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Blake Neff, The Daily Caller

A battle between charter schools and the nation’s capital continues to escalate.

Dozens of Washington, D.C. charter schools are launching a lawsuit against the District and Mayor Vincent Gray, claiming they have been systematically shortchanged in funding by a hostile city administration.

The D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools claims that the city has underfunded charter schools by more than $2,000 per student, per year compared to the D.C. Public Schools (DCPS). The total shortfall since fiscal year 2008, they claim, is over $770 million. The gap, the association says, is a violation of a Congressional command that charter schools receive the same amount of funding as ordinary public schools. It also materially disadvantages the charters, they claim, making them struggle to pay competitive teacher salaries.

The plaintiffs support their claims of a disparity with a study commissioned by D.C.’s own government. The study, released last January, found that public schools benefit from an indirect subsidy through millions of dollars in in-kind support offered by other branches of the D.C. government. For example, the city’s Department of General Services provided far more free facilities maintenance to regular public schools than it did to charters.

“These funding disparities are contrary to D.C. law,” the report concluded.

Other sources of unfairness proliferate, the lawsuit says. Charter schools have their per-pupil funds calculated exclusively on the basis of confirmed enrollments, while DCPS is allowed to rely on estimates of how many students will be enrolled in the coming school year. With DCPS seeing steadily declining enrollment, these estimates are often inflated, the charter advocates claim.

In the past, the city has defended some of these sources of the funding disparity by arguing that DCPS is hamstrung by the need to hire union labor and by the requirement that schools be able to enroll new students throughout the year, of any background. Charter schools do not have such limitations. The plaintiffs argue, however, that such arguments are irrelevant when contrasted with a clear Congressional mandate that charters and public schools be funded identically.

D.C.’s charter school program is one of the nation’s most ambitious, with its approximately 37,000 participating students comprising over 40 percent of all publicly-funded schoolchildren in the city.

The Center for Education Reform (CER), a pro-charter school group, said the lawsuit was an unfortunate necessity brought about by the city government’s failure to close a very obvious gap.

“Across the nation, charter schools continuously get cheated out of resources, even in places like the District of Columbia where charter schools currently serve as an educational lifeline for 44 percent of the public school population,” CER president Kara Kerwin said in a statement sent to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The lawsuit is the latest clash in a bitter history that dates back to 1996, when Congress amended the D.C. School Reform Act to establish a public charter school system in the District. Charter schools’ better test scores and higher graduation rates have led to a sharp decline in the number of students enrolling with DCPS, while charters have struggled to meet rising demand. DCPM has been compelled to close schools, and has fought to prevent the transfer of the closed school buildings to charter schools. Another source of friction has been with the Washington Teachers’ Union, which has long sought to undermine charter schools’ exemption from collective bargaining laws.

CER President, Kara Kerwin, discusses a recent study from The University of Arkansas on the effectiveness of charter schools with Rod Arquette. The first of its kind, “The Productivity of Public Charter Schools,” conducted on a national scale, analyzes the cost effectiveness and return on investment in the public education system.

Star News Online

The 2014 North Carolina Charter Schools Conference will be held in Wilmington, July 30 through Aug. 1, at the Hilton Wilmington Riverside hotel, 301 N. Water St., according to a news release.

Joey Garrison, The Tennessean

In a standoff over a struggling statewide cyberschool, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman says he weighed pulling the plug on the school altogether.

Instead, at his urging, the next incoming class of new students at Tennessee Virtual Academy won’t be admitted — an action that has nevertheless put an education chief known for favoring school choice under unfamiliar fire from national reform groups.

The move to “un-enroll” 626 incoming students marks the boldest action yet in what has been a turbulent three years for the online virtual school operated by the for-profit K12 Inc., which has produced woeful test scores every year in Tennessee since a change in law paved the way for its 2011 arrival.

Because of the school’s third straight year of poor results in student growth, the commissioner had the authority to direct the closure of the school. Huffman chose a less harsh option, recommending that the Union County School Board, which contracts K12 to operate in Tennessee, stop admitting students for the time being.

The board obliged on Thursday, voting to request a waiver from the state to cancel enrollment of students it had recently accepted. Tennessee Virtual Academy’s some 1,200 existing students, who live across the state and take coursework from home, will remain part of the school.

Why not close it outright? Huffman noted Tennessee Virtual Academy students have shown improvement in years two and three, and that the challenges rest primarily with first-year students.

“We definitely considered it, but we wanted to take a deeper look at the data, and when you take a deeper look at the data, you see that the students who have been there two years or three years perform at a reasonable level,” Huffman told The Tennessean on Friday.

Moving forward, he said, “They need to show better results and have a plan also for how they’re going to on-board new students and ensure that students who they’re enrolling are students who can succeed.”

Tennessee Virtual Academy, made possible by a 2011 law, has challenged Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration from the outset, quickly becoming an easy punching bag for Democrats and other critics.

Virtual education could be at a crossroads in Tennessee. The Virtual Public Schools Act is set to sunset next June, meaning the legislature will review the merits of the law during the next session.

Though the school will remain open for now, parents and other supporters of Tennessee Virtual Academy aren’t happy with the outcome.

Nearly 1,200 people as of late Friday had signed an online petition asking that the Union County board not cancel the enrollment of the more than 600 students.

“Our country’s educational system is in the midst of a technological revolution,” the petition reads. “We are making history by utilizing virtual schooling. The fact that there are challenges in the virtual system isn’t a surprise.”

Other groups weighed in as well. The Tennessee chapter of PublicSchoolOptions.orgcalled for an “immediate meeting” today between parents of the school and Huffman and Haslam — a request Huffman told The Tennessean he hadn’t seen.

The Washington-based Center for Education Reform issued a statement saying it “strongly condemns” the directive of Huffman. “It’s an outrage that these 626 legally enrolled students are now being forcefully turned away, just two weeks before the start of the school year,” said Kara Kerwin, the organization’s president.

In slowing down the growth of the Tennessee Virtual Academy, Huffman has had to take aim at an option he has supported exploring. In addition to low test marks, the school also has had high attrition, meaning kids have often gone back to their local districts with low proficiency marks.

“I believe that it’s important to try things like virtual education,” he said. “That’s why, at some level, it’s been disappointing to me to see the results.”

As for the Union County school system, Huffman called it “irresponsible” and “disappointing” for it to initially accept new students for this fall, alleging the board was alerted of its “Level 1 status” on June 15. Results from the 2013-14 Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program for individual districts are to be publicly released next week.

Union County officials initially balked at following Huffman’s directive, suggesting that it didn’t have the legal authority to do so and that it lacked the data Huffman was reviewing. In a follow-up letter Friday after the board’s action, Union County Director of Schools James Carter told the commissioner that “we are willing to acknowledge your recommendation.”

Still, Carter has claimed the district only first learned of its status during a conference call with Huffman and others on July 10 and stopped enrolling new students immediately.

Jeff Kwitowski, senior vice president of public affairs at K12, says Tennessee Virtual Academy has turned down all 1,600 students who have applied to the online school since that time. The company also contends it made “significant academic progress” during the past school year.

Hannan Adely, The Record

New Jersey’s adoption of teacher evaluations that relied on student test scores was hailed by Governor Christie as a way to make educators accountable for how much students learned.

Last week, however, under pressure from lawmakers, parents and teacher unions, the governor announced plans to lessen the impact that those test scores will have on judging teachers. But despite the vocal criticism, those who supported the evaluation system say they have not wavered in their commitment to it.

“I think the Board of Education and the community in general supports [evaluations],” said Mark Biedron, president of the state Board of Education. “The question is what system do you use and how much of it and frankly how much do you weigh on tests?”

New Jersey approved an evaluation system a year ago that rates teachers partly by student scores on state tests — with results counting in such high-stakes decisions as whether to grant or take away tenure.

But over the past year, educators have strongly protested that they need more time to adjust to new academic standards and new computer-based state tests. They said they have to teach new material, prepare students for the tests and improve computers and Internet connections.

Lawmakers said they were responding to those concerns when they appealed to the governor for change, but were not backing off strong measures to judge teachers. change, but were not backing off strong measures to judge teachers. Sen. Kevin O’Toole, R-Cedar Grove, said it makes sense to give less weight to test scores until problems with the new tests can be resolved, but that the state will still hold teachers accountable.

Asked about test scores as a measure, O’Toole said, “I don’t think anything can be hard or fast or set in stone. There are some in the education community who think it’s a real metric that can be used, others that think it’s a false metric.”

Christie’s latest proposal is that student test scores count for only 10 percent on teacher evaluations rather than the 30 percent weight that the state Board of Education approved for the coming school year. The weight can be increased up to 20 percent in the following two school years by the Department of Education.

Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Christie, said the changes were in response to confusion over new tests and evaluation systems. But the changes, he added, “should in no way be interpreted as backing off our desire to improve teacher accountability and instruction.”

In an interview last week, Acting Education Commissioner David Hespe stressed that test scores will remain as one of the measures used to judge teachers, along with student improvement on tests and teacher observations.

“We are going forward as planned,” he said. “It’s just that we’re going to use it as a lesser extent until everyone is comfortable with how it rolls forward.”

Assembly education committee chair Patrick Diegnan, DMiddlesex, said he still supports using student test scores to evaluate teachers but doesn’t think they should be given as much weight as the Christie administration first proposed.

“The administration was adamant in original tenure reform legislation that test scores would be a determining factor,” he said. “I’ve always been a believer that it should be a part of the process but should not be a dominant one.”

New Jersey isn’t alone in changing the way it evaluates teachers. Many states are revising, dumping or delaying the use of test scores to evaluate teachers — largely over concern about the new academic standards adopted in New Jersey and dozens of other states.

Some critics are also urging state leaders to review or to abandon the entire set of standards, known as Common Core, and the tests that go with them. In New Jersey, Christie formed a new commission to study the standards and all federal and state tests that measure what students are learning.

Brian Backstrom, senior policy adviser at the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C., said it was “encouraging” that Christie was using a phase-in method, instead of getting rid of the evaluation system altogether.

“It’s a healthy approach because it isn’t a total trashing of a requirement for teachers to be accountable for student performance,” he said.

Poll supports teachers

Many education groups oppose student test scores as measures to rate teachers, arguing they don’t accurately reflect a teacher’s performance and diminish other more important factors, such as poverty, class size or classroom makeup.

Most New Jersey residents side with teachers on the issue, according to results of a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll released this week. Only 20 percent of New Jersey voters say that it is fair to punish teachers based on how their students do on standards-based tests, with 74 percent saying that it is unfair, according to the poll.

Still, 42 percent agree that teachers should be rewarded for their students’ performance on the tests.

But Backstrom said the people criticizing the use of new tests for evaluations may be seeking to avoid accountability measures completely.

“I think the big question to ask teachers unions and others is will they be satisfied with any tests?” he said.

The steps announced by Christie have been hailed as a compromise — a rollback of how much test scores count in teacher evaluations for three years while a task force reviews what students should be learning and how accurately state and federal tests measure that.

Some lawmakers and educators said they also expect the task force to investigate the use of any tests scores for teacher evaluations, although that goal is not specifically stated in the governor’s executive order. Steve Baker, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, said it was related to the overall issue of overemphasis on high-stakes tests that the task force will review. The task force, he said, should “find the best way and most appropriate way to make these measurements,”

He added, “The hope is now that we have this opportunity to take a step back and look at what we’re doing. We want to do it the right way.”

Sean Higgins, Washington Examiner 

In an impressive display of “we don’t care how this looks,” the Florida Education Association has sued the Sunshine State to prevent students from receiving more state-managed, privately-funded scholarships, including a new scholarship program for disabled students.

The lawsuit, filed June 16, and the accompanying press release didn’t even try to offer any proof that the voucher programs are somehow bad for students. The best it could do was to argue that vouchers cannot be linked to any student gains.

Instead, FEA claims it is suing Republican Gov. Rick Scott and other top officials because the attempt to expand Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program and add a similar program aimed at the disabled is in technical violation of state legislative rules.

It is a fairly thin reed to hang a lawsuit on, but if it prevails, thousands of middle class and disabled students will be denied access to funding for private education. The FEA, whose 140,000 members are primarily public school teachers, is the state branch of the 3 million-member National Education Association.

Voucher programs threaten teacher unions because they boost private education, which isn’t nearly as heavily unionized.

The unions have long said they object to school voucher programs for more altruistic reasons. The main argument is that vouchers drain funding away from public schools, leaving the children outside the program worse off.

But Florida and 13 other states have instituted a version that relies on private funding. The Tax Credit Scholarship Program, created in 2001, works with outside nonprofit groups who raise the funds. The state regulates the program, vetting the groups and setting the educational standards.

It’s a popular program, with about 60,000 students currently receiving scholarships. This year, Scott signed legislation to expand it further, raising the tax credit cap to $874 million and opening the program up to families making about $60,000 annually. It is currently limited to families making about $43,000.

The system is not entirely private money though: The state provides tax credits to the nonprofits. The available credits are currently capped at $286 million annually. On that basis, FEA argues the program still uses public money.

Is that lost revenue really hurting public school students, though? According to state data, in 2007, the state had 2.6 million students and spent $9.7 billion on education, putting per pupil spending at $3,690. That’s not including local and federal contributions.

State education spending has varied from year-to-year, hitting a low of $8.7 billion in 2011. But in the latest budget Scott signed last month, state education spending will rise to $10.6 billion. Enrollment has risen too, to 2.7 million students, putting per-pupil expenditures at $3,911.

So state spending has actually grown overall in both categories. At the same time, the system is taking care of 60,000 fewer students than it would otherwise due to the program.

Is it possible that public school students are still worse off? I asked FEA for any figures they have for how much revenue has been lost to the state public education budget due to the program. I am still waiting to hear back.

Brian Backstrom, senior policy adviser to the Center for Education Reform, which supports voucher programs, points out that the tax credits may have other benefits that ultimately boost state education.

“New economic activity is likely to be stimulated by businesses attracted by the credit-funded scholarship program to stay and even expand in Florida, which actually could generate new tax revenue for the state,” Backstrom told the Washington Examiner.

FEA’s legal case is built entirely around the argument that the state constitution limits the legislature to passing bills that “embrace but one subject.” The tax credit expansion however “contains provisions that were lumped together because the legislature had been unable to enact them in separate bills.”

Given that the expansions were included in a broader bill regulating state education policy, it doesn’t seem on its face to violate even the letter of the state constitution. Then again, who knows what the Florida courts will do? The teachers union might get its victory and limit students’ choice in education.