- D.C. Test Tampering Hurting Teachers, Poisoning Schools
- DCPS Budget: the Rhee Effect
- Graduation Rates Rise
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
March 23, 2012
When J.P. Cotton began teaching at Davis Elementary School in Southeast Washington in August 2010, he puzzled over the scores of his fifth-graders on the previous spring’s D.C. tests. They were doing poorly in his class, as were most of the children at a school long plagued by low expectations and teacher turnover.
Yet several of them had scored proficient as fourth-graders on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams. How could that be?
The answer, several colleagues told Cotton, was that at least one school staffer handling the exams had found ways to help students change their wrong answers into right ones. An administrator told him that one of his students’ former teachers was no longer at the school because of a lapse of integrity. Still the new principal, Maisha Riddlesprigger, told Cotton and other young teachers she had hired that they would turn Davis around.
That hasn’t happened. In fact, Cotton was dismissed last summer as the result, it seems to me, of events he had nothing to do with. Many incidents of possible test manipulation in the District — as indicated by large numbers of wrong-to-right erasures detected by the test company, CTB/McGraw Hill — have gone mostly uninvestigated and unpunished. These questions are poisoning the system.
A few teachers such as Cotton are speaking up about this. Fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki did so in my Post colleague Bill Turque’s recent examination of the D.C. teacher evaluation system. If more educators reveal what they know, school district leaders may be shamed into finally launching a deep, aggressive investigation into the corruption that threatens to ruin their heartfelt efforts to save the city’s kids.
Cotton worked hard at Davis. He said his evaluations from classroom observers got better as the year went on. But his students failed to outdo their suspiciously high fourth-grade scores to save his job. Those test results counted 50 percent in Cotton’s final evaluation. He was not allowed to come back this year despite what he said were Riddlesprigger’s efforts to save him. Riddlesprigger did not respond to a request for comment.
D.C. schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said “we take potential cheating very seriously. . . The picture you appear to want to draw is just not supported by the facts.”
School leaders continue to quote a CTB/McGraw Hill report that found unusual numbers of wrong answers erased in favor of right ones in more than 100 schools on the D.C. CAS test, but concluded the erasures “may be simply coincidental and do not necessarily indicate inappropriate behavior.” They have cited no research buttressing the bizarre notion that children changing as many as a dozen answers each from wrong to right — an impossibility to veteran educators I have consulted — could be the result of anything but tampering by adults.
I have asked Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson for some alternative, innocent explanation that makes sense to a seasoned classroom teacher like herself. So far, neither she nor her staff has answered that question.
Cotton said other Davis teachers and parents have useful information. But under the narrow rules that D.C. officials have imposed on their latest testing probe, Davis will not be investigated because it had no unusual gains in individual student scores from 2010 to 2011.
Has it occurred to those running the city’s schools that if Davis’s 2010 scores were inflated, then they would have gone down, not up, in 2011? That is what happened — from 23 to 15 percent in math proficiency and from 25 to 24 percent in reading. But no investigator has called on Cotton for leads.
The vast majority of possibly tainted test scores have been ignored. The new teacher evaluation system could be using distorted numbers.
A school system desperate for a jolt of honesty gets officially sanctioned cowardice instead.
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
March 23, 2012
D.C. public and public charter schools get an additional $86 million in the FY 2013 budget proposed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray on Friday, much of it to cover projected enrollment increases. That includes a 2 percent increase in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, raising the basic allocation from $8,945 to $9,124. There is also $40 million — savings from rollbacks in private special education tuition — to be reinvested in expanding the capacity of neighborhood schools to support disabled kids. The charter school facility allotment stays unchanged at $3,000 per student.
The capital budget provides for two new middle schools in Ward 5 — per the plan worked out with the community — and modernizations for all existing middle schools, a priority of D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown.
You can see the operating budget here and the capital budget here.
One of the more striking line items on the operating side is for private grant funds. They averaged about $21 million between 2010 and 2012, as the Broad, Arnold, Walton and Robertson foundations supported the labor contract negotiated by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, one that eliminated seniority preferences and established big performance bonuses under IMPACT.
But the Rhee Effect is there in bold relief on Page D-2. With Rhee gone and the three-year foundation commitment up, private largess is considerably more scarce. Grant funds are projected at just $3.8 million for FY 2013, an 82 percent drop. Officials have announced that the cost of the IMPACT bonuses has been passed on to the individual schools.
The city has scheduled a series of community briefings to explain the budget and answer questions:
WARD 8: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Monday, April 2, Savoy Elementary/Thurgood Marshall Gymnasium
WARD 3: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 4, Alice Deal Middle School.
WARD 5: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 10, McKinley Tech High School
WARD 7: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 17, Deanwood Recreation Center.
WARD 2: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Thursday, April 19, Historic Charles Sumner School and Archives
WARD 4: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Monday, April 23, Brightwood Elementary School.
WARD 6: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 25, Eastern Senior High School.
WARD 1: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Monday, April 30, Bell Multicultural High School.
The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
March 25, 2012
The nation's high school graduation rate rose from 72 percent to 75.5 percent between 2002 and 2009. The progress reflects intensive efforts by a number of states to develop and implement strategies to keep students from dropping out. And one key factor in prodding states to act was federal pressure — most notably, the oft-maligned No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
The uptick in graduation was detailed in a report released by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with several nonprofits, including one headed by former secretary of state Colin L. Powell. It also chronicled the decline of “dropout factories,” high schools where at least 60 percent of students don’t graduate on time, from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,550 in 2010.
The number of students who leave school without a diploma is still far too high; that’s all the more reason to spotlight the success of a dozen states — led by New York and Tennessee — in making dramatic gains in graduation rates by implementing such programs as early identification of struggling students. The District was not included in the study; Maryland and Virginia saw only slight increases, which should spur them to evaluate what else they can do. Maryland, for example, needs to change its archaic law that ends compulsory school attendance at age 16. We hope bills in the current General Assembly, supported by state school officials and Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), will get favorable treatment.
Key to the success in raising the national graduation rate was the decision by the Education Department to make changes in NCLB regulations so that states had to use the same methodology in computing graduation rates, instead of concocting their own definitions of a dropout. Also important were millions of extra dollars in school improvement grants the government set aside to help districts turn around dropout factories.
With the next iteration of No Child Left Behind still to be determined by Congress and the administration, it’s important that the federal government not abdicate its critical role in holding states accountable. As this new report makes depressingly clear, just as some states will take appropriate actions, there are others that, left to their own devices, will fall behind.
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