FOCUS DC News Wire 1/27/14

 

 

Over the past decade we’ve had a rich debate on how to expand opportunity for underprivileged children. But we’ve probably made two mistakes.

 

First, we’ve probably placed too much emphasis on early education. Don’t get me wrong. What happens in the early years is crucial. But human capital development takes a generation. If you really want to make an impact, you’ve got to have a developmental strategy for all the learning stages, ages 0 to 25.

 

Second, we’ve probably put too much weight on school reform. Again, reforming education is important. But getting the academics right is not going to get you far if millions of students can’t control their impulses, can’t form attachments, don’t possess resilience and lack social and emotional skills.

 

So when President Obama talks about expanding opportunity in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, I’m hoping he’ll widen the debate. I’m hoping he’ll sketch out a stage-by-stage developmental agenda to help poor children move from birth to the middle class.

 

Such an agenda would start before birth. First, children need parents who are ready to care for them. But right now roughly half-a-million children are born each year as a result of unintended pregnancies, often to unmarried women who are not on contraception or are trying to use contraceptives like condoms or the pill. As the University of Pennsylvania’s Rebecca Maynard and Isabel Sawhill and Quentin Karpilow of the Brookings Institution have argued, if these women had free access to long-acting reversible contraceptives like I.U.D.’s, then the number of unintended births might decline and the number of children with unready parents might fall, too.

 

Once born, children are generally better off if they grow up within a loving two-parent marriage. It would be great if we knew how to boost marriage rates, but we don’t.

 

For the time being, we probably should spend less time thinking about marriage and more time thinking about parenting skills. As Richard Reeves, also of Brookings, points out, if we could teach the weakest parents to behave like average parents — by reading more to their kids, speaking more, using consistent, encouraging discipline — then millions of children might have more secure attachments, more structure and better shots at upwardly mobile careers. Programs like Nurse-Family Partnerships and the Baby College in the Harlem Children’s Zone seem to be able to teach these parenting skills.

 

Once they get to elementary school, children need to learn how to read and write. But that can’t happen in schools where 15 percent of the students are disruptive, where large numbers of students live with so much stress that it has stunted the development of the prefrontal cortexes, sent their cortisol levels surging, heightened their anxiety responses and generally made it hard for them to control themselves.

 

Therefore, we probably need more programs like Pamela Cantor’s Turnaround for Children, which works in schools to help teachers and administrators create “fortified environments,” in which overstressed children can receive counseling and treatment, in which the psychic traumas that go with poverty are recognized and addressed.

 

According to work done by Sawhill and others, a significant number of kids stay on track through the early years, but then fall off the rails as teenagers. Sawhill set a pretty low bar for having a successful adolescence: graduate from high school with a 2.5 G.P.A., don’t get convicted of a crime, don’t get pregnant. Yet only 57 percent of American 19-year-olds get over that bar. Only one-third of children in the bottom fifth of family income do so.

 

 

Over the next few years, we’ve got to spend a lot more time and money figuring out how to help people from poorer families chart a course through the teenage years. There’s evidence that Career Academies help adolescents navigate the teenage rapids. There’s some evidence that New York’s “small schools of choice” yield measurable results. We as a nation have made awesome progress in reducing teenage pregnancies, so it is possible to change teenage behavior, even in the face of raging hormones.

 

But it is harder to find successful programs geared toward teenagers than it is to find successful programs geared toward younger children. It feels like less money has been raised to help teenagers, fewer innovative programs have been initiated.

 

Robert Putnam of Harvard argues that when we design early education programs, they need to be “wrap-around.” They need to have formal and informal programs that bring parents in and instill communal skills. With teenagers, we need more guidance counselors to help them become savvy, so they know how to work the system, and to respond when their needs aren’t being met.

 

Putnam is emphasizing skills — for toddlers or teenagers — that are hard to see and measure. But that’s the next frontier of human capital development: Building lifelong social and emotional development strategies from age 0 to 25. I’m hoping President Obama goes there.

 

 

Caleb Rossiter once told his math students at H.D. Woodson High School in the District that they would not be allowed into his classroom without their homework. It didn’t work.

 

“The kids learn early that there are no consequences for not doing homework or even class work in high-poverty schools, since they eventually pass without doing any,” Rossiter said.

 

This is true of many schools in our nation’s big cities. Plenty of suburban kids also find they can ignore assignments and still get by. Many experts, including the U.S. secretary of education, lately have been putting some of the blame for this on parents.

 

But the remedies proposed aren’t impressive. Our schools repeatedly promise to get more parents involved, but that usually means limp gestures like sending notes home or holding back-to-school nights.

 

Some educators have been experimenting with more personal measures. In his book “Blue Ribbon Story: An Entrepreneur’s Success in Education,” New Jersey educator Robert L. Kravitz said he sent a stronger message by pulling out his cellphone in the middle of a class and letting everyone hear him tell a father how disruptive his son was being.

 

The most promising initiatives have educators visiting parents at their homes. They often start when a teacher shows up uninvited at a home after school because he can think of no other way to get through to a student. He learns the parents aren’t offended by the visit, instead thanking him for his interest in their child. Henceforth his assignments are more likely to be completed because the parents know him and back him up.

 

Except for a few charter school networks, almost no public schools make a habit of home visits. Officials say they cost too much and might be unsafe. But the D.C. school system is giving them a try.

 

The D.C. initiative is called the Family Engagement Partnership (FEP), supported by the Flamboyan Foundation, which tries to improve educational outcomes in the District and Puerto Rico. The program operates in 10 elementary schools — Bancroft, Beers, C.W. Harris, Garrison, Hearst, Neval Thomas, Powell, Tubman, Seaton and Stanton — as well as two education campuses, Truesdell and Wheatley; two middle schools, Jefferson and Kelly Miller; one secondary school, Columbia Heights, and nine charter schools. They had to compete for a chance to join the program. The District plans to add 15 more schools.

 

Teachers are taught what to do, and what not to do, when visiting families at their homes. No surprise visits, no making assumptions about kids or parents, no note-taking, visit more than just a class’s struggling students, listen more than talk. They visit in pairs after school, using a model developed by educators in Sacramento, Calif. Each is paid $34 per visit, plus additional stipends for teacher leaders at each school. Vincent Baxter, school-level family engagement director for the D.C. schools, said another 31 teacher pairs in 29 schools not in the program have been selected as teaching fellows. They also take training and do visits.

 

There are no conclusive data yet, but the first five schools that participated in the program saw their proficiency rates on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System test increase an average 7.4 percent in reading and 15.2 percent in math from 2011 to 2013. “When we focus on helping teachers improve in this way, we see better outcomes for students,” Baxter said.

 

One of the reasons some low-income parents don’t support their children’s schoolwork is because, based on unhappy memories of their own schooling, they often think the instruction is poor and the teachers don’t care. Seeing a teacher show up at their door and treat them with respect can change that attitude. Empty talk about involving parents suddenly becomes real. When the teacher seeks help motivating their child, they are willing to give it a try, one big step toward a better school.

 

 

From 2000 to 2010, the white share of the District’s population grew from 30.8 percent to 38 percent . And from 2000 to 2012, the median household income in the city rose 23.3 percent while the nation saw a 6.6 percent decline, adjusted for inflation. This rapid gentrification provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create racially and socioeconomically integrated public schools. The D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, which is redrawing school boundary lines and feeder patterns, should seize this opportunity.

 

Middle-class families have moved into neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights and Petworth in large numbers. And many of these families are staying in the District even after their kids are old enough to attend school.

 

Meanwhile, more parents in D.C. neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park are sending their kids to public schools, resulting in fewer spots for “out of boundary” students in the most sought-after neighborhood schools such as Lafayette, Murch and Eaton elementary schools or Deal Middle School.

 

As a result, more-affluent parents in the transitioning neighborhoods — squeezed out of schools west of the park and unable to afford private schools — are taking a shot at either the elementary school down the street or a diverse charter school nearby. In several cases, this has been an orchestrated effort, organized via community meetings or e-mail discussion groups. The trend is particularly pronounced in both district and charter preschool programs, resulting in class rolls that are much more diverse than those in the upper grades.

 

If you believe that the overall value of a community is enhanced when it can support high-quality, integrated schools, these shifts mark a significant development for the city. There are plenty of reasons to cheer school integration beyond promoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful dream of creating a multiracial “beloved community.” Evidence shows that poor and rich kids benefit when they attend integrated schools. Indeed, research finds that students of all backgrounds experience civic, social and cognitive benefits from learning in diverse settings — benefits that are increasingly important as students prepare to enter an economy that values critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.

 

But these changes are not without their challenges. At some D.C. elementary schools, rather than settling into a healthy racial and socioeconomic balance, student populations are flipping from one extreme to the other, with fourth-grade classes dominated by minorities and preschool classes that are mostly white.

 

At these rapidly changing schools, mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class families are pushing out poor or working-class “out of boundary” minority families. Many of these middle-class parents want their schools to remain diverse, and lower-income families want to be a part of these successful schools. Yet both are powerless to keep this Big Flip from happening.

 

Even some charter schools — which don’t have “in boundary” families — may face kindred challenges as they gain popularity among more affluent families. Because charter schools in the District generally are required to select students via a blind (unweighted) lottery, the more affluent parents who apply, the more who are likely to get in.

 

We can do better. Here’s how:

 

The first strategy we propose is to create controlled-choice zones in strategic parts of the city (namely, Capitol Hill, Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Dupont/Logan Circle and Petworth). In these neighborhoods, school attendance zones would eventually go away, as they have in a number of other districts across the country that use the controlled-choice model. Parents would express preferences among a cluster of schools, and an algorithm would make matches by balancing personal preferences with the shared civic goal of maximizing socioeconomic integration. Ideally, this list of options would include both district schools and public charter schools. Neighborhood schools in these zones that are disproportionately low-income would be reformed as magnet schools with attractive educational programs and themes to appeal to more middle-income families. Because all of the school options would be in the general neighborhood, no one would be forced to trek across town.

 

The second strategy we propose is to allow public charter schools and magnet schools to use weighted lotteries to create or maintain socioeconomic diversity. With a weighted lottery, charter schools could ensure that their proportion of poor students served never drops below 50 percent, even if a large number of middle-class families enters the lottery.

 

The D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment has the opportunity to shape school enrollment patterns in the city in this pivotal time of demographic change. We encourage the committee to include policies that preserve and promote socioeconomically integrated options for families in their recommended strategies and guidelines for student assignment and school choice.

 

 

A new charter school in Ward 8 is engaging young children through "blended learning," which mixes traditional classroom methods and technology.

 

Critics have charged that blended learning is simply a sneaky way of reducing teacher headcounts and thus easing stretched budgets.

 

But at Ingenuity Prep, which opened this year in the Bellevue neighborhood of Southeast DC, it's a way of allowing teachers the time and flexibility to focus on small groups of students and give them individualized attention. It also permits students to progress at their own rate by using digital tools.

 

Two committed teachers, Aaron Cuny and Will Stoetzer, left their jobs at DC Bilingual, a DC charter school on Columbia Road NW, to found Ingenuity. Right now the school offers only PK-3 through kindergarten, but the goal is to grow through 8th grade by 2021. Of the school's 107 students, 95% are African-American and 92% receive free or reduced-price meals.

 

"We opened this school in a part of the city that's been deprived of great schools," says Cuny, Ingenuity's principal. "We found parents really hungry for that."

 

The two young co-founders had no trouble filling places at the school, which they advertised by handing out flyers at neighborhood supermarkets and bus stops. But they're also mindful that, as Cuny says, "We are newcomers to this community. We are guests and visitors, in a way."

 

A visit to Ingenuity reveals an amazing sight, and more importantly an amazing sound: quiet. Lines of children quietly move from one classroom to another, clusters of children quietly focus on lessons at individual computer workstations, groups of children quietly gather on mats on the floor around a teacher, eagerly raising their hands during a discussion of character and emotions.

 

Ingenuity Prep uses a "rotational model" of blended learning, whereby children go from workstation to workstation within a single classroom. Anyone used to the hubbub that usually accompanies large numbers of young children will be astonished at the order with which these rotations are accomplished.

 

Although the school is just starting out, it's possible to identify several keys to its success thus far.

 

Teacher support:

 

Each classroom at Ingenuity is staffed with four levels of teachers: master, lead, associate, and resident. Master teachers tend to have 5 to 8 years of teaching experience, while lead teachers usually have 2 to 4 years, although factors like expertise and content knowledge are also important.

 

Associate teachers are full-time first-year teachers, and come to Ingenuity through a partnership with DC Teaching Fellows. Resident teachers, who come through the Urban Teacher Center, are also in their first year, but they work only three-quarters time and also complete additional classwork and training programs.

 

Cuny says that new teachers at Ingenuity will always have the benefit of working with mentors with more experience. And the mentoring system allows the school to create a "career pipeline" that will enable teachers to gain more responsibility the longer they stay in the job. In contrast to most school systems where upward mobility means becoming an administrator, senior teachers at Ingenuity will be able to remain in the classroom.

 

Technology, used intelligently:

 

Ingenuity relies on technology not for its shiny bells and whistles, but rather for its potential to personalize learning and differentiate curricula for each student. "Blended learning is part of our model—it's not an end in itself," says Cuny.

 

Ingenuity's student-teacher ratio is 8 to 1, with a class size of 24 children in PK-3 and PK-4 and 30 in kindergarten classes. In comparison, blended learning pioneer Rocketship has a student-teacher ratio of 37 to 1, according to a recent article in Education Week. (Rocketship plans to open as many as 8 charter schools in DC by 2019.)

 

"Our kids get small group instruction all day long," says master teacher Charlotte Hansen. "The kind of personal care and personalization our students are getting is very different from anything I've been able to offer my students in my other classrooms."

 

Starting from scratch:

 

From their very first day of school, Ingenuity's preschoolers and kindergarteners start learning how to rotate from workstation to workstation in the orderly manner that visitors marvel at. The number of students is small, and the Ingenuity team goes to great lengths to involve families, both of which lead to what Aaron Cuny calls "great quality control."

 

Although Cuny says you can "onboard" children to blended learning methods at any age, the process seems likely to become more difficult as students get older. "The earlier you work with kids the better," he says.

 

And the school itself is spanking new. Cuny felt strongly that the best way to build the "exemplary school" he was striving for was to build an "exemplary culture" from the ground up. "Start small and start at the beginning," he says.

 

Emphasis on character:

 

Ingenuity is not only about math and reading. A third pillar of the curriculum is what some educators call emotional intelligence. Ingenuity students devote 90 minutes every day to what the school's leaders refer to as "civic leadership" or "character."

 

"We know that our kids need great math and literacy skills," says Cuny, "but we also know that there's a whole range of other skills and competencies that they need."

 

Charlotte Hansen, the master teacher, says, "So often in my past years in education, I might want to teach about bullying or low self-confidence or gender identity. But there just wasn't time. Here, if I notice something like that, I can send the civic leadership teacher an e-mail. She can then spend time role-playing, working on that issue. That really does make us special."

 

While Ingenuity does indeed seem special, the open question is how its methods will fare in the future with older, less malleable children and a larger student body. It's hard to imagine groups of tweens and adolescents rotating from workstation to workstation in quite the same cooperative way as Ingenuity's 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds. But perhaps, if those students get their educational start at Ingenuity, it just might be possible. 

 

 

I had the honor recently of sitting down for a conversation with Erika Bryant, who on August 1st, 2013 became the executive director of the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School. Linda Moore, who had held this title from the time the school began in 1998 has now transitioned to the position of founder and senior advisor. In this role National Charter School Hall of Fame inductee Ms. Moore will have four areas of focus.

 

The first, Ms. Bryant explained, is that Ms. Moore will work to develop enhanced revenue streams for the school. The new executive director detailed that the school supplies its own in-house catering for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. The charter also provides this service to the two campuses of the Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School (LAMB).

 

An additional focus for Ms. Moore is to develop augmented programs for the school. For example, Elsie Whitlow Stokes is part of the D.C. International middle and high school consortium of five language immersion public charter schools which will open in the fall 2014. Elsie Whitlow Stokes 6th grade will move over to that facility. This creates capacity for additional Pre-Kindergarten students.

 

The third area with which Ms. Moore will assist revolves around communications and external relations. The school has an extensive communications strategy to parents, supporters, and other stakeholders. That strategy includes wide use of social and electronic media.

 

Ms. Moore will also serve as a staff liaison to the school’s board of trustees who appointed Ms. Bryant. Ms. Bryant mentioned that Ms. Moore will play an important role as an advisor since she has so much institutional knowledge about Elsie Whitlow Stokes.

 

I then wanted to know what plans Ms. Bryant has for the charter. She replied without hesitation, “First, I want to continue its good work.” She then easily moved to other possibilities. “As I mentioned, because our sixth grade students will move to DCI, we will expand our Pre-Kindergarten classes. Furthermore, we want to grow our international study programs." The executive director related that for the last 10 years the 6th grade class has traveled abroad for a week, with the students enrolled in Spanish immersion going to Panama and the pupils in the French immersion program visiting Martinique. As part of this exchange, students developed pen pals in their respective countries. She stated that these trips will now transition to the 5th grade after both grades take the excursion this term. Her eventual goal is to have students from Panama and Martinique reciprocate by coming to study at Stokes.

 

Ms. Bryant mentioned that the school is also seeking International Baccalaureate program accreditation. Other important goals boosting the school’s cash reserves so that it is relying less on per pupil funding, and expanding the current Saturday Academy to serve those living in the community.

 

Ms. Bryant is especially proud of the school’s catering program and wants to add to these services. Ms. Bryant informed me that Stokes won a U.S. Department of Agriculture Gold Award of Distinction. The school was selected due to the overall quality of their nutritional offerings, the physical fitness program, education centered about food, the school’s garden, and efforts to support green initiatives. The executive director highlighted that only one half of one percent of schools in this country have received this distinction.

 

Perhaps one reason for the recognition is that all meals at Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS are prepared from scratch. A French-trained chef who came from the Montgomery County school system leads a team of five individuals whose quality products have led to people from the outside visiting the school just so they can partake of what is being served at lunch. Ms. Bryant explained that much of the ingredients come from local farms. She added that students have gone on field trips to these locations to learn the origins of the food that they eat.

 

I then asked Ms. Bryant if the school had transitioned to the Common Core Curriculum. “Yes,” she replied instantly. “We have aligned our standards to the common core. We have done quite a bit of work in this area. Consultants aided our efforts last summer and through this school year. We are excited about the Common Core because we believe that it will encourage a higher level of thinking in our students, the same enhanced level of thinking that being in a dual immersion language school develops.”

 

Stokes School is ranked as a D.C. Public Charter School Board Performance Management Framework Tier 1 school and so I asked Ms. Bryant why she thinks it has attained this status. Here the executive director became animated with excitement in her voice. “We set extremely high expectations,” Ms. Bryant answered. “These expectations are clear to everyone at the school. We consider ourselves a family and we are very tight knit. There is a real sense of community at Stokes. In addition, we have a strong sense of ownership. We strive on a daily basis for academic excellence."

 

All of these qualities, Ms. Bryant detailed, have led to both a soaring student re-enrollment rate and high daily attendance percentages. The positive indicators, combined with greater than average standardized test scores, have allowed Stokes to reach Tier 1 with a student body in which 69 percent qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch.

 

Ms. Bryant is no stranger to Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS. For eight years she served as its director of operations and then for two years held the position of managing director. Of course, her preparation for her current job was aided by the fact that she is Ms. Moore’s daughter. I asked her if it was difficult stepping into the role long performed by her mother.

 

“It is a great honor and great pleasure,” Ms. Bryant exclaimed. “There is a bit of a challenge because my expectations are so grand. I have such a passion to excel. I really never thought that I would be the school’s executive director. But the school community supported the idea and I will do my best to live up to the ideals of my grandmother."

 

Ms. Bryant’s grandmother is, of course, Elsie Whitlow Stokes. During a previous interview with school founder, Linda Moore, she had this to say about her mother:

 

“At about the time that Ms. Moore was first becoming a grandmother Ms. Stokes became terminally ill. The two of them then engaged in what Ms. Moore referred to as ‘importance of life conversations.’ They discussed how indispensable it is to care for and nurture children, and the high value in being a good teacher. She talked with her mother about the significance of self discipline together with the idea that people should have the ability to care for themselves and their communities. The final lesson her mother taught was that ‘you can do anything you want to do.’”

 

The future certainly appears bright for this charter school. Ms. Bryant certainly believes this is the case. “The dual language immersion model opens up all types of academic possibilities for our children. Our first students are about to finish college. Two Stokes School alumni are at Harvard University.” The new executive director also attended this school to obtain her Master’s Degree in education administration, planning and social policy with a concentration in international education. She also speaks both Spanish and French in addition to her native English. The legacy of Elsie Whitlow Stokes is obviously in extremely competent hands.