Posts about Kwame Brown

Currently, charter schools by law must admit anyone who applies. If the grade in question has more applicants than seats, charters use a random lottery to determine which students get an offer of a seat. The only exceptions to the lottery are siblings and founders' children.

Neighborhood schools, by contrast, must accept all students living in their boundary first. Remaining spaces are filled through an out-of-boundary lottery, with preferences for siblings, and for families living nearby but outside the boundary.

Unlike neighborhood schools, charters have to struggle to find facilities as opposed to having the District buy and maintain them. This often forces charters to move or split into multiple campuses, where an elementary school feeds into a distant middle or high school.

Charters need families who are committed to the program, rather than just attending for the short commute. Otherwise, if the school moves or when a student graduates to another campus, many of those families will simply leave the school. Too much turnover interferes with building a successful school.

In addition, charters (or any school of choice) without attendance zones can help break the ugly patterns of race and class segregation that divide our city.

With only neighborhood schools, school segregation usually mirrors residential segregation. Open enrollment and a vigorous parent education campaign can help ensure that charters serve all families, including the District's most disadvantaged, regardless of home address.

Public school choice became popular in the late 1970s in places like Philadelphia and St. Louis, where people sought a voluntary alternative to forced busing as a way to reduce segregation. For example, the Minneapolis Public Schools created a vast array of school types to appeal to people in ways that would draw voluntary movement so that formerly segregated groups would mix.

DC now has that possibility too. When affluent families in Ward 3 and low-income families in Ward 7 both want to attend the same school in Ward 5 because its innovative curriculum, we should not stymie the families' efforts.

The only rationale for this policy is a non-educational one: minimizing commuting distance. Sure, we could save a lot of energy and kids' time if nobody had to commute more than a mile or two. It would help children's fitness and neighborhood cohesion if all students walked to school.

Educational excellence should trump these convenience factors. Even a long school commute within DC is around 5 or 6 miles, which is no farther than many typical suburban school commutes. And frankly, most families will voluntarily choose the shorter commutes and safe routes for their kids even without special preferences or government restrictions.

For those families willing to make that tradeoff because they feel so strongly about the quality of the school, they should have the opportunity, or at least the same opportunity as anyone else. (Chairman Brown, for example, drives his child from his home in Ward 7 to school in Ward 3).

One exception where neighborhood preference would make sense is if the charter school's mission involved serving a particular neighborhood, and that mission were made explicit in the charter. It would make sense to try to find a legal way to allow these schools to offer neighborhood preference.

Maybe DC wants a lot of charter schools with such missions. In that case, the District needs to work harder to help such schools locate permanently in the neighborhoods they seek to serve. If charter schools grow in number, this might very well become a priority of the Public Charter School Board, which authorizes new charter schools. Meanwhile, we can have both types of schools, neighborhood and specialty schools, under DCPS and the Charter School Board.

Jim Graham also argued against enforcing this law, even though, as Mike DeBonis noted, he represents the (residentially) densest ward in DC. He introduced an amendment that would have restricted fines to only apply on streets which have already been plowed. One of the bill's supporters called the amendment a "poison pill." That sends the ironic message that if drivers can't get through a street, it's not important that pedestrians be able to either.

Kwame Brown, who did support the bill but also supported Graham's amendment, made the amusing comment that Mayor Gray has done a good job with snow clearance this year. We've had only 1.7" of snow this year, compared to an annual average average through January of 8.4" and the lowest in 124 years.

Graham insisted that he wants to do something about shoveling; he just wants to use incentives rather than fines. But he's never given a practical incentive-based proposal.

Many councilmembers opining on this issue would have more credibility if they actually walked to transit to get to work in a snow, or for that matter any other time.

During the years he chaired the council's transportation committee and sat on the WMATA Board, Graham came under periodic criticism for very rarely riding transit. He stuck up for low bus fares, but never addressed the problem of unsafe sidewalks after storm. Graham even bragged during today's debate about not moving bills like this one during his tenure as chairman.

Large numbers of DC residents have to get to work or school on foot and on transit after snowstorms, and unshoveled areas create serious safety hazards. Sidewalks are often completely impassable for people with disabilities or even just temporary injuries.

DC already has a law that residents and businesses have to clear their sidewalks, but it's not enforceable. The government has clear the sidewalk and then sue individual violators to collect up to $25. This bill simply makes the penalty for violating this law a straightforward ticket and fine, just like in most cities including Arlington, Alexandria and Montgomery County.

Cheh made many changes to the bill during the last few months to cut the fines even further from the original proposal, put in exemptions for poor and elderly residents, and more. Property owners get a warning before having to pay any fine until the end of 2013.

It's not clear if this law does enough to push the egregious violators, like the large parking lot in Mount Vernon Triangle, to actually take any action, but a majority of councilmembers have made clear that they don't really care to do anything about those problems.

The bill wouldn't have even taken effect until next winter. Now, we're likely to have to wait until yet another winter. If we get a real snow this year, will the councilmembers who voted to table this bill today try walking their neighborhoods and getting to work on foot or by transit? If they did, they'd very likely look at this issue very differently.

DC Council Chair Kwame Brown said he had to cancel the hearing because the DC State Superintendent of Education, Hosanna Mahaley, cancelled that morning. When she skipped the hearing, national experts, grandparents, teachers and students who spent days memorizing their testimony showed up for no reason.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is central to the creation of community schools, and Mahaley had confirmed before Thanksgiving that she would attend the hearing.

The Coalition for Community Schools defines a community school as a school that partners with community resources to "[integrate] academics, health and social services, youth and community development, and civic engagement."

Community schools are open 7 days a week during the day and evening to encourage involvement from families and the community.

Community schools are traditional schools that also offer programs and services for their students, their parents and the surrounding community. They may include: before- and after-school programs for their students, family-support centers and adult enrichment classes on topics, such as parenting, employment, and housing, and medical, dental and mental-health services.

Community schools report gains in academic and nonacademic areas, which impact academic achievement. Research also suggests that students in community schools have higher attendance rates and their families "show increased family stability, communication with teachers, school involvement, and a greater sense of responsibility for their children's learning."

One year after the passing of this act, OSSE would administer multi-year award grants to establish "no less than 5 new community schools (at public schools or public charter schools)."

OSSE would also establish and administer the Community Schools Fund "to fund the operation of the initiative, and to ensure the District of Columbia becomes eligible to receive federal and private dollars in support of community schools."

If DCPS and OSSE are committed to increasing educational outcomes for all children in Washington, DC, they need to further demonstrate that they support the passing of the Community Schools Incentive Act.

The DC Council hearing on the DC Community Schools Incentive Act has been rescheduled for January 31st at 4:30pm. Let the DC Council and OSSE know that school reform is not just about teachers and buildings, but is also about students and their obstacles to learning outside of the classroom.

On October 20, DC Council Chairman Kwame Brown announced that he was drafting a bill focused on recruiting effective teachers to work in under-performing schools. While he plans to examine the incentives other states have used, he has suggested that he is already considering several specific incentives.

They include homebuying assistance, tax credits, loan repayments, and the removal of teacher evaluations under IMPACT. Currently, IMPACT rewards highly effective teachers at high poverty schools with a $10,000 bonus.

The most recent IMPACT evaluation report, which identified 663 highly effective teachers, demonstrates the urgency of increasing the number of effective teachers in low-performing schools. While 135 highly effective teachers work in Ward 3 schools, only 71 highly effective teachers work in schools in both Wards 7 and 8.

While Kwame Brown should focus on recruiting teachers to work especially in high-poverty schools, he should also consider ways to motivate these teachers to stay in these schools for more than a year. He could focus on improving working conditions by recruiting principals who support their teachers by providing professional development opportunities as well as opportunities for collaboration among teachers and other school leaders. These schools could also have an incentive program to recruit qualified administrative staff and paraprofessionals who can assist teachers in completing paperwork and working with students who require additional support.

In order to retain new teachers that decide to work in high-poverty schools, Brown should implement an induction program for new urban teachers that complements the New Teacher Orientation and the mentoring support that DCPS currently offers. This induction program could provide additional support these new teachers on issues specific to high-poverty schools.

Chairman Brown's bill, however, should not include waiving annual evaluations under IMPACT as an incentive. Waiving IMPACT may motivate even those teachers deemed as highly effective to work in higher poverty schools since 50% of the IMPACT evaluation is based on student achievement. Nevertheless, IMPACT's value-added approach focuses on measuring a teacher's true impact on student learning by taking other factors that may lead to poor student achievement into account.

Additionally, IMPACT ensures that all DCPS teachers will not only be observed by both their principal and a master educator, but will also have to opportunity to debrief with them and discuss how to improve their practice. As Chancellor Henderson told Washington Post reporter Bill Turque, "even highly effective teachers want and need feedback [in order] to improve and refine their practice." Receiving this feedback is especially important for the highly effective teachers who are in their first few years of working with a different student population.

Research also demonstrates that in order for professional development to be effective, it must be offered regularly, occur in the school where the teacher works, and be driven by clear goals, data, and teacher input. The 5 classroom observations that are part of IMPACT establish that all teachers in DCPS will have access to effective professional development and that the professional development will meet the needs of each teacher, rather than being a one-size-fits-all workshop.

Finally, it isn't clear whether or how highly effective teachers in high-poverty schools would be recognized for their successes if IMPACT is waived. Currently, IMPACT gives highly effective teachers in all DCPS schools the opportunity to be recognized for their work and their students' achievement by being invited to district leadership events at DCPS and by being recognized at A Standing Ovation for DC Teachers gala and the Rubenstein Awards for Highly Effective Teaching. Under IMPACT, highly effective teachers are also "eligible for performance bonuses of up to $25,000. Repeat highly effective staff members are eligible for base salary increases of up to $20,000, in addition to the annual bonuses."

While monetary incentives are important to recruiting highperforming teachers to underperforming schools, Chairman Brown must consider incentives that focus on improving working conditions to retain these teachers in high-poverty schools. IMPACT plays a role in better working conditions for teachers by ensuring high quality professional development for all teachers and by publicly recognizing teachers who are deemed highly effective.

Mike DeBonis recently highlighted an even bigger failure: Upshur Park, where the grass actually caught on fire. DPR opened the park to great fanfare earlier this year, but then again didn't water the new trees and grass.

DPR followed up with DeBonis to tout Walter Pierce Park, which looks green and verdant. However, DeBonis noted, that might be because it isn't open yet.

DPR is also putting in irrigation at several of its playing fields. But this highlights what many parks advocates say is the issue: a focus on the recreational facilities, like pools, indoor rec centers, and athletic fields, over parks. Ironically, says a former DC government employee, under Mayor Williams the department was renamed to put parks first. Apparently the semantic change didn't translate to policy.

There's been a lot of upheaval at DPR in recent years. Mayor Fenty had 4 separate directors for the agency, one of whom Council refused to confirm amid controversies over contracts that were allegedly improperly routed through DPR. The Williams administration saw similar turnover rates in the job.

Perhaps the biggest cause of problems is funding. Over the last 5 budget cycles, DPR's budget was cut by 47%. It's hard to keep up maintenance of a growing set of parks and rec centers in that climate.

Now, park maintenance is slated to transfer to the new Department of General Services, which could mean it'll get the attention it needs, or it could mean it slips through the cracks entirely.

Perhaps parks slip through the cracks so much because DC has so little actual parkland that's not run by the National Park Service. Maria Barry, the volunteer president of Friends of 16th Street Heights Parks (including Upshur Park, the one that caught on fire), says that many calls to 911 about crime in the park end up routed to the Park Police, even though Upshur and nearby Hamilton Park are not federal and MPD has jurisdiction. Since almost all parkland is federal, dispatchers sometimes erroneously assume that all parkland is.

Tommy Wells now has oversight over DPR on the Council. Will he be able to make any changes? He could fight for more budget, though everyone else has pressing budgetary needs as well. Should he push for any structural reform? Some have suggested creating a separate park division, which could ensure some staff focus on parks, or it could simply rearrange the org chart to no real effect depending on how it's implemented.

When Kwame Brown announced he's open to an income tax increase, he stipulated the money go to maintaining schools, rec centers, and parks. That's a change from earlier promises to use extra money for affordable housing, but could alleviate DPR's woes.

Parks are a significant piece of building a good city for neighborhoods of all types and for all residents. We need to show that DC parks can be great. Failings at DPR aren't an excuse for NPS not to do better, but if DC could make its parks a model for urban parks, it would certainly help set an example for other, federal parks around the city.

First, a quick recap of the long saga: Gray's April budget proposal included a 0.4% tax increase on incomes over 200,000. Kwame Brown vowed to eliminate that, and swapped it out in favor of eliminating the tax exemption on out of state bonds, which no other state has.

The only reason the rest of the cuts-before-taxes councilmembers, like Mary Cheh and Jack Evans, agreed with the measure was because reinstating the exemption was on a list of priorities for spending future unanticipated revenue, at last some of which was indeed anticipated. But Tommy Wells wrangled an amendment to swap that item with restoring other cuts.

In any event, the next budget round had a bunch of spending pressures around Medicaid that pushed this item down the list. The replacement items aren't funded either, yet, and so the bond tax buyout still wouldn't have been had it stayed on the list.

Meanwhile, Mary Cheh said she would introduce an amendment to remove just the part of the bond tax for already-purchased bonds, and put back in an income tax, but only on incomes over $400,000. Yet she never introduced it, and instead passed a measure devoting some of DC's reserve funds to delay the bond tax by one year and make it non-retroactive.

Some councilmembers say she never really meant for the amendment to pass, and withdrew it after Mayor Gray whipped votes for it; she says it's because she feared Wells would round up support for some other change she didn't want.

What Gray vetoed was the bill that delays the bond tax. Now, if the Council doesn't act further, the bond exemption will go away even for already-purchased bonds, including on interest from 2011.

Kwame Brown still insists "people are tired of taxes and fees" even though a DCFPI poll found strong support for the original income tax increase.

Tim Craig writes,

Instead of a tax increase, Brown said he will probably push to establish a commission to explore potential cuts and savings to the city's budget. Brown said the commission would include government officials and citizens who will work to ferret out "wasteful spending within the government."

Say you were on that commission. How would you "ferret out" some waste?

It's become a familiar trope to say there must be waste. And there indeed is. But it's not so easy to just cut the waste, like most politicians pretend.

For one thing, some waste is an unfortunate byproduct of organizations. Even my former employer, Google, which constantly enjoys adulation from the press for being a great organization, has some people not pulling their weight. It's not a lot, sure, but even without obstacles to firing people, getting rid of anyone is difficult, unpleasant, and bad for team morale (especially because there's never unanimity about who the less productive people are).

In a private company, a lot of the waste is just hidden. That doesn't make it right, but the popular belief that anyone with half a brain could just take an axe to government spending easily is a little too facile.

On the other hand, there are indeed some clearer examples of people who aren't adding value to an organization. Most people I've spoken to in government agree and know who those people are; sometimes others share the same view, while sometimes the opinion varies from person to person.

Many agencies could benefit from strategic reductions in their staffing levels. Unfortunately, labor rules make it very difficult to eliminate people based on their performance. The standard procedure is a RIF (Reduction in Force), which has strict rules around removing the most junior people, or people based on their job category rather than their performance, and further rules requiring the agency to find new placements or rehire people if jobs open up.

As I've written before, I think it's detrimental to unions in the long run to stand against the general principle of merit-based firings. Better to push for least arbitrary process for evaluating employees, so that the firings are as fair as possible, rather than opposing the whole idea.

If the Council doesn't want to take this issue on, it may be very hard to find genuine opportunities to cut that haven't already happened. It's worth investigating. If Brown staffs his commission with thoughtful people who really are looking for good win-win solutions, it could come up with something. Though it's hard to have a lot of faith in Brown's ability to choose people on merit instead of for political reasons.

It would definitely not be helpful to have a Boehner-style commission that simply picks programs to axe. Most of the actual objectives the DC government pursues are worthwhile. If accomplishing them more efficiently is not really possible or not politically feasible because of labor issues, wholesale cuts are not the answer.

Such a commission also would not likely be able to find specific cuts between now and the beginning of the fiscal year in October. Brown may have to swallow the tax increase that most residents want, and then pursue longer-term efficiency gains for next year.

And what about alcohol licensing? Kwame Brown gave that to Jim Graham in January. It's widely agreed that this was compensation for taking away transportation. But it has little to do with human services. If rationalizing committees is so important, why isn't it in the same committee as other licensing bodies like DCRA?

I can think of no explanation other than that Brown didn't want to hurt Graham but did want to hurt Wells. Can you? And that's the problem. Brown keeps asserting that payback was not the motive, but almost all local reporters have pointed out that his explanation doesn't hold up.

Sadly, Mary Cheh has started parroting the same line:

CM Brown had to reshuffle things because newly elected Vincent Orange had to be assigned a committee and arrangements had to be made to account for Mr Thomas losing his committee. CM Brown reconfigured committees along better functional lines including placing transportation and public works under the comm on the environment.

No reshuffling had to happen with transportation, because the Thomas/Orange changes don't overlap at all with the Wells/Cheh/Bowser changes. And a transportation committee that has the environment but doesn't have WMATA is definitely not "better functional lines."

John Hendel wrote,

When questioning the Greater Greater Washington report, Brown also emphasized that he hadn't been able to weigh in properly, and that a proper news story needed to include all the different sides of a decision such as this. He told me that he likes the news site but that it has a lot of emotion, and that journalism needs to include multiple perspectives. Again, this sounds fair enough on paper but doesn't seem to harmonize with the increasingly loud sense of outrage over Wells' shift as well as what seems to be a growing consensus that yes, the SUV investigation may have played a role.

I'm sorry that Kwame Brown, citywide elected chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, feels he isn't able to properly communicate with reporters who spend much of their time in his building. This underscores Alan Suderman's point yesterday that one of the clearest lessons from this saga is that Kwame Brown is bad at media relations. Or, maybe, the local press corps is just smarter and more penetrating than Brown would like.

If Brown is genuinely trying to improve the Council's function, Suderman makes another good suggestion: make committee staff more real professional staff rather than political hires of each councilmember.

When members switch committees, the expected convention in the council is that each member of the committee's staff just keeps working for the former chair in their new capacity. For example, in January Tommy Wells and Jim Graham swapped committees. But all the staff of Human Services kept working for Wells even though he didn't have human services oversight, and the staff of Public Works and Transportation kept working for Graham.

John DeTaeye, for example, had been handling DPW issues, and had become an expert on recycling and trash. He had some good ideas which he'd discussed with me for improving recycling rates. Suddenly, he couldn't implement those, and had to learn human services issues (though he also got promoted to committee director).

One uncommon exception was Jonathon Kass, the excellent transportation committee staffer who has a background in transportation. Graham let Wells hire Kass to be the new committee director. But will Mary Cheh do the same? Then what would happen to Jeremy Faust, the current Government Operations and the Environment committee director?

It's all crazy. This makes it less likely for councilmembers to hire people with deeper subject knowledge. As long as all staff are generalists, with backgrounds in law or public policy or something, they can generally shift, but still have to learn new policy areas from scratch, at great cost of productivity and institutional memory.

Kwame Brown shouldn't swap around committees lightly, with unbelievable explanations. Barring that, he should take steps to reduce the severe impacts that result when committees change hands.