- D.C. Public Charter School Board could use services of Charter Board Partners [Friendship PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
- Judge throws out lawsuit challenging D.C. school closures; plaintiffs plan appeal
- How Tests Make Us Smarter
D.C. Public Charter School Board could use services of Charter Board Partners [Friendship PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 22, 2014
A couple of aspects of the story surrounding the revelation that D.C. Public Charter School Board member Barbara Nophlin is working for Friendship PCS through a $195,000 contract stood out for me. The first was the PCSB's executive director Scott Pearson's assertion to the Washington Post's Emma Brown that her engagement does not violate the School Reform Act. So this morning I took a look at the act and here is what it says in reference to this issue:
"No person employed by the District of Columbia public schools or a public charter school shall be eligible to be a member of the Board or to be employed by the Board."
The Post article stated that Ms. Nophlin disclosed her relationship with Friendship at the time she was appointed to the Board in 2013. So I don't understand why a distinction was made between being a direct staff member of a charter school and becoming a contract employee. This is especially true considering today's economic environment in which so many full-time and part-time staff members have been converted to the status of contractor. I think this conflict should have raised a red flag at the time.
The second part of the situation that brings a concern to my mind has to do with a rule put into place after the legal issues arose surrounding Options PCS requiring Board members to receive permission from the executive director before they can do any work for a charter school. But Mr. Pearson reports to the Board, not the other way around. The only way that this requirement makes sense is if permission is granted by Skip McCoy, the PCSB chairman.
We are fortunate in this town to have Charter Board Partners that is able to provide valuable governance expertise regarding matters such as those I'm describing. Perhaps the PCSB should become a client.
Judge throws out lawsuit challenging D.C. school closures; plaintiffs plan appeal
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 21, 2014
A federal judge has dismissed the few remaining claims in a lawsuit that sought to stop the closure of 15 D.C public schools, rejecting plaintiffs’ arguments that the closures violated the civil rights of city children.
“No one is denying that the racial disparities in the recent closings are striking,” U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote in an opinion issued Friday. But “no reasonable jury could infer intentional discrimination.”
Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced in January 2013 that she planned to close the schools, which enrolled far fewer students than they were built to support, so that officials could use resources more efficiently.
Activists with Empower D.C. sued to stop the closures, which disproportionately affected poor and minority students. Sixty-nine percent of the school system’s students are black and 11 percent are white, for example, but black students accounted for 93 percent — and white students just 0.2 percent — of students from the closed schools.
The plaintiffs argued that the closures were intended to free up buildings for charter schools and release funds to pay merit bonuses for teachers, a disproportionate number of whom worked in majority-white schools.
Boasberg, who has been skeptical of the plaintiffs’ arguments since the lawsuit’s filing, dismissed most of the case in October. But he allowed several civil-rights claims to move forward, saying the law required that he give the plaintiffs a chance to gather and present evidence.
In Friday’s decision, Boasberg wrote that the District had provided “overwhelming and uncontroverted evidence” that its closure decisions were race-neutral. The disparity was not due to discrimination but to the location of the under-enrolled schools, which were in neighborhoods where charter schools have attracted an increasing share of students, he added.
“While it is indeed regrettable that our city schools have become so segregated, it is residential segregation, along with changing population patterns, that is largely to blame for the disparities in the closures,” Boasberg wrote.
Henderson praised Boasberg’s “thoughtful decision.”
“Our decision to consolidate schools was made after careful consideration and conversations with the community, recognizing the best way to use the limited resources we have to support all of our students in all wards across D.C.,” Henderson said in a statement.
D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan said in a statement that he is “pleased that the Court recognized what we knew from the start — that our policymakers and elected officials are only doing their best to give the children of the District the top notch education they deserve.”
Plaintiffs’ attorney Johnny Barnes said he plans to appeal.
“We believe we proved that race did motivate the closings, and that is not permitted,” Barnes said. “In addition, the Government wholly violated clear laws governing the process for undertaking school closings and must not be left to believe it can ignore citizen participation and input.”
Boasberg wrote that he is sensitive to the plight of children who have lost the comfort of their neighborhood school and their connections to beloved teachers. But the plaintiffs are arguing policy matters, not law, and their “fight is one for the ballot box — not the courts,” he wrote.
“Although Plaintiffs dislike charter schools, performance pay, and the increasing number of D.C. school closures, there is simply no real evidence that these policies are discriminatory,” he wrote. “As a result, federal courts have no authority to intervene in these sensitive policy choices. . . . Instead, those decisions must be made by the policymakers and experts who have, for better or worse, always controlled public education.”
In a draft plan to overhaul school boundaries, city officials recently proposed reopening five of the closed schools. Activists have argued that the proposal is evidence that no matter what role race played in the decision, the closures were shortsighted.
How Tests Make Us Smarter
The New York Times
By Henry L. Roediger III
July 18, 2014
TESTS have a bad reputation in education circles these days: They take time, the critics say, put students under pressure and, in the case of standardized testing, crowd out other educational priorities. But the truth is that, used properly, testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it.
In one study I published with Jeffrey D. Karpicke, a psychologist at Purdue, we assessed how well students remembered material they had read. After an initial reading, students were tested on some passages by being given a blank sheet of paper and asked to recall as much as possible. They recalled about 70 percent of the ideas.
Other passages were not tested but were reread, and thus 100 percent of the ideas were re-exposed. In final tests given either two days or a week later, the passages that had been tested just after reading were remembered much better than those that had been reread.
What’s at work here? When students are tested, they are required to retrieve knowledge from memory. Much educational activity, such as lectures and textbook readings, is aimed at helping students acquire and store knowledge. Various kinds of testing, though, when used appropriately, encourage students to practice the valuable skill of retrieving and using knowledge. The fact of improved retention after a quiz — called the testing effect or the retrieval practice effect — makes the learning stronger and embeds it more securely in memory.
This is vital, because many studies reveal that much of what we learn is quickly forgotten. Thus a central challenge to learning is finding a way to stem forgetting.
The question is how to structure and use tests effectively. One insight that we and other researchers have uncovered is that tests serve students best when they’re integrated into the regular business of learning and the stakes are not make-or-break, as in standardized testing. That means, among other things, testing new learning within the context of regular classes and study routines.
Students in classes with a regimen of regular low- or no-stakes quizzing carry their learning forward through the term, like compounded interest, and they come to embrace the regimen, even if they are skeptical at first. A little studying suffices at exam time — no cramming required.
Moreover, retrieving knowledge from memory is more beneficial when practice sessions are spaced out so that some forgetting occurs before you try to retrieve again. The added effort required to recall the information makes learning stronger. It also helps when retrieval practice is mixed up — whether you’re practicing hitting different kinds of baseball pitches or solving different solid geometry problems in a random sequence, you are better able later to discriminate what kind of pitch or geometry problem you’re facing and find the correct solution.
Surprisingly, researchers have also found that the most common study strategies — like underlining, highlighting and rereading — create illusions of mastery but are largely wasted effort, because they do not involve practice in accessing or applying what the students know.
When my colleagues and I took our research out of the lab and into a Columbia, Ill., middle school class, we found that students earned an average grade of A- on material that had been presented in class once and subsequently quizzed three times, compared with a C+ on material that had been presented in the same way and reviewed three times but not quizzed. The benefit of quizzing remained in a follow-up test eight months later.
Notably, Mary Pat Wenderoth, a biology professor at the University of Washington, has found that this benefit holds for women and underrepresented minorities, two groups that sometimes experience a high washout rate in fields like the sciences.
This isn’t just a matter of teaching students to be better test takers. As learners encounter increasingly complex ideas, a regimen of retrieval practice helps them to form more sophisticated mental structures that can be applied later in different circumstances. Think of the jet pilot in the flight simulator, training to handle midair emergencies. Just as it is with the multiplication tables, so it is with complex concepts and skills: effortful, varied practice builds mastery.
We need to change the way we think about testing. It shouldn’t be a white-knuckle finale to a semester’s work, but the means by which students progress from the start of a semester to its finish, locking in learning along the way and redirecting their effort to areas of weakness where more work is needed to achieve proficiency.
Standardized testing is in some respects a quest for more rigor in public education. We can achieve rigor in a different way. We can instruct teachers on the use of low-stakes quizzing in class. We can teach students the benefits of retrieval practice and how to use it in their studying outside class. These steps cost little and cultivate habits of successful learning that will serve students throughout their lives.