- D.C. weighs new admissions preference for children of charter-school employees
- In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good
- School Spending Increases Linked to Better Outcomes for Poor Students
- If you want students to learn, teach them how to take notes
D.C. weighs new admissions preference for children of charter-school employees
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 28, 2014
D.C. charter schools may soon get a new teacher recruiting tool courtesy of the D.C. Council, which is slated to vote Wednesday on establishing a new admissions preference for the children of full-time charter-school employees.
The provision was proposed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray as part of the fiscal 2015 Budget Support Act. If passed, it would give children a far better chance of getting into schools where their parents work. It also has the potential to shrink the number of seats available to the general public at sought-after schools that routinely have waiting lists of hundreds of students.
Admissions to the city’s charter schools are decided by citywide lottery, with existing preferences for the children of founding board members and siblings of current students.
Charter leaders argue that a new preference for the children of full-time employees would help them compete for talent with D.C. Public Schools, where average teacher pay far exceeds that of most charters. DCPS does not offer enrollment preference for the children of teachers.
“Family considerations often play a major role in a teacher’s decision [about] whether to remain at a school,” 22 charter leaders wrote in a December letter, urging the D.C. Council Education Committee to act.
The new provision would limit each school’s enrollment of employees’ children to 10 percent of the total student body. Employees and their children must be D.C. residents to qualify.
The council must vote in favor of the Budget Support Act twice — first today and again later this month — before the change can take hold.
In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
May 28, 2014
New Orleans — The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old work sheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good.
Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans’s Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.
It has been two decades since the first public charter school opened in Minnesota, conceived as a laboratory where innovations could be tested before their introduction into public schools. Now, 42 states encourage charters as an alternative to conventional schools, and enrollment has been growing, particularly in cities. In the District of Columbia, 44 percent of the city’s students attend charter schools.
But in New Orleans, under the Recovery School District, the Louisiana state agency that seized control of almost all public schools after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, the traditional system has been swept away.
The creation of the country’s first all-charter school system has improved education for many children in New Orleans, but it also has severed ties to a community institution, the neighborhood school, and amplified concerns about racial equality and loss of parental control.
With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.
An all-charter district signals the dismantling of the central school bureaucracy and a shift of power to dozens of independent school operators, who will assume all the corresponding functions: the authority to hire and fire teachers and administrators, maintain buildings, run buses and provide services to special-needs students.
Of the Recovery School District’s 600 employees, 510 will be out of a job by week’s end. All 33,000 students in the district must apply for a seat at one of the 58 public charter schools, relying on a computerized lottery to determine placement.
Critics of the all-charter New Orleans model say it is undemocratic, because leaders of charter schools are not accountable to voters. They also say the system is challenging for parents, who have to figure out logistics that were not an issue when their children walked to neighborhood schools.
“They don’t answer to anyone,” said Sean Johnson, the dean of students at Banneker, whose father attended the school while growing up in the Black Pearl neighborhood. “The charters have money and want to make more money. They have their own boards, make their own rules, accept who they want and put out who they want to put out.”
Advocates say the all-charter model empowers parents.
“We’ve reinvented how schools run,” said Neerav Kingsland of New Schools for New Orleans, which promotes and supports charter schools. He is leaving the organization to try to export the model to other cities. “If I am unhappy with service I’m getting in a school, I can pull my kid out and go to another school tomorrow. I don’t have to wait four years for an election cycle so I can vote for one member of a seven-member board that historically has been corrupt.”
By most indicators, school quality and academic progress have improved in Katrina’s aftermath, although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons because the student population changed drastically after the hurricane, with thousands of students not returning.
Before the storm, the city’s high school graduation rate was 54.4 percent. In 2013, the rate for the Recovery School District was 77.6 percent. On average, 57 percent of students performed at grade level in math and reading in 2013, up from 23 percent in 2007, according to the state.
Opinion surveys show support for charter schools but unease about the shuttering of all traditional schools, with just 41 percent of New Orleans residents backing the idea in a poll commissioned by the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University in New Orleans. The changes also have been stirred racial tensions and claims of disenfranchisement.
“This is a depressed community,” said Karran Harper Royal, an activist who has been trying to block the school closings. “People here don’t really feel like they can coalesce and fight this.”
In affected neighborhoods, news that Banneker and the four other traditional schools were closing was greeted with shrugs from residents who have grown inured to upheaval since Katrina.
“It’s bittersweet, but what are you going to do?” asked Myra Jenkins, 31, as she picked up her 5-year-old twin boys from kindergarten at A.P. Tureaud Elementary, a school encircled in barbed wire. Built in 1939, the building’s art deco features are scarred and shattered. Inside, a handmade sign peeling off a door welcomes visitors but misspells the school’s name. The school received a “D” from Louisiana’s A-to-F grading system in 2013.
Some residents were disheartened to learn of its closing. “This don’t make no sense,” said Derrick Williams, 45, who walked his great-niece to kindergarten on a recent day. “Me and my sister, the whole family, the whole neighborhood went to that school.”
A few miles away, 486 children attend the sparkling Akili Academy, a K-6 charter school. Akili, a “C” school, occupies the former William Franz Elementary School, in the Upper Ninth Ward, a building that underwent a $24 million restoration and expansion after Katrina. The school has a $250,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation, established by the family that founded Wal-Mart.
“This is the most exciting city in the country for education,” said Kate Mehok, the chief executive of Crescent City Schools, which operates Akili. She began her career with Teach for America and was a founding assistant principal at a KIPP charter school in Harlem. “Anytime you allow parents choice about where they can send their kids to school, it can only be good.”
When Katrina struck in 2005, the public schools in New Orleans were considered among the worst in the country. Just before the storm, the elected Orleans Parish School District was bankrupt and couldn’t account for about $71 million in federal money. There were just a few charter schools.
In the tumult after the hurricane, the state seized control of 102 of the city’s 117 schools — the worst performers — and created the appointed Recovery School District to oversee them, while letting the Orleans Parish School Board run the relatively few remaining.
The Recovery School District closed failing traditional schools or turned them over to charter operators, never intending to reconstruct a traditional school system, said Patrick Dobard, the superintendent.
“We’ve had a clear plan in place,” Dobard said. “We’re going to create a new legacy, a new memory. We don’t have to hold onto some of the things in the past that didn’t work.”
The city is spending about $2 billion — much of it federal hurricane recovery money — to refurbish and build schools across the city, which are then leased to charter operators at no cost.
“The difference between now and pre-Katrina is that we’re replacing schools that are not performing well,” Dobard said. “We don’t let children languish in chronically poor performing neighborhood schools. It was a system of haves and have nots. We passed those times in New Orleans, and I’m glad we left those behind us.”
After Katrina, the recovery district fired more than 7,000 employees — nearly all of them African American — while the charter schools hired scores of young teachers, many of them white recruits from Teach for America. The fired teachers sued for wrongful termination and won a judgment that could total more than $1 billion.
White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.
John White, the state’s superintendent of education, agreed that access to the best schools is not equal in New Orleans, but he said the state is prevented by law from interfering with the Orleans Parish School Board’s operations.
“The claim that there’s an imbalance is right on the money,” White said. “The idea that it’s associated with privilege and high outcomes is right on the money.”
Stan Smith, acting superintendent of the Orleans Parish schools, said his district’s charter schools have agreed to participate in the OneApp when their contracts are renewed, in two to 10 years from now.
The city’s conversion to charters promises the best outcome for the most students, White said. “These kinds of interventions are never easy things,” he said. “When you look at overall outcomes, they’ve been positive. Does it have collateral negative effects? Of course. But does it work generally for the better? Yes.”
At Banneker Elementary, Sharell Washington was absorbing the school closing.
“I’m sad. I like this school,” said Sharell, a bright-eyed 8-year-old who does not know where she will attend school in the fall. “I’ve been here since kindergarten, and I know a lot about this school. I have friends here. They always have my back.”
School Spending Increases Linked to Better Outcomes for Poor Students
Education Week
By Holly Yettick
May 29, 2014
In districts that substantially increased their spending as the result of court-ordered changes in school finance, low-income children were significantly more likely to graduate from high school, earn livable wages, and avoid poverty in adulthood.
So concludes a working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, a private, nonpartisan research organization with headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
The provocative results provide new fodder for long-running debates over whether more education spending translates into improved outcomes for children. They also delve into thorny methodological questions over how to best estimate the way in which state-level school finance reforms have affected district-level spending.
Between 1971 and 2010, the authors write, supreme courts in 28 states responded to large gaps between richer and poorer school districts by reforming school finance systems. Although the changes had limited consequences for children from higher-income families, the paper says, they had large effects on the life chances of low-income children who were exposed to sizable and sustained spending increases.
For low-income students who spent all 12 years of school in districts that increased spending by 20 percent, graduation rates rose by 23 percentage points. Due to the measurement error or “noise” found in almost any study of this type, the effect could, very plausibly, be as low as 8.7 percentage points and as high as 37 percentage points. The estimates are based on the study’s analysis of 15,000 children born between 1955 and 1985. All account for a host of other potential explanations, such as school desegregation, War on Poverty programs, and demographic changes.
The paper’s analysis also found that low-income children who were exposed to a 20 percent spending increase for their entire school careers attained nearly a full year of additional education after high school. (That estimate ranged from about four months to 1½ years.)
Between the ages of 25 and 45, these same children were 20 percentage points less likely to fall into poverty during any given year. (Estimates vary from 8 percentage points to 31 percentage points.) Their individual wages were 25 percent higher than they would have been without the changes, with estimates ranging from 3 percent to 45 percent, according to the paper. And their family incomes were 52 percent higher, with estimates ranging from 17 percent to 86 percent.
The authors of the research are C. Kirabo Jackson, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.; Rucker C. Johnson, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley; and Claudia Persico, a doctoral student at Northwestern’s school of education and social policy.
Narrowing Gaps
“The magnitudes of these effects are sufficiently large to eliminate between two-thirds and all of the gaps in these adult outcomes between those raised in poor families and those raised in nonpoor families,” conclude the authors.
David Card, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley who was not involved in the research, praised the paper for analyzing long-term indicators such as earnings rather than trying to tie results of the finance overhauls to K-12 test scores. He noted that economists studying a diverse set of different educational influences, including teacher quality and preschool, have found that, when test scores are the yardstick, effects may “disappear, then reappear in earnings.”
But Bruce D. Baker, an education professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., raised questions about the amount of time that passed between the implementation of the finance changes and the emergence of the outcomes.
“[E]xploring such [far-apart] outcomes, while a fun academic exercise, is of limited use for informing policy,” he wrote in an email to Education Week. “Among other things, these are changes that occurred under very different conditions than today.”
Mr. Baker also disagreed with the researchers’ caveat that similar changes might have a much smaller effect if introduced today, in part because total school funding nationwide increased by 175 percent over 43 years, from an average of $4,612 per student in 1967 to about $12,772 per student in 2010, as measured in 2012 dollars.
In a statement, the authors responded to that critique and others.
“We acknowledge that the contemporary policy environment and other conditions have changed significantly since the 1980s and 1990s, yet we believe our work contributes significantly to the existing knowledge base of the role of reform-induced changes in school spending on outcomes for poor children,” they wrote. “Whether improvements in school resources for poorer districts can lead to similarly large impacts in the future, given current spending levels, is an empirical question, and one which we will address in future research.”
Mechanisms for Improvement
Mr. Baker said that some of his concerns were allayed by the fact that the working paper’s findings aligned with past research results.
“One would certainly like to think that substantive and sustained school finance reforms have such positive effects, and a significant body of existing literature suggests that they do,” he wrote. “To the extent that increased funding leads to things like … smaller classes and … more-competitive teacher wages, this finding would be consistent with the long-term effects of class-size-reduction literature.”
As part of their study, the researchers did find that districts that increased spending by 20 percent in the wake of court-ordered school finance revisions reduced the ratios of students to teachers and nonclassroom personnel such as guidance counselors and administrators.
“While there may be other mechanisms through which increased school spending may improve student outcomes, results suggest that the positive effects may be driven, at least in part, by reductions in class size and having more adults per student in schools,” the paper states.
Although the new analysis did not examine teachers’ salaries, Northwestern’s Mr. Jackson has done other research suggesting that “districts that saw spending increases may have been able to attract better teachers through increases in salaries,” the paper notes.
Mr. Baker of Rutgers also took issue with the section of the paper that characterizes state-level school finance reforms and examines their effects on district-level spending. That section drew upon a recently compiled data set that tracks school district spending back to 1967, with annual updates available from 1970 through 2010.
The authors found that many legislative finance overhauls that were not ordered by the courts decreased overall spending in the long run.
By contrast, court-ordered “equity based” changes, meant to level the playing field for students, increased spending in poorer districts without affecting overall education spending rates. Court-ordered “adequacy based” reforms, intended to raise funding to levels that met state constitutional obligations to provide all students with an “adequate” education, increased overall spending, with particularly large increases for low-income districts.
The authors also found that overall expenditures declined in the wake of finance changes that imposed spending limits and discouraged spending for wealthier districts. By contrast, when reform measures provided matching funds to poor districts, their spending growth increased, while wealthier districts were left unharmed.
Mr. Baker said it could be misleading to assign the finance revisions to broad categories (such as adequacy-based) or to assume they took effect in specific years. That’s because legal cases may drag out and change over time.
In addition, he wrote, some legal decisions address only one small section of a full overhaul. And some finance changes target specific subsets of districts, spending categories, or students.
“You can’t make a win-lose … variable out of that,” Mr. Baker said. “However, this stuff doesn’t really affect [the authors’] major causal conclusions.”
Joydeep Roy is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a senior economist at the New York City Independent Budget Office, a publicly funded agency. He suggested that the authors had made a thorough effort to conduct a very complicated analysis.
“It is slightly tricky to compare across states when each state’s financing formula might involve many unique features,” he said.
He suggested that multistate studies like this one should be considered in the context of analyses that examined a single state at a time.
“While I agree with the authors that analyzing individual school reforms does not yield as rich a set of conclusions as a cross-country study, focusing on one state allows you to do a much closer scrutiny of the reform in question,” Mr. Roy said.
“You can tease out individual components of the reform,” he said, “and explore in depth—in other words, what you lose in terms of external validity, results being valid in other contexts, you might make up in terms of a higher level of internal validity, results being really robust.”
If you want students to learn, teach them how to take notes
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
May 28, 2014
A recent study showed that students who take notes in longhand retain information better than those who take notes on laptops or tablets. But what about the many students, in DC and elsewhere, who don't take notes at all?
Note-taking is a hit-or-miss proposition in DCPS schools, with no prescribed approach or requirement that teachers focus on it, according to two DCPS instructional coaches who are former teachers. But, say the coaches, it's a crucial skill that requires students to synthesize information and figure out for themselves what is important, something their students struggle to do. Both coaches are now taking the initiative to introduce note-taking instruction to their schools.
Research has found that students who take notes and then review them recall more material and score higher on tests. While some college instructors provide notes to students these days in an effort to reduce inaccuracies, experts have cautioned that instructors shouldn't just spoon-feed content to students. In the long run, they say, students need to learn how to organize ideas for themselves.
Providing largely pre-taken notes to students isn't a phenomenon that's confined to the college level. Lauren Castillo, an instructional coach at the preK-through-8th-grade Truesdell Education Campus in Ward 4, says that she's seen a lot of teachers use "guided notes."
Those are handouts that include blanks for students to fill in, perhaps from a PowerPoint presentation. She says that in her experience that approach doesn't really engage kids in what they're learning.
"My first and second years teaching I used a lot of guided notes," Castillo says. "I was a little afraid to say 'take notes,' because the students didn't know what to do."
Needs to be taught
Lauren Johnson, an instructional coach at Eastern High School on Capitol Hill, says people often assume kids will figure out how to take notes on their own. In fact, she says, it's an essential skill that needs to be taught.
And, she says, schools don't often do that. "I think schools are pressed with so many requirements," she says, "that note-taking falls by the wayside."
Johnson is a fan of a system called Cornell Notes, which has students divide their note-taking pages into one smaller column at the left side of the page and another larger one at the right. In the larger column, students write their notes. After reviewing them, they pull out the main ideas and important points and write those in the smaller column. At the bottom of the page, they summarize the main ideas.
Students can use their notes not only for test review and writing, but also for class discussion. Johnson mentioned one English class at Eastern where class discussions have been particularly rich because the students have been able to draw on "a wealth of material" in their notes.
Johnson introduced Cornell Notes to Spingarn High School when she was the instructional coach there and is now bringing the method to Eastern. And Castillo hopes to introduce note-taking skills at Truesdell next year beginning in 3rd grade.
"Our students are often struggling to summarize and to determine the main idea," Castillo says. "Note-taking forces them to synthesize the information that is being delivered to them and put it into a format they own."
Abbreviations and cursive
But if students are going to take good notes, they need to learn to write quickly. One way to teach them to do that is to introduce a set of abbreviations.
This year, both Eastern and Truesdell have been part of a DCPS pilot program that is trying out the Hochman Method, a system of writing instruction that includes prescribed abbreviations for common concepts. (Disclosure: I have supported the pilot program financially and am a board member of The Writing Revolution, an organization that is promoting the Hochman Method.)
Students can use a forward slash to indicate a new idea, or an equal sign for "means that." An arrow stands for "led to" or "results in." While some of the abbreviations may seem obvious, students won't necessarily think of them on their own.
Both Johnson and Castillo say they were impressed by the student note-taking they saw during a recent visit to a New York City high school that has been using the Hochman Method for several years. "I was surprised to see the kids taking such fluid and engaging notes with almost no prompting," Johnson said.
Another way to get students to write faster is to teach them cursive. Many school systems, including DCPS, don't require cursive anymore, and only a few DCPS and DC charter schools offer it.
Castillo says she plans to introduce cursive at Truesdell next year in 2nd or 3rd grade. Not only will it enable students to take better notes, she says, but the kids are also clamoring to learn it. "It makes them feel empowered," she says. "They can't read things in cursive."
Some argue that cursive is just a quaint relic of a low-tech era that has little relevance now, and that schools should focus on other, more important things: reading, math, and keyboarding skills. Those things are important, but if students aren't taking notes they may not actually be learning much.
Typing leads to "mindless transcription"
And keyboarding doesn't work that well for note-taking. Students who take notes on a laptop or tablet are able to recall as many facts as students who take notes in cursive, according to a recent study. But they do significantly worse on conceptual questions.
Why? The authors of the study found that students who use laptops engage in more "mindless transcription," writing down the content of a lecture almost verbatim. In other words, like students who are handed pre-taken notes, they don't engage in the process of figuring out which points are important and therefore worth recording.
Instruction that relies on technology has its place, but it's possible that many of its touted benefits—like getting kids to "own" their learning—can be achieved through old-fashioned, cheaper methods. And in the case of note-taking, those methods may actually work better.
It's time for schools in DC and elsewhere to realize that simply pouring information over students doesn't ensure they'll absorb it. For that to happen, they have to actually grapple with the information themselves. And schools need to start teaching them how to do that, in a systematic way, as soon as possible.