FOCUS DC News Wire 6/1/2015

• D.C. Charter Board comes close to approving 100 percent of applicants [FOCUS, Washington Leadership Academy PCS, Goodwill Excel Academy PCS and Breakthrough Montessori PCS mentioned]
• Charter Sector Challenged by Quality of School Boards [Cesar Chavez PCS and Community Academy PCS mentioned]
• Education week-in-review: charter schools need more space and more freedom [D.C. International PCS mentioned]
• Undeterred by Waitlists, Parents Apply in Droves for School Lotteries
• D.C. mayor’s first budget thin on new investments for middle schools
• D.C. schools to introduce more challenging ‘cornerstone’ lessons

D.C. Charter Board comes close to approving 100 percent of applicants [FOCUS, Washington Leadership Academy PCS, Goodwill Excel Academy PCS and Breakthrough Montessori PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 1, 2015

During the time that my wife Michele and I were investigating the state of public schools in Amsterdam and Portugal the D.C. Public Charter School Board gave the green light to three out of five applicants for new institutions to open in the fall of 2016. Washington Leadership Academy, Goodwill Excel Academy, and Breakthrough Montessori were unanimously approved at the May monthly meeting. Each of these facilities hopes to eventually grow to teach about 400 students, adding 1,128 seats to our slow desperate march toward the 40,000 needed to provide every child in the nation's capital who needs one a quality seat. All three schools had gone through the FOCUS start up program.

I had made the case that everyone of those seeking to create charters this cycle should have been allowed to proceed. However, this assertion was offered knowing that the PCSB has never approved more than 40 percent of applicants so tradition was definitely not on my side. I also recently learned that a detailed review of the supporting documents demonstrated that a couple of the bids were not as strong as the others. Still, in watching the board meeting video on the trip back to the United States it was fascinating that both of the schools that were not successful, Legacy Collegiate and Fostering Scholars, were urged by PCSB members to follow the example of Washington Leadership Academy by making some tweaks to their applications and resubmitting them the following year. Therefore, my prediction was exceedingly close.

Now the facility hunt for these new charters begins in earnest. Stay tuned.

Charter Sector Challenged by Quality of School Boards [Cesar Chavez PCS and Community Academy PCS mentioned]
Edweek.org
By Arianna Prothero
May 29, 2015

A District of Columbia charter school spent millions contracting for services with a company owned by the school’s founder. And an Ohio charter spent more on rent than staff salaries—money paid to a company that was owned by the same education management group that ran the school.

Those two cases illustrate a recurring issue in the charter school sector: poorly prepared school boards that fail to stop questionable deals or flat out corruption.

When charter schools struggle or get shut down, weak governance is often the source of trouble. And many times, that issue is linked directly to the charter school's board, an entity that even many charter supporters say too often flies under the radar of public scrutiny.

Efforts to professionalize charter boards and raise the caliber of the people serving on them are gaining traction in some corners of the charter sector, even if policy and research focused on the role of those local boards remain scant.

Training for Boards

Last month, a group of sitting and soon-to-be seated charter school board members—lawyers, government workers, and researchers among them—descended on Chavez Prep Middle School, a charter in the nation's capital, as part of a training workshop designed specifically for members of charter boards.

"I don’t think there are enough good charter school boards because there hasn't been enough emphasis from leaders and authorizers on having strong boards," said Carrie Irvin, the president and co-founder of Charter Board Partners, a national nonprofit organization that provides training to charter boards and the sponsor of the recent workshop in Washington. (Charter Board Partners is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Education Week receives support from Gates for coverage of the implementation of college and career-ready standards and from Walton for coverage of parent empowerment issues.)

Taking participants to a local charter school helps drive home the point that a board serves students before all else, Ms. Irvin said.

Having nonprofit boards run individual or small groups of schools instead of a single, elected board running an entire district, is one of the biggest innovations of the charter school movement, some advocates say.

"Charter or no, every school is unique, so there is tremendous benefit to making decisions as close as possible to the kids," Ms. Irvin said. "Boards are able to make much nimbler decisions in response to the particular needs of students and families of that school."

Although that may be the case, such a setup can limit broader community input because charter board members aren't elected by voters.

"District school boards, however imperfect, allow for that," said Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. "Obviously the number of people who vote for them is pretty low, but they were designed to reflect the needs and preferences of the wider community."

This form of school governance also can bring a unique set of problems, caused by an evolving and often unclear chain of accountability among authorizer, board, and management company, said Luis A. Huerta, an associate professor of education and public policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

'The majority [of states] have no regulation that outlines the operations or makeup of charter school governing boards," Mr. Huerta said. "Ultimately, I'm not convinced that board professionalism would necessarily mitigate [those issues].'

Financial Mismanagement

The board holds the charter­­—or the contract—with the authorizer for the school, and is in charge of big-picture operations such as governance, strategic planning, and financial oversight. That last item has been a particular problem for the sector, whose schools receive public funding but operate independently.

Last year, the board for the Community Academy Public Charter Schools, in Washington, came under fire for hiring a company belonging to the school's founder. That company was paid $2.1 million in 2014 to provide maintenance and administrative services, among other duties.

"But it turned out the company only had three employees: the founder, his wife, and his stepson, and they weren't performing many of those services," said Scott D. Pearson, the executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the city’s sole authorizer.

The authorizer eventually decided to shutter the school for fiscal mismanagement. "A lot of people don’t realize how much of a responsibility service on a nonprofit board is," Mr. Pearson said. "They don’t realize that they have serious fiduciary responsibilities."

Mr. Pearson told participants in the recent training session that the No. 1 mistake board members make is simply being disengaged when they are responsible for being stewards of the public's money.

"If it feels fishy to you, it probably is," he told the attendees. "This is taxpayer money, and it's a lot. The total budget for city charter schools [in the District of Columbia] is $700 million."

Situations like the one with Community Academy Public Charter Schools don't just affect a single campus. Proponents worry that they tarnish the whole charter movement.

Ohio has also had a spate of charter school scandals in recent years to the point where the governor and several state legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, are now pushing to retool the state charter school law. Bills that would increase oversight and accountability are making their way through the Statehouse.

Lack of Expertise

One of the organizations backing the tighter state oversight of Ohio's charter sector is the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based think tank. Its Ohio branch also authorizes charter schools in the state.

"Almost always when you see these meltdowns, the board does not understand some very basic things," said Kathryn Mullen Upton, who is in charge of authorizing at Fordham in Ohio. "Often, they relate to areas of professional expertise—being able to read a financial statement and understanding the state’s accountability system."

She said it's important to have a diverse group of professions and backgrounds represented by members on a board because the panels have all the duties and obligations of a school district. They need lawyers, real estate agents, and human resources professionals to compliment the educational expertise of the school leader, she said.

For that reason, Charter Board Partners—which joined the Fordham Institute for a separate board training in Ohio— also acts as a matchmaker, recruiting prospective board members and connecting them with schools.

One such recruit in the District of Columbia is Blanca Guillen-Woods. She is a consultant working in education research, but serving on a charter board wasn't something Ms. Guillen-Woods at first thought she was qualified to do, "because I always think of boards in terms of the financial contributions, which I'm not really in the position to help out with as much. I don’t have a lot of connections in that way," she said.

But as a parent of school-age children, a fluent Spanish-speaker, and an education professional, Ms. Guillen-Woods, in the view of Charter Board Partners, was a prime candidate for a charter board—especially in the District of Columbia, where the authorizer is pushing school boards to use data in more of their decision-making. She is in the process of getting matched with a board.

Authorizers—or sponsors, as they're called in Ohio—have come under the microscope recently as highly publicized school management issues drive a greater focus on charter school quality nationwide. As the charter-granting entity, the authorizer makes the final call in whether a school is allowed to continue operating or is shut down.

But on the other side of any charter contract is a school board, and that party seems mostly to escape notice.

As evidence, Ms. Mullen Upton, Ms. Irvin, and Mr. Huerta all point to a dearth of policy, data, and research which makes it hard to draw any conclusions about the overall quality and professionalism of charter boards on a national scale.

Only seven states­—Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas—require charter school board members to undergo any kind of training, according to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. However, individual authorizers may require training as part of the charter-application process. Charter school associations, as well as organizations like Charter Board Partners, may offer training, but participation, like board service, is voluntary.

"Hopefully, within the next several years, there will be more attention on the importance of that role," said Ms. Mullen Upton. "At the end of the day, they are responsible for the ultimate success or failure of the school."

And, Mr. Huerta added, that may lead to more accountability. "If there isn't enough focus, that means they’re off the hook."

Education week-in-review: charter schools need more space and more freedom [D.C. International PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Paul Brennan
May 29, 2015

From Washington D.C., where charter schools are squeezed for space, to Wisconsin, where more freedom is leading to better results for charter school students, it’s been a busy week in education.

Washington D.C.

Empty school buildings but no room for charter schools

For Carmen Rioux-Bailey, chief education officer at the D.C. International Public Charter School, “space is sort of the civil rights issue for charters right now.”

Charter schools in D.C. often struggle to find permanent buildings in a city where real estate is scarce and expensive.

In this city, it’s not uncommon for charter school teachers to gather students in warehouses, or basements, or to combine small spaces for an art room, gymnasium and cafeteria.

Rioux-Bailey, one of the founders of DCI, said it’s upsetting that some public schools are half-empty as choice schools are oversubscribed due to a lack of facilities.

“It’s really perplexing that there is space in the city and yet there’s an uneven distribution of that space for taxpayers (and students),” she said.

But D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson wants to keep some of those buildings in her control. In April, she testified to the D.C. Council that she wanted be able to open or close schools, depending on demand. The DCPS district is planning to open four new schools in 2015.

Virginia

Sweet Briar’s self-inflicted wounds

In a curious twist to the closing of Sweet Briar College, records show the school’s financial position was more precarious a decade ago.

Assets at the historic women’s college are stronger than they were in 2002-03, according to financial spreadsheets obtained by Watchdog.org.

Recent spending patterns suggest many financial shortcomings were self-inflicted. In the latter days, travel and conference expenditures were each averaging $10,000 a week — aggressive spending for a 600-student campus.

At the same time, school leaders did not fill positions crucial to Sweet Briar’s future. There have been no directors of admissions or the alumnae association for the past two years.

Alumnae told Watchdog they were not apprised of any imminent financial crisis. Affluent grads said they were not asked to increase giving to their alma mater.

Meg Arcadia, a Sweet Briar alum who is leading a grassroots fund-raising effort, said school leaders could have solidified the school’s fiscal future by cutting spending by 9 percent or increasing revenue by 12 percent through higher tuition and giving.

Officials did neither.

Pennsylvania

A new charter school

The Knowledge Is Power Program charter school network is one of the most successful school networks in the country. It serves almost 60,000 students nationwide and operates four successful charter schools in Philadelphia.

The schools boast 75 percent of their eighth grade students testing at or above proficient in reading and math and a 94 percent graduation rate at the high school level.

But that didn’t stop Philadelphia’s School Recovery Commission from rejecting an attempt by KIPP to create a new charter school three months ago.

In February, KIPP was one of 34 charter applications denied by the SRC during a contentious public meeting that was broken up several times by outbursts from the assembled crowd. Four individuals were arrested that night for disorderly conduct. One KIPP application was approved that night, though it had already been operating as an annex of an existing school.

But a new decision by SRC will allow KIPP to open another school.

The new school will be able to accommodate 375 students when it opens 2016.

The KIPP approval was a victory for school choice advocates who have been on the defensive in the past few weeks. Earlier this month, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association filed a right-to-know request with all of the state’s charter schools to find out more about their finances and operations, which some have called a publicity stunt.

State control vs. local control

A bill by Sen. Lloyd Smucker (R-Lancaster), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, would establish a statewide Achievement School District to prop up Pennsylvania’s worst public schools. Modeled after similar efforts that enacted change in Louisiana, Tennessee and Massachusetts, the state would intervene and effectively turn its failing schools into charter schools.

The state has experience in school interventions. The sputtering Philadelphia school district, amid sharp budget deficits and lousy student performance, was taken over in 2001 and the change has produced mixed results. The School Reform Commission, which governs the district, is unpopular among local residents for many reasons, chief among them that schools are still failing.

The ASD would be run by a newly formed state agency, similar to the School Reform Commission.

William Hite, the superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, is concerned that state intervention will saddle the district with an unfunded mandate “resulting in the stripping out of supports and programs from schools left under local district control.”

Between 85 and 95 Philly schools could be eligible for state takeover under the proposed legislation.

“Strikingly,” Hite said, the bill “seems to undermine, or at least distort, our main mechanism for reducing costs.” In Philadelphia, the sharpest tool the district has for turning around bad schools is the renaissance program, a localized turnaround project that transforms poor district schools into charter schools.

In Philadelphia, 20 renaissance charter schools serve close to 16,000 students and 12 “promise academies” service 7,500 students. Hite acknowledged that the charter schools have “achieved notable turnarounds and sustained success.”

While Hite expressed concerns about aspects of the turnaround bill, others have come out fully supporting Smucker’s legislation. Among those are SRC commissioner Bill Green, who endorsed the bill in a letter to Smucker, though he acknowledged the need for additional funding to help turn around the state’s worst schools.

“My hope is that the General Assembly will approve this legislation along with increased education funding,” Green wrote. “Only with both additional resources and transformative changes to the most chronically underperforming schools will we be able to meaningfully improve academic outcomes.”

Georgia

Cheating scandal drives parents to charter schools

Amid the testing scandal that has rocked their public schools, Atlanta parents have been fleeing the centrally-controlled traditional neighborhood schools for charter schools.  Enrollment in the higher-performing charters has boomed, as have the waiting lists.

Atlanta’s charters are attractive to parents because, on the whole, they outperform the traditional neighborhood schools.

In order to retain their authorization, Georgia charter schools need not only to outperform their districts, they also need to outperform the state as a whole.

Despite the growth in interest, applications for new charters in Atlanta have lagged behind other places.

If the number of schools in Atlanta hasn’t been growing, that doesn’t mean the market is closed to new students.  Charter schools have been expanding their existing programs to accommodate new students.

But those expansions aren’t keeping up with the increasing number of hopeful students stuck on the waiting lists.

Minnesota

More transparency

Independent School District 2142 in St. Louis County is learning what its math students already know. If your numbers don’t add up, you’ve got to try again.

Three administrative law judges have again sent the northern Minnesota district back to drawing board with a May 20 order. The district’s assignment? Recalculate the cost to taxpayers of promoting a controversial $79 million referendum that narrowly passed in 2009.

”It is precedent-setting. It’s the first school district, when it comes to ballot questions, that had to comply with the campaign finance laws, if you’re going to promote a ballot question,” said John Colosimo, a Virginia attorney for the district in the latest administrative law court setback. “The case has provided clarification with what school districts have to disclose.”

Independent School District 2142’s initial report — filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board — listed $12,561.72 of public funding for the promotional campaign. Expenses included mainly print, postage and design costs for sending newsletters to residents and parents of the district’s 2,000 students.

Not even close, the administrative law panel found, given the district’s $58,000 communications contract with project manager, Johnson Controls. The schools claimed just a fraction of the $58,000 went to promotional efforts.

The court ordered St. Louis County Schools to recalibrate and add campaign expenditures for polling, telephone surveys, related report, referendum planning and other activities.

The Coalition of Community Schools, the citizens’ group challenging the district’s numbers, believes the total amount of staff time and taxpayer resources dedicated to the ballot campaign will never be known. In the end, the ballot question was just as much of a referendum on how and whether districts should take sides in big spending proposals as whether to build two schools.

“What we’re trying to show are the conflicts of interest,” said Erick Kaardal, attorney for CCS. “Step by step, we’re getting greater disclosure of the close cooperation between these vested companies in these bond referenda and school district boards, and showing their conflicts of interest.”

Wisconsin

Prevailing wage’s real cost

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a Milwaukee-based, limited-government law firm, estimates taxpayers in school districts that approved construction referenda over the past five years potentially could have saved between $163.2 million and $244.8 million had the districts paid market wages, instead of the prevailing wage.

WILL used state Department of Public Instruction data on referenda passed since Jan. 1, 2010, excluding bonding measures that do not fall under prevailing wage laws. Over that time, 142 referenda were passed in 121 school districts — totaling $1.8 billion worth of bonds issued, according to the study.

A bill that would repeal Wisconsin’s Great Depression Era prevailing wage laws was the subject of an Assembly Labor Committee hearing Wednesday, much to the displeasure of Republican leaders in both houses who say they just don’t have the votes for passage.

Rep. Andre Jacque, R-DePere Republican, on Tuesday said he had enough votes in the Labor Committee to approve the bill.

It’s a last-minute push by core conservatives who see Wisconsin’s prevailing wage laws as anti-free market, anti-competition and unnecessarily costly to taxpayers.

More freedom, better results

Allowing schools greater independence to make important policy decisions leads to better results for students, according to a new study that examines student performance in reading and math at both charter schools and traditional public schools.

“We wanted to see how schools that have more freedom and more autonomy to operate performed compared to others,” said Martin Lueken, the author of the study.

As a charter school’s degree of autonomy from local district control increased, so did the rate of growth in student performance in reading and math.

“We found that independent charter schools do very well,” said Lueken.

“But the unfortunate reality is our charter school laws are limiting where these schools can operate. Except for the one school in Racine, all of them are in Milwaukee. But Wisconsin is a big state and there’s a lot of room to expand if we had better charter laws that would allow for these types of schools to have the freedom to operate.”

Undeterred by Waitlists, Parents Apply in Droves for School Lotteries
Townhall.com
By Kevin Glass
June 1, 2015

It’s lottery season.

"Lottery," to you, might bring to mind ping-pong balls bouncing around in a glass tube, as millions anxiously wait to see if they'll win millions of dollars. But nationwide, millions of parents must anxiously wait out a different kind of lottery: to see if their children will be selected to have a chance at a better opportunity. The expansion of charter school programs in some of the nation’s biggest metropolitan areas have given more parents and students access to a different educational track and an alternative option to an underperforming public school system. But despite expansions in charter and other choice programs, massive waitlists persist around the country. These waitlists can number in the tens of thousands, and charter school advocates put the total number of parents on waitlists around the country at over one million. The message is clear: parents want choice.

Reports on some of the nation’s leading choice programs have seen applications far and above what the programs’ limited scope allowed for. This leads to heartwrenching moments for parents and children who merely want the chance for a better opportunity.

A new campaign in Philadelphia called “No More Waiting” is trying to inform voters - and the more than 22,000 families on charter waiting lists in the city - ahead of city council elections this fall. It’s a way for charter advocates to mobilize families who have experience with charter schools or those on these waitlists about the successes of the Philadelphia system and to push for expansion of the program. These huge waitlists persist despite five new charter schools being approved this year.

In Washington, D.C., school choice lotteries have been expanded so that families could apply to both charter schools and public schools outside of their neighborhood borders. There are massive waitlists for both - the waitlists, combined, number over ten thousand students. D.C. charter schools serve on of the largest populations of school-age students of any charter system in the country - and yet demand is still outstripping capacity.

Atlanta, too, has seen runaway success of their charter program. The city voted last month to increase funding by $21 million for the program, to meet an increased demand of thousands more students and families. The charter program there has grown to serve 14% of the school population, and like in Washington, waitlists remain.

 And last year in Wisconsin, their choice program overflowed: over five times more applications were submitted than could be accepted. In the wake of the demand for school choice from parents, Gov. Scott Walker offered to completely eliminate the cap on Wisconsin’s school choice program entirely in his budget proposal.

It’s about more than just putting parents in control of their children’s educational opportunities. Study after study have shown that both charter schools and private scholarship schools outperform public schools and give underprivileged children opportunities that they’d never have if they were trapped in their public school districts. These schools do this despite the fact that they’re usually operating with smaller budgets than their public school brethren.

Opponents who are ideologically committed against educational choice programs typically downplay the numbers that show better outcomes for students. What they cannot argue with is the enthusiasm that parents are showing for choice programs. While anti-choice activists trot out tired arguments that choice schools don’t give students better outcomes (they do) or that choice schools merely “cream skim” the best students from public schools (they don’t), they cannot argue with waitlists. They cannot argue with parents who are applying in droves just to give their children a better opportunity. The people who have the most investment in the future of America's children - parents - are making their preferences heard with their participation in choice lotteries. It would be a brighter future if legislators nationwide gave them better odds to hold a winning ticket.

D.C. mayor’s first budget thin on new investments for middle schools
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler and Abigail Hauslohner
May 29, 2015

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser campaigned on improving middle schools in the District — telling parents at backyard meet-and-greets and in campaign speeches that she wanted to replicate the same quality after-school programs and academic opportunities available at Alice Deal, the school system’s most popular middle school.

But education advocates say those commitments barely make a ripple in Bowser’s first budget, which the D.C. Council approved Wednesday.

The $2.4 billion education spending plan calls for mostly about the same level of funding this year. It sustains investments in middle schools made while she was on the campaign trail but includes no new initiatives at the critical grades when many D.C. families opt out of public schools.

Her capital budget includes funds to renovate and reopen a middle school near Petworth, fulfilling a major campaign promise. At the same time, modernization funds were delayed for more than 40 schools, among them several middle schools. The biggest winner is Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Georgetown, which is now scheduled to receive $170 million for renovations.

Three-year delays at Jefferson and Eliot-Hine middle schools were a major blow to Capitol Hill parents who have worked for a decade to build support for a feeder pattern from elementary schools to Eastern High School.

Joe Weedon, a Ward 6 parent and member of the State Board of Education, said the delay in funding to Eliot-Hine felt like a “bait and switch.”

“If we succeed in turning it around and making it the next Alice Deal, it will be despite the efforts that are contained in this budget,” he said.

The six-year capital budget for public schools dropped 20 percent this year — to $1.27 billion from $1.6 billion. After several years of aggressive borrowing, scaling back was necessary, officials said, to pay down a major debt load that had left the city close to its debt ceiling.

But D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who heads the council’s Education Committee, was critical of the plan, which delayed funds to many schools that have not seen capital investments. He launched a process to bring more objective criteria into future decisions about capital spending, and the council made several changes to Bowser’s capital plan, including restoring funding to some schools, before approving it.

In an interview Tuesday, Bowser (D) said her first budget reflects her commitment to middle schools, pointing to $17 million in spending.

In reality, however, that funding continues investments already underway. While Bowser was campaigning to improve middle schools last year, D.C. Public Schools made a major infusion by providing classes in algebra, foreign languages, art, music and physical education in every middle school, all part of a plan launched by Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson.

At a news conference in March at Brookland Middle School, Bowser highlighted improvements underway at middle schools and announced the expansion of some summer programs for middle-grade students as well as a home-visiting program to serve two new middle schools next year and extra opportunities for field trips.

This year, the school system has moved its emphasis to bolstering programs across all of the city high schools. Henderson has dubbed it “the year of the high school.”

But many in the city do not want to lose a sense of urgency about middle-school reform.

“My belief is we need more than a ‘year of the middle school,’ ” said D.C. Council member Charles Allen (Ward 6). “It is those middle years where we’re seeing a lack of confidence from many parents.”

This year’s budget is much leaner than last year’s, when public schools received an influx of new funding and initiatives. Last year, most notably, there was an increase in the per-pupil funding that drives most school spending, including $80 million for students deemed “at risk.”

In contrast, Bowser began her term with news of a projected $200 million budget shortfall. Some agencies had to make cuts in spending. Most new city investments this year were concentrated in new housing as well as support services for low-income and homeless families, a priority that had widespread support.

Per-student spending in the District remained flat, and increases to the schools were tied to enrollment.

The mayor’s most notable new education-related investment was $7 million for free Metro transit passes for all traditional public and charter school students, which many advocates have said would improve students’ attendance in a city where many children travel across town to go to school.

She also put funds in the budget to increase the facilities allotment for charter schools and to improve the quality of early education. She added funding to expand a community schools model, which provides social services to children and families on-site, something she talked about during her campaign.

The D.C. Council added additional funds for community schools and some other initiatives, including funding for a new “Books from Birth” law, approved this year, that will provide for a book a month to be mailed to every D.C. child under the age of 5.

D.C. schools to introduce more challenging ‘cornerstone’ lessons
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
May 28, 2015

D.C. Public Schools is introducing a slew of new classroom lessons designed to give students more in-depth and engaging learning opportunities across the school system starting next year.

The activities, called “cornerstones,” could include a Socratic seminar, a hands-on science task, a short piece of writing or a weeks-long research project. They are designed to be memorable or inspiring learning experiences that help students make connections to the real world or encourage breakthroughs in their thinking.

Such activities are already happening in a lot of classrooms, but school officials said they want to make them a standard part of every child’s education.

At a training for principals on Thursday, D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said the school system has made strides in increasing the rigor of curriculum, which is aligned to new Common Core academic standards, but lessons aren’t equally challenging across the District.

“If I go to one side of town, I might see the same lesson being taught very differently than on another side of town,” she said.

Citing an example of a lesson that was memorable to her, Henderson sang a jazzy song that she wrote in the eighth grade about the water cycle for a science project.

“Clearly powerful, if, at 44, I still remember it,” she said. She said she hated her science classes until they got to that creative lesson about the water cycle.

Some of the most popular charter schools in the District emphasize project-based learning that helps students apply what they learn and make connections across different subjects. The new academic standards being used in the District and many states emphasize depth of knowledge, and many schools are looking for ways to encourage higher-order thinking skills.

The District is hiring teachers to develop and contribute projects that can be shared. The school system has amassed more than 200 lesson plans on a Web site that can be used by teachers in more than 60 courses.

For example, in a high school algebra class, students could be assigned to create scatter plots and find regression equations using data related to space shuttle flight. In a fourth- grade science class, they might learn about machines and design windmills and sailboats powered by wind. In a sixth-grade health class, they could study the impact of violence in their communities and come up with plans for addressing violence and bullying at school that they can propose to the principal.

Many teachers will be expected to teach four of the lessons a year. Some activities could take a day, others much longer.

Teachers will receive training before they introduce the lessons and then meet afterward to share work samples and reflect on how the activities went.

In some cases, students might also be able to share their work by, for example, reading essays aloud on a stage.

Heidi Haggerty, principal at J.O. Wilson Elementary School in Capitol Hill, said she likes the idea of the new lessons and the opportunity to share work with teachers from across the city.

“This gives us a chance to show what our kids can do,” she said.