The Ward 7 Education Council gathered last week to discuss DC Council member Charles Allen’s Public School Transparency Amendment Act 2019. As written, the proposed legislation would mandate public charter schools’ adherence to the same transparency laws and regulations imposed on the DC Public Schools system and the DC government in general — the Freedom of Information Act, the Open Meetings Act and release of reports on contracting over $25,000 (in the case of the charter schools, that includes those with teachers and management companies).
I was invited to participate on a panel with representatives from EmpowerEd and the DC Public Charter School Board to examine the pros and cons of Allen’s bill. In a previous column, I asserted that the legislation doesn’t go far enough.
Unsurprisingly, the charter board isn’t very fond of it. Steve Bumbaugh, a member who insisted he was speaking for himself — not the group — said there have been discussions about allowing board staff to respond to FOIA requests submitted to individual charter schools. This bifurcation of responsibility, however, could create an opportunity for noncompliance coupled with excuses rivaling “The dog ate my homework” — ultimately leaving no one fully accountable.
Despite my reservations about Allen’s proposal, I have to admit it is more expansive than the measure introduced by at-large Council member David Grosso, which mostly focuses on establishing certain budget protocols. Grosso has scheduled a public hearing on June 26 for his bill. The hearing for Allen’s legislation isn’t expected to take place until October — a deliberate manipulation of the process by Grosso, who chairs the Committee on Education.
Undoubtedly, issues surrounding sunlight and disclosure in the public charter sector are important, and DC is long overdue to create a mechanism to address them. After all, nearly $1 billion of taxpayers’ money is spent on charter schools and the board that oversees them.
Yet when I left the Ward 7 Education Council meeting, I was more troubled by the city’s unquestionable fiscal neglect of schools in that community and in Ward 8. Greg Rhett, a Ward 7 resident and group member, said his voice and those of his neighbors were “lost in that nonsense around relocation of Banneker [Academic High School] and Shaw [Middle School].” Of the 20 schools expected to take budget cuts next school year, seven are in Ward 7 and 10 are in Ward 8. Many are elementary facilities like Plummer, where the education meeting was held. H.D. Woodson High School could lose its special-education instructor.
Despite repealing tax benefits for technology companies, which freed $15 million in revenues for the DC Council to allocate, “Not a penny went to schools,” according to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who also attended the Ward 7 meeting. Actually, some of that money will be spent on school mental-health programs. But the fact remains that the council didn’t address the funding shortfall for traditional public schools east of the river.
The dismal outlook has fortified my belief that the council should require in its Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Support Act — up for a vote later this month — full funding of all DCPS facilities in wards 7 and 8. Further, the council should impose an immediate moratorium on the opening or locating of any charter school in those areas — although some proponents might seek congressional intervention to block such a move.
The budget reductions and previous misdirection of at-risk funds explain, at least in part, why so many wards 7 and 8 institutions received low ratings in the STAR system first released in December by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. It also explains the steady decline in the student population in many of those schools.
The lack of sufficient financial support and the associated adverse effects, including under-utilization, portend potential closing of several schools east of the river. It wouldn’t be the first time. Former DCPS Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson together closed more than a dozen schools, many in wards 7 and 8, despite strong protests from students, parents and education advocates.
Last week, Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn presented to the council the city’s most recent school master facilities plan. He repeated past predictions of overall growth in DC public schools during the next several years. He said that schools in wards 2 and 3 are overpopulated — at 102 percent and 105 percent, respectively. Schools in wards 5, 7 and 8 are only operating at 71 percent, 77 percent and 77 percent, respectively.
“As a system, we must remain thoughtful and cautious about the number and size of our schools. Specifically, we should seek to plan schools in a manner that most effectively maximizes the use of our limited resources and meets the varied needs of communities across the District,” said Kihn. “This means we need to provide adequate space for schools with growing student populations and to find creative solutions to best utilize facilities where student populations are shrinking.”
The capacity percentages in wards 5, 7 and 8 don’t seem low enough to warrant closing any facilities, in my view. You can bet, however, if a recession hits, officials likely will use that as an occasion to justify reducing the number of schools in those communities — without having made any real effort to ramp up their enrollment. When Mendelson asked Kihn what he intended to do to increase utilization at Anacostia High School in Ward 8, for example, the deputy mayor replied that the law mandating the master facilities plan didn’t require the inclusion of such particulars.
Grosso suggested during the roundtable that co-location be considered as an option to address under-utilization of DCPS facilities and the space needs of charters. Any expansion of that arrangement would exacerbate the cannibalism already at play in wards 7 and 8, where parents and advocates like Greg Rhett lament the “oversaturation” of charters. The fact that several traditional elementary schools are operating below capacity shouldn’t be shocking when analyzed within the context of how many charters have been allowed to open.
What often goes unspoken is that many charters are, in fact, no better than their traditional counterparts. Jack Schneider, director of research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, wrote in a recently published essay on scholastic performance across the country: “Charters have also failed to live up to the hype of freeing families from ‘bad schools.’ In large part, that is because the introduction of charters simply creates an opportunity for choice; it does not ensure the quality of schools.” (DC Public Charter School Board executive director Scott Pearson, in a letter to The Washington Post’s editor, asserted that DC’s charters are outstanding.)
Don’t believe the hype.
Rather than opening more charters or co-locating them with traditional DCPS facilities, or expanding popular schools like Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, elected officials could reach for solutions that have languished on the education-reform table for years. The council could mandate aggressive implementation of the boundary study completed in 2014, which would more evenly distribute students throughout the city while relieving overcrowding in certain schools.
Members also could require a logical common-sense feeder pattern that supports growth of schools with targeted academic programs like H.D. Woodson High School in Ward 7, which has a STEM focus. They could, through legislation, impose a system of more direct investments aimed at schools in wards 5, 7 and 8, instead of adhering to a standard per-pupil funding formula.
Most important, the council could pledge an aggressive oversight regime — the kind witnessed under former at-large Council member David Catania. Unfortunately, such precise and effective legislative work has been absent under Grosso’s leadership of the Education Committee.
There isn’t time to waste. “In order to sustain this community, we need a solid logical public education system,” Rhett told his colleagues. “We have a lot of work to do.”
For those residents and advocates who talk about equity in the city, now is the time to walk the walk with families east of the river, demanding a fair and equitable education for all the city’s children — regardless of geography. And it’s time for DC officials to pay heed to those demands.
jonetta rose barras is an author, a freelance journalist and the host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
This piece by Ms. Rose Barras highlights two urgent issues that impact the viability of traditional public schools East of the River (EOR). First, she writes of the proliferation of charters that siphon off students from the traditional public schools (a problem that does not exist in schools west of the Park, where few charter schools are established, and, as a result, where enrollment in those schools is not threatened). Second, she calls for changing the way funding is allocated to the EOR schools in order to ensure their stability and growth.
The Mayor and City Council cannot ignore the danger posed by these two phenomena to the survival of these schools in Ward 7 and 8, the anchors of these communities, and must grapple with ways to ameliorate the impact of the two issues addressed in this column that endanger the survival of these schools. They also must acknowledge how failure to do so would be tantamount of abandoning the children and families East of the River. Every council member should read this column, seriously consider the issues the writer is raising, and begin to craft legislation designed to thwart the effects of both issues that impact the survival of the traditional public schools East of the River.