FOCUS DC News Wire 1/24/14

 

 

As we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his clarion call for civil rights is known around the world.

 

King wrote: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, he noted, America had written African-Americans a bad check, which had been returned marked “insufficient funds.”

 

The civil rights struggle of which he spoke took place in a different world. Just three months prior to the March on Washington in 1963, police in Birmingham, Ala., used attack dogs and fire hoses against peaceful protesters. One year later, the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act passed.

 

Yet access to a quality education remains beyond the reach of so many of our fellow citizens. This civil rights issue is finally being heard, after a long period when the plight of children chronically underserved by urban education was essentially ignored by mainstream America.

 

While a quality education is essential to prevent poverty from being passed from one generation to the next, it is incredibly hard to access for lowincome families. This exacerbates society’s divisions, permanently excluding disadvantaged children from the middle class.

 

Astonishingly, one in four of the nation’s African- American students attend one of the 1,424 public high schools at which less than 60 percent of the freshman class graduates within four years, according to America’s Promise Alliance. The average freshman graduation rate is 64 percent for black children, compared to 82 percent for their white peers, the Children’s Defense Fund has calculated. And only 13 percent of African-Americans receive more than a high school education, the Center for American Progress has found.

 

Urban children are scarred for life by substandard schooling. This is the heartbreaking reason why I founded a public charter school 15 years ago. Over the past 15 years, we as a nation have made some progress in addressing the achievement gap; however, it is clear that there is much more to be done.

 

For all its faults, the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” law did require states to annually assess students with standardized tests. On this measure, Stokes School performs well — 17 percentage points higher than the state average in math, and 14 points higher in reading. But these standardized tests do not measure most of what our students learn, or their

learning skills.

 

The new Common Core standards will raise the bar in terms of assessing the educational content that students have learned. They may enable us to better serve students in schools where most students are not performing at grade level. Common Core may also assist students enrolled in schools that devote significant instructional time to teach to standardized tests.

 

Even so, as a nation we have to face up to the fact all of our children need access to the 21st-century skills required to succeed in today’s global economy. In an era in which jobs are being lost to better-educated nations and to automation, we need to recognize that grade-level proficiency in math and reading, while important, is insufficient.

 

The school I founded prepares students with critical skills and experiences that are lacking in many of our nation’s schools. Our dual language immersion program prepares our preschool-through-sixth-grade students for global connections by teaching them to speak, read, write and think in French and English, or Spanish and English. But the standardized tests administered to our students — 69 percent of whom are eligible for federal lunch subsidies — do not measure these skills. Nationwide, teacher and school performance are being judged too narrowly.

 

Looking at other nations whose students outscore our own on the Program for International Student Assessment, narrowly focused standardized tests appear inadequate. Teacher training is often more rigorous and longer. And higher-quality curricula better prepare students for college, as evidenced by higher high school graduation and college-acceptance rates.

 

Fifty years after King’s rallying cry, too many of our children are still shortchanged on their civil right to a quality education. We have the human and financial capital to provide a quality education to every child. Like King, I refuse to believe that our nation’s treasury of justice is bankrupt.

 

Linda Moore is the founder of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School.

 

 

 

After years of complaints from parents and teachers about too much testing in D.C. public schools, Chancellor Kaya Henderson on Thursday announced that a new task force will work to “help put testing in the proper perspective.”

 

The move comes amid national debate about the role of standardized tests and in the wake of a newly signed D.C. law that requires the city’s traditional and public charter schools to create policies limiting the number of practice tests they administer to students.

 

A spokeswoman for Henderson said that the school system’s effort is unrelated to that law. She said the goal is to make sure that the school system is reducing the time devoted to — and stress associated with — testing, while also ensuring that tests are serving as a tool to figure out what students know and need to learn.

 

“I have heard from parents across the district that their students worry about tests, but they aren’t sure that DCPS is using tests to help their students learn,” Henderson said in a statement. “I’ve put together a task force to determine how we can do testing better, to help ensure that we have schools where testing and accountability do not take away from our students’ love of learning.”

 

The emphasis on standardized tests has intensified across the country during the past decade as politicians and policymakers have sought ways to measure and judge the effectiveness of schools, teachers and principals.

 

But many educators and parents argue that children spend so much time and energy testing and preparing for tests that real learning suffers.

 

“People are getting frustrated with the constant, every six-to-nine weeks, either being prepped for the test or taking the test,” said Lee Granados, the mother of two children at School Without Walls at Francis Stevens. “You don’t feel like your kids are enjoying school anymore.”

 

The District’s 27-member testing task force met for the first time last week and plans to come up with recommendations for Henderson in coming months. The task force includes teachers, principals, instructional superintendents and other school system employees.

 

The task force plans to consult with parents, but parents aren’t part of the group, which some said is a mistake.

 

“You need parents as part of this discussion,” Granados said. Ultimately the ones that are most affected by the testing are the kids, and the people ultimately responsible for the children are the parents and guardians.”

 

D.C. students take standardized literacy assessments as early as kindergarten and continue testing through high school. Besides annual citywide standardized tests each spring, students take four mid-year benchmark exams and other literacy and achievement tests.

 

High school students also miss class to take college-entrance exams, Advanced Placement exams and International Baccalaureate exams.

 

Last year, D.C. Council member and possible mayoral candidate David A. Catania (I-At Large) introduced a bill calling on the school system and all D.C charter schools to develop and publicize plans to limit practice and field tests. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) signed the bill into law last month.

 

 

Muriel Bowser knew her audience.

 

The Ward 4 D.C. Council member was addressing an event organized by a young school board member, and she had just been introduced by a neighborhood education activist.

 

So when Bowser began her remarks in Dupont Circle last Thursday night, it was hardly surprising that her initial focus was families with young children — a growing citywide constituency that may be more concerned with school reform than any other group.

 

“This is what I know about our new parents,” the Democratic mayoral candidate told a crowd of about 50 at The Chastleton co-op. “They are committed to staying right here in D.C. They’re hip — they’re hipyoung parents. They don’t want to move out to the suburbs, and they’ve made a decision that these public schools are going to work for them.”

 

Improving education to retain these families is one of Bowser’s big themes as she campaigns across the District. She says D.C.’s post-2007 school reforms are generally headed in the right direction, especially with regard to the early grades, but that parents have begun to worry as their children grow older.

 

“They want to be assured that their student has a quality education through 12th grade, and they really begin to lose confidence in the middle grades,” Bowser said in an interview Sunday. For this reason, she is pushing for a major investment in the District’s middle schools, calling it the “chief initiative” D.C. Public Schools should pursue in 2014.

 

As a model for reform, Bowser pointed to Alice Deal Middle School in Ward 3, noting that it is the only middle school in the D.C. Public Schools system to achieve top-tier levels of student performance.

 

“Alice Deal has what parents and families want,” she said, praising the school for its facilities, academics, extracurriculars and professional leadership. Asked to specify how the District can replicate Deal’s success, Bowser focused on how school improvement funds should be allocated.

 

“The capital budgets need to reflect the needs of middle schools across the city, to make sure there are quality buildings,” she said.

 

Bowser has already begun work on this issue in her D.C. Council role. In a resolution introduced last month, she set a goal of “increasing the number of proximately accessible high-quality middle schools options all around the city.” In a Dec. 3 news release, she described having too few high-quality seats as “unsustainable and unjust. … A child’s address, race, and household income should not determine his or her access to quality education.”

 

According to the release, her resolution “advises the D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment to append their upcoming report about feeder patterns and boundary realignments to include recommendations consistent with improving middle schools.”

 

Bowser said Sunday that the report will help yield specific suggestions for how to achieve her vision. She noted, though, that she has discussed middle schools with D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson — “certainly as it related to Ward 4” — and that the chancellor recently announced that she also hopes to make them a priority this year. However, given that Henderson is still in the planning stages for her next budget, Bowser said, “I don’t yet know what her vision is for middle schools.”

 

This article is the fifth in a series exploringkey policy objectives from mayoral candidates.

 

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The messy aftermath of a snowstorm didn’t deter hundreds of educators, activists, parents and policymakers from attending the kickoff of National School Choice Week at historic Union Station.

 

National School Choice Week, a 4-year-old event organized by a nonprofit of the same name, runs until Feb. 1 and will feature some  6,000 events scheduled in all 50 states, an increase from 3,600 last year.

 

“The mission of School Choice Week is to get parents to understand that they have more choices than they think,” said Lisa Graham Keegan, the former Arizona superintendent of public instruction who now serves as a senior adviser to National School Choice Week.

 

Keegan acknowledged the political overtones of the event, but stressed that School Choice Week events are as much a celebration of existing policies as they are advocacy for reform.

 

“We’re trying to get the conversation above the fighting about what types of schools we prefer — public, private, public charter, religious, online or magnet — and focus on telling parents to find a school they want. And if they don’t have access to a school they want, we want them to advocate,” she said.

 

In the spirit of elevating the conversation on education policy above partisan fighting, the event seemed carefully planned to incorporate all ends of the political spectrum. Keegan, a Republican, gave a glowing introduction to Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., whom she described as an “incredible champion of public charter schools and advocate for equality for all people.”

 

Polis, a three-term congressman, previously served on the Colorado State Board of Education. He spoke about New America School, a charter school he founded that offers high school courses to immigrants ages 15-21. The school focuses on improving students’ English proficiency and helping them assimilate into America, and offers flexible day and night classes to accommodate working students.

 

“We all know an example of what works and what doesn’t work,” Polis said of school choice. “We need the courage to change what doesn’t work.”

 

Democratic political strategist and Fox News contributor Joe Trippi spoke about his mother’s fight to enroll Trippi and his siblings in an out-of-district school, fearing the gang culture, violent reputation and low graduation rate of their neighborhood’s assigned school.

 

Trippi’s mother was successful, in part, because, “she went in and fought like crazy … and the school board might have been afraid that she was actually crazy.”

 

“What happened to all those other kids, though?” Trippi wondered. “Why didn’t they have a choice? What could my future have been if my mom — who legally shouldn’t have had a choice herself — hadn’t fought for me?”

 

The event concluded with personal testimony from three D.C. high school students, each of whom are enrolled in one of the city’s charter or magnet schools.

 

Daniel Spruill, a senior from Anacostia, said of his parents’ decision to send him to Friendship Collegiate Academy instead of his zoned school, Anacostia High, “It has changed my entire life. I’m dually enrolled at (the University of the District of Columbia), I’ve taken summer courses at Stanford and I’m a student member of the D.C. State Board of Education. Anacostia has a culture of violence … but my school took me away from that and instilled me with their values.”

 

“This wasn’t a choice between two schools — it was between two paths for my life,” he said.

 

“Without school choice, where would I be today?”

 

From now until Feb. 1, that’s the question National School Choice Week will be posing throughout the country.

 

 

The CityBridge Foundation announced the teachers selected to be 2014 Education Innovations Fellows. The extremely fortunate individuals will engage in a year long study of blending learning in a program sponsored by CityBridge and the New Schools Venture Fund. The Microsoft Corporation supports the effort with a million dollar grant.

 

Since I written much about this training I almost feel like I'm a Fellow myself. The program is split into three parts. During the first phase participants will learn about the theory and practice of blended learning. They will also travel to schools to observe the technique in action. Next, during the summer months, they will design their own blended learning curriculum and implement their own pilots at their home school. Finally in the fall the Fellows will gather to learn from their experiences, augment their knowledge about blended learning through lectures and workshops, and plan the 2014 Education Innovation Summit. I spent the entire day at last year's Summit and I can tell you it was so fascinating I did not want to leave.

 

Here's the list of this year's Fellows:

 

 

Several prominent charters are represented on this list including Washington Latin PCS, E.L. Haynes PCS, D.C. Prep PCS, Ingenuity Prep PCS, Center City PCS, and Friendship PCS. If you go to the link announcing the Fellows you can read a short biography of each of these dynamic teachers.