- City Announces Contenders for Stevens School Property [AppleTree, Community Academy, and Eagle Academy PCS are mentioned]
- Survey Finds Teachers Don't Trust Annual State Skills Tests
City Announces Contenders for Stevens School Property [AppleTree, Community Academy, and Eagle Academy PCS are mentioned]
The Dupont Current
By Brady Holt
March 15, 2012
A total of 12 developers and educators have filed applications with the city as potential new users of the West End’s vacant Stevens Elementary School property, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for and Economic Development announced Monday.
The six commercial developers and six educators replied to the District’s “request for expressions of interest” for the city-owned property, which includes the 21st Street school building and an undeveloped L Street schoolyard. Officials envision a developer building a project on the schoolyard and using part of the proceeds to renovate the historic school for an educational user.
According to economic development office spokesperson Jose Sousa, the six development teams that expressed interest are Akridge and Argos; Capstone Development and Green River Partners; Donohoe Development Company and Decca Development Corp.; EastBanc Inc.; Lincoln Property Company and Mosaic Urban Partners; and MRP Realty and CSG Urban Partners.
The educational users are AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation; Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School; Eagle Academy Public Charter School; GEMS Americas, Urban Atlantic Education and The Robert Bobb Group; Ivymount Schools and Programs; and Living Classrooms of the National Capital Region, said Sousa. The economic development office hasn’t yet offered any details about the applications it has received beyond naming the entities that filed them.
Sousa said more details may be presented March 21 to the Foggy Bottom/West End advisory neighborhood commission, but he said the office is still privately vetting the applications against basic criteria. Once the economic development office clears the applications, it will ask each developer to pair up with one or more of the educational users — and vice versa — to discuss how they would share the site. According to the office’s plan, their joint applications will be due May 1 and presented to the community for feedback at that point.
The office will then pick its preferred “pair” later this spring, and the D.C. Council will need to approve the transfer of the Stevens site to that partnership.Foggy Bottom/West End advisory neighborhood commission chair Florence Harmon wrote in an email that she’s pleased with the responses to the city’s solicitation.
“I am excited about the applicants for the Stevens School project and appreciative of the efforts of Mayor Gray and the Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and his staff in making this project possible,” she wrote. Neighbors had blocked a previous plan for the Stevens site, prepared under former Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration, that included no educational component. Officials said they’ve learned from the mistakes of that previous process, and have pledged greater transparency and more opportunities for public input.
USA Today
By Greg Toppo
March 15, 2012
Despite years of rhetoric from lawmakers and education reformers about the importance of tying teacher pay to student test scores, fewer teachers now believe the move will keep good teachers in the classroom.
A new online survey of 10,000 U.S. teachers, released Thursday, finds that only 16% believe linking student performance and teacher pay is "absolutely essential" or "very important" in retaining good teachers. That's down from 28% in 2010.
In all, only 52% of teachers say it'll make any difference at all, down from 65% two years ago, the first year the survey was done.
The massive national teacher survey by the educational publisher Scholastic was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The push to link teacher retention and salaries to scores on annual state skills tests has become commonplace in U.S. education, promoted most significantly by the Obama administration's Race to the Top grants, which all but require school districts to do so. The survey finds that teachers simply don't trust the tests. Only 26% say they're "an accurate reflection of student achievement."
Most teachers also say that simply doing away with evaluations won't work, either: 92% say tenure, granted to many teachers after only a handful of years in the classroom, "should not protect ineffective teachers."
The findings show that teachers welcome evaluations, said Margery Mayer, Scholastic's education president. "They just didn't want it all based on one test."
Teachers also say they're seeing students whose families are struggling in the sluggish economy. About half of veteran teachers surveyed said they're seeing more students come to school hungry or living in poverty. Those findings were a revelation, Mayer said, showing that teachers "are the front line on poverty in our country."
In a finding that may reflect teachers' weariness over the lagging economy and anemic state budgets, fewer teachers now say that higher salaries in general will retain good teachers: 75%, compared with 86% in 2010.
That finding doesn't surprise Cate Dossetti, an English teacher at Fresno (Calif.) High School. By de-emphasizing pay, she said, teachers "are wanting to refocus the conversation around the real work that they do in the classroom every day."
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