NEWS
- Charter school applicant wants to help D.C. students overcome inequality [Washington Leadership Academy and Democracy Prep PCS mentioned]
- No Budget Problems at PCSB
- New rules would govern how D.C. public schools fund renovations
- Study: Far fewer new teachers are leaving the profession than previously thought
Charter school applicant wants to help D.C. students overcome inequality [Washington Leadership Academy and Democracy Prep PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
April 29, 2015
A charter school applicant wants to open a new high school in Washington, D.C., and break down the “Anacostia River line” of inequality.
Stacy Kane, one of the co-founders of Washington Leadership Academy, told the D.C. Public Charter School Board at a public hearing she wants to establish the school because there was a line between high school students who perform well academically and those who don’t.
“That dividing line is the Anacostia River,” she said. “This is not the way it should work, especially here in D.C., where we have an opportunity to be role models for our country and for even the world, in how we can use education to reduce inequality.”
The school will have a strong focus on technology and its curriculum will be based on three core components: knowledge, skills and habits. The charter will teach students with hands-on projects and experiences and help them become “public leaders.”
This is the second year the founders have applied for a charter in D.C. The charter school approval rate is about 40 percent.
The school was co-founded by Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools, a renowned chain of “no excuses” schools that operates in D.C., New York City and New Jersey. In addition to the academy, the founders will establish an education service provider, Revolution Schools, with plans to expand its curriculum to other schools.
The charter’s core curriculum will include classes in English, math, civics, science, computer science, physical education, art and music, Spanish, and electives such as chess, speech, African dance and hip hop.
The academy would also provide a service-learning component for 11th graders, who will work at government entities, nonprofits and social enterprises. Seniors will complete a capstone project that uses technology and helps their community.
If approved, the school will open in the fall of 2016, serving 100 ninth-graders, with plans to expand to 12th grade within four years.
Founders cited a lack of quality high schools in Ward 7 and 8 as a reason to open in D.C. According to the charter’s application, only three charter high schools in the area have a 50 percent proficiency rate in math and reading. The area’s traditional high schools have a proficiency rate of 15 to 22 percent.
Demand for charters increased 18 percent this year, with 8,526 applicants on waiting lists. The waitlist for out-of-neighborhood traditional schools also increased by 25 percent, to 7,000.
Four other charters have also applied to open a school in D.C. next year. The board votes on the applications May 18. The public has until 5 p.m. May 11 to submit written comments regarding each school.
No Budget Problems at PCSB
DC Public Charter School Board Blog Post
By Scott Pearson
April 27, 2015
In his April 24 article, “DC Charter Board has its own revenue equity problem”, (link is external) Mark Lerner made the incorrect claim that the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) is “having its own problems balancing its books”. In reality, the budget PCSB presented to Council at the April 22 FY16 Budget Oversight Hearing represents a conservative budget that will allow PCSB to continue to fully meet its obligation to conduct rigorous oversight over public charter schools in DC, while making up less than 1 percent of total education spending in the city. In fact, the PCSB FY16 Budget includes a contingency as well as a surplus that will be a contribution to reserves.
The article also suggests that PCSB should be given access to District services, such as legal services, in an effort to attain funding equity with DCPS. However, this misconstrues the function of the two agencies, and is not a option that PCSB is interested in pursuing at this time. PCSB does not serve a “central office” function for schools as DCPS does, but instead oversees 61 separate and independent non-profit organizations that operate charter schools. PCSB also values its status as an independent government agency that can make decisions in the best interest of students, outside of politics and bureaucracy.
Scott Pearson is the Executive Director of PCSB.
New rules would govern how D.C. public schools fund renovations
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
April 29, 2015
D.C. Council member David Grosso proposed new rules Wednesday that would govern the council’s decisions about how to fund school renovations in the future, aiming to make more efficient and equitable use of the resources the city spends to improve public school facilities.
Grosso, chairman of the Education Committee, said his proposal emerged from concerns that the school system’s process of spending capital-improvement funds has been haphazard, leaving some schools waiting years for upgrades while others benefit far faster. He said that the changes, if approved, could lead the council to alter the mayor’s capital budget plan, which could result in some schools receiving less planned-improvement money and others receiving needed attention sooner.
There has been an inequity in how the money is spent, he said, with 26 schools not having any improvements in recent years, including many elementary schools east of the Anacostia River.
“The past six to eight years have been a real free-for-all when it comes to capital budgets in the schools,” said Grosso (I-At Large). “I think there can be some objective ways to do this that are fair and can have a better impact on a broader number of schools.”
Under his proposal, decisions about capital spending would be based first on a category called “equity,” taking into account the date and type of the school’s last modernization, the condition of the facility and the amount of investments made in other schools in the same feeder pattern.
The second category would be “student demand,” including actual and projected enrollment figures and how crowded the school is.
He also proposed looking at the school’s community, including overall public financial investment in the neighborhood, as well as the number of school-age children in the boundary and how well the school supports teaching and learning.
Grosso is asking for feedback on the criteria and whether people think they reflect the most important factors that should be considered, and he posted an online survey on his Web site.
Grosso said the rules are a result of work with the D.C. schools chancellor, the deputy mayor for education and the Department of General Services. Chancellor Kaya Henderson asked Grosso to help overhaul the system in February by creating a task force that would create some “logical” criteria rather than “how loudly your community screams.”
Grosso ultimately sped up the process after Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) released the six-year capital budget in April.
The plan caused alarm in many communities. It pushed back about 20 school modernizations, some indefinitely, while adding $30 million to Duke Ellington School of the Arts, increasing its total construction cost to $178 million, the most expensive high school project to date. The plan also showed annual spending decreasing in the next few years.
Grosso said he hopes whatever plan the council approves will be more predictable.
“I am tired of giving people unrealistic or empty promises,” Grosso said.
The council signs off on a six-year plan annually, but that changes dramatically year-to-year and even during the year. The mayor typically asks for a “reprogramming” partway through the year that shuffles projects around further.
Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, said such a process is “long overdue.”
The fund’s ward-by-ward analysis shows that under the proposed capital plan, just 2 percent of modernization funds during the next six years would go to schools in Ward 5, and 4 percent would go to schools in Ward 8, both areas with high concentrations of poverty.
“There has been very little scrutiny over how we fund capital projects,” Filardo said.
Study: Far fewer new teachers are leaving the profession than previously thought
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 30, 2015
New teachers are far less likely to leave the profession than previously thought, according to federal data released Thursday.
Ten percent of teachers who began their careers in 2007-2008 left teaching after their first year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But attrition then leveled off, and five years into their careers, 83 percent were still teaching.
That figure — indicating that just 17 percent of new teachers left their jobs in the first five years — stands in stark contrast to the attrition statistic that has been repeated (and lamented) for years: That between 40 percent and 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.
The higher estimate, which has become a fixture in education debates, comes from the work of Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading scholar on the nation’s teacher workforce.
But Ingersoll’s famous estimate was just that — an estimate. A “crude approximation,” he said in an interview Wednesday, made necessary by the fact that no one had tracked a cohort of new teachers over time to see how long they stayed in the classroom.
But now federal officials have done just that. They followed a representative sample of teachers who began their careers in the 2007-2008 school year in order to find out what happened to them. And the new findings present such a different picture that they have the potential to change the national conversation about new-teacher attrition, a problem that cascades across issues ranging from student achievement to school district budgets.
“I don’t think it’s that the earlier numbers that people like myself calculated were wrong,” Ingersoll said, explaining that his estimate eventually was buttressed by additional data that put new-teacher attrition in the same ballpark. “The hope is that there’s been an improvement and that teacher attrition has gone down.”
Ingersoll pointed out that comparing the new study to his estimate has an apples-to-oranges problem. His estimate included both public and private school teachers, for example, while the new data includes only public school teachers. His estimate looked at attrition that occurs after the fifth year of teaching, while the new data looks at attrition after the fourth year of teaching.
And he said that how you calculate attrition depends on how you define it. He believes 17 percent might be too low. As a member of the advisory panel for the database that gave rise to the new study, he has been doing his own calculations with the raw numbers, and he believes that a more accurate figure — which would include teachers who left the classroom and then returned within the first five years of their career — could be higher than 20 percent.
But even with those caveats, he said, the new figures are clearly lower than those that have been bandied about in education debates for years. And it’s too soon to know why, Ingersoll said, though there is likely to be no shortage of explanations.
Proponents of the Obama administration’s education policies might say that conditions for teachers have improved, Ingersoll said, while others might argue that his earlier estimates exaggerated the problem. And the recession also might have played a role: The new study began tracking teachers just as the economy went south, perhaps giving more teachers reason to stay put in their jobs.
“You can get different spins on this report,” Ingersoll said. “I certainly would hope that the reason the rates were lower is because so many of these reforms have hit pay dirt and we’re improving things. But the truth is, we do not know that.”
Among other key findings from the federal data released Thursday:
- New teachers who are assigned mentors are more likely to continue teaching than those who are not assigned mentors. In 2008-2009, 92 percent of those who had first-year mentors were still teaching, compared to 84 percent of those without mentors. By 2011-12, 86 percent of those who had first-year mentors were teaching, compared to 71 percent who did not have mentors.
- Teachers with higher starting salaries — above $40,000 — were more likely to continue teaching than those with lower salaries.
- The proportion of teachers who leave the classroom involuntarily — for either budgetary or performance reasons — is not insignificant. Of the teachers who left after their first year, for example, 27 percent left involuntarily.
- Older teachers who began their careers after age 30 were more likely to leave the profession within five years than younger teachers, and men were more likely to leave than women.
- Teachers who entered the profession via an alternative certification program (such as Teach for America) were more likely to leave the profession than those who went through traditional training programs. In 2011-2012, for example, about 21 percent of teachers with alternative certification were not teaching anymore, compared with 16 percent of teachers with traditional training.
- Teachers who spend their first year in higher-poverty schools (where more than 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch) are slightly more likely to leave the profession than those who spend their first year in lower-poverty schools. But the data do not say how many of those teachers who began in high-poverty schools then transferred into more affluent schools within their first five years. Such transfers have contributed to particularly high turnover in many of the nation’s neediest schools.
The new findings offer some information about teacher mobility — i.e., how often teachers who stay in the profession move among schools. But the study does not say how many first-year teachers are still teaching in the same building five years later. Isaiah O’Rear, who has managed the study for the National Center for Education Statistics, said a future report will take a closer look at how new teachers move from school to school.
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