- Crime jumps at D.C. elementary schools [Imagine PCS mentioned]
- Local student wins national contest with 'letter' to Wilder [BASIS PCS mentioned]
- Catania introduces legislative package to reform education
- D.C. officials warn school bus drivers not to participate in sickout
- Plans to replace 'No Child' law bring dueling visions of federal role in education
Crime jumps at D.C. elementary schools [Imagine PCS mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
June 6, 2013
Violent crime has jumped 33 percent at the District's public elementary schools this school year, while the amount of those crimes occurring at middle and high schools fell.
Public elementary schools saw 57 incidents of violent crime -- which includes robbery, assault, sex abuse and homicide -- on their campuses between Aug. 1, 2012, and May 21, 2013, compared with 43 incidents reported between Aug. 1, 2011 and July 31, 2012, according to data provided by D.C. police.
Nearly 60 percent of the crimes occurred at traditional public schools, the rest at charter schools. That roughly correlates with the 57 percent of public school students in the District who attend traditional schools.
By contrast, high school campuses reported 35 violent crimes this year, down from 44 last year, and middle schools had 43, down from 48. Overall, crime -- both violent crime and property crime -- at public schools in the District is down.
Among elementary schools, Imagine Southeast Public Charter School, a Ward 8 school offering preschool through seventh grade, had the highest number of violent crime incidents so far this school year, with police reports filed for three assaults and three robberies. Last year, the campus had two robberies and no assaults.
At the high school level, Eastern High School in Ward 6 -- which has only grades nine and 10 -- had the most violent crime, with four robberies and two assaults this year, up from two robberies last year. Last year, Ballou High School had the most violent crimes, with five robberies and three assaults.
When crime occurs on campus, parents often aren't notified.
For Ann McLeod, president of Garrison Elementary School's Parent Teacher Association, news of a crime at school comes in the form of excitement from her first-grade son when he sees police at school.
"Not that I think the school is going to tell us any specifics, but you would hope that they would say, 'You may have heard that there was an incident, and here's what we're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again,' " McLeod said.
Garrison saw five robberies last school year -- the highest number at an elementary school last year -- and one this year, at 11:07 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 10.
An increase in crime could be caused in part by a weak economy, even at an elementary school, said Catherine Bradshaw, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. "Economic factors influence family stress and family stability, and that can be passed along to some kids."
But weak finances also can lead a school system to cut back on many of the prevention services, such as school counseling, that help prevent crime, Bradshaw said.
In the District, the Metropolitan Police Department uses a fleet of nearly 100 school resource officers -- police officers embedded at schools -- and contracts with private security guards to manage crimes in schools, said spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump.
Crime is usually at the top of parents' list of factors when choosing a school, though often they pay more attention to the level of crime on the route to and from school than the level of crime at the school itself, said David Pickens, executive director of DC School Reform Now, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Even if students don't witness a crime firsthand, just knowing it happened at their school can make them feel less safe, Bradshaw said. "As kids are exposed to violent acts in schools, it can change the way they view the world."
See link above for chart.
Local student wins national contest with 'letter' to Wilder [BASIS PCS mentioned]
The Northwest Current
By Alix Pianin
June 5, 2013
Palisades fifth-grader Alessandra Selassie recently became the first student from D.C. to win the Library of Congress’ national Letters About Literature contest.
The 11-year-old wowed judges with her “letter” to author Laura Ingalls Wilder — an essay that explained how Wilder’s novels about growing up in a pioneer family helped Selassie better understand her own father’s childhood in Eritrea.
The annual contest, which is sponsored nationally by the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, asks students in grades four through 12 to select a book, poem or speech, and then write a “letter” to its author explaining how they were personally affected by the work. The contest is judged on a state level first — here by the D.C. Public Library system — and then on the national level. This year, Selassie won both. Selassie heard about the competition when her English teacher at the BASIS DC charter school announced the essay prompt as a class writing assignment. When reaching for a work of writing that had impacted her life, Selassie went with a lifelong favorite: Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books from the 1930s and ’40s. Selassie has been reading — and re-reading — the series since kindergarten, but as she has gotten older, she has started to see parallels between Wilder’s accounts of growing up in the Midwest in the late 19th century and her own father’s early life in eastern Africa, she said.
“My dad kept on telling me stories about his childhood, but I wouldn’t really understand them,” Selassie said. “When this contest came up, I thought about my dad, and I realized how I have sort of changed over the time that I had read [the series], because I understood them more, and I related to the books.”
She was among several at her school — a new charter that opened in downtown Washington at the beginning of the academic year — to be selected as finalists to move on to the state championship sponsored by the D.C. Public Library system. In March, she learned that her essay had been selected as the state winner in the category for grades four through six.
“A great story can help students make sense of their lives,” D.C. chief librarian Ginnie Cooper said in a statement. “When a student like Alessandra connects with and is inspired by a story she reads, it helps that child do well in and beyond school.”
In her paper, Selassie wrote that reading about Wilder’s pioneer experience allowed her to better understand parts of her father’s childhood that had sometimes seemed incomprehensible, such as not always having enough to eat or
See link above for full article.
Catania introduces legislative package to reform education
The Northwest Current
By Elizabeth Wiener
June 5, 2013
Catania introduces legislative package Exercising his clout as chair of
the D.C. Council’s Education Committee, at-large member David Catania Tuesday introduced an ambitious package of bills to improve the city’s public and charter schools.The seven bills would:
■ Alter the per-pupil funding formula to boost the allotment for students from poor families and in vocational schools and schools with low graduation rates. The measure also provides that no public school would lose more than 5 percent of its funding from year to year, in order to maintain stability.
■ Require turnaround plans for schools that underperform for two years, or convert them to “innovation schools” with more flexibility in programming and collective bargaining.
■ End “automatic promotions” for young students and require all students who are held back to attend summer school.
■ Establish a “unified lottery,” with common application and deadlines, for applying to all charter and out-of-boundary public schools. Mayor Vincent Gray recently proposed a similar measure.
■ Require vacant school buildings to be either leased to charter schools or designated for D.C. Public Schools use. This bill would also allow charters to go to court if they feel the disposition process is violated.
■ Clarify the role of the school system’s ombudsman in offering “neutral complaint resolution,” and establish a new Office of the Student Advocate to serve as the voice of students and parents and to provide outreach.
■Set a four-year term for the state superintendent of education and allow removal only for cause.
Since taking over as head of the newly constituted committee in January, Catania has promised to scrutinize the school system’s budget,truancy policies and integrity of scoring on standardized tests. On Tuesday, the council gave initial approval to a bill he authored that would make cheating on standardized tests a violation of D.C. law, create standardized testing procedures, and protect whistle-blowers who report cheating by teachers or administrators. The bills introduced Tuesday aim at even broader goals: lifting achievement citywide and narrowing the academic achievement gap between schools in poorer and more affluent neighborhoods.
Since the mayoral takeover in 2007, “there’s no question we’ve had improvements in infrastructure and programs. But it’s clear there’s work to be done,” Catania said. He cited a systemwide graduation rate of only 57 percent, with less than half of all students testing proficient in reading and math.
The fate of the various bills, drafted with the help of a private law firm, is not clear. They probably won’t be considered until the council returns from summer recess in September. But most of them won immediate co-sponsorship by a majority of the council, and all were referred to the Education Committee, which Catania chairs.
From 2008 until this year, education issues have been handled by the council’s Committee of the Whole — a system designed to avoid “micro-managing.” But critics say it also led to less oversight of the public school system, a lapse Catania has vowed to correct.
D.C. officials warn school bus drivers not to participate in sickout
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 6, 2013
District officials are anticipating a school bus driver sickout Friday and Monday and are warning employees that they can be fired for participating.
More than 1,500 bus drivers and attendants transport thousands of D.C. students with disabilities to and from school each day.
“Your collective bargaining agreements prohibit all work slowdown or stoppage actions,” Ryan Solchenberger, transportation director for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.
Bus drivers and attendants have been protesting OSSE’s plan to reduce their working hours from seven to four hours per day over the summer, when fewer bus routes are operating.
The reduction means a 40 percent pay cut for all employees, said Andrew Washington, president of the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Washington denied that the union has been planning a sickout. But some workers may decide on their own not to come to work, he said.
“Individuals are just frustrated and tired,” he said. “Who knows what an individual may do?”
Light summer workloads are a fact of life in the school bus business. In previous years, the city furloughed hundreds of workers, allowing others to maintain their full-time schedules.
Washington said furloughs are preferable because they allow workers to draw unemployment benefits.
Washington blamed union leader Geo T. Johnson, executive director of AFSCME Council 20, for agreeing to the across-the-board cuts. Bus drivers and attendants are planning to rally at Johnson’s office next week, he said.
Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Plans to replace 'No Child' law bring dueling visions of federal role in education
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 6, 2013
Republicans in Congress have rolled out legislation that would sharply limit the power of the executive branch and shrink the role of the federal government in public education in a rebuke to the Obama administration’s influence over education from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have unveiled their own K-12 plan, which would cede more control to states but still maintain some federal oversight, especially of the worst-performing schools.
This is the latest attempt by members of Congress to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the main education law that sets conditions and requirements for every public school receiving federal funds to educate poor students and those with special needs.
No Child Left Behind was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002 and expired in 2007.
But despite several attempts — including one a little more than a year ago — and broad dissatisfaction among school leaders, teachers and parents with No Child Left Behind, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been unable to agree on a new law.
All the bills introduced this week would get rid of the most unpopular aspect of No Child Left Behind — the provision known as annual yearly progress, which requires schools to make yearly progress toward a requirement that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. If they fail to make progress, schools are subject to steadily escalating punitive measures.
That goal of proficiency by 2014 came to be widely seen as unrealistic, and officials from state governors to school board members have been asking Congress to rewrite the law and replace the provision.
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 of No Child Left Behind. In exchange for waivers, states were required to adopt President Obama’s preferred education reforms.
That outraged Republicans on Capitol Hill, who accused Obama of meddling in public schools, an arena with a long history of local control.
In his bill, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, would retain a central requirement of current law — that states test students in math and reading annually from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. States would be required to make public those scores and the performance of students by race, disability and other categories. Those provisions are in the current law.
But Harkin’s bill would lessen the emphasis on standardized tests by letting states use portfolios or projects to assess student performance. And his bill would allow states to come up with their own strategies for improvement, except in cases of the worst-performing schools. Under current law, states must choose from among four “turnaround” strategies prescribed by the federal government.
Harkin’s bill would cut 20 programs and shift the funds to encourage schools to offer or expand arts instruction, physical education and early childhood education.
On Thursday, the committee’s ranking GOP member, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, introduced his own proposal, which would sharply limit the involvement of the federal government. Alexander, a former Tennessee governor who served as education secretary under President George H.W. Bush, called the Democrats’ version “congested with federal mandates.”
Under the Obama administration, the Education Department has become “the national school board,” Alexander said in a statement.
Alexander’s bill would leave to the states decisions about how to measure student achievement, improve schools and gauge the performance of schools and teachers. His plan would replace 62 programs with two block grants that states could use to pay for local needs and priorities.
In the House on Thursday, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), who chairs the committee on education and the workforce, rolled out his proposal, which calls on states to set their own academic standards and decide whether schools are meeting them, as well as what to do about underperforming schools.
His plan would preserve the requirement that states test students in math and reading annually from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school but also would require regular testing in science.
Like the Senate Republican version, Kline’s bill would let states set their own academic standards, decide how well schools are performing and determine what to do about poor performance.
But that kind of autonomy presents problems for children, Democrats said.
Rep. George Miller (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the committee and one of the authors of No Child Left Behind, said Kline’s bill “turns the clock back decades on student achievement, equity and accountability in American public education.”
The Senate committee will mark up its bill next week; the House committee will vote on its bill June 19.