- D.C. Nabs Top Spot for Pre-K Access, Funding
- Fourteen DCPS preschools have waiting lists of over 200 [Two Rivers PCS and Achievement Prep PCS mentioned]
- Good teaching, poor test scores: Doubt cast on grading teachers by student performance
- Teachers unions threaten Common Core implementation
- Common Core is on the way out
- DCPS task force to promote use of D.C. museums, other sites as classrooms
- Charters, Public Schools and a Chasm Between
D.C. Nabs Top Spot for Pre-K Access, Funding
4NBC Washington
May 13, 2014
Washington, D.C. provides the best access and funding to state-funded pre-kindergarten programs in the country, a new study reports.
According to a national study conducted by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), more than 9 in 10 4-year-olds in the District of Columbia attended such a program during the 2012-13 school year, while 10 states have no such program. The District also serves about three-quarters of 3-year-olds.
“We are pleased to see the continued commitment to expanding early learning opportunity in the District of Columbia, as it leads the nation in ensuring access to pre-K with high standards and adequate funding,” said NIEER director Steve Barnett.
A number of states had fairly high enrollments, according to the report released Tuesday, though slightly lower than the District. More than 7 out of 10 4-year-olds in Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont were in such programs, while about 6 in 10 in Iowa, Georgia, West Virginia and Wisconsin were enrolled.
Maryland's access to pre-K programs landed it the number 12 spot on the study's list while the 26th spot went to Virginia.
According to the study, Virginia spends $900 less per child than it did in 2002 and only meets six of the study's 10 quality standard benchmarks.
“The Recession may be a culprit, but other states have demonstrated it need not be an excuse for inaction, particularly as their economies recover,” Barnett said.
Maryland has done a better job at providing access and resources to pre-K programs. The state was one of just 20 to increase enrollment of 4-year-olds in the 2012-2013 school year.
Nationally, 4,000 fewer children enrolled in state-funded pre-K in the 2012-2013 school year than the year before. Twenty states cut funding while 10 don't even provide state pre-K programs. Overall, $5.4 billion was spent by states on pre-K funding for about 1.3 million preschoolers.
Fourteen DCPS preschools have waiting lists of over 200 [Two Rivers PCS and Achievement Prep PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
May 12, 2014
Results from the first round of the common lottery reveal huge demand for some DCPS preschool programs, while others in the District drew few applications.
Six DCPS preschool programs, mostly in affluent neighborhoods in Northwest or on Capitol Hill, have over 300 names on their waiting lists, and 7 more have over 200 names. But 7 other programs, all but one in Wards 7 or 8, still have 70% or more of their seats available. Results for all schools can be viewed on the DCPS website.
The preschool programs, some of which start at age 3 and others at age 4, are mostly in DCPS neighborhood schools. But residents are not guaranteed a slot, as they are at kindergarten and above. Many applied for slots through this year's common lottery, My School DC.
In addition to DCPS preschool seats, the lottery is allocating seats for those seeking admission to DCPS's application-only schools and most of the District's charter schools. Students who want to attend DCPS schools as out-of-boundary students also entered the lottery.
Results from the first round of the lottery were released on March 31, and families had until May 1 to accept a space at the schools their children were matched with. A second round is open to those who missed the first round or who weren't matched with any of their choices. The deadline for entering the second round is May 15.
Some charter schools have waiting lists of hundreds of names, with Two Rivers topping the list at over 1700. While none of the DCPS preschool programs have lists that size, they're long enough to be discouraging to many who applied.
Schools with the longest lists
The longest of the lists is at Capitol Hill Montessori@Logan, which received 756 applications for 60 PK3 slots and has a waiting list of 348. Under the lottery, only applicants who ranked a school higher than the schools they were matched with are put on its waiting list.
The school with the second-longest waiting list was School-Within-School, which has a program based on the child-centered Reggio Emilia approach. The school, located at 920 F Street NE, received 564 applications for 30 slots and has 325 names on its waiting list.
Most schools give a preschool preference to neighborhood residents, but both Capitol Hill Montessori and School-Within-School are city-wide programs, giving preferences only to siblings of enrolled or matched students.
At most neighborhood schools, students who are in-boundary and have a sibling already enrolled at the school get top preference. Next comes those who are in-boundary and have a sibling matched at the same time, followed by those who are merely in-boundary.
Out-of boundary students with siblings already enrolled or matched get a weaker preference, as do students who live near the school but aren't within its catchment area.
In-boundary families wait-listed
All the neighborhood schools with long waiting lists wait-listed at least some in-boundary applicants, meaning that no out-of-boundary applicants were accepted.
Of the schools with over 300 names on their lists, Janney Elementary, where the preschool program begins at age 4, has the most in-boundary applicants waiting to get in: 29. Janney, which is in Tenleytown, received 600 applications for its 78 slots and has a total of 316 names on its list.
Other schools with over 300 wait-listed applicants are Brent (321, 14 in-boundary) and Peabody (313, 19 in-boundary), both on Capitol Hill.
Oyster-Adams, a bilingual school in Woodley Park, had two separate lotteries for its PK4 program, one for English-language-dominant children and the other for Spanish-dominant. For English-dominant applicants, the waiting list has 335 names, while for Spanish-dominant there are 48.
The school has 9 slots for English-dominant children and 23 for Spanish-dominant. It received 494 applications for its English-dominant program and 95 for its Spanish-dominant one.
The 7 schools with waiting lists over 200 are Eaton in Cleveland Park (279), Key in Palisades (208), Lafayette in Chevy Chase DC (218), Mann in AU Park (219), Maury in Capitol Hill (212), Ross in Dupont Circle (276), and Stoddert in Glover Park (209). Of those, the school with the most in-boundary wait-listed applicants is Stoddert, with 31.
Schools with many available seats
At the other end of the spectrum are the schools that have filled 30% or less of their available seats. Malcolm X@Green filled only 4 of its 30 available seats, or 13%. Malcolm X, in Ward 8, was on a list of schools that Chancellor Kaya Henderson proposed to close in 2012. Instead, DCPS entered into a partnership with Achievement Prep Public Charter School, which has agreed to run the school for DCPS beginning next year.
Other schools with at least 70% of their preschool seats still available are Browne in Ward 5; Aiton and Smothers in Ward 7; and Hendley, Ketcham, and King in Ward 8.
It's often said that District residents now have universal access to preschool, but the imbalance in the lottery results suggests that there's a geographic mismatch between supply and demand.
Of course, the lottery results for DCPS schools don't take account of the students in charter preschool programs, which draw many children in Wards 7 and 8 and may account for the apparent lack of demand there. But it seems unlikely that many of the parents on long waiting lists in Northwest or Capitol Hill will decide to enroll their children in DCPS preschools in Wards 7 or 8.
Are you on a DCPS preschool waiting list? What are your options, and how do you feel about the situation? Let us know in the comments.
Good teaching, poor test scores: Doubt cast on grading teachers by student performance
The Washington Post
By Lindsay Layton
May 12, 2014
In the first large-scale analysis of new systems that evaluate teachers based partly on student test scores, two researchers found little or no correlation between quality teaching and the appraisals teachers received.
The study, published Tuesday in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, is the latest in a growing body of research that has cast doubt on whether it is possible for states to use empirical data in identifying good and bad teachers.
“The concern is that these state tests and these measures of evaluating teachers don’t really seem to be associated with the things we think of as defining good teaching,” said Morgan S. Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. He worked on the analysis with Andrew C. Porter, dean and professor of education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
The number of states using teacher-evaluation systems based in part on student test scores has surged during the past five years. Many states and school districts are using the evaluation systems to make personnel decisions about hirings, firings and compensation.
The rapid adoption has been propelled by the Obama administration, which made the teacher-evaluation systems a requirement for any state that wanted to compete for Race to the Top grant money or receive a waiver from the most onerous demands of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law.
Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia require student achievement to be a “significant” or the “most significant” factor in teacher evaluations. Just 10 states do not require student test scores to be used in teacher evaluations.
Most states are using “value-added models” — or VAMs — which are statistical algorithms designed to figure out how much teachers contribute to their students’ learning, holding constant factors such as demographics.
Polikoff and Porter analyzed a subsample of 327 fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics and English-language-arts teachers across six school districts in New York, Dallas, Denver, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Memphis and Florida’s Hillsborough County.
The data came from a larger project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation known as the Measures of Effective Teaching. Polikoff and Porter’s work also was funded by a $125,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.
The researchers found that some teachers who were well-regarded based on student surveys, classroom observances by principals and other indicators of quality had students who scored poorly on tests. The opposite also was true.
Teacher-evaluation systems have stirred up controversy and some recent legal challenges.
The Houston Federation of Teachers filed a federal lawsuit this month charging that Houston’s “value-added” teacher-evaluation system violates educators’ rights.
Similar legal challenges have popped up in Tennessee and also in Florida, where teachers are in an uproar over a state system that assesses some educators using scores of students they never taught.
Last month, the American Statistical Association urged states and school districts against using VAM systems to make personnel decisions, noting that recent studies have found that teachers account for a maximum of about 14 percent of a student’s test score, with other factors responsible for the rest.
Polikoff said policymakers should rethink how they use VAM models.
“We need to slow down or ease off completely for the stakes for teachers, at least in the first few years, so we can get a sense of what do these things measure, what does it mean,” Polikoff said. “We’re moving these systems forward way ahead of the science in terms of the quality of the measures.”
Teachers unions threaten Common Core implementation
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
May 11, 2014
TEA PARTY opposition to the new education standards in the Common Core is getting a lot of attention. Far more threatening is the less-noticed pushback from teachers’ unions. Even as union leaders profess support for rigorous standards, local and state affiliates are working to weaken, delay or undermine them.
The Chicago Teachers Union, which represents teachers in the country’s third-largest school district, last week approved a resolution opposing the Common Core and vowed to lobby the state school board to eliminate its use. In January, the New York State United Teachers withdrew support for the standards while calling for removal of the state’s education commissioner. In Tennessee, the teachers association was instrumental in getting lawmakers to approve a delay in administering assessments aligned to the standards.
The actions come as the heads of the two national unions, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association (NEA), say they support the standards but contend that implementation has been so rushed, so botched, that adjustments, even delay, are in order. No doubt there have been glitches, with some school districts doing a better job than others with the phase-in, but surely that was to be expected. As Ms. Weingarten pointed out in her spirited defense of Obamacare at the nadir of its rollout, “Any policy effort this large is going to have problems, big and small. But the relentless attacks by Republicans to undermine and destroy the law are wrong. . . . We need to continue to fix the problems and unintended consequences of this law.”
The Common Core is a set of objectives for student learning — not a mandated curriculum — that arose from governors, state education officials and others who understood that American children needed to raise their game to compete in the global economy. It is designed to move away from rote learning toward critical thinking and group effort. It assumes that parents will want to measure school and student progress. In many places, officials are saying that teachers should be evaluated in part on how well they are teaching, with good teachers being rewarded.
That’s the source of union objections. The critique about process is a straw man for the main objection: use of test results as a factor in evaluating teacher effectiveness. Union officials object even though what’s being measured is student improvement, not absolute levels, so no teacher would be held responsible for a child’s deficient home situation or background, and even though no one is proposing to count test results for more than half of an overall evaluation. It appears high standards are fine until they are about to be implemented.
The Tennessee Education Association derailed the use of new assessments with complaints about support and resources, though the state had spent $22 million training teachers over three years, $26 million on “no-stakes assessments” to help teachers gauge the success of their revamped instruction and additional money on new education resources. “TEA supports the more rigorous standards that are included in Common Core, but the implementation must provide time and resources to be effective,” read a union statement. At least the Chicago union was honest about its opposition, listing among a litany of objections the use of test scores “to label and close schools, fail students, and evaluate educators.”
The AFT and NEA were among the biggest supporters of the Common Core. They helped make the case for more rigorous standards and invested in the development of aligned curriculum and teaching tools. Surveys show teachers still support the effort. Will their leaders now be complicit with the tea party in sabotaging the Common Core, or will they help make the standards a success?
Common Core is on the way out
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 12, 2014
The editors of the Washington Post yesterday detailed the growing opposition to the Common Core standards. Last week the Chicago teachers' union passed a resolution against the standards joining many groups on both the political left and right that have turned their back on the Common Core. Liberals, including the teachers' unions and many of their members, say that the Common Core has been rushed in its implementation and therefore assert that it is unfair to hold school staff accountable for poor student standardized test scores. Many conservatives and libertarians claim that the Common Core is a federal takeover of pubic education, a policy area that has traditionally been under local control.
While average citizens may not know what exactly to make of the Common Core this much is certain: the reaction we have witnessed is completely predictable. In her fantastic book "The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way," author Amanda Ripley documents that whenever tougher school academic standards have attempted to be implemented in this country those standards have been quickly diluted or totally eliminated.
Here's the background on the Common Core. President G.W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Law for the first time in history held public schools accountable for the quality of their academic programs by measuring student results on standardized test scores. The legislation allowed states to establish their own grading scales for judging proficiency in reading and math. The problem was that in many jurisdictions the level students needed to reach to be judged proficient were lowered to make the results look better than they should have been. Education policy leaders noticed that in many places where students were found to be proficient these results did not match scores recorded on other measures such as the NAEP exam or the international PISA test.
The development of the Common Core standards began when Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano was head of the National Governors Association during the 2006 to 2007 term. She created a task force to investigate improving math and science education as a way of preparing kids for entering the workforce. The Common Core State Standards came out of an alliance between the NGA, Council of Chief State School Officers, and the organization Achieve as a means of implementing the recommendations of the task force. Now the Common Core has been adopted by 45 States and the District of Columbia.
Ms. Ripley found in her research on U.S. public schools that as a society we are particularly weak at being honest with our students regarding their academic abilities. We are afraid to tell them that they are not high performers, as opposed to countries such as Finland and South Korea that are more direct in revealing to students exactly where they stand academically. This is why the reaction to the Common Core was known to many even before the first examination based upon the standards was administered. Students have generally performed poorly on the test. As more and more kids take examinations based upon the new standards the pressure will build to extremely high levels to throw the standards in the trash.
The basis of the Common Core is to teach children to be able to think logically instead of a course of study focused on the memorization of facts. One hope of using the new curriculum is that pupils will score higher on the PISA examination in which young people in the United States have ranked near the bottom compared to those living in other countries. The overall goal is to make Americans more competitive in the global economy.
All of these objectives are enormously valuable. This is why it will be a tragedy when reaction against standardized test scores associated with the Common Core forces the curriculum's removal from our schools.
DCPS task force to promote use of D.C. museums, other sites as classrooms
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 12, 2014
A D.C. Public Schools task force is working on a new guide that aims to help promote hands-on and experiential learning throughout the city, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced Monday.
The curriculum — titled “The City as Our Classroom” — will compile a set of field-trip ideas and sample lesson plans to help teachers identify opportunities to connect academic skills and themes with the District’s museums, parks and historical sites.
“D.C. has so much to offer,” Henderson said in a statement. “I am excited that this task force is going to create a comprehensive and living document to help us leverage the unique cultural and natural resources of the District and beyond.”
The task force is composed of 30 people, including parents, teachers and central office personnel. They will meet in the coming months and plan to prepare a “guidance document” in time for teachers to use it during the 2014-15 school year.
Teachers hardly have to be convinced that students can have some of their most meaningful learning experiences outside the classroom. But it can be difficult to come up with enough time and money to give children those experiences, especially in high-poverty schools and others that face pressure to raise math and reading test scores.
Nonprofit organizations such as Live It Learn It — which works with more than two dozen DCPS schools, designing academic programs connected to field trips around Washington — often help fill the gap.
Next year, as part of her effort to improve the city’s middle schools, Henderson has proposed giving each middle school $28,000 to help provide “exposures and excursions,” which she has said are essential to the kind of enrichment students need and parents expect. The new investment totals about a half-million dollars.
Elementary and high school budgets for field trips range from zero to a few thousand dollars and, at more affluent schools, are often supplemented by parent organizations.
The new task force comes several weeks after D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) called for a more uniform curriculum to ensure that academic expectations are consistent across schools.
Schools officials have pushed back against the notion that the system lacks such expectations. During the past three years, school system officials have created suggested units and themes for each grade level and subject, producing what they say is a citywide curriculum that never previously existed.
The experiential-learning task force members will work to identify field trips that connect directly to the school system’s “robust, consistent, standardized curriculum in use across the city,” according to a school system statement.
Charters, Public Schools and a Chasm Between
The New York Times
By Javier C. Hernández
May 11, 2014
When Neil J. McNeill Jr., principal of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn, learned that fewer than 4 percent of his students had passed state exams in math last year, he was frustrated.
It so happened that he shared a building with one of the top-performing schools in the Brownsville neighborhood, Kings Collegiate Charter School, where 37 percent of the students had passed, well above the New York City middle-school average of 27 percent.
Mr. McNeill had long been curious about the charter school’s strategies: It, too, served large numbers of low-income black students, many from the same neighborhoods. But the two schools operated in their own bubbles, with separate public-address systems and different textbooks. And as a matter of practice, they did not talk about academics.
“We are kind of two ships in the night,” Mr. McNeill, 39, said recently.
A primary rationale for the creation of charter schools, which are publicly financed and privately run, was to develop test kitchens for practices that could be exported into the traditional schools. President Obama, in recently proclaiming “National Charter Schools Week,” said they “can provide effective approaches for the broader public education system.”
But two decades since the schools began to appear, educators from both systems concede that very little of what has worked for charter schools has found its way into regular classrooms. Testy political battles over space and money, including one that became glaringly public in New York State this spring, have inhibited attempts at collaboration. The sharing of school buildings, which in theory should foster communication, has more frequently led to conflict.
And some charter schools have veered so sharply from the traditional model — with longer school years, armies of nonunion workers and flashy enrichment opportunities like trips to the Galápagos Islands — that their ideas are viewed as unworkable in regular schools.
In recent years, educational leaders, concerned about hostilities between the two types of schools, have worked to encourage warmer relations. In Tulsa, Okla., charter schools and district schools are working together to improve teaching quality. And in Spring Branch, Tex., charter school leaders are helping train district teachers and principals.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped finance some of those efforts, offering $25 million in grants over the past several years for educators interested in tackling common problems.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised a new era of collaboration after months of sparring with charter school leaders. The new contract the city and the teachers’ union agreed to this month gives educators in some schools the latitude to change work rules, in hopes of creating charterlike conditions.
“The spreading of ideas and innovation clearly has been a very imperfect process,” Mr. de Blasio said this month in a radio interview. “What we’ve seen in too many cases is charters and traditional public schools disconnected rather than being mutually involved for innovation.”
Mr. de Blasio also recently began a program to encourage schools across the system to share best practices.
Even so, charter schools were not included in the initial group.
Continue reading the main story
Education experts said it might prove difficult to encourage the kind of sharing of ideas that charter schools were originally supposed to foster, given competitive dynamics. Charter schools serve about 5 percent of public-school students nationwide, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, up from about 1 percent in 2003. In some cities, like Detroit, New Orleans and Washington, the percentages are much higher. (In New York, it is 6 percent.)
“It’s like putting a Burger King kitty-corner to a McDonald’s and expecting — in the same location and competing for the same families — warm and fuzzy cooperation,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Charter schools are known for aggressive recruiting campaigns, and at schools with dwindling enrollment, every student counts: In New York, each brings more than $10,000 in education financing.
Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York, said competition made partnerships unrealistic. “It’s like ‘The Hunger Games,’ ” he said.
The first charter schools in the United States opened in the early 1990s, and were popular among advocates interested in radically overhauling the traditional model of schooling. The schools were given freedom from regulations about staffing, curriculum and scheduling in hopes that they could devise superior models.
As their numbers grew rapidly over the past decade, tensions worsened in many cities. Labor groups have emerged as some of the most vehement critics of charter schools, which are typically not unionized, depriving them of members.
This spring, a battle broke out in New York State as charter advocates pushed for access to free classroom space. They spent millions of dollars on television advertisements, and with the help of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, won some of the most generous protections in the country.
Charter school leaders have defended their efforts, pointing to strong academic results in some of the poorest neighborhoods. But some also say that the tactics of the movement are partly to blame for the reluctance of district leaders to work with them.
“I got into this to create R&D for regular schools,” said Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools, which operates charter schools in Los Angeles. “But sometimes we come off as if we’ve invented everything.”
Despite the backlash, some school districts have adopted practices embraced by charter schools, including longer school days, smaller high schools and more autonomy for principals.
In New York, the Gates Foundation, state and city education officials, and charter school leaders have worked to reduce friction. Charter schools often share classroom space, cafeterias and gyms with traditional public schools, which has created hostility within some buildings.
The Bronx Charter School for Excellence and the nearby Public School 85 are exceptions. Since winning a state grant in 2013, the schools have worked together to improve the quality of their kindergarten programs. They have held teacher exchanges, and every week they come together to discuss topics like student participation and reading strategies.
At first, staff members on both sides seemed dubious, and sat on different sides of the room.
“There was this idea that we were trying to turn this school into the charter, this grand conspiracy of, ‘Oh my God, are we going to be taken over, are we going to be closed?’ ” said Charlene Reid, head of the Bronx Charter School for Excellence.
But now, staff members said they shared observations and ideas by email several times per day. As a result, P.S. 85 began assessing student reading levels earlier in the year and increased the rigor of reading assignments.
In Brooklyn, the Middle School for Art and Philosophy and Kings Collegiate Charter School, which have been neighbors for seven years, have started talking about how they might collaborate.
Mr. McNeill said there were aspects of the charter school that appealed to him, including its smaller class sizes and aggressive outreach to parents. But he said that despite the school’s test scores, it would be a mistake to assume it had all the solutions.
The school serves a much smaller percentage of students with disabilities, for example. And some of its practices, such as a strict code of discipline, might be difficult to put in place in a traditional public school.
Mr. McNeill said the schools would have to work to overcome tensions between some charter school families and those who attend the traditional program. Still, he said, more collaboration was important, pointing to a mural at the entrance of the school, which depicts a handshake, a symbol of solidarity between the two schools.
“There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be that type of cooperation and collegiality,” he said. “It will give our kids an opportunity to show they are certainly no different from the kids upstairs, that they have the same promise and the same potential.”