- DC test scores have improved for both low-income and more affluent students
- Center City Charter's SE Campus Ranked as Top-Tier [Center City PCS mentioned]
- Highest number of students now attend Tier 1 charter schools [Friendship PCS, Achievement Prep PCS, BASIS DC PCS, Center City PCS, DC Prep PCS, KIPP DC PCS, Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS, Two Rivers PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Capital City PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy, SEED PCS, Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, Washington Latin PCS, D.C. Bilingual PCS, Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS, Paul PCS, Roots PCS, Perry Street Preparatory PCS, and Tree of Life PCS mentioned]
- Elementary schools start teaching data literacy [Capital City PCS and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
- To Help Language Skills of Children, a Study Finds, Text Their Parents With Tips
- Save rote memorization. Save rote memorization. Save rote memorization.
DC test scores have improved for both low-income and more affluent students
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
November 14, 2014
Standardized test scores in DC have risen significantly in the seven years since schools came under mayoral control, according to a recent study, and it's not just because of an increase in affluent students. But while math scores have gone up steadily, literacy scores have largely stalled after an early jump.
While DC officials have touted increases in test scores as a sign that education reforms are working, critics have argued that DC's changing demographics are behind the improvements. They say an influx of more affluent students has driven up the scores while the gap between those students and lower-income minority students has remained as wide as ever.
But a recent independent study concludes that low-income and minority students have improved their scores as well. Controlling for factors like race and income, it concludes that less than 10% of the increase in overall scores is due to DC's changing demographics.
A division of the American Institutes for Research called CALDER did the report, which is one of a series evaluating the effects of DC's education reform efforts since the school system came under mayoral control in 2007. The statute that abolished DC's local school board and handed control to the mayor also required independent assessments of how the new regime was working.
The report on student achievement concluded that more affluent DC students had larger test score gains than low-income ones, which were defined as students receiving reduced-price lunch. And more affluent black students improved more than low-income ones.
On the other hand, improvements among black and Hispanic students were larger than those for white students, probably because they had more room to grow.
But when researchers controlled for the effects of differences like race and income, they found increases across all categories, especially in math.
Proficiency rates are different from actual test scores
How can that conclusion be squared with claims that scores for poor and minority students have remained stagnant or gotten worse? It depends on whether you look at proficiency rates or actual test scores.
After students take DC's standardized test, the DC CAS, their scores put them in one of four categories: below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced. Usually what's reported is the "proficiency rate," which is the percentage of students who have scored in the proficient or advanced categories.
The proficiency rate can be useful in highlighting disparities between schools. But it overlooks students who have moved up from below basic to basic, or who have improved their scores but not enough to move up from one category to the next.
The CALDER report was able to capture those changes because researchers looked at actual scores rather than categories. According to Umut Ozek, the report's lead author, that approach provides a more accurate picture of student growth.
A portion of DC students also take another test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), every year. That test found no significant reduction in DC's achievement gap in 2013, but Ozek says the NAEP's samples of racial and economic subgroups are very small, which makes its findings questionable.
Ozek's team also concluded that both DCPS and the charter sector saw roughly similar gains in test scores. Those results remained the same when the team focused just on low-income students in each sector, Ozek said.
There are caveats to reading scores, as well as other research limitations
The report included a number of caveats, including one about gains in literacy scores. About 50% of the increase in reading scores occurred in the first three years the study covered, from the 2006-07 school year to the 2008-09 school year.
Those years were not only the first years the schools were under mayoral control, they were also the first years that students took the DC CAS. And, Ozek says, it's possible the reason for the jump was that teachers and students were adjusting to the new test. When the study team excluded the first year of results from their analysis, the rate of growth became flatter, providing some evidence for the "adjustment hypothesis."
In other words, once teachers figured out what the test was looking for, they were able to better prepare students to take it. But the lack of improvement in later years suggests that teachers and students have hit a wall. The report also cautions that there have been allegations of cheating on the DC CAS.
On the other hand, Ozek says the report's findings are bolstered by similar results on the NAEP tests. The NAEP is widely regarded as cheat-proof and difficult to prepare for.
Other caveats in the report include the fact that test scores provide only an approximation of actual student learning. And to the extent that the scores do show that reform has been working, the study can't tell us which of the various changes since 2007 are responsible for the improvement.
We need a new approach to literacy
One academic connected with the study has argued that the results indicate that DC has generally been heading in the right direction. While that may be true for math, the stagnation in reading scores in both the charter and DCPS sectors is a cause for concern, especially among low-income and minority students.
Generally, it's harder to close the achievement gap in literacy for those students, probably because literacy skills largely rest on the kind of vocabulary and background knowledge that affluent students are more likely to acquire outside of school.
And while math skills are important, students who lack literacy skills are at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to learning almost all subjects. Poor reading comprehension can even interfere with students' ability to do math word problems.
It's good to know that scores for low-income and minority students have gone up, even if that increase isn't enough to show up in proficiency rates. But the stagnation in literacy scores is particularly troubling because DCPS has made literacy one of its key areas of focus.
Maybe it's time for both DCPS and the charter sector to try something new when it comes to helping low-income students acquire the reading and writing skills that form the foundation of a meaningful education.
Center City Charter's SE Campus Ranked as Top-Tier [Center City PCS mentioned]
The Washington Informer
WI Web Staff
November 14, 2014
D.C.'s Center City Public Charter School's Congress Heights campus has been cited by the mayor for outstanding academic performance.
The Southeast charter was the only school in the system this year to move up from Tier 3 — the lowest rating — to Tier 1 on the on the Performance Management Framework (PMF), which measures the performance of charter students and their schools, according to schools spokeswoman Theola DeBose.
"This is tremendous news and it is evidence that charter school quality is continuing to grow," said Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who on Thursday praised the school's achievement while announcing the annual quality ratings for the rest of the city's public charter schools.
"Parents have come to rely on the Performance Management Framework, designed by the DC Public Charter School Board, to help find a quality choice for their child’s education," Gray said.
This year, 16 schools earned Tier 1 status based on their performance during the 2013-14 academic year, according to a statement by the school board.
Additionally, seven schools received the high-performing designation for the first time, while 10 charter schools have been Tier 1 for all four years of the PMF's existence.
The board also noted that 22 public charter schools are rated Tier 1 on the 2014 PMF.
Highest number of students now attend Tier 1 charter schools [Friendship PCS, Achievement Prep PCS, BASIS DC PCS, Center City PCS, DC Prep PCS, KIPP DC PCS, Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS, Two Rivers PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Capital City PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy, SEED PCS, Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, Washington Latin PCS, D.C. Bilingual PCS, Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS, Paul PCS, Roots PCS, Perry Street Preparatory PCS, and Tree of Life PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
November 17, 2014
In a classy and moving ceremony last Friday held at Friendship PCS's Chamberlain campus the DC Public Charter School Board announced the results of this year's Performance Management Framework tiering of charter school's in the nation's capital. The multipurpose room was filled to the brim with leaders of the local movement that included in attendance Mayor Gray and Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith. PCSB chairman John "Skip" McCoy was the master of ceremonies and was joined by many of his fellow board members.
The board revealed that 12,437 students, approximately 33 percent of the 38,302 students attending charters, are now enrolled in Tier 1 schools. The number of total Tier 1 schools has actually decreased by one this year to 22. The Tier 1 schools include Achievement Prep, Wahler Place Middle; Basis; Center City, Brightwood; Center City, Congress Heights; Center City, Shaw; DC Prep, Edgewood Middle; Friendship, Chamberlain Middle; Friendship, Southeast Elementary; Friendship, Woodridge Middle; KIPP DC, AIM Academy; KIPP DC, KEY Academy; KIPP DC, Promise Academy; KIPP DC, WILL Academy; Latin American Montessori Bilingual; Two Rivers; Washington Yu Ying; Capital City, High School; Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy, Parkside High School; KIPP DC, College Preparatory; SEED; Thurgood Marshall Academy; and Washington Latin, High School.
Coming onto the list that were not present last year include Basis; Friendship, Woodridge Middle; Friendship, Southeast Elementary; Center City, Shaw; and Center City, Congress Heights. Charters that were Tier 1 last year but are not in 2014 are D.C. Bilingual; Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom; Paul (not ranked this year); Washington Latin, Middle; Center City, Brightwood; Center City, Petworth; and Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy, Chavez Prep.
Interesting to note is that 12 of the 16 school leaders of 2014 Tier 1 schools were signatories to a letter to the PCSB requesting that charters not be tiered next year due to the initial use of the PARCC student assessment tied to the adoption of the Common Core Standards.
There are now only four Tier 3 schools. In this group are Roots; Center City, Trinidad; Perry Street Preparatory, Upper; and Tree of Life. The PCSB pointed out that past Tier 3 schools have either moved up in the ranking or have been closed.
One of the most interesting success stories on the list is Center City, Congress Heights. This school was in Tier 3 in 2011 and is has now made it into the Tier 1 category.
At the morning's announcement Friendship was the last charter to be given its Tier 1 award. About 20 students joined the school's Chairman and founder Donald Hense and other school staff at the front of the room. Mr. Hense, whose system now includes three Tier 1 schools out of six campuses, reflected on the progress made by D.C. charters. He said that the work has been hard and for those who were there at the beginning it has been much more difficult than we thought. Then he asserted in a slow direct manner that achieving high academic student performance "is simply not just doing one, two, and three, and we need to stop believing that it is." The guests immediately erupted in enthusiastic applause.
Elementary schools start teaching data literacy [Capital City PCS and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Mohana Ravindranath
November 16, 2014
Elementary school teacher Lisa Parisi is trying to teach her students a new kind of literacy.
By the time fifth-graders enter her class at Denton Avenue School in New Hyde Park, NY., they are about 10 years old and have developed basic reading, writing, and math skills. They are less comfortable, Parisi found, handling data.
Parisi is part of a growing movement of educators creating lesson plans to teach students to collect and analyze data — even in subjects outside numbers-
intensive math and science. She hopes to prepare them to eventually fill the shortage of qualified science, technology, engineering and math professionals, but also to derive opinions from measurable, real-world data.
The United States faces a shortage of between 140,000 and 190,000 professionals with analytical expertise, and 1.5 million managers and analysts who can make decisions based on big data analysis, according to research by McKinsey, the management consultancy. Although the number of data-related graduate and undergraduate programs in the United States has grown rapidly in the past couple of years, there has been less interest in data programs in schools, said Michael Chui, a McKinsey Global Institute partner.
Last year, 361,000 high school seniors in the United States took the Advanced Placement calculus exam; less than half that number took the AP statistics exam, Chui and McKinsey Global Institute Director James Manyika noted in a report.
“It makes sense for us to be thinking about education, starting in early childhood, about concepts such as the difference between correlation and causation, what it means to have a bias as you think about data, conditional probability. These are things we as humans don’t naturally do . . . these are learned [concepts],” Chui said in an interview. He added that curricula should teach students about the realistic limitations of data sets — extraneous information, or sampling error, for instance.
Parisi’s class is studying governments, so she asks students to analyze data sets reflecting state and national policy, she said. For the past few weeks they have been examining salaries, categorized by gender.
Parisi uses data sets from Tuva Labs, a New York-based tech start-up that collects real data that educators can use to illustrate statistical concepts. Tuva Labs also develops software that lets students make graphs, track trends or upload their own data sets. In its first two years, Tuva Labs, backed by early-stage venture funding, offers the service free to teachers. About 2,800 schools in 55 countries use Tuva Labs, including the District’s Maury Elementary School, Thurgood Marshall Academy and Capital City Public Charter School, among others.
In the early stages of her new lesson plan, some students struggled to incorporate data into social studies, Parisi said. When she asked them to explain the discrepancy between men’s and women’s salaries, “they’re coming up with the most non-connected ways to explain it,” she said. One student thought an oversupply of women in the workforce might drive down wages.
“I’m like, ‘Where did you get this information?’ . . . It wasn’t in the data. It’s not in any data you can find,” she told the student.
Vanessa Ford, a science coordinator at Maury Elementary School, teaches data analysis skills to her students, who range in age from pre-school to fifth grade. Ford started incorporating more data-collection exercises into her lesson plans after noticing more emphasis on statistics in various national assessments.
In the past year, her classes have been collecting their own data. Every day at 1:40 p.m., her third-grade students measure the temperature outside, tracking changes over the year. Her fifth-grade students are measuring hours of daylight and how it relates to the Earth’s rotation. Her kindergarten class is recording predictions for whether it will be sunny outside the next day, or which foods will decompose fastest, along with the results.
“My hope is that they see data is accessible, and that it’s doable and that it’s meaningful, and if that’s the case, then they’ll want to keep using it,” Ford said. “I have students who think that they hate math but cheer when they take out their weather graph.”
Eventually, Ford plans to upload some of these data sets into Tuva Labs so other classes can analyze them. “It’s neat for them to see their data is meaningful.”
Ford said she and the school are still working out how to evaluate whether this approach to data analysis is effective. For now, she checks papers to see if students can graph data correctly and understand the process of estimation or predictions. But what is more telling, she said, is “ultimately if the kid’s able to have a conversation about it and ask questions about it.”
To Help Language Skills of Children, a Study Finds, Text Their Parents With Tips
The New York Times
By Motoko Rich
November 14, 2014
With research showing language gaps between the children of affluent parents and those from low-income families emerging at an early age, educators have puzzled over how best to reach parents and guide them to do things like read to their children and talk to them regularly.
A new study shows that mobile technology may offer a cheap and effective solution. The research, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research this month, found that preschoolers whose parents received text messages with brief tips on reading to their children or helping them sound out letters and words performed better on literacy tests than children whose parents did not receive such messages.
Pediatricians are now advising parents to read daily to their children from birth. Some communities are developing academic curriculums for home visitors to share with parents of babies and toddlers, while other groups are mounting public information campaigns for parents on the importance of talking, reading and singing.
But many of these efforts do not necessarily target parents at the moments when they are most likely to use the information.
“What’s really cool about this is that the messages reach parents at a time when they can act on them,” said Todd Rogers, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. “It’s not just about getting messages to parents, but giving them in a timely way to serve to remind parents of things they already know and already intend to do.”
The study’s authors, Benjamin N. York, a Stanford University doctoral student, and Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford, followed 440 families with 4-year-olds enrolled in public preschool in the San Francisco Unified School District last year. The vast majority of the parents had low incomes.
Half of the parents received thrice-weekly texts for eight months with messages like “By saying beginning word sounds, like ‘ttt’ in taco & tomato, you’re preparing your child 4 K,” or “Let your child hold the book. Ask what it is about. Follow the words with your finger as you read.”
The messages were developed in consultation with Molly Wertz, executive director of the Bay Area branch of Raising a Reader, a nonprofit that distributes books to low-income families, and Helen Maniates, a reading expert at the University of San Francisco.
The other half of the parents received one text message every two weeks with simple information about kindergarten enrollment or vaccinations.
Carla Bryant, chief of early education for the San Francisco Unified School District, said she understood how the text messages might spur action in overwhelmed families.
“If I got a little text saying, oh, ‘Today have you had a conversation with your child about x, y and z?' ” Ms. Bryant said, “I would be like, oh my goodness I need to do that. Let me just do it.”
Parents who received the literacy texts were far more likely to report pointing out rhyming words or describing pictures in a book to their children than those who received the more general texts. Teachers, who were not aware of which parents were placed in which group, also reported that those who received the literacy tip messages asked more questions about their children’s lessons.
And when the children were given tests of letter and sound recognition, those whose parents had received the literacy texts had scores that indicated they were about two to three months ahead of those children whose parents had received only the general information texts.
Because 80 percent of the families already had unlimited text messaging plans on their cellphones, the cost of the program was less than $1 per child. That compares to home visiting programs that can cost close to $10,000 per child and require that families devote a considerable amount of time during an intensive period.
Other groups are also trying to encourage early literacy through text messages to low-income families. Too Small to Fail, a joint effort of the nonprofit Next Generation and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation that is aimed at closing the language gap across the country, is working with Text for Baby, a nonprofit that sends health care tips to parents, to add messages about talking, singing and reading.
“We didn’t have the technology to reach parents in this mass way in the early 1990s,” said Ann O’Leary, the director of Too Small to Fail, “and we didn’t have evidence of behavioral science and how all these nudges might have an impact.”
Save rote memorization. Save rote memorization. Save rote memorization.
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
November 16, 2014
An erudite reader, former Foreign Service Officer Jack Aubert of Falls Church, objected to a prominent feature of modern education. “Rote memorization is very useful, and it was a mistake to discard it,” he said.
In a way, he’s right. Reformers frequently denounce memorization. They see it as drudgery. But it is hanging on. Creating memories is too much a part of humanity to die.
Reciting poetry was once a big part of school. My wife entertained me last week with stanzas from William Wordsworth and Sara Teasdale, passages her seventh-grade teacher, Lucille Neiter, insisted she commit to memory. “Of course, I can’t remember what we had for dinner last night,” she added.
Stuck in my head is Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” That is because my college Chinese textbook was written by Yuen Ren Chao, a wonderfully offbeat linguist and the father of my Chinese professor. One of his chapters was nothing but the comic Carroll poem translated into Mandarin. I had to memorize it in both languages. Aubert, about my age, said “I memorized Milton’s sonnet on his blindness by the timed light of three matches (I was supposed to be in bed with the lights out sleeping) and can still recite it.”
That urge lives on. The great motives for memorization — music and stories — are as robust as ever. Far more young people are running around with wires carrying songs to their ears than ever before. The constant repetition can implant both tunes and lyrics forever.
This starts young, as it always has. Many parents have observed, happily or otherwise, the effects of the mega-hit film “Frozen” on their children. When that happened to my grandsons, I showed them my favorite animated feature, “Despicable Me 2,” and was gratified to see them soak it up too. They quote it back to me.
When I was 10, I memorized all 20 verses of “The Ballad of Davey Crockett.” Spending my free time putting such stuff in my head was fun. So was much of what I had to recall in school. I have seen no research that memorizing can’t be enjoyable if done right. For children who have difficulty learning that way, teachers have other methods. But it is wrong to assume that going over the same fact or name several times until it sticks is bad teaching.
I know many teachers who encourage students to memorize. The other day, my 3-year-old grandson Tom chanted — without prompting — a six-part verse about doughnuts in a bakery shop he learned in preschool. Many teachers in higher grades still demand quick recall of multiplication tables, great historical events and presidents’ names, even if their education professors would have disapproved. Students need to remember more than they do now if they are to learn how to analyze their lessons and think critically and creatively.
Harriett Ball, the genius Houston grade-school teacher who trained the founders of the KIPP charter school network, noticed her students’ perfect recall of radio songs and composed her own, with the same driving beat, to teach algorithms and grammar. She quickly moved them to deeper understanding, but it was a great way to start. Many of the best classrooms around the country employ those rhythms.
Songs stuck in the head often reach the heart. I love Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” for the geography lesson in the second verse and the bracing acidity of the first verse. Life may not always be great for an American, but “at least I know I’m free,” the song says.
I sang it to my grandsons when they were babies, and occasionally since. They seem to like it. For Christmas, I am looking for more poetry they might enjoy. One book I saw includes Christina Rossetti’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?”, Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” and, much to my delight, “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Maybe someday they will read them to their kids enough times that they will remember.