FOCUS DC News Wire 7/15/13

• D.C. Council member David Catania’s plan for schools draws mixed reviews [FOCUS mentioned]
• Jonetta Rose Barras gets it wrong when it comes to D.C. charters
• Why top teacher ignores latest reform directives
• CRAIG: Common core’s abstraction distraction
• The Trouble With Testing Mania

 

D.C. Council member David A. Catania’s ambitious plan to overhaul city schools drew mixed reactions at five recent hearings, with parents and activists praising the lawmaker’s urgency but voicing concern that some of his proposals may carry unintended consequences. Advocates for the traditional school system offered some of the most pointed criticism, arguing that Catania’s legislation could accelerate the rise of charter schools and the withering of neighborhood schools.

 

“I strongly urge you not to rush,” said longtime education activist Cathy Reilly, testifying Thursday during the last of the five hearings. “These bills represent as large a change as the shift to mayoral control. I don’t think your colleagues on the council or the citizens of the city understand what they will mean.”

 

Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee, said he understands advocates’ concerns but believes that the city’s school system, which has attracted a declining share of students in recent years, is headed for a “death spiral” unless it shows meaningful achievement gains that persuade parents not to flee.

 

“We’ve put forward a serious proposal that I believe will help stabilize DCPS schools,” he said. “If you are not in support of what I propose, then what is your alternative?” Catania’s seven bills touch on a range of issues, including how students should be promoted or retained; how vacant school buildings should be transferred to charters; and how the city should help parents navigate the city’s education choices.

 

But the proposals center on a key trade-off: All schools would get more money for students from low-income families, who often come to class with greater challenges than their affluent peers. And in return, all schools would have to meet performance targets in order to continue operating.

 

While charter schools already must meet certain targets to keep their doors open, Catania’s bills would create a new set of standards for traditional schools. Struggling schools would be required to write turnaround plans and make measurable progress toward their goals. Those that fail would be closed or turned into charter-like “innovation schools,” free of certain municipal regulations and union work rules.

 

That proposed accountability system is among the most controversial of Catania’s ideas, drawing pushback from both community activists, who fear that neighborhoods would lose their schools, and from Gray administration officials. But Catania, who has said that the threat of closure can inspire a school to improve, said he believes his proposals are the right way to go.

 

“I didn’t hear anything in the course of these many days of hearings that made me second-guess the direction that we are going,” he said. “It’s a matter of fine-tuning and tweaking and perfecting what was introduced.”

 

The debate will continue at community meetings that Catania is holding in each of the city’s eight wards over the next several weeks. He said the public input will help him create a revised set of proposals to be released when the council returns from its summer recess in September. He hopes his colleagues will vote on the measures sometime in the fall.

 

Several of Catania’s proposals drew broad praise from activists, including a measure to create a new office of the student advocate, which would run parent education centers around the city, and to strengthen the role of the education ombudsman, who mediates disputes between families and schools. Activists also welcomed Catania’s push to increase per-pupil allocations for poor children, arguing that schools need the extra resources to meet the intense needs of kids who grow up in poverty.

 

The legislation does not specify how many extra dollars would be allocated for each of those categories, and activists urged Catania to wait for the results of a study on school funding that was commissioned by the Gray administration and is expected in September. Catania said he would like to see schools receive about 15 percent extra for every poor child they enroll — or about $1,400 extra per child based on current funding levels.

 

That would cost the District close to $80 million based on the current number of low-income students enrolled in city schools. It’s not clear whether council members would be receptive to such a large increase. Another key subject of discussion during the recent hearings, held during the first two weeks of July, was a proposal by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) to give Chancellor Kaya Henderson the power to approve new charter schools.

 

Henderson has said she needs chartering authority as a tool to bring in outside operators to turn around low-performing schools. But the proposal has spurred resistance from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

 

Robert Cane of the pro-charter Friends of Choice in Urban Schools said chancellor-authorized schools would be a diluted version of charters, lacking real independence from the government.

 

Elizabeth Davis, president-elect of the Washington Teachers Union, argued that chartering authority “gives the chancellor an excuse” for not doing the hard work of coordinating with teachers and parents to improve schools. Davis, calling the growth of charters a “crisis” for the traditional school system, pressed Catania to consider limiting the number of charters allowed to open each year. That argument was echoed by Capitol Hill parent Suzanne Wells, who said that charters continue to open without any effort to understand their impact on existing schools.

 

Catania said he would not support a moratorium or new limit on the number of charters. “I don’t believe that the answer to improving DCPS schools is closing the opportunity for additional choice,” he said.

 

 

Yesterday in the Washington Post Jonetta Rose Barras had a column calling for the city to perform an independent comprehensive report on the effects of charter schools. The rationale behind her recommendation is the recently released Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) Study on the national charter school movement. She writes:

 

"Consider that CREDO researchers found, among other things, 'The 2009 and 2013 charter school impacts on math learning gains are significantly lower than their respective TPS [traditional public school] counterparts.' Further, it says, 'students at new schools have significantly lower learning gains in reading than their TPS peers.'”

 

But Ms. Barras must not have read the entire 90 page paper. For while what she says is true about the overall charter school movement nationally, charters in D.C. have posted much stronger academic findings. The investigators discovered that students attending charters here gain an astounding 72 additional days in learning in reading and an additional 101 days of learning in math per year compared to the traditional schools.

 

So instead of calling for, as Ms. Barras does in her article, the growth of charters to be restricted or stopped, the exact opposite should be the case. Let's pull together as many resources as possible to prevent another year to go by with students trapped in DCPS facilities. Today we must figure out how to permit every child to be taught in a quality charter school seat. This way we allow all parents to see what over 35,000 kids are currently experiencing.

 

 

Rafe Esquith, the most imaginative and productive classroom teacher I know, freely admits he overdoes it.

 

He works long hours, including Saturdays. He leads his fifth graders in mounting several performances of a Shakespeare play each year. He helps former students prepare for college. This summer he gave speeches in China, took former students to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, drove their luggage 700 miles, showed students several John Steinbeck haunts, did an 11 day tour for this new book and took students on a Mississippi steamboat ride.

 

As hyper as he is, after 29 years teaching mostly low-income Hispanic and Korean kids in a small, rundown classroom in Los Angeles he knows what drains teacher energy and ambition. In his new book, “Real Talk for Real Teachers,” he describes this in ways I think nearly every teacher in the country would endorse:

 

The system, “rather than encourage and support you, . . . actively works to discourage you,” he writes. “Every few years a new ‘game changer’ is announced as the newest set of standards are introduced, but the system never really changes. Veteran teachers know that these standards are no different from the old ones. Taking a page from the politburo, leaders stand in the front of the room at professional development meetings making demands and predictions for their ‘New World Order.’ Good teachers don’t know whether to laugh, cry or quit.

 

“The most recent sermon on the mount has come to us in the form of Common Core Standards. I am not making this up: the presenter at our first training explained that our job as teachers was ‘to prepare the children to be a part of the international workforce.’ We were also told that the emphasis on imaginative literature was going to be scaled back because children need more nonfiction.”

 

Let’s give the Cluelessness of the Year award to the presenter who said that to Esquith. He has proven that a close reading of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and even Shakespeare can have a magical effect on 10 year olds from homes where English is not the first language, even though he is told such texts are inappropriate for that age group.

 

Standardized tests have their place. Esquith’s kids do much better on them than other students with similar backgrounds. But the best way to determine a teacher’s worth is to spend time with his students. Ian McKellen, the great English actor, became an Esquith devotee after giving a performance in Los Angeles in which a group of children in the audience way too young for Shakespeare seemed enraptured. In fact, he realized, they were mouthing the dialogue as if they already knew it.

 

As Esquith says in the book, “real teachers know that real teaching is not based on the Common Core, or blended learning, or the newest notebook of rules and regulations handed out at the Tuesday staff meeting.” His view of the new world order is nicely illustrated by the D.C. Public Schools announcement last year that the city’s 40 lowest performing schools would have to raise their average proficiency rates from 23 percent to a completely ridiculous 63 percent by 2017.

 

Esquith’s book is full of good advice for teachers, including himself, who want to raise their kids to a new level without killing themselves. He schedules more rest and relaxation into his day. His formula for great teaching is following his best instincts about what works and ignoring expert advice when it contradicts what he knows to be true.

 

Some schools encourage their teachers to act that way. I wish there were more schools like them.

 

 

Some would have us believe that without Common Core, the nation that sent men to the moon will watch its children float aimlessly along, failing to go to college, land careers or get ahead in the world.

 

Common Core, which in essence is national math and English curriculum standards, slipped under the radar of the public’s consciousness during the Great Recession. Before we knew it, 45 states signed on and it seemed to have a momentum all its own. Many are now realizing that Common Core is only the latest educational fad — one that proponents say is the next magic solution needed to restore our nation’s competitiveness.

 

As a 34-year educator in Maryland’s public schools, I’ve seen education fads come and go. After we accomplished President Kennedy’s goal during the 1960s of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to Earth, the ‘70s brought about a wave of standardized testing regimes in states throughout the country. The era of automated, collectivized testing has been an unfortunate legacy.

 

The Common Core goes a step further. It will attempt to change how children learn, and it not only doubles down on testing, but it makes up its own test. It won’t be enough to know how many miles away the moon is from Earth. The poor student will also have to explain how that figure is derived. Explaining a correct answer under Common Core is more difficult than knowing the answer itself. The following muddled paragraph illustrates this; anticipating how these instructions will be interpreted in classrooms should give everyone who cares about education extreme anxiety.

 

According to the Maryland Common Core “Standards for Mathematical Practice,” first-graders are expected to “decontextualize — to abstract a given situation and represent it symbolically and manipulate the representing symbols as if they have a life of their own, without necessarily attending to their referents — and the ability to contextualize, to pause as needed during the manipulation process in order to probe into the referents for the symbols involved.” I’m sorry, but that is further out there than Pluto, and I have no idea what that means. Neither will 7-year-olds and their hapless teachers.

 

Maryland, as it is apt to do with other federal takeover schemes, jumped head-first into Common Core in 2010. Originally billed as a state-driven effort, the program soon became intertwined with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education grants. Now Indiana, North Carolina and Michigan officials are in various stages of extricating themselves from Common Core, and opposition is brewing in a growing number of states in every region of the country. New York and Kentucky are facing problems with new testing procedures under Common Core, and state education officials are facing a backlash among principals, teachers and parents. The pushback spans from teachers unions to the Tea Party.

 

Add Maryland — the state our politicians promote as the best in the nation in public education — to this list. The same publication that politicians cite relentlessly to tout Maryland’s public school rankings, Education Week, is chronicling the dispute between the state’s largest teachers union and the state’s education department. Politicians are now suddenly quiet. The Maryland State Education Association was planning last month to seek a court injunction against state-imposed teacher evaluation and testing mandates. The subtext of this angst is a new test aligned with Common Core.

 

According to a recent Maryland State Education Association survey, 82 percent of teachers think that significant challenges remain to understanding and implementing Common Core in their schools. Adding to the complexity of implementing Common Core itself is transitioning into the new testing system. If teachers aren’t ready to adhere to Common Core standards in the 2013-14 school year, how ready are school administrators going to be to test studentson it the year after?

 

It used to be a teacher’s primary goal was to “reach” a student. That will never happen as long as politicians and education bureaucrats in Washington insert themselves between teachers and students. Common Core is a backdoor way of nationalizing education, one based on a notion that children are to be churned out of schools on conveyor belts and into the workforce. It will never work.

 

Washington and Annapolis, we have a problem. For a country that educates people well enough to send spacecraft to the moon and Mars, we need not surrender ourselves to the latest education fad that pushes teachers and students further apart.

 

 

Congress made a sensible decision a decade ago when it required the states to administer yearly tests to public school students in exchange for federal education aid. The theory behind the No Child Left Behind Act was that holding schools accountable for test scores would force them to improve instruction for groups of children whom they had historically shortchanged.

 

Testing did spur some progress in student performance. But it has become clear to us over time that testing was being overemphasized — and misused — in schools that were substituting test preparation for instruction. Even though test-driven reforms were helpful in the beginning, it is now clear that they will never bring this country’s schools up to par with those of the high-performing nations that have left us far behind in math, science and even literacy instruction.

 

Congress required the states to give annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight (and once in high school) as a way of ensuring that students were making progress and that minority children were being fairly educated. Schools that did not meet performance targets for two years were labeled as needing improvement and subjected to sanctions. Fearing that they would be labeled poor performers, schools and districts — especially in low-income areas — rolled out a relentless series of “diagnostic” tests that were actually practice rounds for the high-stakes exams to come.

 

That the real tests were weak, and did not gauge the skills students needed to succeed, made matters worse. Unfortunately, most states did not invest in rigorous, high-quality exams with open-ended essay questions that test reasoning skill. Rather, they opted for cheap, multiple-choice tests of marginal value. While practically making exams the center of the educational mission, the country underinvested in curriculum development and teacher training, overlooking the approaches that other nations use to help teachers get constantly better.

 

The government went further in the testing direction through its competitive grant program, known as Race to the Top, and a waiver program related to No Child Left Behind, both of which pushed the states to create teacher evaluation systems that take student test data into account. Test scores should figure in evaluations, but the measures have to be fair, properly calibrated and statistically valid — all of which means that these evaluation systems cannot be rushed into service before they are ready.

 

Foreign nations with the highest-performing school systems did not build them this way. In fact, none of the top-performing nations have opted for a regime of grade-by-grade standardized tests. Instead, they typically have gateway exams that determine, for example, if high school students have met their standards. These countries typically have strong, national curriculums. Perhaps most important, they set a high bar for entry into the teaching profession and make sure that the institutions that train teachers do it exceedingly well.

 

In Finland, for example, teacher preparation programs are highly competitive and extremely challenging. (The programs are free to students and come with a living stipend.) Close attention is devoted not just to scholarly and research matters but to pedagogical skills.

 

This country, by contrast, has an abysmal system of teacher preparation. That point was underscored recently in a harrowing report on teacher education programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. The report found that very few programs meet even basic quality standards: new students are often poorly prepared, and what the schools teach them “often has little relevance to what they need to succeed in the classroom.”

 

Some problems could be partly solved by the Common Core learning standards, an ambitious set of goals for what students should learn. The Common Core, adopted by all but a handful of states, could move the nation away from rote memorization — and those cheap, color-in-the-bubble tests — and toward a writing-intensive system that gives students the reasoning skills they need in the new economy. But the concept has become the subject of a backlash from test-weary parents who have little confidence in a whole new round of exams that the system will require. Beyond that, teachers are understandably worried that they will be evaluated — and pushed out of jobs — based on how their students perform on tests related to the old curriculum while they are being asked to teach the new one. If school officials fail to resolve these issues in a fair manner, the national effort to install the new standards could collapse.

 

Congress could ease some of the test mania by rethinking the way schools are evaluated under No Child Left Behind. Test scores are important to that process, but modest weight should be given to a few other indicators, like advanced courses, promotion rates, college-going rates and so on. Similarly, the states that have allowed the districts to choke schools with the diagnostic tests and data collection could reverse that trend so that schools have perhaps one or two higher-quality tests per year. In other words, the country needs to reconsider its obsession with testing, which can make education worse, not better.