I would strongly oppose any efforts to "slow" or contain the charter schools. If the neighborhood schools aren't working that's not the fault of the charter schools, that's the fault of years of mismanagement, aggressive pandering to teacher's unions, and parental neglect.

How about this idea -- make every school a charter school. The good ones would thrive, the bad ones that fail to comply with their charters get shut down.

Anonymous wrote:
I honestly do not get your point and suspect that you are against school choice which offers greater opportunities to DC students. I have no desire to see more coordination between DCPS and DC charter schools since the result may be DCPS trying to co-opt charter schools and therefore ruining a good thing. There is currently talk by some DC council members of trying to slow the growth of charters and of more coordination which I am totally against. A charter school has provided the best opportunity for my DC and for many others. I think the lottery situation will be ameliorated by more school choices. I do agree that we should should have more data open to the public though.

This is actually something charter schools themselves are putting forth. Because the current hyper-compeition is a huge drag on their ability to advance as well, with parents switching back and forth, classes filled one year but not the next, one kind of cohort one year, a different one the next, little continuity up within the grade levels. What good does the best curriculum do you if by the time kids reach testing grades there are few that started on that curriculum? And each (charter) school grappling with huge uncertainty about future demand. Serving nobody, especially not charter schools themselves and certainly not the students.
And some will recognize this comment from the multiple times I've made it before: School hyper-competition is like cable TV; at the end of the day, all channels offer roughly the same thing, squarely targeted at the median consumer.

Anonymous wrote:The data you get would be completely useless. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protection would make each dataset completely anonymous and you would have no way to link data from one set to the other. It would be a tangle of generic IDs.

If they chose to, you could create a primary index that correlated IDs over time. It would still be anonymized. You could even introduce noise if you needed to for security.

The data you get would be completely useless. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protection would make each dataset completely anonymous and you would have no way to link data from one set to the other. It would be a tangle of generic IDs.

The OP is part of ChPSPO but as far as I know, has nothing to do with SOS. She is an activist with the Montessori school that recently separated from the Cluster school and formed Logan Montessori. I wouldn't judge, but let her speak for herself about her stance on charters. On the surface, more open data is a good idea for all public schools.

Nearly four years after it began [see FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin September 7, 2004, at http://www.focusdc.org/news/news.asp], the law suit filed by the virulent Ward 6 anti-charter group Save Our Schools against Two Rivers PCS has ended in dismissal. Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that the SOS plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate that their children’s schools had lost revenue because of enrollment declines caused by Two Rivers’ opening in September of 2004, and therefore lacked standing to bring suit. Judge Kennedy earlier had ruled [Bulletin July 20, 2006] that Save Our Schools had no standing to challenge the admissions policy of Two Rivers Public Charter School, which, according to SOS’s September 2004 complaint, discriminated against black students.

http://focusdc.org/archiveslaws/bulletins/080716.html

That’s where Two Rivers comes in. The school’s founders discovered early on that they posed a threat to a similar group of urban pioneers with slightly deeper roots: parents at Capitol Hill Cluster School. The Cluster School was founded in 1986, the product of a prolonged effort by parents to merge three Hill schools under a single administration. It now has a long waiting list of out-of-boundary Hill families. Some Cluster parents see charters as an affront to the cluster.

“If people are encouraged to pack up and start their own schools all over town, it’s going to impact the neighborhood school,” says Gina Arlotto, a Hill parent with three children at the Cluster School. Arlotto, who co-founded the anti-charter Save Our Schools coalition, is one of the city’s most vocal critics of charter schools—she’s been quoted in a dozen news stories on schools in the past 10 months. Save Our Schools was initially started to oppose charter sprawl, but it now spends most of its energy fighting the inevitable mayoral takeover of the school system.

Save Our Schools is the lead plaintiff in a discrimination lawsuit against Two Rivers. The suit alleges that Two Rivers engaged in discriminatory admissions because the student body has a larger proportion of white students than the rest of the public school system. A number of those white students are the offspring of the school’s founders.

According to the complaint, the Two Rivers student body initially was 45 percent white, 40 percent black, 10 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian, while DCPS as a whole is 84 percent black. Two Rivers parents, the complaint reads, created the school “specifically with the objective of not having a school that was ‘too black.’?”

Last year a federal judge dismissed most of the claims, but the suit is crawling forward; later this year Save Our Schools will present evidence for its claim that the District’s funding of Two Rivers amounts to discrimination.

The Two Rivers folks won’t talk about the suit on the record. They defer to Robert Cane from FOCUS: “This suit is completely fraudulent,” he says. “These are rabid anti-charter people… they like to blame the charters for all the ills of the school system.”

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/777/diy-charter-school

Really, they wanted to sue Two Rivers for that?? Did they seriously file a claim in court?

This letter and this issue is a CHPSPO (Capitol Hill Public School Parent Organization) thing - some of the same ones who were part of an to sue Two Rivers for encroaching on the Cluster's captive audience back in the day. They see charters as the enemy.

Who knows what this letter's ultimate goal is?

By being so vague OP casts suspicion upon herself.


That said, FOIA is your friend.

I'm not sure what OP is up to, either, but I would love to see up on a public web site plots of test scores vs. % FARMS, vs. ELL, etc. for all schools in the district. Would be very revealing. I suspect it would show that scores correlate tightly with SES which many DCUM readers do not seem to understand. Would do it myself if my data skills were better and I had the time.

Anonymous wrote:DCPS/OSSE used to publish DC-CAS data in greater detail then they did this year. I am fairly it has been a conscious decision to not release the data - it is scary and does DCPS no favor for people to dig into it.

See data on this site: http://nclb.osse.dc.gov

For some reason they decided not to publish data for 2012.

You can go into the school profile section pages of individual schools and glean some data about a school's performance, but no where near the amount or quality that used to be published.

We have made repeated attempts to get the data, and we were repeatedly rebuffed at the highest levels. I cant say that if I was in charge I wouldn't do the same thing - it's realpolitik.

I have seen 2012 dc CAS scores by grade level on great schools.org. but not on OSSE. So strange

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC Families,

I'm on my 3rd round w/ DC schools lottery and I suspect I have 3 more rounds ahead of me, as my children get older. How crazy is it that we have to win the lottery to get a good education? (and even as I give offerings to the lottery gods, I am not sure which school - whether charter or DCPS - I think is the right one!)

The reality is that there are two systems and that choice is really just choice to gamble... I haven't seen much in way of coordinated support from DCPS/PCSB to address this world of 'choice', so I'm taking this problem to science - data science.

In order to make this work, volunteer data scientists and programmers need data (our data, about our children's schools) that OSSE makes partially public. I asked the Mayor yesterday for support in opening up the data in time for an event this weekend, where volunteer data scientists and developers can spend 24 hours working on education problems.

It's an incredible opportunity for the Mayor and city leadership committed to education to take advantage of an army of volunteers (260 so far!) with results by Sunday! It's also an opportunity for Mayor Gray to make good on his commitment to transparency.

I'm hoping to get your help in supporting this. Please reach out to the Mayor, to OSSE and to city council asking for them to provide this data. Nothing is sensitive nor does it compromise privacy of students.

My letter to the Mayor + council and OSSE (w/ their contact info) is posted here: http://chpspo.org/2013/02/19/open-data-day-and-dc-education-open-letter-to-mayor-gray%E2%80%8F-by-sandra-moscoso/

Grateful for your help in reaching out, supporting, and sharing with everyone you know who thinks educating our children should be a given, not left to lotteries.

Thank you!

Sandra
(mom to 2 children in DC Public Schools)

http://chpspo.org/2013/02/19/open-data-day-and-dc-education-open-letter-to-mayor-gray%E2%80%8F-by-sandra-moscoso/

I honestly do not get your point and suspect that you are against school choice which offers greater opportunities to DC students. I have no desire to see more coordination between DCPS and DC charter schools since the result may be DCPS trying to co-opt charter schools and therefore ruining a good thing. There is currently talk by some DC council members of trying to slow the growth of charters and of more coordination which I am totally against. A charter school has provided the best opportunity for my DC and for many others. I think the lottery situation will be ameliorated by more school choices. I do agree that we should should have more data open to the public though.

I suspect this is exactly the case, which is why I'd like OP to come back and clarify for herself. Without that clarification, this is exactly how I'm perceiving her posts, and I'm against it too.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the idea is to know as much as possible about what's going on in the lotteries. Sometimes when the data is organized properly, problems--and potential solutions--make themselves very clear.

That's why I'm asking what data she's looking for? And since OP hasn't responded, in the other PPs speculation about what she's trying to achieve (including your post), it ranges from a bigger agenda of more transparency and trying to improve schools overall (which, if schools were improved overall, would make more quality slots available), or is it specific to improving the lottery process as you yourself are thinking?

I wish OP would respond again, because I'm all for improvements in both the schools themselves and the admissions processes, but I don't understand what data she's after and what her goal is, which is key to me in whether I invest my time. Not that she needs my time in particular, but since she did advertise it here, and I'm supportive of the fuzzy concept, just asking for actual clarity. Maybe she'll get dramatically greater support (and other ideas) if she can be clearer about her goal...

Agree completely. OP?

Anonymous wrote:DC Families,

I'm on my 3rd round w/ DC schools lottery and I suspect I have 3 more rounds ahead of me, as my children get older. How crazy is it that we have to win the lottery to get a good education? (and even as I give offerings to the lottery gods, I am not sure which school - whether charter or DCPS - I think is the right one!)

The reality is that there are two systems and that choice is really just choice to gamble... I haven't seen much in way of coordinated support from DCPS/PCSB to address this world of 'choice', so I'm taking this problem to science - data science.

In order to make this work, volunteer data scientists and programmers need data (our data, about our children's schools) that OSSE makes partially public. I asked the Mayor yesterday for support in opening up the data in time for an event this weekend, where volunteer data scientists and developers can spend 24 hours working on education problems.

It's an incredible opportunity for the Mayor and city leadership committed to education to take advantage of an army of volunteers (260 so far!) with results by Sunday! It's also an opportunity for Mayor Gray to make good on his commitment to transparency.

I'm hoping to get your help in supporting this. Please reach out to the Mayor, to OSSE and to city council asking for them to provide this data. Nothing is sensitive nor does it compromise privacy of students.

My letter to the Mayor + council and OSSE (w/ their contact info) is posted here: http://chpspo.org/2013/02/19/open-data-day-and-dc-education-open-letter-to-mayor-gray%E2%80%8F-by-sandra-moscoso/

Grateful for your help in reaching out, supporting, and sharing with everyone you know who thinks educating our children should be a given, not left to lotteries.

Thank you!

Sandra
(mom to 2 children in DC Public Schools)

http://chpspo.org/2013/02/19/open-data-day-and-dc-education-open-letter-to-mayor-gray%E2%80%8F-by-sandra-moscoso/

I honestly do not get your point and suspect that you are against school choice which offers greater opportunities to DC students. I have no desire to see more coordination between DCPS and DC charter schools since the result may be DCPS trying to co-opt charter schools and therefore ruining a good thing. There is currently talk by some DC council members of trying to slow the growth of charters and of more coordination which I am totally against. A charter school has provided the best opportunity for my DC and for many others. I think the lottery situation will be ameliorated by more school choices. I do agree that we should should have more data open to the public though.