- Simmons: Raise Teacher Pay Without Raising Bar?
- Three New Middle Schools Proposed for Northeast D.C.’s Ward 5
- DCPS Proposes New Middle Schools for Ward 5
- Henderson ‘Disappointed’ With Special Ed Ruling
- How About Better Parents?
- Upcoming FOCUS Workshop
Simmons: Raise Teacher Pay Without Raising Bar?
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
November 20, 2011
Earlier this school year, D.C. officials released some discomfiting news: Only 52 of 187 city schools met federal Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks in reading or math.
Earlier this month, D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown outlined his plan to help turn around those schools by paying teachers more money and offering them several other carrots, including tax credits and help with buying a house and paying for tuition.
But the “presto, change-o” legislative plan, titled the Highly Effective Teacher Incentive Act, contains a glaring, gaping hole: It dilutes the carrot-and-stick approach that then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and then-Chief Deputy Kaya Henderson began implementing in 2009.
What Ms. Rhee and Ms. Henderson, the current chancellor, did was establish a taut teacher-evaluation system (IMPACT) that tied teacher performance to student achievement and rewarded so-called “highly effective” teachers with bonuses that could reach as much as $25,000.
The Rhee-Henderson pay-for-performance approach has since drawn the attention of not only the Obama administration, but also state lawmakers and school-district officials nationwide, who are now following in similar fashion.
But the latest D.C. merit-pay plan moves the city backwards.
Instead of raising the bar on teachers, Mr. Brown’s proposal would lower expectations of teachers and students by permitting teachers to retain their “highly effective” status regardless of their students’ achievement or lack thereof.
In sum, really, really good teachers could begin earning $35,000 on top of their base salary for merely walking into a schoolhouse.
Unions and their enablers will love this one.
But let’s be real: If really, really good teachers aren’t subjected to the risk of losing their “highly effective” status, then the Brown plan becomes a mechanism to drive up the costs of public education and still leaves thousands of D.C. kids behind.
In addition to the potential for teachers to pull in $35,000 on top of their base salary, Mr. Brown’s proposal includes other financial incentives for teachers:
• Homebuyer and other housing assistance: Granted, a majority of the D.C. teaching corps lives outside city limits, but how much will these new housing subsidies cost D.C. taxpayers?
• Tuition assistance: Dollar signs need to be attached to this proposal, too. For example, can Mr. Brown ensure that after taxpayers subsidize teachers’ master’s degrees that student academic-achievement levels will rise to new heights or that disciplinary problems will decline?
• Income-tax credits: This is a no-brainer. First, Mr. Brown’s bill burdens taxpayers with new housing subsidies, then it burdens them with new tuition subsidies, and the third angle mandates tax credits.
Here again lies the dunce factor: The annual education costs will steadily rise while academic expectations of students will remain low.
We need to thank our lucky stars for most teachers, especially those who chose to serve in urban and rural school districts. America would be on ground zero without such noble do-gooders.
Mr. Brown, a Democrat, deserves credit for trying to begin to turn around those 57 schools that simply don’t measure up.
And he’s right to point out that “teachers often hesitate to teach in low-performing schools because they worry about teaching students whose skills are significantly below grade-level and about challenges with classroom discipline.”
However, he is way off the mark to propose legislation that tags D.C. public education with an incredibly high price minus any guarantees.
Surely Mr. Brown wouldn’t spend money on a major purchase, such as an SUV, without a warranty that guarantees performance.
If the chairman wants buy-in from taxpayers, he should return to his own chalkboard and rewrite the Highly Effective Teacher Incentive Act.
Three New Middle Schools Proposed for Northeast D.C.’s Ward 5
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 18, 2011
District officials, responding to parents’ complaints about the lack of education options in Ward 5, have proposed a plan to create three middle schools with different specialties in the Northeast community.
The scenario, which would affect about 3,000 elementary and middle school children, was presented to parents and neighborhood leaders Wednesday night. It involves the shuttering of three PS-8 “campuses” that have been unpopular with many parents since their creation in 2008 under then-Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.
In their place, the District would open three new schools: a stand-alone middle school for arts and world languages; a PS-8 school offering an International Baccalaureate program; and a science and technology middle school housed in a now-vacant wing of McKinley Technology High School.
The new schools would open in August 2013.
“We tried to craft a proposal where any family could see themselves in one of the options,” said Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who added that the plan was inspired by community discussions and a survey of Ward 5 parents.
Rhee created six PS-8 schools in Ward 5 as part of a citywide round of school consolidations and closures. She touted research — widely disputed — that showed improved academic performance at the merged elementary and middle schools. She also saw it as a way to retain families that historically leave the system after the fifth grade.
While the rate of fifth-grade departures did decrease in the PS-8s, test scores were no better overall than in traditional middle schools — and in some cases were far below even the District average. Enrollment in middle grades at many of the PS-8s was not large enough to generate the per-pupil funding necessary for rich academic and extracurricular programs. The funding shortage created a stark, have-and-have-not gap between Ward 5 schools and Alice Deal, the coveted Northwest D.C. middle school.
The situation led to increasing calls for the return of a traditional free-standing middle school to the community. Initial response to Henderson’s plan seems favorable.
“I think it is a good first step,” said Raenelle Zapata, chairman of the Ward 5 Council on Education. “It shows they have given some thought to what has been said. I’m hopeful that we can thrash out the plan so that it will really evolve into some top-notch schools for Ward 5.”
Zapata said her major misgiving about the proposal was that it offered little in the way of immediate improvements for the PS-8s. “We have waited a very long time for that,” she said.
She added that she and other parents might have reservations about placing sixth-graders in the same building with high-schoolers at McKinley, even if the middle grades were in a separate wing.
Many major elements remain to be worked out. They include which of the ward’s seven PS-8s (Burroughs, Brookland at Bunker Hill, Browne, Langdon, Langley, Noyes and Wheatley) would be closed and where the new free-standing middle school would be located. The options include renovating one of the existing PS-8 buildings or the now-empty Brookland building. Another possibility would be razing Brookland and building a brand-new facility.
Zapata said there is heavy sentiment for the Brookland site on Michigan Avenue NE near Catholic University, which is accessible to a Metro station and the Turkey Thicket Recreation Center.
These and other details will have to be resolved sometime in the first quarter of next year, as part of a new citywide round of school closures and consolidations.
DCPS Proposes New Middle Schools for Ward 5
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 18, 2011
DCPS has released its Ward 5 plan. The main elements: conversion of an existing Education Campus or other available building into a stand-alone arts and world language middle school; a PS-8 school with an IB program, and a STEM middle school housed at McKinley SHS. It would require closing at least three existing ECs in the ward. More to come on this.
The plan is on the DCPS site here.
Henderson ‘Disappointed’ With Special Ed Ruling
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 18, 2011
Chancellor Kaya Henderson pushed back Friday at this week’s federal court ruling that the District has failed to identify and treat adequate numbers of young children with special needs, saying that the District received little credit for substantial progress.
She said that since the opening of the Early Stages diagnostic center in 2009, DCPS has dramatically increased the percentage of the pre-school age population identified as needing special education services from 2 percent to 7.4 percent. That places the District 15th among the states in meeting the “Child Find” requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
“I am disappointed that the ruling ignores our remarkable progress over the past two years,” Henderson said in statement.
In his ruling Wednesday on the D.L. vs.. D.C. class action, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth cited the city’s “persistent failure” to live up to its legal obligations, calling it “a failure that works a severe and lasting harm on one of society’s most vulnerable populations — disabled preschool children...” He established a series of performance benchmarks for officials to meet, including an increase in the proportion of young children identified for services to 8.5 percent.
Henderson said the District would have no trouble reaching the target, which has been met by only eight states. She praised DCPS special education chief Dr. Nathaniel Beers, the former founding executive director of Early Stages.
“Families of the District should know that Dr. Beers and the Early Stages team have gone to amazing lengths to remedy this issue. I commend them on their efforts, which have resulted in nearly a four-fold improvement in just two years. As a result of their work, more children are getting the services they need in a timely manner,” she said. Last week, a new Early Stages satellite center opened on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast DC to better serve families in Wards 7 and 8.
But Lamberth’s 45-page opinion, citing trial testimony and documents placed in evidence, said that a major reason for the improvements described by Henderson was the pressure created by the lawsuit, filed by special needs children and their parents in July 2005.
The Early Stages staff itself said that the District is a long way from properly serving the pre-school population, projecting the actual identification rate at about 12 percent. And while Henderson hailed the recent gains, the District acknowledged in court that as recently as last November at least four patients per day contacted Early Stages “to report that a Child Find Coordinator had failed to return their calls regarding providing their children with an evaluation or an eligibility screening.”
Perhaps most embarrassing to the city was that its own expert witness so thoroughly trashed its Child Find efforts that attorneys feared that she might hand the defendants a victory. Maxine Freund, a professor at GWU’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development, concluded that the city’s program has been “troubled and largely unsuccessful in meeting their obligations of IDEA.”
She said the program suffered especially from frequent leadership turnover and lengthy vacancies in key positions. In preparing her report, Freund said she was provided “incomplete documents, drafts, unsigned MOUs and identified practices that did not benefit the systems involved in Child Find.”
Ellen Efros, chief attorney for the Equity Section of the D.C. Attorney General’s office, said that an initial draft of Freund’s report “shredded” the District, and would be “extraordinarily difficult to defend.”
She was apparently correct.
How About Better Parents?
The New York Times
By Thomas L. Friedman
November 19, 2011
In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems — the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.
To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:
“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.
These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.
The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.
“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”
To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.
Using ReportWorks to Create Report Cards in PowerSchool
Thursday, December 1st, 2011, 4-7pm
This workshop will show schools how to develop report cards using the ReportWorks system. Schools will be able to edit templates to manipulate the results to show the data based upon the schools standard report card for both traditional grading and standards based grading.
Requirements:
Basic understanding of PowerSchool
Login information and URL of school’s PowerSchool
$50 per person for VSP schools, $100 per person for non-VSP schools
To register, click here, or visit www.focusdc.org/workshops.
Questions? Need special accommodations?
Contact Alison Collier at acollier@focusdc.org or 202.387.0405.