- D.C. schools to invest $20 million in efforts to help black and Latino male students
- Senate begins debate on education law, focuses on testing
- What are the odds that Congress actually rewrites No Child Left Behind? 50-50, Arne Duncan says.
- As U.S. test scores lag, study shows violence, poverty, teen pregnancy are high
D.C. schools to invest $20 million in efforts to help black and Latino male students
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
January 21, 2015
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced a plan Wednesday to invest $20 million in new support programs for black and Latino male students in the District, including opening an all-boys college preparatory high school east of the Anacostia River.
Henderson said her decision to invest heavily in the specific needs of boys of color has everything to do with “mathematics.” Black and Latino boys make up 43 percent of the students enrolled in D.C. public schools. By almost any measure — reading and math scores, attendance and graduation rates — their performance is lagging.
“Far too many students are not benefiting from the progress we are making,” Henderson said at a news conference at the remodeled Ballou High School in Ward 8. “It’s a very real, very urgent problem.”
The push is part of a citywide effort under Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who took office this month, to improve equity and increase opportunities for young men of color. The effort also reflects work by President Obama to secure private funding to help keep male minority youths in the classroom and out of prison.
Other urban districts also have begun to focus on minority males to reduce the achievement gap or address skewed discipline statistics or stereotypes, all issues that have been magnified since the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August. School districts in Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif., have offices dedicated to black male achievement.
Under the “Empowering Males of Color” initiative, the District plans to open an all-boys college preparatory high school in the heavily minority area east of the Anacostia in 2017. Henderson has enlisted the help of Tim King, a former classmate at Georgetown University and the founder of a high-performing Chicago all-boys school, Urban Prep Academies, to open the school.
For the next three years, Henderson also will focus funds from the Proving What’s Possible grant program on individual schools’ efforts to enhance the academic, social or emotional development of black and Latino male students and to work to engage their families.
The District plans to recruit more minority teachers and has put out a call for 500 new volunteers by the end of this school year to tutor individual students in reading and to serve as mentors. By fourth grade, nearly half of the city’s black and Latino male students are reading below grade level, and officials hope that an army of volunteers can help improve their performance.
Progress for these students will be tracked in a “score card,” which will be published for the District and each school over time.
The plan was spelled out by Robert Simmons, an urban education professor whom Henderson hired last year to become the school system’s chief of innovation and research.
Simmons said his plan emerged from school visits, conversations with school and community leaders and students, as well as his own research focused on the experiences of young male African Americans.
In the District, 48 percent of black male students and 57 percent of Hispanic male students graduate in four years, compared with 66 percent of their classmates. Only about a third of black male students are proficient in reading and math, according to the DC CAS scores, compared with almost 60 percent of students who are not black or Latino males.
Simmons told the audience at Ballou that the school district is approaching the project with a focus on the strengths and potential of every student, rather than seeing a series of bleak data points.
“The boys are not the problem,” he said. “We are not doing enough to empower them, support and engage them.”
The funding will come from private and public sources. Henderson said she and the D.C. Public Education Fund are working to raise money outside the operating budget.
Bowser has made young minority men a priority at the start of her administration. She gave more than 100 boys Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” to read over the winter break, and she hosted two Google Hangouts to hear their thoughts on the book and their ideas for change.
She said at the event Wednesday that mentoring programs were high on the boys’ wish list.
DeAndré Sellars, 16, was one of dozens of young black students dressed in suit coats and ties who attended. The junior at Phelps ACE High School said he would like to be paired with a mentor.
He and his siblings live with their great-grandmother, and he said that he has never had a father figure at home. “My principal is the first male role model I’ve had,” he said.
Senate begins debate on education law, focuses on testing
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
January 21, 2015
The Senate began its most serious attempt in years to rewrite the country’s main education law with a hearing Wednesday focusing on an issue that has caused an uproar nationwide: Whether states should be required to test students every year.
An overflow crowd listened as witnesses described standardized testing as helpful and as harmful to learning, and lawmakers grappled with how much control the federal government should exercise over the nation’s 100,000 public schools.
“There are two worlds. Contractors, consultants, academics and experts and plenty of officials at the federal and state level,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). “And the other world is of principals and teachers who are actually providing education to students. And what I’m hearing from the second world is that the footprint of the first world has become way too big in their lives.”
The current education law, known as No Child Left Behind, expanded the federal role in public education in 2002. The law emphasized accountability, requiring schools for the first time to test students annually in math and reading in grades 3 though 8 and once in high school. It also required states to make scores public for groups including racial minorities and the poor.
The data laid bare gaps in academic performance between racial groups and put pressure on states to address them. Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, credits annual testing with a slight decline in the achievement gap.
Civil rights advocates say the transparency that came with testing was the most valuable contribution of the law.
Without annual testing, some states will “squirm out of their responsibility” to educate historically disadvantaged children, said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. In recent days, 20 civil rights groups have pressed to keep annual testing, and Henderson was accompanied at the hearing by a handful of parents who support tests. The Obama administration also wants to keep annual testing.
Under the law, schools that failed to improve their test scores faced sanctions. The Obama administration increased that pressure, encouraging states to use test scores to judge not only schools but also teacher performance.
States and school districts then began adding interim tests during the school year, to measure whether schools were on track to pass the end-of-year test.
“Are there too many tests? Are they the right tests? Are the stakes for failing them too high? What should Washington, D.C., have to do with all this? “ asked Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
The tests have resulted in unintended consequences that have narrowed curricula and turned the learning experience into drudgery, critics say.
“I’m embarrassed to say I am a teacher who every May would get up and apologize to my students,” testified Stephen Lazar, who teaches U.S. history and English at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City. “I would tell them, ‘I have done my best job to be an excellent teacher for you up ’til now, but for the last month of school, I am going to turn into a bad teacher to properly prepare you for state Regents exams.’ I told my students there would be no more research, no more discussion, no more dealing with complexity, no more developing as writers with voice and style. Instead, they would repeatedly write stock, formulaic essays and practice mindless repetition of facts.”
Jia Lee, an elementary special education teacher at the Earth School in New York City, told the Senate panel that she will boycott standardized tests this spring.
“I will refuse to administer tests that reduce my students to a single metric and will continue to take this position until the role of assessments are put in their proper place,” said Lee, an organizer of a group called Teachers of Conscience.
There has been growing resistance to standardized testing around the country. Two House members Wednesday filed legislation that would switch from annual testing to grade-span testing, which calls for students to be tested less frequently. The bill has support from the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a gathering of U.S. mayors Wednesday that he believes the main federal education law needs to be updated but put the chances of getting a rewrite at about 50-50.
But several witnesses told the Senate that annual exams are the best way to gauge how schools are performing.
“To measure how students do from one year to the next, you need annual measurement,” said Tom Boasberg, superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. “It’s equally important for high-achieving kids as low-achieving kids.”
Congress can design a law that uses annual tests to hold states accountable in a way that does not pervert the learning process, he said.
“As a parent of three kids and superintendent of 90,000, do I care about seeing the progress my children make in literacy and math? Yes, of course I do,” he said. “But we need fewer and shorter tests.”
What are the odds that Congress actually rewrites No Child Left Behind? 50-50, Arne Duncan says.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 21, 2015
Education Secretary Arne Duncan gives Congress a 50-50 chance of reaching a deal to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the federal education law that expired in 2002.
“We would love to find a way to fix it. We think obviously much of it is outdated,” Duncan said Wednesday, speaking at the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington. “The only way we’re going to fix it is if folks in Washington work in a bipartisan way. There’s a chance that will happen, but it’s not a guarantee.”
Duncan made his remarks on the same day that the Senate kicked off its most serious effort yet to rewrite the law with a hearing focused on its standardized testing requirements.
There is plenty for Congress to disagree upon in No Child Left Behind, which is hundreds of pages long and directs billions of dollars in federal spending. But standardized testing has generated the most attention and pushback across the country and on Capitol Hill.
Duncan, backed by influential civil rights groups, wants to continue administering annual standardized tests to students in grades three through eight, and once in high school, to hold schools accountable for the achievement of all students, including poor and minority children.
“I don’t think we ever should walk away from assessing our students on an annual basis,” he told the mayors on Wednesday.
But parents and teachers have argued that too many schools have become test prep institutions, while many in the new Republican-dominated Congress say the annual testing requirement amounts to a federal overreach.
“Are there too many tests? Are they the right tests? Are the stakes for failing them too high? What should Washington, D.C., have to do with all this?” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chair of the Senate education committee, told the Associated Press before Wednesday’s hearing.
President Obama did not address No Child Left Behind nor annual testing in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. Duncan said Wednesday that he has Obama’s support.
“We both think the same thing,” Duncan said. “We think in some places there’s too much, and too much is too much, whether it’s testing or test prep or teaching to the test. Where it’s redundant and duplicative and not helpful, we want to challenge that. We also believe we ought to know whether students are learning or not — and to know every year whether students are learning or not.”
As U.S. test scores lag, study shows violence, poverty, teen pregnancy are high
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 21, 2015
U.S. student performance on international exams has fallen compared to other industrial nations in recent years, a fact policymakers and others often cite in arguing that U.S. public schools need rapid reform in order to maintain their global competitiveness.
But now two organizations are out with a new study that challenges that narrative by comparing the United States to eight other nations on a raft of socioeconomic measures.
The upshot of the report is that the single-minded focus on test scores has led policymakers to overlook other important trends that affect U.S. public education, including high levels of economic inequality and social stress. Schools can’t be expected to solve these larger problems on their own, argue the study’s authors, the Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundtable.
Whether or not you agree with that thesis, the study — which examines the G-7 nations plus Finland and China — presents some fascinating data.
For example, violent death is far more common in the United States than it is in the other eight nations, as this graphic from the report shows:
Visit link to see graphs.
Child poverty is also more prevalent in the United States than in every other comparison nation except China. The metric here is “relative poverty,” or the percent of children living in households with an income of less than 50 percent of the nation’s median income. (This is a different definition of poverty than a recent analysis that found that 51 percent of American public school students are poor. That analysis counted all students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a measure that is a rough proxy for poverty and is unique to the United States.)
Visit link to see graphs.
Teen pregnancy, while on the decline in the United States, is still high compared to other nations:
Visit link to see graphs.
The full report, “School Performance in Context: The Iceberg Effect,” can be found here and includes piles of data, from average per-pupil expenditure to average class size and teacher workload.