- Jonetta Rose Barras: D.C. Charters and Neighborhoods [FOCUS is mentioned]
- Teachers Much Make the Grade in Charter Schools
- Feds: D.C.’s School Grant Management a Problem
- Making Schools Work
Jonetta Rose Barras: D.C. Charters and Neighborhoods [FOCUS is mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Jonetta Rose Barras
May 20, 2012
Squirreled away in the 2013 budget the D.C. Council approved last week was a section mandating a study of admissions preference at charter schools for children who live in the neighborhoods where those facilities are located. Chairman Kwame R. Brown authored the measure, which has been embraced by Ward 6's Tommy Wells and other legislators.
Most folks have taken a what-is-the-harm position. Even charter advocates, like Friends of Choice in Urban Schools Executive Director Robert Cane, "favor" it. "[But] we are skeptical about anything that could limit parental choice."
Caution is a good thing.
Cane also told me data already exist that "could tell whether there's a need for neighborhood preference."
So, why conduct a study?
Brown said such information actually would not be available until January and pointed out that folks from the charter community would lead the task force. He called the study key in removing obstacles -- chiefly multiple lotteries -- faced by parents seeking admission to either premier charter or traditional public schools.
"Each charter has a lottery; DCPS has a lottery. A parent might be in five different lotteries," continued Brown. He said that process is unfair and frustrating, particularly if a child lives across the street from a charter and is denied access. "We have to work to find the best solution and create a win/win for everybody."
Wells said the discussion really is about "in-boundary rights." District law requires a child be guaranteed a seat in a school in his or her neighborhood. Traditional public schools (DCPS) have followed that mandate; charters, as independent institutions, have not. "The District has been forced to maintain two parallel systems," said Wells. "[That] is very expensive."
If ultimately neighborhood preference were adopted, it would be "voluntary" for current charters, Deputy Mayor for Education De'Shawn Wright told me. "We're primarily focused on going forward." He said the District could offer incentives to charters that located in certain neighborhoods and accepted more children from those communities.
If charters want neighborhood kids that is fine but it would not be good to mandate preference.
That could adversely affect the educational and management model of some charters, jeopardizing their potential effectiveness.
Already, charters have become too financially dependent on the government for my taste. Not enough of them have achieved the academic excellence promised in the mid-1990s when the system was created.
The DC Public Charter School Board rated 15 of the 53 charter schools at 34 percent or below -- the lowest of three tiers measuring academics and the overall quality of the schools. Many others were stuck in the middle -- somewhere around mediocre.
District eight-graders -- in charter and traditional public schools -- had an average scale score of 112 for science-based subject matter achievement in 2011, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress report card. The national average was 151.
Truth be told, this whole conversation about neighborhood preference is mostly a distraction.
"The real problem," Cane correctly assessed, "is not enough quality seats. If you had enough schools that were good schools we wouldn't be having this conversation."
Somebody say, amen.
Teachers Much Make the Grade in Charter Schools
The Washington Post
By Fred Hiatt
May 20, 2012
Most parents know who are the great teachers in their schools and who are the teachers to avoid.
So on one level the resistance to evaluating teachers more systematically, rewarding good ones and encouraging bad ones to leave, is puzzling.
Evaluation advocates, like the leaders of D.C. Public Schools, say: Measure how well a student reads at the beginning of the year and measure again at the end. Teachers whose students improve should get raises; teachers whose students aren’t learning should find new careers. Test scores shouldn’t be the only factor, but they should be a substantial one.
Contrary to what many critics argue, the growth model of evaluation doesn’t ask a teacher to compensate for everything a poor child may be missing — parental involvement, books in the home, good nutrition, proper eyeglasses. It compares teachers with their peers in how much improvement they can encourage among comparable groups of children.
But some critics offer more nuanced questions. Should performance be averaged over two or three years? How do you measure the impact of teachers in subjects that aren’t tested, such as art or music? Is it fair to compare a teacher ably supported by a guidance counselor, principal and reading specialist to those teachers left to fend for themselves?
I think those are solvable problems. Most organizations manage to evaluate employee performance despite the presence of hard-to-quantify variables.
But there’s a way to sidestep those problems, too, or at least take them out of the hands of unwieldy bureaucracies: Just leave it to the school.
Under this model, parents would be given comparable information about a host of available schools. They could send their children to schools that are succeeding and avoid those that are failing. School leaders would be free to hire, evaluate and reward staff as they thought best, with no bureaucratic interference. But if they failed to develop and retain talented teachers, they also would fail to attract enough students, and their schools would go out of business.
This model exists. It’s called charter schools. In post-Katrina New Orleans, as my colleague Jo-Ann Armao recently described on this page, more than 80 percent of students are in charters, and they are doing better than before Hurricane Katrina. In the District of Columbia, 31,562 students — 41 percent of public school children — attend one of 53 public charter schools (on 98 campuses). Enrollment has been growing 7 or 8 percent per year. On current trends, more than half of D.C. students will be in charter schools within a few years.
The District has been fortunate, since 1996, to have a law that promotes charter school quality and independence. It’s been fortunate in the caliber of the board, now chaired by attorney Brian Jones, and its executive directors — for many years Josephine Baker and, since January, Scott Pearson, fresh from Arne Duncan’s Education Department.
The schools cannot pick and choose their students. Parents pick their schools, and if there is a waiting list admission is random (with a preference only for siblings of enrolled students and children of a school’s founding board members). Charter school students are, on average, poorer than traditional school students, but their performance is impressive.
The board grades all charter schools and posts results. Criteria include student proficiency, both absolute and growth over time; attendance and re-enrollment rates; and “gateway measures” — how well students read as they prepare for middle school, their math proficiency as they approach high school and their PSAT and SAT scores and graduation rates as they head to college.
One school gave up its charter in 2011 because of low enrollment; two gave up their high school programs; and the board revoked two charters, one each for financial and academic reasons. Meanwhile, innovative operators continue to seek permission to open schools here.
The schools operate inside a clearly defined structure, in other words. But within that structure, they have freedom — including to attract, evaluate, retain and dismiss teachers as they see fit.
Charter schools and unions could (and in a few places do) co-exist, with contracts that set reasonable floors for salaries, for example, and assure due process for dismissals. But charter schools could not thrive with the kind of detailed contracts that limit principal discretion in staffing schools, standardize how many minutes teachers can work each day and on which tasks, and, in many cities, prevent teachers from being judged on results.
There’s no panacea in public education. Not all charter schools succeed, and Washington will be better off if Chancellor Kaya Henderson and her team manage to improve the traditional public school system too.
But a well-run charter system ought to find supporters among both advocates of school choice and people who worry that teacher evaluation will grow too rigid.
Feds: D.C.'s School Grant Management a Problem
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
May 20, 2012
Federal education officials say they have "significant concerns" about the District's efforts to get out from under a law requiring all public school students to be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education is seeking relief from the federal No Child Left Behind law, along with more than two dozen states that say the benchmarks are unrealistic, and 11 more that have already received waivers.
But Michael Yudin, the acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said the feds aren't sure whether to grant the District's request because of the city's poor history of accounting for federal grants, which has made D.C. school system "a high-risk grantee."
In a letter to D.C. State Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley, Yudin said the District's problems complying with special education laws also gave his department pause, as well as OSSE's inability to clearly explain in its waiver application how it would keep schools accountable for progress.
Although most states were asked to respond to questions and resubmit their waiver applications by May 1, "given the number and level of concerns raised by the peer reviewers, OSSE may wish to take additional time," Yudin said.
In an interview with The Washington Examiner, Mahaley pointed out that District schools were deemed "high-risk" before her office was even created.
"I was surprised by that, because we've made so much progress recently in that area," Mahaley said. The only step left to exit "high-risk" status, she said, is to create a formal process to monitor how much grant money goes to overhead funding -- i.e., administration.
Currently, only 45 percent of District students are proficient in reading on standardized tests, along with 47 percent who are proficient in math. Because students are not even close to meeting the 2014 goal of 100 percent proficiency, District officials are asking for new benchmarks: They want 74 percent of students to be proficient in math and 73 percent proficient in reading by 2017.
If the waiver isn't approved, the District won't lose federal funding. But Mahaley says the city could focus more specific efforts on the schools at the very bottom of the heap if it weren't forced to follow all of No Child Left Behind's procedures.
Maryland and Virginia have also sought waivers from No Child Left Behind, with Maryland seeking to get 91 percent of students up to speed in math and 93 percent in reading by 2017. Virginia wants to get 75 percent of students proficient in reading and 70 percent in math by 2014.
Making Schools Work
The New York Times
By David L. Kirp
May 19, 2012
Amid the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.
A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices. And five years ago, a splintered court delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”
To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.
Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.
Why? For these youngsters, the advent of integration transformed the experience of going to school. By itself, racial mixing didn’t do the trick, but it did mean that the fate of black and white students became intertwined. School systems that had spent a pittance on all-black schools were now obliged to invest considerably more on African-American students’ education after the schools became integrated. Their classes were smaller and better equipped. They included children from better-off families, a factor that the landmark 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity study had shown to make a significant difference in academic success. What’s more, their teachers and parents held them to higher expectations. That’s what shifted the arc of their lives.
Professor Johnson takes this story one big step further by showing that the impact of integration reaches to the next generation. These youngsters — the grandchildren of Brown — are faring better in school than those whose parents attended racially isolated schools.
Despite the Horatio Alger myth that anyone can make it in America, moving up the socioeconomic ladder is hard going: children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich, who have about a 22 percent chance.
But many of the poor black children who attended desegregated schools in the 1970s escaped from poverty, and their offspring have maintained that advantage. Of course desegregation was not a cure-all. While the achievement gap and the income gap narrowed during the peak era of desegregation, white children continued to do noticeably better. That’s to be expected, for schools can’t hope to overcome the burdens of poverty or the lack of early education, which puts poor children far behind their middle-class peers before they enter kindergarten. And desegregation was too often implemented in ham-handed fashion, undermining its effectiveness. Adherence to principle trumped good education, as students were sent on school buses simply to achieve the numerical goal of racial balance. Understandably, that aroused opposition, and not only among those who thought desegregation was a bad idea. Despite its flaws, integration is as successful an educational strategy as we’ve hit upon. As the U.C.L.A. political scientist Gary Orfield points out, “On some measures the racial achievement gaps reached their low point around the same time as the peak of black-white desegregation in the late 1980s.”
And in the 1990s, when the courts stopped overseeing desegregation plans, black students in those communities seem to have done worse. The failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.
In theory it’s possible to achieve a fair amount of integration by crossing city and suburban boundaries or opening magnet schools attractive to both minority and white students. But the hostile majority on the Supreme Court and the absence of a vocal pro-integration constituency make integration’s revival a near impossibility.