- D.C. approves three new charter schools [Two Rivers PCS, Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, Monument Academy PCS, Maya Angelou PCS, Children's Guild PCS, and Washington Global PCS mentioned]
- Charter school coordination with DCPS means unbearable lightness of being
- Have a problem with your DCPS or charter school? Now there's someone who will listen [Excel Academy PCS mentioned]
- Making the most of longer school days
D.C. approves three new charter schools [Two Rivers PCS, Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, Monument Academy PCS, Maya Angelou PCS, Children's Guild PCS, and Washington Global PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 20, 2014
The D.C. Public Charter School Board has approved three new charter schools: a residential school meant for children in foster care, a K-8 school targeted at students with special needs, and a middle school that emphasizes international education and foreign language.
All are slated to open in 2015, the same year two existing schools — Two Rivers and Thurgood Marshall Academy — hope to add new campuses, a request the charter board is likely to approve next month.
The changes would add hundreds of charter-school seats across the city, many of them meant for at-risk youths who have few good educational options.
But the expansion also sparks questions about whether it makes sense for the board to continue approving new charters — which now enroll nearly half the city’s students — without regard for their location or their impact on the traditional public school system.
The wisdom of continuing without such cooperative planning is attracting new scrutiny now, when there is broader interest than usual in the city’s education landscape because of a politically charged debate over traditional school boundaries and the future of neighborhood schools.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, whose office is leading the school system’s boundary overhaul, said the desire for closer coordination with charters has been a common request among residents.
And although joint planning would be a “major policy shift for the District,” she said, “this is a conversation whose time has come.”
“I firmly believe that if we take the issue head on, through candid dialogue and a close look at the data, we can come to agreement on how to better achieve the goal of joint planning . . . for the purpose of better serving kids across the city,” Smith said in an e-mail.
Charter board members — who are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the D.C. Council — say they realize that they can, and should, do a better job of compiling, sharing and using data about where schools are most needed.
But they also say that the scarcity of facilities makes it impossible to dictate where schools can and can’t be, and they roundly reject the notion that they should refrain from authorizing promising charters in order to protect the viability of traditional schools and their feeder patterns.
“It’s my hope that this boundary process . . . will not be used as a stalking-horse to impose some sort of central planning on charter schools,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the board. Pearson said he and his colleagues see a “tremendous need” for good schools across the city and that charters can help meet that need because they operate outside of the city’s bureaucracy.
The charter board sets a high bar for new schools, Pearson said, who added that only about one-third of applicants win approval.
This year, the board rejected five of eight proposals for reasons including weak plans for serving students with disabilities and vague explanations for integrating arts and technology into the curriculum.
The two schools seeking to open new campuses in 2015 are rated as high-performing. “It’s not just willy-nilly replication,” Pearson said.
Perhaps the most innovative new school, approved in a charter board vote Monday, is Monument Academy, a residential school for children in foster care — students who traditionally struggle to graduate and face intense social and emotional needs.
Monument, whose founder is former charter board member Emily Bloomfield, plans to open in 2015 with 40 fifth-graders in a location yet to be determined. The charter board approved it for middle grades, with the opportunity to apply later to expand into high school.
Children’s Guild, a Maryland nonprofit with decades of experience educating children with disabilities, plans to enroll about 450 students in grades K through 8, half of whom they hope would be those with special needs. It is slated to open at 5600 East Capitol St., in the same building as the Maya Angelou alternative charter high school.
The third charter to gain approval, Washington Global, is a middle school that plans to emphasize service learning, Spanish and Chinese language courses, and “international mindedness.” Opening with 100 students, it would grow to 240.
“I think that we all know that there is definitely a need for this kind of school,” said Herb Tillery, a member of the charter board.
Proponents of stronger planning say it’s not clear that there is a need for that school, or any other, until the school system and charter officials look more closely at supply and demand.
“Each time a new charter school is opened, students leave existing schools, both charter and DCPS, to attend the new charters, and our taxpayer dollars are spread thinner across a growing number of schools,” Suzanne Wells and Valerie Jablow, two D.C. Public Schools parents, wrote in an open letter to city education leaders urging more cooperative planning. “This is not the way for our nation’s capital to run a high-quality public school system.”
Charter school coordination with DCPS means unbearable lightness of being
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 20, 2014
The Washington Post's Emma Brown had this blunt comment regarding the D.C. Public Charter School Board's approval of three new schools Monday evening:
"But the expansion also sparks questions about whether it makes sense for the board to continue approving new charters — which now enroll nearly half the city’s students — without regard for their location or their impact on the traditional public school system."
Only a traditionalist would question offering students who languish in low quality schools the option of moving to facilities that are high performing. But I'm afraid this line of reasoning is beginning to enlist feelings of guilt from people who have lived their lives fighting to use competition for students as a means for improving educational outcomes in this city. Take a look at the reaction of Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, as quoted by Ms. Brown:
"And although joint planning would be a 'major policy shift for the District,' she said, 'this is a conversation whose time has come. . . I firmly believe that if we take the issue head on, through candid dialogue and a close look at the data, we can come to agreement on how to better achieve the goal of joint planning . . . for the purpose of better serving kids across the city.'"
We cannot fall into this trap. "Joint planning" means that if a DCPS school is in the vicinity of where a charter is about to locate then the new school will be prevented from opening. But my reaction is this; if the traditional schools are so good why would a parent move their kid from that facility? The answer, of course, is that the chance to attend the charter could be the opportunity of a lifetime for that child.
It appears that the PCSB is also beginning to feel the heat. Ms. Brown quotes unnamed charter board members as saying "they realize that they can, and should, do a better job of compiling, sharing and using data about where schools are most needed."
But charters are needed everywhere. The Illinois Facility Fund study estimated that we must create an additional 40,000 quality seats to ensure that every child has a chance for an excellent public education. While some charters have been approved and others have agreed to replicate since the time the report was issued we have yet to make a dent in this figure. It appears only Scott Pearson, the PCSB's executive director, understands what is really going on here. Again from Ms. Brown:
“'It’s my hope that this boundary process . . . will not be used as a stalking-horse to impose some sort of central planning on charter schools,' said Scott Pearson, executive director of the board. Pearson said he and his colleagues see a 'tremendous need' for good schools across the city and that charters can help meet that need because they operate outside of the city’s bureaucracy."
It is imperative that after almost 20 years of work the PCSB is not shamed into restricting the number of strong charter schools that are allowed to operate in the nation's capital. If this does become the case then, as with many of the characters in a Milan Kundera novel, there is really no reason those of us working to fix the schools to exist.
Have a problem with your DCPS or charter school? Now there's someone who will listen [Excel Academy PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
May 20, 2014
After a 4-year hiatus, DC has a school ombudsman again. Joyanna Smith, a lawyer and former charter school administrator, is now fielding parents' complaints and facilitating their resolution.
Parents and students who encounter problems with issues like bullying, school discipline, and special-education services can once again bring them to the Office of the Ombudsman for Public Education. While Smith has no power to enforce a particular outcome, she says the intervention of a neutral party often turns up solutions that schools and parents aren't able to get to on their own.
Although the ombudsman's office was created in 2007 as part of the mayoral takeover of the schools, the first ombudsman quit a year later, and the office closed in 2009. In 2012, the DC Council moved the position from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to the State Board of Education (SBOE) to help ensure its independence, and last year the council allocated the funds to hire someone to fill the job.
Mayor Vincent Gray opposed re-establishing the ombudsman's office, saying there wasn't enough demand to warrant expending the money. But Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and Councilmember David Catania disagreed, saying that parents and activists were clamoring to resurrect the position.
Smith, who has been on the job almost 3 months, says that she's received "well over 75" complaints so far, some of which were waiting for her on her first day. And she and the SBOE are still working to publicize the existence of the office, so the volume of inquiries will probably increase. The office is in the process of hiring an assistant, but for the time being Smith does everything herself, from answering the phone to formally mediating disputes.
Complaint process
Smith, whose jurisdiction covers both DCPS and charter schools, begins by asking for basic information about the problem. Usually the calls or emails come from parents, but Smith says she's also been contacted by students themselves.
"There are some very sophisticated middle-schoolers that I've heard from," she says. Students under the age of 18, however, need to get parental consent before Smith can pursue their complaints.
Once Smith has a grasp of the issue, she asks parents whether they have already spoken to the school and what their desired resolution is. She wants to make it clear that her office can't resolve problems unilaterally, and also that she can't violate any school policies.
But sometimes a solution isn't that difficult to find, she says. One parent who contacted Smith was frustrated because his daughter was having academic difficulties in one of her classes. He had approached the school repeatedly but felt officials there weren't listening to him.
Smith then facilitated conversations between the parent and a couple of the school leaders. As a result, the school agreed to let the student audit the class that was causing the problem, since she was doing well in her other classes.
Sometimes it's hard for the parties to come to a resolution like that on their own, Smith says. Parents are often angry, and school officials may be too busy to focus on the problem.
"I've found principals and teachers do care about students," Smith says. "Sometimes it's helpful just to remind them of the policies."
But facilitated conversations won't always yield a satisfactory resolution. The next step is for Smith to provide a more formal mediation, if the school agrees to it.
As a neutral facilitator or mediator, Smith doesn't function as an advocate for either side. But beginning next fiscal year the SBOE will also house an Office of the Student Advocate, which will represent students' interests before the ombudsman, among other duties.
Part of Smith's job is to report annually to the SBOE on what complaints she's gotten and what trends they suggest. The SBOE can then recommend changes based on that data, said Jesse Rauch, executive director of the SBOE. The reports will also be made public, probably on the ombudsman's website.
School problem-solver
Smith says her background has prepared her for what some would find a stressful job. Her experience as a lawyer for two DC government agencies has helped her identify issues and formulate solutions. And her tenure as an administrator at Excel Academy, an all-girls charter school in Southeast, has familiarized her with school-level problems and how to resolve them.
"I would just stand in front of the school during arrival and dismissal," she says of her time at Excel, "And parents would start to share their problems with me." She became an informal problem-solver at the school, she says.
One thing Smith hasn't yet had experience in is mediation, and none of the complaints she has fielded so far have called for her to do that. But last week she participated in an advanced mediation training.
The ombudsman position may have been allowed to lapse for so long because elected officials preferred to accentuate the positive about DC's public schools. But problems are inevitable in any large system, and ignoring them won't make them go away. The relocation of the ombudsman's office to the SBOE should help insulate it from politics.
Let's hope Smith is able to resolve most of the complaints she gets. But whether she does or not, the mere fact that she's hearing them, and reporting on the patterns she sees, should help the government and the public get a handle on what tends to cause problems at the individual school level, and what can be done to address those issues in a systematic way.
Smith can be reached at 202-741-0886, at ombudsman@dc.gov, or through the ombudsman office's website.
Making the most of longer school days
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
May 21, 2014
Many school improvement ideas vie for attention these days — the Common Core standards, new online and in-class teaching combinations, more social services, better ways to rate teachers. The most promising reform, I think, is increasing the length of the school day and school year.
Many of the most successful charter schools in the District give students significantly more time than the usual six-and-a-half hours a day. In fact, some traditional public schools in the District are also lengthening the day. Our suburban districts have found ways to add periods before the opening bell and after the closing bell, particularly for students whose parents lack the time and skills to support study at home.
But the research shows that extra time doesn’t help unless it is well used. With that in mind, the Boston-based National Center on Time and Learning has just released recommendations on the best way to construct a longer school day.
The center looked at teaching practices in 17 of what it called “high-performing and rapidly-improving schools” that have expanded learning time. The nine charters and eight traditional schools are in 13 states, but not Maryland, Virginia or the District. I have visited two of the schools, the KIPP Central City Academy in New Orleans and YES College Prep- Southwest Campus in Houston.
Conventional thinkers like me would assume those schools would focus on increasing the time students spend with their teachers. But it turns out to be more complicated than that. Much of the additional time is used to give teachers more hours to prepare for their classes.
“Unlike most schools across the country, where teachers spend the vast majority of their time in school engaged in direct instruction,” the report said, the schools in the study “strategically set aside significant time for teachers to work collaboratively with their peers to plan for and strengthen instruction.”
According to the U.S. Education Department, the average teacher work week is 81.3 percent instructional time and 18.7 percent non-instructional time. In the 17 schools studied, the proportions were very different — 59.9 percent instructional time and 40.1 percent non-instructional time. This reflects what researchers have found in European and Asian schools with higher achievement rates than U.S. schools. Their teachers spent much more time researching and planning lessons and sharing advice about how to improve results.
“Teachers in these schools spend on average more than 90 minutes per week working in teams to plan lessons,” the report said of the U.S. schools studied. “In some schools they collaborate up to four hours every week.”
One key factor is embedded professional development. All school districts schedule a certain number of days each year for professional development. Teachers listen to lectures or do exercises to improve their skills. Often the lessons have little to do with their jobs. I could tell that just by looking at the disappointed faces of some of teachers I used to lecture as a professional development speaker.
The schools studied by the center avoid that waste of time by having their own administrators and teachers design professional development sessions that “are highly connected to school-based instructional goals,” the report said.
Seven of the 17 schools devoted two or three summer weeks before students arrived for planning and development of new programs. Many blocked out time for teachers to collect, analyze and plan around data acquired from testing their students. In some schools, individual teachers worked with instructional coaches through weekly observations and feedback. Many schools gave teachers time to observe each other in their classrooms.
According to the center, more than 1,500 schools have joined the movement to increase learning time. Massachusetts has been particularly active, and its achievement scores have improved. Washington area schools have much to learn from what teachers in the rest of the country are doing with their extra time.