- Judge sharply questions activists seeking to block D.C. school closures
- D.C. would be stronger with a weaker mayor
- Education digest: D.C. charter board nominees; Md. teacher training
- Exclusive Interview with Skip McKoy, Chairman D.C. Public Charter School Board
- Young GED test-takers miss out on high school experience
- A powerful term in U.S. high schools: DBQ
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 10, 2013
A federal judge had several sharp and skeptical questions Friday for D.C. education activists who have sued to halt the planned closure of 15 city schools. Opponents argue that the closures would disproportionately affect poor and minority children and therefore violate a number of civil rights laws. In a packed U.S. District courtroom Friday, they pleaded for a preliminary injunction to block the closures, citing “irreparable harm” to children if the plan put forth by Chancellor Kaya Henderson is allowed to move forward.
But Judge James E. Boasberg raised concerns about that argument. Minutes after the hearing began, he referred to a sheaf of statistics demonstrating that most of the children affected by closures are slated to attend schools with higher test scores and more racial diversity than the schools they’re leaving behind.
“The whole purpose of going to school, for these kids, is to receive a good education, correct?” Boasberg said. “It seems to me that the schools they’re transferring into are a whole lot better.” Attorney Jamie B. Raskin, arguing on behalf of five plaintiffs with the community group Empower D.C., said Boasberg’s question sidestepped the central point of the lawsuit. “The point is that having a neighborhood school is a precious public resource and a precious public benefit that we think should not be distributed along the lines of race and class,” said Raskin, a constitutional law professor and Democratic Maryland state senator. Thirteen schools are slated to close in June and two more in 2014.
The move will displace more than 2,700 children, almost all of whom are African American or Hispanic.
District attorneys on Friday denied that the closures are discriminatory, describing them as an effort to improve education across the city. Children have no constitutional right to a neighborhood school, they said, and having students move to a new school does not deprive them of services. Henderson, who in January announced her intent to close the schools, has long said that the school system must close buildings left half-empty after four decades of declining enrollment. Under-enrolled schools are expensive and inefficient to operate, according to the chancellor, who was in the courtroom Friday but did not speak during the proceedings and declined to comment afterward. Boasberg, whose brother is the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, asked the plaintiffs repeatedly to explain when a school system leader could ever legally close a school with a higher-than-average percentage of minority children.
Raskin said the problem is not the closing of individual schools, but a historical pattern of closing schools in poor and minority neighborhoods. Schools in affluent areas west of Rock Creek Park have been under-enrolled at times over the past several decades, he said, but remained open. Sitting in the courtroom were many school-closure opponents who had rallied outside the courthouse before the hearing. When Boasberg asked whether the plaintiffs’ attorneys believed that Henderson — who is African American — intended to discriminate against black and Hispanic children, some in the audience responded “Yes!” Boasberg continued, asking whether the attorneys believed that African American leaders in other cities where schools are closing, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, also intend to discriminate. “Yes!” the audience said again before the judge quieted the courtroom.
Raskin then stepped in, saying that plaintiffs are not accusing Henderson of racial hatred but are highlighting a pattern of discrimination that grows out of the District’s history as a segregated city. That history is “now fundamentally impairing people’s ability to have an equal right to a neighborhood school,” he said. The plaintiffs also said that the city failed to give proper notice of the closure plan to Advisory Neighborhood Commission members. Boasberg said he had concerns about whether plaintiffs had legal standing to sue on those grounds. The judge said he would issue a decision on the preliminary injunction next week.
The Washington Post
By Ken Archer
May 10, 2013
The recent investigation into cheating in D.C. schools highlights a little-understood fact in the District: Our mayor has too much power. Every state-level agency charged with overseeing the mayor’s activities reports to the mayor — a level of control that exists nowhere else in the country. The agency that investigates cheating, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education(OSSE), is charged with overseeing our schools. But OSSE also reports to the mayor, the same official who runs most of the schools OSSE is supposed to oversee. The same conflict exists with the state-level agency charged with overseeing job training in the District. This agency, the Workforce Investment Council (WIC), reports to the same mayor who runs job training and wants voters to see his efforts to train job seekers as successful.
D.C. residents often grow frustrated at the lack of accountability for those who are supposed to serve our children and our job seekers. The truth is that we can usher in a new era of accountability in education and job training very easily. We need to give the state-level agencies that oversee education and job training some of the independence that they enjoy in the 50 states. As with the D.C. chief financial officer, the heads of our state-level oversight agencies should have terms staggered with the mayor’s term and be dismissible only for cause.
The political use of these oversight agencies by the District administration is obvious. OSSE released its report on cheating in D.C. schools on a Friday afternoon, a common tactic to hide bad news. By comparison, the state of Georgia released its damning report of widespread cheating in the Atlanta public school system on a Tuesday.
Georgia investigated hundreds of Atlanta classrooms, finding cheating in 140. OSSE limited its investigation to 41 classrooms it “flagged” for investigation — 18 DCPS classrooms and 23 public charter school classrooms. When cheating was found to have taken place in 44 percent of them, including 67 percent of the DCPS classrooms examined, OSSE declined to investigate more classrooms. The state education superintendent claimed this “serves as proof that 99.4 percent [of classrooms] are following the rules.”
The higher level of accountability in Atlanta is simple to understand. No one in Georgia’s state government reports to the mayor of Atlanta. In the District, everyone at OSSE reports to the mayor. Some will point out that there have been five cheating investigations by other agencies. But the question isn’t whether we found all the cheating in D.C. schools. These five investigations were optional, triggered by media reports of cheating. OSSE is the only agency required to audit test security and numerous other issues. The question, then, is whether we can count on OSSE to oversee D.C. schools when it reports to the same mayor that the schools do. In job training, too, the folks who oversee the mayor’s activities report to the mayor. For several years, the WIC met irregularly; when it did meet, members were told that they reported to the Department of Employment Services — the primary agency they were supposed to oversee.
Under federal law, it is WIC’s job to certify the agencies charged with helping unemployed people find jobs and the training and literacy services they need to prepare for work — providers known as “one-stops.” But the District’s WIC has never certified one-stops and has certainly never decertified failing one-stops. OSSE has a similar responsibility to begin decertifying pre-kindergarten providers that fall short of quality standards by 2014. However, when I asked the deputy superintendent for early childhood education last year how many were likely to make the cut, she said that all D.C. pre-K providers were “gold”-rated and would be certified.
D.C. residents sometimes chafe at the independence given to the city’s chief financial officer; it can feel like this restriction on the mayor’s authority over fiscal matters is a congressionally imposed punishment for previous waste and abuse. The reality is that our mayor possesses power over state oversight agencies unheard of in other cities.
By giving the same independence to the heads of OSSE and the WIC that our chief financial officer enjoys, we can show that a weaker mayor is a sign of the District’s strength. We don’t need Congress to impose close oversight, because we are capable of overseeing ourselves.
The writer is a contributor to the blog Greater Greater Washington.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown and Lynh Bui
May 12, 2013
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) has nominated two candidates to fill vacancies on the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which is responsible for authorizing new charter schools and closing poor performers. The nominees are former charter school leader Barbara B. Nophlin and retired Army colonel Herb Tillery, who now oversees a college scholarship program.
The mayor also nominated board member Sara Mead, a policy analyst with particular expertise in early childhood education, for reappointment. All three nominees will have to be confirmed by the D.C. Council. Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said the mayor solicited input from charter board leaders to identify candidates “with a wide range of experience that can bring different things to the table.” A spokeswoman for the D.C. Charter School Board declined to comment.
— Emma Brown
Maryland
Teachers ask for more training
Maryland teachers are asking for more time and training for new evaluation systems and education standards expected to be in place next school year, according to a survey from the Maryland State Education Association. Nearly two out of three teachers surveyed say they’re unprepared to teach based on more rigorous Common Core State Standards. About 72 percent said they aren’t ready for new evaluation systems. The results are from an online survey of 540 teachers this month. Though not a scientific survey, Betty Weller, the state education association president, said the responses reveal that teachers need more professional development before beginning classes next year.
— Lynh Bui
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 13, 2013
I had the pleasure of sitting down recently with the newly elected Chairman of the DC Public Charter School Board, John H. “Skip” McKoy, who is Director, Programmatic Initiatives for Fight For Children. In answer to my first question he wasted no time in getting into the details of the current state of the District’s 57 public charter schools. “We are clearly doing very well,” Mr. McKoy asserted. “After all, we are educating 43 percent of all of DC’s public school children. We have 22 school campuses performing at the very highest level, Tier 1 on ourPerformance Management Framework. The Board is now targeting Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools to see what they need to improve. I do believe that charters must outperform their counterparts. However, we should have a great traditional school system operating at the same time. I don’t believe that charters are inevitably good and DCPS schools bad. We will have different offerings based upon scale, curriculum, emphasis, hours, governance, location, etc."
“Low Tier 2 and Tier 3 charters are going to have to improve or they will be closed," the Chairman revealed. "There was a California study (“Charter School Growth and Replication.” Volume 1. Center for Research on Education Outcomes, January 20, 2013) that showed that you can get an accurate gauge of a charter school’s quality within the first three years after its founding. PCSB does QSRs (Qualitative Site Reviews) of our schools. Tier 1 charters will not experience many of these. We conduct them on Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools with the hope of providing indicators of where they can improve. We respect charter school autonomy and don’t tell them exactly what to do, but point out areas where the school performance can be stronger. We give them feedback on what is going well and where there are gaps in performance. But the bottom line is after a couple of QSRs, the school must get better. The Board will be unequivocal on this point."
Mr. McKoy continued. “No school should rest on its laurels. Each should always be trying to be better. Charter schools are public institutions open to all students; schools cannot pick and choose who they teach. Therefore, one expects some variability in annual performance. But after three years, a school has its basic cohort of students and the Board expects that the charter will be in the first Tier or approach the upper level of Tier 2.”
I was impressed with the passion with which Mr. McKoy spoke. It was thoroughly interesting to sit with a man who is obviously completely engaged in improving our public schools, yet swore he would never be involved in this field, because his mother’s and father’s careers were in education. So Mr. McKoy decided to become an urban planner who ended up getting a Masters of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and one in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Eventually, Mr. McKoy would get hired to run DC’s City Planning Office, during which time his department created the first locally developed blueprint to improve the design of the nation’s capital. This was during a period when you could clearly see the burnt-out buildings on 14th Street resulting from the 1960’s civil disturbances.
Of course, during his urban planning studies Mr. McKoy read Jane Jacob's “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Although I am only speculating, I attribute Mr. McKoy’s understanding of the marketplace’s role in education reform to this author’s arguments against central planning. I then asked Mr. McKoy for his goals as Chairman. He answered as if he was waiting for my inquiry.
“I have several,” Mr. McKoy responded. “And these are in no particular order. First, I want to improve the portfolio of our schools. We want more PMF Tier 1 schools. Next, I would like the Board to find more ways of assisting schools to improve and get to the first Tier. In addition, I would like to see the Board interact with the public more. As part of this goal, our monthly meetings will soon be televised. Another aim will be to improve our ability to identify entities that will become high performing charters during the application process.” On this point Mr. McKoy indicated that experienced operators will have a better chance of being approved because of their track record.
Mr. McKoy went on to explain that he would also like to provide improved customer service to the sector, perhaps through informal meetings where best practices are shared. Mr. McKoy added that it is important for his organization to maintain high standards for quality, yet not presume the negative when evaluating and working with schools. Lastly, Mr. McKoy said that he is extremely interested in working with the City’s stakeholders to better coordinate educational offerings. “Whatever is best for the kids is what we have to do, whether that means opening an elementary, middle, or high school in a particular quadrant of town. DC has a rich infrastructure of support groups, foundations, parents, business people, and appointed and elected officials who can help make this happen. However,” the Chairman was quick to add, “I don’t feel the District should accomplish this through legislation.”
Mr. McKoy then summarized his vision for the nation’s capital. “We can get to the point where each child is learning in a quality seat. We owe it to our parents and students. We have the structure, most of the resources, and talent to get there with the schools we have. We recognize that we are working in a political environment. Our charter schools have autonomy provided through the School Reform Act, but we must understand we are operating with public money. It has been the freedom to create and innovate that has led to the sector’s success and that must not be impeded."
"PCSB has the staff to get this done. Scott Pearson as Executive Director has done an excellent job in developing a great team. He has been especially effective in utilizing and analyzing data to demonstrate what is taking place here and around the country. Now, we must work to better serve our customers and look for ways to increase the public’s involvement.”
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
May 12, 2013
The GED was designed to give high school dropouts a second chance at higher education and a good job. But every year, hundreds of thousands of teens take the test before their former classmates have graduated, prompting concerns that too many young people are pursuing a GED before they have exhausted their first chance at a more valuable diploma.
Some economists and educators are calling for stricter limits on access to the GED for younger teens. A growing body of research shows that very few GED test-takers go on to earn a higher degree, and most fare about the same in the workplace as dropouts who don’t pass the exam. “We are making it easy for them to make a mistake,” said James Heckman, a Nobel-Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago who has studied the impact of the GED. He said easier access to the test induces students to drop out of high school. According to a 2011 report by the GED Testing Service, about a quarter of test-takers across the country are between 16 and 18 years old, an average that is reflected in both Maryland’s and Virginia’s statewide numbers.
But a Washington Post analysis found significantly higher rates of young test-takers in Prince George’s County, with nearly one in three GED test-takers there last year younger than 18, according to state data. In Montgomery County, one in four was younger than 18. There were far fewer under-18 GED candidates in the District and in Northern Virginia, where the minimum age to take the test without a waiver is 18.
As pressure mounts for the nation’s high schools to increase graduation rates, the GED is drawing new scrutiny. The test isundergoing its largest overhaul in 70 yearsto align with the more rigorous demands of colleges and employers. And more school systems are devising flexible ways to keep struggling students in school however they can. Maryland law allows students to drop out of school at age 16 without parental consent — and it also allows them to take the GED at that age — though lawmakers last year voted to raise the age of compulsory education to 18 by 2017. Maryland also offers people who pass the GED an actual high school diploma, rather than an equivalency diploma, which some say is another reason more teens decide to pursue it.
The high rate of younger test-takers in Prince George’s County is “an area of concern,” said Patricia Tyler, director of adult education and literacy services for Maryland’s Department of Labor. “It’s always a concern when young people are leaving school prior to graduation in large numbers.” But she said there are many complicated reasons teenagers drop out of school. They might fall behind in credits because their home lives are unstable or because of poor health or pregnancy. When traditional schools don’t meet their needs, a GED provides a valuable opportunity to help them take the next step, she said.
Fahirah Jackson was in the ninth grade when her brother was incarcerated on a drug charge, sending her family into a tailspin. They lost their house and moved five times in one year. Jackson dropped out of Charles Herbert Flowers High School in Springdale and started working, at first lying on job applications to say she was older.
For complete article see link above.
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
May 11, 2013
You may not know what a DBQ is. For most of my life, neither did I. But in the high schools of this region and the rest of the country it has become an important and in some ways fearsome term. It haunts the dreams of 400,000 teenagers who will take the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. history Wednesday. It is part of a massive reform of the AP exam system that controls the schedules of most of the nation’s high schools every May. DBQ is an acronym for “document-based question.” Multiple-choice questions make up 55 minutes of the 3-hour, 5-minute AP U.S. History exam, which has the second-largest number of AP test-takers, behind only the English Language and Composition exam. The rest of the time is devoted to two essay questions and the DBQ, an essay based on roughly 10 short historical documents or quotes. The DBQ counts more than any other question on the exam. It draws by far the most attention, including pre-exam guessing of what it will be about.
Is DBQ mania good for our schools? Philip W. Engle Jr., a history teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, has been educating me on this. He has been an AP teacher for 20 years. He doesn’t think DBQs are bad. They “require students to work with documents and use higher-level thinking skills to use this information to defend a thesis,” Engle said. “This is a great skill to have, especially when writing research papers.” But to Engle, the DBQ seems at odds with the view of the College Board — and most universities — that AP U.S. History is a college-level course. The DBQ “is a unique writing task and one they will never do in college,” Engle said. “In my four years as a history major and in pursuing my master’s degree in history, never did I write a single DBQ essay. They are not college assignments.”
That may be changing. The Collegiate Learning Assessment, a key part of a movement to assess how much students learn in college, is essentially one long DBQ. Students receive letters, news clippings and government reports, then they are asked to do some real-world analysis, like telling a corporate board whether to buy a company plane.
John Williamson, a former Kentucky school district superintendent who is executive director for AP curriculum and content development, said Engle is correct that college professors don’t assign DBQs, but they seem to be requiring something similar. He did a search of college U.S. history course syllabi and found that in most cases, “students were asked to read multiple primary sources and then develop a thesis or respond to a question that required the synthesis of several primary sources.” Engle has no problem with the growth of DBQs. But like many AP teachers, he thinks the mystery surrounding what will be on the DBQ and the rest of the history exam hurts learning. “The AP test can ask anything from economic trends, political history, military history, religions, social and cultural history,” Engle said. Many teachers try to cover everything and have little time to assign research papers that develop students’ analytical skills.
Trevor Packer, College Board senior vice president for AP and college readiness, said he shares Engle’s breadth of content concerns. As part of a gradual reform of all AP subjects, Packer said, teachers preparing for the redesigned U.S. History course and exam, scheduled to take effect in fall 2014, will be given “much greater clarity and specificity” about what to cover.
AP history director Lawrence Charap said key documents and specific topics have been identified. Teachers will have more time to go deep into favorite issues. Long research papers, a rarity in U.S. schools, might even be possible. Students must still face the DBQ, but they should be better prepared and less afraid.
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