More steps still necessary, but… Education Budget is increased; New funds targeted for “restoring” staff and program cuts                   The DC Council voted on May 30 to substantially raise the amount of money that will go to DC’s public schools this coming year.  An additional required vote on the budget will be taken on June 16. The original budget proposal submitted by the Mayor provided a per student increase (known as the UPSFF-the Uniform per student funding formula) of only 1.5%, much less than the cost increases that schools will confront—and much less than the 3% increase recommended by the Mayor’s own state education agency.  The budget also put much less money into school renovation/modernization than previous budgets. The result was staff and program cuts across the city, including ten staff cut at Wilson High School (for a total of 30 staff cut in 3 budget cycles), staff cut at other large high schools (especially Ballou, CHEC, and Eastern) and inadequate progress on needed renovations and modernizations across the city. See Washington Post and Northwest Current articles. The Council budget will send an additional $11.5 million to DC public schools as well as $7.2 million to the city’s charter schools.  The Council “expects the additional funds at DCPS to be used for restoring instructional staff and programs at schools (itals mine) and is requiring the Chancellor of DCPS, by September 1, 2017, to submit to the Council a report that outlines how the additional funding to DCPS will be used and a detailed analysis of the changes to the use of “At-Risk” funds. This statement from the Council is critical because in past years, the Council has provided DCPS with additional funds to stave off staff cuts, and DCPS has instead allocated the funds to other projects.  Likewise, funding appropriated by the Council to support at-risk students has been used by DCPS to cover general school costs. Chancellor Antwan Wilson has stated publicly that the funds will go to schools, not the central office.  That’s a good start.  But, it’s important to understand: If schools are to hold on to staff members who have already been told that they’re cut, the schools must be given their revised budgets quickly. It will be important for the Chancellor, the Council, and the Mayor–as well as those of us who advocated for the increased funding–to make sure that schools are notified quickly about their revised budgets. Thanks Due to Many                   The exceedingly low budget proposed for education inspired great parent/citizen activism!  The main group that pushed for both increased funding for all public schools (traditional DCPS and charters) and an assurance that DCPS funds would be used to restore program and staff cuts was the Coalition For DC Schools (C4DC), which led a petition and letter-writing effort.  In addition, high-profile advocacy efforts calling for increased funding for all DC public schools were led by the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and DC Education Coalition for Change (DECC). It was an amazing outpouring in favor of adequate funding for all of our public schools.  Thanks to all!!!!  We also have many to thank on the DC Council.  Chairman of the Education Committee David Grosso and committee members Anita Bonds, Charles Allen, Robert White, and Trayon White issued a committee report in favor of providing at least a 3% increase in the per student (UPSFF) funding.  To make the increase possible, Councilmembers Mary Cheh (3) and Vincent Gray (7) (who respectively chair the committees on the Transportation and Environment; and Health) were able to identify funds from agency budgets overseen by their committees and make them available to the education committee.  Chairman Phil Mendelson was then able to use the report and funds as the foundation for cobbling together the 3% increase as well as funds for other educational programs (including transportation costs for adult students, made possible by a transfer from Elissa Silverman’s Labor and Workforce Development committee). Thanks to all of you who signed petitions and wrote your councilmembers, to all the city’s advocates who really revved up for this campaign, and to the City Council who made the increase a reality—and, who are insisting that the DCPS funds are used to restore instructional staff and programs. Community Working Group launched by DCPS to address overcrowding issues                 Many thanks to Chancellor Antwan Wilson, who in one of his earliest actions as our new Chancellor established a Community Working Group to discuss and make recommendations to address the overcrowding/space needs afflicting Wilson High School and the elementary/middle schools that feed it (largely, but not just located in Ward 3).  Virtually every school that feeds into Wilson High School, as well as Wilson itself, is badly overcrowded, and projections indicate that enrollments will continue to go up, up, up. The first meeting of the group (and a prior discussion sponsored by the Ward 3/Wilson Feeder Education network) focused mainly on ways to increase available space, both to relieve overcrowding and restore the ability of schools to offer seats to students who live out-of-bounds, as promised by the Report on Boundaries Space could potentially be identified for, say, an early childhood center, which could relieve crowding at area elementaries.  Participants identified possible new space at such sites as the Fannie Mae complex, which is being redeveloped, the Lower School that is being vacated by Georgetown Day School, and the old Hardy school. Let me know if you have other ideas! Provide DCPS and the Working Group with your input here: You can follow the committee’s work via the DCPS blog at https://dcpsplanning.wordpress.com. The Working Group includes the principal and a parent representative from each school, plus Brian Doyle (chair of the Ward 3/Wilson Feeder school Education Network); a representative from Councilwoman Mary Cheh’s office; and me, as the Ward 3 representative to the State Board of Education.  The plan calls for the group to meet monthly over the next 4-5 months to develop recommendations that will then be presented to the broader community for feedback.

April 23, 2017

Mayor’s proposed education budget decreases real dollars for city’s schools 

City Working Group calls for 3.5% boost

Proposed 1.5% education increase below inflation; will lead to staff/program cuts

Alert: The City Council’s education committee will hold hearings on the DC Public Schools budget this Thursday, April 27, at 10AM and 5PM. To sign up, click here.

Reminder: PARCC testing begins this week. As anyone who reads this newsletter knows, I believe that our school system relies too heavily on PARCC scores for school accountability and am working to reduce it. But, PARCC provides important information on how our students are progressing; and, our schools and school staff are evaluated largely based on PARCC scores. For all these reasons, I hope you encourage your children to do their best on them. No stress, no hype, just doing their best to show what they know.

Mayor’s proposed education budget decreases real dollars for city’s schools 

It’s budget season, and the education budget proposed by the Mayor is not good news for our schools. While the Mayor’s budget document calls its 1.5% education increase “historic,” the proposal actually means fewer real, inflation-adjusted dollars per student than last year’s budget—and that decrease means reductions in staff    and other cuts at our schools.
It’s particularly bad news for the city’s largest high schools: Wilson, Ballou, Eastern, and CHEC (Columbia Heights Education Campus). Each of these schools appears to face particularly severe staff cuts because of the way D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) allocates funding to each school. For Wilson High School, the proposed budget, as allocated by DCPS, translates into cutting 8.8 staff positions. These cuts are on top of 9 positions cut last year and 12 positions the year before that. Read the Wilson High School Budget Primer here.

Here are a few important facts:
1. Education costs increase when a) the actual costs of education (staff, supplies, etc.) increase due to inflation and b) when enrollment increases, requiring increased resources to meet the needs of a larger student body (more books, more teachers, etc.) In addition, costs can increase if new programs are added or existing programs are beefed up.
2. Since the 1999-2000 school year, the main unit for education budgeting has been “per student funding,” known as UPSFF, the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. By tradition, the City has increased the UPSFF base each year, by roughly 2%, as a way of addressing increased costs due to inflation. You can see how the UPSFF has increased over the years in this letter from Council Member Vincent Gray.
3. After reviewing per student costs, a specially convened city Working Group called for a 3.5% increase in per student base funding. The Working Group was named by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE–DC’s state education agency) to review the current level of DC’s UPSFF. The Task Force was convened amid a variety of concerns, including that education funding had lost much ground to inflation and that for some time the UPSFF hasn’t fully reflected the cost of providing an adequate education. (See here for “Cost of Student Achievement,” a report on funding adequacy in DC, released in 2003.) Click here to read the report of the UPSFF working group, which determined that this year’s per pupil base needed to increase by 3.5%.
4. The Mayor’s proposed 1.5% increase is much lower than what was recommended.
5. The proposed 1.5% increase will not cover the costs of inflation. A parent on Oyster-Adams Bilingual School’s Local School Advisory Team, Emily Mechner–who usefully is also a Harvard-trained economist!–researched DC’s education budget when her children’s school faced staff cuts. She found that the proposed 1.5% increase in UPSFF will not even cover “DCPS’s own estimate of employment costs” and “represents a devastating 3% cut over last year’s levels.”
6. Inadequate funding of the UPSFF causes schools to cover the rising costs of their general, special, and English-language learner education programs with their “at-risk” funds, which are supposed to be reserved to cover the extra costs of providing a strong education to the most vulnerable students. For information on this, inadequate funding for school modernizations (which mainly affects schools in other wards), and other ways in which the proposed budget will leave schools underfunded, see this research conducted by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

Next step: the City Council
The proposed budget is now in the City Council’s court. It’s up to them to find the additional funds to bring the proposed budget up by the needed 3.5%, not the proposed 1.5%.
The Council’s Education Committee will hold its budget oversight hearings next week. The oversight hearing for DCPS will be on Thursday, April 27, with one hearing at 10AM and another at 5PM.        Hearings are held at the City Council at the Wilson building. To sign up to testify, click here. You must sign up by COB Tuesday, April 25.
The Mayor’s proposed budget and the Council hearing are the first key steps in DC’s annual budget process. I will do my best to keep you posted as more information becomes available about the effects of the proposed budget and Council efforts to improve it.

Update: New accountability plan is adopted by the State Board of Education
I’ve reported a number of times that the new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, gave every state a chance to change how it evaluates its schools. The law replaces the old No Child Left Behind Act, which required states (including DC) to evaluate schools almost exclusively based on reading and math test scores and on the proportion of students who reached the score threshold deemed “proficient.”
After many months of discussion, testimony, and two drafts, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) brought its final accountability proposal to the State Board of Education (SBOE) for a vote at the end of March.
I voted against the proposal, along with my colleagues from wards 6 and 8, because I didn’t believe the plan moved far enough towards judging schools based on more than just reading and math scores. I also was disappointed that it didn’t move further towards crediting schools for their students’ progress, especially at the high school level, where schools will continue to get no credit for their students’ test score growth. This Washington Post article explains the issues surrounding the new proposal, and this Post op-ed explains the additional changes my colleagues and I had hoped for.
Without question though, the new policy is an improvement over the previous system. Moreover, I credit my colleagues on the State Board for encouraging OSSE to improve on its original January proposal and OSSE for incorporating some of these improvements. All involved are committed to further improving the process over time.
The State Board will be establishing a task force and a process for following up on some of the commitments made in the final proposal, including a way to measure high school “growth” and an indicator for “access and opportunities,” aimed at encouraging schools to provide students with a well-rounded education.
I look forward to working with my SBOE colleagues, OSSE, and the community to bring about the improvements we all still hope to see.

Calling all District Students!

Would you like to serve as the student representative to the Dc State Board of Education or to join the Student Advisory Committee which advises the State Board of Education. Apply here. Applications are due May 30th. Click here for more information on the work of previous student reps, including video interviews with prior members.