- Nathan: Charters Not Entitled to Extra Funds (FOCUS is mentioned)
- Nearly Every Eligible DCPS Teacher Chooses to Skip Evaluations
- Teachers Take to Twitter to Improve Craft and Commiserate
- DCPS Hoping To Leave “No Child Left Behind” Behind
Nathan: Charters Not Entitled to Extra Funds (FOCUS is mentioned)
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
January 20, 2012
D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan has rejected arguments from charter school advocates that city funds must be distributed to charters and DCPS on a uniform per-student basis.
Nathan’s letter to Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS, is a bit of a slog, but it seems to come down to three points. First, Nathan finds that there’s nothing in the D.C. School Reform Act of 1995 (SRA)--the law passed by Congress that launched the charter movement here--that prevents the city from treating the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula as a legal minimum. Second, the mayor, the D.C. Council and the old D.C. Board of Education have all established precedent over the years by giving extra money to DCPS. Third, Congress could have objected, but it hasn’t.
FOCUS and the city have been arguing about this for years. Nathan’s analysis is essentially a reprise of a 2007 opinion issued on former city attorney general Peter Nickles’s watch. It became an issue again last month when Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced that he would ask the D.C. Council to steer $21.4 million in unanticipated revenue to DCPS to cover cost overruns. In an e-mail accompanying Nathan’s letter, Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright said that DCPS’ budget had to be kept in balance “to avoid raising the specter of the Control Board.”
“We will continue working with both DCPS and the CFO to control unexpected costs, and are taking aggressive action to ensure DCPS remains within its approved budget,” Wright said. “The Mayor has been, and continues to be, a passionate
advocate for charter schools in the District.”
In his opinion, Nathan said that the language of the SRA “is not so specific as to preclude a reasonable interpretation that the District may use the statutory formula to set a minimum baseline budget for funding DCPS and public charter schools without dictating what money, above that minimum level, may be allocated either.”
Nathan also noted that past actions of the mayor, D.C. Council and the old Board of Education, the players involved in implementing the SRA and the 1999 law creating the uniform funding formula, all approved expenditures outside the formula. “Thus their interpretations of those acts are entitled to deference,” Nathan wrote.
Nathan also noted that the D.C. Council is free to amend Congressional legislation aimed specifically at the District, as long as there are clear indications that Congress didn’t want that to happen. If that were the case, he said, Congress would have pushed back when the Council amended the SRA to say that it was not obligated to provide extra money.
Cane called Nathan’s analysis “completely wrong” and said it undermines the notion of uniform funding built into the SRA by Congress.
“There’s plenty in the School Reform Act that makes it totally clear that Congress wanted uniform operating funding for all D.C. kids,” Cane said. “The legislative history confirms this.”
Cane said Gray, who campaigned in 2010 on the issue of funding equity for charters, needed to be called to account. “Where’s the Vince Gray who campaigned on the basis of uniformity of funding? Where is he?”
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 22, 2012
Nearly every D.C. teacher offered the chance to forego some of their classroom evaluations chose to do so, under a new incentive program for top teachers.
D.C. Public Schools introduced a pilot program in the fall that allows teachers rated "highly effective" on their Impact evaluations for the past two years to skip three of their five classroom observations if they perform well on the first two, The Washington Examiner first reported. Teachers and other educators are scored on a scale of 1 to 4, or "ineffective" to "highly effective," during each classroom evaluation.
Of the 225 teachers who qualified -- receiving an average of 3.5 or higher on their first two observations this year -- 221 decided to forego the rest of their observations. Only one declined the opportunity, and three did not respond to the school system's offer.
Melissa Salmanowitz, a spokeswoman for Chancellor Kaya Henderson, told The Examiner that DCPS is planning to continue the pilot program.
"We are certainly planning to continue recognizing our best teachers through policies like this," said Salmanowitz, adding that the system is "currently in the process of assessing how this policy is working and how we can improve it."
Shira Fishman, a math teacher at Ward 5's McKinley Technology High School and the DCPS Teacher of the Year, decided to go for the new incentive.
"Just having observations hanging over your head, or knowing they're coming up, adds a bit of stress," said Fishman, noting that the evaluations also create work for school principals, who conduct some of the observations. "Instead of them spending the time on my observations, this seems like a better use of their time."
A majority of other top-rated school employees, like counselors and social workers, also scrapped their Impact observations. Of the 299 eligible employees, 253 waived their spring-semester observations, 16 declined and 30 did not respond.
The school system is considering other tweaks to Impact, a controversial evaluation tool developed under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. While Impact rewards top educators with annual bonuses of up to $25,000, it has led to the firings of hundreds of school employees -- 309 last year alone.
Impact also has drawn criticism because top teachers tend to be clustered in more affluent areas of the city, despite the larger number of schools and students in Wards 7 and 8.
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown plans to hold a hearing Monday on "The Highly Effective Teacher Incentive Act of 2011," which provides bonuses of $10,000 for highly effective teachers who relocate to low-income, high-needs schools, The Examiner first reported.
Brown also has urged Mayor Vincent Gray to conduct an analysis of waiving Impact evaluations for these teachers.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 21, 2012
After her first year teaching history in a public high school in the District, Jamie Josephson was exhausted and plagued by self-doubt. Teaching had been more grueling than she ever expected. Law school began to sound appealing.
Then she stumbled onto Twitter. In the vast social network on the Web, she discovered a community of mentors offering inspiration, commiseration and classroom-tested lesson plans.
“Twitter essentially prepared me to go into my second year and not give up,” said Josephson, now in her third year at Woodrow Wilson High in Northwest Washington. “I never would have imagined that it would have been the place to find support.”
Josephson (known to fellow tweeters by her handle, @dontworryteach) is one of a small but growing number of teachers who are delving into the world of hashtags and retweets, using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world.
They say the camaraderie and free, instantaneous help they find through Twitter — and its steady stream of pithy messages, maximum 140 characters each — is far more useful than traditional school training programs, which often feature fixed agendas, airless rooms and canned speeches by hired experts.
“I always tell people the the most valuable 15 minutes I spend, in terms of my professional growth, is when I jump on Twitter at night and see what’s going on,” said Greg Kulowiec, a virtual colleague of Josephson’s who teaches in Plymouth, Mass.
When news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke on a Sunday night in May, it prompted immediate and furious tweeting among social studies teachers, Kulowiec said.
Within little more than an hour, they had pooled links to Web sites, documents and other resources, collaborating to write Monday-morning lesson plans aimed at helping students understand the event.
Tweeting tips
That same group of teachers has used Twitter to share tips for everything from using newfangled education technologies to facilitating classroom discussions and teaching about the Cold War.
“After a really good chat, all you are is excited to go back to work and try something,” said Kulowiec, an eight-year veteran of the classroom. “It’s very motivating to see other people motivated.”
The edu-tweet movement began in earnest in 2009 when three teachers, seeking a way to find others interested in talking about education issues, started a weekly Tuesday-night Twitter chat open to anyone in the world.
At first there were about a hundred participants, according to co-founder Shelly Terrell. But the conversation grew steadily as stars in the education field, such as author Alfie Kohn and historian Diane Ravitch, joined in.
Now there are more than 2,000 participants each week, Terrell said. Organizers added a second chat, at noon, to accommodate teachers tweeting from distant time zones in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
Chatters determine the topic to be discussed each week by voting in an online poll. They mark their tweets with the hashtag #edchat, making it easy for anyone to search for the conversation, read and contribute.
Their discussion topics have ranged from the practical (How to use class blogs to improve student writing?) to the philosophical (What’s the real purpose of school?). They’ve tweeted about the pros and cons of homework, hashed out ideas about designing fair teacher evaluations and discussed how to improve working relationships with principals.
‘Better than just Googling’
The original chat has spawned dozens of others.
There is the Monday night social-studies chat — #sschat — to which Josephson and Kulowiec frequently contribute. It draws about 80 chatters each week.
Music teachers (#musedchat), psychology teachers (#psychat) and special-education teachers (#spedchat) all tweet to one another weekly. So do specialists in gifted education (#gtchat), foreign languages (#langchat) and Jewish studies (#jedchat). And of course there is a chat for math teachers (#mathchat) and one for teachers of English (#engchat).
“Some teachers find writing in front of students intimidating, but I think it helps to show kids it takes work — even for you,” tweeted Donalyn Miller (@donalynbooks) during a recent #engchat about motivating students to write.
“I tried this idea — typing directly onto SmartBoard & talking out loud as I go. Hey Mikey, they like it!” replied a middle-school teacher known as @kenc18.
Most groups have Web sites to archive conversations. They don’t confine themselves to talking during scheduled chats. Teachers say that anytime during the week, they can tweet a request for help with a lesson plan and expect to receive a half-dozen responses within minutes.
“When you get expert educators sending you these things, the quality of it is just surreal compared to what I would get on my own,” said Becky Ellis, an instructional coach in Ogden, Utah, and another faithful #sschat participant. “It’s a lot better than just Googling.”
‘Energy and inspiration’
Not everyone is convinced. Tweeters say plenty of teachers look askance at Twitter as little more than a platform for celebrity navel-gazing and inane commentary on the mundanities of life.
“They think of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore and what are you having for breakfast,” said retired teacher Jerry Blumengarten (@cybraryman1), who has put together an online catalogue of education-related Twitter chats. “I say no, no, no! That’s not it.”
Converts include new teachers as well as hardened veterans from affluent private schools, struggling inner-city schools and everywhere in between. Participants say teachers who go out of their way to collaborate online tend to be creative, motivated people with high standards for their own performance — the type who would rather try something new than pull out the yellowed lesson plans they’ve been using for years.
Nineteen-year educator Ron Peck teaches in a small public high school tucked up against the rugged Klamath mountains in southern Oregon, hours from the nearest big city.
Resources in his district are limited, he said, and innovation is slow. He said Twitter has been a lifeline to the larger world, infusing his classroom with new ideas and technologies that he wouldn’t otherwise know about.
It’s also kept him excited about his job. “The energy and inspiration is one of the best things about it,” he said. “If I was still isolated in my classroom after almost 20 years, I would probably feel burned out — but I have colleagues who are like-minded and who I can talk to daily.”
Among those colleagues is Josephson, who said she, too, has built solid relationships with #sschat participants around the country, from New York to Kentucky and beyond.
She is among a group — including Peck, Ellis and Kulowiec — planning a springtime face-to-face gathering for #sschat-ters. Meanwhile, on Twitter these days Josephson is as apt to share her own links and tips as she is to ask fellow teachers for help.
And she’s planning to go to graduate school next fall — but to study education and history, not law. Afterward, she intends to return to the classroom for at least another dozen years.
“I’m just getting the hang of things,” she said.
The Washington City Paper
By Shani Hilton
January 20, 2012
Now that the Obama administration is offering waivers to states that have been bound by No Child Left Behind—the Bush-era policy that forced schools to show year-over-year testing improvements—WAMU reports that D.C. is joining 40 states who are applying for a waiver.
Kayleen Irizarry, the assistant superintendent of elementary and secondary education for all D.C.'s public schools, both traditional and charter, says there are a lot of aspects of No Child Left Behind she supports, but she echoes the Obama administration's call to move beyond "bubble tests and dumbed down standards."
She says the problem with NCLB is it only focuses on whether a school has made the target or not. And the bar is continually being raised.
"It applied a standard that was uniform to all schools and didn't take into account the uniqueness of a school or other contributions that get at how a school is performing," she says. "Such as how many students are taking advanced courses, how many teachers are rated highly effective, what is our truancy rate."
And USA Today notes that the Department of Education is simultaneously trying to cut out teacher cheating on tests in the wake of scandals in both D.C. and Atlanta.
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