- D.C. test data show strong link between student attendance, performance
- New book offers ground-level view of two D.C. schools [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
- It's National Charter School Week
- Forget facelifts. Architects are giving D.C. public schools luxurious settings worthy of trophy office buildings.
D.C. test data show strong link between student attendance, performance
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 3, 2014
As the District works to confront rampant truancy in city schools, national standardized test data show that D.C. students are absent from school more than the national average and more than almost all other large U.S. cities.
Data from the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test administered every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders across the country, also show that students who miss the most school tend to score lower in math and reading than peers who attend more regularly.
“We clearly have a long way to go on truancy and our truancy rates are unacceptable,” said Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, who fielded many questions about truancy Friday at a D.C. Council hearing. “But our truancy rates are going in the right direction. They are going down.”
Students who take the NAEP exam are asked how many days of school they missed in the month before the test. In 2013, 28 percent of eighth-grade students in the District’s traditional school system said they had missed three days or more, a rate equivalent to about five weeks of missed instruction during the course of a year.
Such chronically absent students scored 15 points lower in math than their counterparts who missed no days of school in the month before the exam was administered. Fifteen points is roughly equivalent to about a year and a half of instruction, according to Alan Ginsburg, a retired U.S. Education Department official who co-authored a 2012 study of the connection between absenteeism and NAEP performance.
“At lot of things have improved in D.C.,” Ginsburg said. “This is an area where they still can improve.”
Only two other cities had a higher proportion of eighth-grade test-takers in math who missed as much school. In Detroit, 33 percent of students missed three days or more; in Cleveland, it was 30 percent. Nationwide, 20 percent of eighth-grade students said they missed three days or more.
D.C. Public Schools eighth-graders who took the NAEP reading exam also had among the highest absenteeism rates in the country, as did DCPS fourth-graders. But in fourth-grade reading, there was a whopping 22-point difference — or more than two years’ instruction — between students who did not miss any school in the month before the exam and those who missed three days or more.
The correlation between absenteeism and performance is not surprising. Teachers cannot teach students who are not in class. Despite the clear connection between attendance and performance, NAEP data suggest that nationwide absenteeism rates have not budged over the past two decades, according to Ginsburg’s analysis.
Ginsburg said the city should publish more attendance data. The truancy data that schools currently release should be expanded to include data on the proportion of students at each school who are missing a lot of school for any reason, he said.
That recommendation is echoed by attendance advocates across the country who say that focusing on truancy alone misses the broader problem of chronic absenteeism, which includes excused absences.
Ginsburg, who now works as a part-time teacher at a charter school in the District, said that students in his classroom who accumulate absences tend to fall behind and stay behind. “These kids may have a note from their parent, but they’re absent a lot,” he said. “If they’re absent a lot, it just kind of feeds on itself.”
New book offers ground-level view of two D.C. schools [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 4, 2014
Sam Chaltain is a former teacher who spent a year following two D.C. schools — one charter, one traditional — in an effort to understand how the city’s high-profile school-improvement efforts are working for teachers, students and parents.
Out of that year came “Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice,” a book recently published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press.
It’s a ground-level view of a first-year charter school, Mundo Verde Bilingual, and a long-standing neighborhood school, Bancroft Elementary. But it also touches on broader questions about the direction of education reform in the District and beyond.
Chaltain spoke on a recent rainy morning about those broader issues and about his book. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
Q. How did you conceive of this project and what did you set out to do?
A. Part of it was selfish. I haven’t really seen for a sustained period, up close and personal, what it’s like to be a teacher right now. And I’m curious: What is it like to be working in a first-year start-up environment? My assumption going in was it must be exciting and insane. And what’s it like to be a third-grade teacher as test-based accountability starts to kick in? I left the classroom before No Child Left Behind.
Then also, my wife and I were about to start searching for a school for our son. I have a pretty good sense of what I’m looking for, but what I saw among our friends was lots of really smart, educated folks that have the time to really think about where they want to send their kids to school, and they had no idea what to look for. So there seemed to be a real information gap. People don’t really understand what healthy schools look like and require, what teaching and learning look like and require.
Q. You wrote that you weren’t going into this to compare DCPS and charter schools.
A. It’s a false choice because they’re so different. But what’s become clear to me is that each sector most needs the other’s strength.
The strength of charter schools is they’re able to create these cultures where everyone opts in. The best and the worst feature of charter schools is that everything’s up for reimagining — from the report card to the professional development calendar to the way they recruit. That’s really exciting and it does lead to some innovative thinking, and also that’s why it’s so exhausting and insane.
At Mundo Verde, they needed to design a report card and they would have really benefited if there had been some system in place to quickly access the wisdom of other schools. But none of those dots had been connected, so they were really on their own.
The strength of DCPS is you’re operating at scale. But you’re also — and you see this in the book — professional development is like a game of telephone. The principal at Bancroft would be e-mailed slides from DCPS that she was then responsible for presenting to her staff. And that’s stultifying.
Q. Teacher turnover is a huge problem in urban schools, especially in D.C. What struggles did you see teachers face at Bancroft and Mundo Verde?
A. Teaching is unsustainable work. So that’s what I really saw being reinforced on both sides. . . . All of these women envision careers in education, but pretty soon none of them are going to be in the classroom.
Q. Is there anything that can be done to address that burnout?
A. Definitely.
We’re in the middle of this huge shift — it’s the biggest redefinition of what it means to be a teacher in more than a century. The old notion when we were students was that it was the job of the student to adjust to school. And now it’s the school’s job to adjust to students, every one. So the teacher has to adjust to every student and every need.
That’s right and that’s what schools should be doing, but it’s so much harder to do, and we haven’t caught up yet in our training and our development and our evaluation.
There are three things: There’s what kids need; there’s what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to meet the needs of kids; and then there’s ways in which teachers are evaluated and supported by the larger system.
And if those three things were in alignment, I think teaching would be less unsustainable.
It's National Charter School Week
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 5, 2014
It's National Charter School Week and here in Washington, D.C. where the movement is perhaps the strongest in the country, we find ourselves in a highly precarious situation. We have an election for Mayor coming up that is pitting a Councilwoman who would try to impose a neighborhood preference on our schools against a Councilman who we don't really understand what he would do except for the fact that he would definitely do something.
The facility issue for charters remains as intractable as ever, and the turning over of shuttered DCPS buildings has ended. Public money that would have been allocated to a permanent site for D.C. International has been stopped by Mr. Gray, and no one is trying to figure out how the issue can be resolved so there is equity in capital funding between charters and the regular schools. We have an Adequacy Study that may now collect dust on a shelf with the change in Administrations. The media is having a field day observing the fight over traditional school student feeder patterns, something peripheral to the institutions that are closing for the first time in history the academic achievement gap.
Not being discussed openly is how to get more high performing charters to come here and how to replicate local charters that are doing well. It is as if we have all the time in the world when the great majority of kids attend places where the math and reading proficiency rates are around 50 percent. This after hundreds of millions of dollars has been spent on school reform.
Perhaps over the next seven days those involved in the almost 20 year effort to fix our public education system can pause, reflect, and decide once and for all that every kid deserves a quality seat, today.
Forget facelifts. Architects are giving D.C. public schools luxurious settings worthy of trophy office buildings.
The Washington Business Journal
By Deborah K. Dietech
May 2, 2014
Battle lines are being drawn over D.C.’s public school boundaries, but we’ve already seen victories in improving the physical environments for learning. Only a decade ago, most of the city’s schools were in deplorable condition, marred by broken windows, leaking roofs and overall disrepair.
Now almost two-thirds of D.C.’s 109 public schools have been partially or fully modernized. In his proposed budget for fiscal year 2015, Mayor Vincent Gray has set aside $409 million for more school upgrades, primarily for high schools and elementary schools.
As this ambitious campaign proceeds, some noteworthy architecture is emerging to accommodate the newest approaches to K-12 education. These new schools reflect a more fluid, dynamic and campus-style approach to learning than the rigid “cells and bells” approach of the past.
Overseeing the building improvements is architect Brian Hanlon, who was appointed director of the District Department of General Services in 2011. He is trying to raise the level of public school design and construction in much the same way that the D.C. public libraries have recast their buildings.
But Hanlon is more interested in certified business enterprises than starchitects. He is relying on design-build partnerships to speed construction and guarantee costs and has awarded multiple school projects to the same firms, throwing into question his pursuit of innovation.
Nevertheless, Hanlon insists, “We are pushing the envelope of design to change the culture.” That effort is clearly being made at some of the newer D.C. school projects, as evident from my recent tours of Ballou High School, now being constructed in Southeast’s Congress Heights neighborhood, and Dunbar High School, opened last year in the Truxton Circle section of Northwest.
The gutsy design for Ballou, created by D.C.-based Bowie-Gridley Architects and Perkins and Will, is rising on a hillside next to the dilapidated 1950s school where classes are now held. Once the complex opens in 2015, the old school will be torn down to make way for new athletic fields and a stadium.
At Ballou, students will experience “an explosion of space,” predicts Hanlon, as they enter the building under a huge archway filled with curving glass. Large windows and expanses of glass will brighten learning spaces with daylight and visually connect them to the outdoors.
Nearing completion is the brick-clad academic wing where collaborative learning spaces are interspersed among classrooms with computer stations. Students will be able to share ideas with classmates and learn at their own pace in comfortable surroundings open to hallways.
Now framed in steel is the theater-style auditorium, destined to become one of the largest assembly spaces in Southeast D.C. The next-door practice room is being tailored to Ballou’s renowned marching band, which has played in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A wing for athletics, eventually overlooking the new athletic field, will offer a competition-sized swimming pool, a fitness center and gymnasiums. The school will also house labs for auto repair classes and a teaching kitchen for the culinary arts.
Similarly impressive is the array of learning spaces already in place at Dunbar High School. This majestic building replaced a dreary, 1970s school, described by some as a prison.
Perkins Eastman with Moody Nolan Inc. designed the new school to reinvigorate pride in Dunbar’s legacy of academic excellence. “We wanted to build on the past but do it in a modern way,” said architect Sean O’Donnell of Perkins Eastman.
As the nation’s first public high school for African-Americans, Dunbar has many notable alumni, including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and jazz pianist Billy Taylor. Many graduates are now pictured on metal plaques set within a skylit atrium at the center of the new building to provide daily reminders of leadership. On my tour, students, teachers and principal crowded the light-filled space, underscoring its role as the school’s crossroads.
O’Donnell also showed me his firm’s plans to renovate Roosevelt High School, a 1932 Colonial Revival building on 13th Street NW, suffering from neglect. The school and its 1970s addition will be remodeled and enlarged with arts and athletics wings. The front colonnade and cupola will be restored and a courtyard, enclosed in glass to offer the same type of central gathering space as in Ballou and Dunbar.
Build a new school and the children will come. The new high schools are designed for larger student populations than they currently serve, but some modernized elementary schools like Stoddert Elementary in Glover Park, another Perkins Eastman design, are already feeling the squeeze of soaring enrollments. The community will come, too, for adult education classes, recreation, performances and public meetings in spaces designed into the new and remodeled schools.
Through such resources, the modernized D.C. schools fulfill a broader civic purpose in serving neighborhoods. They are contemporary in design, but built on an old-fashioned idea — the transformative power of architecture to improve lives.