NEWS
- Hoping to raise interest in books, public library opens school branch [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
- New York City charters leave thousands of seats unfilled despite exploding demand, study finds
- Will 'Backfilling' Become the Next Big Charter Schools Debate?
- NEA: No Child Left Behind rewrite doesn’t level the playing field
- Is it a student’s civil right to take a federally mandated standardized test?
Hoping to raise interest in books, public library opens school branch [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
April 12, 2015
The kindergarten students sat in rows on a rainbow-colored carpet and listened to a story during a visit to their new school library. Then they did a reading cheer — “Read, Baby, Read!” — before they got to go “shopping” for books.
Within a few minutes, the children at D.C. Prep Benning Public Charter School were lined up clutching books about Hot Wheels, princesses, pandas, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Curious George, Superman, and Pete the Cat, to name a few.
The students usually select books in their classrooms, going through shelves or bins that are organized by reading level. But the Ward 7 school added 5,000 new books in March by opening a D.C. Public Library branch inside the school.
“For many of them, seeing that many books in one space is really exciting,” said Emily Jeffries, a special education coordinator at the school who is helping oversee the new library.
The partnership is a pilot program designed to increase access to books for D.C. children. Charter schools are far less likely than traditional schools to have school libraries.
During the 2011-2012 school year, 49 percent of the nation’s public charter schools reported having a library media center, compared with 93 percent of traditional public schools, according to a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics. And just one-third of public charter schools had full-time, state-certified librarians, compared with two-thirds of traditional public schools.
A D.C. Public Charter School Board survey of District charter schools in 2014 showed similar results. Of the 100 campuses that responded, 43 had libraries outside of their classrooms. Many charter schools reported having “classroom libraries,” or smaller collections designed to support reading instruction.
School libraries play a different role, educators say, because they offer a far wider selection of books, encouraging students to explore their interests and read for pleasure.
Libraries are a consistent feature in traditional D.C. public schools, although staffing levels have fluctuated over time and collections have varied widely from school to school.
The District’s public school system has increased investments in its libraries in recent years and hired many new librarians. Next year, all but four schools are expected to have at least a part-time librarian on staff, said Jennifer Boudrye, the system’s director of library programs.
Charter schools, which are publicly funded and independently operated, have greater discretion over spending and often have difficulty finding adequate facilities.
“We always plan to have a library,” said Emily Lawson, founder and chief executive of D.C. Prep. “But first we need to get a permanent facility and then grow to a certain size.”
The first D.C. Prep school opened in a temporary location in 2003. It moved the next year to a former warehouse in Ward 5 and later opened an elementary school in another former warehouse down the street. Both Edgewood campuses have school libraries staffed by volunteers.
D.C. Prep’s Benning Elementary School campus opened in 2008 in a former D.C. public school building, and it was renovated last year. It had space for a library, but that space largely stored books for reading instruction, Lawson said.
When she heard that the city’s library system was looking for a charter school to host a branch library last summer, she volunteered for the pilot. “It helped us get a better library much faster,” she said.
It was an attractive deal for the school. D.C. Prep furnished the room and installed the shelves. D.C. Public Library provided the collection, about 5,000 children’s books, as well as the librarians. A children’s librarian from the Dorothy I. Height/Benning library and an intern staff the library two days a week.
Funding for the pilot came from a one-time supplement to D.C. Public Library’s collection budget at end of fiscal 2014, said George Williams, a spokesman for the public libraries. The budget for the new branch at DC Prep is $50,000, but only about half that amount has been spent, he said.
The pilot program is one of a few partnerships developing between the city’s public libraries and public schools.
School and library officials are working on a system to provide all D.C. public school students with a library card on their first day of school, said Richard Reyes-Gavilan, executive director of the D.C. Public Library.
The public libraries and D.C. Public Schools are launching a feasibility study to explore centralizing their online book catalogue, and the ordering, purchasing and delivering of new books and materials.
Two sets of city employees are doing similar jobs, Reyes-Gavilan said. He is interested in ways that the systems can share staffing and resources, including books.
He cited the “Limitless Libraries” program in Nashville as a possible model. There, student ID cards serve as library cards and students check out books from a shared catalogue and have them delivered at school.
D.C. Public Schools is interested in tapping a larger collection of books as it works to build up more equitable library collections across the system.
Historically, the school system did not fund library books annually, and schools relied on philanthropic support or parent donations to stock shelves. That yielded large collections in some schools and small, outdated collections in many others.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced in March that next year’s budget will include a per-student allocation for books ranging from $20 to $30, depending on a school’s population of students who are considered at risk because of poverty or other factors. The D.C. Public Education Fund is raising money to address the disparities.
Scott Pearson, executive director of the city’s charter board, said he hopes the partnership with the D.C. Public Library can expand so that more charter schools can host public libraries.
The public library system is surveying students at D.C. Prep about their reading habits and interest in reading before and after the opening of the branch library to see what impact it has.
“Meeting state benchmarks is a goal,” said Maura Englender, assistant principal of academics at D.C. Prep, referring to annual learning and testing goals. “But we want motivation around reading to be high.”
The school library seems to be helping with that, she said.
In the weeks since it opened, a library club has developed. A group of students come in every Tuesday at the end of the day to check out extra books. And lunchroom conversations often revolve around books, especially on days that the students visit the school library, she said.
One group of third-grade boys jockeys for the chance to check out books from the “Big Nate” series of children’s novels, based on a comic strip. They take turns and are often urging one another to hurry up so they can have their turn with the next book in the series.
“For that to happen with 8-year-old boys is so exciting,” Englender said.
New York City charters leave thousands of seats unfilled despite exploding demand, study finds
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 10, 2015
New York City’s charter schools are leaving thousands of seats unfilled each year despite ballooning demand and long waiting lists, according to an analysis of public data to be released Friday.
The decision not to fill seats that are left vacant by departing students deprives other deserving students of places in the schools, the report argues. It also means that charter schools can appear to be improving, according to proficiency rates on standardized tests, even as the absolute number of children scoring proficient declines each year, it says.
The report, entitled “No Seat Left Behind” and issued by the Harlem-based parent advocacy group Democracy Builders, calls on charter schools to begin voluntarily “backfilling” their empty seats — or admitting new students to replace those who leave.
Traditional public schools are required to fill empty seats, often taking in children who are English language learners, or homeless or poor. Some charter schools also backfill, but many do not, allowing new students to enroll only at certain entry points — such as kindergarten, fifth or sixth grade, and ninth grade.
“We love to say charter schools are public schools,” said Princess Lyles, executive director of Democracy Builders. “We have to be who we say are. If we want to proclaim that we are public schools, then we have to do some of the things that traditional public schools have to do.”
In New York City, charter schools lose an average of between 6 and 11 percent of students annually, Democracy Builders found. Since many schools do not replace those students, more than 2,500 seats are left empty in grades 3 through 8 alone, according to the report.
“One seat left open is one too many,” Lyles said, arguing that the 50,000 children on wait lists deserve as much access as possible to the city’s charter schools. The city’s charter schools enroll about 80,000 children.
Charter school critics have long contended that charters’ refusal to backfill has given them an unfair leg up in comparisons with traditional schools because a steady influx of new students — who are often behind grade level — can hurt math and reading proficiency rates.
The new report echoes that criticism but was written by charter school advocates. The founder of Democracy Builders is Seth Andrew, who also founded one of the city’s most vaunted charter school networks, Democracy Prep (which backfills its seats).
The report includes interactive charts showing proficiency rates and attrition in grades three through eight for charter and traditional schools.
The data show that attrition has left a considerable number of vacancies at some of the most acclaimed charter schools in the city, such as Success Academy, which is known for producing high test scores even though it primarily enrolls poor children.
Between 2006 and 2014, the proportion of students at Success Academy who scored proficient in math ranged from 94 percent in third grade to 97 percent in eighth grade, according to the report.
But the number of test-takers declined with each passing year, as students departed, and the number of proficient students fell from 88 students in third grade to 31 students in eighth.
By contrast, many traditional schools see their numbers increase in later grades. In District 7, for example, between 2006 and 2014 the average number of test-takers increased from 77 to 109 between third and eighth grade, while proficiency fell from 30 to 28 percent.
“Without backfilling, a school can maintain the illusion of success,” Lyles and her Democracy Builders colleague Dan Clark wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in February. The organization is supporting a bill before the New York City council that would require schools to make public far more information about student attrition and backfilling.
In a recent WNYC radio interview, Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz called backfilling a “long, complicated debate” and said her schools now accept new students through fourth grade. Accepting older children who were not prepared academically for Success Academy’s rigors would be detrimental to other students, she said.
“It’s not really fair for the seventh grader or high school student to have to be educated with a child who’s reading at a second or third grade level,” she said, according to a report in Chalkbeat New York.
The report is one sign that backfilling has emerged as a key issue dividing charter advocates around the nation. It is a question that has taken on new urgency particularly in cities where charter schools enroll a substantial share of students and are coming under pressure to reexamine not only their enrollment policies, but also their suspension and expulsion practices and their services for special-needs students.
Michael J. Petrilli, president of the conservative Fordham Institute think tank, wrote in a recent blog post that decisions about such policies should be left to individual schools.
“That’s the whole point of charter schools: to allow educators to escape the Gordian knot of regulations and requirements that have imprisoned traditional public schools,” he wrote. “When we force charter schools to backfill, or adopt uniform discipline policies, or mimic district schools’ approach to special education, we turn them into the very things they were intended to replace.”
Will 'Backfilling' Become the Next Big Charter Schools Debate?
Education Week
By Arianna Prothero
April 10, 2015
A parent and school-choice advocacy organization in New York City is calling on the city's charter schools to fill thousands of empty seats in 3rd through 8th grades.
Backfilling, or replacing students who leave in the middle of their elementary, middle or high school careers, has traditionally been more of a technical term, but it appears as though it may be on its way to becoming a new front in the debate over whether charter schools are equitably serving students.
"Charter schools in New York City that leave classroom seats empty are artificially inflating perceived performance at the expense of real wait-listed children," said Princess Lyles, the executive director of Democracy Builders in a statement. The group released a report Friday documenting the extent of the issue in the city. It found that charter schools lost an average of 6 to 11 percent of their students each year in the period from 2006-2014, and that there were more than 2,500 seats left open in 2014.
The report charges that one of the reasons charter schools don't replace students who drop out or leave non-entry grades mid-year is because new students—who are more likely to come from transient, homeless, or immigrant families—might drag down the school's overall proficiency scores. Meanwhile, students are left on waiting lists indefinitely.
"If charter schools are losing the kids who are doing worse and they don't replace them, then their scores will look better," said Jeffry Henig, a political science and education professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. "And if they're not replacing them, then they will have an advantage, if the race is to improve proficiency, because traditional public schools have to backfill."
Henig said that researchers have been looking at this issue for a long time—not necessarily through a moral or political lens, but rather a methodological one: not accounting for backfill can skew comparisons both within the charter sector and between charters and regular public schools.
But recently, Henig said he has noticed the issue moving beyond the realm of research into the general public and political discourse.
This is the second time in two months that this has flared up. Lyles, the head of Democracy Builders, co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in February challenging policies that permit charter schools to only admit students in kindergarten, 6th, or 9th grades.
In a rebuttal piece, Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Foundation, wrote that requiring charters to backfill would create a "backdoor" to stripping autonomy from the independent schools. Furthermore, there are other structural and instructional reasons for not backfilling, Petrilli argued:
"Great schools spend a lot of time building strong cultures—the almost-invisible expectations, norms, and habits that come to permeate the environment, such as the notion that it's cool to be smart and it's not OK to disrupt learning. Culture-building is a whole lot harder to do if a school is inducting a new group of students every year in every grade. Furthermore, schools that help their charges make rapid gains in their early years will be forced to spend a lot of time remediating new students who enter midstream. That's why so many solid charters and networks that launch as middle or high schools eventually reach down to start serving students at age four, five, or six. It's hard to remediate a kid who has already gone through half a dozen years of learning nothing in a dire school."
You can read the rest of what Petrilli has to say on the subject here.
The backfilling issue could potentially become problematic for charter advocates—many of whom have waged strong arguments for raisinge the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in New York in part on long waiting lists—if some charters are refusing to admit students from waiting lists at any grade.
The University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education posted an essay on its blog in advance of the Democracy Builders' report. Here's a passage:
"Building a system of mutually complementary charter high schools is a challenge (like special education and student discipline) that the charter movement must now face. Charter schools—individually and as a group—need to figure out how they can provide effective education for all children in a locality. If they can't do that, they will reinforce the case for capping charter growth and protecting the traditional school district, which, regardless of its many failures, accepts responsibility for educating all children no matter how challenging."
The rest of the CRPE article can be found here.
Right now, this debate appears to be mostly happening among school choice advocates, although staunch charter opponent and education historian Diane Ravitch did post a short item on her blog about backfilling in March.
And this isn't an issue limited to New York City, the NPR member station in Philadelphia, WHYY also dug into the issue locally this week.
NEA: No Child Left Behind rewrite doesn’t level the playing field
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 11, 2015
The head of the country’s largest teachers union said that her organization does not support a bipartisan proposal in the Senate to replace the nation’s main federal education law because it does not go far enough to create equal educational opportunities for poor children.
“We keep asking ourselves, ‘Does this move the needle for kids? Will a child see something better in his or her classroom?’ ” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country. “And this bill in the Senate doesn’t do it. We’re not at ‘better’ yet.”
Garcia’s comments come as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee begins debate this week on a bipartisan bill crafted by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the panel, and Patty Murray (Wash.), the ranking Democrat. They have been working for months on a 600-page update of the law known as No Child Left Behind.
The bill does embrace several priorities of the teachers union, such as deleting the federal penalties attached to standardized tests, which Garcia has blamed for warping the classroom experience. It also lets states decide whether and how to evaluate teachers, as opposed to a federal requirement that says they should be graded in part on the basis of student test scores.
But Garcia said Friday that the union wants any new federal education law to address the inequities between high-poverty public schools and those in more affluent communities. Recent government data show that in 23 states, state and local governments are together spending less per pupil in the poorest school districts than they are in the most affluent ones.
When Congress enacted the original federal education law in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, it was designed to address funding inequities by sending federal dollars to states to help educate poor and disabled students and those learning English.
But those federal dollars account for about 12 percent of total education spending, and Washington’s role in equalizing resources for schools is limited in a public education system funded largely by local real estate taxes.
The NEA says Congress can address the problem by requiring schools to publish an “opportunity dashboard” that would disclose how much each school spends on teacher salaries, the number of experienced teachers and counselors they employ, access to Advanced Placement and honors courses and other indicators, so that disparity between schools is transparent.
In addition to laying bare the disparities, the union wants any new federal law to hold states responsible for reducing the resource gap between schools, Garcia said.
No Child Left Behind has judged states and school districts based on student outcomes, largely by relying on test scores. But they should also be evaluated based on inputs — whether they are evenly distributing resources from school to school, she said.
“We’ve been talking about this to every senator we can,” Garcia said. “It is time for accountability to mean that all kids are getting what they need.”
She said the union will push hard for changes in a final bill.
“This is not an endgame, this is the beginning of the fight,” she said. “Senators Patty Murray and Alexander really have tried very hard to get this to a better place, and it’s not there yet. We want to work with members of Congress, we want to move this forward . . . we want them to fix some of the things that are egregiously wrong.”
The NEA’s opposition to the bipartisan proposal sets it apart from many other education organizations that have expressed cautious optimism, with the exception of the Heritage Foundation, which also is opposed.
No Child Left Behind was due for reauthorization in 2007, but previous attempts to rewrite the law collapsed amid partisan debates on Capitol Hill about the proper role of the federal government in local schools.
Is it a student’s civil right to take a federally mandated standardized test?
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 10, 2015
Advocates for poor and minority children are pushing a novel idea: standardized tests as a civil right.
The nation’s major civil rights groups say that federally required testing — in place for a decade through existing law — is a tool to force fairness in public schools by aiming a spotlight at the stark differences in scores between poor, minority students and their more affluent counterparts.
And they are fighting legislative efforts to scale back testing as lawmakers on Capitol Hill rewrite the nation’s main federal education law, known as No Child Left Behind.
“Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward, for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don’t have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year,” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, said in recent testimony before the Senate education panel. Her group joined 20 civil rights organizations to lobby Congress to keep the requirement to test all children each year in math and reading.
The civil rights argument adds a new dimension to one of the most contentious education issues in decades: whether standardized testing is good for students. Congress is wrestling with that question as it reauthorizes No Child Left Behind. The Senate education panel is expected to begin debating a bipartisan bill next week that would maintain annual testing, but it is unclear how the bill will fare in the House, where conservative Republicans want to drastically scale back the federal role in education.
[Sens. Alexander, Murray propose bipartisan measure to replace NCLB]
Critics say the testing mandate hasn’t done much to narrow the gap in scores but has drained the joy from classrooms, fostering a testing fixation that critics blame for ills including narrowed curriculums and cheating scandals.
A growing number of parents around the country are having their children opt out of federally required standardized tests, and people including President Obama and comedian Louis C.K. have complained.
“It’s reached a level where people are saying ‘enough is enough,’ ” said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which wants to end the standardized testing mandate. “People are sick of the overkill of test volume and the consequences, ridiculous things like rating art teachers based on the reading test scores in their schools.”
But civil rights advocates don’t trust states to pay attention to disadvantaged children if they aren’t required by federal law to test and make public the scores of blacks, Hispanics, students with disabilities and English-language learners.
“I don’t think you can dismiss the role that assessments play in holding educators and states overall responsible for the quality of education provided,” said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group of civil rights advocates that includes the NAACP and the National Urban League.
States and school districts that don’t want to deal with the daunting task of improving the achievement of poor students complain about testing as a way of shirking accountability, Henderson said. “This is a political debate, and opponents will use cracks in the facade as a basis for driving a truck through it,” he said.
No Child Left Behind, enacted in 2002, ushered in an era of accountability by requiring states for the first time to test all students in math and reading in grades three through eight, as well as once in high school. Students are also required to take three science tests during their studies.
Under the law, schools must make public their test scores by groups according to race, income and whether they are disabled or English learners. Most states began annual testing in 2005, and the public data laid bare achievement gaps between poor children and their more affluent peers, usually divided along racial lines. No Child Left Behind penalizes schools that fail to raise test scores for all groups.
Teachers unions and others say the Obama administration has intensified the pressure by prodding states to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. Some say the idea of standardized testing as a civil right is “misguided.”
“The main victims of this misguided policy are exactly the people the civil rights groups want to help: teachers and students in high-poverty schools,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. The focus on math and reading has squeezed out science, social studies and the arts from high-poverty schools, he said.
Tests don’t address the social problems that poor children bring to school or the fact that many start kindergarten already lagging behind more affluent children, he said.
They also don’t fix the inequality of a public education system funded primarily by real estate taxes, where schools in wealthy communities are well equipped and attract the strongest teachers, while high-poverty schools often have fewer resources and weaker teachers, he said.
“The idea that you can just ignore the conditions that create inequality in schools and just put more and more pressure on schools and if that doesn’t work, add more sanctions, makes no sense,” Orfield said. “As if it’s just a matter of will for the students and teachers in these schools of concentrated poverty.”
Civil rights groups agree that the country needs to address unequal resources, and they want any new federal law to require states to take action to improve the academic performance of disadvantaged students.
But there is a main message that advocates have been sending in public testimony and at private meetings: Keep the tests.
Haycock credits annual testing and No Child Left Behind with a modest rise in math scores among black and Hispanic students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test administered by the federal government across the country every two years.
“The suggestion that No Child Left Behind destroyed American education is absolutely not borne out,” Haycock said at a gathering of the country’s top state education officials two weeks ago.
But black and Hispanic students made even greater gains on the NAEP before No Child Left Behind took effect.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the 3-million-member National Education Association, calls the current system “No Child Left Untested.” The union wants to replace the standardized test with different measures such as portfolios of work and presentations.
The NEA also wants Congress to require schools to publish an “opportunity dashboard” that would disclose how much each school spends on teacher salaries, the number of experienced teachers they employ, access to Advanced Placement and honors courses and other indicators, so that disparities between schools are transparent. The union is running television commercials in 13 markets that urge members of Congress to reduce the role of standardized testing.
Henderson, who has testified before Congress on the importance of keeping the testing mandate, sits on the board of trustees for the Educational Testing Service, the country’s largest such private nonprofit assessment company. He earned $88,250 from ETS in 2013, the most recent year for which tax records are available.
He said there was no conflict between lobbying for testing and earning income from a testing company. “I wanted to understand how testing is used and the quality of measurements,” Henderson said, explaining why he joined the ETS board about a decade ago. “It’s been a useful grounding in understanding the science of psychonometrics.”
In his deliberations over whether to keep the federal testing mandate, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. education secretary and current chair of the Senate education panel, noted that No Child Left Behind requires 17 tests over the academic career of each student.
But as those tests have grown in importance, states and districts have layered on additional tests to make sure students are on track to pass the federally required test, he said. “There’s a cascading effect,” said Alexander, who worked alongside the ranking Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), to craft a bipartisan bill. “Fort Myers, Florida, gives 183 tests during the year!”
No Child Left Behind was due for reauthorization in 2007, but multiple attempts to rewrite it have failed amid partisan debates about the proper role of the federal government in education.
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