FOCUS DC News Wire 6/20/13

 

Shantelle Wright, leader of high-performing D.C. charter school, wins $25,000 award [Achievement Prep PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

June 19, 2013

 

The founder and leader of one of the District’s top-performing charter schools was surprised Tuesday with a $25,000 award for her efforts to close the achievement gap. Shantelle Wright leads Achievement Prep Public Charter School, whose students — mostly from low-income Ward 8 families — score far above the citywide average on math and reading tests. She was one of three educators across the country to receive the Ryan Award, meant to highlight leaders of schools who are helping poor and minority students achieve success at uncommonly high rates. “There are lots of wonderful awards for teachers but I’ve never seen a great school without a great leader,” said Pat Ryan Jr. of the Chicago-based Accelerate Institute, an organization dedicated to training principals to succeed in high-poverty schools.

 

Ryan flew to Washington to deliver an oversized check to Wright during an all-school assembly at Achievement Prep. “All these jobs are tough, but the leadership job is a lonely one, and they give so much of themselves,” he said. Achievement Prep, which serves children in grades four through eight, is rated Tier 1 by the D.C. Public Charter School Board. The school is expanding this fall to serve children in elementary grades. Last year, 86 percent of them were proficient in math, according to annual standardized tests, and 68 percent were proficient in reading. Citywide, fewer than half of students are proficient in those two subjects. That success caught the attention of Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who is seeking to establish an unusual partnership with Achievement Prep, allowing it to move into Malcolm X Elementary in return for offering guaranteed admission to neighborhood students.

 

As a recipient of the Ryan Award, Wright will travel to Chicago to speak about her school’s success with Accelerate Institute principal fellows. “That’s the part for me that is most exciting, sharing best practices so children everywhere can get a great education,” she said.

 

D.C. Principal to Get Leadership Award [Achievement Prep PCS mentioned]

Education Week

By Alyssa Morones 

June 18, 2013

 

The principal of a Washington charter school was scheduled to get a surprise this afternoon when a national education group swooped in to give her a leadership award. The Accelerate Institute, a Chicago-based organization that promotes school leadership and efforts to close achievement gaps among students, planned to present its annual Ryan Award to Shantelle Wright, the founder and head of school at Achievement Prep Academy Public Charter School, in a surprise assembly with her students. She joins Ben Marcovitz, the founder of Sci Academy in New Orleans and James Troupis,the founding principal of Gary Comer College Prep in Chicago, who won the award in its first year.

 

Wright's Achievement Prep is a top-rated public charter school with a student population that is 100 percent African American. Eighty-six percent of the school's students are low-income. Over the past three years, the school improved its students' English/Language Arts proficiency scores on the District of Columbia exam by 13 percent—15 percent more than the average growth rate for the district, which is -2 percent.

 

The other winners' schools saw similar gains. At Marcovitz's Sci Academy in the New Orleans Recovery School District, where 70 percent of the class of students who came to the school in 2008 were reading three years below grade level, 95 percent of the class later graduated with acceptance letters to a four-year college. Ninety-one percent of Troupis' students at Gary Comer College Prep received free or reduced price lunch. Yet, from its first freshman class, 100 percent enrolled in college after graduating. The Accelerate Institute, formerly called the Alain Locke Initiative, focuses on encouraging high-impact leadership as a means of closing the achievement gap.

 

With the Ryan Award, the institute aims to celebrate the hard work that is school leadership, not only in charters, but in all of the nation's schools. In addition to a $25,000 honorarium, winners will act as guest lecturers at the Accelerate's summer institute at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, where they will work with and teach rising principals. Robert J. Birdsell, the chief executive officer of Accelerate Institute, said: "We believe that the greatest way to close the achievement gap is through leadership. The greatest bottleneck we face is the dearth of leadership talent. To help change that, we should highlight the great leaders that are out there."

 

The number one characteristic that the Accelerate Institute looks for in its Ryan Award nominees is the ability to maintain a lasting period of growth in student achievement. "A school can get growth over a year or two, but [maintaining growth] over time is the real driver," said Birdsell. Culture was also an area of importance. Birdsell said that they sought principals who helped cultivate a positive school culture—one in which students were as excited to be in school as their principal was.

 

Even though it was not a required characteristic of nominees, all three of this year's winners were charter school leaders. Birdsell attributed this to the increased autonomy that charter school leaders have and their enhanced abilities to hire and fire the staff that make up their team. The work of all three winners will be highlighted in depth during a dinner in Chicago on September 26. 

 

St. Coletta School, Washington’s Safe Harbor for the Severely Disabled [St. Coletta PCS mentioned]

The Washingtonian

By Carol Ross Joynt

June 19, 2013

 

In so many ways, St. Coletta of Greater Washington looks like any other school or playground where children gather. The DC charter school’s building, designed by architect Michael Graves, is colorful, even festive. It has classrooms and lockers, a cafeteria, an outdoor gym, and even a small indoor pool. In the halls and classrooms children and adults interact. There are smiles. There’s laughter. Some of the children walk and some ride on wheels; some talk, some don’t. But the wheels they ride upon aren’t strollers or bicycles or skateboards. They are wheelchairs. The children who don’t talk probably never will. The 285 students, some as young as three, are moderately to severely disabled, most since birth, and will be disabled for the rest of their lives. St. Coletta is there for them as advocate and friend and most of all not to pander but to teach. The message is: You are not invisible; you count.

 

The chief executive officer is Sharon Brady Raimo, a former school teacher and DC Public Schools assistant principal who has been with St. Coletta for 20 years, during which time it has moved from Clarendon to Alexandria, and then to 1901 Independence Avenue, Southeast, in view of RFK Stadium and a few blocks over from the DC Detention Center. That’s okay with Raimo. She’s not daunted by the neighborhood. She’s lived there for years and raised her children there. The DC location happened with the help of then-mayor Anthony Williams and then-city council member Sharon Ambrose, who believed the five acres of land would be best used as a safe harbor for severely disabled children. With the help of public and private money it opened in September 2006.

 

The school is year-round, the school day is, like other school days, from morning to afternoon. No one spends the night. The staff includes 27 teachers, plus therapists, nurses, and other personnel. The ratio is ten students for every teacher. Some students move about the school relatively independently; others—particularly those “on wheels”—need full-time assistance. Regardless, according to Raimo, “Everybody here is the same.” Their specific needs vary, but they all have needs.

 

Raimo says the majority of the students come from DC and “live somewhere in poverty,” but there also are children from Maryland and Virginia and as far away as Russia and China. It’s a grateful parent community, who “were not used to beautiful things for their children.” Raimo says that at public schools, teachers are too overwhelmed to give the disabled the focus they need, and that too often the disabled children get “put in the basement, or the trailer, or whatever,” and the attitude is “so long as we don’t have to look at you.”

 

The first St. Coletta was founded in Clarendon in 1959 by a couple whose child had Down syndrome. St. Coletta is the patron saint of orphans and special children. At first the school only had two students, and then as word spread it grew fast. When Raimo came onboard she actively recruited students. She also hunted around for a bigger building, and in 1995 she found it at 207 South Peyton Street in Alexandria. It was for sale, but nobody wanted to buy it, except for Raimo, who had $600,000 in raised funds plus another $2.5 million in industrial revenue bonds. The only problem: The building’s owner, the Trammell Crow Company, wouldn’t sell to her. “They said it would undervalue the land, that it was going to be this nonprofit for people with disabilities,” she says. Raimo did not take no for an answer.

 

“I went to see [Virginia congressman] Jim Moran first. He said, ‘Oh, you better see Joe [Kennedy]. I went to see Joe, and he made a few phone calls for me, and all of a sudden the people at Trammel Crow were my very best friends. I got the building, we moved in, and by the end of the first year we were up to 85 students,” she says. St. Coletta still owns the Alexandria facility, which is used for 120 adult students, ages 22 and up. There are another 90 adult students in Rockville in a “supported employment program” and 15 at Woodmont Weavers—which teaches students to weave fabrics—in Arlington. There are students as old as 70.

 

Raimo admits that as much as St. Coletta is for students it is also for parents. Some parents accept their child’s disability “right away,” while others have a harrowing time coming to terms with the facts and the future. “The idea is to make the family feel accepted and welcomed,” she says. “Sometimes they will balk. Even though it is obvious to us that the child needs us, it’s sometimes hard for the parents, especially parents with little children who see big children that have severe disabilities, because that is their future. It’s heartbreaking for them.”

 

She offers parent training—to teach the basics of caring for their children at home—but also emotional support. How does she help them get through it? “A little bit at a time. You can’t give them the reality buffet. That’s too much. You hand them the reality sandwich and have them take little bites at a time.”

 

In terms of space in the school, Raimo says, “We’ve always had a waiting list.” There is no private pay. The city provides $202 a day for children and $91 for adults. She says the youth funding is fair and the amount for adults should be the same. Private fundraising is essential; major sources include an annual gala and the school’s own glass-making operation, which St. Coletta hopes to turn into a full-fledged online business.

 

While we talked in Raimo’s office and toured the school, we wondered whether she is ever forced to turn away children because they are too disabled. “That very rarely happens,” she says. “We’ve had little guys who are 17 years old who are, like, this big [she spreads her hands only three feet apart] with failure to thrive, and they are in a chair where we can wheel them, but they need hand-over-hand assistance, and some of them even need help to regulate their own body temperature. But we can take them. We couldn’t take anybody who needed a bed all day. We’re not a hospital setting. It’s a school.”

 

And very much a school, with an art department, a music department, cooking classes, a gymnasium, and a thriving vegetable garden. “Everybody learns something,” Raimo says. Students who don’t talk, or who have similar impairments, use communications systems, including picture boards and books. “We have symbols for what they want—a drink, to go to the bathroom, or, if they want to tell you, ‘I’m sad,’ a sad face.” The small, heated indoor pool is for wheelchair-bound students, who receive physical therapy in it about once a week. “They love it,” she says.

 

We asked Raimo what it is like to work day in and day out with young people who are severely disabled. She responded from their point of view: “While we may not think as quickly or in the same way as other people, we feel the same way and our feelings are just as deep. When you look away from us, we feel hurt. When you come up and talk to us and give us your attention, we feel happy.”

 

Does she ever get discouraged by the work? No, she says. “It’s a joyful thing. These kids, if it’s in their heart it’s on their lips. There’s no filter. There’s always truth. They are great. I feel happy every day.”

 

A look at the latest plan for redevelopment of D.C.'s Randall School

The Washington Business Journal

By Michael Neibauer

June 18, 2013

 

The team behind the redevelopment of the Randall School site in Southwest D.C. has submitted its latest plan for the long-delayed mixed-use project. Telesis Corp. and the Rubell Family Collection applied May 31 to amend a planned-unit development approved years ago by the D.C. Zoning Commission.

 

The new project, according to the submission, "will provide an exceptional new art museum for the Southwest neighborhood and the city at large, as well as new housing and affordable housing, in a building of outstanding design by the distinguished architectural firm of Bing Thom Architects."

 

The Corcoran College of Art and Design, the main player in those earlier plans, sold its property to the Rubells (noted art collectors and hotel owners) for $6.5 million in 2010. The Corcoran project was crushed by the recession, after Corcoran's partner, Monument Realty, lost its equity partner to bankruptcy. The revised plan includes a 40,000-square-foot contemporary art museum, 550 dwelling units in an ultramodern 12-story residential building, 5,000 square feet of art-related cellar space, 16,000 square feet of retail and 200 below-grade parking spaces.

 

The residential building will be “clad in contemporary materials,” metal panels and glass arranged in an irregular and informal composition, which will serve as a backdrop to the historic building’s red brick and limestone trim.

The Randall School and its two flanking wings will be retained, rehabilitated and incorporated into the project — specifically for arts, retail, commercial service and education-related uses. A restaurant is envisioned for the east wing. The 65 Eye St. SW site, within walking distance of two Metro stations, is generally bounded by Eye Street to the south, the former First Street to the west, the partially closed H Street to the north and South Capitol Street to the east.

 

Republican-led House committee passes new federal education bill

The Washington Post

By Lindsey Layton

June 19, 2013

 

A Republican-controlled House committee Wednesday approved a new version of the country’s main education law that would sharply shrink the federal role in K-12 public schools. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce voted along party lines, 23 to 16, on a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush-era law that marked a significant expansion of federal authority in local school matters.

 

In passing the bill, Republicans took a clear turn away from Bush’s philosophy that states receiving billions of dollars each year in federal aid should be accountable to Washington. The House action comes after Democrats in the Senate passed their own bill in the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that would maintain much of the federal oversight of public education.

 

The question is whether House Republicans and Senate Democrats can find consensus on a single bill, something many observers say seems unlikely. Current federal education law sets conditions and requirements for every public school receiving federal funds to educate poor students and those with special needs.

 

Under the House bill written by the education panel’s chairman, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), states would be able to set their own academic standards, decide whether schools are meeting them and decide what to do about underperforming schools. States now can create academic standards, but the law defines academic progress and stipulates sanctions for schools that fail to make that progress. In addition, federal law dictates the improvement strategies that states must adopt for their weakest schools.

 

Kline said his legislation would “cut through the dizzying maze of mandates, reporting requirements and strict funding rules that make it difficult, if not impossible, for states and districts to improve performance and narrow achievement gaps.” His bill would preserve the requirement that states test students in math and reading annually from grades three through eight and once in high school, make those test scores public and show how certain subgroups — sorted by race, poverty and English ability — perform.

 

Democrats argued that Kline’s version takes the pressure off states to turn around the worst-performing schools. “This Republican bill goes from closing the achievement gap to showing the achievement gap and just hoping someone does something,” said Rep. Jared Polis (Colo.). “Some of these schools have a dropout rate of 50 percent. Unless there is impetus for action, local inertia continues the status quo. The key here is to give the local superintendent flexibility to do what works, but not the flexibility to do nothing. And sometimes, nothing is the easiest course of action.”

 

Rep. George Miller (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on Kline’s committee, offered an alternative bill that was defeated on a party-line vote. Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: They want to erase the most unpopular aspect of No Child Left Behind, the provision that requires schools to make progress toward all students being proficient in math and reading by 2014. If they fail to meet benchmarks, schools are subject to steadily escalating punitive measures.

 

That goal of proficiency by 2014 came to be widely seen as unrealistic, and officials from statehouses to school boards have been asking Congress to rewrite the law and replace the provision. No Child Left Behind, which Bush signed into law in 2002, was due for reauthorization in 2007. With Congress unable to agree on a new law, the Obama administration in 2011 began issuing waivers to states to free them from the requirements. In exchange for waivers, states were required to adopt President Obama’s preferred education reforms. That outraged Republicans on Capitol Hill, who accused the president of meddling in public schools, an arena with a long history of local control. In a specific swipe at the Obama administration, Kline’s bill would prohibit the Department of Education from influencing decisions made by states regarding academic standards.

 

In issuing waivers to No Child Left Behind and through ground rules for states who wanted to compete in Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s national grant competition, the Department of Education required states to adopt “college and career-ready” academic standards in reading and math for K-12. As a result, over two years, 45 states and the District opted to implement the Common Core standards, which are academic expectations for every grade level. The standards do not dictate curriculum, but set standards for the knowledge and skills that students should possess by the end of each grade, regardless of where they live. Critics have slammed the Obama administration’s role, saying it coerced states to adopt the standards.

 

 

No Child Left Behind revamp start on Republican-led education panel

The Washington Post

Associated Press

June 19, 2013

 

WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Wednesday finished their rewrite of GOP President George W. Bush’s prized No Child Left Behind Act, sending to their colleagues a bill that would strip Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his successors of power and give more authority to the states. Members of the Republican-led House Education and the Workforce Committee scrapped vast pieces of the existing education law in favor of an alternative they branded the Student Success Act. The updated version would allow state and local school chiefs — not Washington — to decide if students are being well served.

 

“I trust the teacher in the classroom a lot more than I trust anyone on this panel,” said Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz. Democrats on the panel objected to the proposed revision, saying it shirks Washington’s role in guaranteeing support for poor and minority students. They offered their own rewrite but it did not advance out of the GOP committee. The revamped education plan was expected to head to the full House for a vote in coming weeks. Reducing Washington’s role in education is an important plank for the GOP’s base. Party leaders were eager to show tea partyers they were delivering on promises, such as vows to protect states from Washington imposing achievement benchmarks known as the Common Core State Standards.

 

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted those standards, which were developed by states. Some conservatives view the Common Core as Washington imposing its standards on local schools and were determined to stop them from taking hold. “The secretary — or any single federal official — was never intended to have such unprecedented power. And Congress has a responsibility to protect the autonomy of states and school districts,” said Rep. Todd Rokita, an Indiana Republican who chairs the subcommittee on early childhood, elementary and secondary education.

 

Republicans and Democrats alike on the panel agreed the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law had problems and said changes were needed. But Democrats objected to the GOP approach that shifts oversight authority to states and sends federal education dollars as a block grants to state leaders to decide how best to spend them. “The Republican bill does a poor job of ensuring all students have access to high quality education,” said Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas. He said students whose primary language is not English, those from poor areas, Native American and Alaskan Native students, and rural schools would suffer. “This is clearly unacceptable at a time when our nation’s schools are becoming increasingly diverse,” Hinojosa said.

 

Other Democrats criticized the proposal for giving too much preference to charter schools, reducing the amount of data schools would be required to send to Washington and not emphasizing graduation rates. Republicans dismissed those criticisms as distractions and said the bill included those requirements. “As is always the case, it’s important to actually sit down and read the legislation,” said Rep. John Kline, the Republican chairman of the panel.

 

The latest development followed by less than 24 hours Duncan’s statement telling states they could to be given another year before being required to use student test results to decide whether to keep or fire teachers. That requirement was part of a deal many states made with Duncan in exchange for permission to ignore No Child Left Behind.

 

“Instead of helping Congress fix the law, the Obama administration granted 37 states and the District of Columbia temporary, conditional waivers in exchange for implementing the president’s preferred reforms,” Kline said. “The result expanded federal control and raised serious questions about what the future could hold for our schools.” Most of the debate hinged on how much say Washington could have in schools.  “What this comes down to a real division in terms of trust,” said Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa. One Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado, said he too was sympathetic to frustrations with Washington.

 

“I don’t think we need to increase the federal role,” Polis said. “It’s not about reducing or increasing the federal role. It’s about a disruptive federal role.” But Polis said Washington must guarantee “opportunity reaches every student in every corner of this land.” The Democratic-led Senate education panel already finished work on its rewrite of the law. The Senate version also shifted responsibility away from the one-size-fits-all requirements of the existing No Child Left Behind Act and would allow state officials to write their own school improvement plans. But the Senate version still gives the education secretary the authority to approve or reject reform plans. No vote has been scheduled for the Senate proposal. Aides suggested it could be autumn or later before the full Senate votes on that legislation.

 

Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm

The New York Times

By Jennifer Schuessler

June 18, 2013

 

A new national corps of “master teachers” trained in the humanities and social sciences and increased support for research in “endangered” liberal arts subjects are among the recommendations of a major report to be delivered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The report comes amid concern about low humanities enrollments and worries that the Obama administration’s emphasis on science education risks diminishing a huge source of the nation’s intellectual strength. Requested by a bipartisan group of legislators and scheduled to be distributed to every member of Congress, it is intended as a rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.

 

People talk about the humanities and social sciences “as if they are a waste of time,” said Richard H. Brodhead, the president of Duke University and a co-chairman of the commission that produced the report. “But this facile negativism forgets that many of the country’s most successful and creative people had exactly this kind of education.”  

 

Those people, Mr. Brodhead pointed out, include both President Obama (political science major) and Mitt Romney (English), as well as most of the 54 members of the commission, which includes distinguished jurists, business leaders, artists, scholars, university presidents and politicians, many of whom offer stirring testimonials on the value of their own liberal arts training.

 

The 61-page report, called “The Heart of the Matter,” which was shepherded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and based on meetings held around the country over two years, arrives trailing some of its own controversy, thanks to recent allegations that Leslie C. Berlowitz, the academy’s president, had misrepresented her scholarly credentials. But, more crucially, it lands at a time when the humanities and social sciences are themselves often accused of being frivolous at best, fraudulent at worst.

 

Last fall a task force organized by Gov. Rick Scott of Florida caused a national outcry with the recommendation that state universities charge higher tuition to students in fields — like anthropology or English — deemed less likely to lead to jobs. At the same time, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly tried to eliminate financing for political science research through the National Science Foundation, except for that deemed to be essential for national security.

 

And a report this month by Harvard University, long a bastion of the liberal arts, drew alarm with statistics showing that only 20 percent of its undergraduates in 2012 were majoring in the humanities, a drop from 36 percent in 1954.

Nationwide, a mere 7.6 percent of bachelor’s degrees were granted in the humanities in 2010, a figure several people connected with the report said reflects understandable but exaggerated fears about job prospects. “We are preparing students to be employable,” said Eduardo J. Padrón, a commission member and the president of Miami-Dade College, a mostly two-year institution, whose 175,000 students include many immigrants and low-income students. But without the humanities and social sciences, he added, “they are missing something important.”

 

The commission, whose other co-chairman is John W. Rowe, former chairman of the energy company Exelon, puts strong emphasis on the pragmatic value of the humanities. One chart in the report highlights a survey showing that 51 percent of business leaders regard liberal education as “very important,” while 74 percent unequivocally want it for their own children. The report touches on some contentious issues, starting with its clear endorsement of the Common Core, a national standards initiative that has been embraced by more than 40 states and the District of Columbia and is aligned with the drive toward standardized testing.

 

Its recommendations for increased attention to teaching at the university level may also raise hackles. Russell Berman, a literary scholar at Stanford University and former president of the Modern Language Association, who is not a member of the commission but has seen the report, pointed out its call for scholars to offer “broad-gauged, integrative courses” rather than just those “narrowly tied” to their own research. The report “is trying to turn the dial away from the absolute primacy of research toward a healthier balance of research and teaching,” he said. “Them’s fighting words in parts of higher education.” Pauline Yu, the president of the American Council of Learned Societies and a member of the commission, defended the report’s treatment of scholarly research, which it calls the “core” of the humanities and social sciences at all levels.

 

“The statement is right there: research is the ‘bedrock’ of everything else,” Ms. Yu said. The report, which encourages support for foreign language learning and international study, also notes that China, Singapore and some European nations are currently turning to American-style liberal arts education “as a stimulus to innovation and a source of social cohesion.” Here, it warns, “we are instead narrowing our focus and abandoning our sense of what education has been and should continue to be — our sense of what makes America great.”