? By getting $71 million in federal funds and having to prove they aren’t misusing it? You might think charter schools should be legally required to be completely transparent with the public about their financial operations as part of the deal in which they get public funds to operate, but alas, they aren’t.   While it’s easy to see why the U.S. Education Department put its latest charter grant to Ohio on “high risk” status, it remains an open question why a charter sector with this record deserves the grant at all. **** Here’s the letter from the U.S. Education Department to Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria:  And here’s Brown’s June letter to the department:

How charter schools choose desirable students

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says this about charter schools on its Web site:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University A new story about charter schools admissions by Stephanie Simon at Reuters details how the reality of admissions at many charter schools is far different from the above rhetoric. She writes:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University These are some of the barriers to charter school admissions that Simon writes about in her story: Selective admissions in charters — which aren’t supposed to have them — is one big part of a growing narrative about public schools that critics say show that they act more like private schools, albeit with public dollars. Another part is the issue of expulsions from charter schools, highlighted by my colleague Emma Brown this recent Washington Post story, which said:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University It should be noted that many charter schools do not engage in selective practices. But many do, Simon found, and operate with little regulation and oversight. For example, she found: Charter schools educate about 5 percent of K-12 students in the country, but the sector is growing and gets a great deal of financial and public attention from school reformers. The charter school-dominant Recovery School District of New Orleans is repeatedly praised as being a model for how charter schools can transform a city’s public education system — though those who do the praising ignore the fact that the charters in that district are performing at a very low level. (You can read about that here.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University One thing this latest probe into selective admissions shows is that charter authorizers need to step up oversight.

Who’s minding the people who are supposed to be minding the schools?

Who’s minding the people who are supposed to be minding the schools? Let’s look at two debacles involving schools, one on the West Coast and one on the East, that are symptomatic of problems around the country. My colleague Emma Brown wrote in this story that three former managers of the Options Public Charter School in Northeast Washington — the city’s oldest charter school — have been accused of enriching themselves with at least $3 million of public money that was supposed to be used to help some of the District’s most troubled teens and students with disabilities. The managers created for-profit companies that won contracts from the school and charged very high prices.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University A civil lawsuit alleges that they did this with the help of a senior official at the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which is a non-elected entity that has financial oversight over charter schools in the District of Columbia. Charter schools, which operate outside of the traditional public school district, have their own administration and boards. They now enroll more than 40 percent of D.C. students and get more than $500 million in public funds every year to operate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University And it turns out, according to the lawsuit, that salary and bonuses for the chief executive, Donna Montgomery, during 2012-13 was at least $425,000, with her base salary at $240,000. Even the base salary is a lot of money for a school with about 400 students. Brown notes that Kaya Henderson is paid a base salary of $275,000 as chancellor of the traditional D.C. school system, which has about 45,000 students. Officials of the charter school board said they were sure that problems were limited to this one school. But look at the timeline of how the board came to know about the problems at Options. From Brown’s story:  The board isn’t saying either way, but it seems likely that the board only realized what was going on when Brown asked for the documents. The board has long had a good reputation for its oversight of the city’s charter schools, but there’s no excusing this. In July, it said it had conducted a study of charter school finances and that it had found “no pattern of fiscal mismanagement” at Options in fiscal 2012. Clearly the board needs better oversight procedures to protect kids and public money. Over on the West Coast, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, there’s an ongoing debacle with a $1 billion — yes $1 billion — initiative to get iPads for every student in the country’s second largest school system. There’s been one mistake after another. When the initial planning was done, everybody forgot about the keyboards that kids would need, an oversight which now could cost the district nearly $40 million.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Officials began distributing iPads to some schools and within a week, student hackers figured out to bypass the security system and kids began using the devices to check Facebook, download music and do other personal activities. The Los Angeles Times then reported that more than 70 iPads were “missing” from a pilot program.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University And now, Steve Lopez of The Times wrote in this piece that he looked at some of the software programmed into the iPads by Pearson Education and he was less than impressed:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Lopez asks why school board members let Superintendent John Deasy make such a huge commitment without more oversight. One member, Steve Zimmer, told him that board members “are not equipped … to micromanage.” Wrote Lopez:  It makes you wonder who’s minding the minders.

New Jersey charter schools: What’s real and not real

A new report on charter schools in New Jersey was hailed as proof that charters in the state on average produce better standardized test scores than traditional public schools. Which would be fine, if that’s what the report really said. It turns out that it shows something far less. Julia Sass Rubin, an associate professor of public policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University wrote here on the N.J. Spotlight Web site, about big problems with the report, which was done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. For example, she said: She also notes, among other things, that CREDO largely ignores “dramatic demographic differences between charter and traditional public schools.” Read the whole piece to see her complete analysis. There’s more. A a blogger called Mother Crusader took Rubin’s piece and took a deep look into the report and CREDO, did more investigation about CREDO, entitled “Is CREDO ‘Part Of The Bandwagon?'” For example, she asked the lead researcher of the study, Macke Raymond, how the study was funded and got this response: Mother Crusader then found this on the Hoover Institution’s Web site about Raymond, who serves as director of CREDO: As Mother Crusader notes, CREDO is in part funded by Pearson, the largest education company in the world, and the Walton Foundation, which donates millions of dollars each year to expand the world of charter schools. Who funds and sponsors research is something Read the whole thing here.

Trump orders study of federal role in education

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that requires Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to study whether and how the federal government has overstepped its legal authority in K-12 schools, a move he framed as part of a broader effort to shift power from Washington to states and local communities. “Previous administrations have wrongfully forced states and schools to comply with federal whims and dicate what our kids are taught,” Trump said at the White House. “But we know that local communities do it best and know it best.” The order does not invest DeVos with any new authority. She already has broad powers to revise or withdraw policies that her predecessors promulgated. Rob Goad, a department official, said the order gives DeVos 300 days to conduct a review to identify any regulations or guidance related to K-12 schools that is inconsistent with federal law. The review will be led by a task force headed by Robert Eitel, a senior counselor to DeVos who previously worked for a for-profit college company. The GOP has long been home to lawmakers who say that the federal government should not be involved in public education. But complaints of federal overreach intensified during President Barack Obama’s administration as the department wielded billions of dollars in stimulus funds — and promises of relief from the No Child Left Behind law — to push states toward adopting new teacher evaluations and Common Core academic standards. The bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 transferred much authority over public schools from the federal government to the states. Many on the right are looking for signs that Trump will do more to unwind the federal role in education. Trump’s order brings “welcome attention to a much-overlooked problem of behavior that has festered through all administrations,” said Jeanne Allen, a veteran of the Reagan administration who runs the D.C.-based Center for Education Reform, which advocates for vouchers, charter schools and other forms of choice. Allen said she’s hopeful that DeVos will get rid of the department’s guidance to schools on a variety of issues. The secretary could do that without an executive order and without involvement from Congress, as she did in February when she withdrew controversial guidance to schools on accommodating transgender students. Obama’s Education Department was notably aggressive on civil rights, not only in directing schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms matching their gender identity but also in pushing for school-discipline revamps and in pressing colleges to overhaul their handling of sexual assault on campus. Those efforts, coupled with the department’s sometimes wide-ranging investigations into thousands of complaints of alleged discrimination against students nationwide, also led to complaints of federal overreach. Supporters of those moves on civil rights fear the Trump administration’s campaign to shrink the federal role in education will translate into weaker protections for vulnerable students. Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said the order changes nothing. “Trump isn’t signing it to actually improve education for American students,” she said. “He is doing it to put a fake point on the board within his first 100 days because he can’t pass an accomplishment of significance.”

New scrutiny on suspension rates in some D.C. charter schools

As D.C. officials consider how to keep as many of the city’s students in class as possible, the broadly worded discipline policies of two public charter school networks are coming under scrutiny. Students at any of the KIPP D.C. charter schools can be suspended for creating a classroom distraction or other conduct deemed “detrimental to the best interest of” the schools. Similarly, those at DC Prep schools can face suspension for behavior “inconsistent with the best interest” of the schools, even if it occurs elsewhere. Each of these well-known networks, which together enroll more than 6,000 D.C. students, have schools in the city that suspend more than a quarter of their students in a given year. Typical suspension rates in other D.C. schools are 7 to 15 percent. The situation in the charters has drawn attention from city officials. D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who leads the council’s education committee, is assembling a “working group” of officials to discuss whether new regulations should be imposed on charter schools. The discussions may include defining when a student is being disruptive or disorderly in a classroom, Grosso said. Overall, suspensions appear to be on the decline in the city, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. But experts say suspensions are still too frequent, especially for minor infractions. The city has sought to reduce how often students get sent home for misbehavior, in an effort to keep them on track to graduate and out of the criminal justice system. In 2009, the council passed regulations spelling out when D.C. public schools can suspend students. But those rules for the traditional school system do not extend to charter schools. Charter schools often have higher expulsion and suspension rates than regular schools. Some observers want the city to force charters to have tighter definitions of misbehavior. A Government Accountability Office report this month on suspensions in the District recommended that the city issue more guidance on how to reduce suspensions in charters. The GAO found that suspension and expulsion rates for charters in the District were significantly higher than national rates. But charter officials dispute the findings. They say the GAO relied on old data that failed to show the progress they have made. Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, told Grosso at a recent hearing that he is against any “one size fits all” regulations. Pearson said imposing regulations on charters is “inconsistent” with the law that gives charter schools autonomy to create their own mission and culture. “We also need to keep in mind that public charter schools are schools of choice,” Pearson said. “Parents select schools and often tell us that an orderly environment that allows for a focus on academics is a reason that they have chosen their school.” Patrice Wedderburn, an attorney with Advocates for Justice and Education, an organization that helps parents appeal suspensions, disputed Pearson’s point. “The message seems to be if you don’t like it, you can pull your child out,” Wedderburn said. “That doesn’t sound like real choice.” Wedderburn has represented students who were suspended under broad behavior policies at charter schools, including KIPP and DC Prep. She said she worries that schools are not consistent in how they dole out suspensions, especially for nonviolent behavior. “We are concerned that these definitions become a catchall,” Wedderburn said. In the last school year, DC Prep had about 1,500 students at five schools citywide. At one of those schools, Benning Middle in Northeast, 28 percent of the 220 students enrolled were suspended that year — the highest rate in the network. Emily Lawson, the network’s chief executive, said in a statement that families choose DC Prep for its “safe, rigorous, and supportive learning environment for all students.” Lawson said that suspensions are declining in the network and she expects the trend to continue. KIPP had about 5,200 D.C. students at 16 schools in the past school year. At KIPP’s AIM Academy in Southeast, 33 percent of its 350 students were suspended that year. At KIPP’s WILL Academy in Northwest, 30 percent of its 300 students were suspended. Melissa Kim, chief academic officer for KIPP secondary schools in the District, said KIPP is “not okay with” those rates, which is why it is beginning to try alternatives to suspension. “This is getting us to refocus and recommit to why we do this work every day, and it’s certainly not to suspend students,” Kim said. But Kim defended the network’s policies. Parents choose KIPP, she said, because the network is “promising parents and kids a certain level of expectation that they are not going to be distracted by other kids in the classroom.” Kim added: “At the end of the day we place our students in the hands of adults to make the best determination of what happens at schools. We have to give those adults some space to trust their decisions.”

What a new report shows about D.C. schools

A RECENTLY released assessment of D.C. public schools’ performance under mayoral control pretty much confirms things that already were known. There has been progress in student achievement; formidable challenges remain; change takes time; and stability is important. The report should quiet the lingering grumbling about the reforms launched by former mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), while spurring school officials to tackle work that still is desperately needed. The 340-page report by the National Research Council, which cost about $1.9 million, is the first formal assessment of the effects of the District’s bold efforts to remake public education. The report is a bit dated: It examines the period from 2009 to 2013. As with most academic reports, it is laced with qualifiers. Nonetheless, it paints a picture of an improving system in which student test scores are up, enrollment declines have been reversed and the teaching force has become more effective. Complementing improvements in the traditional school system is the flourishing charter school sector that educates 44 percent of the District’s public school students and offers welcome alternatives to parents. To be sure, a system in which only 59 percent of traditional school students and 69 percent of public charter school students graduated in 2014 has a long way to go. The report singled out the disparities in resources and academic performance between poor and affluent students. The achievement gap is cause for concern, but disparities born of generations of poverty were never going to be eliminated by schools alone — as reform opponents are usually the first to argue — and certainly not in seven years. What’s striking is that the performance of all students — poor and affluent, black and white — has been lifted. Eliminating poverty is the right goal but not an essential precondition for improving schools, in other words. The report is critical of the city’s education bureaucracy for unclear lines of authority, lack of transparency and poor coordination between the traditional and charter school sectors. No doubt there are long-standing issues with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education that need to be addressed; Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) made a good start when she streamlined operations under a well-regarded deputy mayor for education, Jennifer C. Niles. But city officials should resist any move to respond to the criticism by creating new levels of bureaucracy or vesting new powers in the State Board of Education. Likewise, any infringement on the autonomy that has been critical to the success of public charter schools would be misguided. Indeed, if there is an overarching lesson to be gleaned from the report, it is that hard work and smart, steady leadership produce results. The District should stay on course. **Read more on this topic** The Post’s View: An improving record for D.C. Public Schools I went to some of D.C.’s best schools. I was still unprepared for college. Kaya Henderson: Quiet, critical school reform at D.C. Public Schools

Is government a ‘force for good,’ or does it ‘really suck’? Education Dept. is at a pivot point.

The fiercest critics and most ardent supporters of President Obama’s Education Department — which has arguably wielded more influence and sparked more controversy than any of its recent predecessors — generally agree that the agency’s efforts were rooted in the faith that government has a critical role to play in improving people’s lives. Now the department is poised for a radical shift with the arrival of Donald Trump in Washington; the businessman, now president-elect, has often spoken about government as a bumbling failure and an impediment to success. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. — who says public schools saved his life after he was orphaned young — is preparing to move out of his seventh-floor office suite at the department’s D.C. headquarters. His designated successor, Betsy DeVos — a billionaire political power broker who has said public schools are a dysfunctional monopoly and who believes in private-school vouchers and the power of the free market — is preparing to move in, her confirmation hearing set for Tuesday. “Government can be a tremendous force for good,” King said in an interview at his office recently. “Government really sucks,” DeVos, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, said last year at the South by Southwest educational technology conference in Austin. “And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.” It is this ideological divide as much as any other that is at the root of what Trump has promised will be a very different approach to the nation’s public schools. He has said he will shrink federal oversight and interference and wants to spend billions of dollars to encourage vouchers — which the Obama administration has vigorously opposed — and charter schools. Obama administration allies worry that Trump’s approach will overturn much of the work from the past eight years, from its reinvigoration of the civil rights division responsible for investigating complaints of discrimination to its crackdown on for-profit colleges accused of defrauding students. But King, a former U.S. history teacher who once wrote lessons about democracy and is now viscerally experiencing it, steadfastly refuses to speculate about what the next administration might do. Following Obama’s lead, he speaks only obliquely about the disappointment over election results that endanger his legacy, using Obama’s language about history never moving in a straight line toward justice but zigging and zagging along the way. And he says he believes the administration’s work has created momentum — to expand public preschool offerings, to prevent and appropriately handle campus sexual assault — that will continue in schools, cities and states regardless of what happens in Washington. “The next administration and Congress may do some things differently,” King said. “But in some ways, the culture has been fundamentally changed.” The battle over the role of the federal government has been a central tension in U.S. public education for decades, from the desegregation of the Jim Crow South to battles over prayer in classrooms. Republican President George W. Bush was a proponent of a strong federal role in schools through the testing and school improvement mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, which he said was necessary to address the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Not since President Ronald Reagan — who said he wanted to do away with the Education Department — has the executive branch been so openly skeptical of the federal role in education. And while Reagan had to deal with a Democratic Congress, no such partisan roadblock stands in the way of Trump, who also has professed an interest in dismantling the department. Many of the items that King ticks off as recent accomplishments — vigorous civil rights enforcement, new rules for teacher preparation programs and school accountability, and a crackdown against for-profit colleges accused of defrauding their students — already appear to be in opponents’ sights. Congressional Republicans have put two sets of Education Department regulations on their list of rules to undo in 2017, and Trump surrogates have been intensely critical of the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which has fielded tens of thousands of discrimination complaints and has made headlines for pressing schools to accommodate transgender students and deal with campus sexual assault. The fate of the civil rights division — whose efforts are as reversible as they are dramatic — is a top concern for many advocates for children who are minorities, immigrants or LGBT or come from poor families. “We’ve got some tough times ahead, but we are up to it,” Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and an education civil rights icon, told advocates and career Education Department employees at the department’s headquarters. “You might as well hunker down, do your crying at nights and on the weekends. We are not going backwards.” Many conservatives welcome Trump’s promise to scale back federal intervention after spending the past eight years pushing back against what they said was Obama’s overreach into public schools. His efforts produced little in the way of improvements for children, they argue, pointing to stalled and in some cases sliding student achievement on national math and reading exams. High school graduation rates rose to record highs under Obama, but critics say that’s a squishy measure of improvement, since states set their own graduation requirements and they can change over time. King’s predecessor, Arne Duncan, used billions of dollars in stimulus funding and the promise of relief from the most onerous provisions of the widely hated No Child Left Behind law to nudge states into adopting his preferred policies, including new teacher evaluations, new Common Core State Standards and new standardized tests. Those efforts sparked a backlash not only from conservatives but also from teachers unions and parents, ultimately helping to persuade Congress to replace No Child Left Behind with a new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, that set significant limits on the Education Department’s power. King allowed that, with the benefit of hindsight, there are things that he would have done differently. But he said that the fight over federal authority is mostly an inside-the-Beltway debate “divorced from the substantive question of ‘what’s the work that we should be doing as adults on behalf of kids?’ ” The Obama administration has been correct on those substantive questions, he said. And many Republicans agree with the need for stronger teacher evaluations and standards. It’s just that Republicans say that states should and will make those changes on their own, while the Obama administration says the federal government needs to be vigilant. “States’ rights and civil rights have not generally traveled together in the history of the United States,” King said. “That’s not a partisan point, that’s a fact.” To some on the left, this is the sad irony of the Obama administration’s legacy on education: In trying so hard to push states to do what they viewed as right, Obama officials undercut the federal government’s ability to do its most important work — protecting the rights of the most disadvantaged kids. “If you say, as I do, that the federal government is a major source for equity in education,” said Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, the Education Department’s undermining of the federal role “is kind of a tragic legacy.”

Gray sends D.C. Council a proposal to give chartering authority to schools chancellor

It’s official: Mayor Vincent C. Gray on Friday transmitted legislation to the D.C. Council that would give Chancellor Kaya Henderson the authority to approve new charter schools. Gray (D) announced his intention to seek chartering authority for Henderson during his weekly radio address Sunday, and the bill has been under legal review since. Gray has said that chartering authority can be uses as a tool to turn around struggling schools and spur rapid student achievement gains. It would, for example, offer a legal pathway for the high-performing Achievement Prep Public Charter School to take over Malcolm X Elementary, as Henderson has proposed. But some critics wonder why Henderson, who already has broad authority to manage the city’s traditional schools, needs to bring in outside operators such as Achievement Prep to trigger improvements. Others question whether a school system leader, responsible for managing a large bureaucracy, is equipped to approve charters — and able give offer them total autonomy. Council Member David A. Catania (I-At Large) is also seeking to give the chancellor the ability to open schools free from municipal regulations and teacher union contracts. But Catania’s proposal to allow for “innovation schools” — part of a package of education legislation he introduced this week — stops short of giving Henderson chartering authority. Innovation schools, while not necessarily neighborhood matter-of-right schools, would still be part of the traditional system. Here are the main elements of Gray’s bill: • With only two exceptions, DCPS-chartered schools would be “identical” to schools chartered by the D.C. Public Charter School Board (“PCSB”) and operate with the same independence, according to Gray’s transmittal letter to Chairman Phil Mendelson. • The two exceptions: Test scores posted by DCPS-chartered schools will be included in DCPS proficiency rates, and DCPS charters will be able to elect to guarantee access to neighborhood kids. The attendance boundary for a DCPS charter school would be determined by the chancellor. • Charter schools can currently choose to offer preference in enrollment lotteries to children of founders and siblings of current students. Gray is seeking to add three new preferences, including for children of full-time employees at the charter school, students with disabilities and students who live near the charter school. The latter preference would apply to children living within an attendance zone established by the charter authorizer — either the D.C. Public Charter School Board or the chancellor. • Some charter schools are “dependent” on DCPS for special education, which means that the traditional school system is liable for ensuring that those charters must comply with federal law in delivering services to students with disabilities. Gray’s bill would require all charter schools to take on that liability for themselves. • Currently all charter schools fork over 0.5 percent of their annual budgets to the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which uses the money to fund its operations. The bill would raise that administrative fee to 1 percent. Catania has proposed the same increase in his package. The District’s old school board had chartering power until 2007, when then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty took control of the city’s traditional school system. Now the independent D.C. Public Charter School Board is the only entity that can authorize new charter schools in the city.

D.C. Council member questions Inspector General Charles Willoughby’s effectiveness

In the past two years, D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby has investigated two of the city’s most politically sensitive controversies — how the District awarded its lottery contract and whether public school employees had cheated to improve students’ scores on standardized tests. In both cases, revelations subsequent to Willoughby’s investigations have prompted some D.C. Council members and Vincent C. Gray administration officials to ask whether his office has been too timid to effectively perform its watchdog role. They doubt his willingness to use the agency’s $15.7 million budget and 112 employees to quickly and thoroughly stamp out waste, fraud and abuse. And in an unusual step, council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) recently requested that Willoughby explain delays in investigations and answer questions about the school testing probe. “We are concerned that a delay in producing reports compromises everyone’s ability to [uncover] fraud, abuse and waste, and undermines the public’s confidence in the OIG and their confidence in the District’s government as a whole,” McDuffie, chairman of the council’s Government Operations Committee, wrote in a letter to Willoughby. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said he supports McDuffie’s efforts to review Willoughby’s effectiveness. Willoughby, the inspector general since 2005, declined to be interviewed about the criticism or about his office in general. His top deputy, Blanche Bruce, said that “the reports that this office issues speak for themselves.” In a Jan. 18 letter responding to McDuffie, Willoughby said, “It is incumbent that the OIG’s work not be conducted through the press or media.” He also said it is crucial that his office’s work be “as thorough and accurate as possible,” but that it also be done “as expeditiously as possible.” The lottery investigation was requested in July 2009, after suspicions about the contract award became fodder for political attacks during a heated mayoral campaign. Two members of then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s Cabinet — then-Attorney General Peter J. Nickles and then-procurement chief David P. Gragan — urged Willoughby to examine the contract, including council members’ handling of it. It was 18 months before Willoughby issued a report. It totaled 19 pages, and although it cited some contracting irregularities, it did not find wrongdoing by council members. The report addressed allegations that council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) had offered to support one lottery bidder in return for that bidder’s withdrawing from an unrelated land deal with Metro. Graham served on the Metro board at the time. Investigators concluded that there was not “sufficient evidence to support or conclude that the councilmember had acted improperly.” But a subsequent investigation, undertaken on behalf of the Metro board, concluded that Graham had offered a quid pro quo that constituted a violation of the board’s code of conduct. Graham has denied wrongdoing, and the matter is under review by the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability. Nickles, now in private practice, is critical of Willoughby’s handling of the lottery probe. “I was interviewed by one of the IG’s people. I was assured that they would interview the people I suggested,” he said. “It turned out they didn’t do anything.” Nickles praised Willoughby’s investigations of some matters during the Fenty administration. Those investigations — including the inquiry into the government’s dealings with Banita Jacks, who was convicted in 2009 of murdering her four children — found numerous management failings. But Nickles said the lottery investigation demonstrated Willoughby’s reluctance to sort out politically messy issues. ********“The Jacks thing was perfect for them because everybody wanted to get to the bottom of the problem,” he said. “But when you had something that was controversial, like the lottery, and there were lots of different council members, politicians, vested interests involved, then they were not very willing to do it.” One long-awaited inspector general’s report involved Nickles and was undertaken after questions emerged in 2009 about the Fenty administration’s donation of a surplus firetruck and ambulance to a Dominican Republic resort town. The affair implicated a top aide and a close political ally of Fenty’s, and when Nickles issued a cursory report absolving them of wrongdoing, council members asked Willoughby to investigate. His report, issued two years after the initial request, mostly echoed the findings of a politically charged council probe that wrapped up within six months. The probe of school testing was wrapped up in 17 months, and its adequacy remains in question. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson asked Willoughby in March 2011 to probe suspicions raised in a USA Today article that focused on abnormally high erasure rates on tests taken at Noyes Education Campus, one of the schools that showed the most impressive gains during then-Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s tenure. Willoughby’s final report, issued in August and totaling 14 pages, found no evidence of widespread cheating at public schools. It did find some testing-integrity problems at Noyes, including coaching by one teacher who admitted to helping students while they took their exams. A former Noyes principal, Adell Cothorne, appeared on PBS’s “Frontline” this month and made allegations of test tampering at the school. In 2011, she said, she walked in on three staff members who appeared to be making erasures in students’ completed test booklets. She made similar allegations in a federal lawsuit filed later in 2011. Cothorne told “Frontline” that she was not interviewed by Willoughby’s office. In his letter to McDuffie, Willoughby said his investigators asked to meet with Cothorne starting in April 2011. But her attorney, he wrote, would meet only with investigators from the federal Education Department. Devanshi P. Patel, an attorney for Cothorne, told The Washington Post that she had expected to meet with local and federal investigators in May 2011 but that the meeting was canceled. “She did not refuse to have any interview,” Patel said. “Nobody came back around to talk to us.” Federal investigators eventually spoke with Cothorne, Willoughby said. But “leads identified in those allegations were pursued with negative results, resulting in no basis to warrant expansion of the investigation,” he wrote to McDuffie. Willoughby defended his decision not to expand the probe beyond Noyes. A consulting firm hired by the city found dozens of schools that had suspicious rates of erasures, but those findings alone could not substantiate cheating, he wrote. In budget testimony before the D.C. Council last April, Willoughby noted that his office’s budget, like those of other city agencies, had been trimmed as the economic downturn reduced city revenue. Much of his agency’s budget, he said, is devoted to mandatory items, including the District’s annual comprehensive audit and Medicaid fraud probes. An audit and inspection plan issued last fall sets out 93 discrete audits and five “special evaluations” to be conducted in the current fiscal year. Those do not include the dozens of unplanned investigations the office launches every year. In the letter to McDuffie, Willoughby reported that his office opened 227 formal probes in fiscal 2012, the highest number in four years. Prosecutors had accepted 18 of those cases to pursue criminal charges. Willoughby also said low salaries had contributed to staff turnover that exacerbated delays. He identified other problems that can prolong investigations, including a lack of investigative tools, a lengthy subpoena process and the need to coordinate with other agencies’ investigations.

Fairfax teacher proposes charter school

Charter schools have boomed nationwide in recent years, buoyed by bipartisan support from politicians such as President Obama and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. But they have barely gained a foothold in Virginia. Now Fairfax County teacher Eric Welch is aiming to start Northern Virginia’s first public charter school, navigating an unfamiliar and politically delicate process with a proposal pending before the state Board of Education. Welch and his allies envision a small college-prep academy for seventh-to-12th grade students who are at risk of dropping out or barely scraping by. They have been campaigning for a year, meeting with local leaders and pitching their idea as a complement — not a threat — to Fairfax public schools. Welch, a teacher at J.E.B. Stuart High School, stressed that his team has roots in the county system. “We’re not ‘charter school people,’ ” Welch said. But “we need to put every strategy on the table to deal with the achievement gap. That’s our priority. As good as we’re doing as a system, there are still more students we need to reach.” He hopes to open the Fairfax Leadership Academy in fall 2013. Organizing it as a charter school — publicly funded but privately run — will enable him to raise private funds and seek federal grants, he said. Charter advocates have long considered Virginia hostile ground, and that hasn’t changed under Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), who promised a major charter school expansion when he was elected in 2009. There were three charter schools in the commonwealth when McDonnell took office. Now there are four, according to the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, compared with 46 in Maryland, 107 in the District and 539 in Arizona. Some are in high-performing systems. Montgomery County, for example, approved its first charter school last year. Virginia law gives local school boards authority to approve or deny a charter proposal. Charter advocates say the system creates a difficult hurdle because local boards are often loath to help create direct competition. But Virginia lawmakers have fought to protect local control. When McDonnell tried to wrest it away in 2010, he ended up with a compromise: The state Board of Education gets a first look at every charter proposal. If it passes muster in Richmond, the application goes to the local school board, which has final say. “We must make an honest attempt to evaluate the proposal,” Fairfax School Board Chairman Jane K. Strauss (Dranesville) said. “We can’t simply say that we don’t believe in charters.” Supporters of the Fairfax Leadership Academy view the school as a creative, homegrown approach to closing a stubborn achievement gap. Opponents fear that it will drain resources and students from traditional schools. “We believe it’s going to draw some of our best students into that school when we’re already struggling,” said Joan Daly, a Falls Church High School PTA member opposed to Welch’s plan. “The school community doesn’t want it. We don’t feel there’s a need for it, and nobody asked us in the first place.” The 450-student charter school would include some elements found elsewhere in Fairfax, including rigorous International Baccalaureate classes and the Advancement Via Individual Determination program, which aims to help more students see themselves as college material. A small school, supporters say, would allow teachers to develop strong personal relationships with students. In addition, students would go to school for more hours each day and more weeks each year, giving them additional time not just for academics but also for career education and college exploration. Welch has proposed locating the school in the Falls Church area of Fairfax County at what is now Graham Road Elementary. Students there are moving in September to a renovated campus nearby. The charter would target students in low-income neighborhoods on the county’s eastern side, including some in Annandale and Baileys Crossroads. The school would be open to anyone, with enrollment determined by lottery if too many students apply. Former School Board member Martina A. Hone, now an advocate for disadvantaged children, described herself as skeptical of most charters. “But if you see what Eric is trying to achieve and if you really care about poor and needy kids,” she said, “you can’t help but go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ ” Other backers of the proposal include include state Del. Kaye Kory (D-Fairfax), a member of the board of directors, Del. Barbara J. Comstock (R-Fairfax) and Steve Greenburg, head of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers. The attorney for the proposed academy is Sen. J. Chapman “Chap” Petersen (D-Fairfax). Where supporters see an opportunity, parents at Falls Church High see a problem. The academy would be less than a mile from that high school, which has struggled to attract students. Many high-performers in its attendance area go elsewhere. The 1,500-student school is under capacity by 400 students. Daly and other parents fear that the charter school would siphon off some of the area’s most-motivated and best-equipped students. When the parents learned about the proposal last fall, they organized a group to advocate for Falls Church High and against the charter proposal. They contend that it would make sense to locate the charter elsewhere, pointing out that black, Latino and impoverished teens are graduating at a higher rate from Falls Church High than from some other county schools. Finally, they argue that the charter school would hinder Falls Church High’s chances of qualifying for a renovation anytime soon. The school, in a 1960s-era building that shows its age, is not scheduled to be renovated until 2024. That date could be pushed back if enrollment drops. Welch said he wants to help Falls Church High get the renovation it needs. “We’re not trying to compete,” he said. The state board is scheduled to consider Welch’s proposal Feb. 22. The Fairfax board is likely to take it up soon after. It could approve or deny the proposal or order revisions. Or the board could turn Welch’s idea into the foundation for a new county program. That’s what happened the last time a charter school proposal — for students with autism — came before the School Board in 2003. “If it’s a good idea,” said board member Pat Hynes (Hunter Mill), “then we should do it with all the resources we have in Fairfax County.”

The Montgomery County school system needs an inspector general

The recent controversy over credit card use by Montgomery County Board of Education members touches on something far more significant than a few unauthorized hotel expenses [“Montgomery board gives up its school system credit cards,” Metro, July 30]. When I began serving on the Montgomery County Council, I was surprised to learn that the public school system, which accounts for more than half of the county’s budget, employs no independent auditor. You would think that our schools would put extra emphasis on transparency and accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. If the existing financial oversight mechanisms were sufficient, the credit card controversy likely would have been avoided; instead, the board assembled an ad hoc committee to evaluate discoveries made by a citizens group. This is not the right process for public accountability. Montgomery County is rightly proud of its schools, and our willingness to invest in public education helps give Maryland its competitive edge. But the council, which appropriates the money, and the residents, who elect the council and school board, have a right to independent confirmation of how the money is spent. Regular, professional oversight is needed. It is time for Montgomery County Public Schools to have its own inspector general. ****Cherri Branson** , Silver Spring** The writer, a Democrat, represents District 5 (Eastern County) on the Montgomery County Council.

Feds cite D.C. charters for high suspension rates, particularly for black students

Skeptical questions remain over how much support Betsy DeVos will provide traditional public schools in her new role as secretary of education.  With her devotion to charters and her perch at the top of the educational bureaucracy, DeVos, who took office after a tough confirmation hearing in which her fitness was doubted, is well positioned to push efforts aimed at correcting the high and racially twisted disciplinary practices of Washington’s charter schools and to determine if similar patterns exist elsewhere.  During the 2013-2014 school year, for example, “D.C charter schools had about a 13 percent suspension rate, while the national rate for all charter schools was about 6 percent,” the GAO reported. “This was also true for expulsions, with charter schools in D.C. reporting double the rate of charter schools nationally.” The agency that oversees charter schools in the District acknowledges it has issues, but it also had problems with the GAO’s findings. In a response included in the report, the D.C. Public Charter School Board said the GAO “reaches some inaccurate conclusions and from these draws ill-advised recommendations” because it did not use more recent data. Data from the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years show that “steady and significant progress has been made every year in reducing out-of-school discipline,” the board said in response. If there is good news here, it’s only by comparison. D.C. charter suspension and expulsion rates did fall from the 2011-2012 to the 2013-2014 academic years. Also, the charter suspension rate is only a little higher than that of the city’s traditional public schools. But that’s not good enough. When D.C. charter schools kick students out, they are not allowed to return, the GAO reported. They generally transfer to a traditional public school. “In contrast, D.C. traditional public schools generally do not expel students,” the GAO said. “Instead, D.C. traditional public schools generally use long-term suspensions (greater than 11 days) and temporarily transfer these students to an alternative middle and high school.” It’s no surprise that the greater suspension and expulsion rates for charter schools fall heavily on black students. From preschool discipline and throughout the criminal justice system, studies have shown that black people are treated more harshly than white people for similar conduct. The GAO “found that the rates of suspension for Black students in D.C. charter schools were about six times higher than the rates for White students and the rates for students with disabilities were almost double the rates for students without disabilities.” Black students were 80 percent of charter school students, but 93 percent of those suspended and 92 percent of those expelled during 2013-2014. For black boys, the data are even more disturbing. They are 39 percent of the charter students, but 56 percent of the suspended students and 55 percent of the expelled.  Many believe the answer is yes. But the research says no. “A number of different methods have been used to test the idea that differential punishment is due to different rates of misbehavior,” said the report that Russell J. Skiba and Natasha T. Williams wrote for the university’s Equity Project.  “Regardless of the method, such studies have provided little to no evidence that African American students in the same school or district are engaging in more seriously disruptive behavior that could warrant higher rates of exclusion or punishment. … “There is virtually no support in the research literature for the idea that disparities in school discipline are caused by racial/ethnic differences in behavior,” the report continued. “Studies comparing the severity of behavior by race have found no evidence that students of color in the same schools or districts engage in more severe behavior that would warrant higher rates of suspension or expulsion. … In short, the data are consistent: There is simply no good evidence that racial differences in discipline are due to differences in rates or types of misbehavior by students of different races.” Despite its differences with the GAO’s report, the board’s letter said, “we agree that discipline rates remain higher than we would like, and that they remain disproportionate with respect to race and disability status.” But they insist that rather than seeking “large, immediate reductions … the steady progress seen with DC charters is the right way to reduce out-of-school discipline.” Perhaps, but that’s of little comfort to the students treated unfairly while the “steady progress” chugs along.

Maryland state senator wants Pr. George’s charter school to become a contract school

When a Maryland state senator said he wanted to make changes to the charter school agreement between College Park Academy , which has ties to the University of Maryland and the Prince George’s County school system, parents wondered what that would mean for the school’s future. Sen. James C. Rosapepe (D-Prince George’s) — who serves as chairman of College Park Academy, which opened two years ago to great fanfare — tried to reassure parents during a recent community meeting that there would be no impact on learning. He said a change to make College Park Academy a “contract school” would not affect the school’s curriculum, its teachers or its governance structure. “Nothing will change regarding the classes or the school,” Rosapepe said as parents bombarded him with questions about the request. “What is a contract school?” a frustrated parent asked. Unlike charters, which enrolled 2.7 million students in more than 6,400 schools across the country last year, contract schools are a relatively new classification, one that provides a school district with more flexibility than it has with a charter school. Both are publicly funded, but who attends the schools and the system for accountability differs. In Prince George’s, charter schools operate under an agreement with the school system. They are accountable to their sponsors, local school board and the state’s education agency. And they can be closed for failure or poor operating practices. Contract schools in the county would be under contract with the local school system and would be accountable only to the local school district. Charters are open to all students. A contract school could require testing as part of admission or target specific students, according to county school officials. Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president of state advocacy and support at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said contract schools are “often a response to the influx of charter schools.” Ziebarth said such schools have opened using a variety of terms in recent years: In Boston, they are called pilot schools, and in Colorado, they are called innovation schools. There were 52 charter schools in Maryland last year, according to the charter schools alliance. But there were less than a handful of contract schools in Maryland, state officials said. None were located in Prince George’s or Montgomery counties, the state’s two largest school districts. Officials said another difference between a charter and a contract school is in the way they originate. Charters are generally founded within the community — with support from a group of parents, a group of teachers, or a national charter organization — while contract schools are generally operated from the top down at the direction of school district officials. Similar to a charter school, a contract school is run by an independent group. But unlike a charter, a contract school in Prince George’s would not have to adhere to the state charter school regulations, including rules regarding enrollment. Rosapepe wants to reserve a percentage of seats at College Park Academy for children of University of Maryland employees who live in College Park. He could make changes to enrollment requirements if the school receives a waiver from the charter laws or if the school becomes a contract school. Prince George’s County Schools Chief Kevin M. Maxwell told Rosapepe last month that he would not recommend that College Park Academy be reclassified unless improvements are made to its governance. College Park Academy isn’t the only school in Prince George’s that has considered the new classification. Draft documents for two new international high schools, which are being created to support English-language learners, identified the schools as contract schools, but school district officials say the high schools will not be given that designation.

Education Secretary calls on charters to rethink discipline, reduce suspensions

John King Jr. once founded a charter school that aimed to prepare low-income children for college, and it was known both for posting high test scores and for issuing a lot of suspensions. Now King is U.S. Education Secretary, and he plans to recognize the 25th anniversary of the nation’s charter school movement by calling on charter leaders to rethink their approach to discipline and reduce their reliance on suspensions and expulsions. In a speech Tuesday afternoon, he plans to say that he is proud of Roxbury Prep, the Boston charter middle school he founded that is now part of the network known as Uncommon Schools. Students have gone on to graduate from college at a rate five times that of other students from similar backgrounds. But he acknowledged the school’s historically high suspension rate and praised its current leaders for trying to craft a new approach. “We all must commit to accelerate exactly this kind of work,” he planned to say at the National Charter Schools Conference in Nashville, according to excerpts from his prepared remarks. Within King’s planned speech are echoes of critics who have long accused charter schools of using harsh “no excuses” and “zero tolerance” discipline tactics, which often end up pushing students out and sending them back to neighborhood schools that are responsible for serving any child who shows up. “Not all of the criticism has been fair or accurate,” King plans to say. “But, as a whole, it is true that charter schools suspend a higher percentage of their students than do district schools. And students of color are more likely to be suspended in charter schools than in district schools.” King’s remarks are just the latest sign of a shift within the charter-school movement — or some parts of it, at least — on the issue of discipline.  “Here is the inconvenient truth: Education, including education reform, is part of the problem,” Anderson said at a Teach for America summit in February. “We have not made a dent in the problem, and in some cases we’ve made it worse.”   The Obama administration has urged all U.S. schools to reduce their suspensions, pointing to data showing that students who are suspended are less likely to advance to the next grade and are more likely to drop out. And so where harsh consequences, even for small transgressions, were once seen as an important tool for bringing order to classrooms so children could learn, many educators are now turning to “restorative justice,” which emphasizes helping students understand and atone for their mistakes. The issue is far from settled, as some teachers and school leaders worry that schools will trade overly harsh discipline for classroom disorder. King plans to highlight charter schools that have done a good job striking a balance, and to ask other schools to use their hallmark autonomy to find approaches that work. “Discipline is a nuanced and complicated issue. Yet the public discussion of these issues is often binary — pitting one extreme against another. It’s ‘zero tolerance’ or ‘chaos,'” he plans to say. “I am not here to offer any hard-and-fast rules or directives. But, I believe the goal for all schools should be to create a school culture that motivates students to want to do their best, to support their classmates and to give back to their community, and to communicate in ways big and small to our students and educators that their potential is unlimited.”

Chicago charter schools expel many more kids than district schools — new data

New data released by the Chicago Public School system reveals that the city’s public charter schools — whose expansion has been pushed by  Mayor Rahm Emanuel for several years — expelled about 12 times the number of students last year than did traditional public schools. The Chicago Tribune reported that in 2013, charter schools with a total enrollment of about 50,000 students expelled 307, while the traditional school system, with more than 353,000 students, tossed out 182 students. That, the Tribune said, meant that “charters expelled 61 of every 10,000 students while the district-run schools expelled just 5 of every 10,000 students.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The high charter school expulsion rate is not singular to Chicago; such practices have been documented in many other cities where charter schools have grown as well. My colleague Emma Brown wrote in this January 2013 story that    *[WSU]: Wayne State University What these statistics do is underscore the unfairness of comparing charter schools and traditional public schools in terms of student achievement. Why? Many (though not all) charter schools are very aggressive in separating the school from students who are seen as especially difficult to educate. Traditional public schools don’t have the same luxury; they have to take all students — including the ones thrown out by charter schools — and have a much harder time expelling them. This, of course, affects school-wide standardized test score averages, which are the chief metric by which schools and districts are being evaluated in this test-obsessed school reform era. Even if you take charter advocates at their word that charter schools don’t toss out kids to improve their academic record (and in some cases that is known not to be true), the fact is that claims that charter schools are educating the same population of children as traditional schools are simply not true in many cases. This was the first time this data was released in Chicago, and the district’s chief executive officer, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, acknowledged that the statistics will be controversial. The Tribune quoted her as saying: For there to be productive discussions in Chicago, Emanuel will have to face some facts. On her blog, education historian and activist Diane Ravitch noted that Emanuel “once praised the Noble network of charter schools in Chicago” for having a “secret sauce” for success, and part of it was fining students $5 for every disciplinary infraction — leaving some families owing thousands of dollars to the school. According to the Tribune, the three campuses in the Noble network expelled between 2 percent and nearly 5 percent of their students in the last school year. That sounds like it could be a “secret sauce” ingredient, too.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Pennsylvania slapped by U.S. Ed Department over charter schools

While Pennsylvania considers adding eight more cyber charter schools to its roster of 16, it is smarting from a rebuke by the U.S. Department of Education, which slapped down its plan to evaluate brick and mortar charters by a method that is easier than for traditional schools. Confused? Let’s start at the beginning. I recently wrote a post that said: Well it turns out that the U.S. Department of Education apparently didn’t think it was fair either — or, more to the point, didn’t think it was legal — because it has told Pennsylvania officials that charter schools have to be evaluated by the same criteria as traditional public schools. Pennsylvania officials announced earlier this year that they were changing the rules for assessing whether a charter school had met No Child Left Behind’s Adequate Yearly Progress mandate. Instead of treating the charter schools like traditional public schools, they were going to use the same method of assessment for individual charter schools as they do for entire school districts. That matters because the threshold for success for districts is lower than for individual schools, and, as a result, the new method would make charter schools look better for NCLB purposes than they really were. According to the Pennsylvania School Board Association, 44 of 77 charter schools recently labeled as having met the AYP requirements for 2011-12 actually didn’t if compared with the rules that traditional public schools had to meet. Some of the 44 charters even saw declines in proficiency percentages. The state officials didn’t bother to ask the federal Department of Education for permission, and now the feds have said they can’t do what they want. “I cannot approve this … because it’s not aligned with the statute and regulations,” U.S. Assistant Education Secretary Deborah Delisle wrote in a letter to the state, according to the Pocono Record. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is starting hearings Monday on applications to open eight more cyber charter schools — there are already 16 — which critics say will break state law if approved. According to the nonprofit Education Law Center, officials are required by state law to annually review cyber charter schools and strip any of their charters if students are not meeting mandated performance standards. It turns out that of the 12 cyber charters for which there are standardized test scores (four new ones opened this past fall), only one reached the NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress mandates for 2012, and only made it for 2011. Eight were in corrective action status. The law center cites a 2011 study from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes which showed that Pennsylvania cyber charter students tended to have higher test scores when entering those schools but that every subgroup of students’ academic performance was lower when compared to the academic performance of the same subgroups in traditional charter schools. And reading and math standardized test scores for students in eight cyber charters in the study were far below those for their counterparts in traditional public schools. Yet the reformers’ charter obsession marches on….

Second mayoral appointee identified in school-lottery scandal

Two appointed officials working for D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) received preferential treatment from the former schools chancellor, who directly placed their children in schools and allowed them to bypass the notoriously stressful and competitive lottery system, according to an investigation by the District’s inspector general. D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large) said he learned during a briefing from Inspector General Daniel Lucas on Tuesday that two of the three government officials aided by former schools chancellor Kaya Henderson in the summer of 2015 were mayoral appointees. The third was a principal in the school system, Grosso said. In addition, four other people also received improper school placements from Henderson, Grosso said: a former District elected official, the head of a nonprofit that works with the school district, a staffer in the Obama White House and a former classmate of Henderson. None of the seven parents are named in the inspector general’s report on the investigation, and Lucas did not share their names during the briefing, Grosso said. The disclosure of additional information about those who the inspector general found skirted the requirements of the District’s public-school lottery with Henderson’s help comes a day after The Washington Post reported that a top Bowser official, D.C. Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity Courtney Snowden, was probed over her son’s placement at Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan, a school with a waiting list of more than 1,000 families. Snowden and a spokesman for Bowser acknowledged that Snowden’s child — who had previously been enrolled in a private school — received a special or “discretionary” placement at his school from Henderson, but they said it was not improper. The revelation that a second top official in the Bowser administration was identified in the inspector general’s probe raises new questions about the mayor’s knowledge and handling of the allegations. Bowser’s spokesman, Kevin Harris, said the mayor did not know the identities of those Henderson had shown favoritism toward and had not asked, although Lucas briefed her on his findings in February. If true, that would mean Bowser received a report stating that two of her appointees had circumvented the school lottery through improper placements by Henderson but took no steps to find out who they were. Harris said Wednesday that the inspector general’s report did not indicate Bowser’s appointees had done anything wrong by asking for school placements outside the lottery, even if the chancellor’s response to those requests was determined to be improper. “There’s nothing wrong because they asked,” Harris said. “The subject of the investigation is whether Kaya used her authority properly.” Grosso said he has a copy of the inspector general’s report but declined to release it, saying that Lucas had asked him to keep it confidential and that he had agreed. “I don’t think there’s any issue in this report that can’t be public,” said Grosso, who chairs the D.C. Council’s education committee. “But the inspector general has decided to keep it confidential, and I don’t want to break that confidence.” In addition to the seven parents, Grosso said, the inspector general reviewed three cases in which Henderson denied transfer requests. One of those came from a third Bowser appointee, he said. The others were a teacher and a parent in the school district. A second council member, Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), said he requested a copy of the report from the inspector general’s office Wednesday but had not heard back. Allen said that he had received multiple calls from angry parents in response to The Post’s reporting on Snowden and that the report should be made public. The names of any children could be redacted from it if necessary, he said. “This is in the public realm,” Allen said. “This impacts our schools, our lotteries, and I’m already hearing from families who want to know: Did the chancellor use her discretion inappropriately?” Allen said the parents who had contacted his office were particularly unhappy to learn that Snowden’s son had been placed at Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan, one of the District’s most in-demand public schools. The school received 1,101 applications for 73 open slots in the upcoming school year and has a waiting list of 1,028 families. “I’ve had a couple of parents who have reached out to me pretty upset about that, and I’m not surprised,” he said. “There’s a wait list of over 1,000 at a very good school. The fact that at least it feels like, and it’s perceived that, somebody got to cut the line is not going to sit well with a lot of families.” The inspector general has declined requests for the report from The Post. In a one-page letter summarizing his investigation that was submitted to the D.C. Council last month, Lucas said Henderson “failed to act impartially and gave preferential treatment to certain District government officials and members of the public” by placing their children in schools outside the lottery system. Henderson said after the letter was released that she had made discretionary placements of students outside the lottery system but had done nothing improper. Although the chancellor can make special student placements, that power is supposed to be used in rare circumstances when a transfer “would be in the best interests of the student” and “promote the overall interests of the school system.”

Ohio passes legislation aimed at cleaning up scandal-ridden charter school sector

The Ohio legislature has passed legislation that attempts to clean up the state’s scandal-ridden $1 billion charter school sector. Meanwhile, both Republican and Democratic politicians in the state are expressing concern about a $71 million grant that the federal government just gave to the Ohio Department of Education to build and expand charter schools. The legislation, expected to be signed by Gov. John Kasich, who is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, includes a series of governance and financial controls on how charter operators run the schools. that would allow better oversight A June 2015 story in the Akron Beacon Journal said that an investigation it had completed found that Ohio charter schools appeared to have misspent public money “nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” It said that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation” — and the misspending could be much higher.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There had been repeated attempts to get the legislature to pass reforms that would provide better oversight and sensible financial and other controls on charter school operations, but until now, they had all failed. One of the reforms included in the legislation is meant to deal with a situation created last month, when the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in a lawsuit by 10 now-closed charter schools that the for-profit company that once operated them, White Hat Management, owns all of the equipment it purchased for the schools with public funds. Under the legislation, the schools would from here on out own the equipment. Another reform, the Columbus Dispatch reported, changes the way state evaluations of charter school operators are done in an effort to speak to a situation that developed this past summer. In July, David Hansen, the Ohio Education Department official responsible for school choice and charter schools, resigned after it was learned that he given help to some charter schools by making student achievement look better in state evaluations than was actually earned.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Meanwhile, both Republicans and Democrats are expressing concern about a big grant the U.S. Education Department just gave to Ohio. The grant — $32.5 million for this year with a recommended multi-year total of $71 million — was the largest handed out last week to education departments and charter school operators. _[Feds didn’t carefully monitor $3 billion it gave for charters — and it just awarded $157 million more]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico According to the Associated Press, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan “to restrict release of Ohio’s money and has requested copies of all grant application documentation.” And Ted Strickland, a former Democratic governor of Ohio who is now running for the U.S. Senate, wrote a letter to Duncan opposing the grant, according to the Plain Dealer. It said in part:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The AP reported that a Duncan spokesperson said Ohio’s grants came with special conditions. The department hasn’t fully addressed why Ohio got the grant at all given its charter sector history.

California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoes bills seeking more accountability for troubled charter-school sector

California Gov. Jerry Brown, who years ago opened two charter schools, just vetoed legislation passed by legislators who were seeking to bring some accountability to the state’s scandal-ridden charter-school sector. California has more publicly funded charter schools and charter-school students than any other state. While some of the schools are high-achieving, others have been plagued by financial and other problems.  An alliance of business and political leaders in the state had urged Brown to sign Assembly Bill 709, which would have required that all charters be transparent about how they spend public funds, and would have barred charter school board members and their relatives from profiting from their schools. The bill also would have insisted that charter schools be subject to the state’s laws involving conflict of interest, open meetings and open records. Brown’s veto message said that he had vetoed a similar bill in 2014 and that he felt that the new legislation went too far in telling charters how to operate. On Thursday, he voted Senate Bill 739, which was narrower than AB 709. It sought to prevent financially troubled school districts from authorizing charter schools to operate in other school districts that haven’t approved them. In fact, several school districts have sued to shut down charters operating in their districts that they did not authorize. The Grossmont Union High School District, for example, sued to shut down two charters operating in Grossmont under agreements signed by another school district. The San Diego Union-Tribune quoted Scott Patterson, Grossmont’s deputy superintendent of business services, as saying, “It’s been described as the Wild West out there.” Brown started two charter schools — the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute — when he was mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007. In his 2016-2017 budget for the state, he included $20 million in funds for new charter schools.

D.C. Council member demands records on parents who evaded school lottery

The chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee sent a letter Thursday to Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson asking for records of special student placements outside the District’s school lottery, the first step in an inquiry prompted by revelations that politically connected parents were able to bypass the lottery rules. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large) wrote that he was “deeply concerned by the appearance of impropriety within the school lottery process” and asked that Wilson hand over documentation of all requests for school assignments outside the normal lottery process. Grosso requested records of those requests, and former Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s responses, going back to 2014, when the citywide lottery began. Grosso’s letter follows an investigation by D.C. Inspector General Daniel Lucas that found Henderson gave preferential treatment to government officials — including two top aides to Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) — by allowing them to enroll their children directly at some of the city’s most coveted public schools. Students typically claim those spots only if they win them in the fiercely competitive school lottery. Lucas did not identify the parents who benefitted from Henderson’s help, and declined to make the report of his investigation public. Last month the Post obtained and published a copy of the investigation, and reported that the seven parents who had received favors included Deputy Mayor Courtney Snowden, City Administrator Rashad M. Young and former Mayor Adrian Fenty. Lucas did not conclude that Henderson committed any crimes, but found that she violated city regulations, which give the chancellor broad discretion to place students into public schools outside the lottery process but state that the placements must be “in the best interests of the student” and “promote the overall interests of the school system.” Grosso said in an interview Thursday that a full airing of how Henderson used her authority is needed to restore parents’ confidence in the system. The episode has angered many District parents, for whom the lottery is a notorious source of stress. “I don’t know what it will turn up,” Grosso said. “I believe it will at least give us some insight into how pervasive this problem was.” After going over the records from the school system, Grosso said, he will decide whether additional hearings on the issue are necessary. A DCPS spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment Thursday. Henderson has not responded to repeated requests for comment about the inspector general’s report. She told investigators that she thought it reflected well on the school system when government officials enroll their children, and said she was “thoughtful and judicious in her decisions.” Bowser has refused to criticize Henderson or her political appointees, saying only that city regulations did not provide the chancellor with sufficient guidance on when to grant requests for placements outside the lottery. The mayor was first briefed on the inspector general’s findings in February. Last month, after The Post reported that officials in her administration were among those examined in the investigation, she signed an order that Wilson draft new rules for special student placements and requiring that political appointees consult with the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability before asking for a placement.

D.C. charter board considers oversight improvements

The D.C. Public Charter School Board decided at a meeting Wednesday not to immediately initiate the closure of Options Public Charter, the Northeast Washington school at the center of allegations that its former managers diverted millions of dollars to their own for-profit companies. But the charter board’s staff, seeking to improve oversight after the Options allegations, proposed several policy changes meant to ensure accurate and timely disclosure of charter school contracts, conflicts of interest and salaries of top-paid officials. The proposals are a “result of our reflections and learnings from the Options episode,” said Scott Pearson, the charter board’s executive director. Former Options officials allegedly ran a contracting scheme — which court papers say involved the help of an insider at the charter board — that moved large sums of money from school coffers to two companies that offered services back to the school. Charter schools are required to submit all contracts worth more than $25,000 to the charter board for review and to disclose any conflicts of interest in financial transactions. They also are required to submit minutes from the meetings of their boards of directors. But Pearson said schools have not always submitted those items on time or at all, which could limit the charter board’s knowledge of some sizable contracts. The proposed policy changes are meant to clarify what is expected, acknowledging that the charter board has “frankly not been as clear as we should have been about what contracts needed to be submitted and what contracts didn’t.” Under the proposal, schools would for the first time face sanctions if they fail to submit contracts and meeting minutes. Charter schools also would be required to disclose the total compensation of their top three highest paid officials and to publish that information on the charter board’s Web site. That idea stems from what Pearson called “one of the more disturbing aspects of the Options incident”: high salaries and bonuses for school officials. Donna Montgomery, the former chief executive of Options, allegedly earned at least $425,000 in one year, according to a pending civil complaint. According to court documents, Montgomery and two other former Options leaders allegedly received “exorbitant” bonuses shortly before leaving the school to run their companies full time earlier this year. They were allegedly aided by J.C. Hayward, a news anchor for WUSA (Channel 9), who according to the complaint approved the lucrative contracts and bonuses in her role as Options board chairwoman at the time. And Jeremy L. Williams, the former chief financial officer of the city charter board, allegedly maneuvered to ensure that the contracts were not reviewed by board staff. All of the accused have denied wrongdoing. No one has been criminally charged, but investigators have been conducting interviews and a grand jury is expected to convene as early as this week. Pearson said the board does not intend to regulate salaries but instead wants to encourage disclosure of information about the city’s public charters. “Charter schools have full control over their operations,” Pearson said. “But we do think transparency and sunshine is important.” Several charter board members greeted the idea coolly, expressing discomfort with the idea of publishing salaries online. They argued that such additional disclosure might burden law-abiding charter schools or make recruitment of top-level executives more difficult. “I want to be careful that we don’t overreach and add unnecessary burdens to all the charters because of the misbehavior of one or two,” said John H. “Skip” McCoy, the board’s chairman. Charter schools usually must disclose the salaries of their top earners on annual reports to the Internal Revenue Service, but those reports are sometimes incomplete and often are outdated by the time they become public. The charter board is accepting public comment on the proposals and plans to vote on them in December. The Options self-dealing allegations, revealed publicly earlier this month, prompted charter board officials to announce that the board was moving toward closing the charter for financial mismanagement. Options is the city’s oldest charter and serves about 400 at-risk teens. The board now plans to decide whether to initiate the school’s closure by December, postponing any decisions to give Josh Kern — a court-appointed receiver charged with overseeing the school — time to assess Options operations. The school will continue to operate at least through the end of this school year. A final decision on the school’s long-term future must be finalized before Feb. 4, which is the deadline for high school students to enter enrollment lotteries at schools across the District.

Why opening a charter school is like opening your own business

The “school choice” movement in the United States is bound to get a huge boost from President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire and choice advocate, as his secretary of education. If she is approved by the Senate, as expected, DeVos will push to expand a range of choice programs that use public funds for schools not part of traditional public systems. DeVos has called the public education system in the country — which many see as the United States’ most important civic institution — as a “dead end” and a goverment-run “monopoly.” That’s why public-education advocates are worried about her impending leadership at the Education Department. One of the pieces in DeVos’s constellation of choice programs is charter schools, which are publicly funded but operated independently from traditional systems, sometimes by nonprofit organizations and sometimes by for-profit companies. Nationwide, the charter-school sector has grown over the past few decades amid a debate about its virtues and drawbacks — and even over whether the publicly funded schools are public or private entities. Some charters are excellent. But as the sector has grown, so have problems that have gone unaddressed. Ohio and Utah have troubled charter sectors, as does Arizona, where there are no laws against conflicts of interest and where for-profit charters do not have to open their books to the public. In Michigan, 80 percent of the charters are operated entirely or substantially by for-profit entities. Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale recently declared his state’s charter-school law the “worst” in the nation. California has more charter schools and charter-school students than any other state in the nation.  That series was written by award-winning former high school principal Carol Burris, who is now executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education advocacy group. She chronicled many of the glaring problems with the charter-school law in California. Here is a new post by Burris about charter schools and the “choice movement.”  The drive to privatize the public education system under the guise of “choice” is well underway — and can be expected to pick up steam when Donald Trump becomes president. He chose as his education secretary a Michigan billionaire named Betsy DeVos, who is an ardent supporter of school choice who has said the public education system is a “dead end.” During the past 60 years, public education has been the frog in the pot of water, as school privatizers and “education reformers” have slowly turned up the heat. Over 1 million students receive a taxpayer-funded voucher to attend a private school, and close to 3 million attend charters schools. Whether the adjective “public” is in front of the word “charter” or not, charters are at the forefront of school privatization. Opening a charter is akin to opening your own business — but the cost and risk are fully funded by the taxpayers. In most states, taxpayer dollars provide the initial “investment.” This is an odd business model in which the corporation gets income for every customer who walks through the door, regardless of the individual ability to pay. And if the business fails, “owners” are not out a dime, but the customers, who are in this case children, are stranded. It is remarkable that the American public has allowed such risk-free, taxpayer-funded entrepreneurship to occur. If you think that publicly funded, largely unregulated businesses would be ripe for shady deals, oversized compensation and outright fraud, you would be right. In September of 2016, the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Education Department issued its final audit report titled a “Nationwide Assessment of Charter and Education Management Organizations.” The report assessed “the current and emerging risk” that is posed by charter management organizations for fraud, waste and abuse. The audited period was less than two years — between late 2011 and the early months of 2013. Thirty-three charters in six states were selected for review. Of the 33, the department found that 22 lacked the necessary internal controls, resulting in a significant risk to Education Department funds.  The report also made it clear that the Education Department itself is not doing enough to protect taxpayers from charter management fraud.  (The present secretary, John King, led one of the top five charter chains, Uncommon Schools.) The inspector general’s report included specific examples of abuse. It pointed out that the chief executive of a Pennsylvania charter management organization wrote checks to himself totaling $11 million during the 2008-2009 school year alone. The report also cited examples of criminal cases of outright fraud due to charter management organizations and education management organizations having far too much control of charter schools and charter school boards. (CMOs are nonprofit entities that manage two or more charter schools; EMOs are for-profit organizations that manage charters.)  Why are CMOs becoming popular, and what is the danger? Supporters of CMOs claim that they enable rapid charter-school growth by taking over administrative worries.   Those at the top of the KIPP Foundation make salaries that rival private industry, far above the compensation of chancellors of public schools in major cities. In 2014, KIPP co-founder David Levin received a compensation package of nearly $475,000 from the foundation. Co-founder Mike Feinberg received $219,596 from KIPP Inc., which manages the Houston charters, and an additional $221,461 from the KIPP Foundation. According to the organization’s 990s, Feinberg works 50 hours a week for the Houston schools, plus 40 hours a week for the foundation. Levin’s and Feinberg’s salaries are dwarfed, however, when compared with the compensation package of Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz, who received $600,000 in 2014 as the CEO of 41 charter schools.  Five CMOs dominate the American market in terms of the number of schools governed: KIPP, Gulen-linked schools, IDEA, Aspire and Uncommon Schools.  Sharon Higgins is a longtime public-school supporter who lives in Oakland, Calif. She has been keeping a careful watch of the Gulen charter-school world for nearly seven years. According to Higgins, Gulen-linked schools share a constellation of characteristics that include founding boards and school leadership composed of nearly all Turkish men; curriculum that includes the Turkish language and Turkish cultural instruction; extensive use of the H-1B visa program to employ Turkish and Turkic nationals; and an emphasis on teaching math and science. Another characteristic is the participation of students in numerous “competitions,” including ones that promote Turkish culture and the philosophy of the Gulenist movement, which Higgins and others have described as “cultlike.”      Will we have more charter schools with entanglements with foreign governments? Will we have taxpayer-funded charter schools run by white supremacists? Will vouchers go to schools run by jihadists?  Will fraud and abuse escalate? These are serious questions to ponder when the marketplace is the only regulator of school choice. Donald Trump claims our public schools run by locally elected boards of education are “government schools” that fit better with the old Soviet Union. I wonder whether he has thought through his alternative. Freewheeling, government-funded schools, unaccountable to the taxpayers, sound awfully more dangerous to me. [1] All information found on the 990 for KIPP on Guidestar.

After favoritism revealed in school lottery, D.C. parents wait on apology

The fallout from findings that a former schools chancellor misused her authority to place children of top D.C. officials in coveted schools seemed clear. From city hall, where council members were inundated with calls last week, to neighborhood email groups, where parents fumed, there was outrage that well-connected people had stepped ahead of everyone else in the city’s notoriously competitive school lottery. But the mayor doesn’t see it that way. Muriel E. Bowser has refused to cast blame on her city administrator, her deputy mayor or her former chancellor of schools, despite an inspector general’s report that detailed a pattern of favoritism for kids of politically connected parents. Inspector General Daniel Lucas found that former schools chancellor Kaya Henderson misused her authority by specially placing the children of well-connected people in desired schools, allowing them to bypass the lottery that determines school placements for thousands of families across the city. The beneficiaries included two senior members of Bowser’s cabinet, former D.C. mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Roberto J. Rodriguez, who served in the Obama White House as an education adviser, as well as the director of a foundation that works with the school system and one of Henderson’s graduate school classmates. Henderson received 10 requests for special placements in 2015 and granted seven, the inspector general found. His investigation examined just the 2015 lottery season and did not include the rest of Henderson’s tenure, from November 2010 to September 2016. On a call-in radio program Friday, two days after The Washington Post published the confidential report from the inspector general, Bowser was asked whether she was slow to acknowledge public anger over the situation. “Well, actually,” Bowser began, and then she launched into a recitation of ethics advice that public officials will get in the future before seeking special consideration for their children. Bowser defended City Administrator Rashad Young and Deputy Mayor Courtney Snowden, saying they had availed themselves of the help that any parent could request from the chancellor. If she had a regret, the mayor seemed to say it was regarding public perception. “I am deeply sorry that we have to — that there’s any doubt about the decisions that were made by any member of my team,” Bowser said. “That’s . . . outrageous,” said Denise Krepp, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission commissioner who let loose an expletive to underscore her point. Krepp’s family was among thousands in the city that played the school lottery and failed to win its first choice school. “I didn’t call the mayor or the chancellor and ask for a placement, because you don’t. If it’s a pure lottery system, you don’t do that,” said Krepp, a former Obama administration appointee. “They manipulated it, and it’s very clear-cut. I don’t understand why the mayor hasn’t come out and said it was wrong — she should have.” Lucas did not conclude that Henderson committed any crimes, but he said she violated guidelines and forwarded his findings to the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability for further action. Investigators were focused on Henderson and did not address whether the public officials she helped had abused their positions. Council members, however, thought there was plenty wrong. “As a parent, if I believed my child possibly missed out on an opportunity because of special treatment for connected people, I’d be pissed,” said Robert White (D-At Large). Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who chairs the education committee, said he wants to review “discretionary placements” beyond 2015 to see how frequently they were made and why. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and the director of the city’s ethics commission cast doubt on Bowser’s proposal that the commission review all future requests for special school placements from public officials. They said it was not clear what criteria would be used to evaluate whether a request for special placement is appropriate. For Bowser’s critics, the lottery is another example of ethics concerns that have pulsed through other initiatives. Early on in her tenure, Bowser and her supporters were forced to abandon a political action committee over perceptions of pay-to-play politics. Last year, the council threw out the mayor’s plan to build several shelters for homeless families, after The Post reported the land deals would have profited some of the mayor’s top donors. A council report also is pending into allegations that Bowser’s administration pressured officials to award lucrative stadium contracts to the firm of another top donor. “That overlay has made [the lottery investigation] possibly seem even worse to people,” council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) said. “It can obviously feed that whole narrative and that’s an additional danger for her right now.” Bowser promised last year that she would run for a second term, and with the District’s Democratic primary just over a year away, the mayor’s staff has been planning to transition into campaign mode this summer. Cheh said the effect of the school lottery scandal on Bowser’s reelection is still “to be determined.” “I don’t think they fully appreciated the intensity of the reaction because they were looking at it somewhat antiseptically — did anyone break the law? No, well, okay,” Cheh said. “But this is the kind of behavior that people react viscerally to. There’s a long line and when people cut, that’s infuriating.” In an interview with The Post on Wednesday, Bowser, who does not have children, said it was not on her “radar” that people could seek discretionary school placements or that before the IG report there were ethical concerns about how political appointees used the procedure. Bowser maintained that public officials like Young, the top appointed official in her administration, need clearer guidelines about how to approach the “gray area” ofdiscretionary placements. “You ask me, ‘did he do anything wrong?’ Well, he asked, it appears, or contacted the chancellor, it appears, with some questions about the school where he was matched, so if he can’t have any contact with the chancellor, perhaps, that was a piece, a question, he could ask to the ethics board — ‘hey, I’m a parent, I’m going to be a DCPS parent, but I have some additional questions’ — all of, any public official would benefit from that,” Bowser said. The closest the mayor came to apologizing was on Kojo Nnamdi’s show on WAMU-FM (88.5) last Friday. “I do get why people are angry,” she said. “I get angry if I think someone is jumping in line in front of me, and I recognize how important these school decisions are for families. . . . I am not happy about anybody having that view of our cabinet members, and we will change it.” Bowser’s deputies, who referred questions from The Post to the mayor’s office, took to social media to defend themselves. “I didn’t game the system. I properly applied and my kids attend the school they got through lottery,” Young wrote in a tweeted response to criticism by political consultant Chuck Thies, who managed the campaign of Bowser’s opponent in the 2014 election, then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray. Thies countered, “At minimum, you missed a deadline and got special treatment that parents who aren’t politically connected don’t receive.” Young tweeted back: “I had no ability to enroll my kids. I had no dc address, no utility bill, no pay stub with dc withholding. I didn’t ask for a favor.” Young, who had been the city administrator in Alexandria, Va., before Bowser announced his hire in late 2014, had not yet moved into the District when he entered the lottery in spring of 2015. He won seats for his two sons at Murch Elementary School, a high-performing school in Northwest, but did not enroll by the May 1 deadline. The chancellor arranged for Young to claim the seats months later, after Young and his family moved to a $1.2 million house outside the Murch school zone and east of Rock Creek Park. According to the inspector general’s report and the lottery rules, if a family does not enroll by the deadline, the seat is forfeited and the school should have moved on to the approximately 800 other families on the Murch waiting list. In a post on Facebook, Snowden also defended how the chancellor placed her son at Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan, a DCPS school with a waiting list of more than 1,000 students. “Like every parent, I take the responsibility of raising my babies very seriously,” Snowden wrote. “As is the right of any District parent, I petitioned DCPS to secure a discretionary placement, and I am grateful that Chancellor Henderson was able to assist in securing a seat at a school that fit my child’s unique needs.” Snowden’s child was placed at the school despite the fact that he did not appear to have prior Montessori schooling — a requirement for admission. Dan Ridge, a 42-year-old computer scientist and ANC commissioner on Capitol Hill, sends his two children to a private Montessori school in the hope that they will one day be matched to Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan through the school lottery. He said he was galled that Snowden was able to both bypass the lottery and evade the requirement that her son have previous Montessori schooling. After reading the details in the IG’s report, Ridge said, the mayor’s defense of Snowden rings hollow. “The report completely undercuts the mayor’s claim” that Snowden asked for a discretionary transfer in a manner available to every parent, Ridge said. He said that it was possible Bowser had not actually read the report before she spoke out in defense of Snowden and Young, but “if she had read this report, it’s simply dissembling to say that her staff did nothing wrong by asking.” “It’s appalling,” Ridge said. “This is a big deal for a lot of families.”

Fewer expulsions in D.C. public charter schools in 2012-13 year

The District’s charter schools expelled far fewer students in the 2012-13 school year than the school year before, but individual charters’ expulsion rates continued to vary widely, according to D.C. Public Charter School Board data released Tuesday. Charters’ overall expulsion rate fell 27 percent as the number of students removed for disciplinary reasons dropped from 227 in 2011-12 to 186 in the past school year. By comparison, D.C. Public Schools expelled three students in 2011-12; there was one expulsion in 2012-13. The decrease in charter expulsions comes amid increased public scrutiny of the schools’ discipline policies. D.C. charters expelled students at a rate more than three times the national average in 2011-12 — the rate was 72 times higher than in the city’s traditional school system — according to a Washington Post analysis earlier this year. “I think that the charter schools are revisiting their policies to provide safe environments for all students while trying not to exclude students — or when you exclude them, for as short a time as possible,” said Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Charter Board. Critics have said that charters, which have the freedom to design their own discipline policies, expel students excessively and with too little oversight. Many charter leaders say that they remove students only when necessary to ensure that their classrooms are safe and conducive to learning. “Nobody wants to see high expulsion rates, but no one wants to see schools that aren’t safe,” said Susan Schaeffler, chief executive officer of the KIPP DC charter network. “It’s a very difficult balance between the two.” KIPP DC College Preparatory, a high school, expelled 17 students in 2011-12 — or 5 percent of its enrollment. In 2012-13, the rate plummeted by 85 percent: Three students were removed for disciplinary reasons. Schaeffler said the decrease stems partly from policy changes meant to prevent discipline problems, including shorter passing periods between classes and a revised demerit system that emphasizes rewards over punishment. But in future years, expulsion rates could be higher, she said, adding that discipline data normally fluctuate because of student behavior, which varies from year to year for many reasons. One violent incident involving many students can boost expulsion rates quickly, she said, and although KIPP DC watches its discipline data closely, officials will continue to expel students if necessary to maintain safety. More than half of the city’s 102 charter campuses recorded zero expulsions in the past school year. But not every school saw a decrease. Parkside Middle, a campus of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, expelled 12 students in 2012-13, four times as many as the year before. YouthBuild, an alternative high school that caters to students who have dropped out or are older than 16, previously had the highest expulsion rate in the city. It expelled 30 students, or nearly one-third of its population, in 2011-12. That rate dropped 85 percent the next school year, when five students were expelled. There was also a significant drop at Friendship Collegiate Academy, where 18 students were expelled in 2012-13 — far fewer than the 56 students expelled the year before. Officials at YouthBuild and Friendship Collegiate did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. There was also an increase at Integrated Design Electronics Academy, or IDEA, where last year 13 students, or 4.4 percent of the school, were expelled. It had the second-highest expulsion rate in the city. Students were expelled for infractions including physical assault, marijuana possession, and stealing and using a staff member’s credit card. “It goes without saying that such conduct is anathema to a learning environment conducive to high quality instruction and student learning,” Justin Rydstrom, principal of IDEA, wrote in an e-mail. The expulsions came as the school, which was nearly closed because of poor academic performance in 2012, made a concerted effort to turn itself around, restructuring its leadership, bringing in new faculty members, and making double-digit gains on math and reading tests. IDEA has not expelled any students this fall, Rydstrom said. The D.C. Public Charter School Board began publishing suspension and expulsion data about two years ago in order to inspire change without additional regulations. The board is to discuss 2012-13 data at its monthly meeting Wednesday. Expulsions offer only a partial picture of mid-year student mobility. In 2011-12, nearly 2,000 students withdrew from charters mid-year, and 561 of them then enrolled in the traditional school system. Some students move out of the city or decide on their own to switch schools. But others, according to parents and activists, withdraw after a disciplinary violation in order to avoid being expelled. Principals in the District’s traditional public school system — who are obligated by law to enroll neighborhood children — say they see a mid-year influx of students who were previously enrolled in charter schools but left because of behavior problems. DeVeaux, the charter-board official, said the board and the school system are planning to jointly release new “equity reports” in mid-November. For the first time, the reports will publicize mid-year withdrawal rates at each school.

Why charter schools get public education advocates so angry

There are thousands of charter schools in the United States that enroll a few million students. While they are just a fraction of the number of kids who attend school, the charter movement has been a key part of the choice movement and has affected public education in many ways. It has been 25 years since the charter movement began, and it has not evolved exactly as supporters had hoped, with too little oversight of too many charters. In this post, Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is now executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education, explains why putting the word “public” in front of “charter school” — which are funded with tax dollars — is “an affront” to people for whom public education is a mission. Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She has been chronicling botched school reform efforts in her state for years.  By Carol Burris  The obvious answer is the charter sector’s distaste for collective bargaining.  But the antipathy directed at charters runs deeper than that. Charters, regardless of their original intent, have become a threat to democratically governed, neighborhood public schools, and questions about their practices, opacity and lack of accountability are increasing as their numbers grow.     The differences between public schools and charter schools go well beyond issues of governance. One of the strengths of a true public school is its ethical and legal obligation to educate all. Public school systems enroll any student who comes into the district’s attendance zone from ages 5 to 21 — no matter their handicapping condition, lack of prior education, first language, or even disciplinary or criminal record. Not only will empty seats be filled at any grade, if there is a sudden influx of students, classes must be opened.  Even when some charter chains, such as Aspire, Success Academy and KIPP, have simple applications and lottery entrance, student bodies are not necessarily representative of neighborhood schools. Below is a chart with three Success Academy Charter schools, in bold, from three different sections of New York City— Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Each is matched with neighborhood public schools in close proximity to the charter. They are listed below the charter school’s name.  The data is from the 2014-15 school year.     Perhaps the most dramatic example of attrition is Success Academy Harlem 1, the flagship Success charter founded in 2006.  Because the charter continues to ninth grade, long-term attrition is apparent.   The middle column shows the enrollment at grade levels 7, 8 and 9 in October 2015.  The column to the right shows the number of students in that student cohort when they were in second grade.  As students move through the grades, attrition accelerates.   Of course attrition occurs in local public schools as well. Children of poverty move more often than middle-class students. The public/charter difference is that even as students leave, they are replaced throughout the school year by new entrants, who are welcomed by their principals and teachers. It has long been suspected that high attrition in the “no excuses” charters results in part from codes of discipline that rely heavily on excluding students for what public schools would consider to be minor infractions. The strict code of discipline also serves as a screen — only parents who want a regimented and highly disciplined environment need apply.   Here is the 2013-14 data for the three Success Academy Schools and their neighborhood counterparts.   Given the parameters of both reports, there should be more VADIR incidents than suspensions. Either Success Academy is not meeting its obligation to provide information to the NYSED, taxpayers and parents, or Success is suspending students for incidents that are so trivial they are not even listed as a category on the VADIR report. No doubt some charters are better, and others are worse, than Success. What all share, however, is the ability to use the freedom given to them for innovation to shut out democracy, attract the students they want and hide important information from the public, even as they collect taxpayer funds. As Diane Ravitch often asks, “If deregulation is such a great idea, why not deregulate all schools?” I think we know the answer. And that is why charters do not deserve the word “public” in front of their name.

Scary reading in charter school bill

*[WSU]: Wayne State University Short answer: apparently none. Longer answer: A bill titled “NC Public Charter School Board,” introduced by two Republicans, calls for a new board to approve and oversee charters. The State Board of Education would no longer have the job of overseeing charter schools, and charter school applicants would no longer have to get permission to open from local school boards or local education agencies. They could go straight to the new board, whose members would be appointed by the governor. If anyone is worried that members of the new board might have conflicts of interest with the schools they are overseeing, the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Jerry Tillman and Sen. Dan Soucek, are not; their legislation doesn’t have any language ensuring that there are no conflicts. What’s more, local school boards would be forced to lease open buildings or land to charter school operators for $1 annually unless they could prove that wasn’t feasible, according to the Progressive Pulse. If a charter school closes, its assets won’t go the local school agency or school board but to the state’s general fund.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University And there’s more. The Pulse reports that the legislation says: That actually weakens the current requirement on diversity and reveals a lack of interest in such issues. And there’s this: Charter schools would no longer have to have at least half of their teachers officially certified to teach, nor would they be legally required to conduct criminal background checks on their teachers and other staff members. Why? Well, during a legislative committee hearing on the bill, this is what happened, the Pulse reported: The bypassing of local school boards is not unique to North Carolina; Tennessee has a bill to do the same thing and, in fact, more than half of the states with charter-school laws allow state bodies to overrule charter decisions by other authorizers, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The North Carolina legislation may, however, be in a class by itself when it comes to removing any notion of accountability from charter schools.

He home-schooled his 7 kids. Now he’s tapped as education commissioner of New Hampshire.

The editorial is referring to Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire tapped by President Trump to be education secretary even though she never went to public schools nor sent her children to one, and is seen by critics as supporting the privatization of public schools. And it is referring to Frank Edelblut,  a businessman and one-term state representative in New Hampshire who home-schooled his seven children and who has been tapped by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu to be the state’s education commissioner. The selection has to be approved by the Executive Council, a Republican-controlled panel, so he is expected to be confirmed in the job.  Why does Edelblut think he can do the job given his lack of experience in education? He told the Monitor: Who better indeed. The notion of hiring people with no education experience to run public schools is hardly a new one; districts have been hiring people from outside the education world as superintendents for years.  What seems to be missing from these decisions is that over time, non-educators haven’t done any better in improving schools than educators — and in some cases do worse — and that many educator see it as an affront when their boss doesn’t have a clue about the work they do. The notion that people in the business world would understand how to run public schools, which are civic institutions and not businesses, is central to the corporate school reform movement that has failed to systemically improve public school districts in recent years.

Was the ‘original bargain’ with charter schools a raw deal?

Charter school advocates didn’t like it recently when Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform issued a report calling for the strengthening of charter oversight and authorization. While noting that many charters work hard to “meet the needs of their students,” the report said that “the lack of effective oversight means too many cases of fraud and abuse, too little attention to equity, and no guarantee of academic innovation or excellence.” It provided some common-sense recommendations, including an innocuous call for the establishment of minimum qualifications for charter school treasurers. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, not surprisingly, bashed the report.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Meanwhile, a new report was just issued by three groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and ACTION United — that found major fraud and mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s charter schools. It found:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The great New York Times writer Michael Powell recently wrote a column detailing what can go wrong with a charter school when there is little or no oversight; in this case, he explores the sickening mess surrounding Prime Time Prep in Texas, created by Deion Sanders, a Hall of Fame cornerback and National Football League commentator.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Yes, there are many fine charter schools. But seriously bad news about many others keeps coming, and concerns are rising as the number of charters overall is increasing. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says that in 2013-2014, 2.57 million students were enrolled in more than 6,000 public charter schools nationwide, with nearly 2,000 new charter schools opening in the past five years. Here’s a piece about what’s going on in the charter world by Jeff Bryant, who is the director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He owns a marketing and communications consultancy in Chapel Hill, N.C., and has written extensively about public education policy. A version of this appeared in Salon.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico By Jeff Bryant When former President Bill Clinton recently meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance. But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck. But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations. Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for many students, their families, and their communities. **Charter Schools As Takeover Operations**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered. After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat. Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of students in the New Orleans Recovery all-charter Recovery District is obtainable only by “jukin the stats” or, as the NPR reporter put it, through “a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice.” As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek a year ago, “the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. Education Secretary Arne Duncan once even said that he thinks “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina” because it wrecked the previous low-functioning school system and brought about the rise of charter schools in the Recovery District. So some school districts that have not had a Katrina are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s bets for our kids.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico What’s important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures _academically_ , as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going by the name Jersey Jazzman stated on his personal blog. Looking at how the districts’ students perform on state assessments, he found that academic performance levels were “pretty much where you’d expect them to be” based on the fact that “most of York’s schools have student populations where 80 percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage,” and variations in student test score performance almost always correlate strongly with students’ financial conditions. He concluded that what was happening to York schools more represents a “long con” in which tax cuts and claims of “budgetary poverty” have prompted a rapacious state government to “declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures … pick at the bones of a decimated school system.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in Dialogue, “It’s the same story that played out in Detroit, Flint, and Philadelphia where these ‘chief recovery officers’ or ‘emergency managers’ have all made the same recommendation: to hand over the cities’ public schools to the highest private bidder.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Then, hiding behind pledges to do “what’s best for kids,” these operators too often do anything but. **Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their state have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since 1997. The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was released by three groups, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors –just in Pennsylvania – include an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane. What’s even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents, every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud. Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation. The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year that exposed $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud, waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate how charter school fraud is spreading.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico What’s happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter operators being considered for that takeover – Mosaica Education, Inc., and Charter Schools USA – have particularly troubling track records. According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, “complications soon followed.” After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit, and when Mosaica realized they weren’t making a profit within two years, they pulled up stakes and went in search of other targets.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report from the Florida League of Women Voters produced earlier this year found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a construction company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every year.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch, Charter USA’s construction company bought a former Verizon call center for $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the front door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico No wonder York citizens are concerned. **What Happened To Charter School Accountability?**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more “accountable” to the public are turning out to be anything but. As an article for The Nation recently observed, “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.” Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources. In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.” This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label. If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what’s required, Noguera concluded is “greater transparency and collaboration with public schools.” Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction. This report, “Public Accountability for Charter Schools,” published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, “recommends changes to state charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to the communities served,” according to the organization’s press release.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico According to the report, these recommendations are the product of “a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders” from Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and other cities, who have “first-hand experience and years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to assess impact.” These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools. For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of Open Records in Pennsylvania, “testified that her office had received 239 appeals in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters.” In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management Company, “takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually … yet has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own schools for detailed financial reports.” In Philadelphia, the report authors found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available “only one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf club in the Philadelphia suburbs.” In New York City, where charter schools are co-located in public school buildings, “public school parents have complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours, and earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the co-located charter school.” The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, which documented public school classrooms “with peeling paint and insufficient resources” made to co-locate with charters that have “new computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks.” The Annenberg report’s policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of “standards:” Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That organization’s response cites “remarkable results” as an excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry loves to crow about, the facts are those results really aren’t there.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Charter Accountability Now**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out of the corners of the “black box” the industry uses to protect itself, the charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality. Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on a publicity terror with a national campaign claiming to tell “The Truth About Charters” and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia and New York City.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There’s little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw deal. The deal is off.

D.C.’s public charter school system turned 20 this year. Now what?

The District’s finances were in shambles. The city’s schools were widely underperforming. Drugs and violence continued to decimate the city’s poorest neighborhoods in the 1990s, rendering Washington the nation’s murder capital. Malcolm “Mike” Peabody, a real estate developer and activist, believed that the failing schools and a lack of opportunities for poor black residents were a civil rights issue. He wanted to mend these impoverished neighborhoods by improving schools, but he thought it would be impossible given the hold the teachers union had on the school system. His solution: public education that could exist outside the D.C. Public Schools. He started a local charter school advocacy organization, becoming one of the leading voices in the nascent education movement, which advocated for schools that could receive public funding but function apart from a traditional public school system’s bureaucracy. “This was the next major thing in civil rights,” said Peabody, now 88. “I’m not for charter schools, I’m for a better education.” The District’s charter school movement turned 20 at the start of this academic year. During the past two decades, charters have grown from three schools educating 160 students to more than 100 independent schools that educate almost 42,000 students, close to half of the District’s public school enrollment. The city has one of the highest percentages of students enrolled in charter schools in the country, behind New Orleans and Detroit. School choice advocates hail the city’s charter schools as a model for the nation, while critics say that parents have more chance — a lottery ticket to get into one of a limited number of sought-after schools — than real choice. When the charter movement began in the mid-1990s, the D.C. financial control board was in place, with a federally appointed panel managing most day-to-day city functions. Peabody said it was a perfect time to seek federal legislation allowing charter schools. The District’s charters were approved by a Republican Congress — led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich — in April 1996, over the objections of many public school officials. The legislation was viewed as a politically palatable alternative to private-school vouchers, and it ultimately won bipartisan support. The legislation also allowed city funds to be allocated to adult education charter schools. Erika Bryant — executive director of the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, one of the city’s first charter schools, founded by Bryant’s mother — recalls the initial wariness of parents to remove their children from the traditional public school system. She said the first children to enroll in the school were from the city’s poorest families, those who had lost faith in the public schools but didn’t have much other choice. About 90 percent of students at Elsie Whitlow qualified for free and reduced-price lunches. Now, about 50 percent do, Bryant said, indicating that many in the city’s growing middle class are also attracted to charter schools. “More parents are not just now comfortable with sending their kids to charters, but they want to,” Bryant said. Many of the city’s top-performing charter schools — including Washington Latin, BASIS DC and Washington Yu Ying — now attract long wait lists each year because of their academic successes. Charter schools’ academic performance varies widely, but on the whole, charter school students post slightly higher scores on annual math and reading tests and graduate at slightly higher rates than students in traditional public schools. While some tout the city’s charter schools as examples of how school choice can rescue students from struggling public school systems, the charter movement also has raised numerous concerns about its effect on local schools and the ability for the public to oversee how they are spending taxpayer funds. Traditional public school advocates argue that the charters strip neighborhood schools of students and resources. They don’t have the same legal obligation to teach the city’s toughest students, and some charter schools outright fail. And while the D.C. Public Charter School Board oversees the city’s charter schools, each operates as its own school system, which has led to issues involving transparency and accountability, especially when schools contract with for-profit management companies. In 2013, local and federal officials alleged that managers at the District’s Options Public Charter School used the school to enrich themselves with millions of tax dollars meant for at-risk and disabled students. A former senior official at the charter school board who was responsible for financial oversight of the schools was alleged to have been part of the scheme. Options reopened under new leadership in September 2014. When charter schools first opened in the District, the most high-profile exposure the average resident had to them was in 1997, when the principal of Marcus Garvey Public Charter School was convicted of assaulting a reporter. The school closed soon after amid financial management concerns. “We’re all in it for accountability,” Peabody told The Washington Post in 1998. “If Garvey gets closed, that is good news. Schools that don’t do it right ought to close.” At the start, there were two authorizers that approved new schools or closed bad ones: the D.C. school board — then overseeing all D.C. public schools, and widely seen as troubled — and the Public Charter School Board. When mayoral control passed in 2007, the old school board went away and all charter schools were brought under the charter board, which has a national reputation for holding schools accountable, closing those that don’t meet academic targets. At a recent event celebrating 20 years of charter schools, Scott Pearson, the executive director of the Public Charter School Board, warned a room full of parents and supporters that despite charters’ large presence in the District, the movement is still in its nascent stages and charter schools are still political lightning rods. He said advocates should always be prepared for pushback and threats to funding. “Every one of you is part of a revolutionary change in public education,” Pearson said. “It’s important that we all realize that and feel that so when there is someone who says we shouldn’t do it that way — we should fund it less — you are part of the movement that needs to stand up and say ‘yes.’ ” Going forward, Pearson wants further collaboration between D.C. Public Schools and charter schools. He views the competition between the two sectors as healthy, one that forces both to find creative ways to educate children. He wants to develop a program that allows charter high school students to take courses at D.C. public schools, and vice versa. Pearson said he wants to continue to bring expulsion and suspension rates down. Charter schools have long had higher rates of suspensions and expulsions, giving opponents the chance to argue that charters dump the most challenging students back into the traditional public school system. Pearson doesn’t believe charter schools will upend the city’s traditional public schools; he says he expects both sectors to grow as the city’s population rises. It’s unclear what Donald Trump’s presidency could mean for education in the nation’s capital. Trump has said he wants to expand school choice through vouchers, charter schools and magnet programs, but Pearson said the new administration has him nervous because there has been no talk of how to hold schools accountable. “I’m concerned that they will overplay their hand and try to impose a radical plan of school choice that does not have any accountability,” Pearson said. “Our school choice works here because it has an accountability component.”

Federal judge agrees to hear charter schools’ case alleging unequal funding

A federal judge has agreed to hear a case brought by an association of D.C. charter schools that alleges that the city has not provided uniform funding to public charter schools and traditional schools, a violation of the D.C. School Reform Act. Former D.C. attorney general Irvin B. Nathan asked a federal court last fall to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the District has jurisdiction to make locally based funding decisions. But U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan said the case should move forward. Stephen Marcus, the lead counsel for the charter schools, called it a “favorable opinion.” Robert Cane, a senior adviser of FOCUS, a charter advocacy group, said, “This victory energizes us to keep going with the lawsuit as long as it takes to get the government to stop discriminating against public charter school kids.” The lawsuit was filed by the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, along with Eagle Academy and Washington Latin public charter schools, in the summer of 2014. In their complaint, the schools estimate that the city has spent about $2,150 less per charter student each year since 2008 than it has for students in the D.C. public school system, in violation of the School Reform Act. Passed by Congress in 1995, the School Reform Act paved the way for charter schools to open in the District and required the city to set up a “uniform formula” to fund charter and traditional schools equally on the basis of enrollment. D.C. charter and traditional schools are funded primarily through a per-pupil formula. But the charter school plaintiffs allege that additional taxpayer money goes to the traditional school system, largely in the form of services from other city agencies, such as facilities maintenance by the Department of General Services or legal representation by the attorney general’s office. Nathan’s motion to dismiss says that policy decisions the D.C. Council has made about school funding are within its powers delegated by Congress through the Home Rule Act in 1973. The law allowed the District to have its own popularly elected legislature and delegated it broad authority. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine inherited the case this year. How the two laws interact is an important legal question for the nation’s capital, given its status as a federal district that is subject to congressional oversight. Many view it as a test of the District’s authority to govern its own budget and affairs. The judge wrote in her opinion that the case should proceed because the plaintiffs have a “plausible claim for relief” and “because it is not yet clear whether the actions of the Council impermissibly conflict with the will of Congress as set forth in the Home Rule Act and School Reform Act.” Chutkan did dismiss part of the plaintiff’s case — an argument that the city has violated the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which makes federal law the “Supreme Law of the land.” Her opinion said that the clause does not apply to legislation passed by Congress that deals exclusively with the District. Robert Marus, a spokesman for the D.C. attorney general’s office, called the opinion a “partial win” for the city.

Charter school corruption

Here’s how The Arizona Republic started a story detailing its investigation into charter school corruption in the state: Timothy Noah of the New Republic cited this and other charter school scandals in a piece entitled “How Charter Schools Fleece Taxpayers” that starts: Noah mentions other charter school scandals: * This story in the Dayton Daily News starts: The story prompted the Ohio’s state auditor to investigate and recover some taxpayer funds from the schools. * The San Bernardino County Sentinel reported that the county school district closed the Adalanto Charter Academy because “much of the academy’s academic imperative was suborned to the mercenary intent of those involved at the school.” * And he mentions the 2008 investigation by my Washington Post colleagues David S. Fallis and April Witt that says: This is actually the tip of the iceberg. You can learn more at a Web site called http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/ No, this is not an indictment of all charter schools. Some do great things for kids. It is, however, the tip of an iceberg that is repeatedly ignored by school reformers who are insistent on opening more and more charters without sufficient oversight, all along saying it is “for the kids.” Funny so many adults apparently think it is more about their wallets.

Charter school corruption

School reformers love ‘choice,’ except when …

School “reformers” love to promote “choice.” Charters. Vouchers. Tuition tax credits. It’s all about giving parents choices, right? Well, not always. Reformers don’t actually like choice quite so much when: *** Parents decide they want to opt their children out of taking a high- stakes standardized test that has little or no value.**   — In many states, parents — and some students — are being harassed by school administrators not to opt out out. These administrators fear they will be held accountable under federal regulations that require a certain percentage of students to take the test.   — In California, state officials decided they didn’t want to force students to take the standardized test given annually for accountability purposes because it no longer measures the curriculum, which is now centered on the Common Core State Standards. Core-aligned tests are still in development. Education Secretary Arne Duncan threatened to withhold several billion dollars of federal funds from the state, but his department ultimately backed down.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *** Parents prefer that their neighborhood school stays open and gets the resources to improve it rather than have it closed as a failing school.**   — Around the country school districts, with support from the Obama administration, are closing neighborhood schools for a variety of reasons,- including low test scores, under-enrollment and to make way for more charter schools.   — Chicago, for example, closed nearly 50 traditional public schools last year over strenuous objections from parents, saying they were under-enrolled and had low test scores. Yet many of the displaced students went to schools with scores at least as bad, and now charter schools are being planned for neighborhoods where traditional schools were closed.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *** Parents want to elect school boards to govern their school district but local education authority is given to mayors (though only to those mayors that agree with policy-makers).**   — When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had the audacity to tell a few charter schools that they couldn’t co-locate in a traditional school building, officials in the state capital began talking about taking steps to remove his authority to oversee charters.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *** Parents want to see their child’s standardized tests after completion.**   — They can’t. The tests are proprietary.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *** Parents don’t want their children to take any on-line courses.**   — In a growing number of states, including Virginia, Michigan and Florida, students are required to take at least one virtual course to graduate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *** Parents want their local public school to have a well-rounded curriculum that includes history, science, the arts and physical education.**   — Sorry, in the high-stakes standardized testing era, the emphasis is on math and English language arts.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *** Parents don’t want their children’s teachers evaluated on the basis of student standardized test scores because they know it is unfair.**   — Encouraged by the Obama administration, states now have teacher and principal evaluation systems that include test scores. Unfortunately, many teachers wind up being evaluated on the scores of students they don’t have or subjects they don’t teach.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University What else?

Trump terrifies public school advocates with education secretary pick

Advocates of public education in the United States worried that President-elect Donald Trump would tap an education secretary who would speed up the privatization of public schools, a move that many fear could destroy America’s public education system, the country’s most important civic institution. Well, they were right about the appointment — and then some. After Democrats Michelle Rhee and Eva Moskowitz said they weren’t interested in the job, Trump tapped Betsy DeVos, a former Republican Party chairwoman in Michigan and chair of the pro-school choice advocacy group American Federation of Children. Seen by her supporters as a tireless, driven supporter of school choice, opponents say she is the most ideological and anti-public education nominee ever to be put forward to run the the nearly 40-year-old department. They fear that Trump, along with DeVos, will push “choice” programs that many see as draining resources from the traditional public school districts that educate most American schoolchildren. School choice has become a central priority of the corporate school reform movement, which aims to have the U.S. public education system run on market forces. School-choice proponents say that charter schools and vouchers offer parents important options for their children’s education — allowing them to leave their neighborhood schools in search of something better — and that traditional public schools have failed in many places. School-choice opponents say that “choice” not only siphons resources from traditional systems but also promotes segregation, discriminates against students with the most severe disabilities and fights public oversight. There are studies that exist in support of any side, but the preponderance of independent research shows that choice programs have failed to systemically improve student achievement and have harmed public school districts. That prospect was clear this month in Massachusetts, when voters refused to agree to raise a cap on charter school expansion, and Moody’s, the rating agency, applauded the move, saying it would allow urban districts to maintain their current financial operations without added pressure from charters that could create virtually insurmountable money problems.  The push for choice at the expense of traditional public education is what terrifies public school advocates. At some point, they fear, too many traditional systems will not be able to sustain themselves financially because of underfunding and financial pressure from charters and voucher programs and that they will collapse. Where would students go? There are not enough charter schools or private schools to fill the void in most places — and rushing to open new schools without sufficient planning and oversight would create problems too numerous to list. The students with the least resources and fewest advocates will be trapped, perhaps with nowhere to go. Another issue attached to the expansion of charters and vouchers involves just which students are being served. The choice movement has to this point largely aimed to help students in urban areas find alternatives to troubled school districts. But many in the choice movement believe that all students — regardless of family socioeconomic status — should have the right to attend the school of their choice. That proposition leads to a range of problems as well, including the notion that wealthy families could ultimately wind up with public money to send them to exclusive private schools. As it is now, voucher programs don’t provide enough money for a student to enroll in a high-tuition private school without additional financial help, and thus many students using vouchers go to religious schools. In some states, some Christian voucher schools teach concepts that wouldn’t be allowed in a traditional school, such as that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old and that dinosaurs once co-existed with human beings. Because the schools are private, they can teach that with impunity — and public dollars are paying for children to get such an education. When school reformers talk about the importance of high standards for students, this is the kind of thing you might think they would consider. But choice supporters, including DeVos, have consistently refused to make a broad stand for charter accountability. Trump and DeVos would not be starting the “choice” movement; it has been building momentum, first under president George W. Bush and then under President Barack Obama’s administration. Obama did not support vouchers, but his Education Department pushed the spread of charters. Now that the school choice barn door is cracked, Trump and DeVos plan to blast it wide open. Carol Burris, a former award-winning high school principal who is now executive director of the advocacy group Network for Public Education, wrote: DeVos wasn’t an early supporter of Trump’s, and she wasn’t a visceral opponent of the Common Core State Standards, which Trump repeatedly trashed. (She tweeted on Wednesday that she didn’t support the Core.) But in the end, what mattered to Trump was her core belief in school choice, proving that he plans to make the expansion of vouchers or voucher-like programs a top educational priority. DeVos has worked on school reform issues with her husband, Richard. The two helped push for Michigan’s charter school law in 1993, and on Dec. 3, 2002, Richard DeVos gave a now-famous speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation laying out a state-by-state strategy to expand vouchers and school choice by rewarding and punishing legislators who either went along with the plan or did not. During the speech, he advised that supporters call public schools “government schools,” as a pejorative, and urged that they “be cautious about talking too much about these activities” so as not to call attention and garner opposition. There are now 25 voucher programs in 14 states, allowing families to take taxpayer dollars with them to pay for private or parochial schools, according to EdChoice, a pro-school choice organization: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana (2), Maine, Maryland, Mississippi (2), North Carolina (2), Ohio (5), Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin (4) as well as in Washington, D.C. There also are similar programs involving tax credits in other states, showing the broad expansion of the movement in the past two decades. DeVos’s nomination got mixed reviews. Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Republican from Tennessee who chairs the Senate education committee, said she was a great choice: Others, especially advocates for public education, were horrified. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement: Corporate school reformers say that too many school districts in America were failing students and that led to their choice ideas. They weren’t wrong in saying too many schools were inadequate and too many students were failing. But the reasons for this have long been far more complex than claimed many reformers claim; they consistently refuse to acknowledge the importance of factors outside school that affect students and use choice as a cover to try to destroy teachers unions and privatize education. That goal has never been closer.

How D.C. got to be an education hot spot

The news this month that D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson dispatched her principals to recruit students in house-to-house canvassing sounds like a declaration of war with the charter schools. What if they bump up against charter principals doing the same thing — clipboard duels at 20 yards? Given the district vs. charter fights we’ve seen in cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, it’s easy to assume that the District is headed in the same direction. Now that charter school enrollment is up to about half the city’s public school enrollment, this would seem like a logical time for war to break out. Relax. It’s one more sign that the District has evolved into one of the most creative charter-district relationships in the country. And that’s a good thing. The fight in New York City is partly rooted in ideology. The new mayor, Bill de Blasio (D), is an unabashed progressive who believes that all resources should be focused on “common” schools — despite the unimpressive track record they have in educating low-income minority kids. In other cities with bitter charter-district conflicts, it’s a matter of market share: Superintendents and teachers unions view every child in a charter as a revenue loss. The D.C. model is different. Here, a liberal charter school law and generous per-student payments allowed for quick growth — too quick, actually. But Scott Pearson, who oversees D.C. charters, has done an impressive job of shutting down bad charters and building up high-performing charters. While the District has an impressive number of schools belonging to the national charter organization KIPP, what’s notable is the number of homegrown programs that rank in the top tier of D.C. charter schools: D.C. Prep, Thurgood Marshall, Two Rivers, Washington Latin, Achievement Prep and others. Achievement Prep, in Ward 8, warrants special mention. Founder Shantelle Wright has built a school that outperforms other schools in the ward by as much as 40 points on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams. Henderson expressed an interest in Wright absorbing a failing Ward 8 district school — yet another sign that Henderson sees the district-charter relationship as more than just competition. Schooling in Ward 8 is about to get more interesting. In 2015, San Jose-based Rocketship Education will open a school there that will collaborate with the high-performing AppleTree Early Learning. AppleTree will handle preschool and Rocketship will handle kindergarten through fifth grade. That twinning, suggested by Pearson, is yet another reason D.C. schools are drawing national attention. The buildup of good charters played out at the same time that the reforms in public school begun by former superintendent Michelle Rhee and continued by Henderson were kicking in. Those two forces playing off one another made D.C. Public Schools the fastest-improving urban district on recent federal tests. The D.C. district-charter balance resembles the Franklin-McKinley School District in San Jose, where Superintendent John Porter is building a thoughtful weave of charters and traditional schools. When Porter allowed Rocketship charters to build a new school around the corner from the district’s Robert F. Kennedy Elementary, the initial reaction at Kennedy was one of dismay. Would parents abandon the school? Instead, Kennedy responded by building an impressive science-themed school in partnership with San Jose’s Tech Museum. As more charters have opened, district schools have responded by, you guessed it, going to the neighborhoods to recruit students charter-style. It’s working as planned. Where will the District’s charter-district relationship end up? It could evolve into what we see in Houston’s Spring Branch schools, where top charters got invited into district schools as full partners, not just co-located schools. This is inspiration by cooperation rather than competition. My suggestion: Henderson and Pearson should take a road trip to Spring Branch. Soon. In San Antonio, local foundations intent on improving schools assembled a collection of charters — some aimed at low-income Latino parents, others to target middle-class parents. For those accustomed to charters serving only high-need neighborhoods, that sounds odd. But it makes sense. Winning the support of soccer moms means cementing political support for better schools. Currently, D.C. Public Schools has a monopoly on public schools serving the affluent Ward 3, which explains the interest in securing a spot in the high-performing Woodrow Wilson High School zone. But what if charters that appeal to middle-class parents, such as Basis or Great Hearts, opened in Georgetown? That would shake things up in DCPS and the private-school world, where lofty tuitions get forked over for educations no better than what tuition-free charters offer. We can’t pretend that everything is copacetic between D.C. district and charter schools. DCPS has more than 20 unused school buildings it has yet to release. And Wright, despite her sterling success, has yet to find a permanent home. How can that be allowed to stand? But if you think of that as strife, you need to check in on the intense combat in New York and Los Angeles. No comparison. So, if you get stopped on the street by clipboard-bearing D.C. principals, offer encouragement and welcome them to one of the nation’s education hot spots. Sounds weird, right? But it’s true. Richard Whitmire is author of “On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope,” which looks at Rocketship Education. **Read more about this issue:** Jonetta Rose Barras: DCPS gets to clean up a charter school mess Natalie Wexler: Carrots, sticks and set-asides in the DCPS boundaries proposal Natlie Wexler: Should DCPS and charter coordinate more? Mark Simon: Is teacher churn undermining real education reform in D.C.?

New D.C. superintendent aims to bring stability to job after years of turnover

Hanseul Kang, the District’s new state superintendent of education, faces a daunting challenge as she attempts to transform one of the city’s most troubled agencies. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education was formed in 2007, when the city’s schools were placed under mayoral control, and it has struggled with management problems and high turnover. Kang is the eighth head of the agency. After four months on the job, Kang said in an interview with The Washington Post that she aims to bring consistency, stability and high standards to the position. “From my experience, the state education agency can make a difference,” Kang said. “I’m excited to be part of the administration and be here and work hard and see results for our students.” Kang, a 33-year-old former Teach for America corps and staff member who graduated from Harvard Law School, most recently worked as the chief of staff for the Tennessee Department of Education, where she helped implement one of the nation’s first Race to the Top grants. When Kang’s appointment was announced in February, Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer C. Niles said that Kang came highly recommended as a hard worker who is “smart and capable and a problem solver.” In the District, Kang has taken charge of a far less traditional department, with both state and local responsibilities. In addition to overseeing standardized tests, federal grants and compliance with federal laws, the superintendent also manages many local services, including the transportation of special-education students via a fleet of 700 buses and the city’s summer meals program. Politically, she must contend with a powerful public school chancellor and an assortment of charter-school leaders, many of whom resist efforts to establish citywide policies because charters are allowed to operate independently. The National Research Council released a report this year that documented progress in the city’s major reform efforts but painted OSSE as a weak link. It described the agency as a “large and complicated bureaucracy” that has “struggled to gain its footing and earn the trust of D.C. government officials who must rely on” it. The agency has made strides in improving its compliance with federal laws, notably shedding its designation as a “high risk” grant recipient by the U.S. Education Department last summer and emerging from court oversight of its special-education services. But significant problems remain with monitoring and the outcomes for special-education students. Many have high hopes that Kang, who is paid $160,000 a year, will steer the organization in a new direction. “I’d like to see her stick around,” said D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), chairman of the Education Committee. “I hope she can hunker down and really focus on the operations of that agency and make sure the staffing is as high quality as possible and make sure the staff she has is supported.” He also said he hopes she will continue to build a central database that can help education reform efforts, a slow-moving undertaking that the National Research Council report highlighted as a major deficiency and that Kang has said is a priority. In her first months in office, Kang launched a strategic planning process that is expected to wrap up this fall, and she led an overhaul of the agency’s process for responding to Freedom of Information Act requests after OSSE inadvertently released personal student information in response to a media request in March. She also created a “communications review team” to examine many types of outgoing correspondence, a move that has drawn scrutiny for its top-down approach. Kang said the move emerges from a widely held view that OSSE needs to improve the quality and consistency of its reports and other documents. In a recent interview with The Post, Kang reflected on why she came to the new job and what she hopes to accomplish. The following questions and answers are from that interview: _Why did you take this job?_ I think there has been incredible progress happening in the District in student outcomes and enrollment growth in both traditional and charter schools. I think that a state education agency can play an important role in sustaining and accelerating that progress if it can perform at a consistently high level. When the state education agency can do that work well, it can support all schools in making those kinds of gains. _What have been your priorities since you arrived?_ In my first few months, the goal has been to learn about the work of the agency and to help deal with some of the things that were backlogged, like reports and regulations, things that were waiting for decisions to be made. I also want to put us on a path for stronger coordination with other divisions. _The National Research Council’s report questioned the size of OSSE, which last year had a staff of 382 to serve about 83,000 students, compared with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which employed 570 people to serve nearly 1 million students. Why the imbalance? Is OSSE the right size?_ OSSE covers much more than the 83,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grades. It coordinates subsidized child care and pre-K3 and 4 classrooms, and that is a function that most state education agencies don’t have. It also oversees adult education. We also do work around charter-school financing and help charter schools secure facilities. It’s a function that is not always the case in most state education agencies. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. _What are the biggest challenges in the next year for OSSE?_ Because of all the transition and turnover, both internal and external stakeholders need to know we can live up to our commitments. When we say we are going to do something, we are going to do it and see it through.

Rolling back school reform in New York City

NEW YORK Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) wasted no time dismantling the education policies of three-term mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), and his administration claims schools have improved as a result. Well, jettisoning data-driven accountability, transparency and standards certainly makes it easier to claim success. But children measured by low standards and with inflated grades may not be learning, which undermines any chance they will have for success. Mr. de Blasio’s approach to education recently came under intense scrutiny with the release of a $400 million plan targeting struggling schools. So low were the goals for improvement (in some cases, the benchmarks were set lower than a school’s current performance) that they were rebuked as “ridiculous” by a top state education official. In the face of that criticism, city education officials said any schools that meet their benchmarks early will have those targets strengthened and, in a shift of policy, Mr. de Blasio this week announced the closure of three failing schools. Other areas of concern have emerged. A report issued last month by StudentsFirstNY, an advocacy group for charter schools and other school reforms, found rampant grade inflation, with high marks awarded to students unable to pass state tests. A change in promotion policy has led to charges of increased social promotion, with unprepared students passed from grade to grade. We won’t romanticize the state of New York City schools when Mr. de Blasio took over; big problems endured. But reform by Mr. Bloomberg and his imaginative school chancellor, Joel Klein, had produced increases in graduation rates, an upward trend in test scores and the replacement of failed high schools with better-performing small schools. Particularly noteworthy was the success of charter schools that offered the kind of choice that better-off parents take for granted. Sadly, even that initiative is threatened; a recent report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank, says school choice has suffered since Mr. Bloomberg’s departure from office. Making the situation even more worrisome is that it is being played out against a backdrop of state retrenchment. Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state board of regents, who chastised the city for setting low standards and has been a stabilizing force, is leaving, and new board members are seen as favoring anti-reform union interests. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), stung by successful union efforts to get parents to opt out of critical testing, is expected to roll back progress on teacher evaluations based partly on student achievement. The losers in all of this are students who are trapped in failing schools and saddled with ineffective teachers. That most of them are poor and minorities doesn’t seem to matter to those who profess to be progressive. **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: Why is New York Mayor Bill de Blasio undermining charter schools? Scott Pearson and John “Skip” McKoy: Getting the balance right Katrina vanden Heuvel: Bill de Blasio’s persuasive case for universal pre-K

How can two school systems plan for one city?

The work of the D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, created to overhaul school boundaries and student-assignment policies for the D.C. Public Schools, has received praise across the city. Even critics of the reform proposals presented by the committee have paid tribute to the process through which alternatives were formulated. But none of the proposals presented to the public for debate addresses the elephant in the room: We have two independent entities making uncoordinated decisions about the future of our public school system. This makes rational planning impossible. Abigail Smith, the city’s deputy mayor for education, has encouraged the public to reflect on two questions when they evaluate the proposals. What is our vision for public education in the city? What policies will help improve the quality of education at all our schools? The assumption behind these two questions — and it’s a deeply mistaken assumption — is that the D.C. Public Schools can pursue its vision of excellence irrespective of whether the independent charter sector expands, contracts or maintains its present size. The menu of options presented to the public includes out-of-boundary “set-asides” for low-income students and a version of “controlled choice” that would replace neighborhood school assignments with a lottery system to place children in one of a cluster of nearby schools. The theoretical merits of these and other options are worth debating, but no reforms will work according to design if they are implemented without formal cooperation with the charter sector. After a decade of haphazardly reforming our public school system, we have reached a crucial junction. In little more than a decade, enrollment in charter schools has increased from less than 5 percent of the school population to more than 40 percent. We now have the nation’s third-highest percentage of public school children attending charters. The great debate between advocates of charter and neighborhood schools will continue. But this debate should not distract us from what is now the greatest obstacle to improving our public school system: the two-headed monster that rules over the administrative side of our public school system. The D.C. Council in 2007 gave the mayor direct authority over DCPS. It also designated the D.C. Public Charter School Board  the sole authority over charter schools. By law, that seven-member board can approve up to 20 new schools a year. At the time, this approach was reasonable, though it lacked sufficient foresight. Now we have planning problems that only close coordination between these sectors can solve. We cannot continue to support a law that mocks the idea of rational planning. Let me provide one concrete example. The most widely supported menu option put forth by the D.C. Advisory Committee appears to be the creation of new, high- quality middle schools throughout the city. That there is strong demand for good neighborhood middle schools and predictable feeder patterns is clear. In Ward 4, where my children attend a neighborhood elementary school, parents are pushing DCPS to reopen MacFarland Middle School (under a new name). A new and improved MacFarland would not only meet the demand for a good middle school but also supply a newly renovated Roosevelt High School with an influx of motivated students and parents. But how can our next mayor invest in the renovation, redesign and staffing of a new neighborhood middle school without the collaboration of decision-makers in the charter sector? The charter board is considering eight new schools for the 2015-2016 school year, including two middle schools that might compete directly with a reopened McFarland. Can a city afford to invest in a new neighborhood middle school if charter schools open at the same time and compete for the same students? Competition and experimentation can serve constructive purposes. The original logic behind charter schools was that they would be laboratories of learning, much in the same way our states are laboratories of democracy. Innovations that proved effective would disseminate. But the evidence suggests that such collaboration has ceased. What we see today is a counterproductive kind of balkanization: parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, researchers and private funders are either pro-charter or pro-neighborhood schools. Competition, instead of being a spur to excellence, fuels an ideological debate that no amount of data-crunching and statistical analysis will resolve conclusively. Strong convictions may win public debates. But humility is the beginning of intelligent discussion. If we want to manage the reform of our public schools intelligently — if we want to think strategically about the future of our entire public school system — we have to relax our attachment to complete charter autonomy. The combined lottery introduced this year is a baby step in the right direction. But we are still in the political and administrative wilderness. In our present system, the viability of new public schools — charter or traditional — is impossible to predict. **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: Adding more desks to D.C.’s charter schools Jo-Ann Armao: The Big Easy’s school revolution The Post’s View: D.C. should make surplus schools available to charters The Post’s View: D.C.’s charter schools deserve fairer funding

How education data gets spun

As Mark Twain noted, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” In this piece we learn how two different narratives have been spun from statistics on high school graduation rates and charter schools. It was written by Bob Sikes, author of the Scathing Purple Musings blog. A former New York Mets assistant athletic director — including for the fabled 1986 World Series champions — he now teaches high school in Florida. By Bob Sikes It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Florida Department of Education would quickly respond to a U.S. Department of Education report which found Florida graduation rates to be, well, abysmal.  It took four days. Lets compare the two reports. On Monday, Gradebook’s Jeff Solocheck wrote this of the federal report: **Orlando Sentinel**education reporter Leslie Postal wrote this yesterday: The state’s high schools have been waiting for their grades for eight months, yet the Florida Department of Education was able to churn out this past year’s graduation numbers in the matter of hours. How convenient. Meanwhile a one-time charter school owner turned charter school bureaucrat quickly generated favorable data for state charter schools. On November 15, State Impact ** __**reporter John O’Connor wrote of UCF professor Stanley Smithresearch which concluded that the state’s charter schools were not performing as well as public schools. Just six days later, Adam Miller, the FDOE’s charter school director released a contrary report. Miller, who couldn’t explain the difference between his and Smith’s report, said “”we’ve got some phenomenal charter schools across the state that are providing parents with the opportunity to send their kids to a high quality school that meets  the needs of their child.” Smith whose study factored in poverty, told **StateImpact** reporter Gina Jordan Miller’s study “poorly done” and “biased.” Can Floridians trust what the state Department of Education is telling them? They can sure churn out favorable data in a hurry as it’s been known for a long time that Jeb Bush’s foundations and the education department work together on message and narrative. The education department’s July spin over what happened when mistakes were made in school grades was never pursued by reporters. The summer’s Republican presidential convention and the fall’s presidential contest are over. Light will shine again on the education department’s competence. Perhaps its time Floridians find out whether of not the people who run the department are more focused on an agenda than they are on schools and children.

Progress in the D.C. schools: Many authors and a surprising path

Nationally, the District has long been regarded as an educational embarrassment, one of the top spenders on kindergarten to 12th grade with little to show for it. The story used to be familiar: Better-off families flee to the suburbs or apply to one of the many private schools; low-income parents from the “wrong” side of the river desperately seek schools on the other side. It was sad but true. But that was then. The education momentum has shifted so dramatically in the past few years that most Washingtonians have no idea why D.C. students suddenly are being singled out for making remarkable progress, as seen in federal testing results released Wednesday. D.C. Public Schools showed significant increases in math and reading scores in both fourth and eighth grades — the only city school system to do so. Earlier federal test data that included charter school students paralleled these gains, which means all students are advancing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan put it best: “A remarkable story.” Allow me to flesh out this story. The first thing to know is that the rapid progress in Washington can be attributed to three school chiefs. Everyone knows about Kaya Henderson, the D.C. schools chancellor, who is so widely admired that she was approached about taking over the New York City schools. Henderson is the kinder, gentler version of controversial former chancellor Michelle Rhee. As a Rhee deputy, Henderson relentlessly championed improving teacher quality. She hasn’t changed. Then there’s the lesser-known Scott Pearson, who oversees the city’s charter schools, which educate 44 percent of the city’s students. The important thing to know about Pearson: He has relentlessly cleaned up the mess left by the old school board, which approved too many lousy charters. Thanks to his clear accountability system ranking the effectiveness of schools, and his efforts to lure top performers, the District has moved to the top ranks of charter school innovators. The third key player is Susan Schaeffler. Who? Schaeffler oversees the network of KIPP charter schools in the city, a system that has grown from 80 fifth- graders in 2001 to 3,600 students in neighborhoods that include Anacostia, Shaw and Trinidad. That number sounds small, but if you could calculate which of the three school leaders is most responsible for boosting the number of college-ready D.C. students from tough neighborhoods, my money would be on Schaeffler. Together, these three leaders have dug the D.C. schools out of a very deep hole. Preschool is also a big part of the improvement story. Members of Congress debate what really high-quality preschools might look like, when all they have to do is walk a few blocks to any AppleTree Learning preschool to see excellence in action. I once spent a day in an AppleTree classroom in Columbia Heights, watching three teachers, all of them college-educated, walk the students through the organization’s carefully scripted Every Child Ready curriculum. This is what preschool is supposed to be. And it’s being done right here in the District. One interesting overlap with the charter growth story: AppleTree is likely to team up with Rocketship charters (a pairing Pearson suggested), which in 2015 is scheduled to open the first of eight charter schools it is planning for the District. AppleTree would handle the preschool years; Rocketship would pick up in kindergarten and seamlessly carry students through fifth grade. In the District, education trends aren’t playing out as predicted, and that’s a good thing. Conventional wisdom holds that charter schools will suck up all of the motivated low-income students, leaving Henderson’s system with the special-education students and disruptive students who need parole officers. But a different future appears to be unfolding. Aggressive charters are gobbling up huge numbers of poor kids, and not just those with the most motivated parents, creating an unlikely narrative whereby DCPS could end up as a redoubt of wealthy, Ward 3 students. There’s a shocker for you. The real education story here is just beginning to play out. The District may be the fastest-gentrifying city in the nation. Are all of those educated, middle-class couples snapping up homes in once-dicey neighborhoods really going to flee or pay expensive private school tuition? Not likely. For a glimpse into the future, watch what’s already playing out in elementary schools such as Ross and Brent and emerging in schools such as Garrison, Amidon-Bowen and J.O. Wilson. Having a mix of low-, middle- and high-income students of all races and ethnicities is something to be cheered, not feared. The school districts in the country making the most progress with low-income students, places such as Tampa, Charlotte and Long Beach, have middle-class kids in the mix. I’m not suggesting everything will always go smoothly. Inside DCPS there are those who yearn for the days when work rules favored teachers over students. Outside the District, many Rhee haters appear to be quietly rooting for D.C. kids to start failing again so they can paint Rhee as a failure. But while the naysayers can make noise, they have little influence over the outcomes. Good education news out of D.C. approaches a man-bites-dog story. My advice: Embrace it. ****

D.C. charter schools say they were never under investigation for enrollment procedures

Officials at two D.C. charter schools, BASIS DC and Capital City, said Friday that they have never denied admission to immigrant students and were shocked to see their schools named among those under federal investigation for enrollment procedures that discriminate against undocumented children. “There’s never been a complaint about Capital City denying access to immigrant students,” said Karen Dresden, Capital City’s head of school. “We do have a lot of undocumented families, and they’re part of our community.” Phil Handler, a spokesman for BASIS DC, echoed Dresden’s comments and said his school has never received a complaint. “We’re completely in the dark. It looks, frankly, like a mistake.” The U.S. Education Department said Thursday that the two D.C. charters are among 17 schools or districts that federal officials have been investigating in response to complaints about enrollment procedures that discriminate against immigrants. The list of schools was released along with new federal guidance meant to clarify the kind of information schools can require of enrolling students. Education Department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt said Friday that complaints at both D.C. schools have been resolved and that the Office of Civil Rights “made no finding that these schools had been intentionally attempting to discourage any group of students from enrolling.” Nolt said that in the course of investigating other issues regarding services for students learning English as a second language, federal officials asked the two schools to submit student-enrollment documents for review. Investigators found that the schools were using forms that asked for information about students’ birthplace, Nolt said, raising concerns that the form “might chill” undocumented immigrants’ willingness to enroll. The schools voluntarily agreed to change the form. Officials at the two schools acknowledged that they had been the subject of federal civil rights complaints about underidentifying and underserving students who need extra support learning English as a second language. BASIS DC has also received complaints about its services for students with disabilities. But officials from both schools said that no one has ever complained about discrimination in enrollment. And Dresden, the head of school at Capital City, said the enrollment form that drew scrutiny from federal investigators was generated by a citywide education agency. In a strongly worded letter to parents Friday afternoon, Dresden said that Capital City had been “misrepresented” by the Education Department and subsequent news stories. “As you know, Capital City has always been committed to serving immigrant students and their families,” Dresden wrote. “We work hard to remove barriers that are typically faced by immigrant families and to support our students and their families in positive ways, and will continue to do so.”

What taxpayers should know about the cost of school choice

School choice proponents often attack their critics by saying that anyone who doesn’t support choice programs — charter schools, voucher programs, tax scholarship credits — love the status quo and don’t care that children are trapped in failing traditional public schools. So let’s stipulate from the start: Now let’s move on. School choice proponents say that the programs they support do a better job of educating students and that parents have a right to choose the schools they want for their children. Some choice supporters have voiced support for more oversight of charter schools, but the overall thrust of the movement is for expansion of choice, not oversight. Critics say that charter and voucher schools do not do a better job than traditional schools overall, that they reduce resources traditional districts need to improve and educate the vast majority of America’s schoolchildren who attend them, that they are not held to the same standards as traditional schools and that they are not accountable to the public. President Trump has promised to expand school choice — and the Republican-led Congress wants to do the same. Trump has nominated a choice advocate, Betsy DeVos, as his education secretary, who is seen by critics as seeking to privatize public education, though her supporters say she isn’t. This is School Choice Week, a time when organizations that promote charter schools and/or vouchers and/or tax scholarship credits stage literally thousands of rallies (21,392 to be exact, according to the week’s own website) across the country to let Americans know how great school choice programs are. Do not expect to hear, at any of these, about this:   Those are just two of many recent stories of investigations into problems at charter schools across the country that underscore big problems with the sector in some states that choice boosters don’t like to highlight when telling the public about their successes. Of course traditional public schools and districts have serious problems, too, but charters were sold to the public — by Republicans and Democrats — as a solution. In this post, Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal, writes about the costs of school choice that proponents don’t like to talk about. Burris is now executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group, the Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She has been writing about the problems of corporate school reform — school choice and standardized test-based accountability systems — and wrote a series for this blog about the troubled charter sector in California. By Carol Burris It is School Choice Week, the time that true believers in “free market” education celebrate charter and online schools, home-schoolers and vouchers/tax credit programs that use public money to pay for private and religious school tuition. They don’t talk much about traditional public schools as a choice for parents. School Choice Week represents PR work at its best. Throughout the week, some politicians will promise parents that any kind of school they want is okay — and the taxpayers will be happy to foot the bill. The truth is, however, American taxpayers cannot afford to run the multiple systems of K-12 education that the “choicers” desire, nor would it be in the best interest of children to do so. We have been experimenting with taxpayer-funded choice for two decades, and the evidence is clear. We have wasted billions in tax dollars, with no comprehensive evidence that charters, online schools and vouchers have resulted in increased academic performance of American students. It is time we have an honest discussion about the true cost of school choice. It is a policy with steep fiscal consequences for our communities and our nation. Here is what every taxpayer should know:      Imagine manages charters in 11 states. Leona Group, LLC has charters in five states.      Whether charters receive funding from the district, or directly from the state, the costs of running an additional school system are passed on to taxpayers. In the case of district funding, this directly results in fewer resources for public school students.            I think readers get the idea. What makes all of the above more alarming is that it is not even close to an exhaustive list. The above is a small sample of charter scandals that have taken place in the past year and a half.  Voucher schools are not without their own scandals.  Indiana lawmakers passed a  state school voucher program — with help from then governor Mike Pence, who is now the U.S. vice president — promising that it would help poor and lower-middle class families find schools they like for their childrenbut as it turned out, five years after it began, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools and many vouchers are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.  I suspect that Betsy DeVos and her followers would say that all of the above is the price we must pay to keep charters free of regulations. But if regulations are the problem, and deregulation the solution, why don’t the “choicers” push to deregulate public schools? Shouldn’t their creativity be unleashed as well? The reason they do not is obvious. For “choicers,” the marketplace is the first love.  Contemporary, extreme conservatism sees government as having only two functions — policing and defense. True believers do not want communities assuming the responsibility of educating children; they believe that education is the responsibility of the family. And if the child does not have a responsible or wise advocate, or falls prey to a fraudulent scheme, well, Annie, it’s a hard-knock life. In her open letter to Sen. Lamar Alexander, which questions the senator’s support for DeVos, education historian and public education advocate Diane Ravitch had the following to say:

D.C. charter school under scrutiny for lack of special-ed students

A Northwest Washington public charter school that has not enrolled a special education student in three years is under scrutiny by District officials. Roots Public Charter School, which serves 120 children in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, said it does not discriminate against students with physical or emotional disabilities. But the staff of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which oversees the city’s 57 publicly funded, independently operated schools, says in a recent report that it has “grave concerns” about admissions practices at Roots. It said the board planned “an intensive compliance review” of the school. Federal law requires that all public schools provide “a free and appropriate” education to students with disabilities. Charter schools, which are open to all families citywide on a first-come, first-served basis, are prohibited from inquiring about a prospective student’s special education status. About 10 percent of the city’s 29,366 charter school students were eligible to receive special education services in the 2010-11 school year, according to enrollment data. Roughly 13 percent of students in traditional D.C. public schools are in special education. The inquiry into Roots comes as charter school treatment of special-needs students has been called into question in the District and across the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing the Louisiana Department of Education on behalf of thousands of disabled New Orleans students. Last year, the Bazelon Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, filed a complaint with the Justice Department claiming that some of the District’s charters openly discourage parents from enrolling disabled children, especially those with significant needs. Traditional D.C. public schools serve the vast majority of “Level 4” students — those with the most profound emotional or physical disabilities. Most Level 4 charter students are concentrated at two schools, St. Coletta and Options. The Justice Department is gathering information about the complaint, which did not name Roots or other individual schools. Roots, tucked into a converted garage in the Lamond-Riggs neighborhood, opened in 1999 built around Nguzo Saba, the seven principles of African heritage: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Part of its mission is to “prepare students to break the chains of psychological conditioning that attempt to keep them powerless in all phases of society,” its Web site says. Class sizes are small, with a 1-to-10 teacher-student ratio. About 60 percent of Roots students read at proficient or advanced levels on the 2011 DC CAS. The charter board’s new performance rating system places the school in “Tier 2,” the middle of its three tiers. School officials said they have served special education students over the years, but just not in the past three. Founder and Principal Bernida Thompson said the school often draws parents who don’t want their children labeled as needing special services. “A lot of parents who go here feel that too many black children are labeled special-ed and that this is a conspiracy against black children, and they don’t want that,” Thompson said. “Ours is an African-centered school. They learn about their heritage, and it gives them power and strength.” Roots officials also said the school’s open design, with no walls separating classrooms, makes it less attractive to parents of children who have attention-deficit issues or require time away from their classes to receive special services. Charter board members said they are not accusing Roots of wrongdoing but that the unusual absence of special education students merits investigation. “It does seem odd that any of our schools would have no students with disabilities enrolled,” board member Darren Woodruff said. Board members also said that they could not account for why Roots was able to go for three years without a special education student before questions were asked. “We weren’t on top of it,” Vice Chairman John “Skip” McKoy said. “And [the school officials] weren’t on top of it.”

Do your homework, Ms. DeVos

BETSY DEVOS begins her tenure as U.S. education secretary with the dubious distinction of being the only Cabinet member in history to need the tie- breaking vote of the vice president to win Senate confirmation. That she barely squeaked by — due in no small measure to her poor performance at her confirmation hearing — hopefully impresses upon her the need to do some homework and assemble a competent team. We say that not as critics but rather as believers in a principle she has espoused: the need to open up more educational choices and opportunity for American families who are denied options that the more privileged — including some of those who have been most overwrought in their opposition to Ms. DeVos — take for granted. The debate about Ms. DeVos has been unprecedented for someone heading up a department that represents a minuscule portion of the federal budget. But much of it centered on her status as a billionaire, her silly comment about the need for school personnel to be armed against grizzlies and her inability to answer fundamental questions about educational policy and practice. We don’t dismiss concerns raised by her faltering performance or the disservice done by Republicans in cutting off legitimate questions from Democrats. But now that she has been confirmed, the focus must shift. Most critical will be how she — a passionate advocate of school choice in pretty much all forms — aims to reform what she calls the “one-size-fits-all model” of schooling that she rightly says is not equipped to meet the needs of every child. We would urge her to take a good, hard look at the education system in the District, where a commitment to public schools (both traditional and charter) and the judicious use of private school vouchers to help economically disadvantaged students have given parents options and helped improve student outcomes. She should pay particular attention to the hard lessons D.C. officials learned in the early years of public charter schools, when lax authorizations and poor oversight allowed some terrible schools to open and stay in business. Today, the D.C. Public Charter School Board stands as a national model for accountability, while reforms in the public school system — matched with an investment of resources — have made it one of the fastest- improving urban districts in the country. The education system in Michigan, where Ms. DeVos worked for the expansion of charters and private school vouchers with little accounting for how students actually performed, suffers in comparison. So there are lessons to be learned. Let’s hope Ms. DeVos is a quick study. **Read more here:** The Post’s View: ‘Steady progress’ in D.C. schools Elizabeth Wade: I never cared much about politics. Then Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to his Cabinet. Michael J. Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio: The good news in D.C.’s test scores The Post’s View: What a new report shows about D.C. schools Colbert I. King: In D.C. schools, the racial gap is a chasm, not a crack

New collaboration on D.C. schools

The D.C. Public Schools and the Public Charter School Board have traditionally operated in silos, each pursuing its unique mission. DCPS maintains a system of neighborhood schools with seats guaranteed to anyone within prescribed boundaries. The PCSB oversees schools open to all comers citywide. Decisions about openings, closings, program offerings and facilities have, more often than not, been made in isolation. Last month’s IFF report on school capacity is the latest sign that the silos are about to come down. Among its recommendations for improving education in the city’s most underserved neighborhoods is “a sustained and coordinated effort” between the 123-school public system and the community of 53 publicly funded, independently operated schools. The report, which divides all public and public charter schools into quartiles based on test score trends, urges the city to invest in middle-of-the-pack, “Tier 2” schools to make them more effective. But it also sees charters playing a key role in some of the 10 “neighborhood clusters” — most of them south and east of the Anacostia River — identified as most in need of better education options. The report recommended that the city take steps to improve or close 41 schools in what it called Tier 4, the lowest quartile. Most of those are in DCPS. The report also recommended that any school seats lost in that process should be replaced by seats in high-performing charter or regular public schools. While city officials stress that no final decisions will be made without careful discussion at the community level, IFF recommends that the city “coordinate the closure of DCPS schools with PCSB. As necessary, authorize a charter school within the same building or in the immediate vicinity before school closure. With cooperation and coordination between DCPS and PCSB, PCSB can use the buildings as incentives to recruit the highest-performing charter school operators into the Top Ten priority neighborhood clusters.” Scott Pearson, the charter board’s new executive director, said he welcomes the prospect of collaboration. “I came into this job excited about the idea of working in a more coordinated way with my partners in the public schools,” said Pearson, a former U.S. Department of Education official and co-founder of a San Francisco charter management organization. He was appointed by the board in December to manage PCSB staff, consult with board members on charter issues and represent them in dealings with schools and city officials. It will mean a change in the way the seven-member board, appointed by the mayor, does business. When it votes to authorize the opening of a school — as it has done more than 50 times in its 15-year history — it has been with little consideration to location. IFF recommended that the board issue “geographic and grade specific requests for charter school proposals” aimed at the 10 neighborhood clusters. Pearson said the board will work with Deputy Mayor De’Shawn Wright and Chancellor Kaya Henderson on a more concerted approach. “If we see that there are neighborhoods where there is a dearth of quality schools, we should try to focus quality charter operators to open there,” Pearson said, especially if surplus DCPS buildings are available. But, he added, “I don’t think we would get to the point where we would be so prescriptive we would tell schools that they can’t open anywhere but these neighborhoods.” A number of cities have been fostering more collaboration between traditional school districts and charters. A new report by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education noted “a paradigm shift” taking hold in cities such as New York, Baltimore, Denver and Boston, “from two decades of animosity and winner-take-all competition toward strategic collaboration and partnership.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting formal district-charter agreements with funding in 14 cities. Pearson said he plans to look locally and nationally for top charter organizations interested in locating in the neighborhoods targeted by IFF. “I think one of the strengths of the charter sector in D.C. is that so many of the charter schools and so many high-performing schools are home grown,” he said, referring to E.L. Haynes, Washington Latin, D.C. Prep, Two Rivers and other charter schools. One thing Pearson said he does not see: charters somehow replacing traditional public schools in the neighborhoods highlighted by IFF. The city would risk eligibility for federal funding if charter schools operated with some kind of neighborhood admissions preference, he said. “It’s a very dangerous, slippery slope,” Pearson said. “For every neighborhood preference that says ‘This makes a lot of sense,’ there are lot of examples where it would be a bad idea. Once you open the door to that it becomes very difficult to decide which neighborhood preferences would be helpful.”

McDuffie presses inspector general for more information on D.C. schools cheating probe

D.C. Council Member Kenyan McDuffie on Wednesday renewed his criticism of the city’s inspector general for conducting an “anemic” investigation of test-cheating allegations in D.C. Public Schools. In a strongly worded letter to Inspector General Charles Willoughby, McDuffie (D-Ward 5) requested permission to review confidential files compiled during that investigation. The probe lasted 17 months, focused on one school and found no evidence of widespread cheating. “I am gravely concerned that your investigation did not reach further than Noyes Elementary School,” said McDuffie, a former prosecutor and chairman of the council committee that oversees the inspector general’s office. McDuffie’s request came days after the publication of a 2009 memo that warned school administrators that teachers in as many as 70 schools might have cheated on standardized tests in 2008. Chancellor Kaya Henderson and her predecessor Michelle Rhee both said they didn’t recall receiving the memo, which an outside consultant prepared. School system officials said the memo was based on incomplete information and the memo itself — based on an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets — cautions that more information would be needed to draw firm conclusions. But McDuffie said the document raises questions about whether D.C. officials have adequately investigated long-standing suspicions of cheating. “While I do not wish to make inflammatory accusations, the discovery of this memorandum creates doubt that your investigation thoroughly and expansively examined the allegations,” McDuffie wrote. McDuffie first raised questions about Willoughby’s cheating investigation in January. The council member made clear in his letter Wednesday that he was unmoved by the inspector general’s explanation for limiting the probe to one school. Two other investigations — by a DCPS-hired company and a federal inspector general — also found no evidence of widespread cheating, but neither examined the tests from 2008. Teachers and principals at schools that made large test-score gains that year were awarded thousands of dollars in bonuses. McDuffie said there is an “alarming disparity” between the cheating probe in the District and a cheating probe in Atlanta, where officials interviewed 2,000 people before indicting 35 teachers and principals on cheating charges. Willoughby could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday evening. He will face council members Thursday morning when he testifies during a hearing on test integrity in the D.C. schools. Also scheduled to testify are Chancellor Kaya Henderson; Jose Alvarez, chief of staff for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education; Abigail Smith, the Acting Deputy Mayor for Education; and John “Skip” McCoy, chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board.

D.C. mayor to seek chartering authority for schools chancellor

Mayor Vincent C. Gray is set to introduce legislation that would give the D.C. schools chancellor authority to approve new charter schools, a measure meant to improve academic options in long-struggling neighborhoods. Gray is expected to announce the proposal in his weekly radio address Sunday morning, according to spokesman Pedro Ribeiro. The aim is to give Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson a way to attract successful charter operators and a tool to turn around chronically low-performing traditional schools, according to remarks prepared for the mayor’s Sunday address. Gray’s office also made a summary of the legislation available. “We’ve seen some major improvements in our schools,” according to Gray’s text. “But I want to see more gains, and I want to see them faster.” His proposal is another sign of the city’s tilt toward charter schools, publicly funded and independently operated schools that have grown quickly in recent years and now enroll 43 percent of the city’s students. Henderson first expressed an interest in chartering authority more than a year ago, arguing that it would allow her to create schools free of bureaucratic rules and regulations that she said hamper traditional schools. A number of outside charter operators have expressed interest in working with the school system, benefiting from its resources and purchasing power, according to Henderson. “I think the time is now to learn from the past and think toward the future for what our students need,” she said in a statement. “Chartering authority is another tool we can use to help improve student achievement, one that we will use only in the right situations, as strategically as possible, to provide better outcomes for students.” Besides giving new authority to the chancellor, the mayor is also proposing to allow some charter schools — those located in “high need” areas of the city — to become neighborhood schools, which students living nearby would have a right to attend. “High need” has yet to be defined. Charter schools enroll students from across the city, holding lotteries when demand exceeds space. That policy is meant to offer equal access to all children but has led to outcry from District residents clamoring for stronger neighborhood schools that can help define communities. The District’s old school board had chartering power until 2007, when Mayor Adrian M. Fenty took control of the city’s traditional school system. The board — mainly responsible for running a troubled urban school system — struggled to provide oversight of its charters and allowed problems to go too long unaddressed, according to a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office. Now the independent D.C. Public Charter School Board is the only entity that can authorize new charter schools in the city. The charter board supports the mayor’s proposal, said spokeswoman Theola Labbé-DeBose, and is willing to help the chancellor become an effective authorizer. Schools chartered by the chancellor would operate with the same independence as existing charters, with control over budgets, curricula and staff. But test scores posted by chancellor-chartered schools would count toward the school system’s overall proficiency rates. Like existing charters, employees of the city school system’s charters would not be required to unionize, according to Gray officials. Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders said he could not comment until he sees the legislation, expected to be introduced in the D.C. Council next week. Longtime education activist Cathy Reilly, president of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators, wondered why the chancellor needs to bring in outside organizations to improve the city’s schools. “I feel she’s given up being a leader of the municipal system,” Reilly said. “Why can’t we do good DCPS schools without an outside operator?” D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee, also questioned whether the chancellor needs chartering authority in order to provide schools with more flexibility. “But if the case can be made that giving the chancellor chartering authority would improve student achievement, I would welcome that,” Catania said. “I look forward to the conversation.”

D.C. Council bill would make cheating on standardized tests illegal

Cheating on standardized tests in the District would be illegal under a bill introduced in the D.C. Council, and a teacher or principal found guilty of violating the law would lose his professional license and face a fine of thousands of dollars. The measure — which council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) and colleagues Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) introduced Tuesday — comes in response to persistent allegations that cheating led to inflated scores in some D.C. public schools between 2008 and 2010. “District parents deserve a testing system where cheating does not occur and, more importantly, where cheating cannot occur,” Catania said. “And our educators deserve to have student gains beyond dispute or reproach.” Eight other council members signed on as co-sponsors, and a spokesman said Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) supports the measure. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) publishes testing guidelines that require the D.C. Public Schools system and each independent charter school to create a test-security plan and outline sanctions for employees who violate procedures. The bill introduced Tuesday would for the first time turn those expectations into law. The OSSE would be responsible for enforcement. OSSE officials said the proposal does not appear to depart significantly from current guidelines. D.C. school system officials said they were still reviewing the legislation and declined to comment. The D.C. Public Charter School Board is not opposed to the bill, spokeswoman Audrey Williams said. The charter board monitors security protocols at some schools, and if the bill transfers that responsibility to the OSSE, “we have no problem with that,” Williams wrote in an e-mail. ****Suspicions of widespread cheating in D.C. schools have simmered since 2011, whenUSA Today published an investigation showing that more than 100 schools had an unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures on student answer sheets. Such erasures, experts have said, could indicate cheating. Several investigations followed, including by D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby and the U.S. Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Those probes found isolated instances of cheating but cleared the school system of widespread wrongdoing. Skeptics have continued to question whether the investigations were thorough enough to find the truth. Questions intensified last month after news that a former principal had filed a federal whistleblower complaint alleging “systemic” cheating at her school, Noyes Elementary. The principal, Adell Cothorne, also alleged on national television that she witnessed suspicious behavior among teachers at Noyes. When she tightened test security out of concern about cheating, the school’s test scores fell by more than 25 percentage points. The revelations led to calls for the council to investigate further. Catania, chairman of the council’s Education Committee, said in an interview that he doesn’t have the staff or resources to replicate the work of previous investigators and that he would rather concentrate on ensuring that future tests are secure. The bill specifies behaviors that would be illegal, including changing students’ answers, looking at test questions before the test is administered, coaching students toward correct answers, possessing test materials outside of specified testing times and leaving secure test materials unattended. Violators would not be subject to criminal charges but to administrative sanctions that the OSSE would impose. Such sanctions could include a fine of up to $10,000 for each violation, having to pay any costs the city incurs while dealing with the security breach, and revocation or suspension of an employee’s professional credentials. At least 10 states have test-integrity laws on the books, Catania said. Among them is Virginia, where teachers caught violating test-security measures can lose their licenses or be fined. The D.C. measure was referred to the Education Committee, as were two other school-related bills introduced Tuesday. Wading into the battle over Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to close 15 city schools, Barry introduced a bill to give the council say over school closures. He said the measure would “provide for more checks and balances” on the chancellor and mayor, who have unilateral authority to close schools. It’s not clear that Barry’s colleagues want to enter the school-closure fray. Only one member — Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7), who has called for a moratorium on closures in her ward — joined as a co-sponsor. Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) introduced a bill that would require all D.C. public schools to employ a full-time librarian as well as art, music and physical education teachers. “We are spending far too much money to not have these available to our children,” said Evans, who was joined by seven co-sponsors. A similar bill Evans proposed last year went nowhere. A spokeswoman for the school system said officials were reviewing both bills and could not comment.

Black girls at Mass. school win freedom to wear hair braid extensions

After stern admonishments from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, the Boston-area charter school that punished black girls for wearing braided hair extensions decided Sunday to suspend its controversial dress code policies that parents and activists say unfairly target children of color. The Mystic Valley Regional Charter School first came under fire earlier this month for its hair — which ban hair extensions and hair more than two inches in height — after the parents of twin 15-year-olds Mya and Deanna Cook spoke to local media. They said their daughters had been kicked off school sports teams, banished from prom and received hours of detention for refusing to change their professionally braided hair. Then last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a discrimination complaint with the state Education Department, and school officials met with state Attorney General Maura Healey. On Friday came the strongly worded letter, which said the attorney general’s office was investigating allegations that the school didn’t hold white students to the same standards. Mystic Valley may be in violation of state and federal law, the letter said. It also instructed school officials to immediately stop enforcing the policy and withdraw any planned discipline for students, including the Cook twins. The school had said previously that its strict dress code, which also bans makeup, nail polish and dyed hair, is meant to reduce wealth disparity among students. But the letter from Healey’s office, written by Civil Rights Division Chief Genevieve C. Nadeau, says that portions of the dress code “are not reasonably tailored to those goals, if they bear any relation at all.” The school called for an emergency meeting of the public charter school’s board of trustees, which gathered Sunday. Officials were met by nearly 100 students, parents and community leaders who organized a rally with civil rights organizations before the meeting then stayed to watch, Aaron Cook, the father of the Cook twins, told The Washington Post. But instead of publicly discussing the dress code issue, the board immediately went into a private executive session and “disappeared,” Cook said. As the board of trustees moved into a private room for their executive meeting, the room full of attendees chanted “Let them learn!” and “Hey hey! Ho ho! This racist policy’s got to go!” Maya and Deanna Cook carried signs that said “Policy Disrespects Black Girls” and “We will not stop!!!” Another sign read, “Braids are beautiful.” After waiting for two hours, Cook, his wife Colleen and their daughters left the meeting. About 30 minutes later, the board emerged and announced they would suspend the policies under investigation through the end of this school year, which commences in late June.  The Cooks took that to mean their daughters will not have to serve the 18 hours each of detention they had been assigned, though they plan to seek further clarification from the school. Deanna, a talented track runner, will be able to resume practicing with her teammates and compete at the state finals in two weeks, Aaron Cook said. And they hope Mya, who was told she couldn’t attend the prom, will get to dance now. The Cooks are only cautiously optimistic, though.  His daughters, both sophomores and academically strong students, came to school in mid-April with braided hair extensions — essentially braids that combine artificial hair with their own hair — after telling their parents they no longer wanted to chemically straighten their hair. They were learning more about black culture, they told their parents, who are white. The twins were adopted as toddlers, along with their three younger black siblings. The dress code debate has sparked a broader conversation about diversity at the school, Cook said. Frustrated students at the school previously told the Boston Globe that they had experienced a lack of racial sensitivity at the school, which is located about 10 miles north of Boston. The student body is fairly diverse, which is part of the reason the Cooks chose it years ago. Of the 1,500 students there in grades K-12, 43 percent are people of color and within that, 17 percent are black, according to numbers from U.S. News and World Report. But just one of the more than 150 teachers and staffers at Mystic Valley is black, reported the Boston Globe, and Cook said there are no African Americans on the school’s board of trustees. He said the parents and students protesting the policy want a total overhaul, not just to the student handbook, but to the school leadership. More diversity, he said, is vital. “They put on a Band-Aid on a symptoms through the end of the year. It’s certainly a positive step in the right direction, but it’s not over,” Cook told The Post. “I’m hopeful that they will permanently revise their policy so that they do not target girls of color.” The Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, which criticized the school’s policies from the beginning, praised the board’s decision Sunday night.

D.C. test erasures scandal needs full probe

What exactly did Wayne Ryan do that cost him his job? Every District politician, educator and civic activist ought to be demanding an answer to that question. What? You don’t know who Wayne Ryan is? The public’s lack of awareness is part of the problem. And the District school system seems to want to keep it that way by apparently allowing a quiet coverup of past fake results on its standardized exams. Ryan was once the star principal at Noyes Education Campus (K-8) in Northeast. His was one of the faces used to promote former chancellor Michelle Rhee’s education reforms. Recruiting literature featured Ryan’s photo and purported success raising students’ test scores. Then that pesky controversy emerged over suspiciously high numbers of erasures on some of those exams. Correct answers had mysteriously replaced wrong ones on a large number of test sheets, including at Noyes when Ryan was in charge. In June came news that Ryan, who had been promoted to a supervisory position, was no longer working for the school system. No explanation has been provided, then or now, and some parents are frustrated about it. “We heard about it one moment, and then it got brushed underneath. My thing was, is anybody going to investigate this? If not, how do you know it’s not going to happen again?” said Ashaunti Wilson, 26, as she accompanied a friend dropping a child at Noyes on Wednesday. Wilson withdrew her 8-year-old daughter from the school and moved her to a charter school because of the scandal. “It was just pathetic,” she said. “I like knowing where my child is [academically]. If you’re making her test scores higher, it’s impossible.” Ernest Butler, 45, who was dropping off his nephew and niece at Noyes, is happy with the school, but he faulted its handling of the testing scandal. “They need to let people know what’s going on, what was the outcome of it. Test scores and grades are very important,” Butler said. It seems quite likely, to say the least, that Ryan was fired or pressured to quit over falsified test results. A third-grade teacher and a special-ed instructor also lost their jobs. No details have been provided, and almost nothing has emerged about classes in about 100 other schools with suspect numbers of erasures from 2008 to 2010. Considering that such erasures were first identified as a problem more than three years ago, it’s appalling that the District hasn’t gotten to the bottom of this. Initial investigations by an outside contractor called Caveon are widely viewed as incomplete. Caveon has admitted it didn’t use all the tools at its disposal. Some District officials concede the city didn’t insist that the contractor do so — while promising that vetting of tests from 2011 and beyond will be more rigorous. We’re still waiting for results of a second investigation of past irregularities, underway for nearly a year, by the District’s Office of the Inspector General and the U.S. Department of Education. Neither would comment this week. That lackadaisical approach compares poorly with an energetic probe of a testing scandal in Atlanta. In 2010, after months of foot-dragging by the school system (sound familiar?), then-Gov. Sonny Perdue tapped three veteran investigators to dig into the problem. Their blockbuster report concluded that more than 178 educators, including 38 principals, were involved in cheating at 44 schools. D.C. officials insist that past problems here weren’t nearly as bad as in Atlanta. But without a full investigation, how can we be sure that current principals or other officials have been held accountable if they previously conspired to falsify test results or winked at those who did so? It wasn’t reassuring that the school system seemed to be stonewalling again in December. After promising for months that it was about to release test erasure data for 2011, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education decided in December to withhold the names of 54 schools involved. Tamara Reavis, the office’s director of assessments and accountability, said the office did not want to fan suspicions about any school until after a fuller inquiry by an outside contractor. “It’s the whole innocent until proven guilty idea,” Reavis said. Cate Swinburn, who in January became the school system’s chief of data and accountability, said the focus should be on the future. “One reason I don’t think we can do much more about 2008 and 2009 is it would be a witch hunt. If you interview a student, a student is not going to remember what happened,” she said. “I think we need to focus on 2011 and then making sure that 2012 is as strong as possible.” It might be convenient just to pretend these problems never happened. But it’s hardly the lesson we want to teach our children about integrity. The city owes the public a full accounting of whether Wayne Ryan — and possibly other principals — cheated in the past.

Hogan again tries to increase the number of charter schools in Maryland

After a failed attempt in his first year in office, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) is trying once again to increase the number of charter schools in Maryland by proposing to loosen the rules that govern the publicly-funded, independently- run schools and create an independent body with the power to authorize such institutions. Hogan said Wednesday that he will propose legislation that would give charter schools oversight over hiring and firing, more power to set an admissions criteria, greater access to capital funds and an increased say over curriculum, books and professional development. The bill would also create a panel, known as the Maryland Public Charter School Authority, to approve new charter schools. Currently, charters must be are approved by local school districts and adhere to rules set by the state Department of Education. Hogan, a champion of school choice, said the state’s current charter-school law is “restrictive, vague and has consistently rendered the state unable to compete for millions of dollars of federal charter-school grants.” “I believe that every child in Maryland deserves access to a world-class education regardless of what neighborhood they happen to grow up in,” Hogan said in a statement. “The proposals we are announcing today ensure that we will continue to increase the choices available to Maryland families and provide high-quality education for all Maryland children.” Hogan tried to overhaul the state’s charter law in 2015, but the General Assembly watered down the legislation. Wednesday’s announcement drew fierce opposition from the state teachers’ union, which said the governor’s proposal undermines important protections against fraud, waste and abuse. “Gov. Hogan’s proposal amounts to an open invitation to for-profit entities to set up shop in Maryland and make money off our kids’ education,” said Sean Johnson, government relations director of the Maryland State Education Association. “His proposal to create an independent authorizing board for charter schools would lead to the same school privatization and fraud we have seen in other states.” Union officials also accused the governor of an “outright lie” in the news release announcing his proposal. The release said local boards of education “have funded public charter schools at far lesser rates than traditional schools.” A recent report by the American Institutes for Research, which studied the funding for charter and traditional schools in Maryland, found that all but one school district funds charter schools at a higher per student rate than traditional public schools. Shareese Churchill, a spokeswoman for Hogan, said his statement referred to the fact that charter schools currently cannot compete with traditional charter schools for construction funds, creating a disparity. Hogan’s proposal would make those funds available.

Behind the D.C. school lottery scandal: A ‘crisis in confidence ’

By some key measures, public schools in the nation’s capital look better than they did a decade ago when reformers upended the system. Enrollment has steadily increased in the past five years, high school graduation rates have improved, and most students are scoring higher on standardized exams. Schools boast state-of-the-art facilities after a rebuilding spree, and the system has invested in rewarding and keeping good teachers. So why did former D.C. Public C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson feel she needed to boost confidence in the system by giving high-ranking officials special treatment to help their children get into sought-after schools? All those systemic improvements, it turns out, weren’t enough. DCPS still suffers from a “crisis in confidence,” as Henderson told city investigators in a report The Washington Post disclosed this month detailing her actions to help certain families get around the D.C. school lottery. Images can’t be remade simply by having better test scores or shinier buildings. And Henderson believed that having more VIPs in the schools could matter in turning the system’s reputation around. For decades, DCPS hasn’t educated a president’s child. President Trump and Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton all opted to send their children to private schools. Thousands of other families in the city do the same. Additionally, nearly half the city’s public school students enroll in charter schools. Experts say school leaders in systems with tattered reputations will try everything they can to change the system’s image. Some say schools benefit from attracting wealthier families into their schools, as Henderson was trying to do, because research suggests schools benefit academically when they enroll students from a wide spectrum of economic backgrounds, from poor to rich. “Endorsement from parents who are considered peers is probably more powerful than what any principal or superintendent will say about a school system,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The the Century Foundation and an expert on school integration. D.C. Inspector General Daniel W. Lucas found that Henderson helped well-connected parents bypass the city’s lottery to enroll their children in coveted schools. Lucas found Henderson misused her authority by giving preferential treatment to seven of 10 people who requested special school placements for their children during the 2015 lottery season. In at least three of those placements, Henderson told investigators that she approved the placements because she wanted to boost the reputation of the school system. “She felt it looks good for the school district when an elected official reaches out about attending a D.C. public school,” Lucas’s report said of one of the placements. The report does not name the parents who benefited from Henderson’s actions. However, a former city official with knowledge of the school placements provided documents identifying four of them as City Administrator Rashad M. Young, D.C. Deputy Mayor Courtney Snowden, former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty and Roberto J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez, who served in the White House as an education adviser to Obama. The former official provided the information on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. In three of those placements, Henderson told investigators that she wanted influential city and federal workers to have a seat in D.C. schools. Asked about the Rodríguez placement, Henderson told investigators that when people in the White House send their children to a DCPS school, it “shows high-ranking officials’ trust in the school system, leading to the theory that it will show others should also trust the DCPS school system.” Henderson declined an interview request, saying in an email that she has been advised by her attorneys not to make public statements until the conclusion of a D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability probe, but she said she appreciates an exploration of “this part of the story.” While the Lucas report lays bare how Henderson used her power to place the children of those with political clout in sought-after schools, it also revealed her apparent insecurity about the reputation of a school system that is trying to rebuild its image after a decade of school reform efforts that she helped lead. Most of the 48,000 students in DCPS come from low-income families: 75 percent qualify for free or reduced-price meals. In some schools, all students qualify. D.C. officials are pushing to take advantage of the city’s gentrification and to diversify their enrollment. Having middle- or upper-middle class families in schools sends a signal to other parents that there is trust in the school system, Kahlenberg said. Research has found that schools with balanced shares of middle- and low-income students do better academically than those with high concentrations of poverty. Kahlenberg called Henderson’s rationale in trying to attract high-powered families into the school system “half right.” He said he disagrees with Henderson’s methods. “If her argument is you are trying to instill confidence in the system, then using means that suggest to the average person that the system is rigged backfires,” Kahlenberg said. Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association and a former superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, said superintendents sometimes rely on quick fixes to repair their reputations. Having influential government leaders with children in schools can help improve the system’s image, he said. “You scratch and do the best you can in the short term, as Kaya tried to do,” Domenech said. “But it comes down to improving the system so the kids are getting the quality education that they need, and that will attract residents to the schools.”

Why charter schools need better oversight

Charter schools were designed to allow founders the freedom to design and run schools as they wish outside the traditional school system bureaucracy. Here’s a case for why some of that freedom needs to be reined in. This was written by Jeff Bryant, an associate fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and the owner of a marketing and communications consultancy that serves numerous organizations including Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, PBS, and International Planned Parenthood Foundation. He writes extensively about public education policy at The Education Opportunity Network, where this appeared. Follow Jeff on Twitter: jeffbcdm    *[WSU]: Wayne State University By Jeff Bryant There are undoubtedly wonderful charter schools in existence, and Americans generally have a favorable opinion of charters, but hardly a week goes by without news of a scandal or a study tarnishing their image.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University With schools reopening everywhere across the country, the past week or so was no exception in exposing new problems with an idea that was once thought of as a collaborative endeavor between teacher unions and school administrators aimed at serving struggling students, but has now become a heavily funded, well-marketed movement designed to siphon money away from traditional public schools.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Leading off the charter scandal parade was Pennsylvania where an auditor general found that the state’s largest charter school pocketed $1.2 million “in improper lease-reimbursement payments.” The scheme the school was running has become all too familiar to anyone following the nefariousness of some charter school operators.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University First, you take a building, “previously owned by one of the charter school’s founders,” according to this Philadelphia Inquirer story, and use municipal bonds to sell it – in this case, for $50.7 million – at very favorable terms to a “related nonprofit organization ‘established for the sole purpose of supporting’ the charter school.” Then “the same individual who was once the charter’s landlord” creates a for-profit management company to run the school. And voila, what was once a public endeavor focused on educating children for the sole purpose of raising the well being of the community becomes a financial bonanza for a few well-placed individuals – one of whom, in this case, just happens to be “a Republican fund-raiser” who served on the governor’s “transition team.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This Pennsylvania charter was no lone outlaw, as the state auditor noted. “His office had found similar problems at six other charter schools,” the Inquirer story said. **The Aspira Trifecta Scandal**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The litany of charter school scandals doesn’t stop there. Philadelphia, a city that is closing neighborhood schools and leaving school children bereft of art and music teachers due to a miserly state budget, is throwing millions – a projected $729 million – at charter schools. A recent report from Philadelphia City Paper revealed that not all of that money spent on charters goes to educating kids.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Once again, a “non-profit,” Aspira Inc. of Pennsylvania, set up to serve the interests of charter schools is playing a shell game with taxpayer money so a few folks get rich. Similar to other charter schemes, “millions of dollars have moved between the network of charter schools, their parent nonprofit, and two property-management entities.” Four charter schools in the Aspira chain loaned $3.3 million to Aspira “in addition to $1.5 million in lease payments to Aspira and Aspira-controlled property-management entities ACE and ACE/Dougherty, and $6.3 million in administrative fees paid to Aspira in 2012.” What seems pretty clear is that Aspira has used funds from it charters to acquire real estate: The network’s combined real-estate holdings increased from $13.34 million in 2011 to $23.15 million in 2012. But “in the event of a default on that loan,” according to the article, those real estate assets are not “at risk.” Convenient, no? Where is the school district in this affair? “We cannot conduct even limited financial audits of the parent organization,” according to a district spokesperson quoted in the report. And where is the state? Noted reporter Daniel Denvir in the Philadelphia CityPaper: “The state Auditor General, which has seen its staff reduced by 24 percent in recent years, doesn’t have the capacity to audit all the new charter schools that have opened in the past five years. Only three Philadelphia charter schools have been audited since 2008. Aspira’s five charters are not among them.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Cyber Scandals**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Even when there’s not real estate involved, charter schools in Pennsylvania find a way to make a buck at the expense of school kids. According to an article at The Raw Story, the founder of Pennsylvania’s largest “cyber charter,” that operates exclusively over the internet, “was charged with fraud, for funneling $8 million of the school’s funds into his personal companies and holdings.” The operator, Nicholas Trombetta, “allegedly used the tax payer money to purchase a plane, houses for his mother and girlfriend, and a million dollar Florida condo.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Looking deeper into the indictment, Crook’s and Liars blogger Karoli found that Trombetta not only headed the Pennsylvania online charter, called PA Cyber, but also set himself up as the CEO of an organization that provided curriculum and other services to online charter schools, including PA Cyber, and he created a “management group” to advise the organization he was CEO of. That’s quite a trifecta.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The list or recent charter school scandals isn’t confined to the Keystone State. In Texas, a charter school located in Houston was recently accused of funneling of $5.3 million in federal funds to questionable destinations, including ” hotels, cruises and travel packages,” six-figure salaries, and, again, a real estate scheme involving a management company and the charter school.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **“Zero Tolerance” For Struggling Students**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University A scandal of a different kind recently enveloped another charter chain operating in New York City. In an article in the Daily News, reporter Juan Gonzales revealed, “Success Academy, the charter school chain that boasts sky- high student scores on annual state tests, has for years used a “zero tolerance” disciplinary policy to suspend, push out, discharge or demote the very pupils who might lower those scores – children with special needs or behavior problems.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University One school in the Success chain, an elementary school, suspended 22 percent of its students at least once during the 2010-11 school year – “far above the 3% average” of other elementary schools in the district. According to Gonzales, Success Academy Success Academy chief Eva Moskowitz claimed that higher suspension rates helped achieve “order and civility in the classroom.” But high suspension rates invariably produce more school dropouts, and many states are now changing school discipline policies to reduce suspensions. Yet charter schools are often left free to determine their own discipline policies, despite the students they push out or drop out become the responsibility of other schools – or the criminal justice system.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University One charter chain operating in Connecticut, Achievement First, had such high suspension rates – including “shocking numbers” of kindergartners – that a state board is now reviewing the schools’ practices.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Another charter chain, Democracy Prep, has been condemned by parents of former students for its “zero tolerance” discipline policies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Innovation For Innovation’s Sake**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University What’s apparent from all these charter school scandals is that these schools need way more scrutiny and, yes, government regulation. But the charter movement and its ardent backers in state legislatures are adamantly against that. Charters, we’ve been told, “need to be free to innovate.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Yet for all the “freedom to innovate” that charter schools have, the results of these schools generally fall far short of being, well, innovative. In Ohio, a state thick with charter school “innovation” for 16 years, “charters statewide performed almost exactly the same on most measures of student achievement as the urban schools they were meant to reform,” according to an article in The Columbus Dispatch. “And when it comes to graduating seniors after four years of high school,” traditional public schools in Ohio’s urban communities “performed better.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The article, written by Bill Bush, continues, “What started as an experiment in fixing urban education through free-market innovation is now a large part of the problem. Almost 84,000 Ohio students – 87 percent of the state’s charter-school students – attend a charter ranking D or F in meeting state performance standards.” **A National Scandal**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Nationwide, the statistics on charter school “innovation” aren’t much better. The most recent comparison of charter school performance to traditional public schools nationwide found that more charter schools are doing better. But a careful analysis of the study showed only “a tiny real impact on the part of charter schools.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Taken into context – being freed from regulation, having the ability to select the most desirable students, implementing programs designed for test taking, having friends in high places to game the system – charter schools should be kicking the tails of traditional public schools, not barley eking out gains after years of promises and bluster.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Nevertheless, the myth of charter school magic is hard to crack. In Louisiana, when charter schools recently failed and were closed by the state, they were replaced with … more charter schools. In Tennessee, the worst performing school in the state is a charter … protected by lobbyists. And cyber charters and other online providers in the K-12 sphere notoriously under perform traditional schools … but are being ramped up by policy makers in many states.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University All of which denies the ‘first law of the hole’ that the charter movement keeps digging itself – and our nation’s school children – into.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University What is the first law of the hole? If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

D.C. would be stronger with a weaker mayor

The recent investigation into cheating in D.C. schools highlights a little-understood fact in the District: Our mayor has too much power. Every state-level agency charged with overseeing the mayor’s activities reports to the mayor — a level of control that exists nowhere else in the country. The agency that investigates cheating, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), is charged with overseeing our schools. But OSSE also reports to the mayor, the same official who runs most of the schools OSSE is supposed to oversee. The same conflict exists with the state-level agency charged with overseeing job training in the District. This agency, the Workforce Investment Council (WIC), reports to the same mayor who runs job training and wants voters to see his efforts to train job seekers as successful. D.C. residents often grow frustrated at the lack of accountability for those who are supposed to serve our children and our job seekers. The truth is that we can usher in a new era of accountability in education and job training very easily. We need to give the state-level agencies that oversee education and job training some of the independence that they enjoy in the 50 states. As with the D.C. chief financial officer, the heads of our state-level oversight agencies should have terms staggered with the mayor’s term and be dismissible only for cause. The political use of these oversight agencies by the District administration is obvious. OSSE released its report on cheating in D.C. schools on a Friday afternoon, a common tactic to hide bad news. By comparison, the state of Georgia released its damning report of widespread cheating in the Atlanta public school system on a Tuesday. Georgia investigated hundreds of Atlanta classrooms, finding cheating in 140. OSSE limited its investigation to 41 classrooms it “flagged” for investigation — 18 DCPS classrooms and 23 public charter school classrooms. When cheating was found to have taken place in 44 percent of them, including 67 percent of the DCPS classrooms examined, OSSE declined to investigate more classrooms. The state education superintendent claimed this “serves as proof that 99.4 percent [of classrooms] are following the rules.” The higher level of accountability in Atlanta is simple to understand. No one in Georgia’s state government reports to the mayor of Atlanta. In the District, everyone at OSSE reports to the mayor. Some will point out that there have been five cheating investigations by other agencies. But the question isn’t whether we found all the cheating in D.C. schools. These five investigations were optional, triggered by media reports of cheating. OSSE is the only agency required to audit test security and numerous other issues. The question, then, is whether we can count on OSSE to oversee D.C. schools when it reports to the same mayor that the schools do. In job training, too, the folks who oversee the mayor’s activities report to the mayor. For several years, the WIC met irregularly; when it did meet, members were told that they reported to the Department of Employment Services — the primary agency they were supposed to oversee. Under federal law, it is WIC’s job to certify the agencies charged with helping unemployed people find jobs and the training and literacy services they need to prepare for work — providers known as “one-stops.” But the District’s WIC has never certified one-stops and has certainly never decertified failing one-stops. OSSE has a similar responsibility to begin decertifying pre-kindergarten providers that fall short of quality standards by 2014. However, when I asked the deputy superintendent for early childhood education last year how many were likely to make the cut, she said that all D.C. pre-K providers were “gold”-rated and would be certified. D.C. residents sometimes chafe at the independence given to the city’s chief financial officer; it can feel like this restriction on the mayor’s authority over fiscal matters is a congressionally imposed punishment for previous waste and abuse. The reality is that our mayor possesses power over state oversight agencies unheard of in other cities. By giving the same independence to the heads of OSSE and the WIC that our chief financial officer enjoys, we can show that a weaker mayor is a sign of the District’s strength. We don’t need Congress to impose close oversight, because we are capable of overseeing ourselves. **Read more from Opinions:** The Post’s View: Keep the District’s chief financial officer independent

Will charter schools survive the confusing charter movement?

*[WSU]: Wayne State University Education Opportunity Network    *[WSU]: Wayne State University By Jeff Bryant America’s education policies are brimming with contradiction. Schools, we’re told, need more standardization, but parents need more choices, which standardization precludes. Teachers need to be held to more accountability, but entry into the teaching force needs to be easier with fewer qualifications. This kind of contradiction applies to one of the more contentious ideas often equated to school “reform” as well – charter schools. Just as states across the country are ramping up efforts to increase the number of charters, loosen government regulations of these schools and transfer accountability responsibilities from local boards and education administrative bodies to charter enthusiasts, proponents of charter schools are calling for tougher oversight of these schools that would result in many more of them being closed down. If all that seems at cross-purposes to you – and potentially, a colossal waste of time and money, not to mention a risky experiment on our children – then you simply do not understand the guiding principles of what has become known as the “charter school movement.” The existence of charter schools is, of course, nothing new. But the creation and expansion of charter schools is now being referred to as not just an idea for creating better schools in a community but as a “movement” with a messianic goal to expand the power and influence of education “reformers.” While the intent of some charter backers may have at one time been for educators and parents in a community to create a different learning space for students who weren’t being well served, that’s all changed now. Charters have instead ventured into a brave new world of a movement contradictory to the ends it purports to serve. **The Face Of Charter Movement-Building** ****    *[WSU]: Wayne State University If you’re not clear that the charter school movement is now mostly about creating charter schools for charter school’s sake, look at what’s happening in North Carolina. This past week, a new bill was introduced in the state Senate that would significantly weaken the oversight of the state’s charter schools and expand their numbers. An analysis by Rob Shofield of the left-leaning NC Policy Watch group, stated that “the proposed legislation makes charter schools even less accountable than they already are” by “replacing review bodies with cheerleaders,” diluting the qualifications of teachers allowed to work in the school, and keeping funds appropriated for failing charters in the hands of private interests instead of returning money to the state.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University These concerns caused the editorial staff of The Charlotte Observer to notice that the bill would remove “a lot of charter school accountability.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Nevertheless, according to the progressive NC policy Watch group, the bill had the “full support” of charter school activists and the conservative belief- tank community in the state.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This charter school proposal in North Carolina is not an isolated case. Other, similar bills have been trumpeted by conservative lawmakers in Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. According to Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet blog, “more than half of the states with charter-school laws” now provide loopholes to circumvent charter regulation.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In some states, charter enthusiasts are now even pushing for these schools to be exempted from new Common Core standards and assessments that are being demanded of traditional public schools across the nation.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The wave of charter school loophole proliferation is decidedly counter to what leading charter proponents have been proposing. **What About Charter “Quality?”**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Shortly after this current school year began, the principal trade group for charters, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), proposed the need for “tougher laws” governing charters and “said it’s time to rein in growth and focus on quality” according to USA Today’s Greg Toppo.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University NACSA reported their concern arose from the finding that “as many as 1,300 charter schools are in the lowest 15 percent of schools.” Nevertheless, states allowed the vast majority of charters to continue operation, blocking “fewer than one in seven schools” from renewal of their contracts. Stories of low-quality charter schools, in fact, have now become routine in local and national news. This past week, school officials in Ohio reported that a new rating system developed by Gov. John Kasich’s administration would grade over 70 percent of the states’ charters schools “F.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The president of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools said the grades “skewed charter schools’ results” because some of the student populations the charters serve are more challenging. But certainly traditional public schools serve many of these same challenging student populations as well. Meanwhile, another recent report from Ohio, revealed the state’s “charter schools cost the state twice as much per student as traditional schools” to operate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Outside Ohio, education historian Diane Ravitch looked at a recent study about the record of charter schools in Milwaukee, which extends over 20 years. She found, “There is no significant difference between the performance of public schools and charter schools. However, public schools in Milwaukee are more successful with the poorest students than are charter schools.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Also recently, a study by a Stanford-affiliated organization looked at the issue of charter school quality and found similar troubling signs that underperformance among charters was a significant and widespread problem. According to the study, “the performance of charter schools varies widely, even after state policy differences are taken into account,” and “high- performing charter schools are in the minority.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Further, the study found there was great “uncertainty of successful replication” of good quality charter schools. For instance, charter school “chains, called Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) “on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning.” Although the researchers concluded that some CMOs perform vastly better than others, the same can be said for traditional public schools, which casts doubt that there is something magic about charters that would give them vast powers to improve the performance of American K-12 education in general. Last week, widespread problems with poor quality charter schools prompted _The New York Times_ to declare in an editorial:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The revelation that charter schools have a quality problem is not lost on charter backers. Back to the USA Today article, Toppo quoted charter school proponent Caprice Young, “onetime head of the California Charter School Association,” who said the move to toughen standards on charters was “long overdue.” Another charter advocate, Nina Rees of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, chimed in that “authorizers” needed to “to get it right, whatever the numbers may be.” **Forgive My Noting**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Certainly if more charter schools are going to be shut down, someone has to do it. There has to be criteria for the closures, a system of notification and appeal, and a plan for determining what to do with students when their schools are closed. A board of charter school chums appointed by the governor hardly seems up to the job. So something that resembles “government regulation” and someone resembling “government regulators” seems to be in order here. Also, when charters are shut down, it would seem to make sense to create a means of ensuring charters of a similar nature don’t replace the closed schools. That also undoubtedly requires something resembling dreaded “government bureaucrats.” Further, when charters do out-perform regular neighborhood schools, someone has to ensure they aren’t simply gaming the system. For instance, a recent analysis at the website of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution looked at student populations of Georgia’s charters and saw a “demographic discrepancy between their student body and that of the area they serve,” which would likely skewer the charter schools’ academic results higher.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University These discrepancies went beyond race and income. Author Jay Bokman noted that in rural parts of the state, “charters attract students who would otherwise attend private schools,” which would artificially push their numbers up higher. Also, because “charters can require parents to volunteer as a condition of attendance, they draw families in which parental involvement – and the workplace and transportation flexibility needed to be parentally involved – are a given.” Bookman concluded, “That dynamic is an important reason to leave the authority to create charters with local officials who know their own communities”  – in other words, more bureaucracy. In short, the whole movement-driven notion that charter school proliferation should be enabled by lifting regulations and bureaucracy is completely contradictory to the imperative for higher quality charter schools. **A Pogo Moment For Charter Schools**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University An impartial observer of charter schools, Rutgers professor Bruce Baker, once hoped charters would be a possible source of “some creative, energetic leadership . . . that might be associated with a mission-driven start-up school, coupled with an ounce or two of deregulation.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Recently, however, his perception has changed. “This whole movement has gotten way out of control – it has morphed dramatically – especially the punditry and resultant public policy surrounding charter schooling. Sadly, I’m reaching a point where I now believe that the end result is causing more harm than good.” Baker concluded, “Many charter schools, and certainly the political movement of charter schooling, are no longer operating in the public interest.” Really, a quote from the USA Today article cited above said it all. When confronted with the evidence that poor quality charter schools are now more-so the norm than not, NACSA’s leader Greg Richmond declared, “We didn’t start the charter school movement in order to create more underperforming schools.” What Richmond apparently didn’t realize is that when you morph an idea or a strategy into a “movement,” you’re no longer in charge of where the movement leads. For any charter school enthusiast concerned about creating good schools, this is your Pogo moment when your search for the “enemy” of your “movement” has led you to a mirror. Look closely. Whether charter schools survive as a legitimate outcome of the collective effort of local citizens to educate children or become a scourge of low quality institutions devouring the common good for the sake of its own proliferation now depends mostly on you.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

New report cites $100 million-plus in waste, fraud in charter school industry

A new report  by two groups that oppose reforms that are privatizing public education finds fraud and waste totaling more than $100 million of taxpayer funds in 15 of the 42 states that operate charter schools. The report, titled “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, & Abuse,” and released by the nonprofit organizations Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy, cites news reports and criminal complaints from around the country that detail how some charter school operators have illegally used public money. It also makes policy recommendations, including a call for stopping charter expansion until oversight of charter operators is improved. Released during National Charter School Week, it notes that despite rapid growth in the charter industry, there is no agency at the federal or state level that has the resources to provide sufficient oversight.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The Obama administration has supported the spread of charter schools but has also called for better oversight. Proponents of charter schools say they provide choices for parents and competition for traditional public schools, but critics note that most don\\\’t perform any better — and some of them worse — than traditional public schools and take resources away from school districts. Some critics see the expansion of charter schools as part of an effort by some school reformers to privatize public education. The report details cases from state after state, among them: *In Washington D.C.: and *In Ohio: * In Wisconsin: * In California:

A cautionary tale about the fight over a charter school and the effect on a community

President Trump and his new education secretary, Betsy DeVos, have made clear that their interest in education is pushing more  school “choice” — charter schools, vouchers, etc. There are consequences to choice policies, though, and this post explains how the spread of charter schools can affect traditional public schools, the ones that educate the vast majority of America’s schoolchildren. This cautionary tale from Philadelphia was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She has been chronicling problems with corporate school reform for years on this blog, including with a series about troubled charter schools in California.   The popular rationale for charter schools is that they provide families with “choice.” Competition is good, proponents claim, and neighborhood schools will get better as they compete for students and resources. Increasing numbers of parents, however, argue that the opposite is happening. They complain that charters take away the choice they want — a public school in their neighborhood in easy walking distance from their home. The playing field is not even, they argue. Charters have more money to spend, and are favored by political forces. And when a charter chain aggressively lobbies to take over a public school, parents are pitted against each other. Surely that is no one’s choice. What follows is just such a story — that of Philadelphia’s John Wister Elementary, a neighborhood school replaced by a charter, and how that replacement tore a community apart.  John Wister Elementary School had 400 students, nearly all were black and from low-income families. The school was a part of the Germantown, Philadelphia, community since the 1950s. It was named for a prominent citizen from Revolutionary times whose historic home’s garden gate led to the school’s playground.  An understanding of Wister’s story requires background on school governance in Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s schools are governed by the School Reform Commission (SRC), a five-member board. Three members are appointed by the governor, and two are appointed by the mayor. The governor, therefore, has oversized influence over school governance in the city. And the previous governor, Tom Corbett, used that power to financially decimate the public schools.   Then the rules changed. The parent vote was taken away and the power to decide was given to Hite and the SRC. At the time of the announcement, Kenya Nation-Holmes was the mother of a kindergartner and a second-grade student at Wister. Nation-Holmes was furious that parents were no longer the decision makers in whether their school would become a charter. She also believed that a lack of involvement by parents was at the root of Wister’s trouble. And so she decided to get involved and help turn the school around in hopes that the superintendent would change his mind. “I organized parents and started a parent council. We began talking regularly with the principal. Things were getting better and we were going to fight to save our school,” Nation-Holmes told me.   The Mastery Charter School chain, known for its tough discipline and “no-excuses” philosophy, was already running more than 10 schools in the city. CEO Scott Gordon’s background was in business. He founded a home health-care company and marketed cereal before starting Mastery. According to Nation-Holmes, “Scott Gordon told the parents that Mastery would give the school money — $1.5 million to fix up the school. He said they would paint it and fix the playground. He called me and said, ‘I will let you pick the color of the walls.’” Karel Kilimnik, a long-time Germantown resident, and co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, was appalled by the aggressive tactics of Mastery. “Mastery waged a marketing campaign that pitted parents against each other. They paid people to canvas and to make phone calls. I spoke with someone at a meeting at Wister who described her position with Mastery as a ‘paid volunteer.’ One parent who initially supported staying with the district switched sides after getting a job at a Mastery school. Another told us at a meeting of Parents of Wister that, ‘Parents of Wister should be giving out gift cards like Mastery did.’ In my opinion, Mastery poisoned the community in their war to win Wister.” Robin Lowry, a Germantown resident and former Wister teacher, agreed. She had previously taught in a high school that was taken over by a charter. “It was devastating to get the letter that we were a failing school slated to be closed the day after our back-to-school night. There is a pattern. Starve the school of resources, it goes downhill, and then the charters swoop in. It happens in the poorest neighborhoods — they pick the people who have been picked on.” The battle between the grassroots group Parents of Wister and Mastery and its advocates continued throughout the fall and early winter of 2015, with pro- and anti-Mastery parents picketing and testifying at meetings of the SRC. The charter chain had considerably more resources than Parents of Wister. Mastery Charter High School hired Cecilia Shickel, a media consultant, to produce videos designed to encourage parents to support the conversion of Wister to Mastery.     The pressure worked. Green joined two other SRC Board members whose votes had already been secured, and voted for a surprise “walk on resolution” that turned the school over to Mastery. Few Wister parents were present, believing that the issue had been resolved. The room was filled, however, with pro-Mastery parents who cheered.  Despite cries of conflict of interest, the lack of notice to the public, and even objections by the mayor of Philadelphia, on April 28 the SRC gave its final approval to turn Wister over to Mastery Charter Schools. The reverberations over what occurred, however, continued.   “In choosing to pursue Renaissance charters, it is clear then that the district is making a choice to choose to invest in some students at the expense of others,” Gym told the SRC. Gym argued that far more study was needed to judge the effectiveness of the program before continuing it.   Robin Lowry now teaches in a district high school. From time to time, she sees former students who attend the charter school. “They tell me that Mastery is going to get them into Harvard and that everything is perfect there. Their responses seem automatic…. I worry for them,” she told me. Meanwhile, Kenya Nation-Holmes was able to find a district public school that would take her two children. “My son is spirited and creative. I like that about him. Mastery would have taken that away with their strict discipline. I don’t hate Mastery. It’s just not for my kids. I do not, however, like how everything happened.” Nation-Holmes told me that from time to time, parents who stayed at Wister after Mastery took over, contact her and complain that there are problems. They say that they are afraid to speak up. “I tell them there is nothing that I can do,” she said. “I tried to warn them.”

Can a charter school proposal get a fair shake in Fairfax?

Want to know how a school system can kill an innovative program without leaving any fingerprints? All you need to do is watch how Fairfax County Public Schools is handling the charter school application of the Fairfax Leadership Academy. Teacher Eric Welch is leading an effort to create the county’s first charter school. He and other educators believe that this effort is critical to closing the achievement gap between white and minority students. Their goal is to create a school that will serve high-risk, low-income students — the kids who often fall through the cracks. The school is actually focusing on many of the programs that FCPS used to provide to at-risk populations, such as an extended school day and year, which can be critical for students who need more time to master challenging content. Those programs were among the casualties of recent Fairfax budget cuts. In April, the Virginia Board of Education gave unanimous support to the group’s charter application. The next step is for Fairfax County’s school board to weigh in. So the school administration has laid out a timeline that would lead to a board decision in October. A public meeting last month was attended by about 100 people who seemed to be evenly divided between supporters and opponents. (Public meetings are part of Fairfax County’s DNA. We are, after all, the place where 80 parents showed up at a school board meeting to weigh in on a proposed third-grade spelling textbook.) Now school district staff is preparing its recommendation to the school board. It seems evident that some of the questions it is asking in the guise of gathering information are designed more to throw up roadblocks than to generate a productive give-and-take. For example, Deputy Superintendent Richard Moniuszko has asked the Fairfax Leadership Academy to submit documentation of commitments for outside funding. The budget is based on $250,000 in corporate and foundation funding and a $200,000 federal grant that is available to charter schools for startup expenses. However, outside funders are unlikely to commit to support of the school without its approval by the school board. State law permits school boards to approve a charter application “with conditions.” One reasonable compromise would be for the board to approve the application contingent on the organizers raising most or all of the required funding by a date well in advance of the school’s opening. School staff have also suggested that the academy has not spelled out how it will assess students’ performance. But the school’s application states that every student will be given the Developmental Reading Assessment, the Iowa Achievement Tests and AVID portfolios — in addition to Virginia’s own Standards of Learning assessments. On top of that, because the school is dealing with students who have not been successful at previous schools, staff members will meet with each family to design an individualized student learning plan for each student. The school’s small size will allow staff members to monitor students on these clearly articulated goals. Sounds like a pretty thorough assessment plan to me. School staff have been willing to back off some other questionable aspects of their review plans. Originally, the public meeting was to have included a “poll” of parents. At the end of the meeting, parents were to have been asked, “If the proposed charter school were approved, would you be potentially interested in having your children attend if they were at the appropriate grade level?” When it was pointed out that the public meeting was unlikely to include a lot of what politicians call “persuadable voters,” and that attendees were pretty likely to have already made up their minds, the polling idea was dropped. I hope that willingness to compromise can continue. I hope the school board will approach this proposal with a genuinely open mind. There will never be a huge demand for charter schools in Fairfax. But there seems to be a need for the kind of school that the Fairfax Leadership Academy wants to become — a small school that will provide intense instruction to kids who need extra help. Whether there’s a willingness to approve the charter, however, remains to be seen. Forgive me if I’m skeptical. I’ve read this book before — and, sadly, I’m afraid I know how it’s likely to end. The writer, communications director for the think tank Education Sector, was a member of the Fairfax County School Board from 1991 to 2000 and chairman of the board from 1996 to 1998. **More Local Opinions:** David Alpert: The scandal’s serious, the city’s solid Mark Plotkin: Shut out of Statuary Hall Peter Wagner: An end to “prison-based gerrymandering” ****

D.C. charter school executive salaries vary widely, Post analysis shows

Two of the District’s charter school leaders earned about as much as or more than D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson in 2013, though she runs a city school system that, with 45,000 students, is much larger than either of their organizations. A Washington Post analysis of federal tax forms shows that the District’s five dozen charter school leaders earned total compensation ranging from just less than $90,000 to more than $350,000 in 2013. The Post analysis shows that leaders of some charter schools are paid no more than principals at traditional public schools, while others are earning much higher salaries to lead one school, or a handful of schools, that serve just hundreds of students. D.C. taxpayers send more than $600 million to fund the city’s charter schools each year, but there is far less information available about how that money is spent than the tax dollars that flow to the traditional public school system. Even higher salaries have been concealed because some of the charter schools — which are required by law to be nonprofit — used for-profit management companies to supervise their operations. Company executive salaries do not show up on schools’ tax filings and are often impossible for charter school regulators — and the public — to track. For example, the highest-paid employee at Community Academy Public Charter School in 2013 was Head of Schools Brenda Bethea, whose total compensation was $146,772, according to the school’s tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service. But the highest-paid person running Community Academy’s network of five schools in 2013 was chief executive Kent Amos, who earned $1.3 million that year from a private management company, according to tax filings read into the D.C. Superior Court record by Judge Neal E. Kravitz. That figure became public only after the D.C. attorney general filed a lawsuit. As charter schools have grown in the District and nationwide, so have concerns about the lack of transparency in their budgets and their financial arrangements with management companies. Nearly 3 million children are enrolled in more than 6,700 U.S. charter schools, an estimated jump of 14 percent over last school year. In 2011-2012, about 22 percent of charter school students across the country were enrolled in schools operated by for-profit management companies, according to a National Education Policy Center report. Budgets for traditional public school systems are debated in public by elected officials, and traditional schools, like any government agency, are required to disclose detailed information about how they spend their tax dollars. They also must disclose employee salaries. “We’re used to a system where taxpayer dollars fund public schools, and there’s a great deal of transparency in terms of how much everyone makes, including teachers and top administrators,” said Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We’ve moved to a system where the taxpayer money still goes out, but we don’t have any of the accountability and transparency that we’ve come to expect.” In some parts of the country, lawmakers are beginning to question whether salaries for charter school leaders need regulating, arguing that pay for charter leaders has grown unreasonably high at some schools. In New York, for example, Eva Moskowitz, the chief executive of the nonprofit Success Academy network. which runs more than 20 charter schools, earns $578,420 in total compensation, according to tax filings. A state lawmaker has proposed a law that would cap charter-leader salary at $199,000. A bill in New Jersey, where there is a cap on salaries for traditional school superintendents, would apply that cap to charter school leaders. Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says she supports efforts to make dealings with private management companies more transparent, but she does not think lawmakers should place a cap on salaries. “Offering a competitive salary will broaden the pool of applicants,” she said. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are publicly funded with taxpayer dollars. Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools are independent nonprofit organizations that are not required to disclose what they pay their employees. The exception is when charter employees earn more than $100,000; their compensation must be disclosed on forms that schools submit to the IRS. Charter leaders are technically superintendents of small school districts; the District’s 61 charter school leaders oversee 112 individual charter schools throughout the city. Most earn far less than Henderson, who receives a salary of $275,000, plus health, retirement and other benefits to run the D.C. Public Schools, a system with more than 45,000 children enrolled at more than 100 schools. Henderson declined to comment on charter leaders’ salaries. The Post’s analysis of data from the 2013 tax year, the most recent year available, shows that of the 38 charter schools that don’t have a management organization or other related entity, 21 are led by individuals whose total compensation is less than $132,148, the average salary of a D.C. Public School principal this year. (The job responsibilities of a charter school executive vary and often aren’t the same as those a principal might have, but each is seen as a key leader of his or her school.) In many cases, there is a relationship between the size of the school and the compensation for that school’s executive. Olivia Smith, for example, earned $89,367, one of the lowest total compensations in the city, but she also led one of the smallest schools: Bridges, with 143 students and total income of $3.8 million. “I am in it for a cause I believe in, not to be wealthy,” Smith said, adding that the school has since grown and she has gotten a raise. Donald Hense earned a salary of $269,659 and a total compensation package of $356,000 as chief executive of Friendship, one of the city’s largest networks of charter schools, which served more than 3,800 students in 2013 and had a budget of more than $73 million. Friendship’s board of trustees worked with a consultant to look at comparable salaries and set a “a high mark” for compensation for Hense because of his experience and the complexity of the job, said Gregory Prince, the board’s vice chairman. “I would argue that Don Hense is an educator, real estate developer, investment banker and bond market specialist,” Prince said. Friendship operates nine campuses on six sites serving students from preschool through 12th grade. Three of those campuses are rated Tier 1, or high-performing, by the charter school board. Three are rated Tier 2, or mid-performing, and three serving early grades have not yet been classified. “He was the founder, so he’s been there 20 years, but we wanted to make sure we could keep him,” Prince said. Competition for strong leaders and the size of schools are two of many factors that drive decisions about executive compensation at charter schools, according to charter school board members. Boards also survey executive compensation at other charter school networks around the country or other local nonprofit groups for comparison. Some charter leaders say their job duties — as leaders of small businesses — differ markedly from a superintendent of a public school system. “I’m sure Kaya [Henderson] has never had to worry about making payroll for her staff, finding a facility in which to operate or negotiating leases with the city,” Sonia Gutierrez, founder of Carlos Rosario International, an adult-education and job-training charter school, wrote in an e-mail. Gutierrez’s total compensation from Carlos Rosario was $328,744, including deferred compensation. She received another $23,660 from a related nonprofit organization that manages Carlos Rosario’s buildings, making for a total package of $352,404. Some of the highest-paid charter leaders in the city oversee high-performing schools with a reputation for raising the math and reading test scores of disadvantaged students. Total compensation for Susan Schaeffler, chief executive of KIPP DC, is $232,643, while total compensation for Emily Lawson, chief executive of DC Prep, is $231,261. Carrie Irvin, president of Charter Board Partners, an organization that works to strengthen charter school boards, said that in her experience, many boards aren’t doing a good job evaluating and compensating leaders according to their ability to meet concrete goals, including student achievement goals. “We’re talking about allocating taxpayer money to hire and retain a leader who can ensure that kids are getting a great education, and that’s a really big decision,” Irvin said. “That’s why it’s so important to have strong boards.” Charter schools’ tax filings offer only a small snapshot of salaries at the organizations. The picture is even less complete when a school is run by an outside for-profit company. In the District, that fact has been made clear in two pending lawsuits that allege charter officials diverted money from schools for personal gain. One suit involves Community Academy and its leader, Amos. Amos and the school’s board members contend that they did nothing illegal. A. Scott Bolden, the board’s attorney, said Amos earned his salary, given his local and national connections and experience as a corporate executive who built Community Academy into an organization serving 1,600 children. “I think we owe him money, quite frankly,” Bolden said at a recent public hearing. The D.C. Public Charter School Board sees things differently: It voted this month to revoke Community Academy’s charter for financial mismanagement. The second lawsuit involves three former leaders of Options, a school for at-risk teens, and two for-profit management companies they ran. Tax forms show that the highest-paid of the three, former chief executive Donna Montgomery, earned $319,700 in total compensation from Options during the 2012 calendar year. She allegedly was paid $425,000 during the 2012-2013 school year, according to court documents. Options has been run by a court-appointed receiver since the lawsuit was filed in the fall of 2013. At least three other charter schools in the city currently use for-profit management companies: Somerset Prep, Basis DC and Hope Community. Each of the management companies runs multiple schools in multiple states. More than a dozen other schools have relationships with nonprofit organizations that serve as management companies or share facilities or board members or provide other support. Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, has been pressing the D.C. Council to pass legislation that he says would tighten the transparency loophole by giving him more power to examine management companies’ books and records. Pearson said he doesn’t want to limit salaries but does want to ensure that more expenditures are transparent. “PCSB’s concern is that schools provide quality education. It is up to individual charter school boards to set the appropriate salary to recruit the best teachers and other employees,” he said. David Grosso (I-At Large), chair of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee, says he plans to introduce that legislation within the next few weeks. Grosso said that Options and Community Academy, and the high salaries paid their leaders, are outliers. “We have to be good wardens of the money, but most of these schools are,” he said. “We are seeing a couple of instances that are the exceptions.” Ted Mellnik contributed to this report.