NEWS
- Thousands move in and out of schools during the year, creating disruptions [National Collegiate Preparatory PCS and KIPP DC College Prep PCS mentioned]
- D.C. Charter School Uses Tough Love To Erase Achievement Gap [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
- Preventing Student 'Summer Slide'
Thousands move in and out of schools during the year, creating disruptions [National Collegiate Preparatory PCS and KIPP DC College Prep PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 4, 2015
More than 10,000 students transferred into or out of the District’s public schools during the 2013-2014 school year, a massive ebb and flow that experts say is linked to lower achievement and faltering graduation rates.
The churn was particularly acute in the city’s comprehensive high schools, where rosters grew by as much as 30 percent, according to individual school data on student mobility released by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). Students came and went from other countries, from other schools, from neighboring districts, from jail. They stayed for a day or a few weeks, or for the rest of the year. Many who left disappeared from the city’s records completely.
Experts say that such high levels of movement create disruptions and distractions at a time when students are at the greatest risk of dropping out of school. They make schooling more difficult for children and teens, interrupting routines, learning, and formative relationships with friends and teachers. The flux is also hard on schools, as teachers and counselors must constantly adjust to changing classrooms.
“We’re used to it,” said Amber Oliver, a 10th-grade English teacher at Roosevelt High, a neighborhood school in Petworth that started the 2014-2015 school year with 487 students, enrolled 73 more by May and had 47 students withdraw. “We are an open-door school. Students that nobody else will take, we will take them.”
Among those who enrolled in the spring — some just weeks before the school year ended — were a 17-year-old from Guatemala returning to classes for the first time since he was in sixth grade, a ninth-grader who left a nearby charter school after she was caught with marijuana, and an 18-year-old who dropped out of Southeast Washington’s Ballou High earlier in the year after moving into a group foster home in Northwest Washington.
Often, transient students bring complex challenges that can take schools time to identify and begin to address. They present additional challenges in a city such as Washington, which already struggles to educate its most at-risk students and where thousands of children are homeless or have family instability.
According to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report, about 13 percent of students nationally changed schools four or more times by the eighth grade. The most mobile students were disproportionately poor, black and came from families that did not own a home. The report found that about 12 percent of the nation’s schools had high rates of mobility, with more than 10 percent of students leaving their school during a single year.
Dozens of schools in the District gained or lost the equivalent of 10 percent of their enrollment, according to the OSSE data.
The District also is a national leader in school choice, with 44 percent of students enrolled in public charter schools and a lottery system that allows students to enroll in traditional schools throughout the city. Policies that allow for expansive school choice — which communities across the country are beginning to embrace — are intended to improve educational opportunities. But some say they have an unintended consequence.
“They promote the idea that you can change schools at will,” said Russell Rumberger, a professor of education at the University of California at Santa Barbara who studies mobility.
Jennifer Niles, the District’s deputy mayor for education, said that the District needs to do far more work to understand why students weave in and out of the city’s schools and across state lines into Maryland and Virginia. She wants to identify schools that are successful at holding on to potentially transient students to better understand how they do it.
Routine school changes typically happen during the summer, when transitions are easier to manage ahead of a new school year. Midyear transitions are far more disruptive.
In the District, traditional schools bear the brunt of midyear turnover. Many charter schools do not admit students after the beginning of the school year, while neighborhood schools are required to enroll students at any point.
During the 2013-2014 school year, the school system’s enrollment grew by 2 percent — with 3,175 students entering midyear and 2,226 leaving — while charter schools’ enrollment declined by 5 percent — with 1,306 entering and 3,164 leaving, OSSE data shows. Among high schools, nearly every traditional high school gained students, while every charter school lost students.
Cardozo Education Campus, a public school that serves sixth- through 12th-graders, had the highest influx, with a 30 percent enrollment increase due in large part to a growing number of immigrant students; the Northwest Washington school’s net gain was about 18 percent, as scores of students withdrew during the same year. National Collegiate Preparatory, a charter school in Southeast Washington, lost the equivalent of 14 percent of its students, partly due to a policy that automatically withdraws students who have been absent for 25 days, said Jennifer Ross, the school’s founder and executive director.
Demetrice Lester, 18, said that coming from a charter school, the churn at Roosevelt was striking. He left KIPP DC College Prep in the winter after his grades fell and he thought he couldn’t catch up, he said.
“At KIPP, you saw the same people every day. The same kids. It’s kind of like a prep school. Everybody’s parents are on them,” he said. “Here, a lot of kids don’t really come to school.”
Brian Wiltshire, an Advanced Placement English teacher at Roosevelt, said he starts the school year teaching Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” discussing rhetorical devices, what’s real and what’s not, and how education shapes your perspective. It’s a lesson he likes to refer to throughout the year. But he often looks out at his class and sees several students who don’t know what he’s talking about.
“Everything we do in class is interconnected,” he said. “If you can’t make those connections, they are only seeing a piece.”
Teachers at Roosevelt said they help new students get up to speed by customizing lesson plans and offering time for makeups. Wiltshire said he stays at school until 8 p.m. four nights a week to assist students.
The students who transfer in late are often less likely to come to class, he said.
All the coming and going has a cumulative effect. Of the 123 seniors who graduated from Roosevelt on June 12 or are scheduled to graduate in August, just 27 started at the Northwest Washington school at some point during their freshman year; 78 percent of the graduates spent three or fewer years in the school.
After many years of viewing student mobility as a family problem that schools could do little to control, more school districts are focusing on the issue, Rumberger said.
Along with the District, a handful of states, including Colorado and Rhode Island, have begun reporting data on mobility. California is developing a system for holding schools accountable for students’ academic progress even after they change schools.
Niles hopes to reduce mobility by changing the way schools are funded, devising a system that pays schools according to actual enrollments.
A charter school’s funding is based on October enrollment, no matter how many students the school loses or gains throughout the year. Traditional schools receive funding based on projected enrollments from the previous spring. Critics say the system encourages traditional schools to inflate projections and charter schools to let go of students after their October audits.
Cathy Reilly, a longtime advocate for District high schools, said possible solutions are more complex: “We have to change the culture at schools, so we really make it more attractive to stay, and get rid of this whole mentality that the answer is to just go find something better.”
Students enrolling at Roosevelt during the past two years entered a school that already has a makeshift feel. The school has been operating in temporary quarters in the former MacFarland Middle School building while the 1930s-era high school undergoes a $130 million renovation next door.
The reopening of Roosevelt was recently pushed back until the fall of 2016. The new school will feature a dual-language track and a global studies program, as well as a proud new facade.
For now, students make do in the aging building next door with bars on the windows and storage boxes in the hallway, while bulldozers and cranes outside promise something better.
Antony Santay, 17, said he was looking for a fresh start when he transferred in February from DuVal High School in Prince George’s County, where he had been suspended multiple times and was going to school “about once a month.” He moved in with his mother in the District and enrolled at Roosevelt.
“I didn’t want to be a nobody in life,” he said. It was strange to walk into a place where he did not have any friends, but he said he started going to school every day and by spring he had A’s and B’s on his report card, something he hadn’t seen in years.
In the fall, he said, he’ll come back to Roosevelt.
“I’m doing better,” he said. “I think it’s better if I stay.”
D.C. Charter School Uses Tough Love To Erase Achievement Gap [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
WAMU 88.5
By Matthew S. Schwartz
July 3, 2015
Eleven years after the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School opened its doors, its first class of seniors graduated last month. Adding one grade a year until you have 12 presented a series of learning opportunities for everyone. The educators had to figure out just how hard they could challenge their students to succeed. And students had to realize just how much they were capable of.
“I think I took 8 or 9 AP tests and so far I’ve failed all of them,” says now-graduated senior Patricia Salvador. “I thought I was ready for it. It just turns out I wasn’t.”
Salvador isn’t the only one to fail her advanced placement tests. When the Northwest D.C. high school opened four years ago, every ninth grader sat for the tests — and every ninth grader failed.
The school's founder, Jennie Niles, was okay with that. "There is lots of evidence that simply taking an AP course and exposing a student to the level of rigor that they're going to need to achieve at, helps them achieve higher later when they're in college," she says.
Niles, who has since taken a job as D.C. deputy mayor for education, started E.L. Haynes in 2004 with the goal of eliminating the achievement gap in the United States. She wanted to create a school where kids from all different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds could succeed. The ninth-graders didn't pass their AP tests that year, but that wasn't the point of the exercise.
"The sense of self-confidence they came out with by saying — 'I'm a ninth-grader and I just took an AP exam and it was really hard but I got some of it right' — was actually what we were shooting for," Niles says.
A learning experience for students and teachers
E.L. Haynes administrators have walked a delicate balance: They want to challenge their students, but not make things so hard that they discourage them. It's a learning experience for teachers as much as it is for their students.
Duanje Stowes, who's been at E.L. Haynes since seventh grade, says the class has been "guinea-pigged on."
"We're trying some interesting things," says founding principal Caroline Hill. "We're not quite sure if it's going to work. But one thing that we're not willing to negotiate on is the mission of college readiness."
Hill's strategy was to expose students to the most rigor possible. "I firmly believe that you don't know what you can handle until you experience it," she says.
That means throwing students into advanced classes — in many cases without much preparation. "You could have five preps and I could create a General Chemistry and an Honors Chemistry and an AP chemistry — or we could have one," says Hill.
It's a lot of pressure, she says, but it's necessary. "Conventional measures haven't worked for black and brown children. Right? They haven't worked. So we have to think differently about what their educational program looks like if we want to have a different result," she says.
A rigorous education
Creating a high school posed big challenges. E.L. Haynes went from a class of 50 eighth-graders to 121 ninth-graders. Those new students came from all over the city — and nearly 40 of them quickly transferred out. This school can be tough for students who haven't grown up with the rigorous E.L. Haynes philosophy.
"If you're not on it the way you need to be on it, you're going to fail," says Stowes. "A lot of people had a hard time figuring that out."
Stowes grew up in Ward 7. She had been attending a school in southeast before coming to E.L. Haynes. It was a big shock.
"I was so used to teachers not caring, and doing what I want, and watching fights every day," she says. "Southeast D.C. public school system — it was tough before I came to E.L. Haynes. And then when I got here, the teachers were, like, happy! And I was like, 'Teachers happy? I've never seen this before!'"
At E.L. Haynes, she says, "I learned that I was actually smart. Because at public schools, you know, I didn't really know.'"
Stowes was accepted to nine colleges, received $150,000 in scholarships, and is going to George Mason University in the fall. Salvador — the one who failed nine AP tests — became co-valedictorian. She's headed to Goucher College.
Mastery more important than strict timetables
The college acceptance rate among E.L. Haynes graduates is 100 percent. But not everyone has graduated — yet. Of the 78 students in the class of 2015, 25 aren't graduating.
That's okay with Principal Hill, who preaches a "competency-based" model of education that cares more about mastery of a subject and less about how long that mastery takes. "We want to make sure that learning is the constant and time is the variable, and giving every kid what they need to achieve that mission," she says.
If that means it takes the students five or even six years to graduate, that's okay as long as they're ready to move to college and beyond.
As the top education official in the District, Niles says she hopes to apply the lessons of E.L. Haynes to education throughout the city.
"We need to shift the way we think about it, given who our high school students are in D.C.," she says, so that "we can start creating institutions that meet our students where they are, rather than expecting our students to meet the institutions where they are."
Six months after Niles left the school she founded to take on education challenges District-wide, she was back in front of the students she had watched grow up, in front of people she thinks of as family, giving them a final send off into the world she helped prepare them for.
In her speech to the graduating class, Niles had one final message: "We love you," she said. "We will always be here for you." Her voice starts to crack. "We will always believe in you. We will always take pride in you. And we will always remember you."
Preventing Student 'Summer Slide'
Washington Informer
July 3, 2015
As students slip into their summer vacations, it’s up to families to make sure they don’t slip into academic amnesia. Usually, in what is called the summer slide, students forget up to six months of math and reading instruction when they’re not engaged in academic activities between school years.
Matthew Mugo Fields thinks he has the solution to halting that slide. He hopes to bridge the gap with Rocket Group, an education company he founded. His suite of programs for schools and parents blend technology, face-to-face instruction, and specialized curricula based on groundbreaking yet obscure research from Stanford University.
“[Summer slide] is a huge problem. And it’s exacerbated for low-income and minority students,” says Fields, a Morehouse University alumnus who holds a double-masters in business and education from Harvard University. “The research I’ve seen says that nearly half of the achievement gap can be explained by the difference in summer learning between low-income students and their counterparts.
Tammy Drayton is an early childhood teacher in Newark, N.J. Even kindergarten students are expected to know a few things at the start of school, such as counting to 10, colors, shapes, and the days of the week. When such lessons are new or lost to them, the impact is clear.
“We might have to do more one-on-one work with [that student],” she said. “But it may affect their social skills. Because if they realize they’re not on the level of other kids, they tend to pull away and shut down. They feel different, in a sense.”
Summer slide affects older students, too, and the stakes are much higher. In high school, there are fewer interventions and opportunities to relearn lost information, and students can become discouraged with their performance – internally and through the actions of teachers and administrators. In this way, summer slide can lead to dropping out.
It also manifests as poor preparation for post-graduation. Another term, “summer melt,” happens when college-eligible high school seniors do not successfully transition to post-secondary education. The Department of Education estimates that up to 20 percent of high school graduates are lost this way, most of them of color.
“Preparation is a factor, but not the guiding factor of whether a student will be college-bound,” says David Johns, executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. “The belief…if they can even go to college diminishes, if they are not supported over time.”
The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans is currently working on combatting these summer losses. Although it is still gathering data, it’s clear that parental involvement is one of the most important factors in academic achievement across years, for students of all ages.
“It’s important to acknowledge that the first and most important educator in a child’s life is his or her parents. One of the challenges is engaging parents to supplement learning for their scholars,” says Johns.
“Often the way we think of learning is that it’s for school only, it happens in the classroom within the school day. But educational development…happens throughout the calendar year.”
Drayton says that in her kindergarten classroom, parents’ efforts are more important than the personalized schoolwork packets her school sends home with students.
“My students left me today, and I gave them a list of books along with a summer packet. I don’t necessarily rely on the packets [to determine if slide has occurred],” she says. “It affects [students] based on if they worked with a parent, and it all depends on if they had practice or continuing education in the summer.”
Johns explains that income is the strongest predictor of summer slide. More affluent families have the money, job flexibility, and connections to keep their children engaged with programs, gadgets, and enriching experiences throughout the year.
Other families, who may lack time, money, and access, have to get resourceful in supplementing their child’s education.
“Go to the library – it’s free. Dollar stores sell books, and places like the Salvation Army sometimes gives away books,” Drayton recommends. “Read something with your child every day. It’s essential to build literacy skills over the summer.”
For parents and guardians, Fields offers GiftedandTalented.com, which provides personalized academic supplements and one-on-one tutoring via video chat. The supplements are designed to give all students access to the high-quality resources found in traditional gifted and talented classes, regardless of the student’s placement in school. There are free activities on the site, but income-based scholarships and financial assistance is also available to take advantage of the site’s complete offerings.
“I aspire to get many more students to embrace the idea that ‘gifted and talented’ is a destination, it’s something you can become, not just something you’re born as,” Fields says, also recommending the library and recreation centers to prevent summer slide.
“We are in the golden age of technology and education – there are things people can access with any kind of device to keep students engaged. Use the summer to get ahead.”
Johns suggests singing, reading, and playing with younger students to keep their minds sharp, and planning in advance and setting achievable goals for more independent kids. The Department of Education also recommends helping high school students create post-graduation prep checklists, and allowing them to job shadow a parent or relative, or encouraging them to volunteer if they cannot find a job for themselves.
“Create a summer intervention plan. Ensure every day they can preserve their knowledge,” he says. “Sometimes we make this more complicated than it has to be. There’s a role every person can play to make these learning connections, whether grandma reads to them, or dad takes them to the museum, or someone counts money with them. Everyone can be an important part of learning for our scholars.”
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