- D.C. school proposals trigger debate over future of neighborhood schools [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
- What will become of neighborhood schools?
- Parental Involvement Is Overrated
D.C. school proposals trigger debate over future of neighborhood schools [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 12, 2014
Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s proposals to overhaul the District’s school boundaries and the policies that decide how students are assigned to schools are bound in a book. It is hefty with maps and charts and — to the casual observer — inscrutable permutations of set-asides, choice sets and feeder patterns.
But buried within the details is a central question that has riveted parents: Is the District ready to give up on neighborhood schools in favor of expanded lottery admissions that could scatter the city’s children, seemingly at random?
City officials say the effort to retool how students are matched with schools aims to improve education by making sense of a complex system that leaves some schools nearly empty while others face serious overcrowding, some schools struggling while others thrive. But their proposals pit the rising philosophy of school choice, which aspires to untether the quality of a child’s education from his Zip code, against a long-standing American ideal: the school down the block that serves as the center of the neighborhood, the anchor for the community.
The suggestion of a dramatic overhaul has triggered a firestorm of protest, particularly in affluent upper Northwest Washington, where many families bought homes based on the promise of the right to attend good schools nearby. They fear that their emotional and economic investments in their neighborhood could be ripped out from under them, their property values could plummet, and the future of their children’s education could fall into limbo or be left to chance.
“I love that my kids can walk to school,” said Katherine Martin, PTA president at Janney Elementary in Northwest. Martin also is a real estate agent who predicts a run on Montgomery County homes — an exodus from the city — if families are forced to trade guaranteed access to schools for a lottery ticket. “You get to know all your neighbors and all the kids who surround your house. The community thrives on that.”
“You buy a house in a neighborhood for a school within walking distance,” said Nicole Fisher, another Janney parent. “You don’t buy a house to trek miles up the road.”
City officials will settle on a plan after considering community feedback in coming months. But both candidates vying to replace Gray (D) as mayor received the proposals with skepticism last week, setting up the possibility that the proposals could be significantly altered or scrapped after Gray’s term ends.
Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser, a D.C. Council member representing Ward 4, said she is interested in some of the ideas Gray floated, including replacing students’ right to attend one neighborhood elementary school with lottery admissions to one of three or four nearby schools. But she said she would neither support replacing neighborhood high schools with a citywide lottery nor cutting families off from good schools that their children currently can attend, saying that “parents want predictability.”
Independent David A. Catania, an at-large council member, vowed not to adopt any of the proposals if he is elected, and to focus instead on strengthening schools across the city. Catania said he does not support reassigning anyone to a lower-quality school or introducing changes that would “shock that fragile confidence” parents are building in city education.
Though the plans have stoked concern, for most families in this historically segregated city of disparate education options, neighborhood schools are already a thing of the past. Just 25 percent of D.C. children attend their assigned neighborhood schools. The rest forgo their local option in favor of charter schools, out-of-boundary traditional schools or selective magnet high schools.
“How do you preserve predictability for people who feel they want that, and at the same time provide options?” Abigail Smith, the deputy mayor for education, asked a crowd of hundreds of anxious parents at Coolidge High last week. “We’re tackling this problem as a whole city, and different parts of the city are experiencing it in different ways.”
One of Gray’s proposals would maintain the system of neighborhood schools with a percentage of seats set aside for out-of-boundary students. Two others contemplate replacing neighborhood high schools with citywide lottery admissions and float the concept of smaller-scale lotteries for younger students.
Most D.C. parents say they share the age-old ideal of building community via a neighborhood school, but many do not see sending their children to neighborhood schools as realistic. One self-described low-income mother who lives in Ward 8 said she would prefer that her son did not have to wrestle with public transit each morning during his journey to an out-of-boundary traditional middle school across the Anacostia River.
“I want awesome schools in every neighborhood,” said the mother, who requested anonymity because she works for the school system. But her neighborhood schools aren’t awesome right now, she said, adding that in Ward 8, “the schools are just different.”
Dana Miller, who sends her 4-year-old to Garrison Elementary in Logan Circle, said she believes in the neighborhood school and wants it to succeed. She just does not see a path forward from Garrison, which feeds into Cardozo Education Campus, a middle-high school with one of the lowest graduation rates in the city.
So Miller is jumping ship — she gained a lottery spot at Mundo Verde, a sought-after bilingual charter school with plans to offer students instruction through 12th grade. She sees the irony, and she wonders whether the city could strengthen neighborhood schools by limiting other options, forcing parents to help create the change they want.
“D.C. has created so many escape hatches — you don’t have to invest,” Miller said. “Maybe they’ve got to close those hatches.”
School districts across the nation have grappled with student-assignment policies for decades, since the early days of desegregation when children in many cities were bused across town to diversify schools. Issues of race and class and equity continue to loom large in Washington and elsewhere.
Now, the nation is experiencing a new spasm of debate about the virtues of neighborhood schools, driven by the twin forces of urban gentrification and the rise of school choice, said Jeffrey M. Vincent, deputy director of the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California at Berkeley.
Cities including San Francisco, Baltimore and New Orleans have partially or entirely done away with neighborhood schools in favor of citywide choice policies, which, advocates say, put parents more in control of their children’s education. In Nashville — where busing long ago helped to integrate schools — a recent push for a return to walkable local schools led to a backlash from those who saw “neighborhood schools” as code for resegregation.
“We, as a country, are grappling with this tension right now, and if we have communities or cities that are segregated, we are always going to have this problem,” Vincent said. “It’s not a school problem, it’s a housing-integration problem.”
In the District, many parents identify another problem: The city, they say, has failed to strengthen its schools uniformly. A move toward lottery admissions would shuffle children from one corner of the city to another but would not help more schools improve, they say.
“We ought to be able to work together to make sure that every neighborhood in the city has a quality school, not just fight each other for what’s left over,” said Jeff Gumbinner, the father of two students at Murch Elementary in Northwest and one of many parents calling for a halt to Gray’s effort and a push to improve low-performing schools.
That view is not confined to families at affluent, high-performing schools who could be seen as defending their turf. In recent years, families have fought plans to close their struggling neighborhood schools, citing the schools’ central role in building community. Last week, parents from Roosevelt High — which has low enrollment, poor test scores and high truancy — said they, too, would not want to give it up in favor of lottery admissions to other schools.
“The citywide lottery thing is crazy,” said Triena Rogers, a Roosevelt graduate and the parent of a Roosevelt junior.
Advocates of school choice, whose philosophies have driven education policy in many urban areas including the District, say families need more options because it is unrealistic to expect long-struggling neighborhood schools to improve.
“We’ve tried for 50 years to turn around low-performing schools, and the history of it shows it seldom works,” said Andy Smarick, a longtime choice advocate who said the idea of neighborhood schools is quaint. “It’s unfair to low-income families, I think, to promise them that we can make a great neighborhood school.”
D.C. father Randall Chandler also is skeptical. He would love to send his children to a school within walking distance of his home in Northeast. But he watched the city close his son’s elementary school years ago, and then he watched the city shutter dozens of other schools across the city, most of them in African American neighborhoods.
He does not believe the city is willing to seriously invest in schools in majority-black parts of town, so his daughter now treks to Hardy Middle School near Georgetown.
“If you feel like your outcome is predetermined by the city not fully backing the schools in your area, then you want to send your kids to where they’re really backing the schools,” said Chandler, who opposes citywide lotteries because of their random nature but wants a significant proportion of each school’s seats to be set aside for out-of-boundary students.
Across the Anacostia in Southeast, city firefighter Johnie Griffin expects to send his children to their neighborhood schools, and to help those schools improve as an involved parent. But he favors a citywide lottery.
“If a child from Northwest goes to Southeast, the parents will care about the overall school system, not just their own part of it,” Griffin said. “It would hold everyone accountable.”
What will become of neighborhood schools?
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
April 14, 2014
In light of the recent work by the Deputy Mayor for Education's Office to re-examine public school feeder patterns the Washington Post had a front page article yesterday questioning whether neighborhood schools are a thing of the past. The reporter raises this issue because right now in the District of Columbia only 25 percent of children attend their neighborhood school, and because one of the proposals by the Gray Administration is to provide elementary school students with a choice of a few schools in close proximity to their homes, with a lottery deciding the final place of enrollment. Let me be clear. The neighborhood school is not going away.
The only reason we have the mess that we have right now is that in many instances the traditional school closest to where a child lives is characterized by exceedingly low academic performance. This has forced parents to find an alternative. But don't get me wrong, parents would much rather avoid driving their children across town to have them sit in a quality seat.
For proof, we need to look no farther than the charter school movement. You would think that because charters are schools of choice they would pull equally from all areas of the city. They do not. Consider this evidence from the 2012 Neighborhood Task Force Committee, headed by then D.C. Public School Board chairman Brian Jones:
"Thirty five percent of public charter school students in 2011- 12 went to school within one mile of their home;
forty nine percent went to a charter school in their ward. Similarly, in 45% of all public charter schools (44 schools), at least 50% of students come from within the ward. In 68% of public charter schools (66 schools), 40% or more of their students come from within the ward."
As more and more of the Performance Management Framework Tier 1 schools replicate an even greater percentile of the student body will come from the neighborhood. This is only natural. If our goal as a community is to increase the number of kids traveling a short distance to school we should develop public policies that foster the growth of high quality charters. These would include rapidly closing poor performing charters and traditional schools, efficiently turning shuttered DCPS buildings over to charters, ending the funding inequities between the two school systems, and providing incentives in the way of space and decreased oversight for those willing to educate a greater population of students.
Parental Involvement Is Overrated
The New York Times
By Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris
April 12, 2014
Most people, asked whether parental involvement benefits children academically, would say, “of course it does.” But evidence from our research suggests otherwise. In fact, most forms of parental involvement, like observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it.
Over the past few years, we conducted an extensive study of whether the depth of parental engagement in children’s academic lives improved their test scores and grades. We pursued this question because we noticed that while policy makers were convinced that parental involvement positively affected children’s schooling outcomes, academic studies were much more inconclusive.
Despite this, increasing parental involvement has been one of the focal points of both President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and President Obama’s Race to the Top. Both programs promote parental engagement as one remedy for persistent socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps.
We analyzed longitudinal surveys of American families that spanned three decades (from the 1980s to the 2000s) and obtained demographic information on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, the academic outcomes of children in elementary, middle and high school, as well as information about the level of parental engagement in 63 different forms.
What did we find? One group of parents, including blacks and Hispanics, as well as some Asians (like Cambodians, Vietnamese and Pacific Islanders), appeared quite similar to a second group, made up of white parents and other Asians (like Chinese, Koreans and Indians) in the frequency of their involvement. A common reason given for why the children of the first group performed worse academically on average was that their parents did not value education to the same extent. But our research shows that these parents tried to help their children in school just as much as the parents in the second group.
Even the notion that kids do better in school when their parents are involved does not stack up. After comparing the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing.
In fact, there were more instances in which children had higher levels of achievement when their parents were less involved than there were among those whose parents were more involved. Even more counterintuitively: When involvement does seem to matter, the consequences for children’s achievement are more often negative than positive.
When involvement did benefit kids academically, it depended on which behavior parents were engaging in, which academic outcome was examined, the grade level of the child, the racial and ethnic background of the family and its socioeconomic standing. For example, regularly discussing school experiences with your child seems to positively affect the reading and math test scores of Hispanic children, to negatively affect test scores in reading for black children, and to negatively affect test scores in both reading and math for white children (but only during elementary school). Regularly reading to elementary school children appears to benefit reading achievement for white and Hispanic children but it is associated with lower reading achievement for black children. Policy makers should not advocate a one-size-fits-all model of parental involvement.
What about when parents work directly with their children on learning activities at home? When we examined whether regular help with homework had a positive impact on children’s academic performance, we were quite startled by what we found. Regardless of a family’s social class, racial or ethnic background, or a child’s grade level, consistent homework help almost never improved test scores or grades. Most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children with homework. Even more surprising to us was that when parents regularly helped with homework, kids usually performed worse. One interesting exception: The group of Asians that included Chinese, Korean and Indian children appeared to benefit from regular help with homework, but this benefit was limited to the grades they got during adolescence; it did not affect their test scores.
Our findings also suggest that the idea that parental involvement will address one of the most salient and intractable issues in education, racial and ethnic achievement gaps, is not supported by the evidence. This is because our analyses show that most parental behavior has no benefit on academic performance. While there are some forms of parental involvement that do appear to have a positive impact on children academically, we find at least as many instances in which more frequent involvement is related to lower academic performance.
As it turns out, the list of what generally works is short: expecting your child to go to college, discussing activities children engage in at school (despite the complications we mentioned above), and requesting a particular teacher for your child.
Do our findings suggest that parents are not important for children’s academic success? Our answer is no. We believe that parents are critical for how well children perform in school, just not in the conventional ways that our society has been promoting. The essential ingredient is for parents to communicate the value of schooling, a message that parents should be sending early in their children’s lives and that needs to be reinforced over time. But this message does not need to be communicated through conventional behavior, like attending PTA meetings or checking in with teachers.
When the federal government issues mandates on the implementation of programs that increase parental involvement, schools often encourage parents to spend more time volunteering, to attend school events, to help their children with homework and so forth. There is a strong sentiment in this country that parents matter in every respect relating to their children’s academic success, but we need to let go of this sentiment and begin to pay attention to what the evidence is telling us.
Conventional wisdom holds that since there is no harm in having an involved parent, why shouldn’t we suggest as many ways as possible for parents to participate in school? This conventional wisdom is flawed. Schools should move away from giving the blanket message to parents that they need to be more involved and begin to focus instead on helping parents find specific, creative ways to communicate the value of schooling, tailored to a child’s age. Future research should investigate how parental involvement can be made more effective, but until then, parents who have been less involved or who feel uncertain about how they should be involved should not be stigmatized.
What should parents do? They should set the stage and then leave it.