- District Charter Schools Set to Expand [KIPP DC PCS is mentioned]
- Simmons: Sound-Bite Reality Spews from D.C. Council [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
- Teach the Books, Touch the Heart
- Anacostia School Is Among Those in Pilot Program Stressing the Arts
District Charter Schools Set to Expand [KIPP DC PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
April 22, 2012
The District's booming charter school network is set to expand further Monday evening when school leaders vote on 11 wide-ranging applications to open schools.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board is also likely to approve another campus for KIPP DC, a high-performing charter operator looking to create more slots for preschoolers through eighth-grade students.
"We have a real sense of urgency about expanding," said Susan Schaeffler, CEO of KIPP DC, which has 2,627 students on waiting lists for its three campuses. That's one student more than the 2,626 enrolled.
Charter schools have been rapidly growing in the District, with enrollment increasing by 8 percent this school year, continuing a steady trend over the last decade. The 53 charters operating on 98 campuses serve nearly 32,000 children, or 41 percent of all public school students in the District. Last spring, the board approved four new charter schools that are slated to open this fall.
But if there's a saturation point, charter leaders say they're far from it as parents continue to enter lotteries for coveted spots in the city's top charters.
Among the 11 applications to be voted on Monday are two schools that separately proposed Hebrew and Arabic language-immersion programs; three adult education charters, including one virtual school; a K-12 campus that would be partially online; and college prep, Montessori and early childhood programs.
Charter applicants must explain why they would meet the needs of an underserved student population, as well as detail their fiscal and academic plans.
Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, declined to discuss specifics about Monday's prospects.
"The board makes a decision on whether this group has a very high chance of success," DeVeaux said.
KIPP DC, which operates several programs across three top-rated campuses, also will find out Monday if it has the board's blessing to open a fourth campus. The organization is eyeing a number of former DC Public Schools campuses, especially a spot near Browne Education Campus in Northeast, but is also keeping an eye out for more facilities.
Finding a space is an ongoing problem for charter schools, which must secure their own buildings.
"I want to expand, I want to meet more kids' needs in the city, and the one thing holding us back is access to facilities," Schaeffler said. "That's what I know."
Simmons: Sound-Bite Reality Spews from D.C. Council [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
April 22, 2012
Let’s face reality. Whether you are a lefty or a righty, there never is a shortage of sound bites from the D.C. Council, and this budget season is no different.
Organic yogurt for school children instead of regular Dannon.
Taller buildings.
Fewer school buildings.
Newer school buildings.
D.C. bars and restaurants getting the go-ahead to make the last call at 3 a.m. on weekdays and 4 a.m. on weekends.
Proposing that indigent and working-class people help pay for their health-care coverage.
Those issues are but a few items on a very long list that the council is chewing over as they try during oversight hearings to reconcile demand for city services with the supply of revenues.
Fortunately, the media, and lawmakers themselves, are providing some insight into the annual budget follies.
• Here’s the Washington Examiner quoting council member Jim Graham to WAMU-FM’s Kojo Nnamdi on why he opposes extending last call for alcoholic beverages: “Slamming car doors, arguing, cursing, singing, talking, cars starting, stopping, cabs coming and going — this is a very major issue for anyone who lives nearby. … What we’d be doing … is extending that problem another hour.”
Guess Mr. Graham, Ward 1 Democrat, hasn’t noticed that slamming car doors, arguing, cursing, singing, talking, cars starting, stopping, cabs coming and going are 24-hour occurrences in all eight wards of the city.
• Council member David A. Catania, at-large independent, announced last week that he is considering legislation that would require “small co-pays or premiums for [some subsidized health insurance] participants in order to maintain hospital-based service coverage.”
How radical, proposing health care co-payments.
• Mayor Vincent C. Gray exposed his radical side, too. One week after he froze and then thawed funds for charter schools, as The Washington Post put it, the mayor commented on why school closings are inevitable.
As the Examiner pointed out, traditional schools have 20,000 fewer students than they did just 10 years ago, but the school system has an estimated 40 buildings that the city can no longer afford. “Just do the math on it — it’s not sustainable,” the newspaper quoted the mayor as saying.
But here’s where the follies kicked in. The mayor also said “we will be back at you in a couple of weeks to talk about the closing of schools.”
School closings and modernizations bring out the best and worst of politicians’ biases, and the mayor’s alma mater, Dunbar High School, stands as a perfect example.
Dunbar is only 35 years old but is slated for a $100 million remodel.
In need of a point guard: Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown blew the lead during last week’s point-by-point public hearing with schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson regarding the outrageous Healthy Schools Act that Mr. Brown, Mr. Gray and other lawmakers passed unanimously two years ago.
Ms. Henderson lobbed her game winner in Mr. Brown’s face when she said the healthy schools mandate meant purchasing more costly “organic yogurt” for school children instead of Dannon.
Mr. Brown blew the game by failing to ask Ms. Henderson a pointed question: Were the children actually eating the regular Dannon, and are they now actually eating the higher-priced organic?
Three cheers: Friendship Public Charter Schools spent the better part of Saturday evening honoring the accomplishments of its students and teachers at its annual Teacher of the Year gala at the J.W. Marriott.
The event highlighted teachers in their classrooms engaging and encouraging their charges, including special-education students who many would rather turn their backs to.
Friendship Charters, thanks to the hard work and keen vision of founder and Chairman Donald L. Hense, is the city’s first charter to open multiple grade levels on multiple campuses, offer the first before- and after-school programs, and the first to offer Saturday schooling.
And while each of its schools picked a teacher of the year, Daniel Moses of Friendship Collegiate spoke truth to power after winning top honors.
He said while all children want to learn and deserve an uncompromising learning environment, the key is a loving and passionate teacher.
Three words said it all: “I love kids.”
Three cheers to Friendship for hiring Mr. Moses.
The New York Times
By Claire Needell Hollander
April 20, 2012
Franz Kafka wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.
We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate.
For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my principal after learning that a former stellar student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school — one that often attracts the literary-minded offspring of Manhattan’s elite — into a less competitive setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in jail, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital” could help students like her fare better in high school, where they would inevitably encounter, perhaps for the first time, peers who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned not G.E.D.’s but Ph.D.’s.
Along with “Of Mice and Men,” my groups read: “Sounder,” “The Red Pony,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lord of the Flies,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth.” The students didn’t always read from the expected perspective. Holden Caulfield was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage. About “The Red Pony,” one student said, “it’s about being a dude, it’s about dudeness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read “The Grapes of Wrath” and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical perspective was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, ex-students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their freshman year as a result of the classes.
And yet I do not know how to measure those results. As student test scores have become the dominant means of evaluating schools, I have been asked to calculate my reading enrichment program’s impact on those scores. I found that some students made gains of over 100 points on the statewide English Language Arts test, while other students in the same group had flat or negative results. In other words, my students’ test scores did not reliably indicate that reading classic literature added value.
Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data. But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test-preparation tutorial program. Only the highest-performing eighth graders were able to keep taking the reading classes.
Since beginning this new program in September, I have answered over 600 multiple-choice questions. In doing so, I encountered exactly one piece of literature: Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” The rest of the reading-comprehension materials included passages from watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures — passages chosen not for emotional punch but for textual complexity.
I MAY not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students’ test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By “using data to inform instruction,” as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck’s novels of the opportunity to read them.
It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for “cultural neutrality.” This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.
Of course no teacher disputes the necessity of being able to read for information. But if literature has no place in these tests, and if preparation for the tests becomes the sole goal of education, then the reading of literature will go out of fashion in our schools. I don’t have any illusions that adding literary passages to multiple-choice tests would instill a love of reading among students by itself. But it would keep those books on the syllabus, in the classrooms and in the hands of young readers — which is what really matters.
Better yet, we should abandon altogether the multiple-choice tests, which are in vogue not because they are an effective tool for judging teachers or students but because they are an efficient means of producing data. Instead, we should move toward extensive written exams, in which students could grapple with literary passages and books they have read in class, along with assessments of students’ reports and projects from throughout the year. This kind of system would be less objective and probably more time-consuming for administrators, but it would also free teachers from endless test preparation and let students focus on real learning.
We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.
An English teacher at a public middle school in Manhattan.
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 22, 2012
In its effort to transform the nation’s worst-performing schools, the Obama administration is launching an unusual experiment to pump up arts education in eight struggling schools, including one in the District.
The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, working with the Education Department, will announce a plan Monday to infuse art, music, dance, theater and other forms of creative expression into the schools over a two-year period.
Officials involved in the project want to prove a theory: Robust art, music, dance and theater can set failing schools on a path to academic success.
“These schools are ground zero for educational reform efforts in many ways,” said Rachel Goslins, executive director of the committee. “Arts could be really helpful in moving the needle. . . . Historically, the arts have been marginalized as ‘enrichment.’ We’re trying to show that arts education is not only a flower; it can also be a wrench.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the arts have been wrongly pushed out of elementary and secondary schools because of budget cuts and an emphasis on reading and math that resulted from the federal No Child Left Behind law.
As a boy, Duncan played drums in music class, although “not very successfully,” he said. His own children attend a science-focused elementary school in Arlington County, where Joe Puzzo, the music teacher, “has the kids singing and dancing about the planets. He’s got them doing extraordinary things.”
The eight schools in the pilot program also are receiving $14.7 million in federal school improvement grants over three years as part of a program to help chronically failing schools. The arts initiative will bring an additional $1 million in the first year, including several foundation grants, as well as $10,000 for each school in arts supplies from Crayola and $10,000 per school in musical instruments from the NAMM Foundation, as well as teacher training. Booz Allen, the consulting firm, is donating its services to perform an independent study of the program’s impact. And some famous artists, including musician Yo-Yo Ma, actress Alfre Woodard and painter Chuck Close, have each agreed to “adopt” a school, working with the students and teachers.
Children in high-poverty schools have less access to the arts than those in more affluent schools, a recent survey by the Education Department shows.A decade ago, 100 percent of high-poverty secondary schools offered music instruction; today, that figure is about 80 percent, according to a recent federal survey. And when high-poverty secondary schools teach music, they offer fewer courses than middle-class and affluent schools. A similar pattern holds for the visual arts.
More than 1.3 million students in elementary school and 800,000 secondary students receive no music education. About 4 million elementary school students do not get any visual arts instruction. The numbers are worse when it comes to dance and theater, the survey found. A decade ago, about 20 percent of elementary schools taught dance or theater, according to the report. Now 3 percent offer dance, while 4 percent teach theater, according to the survey.
And yet, in many ways, arts education is even more important for poor children because they have fewer opportunities to experience the arts outside school, Duncan said.
“The ugly truth is, in disadvantaged communities, these resources have been disproportionately cut,” he said. “That’s just a fact. And these are kids who don’t have access to private ballet lessons or piano lessons.”
New research indicates that students from low-income families who attend arts-rich schools are three times more likely to earn a college degree, and those who earn arts credits in high school are five times more likely to graduate than those who took few or no arts classes.
“It takes one opportunity for a child to perform and to really be recognized for having done something out of the ordinary — they begin to see themselves in a different light,” said Patrick Pope, principal at Savoy Elementary School in Anacostia, one of the eight schools in the pilot, has made the arts central to the school’s turnaround plan: He’s adding summer school for the first time, and it, too, will focus on the arts.
All of Savoy’s 372 students are African American, and 89 percent meet the federal definition of poor. Just 15 percent of Savoy’s students tested as proficient in math on the most recent standardized tests; 21 percent were proficient in reading.
The other schools selected for the pilot program are Batiste Cultural Arts Academy at Live Oak School in New Orleans (K-8); Findley Elementary School in Des Moines; Lame Deer Jr. High School in Lame Deer, Mont.; Noel Community Arts School in Denver; Orchard Gardens School in Boston (K-8); Martin Luther King Jr. School in Portland, Ore.; and Roosevelt School in Bridgeport, Conn.
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