It's A Great Day

FOCUS announced yesterday that student enrollment in DC charters has reached 25% of all kids attending public school. More than 19,000 children and their families now pick the school of their choice. Amazing. There are now 52 charter schools on 64 campuses.

After reading the news I immediately forwarded the information over to Dion Haynes at the Washington Post and suggested that now is the time to begin studying what is going on in these schools financially, academically and administratively. Since charter schools are start-up businesses founded by true entrepreneurs there must be some great stories to tell.

And of course, the William E. Doar, Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts would be the place to start. 260 students have signed-up and we are only in our second year. With a waiting list. Beautiful permanent facility obtained during our first year. Plans to grow at this site and others. Come on over Mr. Haynes.

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This year we stayed in New York City 3 days as we moved our daughter back into her dorm room. We

1. Visited the Central Park Zoo
2. Saw the excellent Matisse show at the MET.
3. Had a drink on the MET's roof looking out over NYC.
4. Saw the show Lennon (don't go).
5. Saw the show The Pillowman (Go, but there is not much time as it closes September 18th.)
6. Saw the show Altar Boyz (go, go, go).
7. Visited the Whitney.
8. Ate lunch at Tom's Diner.

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Our family saw my favorite musical last night at the Signature Theater. In may respects this version of Urinetown is better than the Broadway version. Go see it if you can. Here's a review of the original staging by Reason Magazine contributor Ronald Bailey.

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I read a couple of days ago that the state of Connecticut is suing the Federal Government over the No Child Left Behind Law. The rational being given is that it is an unfunded mandate. This argument makes no sense.

The law is not a mandate. Connecticut can decide not to participate and forfeit the Title 10 money tied to the legislation.

But what reason would be given for their concern over an unfunded mandate? It would have to be that the State does not want their citizen's private property (taxes) going to pay for something that they did not voluntarily choose to do.

Very strange for a State that has not problem taking private property through eminent domain.

I believe that the real reason that they are taking this issue to court is that they don't want to be held accountable for the public education of their children.

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In an extremely unusual speech delivered by a sitting Supreme Court Judge, John Paul Stevens says that if he were a legislator he would have sided on the correct side in the recent eminent domain and medical marijuana cases. However, as a judge he had a duty to vote the other way:

In one, the eminent domain case that became the term's most controversial decision, he said that his majority opinion that upheld the government's "taking" of private homes for a commercial development in New London, Conn., brought about a result "entirely divorced from my judgment concerning the wisdom of the program" that was under constitutional attack.

Justice Stevens said he also regretted having to rule in favor of the federal government's ability to enforce its narcotics laws and thus trump California's medical marijuana initiative. "I have no hesitation in telling you that I agree with the policy choice made by the millions of California voters," he said. But given the broader stakes for the power of Congress to regulate commerce, he added, "our duty to uphold the application of the federal statute was pellucidly clear."

The story, as reported by Linda Greenhouse, makes me want to call in sick to work today. Perhaps he could have worked out his own internal logical contradictions before joining the Court 27 years ago.

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Of course, I had seen the news stories covering the study which says that there is a significant funding difference in the states between money for traditional public schools compared to charters, with the later receiving the short end of the stick. And I was purposely staying away from the subject. But now that my friend Dion Haynes has written about it I guess I'll comments.

I have to admit I'm not crazy about this subject. First of all the paper was written by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation together with the Gates Foundation and both are strongly supportive of charter schools, so my assumption is that it is biased.

But second, I guess I have a problem with the over-all premise. Public school critics have cried out for years that inner city public schools spend way too much per child. So if it costs the District $13,000 per kid to educate them then do we really want charters to get this much? This is what FOCUS has been arguing for years. But if we need that much then why can parochical schools educate kids for much less? How do voucher schools that across the country receive less than a third of this provide quality education?

The mistake I see some charter schools make is that because the facility allotment does not buy them what they need they supplement this money with per pupil funding for education. A big mistake since paying for a building could crowd-out a school's education program. But they do this in order to survive. If we fix the facility issue we will go a long way to achieving a true comparison between what it cost charters versus traditional public schools to educate a child.

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The Institute for Justice had asked the court to review their recent decision. Sadly, the court has refused their request.

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Dion Haynes reports today that 44 D.C. principals will be new to their jobs this year, which he claims represents about 1/3 of all such positions in the City. The tone of the article is that Superintendent Janey is fulfilling his promise to rid they system of underperforming school leaders.

Of the 44 appointments, 23 are people hired from other school systems or an outside principal training program called New Leaders for New Schools.

The number of vacancies was about twice as high as last year, officials said. Six of the openings resulted from resignations, six from dismissals, 13 from retirements and the remainder from promotions or leaves of absence, Janey said.

The school system is patting itself on the back because in contrast to previous years all of these positions have been filled before the start of the school year. Talk about low expectations.

But the article is wrong. The 44 replacements come from traditional public schools. Missing is how many charter school principals have been replaced. And is it too much to ask what is happening regarding school leaders in the private schools which have accepted vouchers?

The educational landscape in the nation's capital is complex and confusing. Its way past the time that we should accept an article such as this that pretends that nothing has changed since the 1950's.

For example, at least 6 new charter schools have been approved to open in September. Did they ever find a facility? If the answer is no then what alternatives are there for the families who have already enrolled their kids there? What about the 600 students who had to find a new school to attend when SouthEast Academy was shut-down?

If the Washington Post doesn't have the resources to properly cover local education then they need to hire more reporters. But we have certainly gone way beyond the point where 44 new principals represent 1/3 of all schools. It does not.

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Kaitlin Bell of the Boston Globe says that young blacks are finding it easier to break with their parents and vote for Republicans over Democrats.

The issue of privatizing social security is one of the prime reasons for the switch according to Ms. Bell. I have said for a long time that blacks should be supporting the President over this issue. Now the GOP has an opening that could eventually lead to the end of the Democratic Party.

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Great idea. Maybe with my earnings we should buy everyone a car, house, and 4 years of pre-paid college tuition. Makes me really want to get up in the morning and go to work.

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I guess the big news in cyberspace this Summer is that my friend Casey Lartigue has quit his job at Fight for Children and is going off on his own. This after leaving The Cato Institute as a policy analyst a couple of years ago. He even changed the name of his blog. Casey comments:

I recently adopted a mentor who says--"Get off the plantation! When you're working for someone else, putting money in that person's pocket, you are just like a 19th century slave."

Strange words from a libertarian. Yes, if an employer is acting as a muzzle around your mouth and you cannot be a civic activist as you would like then I would be the first to say that you need to run toward the exit sign.

But remember that Casey ignited the school voucher movement in Washington, D.C. when he was at Cato with his report on the state of public education in the city. And he has been extremely active while at Fight for Children with the Washington Scholarship Fund.

Those of us who believe in the free market understand that there are advantages to both parties in a healthy employer/employee relationship. When the scale tips widely to the boss then it may be time to go. But a fighter may also try and correct the situation first if there is hope for the association and value in the work that is being done. I'm wondering if Casey took the easy way out to the detriment of the organizations he abandoned.

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As a new school year approaches policy analysts at my favorite think tank have been focused like laser beams on documenting the inherent structural problems with public education. Mark Harrison lists it's 7 deadly sins :

It wastes resources, discourages good teaching, inhibits parental involvement, suppresses information, stifles innovation, creates conflict and harms the poor.

I would add to this list the fact that, at least in many inner cities, it is safer for a parent to keep their child at home then to send them to school.

Today, John Wenders estimates that 35% of public educational expenditures in this country are wasted:

In the topsy-turvy world of public education, the incentive is for efficient, low-cost schools to imitate the less efficient, high-cost schools by spending more. The result is that U.S. public education is greatly over-funded. Public school per-pupil costs are roughly 40 to 45 percent higher than those of private schools. When we take into account the larger number of private elementary schools and further adjust for special ed, the difference narrows to about 36 percent.

Most of these funds are tied up in labor:

Over the period 1980-2000, national student enrollment grew by 15.5 percent, but total school employment grew by 37.4 percent, and teachers grew by 35.2 percent. Public schools now have about one employee for every 6.5 students, and teachers make up only 40 percent of school employees. Our public schools have become vast jobs programs, reminiscent of the Depression era WPA, rather than educational institutions.

This excessive spending is nothing to wink at since it equates to $141 billion a year, which I would guess is more than sufficient to buy every school-aged child a voucher so that they can attend the private or public school of their choice.

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My daughter and her friends who this past June created The Walking Shadow Theater Company and performed the play "The Country Club" over the last 2 weekends were not only able to cover their $2,000 start-up costs through fundraising (bake sales, car washes) but then earned enough in ticket purchases to be able to donate $2,500 to the William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts.

The small Warehouse Theater (42 seats) in Washington D.C. was sold-out for 4 of their 6 performances. Last weekend the City Paper named them "Pick of the Week" for Saturday night. Amazing.

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If you think that its a good idea to allow your teenager to drink at home so that as a parent you can make sure that they then don't get on the road - think again. Quick.

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Dion Haynes reports today that 12 out of 31 campuses of Washington D.C. charter schools authorized by the D.C. Public Charter School Board failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress goals of the No Child Left Behind Law.

On the list of "schools in need of improvement" is The Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy. For 3 years I served on the Board of Directors of Chavez. I also tutored students for 4 years there.

It has been just over 2 years since I attended my last board meeting. At that session I remember like it was yesterday reviewing student standardized test scores. The findings were shocking. They demonstrated that the longer our students stayed at Chavez, the worse the results. (Stanford-9 scores are open for review by the public so I am not revealing confidential information here.)

These findings are also significant because there is so much student attrition at Chavez. So if there are 75 kids in 9th grade perhaps 20 of these complete their senior year. You might expect that with so many students electing to go elsewhere that the school would have an easier time meeting the AYP goals.

Mr. Haynes also includes in his article this quote by a well-known charter school critic:

"We are crushing our neighborhood schools at the expense of an experiment that is failing," said Gina Arlotto, president and co-founder of Save Our Schools, an organization that has filed suit alleging that traditional public schools are inadequately funded because of charter schools. "What we have in D.C. is complete chaos now."

I agree that when it comes to the charter school movement in D.C. we are in chaos. Each year the D.C. Public Charter School Board approves many new schools who have no facility in which to open and who have no access to cash for renovating a property.

It is not fair to educate kids in warehouses and church basements. This must stop. Until there is a clear plan for how charter schools can obtain facilities I would support a moratorium on the approval of new schools. Perhaps this will put sufficient pressure on charter school leaders to at last come up with a viable solution.

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I took the day off from work today. So I'm sitting in my basement, watching Brain Lamb host C-Span's Washington Journal and I have my daughter Amy's laptop computer so I can surf the web and read the articles that Brain is reading on T.V.

Perfect.

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Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post documents the BIG GOVERNMENT spending of the smaller government Republicans in Congress:

"If you look at fiscal conservatism these days, it's in a sorry state," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of only eight House members to vote against the $286.5 billion transportation bill that was passed the day before the recess. "Republicans don't even pretend anymore."

Last week, Congress approved transportation and energy bills that burst through the president's cost limits. Annual spending bills are inching above caps set by Congress itself in its budget plan for 2006. And a massive water projects bill passed by the House last month authorizes spending that would exceed current levels by 173 percent.

"You have to be courageous to not spend money," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), "and we don't have many people who have that courage."

Indeed, Congress has exceeded the allocations or assumptions in its budget resolution four times -- and the year's legislative work is far from complete. According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, those budget violations have raised spending through 2010 by roughly $2.2 billion above Congress's limits and tacked $115 billion onto the federal budget deficit through the end of decade, including $33 billion in 2006 alone.

Perhaps the Democrats are really in office and they just changed their name so no one would notice.

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C-Span, my favorite network, is holding a 25th anniversary contest asking viewers to write in as to why they participate in viewer call-in portions of their programs. The winner will have an opportunity to host part of a call-in segment of one of their shows. The catch is you can only use 250 words. Here's my entry:

I almost did not submit an entry for this contest. This is because I assume my interest in C-Span's viewer call-in programs is the same as others who obsessively and compulsively re-dial the telephone in order to talk for 30 seconds on the air. We call for one reason only - to stir up trouble.

The goal is simple. It is say the most intelligent thing that anyone has ever said. But our comments cannot just be unique. They must be controversial. No controversial is too weak a word. They must inflame.

Our fuel is the impact we have on other callers. You win the prize if you get feedback from one of C-Span's unwaveringly stoic hosts.

Essential is that you hold political opinions outside the mainstream. If the topic is social security private accounts, then you have never heard of a better idea. Want to cure the ills of public education? Then give everyone a school voucher. If people are so tired of the destructive impact of the War on Drugs then why not just legalize them?

I pride myself in getting Brian Lamb to react. The question concerned the retirement of Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist. Callers commented on whether he was too old to continue in his job. My observation was he had to go based upon his inability to lead the court towards a more limited government. Mr. Lamb retorted with disbelief. He said "So you want him to leave because of his politics?" My day was made.

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Samuel Freedman of the New York Times brings up a topic that many people don't want to discuss. It turns out that the 6 year graduation rate at traditional black colleges is only 38%, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. At one school featured in the article, Texas Southern University, only 6% of students graduated in the normal 4 years, 21% in 6. These numbers are actually an improvement over prior years. The reporter comments:

A half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, 40 years after Lyndon Johnson's speech endorsing the concept of affirmative action, and two years after the Supreme Court upheld racial diversity as a factor in admissions, the approximately 80 historically black colleges and universities still enroll more than 10 percent of the African-American students in higher education and award close to 20 percent of degrees.

What's going on here?

What pushed the six-year graduation rate nearly into single digits earlier this decade were factors, both educational and financial, that affect scores of black institutions nationwide. With the desegregation of colleges and universities in the South and the increased recruiting of black students by top universities, what W. E. B. DuBois famously called the "talented tenth" no longer heads to places like Texas Southern by default. In fact, the top 10 percent of graduates from any Texas high school are guaranteed admission to the state university system.

As a result, the students who come to Texas Southern arrive less prepared and sometimes less committed than their forebears. Roughly one-third of them require remedial classes before they can enter college-level courses. More than 100 of the available spaces in the Summer Academy went unclaimed, even though the program charges no tuition and provides a stipend for books that is worth several hundred dollars.

So now we see the connection between this post and that of yesterday's. Minority students attend inadequate primary and secondary schools who all share one depressing characteristic: social promotion. Then they send these kids off into a society that says that you must have a college degree to succeed in life but are grossly unprepared to earn a 4 year degree. Again, where's the outrage?

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Washington Post reporter Dion Haynes says that the Stanford-9 test results are in for D.C. public schools and the results are not encouraging:

D.C. school officials compiled such lists more than two weeks ago, based on results of the Stanford 9 tests taken by students this spring. According to a draft document obtained by The Washington Post, 80 schools -- more than half of the 147 schools in the system -- are in the "in need of improvement" category, up from 68 schools last year.

So now suppose a parent wants to pull their kid from their failing neighborhood school and send them someplace else. They are out of luck. The voucher program has long ago selected families who can participate for next year and there were many more individuals who wanted to use them than slots. How about a charter school? Sorry, the enrollment at our school, William E. Doar, is essentially set with a substantial waiting list.

And if we had a school superintendent who was passionate about his job then I imagine you would see a press conference with someone with tears in his eyes apologizing to parents about the state of the product he was providing. Instead, Mr. Janey leaves it to the press to deliver the horrible news.

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