NEWS
- D.C. board votes to hold adult education charters accountable [The Next Step PCS and Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
- DCPS spotlights the needs of African-American and Latino males
- D.C. Mayor Bowser contends private school voucher program should wind down
- Teachers union, think tank propose compromise on testing of U.S. students
D.C. board votes to hold adult education charters accountable [The Next Step PCS and Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
January 30, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Adult education charters in D.C. will be ranked next year and held to a similar standard as other charter schools.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted unanimously earlier this week to adopt changes to next year’s performance ratings.
The performance indicators are used to rank schools based on test scores, attendance and college readiness. Currently, only elementary and high school charters are ranked.
If schools perform at the lowest ranking for three of the past five years, or score 20 percent or lower, the board will review the school’s charter.
To reach the top status, an adult education school will have to score 65 percent in specific categories, including student progress, achievement, and college and career readiness. The charters also must receive survey responses from at least 50 percent of students after graduation.
While the board was in favor of the new rankings, some members had concerns about schools having to reach a high score in all categories to be in the top rating.
“I am in support of the recommended guidelines ,but I am somewhat concerned that a scenario that we don’t expect to happen could happen and then we would be challenged by is this school really a tier 3 school, if in fact they are achieving all these other desired outcomes,” said Darren Woodruff, vice chairman of the charter board.
An estimated 60,000 D.C. residents have no high school diploma. In 2013, only 64 percent of those who took the General Educational Development test in D.C. passed, according that year’s Annual Statistical Report on the GED Test.
All seven of the adult education charters in D.C. went through a pilot program that helped determine the rankings. At previous board meetings, some expressed concerns about how they would be ranked.
Julie Meyer, executive director of The Next Step public charter school, said in a written statement that requiring the schools to reach a minimum in all categories would mislead the public because “schools are tiered according to their lowest-scoring category.”
“This system will confuse the public since the raw score and tier will not be aligned,” she said.
Sara Navaro, executive director at the Maya Young Adult Learning Center, said her organization opposes the new guidelines because they would disadvantage schools that serve areas of higher unemployment.
She said that in the elementary and high school rankings, scores are based on the campuses’ overall status.
“This makes sense because it provides flexibility for schools to exhibit varied performance levels on certain metrics by virtue of the students they serve and the neighborhoods in which they operate,” she said in a statement.
D.C. public and charter schools that receive $6,980 for each adult student enrolled for at least 12 hours a year. That allotment will increase to $8,448 next year.
DCPS spotlights the needs of African-American and Latino males
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
January 29, 2015
DC Public Schools has announced a new initiative that will train a "laser-like focus" on African-American and Latino males, two groups that fare worst on many measures of academic achievement. But the effort, which includes a new all-boys high school, will inevitably leave some students in relative darkness.
DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson recently unveiled a three-pronged program targeted at the 43% of DCPS students who are males of color. Spending $20 million over the next three years, DCPS plans to recruit 500 tutor-mentors, fund school-level programs aimed at engaging and supporting black and Hispanic boys, and—most ambitiously—bring in a successful Chicago charter network to replicate its prep school model in DC.
Many details are still unclear. DCPS is already recruiting volunteer tutors for the four well-regarded tutoring programs it is partnering with, but at least one of them uses only paid tutors. More fundamentally, it's not clear exactly where the $20 million will come from, although DCPS hopes to raise at least $7.4 million of it from private donors.
Another question is whether Urban Prep Academies, the organization that will run DCPS's prep school beginning in the fall of 2016, will enjoy the same degree of autonomy here that it's had running three charter schools in Chicago. Henderson promised that Urban Prep will have "as many autonomies as they need to make it work," but she added that the DC Council may need to change the law to make that possible.
Urban Prep has made headlines for getting 100% of its alumni into four-year colleges since it began graduating students five years ago. Its school uniform, which includes red ties and navy blazers adorned with the school crest and motto—"Credimus," Latin for "We believe"—calls to mind an elite boys' school like St. Alban's.
But, unlike most of those at St. Albans, Urban Prep's students are black, and many are from low-income families.
Joining Henderson at last week's kick-off event, the school's founder, Tim King, told an inspiring story about a homeless student who "would actually sit on the cold floor in the shelter bathroom doing his homework, because it was the only place there that had the lights on past 10 pm." That student, King added, became class valedictorian and is now a student at Georgetown University.
Snaring Urban Prep was a coup for DC, according to Henderson. "Let me be clear," she said. "Everybody in the country wants Urban Prep Academies to open a school in their city."
One reason DC won out might be that Henderson and King have known each other since their undergraduate days at Georgetown, where King was assigned to be Henderson's mentor.
Critics say school has high attrition and low scores
As with almost any successful charter school, Urban Prep has its critics. Some say the attrition rate is high, with the size of a class sometimes shrinking from 150 to 50 students between 9th and 12 grades. (Urban Prep did not respond to questions about this and other topics.)
Another complaint about charters like Urban Prep is that its students are a self-selected group, with more motivated families and a lower poverty rate than students in neighborhood public schools. Although the DC version of Urban Prep will be a traditional public school rather than a charter, the same criticism could apply, since parents will presumably need to take affirmative steps to enroll their sons.
One response to these critiques is that even if Urban Prep doesn't work for all kids, at least it works for the ones who get there and stick with it. But some question even that.
At one of the school's three campuses last year, only 9% of students were deemed ready for college-level work, defined as scoring at least 21 on the ACT. At the other campuses, the figures were 28% and 20%. The average for Chicago public schools is 27%.
Even if one assumes that Urban Prep does change the life trajectory of the young African-American men it serves in Chicago, will it do the same for the young Latino men that are also supposed to be part of DCPS's "laser-like focus"? (Speakers used that metaphor no less than six times during the announcement of the initiative.)
While the DC school presumably won't exclude anyone on the basis of race or ethnicity, the Urban Prep model is clearly geared to black students. And its planned location at some unspecified site east of the Anacostia River, an area that is almost entirely African-American, may make it difficult for Latino boys to attend in any event.
Black and Latino girls need help too
And what about black and Latino girls? While the legality of single-sex education used to be in dispute, the federal government loosened its rules in 2006, and since then single-sex schools and classes have proliferated.
Research has been equivocal on whether single-sex education produces better results. But some data indicate that it's most likely to benefit poor and minority students, although it's not clear why.
Single-sex charter schools like the Chicago version of Urban Prep are free to operate with no restrictions. But when a single-sex school is part of a traditional school district, federal policy requires the district to make another school of "substantially equal" quality available to the excluded gender. That other school can be either coed or single-sex.
Will black and Latino girls have a "substantially equal" option? That could become a matter for debate, and possibly even litigation.
Aside from legality, the plan for Urban Prep and indeed the whole "Empowering Males of Color" initiative raise questions of equity. On DC's standardized tests last year, the proficiency rate for black girls was about 45%, and for Latinas about 57%. That's better than the rates for black and Hispanic boys—about 35% and 49%, respectively. But it's way below the 90% proficiency rates for white students.
Of course, efforts that elevate the needs of one group almost always have an adverse effect on others. And in the case of young men of color, you can make a case that it's justified.
Perhaps a bigger problem is that Urban Prep, in combination with DC's many charter schools and its several application-only DCPS high schools, will further drain off the more motivated male students from neighborhood schools, leaving behind a higher concentration of those who are hardest to educate.
D.C. Mayor Bowser contends private school voucher program should wind down
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
January 30, 2015
The Washington Post's Mike DeBonis had a story on Tuesday regarding a meeting between D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the U.S. Congress Speaker of the House John Boehner. Apparently, during the conversation the Speaker brought up the Opportunity Scholarship Program, one of his favorite pieces of legislation which he actually authored. The private school voucher plan that is now over a decade old is something that the White House would love to see disappear. In fact, each year that he has been in office President Obama removes funding for the scholarships in the Federal budget and then Mr. Boehner goes ahead and restores the money. It appears from Mr. DeBonis' article that Ms. Bowser is also not a fan. The Post reporter quotes the Mayor as stating:
“I’ve been a supporter of vouchers in the District of Columbia … if only for the children who are in the program. I think that the program should live up to its promise and allow them to matriculate. When the Opportunity Scholarships were first introduced, I think our school system was in a very different place. I actually think that the quality and choice in our city has improved very much since then, and that’s one reason why we’re attracting families to the District of Columbia and to our public schools, all of them.”
Perhaps not the greatest thing to say during National School Choice Week.
In fact, the 2012 Illinois Facility Fund Study which looked at public school offerings in the nation's capital came to the conclusion that the city lacked 40,000 quality seats. Unfortunately, we have not seen a significant number of high performing classrooms added since then. But even if this need did not exist scholarships to private schools for those living in poverty would provide important competition for students that would drive all other schools, both traditional and charter, to improve. But right now, at this moment in time, the vouchers are offering a life preserver to those fortunate enough to receive one.
Yes, public education has improved in Washington, D.C. But if it were your child and a method existed for him or her to attend a private institution such as Sidwell Friends instead of a DCPS neighborhood school where the math and reading proficiency rates were stuck at 50 percent or below then wouldn't you grab this option as rapidly as possible? For the benefit of our families we desperately need the Opportunity Scholarship Program to flourish.
Teachers union, think tank propose compromise on testing of U.S. students
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 30, 2015
As Congress undertakes its most serious effort to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, backlash against standardized testing has prompted vigorous debate about whether the federal government should continue requiring annual exams.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has written a draft revision that proposes two options:
●Continue requiring annual tests every year in third through eighth grades and once in high school, the policy favored by the Obama administration and a group of the nation’s most influential civil rights groups.
●Or get rid of those annual tests and give states much more room to develop their own testing regimes. One option for states would be to require assessments once each at the elementary, middle and high school levels. That is known as “grade span testing,” an approach that is favored by the National Education Association, which is the nation’s largest teachers union, and by many parents and teachers who say overtesting has warped schools.
Now, trying to bridge the gap between those two sides, is the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, and the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with ties to the Obama administration.
The two groups want to keep administering tests each year and keep publishing data that show — for each school, school district and state — how subgroups of students are faring.
But most of those tests wouldn’t be used to judge schools. Only once at each grade span would the tests actually “count,” i.e., be part of an accountability system used to identify and force change at struggling schools.
Under No Child Left Behind, every annual test has counted, and schools that have persistently failed to meet achievement targets have been subjected to a range of sanctions and interventions.
Alexander, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the committee’s ranking member, aren’t saying what they think of the hybrid approach.
“When our hearings are completed, I will work with Sen. Murray and others to see what the best ideas are,” Alexander said through a spokeswoman. A spokeswoman for Murray reiterated the Democrat’s oft-stated concern “about anything that would roll back the annual statewide assessments.”
The union and the think tank argue that their proposal is a way to thread the needle on a difficult issue. Achievement gaps would still be plainly transparent, they argue, but schools, teachers and students could ratchet down the stress and time they expend on testing in favor of more time and energy for teaching and learning.
“After a decade of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, we know that an environment with high-stakes, annual tests forces schools to focus on compliance, not on kids,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “Ultimately, this re-envisioned accountability system, with grade-span testing as one of many measures, will allow us to put kids, not high-stakes tests, at the center of everything we do.”
A spokeswoman for Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has pressed for annual testing, declined to comment on the AFT-CAP proposal. But the proposal has drawn criticism from champions of the Obama administration’s approach to testing.
“Dumb Policy Ideas Not Limited to the Far Right,” reads the headline of a blog post by Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit that joined more than a dozen civil rights groups in arguing that annual testing is necessary to shine a light on achievement gaps that leave too many poor and minority children lagging behind their peers.
Haycock and other critics argue that the proposal would allow schools to slide by without being held accountable for their students’ learning and would make it difficult to recruit teachers for tested grade levels because there would be so much pressure on them to get good test scores for the whole school.
“In some ways, we’re not getting rid of all stakes, we’re just making some tests count much, much more than others,” said Anne Hyslop, a senior policy analyst for Bellwether Education Partners, who says the proposal would create new problems.
Hyslop said the proposal would also make it more difficult to overcome one of the key weaknesses of No Child Left Behind: its focus on proficiency rates in math and language arts.
Many experts argue that proficiency rates are more reflective of students’ income levels than of their schools’ success and that it would be fairer and more accurate to judge schools by how much progress their students make annually. That would be difficult if not impossible to do if tests count only once per grade level, Hyslop said.
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