- Small Classes [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- Positive news for charters from Mayor Gray's proposed budget
- D.C. officials seek to clarify confusing test instructions
- D.C. mayoral primary has Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s future up in the air
- What does Bowser’s primary win mean for D.C.’s schools?
Small Classes [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Northwest Current
By Davis Kennedy and Chris Kain
April 2, 2014
Speaking before the DC Rotary Club last month, Martha Cutts pointed to small class sizes as a factor in the success of Washington Latin, the charter school she directs.
Along with other notable characteristics — including requiring students in fifth through 10th grades to study Latin, and employing the Socratic method of instruction whenever possible — the school caps all classes at 20 students, with an average of 16 pupils per course.
Those methods work: The fifth-through-12th-grade school has the highest graduation rate of any open-admission public school in the District. And the list of schools offering graduates admission includes Bowdoin, Brown, Cornell, Georgetown and Morehouse.
Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration says that his proposed budget for the next fiscal year will feature a significant boost for traditional public schools, including money targeted to “at-risk” programs, a concept pushed last year by at-large D.C. Council member David Catania.
We hope some of that money will go toward ensuring small classes like those at Latin. Student-teacher ratio is just one facet of many that can help bolster struggling students, but we think it’s particularly important.
Overall, the idea of targeting the schools having the most trouble makes perfect sense. Part of the money will fund extended school days and Saturday classes — where teachers agree, as per collective bargaining agreements — which could also be important factors to improvement. But more hours spent at school are only as useful as the instruction that is offered, so ensuring that targeted students have quality teachers — and enough time to work with them — is crucial.
Positive news for charters from Mayor Gray's proposed budget
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
April 4, 2014
The charter sector has been eagerly awaiting Mayor Gray's release of his proposed Fiscal Year 2015 budget. The reason for the high level of anticipation was that last January the Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith released the Adequacy Study with the promise to end the approximately $100 million a year that the traditional schools receive outside of the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula to which charters do not have access. When she made the final report available to the public Ms. Smith revealed that the fix would be fazed in over several years. Yesterday, we got the first glimpse of what form the remedy would take.
Well it looks like the solution has been mostly put off for another day, and now we know, for another Mayor. However, at the same time, there is good news in the budget document for charters. For example, the DME explains that there is $112 million in new money in the UPSFF for both school systems. The base rate for teaching pupils would go up two percent, from $9,206 per child per year to $9,492. The remainder of the increase is targeted to augmenting funding for the following categories of students: middle school, high school, English language learners, alternative and adult. Finally, a weight was added "for students who are at risk of academic failure."
Moreover, there is an additional $5 million to assist in providing nurses to charter schools. Then comes the surprise. Although the Adequacy Study committed to studying charter school facility funding at a later date, Mayor Gray's budget includes the first increase in the facility fund in years. At $3,072 a year for each pupil the average charter of 400 students would see $288,000 in additional revenue. But there's more. The proposed budget ties the facility allotment to inflation so that it would go up as costs do.
A couple of other notes about the budget. It contains a new justification for DCPS being provided Department of General Services building maintenance dollars outside of the UPSFF because "DCPS is a system of right that must accommodate students in every community across the city, at any point during the school year, it must maintain a network of neighborhood schools, even if some are underutilized." It also does not target any money for Councilman David Catania's Promise school scholarships. The Mayor justifies this omission by saying that providing funding would lead to Congress ending the DC TAG program. The only problem with this justification is that no one on the Hill with oversight over the Federal plan is saying that this would be the case.
D.C. officials seek to clarify confusing test instructions
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 3, 2014
Some standardized tests administered to D.C. students this week included confusing instructions that city officials sought to clarify after teachers and principals — some of whose jobs depend on test results — reported the problems.
Directions for one section of an eighth-grade math test said that students could use calculators only on the first 16 questions, when, in fact, they were allowed to use calculators on questions 17 and 18 as well.
On a fifth-grade math exam, a picture of a stop sign printed on students’ answer sheets directed them to stop after answering Question 49. But the section actually continued on the next page to Question 52.
And on a sixth-grade math exam, both parts of a two-part question were labeled “49A” in the test booklet, but answer sheets labeled them as “49A” and “49B.”
CTB/McGraw-Hill writes the tests under a contract with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the city agency responsible for administering standardized tests. The publishing company received $3.4 million this year to develop, print and analyze the city’s annual tests.
Jesus Aguirre, who leads OSSE, called the problems “minor typographical errors” that affected only a small number of questions. Aguirre said agency staff provided guidance as soon as they heard about the issues after testing began this week.
Aguirre said CTB will analyze each question and throw out those for which students provided a statistically skewed number of incorrect answers, as they do every year. “We’re pretty sure that we’re going to get valid testing results,” he said.
Pete Weber, chief of data and strategy for D.C. Public Schools, which is required to administer the tests received from OSSE, said school system officials are “very disappointed and frustrated about these errors.”
“This is already a very stressful time for our teachers and school staff, and these issues do not help,” Weber said. “We are providing guidance and support for schools to deal with the errors, and we hope that no more come up during this test administration.”
Students who had already taken the flawed sections of the sixth-grade and eighth-grade exams before OSSE clarified instructions are not allowed to go back and revisit them.
Fifth-graders who stopped at Question 49 instead of 52, as the answer sheet directed them to do, are able to go back and answer those three questions. Proctors giving that exam have been told to remind students that they should turn the page past the stop sign, the kind of assistance that teachers have been trained not to offer to avoid accusations of cheating.
D.C. mayoral primary has Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s future up in the air
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 3, 2014
The day after Vincent C. Gray defeated Mayor Adrian M. Fenty in 2010, then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said that the election results would be “devastating for the schoolchildren of Washington, D.C.” Not long afterward, Rhee quit.
The day after Gray was defeated at the polls this week, Chancellor Kaya Henderson had a much different response.
“No disaster has happened — not here, at least,” Henderson said in an interview Wednesday shortly after calling her staff together to reassure them that she remains committed to her job and that the election does not change anything — at least not immediately. “We’re still building a world-class education system for children in D.C., and so we’re going to keep doing that.”
But Henderson’s job is secure only for the next nine months. Gray’s defeat injects new uncertainty into the city’s efforts to improve public education, raising questions about how the next mayor will handle all kinds of policy decisions, perhaps none more closely watched than whether Henderson will remain at the helm of the school system.
Gray has been Henderson’s unequivocal champion, crediting her with leading the system forward after Rhee’s tumultuous tenure. But neither of the two D.C. Council members now vying for the mayor’s office — Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), who unseated Gray on Tuesday to win the Democratic nomination, and David A. Catania (I-At Large), who will challenge Bowser in the general election — has said whether Henderson will keep her job.
“I just think that these kinds of personnel choices are made after elections. They’re not made before,” said Catania, chairman of the council’s Education Committee, who has sometimes sparred with Henderson about issues ranging from school budgets to the pace of middle-school improvement. “I’ve been clear that there are a good number of things that I support that the chancellor has done, and there are some things that I have a different point of view on and would hope for a greater sense of urgency in addressing.”
Bowser, during a mayoral debate in late February, said the city has a “great” chancellor but would not say if she fits into a potential Bowser administration. “I think she has good ideas, and she’s moving the ball in the right direction,” Bowser said. “I want the opportunity to make sure that her commitment and vision [match] my own.”
Henderson has led the system since 2010, building a reputation locally as well as nationally for continuing many of Rhee’s policies but with a softer touch. Under her leadership, the school system has made some of the largest testing gains in the nation, but enormous achievement gaps remain.
While critics fault her for not tackling those gaps more aggressively, supporters credit her for doing often-unheralded work to transform the school system, including engineering the shift to teaching more rigorous Common Core State Standards. Her continued leadership, they say, is vital to maintaining the city’s educational momentum.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) has urged the mayoral candidates to reach out to Henderson, as well as Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, to reassure them if they are going to be kept on.
Henderson said she would like to remain chancellor until at least 2017, when she has promised that the school system will reach five goals for student achievement and satisfaction that she set as benchmarks in 2012.
“If I can meet those goals by 2017, then I will have delivered a very different school district,” she said. “And then,” she said, laughing, “I’ll be headed to a beach somewhere because the city will have beaten my good years out of me.”
She declined to discuss what commitments she would need from a new boss, adding that she will be ready to have that conversation when it is clear who will be the next mayor. But for now, she said, “I’ve got a boss until December, and I just need to keep working for him.”
Henderson said she is eager for the day when the school system’s excellence is so well established that political change does not trigger uncertainty in the education sphere. “I want to get to the point where the day after an election, I don’t have to go talk to my staff about how we’re going to keep the trains running,” she said.
She said she took the chancellorship in 2010 because she saw how Fenty’s defeat and Rhee’s decision to leave threatened the schools’ controversial trajectory.
“We can’t have a system that’s built on one person: a mayor, a chancellor, a principal or whatever,” Henderson said. “If we are building a world-class school system, we’ve got to build a system where we’re all accountable, where we’re all holding the bar high, where if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, things can continue in DCPS.”
What does Bowser’s primary win mean for D.C.’s schools?
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
April 3, 2014
Democratic mayoral nominee Muriel Bowser has displayed her strengths as a campaigner, but her education platform is pretty thin. Before the general election 7 months from now, she has the opportunity to flesh it out.
Bowser's main campaign promise on education has been that she would replicate the success of Ward 3's Deal Middle School in other parts of the city. While the middle grades in other schools need attention, it's far from clear that replicating Deal district-wide is a workable strategy.
Only 23% of Deal's students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. At other middle schools in DC, that proportion is far higher. While it goes without saying that all kids deserve an excellent education, delivering that education to low-income kids requires a different set of skills and methods.
Simply recreating Deal's amenities in high-poverty schools or moving its excellent teachers there (assuming they would be willing to go) won't automatically transform those schools. To succeed there, teachers will need expert classroom management skills in addition to all the other qualities that make teachers great. And given the high proportion of special education students in high-poverty schools, it would help if they also had training in that area.
There are a host of other things that will be necessary before high-poverty middle schools, or high-poverty schools at any grade level, can reach Deal's level. You need strong principals who can inspire their staffs to work together and to persevere in the face of discouraging setbacks. You need support services for kids who have been traumatized by the effects of poverty.
Most fundamentally, you need to develop a positive school "culture" that motivates kids to adopt behavior that will lead to their success. At the same time you need to teach them to reject behavior that is destructive to themselves and disruptive to the education of others.
Other issues
Bowser has also said that she would focus on schools that are "on the brink" of excellence. But she hasn't defined what that means, or how she would get them over the brink. And what about the schools that are far from that brink? There are thousands of DC kids in schools fitting that description. Shouldn't we be focusing on them at least as much?
Bowser has also given contradictory signals on whether she would retain Chancellor Kaya Henderson. While DCPS is still in many ways a work in progress, Henderson has launched some promising initiatives that may be close to bearing fruit, and it would be worth keeping her in place for that reason if for nothing else. A commitment to do that sooner rather than later would help ensure that progress doesn't stall while the Chancellor's status is in limbo.
Nor has Bowser indicated how she would coordinate the DCPS and charter school sectors, aside from saying that she would try to prevent new charters from locating near existing DCPS schools. With 44% of DC public school students in charter schools, we can no longer view charters simply as competition against DCPS that needs to be held in check. It's time to figure out how to connect the two sectors into something that resembles one coherent system.
Education and the general election
Bowser may not feel much urgency to develop her positions on education at this point, given that she won a resounding victory over Mayor Vincent Gray with the little information she's divulged so far. But things may change.
The issue of corruption dominated much of the primary. But in the November general election Bowser will face Councilmember David Catania, chair of the DC Council's Committee on Education. Catania has turned himself into a genuine expert on DC public education in very little time, and there's no doubt he'll have detailed, well thought-out stands on education issues.
Right now Bowser may have a 30-point lead over Catania in the polls, but that could disappear once attention turns to the vital issue of education. If Bowser is going to win the general election, she'll need to be able to hold her own against Catania on that issue in a debate. And he will no doubt be a formidable debater.
Bowser needs to start researching and thinking seriously about education in DC now, and not just because she'll need ammunition against Catania. The pace of progress in public education in the District has been distressingly slow, and for the sake of DC's children, anyone who is elected mayor this fall will need to be able to hit the ground running.