FOCUS DC News Wire 6/21/13

 

Vincent Gray says D.C. must ‘stay the course’ in improving schools [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

June 20, 2013

 

The District must “stay the course” in its efforts to improve its schools, Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Thursday, arguing that the city needs to tweak its policies, not overhaul them. “We’ve already made revolutionary changes in our public education system. These were the right things to do,” said Gray (D), referring to the rise of charter schools and the advent of mayoral control of traditional schools. “Now we must have the courage of our convictions to stay the course and the smarts to know when to make refinements and adjustments,” he said.

 

In his first mayoral address devoted solely to education, Gray offered several new ideas, including the development of procedures that would allow charter elementary schools to feed into traditional middle schools and vice versa. But he largely described initiatives already underway, saying that although those efforts “may not send out seismic shock waves or make big headlines . . . they will make a real difference to District families and students.”

 

He had to raise his voice at times to be heard over a handful of activists, including a half-dozen children, who shouted in protest of Gray’s decision to close 15 traditional schools. The activists blame the closures on Gray’s support for fast-growing charter schools.

 

Speaking in an Anacostia gymnasium shared by Savoy Elementary, a traditional neighborhood school, and Thurgood Marshall Academy, a charter high school, Gray said the two sectors should view themselves as collaborators instead of competitors. “We must embrace a spirit of partnership between DCPS and charter schools to take education reform to the next level,” Gray said.

 

Gray’s move to lay out his education agenda comes as D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the Education Committee, has mounted his own campaign to improve the schools. Catania introduced a seven-bill package that touches on issues including student retention, school funding and principals’ autonomy. Catania said he sees some common ground between his proposals and the mayor’s, but he said he had hoped to hear more specifics Thursday about Gray’s plans to boost student achievement.

 

“What was missing were specifics aimed at addressing the core deficiencies in our system,” Catania said. Gray administration officials have said that some of Catania’s proposals would replicate current efforts and that others could interfere with mayoral control of the schools. “To the extent that any of those bills, individually or collectively, lead to people not working together, it could be a problem,” Gray said.

 

The mayor used his address to outline his administration’s plans to “scale up, strengthen and simplify our city’s public education enterprise,” including adding more vocational programs and developing, by fall, a blueprint for “reengagement centers” to get dropouts back into school.

 

Gray said he has directed Abigail Smith, deputy mayor for education, to ensure that per-pupil funding follows students who transfer between schools midyear, a change that would allow schools to be compensated for the students they actually serve. He described efforts to expand high-performing schools, transfer surplus buildings to charter schools, and ease school choice for parents by developing a unified enrollment lottery and standardized report cards.

 

Gray also reiterated his interest in giving Chancellor Kaya Henderson the authority to approve new charter schools and in allowing charters in high-need areas to offer neighborhood children guaranteed admission. The latter could allow for student-feeder methods that mix charter and traditional schools, Gray said. He said he has asked Henderson and Smith to explore that idea as part of their efforts to overhaul the city’s school boundaries. Gray offered no timeline for those boundary revisions , which were initially slated to be decided by this summer. “We must tread carefully here, but we must not shy away from the challenge,” he said.

 

D.C. Mayor Gray Shares Vision for Education Reform [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]

The Washington Informer

By Deborah Rowley

June 20, 2013

 

D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Thursday during a 40-minute speech at Savoy Elementary School in Southeast that in order to take education reform in the District to the next level, it’s imperative for the city’s charter and public schools to work together. In sharing his vision for a "successful" and "sustainable" reformation, Gray told a crowd of more than 300 people that it wasn’t until about 2007 that District officials began to get serious about restructuring the public school system.

 

As a result, school administrators "have now embraced innovation and students and teachers have clear expectations for success. But there’s still a lot of work to do," he said, adding that the lack of high-quality programs for students remains an issue. Noting the success of Thurgood Marshall Academy – the District’s highest-performing charter – Gray said that the law-themed high school that sits adjacent to Savoy, is "an example of what can happen" when schools and educators are provided the right tools and resources. He said that likewise, Savoy has been on a similar track toward educational excellence.

 

"It’s no accident that we chose this location to talk about the future of education reform in the District, because Savoy and Thurgood Marshall provide a snapshot of that future," Gray said. "The creative, community-driven partnership between these two schools – one charter, one DCPS – should make us all proud of the direction of education reform in the District." Gray said that a partnership of 26 District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and charter schools next fall is an example of how the two school systems would be taking the right steps transforming local public education. But he said the pace has been slow.

 

"I’m not pleased with the pace of school reform in the District,” Gray said. "[However,] the charters and public schools have to collaborate for that to occur." Emphasizing "a new spirit of collaboration and problem-solving," Gray further stated that while McKinley Technology High School in Northeast and School Without Walls in Northwest will be linked to programs that serve elementary and middle school students. DCPS will also expand Benjamin Banneker High School, School Within School, and Capitol Hill Montessori to allow more students access to those schools’ programs. "The more common perception is that charter schools are taking over, and that DCPS schools are disappearing," Gray said. "We are accustomed to the language of competition, and fixated on whether we are reaching a 'tipping point' where neighborhood schools will be a thing of the past. There is a lot of fear in this narrative, and a lot of distrust," he said, adding that his vision for education reform is centered around a proposal that builds on the work that has already been done.

 

Gray's strategy, which is based on two years of public feedback, includes scaling up existing pockets of excellence to serve more students, strengthening current schools and programs to ensure they provide the highest-quality education to the largest number of students, and simplifying the way families access all aspects of D.C.'s education system.

 

In D.C. public schools, advocacy group finds high rates of suspension [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

June 20, 2013

 

The District’s traditional and charter public schools suspended about 10,000 children — more than one in 10 D.C. students — during the 2011-12 academic year, according to a coalition of advocacy groups seeking to reduce disciplinary measures that keep kids out of class. The Every Student Every Day coalition released its analysis of school data Thursday in an effort to encourage city lawmakers, who have been pressing schools to reduce widespread truancy, to consider suspension and expulsion an equally important issue.

 

“Way too many children are missing school because they’ve been suspended or expelled, often for minor, nonviolent issues which could easily be dealt with,” said Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children’s Law Center, a member of the coalition. Researchers have found that students who are suspended once in ninth grade are twice as likely to drop out of high school as their peers who are not suspended. Still, some educators argue that suspension is a powerful tool to teach children that there are consequences for their behavior and to keep disruptive students from interfering with the ability of other students to learn.

 

Eduardo Ferrer of D.C. Lawyers for Youth, who wrote the report, said the coalition is not suggesting that students be allowed to be disruptive but that the city seek alternatives for dealing with misbehavior. The D.C. Council recently passed an anti-truancy bill requiring the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to develop ideas for reducing suspensions and expulsions. D.C. schools officials said it was too soon to comment. “We are continuing to review the report and its findings,” spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said.

 

During a speech Thursday that centered on education policy, Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said that removing students from school should be done sparingly. “All publicly funded schools should meet a high standard for supporting and intervening with a student before long-term suspension or expulsion becomes an option,” Gray said.

 

The report found that 13 percent of D.C. students served a suspension during the 2011-12 school year, with some schools reporting suspension rates far higher than that average. The vast majority of the suspensions — about 96 percent — were for 10 days or fewer. Secondary students appeared especially prone to being removed from class. At traditional middle schools, about one in three students served an in-school or out-of-school suspension. The 10 charters with the highest suspension rates, ranging from one-third to two-thirds of students, serve secondary students.

 

At Maya Angelou Public Charter School’s middle school campus, 67 percent of students were suspended last school year. Executive Director Lucretia Murphy said the school, which serves at-risk youth, only tries to use suspensions for safety reasons. “We are very concerned about our suspension numbers because we know that every incident of suspension is time that a student spends out of school,” Murphy said. Students with disabilities were three times as likely to be suspended as their non-disabled peers, mirroring a national trend of disproportionately high suspension rates for kids with special needs. Children attending schools in wards with high poverty were also more likely to be suspended.

 

Traditional and charter schools suspended children at similar rates, although the traditional schools’ figures include in-school suspensions and the charter schools’ do not. Expulsion rates differ significantly between charter and traditional schools, as The Washington Post previously reported . Charters removed 227 children for disciplinary offenses in 2011-12, while the city’s traditional school system — which is legally obligated to serve all students — expelled just three. The charter board began publishing school-by-school discipline data last year, arguing that such disclosure would persuade schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions without new and burdensome regulations.

 

Charter board officials said that approach appears to be working. As of the end of April, expulsions for the 2012-13 school year were down 31 percent compared with the year before. “Our actions mirror the call by advocates for more transparency and accountability on discipline issues through data collection,” said Theola Labbe-DeBose, the charter board’s spokeswoman. “We agree that lost instructional time for any reason adversely impacts student learning and support our schools as they seek to minimize interruptions to learning with equitable discipline practices.”