NEWS
- School waitlist data can tell us what families want [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
- How some school funding formulas hurt learning and make schools more dangerous
- Sen. Jon Tester seeks to end annual standardized testing
School waitlist data can tell us what families want [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
April 21, 2015
Charter and traditional public schools with the longest waitlists for the coming school year are clustered west of the Anacostia River, with bilingual programs generally leading the pack. But there's also a marked difference in demand for some schools that have similar test scores.
Earlier this month the District announced the results of the lottery that determines admission to many public schools, along with waitlists for each participating school. Families need to enter the lottery in order to apply to almost all charter schools and some DC Public Schools.
Students who want to go to their zoned DCPS school don't need to enter the lottery. But the lottery is the route for those who want to go to DCPS schools as out-of-bounds students or to an application-only DCPS school. Most families who want to send their children to a DCPS preschool program also need to use the lottery.
Families can list up to 12 choices. This year the vast majority were matched with one of them in the lottery's first round. But if families didn't get their first choice, they were waitlisted at any schools they placed higher than the one they were matched with.
Now that the lottery results are in, more than 8,500 students are on waitlists for charter schools, and almost 7,000 are on waitlists for at least one DCPS school. Families matched in the first round have until May 1 to enroll. Those who didn't get matched in the first round or who didn't participate can enter a second round until May 8.
Both DCPS and the Public Charter School Board have created tools to help families find schools that still have space available.
DC's Office of Revenue Analysis has published a series of interactive graphics illustrating the waitlist data on its blog, District, Measured.
Waitlist data roughly reflects demand
Roughly speaking, the waitlist data shows where the demand is for schools, both geographically and in terms of specialized programs. One caveat is that it doesn't reflect demand for neighborhood schools from those who live within a school's boundaries. If a lot of "by-right" students want to attend their neighborhood school, the school simply has to squeeze them all in.
With that caveat, the map above shows that demand is generally strongest for schools west of the Anacostia River. East of the river, there's more demand for charters than DCPS schools.
For at least the second year in a row, Two Rivers, a charter school in NoMa, has the longest waitlist, with 1,381 names. The school will open a second campus this fall with 178 spaces in preschool through first grade. That campus, in a less central location at 820 26th Street NE, has a waitlist of 183.
The bar graph above also reveals how strong the demand continues to be for dual-language programs. With the exception of Two Rivers, the schools with the four longest waitlists are all bilingual.
Schools with similar test scores aren't always equally popular
Perhaps the most intriguing of ORA's graphics is the one that plots waitlist numbers against reading proficiency scores on DC's standardized tests.
Generally speaking, the schools with the highest scores also have the highest demand. But there are exceptions that show families don't make decisions about schools just on the basis of test scores.
For example, Bancroft Elementary in Mt. Pleasant and Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary in Congress Heights have similar unimpressive reading proficiency rates: 31% for Bancroft and 32% for King. But Bancroft's waitlist has 460 names on it, while King has no waitlist at all.
Why the discrepancy? The Washington City Paper's Aaron Wiener opined that it's "surely because Bancroft feeds into well-regarded Deal Middle School and Wilson High School, while King feeds into lower-performing Hart Middle School and Ballou High School."
But there are almost certainly other factors at work as well. For one thing, while Congress Heights, in Ward 8, may be on the rise, it hasn't yet seen anything like the gentrification that's been going on in Mt. Pleasant for decades. And it's in a far less central location.
And the reason for the low reading score at Bancroft may be that 55% of the school's students are English language learners. The school's math proficiency rate is 56%—more than twice the 25% math proficiency rate at King.
And if Wiener is right about the importance of feeder patterns, the discrepancy between the waitlists of two other schools with similar scores doesn't make sense. In that case, the one with the longer waitlist is the one that doesn't feed into Deal and Wilson.
Shepherd Elementary—which feeds into Deal—and Capitol Hill Montessori both have respectable 73% reading proficiency scores. But the waitlist at Shepherd is 394, while the waitlist at Capitol Hill Montessori, which feeds into lesser-regarded Eliot-Hine Middle School, is 716. It seems that the demand for a particular educational approach, like Montessori, can trump a less desirable feeder pattern.
And then there's Brent and Ludlow-Taylor elementary schools, both in Ward 6. Both have high proficiency rates of 77% in reading, but Brent's waitlist is 880, and Ludlow-Taylor's is 413. The schools are of similar size and have similar facilities, and neither feeds into Deal.
One explanation for the difference in waitlists may be that middle-class parents tend to choose schools where there's already a critical mass of families like them. Brent, for example, is 64% white, and only 6% of its students are on welfare, homeless, or otherwise at-risk. Ludlow-Taylor, on the other hand, is 21% white and has 32% of its students in the at-risk category.
Of course, the difference in waitlists doesn't mean Brent is a better school. In fact, it seems Ludlow-Taylor is doing an amazing job with a more challenging population. And the bottom line is that a whole lot of families who want to go to either of these schools are going to be disappointed.
Meanwhile, there are many DCPS schools operating below capacity. The real trick is to figure out how to make enough schools desirable so that we no longer have hundreds of students being turned away from schools they want to attend.
Correction: Originally, this post said that Capitol Hill Montessori fed into Eliot-Hine, relying on information from the DCPS website. In fact, the school goes through 8th grade, so it doesn't feed into any middle school. Nor does it feed into any high school, because it's a District-wide school rather than a neighborhood school. When they leave Capitol Hill Montessori, students have a right to attend the high school their home address is zoned for, or they can apply to another high school.
How some school funding formulas hurt learning and make schools more dangerous
The Washington Post
By By Cinque Henderson
April 21, 2015
At a California charter school where I once worked as a student teacher a few years ago, I saw a 16-year-old student curse at and threaten a teacher in the worst way. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this type of thing, but this incident was particularly bad. The bell had just rung to change periods, and the halls were crowded. I have no idea what the argument was about, but the student flipped off the teacher and said “f— you!” As the teacher was trying to call a guard, the student walked back toward him menacingly and said: “You don’t have to call the guard. We can handle this right now.” This student wasn’t a first-time offender; he habitually bullied students and adults alike. It was baffling that, after all this bad behavior, the student was still allowed on the campus. Then I overheard a parent offer a disturbing explanation: “This is what $41 a day gets us.”
Forty-one dollars. That’s how much money that charter school receives per day for each student who walks through its doors. When a student doesn’t show up at school – whether it’s because of illness or a suspension – neither does that $41. That might not seem like a lot, but that money can quickly add up. Take a small charter school in a transient, low-income neighborhood: If it were to lose just 10 students over the course of the year – a few students transfer to other schools; a few families move out of the area; a few kids are expelled or become truants – the school would be docked about $75,000. That could be the equivalent of two teachers’ salaries. For a cash-strapped school serving a lot of at-risk students, that is a death blow.
Traditionally, public schools are funded based on their total student enrollment. But California, Texas and some other states tie dollars to attendance instead, incentivizing schools to get as many students in their classrooms as possible. That has led schools to implement programs that dole out rewards to students for high attendance, from bicycles and laptops to performances by pop stars and $20,000 vouchers for a new car. It might sound like a noble effort: Students with high attendance are more likely to graduate, and absenteeism has been tied to crime and other social problems. But there’s a downside to keeping kids in school at any cost – often that cost is the well-being of teachers and other students.
An assistant principal at the charter school where I taught told me that the head principal was loathe to suspend any student, no matter how disruptive, and expulsions were extremely rare. The tiny, poorly funded charter desperately needed the money that came with each student marked present every day, even potentially dangerous ones.
Moreover, attendance-based funding formulas are most harmful to schools that serve high-poverty areas, those teaching students who often need expensive extra supports and resources to learn. Inner-city schools with larger numbers of single-parent households and higher crime rates suffer from higher rates of truancy, dropouts and suspensions than those in wealthier suburban neighborhoods. The result can be “financially staggering,” according to a study of San Diego public schools. That district loses $29 for each day a student isn’t in class – a number that ballooned to $102 million in the 2009-2010 school year. The district was shortchanged $624 million over five years as a result of attendance-based funding.
Some may argue that this is good stewardship of public funds. Why pay money for a student who isn’t there? The cost of an enrolled student doesn’t disappear just because he or she doesn’t show up. Schools are staffed according to total enrollment, so even when a student isn’t present, the district is still responsible for the teachers’ salaries and the bills that keep the school operating. But that lost revenue must be cut somewhere, so after-school programs vanish, broken toilets go unfixed, and the school library is closed. Services that many low-income children don’t have access to elsewhere – music and art classes, breakfast, math tutoring – disappear.
As Congress debates this month the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the nation’s primary education law, lawmakers should consider how states distribute the federal funds they receive for schools. NCLB administers Title I funding, first established 50 years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson in part to “meet the educational needs of low-achieving children in our Nation’s highest-poverty schools.” In the 2014 fiscal year, that amounted to $14 billion that should have been dedicated to providing extra educational resources to low-income students. But in far too many cases, that money is just filling in where state and local funds fall short on providing the basics. A 2001 report from the Department of Education found that 40 percent of schools in high-poverty areas are shortchanged by inequitable state and local funding formulas, leaving low-income students with fewer resources than wealthier students nearby.
Attendance-based school funding hurts our most vulnerable students by pressuring educators to keep unruly – sometimes violent – children in school. Add to that the recent push to ban suspensions altogether, and the schools in our toughest areas feel no different from the rough streets that schools, at least in part, are designed to provide poor students an escape from.
These funding formulas put educators in a no-win situation: If they suspend or expel disruptive children, they lose out on money to provide educational services to other students who need it. If they keep misbehaving children in school, that threatens the safety of the staff and cripples the learning process. Teachers can’t teach when they are forced to babysit recalcitrant students in their classrooms. Allowing states to, in essence, punish the vast majority of students — those who are well-behaved and show up to school every day willing to learn — for the indifference or truancy of the minority who are chronically absent seems fundamentally unfair.
Sen. Jon Tester seeks to end annual standardized testing
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 21, 2015
Amid a national debate about overtesting, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a onetime elementary school music teacher, wants to erase the federal requirement that states test every child every year in math and reading.
Tester said Tuesday he will try to amend a bipartisan bill that was crafted by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and was passed unanimously last week by the Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education and Pensions.
That bill, which is designed to update the country’s main federal education law, maintains the requirement that has existed since 2002 that states give standardized math and reading tests annually to every student in grades three through eight and once in high school.
Critics say the testing mandate has drained the joy from classrooms, leading to narrowed curricula as teachers focus on math and reading to the exclusion of social studies, the arts and other subjects. In the worst cases, the emphasis on testing has led to cheating scandals, opponents say.
A growing number of parents around the country are having their children opt out of federally required standardized tests. In New York, an education advocacy group said more than 175,000 students opted out of English language arts exams given last week.
“Students shouldn’t be spending most of their time in schools filling out bubbles,” Tester said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “High-stakes testing is an expensive way to judge school districts and a bad way to prepare children for their future.”
Tester’s bill would require states to test students in math and reading three times — once in elementary school, once in middle school and once in high school. It would be up to a state or school district if they wanted to test more frequently, Tester said. “If you’ve got a local school district or a state that thinks they need more than that, that’s their call,” he said.
Annual testing required by the federal government is a priority of civil rights groups, which lobbied Alexander and Murray to maintain the testing mandate. The groups argue that federally required testing is a tool to force fairness in public schools by aiming a spotlight at the stark differences in scores between poor, minority students and their more affluent counterparts.
Civil rights advocates say they don’t trust states to pay attention to disadvantaged children if they aren’t required by federal law to test and make public the scores of blacks, Hispanics, students with disabilities and English-language learners.
Tester said he understood that argument but believes that local residents, not the federal government, are in the best position to hold their school districts accountable.
“We have a similar situation in Montana. We have a lot of Native American kids at risk, they need attention,” he said. “. . . If you have a state that’s going to ignore certain segments of the population, I can assure you the federal government coming in and doing mandates is not going to make it be accountable. We need to help the states with their evaluation, and hopefully the states will do their job.”
The Alexander-Murray bill would update No Child Left Behind, which was enacted in 2002 and was due for reauthorization in 2007. The law ushered in an era of accountability by requiring states for the first time to test all students in math and reading in grades three through eight, as well as once in high school. Students are also required to take three science tests during their school career.
Under the law, schools must make public their test scores by groups according to race, income and whether the students are disabled or English learners. Most states began annual testing in 2005, and the public data laid bare achievement gaps between poor children and their more-affluent peers, usually divided along racial lines. No Child Left Behind penalizes schools that fail to raise test scores for all groups.
“I’ve got many educators in my family,” Tester said. “We talk education around the Easter dinner table.”
Tester said he plans to offer his bill as an amendment during the Senate floor debate on the Alexander-Murray bill, which has yet to be scheduled.
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