NEWS
- The FOCUS 2015 Gala [FOCUS, Cesar Chavez PCS, and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Applications up in D.C. School Enrollment Lottery
- Do not abandon No Child Left Behind
- Can volunteers help kids read more proficiently? New research says yes.
The FOCUS 2015 Gala [FOCUS, Cesar Chavez PCS, and Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 30, 2015
Last Thursday evening my wife Michele and I had the distinct honor of attending the 2015 Friends of Choice in Urban Schools Gala. The annual event had a special poignancy this year because it was the final one that would include Robert Cane as the organization's executive director.
Perhaps due to the significance of the evening or maybe because of the uncertain support charters face with the start of a new Mayoral administration, the room was packed wall-to-wall with members of Washington, D.C.'s school choice movement. Simultaneously, however, the venue never felt crowded. This may be because the gala was being held for the first time in the stately Whittemore House, located just north of Dupont Circle. The venue is comprised of several rooms which appear purposefully graduated in size from smallest to largest as guests traveled from the entrance parlor to the dance floor while being serenaded to the ethereal music of the Glenn Pearson Orchestra. The outdoor terrace that guests could enjoy on this warm day also helped decompress the space.
After participants had ample time to enjoy the plentiful food and drink it was time for the formal remarks. Accompanying the program was a highly professional glossy brochure containing the agenda and advertisements by many of our local charters. The ads contained demographic information about the schools such as the year they opened, the number of students enrolled, the name of the school leader, its location, and a short summary of its academic program. Many of these, along with ads from business enterprises, also included congratulatory remarks to Mr. Cane about his superlative career.
Several awards were presented by Mr. Cane. FOCUS recognized charters in four categories: Academic Achievement (13 schools); Closing the Achievement Gap (11 schools); Special Achievement (12 Schools); and Pioneers (9 schools and FOCUS that began at the start of D.C.'s charter movement in 1997). I was seated directly in back of Cesar Chavez for Public Policy PCS's Irasema Salcido, a Pioneer Award winner who I began my charter work with 18 years ago, and down the row from Washington Latin PCS's Martha Cutts, an Academic Achievement Award winner, with whom I will end my direct involvement with charter school boards in a few months.
But the highlight for everyone in the room were the remarks from the 2015 FOCUS Charter Champion Award designee Kevin Chavous. It has been a little while since I last heard Mr. Chavous speak. Now I want the opportunity to listen to him each and every day. The passion with with he talked about the urgent need for school reform is second to none.
Mr. Chavous reminded the audience that half of all children of color across the United States drop out of high school. Earlier this year, the guest of honor remarked, it was revealed that 17 countries scored higher on the international PISA examination in reading, 21 in science, and 26 in math. In addition, Mr. Chavous pointed out that for all the opportunity in this country we are the least socially mobile people in the world. For those born in poverty it is extremely likely that they will remain in poverty their entire lives.
Of course, Mr. Chavous asserted, the answer to these problems is to greatly improve Kindergarten to grade 12 education. But he contended that we must understand the need to fly the plane while we fix it. This is a phrase Mr. Chavous has used in the past, and it simply means that as we fight to make our schools great we cannot turn our backs on those that are currently trapped in low performing institutions.
School choice, according to Mr. Chavous, is the way to bring this needed relief. He said that as a movement we need to offer parents all forms of quality options that help kids learn; charters, traditional public schools, specialty schools, religious schools, and school vouchers.
In closing he asked the audience to remember a couple of things. First, Mr. Chavous warned against replicating the very thing you have been challenging. He stated that we should remember the notion of starting just one great school and then another. The honoree admitted that one of his fears is that as he travel the country he sees signs of education reformers imitating local school districts "in practice and in deed."
Then he asked the crowd, "How many cures of cancer are trapped in the mind of child we have failed to educate?" Mr. Chavous then modified this statement to inquire "How many D.C. charter school students will help change the world?" He said that he realizes that many in our movement, especially teachers, may question their effectiveness and grow weary of the struggles in the face of regulation and politics. He requested that people never lose the sense of urgency and commitment for every child. Mr. Chavous extolled everyone in attendance to believe in what you do and keep on doing it. He declared that felt humbled and honored just to be in their presence.
Applications up in D.C. School Enrollment Lottery
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
March 27, 2015
More than 20,000 students applied in the first round of the citywide enrollment lottery for next school year, according to numbers released by the mayor’s office Friday afternoon.
That marked an increase of about 3,000 applications over last year. Enrollment has been on the rise in charter and traditional public schools, as more families are staying in the city and choosing public schools. City officials also conducted an intensive outreach campaign to make more families aware of the lottery in advance of the deadline.
This year, 72 percent of applicants were matched with a school, up slightly from last year. Of those, 85 percent were offered a seat at one of their top three school choices.
This is the second year that families could apply through a common application and enrollment lottery for more than 200 traditional and charter schools. Historically, families had to submit multiple applications to multiple schools with multiple deadlines. This is the first year that the wait list will also be centralized. The application and wait list are managed by My School DC, which is operated by the deputy mayor for education’s office.
D.C. Public Schools reported a 9 percent increase in the number of applications that included at least one traditional school – from 13,480 to 14,673 – and a 17 percent increase in the number of families who were matched with a D.C. Public School.
Christopher Rinkus, deputy chief of student enrollment and school funding for D.C. Public Schools, said the increase reflects two things: parents becoming savvier consumers of information that’s more accessible through the common application, as well as schools doing a better job reaching out to interested families.
The result is “cutting down on the number of applications that go to the hyper-popular five or ten schools,” he said.
Do not abandon No Child Left Behind
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
March 28, 2015
U.S. EDUCATION officials in February had some modestly good news to announce: the nation’s high school graduation rate had inched up to a historic high. This month came even more encouraging news: Those rates have improved for all types of students, as the achievement gap that separates minority students from their white peers has narrowed. This progress is not mere happenstance; it is a product of reforms that have brought rigor and accountability to American public education. We hope that reality will not be lost on Congress as it debates the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.
According to the department’s National Center for Education Statistics, graduation rates for black and Hispanic students increased by nearly 4 percentage points from 2011 to 2013, outpacing the growth for all students in the nation. They weren’t alone as increases were reported for all other subgroups of students: white, Asian, low-income, English language learners, young people with disabilities and American Indians. The gap in achievement between white students and black and Hispanic students shrunk for those three years from 15.3 percent in 2011 to 13.4 percent in 2013. The overall graduation rate for the class of 2013 was placed at 81 percent, up from 79 percent three years ago when states started calculating rates in a uniform way.
Of course, that’s still not good enough, but the promising gains showed how it’s possible to give targeted help to students who need it while still lifting overall performance — thus preparing more students for careers or college.
No Child Left Behind insisted on annual testing and demanded that school systems track test scores of differentiated student groups. Until then, it was easy for school districts to ignore and hide the failures of minority or economically-disadvantaged students. Even more important is that after the law went into effect in 2002, school districts were required to actually do something — improve instruction, provide additional help, get better teachers — to address the struggles of these students. There is still much work to be done in improving educational opportunities for every student. All the more reason that the nation must continue to measure performance.
Congress hopes to rewrite No Child Left Behind this year; a House bill seems stalled, but Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate education panel, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking committee member, are working on a bipartisan bill. By all means, they should correct any overly punitive or unhelpful provisions of the law, but they should not abandon this fundamental principle: Schools need to know whether students are learning and do something about it when they aren’t.
Can volunteers help kids read more proficiently? New research says yes.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 28, 2015
Public schools have long relied on volunteers to manage bake sales and to chaperone field trips. But what if schools could harness and organize volunteers to do something bigger and more difficult?
They can, according to new research that suggests that volunteers could be instrumental in helping millions of American children to read proficiently.
There have been plenty of studies on small volunteer tutoring programs that reach a few dozen children at a time in individual schools. But until now, there has not been evidence that such programs can make a difference on a much larger scale, across many schools and for thousands of students.
“Bringing volunteer programs to scale is often quite difficult, so that’s really the exciting thing about the research coming out now,” said Robin Jacob, a research scientist at the University of Michigan’s education school.
An independent evaluation of the Minnesota Reading Corps, which relies on AmeriCorps service members to identify and tutor struggling students, showed that preschoolers in the program were far more likely to gain the literacy skills they need to be ready for kindergarten than other preschoolers.
A separate study of a different tutoring program, Oakland, Calif.-based Reading Partners, found that it added about two months of additional growth in students’ reading proficiency. And it made that difference despite depending on AmeriCorps members and community volunteers, who had no special training in literacy education.
Both programs already have expanded into multiple states and have visions of growing further, bolstered by the burgeoning evidence that, armed with the right training and curriculum, volunteers can play an important role in closing the nation’s persistent achievement gap in reading.
“Volunteers really can make a difference, and they’re a somewhat underutilized resource by schools to improve things for kids,” Jacob said. “It’s something that deserves wider attention than it’s gotten in recent years.”
Paid reading specialists have been tutoring children in school for decades, but experts say that their roles have shifted over time, and specialists are now as likely to spend time coaching classroom teachers as working one-on-one with children. At the same time, schools are struggling to address the sharp rise in the number of students with intensive literacy needs, including children who are poor and English-language learners.
Organized volunteers are stepping into that void, but the prospect of tapping an army of untrained people to tackle students’ literacy problems doesn’t sit well with everyone.
Richard Allington, a reading education expert at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, said that although he appreciates volunteers’ goodwill, systemic change will come only when teachers are trained to be reading specialists who know how to identify and address their students’ struggles.
“Just having someone available to listen to you read or to read with you is always helpful,” he said. “But if I was a parent and somebody wanted to send my kid out of class to a reading program to work with a volunteer, I’d tell them, ‘I’ll take you to court.’ ”
But leaders of the Minnesota Reading Corps and Reading Partners are seeing interest in their programs grow as more schools see what they can accomplish.
Michael Lombardo, chief executive of Reading Partners, said that about 18 million people volunteer in U.S. schools. He hopes his organization can help persuade more people to volunteer by giving them a chance to effect change.
“Easily it could be 50 million; it could be more,” he said. “Our tutoring force is virtually unlimited.”
Giving it a test run
The Minnesota Reading Corps began as an experiment with 250 children in 2003, the year after Alice Seagren, then a state legislator, visited a school that managed to do the seemingly impossible: get every first-grader reading at their grade level by the year’s end.
“I was thrilled,” said Seagren, whose push to replicate the success in that school gave rise to the Minnesota Reading Corps, which now serves 30,000 children in eight states and the District.
The approach at that Minnesota school relied on materials developed by University of Minnesota researchers. Teachers and aides were able to use tools to track students’ skills and to intervene with targeted one-on-one help at the first sign of trouble, such as when a child did not know the sounds that letters make or when a student could not assemble letters to make words.
Seagren determined that handing over all that tracking and tutoring to members of AmeriCorps — often called the domestic Peace Corps — would bring down costs and make the reading program easier to replicate.
For kindergarten through third grade, the AmeriCorps volunteers assess children three times a year to determine who needs what kind of help. They pull struggling students out of their classes every day for 20-minute one-on-one sessions, using scripted lessons to work on literacy skills ranging from identifying letter sounds to reading fluency.
In preschool, the volunteers not only tutor children but also embed themselves in classrooms all year long, working alongside teachers.
One recent morning at Aiton Elementary School in Northeast Washington, AmeriCorps member Flori Kirkpatrick led her whole class in an alphabet song — “A, ah, alligator,” the children chanted, opening their arms to mimic a toothy reptile — before she retreated to the back of the classroom to work with a 4-year-old named Devonte Berry.
“Letters, letters, letters have names,” Kirkpatrick sang. “What is the name of this letter?” she said, pointing at a lower-case E.
“That one has a hole in it,” said Devonte, who named the letter correctly after some patient coaxing.
The volunteers get just a few days of training before they begin working in schools. But they learn how to talk with children so that every moment of the day — from morning greetings to lunchtime conversation — becomes an opportunity to encourage children to practice using language. And they receive ongoing guidance from an “internal coach,” who is a teacher at the school, and an “external coach,” who is an employee of the Minnesota Reading Corps.
Leaders have been encouraged by the results.
A 2012 study found that Minnesota Reading Corps participants were three times less likely to be referred to special education, saving the state an estimated $9 million a year. Kindergartners and first-graders who received help from the Minnesota Reading Corps made significantly more progress than other children, even after just one semester, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers from the NORC at the University of Chicago and paid for by the Corporation for National and Community Service, AmeriCorps’ parent agency. The program had less of an effect for children in grades two and three.
The newest research, on the preschool program, suggests an even stronger effect.
By the end of the school year, children in Reading Corps classrooms on average met or exceeded all five literacy targets for kindergarten readiness, which are based on predictors identified by a panel of national reading experts and include knowledge of letter names and sounds, rhyming, alliteration, and vocabulary. Children in comparison classrooms, on average, met only one target by the end of the school year.
“We really want to close the gap in vocabulary and oral language, and we are closing that gap,” said Kate Horst, the pre-kindergarten master coach and trainer, who developed much of the curriculum that AmeriCorps members use. “We feel like we really are making inroads.”
The Minnesota Reading Corps is trying to raise $10 million to continue growing, with the goal of expanding into 10 additional states in the next five years. In Minnesota, the program costs between $800 and $900 per child each year, with the federal government bearing about 60 percent of the cost through its funding for AmeriCorps and with the state government paying for most of the rest.
One-on-one time
Reading Partners is undergoing an expansion, too, and it also relies on a highly structured curriculum. Volunteers, who range in age from teenagers to senior citizens, pick up a packet of exercises to complete during the hour they spend with their students each week.
At each school, an AmeriCorps member serves as site coordinator, training and managing all of the volunteers.
Children who work with a Reading Partners tutor make significantly more reading progress than their counterparts who don’t, according to a randomized, controlled study of the program at 19 schools in three states. The study was conducted by the social science research firm MDRC and was funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Jacob, the University of Michigan research scientist, was the lead author of the Reading Partners study. She said that the students who benefited most from the tutoring were those who entered the program furthest behind.
“Even if it’s only an hour and a half a week, that individual time with somebody who’s just attending to that student’s particular needs can be really effective,” she said.
But even though the program makes a significant difference, she said, tutoring is not enough to solve all children’s reading struggles. Reading Partners offers the equivalent of two extra months of instruction per year, but some children are years behind.
“The model, as it currently runs, is not going to close the achievement gap for all the kids who need it,” Jacob said.
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