- D.C.’s Hospitality High to convert from charter to traditional school [Hospitality High PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
- Options to remain open next year [Options PCS mentioned]
- Turning around a failing DCPS school isn't impossible, but you need the right principal
- A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy
D.C.’s Hospitality High to convert from charter to traditional school [Hospitality High PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 29, 2014
Leaders of Hospitality High, a D.C. charter school backed by some of the Washington area’s largest hotel companies, have decided to relinquish their charter to join the city’s traditional school system.
The unusual move — it is the first time a D.C. charter school has converted into a traditional school — allows Hospitality to avoid potential closure by the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which is responsible for approving new charters and closing those that underperform.
“Our choice to merge with D.C. Public Schools was in the best interest of our students and the commitment that we’ve made to the District of Columbia to expose them to the wonderful industry that is hospitality, which is the largest industry in the city,” said Hospitality board member Solomon Keene, president of the Hotel Association of Washington, D.C.
Hospitality’s board — a politically connected group including lobbyist David Wilmot and representatives from such hotel giants as Marriott International and Hilton — signed an agreement to join the school system in the 2015-16 school year. The board will operate an academy within the school system’s Columbia Heights Educational Campus, according to the agreement.
The parties have 90 days to work out a detailed transition plan, including what will happen to Hospitality’s building in the Logan Circle-U Street neighborhood.
“I’m very happy that DCPS is willing to help this school continue,” said Darren Woodruff, vice chairman of the city’s charter board, which voted Tuesday to accept Hospitality’s relinquishment of its charter. “I wish them success.”
During the 2014-15 school year, Hospitality will be managed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) under a little-known and little-used provision in city law. The school’s board will continue to be responsible for day-to-day operations.
“It’s no secret that the mayor is a big proponent of career and technical education,” said Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro. The District is “a city booming with amazing restaurants and some of the country’s finest hotels, and it only makes sense to continue having a hospitality program, whether it’s a charter or traditional school.”
About 200 students attend Hospitality, which aims to train students for careers in the industry while simultaneously preparing them for college. The school’s 15-year charter is to expire in September, and it appeared unlikely to meet the legal standard for renewal, charter board staff member Sarah Medway said Tuesday.
Medway said Hospitality had failed to meet its academic goals, citing standardized test scores below the city average: Thirty-five percent of its students were proficient in math last year and 31 percent were proficient in reading.
Hospitality officials said that they believed the school did meet its goals and that the school was targeted for closure before it was allowed its full due process.
The hospitality industry has contributed generously to the school. Marriott donated $500,000 to help buy Hospitality’s building, and Hilton invested $100,000 toward renovating a kitchen. Altogether, members of the city’s hotel association have contributed more than $1.4 million. “If you look back over the past several years, you’ll find that no other industry in Washington, D.C., has committed themselves to the education of their young people like the hotel industry,” Keene said. “It’s something we pride ourselves on.” Hospitality was founded in 1999 by a group of industry leaders including Emily Durso, who was then president of the hotel association. Durso resigned from the school’s board in 2011 to join the Gray administration, and she now heads the office responsible for redesigning the school system’s approach to middle and high schools.
Officials with the public school system said they have no concern about a conflict of interest since she is no longer directly involved in Hospitality. Hospitality’s board is now chaired by Durso’s cousin, Michael A. Durso, a longtime educator and president of the Montgomery County Board of Education.
The Public Charter School Board also voted Tuesday to allow Options Public Charter School, which is for at-risk youths and had faced closure for alleged fiscal mismanagement, to remain open through the end of next school year under the oversight of court-appointed receiver Josh Kern.
Options to remain open next year [Options PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 29, 2014
The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted unanimously Tuesday to allow Options Public Charter School, a school for at-risk youths that had faced closure for allegations of fiscal mismanagement, to remain open through the 2014-2015 school year.
The board also voted to enter into an agreement with Josh Kern, Options’ court-appointed receiver, to continue overseeing the school during that time.
The move ends, at least temporarily, a long period of uncertainty and instability for the school’s nearly 400 middle- and high school students, most of whom have severe disabilities, have been expelled from other schools or struggled with homelessness and other such risk factors.
“It’s been very tough,” said Charles Vincent, the executive director of Options. “I’m glad to see the school is open because it is best for the kids.”
Options was thrust into turmoil in October when the D.C. attorney general filed a lawsuit alleging that its three top managers had diverted millions of taxpayer dollars to two for-profit companies they owned.
A judge appointed Kern to oversee Options and the charter school board voted to begin charter revocation proceedings, prompting an outcry from Options students and parents who said they had nowhere else to go.
Kern explored whether the school could stay open under the operation of D.C. public schools, but he and DCPS could not reach an agreement to do that in a way that met the city’s legal requirements, according to District lawyers. DCPS officials also said their neighborhood schools did not have the capacity to take on Options’ high-needs students.
Charter board officials were persuaded that it would be best for Options to stay open under Kern, who plans to hire an executive director to manage day-to-day operations. The one-year extension will give the city more time to figure out how to adequately serve Options students over the longer term, board members said.
“This process has illuminated an urgent need within the city to address the educational needs of these 370 students and other students in the city who have comparable educational needs,” said board member Don Soifer.
Under federal law, students with disabilities are guaranteed placement in a private school if there is no way for them to appropriately served in a public school. But the possibility of sending Options students to private schools has not been discussed in public charter board meetings and court hearings.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) has pushed to shrink the number of students with disabilities who go to private school at taxpayer expense and often speaks of the tens of millions of dollars that have been saved through that effort.
Tami Lewis, who works on special education issues for the charter board, said that the expense was not a factor in determining what should happen with Options students. “Cost is not the issue here,” she said.
Lewis said the quality of private schools that serve students with disabilities is uneven, and that moving at-risk students to a new school can be so disruptive that they drop out of school altogether.
“I think there’s almost this fantasy that if we put these children in non-publics, it would be a magic pill,” Lewis said. “That is not the case.”
Turning around a failing DCPS school isn't impossible, but you need the right principal
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
April 29, 2014
There's no set formula for the notoriously difficult task of turning around a failing school. But if you find the right principal and give him or her enough resources and freedom, you might be on your way.
The pace of improvement at DCPS schools has generally been painfully slow, but a few have seen significant gains in proficiency in recent years while continuing to serve high-poverty populations. One of those is Wheatley Education Campus in Trinidad, where proficiency rates have more than doubled since 2008. Is there a way to replicate that success?
When Scott Cartland took over as principal of the preK-8 campus 6 years ago, he was in for a shock. He had spent the previous 7 years as an administrator at two high-performing elementary schools in Upper Northwest. Wheatley—or, as it was then known, Webb-Wheatley—was something else entirely.
"I felt like we walked into total chaos," he says. "The culture was just so negative and dysfunctional."
In a way, Cartland was lucky: the school's performance had been so poor that it was being reconstituted under the federal No Child Left Behind law. That meant Cartland was free to replace the staff, and he ended up keeping only 4 or 5 teachers out of about 30.
But that had its disadvantages as well. With so many new teachers, "the kids don't know anybody," he says, and "relationships are important."
Proficiency rates—the usual measure of a school's success—barely budged for the first several years. But the past two years have seen a marked increase. The 2013 rates were 37% in math and 31% in reading. That may not sound impressive, but consider that in 2009 they were 13% in both subjects.
Change takes time
One of the lessons Cartland draws from his experience is that change takes time. And it takes even more time before it shows up in proficiency rates.
DC's standardized test scores group students into 4 categories: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. The system is set up to measure a school's success primarily by the percentage of students in the Proficient or Advanced categories.
But at a school like Wheatley, where over half the students were Below Basic in math in 2008, it takes a while before significant numbers can move up to Proficient. The vast majority will move up to Basic first, and the school gets little credit when they do.
Another challenge is the tremendous amount of movement between schools in DC. Cartland says that a third of his students are new every year, and about 20 of them arrive after having been "kicked out of charters." So each year the tests are assessing a different group of students.
How has Cartland managed to get the school on an upward trajectory despite these obstacles?
First, he was careful about who he hired. He looked for teachers and administrators who would be willing to work as a team, and who would "buy into the idea that this is important work, not just a teaching job."
Cartland says that to be successful at a high-poverty school, teachers need to be able to build strong relationships with kids, and they need excellent classroom management skills. Perhaps most important, they have to be constantly striving to improve, and they can't quit when the going gets tough. "It never gets easy," Cartland says.
Second, he focused on creating an environment that was calm enough to allow teaching to take place. That required "lots of conversations with teachers" about making behavioral expectations clear and being consistent about consequences. Creating this kind of positive school culture, Cartland says, isn't just about punishing kids but also about "giving kids the tools to work out problems."
Finding the right partners
Third, Cartland entered into a number of beneficial partnerships with other organizations. The Flamboyan Foundation has helped teachers engage parents in their children's education. Turnaround for Children has been crucial in connecting kids who are struggling with the social services they needed.
Reading Partners provides tutoring. (Disclosure: I volunteer as a tutor with Reading Partners at Wheatley.) A couple of other organizations sponsor cultural field trips that are tied to the curriculum.
Another kind of partnership that Cartland clearly values is the DC Collaborative for Change, or DC3, a network of 9 DCPS elementary schools that share ideas and engage in professional development together.
Some of the schools are struggling to improve, like Wheatley and Walker-Jones Education Campus, while others, like Janney and Mann in Upper Northwest, serve a more affluent population. The premise of the collaboration is not that the higher-performing schools will "teach" the lower-performing ones, but rather that all of these schools can learn from one another.
Cartland says being part of DC3 has helped him maintain a consistent instructional philosophy. It's also enabled him to operate with more autonomy than some other principals have, because DCPS has given the DC3 schools greater control over things like budgeting and professional development.
And now that Wheatley has a positive school culture more or less in place, Cartland is turning more of his attention to academics. With the help of a Breakthrough Schools grant announced today, next year he'll introduce a new competency-based approach in the middle school grades. He says that will give kids more ownership of their educational experience and also allow them to move at their own pace.
That approach, he says, should also enable Wheatley to engage and challenge kids at any ability level, including children from middle-class families now moving into the neighborhood. The school hasn't yet seen any effects of gentrification, but Cartland says Wheatley will be ready if and when that happens.
Autonomy plus the right leader
The relative autonomy Cartland has enjoyed may be the key to Wheatley's transformation. It's enabled him to basically choose the staff he wanted and to shape the school largely as he saw fit. Every school is different, Cartland says, and there's no fixed menu of improvements that will work across the board.
Some argue that autonomy is the basic reason for the success of high-performing charter schools. And some have advocated giving greater autonomy to traditional public schools in hopes that it will have similar effects.
But autonomy only works when the individuals exercising it have clear goals and understand how to achieve them. Most DCPS schools where principals have had the authority to replace teachers haven't seen the kind of improvement Wheatley has. Low-performing schools that have made progress, including Kelly Miller Middle School and Tubman Elementary School as well as Wheatley, have been led by strong principals.
And while there are programs that have brought good results in a number of high-poverty schools, like Flamboyan and Turnaround for Children, even the best program will only work if a school implements it well. And good implementation depends largely on the school's principal.
So if we're going to replicate the kind of success Wheatley has experienced, the first step may be to replicate Scott Cartland, or at least identify others like him. Then we'll need to give those principals the time, the freedom, and the resources to figure out what will work to improve their schools, and to make it happen.
The question is: with so many low-performing schools in DC, are there enough Scott Cartlands out there to go around?
A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy
The New York Times
By David Leonhardt
April 29, 2014
The behavior gap between rich and poor children, starting at very early ages, is now a well-known piece of social science. Entering kindergarten, high-income children not only know more words and can read better than poorer children but they also have longer attention spans, better-controlled tempers and more sensitivity to other children.
All of which makes the comparisons between boys and girls in the same categories fairly striking: The gap in behavioral skills between young girls and boys is even bigger than the gap between rich and poor.
By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way, a Washington research group. The gap grows over the course of elementary school and feeds into academic gaps between the sexes. By eighth grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A’s and B’s or better. Only 31 percent of boys do.
And in an economy that rewards knowledge, the academic struggles of boys turn into economic struggles. Men’s wages are stagnating. Men are much more likely to be idle — neither working, looking for work nor caring for family — than they once were and much more likely to be idle than women.
We reported last week that the United States had lost its once-enormous global lead in middle-class pay, based on international income surveys over the last three decades. After-tax median income in Canada appears to have been higher last year than the same measure in this country. The poor in Canada and much of western Europe earn more than the poor here.
These depressing trends have many causes, but the social struggles of men and boys are an important one. If the United States is going to build a better-functioning economy than the one we’ve had over the last 15 years, we’re going to have to solve our boy problems.
To put it another way, the American economy — for all its troubles (and all of the lingering sexism) — looks to be doing pretty well when you focus on girls. The portion of women earning a four-year college degree has jumped more than 75 percent over the last quarter-century, in line with what has happened in other rich countries. Median inflation-adjusted female earnings are up almost 35 percent over the same span, census data show — while male earnings, incredibly, haven’t risen at all.
“We know we’ve got a crisis, and the crisis is with boys,” said Elaine Kamarck, a resident scholar at Third Way and a former Clinton administration official. “We’re not quite sure why it’s happening.”
Two of the leading theories involve single-parent families and schools. The number of single-parent families has surged over the last generation, and the effect seems to be larger on boys in those families than girls. Girls who grow up with only one parent — typically a mother — fare almost as well on average as girls with two parents. Boys don’t.
But the trends seem too broad for family structure to be the only cause. That’s where schools come in.
Girls enter school with a lead on boys, and schools then fail to close the gaps. Instead, they increase. The behavioral advantage that girls have over boys in kindergarten, based on teachers’ assessments of their students, are even larger in fifth grade.
By then, the average girl is at the 60th percentile of an index of social and behavioral skills, while the average boy is at only the 40th percentile, according to Claudia Buchmann of Ohio State and Thomas DiPrete of Columbia, the authors of the new paper. That gap of 20 percentage points is larger than the 14-point gap between poor and not poor children or the 15-point gap between white and black children.
These behavior measures are subjective, of course, based on the views of teachers across the country in very different classrooms. Yet it’s clear that the measures reflect something real, because the behavior differences later translate into academic differences. By high school, even advanced math and science classes now have more girls than boys. At college graduation ceremonies around the country this spring, women in caps and gowns will easily outnumber men.
The experts who study the subject disagree on the solutions. Some, like Ms. Buchmann and Mr. DiPrete, point out that boys still do quite well in the best-performing schools. When good grades bring high status, boys respond. To the researchers in this camp, the answer involves improving schools, which will have a disproportionate effect on boys, rather than changing schools to be more attuned to boys’ needs.
Others, like Christina Hoff Sommers, argue that today’s education system fails to acknowledge the profound differences between boys and girls. It asks boys to sit still for hours every day and provides them with few role models in front of the classroom. Just as the dearth of female science professors hampers would-be female science majors in college, the dearth of male fourth-grade teachers creates problems for 10-year-old boys.
My own sense is that both sides have a point — and that their ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. Experimenting with all kinds of solutions will offer better answers than we now have.
The problems that stem from gender have become double-edged. The old forms of sexism, while greatly diminished, still constrain women. The job market exacts harsh financial and career penalties on anyone who decides to work part time or take time off, and the workers who do so are overwhelmingly female. That’s a big part of the reason that the top ranks of corporate America, Silicon Valley and the government remain dominated by men.
But men have their own challenges. As the economy continues to shift away from brawn and toward brains, many men have struggled with the transition.
“Boys are getting the wrong message about what you need to do to be successful,” Ms. Buchmann says. “Traditional gender roles are misguiding boys. In today’s economy, being tough and being strong are not what leads to success.”
The problem doesn’t simply involve men trying to overcome the demise of a local factory or teenage boys getting into trouble. It involves children so young that most haven’t even learned the word “gender.” Yet their gender is already starting to cast a long shadow over their lives.