FOCUS DC News Wire 7/10/13

 

 

D.C. Council Member David Catania (I-At Large) scheduled four hearings this month to give the public a chance to weigh in on legislation that aims to lift student achievement across the city. He allotted eight hours for each hearing, but so far he hasn’t needed nearly that much time. Catania’s bills have the potential to reshape public education in the District, but they haven’t yet stirred enough passion to draw throngs to the Wilson Building in the dog days of July. Nine parents, activists and school leaders showed up Monday to testify on bills to improve parent engagement and create a more independent Office of the State Superintendent of Education. Last week, a dozen people spoke about bills related to school facilities and enrollment lotteries.

 

Turnout may increase Tuesday for a hearing on some of Catania’s most controversial proposals, including a new local accountability system that would require DCPS schools to be closed or turned into charter-like “innovation schools” if they fail to meet performance targets. Like Gray administration officials — who testified in a separate hearing on July 2 — members of the public have offered mixed reaction to Catania’s proposals in the first two hearings, July 3 and July 8. Here are four main themes that emerged:

 

Charter school advocates like Catania’s facilities bill. Under current law, charter schools are supposed to get first dibs on surplus traditional school buildings. But some empty DCPS schools have ended up in the hands of developers, while others have sat vacant for years. Meanwhile, charters continue to open in church basements and converted commercial spaces that lack gyms, cafeterias and other features that parents expect in a school.

 

“The problem of charter school access to facilities has been one of the most wearying problems that I’ve had to deal with,” said Robert Cane of the pro-charter group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools.

 

Gray administration officials recently announced that they plan to release more than a dozen DCPS buildings to charters, but Catania argues that the city needs an ongoing and systematic process to dispose of buildings. His bill requires the DCPS chancellor to issue five-year facilities plans explaining which buildings the school system needs. The bill also outlines a process for transferring surplus DCPS buildings to charters and gives the D.C. Public Charter School Board a right to take the city to court if it feels the chancellor is wrongly holding onto buildings. Cane called the proposal “much needed and long overdue.”

 

Critics argue that the facilities bill is shortsighted and hastens the transfer of public assets into private hands. Catania's bill misses the point, said Mary Filardo of the 21st Century Schools Fund, an expert in school facilities. The problem is not that charters don’t have enough access to buildings, she said, but that the District has no comprehensive plan for facilities and ends up using school buildings and capital dollars inefficiently. Filardo said she's also concerned that if Catania’s bill becomes law, 40 years from now, the city will have disposed of so many of its buildings that it will no longer have the public school buildings it needs to educate kids.

 

 

 

M.C. Terrell-McGogney Elementary, one of 13 traditional D.C. schools that closed in June for low enrollment, is slated to reopen in the fall as Somerset Preparatory Academy Public Charter School. The summertime conversion of the Southeast Washington school underscores the District’s tilt toward fast-growing charters, which enroll more than 40 percent of the city’s students.

 

Somerset Preparatory Academy is one of four new charters opening in the District this August. The first D.C. school in a charter network operating across Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, it will enroll about 200 students this year in grades six through eight. The college prep school plans to grow each year, eventually serving more than 800 students in grades six through 12. Its board of directors has contracted with Academica, a for-profit Florida company that provides back-office and academic services to more than 100 charter schools across the country.

 

Somerset is moving into M.C. Terrell-McGogney on a one-year sublease from the Charter School Incubator Initiative, a public-private partnership that aims to help new schools afford facilities. The school will pay 80 percent of its facilities allowance — or $2,400 per pupil — in rent this year. Board Chairman Joe Bruno said he is interested in applying for a long-term lease when Gray administration officials put the building out for competitive bids later this year. Parents of students who attended M.C. Terrell-McGogney said they were surprised by plans for the building because Chancellor Kaya Henderson had told them that the school would not become a charter.

 

“Why did she tell us that?” asked Donna Stewart, who served as M.C. Terrell’s PTA president and said that the school’s closure disrupted students’ relationships with each other and with teachers. “It’s unfair that all of those relationships had to be split off for you to do the opposite of what you said.” A school system spokeswoman declined to comment. Henderson’s school closure plan, released in January, did not identify what would happen to M.C. Terrell-McGogney but said DCPS officials would “continue to engage the community and district agencies in the re-use” of the building. M.C. Terrell-McGogney is one of a dozen surplus school buildings that Gray administration officials plan to release to charters on long-term leases later this year.

 

 

The Washington Post's Emma Brown reports that Somerset Preparatory Academy, one of four new charters approved by the D.C. Public Charter School Board to open in the fall of 2013, willoperate during its first year at the closed DCPS M.C. Terrell-McGogney Elementary. Ms Brown explains that Somerset Preparatory is going into Terrell-McGogney with a year's lease from theCharter School Incubator Initiative, a private-public partnership with D.C.'s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). Building Hope manages new construction projects for the Incubator Initiative. Joe Bruno, Building Hope's President, is Chairman of the board of the new charter.

 

M.C. Terrell-McGogney Elementary, located in Southeast D.C., is one of the sixteen schools Deputy Mayor of Education Smith recently announced would be turned over to community organizations or charters for use as permanent facilities. Ms. Brown quotes Mr. Bruno as saying that Somerset Preparatory Academy is interested in submitting a proposal to lease the school when it goes out for bid.

 

Ms. Brown also reveals that the new charter has contracted with Florida's Academica for educational support and services. I recently wrote about hearing an exciting talk by Academica's President Fernando Zulueta at the 2013 National Charter SchoolsConference. Somerset PCS, a college preparatory charter, plans to open with 200 students in grades six through eight and will grow to 800 pupils in grades six through twelve.

 

 

People make a lot of decisions based on school test scores. Parents select schools for their children. Administrators fire principals and close schools. But few realize that they are using the wrong scores to make these important decisions.

 

Most people use the "percent proficiency" score, which measures what percentage of the students in a school are proficient in math or reading using the DC CAS test. They should also be using the Median Growth Percentile (MGP) which is based on the CAS scores. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) calculates MGP, but few people look at it.

 

That can cause problems. Recently the Public Charter School Board actually closed one of the top performing schools in the city based on MGP, because its percent proficiency scores were too low. Where does your local school rank based on MGP scores? See below. Proficiency measures demographics, MGP measures value added by a school

Most parents compare schools by looking at the percentage of students in the school who tested proficient in math and reading. It's understandable why they do that, as DC Public Schools prominently displays this information on their web site.

 

The DCPS web site shows that 85% of students tested proficient in math and 82% tested proficient in reading. Deal ranks as having the 10th highest test scores in the city, the highest of any middle school. But what does that mean? How much of this comes from actual great teaching at Deal, and how much from the fact that Deal draws from some of the most affluent parts of the District? What really matters is how much a school helps its students advance. Percent proficiency doesn't tell you this on its own. For example, Janney Elementary feeds into Deal Middle School. 90% of students at Janney test proficient in math and 93% test proficient in reading. Does that mean Janney students are going downhill when they attend Deal? Probably not.

 

What would happen if a housing development opened next door to Deal, and the city attached a sizable affordable housing requirement to the development which drew some families with middle schoolers who were previously farther behind? Deal's proficiency percentages would go down the following year. Does that mean that the quality of instruction got worse at Deal? Probably not that, either.

 

These scenarios illustrate the problem with using static data to try to understand the quality of instruction at a school. What you want to look at is longitudinal data. Longitudinal data tracks the performance of the same students over time, to measure the value added by different schools and classrooms over the entire schooling of a student. MGP uses longitudinal data.

 

The National Academy of Sciences argues against using the most prominent source of static test scores—the federal NAEP test—to draw conclusions on the causal effect of school reforms for exactly this reason. Yet nearly every piece of advocacy research arguing for or against school reform makes the mistake of using static data. That's why they draw different conclusions using the same data, leaving parents confused and frustrated.

 

Ranking DC schools by MGP scores reveals some surprises. Here's how MGP works. If a school has an MGP of 60, that means that the students in that school scored better than 60% of the students citywide who had similar test scores in previous years. The top 5 schools by MGP are not in the top 5, or even the top 10, when ranked by percent proficiency.

 

Deal Middle School, the 10th ranked school by test scores and top ranked middle school, ranks 38th by MGP. Deal has a math MGP of 59.9 and a reading MGP of 58.5. Does that mean that KIPP middle schools are better than Deal? Many parents would say no. And MGP doesn't measure everything important about a school on its own. But this reveals how parents often use test scores—as an indicator of the quality of the other students, not the quality of the instruction. 

 

 

However, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) ranked Septima Clark as a "mid-performing school" in its Charter Performance Report. The PCSB indicated that it would close the school, which forced Septima Clark to merge with Achievement Prep. One parent told ABC, "Either the board was misinformed, had no idea what was going on or just deliberately did not care".

 

When asked why they closed one of the top-performing schools in the city, PCSB Executive Director Scott Pearson said "Growth is one of many important indicators of school quality, but we caution the use of it in isolation". Pearson pointed to a high churn rate of students at Septima Clark, which indicates to him that parents are dissatisfied. Pearson said that the PCSB "weighs growth as a factor, along with proficiency, attendance, re-enrollment, and whether students can read by third grade (a predictor for future successes such as high school graduation and college completion). We were pleased to see Septima Clark PCS had a strong showing in growth last year, but previous year's growth scores were not as strong, and its proficiency is one of the lowest in the city."

 

MGP scores should be a larger factor in assessing schools. OSSE has provided MGP scores for 2 years. Nonetheless, advocates on all sides of the education reform dialogue continue to use non-longitudinal data to assess the outcomes of school reform initiatives. And DCPS, PCSB and OSSE continue to prominently display percent proficiency scores of each school on their online report cards. All three agencies should modify their online report cards to prominently display MGP, and explain it in layman's terms. It's not complicated. And people make very important decisions based on these scores.

 

Journalists should also ask advocacy researchers why they use static data when longitudinal data is available. Just like journalists note the margin of error of studies that they report, they should also note when advocacy research relies on non-longitudinal data. Wanna see where your local school ranks? Here's the entire list (XLSX) of DC schools, ranked by the average of 2011 and 2012 MGP. How does your child's school or your neighborhood school rank, and what does this tell you?