NEWS
- D.C. charter graduation rate declines as schools focus on rigorous academics [Washington Latin PCS and KIPP DC PCS mentioned]
- Tennessee school districts sue state over what they say is inadequate funding
- Are School Turnarounds a Sticking Point in Senate NCLB Rewrite Negotiations?
D.C. charter graduation rate declines as schools focus on rigorous academics [Washington Latin PCS and KIPP DC PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
March 26, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The D.C. charter high school graduation rate declined seven percentage points last year, and some schools say it’s because students are spending more time preparing for college.
Only 69 percent of students in charter high schools last year graduated in four years, according to data from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. That’s compared to 76 percent of students who graduated on time the year before.
But the D.C. Public Charter School Board isn’t concerned. Students aren’t dropping out of high school, it’s just taking them longer to graduate, it says. The five-year graduation rate for charter schools last year was close to 80 percent.
“There’s (a) big focus on college persistency, and I think schools are really looking at that as their ultimate goal,” said Naomi Rubin DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
The D.C. Public School system saw a slight increase, with 58 percent in the number of students who graduated in four years, up from 56 percent the year before. While the charter schools outperform the traditional public schools, the D.C. graduation rate lags far behind the national average of 80 percent.
Another factor for the decline is the number of students graduating from charters isn’t high, said DeVeaux. Only 1,040 students graduated from charter high schools last year. The number of students graduating from each high school range from 15 to 97.
Martha Cutts, head of Washington Latin Public Charter School, attributes the decline to small classes. The charter has had three high school classes, and the first two classes had the highest graduation rates of any non-selective public high school in the city, with 96 and 93 percent of students graduating on time. Last year, 85 percent of the charter’s students graduated in four years.
“We’re doing the same things, we’re working just as hard to support kids and it’s going to go up and down, for any school,” she said.
Lindsey Kelly, a spokeswoman for KIPP D.C., in an email said after receiving feedback from alumni the charter network increased the academic rigor at KIPP DC College Prep. That increase resulted in a graduation decline of close to 13 percent, with only 85 percent of students graduating in four years. But school officials expect the five-year graduation rate to be closer to 90 percent, Kelly said.
“Ultimately, we want our students to be well prepared to tackle the challenging coursework that awaits them in college,” Kelly said in an email.
Tennessee school districts sue state over what they say is inadequate funding
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 27, 2015
Seven Tennessee school districts have sued state officials over what they say is inadequate school funding, charging that by shorting schools by hundreds of millions of dollars, the state has “breached its duty under the Tennessee Constitution to provide a system of free public education.”
The complaint, posted online by the Tennessean newspaper, says that in affluent communities, parents have stepped into the funding void, paying hundreds of dollars in fees to support extracurricular activities and buy educational technology. But in poorer communities, where parent can’t pay such fees, “there are insufficient resources available to operate a school,” the suit says, and districts have been forced to cut core educational services.
“Neither alternative is appropriate in a State that recognizes a free public education as a fundamental right,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit comes as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has sought to highlight inequitable education funding around the nation, arguing that states’ unwillingness to properly fund education has resulted in “school systems that are separate and unequal.” Nearly two dozen states, including Tennessee, spend less per pupil in their poorest school districts than they spend in their most affluent districts.
The differential in Tennessee is relatively small — the state’s poorest school districts get about 1 percent less per student than its richest school districts, according to federal data from fiscal year 2012. But that year, Tennessee also dedicated an average of only $7,037 per student in local and state tax dollars — substantially less than the national average of $9,210.
In the suit filed this week, the seven Chattanooga-area school districts — including Hamilton County, home to Chattanooga itself – are seeking to force the state legislature to spend more.
“The General Assembly has been aware of its obligation to fund a system of free public education across the State for more than 20 years and yet has been deliberately indifferent to its constitutional duty,” the complaint says. “ln view of the General Assembly’s persistent failure to provide Tennesseans with this fundamental right, this Court must order the State to fund the true cost of public education with all deliberate speed.”
The so-called “Basic Education Program,” the state’s school funding formula, underestimates the cost of teachers’ salaries and benefits by nearly $600 million per year, according to the lawsuit. And it underestimates other classroom costs by more than $130 million, the complaint says.
The plaintiffs also argue that Tennessee has chosen to starve schools of funds at the same time that it has instituted a series of costly reforms. The state has adopted new Common Core standards and is giving new online tests, for example, but the districts argue that schools don’t have money to train teachers in new curriculum or to buy computers that students can use to take new tests.
The seven school districts filed their suit Tuesday, a day after superintendents from four large school districts, including Hamilton, met with Gov. Bill Haslam (R) about boosting state investment in public school, Chalkbeat Tennessee reported. Haslam is named as a defendant in the case, as are speakers of the state house and senate, the state commissioner of education and members of the state board of education.
Haslam spokesman David Smith did not respond to a request for comment.
But Chalkbeat reported that Smith said the governor was “very disappointed” about the lawsuit, given that he had committed to superintendents that he would work on the problem. “Litigation will obviously decrease potential for collaboration,” Smith said. Haslam’s budget proposal includes an additional $170 million for K-12 schools this year, according to Chalkbeat.
But the plaintiffs say they are tired of struggling to provide the most basic resources for their students, according to local news reports. One school board member cited a high school in Polk County that has had trouble buying toilet paper for its students as one reason for going ahead with the lawsuit.
“We have to realize that kids need toilet paper in Polk County,” Jonathan Welch said, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Are School Turnarounds a Sticking Point in Senate NCLB Rewrite Negotiations?
Education Week
By Lauren Camera
March 26, 2015
In a town that feeds off legislative gossip, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., have been doing a really good job keeping private their negotiations on how to overhaul the No Child Left Behind law.
For nearly a month now, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate education committee have been working with their staffs behind closed doors to cobble together a bipartisan bill that would give the federal K-12 law a major facelift. But other than releasing a joint statement a few weeks ago announcing a planned committee markup of the bill during the week of April 13, the two have been mum on where their compromise stands.
That's smart politics. After all, when they first announced they were going down this path, Alexander and Murray were far apart on a laundry list of education policy areas, including Title I portability, accountability, and early childhood education (more on that last piece here).
There's one issue, however, that seems to flying under the radar: What to do about chronically low-performing schools. Should states have to identify a percentage of their poorest performers? Should they be allowed to craft a turnaround model themselves? And if they do craft their own models, should the Education Secretary get sign-off?
There's a lot of wonky history behind those questions. When the Obama administration supercharged the School Improvement Grant program back in 2009, it limited the turnaround models to some pretty dramatic interventions, including removing the principal, replacing half the staff, converting the school to charter status, or shuttering it altogether.
What's more, the administration essentially doubled down on that strategy in the NCLB waivers, which required states to identify the poorest-performing 5 percent of schools and put in place a turnaround plan that closely mirrors the SIG models.
But, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have long pushed back on the Obama administration's turnaround vision, arguing it's too restrictive. And many felt their criticisms were bolstered when two successive years of student-outcome data from the SIG program showed that it has a decidedly mixed track record of actually improving schools.
Then, in January of 2014, lawmakers incorporated language into a spending bill for the U.S. Department of Education that added additional turnaround options to the mix, including allowing states to partner with organizations that have strong records of fixing low-performing schools, or to cook up their own turnaround options and submit them to the U.S. secretary of education for approval. And under new regulations, "priority schools" in waiver states were allowed to use those new models, too. The change was a big victory for many in Congress—and a blow to one of the Obama administration's top priorities.
But, in a draft bill meant to spark discussion on an NCLB, Alexander signaled he'd like to go even further. The draft eliminates the SIG program entirely, instead allowing states to set-aside a greater share of their Title I dollars for school improvement. And there are no rules in the proposal about how many—or what kind—of schools states need to identify for improvement. The House GOP NCLB rewrite bill, which is still awaiting a floor vote after conservative criticism, takes an almost identical approach.
And over the past few weeks, there have been small signals that the turnaround question may be a point of contention between Alexander and Murray (not to menton the Obama administration, which will ulimately need to sign any compromise bill.) And we felt like it was high time to at least string them together, for whatever it's worth.
So here are those bread crumbs:
Evidence #1: When the Senate began debating an anti-human trafficking bill, Alexander made a speech on the chamber floor on March 11 that focused on the overreach of the federal government. The crux of his speech wasn't about education, but he quickly veered in that direction and started talking about how the U.S. Department of Education has overstepped its boundaries in regards to school turnarounds and the Common Core State Standards, and how that is one of many issues he's currently negotiating with Murray.
"In No Child Left Behind, there are requirements about improving low-performing schools," he said. "The [Education] Department, in its well-intentioned activities, defined what a Governor of Tennessee or Utah or Iowa could say about his or her own idea about fixing low-performing schools. That happens all the time. It happens all the time. Over the last several years we have created, in effect, a national school board in Washington, DC, by substituting the judgment of Washington for local schools."
Evidence #2: In remarks to the press after meeting with members of the Council of the Great City Schools on March 16, President Barack Obama talked about the need to continue focusing on low-performing schools.
"We've got a major debate obviously taking place about the reauthorization of the major education act that shapes federal policy towards our schools," Obama said. "There is, I think, some useful conversations taking place between the chairman of relevant committee, Lamar Alexander, and Patty Murray. But there's some core principles that all the leaders here believe in: ... Making sure that we continue to focus on low-performing schools and that they are getting additional resources."
Evidence #3: Days later, on March 19, Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely associated with the Obama administration and previously the assistant secretary of planning, evaluation, and policy development at the department, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the success of targeted school turnarounds and why a rewrite of NCLB should include a federal role.
"Federal policy needs to keep the pressure on school districts and states to continue the momentum," Martin wrote. "We have an opportunity to make great strides in improving educational outcomes, but passing a bill that does not include federal guardrails would be a step backward."
Evidence #4: In an interview with Education Week on Monday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he's open to various different levels of federal involvement in turning around low-performing schools, but that an NCLB rewrite should include a role for the feds in school turnaround. Here's what he said:
You've talked a lot about the federal role in turning around low-performing schools. Do you think there has to be a specific percentage of [schools states must identify as needing extra help]?
We need to not just label the problem, we need to not just admire the problem ... we need to do something about it. ... Some [schools] have done an amazing job with [turnarounds]. Some we haven't seen as much as improvement as we'd like. But at least we're trying. At least people are in the game. And to be clear ... we did 5 percent [a reference to the percentage of schools the education required states to identify for dramatic turnarounds]... there's nothing magical [about that percentage]...whether it's 4 percent or 6 percent ... we're open to those conversations. ... We're open on models ... you have to have evidence-based stuff. ... But let's not just stand by. I promise you we would not be seeing these improvements in dropout rates, in graduation rates, if we just watched or observed or really didn't do anything about it.
What does this all mean? Well, maybe nothing at all. It could simply be one of several threads in a broader conversation about the federal role in K-12, which we know is the crux of Alexander and Murray's ongoing negotiations.
Or it could be something the White House considers important enough to go to bat for. Either way, we'll see in the coming weeks when Alexander and Murray unveil the long-awaited results of their ongoing negotiations.
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