- Catania gets $100,000 for school study from Emanuel Friedman
- D.C. spending plan cuts programs and staff at dozens of schools
- Thurgood Marshall Academy Gains National Prominence [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
- Why many DCPS students can't write
The Washington Post
By Tim Craig
May 1, 2013
A wealthy investment banker has donated $100,000 to D.C. Council member David A. Catania’s controversial private fund to help finance outside legal advice on education policy. The contribution by Emanuel J. Friedman, a Kalorama resident who manages a multibillion-dollar investment fund, is the first to Catania’s effort. Friedman, 67, did not return calls seeking comment. Friedman’s donation brings the fund a third of the way toward its goal of $300,000. The money would pay the Hogan Lovells law firm for work in support of the council’s Education Committee. Catania (I-At Large) said he appreciated the financial support, adding that it will enable a review of “decades of municipal regulations and laws” that may be “barriers to schools and teachers.” “It’s sensible to review, occasionally, the totality of our laws and regulations to make sure they are consistent with best practices,” Catania said.
The council occasionally seeks outside legal help, but such work is usually done pro bono or funded with tax dollars. But Catania, who took over as chairman of the Education Committee in January, has said that private funds would expedite the firm’s work by guaranteeing it as a priority.
The District’s ethics board has signed off on the arrangement as long as donors do not have business before the city and have “no expectation of special treatment from the District.” But Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said he is unsure whether one council member should undertake such a broad effort to revise school reform. Among other changes, the 2007 legislation gave the mayor control over public schools. “If we are going to be looking outside [for advice], we ought to be doing it together,” Gray said Tuesday, adding that he and Catania have yet to discuss education matters. “I think, [for] something of this magnitude that could have real policy implications for the city down the road, it would be good if we had some consistency how we are going to approach this, especially if we are going to spend this kind of money.” But Catania noted that Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson also solicits private donations for city schools.
“I just think there are a number of items that have been left unattended to for the last 21 / 2years, and the council is a separate branch of government,” Catania said. “While I appreciate the mayor’s point of view, he can tend to his work, and we can tend to ours.” Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said Monday that Catania did not brief him before crafting the private-donation plan. Mendelson said he’s supportive of the effort, even though some council members question whether they should have voted on the plan. Catania, who is considering running for mayor next year, said he is hiring the international firm of Hogan Lovells to research school-reform efforts across the country. He then hopes to draft legislation to address performance standards, enrollment lotteries and the allotment of school resources. Maree Sneed, a partner at the law firm and a former principal in Montgomery County, is heading up the research. Mary Levy, an education finance expert and city schools watchdog, agrees that it may be time to fine-tune or revise the District’s education policies. But Levy questions whether a law firm and private donors should lead the effort.
“I think it’s worthwhile getting expertise on legal questions, but in terms of education policy, I wouldn’t hire a law firm to do it,” Levy said. “So much research of this kind is funded by those with ideological purposes.”
Friedman is a co-founder of the Friedman Billings Ramsey Group, currently known as Arlington Asset Investment Corp. He left the firm in 2005 and now oversees EJF Capital LLC, an investment firm valued at $2.6 billion, according to Bloomberg News. A former history and geography teacher, he has been linked to numerous local philanthropic endeavors. He has also donated to several local political campaigns, including three $1,000 donations to Catania’s campaigns since 2001.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 2, 2013
When D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced in January that she wanted to close 15 city schools, she said the downsizing would help create a stronger school system with rich academic offerings that could compete with the city’s fast-growing charter schools. But Henderson’s proposed 2014 budget has raised concerns about her ability to fulfill that promise. The $818 million spending plan, an increase of less than 1 percent over this year’s budget, calls for some new investments but requires cuts to staff and programs at dozens of schools, including some where enrollment is rising or holding steady.
Parents and politicians say the reductions threaten families’ faith in the school system, particularly in nonselective high schools and middle schools, many of which are facing deep cuts. At Stuart-Hobson Middle School on Capitol Hill, where enrollment is projected to rise but the budget is slated to be sliced by 12 percent, students will be able to take a foreign language only if parents raise enough money to hire an after-school Spanish teacher.
“The message that DCPS sends to families looking for anything other than the bare minimum is, ‘Go to charters,’ ” said Laura Marks, a PTA member at Watkins Elementary, which feeds into Stuart-Hobson. “It’s like DCPS has given up the game at middle school. They’re just walking away from it.”
Henderson is likely to face that skepticism Thursday morning, when she is scheduled to testify before the City Council’s new education committee, which is bringing fresh scrutiny to the school system’s spending decisions.
Henderson and Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D)have said that school-level cuts are necessary because of the system’s failure to meet enrollment projections. The system received per-pupil funding this year for a projected enrollment of about 47,000 students, but only 45,500 showed up for class.
Gray said he was obligated to project a more realistic number for next year: 46,060. But parents say individual schools’ enrollment estimates seem arbitrary and unfairly low, and that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Low projections lead to program cuts, which drive families away. “Not investing in neighborhood schools where enrollment is low is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Logan Circle resident Jim Sullivan, one of dozens of parents and activists who aired their concerns about the school budget during a five-hour council hearing last month.
Council members have appeared sympathetic to that argument and have signalled an interest in restoring some of the cuts, although it’s unclear where they would get the money to do so. David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee, has said he is interested in identifying unnecessary spending that can be redirected into a fund that would be used to stabilize budgets at schools with falling enrollment. Absent such a fund, Catania says, families can’t trust that schools will offer the same programs from one year to the next, and schools can’t serve the students left behind.
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Thurgood Marshall Academy Gains National Prominence [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
May 1, 2013
When it comes to raising the bar and educating minorities in the District of Columbia, Thurgood Marshall Academy in Southeast has stepped up to the plate. And, in the process has gained national prominence closing the achievement gap among black male students. The Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color (COSEBOC) announced during its annual meeting that took place April 26 in Chicago that the public charter high school is one of its five award schools for 2013.
"We have a large achievement gap in this country, and D.C. is synonymous with under-achievement," said Adrian Austin, Thurgood Marshall grants writer. "So this award is very special for us." Austin, 30, added that while many District residents are already aware of the effective programs at the school, the award serves as an opportunity to showcase to the rest of the country, the staff's success educating young black males.
"We had panels of students, parents, teachers and administrators who were interviewed for the award during on-site visits [from COSEBOC] and no one was coached beforehand on how to respond," said Austin. "We just encouraged everyone involved to tell the truth, and that was one of the main things that helped us to win."
COSEBOC is a national network of schools, highly-respected educators, researchers, policy-makers and advocates who share and promote innovative approaches and initiatives aimed at improving the educational outcomes at schools with significant populations of African-American males. Thurgood Marshall, which is located in Ward 8, is the only school in the District, and one of only two high schools in the country to receive the prestigious award. The school is also the recipient of a $10,000 grant from the New York City-based Black Male Achievement campaign.
In addition to Marshall, this year's award schools included Best Academy in Minneapolis, Minn.; Devonshire Elementary School in Charlotte, N.C.; and Merrillville High School and Salk Elementary, both in Merrillville, Ind. All of them were honored last week at COSEBOC's 7th annual "Gathering of Leaders," where teachers and students shared their formulas for success. The schools were selected based on their success engaging and educating students through test scores, graduation rates and college attendance. However, Marshall took its commitment a step further, having placed more emphasis on creative, effective, and sustainable in-school and out-of-school programs for its male students.
COSEBOC Executive Director Ron Walker said the awards are proof and evidence of educational environments that work "extremely well" for black male students. "Identifying schools that have developed effective, creative and sustainable approaches and sharing those successes with other educators is the cornerstone of the work we do at COSEBOC," said Walker. "These five schools are unrepentant in their belief that students can succeed and soar to great achievement levels," Walker said. "Each is led by a principal who is determined to build great schools. Most importantly, they know that great schools are not an accident."
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
May 1, 2013
Many DCPS high school students have trouble writing a grammatically correct sentence, let alone a cogent essay. If they can't write, how will they fare in college? Or in life? For the past few months, I've been a volunteer writing tutor at a DCPS high school, working with 4 students selected by the school for their motivation and their promise. I wanted to help these kids, of course. But I also wanted some first-hand experience of what it was like to teach (albeit not in a classroom) in a high-poverty DCPS school.
It's been an eye-opening experience. I didn't have high expectations, knowing something about the state of writing skills in the general population. Still, I've been surprised, if not shocked, by the deficits I've found. And although the sample size has been small, from conversations with teachers and others, it's clear that this problem is widespread. DCPS teachers, like teachers elsewhere, just haven't focused on teaching kids how to write. I'm not saying teachers are to blame. Teaching writing is highly labor-intensive, and teachers with 4 or 5 classes of 25 or 30 kids each simply don't have the time to give meaningful feedback on writing assignments. And standardized tests have emphasized multiple choice answers in reading and math rather than writing, partly because it's a lot harder to grade writing. That means even if teachers had the time to focus on writing, the system hasn't given them much incentive to do it.
The problems are both micro and macro. Students don't know what subjects and verbs are, and they don't understand why a phrase like "Running to catch the bus" is not a complete sentence. (One of my students defined "subject-verb agreement" this way: "That's like, if you're talking about a subject, and the audience agrees with you.") Perhaps more worrisome, students don't know how to construct a logical argument. If you ask most of my students to write a paragraph consisting of a topic sentence followed by sentences with supporting evidence, you may well get an almost random dump of information. I recently tried to help a couple of them with an assignment to write a 5-paragraph essay. The experience was so frustrating that I found myself in tears on the way home. All of my students are intelligent and hard-working, and they're able to make good points orally. But, with one exception, they all have difficulty organizing their thoughts into coherent writing. (The one exception is a student who told me she reads a book a week for pleasure; obviously, that's helped her.)
It's hard to imagine these students writing a college-level term paper in a few years, or even a decent college application essay. DCPS has worked hard to instill in students the expectation that they'll attend college (all of my students say they plan to go). But if we don't teach them how to write, we're setting them up for failure. Lately there's been a good deal of attention focused on writing instruction on a nationwide level. That's partly because the Common Core State Standards, which DC and 45 states have adopted, are looming on the horizon. These standards place a lot of emphasis on writing, which they divide into three types: narrative, explanatory, and "argumentative." "Argumentative" writing involves marshaling evidence in support of a claim, and is probably the most difficult of the three. Narrative writing, which basically involves telling a real or imagined story, is undoubtedly the easiest. The Common Core standards introduce the idea of "opinion pieces" as early as kindergarten, but the standards ascend gradually from grade to grade in terms of difficulty. A student who has been schooled in a Common Core-aligned curriculum beginning in kindergarten may well be equipped to tackle argumentative writing by the time she reaches high school.
The problem is that DCPS, along with other school districts, is expecting current high school students to tackle complex argumentative writing before they've learned how to write coherent narratives. Trying to help my students with their 5-paragraph essays, which were aligned to the 10th-grade Common Core argumentative writing standards, put me in mind of a comment from a physics teacher at a DC alternative public school in the PBS documentary 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School: "Words cannot describe how hard it is to teach physics to students who can't multiply." It isn't any easier to teach argumentative writing to students who haven't learned how to write a decent sentence.
What can be done about this situation? One possibility, from a much discussed piece in The Atlantic, is "writing across the curriculum." In a low-performing Staten Island high school, all teachers, not just those teaching English, began to use a program that focused on analytical writing skills. Within a year or two, test scores had risen dramatically. After four years, the school's graduation rate, which had been 63% before it adopted the writing program, reached 80%.
Whatever the solution, it will almost inevitably involve a lot of work on the part of teachers. Recently a nonprofit called EdX has devised computer software that assesses student writing, a development that has predictably unleashed a hailstorm of criticismfrom English teachers. I can see a use for computers in helping students recognize basic grammatical errors, but for anything more sophisticated a human being is probably necessary. It won't be easy, and it won't be cheap. But teaching kids how to write is vitally important, and not just because test scores are likely to plummet next year when DC will begin to align its standardized tests to the Common Core. Nor is it just a matter of giving kids a skill that will enable them to succeed in college or in the job market, important as those things are. Learning how to write is, ultimately, learning how to think. And given that we live in a democracy, the more people we have who can think in a clear and sophisticated way, the better it will be for all of us.
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