NEWS
- Language immersion schools flourish in D.C. [D.C. International PCS and Washington Yu Ying PCS mentioned]
- Richard Wright Public Charter School 2015 Black Tie Gala and FilmFest [Richard Wright PCS mentioned]
- D.C. Council considers steps to restrict public access to teacher evaluations
- A new plan to narrow DC's achievement gap
- Back to school for D.C.’s dropouts
- Union-backed group calls for pause in federal money for charter schools
- Flood of new scorers could pose problems for Common Core
Language immersion schools flourish in D.C. [D.C. International PCS and Washington Yu Ying PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
June 12, 2015
Snippets of French, Mandarin, English and Spanish can be heard throughout the classrooms and hallways of D.C. International Public Charter School.
A group of middle schoolers speak in Spanish as they learn geography, while next door students practice their French.
“At DCI we really think it’s important to learn a language and to be internationally (aware),” said Monona, a sixth grade student who is learning Chinese.
Monona is an ambassador for the school and gives me a tour of the building as she explains how students are immersed in one of three different languages.
The charter is the city’s first language immersion middle school and is a feeder school for students enrolled in five other language immersion charter schools in the city. The school opened this past fall with sixth and seventh grade students and will expand to serve sixth through twelfth grade students.
Language immersion charter schools are among the most popular in the city, with thousands on the wait list for seven of the traditional public schools and the five charter schools that offer immersion.
Immersion goes beyond taking a foreign language credit in high school- students learn to communicate ideas and subjects in both languages. Classes are split between learning subjects in English and another language.
Mary Shaffner, executive director and chief operations officer of DCI, co-founded the school after parents wanted to know where to send their children to middle and high school. There are not many options for students in immersion programs after elementary school, she said.
It’s not her first time founding a language immersion program either. She founded the city’s only Mandarin Chinese school, Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, in 2006 and is fluent in Chinese.
Shaffner is passionate about language immersion and wants to offer it to all students. About 80 percent of DCI’s students are from the five other immersion schools, while 20 percent are from the city-wide enrollment lottery.
“We want to make this educational opportunity available to as many people as possible,” she said.
Their biggest concern is space– real estate is a challenge for charter schools and some say it’s because funding differences between charter and traditional public schools.
Some parents want more language immersion programs, including in the D.C. Public Schools district.
The D.C. Language Immersion Project, a language education advocacy group, is the biggest force behind expanding programs in the District. The group often hosts educational meetings on the benefits of language programs.
They say studies point to the academic advantage of immersion programs, including long-term economic benefits.
But for some parents, language immersion is about diversity. That’s why Rodney Choice enrolled his daughter into DCI. He and his wife wanted their daughter to be exposed to the same cultural diversity that they grew up around in New York City.
“She’s been in language immersion since nursery school and one of the concerns is how do you continue the language track onward to middle school and high school, so the very fact that DCI was created, we’re very happy about that,” he said.
Richard Wright Public Charter School 2015 Black Tie Gala and FilmFest [Richard Wright PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 15, 2015
I know that people in the Washington D.C. area are extremely busy and so there is no such thing as having too much notice about placing an event on your calendar. Therefore, everyone out there who cares about education in the nation's capital should begin planning to attend next year's Black Tie Gala and Film Festival presented by the Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts. My wife Michele and I had the great honor of attending the fourth annual ceremony last Saturday night.
We were informed that the venue was being held at the spectacularly beautiful Warner Theater, but what we didn't realize before we arrived is that the evening actually begins in the glass enclosed atrium of the office building next door. The space is set up as one part stage and another part reception hall complete with a bar and expansive tables of food. Most of the men came dressed in black tie and the women wore gowns to match the glamor of the entire spectacle. Waiters and waitresses frequently circulated the room bringing appetizers to the guests. The musical groups Be'La Dona and Black Alley entertained the overflow crowd. I just want to make one comment about the refreshments. There was a seafood table complete with all the oysters, clams, shrimp and salmon that you could eat. I thought I had arrived in heaven.
Here I was greeted by my hero Dr. Marco Clark, the founder and principal of Richard Wright PCS. I interviewed Dr. Clark about a year ago and his strong passion for teaching children living in poverty became readily apparent from the moment I met him. One of his first comments to me at that meeting was that "We are creating scholars here, not inmates.” From that moment I was hooked. Tonight, he introduced me to Dr. Rhonda Wells-Wilbon, the founding chair of the school's board of trustees.
After the reception it was time to move over to the theater. Joining us here from New York City was actor Michael Rainey, Jr. who stared in the movie "The Butler" and is who is now filming "Barbershop 3." The program began with a welcome from the Mistress of Ceremonies Ms. Taylor Thomas, news anchor and journalist at WHUR 96.3FM who appears on the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Ms. Taylor was the perfect choice to serve in this role as her bright and optimistic personality was present in each and every word that she spoke. She informed the audience that this has been a monumental year in the history of Richard Wright PCS, which included its first graduating class in which one hundred percent of seniors had been admitted to college.
We then sat and watched a dozen short films, each about five or ten minutes long, created by the eighth through twelfth grade students of the charter. These were the school's ROXIE Award recipients, and they were produced to the level of movies coming out of Hollywood. It was easy to follow along with the sequence of events since a highly professional glossy brochure was handed to each guest as they entered. The booklet was impressive, not only because of its quality, but because it included congratulatory notes from Mayor Bowser, U.S. House of Representatives Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, and each of the members of the D.C. Council. This show of support says all you need to know about the amazing impact this five your old educational institution is having in this town.
All of the short films grabbed our interest but there were three that stood out in my mind. "The Note" was a heartwarming story about the relationship between a father and daughter. There was a fascinating movie about a psychiatric hospital patient with multiple personalities. Finally, some of the school's students had spent time talking with Congressman John Lewis. Anytime you have the opportunity to hear from this bedrock of the civil rights movement it is a great day.
After viewing the video presentations the audience was brought to its feet by the highly energetic music of Tony! Toni! Tone! Eventually, this pure and elegant celebration of student achievement had to come to an end. However, there is always next year.
D.C. Council considers steps to restrict public access to teacher evaluations
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
June 15, 2015
The Washington Teachers Union and open-government advocates are urging the D.C. Council to slow down a vote that would curb access to information related to teacher evaluations, one of the most controversial aspects of education reform efforts in the District.
A proposed amendment, included in the Budget Support Act that the council is scheduled to vote on Tuesday, would block public record requests for individual education evaluations, “effectiveness ratings,” observations, and other assessments. Summary or aggregate-level data would not be exempted from public release.
Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said the wording of the measure is confusing and could potentially have broad effects, including limiting the union’s ability to represent its members.
She called it a “secrecy provision” that the public should have more time to weigh in on.
“Without access to this data, there’s no way for the public or our union to tell whether the strategies DCPS uses —l ike mayoral control — are helping students or simply creating school closures and high teacher turnover,” she wrote last week in a letter to Phil Mendelson, chairman of the D.C. Council.
Many states have recently passed or amended laws to protect teacher evaluations from being made public. Unions frequently advocate to keep such information private.
In 2010, the Los Angeles Times sparked a national debate when it published teachers names alongside value-added scores that attempt to measure a teacher’s effectiveness based largely on standardized tests. Many educators consider the scores misleading and their publication unfair.
District officials said individual-level records are already exempt from public records requests from D.C. Public Schools because they are considered personnel records under legal protections currently afforded to city employees.
D.C. Council member David Grosso, chairman of the education committee, said the legislation in question seeks to extend that protection to public charter school employees. The measure passed as temporary, emergency legislation twice since 2014. This vote would make it permanent.
New teacher evaluations are one of the most controversial aspects of reforms that were put in motion after former Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the city’s public schools and appointed Michelle Rhee as chancellor of the public schools. Hundreds of teachers lost their jobs after receiving low scores on their evaluations.
Given the high level of scrutiny on the system, the union has been battling with the school system to release detailed information about teacher evaluations, including individual-level data.
The school system declined to release teacher-level data, even with names redacted, saying it would create an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
The union appealed the denial to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office, which upheld the decision. Now, the union is suing.
Among the records requested, according to the union’s complaint in D.C. Superior Court, are “documents listing teacher terminations, including each teacher’s school, grade, IMPACT group, certification, subject and reason for the termination” as well as “IMPACT scores for each teacher, including school, grade, IMPACT group, certification and subject.”
The proposed legislation addresses data requests from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. Traditional and charter schools are required to provide information about teacher evaluations to the OSSE, which must report it to the federal government. But, he said, many charter schools have been reluctant to provide data because they are afraid it could be made public.
“We want to be very clear so that they can feel more at ease with submitting this data,” he said in an e-mail.
Kevin M. Goldberg, president of the D.C. Open Government Coalition, said in a letter to Mendelson early this month that the coalition is not necessarily opposed to the substance of the bill, but that it has “fundamental objections” to the process. He said the larger Budget Support Act is “not a proper vehicle for denying D.C. residents access to public records.”
An exemption from public records warrants a more transparent process through its own bill or as part of a transparency related measure, he said.
“We hope the Council will not rush to limit the public’s oversight of the school system, as there is still time to engage in the crucial thorough review of necessity of this exemption.“
In a recent analysis of the progress of education reform in the District, the National Research Council found that the school system’s efforts to improve teacher quality are falling short in many schools. It noted that effective teachers are distributed unevenly across the city, with far fewer highly rated teachers working in the highest-poverty schools.
It recommended that the city needs to do a more careful analysis about how the evaluations are working and whether they are achieving their goals, and that it report much more information related to teacher quality in traditional and charter schools alike.
A new plan to narrow DC's achievement gap
The Washington Post
By Natalie Wexler
June 13, 2015
For several years, D.C. Public Schools has been at the forefront of a movement to give students a coherent body of knowledge starting in kindergarten. It’s a commendable effort but still a work in progress.
Some of DCPS’s education reform efforts, such as teacher evaluations and school closures, have drawn a lot of attention. But few people have noticed a fundamental initiative to change what and how teachers teach. If successful, it could help narrow the District’s persistent achievement gap.
Until four years ago, DCPS teachers were left largely on their own in deciding the specifics of what they would teach. To find texts, they worked backward from a set of learning standards that students were supposed to meet by the end of the year.
An English standard might say: “Students will be able to identify the main topic of a multi-paragraph text.” And while standards in social studies and science were more specific, teachers got little guidance on classroom practice.
Even worse, many elementary teachers have focused on skills such as “finding the main idea” in stories or random nonfiction texts. But, research has shown, you can’t understand what you’re reading unless you have background knowledge and vocabulary about the subject matter.
That’s a particular problem for low-income students, who are less likely to acquire knowledge at home. By the time those students get to high school, where they’re expected to understand fairly sophisticated texts, they’re often hopelessly behind their middle-class peers. Fundamentally, the achievement gap is a knowledge gap.
The Common Core State Standards tried to attack this problem by getting schools to build children’s knowledge from an early age. Unfortunately, that aspect of the Common Core has gotten lost in the noisy debate over the initiative’s merits.
That’s partly because the Common Core standards are, in fact, standards and not a curriculum. They were designed for use by schools and school districts nationwide, while curriculum remains a local decision. The Common Core standards suggest texts but don’t mandate content.
Still, DCPS got the idea. Administrators began developing a curriculum rich in science, history and literature beginning in kindergarten. They created “units of study,” six- or seven-week modules on themes such as “Plants are Everywhere” in second grade and “Early Americans” in fourth.
Teachers receive a list of texts that accompany each unit, in the order students should read them. They also get guides for presenting and discussing the texts with students and suggestions for student activities.
These units of study should help DCPS ensure that all students have a common educational experience with the same minimum level of quality. Ideally, the curriculum should level the playing field for students who aren’t acquiring as much knowledge at home as others.
But DCPS doesn’t require teachers to follow the curriculum or use the units of study. Brian Pick, chief of teaching and learning for DCPS, says that 83 percent of teachers report that they use the curriculum. But there is significant variation among classrooms.
It’s unclear from test scores whether DCPS’s efforts are bearing fruit. While students in all categories are improving, according to nationwide tests, the achievement gap hasn’t shrunk, as a recent evaluation of the District’s reform efforts concluded. And reading scores on local tests have largely remained stagnant.
To encourage teachers to use the texts specified in the units of study, DCPS is unveiling an ambitious menu of curriculum-related assignments. For the 2015-2016 year, there will be 215 “cornerstone” assignments, four per year for each grade level and subject. The assignments take only about 10 percent of classroom time, but the idea is to get teachers using the content and teaching it in engaging fashion.
The cornerstone assignments are not required, but they may be in the future. Some are fairly traditional writing assignments or science experiments, while others are more innovative. In third grade, students will create a travel guide to their neighborhoods after studying area monuments and landmarks. Other assignments involve debates or dramatic presentations.
It’s a worthy effort, but it’s too soon to tell how the assignments will play out across the range of DCPS schools or to what extent teachers will embrace them. One cause for optimism — teachers are playing a large role in their creation. This summer, about 100 teachers are developing cornerstone assignments. And teachers will collaborate in evaluating how well the assignments worked after trying them. As Pick recognizes, a curriculum is an eternal work in progress.
“Curriculum-building is like if you were given a rock and told to turn it into a perfect sphere,” he says. “You’re always going to be polishing, refining, making it better, making it richer.”
Too often, education reform efforts are a top-down affair, leaving teachers feeling that things are being done to them rather than with them. If DCPS is open to teacher feedback as it polishes and refines its cornerstone assignments and its curriculum in general, those initiatives could find the kind of reception that will help ensure their success. And maybe the District’s achievement gap will at last begin to narrow.
Back to school for D.C.’s dropouts
The Washington Post
By Colbert I. King
June 12, 2015
The creation of the marginalized is taking place before our very eyes. It materializes in one statistic: the D.C. Public Schools 2014 graduation rate.
The overall four-year DCPS graduation rate is 58.3 percent — one of the lowest in the nation. The graduation rate for black males in the system is an even more dismal 48 percent. Then there’s the doomsday number.
It is found in a category euphemistically dubbed: “Educationally disengaged.” These are the students who didn’t graduate, aren’t currently enrolled, have not received a GED and aren’t attending any postsecondary education program. In other words, they are high school dropouts. In 2014, that number for DCPS was 591. It was 117 for public charter schools.
Crunching the numbers, as education blogger Natalie Wexler did in March on Greater Greater Washington, reveals the hidden truths buried within DCPS’s overall graduation rate.
Some of our D.C. high schools are “dropout factories,” a term used by America’s Promise Alliance to describe a high school with a graduation rate of 60 percent or less. Dunbar (my alma mater), Woodson, Coolidge, Ballou, Cardozo and Anacostia high schools all fit that category.
There’s a wider picture.
In October, The Post cited an Office of the State Superintendent for Education analysis that reported that there are “at least 7,493 people ages 16 to 24” who attended DCPS from 2006 to 2013 and dropped out. Nearly 60 percent of them are male; 86 percent are African American.
What can be safely predicted about the approximately 700 dropouts in 2014, if they don’t get back to school?
Check in 10 years from now and you’ll find that if they are in the workforce, they will be making far less than the women and men their age who completed high school.
Some of the girls are likely to be single mothers. Some of the boys will be off the scene, stashed away behind bars. Many will have been on the receiving end of some form of government assistance.
Some will show up in domestic-abuse statistics or among the parents of abused and neglected children placed in the city’s custody.
Many will live out their lives on the fringe, both economically and socially. And they will resent it.
A glimmer of hope: More than 800 students who did not graduate in four years are still enrolled in school. Some may require five years to get a diploma. No catastrophe.
I write these words not from the vantage point of some high and mighty tower. These observations are based upon real-world experiences that can be traced to my own bloodline.
As written before, the King pedigree spans the gamut from Penn State to the state pen.
Yes, we have a grandson who will graduate from high school this month and head off to college in the fall, following in the footsteps of his oldest brother. Other grandkids are lined up to continue on the path to college that has been trod by their parents and many uncles, aunts and cousins.
But a few relatives didn’t advance in grade levels with their classmates. They fell behind and stayed there, unmotivated to move up and on. They are paying for it now.
As a community, however, we all pay for it.
Welfare’s not free. Neither are jails. Dropouts exact a cost on the community.
What makes this all so tragic is that some youth are giving up on school as the world around them speeds ahead. Should they eventually catch on, it may be too late to catch up.
What to do?
Recognizing the problem is a start. D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, fortunately, appreciates the seriousness of dropping out. Increasing graduation rates has been a top priority, and under her leadership the overall graduation rate — though lower than the national average — has risen. But as she told The Post in March, “Still too few of our young people are graduating.”
In an effort to turn things around, the city has opened a center to help young high school dropouts return to the classroom. And Henderson is beefing up her budget to improve the city’s high schools with a better focus on attendance, more rigorous courses and enrichment opportunities.
But the school system can’t do it alone. Some of the challenges are beyond the classroom. Often, the family encouragement necessary to stay in school is missing. Then there’s the lure of the streets, which can temporarily outshine the bleak future that lies beyond. Heading off those young women and men from diminished lives requires not only schools but also churches, nonprofits and people with standing in the community.
Staying in school and graduating pays off for the student and the community. Joining the “educationally disengaged” leads to marginalization, which equals self-destruction.
Union-backed group calls for pause in federal money for charter schools
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 12, 2015
A labor-backed group is objecting to a U.S. Education Department proposal to expand federal funding for public charter schools, after the agency’s inspector general issued a scathing report that found deficiencies in how the department handled federal grants to charter schools between 2008 and 2011.
The inspector general discovered some charter schools received federal dollars but never opened their doors to students, and the agency could not say where the money went.
The department has given $1.7 billion in grants to charter schools since fiscal 2009, according to an agency spokeswoman. In its budget request for 2016, the Obama administration is seeking $375 million for the program — a 48 percent increase over current funding levels.
Public charter schools are funded by tax dollars but managed privately and often are not unionized. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been a strong advocate for charter schools, a position that puts him at odds with teachers unions.
The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, which includes the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union, wrote to Duncan on Monday, asking how his agency could seek to expand the charter schools program “despite mounting evidence of significant fraud, waste and abuse within the charter sector, and despite the warnings of your own office of inspector general that federal charter start-up and expansion funds are not adequately monitored or accounted for.”
The inspector general found that the department had been lax in making sure federal dollars were spent in accordance with the law and failed to follow up when others flagged problems.For example, state officials in Florida found “serious deficiencies” in 2008, but it took the federal agency 29 months to react. And when it did, it deemed the Florida problems “resolved,” but the inspector general later found those same problems persisted.
Federal dollars find their way to charter schools through two routes. In most cases, the federal government awards money to a state, and the state hands out grants to charter schools. In some instances, the federal government directly awards money to a public charter school.
But the inspector general found lax oversight in both categories of charter school grants, with the federal agency failing to review the fiscal activities of charter schools that received federal dollars. In addition, the staff at the department in charge of the charter schools program didn’t have adequate training in fiscal and program monitoring, the audit found.
“There is a heightened risk that grantees were not fully complying with program goals and objectives as well as federal laws and regulations,” the inspector general found. “As a result, there is increased risk that department funds were not used for the intent and purpose of the program.”
The alliance is seeking a moratorium on new federal funding for public charter schools. Its letter to Duncan asks what specific actions the department has taken since 2012 to step up monitoring and accountability regarding charter school grants.
Nadya Dabby, an assistant deputy secretary, said her agency has completed 14 of 17 corrective actions outlined by the inspector general and has added staff to the charter program to improve monitoring.
Still, the federal role is largely focused on funding and not direct oversight of the grants, Dabby said. “It’s the responsibility of states to make sure they develop and submit plans for subgrantee monitoring,” she said.
The inspector general looked at three states — Arizona, California and Florida — and found multiple weaknesses in the ways those states oversaw federal dollars sent to charter schools.
California state officials were “unqualified to conduct onsite monitoring of charter schools,” the inspector general found. Of 13 state employees responsible for visiting charter schools, seven did not have the necessary experience and the state could not provide qualifications for two more, the audit said. Some of those state employees told the inspector general’s staff that they felt “awkward” conducting site visits because they didn’t know much about charters and fiscal matters.
In the three states that were audited, the inspector general found that 26 charter schools either closed during the audit period or never opened their doors to students. The schools had received a total of about $7 million in federal funds. In Florida and California, there was no record of what happened to the equipment, supplies or anything else purchased with the federal dollars for schools that never opened, the audit said.
“We weren’t holding states responsible for monitoring these programs,” Dabby said. “We had to make our standards clear to them in respect to fiscal oversight and also have them thinking very clearly about the quality of education offered to their students.”
The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools wants the Department of Education to maintain a public database of charter schools that receive federal grants, the students served and the operational and academic performance of each school.
Dabby said the department collects only the names of charter schools that receive federal funds and that states are expected to maintain the other information. She said agency officials have not decided whether to create the public database requested by the alliance.
Flood of new scorers could pose problems for Common Core
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
June 14, 2015
Standardized test scoring, the kind done by human beings when written answers are required, is a mysterious, mostly hidden activity. The best scorers assess free-response answers on high school Advanced Placement tests. I have seen them in action at summer scoring sessions across the country.
The AP scorers are experienced teachers and professors. A somewhat different bunch has just embarked on the nation’s largest human scoring experiment ever, and I am not sure how it will turn out. The companies handling free-response questions for the Common Core-based tests — the education reform of the decade — are hiring and training far more people than have ever done such work, and many of them have little relevant experience.
Catherine Gewertz of Education Week gathered the numbers. At least 42,000 people will be grading 109 million student responses in the 28 states plus the District that are part of two large federally funded test-creating consortiums. That is nearly four times the previous record: 13,000 readers who scored 17 million AP responses last year. It is 26 times the 1,600 graders who scored 1.7 million SAT writing-test responses in 2014. And it doesn’t include many states creating their Common Core-based tests in other ways.
Gewertz is a veteran journalist who sticks with the facts and doesn’t speculate. So let me do that. One of the advantages of having computers grade exams — they will still score the multiple choice questions on these tests — is that the machines don’t call up reporters or post angry exposes on the Internet. Human beings do that. Invite 42,000 of them inside the process, and when unsettling things happen — as they do in any large enterprise — some of those scorers are going to go public with what they know.
I am not saying the Common Core-based courses and exams are bad. I don’t think they will do much to raise achievement, but some of the best teachers I know think they are a big improvement. The new exams are more challenging than the state exams they are replacing. One measure of that is the increased number of free-response questions, to be graded by humans. The vast expansion in the number of graders is more a public relations than a learning problem, but if the public image of these courses and exams takes too many hits, the noble experiment will end.
Hiring rules differ from state to state. Most seem to require that scorers have bachelor’s degrees, but not necessarily in the subjects they are grading.
The Common Core graders will be paid differently in each state, roughly in the range of $12 to $15 per hour. Maryland and the District have Common Core exams; Virginia does not. At an Ohio Common Core scoring center run by one of the testing companies, Pearson, Gewertz saw a third-grade math question: Inspect solutions by two fictional students, say which is right and explain why. Pearson graders were expected to evaluate 50 to 80 third-grade math answers an hour.
As has happened with the old state tests, it is likely that some graders will say they are not being given enough time to do a good job. One expert told Gewertz the testing companies will have difficulty finding enough experienced scorers to supervise the newbies.
A spokeswoman for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two federally funded groups creating the exams, said, “Students deserve a test that measures critical thinking, writing and problem solving; hand-scoring is an important part of creating such an assessment.” A Pearson spokeswoman said, “We hire an experienced group of scorers who go through a rigorous hiring process.”
The people criticizing the Common Core have had little impact with their marginal arguments about federalism and curricular philosophies. But if graders around the country complain publicly that the new tests are not being handled fairly or competently, the debate will become more serious, and one of America’s most ambitious school reforms will be in jeopardy.
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