- Facing Closure, D.C. Charter School to Plead its Case [IDEA PCS is mentioned]
- Depending Too Much on Charters is Perilous [KIPP DC PCS is mentioned]
- D.C. Parents, Students Support Creation of 'Community Schools'
- District Schools to Introduce Gifted-and-Talented Program
Facing Closure, D.C. Charter School to Plead its Case [IDEA PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
February 1, 2012
A Northeast Washington school will plead its case Thursday evening as the DC Public Charter School Board decides whether to close the campus because of poor academic performance. Opened in 1998, Integrated Design Electronics Academy Public Charter School is one of the oldest charters in the District, and charter officials say it also has a "10-year history of low performance in student achievement in both reading and math," and just more than half of students graduate. But Norman Johnson, IDEA's executive director, says his charter was approved to serve students who may have issues with the law or truancy, making the ratings unfair.
Depending Too Much on Charters is Perilous [KIPP DC PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
February 1, 2012
A consultant’s report ordered by Mayor Vincent C. Gray says that the District should close or quickly improve 38 regular public schools and send many of their students to a new crop of charter schools.
Charter advocates such as me — my latest book was about the high-achieving KIPP charter network — are expected to cheer that recommendation. D.C. charters on average produce higher achievement for low-income students than do regular public schools. Charters are so popular with parents that 41 percent of all D.C. public school children attend them. They could be the majority in three or four years, my colleague Bill Turque reports.
This charter fan doesn’t think that’s good. It is not clear that the best charters are capable of such rapid expansion. More important, moving kids from bad regular schools to charters in the way Gray’s Chicago-based consultant, IFF, recommends would accelerate the downward spiral of traditional public schools in the city. Regular schools and the people who work in them, with a few exceptions, would become a permanent education underclass. If Gray and Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson don’t figure out how to significantly raise the level of our worst regular schools in the next few years, confidence in the system is never going to recover.
The IFF report maintains some hope for regular schools but emphasizes how much better charters are doing. Only three charters are listed among the 41 public schools it says must get better quickly or go away.
Why is that? Gray and Henderson know. Some of their best friends are charter people. The most successful charters insist on high expectations, telling each child that he or she is going to college. They have longer school days and avoid time wasters such as chatty home room periods and pointless assemblies. Their teachers coordinate learning and discipline. They recruit and train principals carefully and give them unusual power over their budgets and the hiring and firing of staff members.
Those charters succeed despite having less money per child than regular schools, as revealed by school funding experts Alice Rivlin and Mary Levy. Rivlin and Levy say charters don’t get their overspending covered by the D.C. Council, don’t get free maintenance and legal services, don’t get money for projected enrollment increases that don’t happen and don’t get free school buildings, as do regular public schools.
Successful charter methods could be applied to the worst regular schools. The IFF report says many regular schools are half-empty, with fewer than 300 students and relatively few teachers, which would make a change to a new principal and new methods easier.
Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, also a charter enthusiast, had such changes in mind but failed miserably — as she conceded — in recruiting and training great principals, the key to turning a school around. She relied on a slapdash recruitment process and her instincts about which of the administrators she interviewed would be good and which wouldn’t.
The best charter school networks pick principals differently. They put applicants through a series of mind-bending interviews with successful inner-city school leaders and lean toward people with experience in their schools. They have long training periods, some up to a year. The novice principals learn school management from experts and spend months as interns working with charter principals who have great track records.
The D.C. school system has enough well-tested, successful principals to mentor well-chosen new school leaders for a few months. The D.C. system doesn’t have to lengthen the day and create principal autonomy in all the schools, just the ones IFF wants to replace with charters.
I know some activists who would like all city schools to be charters. Not me. The traditional neighborhood school is still woven into the American education system and our culture. Most people like it. It should be preserved. But there is not much time left to do that here.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
February 1, 2012
Parents, students and school officials voiced their support for legislation that would keep District schools open after-hours to provide medical services and learning opportunities to the surrounding low-income communities.
The Community Schools Incentive Amendment Act of 2011, written by D.C. Councilman Michael Brown, D-at large, would partner five public schools with community organizations to provide mental health services, tutoring, adult classes in nutrition and literacy, and more initiatives to combat the effects of poverty.
"For a community school, that might mean feeding a child's family or clothing them," Ralph Belk, a deputy executive director for the National Center for Children and Families, told the D.C. Council. "It might mean keeping that child's parents from getting evicted."
At the J.C. Nalle Community School in Ward 7 -- a partnership among Belk's organization, D.C. Public Schools and the Freddie Mac Foundation -- 78 percent of students in the extended-day program increased their math or reading scores on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams last year.
"It seemed like everyone saw something special in me," said Brianna Hooks, a former Nalle student and current seventh-grader at Sousa Middle School who says she loved the after-hours cooking classes and field trips -- even an excursion to Costa Rica.
Funding for the initiative is up in the air: Council members said they are exploring local, federal and private dollars to fund the $1 million annual cost of operating five community schools.
Washington Teachers' Union President Nathan Saunders said his members support the bill, as long as it doesn't pull money from their already cash-strapped classrooms -- a fear Brown said was unfounded.
Testimony from both the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which would have 180 days to create a process of awarding the $200,000 grants, and DCPS indicated they support the legislation.
Emily Bourn, a parent at Ward 7's Kelly Miller Middle School and a product of DCPS, said she also supported the creation of community schools.
"I spent a large part of my time [growing up] on Naylor Road, over by Minnesota Avenue, and I know there is a great need throughout the city," Bourn said. "I don't know what has taken us so long."
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
February 1, 2012
D.C. Public Schools is rolling out its first gifted-and-talented program in two middle schools this fall, The Washington Examiner has learned.
After testing for a year at Hardy Middle School in Georgetown and Kelly Miller Middle School in Lincoln Heights, school officials say they are hoping to expand the program — which does not require a student to test in — to schools throughout the District.
The schools will use the University of Connecticut–created Schoolwide Enrichment Model, which allows any student recommended by a parent, teacher or other staffer to participate. Classroom lessons won’t change, but a “gifted resource teacher,” identified by principals and trained over the summer, will pull students out of class for special projects on a subject-to-subject basis.
It’s a different turn for the city’s schools; data-driven reforms have been focused on bringing up low test scores. Now, school officials say they need to stimulate the District’s top students, and, in the process, stave off the flight from DCPS to charter and private schools that historically occurs in middle school grades.
“I think in terms of the work we’ve been doing, we’re poised for this now,” said Carey Wright, chief academic officer for DCPS, noting the new English curriculum that was rolled out this fall.
Hardy and Kelly Miller are very different schools, which Wright says was deliberate. Hardy is one of the best in the city, with 82 percent of students scoring “proficient” or “advanced” on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reading test last spring. Just 1 percent of students at Kelly Miller, an underenrolled Ward 7 school, performed in the “advanced” rung, while 23 percent scored “proficient.”
Abdullah Zaki, principal of Kelly Miller, said he recognized that there was still work to be done to bring most of Kelly Miller’s students up to grade level, but pointed to the 24 percent of students who might benefit from extra enrichment in reading.
“All students of all ethnici ties, regardless of where you come from, have the ability to achieve at high levels, and all students require some amount of differentiation — whether they’re two or three grade levels below or two or three or four grade levels above,” Zaki said.
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