- Are Charter Schools Bad At Special Ed? [DC Prep PCS is mentioned]
- ISO: Current or Former Parents of Charter School Special Education Students
- D.C. Urges Schools to De-Emphasize Standardized Testing for Teacher Evaluations
- Simmons: In Memory of Hope for the Poor
Are Charter Schools Bad At Special Ed? [DC Prep PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
May 16, 2012
Critics say public charter schools have an unfair advantage over regular public schools because they are less likely to have students with learning disabilities. That is not always true. Consider one D.C. charter management organization, DC Prep, with more than 1,000 students.
Its Edgewood Middle Campus, a fourth-through-eighth-grade middle school, has a larger portion of special education students than the District’s average. Seventeen percent receive services and are showing progress.
I do not mean to disparage regular D.C. schoolteachers who are doing special education work. I have seen enough programs for students with learning disabilities to know that fine work can be found at schools otherwise labeled as failing because of their low test averages.
Emily Lawson, founder and chief executive officer of DC Prep, describes her school’s methods this way:
“We employ an inclusion model, with special education teachers working alongside the general education teacher in the classroom. This general classroom experience ensures that special education students master grade-level content.
“We have structured our school day to provide two hour-long sessions of small-group work for students at all levels — both those requiring extra support and those doing above-grade-level work. Because these groups are fluid — with groupings changing as students master specific skills and content — students are able to get the targeted intervention they require in a timely, focused way.
“The student achievement data demonstrate that our approach is working. While our special education subgroup as a whole did not make AYP [adequate yearly progress, the benchmark for the federal No Child Left Behind law], results in each of the past two school years show that at least 66 percent of our special education students made 100 points of progress or more in reading, and at least 67 percent made such progress in math [100 points is roughly equivalent to one year of progress]. To us, since this is individual student-level data, . . . this is a more accurate measure of progress than AYP.”
DC Prep has, like most D.C. public schools, a large majority of students from low-income families, who usually achieve at lower levels than affluent students because of the lack of an academically enriched home environment. Seventy-seven percent of DC Prep’s children are from families who qualify for federal lunch subsidies.
Yet its academic results make it one of the highest-performing D.C. middle schools. In the 2011 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests, 74 percent of DC Prep students overall were proficient or better in reading, and 92 percent reached that level in math. The comparable results for D.C. schools were 46 percent in reading and 50 percent in math.
Forty percent of DC Prep students in special education were proficient or better in reading and 71 percent in math. Among special education students in D.C. schools, the portions were 16 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Some public-school advocates say charter parents are more involved with their children and savvier about schools, which is why charters have higher test scores.
I think that’s wrong. The nature of special education is part of my argument. Smart parents whose children have disabilities look for the best teachers for their child, and often find them, after careful investigation, in regular public schools. They are not going to take their children away from teachers who have earned their trust just because their friends say charters are better.
Lawson, however, disagrees, saying many parents of special education children come to her school because their neighborhood or other charter schools have proved unable to provide the services they need.
I know of no data supporting either side. Parents should not automatically write off regular or charter schools until they see what the actual school they have in mind might do for their child, no matter what the test scores are.
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
May 23, 2012
I’m working on a story about how public charter schools serve special education students. If you’re a current or former charter school parent of a child with an IEP, I’d like to hear about your experiences, negative and positive. I’m especially interested in speaking to families who feel they’ve been discouraged from enrolling or “counseled out.”
You can reach me at turqueb@washpost.com or 202-334-9294.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
May 23, 2012
The District is changing the rules governing its teacher evaluations, encouraging public schools to reduce the emphasis on standardized test scores when rating their teachers.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education announced Wednesday that D.C. Public Schools and certain charter schools no longer have to base 50 percent of teachers' evaluations on the results of the DC Comprehensive Assessment System, or DC CAS.
Instead, the standardized tests can count toward 30 percent of the evaluation, or any variation in between 30 and 50. The gap should be filled with other performance measures such as SAT scores, literacy assessments or end-of-course exams, OSSE officials said.
"The time has arrived for a holistic measure of teacher evaluation," said State Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley.
D.C. Public Schools and the 29 charter school operators regulated by the federal Race to the Top grant program must seek approval from OSSE to make the changes.
Frederick Lewis, a spokesman for D.C. Public Schools, said the school system is "considering" applying.
The Washington Examiner first reported in April that DCPS was considering scaling back the weight of evaluation tool Impact for teachers in tested classrooms.
Impact is one of the most controversial reforms of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee because poor ratings have led to the firings of hundreds of teachers -- 206 last summer alone. Classroom observations and whole-school performance also factor into the evaluations.
Because the District receives grant money from its successful Race to the Top application, it has had to stick with the reforms it outlined until the U.S. Department of Education approved the modification announced Tuesday.
Robin Chait, director of teaching and learning at OSSE, said a task force has been working on the changes. "It's something we've been talking about as the charter schools are implementing more rigorous evaluation systems for the first time this year, and DCPS has had Impact for a couple years now," Chait said.
Mahaley said multiple performance measures would allow teachers to provide midyear interventions if student data show help is needed; teachers don't receive DC CAS results until the summer.
Washington Teachers' Union President Nathan Saunders, who has been critical of Impact and other reforms instituted by Rhee, said he believes weakening the test's role in evaluations is a move in the right direction.
"The scores don't reflect the existing conditions that students bring into the classrooms, issues pertaining to family dysfunction, economic circumstance, poverty," Saunders said. "There are [problems] that are more immediate that young people face in their neighborhoods and communities, that if they face those on the day of testing could totally devastate their scores and their teacher's career."
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
May 23, 2012
Monday is Memorial Day, the American holiday when we pay homage to living and deceased heroes in jubilant and solemn fashion. And while I mean no harm to our commander in chief, I do think it the perfect time to again reflect on the audacity to hope on behalf of our rising generation of youths, who are inextricably tied to troubled school systems.
For some reason, our commander in chief fails to see the value in public education vouchers, and he apparently has an acute disdain for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which grants up to $12,000 in tax money to pay for a poor child’s tuition at a private or religious school.
In fact, President Obama wants to slam shut the schoolhouse doors to any new applicants, having proposed in his fiscal 2013 budget that no more children be allowed.
Now, this is not the first time the president has dampened the academic hopes of poverty-stricken families. After all, he grandfathered in children for the D.C. voucher program in 2009 but blocked other children from entering.
Blessedly, Congress intervened in 2010 with the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act (SOAR), which reconstituted funding for more voucher applicants and laid out guidelines for researching several aspects of the voucher program. SOAR also appropriated money for D.C. traditional and charter schools, and Mr. Obama signed the legislation into law.
But the president is reneging by trying to put an artificial cap on the program of 1,615 students, and that causes two major problems.
For one, as I mentioned earlier, it means no additional students.
More important, it means that researchers will be handicapped, unable to track how effective or ineffective the successful program is, was or can be with new participants.
Public school teachers, by and large, do not like tracking methods because they reflect on an individual teacher’s effectiveness and interfere with determining whether a teacher, individually or collectively as a bargaining unit, gets a raise, promotion, bonus or tenure.
Indeed, a serious teacher tracking system is the only component missing from D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown’s ambitious and costly plan to pay higher salaries to those who teach in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and lowest-performing schools. For his part, though, Mr. Brown is a huge supporter of SOAR, which fully funds the three-pronged approach to public education.
What the commander in chief needs to do is look at what the future holds for underprivileged youths in the D.C. voucher program.
• Research released Tuesday by the D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp. shows that in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years, voucher students had a graduation rate of 94 percent and that 89 percent of them enrolled in two- or four-year colleges.
• Parental satisfaction remains high, too — with 92 percent of parents elated with their children’s academic progress and 98 percent intending to renew their children’s participation for the next school year.
What’s more, nearly 1,700 families have applied for renewals and 1,200 new applications for the next school year are in play.
Those facts underscore the success of the program, which began in 2004, as well as its popularity as local and federal authorities continue to grapple with the question of what role, if any, school choice should play in education reform.
Kevin P. Chavous, one of the District’s strongest voices for choice, knows the inside story of what’s going on here.
“Parents want this program and have applied in big numbers despite very few formal application events,” Mr. Chavous, a former council member and current senior adviser at the American Federation for Children, said Tuesday.
To deny school vouchers to low-income families is the same as issuing a dream-deferment voucher to their children — for a second time.
It’s unfathomable why the president of the United States — the commander in chief as he is called when such holidays as Memorial Day roll around, would try to divine such a prospect upon families that otherwise could not afford such a possibility that clearly is pregnant with academic expectations.
Poor people have the audacity to hope, too.
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