This year, instead of one massive council performance oversight hearing for all DC education agencies arising from committee of the whole oversight (RIP council education committee), we were treated to three (slightly less massive) hearings covering oversight of >$2 billion in taxpayer funds:
–An 8-hour hearing on February 27 for public and government witnesses for UDC, the charter board, the state board of education (SBOE), the office of the student advocate, the education ombudsman, and the DC state athletic association (see the 2/27 video here);
–A 12.5 hour hearing on February 28 for public witnesses for DCPS, the office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE), and the deputy mayor for education (DME) (see the 2/28 video here); and
–A 7.5 hour hearing on March 1 for government witnesses for DCPS, OSSE, and DME (see the 3/1 video here).
In an effort to lend some clarity and order to something with little enough of either, I have put below recaps of a variety of important topics as they were discussed in these hearings, provided in agency responses, and/or resonated beyond the Wilson Building. Agency responses are at the hearing links above for the 2/27 hearing (charter board) or the 3/1 hearing (DCPS, OSSE, DME).
The topics are the following:
IDEA/FAPE violations
DCPS teachers’ contract
data on attendance and graduation
MFP & boundary study
school accountability
DCPS budgets
DCPS tech
school health issues
head start funds
(As I cannot pretend this is comprehensive, please let me know other topics that should be mentioned.)
IDEA/FAPE Violations
Before DC residents filed a class action against DC alleging violations of the IDEA (the individuals with disabilities education act) and FAPE (free appropriate public education) because of recurring problems with OSSE buses for students with disabilities, OSSE minimized its bus problems in its responses to current council oversight questions.
For instance, in response to council question 83 (starting on p. 219) about special education transportation, OSSE maintained that while last year was bad this year is better, without really getting into the fact that serious problems persist right now—as in, a fundraiser for a parent who lost a job because of getting their child to and from school in the wake of OSSE bus failures.
Incredibly, on p. 227 of its responses, OSSE offloaded to LEAs responsibility for students denied their educations because of the late or missing buses. The agency noted that LEAs need to identify FAPE violations as a result of late or missing buses–and then make up for them. (The good old “heads we win, tails you lose” game.)
As bad as the buses have been, they are hardly the sole issue around IDEA violations in our schools. For instance, in DCPS answers to council questions about lawsuits and settlements (attachments #18 and #19), most were about IDEA. The only lawsuit reported in the charter sector was against the agency itself, for a FAPE violation; the council never asked about lawsuits against individual LEAs (the DC version of don’t ask, don’t tell).
Not surprisingly, this year’s hearings featured notable testimony on how special education is consistently inappropriately dealt with in our schools—to wit: testimony of teacher Laura Fuchs about the situation in DCPS and the testimony about the situation in charters from Advocates for Justice and Education lawyer Maria Blauer (starting at the 1 hour, 33 minute, 30 second mark on the 2/27 video). You can reach out with your own bus story here. [Note 3/13/24: Also check out some more direct SPED/bus news here and here.]
DCPS Teachers’ Contract
At the February 28 hearing, DCPS instructional coach Gina Stephens memorably testified about bullying around the DCPS contract (at the 7:48:40 mark) and Black teachers being “impacted out” by the DCPS teacher evaluation system, IMPACT.
As if allowing the DCPS teachers’ contract to expire once again was not bad enough, DCPS has held negotiating meetings at 5 am–at which the chancellor appeared to be a no show.
At the March 1 hearing, at the 7 hour, 29 minute mark, council chair Phil Mendelson questioned the chancellor about whose idea those 5 am meetings were. The chancellor insisted the early hour meeting time was “mutual.” A few minutes later, Mendelson read from a public witness’s testimony, which quoted a DCPS teacher as saying that of that teacher’s 17 years in DCPS, 12 were under an expired contract, highlighting a pattern of dissing DCPS teachers across multiple chancellors and mayors (though possibly not across multiple council chairs, as Mendelson has been chair since 2012).
Among other things, the lack of a contract now implicates athletic trainers, who are in short supply.
Fascinatingly, in response to council question 28 (on p. 47, about transparency), OSSE happily outlined the increase in pay for charter teachers as a result of the last DCPS teachers’ contract—without once mentioning the DCPS teachers’ contract. (Perhaps obviously, there were no charter lobbyists at those 5 am negotiating sessions, either—because charters will get that money without having to show up at 5 am for it.)
Data On Attendance & Graduation
During the 2/27 hearing, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin asked charter board executive director Michelle Walker-Davis about the offloading of charter students to DCPS during the school year (at the 6 hour, 6 minute mark) and how charter graduation rates are calculated (at the 6 hour, 13 minute mark). The entire exchange is worth listening to if for no other reason than to hear the charter board executive director declare that all students counted as graduating from charters were there at 9th grade—something that the adjusted cohort (as defined by OSSE) renders impossible.
Now, that is not to say that OSSE doesn’t know exactly which kids start and end (and when) at each of our publicly funded high schools! OSSE certainly has this data. The problem is that we the people just as certainly do not have that data. In fact, what we have is positively inscrutable—by design.
For instance, while DCPS provided in its responses to the council a number of data tables in excel, OSSE did so, too—but only for the council, apparently. Instead, what we the people have access to via the council are a bunch of utterly nonsensical PDFs.
Take OSSE’s response to question 42 (on p. 66), about student mobility. In its oversight response document, OSSE references providing the council an excel spreadsheet. But there is no excel spreadsheet available to the public with this data. Instead, we the people have access to a PDF document with this data starting on p. 354 of the OSSE attachments. The PDF document breaks apart what would be a table into incoherent pieces so that at NO time can you read it in tabular form.
The response is, quite literally, nonsense.
Now, you can with a lot of time and patience piece together the various pages of this PDF and transfer those individual pieces to an excel spreadsheet (or print out all the pages and then cut and tape them together to form a massively large paper table). But why should anyone have to expend hours in such menial ways when OSSE clearly already has that data, in tabular format to boot, so anyone can easily see student mobility and (in the case of the PDF chart starting on p. 773 of the OSSE attachments) adjusted cohort graduation rates?
Or, perhaps more to the point: what is so terrible about mobility and who graduates from our high schools that the public has been literally blocked from data about either?
After all, while the adjusted cohort model makes a mockery of tracking kids through high school for graduation (pace Dr. Walker-Davis), the reality is that there is no publicly available data on how many kids start at each high school AND finish at that same school 4 or 5 years later. The council can ask for this, of course, and OSSE can provide it. But given the obfuscation inherent in providing this data in nonsensical PDFs, what is the likelihood anyone in the council will ask for that data?
There were other moments that raised more questions than they answered:
–OSSE dutifully answered question 93 (p. 248) about the lottery without explaining (or even wondering) why only about half of matched students enroll in their matched schools. Is everyone gaming the system? Is there an issue with transportation or start times or end times? Who knows?
–At the 2 hour, 9 minute mark of the 3/1 hearing, the DME stated that the change from the 80/20 rule to the 60/40 rule had no effect on attendance. Recall that this change was a BFD—and now, we have only this one bald statement over the course of almost 30 hours of testimony.
–At the 5 hour, 17 minute mark of the same hearing, the OSSE superintendent showed a slide on attendance without any explanation of the most direct and obvious way to get to attendance problems and anomalies: an audit.
–While there is apparent improvement in absenteeism in DCPS, there is no clarity around how or why.
MFP & Boundary Study
At the 3/1 hearing, we learned that the master facilities plan (MFP)—long heralded as the first of the DME’s major projects this year to be released—will be delayed until the end of this month, along with the boundary study. (The boundary advisory committee’s last meeting was on March 6, and the recording is worth listening to once it’s posted here, if only to hear impassioned words from committee members about the DME ignoring schools and kids EOTR while DME staff bloodlessly presented the boundary recommendations as done deals.
At that same 3/1 council hearing, at large council member Anita Bonds asked the chancellor about extra space within DCPS facilities, while a few days earlier at the 2/27 hearing, at large council member Christina Henderson noted (at the 6 hour, 51 minute, 50 second mark) issues with charter facilities “as space becomes available in parts of the city where there aren’t charter schools.” So: do these at large council members know of spaces becoming “available” for charters—and if so, where (and what!) are those spaces?
While these council members ideated thusly, many public witnesses testified about a distinct LACK of available space in DCPS for swinging into for renovations–even as policymakers ignore hundreds of thousands of unused square feet in charters (that link is to information included in a footnote in my testimony for DME oversight).
School Accountability
At the 2/27 council hearing, at about the 6 hour, 8 minute, 30 second mark, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin asked whether the charter board’s new accountability rating included teacher retention and mid-year mobility data—and was told it doesn’t. Apparently, the issue of mid-year mobility is addressed by the charter board only every half decade, in regularly scheduled charter reviews. (No word on whether teacher retention is ever addressed, though charter teacher retention appears to be worse than that in DCPS, which is itself not good.)
The week before, on February 21, the DC SBOE was set to vote on the categories and format of the school report cards for DC’s publicly funded schools. But a protest that evening, spearheaded by EmpowerEd, ensured the SBOE vote was postponed until March 4 so the board could consider simple changes in the report card toward greater equity, such as putting information on teacher retention and school climate higher on the profile page and adding information around school safety and minutes per week in specials.
While the SBOE approved some changes, state board members also approved a summative rating that (as other members noted at the March 4 meeting) doesn’t represent school quality. As there is plenty to show how a summative rating and test-heavy scores are misleading, inaccurate, and damaging (see here and here and here), the only question now is:
Will SBOE and OSSE publicly, broadly, and obviously acknowledge that a summative rating doesn’t truly represent school quality?
DCPS Budgets
Since DCPS budgets came out mid-February, there have been a lot of good analyses of them (NB: the twitter links go to tweet streams that are visible if you have a twitter account):
Side-by-side budgets from the LSAT Collective: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OqExSSKJ8Z4VimzF1eTldJIPEW82-GNz7oaG8Ejg8i8/edit#gid=1839516111
One teacher’s take: https://twitter.com/DCWard7teacher/status/1757467755421319212
Post-pandemic money shortfalls: https://www.washingtoninformer.com/dcps-fy-2025-budget-investment/
Betsy Wolf’s take (getting better but still not good): https://betsyjwolf.substack.com/p/dcps-budgets-the-good-and-the-bad
Mary Levy’s take: https://twitter.com/MaryLevy17/status/1761465792023888212
Special education hits: https://www.washingtoninformer.com/school-budget-constraints-jeopardize-special-education-supports-and-programming-community-members-say/
Betsy Wolf and Mary Levy on stability: https://betsyjwolf.substack.com/p/dcps-budgets-unpacking-stability
C4DC budget resource with Mary Levy note: https://www.c4dcpublicschools.org/new-page-48
Historical document of initial allocations (created by Mary Levy; NB: none of this is what schools ended up with because the council added money since these initial allocations): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15HDesHrH8k4ZnJm8fED-Zm9Bivnv7PCP/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106488664687330576324&rtpof=true&sd=true
By the time education agency oversight hearings started at the end of February, two distinct patterns emerged in public witness testimony about school budgets:
People associated with charter schools without fail thanked OSSE and/or DME and/or the mayor for an increase in per pupil funding, while dozens of DCPS parents, teachers, and administrators testified about DCPS schools having massive budget cuts even with little or no loss of enrollment.
At about the 8 hour, 51 minute, 12 second mark of the 2/28 hearing, there was an exchange that encapsulated budget issues in DCPS. Council chair Phil Mendelson challenged DCPS parent and budget expert Betsy Wolf about her statement in her testimony that we have more equitable school budgets now than in years past. Mendelson mentioned Kelly Miller losing 10 staff members and noted that he didn’t see any equity in that loss.
In reply, Wolf noted the difference between what Mendelson was highlighting (budget stability) and what she had testified about (equity). She noted that there are lots of factors that get at equity, like other schools locating nearby or lousy resources or facilities. Mendelson replied that there are problems with using enrollments for budgets.
Wolf added that while schools are getting more supplemental resources than before, there are still “structural problems”—and gave as an example funding schools based on their October enrollment (and thus not accounting for charter offloading to DCPS, which is considerable). Changing that way schools are funded, she noted to Mendelson, is “in your court.”
Fascinatingly, Mendelson quickly ended the exchange without responding.
Not long after (at 9:01:53), Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin asked Wolf what it would cost to achieve a “steady state” in DCPS schools’ budgets. Wolf noted that budget expert Mary Levy had done such an analysis and that the cost is “substantial.”
A few days later, starting at the 6 hour, 5 minute mark of the March 1 hearing, Mendelson laid into the DCPS chancellor about DCPS budgets and spoke about an enrollment “death spiral” for Anacostia high school—without mentioning the growth of high school seats in the ward (Bard, KIPP at Ferebee-Hope) as well as across town (Banneker, MacArthur) in the face of a static student population.
Hours earlier in that same hearing, at the 2 hour, 59 minute mark, W5 council member Zachary Parker asked the DME for a comparison of DCPS budgets using the recently passed Schools First law and the modeling that DCPS uses. As of March 8, Parker’s office told me he had not received anything from the DME—and as of this blog post, I have received no further word from the council member’s office.
DCPS Tech
At the March 1 hearing, we learned that the tech plan that DCPS was responsible for submitting to the council by January 31 was submitted to council on February 29. (Whether we the people will see it in a timely manner is another question—but testimony from Digital Equity in DC Education makes clear that group is on top of it.)
School Health Issues
As the deadly measles virus steps out in a worldwide renaissance, OSSE’s head blithely presented a slide at the 3/1 hearing (at the 4 hour, 29 minute mark) that showed vaccine compliance in our publicly funded schools falling well below the mark for herd immunity for a variety of vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles.
Recall that earlier this school year, OSSE declared that students had to comply with routine vaccine mandates only at certain grades (specifically, Pre-K 3, kindergarten, 7, and 11)—a distinct change from when every student was supposed to be fully immunized every year for school (and when, not coincidentally, measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000).
Recall also that DC schools as of this school year have no more covid vaccine mandate. While a September 2023 DC council report acknowledged the vaccine’s efficacy; the terrible toll of covid; and the importance of vaccines for control of deadly disease, the report also noted that disparities in compliance meant that students most likely to miss school for lack of compliance are not White. Yet, instead of ensuring DC students have increased access to vaccinations, doctors, and accurate information, the council simply abolished the requirement—which the CDC recently took one step further, by saying that people testing positive for covid don’t even need to isolate themselves.
Given the tenor of these biologically exciting times, several council members have created new legislation to reduce the number of hours required for nurses in every school. This legislation came in the wake of two hearings–a January 4 round table and a January 18 oversight hearing—that made clear the failure of the school nurse staffing model just implemented in SY23-24. In an effort to ration school nurses, this model groups schools in geographically close clusters of four, with each cluster having two nurses and two health technicians and each school in the cluster assigned either a nurse or health technician.
The new legislation is also tacit admission that earlier legislation mandating a full-time nurse in every DC publicly funded school (from the bad old days of 6 years ago) was never enforced.
Head Start
The same 6 DCPS schools are receiving Head Start funds this school year as did last year, per DCPS’s answer to question 75. That is a fraction of the number of DCPS schools before 2020, when DCPS returned its Head Start monies. There’s nothing I saw in the responses about DCPS ever getting back its former Head Start funding—and nothing about why it was returned, although compliance with federal rules may have been an issue. (The amount left on the table was not insignificant back in 2020; a write-up about it by DCPS budget expert Mary Levy is here.)
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