DC Charter Schools Puzzling Performance


Courtesy of Cesar Chavez H.S.

Chavez seniors participated in the United States Department of State's Annual "Job Shadow Day".

Isabel M. Estrada Portales
Washington's Voz
08/19/2005

Accustomed to be in the front pages, D.C. public charter schools were making headlines again this week, when ten of the 18 whose test results could be reported failed to make adequate yearly progress, as required by federal law.

There are 31 charter schools campuses, but 13 of the them did not serve enough students in the tested grades to be included in the calculations. The scores in question were on the Stanford 9 achievement taken this spring, which is a requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act.

But the D.C. Public Charter School Board says that the test scores don't tell the whole story, and schools are actually performing much better than those results indicate.

“We measure our schools against their accountability plans, which include test scores, but that's just one of many factors,” said charter board spokeswoman Nona Mitchell Richardson. “Each school is completely unique. Each of them bring a plan that says 'this is how we plan to educate our students.' Each one has its own program. And we evaluate them against what they have promised.”

Richardson insists they discourage officials from comparing schools against each other. “We measure them against how close they come to hitting their goal.”

This individual approach encounters a bit of a challenge when schools have to comply with the federal law called No Child Left Behind, which mandates standardized testing for all students, and focuses in academic achievement.

And Richardson admits that the benchmark was not exactly too high, since it only required that little over 40 percent of students performed at grade level. When schools fail to meet the benchmark, they are classified “in need of improvement.”

The rest of DC public schools also had a poor showing, with 81 of the 145 schools considered “in need of improvement.”

But charter schools are actually in a public relation battle, because the expectations were that charters would improve education pretty much overnight. On the other hand, critics are now convinced that they were right in opposing them, since they did not show much of what they promised.

For Richardson, the expectations were unrealistic.

“If you are a student who is doing specially well in DCPS, what are the chances you'd transfer to a charter school? Not many. But if you are a student who is failing, your second chance is a charter school. When you bring students who were not doing so well, you won't change that in a year,” said Richardson.

The Charter Board mentioned the good SAT scores their students received, as well as the high rates of admission in highly competitive colleges. But that still does not explain the low level of compliance with the, arguably low, standards of No Child Left Behind.

“Yes, I don't know what to say either, or how to explain it,” Richardson says. “These results do conflict with what I see in those schools. We do not feel that the AYP, which only tested a fourth of the student population, is a good measure of success.”

According to Board Chair Tom Nida, t he local State Education Agency dictated that all D.C. public schools be judged on Adequate Year Progress (AYP) for grades 3, 5, 8, and 10 only, using the results of the Stanford 9 Achievement Test.

However, Richardson admits that the results were only slightly better last year when all the grades were tested, and that still does not change the fact that specific grades were failing in Math and reading.

Hispanic students had a mixed showing.

Cesar Chavez Public Charter, with a majority of Hispanic students, failed to attain the benchmark for two years in a row, although Board Chair Nida pointed out that this school increased its average reading and math NCE (Normal Curve Equivalent) scores from last year.

In Cesar Chavez, 72 percent of Hispanic students performed at or above grade level in Math, but only 16 percent did in reading, which Richardson attributes to a language issue.

Paul Public Charter Middle School, with enough Hispanic students to be reported by ethnicity, did not make the benchmark, and also lost ground in reading and math scores from last year. But Hispanics showed a 60.9 percent of proficiency in reading and a 78 percent in math.

“The great intentions of the No Child Left Behind legislation is that is really discouraging schools from ignoring those students who are performing poorly,” said Richardson.