BASIS DC Student Wins National Contest

Come Testify at Public Hearing on DC International Charter School

Parents, are you interested in language-immersion options for your children? On Monday, May 20, PCSB will be holding a public hearing about the future DC International charter school (DCI).

DC International is a proposed program combining five existing language-immersion public charter schools to create a single middle and high school that would offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum and give students the option of learning a second language from the following schools:

• Chinese (Washington Yu Ying)
• French or Spanish (Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom)
• Spanish (DC Bilingual)
• Spanish (Latin American Montessori Bilingual)
• Spanish (Mundo Verde)

The five schools are all planning to expand their current elementary grade offerings up through middle and high school, and will be housed together in one building to create DC International. At full capacity, DCI would enroll 1,000 to 1,400 students  -- including existing students from the member charters  as well as new students -- in grades 6 through 12.

Washington Yu Ying applied to PCSB to amend its charter to accommodate DCI, and the school received approval in December 2012. At next week’s hearing, the public will get a chance to hear the plans of the remaining four schools to expand into DCI.

The hearing will be held at Carlos Rosario International PCS, 1100 Harvard St, NW, at 6:30 p.m. All are welcome to attend the hearing and the public is encouraged to testify. If you are interested in signing up to speak, please contact Isoken Igodan at iigodan@dcpcsb.org.

Every Kid Needs a Champion

How Wide is the Disparity between Public School and Charter Facility Space?

The DC Public Education Master Facilities Plan, which the D.C. Council recently held a hearing, is rich with data on how wide the facility disparity is between DC Public Schools (DCPS) and DC public charter schools.

The report breaks down the average gross square feet (GSF) per grade type, and compares the data between DC charters, DCPS, and national averages. At every level charters are making do with less space per student, most strikingly in middle school facilities where charters only have 28% of the square footage per student as compared to DCPS middle schools.

DCPS has also created guidelines for how much square footage should be built per student in future public schools, called the DC Standard for Modernization. At every grade level charter schools are currently occupying less space than these standards recommend for public schools, averaging between 19% and 24% fewer square feet per student.

 


It’s clear that charter school students are being forced to learn in too-small spaces. Meanwhile, more than 25 former DCPS school buildings sit empty – school buildings that are large and spacious, this study demonstrates – and charter schools do not have access to them.

Instead, charter schools are responsible for securing their own facilities, with schools currently utilizing a wide variety of facility types, everything from purpose-built new schools to leased commercial space to former DCPS school buildings. As a result, they are not able to secure the same amount of student space that DCPS is allotted.  Even the current modernization standards for DCPS require more square footage per student than the average charter facility currently utilizes, at every education level.

In order to ensure that charters continue to thrive, it is critical that schools have access to suitable facilities for classrooms, cafeterias, and other student spaces. 

Charter School Wait Lists Show Continued Need for High-Quality Schools

We have once again asked schools to share with us information about waitlists and available seats. We collect this information primarily so that we can share with parents which schools still have available spaces, and how high the odds are to clear the waitlist at schools that are full.

We are still validating this data, and expect to post detailed grade-by-grade waitlist and availability information for the 2013-2014 school year, for all schools, on Monday, May 6.

But what we can report now, is that our early data show that around 22,000 names are currently on the wait lists to get into charter schools of their choice. This is nearly 50% higher than the 15,000 names we reported last year. This is a depressingly high number that testifies to the continued strong demand for quality schools among DC families and the ongoing shortage of enough quality seats to meet parent demand.  More than half of all names on waitlists are at schools rated as “Tier 1” under our Performance Management Framework.

It also appears that there are approximately 1,000 slots still available at schools. Again, we will share specific information about where these slots are available on Monday.

Demand is high in nearly every ward.  Nearly every ward has more than 1,000 students on waitlists, with the exception of Ward 3 which has no charter schools. We are seeing the greatest demand for seats in the early grades – roughly 14,000 in PK3 through 1^st grade, but parents are looking to enroll the children in a charter school at every grade level.

We know that parents are on wait lists at multiple schools, so our waitlist count undoubtedly includes duplicate names. This year we aren’t able to “dedupe” the names.  But next year, as we work to build a common lottery, we expect we will be able to report not only on the total number of names, but also how many individual students this represents.

The real tragedy behind these numbers is that many of our best schools want to grow to serve more children, but they are constrained by facilities.  Meanwhile, we count 25 empty school buildings that are either vacant or soon to be vacant. Quality charter schools need access to these buildings to serve the thousands of families currently on waitlists.

Mid-Year Transfers: Funding Myths Busted

It’s budget season in DC and the Washington Post recently ran this story about how DC schools are funded.

The piece described how charters are paid based on actual enrollment, while DCPS is paid based on estimates:

Also, charter schools are paid according to their actual audited enrollment. But traditional schools are funded based on projected enrollments, which tend to be overly optimistic. FOCUS estimates that the school system received $142 million between 2009 and 2013 for students it did not actually enroll.

For years, school system officials have maintained that the cushion helps them deal with an influx of students, many from charter schools, who come after enrollment counts are finalized in October. Unlike charter schools, traditional schools are legally obligated to serve all students — just one of many ways in which the two sectors operate under different rules.

When I first started at PCSB I was told that "thousands" of students flowed into DCPS each year after the enrollment count, and hence the over estimation was somehow justified as paying for students who arrive mid-year.  

While it’s true that students do transition between schools mid-year, these numbers have been greatly overblown.  But while thousands of students enter DCPS mid-year (3,697 to be exact), thousands leave mid-year as well (3,359 students).  According to this mobility study by the Office of the State Superintendent (OSSE), the net gain in DCPS mid-year for the most recent school year was just 338 students.  We could fully reimburse DCPS for these mid-year students for about $3M per year, but the overestimation adds up to ten times this amount!

The facts are clear: the supposed influx of thousands of students is in reality a few hundred, and the funding cushion is at least ten times larger than it needs to be to accommodate for those students that switch schools.

What we need, and need urgently, is to fundamentally revise the payment process.  Both charters and DCPS should be paid based on actual numbers.  And rather than rely on a single count of students in October to set the payment, there should be multiple counts throughout the year to ensure that schools who add students are properly compensated.  This is common sense reform that ensures equality and proper incentives.

As an aside, the OSSE mobility study is worth looking at closely because it bursts so many myths. For example, of the 3,697 who entered DCPS mid-year, just 561 transferred from a charter school.  Indeed most students who leave charter schools mid-year do so because they are moving out of state.

Twitter Tips for Teachers

Social media is something that many teachers may be afraid of, not just for students but for themselves. However, as students continue to spend more and more online, educators should start thinking of ways to be engaging and communicating with them. For those of you wondering how to launch yourself into the Twittersphere, here is a handy video on starting your own Teacher Twitter! 

Washington Post Panel featuring PCSB Executive Director

PCSB Executive Director Scott Pearson will be among the featured panelists at a Washington Post forum on The State of District Education the evening of Wednesday April 24. The panel is the first in a three-part discussion series on education in the Washington region. The event will also include DC Councilmember DavidCatania, Director of Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principles and Educators (SHAPPE) Cathy Reilly, The Washington Post DC Schools reporter Emma Brown, and Empower DC’s Daniel del Pielago. Natalie Hopkinson of The Washington Post will moderate the event, which PCSB will be livetweeting, starting at 6:30 p.m. 

PCSB Praised by Dell Foundation

PCSB is an exceptional model of using ongoing assessments to foster positive growth in schools, a key pillar of portfolio school district strategy, according to the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. The Foundation praised PCSB’s use of the Performance Management Framework (PMF) and other school performance evaluations to determine success and direct school growth. Citing PCSB’s recent decision to raise the enrollment ceilings of nine charter schools for the upcoming school year, the Foundation recommended that other school districts look to PCSB as an example of a successful charter school authorizer.

Read more at the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation website.

Guest Post: How Authorizers Can Create High-Quality Charter Schools

How does the work of charter school authorizers help create high-quality schools? This is the core question to be explored Wednesday at a summit, Accountability and High Quality Charter Schools: Policies and Practices to Strengthen the Sector, sponsored by the National Charter School Resource Center. PCSB deputy director Naomi DeVeaux and I, along with others from the charter authorizer world will take part in the summit to discuss challenges, strategies, and opportunities related to establishing and maintaining high quality charter schools. 

The goal of the event is to explore the variety of approaches being used by charter authorizers across the country to maintain high standards for student performance and to support underachieving schools in moving towards higher achievement.  

Coincidentally, this week also marks standardized testing for DC students, the annual process of determining the quality of learning for both charter and traditional public school students in grades 3 through 8 and 10.  At PCSB, where we use a Performance Management Framework (PMF) to measure school performance, charter schools that score high on the DC assessment typically fall into the Tier 1 category, and schools with lower test scores receive either tier 2 or tier 3 rankings. 

In the most recent PMF assessment, about a third of our schools achieved a Tier 1 ranking, with close to half landing in Tier 2 and, happily, only a small number of schools landing in the lowest level, Tier 3.  These rankings areas impact the assessment of schools under quality review by the charter board as well as those up for renewal of their 15-year charters, with a variety of consequences including possible school closure.

It is notable for this discussion that the DC charters receiving Tier 2 or Tier 3 rankings represent a wide range of school missions and academic programs, including schools that provide traditional college preparatory or STEM curricula, schools that focus on language and cultural immersion, schools with a vocational training focus, and schools for students that have not succeeded in traditional learning environments.  This diversity, while a welcome and much needed feature of the charter movement, also represents a challenge in terms of ensuring that PCSB can fairly and accurately assess the value of individual school programs and the impact these schools have on learning outcomes for our students.

According to the National Association of Charter School Authorizer’s (NACSA) 2012 Principles & Standards for Quality Charter School Authorizing, a charter authorizer’s primary focus should be on setting and maintaining high standards for charter school performance.  To this end, an authorizer should:

1. Set high standards for approving charter applicants.
2. Maintain high standards for the schools it oversees.
3. Effectively cultivate quality charter schools that meet identified educational needs.
4. Oversee charter schools that, over time, meet the performance standards and targets on a range of measures and metrics set forth in their charter contracts; and
5. Close schools that fail to meet standards and targets set forth in law and by contract.

The high stakes challenge of capturing the quality of learning in charter schools, both here in Washington DC and across the nation, mirrors the content of this week’s accountability summit and is a subject worthy of continued discussion by all in the charter school community, including school leaders, parents and students. 

It is the responsibility of the PCSB, and all charter authorizers, to ensure that our charter schools fully deliver on the promise of providing superior options and outcomes for all of our students. To get there, we must demand more of ourselves, including taking a close look at our strategies for determining the value of schools that represent diversity – both in the missions represented in their school programs and in the students attending their schools.  I look forward to this week’s conversation.