- D.C. Charter School Board Gets a New Leader [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS is mentioned]
- Board Names New Exec Director of D.C. Charter Schools
- D.C.-Area Students Compete in Frederick Douglass Oratorical Contest [Arts & Technology Academy PCS is mentioned]
- The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice
- Donate to FOCUS
D.C. Charter School Board Gets a New Leader [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
December 8, 2011
After a search that sputtered for months, the D.C. Public Charter School Board has found a new executive director. He is Scott Pearson, a former U.S. Department of Education official and co-founder of a San Francisco charter management organization.
He replaces Josephine Baker, the board’s founding executive director, who retired in May.
While the $180,000-a-year post is low-profile, it is a critical spot at a propitious moment for the city’s charter school movement. Steady growth has pushed enrollment at the 98 charter campuses to more than 40 percent of the public school population. Mayor Vincent C. Gray and his deputy mayor for education, De’Shawn Wright, are far more charter-friendly than the Fenty-Rhee regime.
The executive director runs the board staff that oversees school performance and screens charter applicants. He will also be at the table as the city sorts through the findings of the Illinois Facilities Fund, a firm commissioned by Wright to determine what communities are underserved by quality schools. A commission appointed by the D.C. Council is expected to make recommendations in late January to ensure more uniformity in the funding of public and public charter schools.
“D.C. is arguably one of the two or three most vibrant and important centers of charter schools in the country,” said Pearson, 49, in an interview Thursday at the board’s Columbia Heights offices.
He listed three priorities: continued attention to school quality, efforts to make charters more accessible to special needs students — a big issue in the District — and to “defend against the creeping re-regulation of charter schools.” Asked if he saw the creep in the District, however, he backed off.
Pearson, who holds two masters degrees from Harvard (public and business administration) comes to the job with both local and national charter experience. He was most recently an Obama Administration appointee at the Education Department, where he served as associate assistant deputy secretary in the Office of Innovation and Improvement under Jim Shelton, the former education director for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His portfolio included the federal charter schools program, which provides financial support and promotes public understanding of the charter movement.
He co-founded the Leadership Public Schools, a Bay Area charter management organization with high schools in Richmond, Hayward, San Jose and College Park. Prior to that he was an executive with AOL and Bain and Company.
“I am absolutely convinced that we hit a grand slam for the charter sector,” said board president Brian Jones.
Pearson is the product of a search that went in fits and starts through the summer and fall. Two sources familiar with process said the board initially chose Thurgood Marshall Academy co-founder Josh Kern, but that he and the board couldn’t agree to terms. The board started again, this time with the help of the K12 Search Group, an Austin-based education headhunting firm. Sources said the short list consisted of Pearson and board member Darren Woodruff, principal research analyst at the American Institutes for Research.
Pearson starts Jan. 9
Board Names New Exec Director of D.C. Charter Schools
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 8, 2011
There's a new sheriff in town, if D.C.'s public charter schools were a Wild West town. But since they're not, we'll go with the announcement of a new executive director: Scott Pearson, who most recently oversaw charter school programs at the U.S. Department of Education.
Pearson's appointment comes seven months after local legend Josephine Baker stepped down to take a "long, restful break," in her own words.
Charters enroll 40 percent of the District's public school children, the second-highest rate in the nation behind New Orleans. It's a busy job. and local leaders say Pearson is up to it.
“By selecting a leader with an array of management experiences and a long history of promoting high-quality educational opportunities at the local and federal level, the [charter school] board has shown its commitment to seeing the reform efforts continue," said De'Shawn Wright, deputy mayor for education, in a statement.
City Council Chairman called Pearson "a seasoned, well-respected leader in the national charter school community," adding that he "brings sound expertise to the position." Prior to his role with the feds, Pearson co-founded a charter management group that served low-income high school students around San Francisco. Leadership Public Schools comprises four high-school campuses in the Bay Area. About 69 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced lunch, an indicator of poverty, and 66 percent of students are Latino.
Ninety-seven percent of Leadership graduates across the network are accepted to college Eighty-five percent of them will be first-generation college students. According to the website, Leadership's curriculum is tailored around admission standards to the University of California and California State University. In fact, students must apply to a two- or four-year university in order to graduate. Unsurprisingly, Leadership emphasizes leadership, including a retreat focused on the skill for all new freshmen.
His work, Pearson said, is guided by "an emphasis on quality, autonomy and fidelity to the notion that charter schools are meant to be an option for all students." Since coming into the District in the '90s, the charter school network has generally outpaced D.C. Public Schools in enrollment and test scores. It's also expanded rapidly, currently with 53 charter schools on 98 campuses. The board has been aggressive about closing new schools, whether for financial or academic failings, and a handful of new experiments open each year.
Pearson is expected to speak to reporters early Friday afternoon to discuss how he'll navigate the system serving 32,000 students.
D.C.-Area Students Compete in Frederick Douglass Oratorical Contest [Arts & Technology Academy PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Staff
December 8, 2011
Fourth- and fifth-graders from the Arts & Technology Academy, a public charter school in Washington, performed on the first day of the three-day competition, where students read portions of Douglass’s famous 19th-century speeches.
Click here to see presentation
The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice
The Huffington Post
By Sam Chaltain
December 8, 2011
In the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, a debate is raging over which set of economic proposals to pursue in order to rebuild the national economy. At the same time, K-12 education reformers are engaged in their own frantic search for the right recipe(s) that can unlock the full power of teaching and learning. But rarely do we acknowledge that one individual stands, improbably, at the center of both debates -- John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes' influence on economic thinking is well established: ever since 1936, when he first argued the economy was driven not by prices but by "effective demand," we've been in a continual debate over whether outside agencies (like, say, the government) are required to intervene during times of crisis. By contrast, Keynes' influence on education thinking remains largely invisible -- yet most urban school districts across America are being recast in the image of his core theories, particularly the notion that providing more choice in schooling will empower urban parents to drive demand and, in so doing, unleash a series of tailwinds that can transform public education.
Regardless of how one feels about the move toward greater school choice, it is almost surely here to stay. Consequently, as more and more parents encounter the inchoate marketplace of public school options for their children, we should stop asking ourselves whether school choice is "good" or "bad", and start asking a different question instead: In what ways can urban parents' newfound power as education consumers engender more schools capable of giving more young people the skills and self-confidence they need to become active, visible contributors to the public good -- a public good that, amidst the din of the ongoing battle between our intermixed democratic and capitalistic ideals, still seeks to fulfill our founding spirit of E Pluribus Unum -- out of many, one?
That's a big question, and I think it's possible for us to answer it -- but only if we understand the extent to which urban parents can actually drive "effective demand" in ways that improve learning environments, increase equity, and ultimately serve their own and the larger community's interests.
I know of what I speak, because I'm the parent of a two-year-old in Washington, DC. Most of my closest friends are also DC residents, and also the parents of children about to enter formal schooling. All of us are spending a lot of time thinking about where to send our kids, and all of us are well-educated and motivated to make the right choices: in short, we are the low-hanging fruit in an idealized marketplace in which knowledgeable parents can drive demand.
But there's a problem: most of the resources that exist today to edify my friends and neighbors are still reflective of the myopic notion that schools can be meaningfully ranked according to a single measure -- test scores. To make matters worse, whereas in theory all families in DC have the same chance to get into the same set of schools, the reality is that most middle-class families will have more of a particularly precious resource than their lower-class compatriots: the time it will take to evaluate and assess which schools are the best fit for their child.
As an example, look at Great Schools, the wildly successful organization that serves as "the country's leading source of information on school performance." Great Schools receives more than 37 million unique web visitors a year, and it supports parent outreach and education programs in three cities - including here in DC. In a world where parents are feeling overwhelmed and under-informed, Great Schools is the closest thing to a one-stop-shop out there.
The good news is that Great Schools is filled with great information that will be helpful to the most motivated parents -- from individual school data to concrete recommendations about ways to stay connected to their school; build new play structures; start a school library; or identify the attributes of a great principal. The bad news is that the main factor fueling Great Schools' growth is its school ratings system, and as of today, each school's 10-point score is still determined by a single measure -- "its performance on state standardized tests."
The appeal of such a simple recipe is clear; it's equally clear that such a formula will never drive effective demand. Instead, this sort of rating system is feeding a different beast. Keynes had a name for that, too -- he called it our "animal spirits," and warned that, absent a holistic picture of any given situation, these spirits can lead us "to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation." When that happens, Keynes cautioned, "enterprise will fade and die," and where "effective demand is deficient not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him."
In other words, parents and policymakers need to be guided by more than their animal urges for simple answers to complex problems, and schools need to be evaluated by more than one criterion. As Keynes first suggested, 75 years ago, "it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom."
The same sort of recipe can apply to school choice -- but only if we prevent ourselves from seeing choice itself as the panacea; it is freedom and efficiency that we need. And until our individual freedom to choose is matched by our collective capacity to better understand what powerful learning looks like -- and requires -- any future efforts to help parents drive demand are likely to remain as elusive as all the current efforts to get many of those same parents back to work.
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