- Time for Charter Board to enlist services of Building Hope [Harmony DC PCS and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
- Anti-bullying policies fall short for 30 percent of D.C. charter schools, report says [Academy of Hope PCS, Hope Community PCS, Ideal Academy PCS, and William E. Doar, Jr PCS mentioned]
- D.C. teachers share tips for implementing Common Core standards
- Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds
Time for Charter Board to enlist services of Building Hope [Harmony DC PCS and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 17, 2014
The problems surrounding both Harmony and Rocketship as these charter management organizations attempted to secure permanent facilities in the District of Columbia point to a lack of support by the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Yesterday, I heard Scott Pearson, the executive director of the PCSB, state at a conference that his organization regulates these alternative schools and does whatever it can "to ensure their success." But when it comes to finding classroom space that assistance is mostly absent.
Think about it. Here we have two nationally recognized high performing schools relocating to the nation's capital for the first time. Can you just imagine the complexities involved with navigating through the politics of a city in which buildings for the purpose of providing classrooms are both exceedingly difficult to find and costly? These strangers to our town must somehow meet with ANC commissioners who are most likely hostile to their presence, talk to banks that are reluctant to loan money to entities coming to them with pupils as their only collateral, ask for assistance from politicians loyal to the traditional schools, and attempt to work with real estate brokers who need to return telephone calls and emails from much more lucrative clients. Fortunately, locally we have a valuable resource that can help.
Building Hope has done all of this before. The organization has been involved in almost all successful charter school permanent facility transactions practically from the time the local movement began. Joe Bruno, Paul Leleck and Tom Porter have professional relationships with all the major players that can make finding a home for these schools a success story.
Harmony PCS has been criticized for locating across the street from a traditional school offering the same grades and academic program. This week we learned that Rocketship PCS is planning on operating in close proximity to a federal prisoner halfway house while doing a particularly poor job interacting with those in the community before deciding where to land. Building Hope can be enlisted by the PCSB even before a charter is approved to anticipate these kinds of problems so they don't happen again.
If our goal is really to provide a quality seat to every child who needs one then we need more charters here like Harmony and Rocketship. But so far the clear signal we have been sending to these schools is that you are not welcome here. In order to reverse these unfortunate experiences the PCSB should enlist the aid of Building Hope in getting the facility hunt off to a positive start.
Anti-bullying policies fall short for 30 percent of D.C. charter schools, report says [Academy of Hope PCS, Hope Community PCS, Ideal Academy PCS, and William E. Doar, Jr PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
October 16, 2014
About 30 percent of public charter schools have anti-bullying policies that are not compliant with District law, according to a report released this week by the city’s Office of Human Rights.
The District’s Youth Bullying Prevention Act of 2012 requires all schools and libraries and other organizations that serve children and teens to adopt and implement bullying prevention programs.
A task force created a model policy that organizations can use, but many draft their own.
According to the law, each policy must address in detail some key components, including a code of conduct and consequences, reporting requirements, investigations, appeals and retaliation.
This review, conducted by nonprofit Child Trends for the city, is an audit of schools’ new policies. D.C. Public Schools and charter operators were asked to submit their policies for review between August 2013 and September 2014. They received compliance reports, and many resubmitted revised policies.
Ultimately, D.C. Public Schools and about 70 percent of public charter schools had policies that were found to be compliant.
A handful of public charter schools -- Academy of Hope, Hope Community, Ideal Academy, and William E. Doar, Jr — did not submit policies at all. The report details how each charter operator fared.
The review was limited to written policies, and did not look at how they are implemented.
“It is not assumed that [schools] will successfully prevent and intervene in bullying incidents simply by having a bullying prevention policy,” the report said. “However, having a compliant policy is a first step toward these goals.”
D.C. teachers share tips for implementing Common Core standards
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
October 16, 2014
More than 100 educators in the District met for a day-long training Thursday on implementing the new Common Core academic standards.
The “Ahead of the Curve” conference, organized by the D.C. Public Charter School Board and nonprofit organization Fight for Children, offered an unusual opportunity for teachers and school leaders from charter and traditional schools to work together.
“Everyone is dealing with the same issues and facing the same problems and trying to work smart and get our kids ready,” said Adam Zimmermann, an eighth-grade English Language Arts teacher at Truesdell Education Campus in Northwest. “All those in the room were pushing each other.”
Charter schools, which are publicly funded and independently managed, have proliferated in the District in part under the premise that greater freedom will lead to innovations that can inform school improvements more broadly.
But many educators say that promising practices aren’t often shared.
The Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted by the District and more than 40 states, spell out the knowledge and skills that students should have in math and reading.
The more rigorous expectations represent a major shift in instruction. Newly designed assessments are scheduled to be administered this spring.
School leaders from different parts of the city talked at the conference, which was hosted at Discovery Education in Silver Spring, about how far along they are with implementing the standards and what’s working or not.
Workshops offered practical tips for communicating with parents about the new standards, teaching close reading, or using formative tests to measure progress in math.
Lauren Castillo, an instructional coach at Truesdell, said she got ideas for different ways to bring the new expectations into daily interactions in the classroom.
”Every time I have been able to come to a forum like this, the dynamic is super inspiring.”
Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds
The New York Times
By Douglas Quenqua
October 16, 2014
It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school. The findings led to increased calls for publicly funded prekindergarten programs and dozens of campaigns urging parents to get chatty with their children.
Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.
A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.
“It’s not just about shoving words in,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. “It’s about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.”
In a related finding, published in April, researchers who observed 11- and 14-month-old children in their homes found that the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2. The total number of words had no correlation with future ability.
The idea that quality of communication matters when it comes to teaching children language is hardly new.
“Our field has been pretty consistent in recognizing all along that there has to be quality and quantity,” said Dr. Hirsh-Pasek. Even the 1995 study that introduced the notion of the 30-million-word gap, conducted by the University of Kansas psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, found that parental tone, responsiveness and use of symbols affected a child’s I.Q. and vocabulary.
But this year’s studies are the first time researchers have compared the impact of word quantity with quality of communication. The findings, said Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and an author of the April study, suggest that advocates and educators should reconsider rallying cries like “close the word gap,” that may oversimplify the challenges facing poor children.
“I worry about these messages acting as though what parents ought to focus on is a word count, as though they need a Fitbit for words,” she said, referring to the wearable devices that tally steps.
The use of the word “gap” may be counterproductive, said Dr. Hirsh-Pasek. “When we talk about gaps, our natural tendency is to talk about filling them,” she said. “So we talk about the amount as if we’re putting words inside the empty head of a child.”
“But in the same way that you can’t drop the shingles and the siding for a house on the ground, you need to have the foundation there first if language isn’t going to just roll off the child’s back and become background noise.”
For the new study, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues selected 60 low-income 3-year-olds with varying degrees of language proficiency from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a long-term, wide-ranging study of 1,300 children from birth to age 15. Other researchers reviewed video of those children at age 2 in play sessions with their parents. The researchers watching the video were unaware of how the children would later develop.
“We were able to ask whether those interactions held any clues accounting for the differences we saw at age 3,” said Dr. Hirsh-Pasek, who was an author of the long-term study. “It turned out we were able to account for a whole lot of the variability later on.”
Quality of communication accounted for 27 percent of the variation in expressive language skills one year later, she said. The results were not significantly changed when the researchers controlled for the parents’ educational level.
But those who urge parents to talk to their children more say that increased quantity of language inevitably leads to better quality.
“It’s not that one mother is saying ‘dog’ and the other is saying ‘dog, dog, dog,’ ” said Ann Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford. “When you learn to talk more, you tend to speak in more diverse ways and elaborate more, and that helps the child’s cognitive development.
Dr. Ferald, author of a 2013 study that found a vocabulary gap between affluent and poor children as young as 18 months, is a scientific adviser to Providence Talks, a program in Providence, R.I., that outfits children with devices that record the number of words they hear each day.
“People emphasize the quantity because that’s what you can measure,” she said. But she noted that the program also sent counselors into children’s homes to more closely evaluate their exposure to language and teach parents how best to communicate with children.
Still, Ann O’Leary, director of Too Small to Fail, a joint effort of the nonprofit Next Generation and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation that focuses on closing the word gap, acknowledged that messages to parents could do more to emphasize quality.
“When we’re doing these campaigns to close the word gap, they do capture the imagination, they do get people understanding that we do need to do a lot more talking,” she said. “But we also need to be more mindful that part of what we need to do is model what that talking looks like.”