- D.C. school boundary revisions will not be ready before the fall, officials say
- The racket with standardized test scores
- In Indiana, a big win for school choice
- EDITORIAL: The real civil rights issue: Indiana Supreme Court advances school choice
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 1, 2013
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s politically sensitive effort to overhaul school boundaries is moving more slowly than anticipated and will not be finalized in June as planned, officials said Monday. Work on the revisions will continue throughout the summer and into the fall, according to spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz. Despite the delay, the changes are still expected to take effect for the 2014-15 school year. “We want to make sure this process is as thorough and inclusive as possible,” Salmanowitz wrote in an e-mail. “It takes time to get all the right pieces together.” The comprehensive review of boundaries, feeder patterns and enrollment policies is the first since the 1970s and could trigger a broad and divisive fight over access to some of the city’s highest-performing schools. When the chancellor announced the undertaking this past fall, she said her staff would begin holding community meetings on proposed boundary changes in January.
Since then, no meetings have been held. No proposals have been made. And anxiety among parents — including among those who purchased their homes based on school zones — has been building.
“As months have been passing, parents have been wondering and asking,” said Jenny Backus, a mother at Lafayette Elementary, which feeds into Alice Deal Middle and Woodrow Wilson High, two of the city’s most sought-after and overcrowded schools. “I think there are some worries out there that we don’t know what’s happening yet.” Backus is among more than a dozen Lafayette parents who began organizing months ago to defend the school’s boundaries and feeder pattern. They pleaded their case to schools officials in an online letter that has been signed by more than 300 people.
“We don’t want to wake up in a month and realize somehow we missed an opportunity to get our voices heard,” Backus said. “We know they have a really hard job and they’re going to try to balance a lot of competing interests.” The boundary issue comes at a busy time for schools officials, who are preparing to close 13 schools in June and planning for the subsequent displacement of more than 2,500 students. Henderson has floated the possibility of eliminating high school boundaries, replacing assigned neighborhood schools with magnets open to applicants citywide. But otherwise she has provided few clues about what might be in the offing.
The chancellor told D.C. Council members in March that boundaries-related work has been proceeding, even though it hasn’t been visible. Consultants have pulled together demographic and other data to inform decisions. Now the school system is convening a task force that will be responsible for recommending changes to the chancellor based on community members’ questions and concerns. The task force will include about 20 members of varied backgrounds, officials said, including parents from each ward; residents familiar with schools, neighborhoods and history; legal and policy experts; and D.C. government officials. The chancellor said last month that the task force would develop a draft proposal before asking for reaction and input from parents. Now there are hints that parents may have a chance to weigh in earlier, before recommendations are even drafted.
“We look forward to engaging parents and the community about their concerns before making even initial proposals,” Salmanowitz wrote in an e-mail. “It’s still very early in the process.” Salmanowitz said she could not say when the members will be named. She added that officials have put the boundary-revision effort on hold so they can consult with incoming deputy mayor for education Abigail Smith, who starts work April 10. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who has urged schools officials to engage parents early on, said the slowed timeline may bode well. “If you don’t have an open, transparent process — that not just makes it look like parents are going to be engaged, but actually engages parents in the discussion and the debate — then I don’t see how you’re going to do a good job on this,” he said.
Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who represents Upper Northwest neighborhoods that feed into Deal and Wilson, agreed that the delay could be a good thing if it means that parents will be included in the decision-making process. But the lack of information so far has engendered angst and rumors, Cheh said. Officials should start the public conversation soon, she said — at least about general principles, such as how current students and younger siblings will be grandfathered into existing boundaries and feeder patterns. “The sooner they get out there with some basic parameters, the sooner they get out there and try to hear from parents — the better it will be,” Cheh said.
The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson
April 1, 2013
It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket. I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, is also accused of theft, conspiracy and making false statements. She has denied any wrongdoing.
Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.
In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall “National Superintendent of the Year” for improvement in student achievement that seemed, in retrospect, much too good to be true. On Georgia’s standardized competency test, students in some of Atlanta’s troubled neighborhoods appeared to vault past their counterparts in the wealthy suburbs. For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,” according to the indictment.
But there was a sure-fire way to meet those targets: After a day of testing, teachers allegedly were told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers. Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform. The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get accolades, plus a much bigger bonus. And students — duped into thinking they had mastered material that they hadn’t even begun to grasp — would get the shaft.
State education officials became suspicious. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories. There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in test scores at some schools in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets. But there was no proof. Sonny Perdue was Georgia’s governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation. Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade — and that Hall either knew or should have known. Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s grand jury indictment.
My Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that while there have been “dozens” of alleged cheating episodes around the country, only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated. “We don’t really know” how extensive the problem is, Strauss wrote, but “what we do know is that these cheating scandals have been a result of test-obsessed school reform.”
In the District of Columbia, for example, there are unanswered questions about an anomalous pattern of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets during the reign of famed schools reformer Michelle Rhee, who starred in the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” and graced the cover of Time magazine. Our schools desperately need to be fixed. But creating a situation in which teachers are more likely than students to cheat cannot be the right path.
Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. I totally reject the idea that students from underprivileged neighborhoods cannot learn. Of course they can. But how does it help these students to have their performance on a one-size-fits-all standardized test determine their teachers’ compensation and job security? The clear incentive is for the teacher to focus on test scores rather than actual teaching. Not every school system will become so mired in an alleged pattern of wrongdoing that officials can be charged under a racketeering statute of the kind usually used to prosecute mobsters. But even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals. It reduces students to the leavings of a No. 2 pencil.
School reform cannot be something that ostensibly smart, ostentatiously tough “superstar” superintendents do to a school system and the people who depend on it. Reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents — with honesty and, yes, a bit of old-fashioned humility.
The Washington Post
By Michael Gerson
April 1, 2013
The school choice movement — which germinated 50 years ago in free-market economistMilton Friedman’s fertile mind — recently counted its largest victory. The Indiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the state’s school voucher program. Under it, more than half a million low- and middle-income Hoosier students — and about 62 percent of all families — are eligible for state aid to help pay for a private or religious school. This is what school choice traditionally has lacked: scale.
Since the first experiment in Milwaukee in 1990, voucher programs have been resisted by a powerful combination of interests. Teachers unions have fought what they regard as a diversion of resources from public education — while conveniently undermining a source of professional competition and accountability. But this opposition has been empowered by the skepticism of many suburban parents, who have paid a premium to buy homes in better school districts. When educational outcomes become less connected to the Zip code you inhabit, some property values will decline.
It is a paradox Friedman would have appreciated. Vouchers have been blocked by unions resisting market forces and by suburban parents reflecting those forces. Not surprisingly, support for school choice programs is often twice as high among urban residents as it is among suburban ones. This generally has relegated vouchers to the margins of education reform, in underfunded micro-programs aimed at the very poorest. The District of Columbia’s scholarship program, for example, capped participants at 3 percent of the student population while increasing funding for public education. The political price of providing vouchers to disadvantaged children often has been to shield public schools from even the mildest competitive pressure.
A limited choice program is not the same thing as a healthy, responsive educational market. “A rule-laden, risk-averse sector,” argues Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, “dominated by entrenched bureaucracies, industrial-style collective-bargaining agreements and hoary colleges of education will not casually remake itself just because students have the right to switch schools.” But even small, restricted choice programs have shown promising results — not revolutionary but promising. Last year a group of nine leading educational researchers summarized the evidence this way: “Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact. . . .Other research questions regarding voucher program participants have included student safety, parent satisfaction, racial integration, services for students with disabilities, and outcomes related to civic participation and values. Results from these studies are consistently positive.”
The Washington Times
April 2, 2013
Liberals spent all of last week portraying the legalization of homosexual wedlock as “the civil rights issue of our time.” As that theme suffused debate at the U.S. Supreme Court, a state high court stepped up and decided the real civil rights issue of our time. In a 5 to 0 ruling, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the ambitious school-voucher program put in place two years ago by Mitch Daniels, then the Republican governor. The ruling means the children of poor families won’t be condemned to attend the state’s worst schools by a union bureaucracy that cares more about protecting the jobs of incompetent teachers than about ensuring every pupil has a shot at a promising future.
The Indiana court rejected stale arguments against the state program, which offers families up to $4,500 to attend schools outside the public education system. The court found this arrangement does not unfairly send taxpayer money to religious institutions. Instead, the justices concluded the governmental assistance to parochial schools was incidental. “The parents of an eligible student are thus free to select any program-eligible school or none at all,” Chief Justice Brent E. Dickson wrote in the ruling. The ruling ends the legal challenge at the state level, but teachers unions and their water carriers could still take the issue to federal court. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar program in 2002 in Ohio, so the attempt to make a federal case out of it would be a long shot.
What sets Indiana’s program apart from other, more modest efforts across the nation is its scope. It’s not limited to poor families or those with children in failing public schools. Middle-class families are eligible to apply for vouchers, and the vouchers are offered statewide, even to families living in areas with adequate public schools. “I have long believed that parents should be able to choose where their children go to school, regardless of their income,” says Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican.
If Education Secretary Arne Duncan meant it when he asserted during a September 2011 “Back to School” bus tour of the Midwest that education is “the civil rights issue of our time,” he ought to embrace the Indiana model. The administration, unfortunately, is dead set against any reform that might upset powerful public-sector unions. President Obama has sought unsuccessfully in the past to defund Washington’s voucher program, known as D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. In this, Mr. Obama follows in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, who wielded his veto pen to thwart the first attempts to create the program. Once Congress was able to make it happen, the program proved wildly popular with low-income parents. The modest scholarships still aren’t enough to enable D.C.’s inner-city schoolkids to hobnob with the sons and daughters of presidents and senators at schools like gilt-edged Sidwell Friends. That doesn’t mean they should have to settle for what they’ll get from the failed public schools.
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