- School reform in D.C. should stay the course
- Principal to resign from D.C. charter school accused of cheating [Meridian PCS mentioned]
- The Deputy Mayor of Education faces charter leaders
- Gray Continues Push For Charter School Expansion in D.C.
- Friendship Collegiate Academy expelled 56 students in 2011-12 [Friendship PCS, Meridian PCS, Roots PCS, Maya Angelou PCS, KIPP DC PCS, and SEED PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
June 22, 2013
MAYOR VINCENT C. GRAY’S (D) first speech dedicated to education, delivered last week, contained no dramatic proposals or revolutionary changes. That is a good thing. Mr. Gray is right in not wanting to upset the course of school reform. What is needed now is persistence in the hard work of school improvement. We hope the D.C. Council gets the message and backs off ill-advised efforts to usurp the authority of the mayor and D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson in running the schools.
“I am as impatient as anyone when it comes to the pace of school reform in the District. I also realize that the kind of lasting, sustainable success we are working towards doesn’t happen overnight,” Mr. Gray said Thursday at an Anacostia school. The speech recapped major changes that have occurred in public education, including mayoral control and the growth of charter schools. The mayor proposed a few new ideas but mainly recommitted to ongoing initiatives. He said he didn’t expect to make “seismic shockwaves” or “big headlines,” noting that “headlines get you only so far.”
No doubt that was a reference to the attention D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) has attracted with his multi-part proposal that would reshape public education policy but that Ms. Henderson said she doubts will result in improved student achievement. Since becoming chairman of the council’s education committee in January, Mr. Catania, openly derisive of Mr. Gray’s efforts, has sought to assert control over the direction of school reform. The likely result would be disruption without progress.
Some of Mr. Catania’s ideas, such as strengthening the ability of the school board to shut ineffective schools and figuring out how to better weight resources toward students who need them the most, have merit. But other proposals would undermine the chancellor’s ability to set priorities and lead the system. Particularly worrisome are Mr. Catania’s efforts to give new powers to the state board of education and the Office of the State Superintendent. Surely the District doesn’t want to return to the bad old days of divided educational accountability, with different interests fighting for influence. School chiefs came and went because they couldn’t deal with the political games that prevented them from making decisions and following through.
After his speech, Mr. Gray met with Mr. Catania in what both sides characterized as a constructive session. Mr. Catania told us that there is a lot of agreement on the outlines of what needs to be done; he said he is committed to collaborating with Mr. Gray and Ms. Henderson. We hope that is true. School reform is a long, hard process. The District is finally moving in the right direction, thanks in part to Mr. Gray’s patient support of Ms. Henderson and her vision. Particularly with a mayoral election next year, it’s crucial that political ego and ambition not interfere.
Principal to resign from D.C. charter school accused of cheating [Meridian PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 21, 2013
The principal of Meridian Public Charter School is resigning in the wake of allegations of test-tampering on 2012 standardized tests, according to a document Meridian officials submitted to the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
The document, a “remedial action plan” prepared by Meridian’s board of trustees, lists the principal’s June 26 departure as one of 10 steps officials will take to ensure that cheating does not occur on future tests. Meridian’s trustees decided not to fire any teachers. Any wrongdoing on the part of teachers was “more attributable to inadequate training and oversight as opposed to a conscious effort” to cheat, the document says.
The school plans to improve teacher training and revise testing procedures in coming months.
Christopher Siddall, chairman of the board of trustees, declined to comment on Meridian’s plan. Siddall is scheduled to present the plan Monday at a meeting of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Meridian was among four charters that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education flagged in April for possible cheating on 2012 standardized tests.
Five Meridian classrooms — representing more than 40 percent of tested students — were implicated. Teachers and proctors allegedly explained test questions and urged students to review their answers on certain questions.
Meridian’s students also had an inexplicably high number of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets. Across the entire school, 1,084 answers were changed from wrong to right — one of the highest levels in the city. Administrators could not explain this when questioned by outside consultants enlisted by the OSSE.
Meridian made impressive academic gains, according to the results of those tests, which showed 62 percent of students proficient in math and 57 percent proficient in reading. Those scores have been invalidated. The school’s remedial action plan says that Ten Square — a consulting firm led by Josh Kern, a former D.C. charter school leader — will lead a national search for a new principal. Ten Square, under a $28,000 contract with Meridian, will also conduct a school audit to give trustees “a deeper sense of school operations, best practices being used, and additional areas of concern.” In addition, the school plans to strengthen its evaluations for teachers and administrators, recruit two new board members with academic expertise and simulate the administration of standardized tests twice before the real test in spring 2014.
At each of the other three charters flagged for cheating, problems were isolated to one classroom. Representatives from those schools told the board in May that teachers and administrators who cheated are no longer employed.
Seven traditional schools were also flagged for test-tampering. “Our investigations continue to ensure we have the sufficient information to take the appropriate personnel actions,” said Melissa Salmanowitz, a spokeswoman for the D.C. school system.
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 24, 2013
Last Friday afternoon D.C. Deputy Mayor of Education Abigail Smith had what she promised was the first of regularly planned conversations with charter leaders about Mayor Gray’s education proposals. The one and a half hour meeting was not so much a discussion but a review by Ms. Smith of Mr. Gray’s priorities regarding public schools in the nation’s capital. These were characterized by the Deputy Mayor into eight areas of emphasis:
1. Provide DCPS with chartering authority with the ability to have schools with a neighborhood admission preference
2. Create a data system to access programmatic education needs across the city,
3. Provide facilities to charter schools,
4. Access city’s ability to serve various student subgroups focusing on at-risk children,
5. Update the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula to provide funding equity between the two systems,
6. Institute a uniform lottery,
7. Form “Re-Engagement Centers” which are “a one-stop shop for disconnected youth that will reconnect them with appropriate educational and support services, and
8. Simplify student assignment by initiating feeder patterns from DCPS schools to charters and the reverse.
All of this work is based upon the following thesis. “. . . the lack of coordination between sectors has led to inefficient and suboptimal use of public education resources, and in some cases LEAs and schools actually working at cross-purposes. As a result, we are not optimizing outcomes for students or best meeting the needs of families.”
I could not agree less with this statement. Charters in this town have been working for over 15 years to provide every child with a quality seat. We did this while DCPS allowed the status quo of educational malpractice to continue full steam ahead and sat and watched silently as scores of parents voted with their feed to leave their system. Only when charters reached over 25 percent of the total public school student population did Mayor Fenty ask for authority to run DCPS.
Charters did this against almost impossible odds. We were funded at levels thousands of dollars per pupil below that of the regular schools. At the same time we had no access to facilities in which to house our public school students.
Our movement must now be vigilant to protect the tenants of school choice that have allowed us to be successful. For example, creating feeder schools will have the impact of limiting completion for slots in middle and high schools. Neighborhood admissions policies will have a similar effect.
One more point. I was not allowed to ask any questions during the session. But if I had the chance I would like to know if funding equity will include school modernization funds for charter schools.
CBS Local
By Kevin Rincon
June 23, 2013
WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — Fresh off the heels of his education reform speech that was met with some protest Thursday, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray continues to push for changing the educational landscape in the District. Gray used his weekly Sunday radio address heard exclusively on All-News 99.1 WNEW to once again lay out his plans for education reform, a key portion of which, Gray says, is striking a balance between charter and public schools. He believes an expansion of charter schools will be beneficial to D.C.’s youth — and the time to act is now.
“I think you’ve got to move ahead,” Gray says. “I don’t think we have time to have meeting after meeting, month after month or year after year of discussion.” Gray’s push for expanding charter schools in the District has been met with backlash from some residents. “The perception that charters are really on a mission to get rid of D.C. public schools” is not true, Gray says. “We need to start looking at this as one approach to education over two different governing systems (D.C. Public Schools and Public Charters).”
Gray knows the most effective tool in convincing people that charter schools are a positive for the city’s education system will be results.
“A lot of the convincing comes from people seeing results, and those results will come as the result of the changes that we make,” Gray says. More importantly, he says, people need to consider what is best for the city’s children.
“The convincing that we’ve got to do, I think, is to help people understand that the most important thing we should focus on is getting the best possible outcomes for our children,” he says.
In addition to a common, simplified lottery system for D.C. residents, Gray also is happy the school boundaries finally have been redrawn. “The boundaries have not been really comprehensibly redrawn in four decades,” Gray says.
Friendship Collegiate Academy expelled 56 students in 2011-12 [Friendship PCS, Meridian PCS, Roots PCS, Maya Angelou PCS, KIPP DC PCS, and SEED PCS mentioned]
ABC7 WJLA
By By Justin Karp, Hatzel Vela
June 21, 2013
The Ward 7 charter high school that captured the District of Columbia's first ever citywide football championship in 2012 and sent 20 players from that team to college on scholarships has another, less distinguished statistic to boast - it accounted for nearly a quarter of the city's expelled students in 2011-12.
The Friendship Collegiate Academy Public Charter School expelled 56 students - or 5 percent of its total student population - that year, and suspended 331 of its 1,110 students for at least one day. It's all according to a study done by D.C. Lawyers for Youth, an advocacy group pushing for changes to discipline in schools citywide. In total, Friendship's 56 expulsions accounted for 24.3 percent the 230 students expelled from both D.C. Public Schools and the city's charter schools in 2011-12. The vast majority of those, 227, were kicked out of charter schools.
The broader statistics about school suspensions indicate that 13 percent of the District's students were suspended for at least a day in 2011-12. In total, 18,720 suspensions were handed out across D.C.'s public and charter schools. D.C. Lawyers for Youth says that a disproportionate amount of the discipline affects both special education students and students in poorer wards of the city. "Every time we suspend a student, it makes it more likely that they're going to be held back,” says Eduardo Ferrer, DCLY’s legal and policy director. “It makes it more likely that they're going to drop out of school completely and it makes it more likely that they'll end up in the juvenile justice system."
The numbers seem to back up the latter; of the highest-ranked schools in categories including highest percentage and number suspended, highest number expelled and highest percentage of students suspended for 10 days or more, all of them are located in either Wards 7 or 8. On the contrary, several schools with the lowest rates of discipline, including Meridian and Roots Public Charter Schools, have similar demographic makeups but are located in different parts of town.
Those schools include Friendship Collegiate, Maya Angelou Middle School, KIPP DC, and SEED D.C. Among public schools, campuses including Aiton, Amidon-Bowen and Malcolm X Elementary School rank amongst the highest, while Jefferson Middle School in Ward 6 suspended 72 percent of its student population in 2011-12. A startling 35 percent of all middle schoolers in the District were suspended at one point, the statistics show. Among the city's public schools, the study indicates that fighting, reckless behavior and classroom disruption are the most common reasons students are being suspended.
ABC7 contacted D.C. Public Schools, but a spokesperson wouldn't comment except to say they are reviewing the report. Incredibly, only one of the District's public middle schools, Deal Middle School in Ward 3, suspended students at a rate of less than 20 percent. On the high end, Jefferson Middle in Ward 6 and Shaw Middle in Ward 1 each suspended at least 70 percent of its student body during 2011-12.
Malik Thompson is a young activist who works for Critical Exposure, a non-profit that uses photos to highlight issues young people are facing. Now home schooled, but once a student at three different D.C. schools, he says suspension was common. He was even suspended once in middle school. "Even that one time, not being in the classroom for three days really put me back behind in school work,” Thompson says.
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