I had been also thinking (but did not write down) that the tide would turn, and that teachers and schools themselves would no longer be seen as the whole cause of poverty or brilliance.
Instead, I feared that racists would once again become free to loudly and publicly blame black and brown people for their own poverty, just like they did from the end of Reconstruction 147 years ago, right up through the anti-Civil Rights backlash of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1983 the essay (disguised as an objective report) called “Nation At Risk” (NAR) jump-started an Education Reform drive that was truly bi-partisan, and had scores of billionaires both liberal (eg Gates) and conservative (eg Waltons) willing to fund it and push politicians to back it. Presidents Clinton, Bush2, and Obama and their secretaries of education all embraced it.
If you hadn’t noticed, this reform movement failed completely.
By its own terms (that is, test scores).
Despite having ‘edu-reformers’ in charge of every single large public school system in the nation.
But it took a while for those failures to become obvious.
At first, only a handful of writers such as Gerald Bracey pointed out the errors in that study and in the reformers’ steamroller. When the report first came out, I was teaching math to 7th graders in a very poor region of DC, and felt embarrassed that so many of my students there (100% Black) did so poorly in school, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues.
Some teachers from East Asia warned me not to believe the hype surrounding NAR. They said the model of education that exists in China, Japan, Korea and so on was NOT one that should be emulated by the US.
But I did believe the myth.
Later, I read some columns by Bracey and others and began to have doubts.
Then the amazing fraud Michelle Rhee was given control of DC’s entire public school system in 2007, less than two years before I retired.
I had never heard of the woman before, but upon her being named Chancellor of DCPS, I heard that she claimed to have performed educational miracles in a low-income, all-Black public school as a 3rd and 4th grade charter school teacher in Baltimore. She wrote in her resume: “Over a two-year period” in the mid-1990s she “moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”
When I read that sentence in herresume, I seem to recall my jaw literally dropping open.
If you have ever been around kids and looked at their test scores, you would realize that this feat would be the equivalent of landing a triple axel in ice skating, while also sinking a three-pointer in the NBA, and running a marathon in under two hours.
Simultaneously.
If this really had happened, it would have been front-page news in every single publication that dealt with education.
(Sounds like George Santos took lessons on fake resume claims from Michelle Rhee!)
Of course, there were no such articles. So I scratched my head and wondered.
After I retired, someone pointed me to where the fairly detailed Baltimore test scores could be found. I looked at them, and found that she had mythologized a small bump in test scores into the greatest educational achievement ever accomplished, anywhere. And nobody had called her on this lie.
I suspect that the bump can be attributed in large part to the fact that over one third of the students at her grade level, at that school, in that year, had scores that were so low that they weren’t counted!!! I wrote a few posts on my blog about it, and even did a call-in on an NPR interview with her, asking why she lied so much, in particular about those scores. She just giggled, as if to imply that I was just being an idiot for trying to call her on such a small technicality, when she was still working miracles.
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From theDaily Howler: “In the 1994-1995 school year, the seven schools run by EAI were under enormous pressure. During and after the previous year, major disputes had broken out about the low test scores of the EAI schools; by the fall of 1994, everyone knew that the pressure was on, that the plug might be pulled on the program. (As a simple Nexis search will show, all these matters were being discussed in the Baltimore Sun.) Do we possess three brain cells among us? If any school in the EAI group had an educational miracle occurring, this glorious fact would have been shouted to the skies by EAI’s corporate leadership. Trust us: The teachers involved would have gained acclaim in the national media—the kind of “acclaim” Rhee used to say she had attained, before she realized she had to stop saying it. It’s absurd to think there was some large group of third-graders “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher,” but their test scores somehow never came to the attention of the UMBC researchers.”
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Apparently nobody else with any knowledge of basic, elementary statistics and probability had previously bothered to compare those actual scores with her extraordinary claims. So I wrote what I found, with a fair amount of fury at the fact that such an amazing, world-class fraud and liar could be in charge of education in my home city, Washington, DC, the very seat of national government and so on. I got my 15 minutes of fame, but while Rhee did retire in disgrace, she has unfortunately never been indicted for fraud, even though she clearlysuborned all sorts of cheating and erasing of bubble marks on students’ tests, and gave prizes and awards to one of the most prolific cheaters, a principal in my own neighborhood. (see here for some details.)
As I have recently feared, but did not put into writing, the really scary part now is that right-wingers and racists are using the failure of this billionaire-led disruption of public schools to get rid of the very idea of public education as a public good. They applaud the self-segregation.
My former math colleague Betsy James compiled this graph. It appears that at some of the best-known charter organizations, such as Rocketship, DCI, ELHaynes, Achievement Prep, Richard Wright, and St Colletta’s, the highest executive salaries are literally off the chart.
She wrote, on Twitter , “I think it’s right to be suspicious of DC charters wanting all of the benefits of teachers unions while none of the responsibilities. But I also feel for charter teachers caught in the middle. Pay the teachers & show the receipts.”
In the wake of testimony this springabout charters needing, and deserving, the monetary increase that DCPS teachers fought for (and won) through their union, this blog post aims to be an outline of some basics of charter school funding and expenditures in DC as well as public accountability behind both.
The bottom line is that accounting of DC charter finances is disaggregated, incomplete, inconsistent, and sometimes purposefully obfuscating, and lacks any meaningful democratic governance and guardrails. As a result, true public oversight is almost impossible for the finances of the publicly funded schools that educate nearly half of DC’s students. This landscape represents a real danger to good use of taxpayer funds and, consequently, proper financing of all of DC’s publicly funded schools.
Each year, DC charter schools receive $1 billion from DC taxpayers (about the same as DCPS receives) by way of the uniform per student funding formula (UPSFF). That public money for charters (apportioned to each on the basis of student population and characteristics, as it is to DCPS) goes directly to the individual, privately run nonprofits that operate each of DC’s 69 charter LEAs.
A separate funding formula is used to provide charters with facilities funds from DC taxpayers. Those facilities funds are apportioned based on the number of students in each LEA, with a set amount per student. The total amount of facilities funds slated forcharters for FY24 is about $175 million. Though the idea is to ensure charters have funds specifically for facilities (something that DCPS does not have to pay for itself), DC charter facilities funds can be used for anything and are entirely untracked and unmonitored by DC.
While those two funding streams from DC taxpayers constitute the majority of each DC charter school’s annual revenue streams, DC charters can also receive federal and local grants from the office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE) as well as philanthropic and other (private) grant revenue.
To better outline charter finances, how they are reported, specific problem areas (reserves, audits, facilities funds, and philanthropy), and what all this means for DC democracy, I have organized this blog post in the following broad categories:
I. The Current Landscape II. Problems With The Current Landscape III. Reserves IV. Audits V. Facilities Funds VI. Philanthropy VII. Solutions
I am happy to include more and correct what is here as you, my readers, may advise–including adding more solutions to what is an annual $1 billion anti-democratic mess.
I. THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
To account for their spending, DC charters provide to the public charter school board (PCSB, their authorizer) annual 990s as well as annual budgets, annual audits, and annual reports.
In addition to publicly posting all of that, PCSB provides its own annual financial analysis reports and annual at risk funding reports, while posting the deputy mayor for education’s annual per pupil funding analyses (which look at a high level of per pupil funding in charters). The financial analysis reports are created by PCSB to analyze the fiscal health of individual charter schools, while at risk funding reports are compilations of what individual charter LEAs report of their planned use of at risk funds.
Between all of these, there is a lot of financial information—which sounds good except for its inherent disaggregation and resulting lack of meaningful and connected detail:
—annual reports of charter schools outline minimum, maximum, and average teacher salaries and also list “salaries of the 5 most highly compensated individuals in the organization, if over $100,000” for the prior school year. There is no requirement for donations to be outlined, and while listing the top five salaries is perhaps sufficient for a small LEA, it doesn’t work well for a large LEA like KIPP DC, whose latest annual report outlines top five salaries ranging from $216K to $359K (by comparison, the DCPS chancellor makes less than $300K, while DC’s mayor makes $220K). Moreover, each annual report is done by school year, not fiscal year like the financial analysis reports, annual budgets, and annual audits.
—annual budgets (done by fiscal year) appear to have more finely outlined details than annual reports, but again do not outline who donated what and do not outline all executive salaries, individual teacher salaries, specific grants and donations, and specific facilities costs and expenditures.
—annual audits are also done by fiscal year, but a year prior to the budgets, making alignment of the information between publicly available financial sources difficult (not to mention that some of the audit information is frankly out of date by the time of its posting). The audits appear to outline federal grants; contracts; lease activities; and real estate obligations as well as loans and other fiscal obligations. They also outline donor restrictions on funds. But as with the annual budgets, there is no outline of who donated what; all executive salaries; individual teacher salaries; all grants and donations; and clear delineation of facilities costs and expenditures as well as actual real estate holdings. As with the annual reports and budgets, the reporting is dependent on what the school itself provides to the auditing companies they hire for this purpose.
—990s for each DC charter LEA are publicly available on websites other than PCSB’s (for instance, the IRS website, guidestar, and pro publica’s nonprofit explorer)–but all are literally years behind the current year. (For example, the latest form for DC Prep is for 2019 on both PCSB’s and pro publica’s websites, dating from 2020, while guidestar has a 2018 form dating from 2019.) The 990s are the only place I have seen where some charter LEAs indicate that they have engaged in lobbying. The 990s also list the highest paid salaries, contracts, and fundraising expenses as well as contributions in excess of $5000—but without any donor information (i.e., just 5 individuals gave KIPP DC $14 million as reported on its 2019 990—but who they are is publicly unknown).
—financial analysis reports are created by PCSB based on information in the audits and data submitted directly to PCSB by charter LEAs. The financial analysis reports put that information into more readily understandable categories. The reports contain the days of cash on hand and percentage of DC and grant funding for each charter. The reports use this data among others to present “report cards” on each LEA’s fiscal strength.
—at risk funding reports before FY23 are collections of aspirational wishes and actions, not only because charters have not been required to report how their at risk funds are used, but also because the reporting is (perhaps obviously) highly variable. That will change slightly starting in 2024, when charters will report both their budgeted and actual at risk expenditures. But the variability of use will likely continue, as at risk funds in each charter are not mandated for any specific uses, unlike in DCPS.
II. PROBLEMS WITH THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
As outlined above, the public has a lot of available fiscal information around our charters–but it is not easily or even directly related to the most basic questions of accountability with respect to public money.
Setting aside clear and direct fiscal mismanagement, here are the problems:
1. There are no truly independent audits of DC charters, whether for attendance (which is directly related to DC’s school ratings and payments) or taxpayer funds. Charters’ annual audits are done by companies hired by individual charter businesses.
2. There is no forensic accounting, or tracking, by DC government of any charter money, including randomized tracking of taxpayer funds and money following students from charters to DCPS after count day. This is important inasmuch as DCPS sees an influx of students from charters every year—but the money cannot follow those students because there is no tracking of it OR of students. It is also important because all publicly available information on DC charter finances originates with the charter nonprofits themselves, incentivizing obfuscation. (More on that under “audits” below.)
3. There are no rules on reporting specific charter expenditures for teacher pay and facilities. As noted above, the facilities funding is completely untracked and without any mandate for its use. As a result, public reporting on these and other areas of charter spending is entirely voluntary, incomplete at best, and publicly untransparent.
4. There is no required disclosure of donors and their donations to charter schools. While donations do not constitute a large percentage of DC charter revenue as far as I can see, for some charters donations are sizable and constitute a powerful tool in their operations. Moreover, the way in which philanthropic revenue is accounted for is less than clear, with literally unbelievable reporting of $0 in philanthropic revenue for some LEAs. (More on that under “philanthropy” below.)
5. There are no mandated charter reserves or limits on reserves.
6. There are no rules for investments, or use, of charter reserves, which are mainly DC taxpayer funds. This represents a boon for the financial sector, essentially transferring public dollars to private hands without any way for the public to have a direct say in that investment and a direct benefit from it.
7. Although there is public reporting of charter contracts, it is completely disaggregated (see the PCSB website here), with charter 990s the only other source of this information (where it is truncated and years behind the present). This means there is no way for anyone outside the LEAs themselves to know what contracts any given LEA has at any given moment.
8. No elected or appointed DC official with any oversight of DC charters has knowledge of individual LEA charter donors, use of reserves, teacher pay, per pupil expenditures, facilities expenditures, contracts, or use of at risk funds, so oversight of DC charters by officials directly accountable to the public is necessarily limited.
As a result of this weak and publicly unresponsive governance, several things are apparent with respect to DC charter finances:
–Every LEA has different methods, different desires, and different uses for its money. While the central tenet of DC charters is their independent governance, those different things are not accounted for anywhere clearly or unambiguously. In fact, if revealed at all, that information is disaggregated such that meaningful public oversight is nearly impossible.
–At no point can anyone outline basic financial issues in charters, such as which LEA pays teachers the best or even the most consistently (i.e., is there a minimum and a maximum salary for teachers and administrators); what return on investment LEAs have for their investments; and what hundreds of millions in facilities funds are used for.
–Many charter executives have large-scale pay that is revealed explicitly only in the LEA’s 990s—and thus disaggregated from all teacher pay in all public accounting and not up to date. But when plotted against charter teacher pay (see here if that link isn’t working), the disparity is jarring—especially as at least 10 charter executives are currently making more than DC’s mayor, despite no charter LEA having as many students as DCPS, which the mayor herself is nominally in charge of.
The bottom line: There is no way for anyone in the public sphere to understand where that annual $1 billion investment in our charters actually goes and how much is being directly invested in our kids.
Below are a few areas of charter finances where the lack of public sunshine is very problematic.
III. RESERVES
Per FY21 guidelines (the most recent available) for PCSB’s financial analysis reports, PCSB recommends that schools have “at least 45 days of cash on hand. Fewer than 30 days of cash on hand may be cause for concern.”
But the median of cash on hand for charters, per the FY21 financial analysis report, is 165 days. It is not clear what level, if any, is actually required (as opposed to recommended)—and certainly there is nothing about what a maximum should be.
At the March 3 oversight hearing, starting at the 4 hour and 55 minute mark of the video, at large council member Christina Henderson asked the PCSB executive director about cash on hand, noting one school with 24 days of cash on hand while another school with about 700 days. Henderson mused that if charter LEAs have all that cash, why not just pay their teachers more?
In response, the PCSB executive director and the PCSB director of finance noted that refinancing or saving for mortgages may be a reason a school has small or large reserves, respectively.
A few minutes later in the same hearing, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin noted that if cash on hand is being banked for expansions, it’s getting ahead of the issue. He also noted that charter cash on hand goes up annually by $50 million.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear how to account for that annual growth.
For instance, the FY20 financial analysis report showed $351 million in “unrestricted cash” for DC’s charter schools.
But the FY21 financial analysis report showed that “unrestricted cash and cash equivalents” amounted to $419 million.
So: what is “unrestricted cash” versus “unrestricted cash and cash equivalents”? It is not defined clearly anywhere.
Moreover, annual growth in cash reserves appears to be different for each LEA, without any clearly delineated and publicly specified reasons for that growth, such that it is impossible for any DC officials or taxpayers to know if the growth is due to investments, better use of money, or something else (layoffs of staff, reorganizing, etc.).
Possibly the only deduction one can make around the annual growth of DC charter cash reserves is that it is mainly money paid by DC that is not going directly to students now or (possibly) ever, because most funding to DC charters comes directly from DC taxpayers.
When I mentioned last year to the PCSB director of finance this obscured public view of charter spending because of the obscurity around cash reserves, he noted that not only do PCSB staff check in with charters regularly when they see large reserves (or lack thereof), but that charter review and renewal reports show “patterns of cash” that elucidate their operation.
The trouble is that the public is not privy to PCSB staff conversations on that subject—not to mention that those charter renewal reports occur only every 5 years, which for the sake of public clarity and accounting is an eternity.
DC Prep provides an excellent example of these problems.
A year ago, at its May 2022 board meeting, DC Prep’s board discussed investing almost $30 million in cash reserves. That amount represents more than 10% of the LEA’s annual operating budget with about 2000 students. Shortly thereafter, DC Prep advertised for an investment manager (see the notice in the charter school section of the DC register, 69/26, dated 7/1/22).
As a staffer noted at minute 39 of the May 2022 meeting video, DC Prep has seen an extra $4 million in its coffers annually, mainly due to “healthy increases in per pupil funding.”
Not surprisingly, given that the school receives almost 90% of its revenues from DC taxpayers, at the 56 minute mark of the video of that May 2022 board meeting a DC Prep board member worried about the “optics” of a publicly funded charter school having an investment strategy for tens of millions.
But housing developer and board member Terry Eakin had a different view. At 58 minutes in the video, Eakin noted that “donors have given us over $36 million since the beginning [in 2003]. If we were investing in the stock market monies from the taxpayers, I think it would be different.” Eakin also noted (boldface mine) that “in the unlikely event we were to make a major investment and lose all of [the invested cash], it wouldn’t be monies we had gotten from DC. I would earmark it as monies we received from donors. . . . the way I look at it, we’re just trying to get a better return for our kids.”
At that same May 2022 board meeting, DC Prep’s board declined to give permanent raises to staff—even though teachers there are paid on average less than $70,000 per year; the school struggles with staff retention (that topic alone took up almost half of the May 2022 board meeting discussion); and the school’s top administrators have recently been paid more than the mayor.
Let us put all of this into perspective:
DC Prep’s most recent publicly available audits show that between 2014 and 2021, DC Prep got an average of 82% of its revenues directly from DC taxpayers. Each audit makes this statement: “DC Prep receives a substantial portion of its revenue from DC.” The school also has a fairly high debt load—something that the FY21 financial analysis report noted.
So we know that
–Terry Eakin’s statement regarding DC Prep’s cash reserves as given (mainly or wholly) by donors is incorrect; –DC Prep’s teachers are not well paid relative to its administrators; and –Despite troubles with staff retention, relatively low pay for teachers, and a high debt load, DC Prep’s board avoided using the LEA’s extra millions in cash to address any of it, declining to raise salaries overall or to offer (as detailed at minute 31 of the board video) a “substantial bonus” or “money” to discourage mid-year staff departures.
Upshot:
Even though charter cash reserves largely come from DC taxpayers, the purposefully weak governance structure of DC charters ensures that DC taxpayers (and the elected and appointed officials representing their interests) have NO control or say in any of it, even though all of it is central to the operation of those LEAs and the mission of teaching our kids and constitutes hundreds of millions transferred from the public to private hands.
IV. AUDITS
As noted above, DC charters’ annual audits are conducted by companies charters themselves hire and then provide with statements about the schools’ accounting. In addition, those audits and individual LEA reporting are the basis for PCSB’s financial analysis reports, which analyze and report on the fiscal health of charters.
But even while they appear to be extensive, charter audits have two glaring problems.
1. Charter business dealings and investments are not entirely (or at all) clear in the audits.
For instance, both KIPP DC and DC Prep own property that is not as far as I can see currently used or rented. As a result, I could not figure out how that is reported in the audits, because it is not specifically mentioned.
In December 2019, DC Prep bought 1619 Frankford St. SE, a decrepit residential property with a large lot, as a location for a future middle school. In the wake of public protest, DC Prep promised to sell the property if it got another location for its middle school. (See p. 79 of the transcript of the PCSB November 18, 2019 meeting here: “If we can secure an alternative site for our permanent location, we will resell the Frankford Street site.”)
But DC Prep still owns the property in 2023, despite being awarded in 2021 a huge site by DC for its middle school. How DC Prep’s ownership of 1619 Frankford is accounted for in publicly accessible documents is unclear–even when the school owes property taxesand accrued penalties on it.
In early 2017, KIPP DC bought 12 wooded, undeveloped acres behind Gainesville St. SE, in Hillcrest, and days later proposed to build a 900 seat high school there. While that proposal was defeated by community opposition, half a decade later KIPP DC still owns that land. The tax rate and assessed value is very low, amounting to a tiny fraction of KIPP DC’s expenditures and assets—but how this is accounted for, including the millions used to purchase the land and what KIPP DC’s future plans are for it, remain publicly obscured.
And that is not mentioning DC charters that also operate in other jurisdictions (i.e., Friendship and Eagle). Those operations are unaccounted for in publicly available documents for DC charters, even though those operations outside DC could affect the financial health of the LEAs’ DC operations.
2. Audits are delayed relative to other charter financial information, and this ensures poor information for the public while vitiating meaningful oversight.
Perhaps the most obvious example of that is the recent revelation that $2 million was embezzled from KIPP DC—which was (incredibly) not the only OR largest recent fiscal impropriety of KIPP DC.
KIPP DC’s $2 million embezzlement took place from April 2020 through August 2021, a relatively long period. But the school’s most recent publicly available audit, from June 2021, doesn’t mention it. That may be because KIPP DC was reported to have found the problem only months after that June 2021 audit, “during a routine internal review in December [2021].”
That said, the embezzlement did not become public knowledge until nearly a year after KIPP DC’s reported discovery of it, after the feds filed a lawsuit for civil forfeiture in August 2022.
In other words, but for the feds suing 8 months after KIPP DC said it discovered the $2 million embezzlement, we the DC public might STILL not know about any of this. As it is, the lawsuit was filed months after multiple spring oversight hearings in 2022 by the DC Council, hearings in which none of this was raised.
In addition to that embezzled $2 million, more than $5 million around construction contracts and commitments was in the last 2 or more years underreported by KIPP DC (see p. 42 in the June 2021 audit).
The most recent PCSB financial analysis report, from FY21, came out sometime after September 15, 2022–in the wake of reporting around the federal forfeiture lawsuit around the embezzlement at KIPP DC. The analysis of KIPP DC in that FY21 report gives the LEA a good rating for fiscal health, but also notes the $2M embezzlement AND the $5M underreporting. The financial analysis report goes on to note that it didn’t believe the underreporting was related to the embezzlement, but that the LEA will take “further corrective actions.”
So: what are those “further corrective actions” and when will we taxpayers hear about them?
In an early September 2022 story about the embezzlement, PCSB was reported to be holding a public hearing later in that same month to “highlight the steps it has taken and will take in the future to prevent other incidents of fiscal malfeasance in the charter sector.”
It never happened.
Then, in October 2022, when I spoke to him about the embezzlement, the PCSB director of finance said PCSB was “continuing to gather information and review it” and expected to have a “robust conversation” in November or December [2022] about it.
If that conversation ever happened, it certainly was not public.
That said, the charter board recently held a closed session on April 24, 2023 to discuss KIPP DC’s finances (remember: three YEARS after the embezzlement started and about two YEARS after the underreported $5 million). That 4/24/23 Monday morning meeting was publicly noticed only 72 hours before, on a Friday (April 21) in the DC Register.
And this is not even getting into the confusing information provided to the public about the $2 million that was embezzled.
For instance, the federal lawsuit specifically says this:
“Between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020, KIPP DC received approximately $1,372,412 in federal grants, and between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, KIPP DC received approximately $3,426,314 in federal grants.”
One would thus conclude that the embezzled $2 million constituted federal grant money that the federal government is seeking to get back.
Yet in 2022 public reporting in the wake of that lawsuit filing (see here and here), a KIPP DC spokesperson said the embezzled funds came from “KIPP DC’s financial reserves and from a single private grant.”
So which is it: “private” money kept as cash reserves OR money the federal government is entitled to?
Now, three years after the embezzlement started, and two years after the underreporting of $5 million, we don’t know
whose money was taken; what the misreporting means for the public; when any missing money will be returned and how; and why none of this was ever publicly reported by KIPP DC and/or PCSB directly and unambiguously.
In fact, not one syllable about any of this was uttered at the recent spring 2023 oversight hearings at the council.
V. FACILITIES FUNDS
DC charter LEAs are granted facilities funds that provide a set amount per student each year, without any specification about how those funds are to be used. In addition, there is no tracking of them by any DC entity. In the last decade alone, DC charter LEAs received more than $1 billion in facilities allocations.
In a recent letter about charters wanting to have more money as a result of the DCPS teacher contract, the PCSB executive director noted that charter facilities funds must cover both capital expenses as well as maintenance for DC charter schools.
But that is in fact incorrect (as C4DC noted in its own correspondence on the subject): The UPSFF is meant to cover charter maintenance costs—which it in fact does in DCPS.
At the March 3 hearing, after noting that DC charter facilities allocations are about $25 million less than reported occupancy expenses in the sector, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin said that $50 million of charter occupancy expenses are for maintenance. Thus, he noted, one might conclude that the facilities allowance for charters is $25 million too much!
Unfortunately, the accounting here is not good. For one, no one is tracking facilities funds. For another, facilities funds are given without regard for need. And for yet another, as a result of both of those things, no elected or appointed officials can exercise any oversight whatsoever.
It’s not just a blind trust—it’s needlessly anti-democratic and inevitably wasting public money.
Consider that in 2019, Rocketship applied to open a Ward 5 campus. Its application noted that eventually, the total facilities costs for all three of its DC campuses would amount to $6.5 million per year, for about 2112 students. The application noted that that comes out to about $3068 per student–which is less than what the school would expect to receive in per student charter facilities funds (in FY20, that was $3335 per student).
VI. PHILANTHROPY
Until sometime after 2017, philanthropic revenue in DC charters was reported unambiguously as precisely that: philanthropic revenue. (See, for example, the chart here for 2017, from the financial analysis report for that year.)
But sometime after 2017, PCSB stopped reporting philanthropic revenue clearly, eventually removing the term “philanthropy” entirely and changing the years of reporting, such that it is now practically impossible to know what, exactly, each charter has for philanthropic revenue.
Here’s what happened:
This document is a sequential compilation of screenshots of the FY18-FY21 financial analysis reports for exhibit 10, which starting in FY18 purportedly showed philanthropic revenue in DC charters.
In the FY18 report, this exhibit 10 table is titled “philanthropic revenue by school.” But unlike the 2017 table (where the column reporting this data is labeled “philanthropy”), here the values for individual LEAs are put into a column labeled “FY [X year] grants and contributions.”
As OSSE can and does give grants to charter schools, this is a bit confusing: what grants and what contributions? It’s not said. But if one looks at the 2017 table, and compares the 2017 values to the values reported for FY2017 on the FY18 table, it seems like they are the same values.
But while we can thus deduce (at least for the few LEAs I checked) that “grants and contributions” for 2018 = philanthropy for 2017, this is not explained anywhere.
For the FY19 financial analysis report, this information is reported differently yet. Instead of labelling the columns in exhibit 10 “FY [X year] grants and contributions” (as was done for the prior year’s report), the FY19 financial analysis report labels all of them with a 2-year span—for example, “2018-2019 total grants and other contributions.”
So: Is that a fiscal year? A school year? A calendar year?
Again, it is unexplained—but again, one can deduce that these are likely the same values as shown in the same exhibit for the same years in the FY18 financial analysis report.
That is, the “FY2017 grants and contributions” reported in the FY2018 financial analysis report for exhibit 10 (“philanthropic revenue by school”) appear to be the same as the “2016-2017 total grants and contributions” reported in the “philanthropic revenue by school” (exhibit 10) in the FY2019 financial analysis report—at least for the few I checked. The totals certainly add up to the same numbers.
But who will check from one year to the next to see if the reporting changed at all, in the event that these are in fact *not* intended to be equivalents, as no explanation is provided?
For the same exhibit in the FY20 financial analysis report, the labelling appears to be the same for the columns as in the FY19 financial analysis report—but the entire table is titled differently, as “grants and other contributions by school.”
Thus, with the FY20 financial analysis report, we have entirely lost any mention of philanthropy or philanthropic revenue!
As with the FY19 financial analysis report, exhibit 10 in the FY20 financial analysis report labels the columns with a year spread—for instance, the column with the most recent data is “2019-2020 total grants and contributions.”
In the latest financial analysis report, for FY21, exhibit 10 is different yet again, with the entire table being labelled “grants and other contributions by LEA” and columns being labelled thusly: “FY [year] total grants and other contributions.”
For all the exhibit 10 tables contained in the FY18-FY21 financial analysis reports, it appears that the column with the most recent data has the same values as a column outlining grants and contributions by LEA in those reports’ exhibit 9, which outlines sources of revenue by LEA (including total revenue, federal revenue, grants, and other (unspecified) income). The column in each report’s exhibit 9 that appears to be identical to that exhibit 10 column is titled “total grants and other contributions.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, each report’s exhibit 9 and all their columns, including the ones outlining grants and contributions, doesn’t mention philanthropy at all.
Thus, back in October, to better understand where philanthropic revenue figures in this reporting, I spoke with PCSB director of finance Michael Bayuk. He told me that the exhibit 9 column for the FY21 financial analysis report (“total grants and other contributions”) is state and local grants and philanthropy. He told me that “we didn’t think it” worthy of including philanthropy separately as a category.
He then noted that a “large part of these funds” (i.e., in that column of total grants and other contributions) is philanthropy. (I discovered, however, that this last bit is not true, at least for FY21—read on.)
As far as OSSE grants go, Bayuk noted that sometimes OSSE is a pass-through for federal money, so in that case, if an OSSE grant to a charter is federal money, it gets counted as federal for this table. The column in exhibit 9 titled “other income” is activity fees, interest income, rental income, and anything that doesn’t fit into the other columns. He noted that it is variable; it is certainly not forthcoming in terms of defining, or breaking out, where the money is coming from.
To better suss out philanthropic revenue in DC charters, in October 2022 I requested by FOIA from PCSB the source files for the column on exhibit 9 of the FY21 financial analysis report titled “total grants and other contributions,” broken out in terms of state, local, and other grants; philanthropy; and whatever else is contained in that column for each school.
Therein ensued nearly 6 months’ worth of obfuscation including unlawful delays; creation of documents specifically for me that were not what I requested; incomplete production; and document manipulation such that dates were obscured. (You can read the whole sorry saga here.)
But by March 2023, I had in my possession (finally!) what I think (and hope and believe) is a complete set of what are most likely original source files for this information. They consist of spreadsheets with an actual line item called “income from philanthropy.” Here’s a link to all the different folders and files, produced over a period of more than a month.
That line item, income from philanthropy, is separated out from grants and is apparently what DC charters report each year directly to PCSB. By compiling the FY21 income from philanthropy line items for each charter and comparing them to the values shown for each charter for grants and contributions on the FY21 financial analysis report, I discovered a few things:
1. PCSB collects information every year from DC charters specifically on their philanthropic revenue. But because there is no required reporting of philanthropy in DC charters other than this, the only measure we have is what PCSB gets—and it is available to DC taxpayers only by FOIA and until such a time as PCSB decides not to request that data from charters.
2. For the most recent year of grants and contributions in the FY21 financial analysis report, the values shown for that in exhibits 9 and 10 are identical—but in most cases not the same as “income from philanthropy” as reported on the documents I received via FOIA.
3. For only a relatively small subset of schools (12 out of 66 by my count), philanthropy constitutes the vast majority of grants and contributions.
4. For other schools, the majority of their grant and other contribution income appears not to come from philanthropy. For some of these, however, the utter lack of philanthropic revenue reported is mystifying. How is it that KIPP DC doesn’t have any philanthropic revenue for an entire year? (See this webpage for KIPP: “KIPP DC relies 100% on private donations to fund growth efforts to reach more students and operate critical programs like KIPP Forward and the Capital Teaching Residency.”)
5. For yet another subset of schools, there is nothing–no philanthropy and/or no grants—which appears to highlight disproportional outside funding in DC charters.
Notwithstanding that lack of clarity around philanthropic revenue, the sheer amount in charter “grants and contributions” is astonishing. In that short period starting with FY18, for instance, the total grew thusly:
All of that begs the question: what was/is behind that growth? Federal money in the pandemic? Something else? The point appears to be that no one knows—least of all DC taxpayers.
And this analysis of PCSB reporting shows that obscurity is purposeful.
VII. SOLUTIONS
All of these issues—the obfuscation, the lack of data, the impossibility of oversight, and the lack of budgetary guardrails and basic guidelines—make clear that there is no way for anyone in the public sphere to understand where DC taxpayers’ annual $1 billion investment in our charters goes and how much is directly invested in our kids.
This isn’t about the ever-mentioned “outcomes,” whether test scores, graduation rates, or post-secondary career or college achievement. It is, literally, about where the money DC taxpayers provide is going. Simply put, such “outcomes” are meaningless metrics without understanding where OUR money is actually going–and where it isn’t going.
So let us look at what we CAN and SHOULD do better regarding public accountability in charter finances:
–Track students so money follows them.
–Require teacher minimum pay in charters, along with full disclosure of all charter teacher salaries as in DCPS.
–Require documentation from individual LEAS that all their charter teachers receive increases as a result of any cash the charter sector receives as a result of DCPS teacher wage increases from union contracts.
–Disclose all donors and the amount they donate to all DC publicly funded schools.
–Hold regular investigative, independent audits of all DC charter businesses.
–Make DC—not private businesses or the financial institutions they choose to enrich—the reserve holder for all charter reserves, in amounts proportional to the percentage of taxpayer funds received. DC would be responsible for investment of that money and would pass the investment proceeds only to charter LEAs that have demonstrated need of it. This underscores that DC charter businesses are not mere nonprofits–they are chartered entities that are chartered for a specific public purpose and do not exist to profit from (or to profit others in) that public purpose.
–Enact a maximum pay limit for charter executives and administrators.
–Decouple all efforts to specifically increase charter teacher pay from increases in DCPS teacher pay. The two sectors are separate and governed differently, and teacher pay is purposefully different in each. If DC charter teacher pay is inadequate at any given moment, that is an issue solely to be addressed by the charter sector–not coupled to anything in DCPS.
–Disclose all charter school business deals and assets explicitly and directly, naming each.
–Have a website for all charter contracts per LEA at all times.
–Have explicit disclosure of, and tracking for, all facilities funds to charters, and apportion facilities funds based on demonstrated need and without regard for maintenance costs, which are included in the UPSFF.CommentLikeYou can also reply to this email to leave a comment.
The sacred and the profane: A former D.C. charter school board member calls for change
By Valerie Strauss, Washington Post Reporter
September 23, 2021 at 10:29 a.m. EDT
Steve Bumbaugh is a former member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, having served on the seven-member volunteer panel from 2015 until early this year. During that time, Bumbaugh visited numerous charter schools and attended many board meetings where questions of whether schools should be authorized, sanctioned or closed were discussed.
Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently from the school systems in the areas where they are located. In the nation’s capital, charters enroll nearly as many of the city’s schoolchildren as the system does. Supporters of charters say that they provide families with a necessary alternative to schools in traditional districts. Critics say they do not, on average, provide better student outcomes than traditional districts and steer public money away from districts that educate most schoolchildren.
Bumbaugh is a big supporter of charter schools. In this unusual post, he writes about his experience on the charter board and makes recommendations for change that he said will be bring better representation from the community.
Bumbaugh has worked in the education field for several decades in various roles. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at Yale University and an MBA at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
By Steve Bumbaugh
Let’s travel back to September 2017. I was in Southeast Washington, D.C., scheduled to tour a school in an hour. I remember visiting 25 years ago when it was part of the D.C. public school system. That school was closed in 2009 — one of dozens closed in the last 15 years — and now several charter schools occupy the campus.
At the time of this visit, I was a member of board of the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB), having started my tenure in 2015 and serving until early this year. In that capacity, I visited dozens of D.C.-based charter schools. Sometimes, I left those visits saddened, even defeated.
This was one of those times.
Over several decades of work at the intersection of education and poverty, I have learned that much of a school’s character can be divined through its start-of-the-day ritual. So on that day in 2017, I arrived early and sat in my car, far enough away that no one seemed to notice me, but near enough so that I could observe the comings and goings. Several young Black women arrived at school with their children who look to be 5 or 6 years old. They were greeted by staff members, and I observed them having what appeared to be tense conversations with the women. Some of these women left with their children in tow. Others handed their children over to staff members and departed.
When I entered the school for my scheduled visit, I was greeted by one of the founders, a 30-something man with energy and charm. He was joined by the school’s board chair, a distinguished senior partner from one of D.C.’s blue-chip law firms. They took me on a tour of several classrooms. I noticed that the leadership of the school was entirely White as were many of the teachers. All of the students were African American, most from families that struggle financially.
For the most part, the school looked like most other “no excuses” charter schools in the nation’s capital, dotting low-income African American neighborhoods, and in other places across the country.
These schools start with the belief that there is no good reason for the huge academic gaps between privileged and poor minority students — and that strict discipline, obedience, uniform teaching methods and other policies could erase the gaps. A feature of many of these schools, and one evident on this site visit, are lines painted on the hallway floors. Students are expected to walk on these lines as they move from classroom to classroom. Any deviation is likely to result in punishment. The only other places I had seen this before was at correctional facilities.
I entered a preschool classroom where students were gathered in a semi-circle on a rug. Like curious 4-year-olds everywhere, the students turned their heads to scrutinize us. Many smiled widely and some even waved. The teacher snapped at the children, demanding their attention. I was startled by her aggression. They were, after all, 4-year old children engaging in age-appropriate behavior.
That evening I called a staff person from this school who I’ve known for several years. I asked her to translate the scenes I witnessed outside the school. The conversation went something like this:
–“Those scholars probably had uniform violations. The staff persons were probably telling the moms to go home to have the kids change.”
–“I didn’t notice that they were wearing anything different from the other children.”
–“Well, they may have had the wrong color shoes. Or maybe they had the correct color shirt, but it didn’t have the school’s insignia on it.”
–“They have to go back home for that?”
–“Unless they want to spend the day in a behavior support room.”
Incredulous, I pressed my friend for details. I discovered that children as young as 3 years old could spend an entire day in seclusion, away from their classmates, if they were wearing the wrong color shoes. I am dumbstruck. Is this even legal?
This sort of interaction between students and staff was not uncommon in no-excuses charter schools I visited over the years.
Occasionally I did visit schools that combine academic rigor and kindness with student bodies that are mostly Black and low-income. But those schools were the exception. I’ve seen schools where children are taught to track the teachers with their eyes, move their mouths in a specific way, and engage in other humiliating rituals that have little educational value.
I visited a school that suspended 40 percent of its 5-year-old children who had been diagnosed with disabilities. At some schools, when children are sick, their parents were forced to produce a doctor’s note because school leaders believed the parents were lying. But some of these parents were uninsured and there weren’t — and still aren’t — many doctors in their neighborhoods. Obtaining a doctor’s note required them to take their children onto packed public buses so they could go to public health clinics or emergency rooms.
Schools that still do this are telling these parents that they are not trusted. And while children in these schools are taught computational math and textual analysis, they also learn that they are congenitally profane.
Charter schools arose a generation ago in Washington, D.C. when the city was poor and in the grips of a decade-long homicide epidemic. I was part of a group of 20-somethings frustrated with the lack of progress in the city’s long-troubled public school system. We had been creating programs for the D.C. Public Schools system that dramatically outpaced the district’s regular academic outcomes, and we wanted to turn these programs into actual schools.
We talked about forging solutions with parents and students, working to retain every single student, exhorting patience about building the infrastructure from which improved academic outcomes would spring.
But little of this vision was attractive to an emerging cadre of funders and policymakers who placed huge bets on charter schools. They submitted to a vision, not based on a shred of evidence, that Black and Brown children would thrive if they were taught “character” and “grit.” The way to do this, apparently, was to create an assembly-line model of instruction with rigid rules. Children who could not abide by these rules were “counseled out” to return to traditional public schools. Now about one-third of D.C. charter schools are in the no-excuses category, enrolling at least half of the charter student population. (Some of these schools say they are changing, but I haven’t seen real evidence of that.)
Some ‘no-excuses’ charter schools say they are changing. Are they? Can they?
Remember, this was a time when Black communities were ravaged by an epidemic of crack cocaine and criminal justice laws that sent Blacks to jail for far longer sentences than Whites arrested for using essentially the same drug. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, warned against “the kinds of kids that are called super predators, no conscience, no empathy” — which many of us took to mean low-income Black children. In this context, powerful people not familiar with low-income communities were easily seduced by plans to tightly control children who might otherwise grow into dangerous adults.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board was created in 1996, at a time when homicide rates in the District were so high the city was dubbed the “murder capital.” It is no wonder the D.C. Public Charter School Board jumped on the “no-excuses” bandwagon.
What have we gained from this system? As of 2018-19 — the latest data available on the website of the charter school board — only 8.5 percent of Black high school students (about 80 percent of the student population) in charter schools were deemed proficient in math and 21 percent in English Language Arts, according to scores on the standardized PARCC exam.
There are some charter schools that are doing amazing work, but the system itself is ineffective. The vast majority of our students are not remotely ready for the rigors of college coursework.
After untold millions of dollars of investment and the creation of scores of schools — there were 128 operating this year — it is time for us to admit that this experiment is not working as it should.
So what must be done?
The District must rethink its charter schools, and more specifically, charter schools must be integrated. “Chocolate City” has been replaced by a city where upper-income White residents and a more diverse spectrum of Black residents exist in equal numbers.
One of the few scalable policies that dramatically improved academic outcomes for Black students was the integration of American public schools in the 1970s and ’80s. The Performance Management Framework that ranks the quality of each charter school should ensure that schools reflect the demographics of the city as it is today, particularly given that charter schools are not constrained by neighborhood boundaries that enforce segregation in traditional public schools.
New York City provides a replicable, legal model to enact a charter school system that prevents the proliferation of a worrying trend in D.C’s charter schools: elite charters that essentially shut out vulnerable, low-income Black children. (Though the city also has some of the most egregious no-excuses charters.)
What we have now, with some notable exceptions, is a system where highly resourced families crowd into a handful of desirable schools that have impossibly long waiting lists, and students from poor families attend no-excuses schools or charters that struggle to remain open. A school that serves a student body where 6-8 percent of the students meet the definition of “at risk” should not be considered top tier when 51 percent of the students (a statistic confirmed by a charter board staff member) in the entire system are at risk.
Similarly, schools should not be penalized or subtly encouraged to move out low-performing students when they serve student bodies that are overwhelmingly at risk.
“Separate and equal” should not stand in one of the most liberal cities in the United States.
Moreover power needs to be distributed more evenly. At first glance, the concentration of institutional power is not evident at the Public Charter School Board.
Most of the board members, including the current executive director, are Black or Latino. A closer look — and I am including myself in this observation — reveals that we are not remotely similar to most of the families with children attending D.C. public charter schools. Fully 80 percent of these families are African Americans who qualify for free and reduced lunch, which is not the same as at risk, but which is generally seen as a proxy for school poverty.
The people who are on the charter school board are highly educated professionals. Since I began serving on the panel — which has seven rotating volunteers, all appointed by the D.C. mayor — there have been 10 sitting members, half of whom attended Yale, Stanford or Harvard universities, or some combination of the three. We are well-versed in the contours of institutional power and know how to operate inside of its rarely articulated but clearly delineated boundaries. We’ve been rewarded for decoding these rules and abiding by them, which is precisely why we are selected for these coveted roles. We provide cover through optical diversity.
But if we really want to embrace equity, it’s time to rethink the make-up of the Public Charter School Board. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser will have a unique opportunity to reshape this board over the coming year as five of its seven members will be termed out.
We need a board with members who reflect the communities served by D.C. charter sector. As cities move away from elected school boards to mayoral appointments, it’s critical that the voices that used to represent low-income communities continue to be present.
In the District, 80 percent of families attending charters are eligible for free and reduced lunch, but the charter school board has not in its 25-year history appointed a single board member who lives in poverty. Why not adjust the PCSB’s contours to reflect the communities in which these schools are located instead of incessantly asking poor Black people to acclimate?
Continuing to govern charter schools without input from low-income parents robs them of agency. This one-way flow of power is precisely the mistake this movement has made at the student level. Involving parents in the co-architecture of the sector would signal an evolutionary step forward.
Lastly, “no excuses” schools must be banned outright. The central failure of the education reform movement is the mimicking of carceral institutions, established and often celebrated by highly resourced outsiders. The idea that low-income Black and Latino students need to be tightly controlled in order to do well is a relic of Jim Crow.
—
My parents were Protestant ministers whose doctrine was best reflected in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. In their theology, elites look askance at the most vulnerable even though it is the most vulnerable — the poor, the outcasts — who can redeem a flawed world. It is the poor who are sacred. Their unearned suffering is both incessant and redemptive. This inversion of what is truly sacred and what is genuinely profane is a persistent theme in religion because the human spirit is so inclined to side with power; the path of least resistance. The education reform world is no different in this regard.
When I was teaching at Eastern High School in the early 1990s, we forbade our students from wearing T-shirts popular with their generation that sported curse words and gun imagery. Teenagers being teenagers, they pushed back against this restriction accusing us of violating their rights.
Over lunch one day, we put the dress code on trial. In my closing argument I asked the defendant if he would wear an offending T-shirt to his grandmother’s house or to church. “No” he responded. Somewhat theatrically I leaped: “Of course you wouldn’t! Your grandma’s house and church are sacred spaces.” I pulled the snare tightly across the throat of his argument, asking him in a whisper: “Why isn’t my classroom a sacred space?”
Then as now, the sacred places don’t exist in their neighborhoods. Where are the bookstores and the movie theaters and the art studios? They are in the wealthier neighborhoods where the people are sacred.
This hoarding of the sacred expresses itself in remarkable fits of paradox. In the education reform world, those of us who can retreat to our own sacred places sometimes expect to be praised for the simple reason that we take notice of the profane at all.
So even though the education reform world is replete with leaders whose own children are too sacred to attend the schools they found or fund or otherwise support, we are expected to ignore the contradiction when we tout these schools to the general public.
This is because there is an understanding at an almost cellular level that some children deserve sacred spaces and others should gratefully accept what the sacred give them.
In an era when Black Lives Matter signs are ubiquitous and a national conversation is underway about how to untangle our historical caste system, the PCSB has a role to play.
We can create a system that sees every child as sacred, regardless of ethnic stripe or socio-economic status.
And because effective social movements are not led by outsiders, we must create a system where families who attend these schools fully participate in the institutions of power. This is the beautiful, messy contract required by democracy.
Valerie Jablow writes periodically about abuses of leadership in DC publicly-funded schools. In this post, she reports on a task force — completely unknown to the public — that is in charge of deciding what to do about ‘learning loss’ during the current pandemic.
“The task force members, almost to a person, have ties to ed reform, school choice, and charter proliferation, with many working for organizations that have received private foundation money (Walton, Gates) that has fueled the same.
“The only public hint that the task force existed at all was dropped back in December, when a COW report said this on p. 7 (boldface mine):
“’The Committee [COW] has also worked to understand the learning loss students have experienced during the pandemic and what strategies the District should pursue to mitigate it. Recognizing that the pandemic is an unprecedented situation and that alleviating substantial learning loss would require innovative, yet proven methods, the Committee assembled a taskforce of public education experts and researchers in May 2020. For the past six months, the Committee has met regularly with the taskforce and gained a deeper understanding of the learning loss that is occurring in the District. The taskforce has also identified strategies that have been used to ease the learning loss that occurs annually over summer break and ways to adapt those strategies to the current situation. The Committee has used this information to guide its oversight of DCPS and public charter schools’ mitigation efforts. Moreover, recommendations from this taskforce helped guide the Committee’s budget priorities for the fiscal year 2021 budget.’
“The idea of the council meeting with this (non-teacher) task force to worry over learning loss (and its BFF, re-opening schools), while at the same time limiting public voices at hearings on re-opening in December and January (not to mention entirely eliminating the education committee), is pretty rich.”
“But it gets even richer when you consider the following:
“–Only a bit more than half of the DCPS slots allocated for in person learning were claimed days before it was slated to begin, which suggests less-than-enthusiastic buy-in for in person learning.
“–The office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE) is determined to move ahead with PARCC testing, despite the fact that it’s not likely schools will make the 95% participation OSSE requires before imposing penalties—and that testing conditions will be, uh, variable.
…
“The irony with that last piece is that applications for seats of choice are waaaaay down this school year, with nearly every ward and every grade seeing huge drops in applications through the lottery.
“Despite that reality (outlined at the January meeting of OSSE’s common lottery board), the board touted the success of its annual Ed Fest, which this year featured 1,473 virtual participants (out of more than 90,000 students in DC’s publicly funded schools—but hey, who’s counting?)”
Jablow also points out that it’s very hard for parents, students or teachers to keep up with all the school closings (especially among the charter schools) in DC. Also, it remains the case that in DC (as in most of the USA) the worst-run schools are reserved for underserved, low-income Black and Latino children. Here are a couple of charts on this:
Ten years ago, I worked as the Director of Assessments for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). For temporal context, I arrived after the first of the infamous test cheating scandals and left just before the incident that spawned a second. Indeed, I filled a new position created to both manage test security and design an expanded testing program. I departed shortly after Vincent Gray, who opposed an expanded testing program, defeated Adrian Fenty in the September 2010 DC mayoral primary. My tenure coincided with Michelle Rhee’s last nine months as Chancellor.
The recurring test cheating scandals of the Rhee-Henderson years may seem extraordinary but, in fairness, DCPS was more likely than the average US school district to be caught because it received a much higher degree of scrutiny. Given how tests are typically administered in this country, the incidence of cheating is likely far greater than news accounts suggest, for several reasons:
· in most cases, those who administer tests—schoolteachers and administrators—have an interest in their results;
· test security protocols are numerous and complicated yet, nonetheless, the responsibility of non-expert ordinary school personnel, guaranteeing their inconsistent application across schools and over time;
· after-the-fact statistical analyses are not legal proof—the odds of a certain amount of wrong-to-right erasures in a single classroom on a paper-and-pencil test being coincidental may be a thousand to one, but one-in-a-thousand is still legally plausible; and
· after-the-fact investigations based on interviews are time-consuming, scattershot, and uneven.
Still, there were measures that the Rhee-Henderson administrations could have adopted to substantially reduce the incidence of cheating, but they chose none that might have been effective. Rather, they dug in their heels, insisted that only a few schools had issues, which they thoroughly resolved, and repeatedly denied any systematic problem.
Cheating scandals
From 2007 to 2009 rumors percolated of an extraordinary level of wrong-to-right erasures on the test answer sheets at many DCPS schools. “Erasure analysis” is one among several “red flag” indicators that testing contractors calculate to monitor cheating. The testing companies take no responsibility for investigating suspected test cheating, however; that is the customer’s, the local or state education agency.
In her autobiographical account of her time as DCPS Chancellor, Michelle Johnson (nee Rhee), wrote (p. 197)
“For the first time in the history of DCPS, we brought in an outside expert to examine and audit our system. Caveon Test Security – the leading expert in the field at the time – assessed our tests, results, and security measures. Their investigators interviewed teachers, principals, and administrators.
“Caveon found no evidence of systematic cheating. None.”
Caveon, however, had not looked for “systematic” cheating. All they did was interview a few people at several schools where the statistical anomalies were more extraordinary than at others. As none of those individuals would admit to knowingly cheating, Caveon branded all their excuses as “plausible” explanations. That’s it; that is all that Caveon did. But, Caveon’s statement that they found no evidence of “widespread” cheating—despite not having looked for it—would be frequently invoked by DCPS leaders over the next several years.[1]
Incidentally, prior to the revelation of its infamous decades-long, systematic test cheating, the Atlanta Public Schools had similarly retained Caveon Test Security and was, likewise, granted a clean bill of health. Only later did the Georgia state attorney general swoop in and reveal the truth.
In its defense, Caveon would note that several cheating prevention measures it had recommended to DCPS were never adopted.[2] None of the cheating prevention measures that I recommended were adopted, either.
The single most effective means for reducing in-classroom cheating would have been to rotate teachers on test days so that no teacher administered a test to his or her own students. It would not have been that difficult to randomly assign teachers to different classrooms on test days.
The single most effective means for reducing school administratorcheating would have been to rotate test administrators on test days so that none managed the test materials for their own schools. The visiting test administrators would have been responsible for keeping test materials away from the school until test day, distributing sealed test booklets to the rotated teachers on test day, and for collecting re-sealed test booklets at the end of testing and immediately removing them from the school.
Instead of implementing these, or a number of other feasible and effective test security measures, DCPS leaders increased the number of test proctors, assigning each of a few dozen or so central office staff a school to monitor. Those proctors could not reasonably manage the volume of oversight required. A single DC test administration could encompass a hundred schools and a thousand classrooms.
Investigations
So, what effort, if any, did DCPS make to counter test cheating? They hired me, but then rejected all my suggestions for increasing security. Also, they established a telephone tip line. Anyone who suspected cheating could report it, even anonymously, and, allegedly, their tip would be investigated.
Some forms of cheating are best investigated through interviews. Probably the most frequent forms of cheating at DCPS—teachers helping students during test administrations and school administrators looking at test forms prior to administration—leave no statistical residue. Eyewitness testimony is the only type of legal evidence available in such cases, but it is not just inconsistent, it may be socially destructive.
I remember two investigations best: one occurred in a relatively well-to-do neighborhood with well-educated parents active in school affairs; the other in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Superficially, the cases were similar—an individual teacher was accused of helping his or her own students with answers during test administrations. Making a case against either elementary school teacher required sworn testimony from eyewitnesses, that is, students—eight-to-ten-year olds.
My investigations, then, consisted of calling children into the principal’s office one-by-one to be questioned about their teacher’s behavior. We couldn’t hide the reason we were asking the questions. And, even though each student agreed not to tell others what had occurred in their visit to the principal’s office, we knew we had only one shot at an uncorrupted jury pool.
Though the accusations against the two teachers were similar and the cases against them equally strong, the outcomes could not have been more different. In the high-poverty neighborhood, the students seemed suspicious and said little; none would implicate the teacher, whom they all seemed to like.
In the more prosperous neighborhood, students were more outgoing, freely divulging what they had witnessed. The students had discussed the alleged coaching with their parents who, in turn, urged them to tell investigators what they knew. During his turn in the principal’s office, the accused teacher denied any wrongdoing. I wrote up each interview, then requested that each student read and sign.
Thankfully, that accused teacher made a deal and left the school system a few weeks later. Had he not, we would have required the presence in court of the eight-to-ten-year olds to testify under oath against their former teacher, who taught multi-grade classes. Had that prosecution not succeeded, the eyewitness students could have been routinely assigned to his classroom the following school year.
My conclusion? Only in certain schools is the successful prosecution of a cheating teacher through eyewitness testimony even possible. But, even where possible, it consumes inordinate amounts of time and, otherwise, comes at a high price, turning young innocents against authority figures they naturally trusted.
Cheating blueprints
Arguably the most widespread and persistent testing malfeasance in DCPS received little attention from the press. Moreover, it was directly propagated by District leaders, who published test blueprints on the web. Put simply, test “blueprints” are lists of the curricular standards (e.g., “student shall correctly add two-digit numbers”) and the number of test items included in an upcoming test related to each standard. DC had been advance publishing its blueprints for years.
I argued that the way DC did it was unethical. The head of the Division of Data & Accountability, Erin McGoldrick, however, defended the practice, claimed it was common, and cited its existence in the state of California as precedent. The next time she and I met for a conference call with one of DCPS’s test providers, Discover Education, I asked their sales agent how many of their hundreds of other customers advance-published blueprints. His answer: none.
In the state of California, the location of McGoldrick’s only prior professional experience, blueprints were, indeed, published in advance of test administrations. But their tests were longer than DC’s and all standards were tested. Publication of California’s blueprints served more to remind the populace what the standards were in advance of each test administration. Occasionally, a standard considered to be of unusual importance might be assigned a greater number of test items than the average, and the California blueprints signaled that emphasis.
In Washington, DC, the tests used in judging teacher performance were shorter, covering only some of each year’s standards. So, DC’s blueprints showed everyone well in advance of the test dates exactly which standards would be tested and which would not. For each teacher, this posed an ethical dilemma: should they “narrow the curriculum” by teaching only that content they knew would be tested? Or, should they do the right thing and teach all the standards, as they were legally and ethically bound to, even though it meant spending less time on the to-be-tested content? It’s quite a conundrum when one risks punishment for behaving ethically.
Monthly meetings convened to discuss issues with the districtwide testing program, the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS)—administered to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. All public schools, both DCPS and charters, administered those tests. At one of these regular meetings, two representatives from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced plans to repair the broken blueprint process.[3]
The State Office employees argued thoughtfully and reasonably that it was professionally unethical to advance publish DC test blueprints. Moreover, they had surveyed other US jurisdictions in an effort to find others that followed DC’s practice and found none. I was the highest-ranking DCPS employee at the meeting and I expressed my support, congratulating them for doing the right thing. I assumed that their decision was final.
I mentioned the decision to McGoldrick, who expressed surprise and speculation that it might have not been made at the highest level in the organizational hierarchy. Wasting no time, she met with other DCPS senior managers and the proposed change was forthwith shelved. In that, and other ways, the DCPS tail wagged the OSSE dog.
* * *
It may be too easy to finger ethical deficits for the recalcitrant attitude toward test security of the Rhee-Henderson era ed reformers. The columnist Peter Greene insists that knowledge deficits among self-appointed education reformers also matter:
“… the reformistan bubble … has been built from Day One without any actual educators inside it. Instead, the bubble is populated by rich people, people who want rich people’s money, people who think they have great ideas about education, and even people who sincerely want to make education better. The bubble does not include people who can turn to an Arne Duncan or a Betsy DeVos or a Bill Gates and say, ‘Based on my years of experience in a classroom, I’d have to say that idea is ridiculous bullshit.’”
“There are a tiny handful of people within the bubble who will occasionally act as bullshit detectors, but they are not enough. The ed reform movement has gathered power and money and set up a parallel education system even as it has managed to capture leadership roles within public education, but the ed reform movement still lacks what it has always lacked–actual teachers and experienced educators who know what the hell they’re talking about.”
In my twenties, I worked for several years in the research department of a state education agency. My primary political lesson from that experience, consistently reinforced subsequently, is that most education bureaucrats tell the public that the system they manage works just fine, no matter what the reality. They can get away with this because they control most of the evidence and can suppress it or spin it to their advantage.
In this proclivity, the DCPS central office leaders of the Rhee-Henderson era proved themselves to be no different than the traditional public-school educators they so casually demonized.
US school systems are structured to be opaque and, it seems, both educators and testing contractors like it that way. For their part, and contrary to their rhetoric, Rhee, Henderson, and McGoldrick passed on many opportunities to make their system more transparent and accountable.
[1] A perusal of Caveon’s website clarifies that their mission is to help their clients–state and local education departments–not get caught. Sometimes this means not cheating in the first place; other times it might mean something else. One might argue that, ironically, Caveon could be helping its clients to cheat in more sophisticated ways and cover their tracks better.
[2] Among them: test booklets should be sealed until the students open them and resealed by the students immediately after; and students should be assigned seats on test day and a seating chart submitted to test coordinators (necessary for verifying cluster patterns in student responses that would suggest answer copying).
[3] Yes, for those new to the area, the District of Columbia has an Office of the “State” Superintendent of Education (OSSE). Its domain of relationships includes not just the regular public schools (i.e., DCPS), but also other public schools (i.e., charters) and private schools. Practically, it primarily serves as a conduit for funneling money from a menagerie of federal education-related grant and aid programs
Short answer: nothing that would actually help students or teachers. But it’s made for well-padded resumes for a handful of insiders.
This is an important review, by the then-director of assessment. His criticisms echo the points that I have been making along with Mary Levy, Erich Martel, Adell Cothorne, and many others.
Looking Back on DC Education Reform 10 Years After,
Part 1: The Grand Tour
Richard P Phelps
Ten years ago, I worked as the Director of Assessments for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). My tenure coincided with Michelle Rhee’s last nine months as Chancellor. I departed shortly after Vincent Gray defeated Adrian Fenty in the September 2010 DC mayoral primary.
My primary task was to design an expansion of that testing program that served the IMPACT teacher evaluation system to include all core subjects and all grade levels. Despite its fame (or infamy), the test score aspect of the IMPACT program affected only 13% of teachers, those teaching either reading or math in grades four through eight. Only those subjects and grade levels included the requisite pre- and post-tests required for teacher “value added” measurements (VAM). Not included were most subjects (e.g., science, social studies, art, music, physical education), grades kindergarten to two, and high school.
Chancellor Rhee wanted many more teachers included. So, I designed a system that would cover more than half the DCPS teacher force, from kindergarten through high school. You haven’t heard about it because it never happened. The newly elected Vincent Gray had promised during his mayoral campaign to reduce the amount of testing; the proposed expansion would have increased it fourfold.
VAM affected teachers’ jobs. A low value-added score could lead to termination; a high score, to promotion and a cash bonus. VAM as it was then structured was obviously, glaringly flawed,[1] as anyone with a strong background in educational testing could have seen. Unfortunately, among the many new central office hires from the elite of ed reform circles, none had such a background.
Before posting a request for proposals from commercial test developers for the testing expansion plan, I was instructed to survey two groups of stakeholders—central office managers and school-level teachers and administrators.
Not surprisingly, some of the central office managers consulted requested additions or changes to the proposed testing program where they thought it would benefit their domain of responsibility. The net effect on school-level personnel would have been to add to their administrative burden. Nonetheless, all requests from central office managers would be honored.
The Grand Tour
At about the same time, over several weeks of the late Spring and early Summer of 2010, along with a bright summer intern, I visited a dozen DCPS schools. The alleged purpose was to collect feedback on the design of the expanded testing program. I enjoyed these meetings. They were informative, animated, and very well attended. School staff appreciated the apparent opportunity to contribute to policy decisions and tried to make the most of it.
Each school greeted us with a full complement of faculty and staff on their days off, numbering a several dozen educators at some venues. They believed what we had told them: that we were in the process of redesigning the DCPS assessment program and were genuinely interested in their suggestions for how best to do it.
At no venue did we encounter stand-pat knee-jerk rejection of education reform efforts. Some educators were avowed advocates for the Rhee administration’s reform policies, but most were basically dedicated educators determined to do what was best for their community within the current context.
The Grand Tour was insightful, too. I learned for the first time of certain aspects of DCPS’s assessment system that were essential to consider in its proper design, aspects of which the higher-ups in the DCPS Central Office either were not aware or did not consider relevant.
The group of visited schools represented DCPS as a whole in appropriate proportions geographically, ethnically, and by education level (i.e., primary, middle, and high). Within those parameters, however, only schools with “friendly” administrations were chosen. That is, we only visited schools with principals and staff openly supportive of the Rhee-Henderson agenda.
But even they desired changes to the testing program, whether or not it was expanded. Their suggestions covered both the annual districtwide DC-CAS (or “comprehensive” assessment system), on which the teacher evaluation system was based, and the DC-BAS (or “benchmarking” assessment system), a series of four annual “no-stakes” interim tests unique to DCPS, ostensibly offered to help prepare students and teachers for the consequential-for-some-school-staff DC-CAS.[2]
At each staff meeting I asked for a show of hands on several issues of interest that I thought were actionable. Some suggestions for program changes received close to unanimous support. Allow me to describe several.
1.Move DC-CAS test administration later in the school year. Many citizens may have logically assumed that the IMPACT teacher evaluation numbers were calculated from a standard pre-post test schedule, testing a teacher’s students at the beginning of their academic year together and then again at the end. In 2010, however, the DC-CAS was administered in March, three months before school year end. Moreover, that single administration of the test served as both pre- and post-test, posttest for the current school year and pretest for the following school year. Thus, before a teacher even met their new students in late August or early September, almost half of the year for which teachers were judged had already transpired—the three months in the Spring spent with the previous year’s teacher and almost three months of summer vacation.
School staff recommended pushing DC-CAS administration to later in the school year. Furthermore, they advocated a genuine pre-post-test administration schedule—pre-test the students in late August–early September and post-test them in late-May–early June—to cover a teacher’s actual span of time with the students.
This suggestion was rejected because the test development firm with the DC-CAS contract required three months to score some portions of the test in time for the IMPACT teacher ratings scheduled for early July delivery, before the start of the new school year. Some small number of teachers would be terminated based on their IMPACT scores, so management demanded those scores be available before preparations for the new school year began.[3] The tail wagged the dog.
2.Add some stakes to the DC-CAS in the upper grades. Because DC-CAS test scores portended consequences for teachers but none for students, some students expended little effort on the test. Indeed, extensive research on “no-stakes” (for students) tests reveal that motivation and effort vary by a range of factors including gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, the weather, and age. Generally, the older the student, the lower the test-taking effort. This disadvantaged some teachers in the IMPACT ratings for circumstances beyond their control: unlucky student demographics.
Central office management rejected this suggestion to add even modest stakes to the upper grades’ DC-CAS; no reason given.
3.Move one of the DC-BAS tests to year end. If management rejected the suggestion to move DC-CAS test administration to the end of the school year, school staff suggested scheduling one of the no-stakes DC-BAS benchmarking tests for late May–early June. As it was, the schedule squeezed all four benchmarking test administrations between early September and mid-February. Moving just one of them to the end of the year would give the following year’s teachers a more recent reading (by more than three months) of their new students’ academic levels and needs.
Central Office management rejected this suggestion probably because the real purpose of the DC-BAS was not to help teachers understand their students’ academic levels and needs, as the following will explain.
4.Change DC-BAS tests so they cover recently taught content. Many DC citizens probably assumed that, like most tests, the DC-BAS interim tests covered recently taught content, such as that covered since the previous test administration. Not so in 2010. The first annual DC-BAS was administered in early September, just after the year’s courses commenced. Moreover, it covered the same content domain—that for the entirety of the school year—as each of the next three DC-BAS tests.
School staff proposed changing the full-year “comprehensive” content coverage of each DC-BAS test to partial-year “cumulative” coverage, so students would only be tested on what they had been taught prior to each test administration.
This suggestion, too, was rejected. Testing the same full-year comprehensive content domain produced a predictable, flattering score rise. With each DC-BAS test administration, students recognized more of the content, because they had just been exposed to more of it, so average scores predictably rose. With test scores always rising, it looked like student achievement improved steadily each year. Achieving this contrived score increase required testing students on some material to which they had not yet been exposed, both a violation of professional testing standards and a poor method for instilling student confidence. (Of course, it was also less expensive to administer essentially the same test four times a year than to develop four genuinely different tests.)
5.Synchronize the sequencing of curricular content across the District. DCPS management rhetoric circa 2010 attributed classroom-level benefits to the testing program. Teachers would know more about their students’ levels and needs and could also learn from each other. Yet, the only student test results teachers received at the beginning of each school year was half-a-year old, and most of the information they received over the course of four DC-BAS test administrations was based on not-yet-taught content.
As for cross-district teacher cooperation, unfortunately there was no cross-District coordination of common curricular sequences. Each teacher paced their subject matter however they wished and varied topical emphases according to their own personal preference.
It took DCPS’s Chief Academic Officer, Carey Wright, and her chief of staff, Dan Gordon, less than a minute to reject the suggestion to standardize topical sequencing across schools so that teachers could consult with one another in real time. Tallying up the votes: several hundred school-level District educators favored the proposal, two of Rhee’s trusted lieutenants opposed it. It lost.
6.Offer and require a keyboarding course in the early grades. DCPS was planning to convert all its testing from paper-and-pencil mode to computer delivery within a few years. Yet, keyboarding courses were rare in the early grades. Obviously, without systemwide keyboarding training in computer use some students would be at a disadvantage in computer testing.
Suggestion rejected.
In all, I had polled over 500 DCPS school staff. Not only were all of their suggestions reasonable, some were essential in order to comply with professional assessment standards and ethics.
Nonetheless, back at DCPS’ Central Office, each suggestion was rejected without, to my observation, any serious consideration. The rejecters included Chancellor Rhee, the head of the office of Data and Accountability—the self-titled “Data Lady,” Erin McGoldrick—and the head of the curriculum and instruction division, Carey Wright, and her chief deputy, Dan Gordon.
Four central office staff outvoted several-hundred school staff (and my recommendations as assessment director). In each case, the changes recommended would have meant some additional work on their parts, but in return for substantial improvements in the testing program. Their rhetoric was all about helping teachers and students; but the facts were that the testing program wasn’t structured to help them.
What was the purpose of my several weeks of school visits and staff polling? To solicit “buy in” from school level staff, not feedback.
Ultimately, the new testing program proposal would incorporate all the new features requested by senior Central Office staff, no matter how burdensome, and not a single feature requested by several hundred supportive school-level staff, no matter how helpful. Like many others, I had hoped that the education reform intention of the Rhee-Henderson years was genuine. DCPS could certainly have benefitted from some genuine reform.
Alas, much of the activity labelled “reform” was just for show, and for padding resumes. Numerous central office managers would later work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Numerous others would work for entities supported by the Gates or aligned foundations, or in jurisdictions such as Louisiana, where ed reformers held political power. Most would be well paid.
Their genuine accomplishments, or lack thereof, while at DCPS seemed to matter little. What mattered was the appearance of accomplishment and, above all, loyalty to the group. That loyalty required going along to get along: complicity in maintaining the façade of success while withholding any public criticism of or disagreement with other in-group members.
Unfortunately, in the United States what is commonly showcased as education reform is neither a civic enterprise nor a popular movement. Neither parents, the public, nor school-level educators have any direct influence. Rather, at the national level, US education reform is an elite, private club—a small group of tightly-connected politicos and academics—a mutual admiration society dedicated to the career advancement, political influence, and financial benefit of its members, supported by a gaggle of wealthy foundations (e.g., Gates, Walton, Broad, Wallace, Hewlett, Smith-Richardson).
For over a decade, The Ed Reform Club exploited DC for its own benefit. Local elite formed the DC Public Education Fund (DCPEF) to sponsor education projects, such as IMPACT, which they deemed worthy. In the negotiations between the Washington Teachers’ Union and DCPS concluded in 2010, DCPEF arranged a 3 year grant of $64.5M from the Arnold, Broad, Robertson and Walton Foundations to fund a 5-year retroactive teacher pay raise in return for contract language allowing teacher excessing tied to IMPACT, which Rhee promised would lead to annual student test score increases by 2012. Projected goals were not met; foundation support continued nonetheless.
Michelle Johnson (nee Rhee) now chairs the board of a charter school chain in California and occasionally collects $30,000+ in speaker fees but, otherwise, seems to have deliberately withdrawn from the limelight. Despite contributing her own additional scandalsafter she assumed the DCPS Chancellorship, Kaya Henderson ascended to great fame and glory with a “distinguished professorship” at Georgetown; honorary degrees from Georgetown and Catholic Universities; gigs with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Broad Leadership Academy, and Teach for All; and board memberships with The Aspen Institute, The College Board, Robin Hood NYC, and Teach For America. Carey Wright is now state superintendent in Mississippi. Dan Gordon runs a 30-person consulting firm, Education Counsel that strategically partners with major players in US education policy. The manager of the IMPACT teacher evaluation program, Jason Kamras, now works as Superintendent of the Richmond, VA public schools.
Arguably the person most directly responsible for the recurring assessment system fiascos of the Rhee-Henderson years, then Chief of Data and Accountability Erin McGoldrick, now specializes in “data innovation” as partner and chief operating officer at an education management consulting firm. Her firm, Kitamba, strategically partners with its own panoply of major players in US education policy. Its list of recent clients includes the DC Public Charter School Board and DCPS.
If the ambitious DC central office folk who gaudily declared themselves leading education reformers were not really, who were the genuine education reformers during the Rhee-Henderson decade of massive upheaval and per-student expenditures three times those in the state of Utah? They were the school principals and staff whose practical suggestions were ignored by central office glitterati. They were whistleblowers like history teacher Erich Martel who had documented DCPS’ student records’ manipulation and phony graduation rates years before the Washington Post’s celebrated investigation of Ballou High School, and was demoted and then “excessed” by Henderson. Or, school principal Adell Cothorne, who spilled the beans on test answer sheet “erasure parties” at Noyes Education Campus and lost her job under Rhee.
Real reformers with “skin in the game” can’t play it safe.
The author appreciates the helpful comments of Mary Levy and Erich Martel in researching this article.
(A guest blog by Peter MacPherson on the need to revert to democratic local control of schools in Washington, DC.)
By Peter MacPherson
The right moment.
A crucial sense of timing has long been viewed as the key to successful human endeavors. Advertising keeps reminding us that it’s crucial to have the erectile-dysfunction drug Cialis on hand when the right moment strikes, otherwise the opportunity for a joyful session of lovemaking will be lost. Sometimes the right moment, at least in retrospect and in real circumstances, can be of almost incalculable importance, where the very course of history is recognized to have been altered by timing. In early June of 1944 American General Dwight Eisenhower, with the help of his fellow centurions, was desperately trying to determine when they could unleash the largest invasion force in history on the shores of France to begin the final chapter of the Second World War in Europe. Before the invasion, Eisenhower and his colleagues had been bedeviled by bad weather, and 156,000 allied troops were onboard ships in ports along the British coast waiting to be dispatched to a battle that many participants on both sides viewed as an impending struggle of almost biblical proportions.
Group Captain James Stagg, a British RAF officer who led a team that monitored the weather for Eisenhower, determined that a brief window would open for a few hours on June 6, 1944 that would allow the allied invasion force to leave port and put ashore on the beaches of Normandy in France. Upon receiving this vital information Eisenhower recognized that the quintessential right moment had arrived.
The outcome of acting in that moment could not be clearer.
The voters of the District of Columbia are entering a period that seems very much like the right moment, the zone of opportunity, to produce a badly needed change for which the city will benefit enormously over the long term. With the announcement by At-Large Councilman David Grosso that he does not intend to seek re-election and that charter school board executive director Scott Pearson is leaving his post in May, the right moment to drop the curtain on mayoral control of the schools has presented itself. For it to be the right moment, though, it has to be recognized as such.
Here, in my view, is why the way in which the stars have aligned has produced this crucial moment for the city.
Grosso is now a deeply unpopular District politician. He’s been chairman of the council’s education committee for four years and because of a prickly, dismissive personality and a seeming view that the role of the panel he oversees should be a limited one, oversight of public education has been wanting. Over the past four years the District of Columbia Public Schools has been beset by scandal. Among them are heavily inflated graduation rates, the untimely departure of and reasons for former chancellor Antwan Wilson leaving DCPS and thin to non-existent oversight of critical aspects of DCPS’ operations.
Scott Pearson has been a deeply problematic actor in the ongoing drama of public education in the city. Though nominally a public employee, Pearson advocates for public charter schools as if he were heading a trade group. He’s pushed back vigorously against even modest efforts to open the charter sector to additional scrutiny by both the council and outside groups. In recent testimony before the council on member Charles Allen’s proposed legislation that would have opened charter schools to the provisions of the District’s Freedom of Information law, Pearson expressed his adamant opposition to the bill.
And the future and health of DCPS has never seemed to be in his portfolio of concerns. Pearson has actively sought to allow the untrammeled growth in the number of charter schools in the city. During his seven-year tenure as the charter board’s executive director, the number of charter schools in the city has grown from 98 to 123. They now enroll 43,000 students. He has pressed the city to transfer closed DCPS buildings for use by charters, thus inhibiting their use as swing space during modernizations or to reopened as DCPS campuses. Essentially, on Pearson’s watch, a parallel school system has been established in the city. And until his planned departure of the charter school board in May, he will continue to press for the unabated expansion of the sector in the city.
In 2007, at the beginning of the mayoral-control era, DCPS had an enrollment of around 50,000 students, with the charters educating around 22,000. During this 12-year period DCPS has bled away a staggering level of enrollment to charters. If mayoral control was supposed to secure the future of DCPS, which was broadly represented to mean high-quality education for all District children, then the great education reform experiment has failed. DCPS has good schools, as it always has. But their location is as disparate as ever. Between stagnant enrollment and virtually non-existent test score growth, then the experiment has failed. The city not only has a failed governance model, it has also wasted an immense amount of municipal treasure pursing this model. In the surrounding jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia that have comparable numbers of students to the District, they spend around half of what the city does [per student] and have higher performing systems. With over 22,000 vacant seats, the District is maintaining a staggering amount of excess capacity.
With the impending departures of Grosso and Pearson, the question that District stakeholders need to ask themselves is whether meaningful change will happen once they’re off the stage. If mayoral control remains in place the answer is easy to discern. For those not wearing their glasses and cannot see the writing in the sky, the answer is no.
Part of the reason that one should have no expectations of changes that will lead to school improvement is implicit in the design of mayoral control. Though the mayor has statutory responsibility for DCPS, the executive is also responsible for generating a budget that funds the charters. The mayor appoints the members of the charter school board. The mayor ultimately decides the fate of excess District school buildings. And, through the deputy mayor for education, has a strong planning role as well.
Then there’s the realpolitik aspect of the way the city government run. The mayor is beneficiary of significant campaign contributions from outside charter supporters and operators. It’s inevitable that the mayor would play both sides and that is certainly what Muriel Bowser has done.
The city council, during 12 years of mayoral control, has mostly shown great squeamishness about exercising its oversight role of the schools. Having watched and given testimony before the council, I have yet to see a major sea change in DCPS policy that resulted from that testimony. The impact of public testimony has chiefly been felt in area of school modernizations, which have often required aggressive advocacy on the part of school communities to bring equity what has been a brutally unequal process.
Going forward what we’re likely to see is a real struggle to find a council member willing to enthusiastically take on the role of education committee chairman. One frequently hears from council and their representatives that the council is not the school board, that by design oversight is supposed to be more modest. But when the council voted to eliminate the elected school board, they became de facto the school board. The public has demanded a court of last resort in education matters when they don’t like the way things are going. Virtually any education committee hearing that will accept public testimony finds itself hearing from a large number of witnesses. The public clearly wants to participate in school governance and wants its voice heard.
The obvious ambivalence of current council members to take on the education committee chairman role, and the track record the council has relative to education oversight, mean that the city is in the midst of a right moment moment.
In a city short on representative democratic institutions, the city council and mayor made a grave error in eliminating the school [board] in 2007. The experiment upon which they allowed the city to embark has proven to be one of poor quality. And the council is not telegraphing a willing desire to improve its performance relative to education oversight. District children need oversight of their school from adults who are committed to their success, who want DCPS and existing charter schools to thrive. The mayor keeps DCPS on life-support. It’s never permitted to be strong or aggressive enough to really compete in an education marketplace.
And charter students are poorly served in the existing governance structures. The city provides a significant facilities fee per student to charters. Yet that money is not required to be used for that purpose, and frequently is not. If students and parents have an issue with a charter, their route of appeal ends at the front door of the school. And once the search begins for a new charter school board executive director, the selection process will not involve the public in any meaningful way. Remember that the charter school board is appointed by the mayor, which then functions autonomously. The charter board will decide on its next executive director.
Ideally the council would vote to reestablish the elected school board. It would also vote to make the State Superintendent of Education a creature of the State Board of Education, the District’s only body related to education that is directly elected by voters. And they would also construct a more robust regulatory structure for charter schools so that parents, students and teachers have a real voice. But if the council will not act than the voters must. If a ballot initiative is required, then concerned citizens must pursue it vigorously.
I am reprinting a letter of resignation from two members of the task force that was supposed to analyze problems with DC’s regular public schools and charter schools. (Disclosure: I have met one of the writers several times)
Mary Levy and Caryn Ernst Resign from Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force
November 10, 2018
To: The Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force
c/o Paul Kihn, Acting Deputy Mayor for Education
From: Mary Levy and Caryn Ernst
We write to submit our resignations from the Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force and to state why we have declined to endorse the report just released.
We do this because the report and recommendations fail to deal with the most important elements of the Task Force’s basic mission: to formulate a clear vision to guide the relationship between the traditional and charter education sectors; to significantly reduce student mobility, particularly mid-year mobility; and to create a meaningful framework for opening, closing and siting schools that reflects a sensible vision for public education in the District of Columbia.
There are big underlying issues: Will the City provide an excellent matter-of-right DCPS path from PK through high school in every community in a system that is accountable to them and their elected officials, providing families with shelter from the “chance” of the lottery and the need to traverse the city? To do so would require making that an explicit goal and implementing policies to achieve it. Will the City close more DCPS schools or have charter schools take them over? Does the City recognize the different obligations and challenges of DCPS matter-of-right schools and charter (and other DCPS schools) and the implications of those differences? The report and recommendations, at best, leave these issues open and yet addressing them lay at the heart of the Task Force mandate.
We and others have raised all these concerns during Task Force meetings, in a November letter we sent to the DME, the co-chairs and members of the Task Force, and in comments on the draft. Parents and community members at the public engagement sessions also spoke to these issues
Our voice is not represented in the tone or the recommendations, nor in a minority report. We believe that charter schools are not a substitute for excellent by-right DCPS schools in every neighborhood. Policymakers’ talking to each other does not constitute a framework for opening, closing and siting schools. We fear that the only steps on student mobility facilitate rather than reduce it.
We understand that this task is difficult and that efforts were made, but at bottom, after two and a half years of effort, the key finding of the Task Force seems to be that no real consensus could be reached on a vision or on ways to meaningfully address the key challenges the Task Force was created to address. The report suggests that we are generally on the right track and therefore conveys a sense that the absence of a vision and a framework for where we want to go is not a serious problem. We do not share either view and as such, the report does not reflect our views in letter or spirit. We cannot therefore endorse it.
CSCTF Report final.pdf
Valerie Jablow of EducationDC has a lengthy and thorough column, guest-written by one Betsy Wolf, with way more analysis of the recently-released PARCC scores for DC’s charter schools and regular public schools than I could ever accomplish.
The conclusions that I draw are that:
(1) There is a huge amount of variation in PARCC test scores and proportions of ‘at risk’ students from school to school, both in the regular public schools and the charters;
(2) The public schools have slightly higher scores than the charter schools;
(3) There is a very strong and negative correlation between the proportion of ‘at risk’ students and the proportion of students scoring at the highest levels on this test;
(4) There is a much greater concentration of ‘at risk’ students in the regular public schools than in the charter schools;
(5) No, we have not overcome socio-economic segregation, and
(6) No, the charter schools do not have a secret method for achieving success for every kid, no matter what.
I reproduce here a couple of Ms Wolf’s graphs, showing that close correlation between income and PARCC scores in both the charter and regular public sectors. The horizontal axis is the percentage of the student population at the school that is ‘at risk’ (a composite measure including the fraction of families being on food stamps, welfare, incarcerated, free and/or reduced lunch, etc), and the vertical axis is the percentage of students scoring either a 4 or a 5 on the PARCC (that is, the highest levels). Both are for mathematics; the first one is for regular DC public schools, and the second is for the charter sector.
and
(Both of these graphs are copyright 2018 by Betsy Wolf, and if you click on them you can see enlarged versions.)
The first one shows that Janney, Ross, SWS, Key, and Mann elementary schools all have zero percent of their students classified as ‘at risk’, and have some the highest percentages (about 80%) in the entire city of their students scoring 4 or 5 on the math portion of the PARCC in all of DC.
Conversely, Luke Moore, Washington Metropolitan, and Roosevelt STAY — all alternative high schools — have nearly 100% of their students ‘at risk’ and have zero percent of their students scoring 4s or 5s on the PARCC. There are roughly 30 regular DC public schools that have over 75% of their students ‘at risk’. That’s a lot of kids. So the segregation by socio-economic status in the regular public schools is rather extreme. (Luke Moore happens to be about 6 blocks from my house; I’m not sure how often the students there actually attend class on a regular basis, based on how often, and when, I see students come and go.)
By comparison, there are only about six charter schools with over 75% of their students ‘at risk’. The negative correlation between the fraction of ‘at risk’ students and the fraction that ‘passes’ the PARCC with a 4 or a 5 is very strong in both the charter schools and the regular public schools, but more so in the latter (the first graph).
In the charter sector, there are many fewer schools with greater than 60% of their students scoring 4s or 5s (that is, above the fourth gray horizontal line, counting from the bottom). Also, there are fewer charter than public schools with less than 25% of their students at risk (that is, to the left of the second gray vertical line, counting from the left).
Interestingly, there are a number of somewhat anomalous charter schools that don’t seem to fit the stereotypes: Lee Montessori, Shining Stars and Roots have NO students ‘at risk’, but fairly low fractions of their students scoring high on the math PARCC, and we have four of the KIPP Schools (Spring, Lead, Promise, and Heights) which have middling concentrations of ‘at risk’ students but relatively high scores on the PARCC. (Shining Stars happens to be less than a block from my house, and I see apparently prosperous, professional families, many European-American, dropping off and picking up their kids every morning and every afternoon.)
Why these anomalies? That bears some further investigation, but my colleagues who have taught at various KIPP schools have told me me that the KIPP system is quite effective at weeding out non-compliant students.
Bottom line: DOES THE CHARTER SECTOR HAVE A SECRET SAUCE FOR GETTING EVERY STUDENT, NO MATTER WHAT, TO EXCEL?
GFBrandenburg's Blog 