FOCUS DC News Wire 5/14/13

 

D.C. Council education committee flexes its muscles on school boundaries [D.C. International School, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS, Mundo Verde PCS, and Latin American Bilingual Montessori PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

May 14, 2013

 

The D.C. Council’s education committee stepped into a looming fight over school boundaries last week when it voted unanimously to ensure that parents get at least a year’s notice before boundary changes take effect. The measure would force Chancellor Kaya Henderson to put off the politically sensitive changes for at least one year, from fall 2014 to fall 2015. It is just one of many ways in which the council’s five-month-old education committee has asserted itself as a force in school policy during the spring budget season. The committee’s recommendations — including the school-boundary tweak — now go to the full council, which is scheduled to discuss them Tuesday as part of a broader debate on the fiscal 2014 budget.

 

Led by Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large), the committee is pushing for significant changes to Mayor Vincent Gray’s (D) proposed spending plan, including an additional $1 million for summer school, $2.3 million to limit budget cuts at schools with low enrollment and about $250,000 for a public education ombudsman to help parents navigate traditional and charter schools. The committee also restored funds for full-time librarians at 20 schools that otherwise would have seen those positions cut to half-time.

Peter MacPherson, a D.C. parent who has been lobbying for investment in libraries, said he was thrilled by the changes. “I was giddy for about 12 hours,” said MacPherson, a vocal critic of Henderson and Gray who said he welcomes the new education committee’s scrutiny of school budgets.“They’re definitely a new sheriff in town,” he said. “This really represents a sea change.”

 

Money for the popular additions came from utilities — the committee estimates that the school system will spend less than it had expected on electricity and water due to closing 13 schools in June — and from regular personnel vacancies, which reduce personnel costs over time. The committee also proposed slicing more than $350,000 from the office of the deputy mayor for education, a key adviser for Gray on schools issues. That move would reduce the deputy mayor’s office from 11 positions to 7 — a size more in line with other deputy mayors’ offices, according to Catania. The proposed cut highlights a growing tension between the mayor — who is responsible for public education — and education committee chairman Catania, who is often mentioned as a possible 2014 mayoral candidate, and who has criticized the Gray administration for failing to move aggressively on issues such as reducing truancy and improving coordination among charter and traditional public schools.

 

Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said Catania’s proposed cuts would make it more difficult to make progress on those issues. “We don’t know why he would do this,” Ribeiro said. The education committee also threw its weight behind individual school projects. H.D. Woodson Senior High is slated to receive $135,000 for a long-promised but never-delivered science, technology, engineering and math program. Garrison Elementary, which parents fought to keep open last fall, will get an accelerated renovation.

And the committee is seeking to give $6 million to a group of charter schools that wants to start a high school for intensive foreign-language instruction. Catania said the D.C. International School (DCI)— a project of Washington Yu Ying (Mandarin Chinese), Elsie Whitlow Stokes (French and Spanish), Mundo Verde (Spanish) and Latin American Bilingual Montessori (Spanish) — needs the money to renovate its building on the campus of the old Walter Reed hospital. “This is a very exciting project,” Catania said.

 

But allocating money to individual schools raises questions of fairness and transparency, said longtime education activist Cathy Reilly, who urged council members to be more clear about the criteria they use to determine which schools get funds. For example, she said, countless charter schools would undoubtedly like to receive more money for facilities, and each should have an equal shot at those dollars. You can read the education committee’s budget recommendations here. You can watch the council’s discussion on the 2014 budget beginning at 9 a.m. here. The council is not scheduled to vote on the budget until later this month.

 

 

For public charter schools, crowdfunding can be a challenge [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Mohana Ravindranath

May 13, 2013

 

When the weather’s nice enough, students at Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy’s Prep Campus in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood walk single-file up Kenyon Avenue through a narrow alleyway into the Bruce Monroe Community Park — a public park — for recess. On other days, the sixth- through ninth-grade students are sent to the teacher’s parking lot next to the school, where they run sprints. Without a gymnasium, the school’s teachers are forced to improvise activities for the more than 300 students in a limited space. In bad weather, they use a small basement classroom to watch documentaries about nutrition, play board games, or do yoga. Students in after-school sports are bussed off-campus to practice or for games.

 

The school recently embarked on a $2.2 million dollar campaign to build a gym over the parking lot next to the school, funded by philanthropists, government grants, and charitable foundations, tentatively scheduled to finish by the end of the calendar year. In one of the first examples of a public charter school using crowdfunding, Cesar Chavez staff hoped to supplement traditional funding with small contributions from large groups of individuals, to raise an additional $30,000. Ultimately, though, the campaign reached a little more than a third of its goal, illustrating some of the challenges of crowdfunding social ventures.

 

Crowdfunding is a phenomenon relatively new to the education world, crowdfunding analyst Chris Camillo said, and the few school systems using the method are still developing the social media savvy required for a successful campaign. But the transparency of a crowdfunding campaign — in which the school defines for donors online exactly how the funds will be used — contrast the more traditional method of making general donations to a school or a fund, he said. “It’s really easy to do a bake-sale,” Camillo said. More challenging is “forcing students and teachers to organize a business plan, to put together an effective crowdfunding campaign, making a pitch.”

 

Christine Lai, marketing manager for the Cesar Chavez schools, ran the crowdfunding campaign with two colleagues. About a month and a half ago, she created a Web page for the cause on StartSomeGood, a D.C.-based online crowdfunding platform for non-profits and social entrepreneurs. Once projects on StartSomeGood reach a certain “tipping point” chosen by the entrepreneur — between 25 and 100 percent of the goal — they can keep the funds they raise, and the platform only takes a cut of funds raised if the campaign meets its funding goal.

 

Alex Budak founded the platform two years ago in D.C., after a stint in India teaching girls from slums to play Ultimate Frisbee. “I had this realization that fundamental social change isn’t going to come from one or two huge organizations, but rather, it’s going to come from lots of people pursuing their own version of social good,” Budak said.

When he returned to the U.S., Budak wanted to start his own social enterprise for sports and youth development. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t really didn’t know how to get started, how to get that initial capital I needed to get off the ground and how to get that initial group of supporters to be there to help me. I realized, ‘Hey, if I don’t know how to take action on this idea, how many other great ideas must there be, that could never go from the idea state to actually taking action on it?’ ”

 

For the complete article see link above.

 

Jonetta Rose Barras: Government subterfuge in D.C.

The Examiner

By Jonetta Rose Barras

May 13, 2013

 

"Opaque." That word was used consistently by many D.C. Council committees to describe Mayor Vincent C. Gray's 2014 budget. Legislators may have made their way through the voluminous document, but they screamed for more transparency. An obscure plan makes it difficult for the council to effectively challenge budget assumptions used by the mayor and Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi. It also prevents District taxpayers from fully understanding how their $7 billion is being used to finance the local budget.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who also oversees the Committee of the Whole, found that sometimes "performance objectives and measures from year to year are inconsistent, minimizing their utility as an accountability tool." Four of the five fiscal year 2013 measures for the Office of Contracting and Procurement are different from the previous year and the 2014 proposal.

 

"If the council and the public cannot see whether agencies are meeting their stated goals ... no one can be sure whether the dollars we are budgeting are being spent in an efficient and effective manner in which results are being achieved," Mendelson argued in his draft committee report. The Committee on Education and Libraries, headed by at-large Councilman David Catania, found that DCPS presented multiple budget formats allegedly based on the agency's organizational chart. In the one to the legislature, there were nine areas of focus. But DCPS' internal budget format is based on six categories, including executive offices, chief of staff, office of the superintendent, chief academic officer, chief operating officer and schools.

 

"The existence of these two parallel budget formats severely limits transparency with respect to the agency's budget," Catania said in the report. Key communities are unable to clearly assess how the agency is spending its money by "looking simply at the budget as presented by the mayor." The result often is "confusion and misperception."

Obscuring agencies' organizational structures, performance goals and spending may be deliberate. DCPS' budget certainly camouflages central office excesses and redundancies. Consider that there is an Office of Chief of Schools, Office of Academic Programming and Support, and Office of Teaching and Learning, according to council documents.

 

Wondering how those are different from the Office of the Chief Academic Officer? Chancellor Kaya Henderson did not respond to my request to provide the distinction.

DCPS' website states the Office of Teaching and Learning "establishes what rigorous content students learn and improves how they learn it." Academic Programming and Support helps "schools so that all students can access content and high-quality programs." That kind of personnel and financial attention on academics should at least translate into the majority of DCPS students scoring proficient on standardized tests, right?

 

Education reformers have been quick to demand teacher evaluations. I support ensuring qualified instructors are in the classroom, but what about administrators? Shouldn't their value and effectiveness be scrutinized? Oh, I forgot to mention there's an Office of School Turnaround. It supposedly is focused on helping "struggling schools that are failing students." Don't get me started.

 

In American Schools, What Is Quality Work? [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]

Education Week

By Sam Chaltain

May 9, 2013

 

For years now, I've been asking everybody I meet the same question: "When and where were you when you learned best?" I've asked this question because so many of our national school reform efforts are not about learning at all; they're about achievement, which has come to mean something quite apart from the stories people tell when you ask them to recall one of the most powerful experiences of their lives. And here's the thing: if you stitch everyone's stories together, a clear pattern emerges. I know because I've done it (see for yourself). And what emerged was that we all need, to differing degrees, learning opportunities that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential.

 

I was reminded of that work - and of the importance of relevance - when watching Chapter 8 in the10-part video series about Mission Hill, a public elementary and middle school in Boston. It begins with a young boy holding an alligator. It continues with young children organizing and opening a bakery in their classroom. And it concludes with a group of teenagers eagerly ripping open a package that contains fresh copies of the book they have all worked to co-create. What we learn is that the children have been asked to imagine a possible future profession for themselves, and to interview someone who does that work so they can better understand if it might really be for them. One child envisions a life as an animal tamer. Another thinks he might become a martial artist. And two other students have each set their eyes on becoming the future Mayor of Boston.

 

"It's so important that the ideas come from the kids," says teacher Kathy Klunis D'Andrea, "and that they get to see them actualized. There's so much that they can learn about those real-life experiences that make true connections that they don't forget. They are locked into learning." Of course, what we see at Mission Hill is more than just relevant projects. There's a culture in place, an ethic, that demands the best of its teachers and students. As longtime educator Ron Berger puts it in his wonderful book An Ethic of Excellence, "Weighing yourself constantly doesn't make you lighter and testing children constantly doesn't make them smarter. The only way to really lose weight and keep it off, it seems, is to establish a new ethic - exercise more and eat more sensibly. It's a long-term commitment. It's a way of life.

 

"I have a hard time thinking about a quick fix for education," Berger continues, "because I don't think education is broken. Some schools are very good; some are not. Those that are good have an ethic, a culture, which supports and compels students to try and to succeed. Those schools that are not need a lot more than new tests and new mandates. They need to build a new culture and a new ethic." To build a new ethic at a school, one must begin somewhere. Berger believes student work is the logical place to start. "Work of excellence is transformational," he writes. "Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same. We can't first build the students' self-esteem and then focus on their work. It is through their own work that their self-esteem will grow."

 

This ethic of excellence Berger describes is at the center of schools like Mission Hill. It's also present in organizations like Expeditionary Learning, a national network of more than 150 K-12 schools. And the EL network isn't only filled with established, stable schools; it's expanding to include the places where a school-wide ethic of excellence is being cultivated for the very first time.

 

One such place is the Mundo Verde Public Charter School in Washington, DC. Now in its second year, Mundo Verde decided to document one of its expeditions - multiweek explorations of a topic that involve not just original research, but also a culminating project that is presented to the public - in its first year of operation. The film of that experience, La Expedición, highlights the same qualities we see at work in Mission Hill - and the same core characteristics we see in our own personal learning memories.

As you watch both videos, consider the quality of the work Mission Hill's 8th graders and Mundo Verde's Kindergartners are able to produce. In schools like these, there's no doubt about what matters most - nor is there any confusion over what high-quality student work actually looks like, and requires. But if there was any doubt remaining about why that's the right goal to have, Mission Hill's 8th graders are there to remind us, courtesy of the title they chose for their book: A Place for Me In The World.