- ‘Dream City’ connects D.C. students to city history [SEED PCS, EL Haynes PCS, and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
- DCPS reaches tentative agreement with principals union
- 60 years after ‘Brown,’ D.C. schools face different difficult questions
- How can two school systems plan for one city?
- How One Principal Is Solving D.C.'s School-To-Prison Pipeline Problem
‘Dream City’ connects D.C. students to city history [SEED PCS, EL Haynes PCS, and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 18, 2014
Two decades ago, after then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s infamous arrest for smoking crack cocaine at the Vista Hotel, local journalists Tom Sherwood and Harry Jaffe published a book that chronicled Barry’s life and the history of the District of Columbia.
Long out of print, “Dream City” has remained a defining account of the District’s struggles for civil rights and self-governance and against crack and violence. Now it’s available as an e-book, and there is a push to get it into the hands of high school students to help them understand the roots of the fast-changing city they call home.
“There’s no way you’re going to be a teenager reading this book and not have questions, or have something hook you,” said Cosby Hunt, a native Washingtonian and former D.C. history teacher who now works for the Center for Inspired Teaching.
With help from a D.C. Humanities Council grant, Hunt wrote lessons to accompany “Dream City” and then recruited history teachers at traditional, charter and private schools to teach the book. The effort culminated last Thursday evening at Martin Luther King Jr. Library, where dozens of students gathered to hear from the authors of the book.
“I’m gratified by you all, the teachers and the students,” Jaffe said. He added that he is “blown away and in awe” that they are reading the book.
Jaffe and Sherwood wrote “Dream City” to explain local Washington, a city with a history and a culture apart from official Washington. Jaffe calls it the city behind the monuments, and Sherwood calls it the most un-American place in America, thanks to the District’s lack of voting power.
“Americans across the country don’t see you, they don’t know you, they don’t know you’re voteless, they don’t know you have lives,” Sherwood told students in the audience Thursday. “I was hoping that our book could help give a sense that this is a place.”
Bernadette DeSario, a history teacher at Coolidge High, said that the book triggered a “level of outrage and inquiry” among students, who felt a personal connection to many of the events they read.
That sentiment was echoed by Bill Stevens, a teacher at SEED, a residential charter school in Southeast Washington. Students knew aunts, uncles and grandparents who had gotten their first jobs thanks to Barry’s administration and initiatives.
“It’s great to say, ‘That’s history. What your family experienced is history,’ ” Stevens said.
Brianna Cook, a senior at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Anacostia, said she was surprised to learn that Barry’s story was bigger than his arrest. She hadn’t known of his civil rights work or of his early accomplishments in politics.
“It gave us more insight into the leaders of the city, especially the black leaders,” Cook said. “Usually you only hear about the bad, but you got to see the good.”
Students from high schools including Coolidge, Roosevelt, Ellington and E.L. Haynes quizzed Jaffe and Sherwood during a question-and-answer session, asking about everything from the authors’ views on gentrification and race to why they thought Barry was able to win reelection after spending time in federal prison.
One student asked what the authors thought the government should do to keep teens from dropping out of high school.
“I always say that local Washington is only as good as the people active in it,” said Sherwood, urging students to register to vote and figure out how to get involved in issues they care about. “It’s really up to you.”
DCPS reaches tentative agreement with principals union
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 18, 2014
D.C. Public Schools has reached a tentative collective-bargaining agreement with the Council of School Officers, the union that represents principals, assistant principals, business managers, master educators and other non-teachers who work in schools.
The contract would cover four years, from October 2013 to 2017, and would offer 3 percent annual raises for most of the union’s 600 members.
Principals and assistant principals — who, to the consternation of the union, received raises not available to other members in recent years — would receive a 2 percent salary increase in the first year and 3 percent each year thereafter.
“This agreement represents hard work and collaboration,” school system officials and union negotiators, led by President Aona Jefferson, said in a joint statement. “We are confident this contract addresses the issues raised by members of the union and rewards the commitment demonstrated by all CSO members.”
Union members must vote to ratify the contract, and the D.C. Council must vote to approve it, before it can become effective. School system officials could not say how much the new agreement would cost.
The school system and the union had been locked in a stalemate since the union’s last contract expired in 2007. Union members, with the exception of principals and assistant principals, have not received a raise since then.
The two sides reached a tentative agreement last fall, but members voted it down. Principals and assistant principals were particularly outraged by a provision that would have required them to notify the school system by February if they intended to leave their jobs at the end of the school year, or they would have to face a $5,000 penalty.
The new agreement gives administrators until March 15 to declare their intent to leave, and the penalty for failing to do so has been decreased to $3,500.
Jefferson and Jason Kamras, the school system’s chief of human capital, both said they were optimistic that union members will ratify this agreement.
“We had some good and productive dialogue,” Kamras said. “I think we’ve come to a really positive place.”
In addition to the salary increases, the agreement enshrines a merit pay structure that currently rewards principals with bonuses of as much as $30,000 and assistant principals with up to $15,000, and adds the possibility of $2,000 bonuses for other union members, Jefferson and Kamras said.
It also guarantees that members may use some leave during holiday breaks, and it guarantees that the school system will pay union members’ dues to professional societies.
Not addressed in the contract is the schools’ controversial evaluation system known as IMPACT. It is not subject to collective bargaining.
The school system’s tentative deal with the union comes as the city prepares to increase education spending by more than $100 million next year, and it comes after two other important labor agreements with unions whose members have not received raises in years.
Both of those agreements also cover four years and call for 3 percent annual raises.
AFSCME, which represents classroom aides and front office staff, has ratified its new contract, and the Teamsters, which represents custodians and some attendance counselors, is set to vote on its tentative agreement May 30.
The school system is still far from an agreement, however, with the union that represents the system’s more than 4,000 teachers. The Washington Teachers’ Union contract expired in 2012. Talks were reportedly close to conclusion last summer, but then-President Nathan Saunders lost his bid for reelection and negotiators had to start over with the new president, Elizabeth Davis.
“We have a lot of work to do on the contract with the WTU,” Kamras said.
60 years after ‘Brown,’ D.C. schools face different difficult questions
The Washington Post
By Colbert King
May 16, 2014
Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal. That same day, May 17, 1954, the high court declared in a companion decision that the District of Columbia’s segregated public schools were unconstitutional under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
I entered all-black Dunbar Senior High in September of that year. Today , Dunbar is 97 percent black, with 0 percent white students. Francis Junior High, which I attended when the court’s decision was handed down, was 100 percent black. Today, the School Without Walls at Francis Stevens — a combination of my junior high and elementary schools and the School Without Walls — has a 73 percent black and Hispanic enrollment; the white enrollment is 16 percent.
That kind of de facto segregation can be found nationwide.
A 2012 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that “80% of Latino students and 74% of black students attend majority nonwhite schools (50-100% minority).” Further, “15% of black students, and 14% of Latino students, attend ‘apartheid schools’ across the nation, where whites make up 0 to 1% of the enrollment.” Today, typical black public school students have less exposure to white students than they did in the 1970s.
So what does that say about the ’54 school desegregation decisions? Given the reality of segregation that still exists in public schools in this city and elsewhere, was Brown all for naught?
No.
Declaring “separate but equal” unconstitutional was the critical step in striking down school segregation sanctioned by law. The finding that the government cannot discriminate in public education on the basis of race took the United States in a different and irreversible direction.
However, Brown did not, and could not, change all hearts and minds. Where one chooses to live, the neighbors that one chooses to have, which communities one wishes to call home: These remained beyond the reach of Brown. The desegregation decisions were aimed at schools, not society.
Clearly, Brown laid the groundwork for all that followed in civil rights history. But law, despite its majesty, has its limits.
All public schools in our nation’s capital are now legally desegregated. But many of their students are as racially isolated as they were in my day.
The conversation, if that’s what it’s called, has shifted over six decades. Equality before the law is no longer expected to lead to black educational achievement. Today the question is how to enable black-majority schools to overcome these handicaps, given their high levels of poverty, inadequate resources and lack of good teachers and principals. The short answer is that schools with those shortcomings cannot produce educational achievement.
Spending equally on achieving and non-achieving schools produces only more inequality. It only perpetuates the absenteeism, the high dropout rates and the achievement gap that exists between schools with students of lower socioeconomic status and those from better-off families.
Thus the reality, 60 years after Brown.
In the debate over D.C. public schools, today’s focus is where it belongs: on the allocation of resources to schools in need of investments for at-risk students and support for schools desperately in need of renovations.
Going forward, the debate must also address the effects of poverty on how children learn. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, which didn’t even exist in 1954 , now produces the kind of information that can help educators understand how to help children from low-income families succeed in school.
By happenstance this week, I got an earful from D.C. Council members David Catania (I-At Large), Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) and Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who were engaged in an impromptu discussion of the school system’s budget. These three legislative veterans, contrary to what some city detractors might think, were deeply engaged in substantive arguments over educational reforms. The exchanges weren’t political but focused on quality programs for all students.
This is not the kind of conversation that would have occurred in the District in 1954.
Now D.C. school leaders, and the most forward-looking city elected officials, including Catania and his Democratic opponent in this year’s mayoral race, Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), are talking up-front about education, race and class and how to fix neglected schools and work collaboratively with parents.
The Supreme Court said in ’54, “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.”
Many of the District’s schools may not be any more diverse than they were 60 years ago. But the District’s response to those students in separate and underperforming schools is a far cry from what it was in 1954. Would that the same could be said about the persistence of educational inequality.
How can two school systems plan for one city?
The Washington Post
By Aaron Hanna
May 16, 2014
The work of the D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, created to overhaul school boundaries and student-assignment policies for the D.C. Public Schools, has received praise across the city. Even critics of the reform proposals presented by the committee have paid tribute to the process through which alternatives were formulated. But none of the proposals presented to the public for debate addresses the elephant in the room: We have two independent entities making uncoordinated decisions about the future of our public school system. This makes rational planning impossible.
Abigail Smith, the city’s deputy mayor for education, has encouraged the public to reflect on two questions when they evaluate the proposals. What is our vision for public education in the city? What policies will help improve the quality of education at all our schools? The assumption behind these two questions — and it’s a deeply mistaken assumption — is that the D.C. Public Schools can pursue its vision of excellence irrespective of whether the independent charter sector expands, contracts or maintains its present size.
The menu of options presented to the public includes out-of-boundary “set-asides” for low-income students and a version of “controlled choice” that would replace neighborhood school assignments with a lottery system to place children in one of a cluster of nearby schools. The theoretical merits of these and other options are worth debating, but no reforms will work according to design if they are implemented without formal cooperation with the charter sector.
After a decade of haphazardly reforming our public school system, we have reached a crucial junction. In little more than a decade, enrollment in charter schools has increased from less than 5 percent of the school population to more than 40 percent. We now have the nation’s third-highest percentage of public school children attending charters.
The great debate between advocates of charter and neighborhood schools will continue. But this debate should not distract us from what is now the greatest obstacle to improving our public school system: the two-headed monster that rules over the administrative side of our public school system.
The D.C. Council in 2007 gave the mayor direct authority over DCPS. It also designated the D.C. Public Charter School Board the sole authority over charter schools. By law, that seven-member board can approve up to 20 new schools a year.
At the time, this approach was reasonable, though it lacked sufficient foresight. Now we have planning problems that only close coordination between these sectors can solve. We cannot continue to support a law that mocks the idea of rational planning.
Let me provide one concrete example. The most widely supported menu option put forth by the D.C. Advisory Committee appears to be the creation of new, high-quality middle schools throughout the city. That there is strong demand for good neighborhood middle schools and predictable feeder patterns is clear. In Ward 4, where my children attend a neighborhood elementary school, parents are pushing DCPS to reopen MacFarland Middle School (under a new name). A new and improved MacFarland would not only meet the demand for a good middle school but also supply a newly renovated Roosevelt High School with an influx of motivated students and parents.
But how can our next mayor invest in the renovation, redesign and staffing of a new neighborhood middle school without the collaboration of decision-makers in the charter sector? The charter board is considering eight new schools for the 2015-2016 school year, including two middle schools that might compete directly with a reopened McFarland. Can a city afford to invest in a new neighborhood middle school if charter schools open at the same time and compete for the same students?
Competition and experimentation can serve constructive purposes. The original logic behind charter schools was that they would be laboratories of learning, much in the same way our states are laboratories of democracy. Innovations that proved effective would disseminate.
But the evidence suggests that such collaboration has ceased. What we see today is a counterproductive kind of balkanization: parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, researchers and private funders are either pro-charter or pro-neighborhood schools. Competition, instead of being a spur to excellence, fuels an ideological debate that no amount of data-crunching and statistical analysis will resolve conclusively.
Strong convictions may win public debates. But humility is the beginning of intelligent discussion. If we want to manage the reform of our public schools intelligently — if we want to think strategically about the future of our entire public school system — we have to relax our attachment to complete charter autonomy.
The combined lottery introduced this year is a baby step in the right direction. But we are still in the political and administrative wilderness. In our present system, the viability of new public schools — charter or traditional — is impossible to predict.
How One Principal Is Solving D.C.'s School-To-Prison Pipeline Problem
The DCist
Matt Cohen
May 15, 2014
Among the issues — and there are many — D.C. Public Schools are facing and attempting to fix is an end to the "school-to-prison pipeline;" a term that describes a pattern in which schools push students out of the education system and into the criminal justice system. There's a popular belief that our nation's education system is often neglectful when it comes to addressing the needs of troubled and underprivileged students, more intent on disciplining them through suspension and expulsion instead of working with them to solve the root of the problem. The effect, experts say, sets youth up for a life behind bars.
While the school-to-prison pipeline is an issue facing schools across the nation, in D.C., some school officials are exploring new methods to help fight that culture. The root of the problem, they think, lies in how D.C.'s public, private, and charter schools punish students. "We've got to stop incarcerating what is essentially adolescent behavior," says Dr. Ian Roberts, principal of The Academies at Anacostia.
At a panel organized by Councilmember David Grosso (I-At Large) addressing the school-to-prison pipeline problem last night, Roberts — along with Thena Robinson Mock, the project director of Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track of The Advancement Project, and Eduardo Ferrer, the legal and policy director of D.C. Lawyers for Youth — discussed what can be done at the local and national level to help address this issue.
A big part of the problem is the myth that suspension and expulsion helps set a student straight, according to the panelists. According to statistics from DCPS, 13 percent of students enrolled in D.C. public schools during the 2011-2012 school year were suspended at least once, while some middle schools had suspended over 50 percent of their student body. "The bulk of suspensions and expulsions are discretionary," Ferrer says, "and they mostly have adverse effects."
At The Academies at Anacostia, Dr. Roberts says he's been employing his own unique efforts to help combat the school-to-prison pipeline, and they've shown to be an improvement. At the beginning of each school year, before students arrive, Roberts makes his staff go out into the community and introduce themselves to every parent. "It builds a positive relationship with the parents and with the community," Roberts says. Especially for his staff who, he says, are mostly "white college grads" from a middle class or upper middle class upbringing, and have never spent time in the predominantly black, lower-class neighborhoods near the school.
Roberts has also introduced several other quirky policies that has helped students stay in school and out of juvenile detention centers. "We believe in giving students second chances," he says. "The solution is not for [the Metropolitan Police Department] to arrest students for school violence, and it's not to suspend or expel students." Roberts firmly believes in finding different ways to help troubled students that often act out with violence. Among them is keeping the school open later, so that teachers or guidance counselors can work with students to help them work out their problems. Roberts has even implemented week-long suspension moratoriums, instead forcing students who get into trouble to work out their issues in school, rather than sending them away as a punishment.
On a national level, advocacy groups like Dream Defenders and the ACLU are trying to solve the school-to-prison pipeline problem by working to diminish ineffective procedures like zero-tolerance policies, high-stakes testing, excessive police presence in schools, and a racial bias towards students of color. By implementing restorative justice programs as a counter—much like what Roberts is doing at The Academies at Anacostia—it can greatly reduce the amount of students in the school-to-prison pipeline.
But while Roberts' methods at The Academies at Anacostia are having a positive impact, that's just one school. The big question is what can be done to reduce the school-to-prison pipeline at a city-wide level. For one, the role of MPD officers in schools can be reevaluated. "The role of cops in schools is not to be a disciplinarian," Mock says. "That is for teachers, guidance counselors, or administrators. Not police." In terms of what city officials can do, Grosso says that introducing legislation that increases transparency in school data, as well as introducing more wrap-around services for school—especially in mental health—can help schools.