Ripples from the recent mini-baby booms across the city, already visible in preschool and pre-K enrollment, will soon be lapping at the doors of the District’s middle schools.

That means D.C. officials need to start planning now, says a new study by D.C. Action for Children. The non-profit advocacy group studied OSSE and census data in collaboration with the Annie E. Casey Foundation to develop a compelling set of ward-level demographic snapshots.

OSSE has hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to study the quality of special education programs in the District, an $800,000 project it hopes will identify best practices that can be replicated and brought to scale in public and public charter schools.

“The plan is basically to start a conversation about what quality special education practices should look like in the District of Columbia.,” said Amy Maisterra, assistant state superintendent for special education.

The venture, to be paid for with federal Race to the Top funds, also will help establish a series of performance indicators that schools can use to assess how they serve the city’s roughly 9,000 physically and mentally disabled students.

Maisterra said much of OSSE’s work to date has been around ensuring compliance with federal laws. This is an opportunity to step back and have a discussion “at a granular level” about instruction, behavior and support services. The study will start with a literature review of effective practices locally, nationally and internationally, followed by a series of stakeholder focus groups. Maisterra said she hopes to have a report out by early summer.

Fall enrollment in D.C. public charter schools jumped 8 percent compared to the previous year, education officials announced Monday.

D.C. State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley said that auditors verified 31,562 students in the independently operated charter schools as of fall 2011, up from 29,356 in fall 2010.

Enrollment in D.C. Public Schools, the city’s school system, fell slightly, to 45,191 in 2011 from 45,630 the year before, according to Mahaley. That amounted to a 1 percent decline.

In all, charter students now account for 41 percent of total D.C. public enrollment.

The early pieces seem to be coming together for BASIS, the Arizona-based charter school group that promises an unprecedented level of rigor when it opens its D.C. campus this summer for grades 5 to 8. It has a building in Penn Quarter, and 319 students who registered during an open enrollment period that ended Friday. That’s short of the 400 that officials targeted, but head of school Mary Riner Siddall said the good news is that no lottery will be necessary.

“I am very happy about this fact that we won’t have to let anyone down,” she said in an e-mail. She held more than 30 informational sessions all over the city for prospective parents. Registrants represent more than 75 schools across all eight wards, she said.

When BASIS founders Olga and Michael Block announced plans to come to D.C. last year, their calling card was an uncompromising European-style academic program. Seventh graders would take Algebra 1 and Latin. There would be nine hours a week of physics, chemistry and biology. To graduate, students would be required to complete at least eight AP courses and pass six exams. Eighth graders will have to pass the University of Cambridge international benchmarking exam. It was a formula that earned their Arizona schools national ranking and test scores that exceeded statewide averages.

OSSE has winnowed from 128 to 35 the number of classrooms that it will ask an independent contractor to investigate for possible cheating on the 2011 DC CAS, the agency announced Thursday.

The 128 classrooms, spread across 54 public and public charter schools, represent less than three percent of classrooms citywide in which tests were administered last April. They were identified in a study last July by CTB/McGraw-Hill, publisher of the DC CAS, as having “inordinate numbers” of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets. The study, which wasn’t made public by OSSE until late December, said the data “may indicate inappropriate intervention on students’ answer documents by an educator.”

But in a statement, OSSE said only 35 classrooms met the expanded set of criteria the agency is now applying to determine whether a classroom’s test results should be fully investigated. These are: unusual test score gains by individual students from 2010 to 2011; wide variances or unusual patterns of scores within a classroom, and prior year’s test results that showed inordinate wrong-to-right erasures in that teacher’s classroom. OSSE said it consulted with an independent advisory committee of testing experts to develop the criteria.

“Erasures themselves are not an automatic flag,” said OSSE spokesman Marc Caposino.

The CTB/McGraw-Hill analysis of 2011 scores also cautioned against using elevated erasures as the sole criterion for investigation:

“We emphasize that the results from this study may be used in conjunction with other information to investigate whether inappropriate interventions may have taken place. Inordinate WTR [wrong-to-right] answer change rates, by themselves, may simply be coincidental and do not necessarily indicate inappropriate behavior,” the study said

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