- D.C. Bill Would Assess Third-Graders’ Readiness to Advance
- Chavez Teacher Uses Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellowship as Bridge to Change [Cesar Chavez PCS is mentioned]
- How Not to Respond to a Testing Scandal
-
$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies
D.C. Bill Would Assess Third-Graders’ Readiness to Advance
The Washington Times
By Tom Howell Jr.
February 15, 2012
A D.C. Council committee is vetting a bill Thursday that ensures third-graders are ready for fourth grade, a reflection of efforts across the country to gauge academic progress in the early years of children’s education.
Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown will hear testimony on the legislation as part of a hearing before the Committee of the Whole on reforms such as early childhood education and college preparation.
Council members Vincent B. Orange, at-large Democrat, and Marion Barry, Ward 8 Democrat, introduced the bill in November. The legislation proposes to assess the progress of students on the cusp of fourth grade after essential years of instruction in reading and mathematics from kindergarten to third grade.
“This is the turning point in the curriculum,” Mr. Orange said.
The bill also calls on the D.C. Public Schools chancellor to ensure that 3- and 4-year-olds are prepared for kindergarten.
The bill joins a growing list of education proposals before the council, including a bill from Mr. Brown that uses financial incentives to draw highly effective teachers to schools that need them the most.
Mr. Brown also is hearing testimony on his bills to assess students from grades four to nine and to require each high school student to take a college-entrance exam such as the SAT or ACT and apply to at least one college.
D.C. officials’ focus on the learning cycles of students — from kindergarten to third grade, from fourth grade through middle school, and high school and beyond — adds to efforts by Mayor Vincent C. Gray for education offerings among children as young as 1 to 3.
Mr. Orange said he has not spoken with the mayor about his bill but expects Mr. Gray’s support because it builds on the education “of the 10,000 children he boasts about in early childhood education.”
Mr. Orange said he drafted similar legislation during his last stint on the council during Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ administration, but the measure never went anywhere.
“This is a bill that I’ve been pushing for a long time,” Mr. Orange said. “This didn’t just come around.”
His argument has been buttressed by several states that are pushing to assess — and even hold back — third-graders who do not meet reading requirements.
At the council’s retreat Tuesday, Mr. Orange passed around a Wall Street Journal article on the subject that had been published a day earlier and listed seven states that are considering the issue.
Mr. Orange said he does not have a price tag for the proposal — he needs to “see it on paper” first — but thinks the city would save money on social safety nets or incarcerations down the road by spending a little more now to support childhood education.
Chavez Teacher Uses Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellowship as Bridge to Change [Cesar Chavez PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Megan Buerger
February 15, 2012
A teacher at Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School on Capitol Hill is taking extra steps to give her students and fellow teachers a voice.
This month, Alexandra Fuentes, 26, who is in her third year teaching 10th grade biology at Chavez, was one of 25 Washington area teachers awarded the Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellowship, an 18-month program for teachers interested in bringing their experience to discussions about education policy. The program has branches in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Memphis. It expanded to the District in January.
Candice Crawford, executive director of the District’s Teach Plus branch, said Fuentes, who lives on Capitol Hill, was selected for her innovative methods and passion for extending opportunities to students in low-performing schools.
“Our end goal is for our teachers to have a policy impact in their area so that they can bring the voice of teachers to policymakers,” Crawford said. “Alexandra stood out from the beginning as someone who can be a strong advocate for improving the teaching profession.”
Her trick to making the lesson plans stick? Trust. For students to see themselves as leaders, Fuentes said, teachers must trust them with opportunities to apply what they’ve learned.
“It’s not as simple as connecting content to what is relevant,” she said. “It’s about putting students in positions of power where they can interact with scientists and policymakers.”
Minority students and those who have grown up in poor, neglected neighborhoods pose an extra challenge, Fuentes said, in that they don’t always think their voice matters.
“They’re an untapped resource of talent,” she said. “We just have to get them to rethink their potential.”
Chavez High is 86 percent black and 13 percent Latino. More than two-thirds of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.
To build confidence among her students, Fuentes creates opportunities for them to explore what they’ve learned outside the classroom. In 2010, with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, Fuentes and five of her students attended an AIDS conference in Atlanta where they shared ideas about how to break down barriers of discussing HIV.
“She’s precise,” said Jasmine Stanfield, 15, a 10th-grader at Chavez. “For me, science was just a lot of multiple choice. Now, we talk about how it affects our lives. When it comes to AIDS, you know, people really don’t talk about it, but Miss Fuentes encourages us to.”
Fuentes was born in Puerto Rico. Her family moved to Youngstown, Ohio, when she was a baby. Today, she’s one of eight teachers in her family, including two aunts, three cousins and her mother.
For Fuentes, the desire to teach didn’t strike until she attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she was studying to become a scientist and volunteering at a preschool and low-performing high school.
“The preschoolers expressed this unbelievable excitement and eagerness to learn, but the high-schoolers had lost all semblances of interest,” she said. “In a way, it was frightening.”
Fuentes changed career paths and applied to Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. She also received the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation Fellowship, a highly selective five-year program that works to support entry-level teachers and improve retention rates. Both Knowles and Teach Plus estimate that 50 percent of new teachers leave the field within five years.
When it came time to job hunt in 2009, Fuentes said, the District was her first choice for its “energy around education policy” and improving schools.
But she doesn’t intend on leaving the classroom for the Hill anytime soon; instead, she’ll use the Teach Plus fellowship as a bridge between the two worlds.
“This fellowship gives teachers a seat at the table,” she said. “We have a unique perspective on just how the policies affect the classroom, the school, the conversation. Our voice is essential.”
For information on Teach Plus D.C. fellows, visit www.teachplus.org.
How Not to Respond to a Testing Scandal
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
February 15, 2012
Hosanna Mahaley, state superintendent for education in the District of Columbia, said last week city officials are “committed to restoring and improving confidence” in standardized test security. Yet what they are doing will achieve the opposite.
Since USA Today last year exposed unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests in more than 100 schools, many parents and teachers have been waiting for a deep, tough investigation.
Elementary and middle school kids taking an exam don’t suddenly realize that several of their answers are wrong and erase to make them right. What they know or don’t know rarely changes during a test. Yet the USA Today project (conceived and edited by my wife) found that D.C. classrooms sometimes had 10 times as many wrong-to-right erasures per child as was normal. Educators familiar with testing say it is likely that school administrators in at least some cases tampered with answer sheets after children went home.
Many people assumed school officials would question teachers and principals closely and compare their statements to what students remembered. The long-term reputation of the school system was at stake.
When similar erasure data was found in Atlanta, Georgia’s governor ordered state investigators to question educators under penalty of criminal charges. They found wrongdoing in 44 schools. The state forced the removal or resignation of many principals found to have tampered with tests themselves or colluded with teachers.
In D.C., however, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson last spring handed the investigation of 2009 and 2010 scores over to D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby. He seems to have devoted few resources to the investigation and has not yet released a report.
Last week, Mahaley’s office said it had reduced from 128 to 35 the number of classrooms it will ask an independent contractor to investigate in connection with 2011 tests. Its criteria for the probe will make identification of tampering by administrators more difficult.
As reported by my colleague Bill Turque, just having an unusual number of wrong-to-right erasures will not guarantee a close look. A classroom will only be investigated if it also has big test score gains by individual students from 2010 to 2011, wide variances or unusual patterns of scores within the classroom, and test results from the prior year that showed inordinate wrong-to-right erasures in that teacher’s classroom.
This approach focuses on possible wrongdoing by individual teachers and narrows the period of time that can be examined. It overlooks the possibility of tampering by principals and test directors over several years. Some erasure outbreaks were found as early as 2008. If a school had a big improvement in test scores in 2008, 2009 or 2010 and stayed at that high level by continued tampering, there would be no suspicious rise in scores from 2010 to 2011 and thus no reason to investigate under these rules.
The city should have investigators interview principals, test directors and teachers under threat of criminal sanctions if they do not tell the truth. Asking students what they remembered would also help: Did they actually check their work and make erasures?
It appears that is not going to happen in the District. Mahaley’s office said it consulted with independent test security experts in deciding on the criteria. I spoke to one of those experts and reviewed the resumes of the others. None appear to have any experience investigating the large-scale cheating that seems likely to have happened here and did occur in Atlanta. The consultants’ experience is in isolated cases of cheating by students and teachers, not relevant to wrong-to-right erasure numbers this numerous and in so many schools. A Mahaley spokesman said erasures alone don’t indicate impropriety.
Will we ever discover what happened after hours to the D.C. answer sheets kept in cabinets to which principals had the keys? Will D.C. parents ever have proof that the people running their neighborhood schools can be trusted? I doubt it. The impact of ignoring the inflated scores will be disastrous. I wonder why the people in charge don’t see that.
$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies
The New York Times
By Winnie Hu
February 15, 2012
The Obama administration will propose a $5 billion competitive grant program to encourage states to overhaul the teaching profession, federal education officials said Tuesday, using its Race to the Top school improvement competition as a model.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan backs the proposed grant program.
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the largest teachers' union, also supports the proposed program.
The new program, which needs Congressional approval, is part of President Obama’s budget proposal and expands upon a call in his State of the Union address last month to give schools more resources “to keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones.”
Federal education officials said the program would seek to bring together state and district officials, union leaders, teachers and other educators to address a range of issues, among them tightening tenure rules, increasing salaries and improving professional development.
The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, will formally unveil the proposal at a meeting with teachers on Wednesday in Washington. He plans to enlist teachers from an Education Department fellowship program to help promote the proposal, called the Respect (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project.
“Our goal is to work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy,” Mr. Duncan said in a statement.
The new program would follow the general format of Race to the Top, with states designing their own proposals for teacher improvement and the federal Education Department selecting the most promising ones for multiyear funding. It would focus only on teaching, though, while the Race to the Top program had a broader agenda for kindergarten to 12th-grade education.
Officials said the new program, which has been in development for a year, was not a response to any current efforts to install teacher evaluation systems in specific states, including New York. They said it was intended to address the needs of experienced teachers and to make the teaching profession more appealing over all — through salary increases, more selective teacher colleges and other measures — to attract a new generation of teachers.
“We need to change society’s views of teaching from the factory model of yesterday to the professional model of tomorrow, where teachers are revered as thinkers, leaders and nation-builders,” Mr. Duncan said. “No other profession carries a greater burden for securing our economic future.”
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union of teachers and education professionals with more than three million members, said he supported the Obama administration’s wide-ranging approach to a systemic problem. He said he had long emphasized the need for attracting top-tier teaching candidates, maintaining competitive salaries and promoting professional development.
“It incorporates what we believe is necessary to transform the system,” Mr. Van Roekel said. “We need to do all of these things.”
Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that recruits new teachers for school districts, including New York City, said the use of a competitive grant program would encourage states to come up with innovative ideas.
“Teachers are treated as interchangeable parts — they’re not honored as highly skilled professionals — and this has gone on for decades,” he said. “Everyone knows we have to make teaching better, but they have put their money where their mouth is.”