NEWS
- Judge upholds revocation of charter for D.C.’s Community Academy [Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- Tale of Community Academy Public Charter School just became sadder [Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- Two Rivers Public Charter School in Near Northeast Tops Wait List Rankings [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
- Seats open in top D.C. charter schools
- Volunteer tutors aren't the answer to DC's reading crisis
- Want Reform? Principals Matter, Too
- Senate panel votes unanimously in favor of No Child Left Behind revision
Judge upholds revocation of charter for D.C.’s Community Academy [Community Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
April 16, 2015
A Superior Court Judge this week upheld a D.C. Public Charter School Board decision to revoke the charter of Dorothy I. Height Community Academy, whose founder Kent Amos is facing trail amid allegations that he personally profited from the diversion of taxpayer dollars meant for the school.
Judge Ronna Beck noted in her ruling that the charter board’s finding of fiscal mismanagement at the school, which led to the charter revocation, was largely based on the same facts included in a lawsuit the city’s Attorney General has filed against the school.
The decision, announced Tuesday, gives school officials and families of the 1,600 students enrolled at the school’s three campuses and its online academy new certainty about what will happen next year.
“Throughout this process, our number one concern has been the students, and to minimize any disruption in their education,” Darren Woodruff, chairman of the charter board, said in a statement.
The charter board voted in February to revoke the school’s charter effective June 31. On the same day, deputy mayor for education Jennifer C. Niles announced a road map for next year, with plans for two charter schools and D.C. Public Schools to take over the Community Academy buildings and online program. Community Academy students received preference in the citywide school enrollment lottery to remain in their schools under the new operators if they chose to.
But Community Academy’s appeals of the revocation left some doubt as to how the plan would unfold.
A. Scott Bolden, an attorney who represents the school, called the judge’s decision “disappointing.” He said it focused on “the bad acts of the chief executive and the management company,” rather than the charter school or its board and how well they were performing.
The lawsuit against Amos and the school is ongoing, but a Superior Court judge in October ordered payments to the school’s management company to be stopped through a preliminary injunction, as Amos allegedly used the management company to divert taxpayer dollars from the school. The judge said the District had a strong likelihood of demonstrating that Amos paid himself more than $1 million last year alone, according to tax records, contrary to the school’s non-profit mission and its own articles of incorporation.
A related lawsuit was filed last month against two members of the school’s Board of Trustees: Ernest Green, Jr. and Maurice Sykes. According to that complaint, the trustees “grossly abused” their positions and contributed to the school having acted “contrary to its non-profit purposes.”
The complaint says the trustees received money or expected to receive money from the school’s management company but failed to disclose their business dealings and acted to further the interests of Amos at the expense of the school.
Sykes, reached by phone, declined to comment. Green did not respond to phone and e-mail messages seeking comment. Brian Stolarz, an attorney who is representing Green and Sykes, declined to comment Wednesday.
According to the court filings, Green was paid $5,000 by Amos’s company in August 2013, and he was listed as a “consultant” in the management company’s records. About a month later, Amos’s company paid Green $4,000, a payment that was recorded in the school’s records in the category of “gifts.” Records show arrangements in 2014 for a payment to Green’s daughter for at least $5,000 to compensate her, in part, for planning a birthday party for Amos.
Sykes sent an invoice in the amount of $32,500 addressed to Amos’s attention in July 2013, for “professional consulting services as chief educational advisor,” according to the lawsuit. The invoice indicated it would be the first of four installment payments.
In August 2013, Sykes and Green were part of a four-member executive committee of the Board of Trustees, which voted to approve the language of a new management agreement. The agreement deleted an earlier provision that required the company to provide information about the salaries and benefits of all management staff. That change removed the ability to see whether fees reflected actual costs, and enabled Amos to pay himself an unreasonably high salary, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint argues that Green and Sykes should have recused themselves from voting on the agreement.
It is not unusual, or illegal, for board members of charter schools to do work or receive pay from the schools or management companies they oversee. But D.C.’s nonprofit corporation law requires board members to disclose any conflicts of interest, or, in the alternative, that boards ensure contracts are fair to the school when they vote to approve them.
The complaint also said that Sykes acted as Amos’s “eyes and ears” on the school’s board, sharing information about confidential board deliberations.
Green is a partner in an asset management firm. He retired from Barclays Capital, formerly Lehman Brothers, where he was a Managing Director of Municipal Finance, according to his biography on the Community Academy Web site. He served as an assistant secretary in the Labor Department during the Carter administration and as Chairman of the African Development Foundation under President Clinton, according to his bio.
He is well known for being one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the first group of African-American students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools in 1954.
Maurice Sykes is the director of the Early Childhood Leadership Institute at the University of the District of Columbia and author of “Doing the Right Thing for Children: Eight Qualities of Leadership.”
Kent Amos, the school’s founder and chief executive, became one of the first African-American executives at Xerox before he left the private sector to pursue charitable work with children.
Tale of Community Academy Public Charter School just became sadder [Community Academy PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
April 17, 2015
It was bad enough that the founder of the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS's Kent Amos diverted millions of dollars in public money to his for-profit management company for services that were already being provided by the school's staff. In a fine article yesterday by the Washington Post's Michael Allison Chandler we find that corruption allegedly extended to board members responsible for financial oversight of the charter.
In her piece about a Superior Court Judge supporting the revocation of Community Academy's charter by the DC PCSB, Ms. Chandler reveals that one of the board members, Ernest Green, Jr., was paid $9,000 by Mr. Amos' firm, some for consulting and some as a gift. His daughter was awarded $5,000, for among other things because she organized a celebration of Mr. Amos' birthday. Here is the kicker, and I'll simply quote from the story: Mr. Green "is well known for being one of the 'Little Rock Nine,' the first group of African-American students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools in 1954."
The other board member that the court contends benefited directly from his relationship with the school is Maurice Sykes. Mr. Sykes invoiced Mr. Amos for educational consulting services of $32,500. There were three other checks in the same amount to follow. This gentleman apparently holds the title of director of the University of the District of Columbia's Early Childhood Leadership Institute. He also wrote a book entitled Doing the Right Thing for Children: Eight Qualities of Leadership. The book, according to Amazon.com, "challenges and inspires educators to become effective leaders who make a difference in children’s lives."
The two men together with another pair of individuals, according to Ms. Chandler, comprised the team that approved Mr. Amos' management contract and removed language that would have forced the disclosure of his company's employee salaries.
Mr. Amos, the Post reminds us, was one of the first black senior managers at the Xerox Corporation.
A worse example for our kids could not be provided.
Two Rivers Public Charter School in Near Northeast Tops Wait List Rankings [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
Hill Now
By Andrew Ramonas
April 16, 2015
Two Rivers Public Charter School in Near Northeast has the longest wait list in the District, new data shows.
The school at 1227 4th St. NE has 1,381 students waiting to enroll in its preschool, elementary school and middle school classes, according to a District, Measured analysis of D.C. Public Schools and the D.C. Public Charter School Board wait list numbers. Two Rivers had 516 students in the 2013-2014 school year, according to PCSB.
Brent Elementary School on Capitol Hill also has one of the District’s longest wait lists. With 880 students on the list to get into Brent, only five other schools in D.c. have longer wait lists. The school at 301 North Carolina Ave. SE has 368 students this school year, according to DCPS.
Of the 33 Capitol Hill-area schools that have wait lists, almost half have more than 100 students trying to get in. Those schools include School-Within-School (920 F St. NE), Capitol Hill Montessori (215 G St. NE) and Maury Elementary School (1250 Constitution Ave. NE.)
The wait lists, which DCPS and PCSB released last week, came after the first round of the District’s annual public school lottery. The lottery dictates which students receive admission to D.C. charter schools, out-of-boundary DCPS schools and DCPS preschool classes.
Seats open in top D.C. charter schools
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
April 16, 2015
Despite an increased waitlist for D.C. charter schools, parents still have a chance to enroll their children in some of the city’s top charter schools.
There are 2,759 spots available for charter schools, according to the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Of those, 212 spots are open at Tier 1 schools.
Parents have until May 8 to apply for the second round of the lottery. A list of schools with open seats can be found here.
The number of students waitlisted for charter schools increased by 18 percent this year, while demand for traditional public schools increased by 25 percent. Enrollment in the placement lottery increased to 15 percent, with 72 percent of families getting into a school of their choice.
Families could rank their top 12 schools out of 200 charters, out-of-boundary traditional schools and specialized high schools. Those that were not matched with their top choices were waitlisted at those schools.
The lottery is run by My School DC and managed by the office of the deputy mayor for education.
Volunteer tutors aren't the answer to DC's reading crisis
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
April 16, 2015
Some observers are pinning their hopes on volunteer tutors as a low-cost way of narrowing the achievement gap between low-income students and their more affluent peers. But there are limits to what volunteer tutors can do.
A leading nonprofit tutoring organization deploys minimally trained volunteers to teach reading comprehension as a set of skills. The problem is that to understand what they're reading, kids need background knowledge, not just skills.
A study released last month concluded that Reading Partners, which uses community volunteers to work one-on-one with struggling readers, boosts students' abilities. The program is active in eight states and the District, where it provides tutoring in 16 schools. Fewer than half of DC students score proficient in reading on standardized tests.
Reading Partners, which serves students in kindergarten through fifth grade, will probably soon be expanding its efforts in DC. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced that as part of an initiative targeting male students of color, the District will recruit 500 volunteer tutors to work with Reading Partners and several other tutoring nonprofits in DC Public Schools.
Reading Partners is a well-run organization staffed by dedicated individuals. But after spending a year as a Reading Partners tutor and educating myself about reading comprehension, I've concluded that its approach in that area is fundamentally mistaken. The approach assumes that reading comprehension is a skill like hitting a baseball, which you can learn by practicing certain strategies repeatedly. If you practice keeping your eye on the ball over and over, for example, you'll get better at hitting it.
Reading Partners tutors, who receive minimal training, work with students on comprehension skills like "finding the main idea" and "making inferences." At the beginning of each 45-minute session, the tutor picks up a packet containing two or three books at the child's reading level and a worksheet that focuses on the skill of the day.
The child chooses one of the books to read, and the tutor guides the child in practicing the skill. Children come to the reading center twice a week, and often miss regular class time in order to do so.
Because Reading Partners only works with students reading below grade level, a fourth-grader might be reading books on a second-grade level. Some of the books are fiction and some non-fiction, but the focus is on learning skills rather than on the books' content.
The books cover a random variety of subjects, and there's no effort to coordinate them with what children are learning in class. The theory is that once a child gets good at "finding the main idea," she'll be able to find the main idea in whatever text is put in front of her.
Reading comprehension isn't a skill
The problem is that reading comprehension is, in fact, not a skill like hitting a baseball. It's very dependent on how much you already know about the subject you're reading about. To see what it's like to read about something you're unfamiliar with, try parsing this summary of a technical scientific article.
Generally speaking, low-income children start out in school with a lot less background knowledge and vocabulary than more affluent children. That makes it harder for them to understand what they're reading.
So if we want to close the achievement gap, we need to spend time giving low-income kids as much knowledge as we possibly can. Giving them comprehension strategies rather than knowledge in elementary school means that by the time they get to high school, they'll be hopelessly behind.
Why, then, did a study conclude that Reading Partners was able to raise student achievement? It did give students a bump, but the effect was not all that dramatic. As compared to a control group that was getting other kinds of reading help, the Reading Partners group made about one-and-a-half to two months more progress. They also spent about the equivalent of an extra month working on reading, so the additional bump is even smaller than it appears.
And studies have shown that teaching kids reading strategies can boost comprehension, but only up to a point. Kids who get 50 sessions receive no more benefit than kids who get six.
Beyond that, we need to look at how the researchers measured progress. They used an assessment that, like all standardized tests, treats reading comprehension as a skill. Let's say a fourth-grader reading at a second-grade level manages to find the main idea in a third-grade-level text. That counts as progress. But when that student gets to ninth grade and is expected to, say, read a text about the Renaissance and Reformation in Europe, will he be able to find the main idea? Only if he acquires a lot of background knowledge in the interim.
Having tutored both elementary and high school students in high-poverty schools, I'm skeptical that he will. I have learned never to assume background knowledge on the part of students. When I've asked the fourth- or fifth-graders I've tutored through Reading Partners to find DC on a map of the United States, they've had no idea where to begin. And the high school students I tutored in the past had huge gaps in their knowledge. Among other things, they had barely heard of the Supreme Court and didn't know the meaning of words like "admirable."
Part of the problem is that many elementary schools focus on skills rather than knowledge. While DCPS elementary schools theoretically focus on knowledge, they apparently aren't using methods that ensure kids will absorb it. And that continues to be a problem in later grades.
Kids want and need knowledge, not just skills
Aside from the fact that a skills-based approach doesn't give students what they need, it's also boring. One student I tutored, who I'll call Keisha, was so resistant to coming to Reading Partners that she would sometimes enter a state of near catatonia, not answering questions or making eye contact. Eventually, she just refused to come.
While levels of enthusiasm vary, I personally know of several kids who were clearly unhappy to be at Reading Partners. And tutoring is unlikely to work if a student isn't motivated.
Meanwhile, kids are hungry for actual knowledge. One boy I tutored wanted to know if you could get poisoned by eating a poisonous snake. Another asked his tutor if a hyena was more like a cat or a dog. These are good questions, and tutors can do their best to answer them. But giving kids that kind of information isn't the purpose of the program.
In any event, kids don't absorb and retain knowledge from hearing random facts once or twice. They need to spend several weeks on a topic, not only reading about it but also listening to their teacher talk about it in a way that may be beyond their reading level but within their ability to comprehend. They should also be writing about it.
Volunteer tutors might be useful in some areas. Math is one possibility. Tutors may also be able to help very young children learn the basic skill of reading, or decoding, as opposed to reading comprehension. Reading Partners also uses volunteers to do that kind of tutoring, and next week I plan to start working with a student who needs that sort of help.
I suspect it would also be effective to use volunteer tutors to meet with kids after school and help them understand what they're supposed to be learning in class—assuming the kids are learning actual content and not just comprehension strategies. That's the kind of tutoring wealthier kids often get. But it's hard to see how you could get minimally trained volunteers to engage in that kind of tutoring on a large enough scale to make a dent in the problem.
Any tutoring program that relies on volunteers would do best to focus on giving young children the basic skills necessary to decode text. And schools and school districts, like DCPS, should ensure that classroom teachers are supplying kids with the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand it.
Want Reform? Principals Matter, Too
The New York Times
By Will Miller
April 17, 2015
POLITICIANS and education reformers are fixated on the performance of teachers, but they often overlook another key ingredient for improving student achievement: principals. The problem is that great principals often don’t end up in the schools that need them most — those with poor and minority students. School districts, states and universities need to do much more to get outstanding principals into these schools.
A generation ago, good principals were efficient middle managers. They oversaw budgets, managed complicated bus schedules and delivered discipline. That started changing in the mid-1990s. Today’s principal needs to be much more focused on the quality of teaching in the classroom.
Take Clayborn Knight, principal of Nesbit Elementary School in Tucker, Ga., where more than 90 percent of his 2,100 students live in poverty. Mr. Knight arrives by 6 a.m. to form his game plan for the day and handle administrative matters so he can help teachers improve instruction during the rest of the day. He roams from classroom to classroom to observe teachers, give them informal feedback and present model lessons.
Dewey Hensley, the former principal of the J. B. Atkinson Academy for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Louisville, Ky., where nearly all of the roughly 400 students were living in poverty, used data to get teachers to own their students’ performance. He lined a wall in the staff room with photos of teachers and color-coded charts showing whether their students were at grade level, below grade level or significantly below grade level. Once one of Kentucky’s lowest performers, his school doubled its proficiency in reading, math and writing.
Kimberly Washington, principal of Hyattsville Middle School in Hyattsville, Md., zeroed in on behavior that interrupted teaching and learning — students who were hanging out in the halls and coming late to class. She instituted uniforms, got extra help for misbehaving students and celebrated students’ accomplishments at rallies. Creating a positive culture helped cut suspensions by 90 percent from one year to the next.
Without strong principals like these, student achievement won’t improve. My organization, the Wallace Foundation, has spent a decade and a half working with states and districts nationwide, including the districts where these exemplary public school principals operate.
We also commission research on school leadership. In the largest of these studies, covering 180 schools in nine states, researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Toronto concluded, “We have not found a single case of a school improving its student achievement record in the absence of talented leadership.”
We need a bigger pool of outstanding principal candidates; we need to get them into the schools with the greatest challenges; and we need to support them on the job. Right now, that’s not happening in enough communities.
Most principals start out as teachers. They typically earn master’s degrees in educational administration, but many university principal training programs are “inadequate to poor,” according to a study by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College at Columbia University. Would-be principals take classes in general management, school laws and administrative requirements, with little emphasis on how to improve teaching and student learning. The head of the University Council for Educational Administration estimates that only 200 out of the 500 university preparation programs for principals are effective.
New principals are often thrown into these tough jobs to sink or swim with little assistance from their districts, prompting many to quit before they can turn things around. On average, principals nationwide stay at a school about three to four years. That’s less than the five to seven years recommended by the Minnesota-Toronto researchers who conducted our study of school leadership.
It’s hard to think of another profession where so little attention is paid to leadership. Organizations like the military, corporations and universities invest heavily in their leaders. If we’re going to do this in public education, a lot has to change.
In Congress, lawmakers debating reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act need to make principals a priority. Currently only 4 percent of federal dollars for improving educator performance is spent cultivating principals. Federal policy should fund improved training and mentoring for principals and require the equitable distribution of effective principals to schools with the greatest needs.
States should be much tougher about which university principal training programs get accredited and about principal licensing requirements.
University programs should selectively admit outstanding candidates who really want to become principals, not teachers looking for a credential to get a pay raise. The University of Illinois at Chicago, which has participated in our foundation’s meetings, has made its curriculum for principals much more challenging. It carefully screens applicants, who get hands-on experience during a full-year internship, as well as three years of on-the-job coaching by former principals. U.I.C. reports that schools led by these principals outperform comparable public schools in Chicago on measures ranging from keeping freshmen on track for graduation to standardized test scores to actual graduation rates.
School districts need to groom many more outstanding school leaders, in part by making sure they get proper training, but also by matching principals’ strengths with schools’ needs. It should become routine to provide new principals with mentors for several years.
Great teachers are essential but not enough. They need to be led and developed by great principals. As the federal government, states and local districts work to turn around schools, we need to figure out how to get more people with the right training and support to take on one of the hardest jobs in America.
Senate panel votes unanimously in favor of No Child Left Behind revision
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 16, 2015
The Senate education committee voted unanimously Thursday in favor of a bill to revise the nation’s main education law, sending the measure to the Senate floor for consideration later this spring.
The 22-to-0 vote was an unusual example of bipartisanship in a Congress known for its polarization and gridlock. It gave many observers reason to believe that federal lawmakers might finally be able to reach a deal to rewrite the law known as No Child Left Behind, which expired in 2007.
“This has been a piece of legislation that has been seven years in the making,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “We’ve never been able to get it to the floor, because we’ve not really agreed on anything. This time it’s different.”
The compromise bill would leave in place the requirement that states test students in math and reading in Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. But it would significantly reduce the federal role in public schools.
States would still have to do something about low-performing schools, but it would be up to state officials to decide how to define a low-performing school and what, exactly, to do about them — a departure from No Child Left Behind, under which the federal government laid out an escalating series of sanctions for schools that persistently failed to meet academic targets.
Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, spent months hashing out a bipartisan compromise, setting a tone of cooperation that continued as the committee marked up the bill this week.
The committee voted unanimously to adopt several noncontroversial amendments, including one to provide funds for states to audit their standardized tests to determine which are redundant or low-quality.
And senators on both sides of the aisle withdrew proposals that did not have bipartisan support, leaving intact the basic framework of the Alexander-Murray compromise.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) expressed deep reservations about the bill, saying that it fails to protect the interests of the nation’s most vulnerable students, including poor and minority students, students with disabilities and English-language learners. But she said she had “deep respect” for efforts by Alexander and Murray to work in good faith toward a better bill.
“It is in deference to those ongoing efforts that I am going to vote yes,” Warren said. “But I intend to fight for these changes when it gets to the floor, to ensure that this legislation . . . lives up to the promise that we once made in our landmark civil rights laws.”
The bill could still change significantly or stall before it hits President Obama’s desk.
A House bill to rewrite the law stalled in February, when a floor vote was canceled after conservative GOP lawmakers said it did not do enough to get the federal government out of local schools. Some conservatives have been critical of the Senate bill for the same reason.
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