The D.C. Public Charter School Board has voted tonight to convert seven Catholic schools to charters. The vote was unanimous, after about 15 minutes of discussion. More to come.

UPDATE, 10 P.M.: The Catholic conversions, to be known as the Center City Public Charter School, were the only application to be accepted unconditionally by the board this year. The application for the National Collegiate Preparatory Academy, a high school, was also approved unanimously, albeit with conditions to be specified. The board denied the applications from the other seven schools, all but two unanimously.

While introducing the charter-applications portion of the agenda, board chair Tom Nida mentioned that letters and petitions had been received in opposition to the Center City application, but during the discussion of the proposal, virtually every member spoke in praise of it.

“These have been well-run schools with a culture of achievement and high standards,” said member Will Marshall.

Member Dora Marcus called Center City’s a “strong application” and said it was “our duty” to keep the schools open.

The only even mildly negative comments came from member Karl Jentoft, who expressed concerns (somewhat self-servingly) at higher level of oversight and accountability the schools would have as a charter, and from member and executive director Josephine Baker, who expressed some dismay at the size of the proposed school—possibly more than 1,000 students across seven campuses. Both voted to approve.

Jentoft dismissed much of the hullabaloo surrounding the decision: “There’s been a lot of political stuff going on,” he said, “but our role is to look at the application and make sure the children get an education.”

Nida closed discussion after about 15 minutes with a defense of the board’s procedures. “We’re in a situation where I come back to our process,” he said. “The process has been followed….Has it been followed? Is it fair to the parties concerned? This is a test of our process.”

He included a poke at the old D.C. Board of Education, which used to share chartering authority with the Public Charter School Board before giving up that authority in 2006 with the achievement of its schools in doubt: “This is why we’re the sole authorizer. Our process has worked.”

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine is expected to announce today that Clifford Janey is his pick for the Newark School District “after months of meetings and at least a dozen interviews with prospective candidates,” according to the Star-Ledger. The district has been under state control since ‘95 and Janey will have to be approved by the New Jersey Board of Education.

The scuttle in Jersey about Janey’s time at DCPS is he received “mixed reviews” here. We’d like to say something snarky about that, but it’s about right, according to fomer LL James Jones, a close watcher of Janey’s over the years. This, from his “Requiem to a Superintendent” item:

Janey seems like a pretty nice guy. What he lacks in inspired rhetoric, he makes up for with clear-spoken luminosity. At least that’s what the city’s political class pointed out when he was hired about two years ago. Back then, you would have thought D.C. was about to get a taste of school-reform royalty, even if he wasn’t the first choice for the job.

Shortly after Janey’s hiring, the previous mayor, activists, and the D.C. Council delivered a united message: Give this guy a chance. Don’t run him out of town like other school reformers who tried to fix the city’s schools.

Just this past December, when Janey delivered the first-ever State of the D.C. Schools speech, he was greeted by a standing ovation. Even then Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty—who was already crafting a bill to take over the schools—rose to his feet.

But judging from the key defections from his inner circle and his abandonment by the city’s political leadership, Janey suddenly looks like yesterday’s hero.

Janey’s coffin nail, according to LL, was a lack of patience. Funny, that, when the oft-heard gripe about Michelle Rhee is she moves too fast. Will you people never be happy?

(photograph by Darrow Montgomery)

At 9 a.m., Hart’s graduating 8th grade class of 2008 gathered in the hallways leading to the school’s small auditorium. Wearing their Sunday best, students snapped photos of each other, hugged their favorite teachers and generally basked in the one commodity the hallways had over the auditorium: air conditioning.

If the scene was chaotic, if the ceremony blew past its 9 a.m. start time, you could forgive the students and their parents for wanting to linger in the AC. The cool hallways were the only evidence of buff-and-scrub, Michelle Rhee’s shiny optimism and blunt accountability, and Mayor Fenty’s stubborn focus. Everything else about Hart’s graduation was depressingly old school.

As parents walked into the auditorium, they were handed a program. The program’s cover bore a picture of a gold cap, a crisp rolled-up diploma, two white rosees, and a quote—”Success Is Determined by the Choices You Make.” It all suggested Hart had its act together for at least the moment it took to design and print the program. After the processional, parents and students settled into the stifling room. And several things became immediately clear:

*There were not enough seats for everyone.

*Hart’s P.A. system might have been considered high-tech in the ’60s.

*It was too damn hot.

*The scheduled program that parents were now using as a fan wasn’t exactly an indicator of how things were going to go.

*It was too damn hot.

Audience members could hear every third word. If you were inclined to be against prayer in school, it was hard to muster any anger at hearing the opening benediction rendered as sort of oral Mad Libs in which sentences ended in muffled blanks and verbs and nouns were left up to you.

Soon enough, Ward 8 Councilmember-for-Life Marion S. Barry Jr. skipped possibly six places in the program to give a quick off-the-cuff speech that swerved between confessing his own missteps and encouraging the audience to call Fenty about the busted AC. At one point, he labored through a call-and-response with the crowd— getting them to shout back the 727 number they were supposed to dial to register their beef with the heat.

The P.A. was no help to the aging politico. Only phrases could be easily heard: “Work for it,” “But I got up,” and then the rousing finale: “Respect each other. Love each other. So I can’t stay long.”

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As LL first reported, city legislators are gearing up to put additional restrictions on the expansion and oversight of the city’s charter schools. Yesterday, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray, along with Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells and Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr., introduced legislation toward those ends.

Well, charter backers are wasting no time fighting back.

The city’s main pro-charter group, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), is planning a Wilson Building press conference tomorrow morning, to be followed by a door-to-door lobbying tour of the hallways, where politicos will be given copies of a pro-charter petition signed by 5,700 charter supporters. The petition, according to a press release, “asks the mayor and Council to continue to let the parents decide how many charter schools are open in D.C.”

A meeting was scheduled this afternoon in the office of Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, but it was rescheduled due to scheduling conflicts.

In an e-mail circulated to charter parents asking them to attend, a FOCUS employee explained that, “We just want you to tell your story and why you chose your charter school….It’s an election year and we want the DC Council members (especially those that are anti-charter) to know that they have to answer to parents who choose to send their kids to charter schools.”

Press release after jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Minutes ago, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray introduced a bill containing several changes to charter school oversight, the School Reform Amendment Act of 2008—as LL reported in his column last week.

The legislation, as described in comments by Gray and co-sponsors Tommy Wells of Ward 6 and Harry Thomas Jr. of Ward 5, contains several components. The first is to change the process by which members of the Public Charter School Board are nominated; currently the mayor selects nominees from a list provided by the federal education department. The bill proposes making the members direct mayoral appointees with a District residency requirement, a move likely to attract congressional scrutiny.

Other parts:

• A requirement to match quarterly payments to charters to enrollment figures, making sure money better follows the movement of students between schools
• A required 15-month planning period for new charter schools. Virtually every charter school has followed this to date; the grand exception, of course, is the pending Center City application, which would convert seven Catholic schools to charters in only three months.
• A requirement to open only a single campus upon a school’s initial chartering (also a poke at the parochial schools), and, as a corollary to that, a requirement that a charter school meet certain academic benchmarks before expanding.

In his remarks, Wells made the point that charters schools were intended to be places of “innovation and best practices” in educational methods. “Failure to make adequate yearly process in five years is not a best practice,” he said.

Members Marion Barry of Ward 8, Mary Cheh of Ward 3, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, plus at-large members Kwame R. Brown and David A. Catania, signed on as co-sponsors, giving the bill immediate majority support.

Is D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee nuts?

That’s the question I had after reading the account in yesterday’s Washington Post about her firing of Marta Guzman, the principal of Woodley Park’s Oyster-Adams Bilingual School. Rhee’s own two children attend the school.

And based on the report by the Post’s Bill Turque, Rhee had an awfully weak explanation for parents who wondered why she’d fired Guzman. Here’s Rhee’s side of the story:

Rhee said that as a parent “in the school three days a week,” and with information from her own staff, she had a broad base of opinion to draw on. She said a major concern she had, for example, was that while the “English dominant” students, such as her daughters, were learning Spanish, they were “not truly bilingual in the way we would want.” For that to happen, bilingualism needed to be more deeply embedded into all moments of the school day.

So I’m thinking–Rhee’s daughters aren’t yet running around the house using the imperfect subjunctive to perfection, and so Rhee fires their principal. Now, I am not an Oyster parent and haven’t done a lick of reporting on this matter, nor will I. But I do want to state one thing: No new principal is going to come in, snap some fingers, and make bilingualism more deeply embedded into all moments of the school day. Kids speak their dominant language, and if that language is English, they’re going to be speaking English in the hallways, English in recess, English in the lunchroom and so on. Even some Spanish-dominant kids go through a phase when they reject the language they speak in the home and go with English.

So, Rhee: Good luck getting a principal who can reverse these tendencies.

I just stopped by Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest, hoping to talk to kids about the breaking news that at least one of their own is suspected in connection with a mostly-suburban drug ring with “plans” to sell marijuana to high school students. After finding more than $6,000 in cash and more than three pounds of marijuana in one student’s home (which leads me to believe the “plans” had already been realized), Montgomery County police arrested two students, from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, and two adults. More arrests were promised–potentially at Wilson. Police said they were proud they caught the little buggers before they had a chance to sell any drugs. Um, right.

Anyway, I figured this news would be the talk of the town at Wilson. Even though the campus was relatively busy this afternoon, I found only one student who’d heard anything. The gossip, she said, was something about “a white, 17-year-old girl” involved with selling drugs with kids from Maryland. The rest of the students I talked to were more concerned about another police action on campus today: the closure of Fort Reno park due to high arsenic levels in the soil. According to a group of students sitting on some steps at a business across from the school, at about 1:30 p.m., the park was their favorite place to ditch class. Now where will they go???

I understand their frustration. When I was in high school, we would sneak away to a place called Hamburger Mary’s in Portland. We would order home fries, douse them with Tabasco, nurse coffees and smoke Marlboro Reds. I was really not that much of a rebel, so we only skipped during assemblies or when we’d done something to make showing up in class riskier than getting caught skipping. When Hamburger Mary’s closed, we were distraught. We tried going to the fancier brew pub down the street, but the waiters quickly caught onto our game and gave us a time limit. The next year, our school started locking the doors during assemblies. That meant we actually had to go. And they were really, really bad. Wilson students, I feel your pain.

Several parents of students at the Coeus International School have told the Washington City Paper that the school is closing after the end of classes in May. Coeus founder and headmaster Daniel Hollinger, when questioned by a reporter at the school this afternoon, refused to confirm or deny that classes will not be held in the fall.

Hollinger founded Coeus in the fall of 2006 after being ousted by the board of trustees of his previous school, Rock Creek International, which closed last year under financial distress. With Coeus, Hollinger ditched the usual non-profit model used by most private schools. He told the City Paper last year that he hoped being able to attract investors would eventually allow the program to expand on a global scale.

Coeus is located on the sixth floor of an office building on Connecticut Avenue near the Van Ness Metro station.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty might be a Barack Obama supporter, but his hand-picked education czar is opting for a different approach, at least when it comes to improving schools. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, in comments on Thursday night at a gathering of the Korean-American Coalition’s D.C. chapter, endorsed the education plan of Arizona Republican John McCain “far and away” over those of either Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Rhee, in a speech at Tony Cheng’s Restaurant in Chinatown, referred to herself as a “card-carrying Democrat” (LL forgot to ask to see the card), yet endorsed McCain’s approach based on his willingness to reauthorize the controversial “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Both Clinton and Obama have been highly critical of the law and its effects.

“I think they’re pandering, quite frankly, to the teachers’ unions and other folks,” she said.

In comments after the speech, Rhee explained that her support for NCLB arose from her belief in accountability and the need for hard goals for school systems. She called herself as a “huge proponent” of the federal law and said she was “incredibly disappointed” with the lack of Democratic support for the law—though she did say she had a “laundry list” of things she would change with the statute.

Why might an urban school superintendent favor No Child Left Behind? Well, for a cynical view, look at the political cover it provides: Long-failing public schools are required to be “restructured,” a process Rhee is going through currently with several DCPS schools. Without such a federal impetus, big changes—which can extend to the brink of privatization—can be difficult to justify to parents. “Blame NCLB” certainly is a handy refrain to bring to parent meetings explaining the need for such drastic measures.

Nathan A. Saunders, general vice president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, today filed suit in federal court against leaders of his union and city administrators, alleging that he was “systematically punished and retaliated against” for speaking out on labor issues.

The lawsuit is the most explosive manifestation to date of a feud that had simmered quietly in the past year. WTU President George Parker (pictured) and Saunders were both elected in 2005 at the top of the first slate to be chosen since the 2002 Barbara Bullock scandal sent the WTU into receivership. With mayoral takeover of the D.C. Public Schools and the selection of Michelle Rhee as chancellor, friction grew between the two labor leaders, as Parker showed a willingness to work with Fenty and Rhee on possible contract reforms. Saunders, during that time, has stuck to a tough line on protecting teachers’ contractual rights.

Named in the lawsuit are Parker, WTU Chief of Staff Clay White, Al Squires and Edward J. McElroy of the American Federation of Teachers (the WTU’s parent organization), four members of the WTU executive board, and three unnamed DCPS employees. The various defendants are charged with offenses including fraud, racketeering, and breach of fiduciary duties. In the complaint, Saunders says he has been exposed to “direct intimidation and retaliation impacting employment benefits, rights and privileges” for speaking out on labor issues, including Rhee’s attempts to reclassify central-office employees as “at-will.”

“They tried to shut me up,” Saunders tells LL.

In his complaint, Saunders alleges that at a December meeting of the WTU executive board, a member attempted to pass a resolution allowing only Parker to speak for the organization; the motion failed, according to the complaint. Despite that, Parker issued a memo on “Media Policy & Guidelines” outlining that the only official WTU position can come through the union’s communications staff. Saunders’ suit also tells of a phone call that he overheard between Parker and Squires where they discuss ways to silence him by tampering with DCPS personnel records.

This isn’t the first time Saunders has sued his own union. Back in 2002, Saunders came to prominence by filing suit against Bullock, the WTU leadership, and the AFT alleging financial mismanagement, which resulted in a settlement.

The backdrop of all this are the ongoing negotiations over a new teachers’ contract; the last contract expired last October. Rhee, in the past, has advocated overhauling the processes by which teachers are reassigned to schools.

Reached by phone, Parker declined to comment. “I’m not aware of the lawsuit,” he said. “I don’t know what the content is so I have no comment”; for similar reasons, DCPS spokesperson Mafara Hobson also declined to comment.

UPDATE, 4:35 P.M.: Another interesting allegation from Saunders’ complaint: That Parker and White “embezzled, stole, or unlawfully and willfully converted WTU money and funds to their own use or the use of others.” There are related charges of fraud and money laundering. Specifically, Saunders alleges a “diversion of WTU funds, though an out of state company, to a family member over a protracted period of time,” as well as an “undecipherable $10,000 finder’s fee” attached to a rental contract.

Photo of Parker by Darrow Montgomery

For this week’s Show & Tell, I spoke to a group of local writers, educators, and nonprofit  staffers working to start up a creative writing center for District youth, ages 6 to 18. The 19 volunteers have a lot of ideas for the project, but their Capitol Letters Writing Center is still very much a work-in-progress: Currently, they’ve got no location, no students, and no money. Why don’t we help them out!

Reader: The future of the Capitol Letters Writing Center is in your hands! Help its volunteers decide where to locate their center, what sort of proto-nonprofit optimism Kool-Aid to drink , and whether or not to face their white guilt!

The social worker who pleaded in vain for the city to intervene in the Banita Jacks case has a new job: She’s working for Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso.

Kathy Lopes had been a counselor at Booker T. Washington Public Charter School, where 16-year-old Brittany Jacks had attended. After Brittany stopped going to school for a month last spring, Lopes visited the Jacks home and repeatedly tried to get the city’s Child and Family Services Agency to intervene. After it was discovered in January that Brittany and her three sisters had been murdered, the city released tapes of Lopes all but begging a CFSA social worker to check on her.

Lopes started as a “program analyst” on March 3; according to Reinoso, her job is connected with a pilot program that aims to identify at-risk schoolkids and coordinate the delivery of city services to help them. She currently works out of the deputy mayor’s Wilson Building office suite, but Reinoso says that next month Lopes will start working in one of two DCPS schools slated to debut the program this school year. Another five schools will start the program in August. (The chosen schools are scheduled to be announced at 10:30 this morning.)

Reinoso says Lopes came to his notice due to her involvement in the Jacks case. “We reached out to her,” he says. “She obviously understands the importance of people coordinating on these issues.”

Lopes went through an interview process along with about a dozen other social workers before she was selected. “She obviously has a lot of persistence,” Reinoso says. “You’ve got to have a lot of persistence in this line of work.”

Lopes could not be immediately reached for comment.

In a recent broadcast of “This American Life” Burroughs Elementary School parent Maria Jones, interviewed by journalist Jon Jeter, calls Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s proposal to close down 23 district schools a “land grab.” In making her point, Jones mentions two former school buildings sold to developers and converted into swank condos: Pierce School (now Pierce School Lofts) and Lovejoy School (now Lovejoy Lofts).

She’s not crazy. Quite a few other ritzy apartment buildings have origins as DCPS properties. Bryant School Lofts, Lennox School Condos, Berret School Lofts, and Carbery School Lofts, for example.

When asked whether the District was shutting down schools in order to sell public land to hungry developers, D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s spokesperson, Mafara Hobson, responded that the claim was “absolutely not true.” “There are a number of rumors circulating, but parents and residents should know that there are no immediate plans for the school buildings.” Hobson added there would be a “separate public process to determine alternate uses for the buildings.”

Contacted on this matter, Jones counters that “immediate plans” is the key phrase. “They’ll let them[the buildings] sit there for a few years, then either sell them to developers or give them over to charters. It all points towards privatization,” she says. Jones describes the school closures as a “corporate heist” and warns that in the District, “all our public property is being threatened, period.”

Though the school her daughter attends was recently taken off of the administration’s “hit list”, Jones said that she’ll continue to work against the closures.

“Even my little daughter knows that school reform does not mean closing buildings.”

—Rend Smith

This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured a conversation about education philanthropy with several education and charity experts. Among them was Joel Klein, who has been chancellor of the New York City school system since 2002. Klein also figures prominently in the D.C. education world since he recommended District chancellor Michelle Rhee for her job. Apparently, he’s still standing behind his selection because he mentioned her in the Times piece. The premise of the conversation is to discuss how an ignorant, but benevolent billionaire could properly invest his money in education.

“I would look for the most promising individuals and make heavy investments in them. Let’s say you choose Michelle Rhee, the new schools chancellor in D.C. That school system has long been one of the worst-performing in the country, and Michelle wants to really overhaul it. I think our philanthropist could make an eight-year bet on her. It’s the same kind of thing I would have wanted to have happen to us when we started six years ago in New York. To start, I’d give her a couple of million to do some planning. Then I’d ask her to sit down and show me what strategic investments she thinks a philanthropist could make in D.C. that the system itself, for whatever reason, is not going to make. And I would try to make three or four of these strategic bets around the country, on individuals who I thought had the talent, the longevity and the political support to make significant change feasible.”

Tuesday’s City Title basketball game between Gonzaga and Roosevelt drew more than 6,000 fans. Not bad for a high school game in this town, right?

Well, for these times, anyway.

But go back to the early 1960s, and nothing could pull in fans like high school sports. Not even the Redskins or the Senators.

You can look it up: The City Title football game could sell out D.C. Stadium. Some amazing (perhaps only to me) local history buried in this week’s Cheap Seats column: The 1962 gridiron matchup between St. John’s and Eastern brought in 50,033 fans to the place now called RFK, making it at the time the biggest sporting event in D.C. history.

And this is a town that by that point had hosted NFL Championships, World Series games, and even Joe Louis fighting outdoors for the heavyweight championship (against Buddy Baer at Griffith Stadium in May 1941).

But, the St. John’s/Eastern game ended horribly, with a black-on-white brawl that brought tons of attention to D.C., all of it bad. Columnist Drew Pearson told readers of his nationally syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column that the brouhaha was “the worst race riot Washington had seen” in more than 40 years. Congressional hearings were held to discuss what happened. And, all future City Title football games were put on hold. Perma-hold, really.

But, now there’s been movement to put the matchup of champions from the public school league, the DCIAA, and the Catholic league, the WCAC, back in play. And the main player in this movement is, strangely enough, the Washington Post.

Last football season, some 45 years after the brawl, David Jones, public relations manager for the Washington Post, approached WCAC and lobbied the Catholic schools league to restart the football game. Jones was backed in his discussions by D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray.

Asked why the Post would launch such an effort, Jones said, “We’re a hometown newspaper. This is a big event.”

Jones declined to answer any other questions about the City Title game or his role in its possible comeback. Despite the powerful folks behind the campaign, the leagues have yet to agree on terms.