The Comeback of Charters

Jan. 26, 2016 – The Philadelphia Citizen – by Roxanne Patel Shepelavy

Twenty years in, good charter schools are self-policing and calling for the closing of bad ones. Is it enough to get the movement’s mojo back?

The thing about the soap opera at last week’s School Reform Commission meeting—at which the commissioners made an 11th-hour decision to turn Wister Elementary into a Renaissance school run by Mastery Charters—is that underneath it all, it was a dramatic retelling of the same old story.

On the one side were desperate parents and pro-charter supporters who believe Mastery can turn around the school quicker and better than the District—something they say the charter organization has proven time and again. On the other side were a different set of parents and charter opponents who believe what Wister needs is more and better support from the District to continue the modest performance gains it made last year—not giving it over to a charter.

Commissioner Sylvia Simms, after speaking with pro-Mastery parents, proposed a resolution overturning Superintendent William Hite’s decision to keep Wister a traditional public school. She spoke movingly of parents like her: From low-income neighborhoods, where schools have long struggled to provide a good education, whose children make up the thousands on charter waiting lists. Three commissioners supported her. And immediately, the decision was slammed by public school advocates like new Councilwoman-at-large Helen Gym, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan, and Mayor Jim Kenney.

So much shouting into the wind, so little change in the conversation. It’s no wonder so many of us feel like nothing is ever going to change.

Or is it? This year could mark a new era for charter schools in Philadelphia. For the first time publicly, high-performing charters have started to acknowledge what critics of the whole movement have been saying for years: that many charter schools do a worse job of educating students than traditional public schools; that they should not be allowed to continue; and that the city and state have made it too hard to shut down a school, even when it has had poor results for years.

In September, the group of about 50 charters calling itself Philadelphia Charters for Excellence (PCE), along with the advocacy arm of charter-friendly Philadelphia School Partnership, issued a position paper that called for the closing of poor-performing charter schools.

“When charter schools are effective, they should be encouraged to grow,” the paper, “Better Isn’t Good Enough,” says. “But when they are ineffective, they should be closed or transformed, especially since the priority is to give as many students as possible access to high quality schools.”

It was the first stroke in what will be a line in the sand starting this year: On one side will be charters that serve Philly students well, as judged by a particular set of standards; on the other, will be those that don’t. It’s a distinction that could allow charters to take back a piece of the school reform narrative that has turned away from them in the last few years. And, if all goes as planned, it could benefit the school system as a whole.

“For the good of the charter movement, for the good of schools, for the good of the District, we will be setting clear standards about what is success,” says Amy Ruck Kagan, who was hired by PCE’s board in June to transform the organization. “There is support in Philadelphia to change the charter movement here, to finally say, it’s not about growing for growth’s sake, but to be a part of the conversation about the future of schools.”

Kagan, formerly head of New Jersey’s charter school office, started in the middle of what was, by many accounts, a tough year for the perception and politics around charters. (“I never thought anything could be more politicized than New Jersey,” Kagan says. “This is, or at least as much.”) In February, the SRC approved only five of 39 applications for new schools—a number on par with the national trend but still a disappointment to many advocates. (Another school was added later.) Still, even that concession led (then new) Gov. Tom Wolf to replace SRC Chairman Bill Green with Marjorie Neff, the only commissioner who voted against any new charters at all.

A few months later, decidedly pro-charter Anthony Williams was decidedly defeated in the city’s Mayoral primary, for an election which several months later saw public school advocate Helen Gym garner the most votes for her new Council-at-large seat. Even Hillary Clinton got in on the act nationally, chiding charters for not accepting or keeping enough hard-to-teach students.

This year started with Gov. Wolf sending money to school districts that charters contend was owed to them—and with an ongoing debate over a provision to the state school code that would weaken the District’s authority over charters. Where it will end is still not known.

“This is a less welcoming environment for charters in the state than we’ve seen in a long time,” says Kagan. “Everything politically is pointing to the need to make a change. It’s vital that we do this now.”

This month, Kagan unveiled a three-tiered membership system that demands PCE members perform to certain standards in academics, governance, finances and admissions/enrollment policies. (Citizen chairman and columnist Jeremy Nowak was a consultant to PCE in developing the standards.) Each tier comes with academic expectations—from a School Performance Profile index of 50 for Tier 1 to an SPP of 75 for Tier 3—and increasingly stringent requirements for financial solvency and board transparency.

All members will also be required to take an “equity pledge,” promising to maintain and take students off a waiting list, and have a one page admissions application, in multiple languages, with someone available to walk parents through it—as close as possible to the ease of registering for a neighborhood school. To check, Kagan says PCE will initiate a “mystery shopper” program, posing as parents to randomly call charters to confirm their admissions policies—something charter authorizers in other cities have started to do.

For those that qualify, PCE membership will mean the school has passed a series of tests, set up by charters for charters, to achieve something like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The tiers will give parents and school officials a way to compare charters that has been lacking so far. And Kagan says PCE plans to convene disparate PCE members for more directed professional development, discussion of best practices and collaboration.

As a group, PCE membership may give charters more leverage to advocate locally and statewide, especially since PCE and school reform group PennCAN are also working with Pittsburgh schools to sign on to a similar program. Eventually, Kagan hopes a PCE score will signal to the School District, the SRC, the state and parents which schools should be allowed to grow—and which should be made to close.

“We’re battling in Harrisburg, and locally, and the argument keeps coming back to: But so many charters are doing badly,” Kagan says. “We’re changing the conversation by asking you to stand behind the ones that offer access to all, are academically strong, and are ready and poised to take on new kids.”

The move is the boldest acknowledgement on the part of charters that the tides have shifted nearly two decades after the movement started. Which begs the question: What took them so long? For the first several years, the charter school movement meant innovation—it was educators opening schools, hoping to find a way out of the morass of public education that had long been failing many students. The District allowed for rapid charter growth before anyone could gauge success or failure. By then, the state charter law had made it expensive and cumbersome to shut down a school, and had allowed them to grow their populations. Some 28 percent of Philly students now attend a charter school.

In the last few years, what had started as an alternative for every Philadelphian became a symbol in the class struggle epitomized by Occupy Wall Street. Suddenly, charters were stand-ins for the haves taking from the have nots—never mind that most Philadelphia charter school students are still among the poorest kids in the country—a perception not helped by, well, charters. Like this gem from 2013: A closed-door meeting of private donors who give $50,000 in charitable donations yearly, meeting at The Union League, to discuss the future of public education. (Full disclosure: Citizen chairman and columnist Nowak was among the program’s speakers.) Are Bill Gates and Michael Dell, whose nonprofit foundations attended the event, getting rich off of charter schools? Doubtful. But the event fed the notion that charter schools were for and about something distasteful to regular folks.

Meanwhile, as middle class families have expanded beyond Center City, they have embraced their local public schools, a civic-minded pursuit that has also become an anti-charter movement. With the political winds shifting, the charter school sector often acted like a monolith, loathe to point fingers at each other, even when it became clear that some charters have unfairly culled their population, or failed to educate their students, or operated in a way that is not transparent or above board. They lobbied the state—successfully—to make Philly consider opening more charter schools, even while the city struggled to close those that were not successful.

Add into the political stew the fact that budget woes over the last several years have led traditional public schools to close, consolidate, cut staff and grow their class sizes. An already fractious debate over charters has now become one about survival, on both sides.

“Scarcity makes people dig in their heels and protect their territory more than before,” says David Lapp, a lawyer at Education Law Center, who is a critic of many charter school policies. “It’s inevitable that as we got to this percentage of students in charters, people would start looking at what this sector is doing, and whether or not it’s a good thing to have it expanding.”

It’s a delicate moment for PCE and Kagan: Hired by PCE’s board, made up of charter school officials, she is now telling those officials what they must do to remain in PCE. As she has unveiled her group’s plans, she says her standing members have reacted in three ways: Confusion over what it means; disagreement over the academic standards, particularly using the state’s assessment system, which relies heavily on standardized tests; and a worry that the bar for inclusion is still not high enough.

Kagan says schools have until September to align themselves with PCE standards. Academics alone will mean some current members—like some Universal charter schools—will not make the cut. (Because of changes to state assessments last school year, the education department last issued SPP scores in the 2013-2014 school year; those are the figures PCE will look at.)
For other pieces of the membership process, Kagan says PCE plans a series of group trainings, as well as individual sessions, to help schools that need a little extra guidance. “We want to help them get there,” Kagan says. “Still, we’re not winning a lot of friends in our own movement, necessarily.”

But she has no other choice if she wants to win over an even more difficult contingent: those outside the organization. Lapp says the success of PCE’s new initiative will depend on many factors: How transparent it is with its standards, what they consider “success” in academics, and how far they plan to go to ensure low performing schools are actually closed. Kagan, who has conferred with both friends and foes of charters, says PCE has and will lobby for legislation to ease the shuttering of schools.

That remains to be seen, but even charter critic Lapp concedes that there’s cause for some hope. “I think it’s awesome that PCE is owning its name and defining excellence in a different way,” he says.

Op-Ed: Proposed changes to Pa. law would squander higher school funding

Jan. 20, 2016 – the Philadelphia Public School Notebook – by Michael Churchill, Deborah Gordon Klehr, Susan Spicka

Earlier this month, Gov. Wolf approved emergency funding to allow schools to remain open despite the ongoing budget impasse in Harrisburg. We are pleased that the governor is holding out for an agreement with legislative leaders that would result in a historic $350 million increase in basic education funding, which would include a $100 million restoration of funding to Philadelphia schools. This money would provide immediate relief to a cash-strapped district and would allow it to begin restoring cuts to nurses, counselors, and other vital services after years of bare-bones budgeting.

Yet those gains could be fleeting.

We are deeply troubled by language that has been inserted into the proposed Pennsylvania School Code that would enact sweeping changes to our state charter school policy. The changes would weaken the important role of school districts as charter authorizers to both manage responsible charter school growth and ensure that charter schools are providing a high-quality education to all kinds of students.

To be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, fiscally distressed school districts must balance requests for charter expansion with the fact that every new charter school costs districts money and siphons resources away from children who remain in traditional public schools. Indeed, the School District of Philadelphia would have to set aside $35 million of the $100 million in additional funding it would receive under the previously agreed-upon budget framework simply to cover additional payments to charter schools.

The proposed school code language contains provisions – in effect directed only at Philadelphia — requiring five schools a year to be designated for takeover by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. At least two, and possibly all five, would be converted to charter schools.

The irony, of course, is that Philadelphia’s schools are already controlled by the state. There’s no evidence that this move will improve results – but it is sure to worsen the District’s structural deficit.

Additional language applicable to every school district in the state would weaken local districts’ ability to provide effective oversight of charter school operators to ensure that charter expansion occurs in sustainable ways and that charter operators deliver quality education to their students. It would enable charter schools across the state to amend the terms of their charters, create cross-district charter school networks, open new buildings, add new grades, and expand enrollment – all without the authorization of local school boards. It would also reduce accountability by allowing charter schools to go a full decade before having to renew their charters.

Taken together, the school code as written is a Trojan horse, destroying what it purports to save.

Our calculations show that these provisions could increase costs to districts so much that even with increased revenues, this budget deal could result in a net loss for the School District of Philadelphia in as little as 36 months.

Thus even as lawmakers in Harrisburg continue to complain that Philadelphia schools need to live within their means, they are pushing legislative language that would continue to burden the district with costly new mandates that only dig the District into a deeper financial hole.

At the same time, they fail to recognize that Philadelphia schools educate far more students in poverty, English language learners, and vulnerable students than almost all districts in the state. Roughly 85 percent of Philadelphia schoolchildren come from poor families – compared with a statewide average of 43 percent.

Even worse, there are rumblings in Harrisburg that lawmakers, skittish about raising taxes to support increased investment in our schoolchildren in an election year, may attempt to abandon substantial education funding increases while continuing to pursue this aggressive pro-charter language. This would leave Philadelphia with greater expenses and more cuts in services for its students.

The governor should make it clear that this would be unacceptable.

The important question about the role that charter schools should play in our educational system deserves its own broad and wide-ranging debate and should not be swept into the budget negotiations as a price that Philadelphia pays to get past funding cuts restored. The Philadelphia delegation should carefully review the costs of additional funding in deciding what to support.

There’s still time to make things right. As lawmakers return to Harrisburg to resume negotiations on a budget solution, these destructive proposed provisions should be eliminated from the school code.

Our lawmakers must instead refocus on passing a budget that contains at least $350 million in new basic education money to help restore school funding cuts and that begins to implement a new funding formula that rationally and fairly distributes education dollars. Only then can we embark on a long-term, sustainable solution that begins to right the School District’s finances and reflects our commonwealth’s values by beginning to provide every child with the resources needed to succeed.

Michael Churchill is an attorney at the Public Interest Law Center.

Deborah Gordon Klehr is executive director of the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania.

Susan Spicka is an advocacy coordinator for Education Voters PA.

Concerns raised about law replacing No Child Left Behind

January 10, 2016 – The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – By Mary Niederberger and Clarece Polke

One month after Congress approved legislation shifting oversight of student accountability standards from federal to state control, state officials, including those in Pennsylvania, are planning how to establish and measure those new standards.

The end of No Child Left Behind, passed by Congress in 2001 and put into effect in 2002, was welcomed by many who objected to its focus on testing and to the complex reporting requirements. The program also did not come close to its goal for 100 percent proficiency by 2014.

But some civil rights and education advocacy groups are concerned that the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaces the former federal statute known as No Child Left Behind, will create an environment that will not require some under-achieving schools to improve.

“We are concerned that without federal oversight that the schools in Pennsylvania can overlook the needs of educationally vulnerable students,” said Cheryl Kleiman, staff attorney in the Pittsburgh office of the Education Law Center.

The D.C.-based civil rights organization Advancement Project cited the case of Brown v. Board of Education in which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously declared state-sponsored segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

“History tells us the federal government is a necessary party in ensuring equity in education,” the organization said in a release shortly after passage of the ESSA. “Without federal interventions segregated schools would have persisted.”

While, the ESSA was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in December, its exact details won’t be known to states until the voluminous legislation is translated into regulations by the U.S. Department of Education. It takes effect in the 2017-18 school year.

Nicole Reigelman, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said the department “is encouraged by the changes brought about by the ESSA,” and plans to work with stakeholders in the development of Pennsylvania’s assessment plan. The department is working on a timeline for the plan’s completion.

The NCLB required the reporting of student achievement data that was broken down by subgroups such as minorities, English Language Learners, special education and economically disadvantaged students.

Signed into law in 2002, the NCLB created the measure of Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, and required all students to hit proficiency targets that increased each year. Schools with grade levels and student groups that did not hit the annual targets were labeled and required to devise improvement plans. Though it was never acted upon, the threat of the loss of federal funds hung over the heads of states and districts if appropriate actions weren’t taken

The ultimate goal was 100 percent proficiency by 2014. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card,” “proficiency” rates in 2014 were below 50 percent for every racial and ethnic group, in both reading and math, in both fourth and eighth grade. There were two exceptions: Asian students in all subjects scored 51-64 percent and white students in fourth-grade math scored at 54 percent.

Critics of the NCLB said that it set an unattainable goal, created an excessive focus on annual testing and did not take into account other measures of progress. In order to address those issues, ESSA will require states to take a more comprehensive look at student achievement with less emphasis on testing.

Under the ESSA, states are mandated to create academic plans that will produce students who are college or career ready, without remediation. However, they also are required to intervene only in the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, high schools where a third or more of the students fail to graduate and schools with persistent achievement gaps.

Carey Harris, executive director for educational advocacy group A+ Schools said the legislation leaves room for chronically underachieving schools that don’t fall within the bottom 5 percent to “fall through the cracks.”

“Five percent is a very low bar,” she said. “None of the city public schools would even meet that target, yet you have some that have struggled academically for years. I would hope this legislation would get very serious about addressing that, so we’re not looking at Westinghouse, looking at Carrick, looking at [University Prep] in 10 years and saying they’re still no better off.”

Chad Aldeman, an associate partner at the education consulting and research group Bellwether Education Partners and former adviser in the policy office of the U.S. Department of Education, estimates that about 17,000 schools in the nation that would have been required to come up with meaningful improvement plans under NCLB will now be “off the hook.”

Ms. Reigelman said Gov. Tom Wolf is dedicated to making sure that every Pennsylvania student is college or career ready when they graduate and that he has lobbied for “historic” funding increases to Pennsylvania to work toward that goal.

A holdover from the NCLB included in the ESSA is that student achievement data will still be reported by subgroups. But critics question its value if there is no federal mandate for improvement beyond the bottom 5 percent. However, states can set their own target percentage for improvement, but would receive no federal funding about the bottom 5 percent.

“A lot of that data is available to the public now, although some states and districts are better than others about publicizing it,” said Dwanna Nicole, senior policy advocate for Advancement Project. “Even with all that data, if the school district and state aren’t going to use it to ensure equitable education for young people, then it doesn’t matter.”

Civil rights and educational advocacy leaders say it’s their hope that their organizations can fill the void of federal oversight by holding schools and districts accountable and working with states as those plans are formulated.

That collaboration “should begin now,” Ms. Nicole said.

The groups want to see testing become less of a focus in the measurement formulas. In its place, they want to have other factors incorporated, including the annual academic growth of student groups, school climate, and how students are disciplined. In Pennsylvania, Ms. Reigelman said the governor and Education Secretary Pedro Rivera have had “ongoing meetings with stakeholders to explore alternatives and develop new measures” to make the state’s School Performance Profiles a more effective evaluation tool.

Ron Cowell, executive director of the Education Policy Leadership Center, said the new federal law has been applauded because it gives states far more flexibility than the NCLB, but with that flexibility comes responsibility.

“They need to respond in a way that we don’t lose a sense of responsibility and accountability for how schools are serving particularly kids who are most dependent on public education and historically were not well-served,” Mr. Cowell said.

Like Ms. Reigelman, Mr. Cowell raised funding as an obstacle for those putting together Pennsylvania’s plans. He said to overcome the lack of federal oversight, the state needs an aggressive accountability plan, but that requires adequate and stable funding from federal and state sources.

Mr. Cowell said it will be difficult for the state education department to determine the amount of financial resources it will have in the future, given that the state budget still is not settled and that the parties are in disagreement about the extent of education funding. This is compounded by the fact that education in Pennsylvania is still recovering from the nearly $1 billion reduction in funding in 2011.

In addition, he said, the department, similar to state education departments across the country, has been downsized in staff considerably in the past decade, leaving a smaller staff to carry out the federal mandates.

“When you start out with inadequate resources and no predictability about what available resources will look like year to year in the future, it’s pretty hard to engage in serious planning,” Mr. Cowell said.

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2016/01/10/Education-advocates-worry-about-lack-of-federal-oversight-for-schools/stories/201601060194

The wheels on the bus are late

January 6, 2015 – Philadelphia Daily News – by Ronnie Polaneczky

IN PHILLY, if your child is late to school often enough, you may be hauled into Truancy Court to explain why your kid isn’t in class when he should be.

If only the absences were taken as seriously when the lateness is caused by the Philadelphia School District.

Since September, Monica Klimas’ son Danny Gallagher has been late to Gen. Philip Kearny School countless times. That’s because the bus that picks him up at home in Bridesburg can’t reliably get him to Kearny, in Northern Liberties, in time for the morning bell.

“Look at this,” Klimas says, opening the log she has kept of Danny’s tardy pickups. Except for October, when the bus miraculously arrived within minutes of its scheduled time, Danny’s transportation has been as unreliable as a Comcast service call.

On two back-to-back days in December, the bus never came at all.

Some days, sixth-grader Danny, 11, has been as late getting home. One time, he didn’t walk through the door until 5:30 p.m. He was famished and rattled from the two-hour bus ride.

“His day was longer than mine,” says Klimas, an optician who works in East Falls. She doesn’t drive, so if the bus is running really late, it costs her $30 in cab fare to get Danny to school.

She has endlessly e-mailed the district and left unanswered voice mails. She’s also routinely hung up in frustration when the voice-mail box was full.

Klimas worries that Danny, who has Down syndrome and is enrolled with six other intellectually disabled kids in Kearny’s terrific new life-skills program, has missed out on critical class time.

Despite continual reporting of her transit problems to the district, including calls and emails on her behalf made by Kearny principal Daniel Kurtz and his staff, the unpredictability has persisted, Klimas says.

As I listen to this very good mom’s tale of torment, I think, “Man, someone really needs to talk to the Pennsylvania Department of Education about this kind of stupidity.”

Except someone already did.

Last year, the local Coalition of Special Education Advocates filed a formal complaint with the department on behalf of special-ed students whose education plans call for district transportation to and from school.

For years, parents had complained that buses were frequently late. Routes were changed with little warning. Drivers and bus aides were poorly trained to deal with special-needs kids. And parents couldn’t get through to the district for help.

So the state investigated, sending surveys to 254 schools to inquire about transportation services to special-ed students in the 2014-15 school year.

Among the 93 schools that responded, 26 had no issues. The remaining 67 reported that buses had failed 10 times to pick up a student and had been late to school 392 times.

Yep, those are real numbers.

The state has since expanded its survey to monitor transportation services to any school that provides instruction to any district special-ed student.

Meanwhile, the state has concluded that special-ed students who miss instruction or therapies because of transportation problems are entitled to “compensatory education services” to make up for the times they were denied a “free and appropriate public education” as required by law.

Last month, a letter was to have been sent to parents of all special-ed students to tell them that.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard was not aware of the state’s action, but conceded that the district’s goal is always to get kids to school on schedule.

“We’re definitely not meeting that [obligation] all the time,” he says. “The expectation is on us to get it right.”

Still, he says, “we’re dealing with a very large urban transportation system, almost like SEPTA, with 1,600 routes. There are going to be problems with traffic and bus breakdowns that cause late arrivals for students.”

Of the district’s 280 buses, 160 have GPS systems that track in real time a vehicle’s whereabouts, he says; buses provided by private transportation companies to the district are already equipped with the devices.

They don’t appear to have helped special-ed student Terrell Ward, an eighth-grader at Morris E. Leeds Middle School in Mount Airy. His bus service was so erratic that his mom, Tamika Ward-Andrew, was summoned to Truancy Court last fall for his alleged massive absences.

In truth, she says, he was routinely dropped off at school after roll was taken.

“One time,” says Ward-Andrew, “the bus didn’t show up for two weeks in a row; the third week, it was late every day.”

She contacted the Education Law Center for help, and senior staff attorney Maura McInerney was able to get the truancy case dismissed. But Terrell’s record still shows 88 late days and 25 absences – most of them filed in error.

“Our next step is to get the record corrected,” says McInerney.

Hearing these tales, I am floored.

Children thrive on routine and structure. And parents – especially those working outside the home – need a degree of reliability to keep family life from flying off the rails.

And for special-needs kids, says McInerney, the need for predictability is even greater.

“When a child’s class day is disrupted, they can miss more than instruction,” says McInerney. “For children with emotional-support needs, predictability is a critical issue.”

Lateness throws them a curve ball they can’t handle.

Monica Klimas and Tamika Ward-Andrew say their sons love school. And both moms are impressed by the quality and commitment of the special-ed teachers at their kids’ schools.

If only they could say the same about the bus service they rely upon to get them there.

Parents having problems with district-provided transportation can call 215-400-4350, a hotline established as a result of the state investigation. For help securing compensatory services for a child’s missed instruction, contact the Education Law Center at 215-238-6970 or go to https://elc-pa.org.

http://mobile.philly.com/beta?wss=/philly/news&id=364329951

Opinion: Unless we’re careful, the new ‘No Child’ may still leave some behind

PennLive Op-Ed – Dec. 24, 2015 – By Deborah Gordon Klehr and Jackie Perlow:

Earlier this month President Barack Obama signed into law a comprehensive overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), previously known as No Child Left Behind.

First passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, the mission of this federal law is “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.”

While past iterations of ESEA have failed to fulfill this promise, this month’s reauthorization offers states like Pennsylvania an opportunity to reaffirm ESEA’s central mission to advance educational equity and protect the civil rights of vulnerable students.

In several ways this reauthorization, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), represents an improvement over existing legislation.

It will provide targeted support to struggling schools, including schools where traditionally overlooked student groups consistently underperform.

The new ESSA does more to hold schools responsible for the achievement of English language learners, including those with disabilities, and provides significant educational protections for children in foster care and those experiencing homelessness.

The law also expands educational opportunities for youth in the juvenile justice system and supports their smooth transition both into and out of juvenile justice school placements.

In addition, we know that many vulnerable students experience trauma, and ESSA also takes positive steps to support schools to recognize and address trauma. We applaud these important new provisions.

However, the Education Law Center remains concerned about whether the new law has the teeth to guarantee a quality public education to our state’s most vulnerable students.

On its face, the changes in ESSA will do little to improve resource inequities, discipline disparities, or the lack of opportunities for educationally at-risk students in Pennsylvania.

Most worrisome, however, is the law’s lack of federal oversight and accountability.

Under ESSA, much of the responsibility for ensuring educational opportunities for vulnerable students has been shifted to the states.

Both current research and our experience in Pennsylvania show that when states are given unfettered control over education, the civil rights of the most educationally vulnerable students often go unprotected and their academic outcomes suffer.

We are concerned that without federal oversight, schools in Pennsylvania may ignore the needs of the educationally vulnerable students they serve.

In no area is this concern more pressing than when it comes to school discipline. Under No Child Left Behind, schools faced harsh consequences if students failed to achieve on high-stakes testing.

This focus on standardized test scores incentivized schools to push out the students who posed the greatest challenges.

At the same time, states largely turned a blind eye to the resulting discipline practices that disproportionately excluded students of color and students with disabilities.

While data shows that students of all races violate school rules at the same rate, black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students.

The consequences of punitive discipline reach far beyond missing a day or two of class.

Students who are suspended even once in ninth grade are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school.

We know that unless the state actively holds itself accountable for eliminating existing discipline disparities, discriminatory and overly punitive discipline practices will continue to act as barriers for our most vulnerable students.

While ESSA will not require Pennsylvania to address these disparities, it does offer an opportunity to do so.

Under ESSA, each state is charged with developing an accountability plan. This plan must include three academic factors and one non-academic factor.

The law permits states to choose “school climate” – a broad term that encompasses suspensions, expulsions, and removal to alternative education settings – as the non-academic factor in their accountability plan.

The Education Law Center urges Pennsylvania to take advantage of this opportunity and identify school climate as the fourth factor in its accountability plan.

We also caution Pennsylvania not to replicate the incentives in No Child Left Behind that drove schools to adopt exclusionary discipline practices in a failed attempt to improve school performance.

Rather, the state’s renewed attention to an accountability framework should address improving academic performance in tandem with addressing school discipline.

This opportunity is timely because the Wolf administration and the Pennsylvania Department of Education have recently announced plans to revamp the state’s current and flawed School Performance Profile metric, which often penalizes schools impacted by poverty rather than rewarding progress.

However, including this factor is only the first step. As the state begins the process of developing and implementing its accountability plan, it is vital that Pennsylvania engage parents, students, advocates, and educators in these decisions.

We urge the state to seek out communities and leaders with diverse perspectives and include their voices at every step in the accountability plan process.

Only by holding ourselves accountable for eliminating the barriers that harm vulnerable students and providing schools with the resources they need to support them will Pennsylvania be able to avoid the shortcomings of the ESSA and ensure that all students in the state receive the quality education they deserve.

Deborah Gordon Klehr is the Executive Director of the Education Law Center. Jackie Perlow, Esq. is the Kaufman Legal Fellow at the Education Law Center.

http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2015/12/unless_were_careful_the_new_no.html