FOCUS DC News Wire 3/10/2014

 

 

David Catania is an at-large member of the D.C. Council and chairman of council’s Education Committee.

 

I was interested to read the Feb. 25 op-ed by former Washington Post publisher Donald E. Graham on the District of Columbia Public Schools and the D.C. Council education committee’s recent hearing on DCPS [“Has D.C. learned its lesson?”]. This hearing was part of the council’s regular performance oversight process. The committee is required to hold such hearings on the agencies in its purview, which include the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the deputy mayor for education, the state board of education, the public library system and the public charter school board.

 

I welcome Graham’s participation in local education policy, and I share his optimism about the direction of our public school system. I see the incredible improvement firsthand in my near-daily visits to D.C. public schools, where I have met hundreds of dedicated and talented educators. When you have been to as many schools as I have — 124 in the past year — you do not need test scores to know that we are making progress.

 

But we still face big challenges, and looking beyond the top-line test results to better understand these challenges does not make one, as Graham suggested, a member of the “Flat Earth Society.” It makes us intellectually curious and thorough. There is substantial evidence that the recent improvements are rooted, at least in part, in demographic shifts in our schools.

 

Between 2007 and 2013, the share of D.C. fourth-graders who are African American fell from 83 percent to 67 percent. Meanwhile, the share of white students more than doubled, from 6 percent to 13 percent. Similar shifts occurred on the eighth-grade level. It is well established that socioeconomic status and student achievement are correlated. Because socioeconomic status often tracks with race in our city, this demographic shift matters in understanding overall results.

 

In support of his position, Graham pointed to data from the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which measures fourth- and eighth-graders’ aptitude in reading and math. Those data also show that African American fourth-graders in the District scored, on average, 68 points lower in reading and 59 points lower in math than their white classmates. It is significant that the average-scale score for reading remained unchanged between 2007 and 2013 for African American fourth-graders, at 192. Among African American and white eighth-graders in the District, there was a 64-point difference in average reading scores and a 62-point difference in average math scores. These are the largest achievement gaps in the nation. And in most cases, they are growing, not shrinking.

 

Furthermore, in 2013, only 49.7 percent of African American males in DCPS graduated high school on time, compared with 88 percent of their white counterparts. I am not satisfied with progress that does not reach low-income and minority students. And I do not believe that this is merely an area in need of improvement. This is an emergency.

 

Over the past year, the D.C. Council’s education committee has developed several strategies to address this crisis, including additional funding for the schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, to support low-income students and those at risk of academic failure; greater budget autonomy for principals to make decisions that are in students’ best interest; and replacing a policy that required social promotion with one of early detection and mandatory intervention. Each of these new laws incorporated the views, and ultimately the support, of the mayor and his education team.

 

Speaking of supporting the chancellor, last year I stood with her on two especially controversial public education issues: school closings and allegations about her role in a cheating scandal. I attended every community meeting on the chancellor’s plan to close 15 schools and listened to the concerns of those who opposed her proposal. It would have been far more politically expedient to join ranks with them. But the chancellor was right, and I supported her decision.

 

When allegations about test cheating resurfaced last spring, I found it more productive to strengthen our testing protocols going forward than to prolong finger-pointing. For this I earned the wrath of another major media outlet, which accused me of whitewashing Henderson’s alleged involvement. Previously, it was not against District law for adults to participate in cheating on academic assessments. Thanks to the committee’s work, our city now has one of the most comprehensive testing integrity laws in the country.

 

Perhaps Graham and I simply disagree about the value of an engaged legislature. I see the committee’s role as helping to remove the barriers between students and their success and providing oversight and accountability for the system. I welcome continued substantive contributions from Graham and organizations such as the CityBridge Foundation in helping to remove these barriers. But the city’s elected leaders, educators and parents have important roles in building a public education system that provides our students with opportunities to succeed in life.

 

 

Yesterday D.C. Councilman David Catania had an editorial in the Washington Post refuting the column by Donald Graham which celebrated the academic advancement being made by students enrolled in D.C. public schools. Now don't get me wrong, I too have written about the huge gap between black and white students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress Test, but these results do not show, as the chairman of the council's education committee asserts, that the schools are getting better. Let's take a look at the numbers.

 

For DCPS, fourth grade black math scores went from 212 in 2009 to 218 in 2013. For students qualifying for free or reduced lunch these results went from 210 to 217 for the same subject and years. In eighth grade math grades for black students have risen to 253 from 244 and for kids in poverty the score has gone from 243 in 2009 to 251 last year.

 

In regard to reading in the traditional schools fourth grade black students did show a slight decline from 2009 to 2013. These findings went from 195 to 192 and for low income kids the result essentially stayed the same at 193 in 2009 versus 192 in 2013. For eighth graders, however, the patten of improvement returned. For reading blacks saw their scores go up to 237 from 235 and for low income students the results went from 232 in 2009 to 237 in 2013.

 

The rise made by those attending charter schools was even more impressive. For fourth grade math between 2009 and 2013 black students results went to 225 from 215. For the same years poor students improved from 213 to 225. In eighth grade black student scored 254 in 2009 compared to 269 in 2013. For those in poverty the measure went from 252 to 266.

 

In reading black fourth graders made 204 in 2009 and 197 in 2009. Low income student scores went form 195 to 201. In eighth grade black student results were 243 in 2009 compared to 250 in 2013. Low income results climbed to 247 from 243.

 

In all, as the former owner of the Washington Post pointed out, things are looking up. The positive change has occurred because of the explosive growth of charter schools that generated competition for school children. The loss of students in the regular schools directly led to the Mayor taking over DCPS and appointing Michelle Rhee as Chancellor who was has now been succeeded by Kaya Henderson. The CityBridge Foundation has been supporting these reforms throughout.

 

Mr. Catania's main contribution to all of this has been to belittle the work of Ms. Henderson and to reinsert the Council into running the traditional schools. In light of all the advancement that has been made, it is time for him to get out of the way.

 

 

How can we speed the pace of improvement in struggling DCPS schools? Some mayoral candidates say it just takes time, and Andy Shallal says we need to focus more on the effects of poverty. But Tommy Wells wants to bring in successful charter organizations to turn schools around.

 

 

"I think sometimes it takes DCPS too long to turn an elementary school around," Wells said, mentioning a period of 3 to 4 years in the case of one school, Tyler. "And we know that there are national-model charter schools across the country that can come in and turn a school around within a year to two years."

 

Charter authority for Henderson

 

Wells said that if elected he would give DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson the authority to charter schools herself. (Right now the only body in DC with the authority to issue charters is the Public Charter School Board.) He would then recruit charter networks who have a proven track record of success and bring them in to run failing DCPS schools.

 

Neighborhood children would still be able to attend those schools as a matter of right. And, he said, "those schools may become traditional DCPS schools again. But we can't wait, we can't close more schools and consign more neighborhoods to not being able to have great schools."

 

The current administration, Wells said, has been "coasting forward on the work done by the previous administration." He promised that if elected he would court successful charter organizations with the same aggressiveness that he said Mayor Vincent Gray employs in luring businesses such as Microsoft to the District.

 

Andy Shallal, in contrast, bristled at the suggestion that the charter sector should be encouraged to expand its role in DC. "That really denigrates educators," he said. "It denigrates people that know how to do this stuff."

 

More resources to fight social ills

 

The problem, he said, is that "we're asking schools to solve social ills. We're asking teachers to be social workers, mental health specialists, nutritionists, nurses. And that doesn't make sense. And so for us to say, gee, we have no idea how this works, show us … No, we know how this works. You put in enough resources, enough wrap-around services, you fire bad people and you hire good people. That's how it works."

 

Shallal also said that while it's fine to emulate some techniques used by high-performing charters, "you have to understand that charters are self-selecting at some point," because parents who take the initiative to apply may be more engaged than those who don't. In addition, he said, "Charter schools can actually ask a child to leave if they don't match the criteria or the requirements of that charter school. And public schools have to accept them."

 

Shallal said that what's needed is a commitment to ensure that public schools succeed. "We have basically gone on a tear, closing down schools," he said. "We say schools fail, and the reality is schools don't fail. We fail them. We fail our children."

 

The three other major candidates essentially said that high-performing charters should be allowed to expand, but they didn't share Wells' enthusiasm for using them to speed the pace of change within DCPS.

 

In contrast to Wells, Bowser presented the mayor's role in bringing in charters as subordinate to that of the Public Charter School Board, which she said "makes a lot more decisions about which charters come in than the mayor does." Her concern, she said, is to make sure that charters locate where the need is greatest and to ensure that in at least some communities charters give a preference in admissions to neighborhood kids.

 

Both Gray and Jack Evans said they were supportive of high-performing charter schools, but both were quick to add that DCPS schools need support as well. Like Wells, Evans said that what was needed was a mayor who could "find a way to meld these two systems together."

 

Asked how the pace of progress could be increased, both Gray and Evans cautioned that change would take time, using almost identical language. "If there were a silver bullet, we would have found it," Evans said.

 

"I don't think there is a magic solution or a magic bullet or a quick fix," Gray said.

 

A possible model

 

Gray did mention with approval a DCPS school that has begun to turn around under an arrangement similar to what Wells is suggesting: Stanton Elementary in Ward 8, which for the past 3 years has been managed by a charter organization, Scholar Academies. According to the school's website, since then math scores have increased by 320% and reading scores by 100%. Those familiar with the school before the takeover say it's now a much calmer, happier place. (Disclosure: I serve on the board of DC Scholars, a charter school that is also managed by Scholar Academies.)

 

But Gray brought up Stanton not as the wave of the future but as an example of the "multiplicity" of approaches necessary to education reform. "It's yet another innovative approach that is starting to produce substantially increased outcomes for our children," he said. Then he added, "I don't know that we can predict exactly how long it will take."

 

For those impatient with the pace of reform, those words aren't particularly reassuring. Wells' idea of bringing in charter organizations with proven track records to turn around struggling schools could give the system the jumpstart it needs. Wells mentioned that it can take DCPS 3 or 4 years to turn around a school, but there are quite a few DCPS schools that show no sign of turning around at all.

 

Those concerned, like Shallal, that charters are selective or that admission is unpredictable should consider that a charter-operated DCPS school would most likely be required to admit all comers, just like a regular DCPS school. That's certainly the case at Stanton. And while Shallal has a good point about the need to address the effects of poverty on students, there's no reason that can't be done at a charter-operated school as well as at a traditional DCPS one.

 

Can charters do the job?

 

It's harder to turn a failing school around than to start a school from scratch, and not all charter operators will be willing or able to take on the job. There have been a couple of failed experiments with charter partnerships at the high school level, most notably at Dunbar.

 

But high schools are particularly tough places to re-invent, and it's important to select a charter operator with experience in turnarounds. The charter organization that came into Dunbar had previously operated a charter traditional public high school in New York that it had started from scratch—and that was application-only.

 

The experiment at Stanton seems to be working, without the advantages of self-selection or "cherry-picking" that critics say charters enjoy. We may not know exactly why charter organizations can sometimes succeed where DCPS hasn't been able to, but maybe we should give them more opportunities to try.

 

 

We education wonks have been arguing for years about the amount of testing in schools, even though we usually don’t know what we are talking about. It’s too much! It’s not! I don’t recall anyone providing any information about how much time is actually devoted to testing each year.

 

Lucky for us, the Boston-based nonprofit Teach Plus has gotten money from the Noyce and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations to answer the question. The researchers reported that administering tests takes much longer than school district officials say it does. Also, tests designed by school districts might be more time-wasting than the annual state tests we complain about most.

 

Authors Mark Teoh, Celine Coggins, Christine Guan and Tamara Hiller also examined a category of tests that bothers students more than adults. Read the report before your next PTA meeting. It’s only 24 pages long, and some of it is derived from data and interviews in Fairfax, Prince George’s and Howard counties, and the District.

 

The report’s first finding sounds like a victory for people like me who have argued that testing isn’t so bad. Across 12 urban districts, the authors concluded, the average amount of time students spend on state and district tests equaled only 1.7 percent of the school year “in third and seventh grade and substantially less in kindergarten.”

 

I am not celebrating. The report showed that figure is deceptive based on the testing calendars that school districts give to parents and the general public. The authors surveyed 300 teachers in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis and the District who reported that the actual test administration time, based on their first-hand experience, is more than double that length.

 

In kindergarten, the school districts counted 2.3 hours a year of testing. The teachers said 7 hours. In third grade, the districts said 14.2 hours; the teachers said 27.7 hours. In seventh grade, where teachers and students had more experience with the process, the numbers were closer; districts reported 14.9 hours and teachers said 16.4 hours. Keep in mind this is only the time spent giving the test. The report did not assess the time spent preparing students for the test or analyzing the resulting data. That would be a much higher number.

 

That was not the report’s only troubling discovery. It found enormous differences among urban districts. A typical Denver student, for instance, “will have about 159.4 hours of math and English Language Arts testing by the time he/she finishes the eighth grade,” the report said. “By comparison the typical student in Chicago will have had just 53.8 hours of math and ELA testing. The difference of about 105 hours, after nine school years, amounts to about 19 instructional days, or almost four weeks of school.”

 

The District was somewhat below average in scheduled testing time compared to 11 other urban districts surveyed. But it had more testing time than the three suburban Washington districts surveyed. Nationally, suburban district schedules showed 1.3 percent of the school year spent in testing, compared to 1.7 percent in urban districts.

 

There was one mention of classroom and school tests, the most stressful to our children because they usually count on report cards. The researchers said these under-studied assessments “absorbed substantially more time than state- and district-mandated assessments.” Children rarely testify at hearings or write op-eds, so that issue is going nowhere.

 

District-designed tests take more time than state tests, the report concluded. Teachers nationwide complained, as D.C. teachers do, that district preliminary tests to help prepare students for annual tests often ask irrelevant questions and waste time. That is something local districts might be able to fix. Reducing the total time devoted to testing will not be so easy and might have unexpected consequences.