- D.C. mayor-elect wants to ‘accelerate’ public school reform
- Education Department moves to regulate teacher preparation programs
- Full-Day Kindergarten Twice as Good for Hispanic Children, Study Finds
D.C. mayor-elect wants to ‘accelerate’ public school reform
Watchdog.org
By Moirah Costa
November 27, 2014
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Mayor-elect Muriel Bowser wants to increase public school reform and focus on accountability and results, according to a 56-page transition plan.
Bowser wants to evaluate academic and extracurricular activities at low-performing schools, renovate or construct new school buildings, expand preschool programs, and increase STEM options for students, among other things, according to the plan released by her office last week.
“As Mayor, Muriel Bowser will accelerate the pace of school reform by discontinuing ineffective programs and policies and replicating those that have demonstrated strong outcomes to ensure that all students receive a high quality public education,” the report stated.
The mayor-elect’s transition office did not respond to a request for comment.
Bowser, who takes office in January, also said she wants to increase collaboration between D.C. Public School and charter schools. Her plans calls for giving the city’s deputy mayor for education authority to make recommendations on improving the collaboration between the two school systems.
D.C. public charter schools are autonomous from the city and are regulated by the D.C. Public School Charter Board. About 44 percent of D.C. school children were enrolled in charter schools in the 2013-2014 academic year.
The D.C. Public School declined to comment on the Bowser’s plans to collaborate with charter schools.
The DC Association of Chartered Public Schools, a nonprofit that represents charter schools in the district, did not respond to a request for comment.
The plan also highlights Bower’s desire to make the budget process more transparent to taxpayers. The document did not provide any other details but did layout plans to respond to parents’ and community member’s concerns, including collecting student and parent satisfaction data from both public and charter schools.
As Watchdog.org reported, a recent study showed that mayoral control of the public school had lead to less transparency for officials and community members.
The mayor-elect’s plan says she will propose a longer school day and re-evaluate the effectiveness of mayoral control of the DCPS. She also will provide additional resources for underperforming schools and vows to raise $50 million from private-sector partners to support school reform efforts. The plan did not expand on what reforms would be included.
The document stated that Bowser will retain the Public School Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
Wayne Frederick, president of Howard University, and Michela English, president and CEO of Fight for Children, a nonprofit that promotes education for low-income children in D.C., were named co-chairs of Bowser’s education committee.
Bowser’s plan also calls for looking beyond standardized test scores to provide a broader approach to evaluating schools and provide more autonomy for high-performing schools. She indicated more resources will be going to the 25 lowest performing schools in the city in an effort “to close the achievement gap.”
The document states Bowser’s plans to double the number of community schools in the district, which are partnerships between public schools and community-based nonprofits. Six community schools were awarded one-year grants in 2013 and provide social services, parent support and mental and physical health care to students and their families.
Additionally, Bowser’s plan calls for a “Good to Great Initiative” that will target schools close to being considered “highly-regarded by parents.” The plan did not expand on any details of what schools would be included or what the program would entail.
The mayor-elect has stated that she wants to tweak the new school boundaries adopted by Mayor Vincent Gray in August, but she has remained vague about what those tweaks would be, according to public radio station WAMU. There was no mention of the school boundaries in the transition plan.
Education Department moves to regulate teacher preparation programs
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
November 25, 2014
The Obama administration unveiled a proposal Thursday to regulate how the country prepares teachers, saying that too many new K-12 educators are not ready for the classroom and that training programs must improve.
Under the plan, the federal government would require states to issue report cards for teacher preparation programs within their borders, including those at public universities and private colleges, as well as alternative programs such as those run by school districts and nonprofits such as Teach for America.
The rating systems, which would need approval by the Education Department, would for the first time consider how teacher candidates perform after graduation: whether they land jobs in their subject field, how long they stay and how their students perform on standardized tests and other measures of academic achievement.
“Nothing in school matters as much as the quality of teaching our students receive,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters Thursday. “We owe it to our children to give them the best-prepared teachers possible.”
It will be years before any changes take effect. The administration will take public comments for 60 days, and it plans to issue new regulations by September 2015. But states would not be required to issue report cards for teacher programs until April 2019, well into the next administration.
Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and a critic of teacher preparation programs, said the country needs urgent action. “Our colleges and universities have waited far too long to transform these programs to meet the needs of both today and tomorrow,” he said
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities, said the move is “a significant expansion in the federal role overseeing state government. But it may well change considerably before it becomes final.”
Some professions have standardized systems and exams to ensure consistency. Medical students, for example, undergo a four-year program and a residency before taking a state licensing exam and national board exams, all designed so that new physicians have the same essential knowledge and practical skills.
Teacher preparation programs vary from school to school, and states set licensing requirements.
A 2007 McKinsey study found that 23 percent of U.S. teachers graduated in the top third of their class, while 100 percent of teachers in Singapore, Finland and other nations whose students lead the world on international exams finished near the top of their classes.
A shortcoming of the programs is that few track how their graduates perform in the classroom, Duncan said. The proposed regulations would create a feedback loop for teacher candidates choosing among programs and school districts looking to hire new graduates, he said.
States would be required to judge the quality of an education program in large part by tracking the performance of a newly minted teacher’s students on standardized tests. That idea triggered immediate protests from teachers unions, which argue that student test scores are not an accurate measurement of teacher effectiveness.
“There’s no evidence these regulations will lead to improvement and plenty of reason to believe they will cause harm,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, adding that teacher prep programs might avoid placing graduates in struggling schools where test scores tend to be lower and teacher turnover higher.“Due to the focus on K-12 test scores, the very programs preparing diverse teachers for our increasingly diverse classrooms will be penalized.”
Becky Pringle, vice president of the National Education Association, said her union recognizes the need for better teacher training, but she also slammed the “inappropriate” use of test scores to judge teacher preparation. “Too many teachers are saying they are unprepared for the realities of the classroom and that teacher preparation, licensure, and induction standards must improve,” she said.
This is the second time the department has tried to regulate how schools prepare teachers. An earlier effort collapsed in 2012, after negotiators could not agree whether test scores are a valid way to assess teacher quality.
Under the proposal, states would rate programs as “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective” or “exceptional.”
If a program is “low-performing” or “at-risk” for two consecutive years, it will lose federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education, or TEACH, grants, which give up to $4,000 a year to teacher preparation candidates who agree to work full time in high-need fields and struggling schools for at least four academic years. In fiscal 2014, the Education Department awarded about 34,000 grants worth $96.7 million under the program.
Charles Barone, policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, said that improving the education schools’ quality will prevent future problems.
“They could save a lot in the long run if they just got the training right from the get go,” he said.
“Too many people are graduating who aren’t prepared to teach. Then you get bad instruction for the kids. And we try to remediate that,” Barone said. “You’d do less of that and disrupt fewer lives if you just got it right from the beginning.”
Full-Day Kindergarten Twice as Good for Hispanic Children, Study Finds
Education Week
By Kathryn Baron
November 25, 2014
Children in full-day kindergarten programs made much bigger leaps in early reading skills than their schoolmates attending traditional half-day programs, according to a new study.
The gains for Hispanic students were twice as large as their classmates', but there were statistically significant improvements for all full-day kindergartners across the board, said researcher Chloe Gibbs, an assistant professor in the schools of public policy and education at the University of Virginia.
"It is a rare education intervention that is both helpful for everyone, but also has particularly concentrated effects for disadvantaged kids, for kids who come in with very low literacy skills, and for Hispanic kids," Gibbs told Education Week. "Those are the sorts of interventions that we often are trying to find because we would like to both help everyone and catch the lowest performers up to the level of their higher-performing classmates."
Gibbs had a ready-made study group of 23 schools in five Indiana school districts that didn't have enough space in their full-day kindergarten classes so they randomly assigned children to full- or part-day programs by lottery.
In 2007, Indiana legislators decided to increase access to full-day kindergarten and approved $33.5 million in additional funding for voluntary expansion by districts and charter schools in the 2007-08 school year.
There were a lot of takers; enrollment in full-day kindergarten in Indiana increased from 41 percent to 63 percent between 2006-07 and 2007-08. But the funds were distributed in block grants rather than the usual per student funding and there wasn't enough money to cover the demand in some places.
For each school, she analyzed student scores on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (DIBELS) and the Indiana Reading Diagnostic Assessment (IRDA), which measure vocabulary and skills that children need to know before they learn to read, such as being able to sound out and identify letters.
One particularly big impact found full-day kindergarten closed the achievement gap between Hispanic children and their classmates by 70 percent.
Those findings are really important, Gibbs explained, because "interventions in the early years have a greater likelihood of long-term improvement for children because their brains are more malleable."
She is continuing to follow the children from this study to see if the literacy gains do last and if they extend to math.
On an economic level, the study found that full-day kindergarten seems to be more cost-effective than other education interventions. On the low end, Indiana districts reported that the price of moving from half-day to full-day kindergarten was about $1,500 per student; on the high end, Gibbs estimates it could be as much as $4,000 per student. That includes making sure there are enough classrooms and teachers for all-day programs because schools often run morning and afternoon programs.
Gibbs said having this information is important on a policy level, especially now with the strong push from the White House and states for universal early-childhood education programs.
According to the Children's Defense Fund, 75 percent of kindergartners are enrolled in a full-day program, even though only 11 states and the District of Columbia are required to provide a publicly funded full-day program. Forty-five states require districts to offer at least half-day kindergarten, and in five states, districts don't have to provide any kindergarten.