- National Philharmonic Partners with DC School to Provide Intensive Music Program for Students [William E. Doar PCS is mentioned]
- The Evolving Classroom: Lessons Go Virtual [EL Haynes and DC Bilingual PCS are mentioned]
- Looking Forward: The Charter School Challenge
- Most D.C. High School Graduates Don't Finish College in Six Years
National Philharmonic Partners with DC School to Provide Intensive Music Program for Students [William E. Doar PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Associated Press
June 26, 2012
The National Philharmonic is taking over music education programs at a public charter school in Washington to provide intensive instruction in violin, piano and other instruments.
The orchestra based at Strathmore arts center in Bethesda, Md., announced Tuesday that it is partnering with the William E. Doar Public Charter School for the Performing Arts. It will provide music education for all students in kindergarten through 8th grade.
The program will include daily violin instruction for students in kindergarten through 2nd grade. Children in 3rd grade through 5th grade will study music daily in a new piano lab. They will also receive vocal training and lessons on instruments of their choice.
Students in 6th grade through 8th grade who choose a music concentration will spend two hours daily on individual projects.
The Evolving Classroom: Lessons Go Virtual [EL Haynes and DC Bilingual PCS are mentioned]
CNN News
By Rick Bastien
June 27, 2012
On any given Sunday night, your child’s teacher might face this problem: How do you come up with a lesson plan for 20 or more students for an entire week when all your students are learning at a different pace?
Mike is great at reading but needs help in math. Katie excels in science but struggles with writing. They both need to pass the same state tests. And with states picking up new high standards for education, there isn’t always a precedent of how to teach. Even with textbooks and years of experience, the best teachers can struggle to find new ways of teaching complex subjects, especially when each student learns differently.
This is a problem that Eric Westendorf and Alix Guerrier are determined to solve. The two former teachers co-founded LearnZillion.com, a social venture that provides free lessons for students, all in organized YouTube-style videos.
The formula is simple: Videos have to be about five minutes long, illustrated by hand and voiced by a real teacher. The product simulates a real-classroom effect —it’s like your favorite teacher drawing the math lesson on the chalkboard, except that you can play it over and over if you don’t quite understand it. At the end, you take a brief quiz. But as it turns out, this resource is mostly utilized by teachers looking for new ways to teach the topics with which their students are struggling .
In other words, teachers need help from other teachers. Jonathan Krasnov, Learnzillion’s publicist notes, “Even great teachers don’t teach everything great.”
Westendorf was the principal of E.L. Haynes, a charter school in Washington, D.C., when he came up with the idea.
He told CNN, “We started using it because we came across the Khan Academy site. We liked this idea of instruction being captured and delivered to students. Then we said, ‘What if it could be based on the Common Core Standards, [which mostU.S.states have now adopted] , so that it is aligned with what students need? … It was out of these ‘what ifs’ that I came up with a prototype.”
Westendorf plans for LearnZillion to eventually make profit by selling services to school districts, such as lessons tailored to the needs of the school. But he says that the lessons posted online will always be free.
CNN attended LearnZillion’s first TeachFest , recently held in Atlanta. Westendorf and Guerrier recruited more than 100 “Dream Team” teachers to help build up their database of lessons. The teachers get paid $100 for each lesson created. But the chance to reach more students is the biggest reward for many teachers to whom CNN talked.
Mike Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher from Cohasset, Massachusetts, says his interest in the “ability to replicate yourself and your lessons using video” is what led him to LearnZillion. The slogan for TeachFest was “scale your impact.”
The idea is not new. KhanAcademy.org has thousands of lessons, and unlike LearnZillion, Khan Academy is a nonprofit. Both receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation donated $300,000 just for TeachFest.
Even Bill Gates acknowledges that the idea of the virtual classroom hasn’t quite gone viral yet. During last month’s Innovation in Education summit, the Microsoft CEO noted the example of Edx, a partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that provides free online courses.
“The actual usage of things like MIT open courseware is mind-blowing for one reason: Basically no one uses it. … There’s no market for people at home at night saying, ‘How do those wave equations work?’ ”
He pointed out that online lessons won’t dramatically change how schools teach, noting that “there have been as many failures as successes.”
Gates seems to understand it takes time for the technology to evolve. An idea like Khan Academy begins to flourish, and LearnZillion tweaks and tailors the formula to direct it at teachers.
When asked about the successes and failures the Gates Foundation has sponsored, a spokeswoman told CNN in an e-mail, “We are looking for early-stage innovators, and expect that some will succeed and others won’t. When innovations produce great results, they should get plenty of traction to be sustainable over the long run. When some of our investments don’t make it, we’re committed to learning from them and sharing the knowledge broadly.”
CNN education contributor Dr.Steve Perry says that online resources for students and teachers are critical.
“We have passed the place where the local third-grade teacher is equipped with enough knowledge or skills to support her 24 students. She needs to be able to meet their diverse needs.”
He explained why not every classroom has welcomed this kind of technology.
“There are lots of reasons that the Internet has been limited in our brick and mortar schools. Few are good. Most have to do with the threat that they present to the way in which organized labor has established who can and can't be a ‘teacher.’ Sal Khan has four million distinct students a month, yet he couldn't be a teacher in an American public school because he's not a 'certified teacher.' ” Khan was a hedge fund manager before he started Khan Academy.
Jacquelyn Vivalo is dedicated to using technology in her classroom.
She teaches fifth grade at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School, and her students use a variety of online programs on their tablets in class. She says online courses are key for her students because they’re still learning English. Students can review LearnZillion lessons to ensure they understand the language and the content, which helps English language learners. Vivalo might be ahead of the curve, technologically. She says she also uses programs such as readinga-z.com and betterlesson.com, but she became interested in creating lessons for LearnZillion because of the focus on state education standards.
Vivalo sees all this as part of a greater trend, a move toward more classroom integration with lessons available on the Web.
“Teachers and administrators need to be exposed to it and trained with it and have time to get comfortable with it. Once that happens, you can use technology to cater to your students’ needs.”
The Huffington Post
By Kevin P. Chavous
June 26, 2012
Early in my professional career while working as a jury trial lawyer I tried many cases in D.C. Federal court. As fate would have it, the late judge Harold Greene who was presiding over one of my many trials was also working with a host of lawyers on the consent decree which led to the breakup of AT&T, commonly referred to "Ma Bell." Following one of their negotiation sessions, as the telecom lawyers were leaving his chambers, Judge Greene said to me and my opposing counsel, "Monopolies just don't work. Do you know that Ma Bell has several innovations in place, including video conferencing, that they haven't offered to the public because they are waiting for the right time? ... The public needs access to other providers so they will have more innovative telephone options."
"My main concern," Judge Greene said further, "is that these new service providers eventually become the same animal as companies like AT&T."
I thought about Judge Greene's words last week at the National Charter School Conference. Nearly 4,000 people descended on Minneapolis, Minnesota for this event which was particularly special since the first charter school law was passed in Minnesota 20 years ago. It was great to see so many reform-minded educators, policy makers and community activists, all committed to the education of our children, in attendance. However, as with any movement for change, the 20th anniversary of charter schools should also signal a time for all of us to reflect on where the charter movement is today and where it needs to go in the future.
There are now over 5,600 charter schools, serving two million children in 41 states and the District of Columbia. And, for the most part, these schools are serving our children well. But when charter schools aren't performing as well as they should, unlike traditional schools, there is a means to shut them down. Whether a school is public, private or charter, if it's low performing then it must be closed. And, several myths around charters schools remain, such as: they only take the best students, they don't serve kids with special needs, and they don't perform as well as traditional public schools still remain. Charter schools are in fact public schools, the majority are high performing and they must accept all children within their capacity. Yet while there is a lot of angst around the charter school movement, we can't ignore the fact that children have benefitted greatly from the introduction of charter schools.
Just as the break-up of Ma Bell forced us to look at an unfair monopoly within the telecommunications industry, charters schools have forced all of us to re-examine our education service delivery model. Similar to technology boom of the '90s, which brought us Microsoft, Sprint, AOL, Apple and others, American citizens are increasingly becoming better informed education "consumers" and as was the case with AT&T so many years ago, the one size model no longer fits all. Charter schools, specialty schools, magnet schools, private schools and other options provide differing and unique models that address our kids' individual needs.
That being said, bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. It happened with the telecommunications industry, and I am fearful that it will happen within the education reform movement. Our telecom industry has gotten so big that the largest service providers are slowly but surely becoming laser focused on profit, the ability to scale up for bigger impact, and squeezing out the competition, all the while forgetting about the importance of quality customer service. Similarly, folks in the charter school movement seem to have forgotten that the origins of the movement were based on putting thriving "Mom and Pop" schools in place that could serve neighborhood needs better than the bureaucracy-laden local school districts.
While the conference was full of discussions about scalability and replication -- mind you all important topics to the growth and sustainability of this movement -- we cannot ignore the fact that 20 years later, it is increasingly difficult for a single charter school to get started. Today, without a proven track record, the right funders and properly credentialed principal and staff, it's almost impossible to get a charter school approved. Is there an "enemy within"? What happened to the idea of one great educator with the knowledge, skills and ability to work with parents and the community to build a great school in a chosen neighborhood?
At their very core, charter schools were formed to help children obtain a quality education to extricate them out of the cycle of poverty. My fear is that the charter school movement will end up being that which we fight against: a bureaucracy driven system with overstated requirements that place more significance on preserving the system than ensuring that every child has access to a quality education. This may seem harsh, but charter school advocates and leaders must remember why they joined the education reform movement in the first place -- innovation, creativity, and accountability for all children. And if those education reformers need a blatant reminder to steer them away from a bureaucratic mindset, all they need to do is call Sprint customer service and see how long they are placed on hold.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
June 26, 2012
Only 23 percent of students who graduate from D.C.'s public high schools end up graduating from college or any other postsecondary institution within six years, according to an estimate from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
Of 1,969 students who graduated from DC Public Schools and charter schools in 2005, 76 percent went on to a university, community college or trade school. But OSSE has been able to confirm only that 454 students from the class of 2005 ever graduated from a postsecondary institution.
Now, school officials plan to use newly won federal grant money to better track where students go to college, whether they enroll in remedial courses or transfer schools, if and when students graduate, what careers they go on to, and how much money they make in those careers.
By the numbers
High school graduates surveyed: 1,969
High school graduates enrolled in postsecondary: 1,505
High school graduates graduating postsecondary within six years: 454
Source: Office of the State Superintendent for Education
"For the first time we are going to have a real understanding of the question 'Are students prepared for college when they enter?' " said Jeff Noel, director of data management for the public schools.
Many D.C. students don't graduate from high school at all: Only 59 percent of the class of 2011 graduated within four years.
Noel said the number of graduates finishing college may be higher than 23 percent because OSSE was unable to verify a significant number of students' outcomes.
Melissa Salmanowitz, a spokeswoman for DCPS, said the number of students succeeding in college may have increased since the class of 2005 because DCPS has expanded the availability of college-level courses in high schools and begun paying for students to take the PSAT to prepare for college.
Once the new data tracking takes hold, District high schools will receive "feedback reports" based on how their graduates are performing in college and will be encouraged to make changes based on those reports. For instance, if a university notices that students from a particular high school can't write five-paragraph essays, that high school's ninth- and 10th-grade English teachers would be asked to re-examine their curricula.
School officials said Tuesday that DC Public Schools and charter schools could choose to use the data to inform their teacher evaluations. OSSE announced recently that schools could use data points other than standardized test scores, such as high school graduation rates, to evaluate a teacher's performance.
Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, said high school students receive support from their K-12 teachers but are more on their own in college, which could explain part of why so many students don't graduate.
"What if college professors' paychecks and job security were directly related to students getting good scores?" Saunders said. "That, I think, would be an interesting dynamic."
The District will use the $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education and spend about $4.5 million in city funding over the next five years to build a tracking system using college data from the National Student Clearinghouse and employment data from the Baltimore-based Jacob France Institute.
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