Denver:DPS busts parents lying for seats
"DPS officials confirmed this week they’re analyzing address anomalies to root out people misleading the district about their home addresses as a way to ensure placement of their children in coveted schools, such as East High School, the Denver Schools of Science and Technology, and Bromwell, Steck, Stapleton and Cory elementary schools."
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New Orleans:
Recovery School District school assignments appealed by about 5 percent of students
"About 5 percent of the 32,000 students assigned to public schools this year through the Recovery School District's new central enrollment system appealed their assignment, district officials said Tuesday. Of those, about 69 percent got into one of their top three choices of school after the district reconsidered their case.
"On the other hand, about 31 percent of the roughly 1,400 students who appealed got matched to a school that they hadn't ranked on their application at all, meaning about 430 families are likely still feeling frustrated.
"We need more good and great schools to give parents more options," Recovery District Superintendent Patrick Dobard said. "That's what we look at these numbers as speaking to."
"This spring marked the first time that the Recovery District has offered one application, known as the OneApp, for a slot at any district school. In the past, each of the city's independent charter schools, which make up most of the district, handled enrollment on their own, presenting parents with a sometimes frustrating search for an open seat. None of the district's schools have traditional neighborhood attendance zones.
"With the OneApp in place this year, the district took in about 25,000 applications. Technically, everyone is required to turn one in, whether they plan on staying at the school they already attend or not. Overall, the district assigned 32,000 students to schools, keeping those who didn't turn one in at their current schools and manually assigning those who didn't turn in an application but were scheduled to finish their school's last available grade -- eighth graders slated to move on to high school, for instance."
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Orleans Parish School Board approves resolution moving toward common enrollment
"The city's local school board made a formal commitment Tuesday to work with state officials on a common enrollment process for all of the city's public schools. It's a step that could simplify life for families in a city where parents have both the burden and opportunity of choosing a school on their own, rather than letting geography decide.
"But negotiations between local and state education officials, as well as the independent charter schools that now predominate in New Orleans, may still have far to go before a common enrollment system is in place.
"In a unanimous vote, the Orleans Parish School Board approved a resolution promising to work toward joining the so called OneApp, a central enrollment system deployed for the first time this year by officials at the Recovery School District, the state agency that has governed most of the city's public schools since shortly after Hurricane Katrina.
"Bringing all, or at least the vast majority, of the city's public schools into one enrollment system would mark a significant reversal. In Katrina's wake, the state swept most schools into the Recovery School District and began handing over the reins of individual schools to independent charter operators that handle their own process for enrolling students, drawing applicants from across the city rather than a single neighborhood. The School Board, left with about 17 campuses, is now a majority charter district as well, leaving parents with a patchwork of varying applications and deadlines.
"Responding after years of complaints about the complexities of the new system, the Recovery District put all of its traditional and charter schools into the same enrollment system this year. Experts from Duke, Harvard and MIT, helped engineer a computer-driven matching scheme that assigns students based on their top choices, the school their siblings attend, their proximity to the campus and a randomly assigned lottery number.
The School Board, which governs a district encompassing about a quarter of the city's public school students and all of the city's magnet schools, sat the OneApp's first round out, concerned about ceding further authority to the state without being assured of a fair process.
"Quiet negotiations between the two districts have yielded an apparent compromise. As it's spelled out in the School Board's resolution, the board will be taking over management of the OneApp itself, although when and on what terms isn't clear, leaving room for any potential agreement to fall apart.
"Officials from either district tell slightly different versions of how they see a merger of enrollment systems playing out. In an interview on Tuesday, Recovery District Superintendent Patrick Dobard said he's hoping to incorporate School Board campuses into the OneApp as early as next year -- before the Recovery District would be ready to hand over the keys of that system for the School Board to run. Dobard said any transition toward School Board control of the OneApp would likely be settled with some type of written contract, likely years down the road and as a part of a broader discussion of bringing all of the city's schools back under some type of unified governing body.
"We don't have to be the long-term manager," Dobard said. "But we would likely have to some kind of memorandum of understanding."
"Thomas Robichaux, the School Board's president, however, said Tuesday, "It's our intention to manage it right away, or at the very least to be the joint manager."
"The School Board's 11 independent charter schools -- publicly funded but operating autonomously in a contract with the district -- may present another hurdle. Robichaux has said that the district cannot force those schools into a common enrollment process, so officials will have to negotiate with each of them.
"One other caveat, even if the Recovery District and the School Board succeed in unifying their enrollment, will be the city's so-called Type 2 charters, authorized by the state and operating outside the jurisdiction of either district. Recovery District officials have said they would like to include Type 2s in the OneApp as well, but there has been no public move in that direction.
"Still, Dobard said he's optimistic about getting a deal done, with the School Board at least. Recovery District officials say there are technically problems to overcome. They will need a new computer algorithm to incorporate the selective admissions requirements at some School Board campuses. But none of it is beyond working out. "
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Washington D.C.
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools
"The current application process for DC's charter and non-charter public schools is a chaotic mess that confuses parents and hurts education for students. DC could fix many problems by creating a centralized lottery process for all public schools, charter and non-charter.
"Steve Glazerman called
for a centralized application for charter schools in 2010. Since then, DC
Public Schools (DCPS) instituted a common
application for the District's specialized high schools.
This is a great step, but it could go a lot further to include charter
schools and traditional neighborhood schools at all grades. It wouldn't be hard;
the company District officials generally agree. Scheherazade Salimi, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Mayor for Education, says that "a common application is something the Deputy Mayor would like to explore in partnership with DCPS and [the Public Charter School Board]."
In a centralized application, parents would select several schools, rank-ordered by preference. They would select charters and non-charters, and could conceivably select up to 12, 15 or 20 schools.
A single lottery would select applicants one by one, and assign each to the first school on his or her list with an open slot. This is similar to how many colleges assign dorm rooms, for instance.
This type of centralized application would have many benefits over the current system.
Parents are more likely to get into their top choice schools.
When parents apply to schools now, they apply for DCPS schools using a centralized application, and apply to each charter school separately. Pre-K programs have lotteries for all children, while students in 1st grade and older enter lotteries only for out-of-boundary DCPS schools.
As a result, one applicant in Capitol Hill could be waitlisted at a nearby charter that was their top choice and accepted into a Columbia Heights charter that was their 2nd choice, while a Columbia Heights family that preferred the nearby charter could be waitlisted there but accepted to the Capitol Hill charter school.
The result is that neither child can go to his or her top choice charter, and both families are making unnecessary drives to get the kids to school.
Spots at competitive schools won't be locked up by parents who don't plan to send kids there.
Schools hold their lotteries in the spring for spots in the fall. In the current system, if a child gets accepted to multiple charter schools and/or an out-of-boundary DCPS school, parents might tell each school that the child will attend in the fall.
When they decide which school to attend, they inform the schools at some point in the summer or they just don't show up for the schools they didn't select. There's no deposit or penalty, so they don't pay a cost for this, but other families lose out who might have taken the slot but had to make a decision earlier to go elsehwere.
Some parents do this to give themselves more time to research the schools; some want to wait until school starts to assess the facilities of charter schools that were still preparing their facilities in the spring.
When a student attending an out-of-boundary DCPS school gets into a different out-of-boundary DCPS school, the principal of the first school "releases" the student before they can secure their spot into the new school. Charter schools have no such process.
Squatting on multiple school slots is unfair to everybody. When children accepted through the lottery don't show up in the fall, principals have to scramble to contact any remaining applicants on their wait list. Squatting also leads to the next problem.
Principals could provide better estimates of enrollment for funding purposes.
One of the most common grievances from charter advocates is that DCPS principals overestimate their enrollment to receive extra funding.
DCPS schools project fall enrollment in the spring and these projections determine funding for the following year. If the actual enrollment is lower, DCPS' budget doesn't shrink. But charter schools receive funding quarterly based on their actual enrollment. If a charter school's enrollment declines, it loses money.
Some principals might be doing this on purpose, but it's also difficult for DCPS principals to accurately estimate enrollment for the following fall when applicants hold a spot at their school while they spend the summer deciding whether to attend charter schools.
A centralized application would eliminate much of this problem. Each school, DCPS and charter, would know that every child on its list isn't going to suddenly go elsewhere in the DC system. They could go to private school or move to another jurisdiction, but that applies to a smaller number of children.
Charter principals wouldn't be able to "skim the cream."
Charter school critics often complain that charter school principals find ways to weed out students during enrollment who may be harder to educate. The lottery initially fills all charter school slots randomly, but as parents of children who got in on the lottery tell the school that they won't be taking the slot, the charter itself contacts applicants off of their wait list.
There are opportunities for principals to intentially or unintentionally abuse this system. For example, principals can give an applicant more or less time to respond and claim the slot before they move on to the next child. They might give more "desirable" children more time than others.
A charter school in New York was put on probation last year for weeding out applicants in the enrollment process. While there hasn't been a specific accusation like this against any DC charter school, a centralized application system could remove this because students would be assigned to a single school.
We would have data on capacity needs at all grades, especially pre-K.
District officials say that DC has achieved universal pre-K, but the city's auditor of pre-K capacity disagrees. Who is right? We won't know until we have data on the actual demand for pre-K.
A centralized application for pre-K, including all of the pre-K programs, would generate this data. It would then be easy to compare the number of total children applying against the number of public pre-K slots.
The data wouldn't be perfect, as some parents apply to DCPS pre-K programs as a backup to their private pre-K applications, while other parents miss the pre-K lottery (in February) but still want to send their children to pre-K. But it would be far better than the current audit, which effectively measures nothing.
All students would start school on time together.
One of the unintended consequences of the plethora of charter school choices is that schools don't really know who will show up for school in September. This is largely due to parents holding spots through the summer for multiple schools but only sending their kids to one school.
The result is that classroom compositions are in flux throughout September and October as principals contact students off the wait list to fill suddenly vacated spots. This is challenging for teachers and ultimately hurts students' education.
District education officials and the State Board of Education can start pushing toward a single lottery right away. An education committee in the Council, as many have suggested, could also help move this forward.
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