- D.C. to release refined set of school boundary recommendations
- In D.C., Bowser-Catania budget fight over school funding previews mayoral contest
- D.C. Mayoral campaign leaving charter school sector in dark
- How charters and rivals may get together [KIPP PCS and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
- D.C. classrooms welcome babies in effort to teach empathy [KIPP DC PCS and Capital City PCS mentioned]
- Unlocking Opportunities - Services That Help Poor Children Succeed in the Classroom
- Increasing Number Of Homeless Students Puts Pressure On D.C. Public Schools
- Is the divided New Orleans school district system fair to African American kids?
D.C. to release refined set of school boundary recommendations
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 30, 2014
Two months ago, D.C. officials released three politically charged proposals to overhaul the city’s school boundaries and student-assignment policies, setting off vigorous debate about the future of the city’s neighborhood schools.
Now, after considering volumes of community feedback, officials in the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Education say they are set to release a refined set of draft recommendations late during the week of June 9. They will be available online and announced to families through their schools as well as on Twitter and via e-mail to those who attended the previous round of community meetings in April.
Parents and community members will have a chance to react at three public meetings scheduled the following week. Unlike previously, parents at these meetings will not only hear about citywide policy proposals but also will break out into groups to discuss the effects of the recommendations on specific schools and neighborhoods, according to a flier slated to go out to parents starting today.
All meetings are from 6-8 p.m. Here are the dates and places:
●Monday, June 16, at Savoy Elementary, with breakout groups for Anacostia, Ballou and Woodson feeder patterns.
●Tuesday, June 17, at Dunbar High, with breakout groups for Dunbar, Cardozo and Eastern feeder patterns.
●Thursday, June 19, at Takoma Education Campus, with breakout groups for Coolidge, Roosevelt and Wilson feeder patterns.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith has said that the community advisory group that is working on new boundaries will use the feedback collected at these meetings to develop a final set of recommendations.
Those recommendations will go to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) this summer, and Gray is expected to announce his final decisions in September. However, since the recommendations would not go into effect until fall 2015, how much of Gray’s plan is adopted is really up to his successor — at this point, either Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser or independent David Catania, both City Council members.
Catania and Bowser have both said that they would not adopt any of the three proposals that are on the table so far.
In D.C., Bowser-Catania budget fight over school funding previews mayoral contest
The Washington Post
By Aaron C. Davis and Emma Brown
May 31, 2014
Muriel Bowser made her most forceful foray into the District’s education debates last week when the Democratic nominee for mayor and Ward 4 council member maneuvered to include seed money in next year’s budget for what she said would be one of four new or entirely remodeled middle schools if she is elected in November.
David A. Catania (I-At Large), the council’s education chairman who is running against Bowser, immediately blasted the proposal, saying she would begin building schools without a plan for how the new projects might affect existing schools. Those that could be affected, he said, include dozens that have been promised a share of the $1.6 billion the city plans to spend on school modernization in coming years.
The tense exchange offered a preview of debates between Bowser and Catania, and it highlighted a power that the city’s next mayor will wield: the authority to decide which schools are replaced or rebuilt — and therefore to influence to some extent which areas of the city become more attractive to families.
Bowser and Catania said in interviews Friday that they want to make the city’s plans for new schools more reliable and predictable. The District’s six-year renovation blueprint has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Bowser and Catania voted for the latest version, passed Wednesday by the council.
Bowser said the city’s capital improvement plans for schools have been “a moving target.” She said that if she’s elected mayor, she will seek a “thoughtful process” for planning school renovation projects. Parents should be able to have confidence in at least the first two or three years of the city’s multiyear plan for school renovations, she said.
Catania said he would make a priority of fulfilling all of the currently promised school reconstructions through 2020.
“The presumption is in favor of the projects that are presently funded,” he said.
“But what’s important is that we be consistent. There has to be a rhythm to which schools are built, and we have to make sure the dollars are being fairly and equitably distributed,” Catania said. “We have invested significantly in high schools, but the increase in enrollment has been in elementary schools, so we really haven’t thought that through.”
Under former mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and now Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), the city’s school-building plan has not always matched demand. More than $600 million has been spent rebuilding neighborhood high schools in recent years, but most remain under-enrolled. At the same time, free preschool has driven up enrollment in elementary schools, which in many parts of the city still have buildings that are outdated and increasingly crowded.
Promised renovations of schools from Northeast to Southeast Washington have been delayed repeatedly since 2007.
Modernizations at Roosevelt and Coolidge high schools were delayed a year for each school, drawing protest from parents as the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars elsewhere. A planned renovation at Capitol Hill’s Watkins Elementary was going to be pushed back for the third time in four years, and Orr Elementary’s renovation was delayed for eight years, until Catania’s Education Committee restored funding for both schools this spring.
The already fluid school construction plan could face further pressures from a realignment of school boundaries and feeder patterns. The city is debating Gray’s proposal for the first major overhaul of school boundaries in 40 years.
Bowser and Catania have said they oppose the plans. But similar to the idea Bowser outlined Friday, one of the boundary proposals calls for four new middle schools, projects for which no construction money has been allocated. Bowser’s move matched campaign promises she made in the run-up to the April primary, when she vowed to focus on middle schools, which remain a problem citywide.
As part of the council’s budget negotiations last week, Bowser successfully inserted $7 million for planning one new stand-alone middle school in Ward 4.
Catania said that Bowser could not fund a new middle school without taking money away from several others, because every dollar is already accounted for.
Bowser said she would identify money in future budgets to pay for construction and could do so without compromising existing promises to build other schools.
She said her effort to secure funds for a new Ward 4 school was no different from Catania’s move to insert $8 million into the budget to plan a new Ward 7 middle school.
“It’s exactly the same,” Bowser said.
Neither building has funds allocated for construction yet.
Catania disputed Bowser’s characterization, saying that the Ward 7 school has been a subject of discussion at hearings since last fall.
Valerie Jablow, who is the parent of a third-grader at Watkins Elementary and a seventh-grader at Stuart-Hobson Middle, is among parents who have repeatedly been frustrated by the city’s shifting promises on school modernization. Capital improvement plans for schools change so frequently that they are “meaningless” to parents, Jablow said.
“Basically, every year they start anew, and this is a huge, huge problem,” she said.
D.C. Mayoral campaign leaving charter school sector in dark
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 2, 2014
The Washington Post had another story over the weekend about the views of Mayoral candidates Muriel Bowser and David Catania on the current school boundary discussions and whether and where to build a new middle school. Lost in the thousands of words tracking these politician's discussions of the traditional schools is what they would do in office regarding charters.
Their silence on this subject is odd. After all, serious school reform in the District of Columbia began with the charter movement. It was only after more than 25 percent of DCPS's student population fled to be educated in these alternative schools that Mayor Fenty was elected on his promise to takeover and fix the regular schools. He then hired Michelle Rhee, and began spending millions to modernize severely dilapidated classrooms. The progress that we have witnessed under Chancellor Rhee and that has continued under Kaya Henderson is due only to the competition for pupils that charters instigated.
Since this time the charter school system has matured and has correctly focused more on quality than quantity. Poor schools have been closed and the D.C. Public Charter School Board developed the Performance Management Framework to shine a bright light on those institutions that are doing well and therefore should expand and replicate, and those that should no longer be in business.
The education of our children is a topic on everyone's mind so you might have assumed that the current issues facing charters would be front and center in a Mayoral contest. You would be wrong. Not mentioned is if shuttered DCPS buildings will be turned over to charters, whether the illegal and unethical difference in operational funding between the two systems will be corrected, and how to solve the problem of charters gaining access to the capital improvement dollars the traditional schools have used to build shining classrooms found only at our country's elite colleges and universities.
Charter schools do like their autonomy combined with accountability, so being left alone by those running for office is not altogether a bad thing. However, there are crucial policy issues that the group that educates 44 percent of all public school children is up against, and decisions in these areas will impact how far as a community we can get toward our common goal of providing every kid who needs one a quality seat. The conversation about these topics really cannot wait another day.
How charters and rivals may get together [KIPP PCS and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
June 1, 2014
Elliott Witney, a brilliant reading teacher, was one of the six people who launched KIPP, now the nation’s largest charter school network, in a Chicago hotel conference room 14 years ago. He eventually became principal of KIPP’s flagship school in Houston. So, why has this hero of the charter movement taken an administrator job in a traditional Houston area district full of bureaucratic annoyances charters were created to eliminate?
That is one of the many surprising questions asked and answered in Richard Whitmire’s intriguing new book, “On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope.” It is the best account yet of what is happening with charters. Both those who hate the independent public schools and those who love them should read it.
Whitmire does not hide charter struggles and mistakes. The Rocketship charter network at the center of his story soars, then sputters, then twists and turns. Whitmire is as sympathetic to the parents and educators opposed to Rocketship as he is to the entrepreneurs and educators who created the network.
Whitmire makes no secret of his support for charters, even while explaining wild ideas like Rocketship founder John Danner’s belief that he can achieve Fibonacci growth — a reference to a 13th-century Italian mathematician — and have a million students by 2030. By exposing charter missteps, Whitmire is a more convincing chronicler of this dynamic part of today’s schools than any of the anti-charter bloggers.
At one point, Preston Smith, executive director of Rocketship schools in San Jose, was told by Danner to institute what most experienced educators would consider an insane plan: Knock down walls so elementary school classes could expand to 120 students each. That idea bombed in the 1970s, but Danner, a confident multimillionaire, insisted on it. Only when Smith’s staff revolted was the plan shelved. “Three-quarters of my executive team was ready to go out the door,” Smith told Whitmire.
It got worse. Media reports had suggested that Rocketship was the best new thing in charters. Its devotees said it used computers so efficiently that student achievement would soar without extra fundraising to augment government funds, as organizations like KIPP had to do. But its first venture outside Silicon Valley faltered. Resistance in union-strong Milwaukee was so vehement that Rocketship’s growth projections had to be revised.
Yet Whitmire still sees Rocketship on an upward track. He argues that charter growth is inevitable. Once parents have a chance to choose something other than their struggling local urban schools, they will do so, he says. If enough charters outperform local schools, parents will flock to independent schools. He cites the 44 percent of D.C. public school students now attending charters as a prime example.
And, he adds, “when looking around the country at cities experiencing major education changes driven by high-performing charters, D.C. would barely make a top-10 list.” He is not, however, employing the usual calculation of which cities have the most charter students and the highest charter scores. Instead, he praises cities with the most cooperation between charters and traditional schools. High on that list are Memphis, San Antonio, Denver and San Francisco. He lauds D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson for “talking like a charter leader, proposing to send her teachers out for home visits, a strategy used by most top charter schools.”
The Spring Branch district in Texas is praised by Whitmire because superintendent Duncan Klussmann lured Witney from KIPP to be executive director of strategic initiatives and innovation. Witney’s job is to bring in effective charters and help regular schools reach their level. Spring Branch might be a traditional district, Witney says, but it is full of creative people. That helpful attitude could lead the charter battle into more positive directions.
D.C. classrooms welcome babies in effort to teach empathy [KIPP DC PCS and Capital City PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 1, 2014
The newest teachers at the District’s Maury Elementary School haven’t been to college. They can’t tie their own shoes. They don’t speak much English. And they aren’t potty-trained.
They are babies. Mostly bald, and completely mesmerizing.
Maury is one of five D.C. elementary schools attempting to harness the disarming power of infants to help students recognize and deal with emotions in themselves and their classmates. The babies, in other words, are meant to help teach children how to be kind.
“I think it’s really changed people in our class,” said 10-year-old Vivian Dougherty, a fourth-grader at Maury who has spent the year learning from Baby June, who is 11 months old. “It’s really made people nicer.”
The program, called Roots of Empathy, was conceived nearly two decades ago in Toronto and has since become common across Canada. Now it has been imported to the United States, amid growing concern about classroom bullying and growing conviction that teaching certain character traits — such as persistence, self-control and self-confidence — is just as crucial for students’ futures as teaching academics.
Roots is built on a simple notion: When babies such as June bring their huge eyes, irrepressible smiles and sometimes unappeasable tears into the classroom, students can’t help but feel for them. The idea is that recognizing and caring about a baby’s emotions can open a gateway for children to learn bigger lessons about taking care of one another, considering others’ feelings, having patience.
“As important as it is to learn to read, it’s also important to learn to relate,” said Mary Gordon, who founded the Roots of Empathy program in 1996. “So we teach them emotional literacy, the words to understand what you feel based on what you’ve witnessed with the babies.”
Roots is one of many character-education and social-emotional learning programs that are in vogue. President Obama has spoken of the need to address the nation’s “empathy deficit,” while KIPP — the well-known and successful charter school network whose motto is “Work hard. Be Nice.” — has popularized the effort to teach grit and other intangible traits in addition to rigorous academics.
But Roots costs time and money — two commodities that are always scarce in schools, especially in urban districts struggling to lift the achievement of disadvantaged children. And while much of American education policy focuses on improving reading and math proficiency, the idea of using babies to help build social skills has its share of skeptics.
Chester E. Finn, president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the program “a costly diversion that probably does no harm but isn’t what serious policy makers should be spending their time and scarce resources on,” especially given persistent achievement gaps.
Finn added that programs such as Roots are attempting to make changes that “are so nebulous long-term and hard to measure that, frankly, it’s exceedingly difficult to gauge program effectiveness with any reliability.”
Gordon and others who support her approach say that research has shown connections between social-emotional learning and academic progress and that bullying is a pervasive problem linked to poor academic performance and high dropout rates.
Roots pairs each classroom with a baby, who visits nine times throughout the year with his or her mom or dad, a volunteer recruited from the community. Each child has a chance to look the baby in the eye, squeeze its toe and say hello before the class settles into a circle around a green blanket.
A volunteer instructor asks questions related to one of nine themes, from the reasons babies cry to the emotions they feel. The classes — which range from 30 to 50 minutes, depending on the baby’s mood — are mostly a chance for students to watch the baby as it responds to songs and games and to ask questions and share observations about whatever comes to mind.
“How come my baby sister can walk, but Baby Joshua can’t walk?” asked a puzzled second-grader at Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys, a tuition-free private school in Southeast Washington.
“We all develop in different ways,” said the instructor, Anthony Davis.
The schools hosting Roots in the District this year include private schools exempt from the city’s standardized tests and public schools that have a lower-than-average proportion of poor children. It can be hard to see how bringing babies into the classroom could make a dent in children’s overwhelming needs across the city, in places where poverty is more concentrated, where teachers say there often is too little in the way of mental health counseling and where some schools are not even able to offer a full year of science and social studies.
But Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied Roots since 2000, said it is particularly important to teach social-emotional skills with at-risk youths.
“The evidence is so clear that when you do it, it doesn’t interfere with test scores, but it actually helps them do better in school,” she said. “It builds resilience.”
Schonert-Reichl has found in multiple studies that children who participate in Roots tend to show declines in aggressive, bullying behaviors and growth in sharing, cooperative and helping ones, as measured by surveys filled out by the children and their teachers. In one study, she found that 88 percent of Roots participants decreased in what’s known as “proactive aggression” — the coldhearted use of aggression to get what you want. In a control group that did not participate, only 9 percent of students decreased in proactive aggression, and 50 percent increased.
To an outside observer, the program doesn’t always seem all that remarkable. But the tiny creature transfixes students in a way that math lessons often don’t.
Instructors reinforce each baby visit with lessons before and after, for a total of 27 sessions throughout the school year. That’s about 20 hours of class time, roughly equivalent to the time a college student spends in a 1.5-credit course. Teachers say the baby visits and focused instruction serve as a common reference point for students that helps spur ongoing lessons about dealing with emotions throughout the rest of the year.
VanNessa Duckett, whose fourth-grade class at Maury has hosted June, said she was initially a bit skeptical. But the 15-year teaching veteran said the sessions have triggered real change, both in her approach to managing the classroom and in her students. They have become more thoughtful, she said, and less likely to misbehave.
“I feel like every moment is truly a teachable moment when it comes to these children’s character,” Duckett said. “I wake up excited to come and work on who they are as people. It makes them available for learning.”
Duckett said the empathy instruction appears to have made a significant difference for four or five students in particular. One of them is Kanye Cheeks, who during a recent classroom visit returned June’s shy smile with a grin.
Kanye was new to Maury last year, in the third grade. He tells it pretty straight: He didn’t have many friends, he didn’t always feel comfortable asking questions, and he got into a lot of trouble.
This year, he has almost all the same classmates. But Duckett said things are different.
Kanye raises his hand in class. He participates. His classmates say he’s more respectful and nicer.
“I’m getting better,” Kanye said. He said he has learned to “keep pushing instead of giving up” when he encounters a tough class assignment. He knows that he can ask classmates for assistance without risking his dignity. “I’ve got this desk partner, and he helps me. He’s not going to be yelling at me,” Kanye said.
Research on Roots’ effects helped persuade Canada’s provincial governments to subsidize the program with millions of taxpayer dollars each year.
Governments have helped subsidize expansion in other countries, too, including Scotland and New Zealand. In the United States, burgeoning Roots of Empathy programs in Seattle, Oakland, New York and now the District have been paid for with private donations.
Besides Maury and Bishop Walker, the other D.C. schools using Roots of Empathy this year are another traditional public school, Mann Elementary in Northwest; a public charter school, Capital City in Manor Park; and Beauvoir, a private Northwest D.C. school that led the push to bring the program to Washington.
Beauvoir donated half of the $100,000 required launch fee for the five D.C. schools, which goes toward training, classroom materials and evaluation. Roots had hoped to double the number of schools and classrooms it is serving in the District next year, but that would cost another $100,000, money that schools don’t have.
Maury parent Chantese Alston said she’d like to see the program spread after watching her 10-year-old daughter, Ne’vaeh, undergo a transformation during the past year.
“She’s not just thinking of herself and what she wants, she is thinking about others,” Alston said, describing how Ne’vaeh has become more patient with her little brother, less demanding about getting what she wants at the grocery store and more willing to help her parents at home. She attributes the change, in part, to Ne’vaeh’s empathy training.
Ne’vaeh also dissolved a clique she had started with friends after they realized, with the help of their teacher, that it was hurting other girls’ feelings.
“I hope she doesn’t ever grow out of this,” Alston said. “I love it.”
Maury Principal Carolyne Albert-Garvey said that despite the pressure on schools to raise test scores, she is committed to carving out time for community-building, including Roots. It’s not an extra, she said. It’s essential. And students agree.
“People can learn a lot from Roots of Empathy,” said Kanye, June’s favorite student. “You learn how to make people feel good and treat people right.”
Unlocking Opportunities - Services That Help Poor Children Succeed in the Classroom
HillRag
By Soumya Bhat and Jenny Reed
June 2014
It is hard to imagine a city that has pursued school reform more assertively than the District of Columbia. There have been major efforts to improve teaching through better pay, incentives, and stricter performance accountability. There have been huge investments to modernize school facilities and increase access to pre-school. And DC now has an impressive level of school choice and innovation through one of the largest charter school sectors in the nation.
These investments have made a difference, but the city has a long way to go, with most low-income students still scoring below proficiency on standardized tests and many schools struggling to improve. That may reflect the problems that poor children bring with them to school, rather than problems in the schools themselves.
The next step in education reform may not be about what happens in the classroom but instead about dealing with the stresses of poverty that make it hard for students to succeed.
In DC, over one in four children lives in poverty, defined as less than $18,500 per year for a family of three. In some neighborhoods in Wards 7 and 8, the child poverty rate is greater than 50 percent. Low-income students are more likely than other children to have physical or mental health problems. They are more likely to live in violent neighborhoods or in families marked by instability that comes from poor quality housing and low-wage jobs. Poor parents who themselves struggled in school or who work at nights are less able than other parents to be active in their child’s education.
School provides a natural setting for the provision of services that can alleviate the effects of poverty on students. In school, children with mental health problems can be identified. Schools can take steps to make sure homeless children get the help they need. And schools can help parents reinforce teaching at home.
Helping Students Cope with “Toxic Stress”
Low-income children are often exposed to frequent trauma and stress, which has been shown to affect their ability to concentrate, plan, organize, recall information, and analyze. Children experiencing toxic levels of stress perform worse on academic tests than their unstressed counterparts.
In DC there are 5,000 children with unmet mental health needs, according to the Children’s Law Center, which means more needs to be done. DC’s School-Based Mental Health (SBMH) program places professionals in traditional public and public charter schools, who offer one-on-one counseling, screening, and classroom-based prevention activities. But due to lack of funding , the program is located in just 72 schools — roughly a third of all schools — with services primarily located in Ward 6, 7, and 8.
Improving access to mental health services is not only important to helping children succeed in school. It also can help children avoid entering the criminal justice system. Nationally, the vast majorityof children in the juvenile justice system have at least one mental illness.
Maintaining Educational Stability for Homeless Students
When families move frequently from home to home, or become homeless, that disrupts a child’s educational continuity. Homelessness in particular leads to child anxiety, depression and withdrawal that can result in poor educational outcomes. Over 4,000 students in DC Public Schools are homeless, a number that has grown 37 percent in two years (See Figure 1.) In some schools, as many as one-fourth of the students are homeless, and the student homelessness rate is over 10 percent in one of eight schools. This means that meeting the special needs of homeless students is an important part of improving school outcomes in the District.
The federal McKinney-Vento program is the main way DC and states provide services to homeless students. It sets important goals, such as providing transportation so that students can remain at their school of origin, helping students enroll in school quickly, identifying homeless youth, and providing financial assistance for things like field trips and graduation fees. But the District gets just $34 per homeless student from this program, making it unlikely the District can support all of these goals in a meaningful way.
Given the complexities of barriers facing homeless students, it is important that the District assess the adequacy of these services and expand them if needed. This includes additional support for homeless liaisons in schools so that they are better able to meet the needs of a rising homeless youth population.
Engaging Parents in Their Child’s Education
Students do better in school when their families are engaged, including improved literacy and math skills in elementary school, reduced truancy, and fewer behavioral problems. Also, aparent who is engaged in their child’s education can reinforce what is learned in the classroom.
For a variety of reasons, however, low-income parents are less likely to have a healthy connection to their child’s school than parents who are not poor. This is partly because low-income parents often work multiple jobs and have less free time and resources available to regularly participate in school activities.
A number of school systems have developed parent engagement strategies to reach out to parents. One local foundation, Flamboyan, is working with DCPS to support programs in 15 schools (21 next year) where school staff visit families at their homes. This allows teachersto communicate with parents about what their children are working on during the school day, and to offer guided activities to be done at home with their child. For example, if a first grader is meeting most academic goals but is not on track for the number of words per minute they can read, a home visit can alert parents to this situation and help them develop learning goals to address it.
DCPS also has started working with teachers in other schools to build family engagement skills and encourage teachers to make home visits. In the 2013-2014 school year, over 52 teachers from 28 schools participated in the FEC and have completed over 520 family home visits to date.
The District’s approach to boosting student achievement needs to go beyond improving the quality of classroom instruction to also address the challenges that poor children bring with them to school. Addressing the stresses that are common in poor neighborhoods is critical to improving outcomes of DC’s lowest-performing schools, most of which have very high poverty rates. Non-instructional supports like mental health services can help ensure that all students benefit from the classroom improvements being made in publicly funded DC schools.
Reed is the policy director and Bhat is the education policy analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (www.dcfpi.org). DCFPI conducts research on tax and budget issues that affect low- and moderate-income DC residents.
More than a Backpack, Poor Children Bring Many Problems with Them to School
Poverty affects children negatively in a number of ways that make it harder to succeed in school.
Physical health problems. Low-income children are more likely to suffer from asthma, lead poisoning, low birth weight, developmental delays, and learning disabilities. They are more likely to face obstacles to learning and have poor school attendance.
Mental health problems. Low-income children are more often exposed to trauma and stress, which limits the ability to concentrate, plan, organize, recall information, and analyze. More than 5,000 District children who need mental health services are not receiving them.
Neighborhood instability. Many DC parents report that their children are not safe in their neighborhood or school. Low-income children are more likely to experience violent crime and say they are afraid to go out. Low-income children often live in neighborhoods with poor air and water quality, or in housing that exposes them to lead, asbestos, mold, roaches and rodents.
Family instability.Low-income students and their families move around much more than other children, including frequent moves from school to school. Homelessness in particular leads to child anxiety, depression and withdrawal that can result in poor educational outcomes. In some DC schools, as many as one-fourth of the students are homeless.
Low levels of literacy. Children in low-income families on average are read to less, exposed to more television, and have less access to reading materials than other children.
Increasing Number Of Homeless Students Puts Pressure On D.C. Public Schools
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
May 30, 2014
Many of the children who stay at D.C. General Shelter go to Ketcham Elementary School in Southeast D.C. Nearly 30 percent of the student population there is homeless.
Principal Maisha Riddlesprigger stands in the foyer of Ketcham Elementary School at 8:30 every single morning.
“I think it’s important to greet families. It’s important they see the principal, when they come in they are greeted with a warm face, a ‘Good morning,’ a ‘Hello,’ because you never know what’s happened the night before,” she says.
The school is about two miles from the D.C. General. Little children come up to Riddlesprigger for a quick cuddle before they go to class. Riddlesprigger says these children have very unstable lives.
“When you’re moving around from place to place there are a lot of things as a child you feel are out of control. So we want to make this a constant,” she says.
It isn’t obvious which students here are homeless. Julia Zahn, the social worker and homeless liaison at Ketcham, says that's the school’s goal. Students wear uniforms so there are no obvious differences; they have a very structured routine and all follow the same rules.
“For our children having a place of belonging, that’s the same every single day, they know they’re going to get their hot meals here, they’re going to look like everyone else, they know they’re going to go outside and play, knowing what to expect helps improve their behavior, helps them improve academically,” Zahn says.
Zahn says a federal law allows students to keep attending the school if they become homeless during the academic year. She says that’s very helpful, because otherwise the stress is even greater for these children.
“They bounce and bounce and bounce, they might have had four or five different teachers over the course of the year and that’s really difficult,” she said.
For homeless families struggling with immediate needs, like food and shelter, school is often not a priority. A big challenge for this school is absenteeism; many students come late or sometimes not at all.
Fifth grade teacher Camille Townsend says poor attendance is a problem and in turn hurts learning.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re just learning their ABCs, they’re just learning how to count, I can teach that at home,’ but there’s a conceptual knowledge, application their learning in school how to take those skills and link them to science and social studies, art and music. And that’s one thing that really does affect homeless students because they really do have such poor attendance,” Townsend says.
Townsend says children learn the building blocks of reading and math in elementary school.
“What a kindergartner learns, phonics, how to decode words those specific skills and that can because when they were in kindergarten or first grade. I have children struggling with subtraction, well how are they going to division? If you don’t have a foundation it’s a lot harder later,” she says.
Jamilla Larson, who directs the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project, says it’s more difficult for homeless children to concentrate.
“In the classroom, we know that Cortisol — the stress hormone — really corrodes the child’s developing brain and has a direct impact on the hippocampus which is the memory center. So it’s very difficult for children to retain information when cortisol is eating away at your brain. So there’s a lot of research on even in the highest level of educational quality, it takes half a day to reach a level where they can actually absorb new information,” she says.
A University of Chicago study found homeless students were less likely to perform on grade level than classmates who weren’t homeless. They were also twice as likely to be identified as needing special education, and a third had been held back a grade once. All these pressures means teacher Camille Townsend needs to make time for a lot more one-on-one instruction.
“It’s definitely worrisome as a teacher. How am I going to address this new skill when I know this child has been gone last week? You have to figure out how do I teach normally for everyone else and how do I double back for this child,” Townsend says.
It also puts additional pressure on teachers who are evaluated in part based on their students’ test scores.
“It’s definitely a worry, it’s something I verbalize, other teachers have verbalized. Unfortunately it’s something we have to deal with. But the impact on me is minimal; I’m an adult I can bounce back. My evaluation is secondary,” she said.
Donice, a young mother, lives at D.C. General with her two children, aged one and seven. She’s almost two hours late in dropping off her first grader at school. She says she wants her son to do well in school but it’s hard living in a shelter.
“He wants to go outside and play but there’s no place for him. Sometimes he has bad dreams. We don’t be as happy you know, we’re not as comfortable as normal people with a normal house. We have to find the motivation,” she says.
Donice is looking for a job and says this school is a huge help. She gets free bus tokens to bring him to school, staffers organize food drives every month and she can use computers to search for a job. But most of all her son is taken care of.
“There are kids his age, he loves his teacher, Makes him a little happier. School is a big impact because he’s comfortable; he likes it,” Donice says.
According to the National Center on Family Homelessness, children who are homeless show three times the rate of emotional and behavioral problems compared to non-homeless children. Teacher Camille Townsend says it just depends on the child.
“I know a particular student who tends to steal and that is because there’s this desire, I want to have own set of things. I don’t have anything that is mine. There are some students I know who hoard food, they’re always asking for extra breakfast, extra snacks,” she says.
Principal Riddlesprigger says she worries most about children who withdraw from everyone.
“It’s the ones who are quiet I worry about. Friends can be a great support they can say ‘I went through this before, this is what happened at our shelter, this is how we stayed safe, this is how we stayed with our mother.’ But a child who bottles up their feelings we never know what’s going on and how we can help,” Riddlesprigger says.
Answering those questions — what’s going on and how can we help — has become increasingly important at this school. Julia Zahn, the homeless liaison at Ketcham, says five years ago she was helping two students with transportation, and now she has over 50 receiving transportation assistance.
“There are a couple reasons, the number of homeless families is increasing, the other is more awareness of services,” she said.
Zahn opens a large closet with all the extra supplies she keeps on-hand. There are winter coats, hats, gloves and mittens in a variety of sizes.
“It’s all inventoried, these are a few left over toys we had donated to us. A lot of my families move and don’t have access to their belonging so being able pick out a stuffed animal is really helpful. You can see uniforms, different sizes. Backpacks, backpacks, backpacks,” she says.
Zahn works with about 20 different community partners, stocking up on uniforms, shoes and shampoo.
“Just last month a community partner asked is there anything else you need? And I knew right away, ‘underwear!’ Then the next day we got a huge packet of underwear,” she says.
Nicole Lee-Mwandha oversees homeless programs for D.C’s public school system. She says every year the numbers of homeless children increase. Since the 2009-10 school year, it has jumped by 60 percent.
“DCPS is about five percent [homeless], but in my heart I strongly believe students go unidentified because of the shame and stigma surrounding homelessness,” she says.
Lee-Mwandha is getting more buy-in from school staff and has begun holding training workshops for them at shelters.
“Instead of a training in a nice cushy air-conditioned room, I do training in D.C. General and really see where their homeless children are coming from,” she says.
Lee-Mwandah says there’s a sense of urgency to help these homeless children. Stanton Elementary packs food for its approximately 70 homeless children to take home for the weekend. Roosevelt S.T.A.Y., with more than 100 homeless students, has a relationship with a bakery so families get fresh bread. She says some schools’ homeless liaisons even provide turkeys for homeless families on Thanksgiving, but, she says, it’s still not enough.
“And that’s the hard part when they need to select how many families out of the abundance of families they can help. We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have, it’s still very limited,” she says.
For school staff on the front lines, the fear is the issues these children deal with are much bigger than what can be addressed during the hours they’re at school.
Is the divided New Orleans school district system fair to African American kids?
The Washington Post
By Lyndsay Layton
May 29, 2014
The news this week about the closing of traditional public schools in the Recovery School District in New Orleans raises questions about whether African American students are getting an equal opportunity to attend the best public schools in the city.
Issues of access and equity are complicated by the public school situation in New Orleans, where there are two distinct systems. The Recovery School District, the larger of the two, was created when the state seized control of most public schools in the turmoil that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After this week, when the Recovery district closes the last neighborhood schools, that system will consist of public charter schools, which are funded by taxpayers but privately run.
The second system, the Orleans Parish School District, consists of 14 charter schools and six traditional neighborhood schools. Four of the 14 charter schools have selective admission, which means that students are accepted on the basis of certain criteria, which can include test scores and interviews. These schools are among the city’s highest -achieving schools.
The Orleans Parish School District, which is overseen by an elected school board, ran all the public schools in New Orleans before Katrina. It was in serious trouble before the storm: It was bankrupt and couldn’t account for $71 million in federal funds.
But after Katrina, the Orleans Parish district emerged to control the city’s best-functioning public schools. Five of the OPSD charter schools were given an “A” rating on Louisiana’s A to F report card for 2013. By contrast, none of the Recovery district’s charter schools earned an “A” rating that year.
Those high-performing schools in the Orleans Parish district also enroll a disproportionate number of white children, which has sparked protest from community activists who say that admission policies to some of the OPSD schools have the effect of excluding African American children.
For example, five of 14 charter schools overseen by OPSD participate in the city’s OneApp process, a common, computerized lottery system that parents use to secure a public school spot for their children.
All schools in the Recovery School District participate in the OneApp. But nine OPSD schools do not, requiring families to apply individually to those schools. That’s a tall order for many parents, activist Karran Harper Royal said, because it assumes they have information about the schools and understand the schools’ various deadlines and admission requirements.
Royal and others have filed a federal civil rights complaint charging that the public school landscape in New Orleans discriminates against African American students. The complaint, filed with the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, targets the state education department and the Recovery School District, but not the Orleans Parish School District.
The Recovery School District has been trying to improve transparency and equity, district officials said. It uses the OneApp to centrally manage placements and prevent schools from unfairly turning away some students on the pretense that their classes are full. And it instituted a common expulsion process so that charters cannot apply different disciplinary standards and unilaterally expel students. Instead, all proposals for expulsion go through a central hearing process run by Recovery School District officials.
Louisiana’s superintendent of education, John White, said there is a clear problem with equal access to the best OPSD public schools. But he said the state is prevented by law from interfering with the way the elected Orleans Parish School Board runs its schools.
Stan Smith, the acting superintendent of the OPSD, defended his system Thursday. He noted that the OPSB has adopted a new policy that requires all charters to participate in the OneApp at the time they renew their charters, which will range from two years to 10 years from now.
“It was not by agreement of the charters; it was by policy adopted by OPSB that these charters will be converted to OneApp at their next renewal,” Smith wrote in an e-mail.
He also addressed the characterization that OPSB is a selective-admission district.
“Four of our charters have some form of admission criteria,” he said. “These charters are type 3 charters, which are conversion of a traditional school. Two of these schools were citywide-access magnet schools prior to converting to charter, and they retained the criteria as a charter. One of the schools operates a French immersion program and has criteria tied to this program.”