FOCUS DC News Wire 11/25/13

 

 

My wife Michele and I had the great honor once again of attending the Friendship Public Charter School Awards Gala held at the J.W. Marriot Hotel on Saturday. We had come to expect a grand level of glamour from this annual event, and the evening did not disappoint. As in previous years we walked into the entrance of the ballroom to find abundant appetizers being served by uniformed waiters and waitresses, multiple open bars, and a crowd of men all dressed in black tie and women clothed in dresses and formal gowns.

 

Fortunately, right away I spotted the host, Friendship PCS’s chairman and founder Donald Hense. I asked him how he felt about tonight’s ceremony. “I’m excited,” he replied without hesitation. I then quickly inquired if he knew who won the teacher of the Year Award. “Well, I just signed the check,” the Friendship chairman answered. He added, “They don’t tell me who it is because they know that I will let the secret out.” We would learn later that the selected finalist is presented with a financial prize of $15,000, with each of the ten finalists winning $5,000.

 

Of course, being one of those selected among your fellow educators to potentially win this award is quite an honor at Friendship. The charter now employs over 600 teachers instructing almost 8,000 students in ten schools in Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Mr. Hense pointed out in his “Letter from the Chairman” contained in the glossy professional brochure guests received upon arriving that Friendship each year graduates 22 percent of all high school students attending public school in the nation’s capital. The Friendship founder would explain in his remarks at dinner that the charter now employees over 1,000 people, manages one half million square feet of real estate, and has a $90 million operating budget. Mr. Hense went on to reveal that Friendship’s charter was recently renewed for another 15 years by the D.C. Public Charter School Board; the only institution to win such approval without conditions.

 

It was then on to meet some of the nominees. I first ran into Eric Blood, an Advanced Placement social studies teacher at Friendship Collegiate Academy. I was first introduced to Mr. Blood during my visit to the school last June. I asked him why he thinks he was nominated for this award. “I believe it is a testimonial regarding what all of our A.P. students have been able to achieve,” Mr. Blood explained. He provided an example of his unique teaching abilities in the event brochure:

 

“Cooperative learning in my classroom does not mean the same thing every day. Students may work in cooperative groups to master a set of content, helping each other to achieve an end goal. Students may work in teams in a game setting, it may be more of a group investigation in which each group in the class is given a different task and asked to present their findings in some unique way. A jigsaw technique can be used in which students inside of a group are each given a different task or source of information. Students would then meet in an expert group of members from other groups who had the same task as they did in order to discuss and master the given material.”

 

I also had the opportunity to speak with nominee Garry Cameron , a seventh grade math teacher at Tech Prep. Mr. Cameron immediately explained the reason that he feels he has been successful at Friendship. “I am extremely passionate about what I do and I believe the passion rubs off on my students. I try to make a connection between what I’m doing and their future success. Our vision is that every young man or woman can go to college. We even emphasize this fact by naming every classroom after a college or university.”

 

It was then time for dinner. As in the past Roland Martin was the Master of Ceremonies and as is now the custom each principal introduced a video that described the work of the teacher nominated from their school. But here the similarities between previous years ended. The event appeared much crisper than other times we have attended, with transitions between speakers and various aspects of the program orchestrated to a degree typically found I would imagine at important gatherings of heads of state.

 

By the time the winner was to be announced Michele and I did not have a clue who should be selected as they were all appeared so incredible impressive. Especially striking was the joint nomination of Diamond Harris and Candice Cooper as fourth grade co-teachers at the Performance Management Framework Tier 1 Chamberlain Elementary. We also particularly enjoyed the interview with Blow Pierce health and physical education teacher Marvin Graves.

 

But on this night it was Jennifer Beckwith, a seventh grade science teacher at Woodridge Academy, who would be named the 2013 Friendship Teacher of the Year. She wrote that “all students regardless of their backgrounds deserve a world-class education.” Mr. Hense in his highly reflective closing remarks explained that teachers who come to Friendship to practice their craft understand that this is not like working with kids at Harvard. He reminded the audience that the students these teachers have in their classrooms are the toughest of the tough. He then sincerely thanked them for their drive and perseverance. With Ms. Beckwith’s comment to me that her selection means that her student’s academic progress is being rewarded, she clearly demonstrated that she is truly a modest hero among her peers.

 

 

Having taken a look at several states’ school rating systems  (see our posts on the systems in IN, OH, FL and CO), I thought it might be interesting to examine a system used by a group of charter schools – starting with the system used by charters in the District of Columbia. This is the third year the DC charter school board has released the ratings.

 

For elementary and middle schools (upon which I will focus in this post*), the DC Performance Management Framework (PMF) is a weighted index composed of: 40 percent absolute performance; 40 percent growth; and 20 percent what they call “leading indicators” (a more detailed description of this formula can be found in the second footnote).** The index scores are then sorted into one of three tiers, with Tier 1 being the highest, and Tier 3 the lowest.

 

So, these particular ratings weight absolute performance – i.e., how highly students score on tests – a bit less heavily than do most states that have devised their own systems, and they grant slightly more importance to growth and alternative measures. We might therefore expect to find a somewhat weaker relationship between PMF scores and student characteristics such as free/reduced price lunch eligibility (FRL), as these charters are judged less predominantly on the students they serve. Let’s take a quick look.

 

The most simple descriptive statistic is to simply calculate the average FRL and special education rates of the schools within each tier (again, charters are sorted into Tiers 1-3, with Tier 1 being the highest performing, at least according to this system). These averages are presented in the table below for all 51 elementary/middle charter schools that received a 2012 rating (keep in mind that this is a small group of schools – 51 in total, and that most are concentrated in Tier 2, which means that the averages can be influenced substantially by a small set of schools).

 

There is no apparent relationship between tier and special education (the rightmost column) – schools in Tier 1 actually have the highest rates.

 

The FRL averages, in contrast, do exhibit a pattern – schools in the lower tiers have a higher FRL rate, on average, than schools in the higher tiers. The difference is most stark when comparing Tier 1 (66.4 percent) to Tier 2 (77.7 percent). This is to no small extent a result of the measures employed by the system – not only of the proficient/advanced rates, which are heavily associated with characteristics such as FRL, but also the growth measure (median growth percentiles), which usually are modestly correlated with these traits.

 

Averages, of course, sometimes mask what’s happening underneath, so it might be useful to take a look at the scatterplot of FRL by the actual index scores upon which the tier ratings are based.

 

You can see a relationship, but it is quite messy. Although virtually all of the schools in Tier 3 (those with index scores below 35 percent) are high poverty, the schools with the four highest index scores have FRL rates over 80 percent, while several schools with rates below 50 percent receive relatively low index scores.***

 

It is therefore fair to characterize this relationship as discernible (statistically and otherwise) and modest-to-low. It is also noticeably less strong than that in most of the other states I have reviewed.

 

The reason for this is very simple: The PMFs rely less heavily on absolute performance measures, which are strongly correlated with student characteristics such as FRL. This does not necessarily mean these DC charter ratings are “better” or more fair than their counterparts elsewhere, but it does show how the choice of constituent measures has a predictable and often substantial impact on the association between the results and the students schools serve.

 

- Matt Di Carlo

 

***** 

 

* The DC charter board does not make these data available in a convenient format, which is why I limited this simple analysis to elementary/middle schools (and it’s also why I concentrated solely on one outcome – schools’ final score/tier).

 

** For elementary and middle schools, growth measures (median growth percentiles) are 40 percent (20 percent reading, 20 percent math). Math and reading proficiency rates contribute another 20 percent, while an additional five percent is based on advanced rates in both subjects. 15 percent is based on what the board calls gateway indicators, which are proficient/advanced rates in reading among third graders for elementary schools, and proficient/advanced rates in math for eighth graders among middle schools. The final 20 percent of schools’ scores – called “leading indicators” – are attendance and re-enrollment rates (10 percent each) for both elementary and middle schools. The formula is slightly different for combined elementary/middle schools.

 

*** Two quick side notes: First, as suggested by the table above, which looks at tier categories, there is essentially no correlation between index scores and the proportion of schools’ students that are classified as special education; second, as in most accountability systems that sort scores into categories, there are a number of schools right at the Tier 1/2 and Tier 2/3 cutoff points.

 

 

Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s nominee for state superintendent of education received both praise and pointed criticism at a confirmation hearing Friday before a D.C. Council committee.

 

Jesus Aguirre has served since October as the District’s acting state superintendent of education, overseeing an agency that funnels millions of federal dollars to schools, runs buses for students with disabilities and crafts policies that affect both traditional public schools and public charter schools.

 

Now he is seeking to make the role permanent.

 

Several members of the public testified in support of Aguirre’s confirmation, arguing that he showed himself to be an able administrator as director of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation since 2009.

 

Aguirre managed — against all odds — to open pools and recreation centers on time, said Mary Terrell, a retired D.C. Superior Court judge.

 

“Every summer this becomes the battle of the ages, and there were many who said it could not be done,” Terrell said. “But he got it done … and I think he would bring that same can-do attitude to his work at OSSE.”

 

But Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), who oversaw the parks department during Aguirre’s tenure, was far less impressed. “You are the least responsive administrator of all the agencies I’ve had oversight of,” Wells said, criticizing what he said was Aguirre’s lack of innovation and failure to implement needed reforms.

 

Several council members on the five-member education committee questioned whether Aguirre would be a strong enough leader to do what’s best for the city’s children even when it’s politically inconvenient for the mayor.

 

“I have no confidence that you will be able to speak independently on education policy other than what you’re given permission to say,” said Wells, suggesting that Aguirre’s nomination was a reward for loyalty to the Gray administration.

 

Aguirre came to the District in 2007, to serve as a member of then-Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s senior leadership team. He said he is excited to be working in education again and is crafting a plan to reorganize and strengthen the agency he is leading, known as the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

 

Wracked by leadership turnover, OSSE has struggled to find its footing since it was created in 2007.

 

“On a basic level, OSSE needs focus,” Aguirre said Friday. “We need to evaluate and clarify our role and ensure that all staff and stakeholders understand and accept this role.”

 

Education Committee Chairman David Catania (I-At Large) asked how the city can be confident in Aguirre’s ability to improve OSSE’s poor record of administering federal grants. Aguirre and his wife founded an Arizona charter school that was closed in part due to its failure to meet federal grant-reporting requirements.

 

“We just focused on providing positive educational experiences for our children, and we just frankly weren’t great businesspeople at the time,” Aguirre said. “We made a lot of mistakes and we learned a ton from those mistakes.”

 

Aguirre said the experience taught him that a state-level education agency can’t just focus on accountability; it must also provide support. That drew scrutiny from Council Member David Grosso (I-At Large), who said he worries that Aguirre might not be willing to dole out “tough love” to struggling schools.

 

Committee members Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) both expressed their support for Aguirre’s nomination.

 

If the committee votes on Aguirre’s nomination, its recommendation for or against approval would then go to the whole council. If the council takes no action, Aguirre will be automatically confirmed on Feb. 14.