FOCUS DC News Wire 8/21/13

 

 

School choice is thriving in the nation’s capital which has now resulted in academic gains by all groups of students in both charter and traditional schools on this year’s DC CAS. This is extremely encouraging. However, there are several policy initiatives that threaten to slow down or even halt the progress being made in our public schools. These include:

 

1. Neighborhood admission preference for charters. The competition for students has led schools to innovate and for parents and students to be viewed as the customer in public education. In traditional schools, especially in the inner cities, it is most times the bureaucracy that becomes the customer. Therefore, anything that takes away from an educational marketplace can disrupt the relationship between schools and pupils. A neighborhood admissions preference provides charters with a guaranteed student population that is not necessarily attracted to the unique mission of the school. This can have the effect of lowering academic performance.

 

2. Feeder relationships between elementary and middle schools. A proposal from the Gray Administration, the idea is to set up student admission feeder relationships between, for example, a traditional elementary school and a charter middle school. Again, the notion of a guaranteed student population reduces the competition for students and works against the theory of school choice.

 

3. Chartering authority for DCPS. Competing charter authorities has been shown to improve the quality of charter schools and is usually something to be applauded. However, there is much concern about Chancellor Henderson’s proposal to allow DCPS to create their own charter schools. Some suspect that she is not interested in replicating the highly autonomous and accountable system developed by the PCSB, but instead simply wants to bring in charter operators to take over some of her most challenging facilities. However, if a charter-light plan is implemented it may harm the reputation of the entire movement. As Brian Jones, the former PCSB Chairman, has commented regarding this idea the devil is definitely in the details.

 

4. Sharing names on charter and DCPS waitlists. While on the surface this appears to be a logical step in trying to prevent families from holding valuable spots at more than one educational institution it could have the effect of putting pressure on parents to limit their selection of schools. What we have, and what we want, is schools clamoring for our kids since under our strong system of school choice money follows the child. Again, we don’t want to reduce competition in any way.

 

5. Coordination of facilities between DCPS and charters. Because of the free market nature of the spread of charter schools there have been calls for limits on the number, or restrictions on the location, of these non-traditional schools. For example, some say that charters often open in close proximity to neighborhood institutions thereby stealing their students. Again, if the competition for pupils is what makes schools perform at a higher level then we should have as many good charters as possible positioned throughout our town.

 

6. Ending the Opportunity Scholarship Program. President Obama and U.S. Education Duncan have tried for years to end funding for the OSP. But families love the private school vouchers; there are about four times the number of applicants for available spots. In addition, the four year high school graduation rate for these students far exceeds that of the traditional schools. Although limited to a couple of thousand kids, the OSP provides another avenue for families to place their sons or daughters in quality seats. The system should be allowed to continue and grow free from political pressure.

 

We are so fortunate in this town that experiments in the delivery of public education have been allowed to flourish. Academic advancement is now occurring as many of us predicted it would. The future looks bright as long as we stick with what has worked and have the strength not to go back to what got us in trouble in the first place.

 

 

All juniors and seniors in the District’s public high schools, including those attending traditional and charter schools, will be able to take the SAT for free this year, Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Tuesday.

 

The aim is to encourage more students to take the exam, which is required for application to many of the nation’s colleges.

 

“I’m so pleased that we are able to make this crucial college-entrance exam more accessible to all of our students, making it easier for them to gain admission to institutions of higher education across the country,” Gray (D) said in a statement.

 

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education will pay for the tests, spending $224,084 to ensure that more than 7,300 students can register for the SAT for free. Registration normally costs each student $51, although fee waivers are available to low-income test-takers who submit required paperwork.

 

Traditionally administered on Saturdays, the exams will be offered at each of the city’s 34 high schools during school hours, another effort to ensure that more students sit for the test.

 

The changes build on existing efforts to expand D.C. teenagers’ access to the SAT, which is published by the College Board. Last year, the city’s traditional school system began offering the exams for free to all juniors.

 

“The SAT is the gateway to college for many students, but too often the cost is a tremendous barrier,” Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said in a statement. “Making the SAT more accessible is great news for our students and their future success.”

 

Eligible students will receive vouchers at school that they can use to register online for the SAT beginning Sept. 4. Seniors have a scheduled exam date of Oct. 15, and juniors are scheduled to take the test on Feb. 26.

 

The District has seen high participation on the SAT, with 83 percent of the city’s high school seniors taking the exam in 2012. Only five states reported a higher percentage. In Maryland, 74 percent of seniors took the SAT last year; in Virginia, it was 72 percent.

 

Public school students in the District scored an average of 1184 out of a possible 2400 on the SAT in 2012, nearly 300 points below the national average.

 

 

When the sprawling Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus in Northwest opens next week for the 2013-14 school year, it will do so with new classrooms, updated artwork and a restructured athletic field and gymnasium after nearly two years of extensive renovations.

 

The 97-year-old high school received a $100 million facelift that had been in the works since December 2011. The renovations, which also include a new central staircase, have allowed much of Cardozo's unique architecture and its picturesque hillside views to remain intact.

 

Jesse Robbins, an architect with the Vermont-based Freeman French Freeman firm, lauded the contractors for preserving the school's original design.

 

"I come from a green-building perspective, and the most sustainable building, in many cases, is the one that's already there," said Robbins, a former Washingtonian who has tracked the renovations through magazine photos.

 

The school, constructed in 1916, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The renovations were part of the D.C. Education Reform Act of 2007.

 

"Old schools like Cardozo have the advantage of having been built with high ceilings to deal with warm climates when heat rises," Robbins said, "and a lot of the schools in D.C. have natural ventilation already built into them. These schools were very well constructed, they're sturdy buildings and it just makes more sense to renovate them than to build newer facilities."

 

Robbins said that revamped Cardozo in a manner that maintained its hilltop views is a plus.

 

"Studies show that when students are provided ample [flows of] daylight in their classrooms, it's more relaxing and, overall, helps to create a healthier environment for everyone in the building," he said.

 

A new Dunbar Senior High School in Northwest will also open Monday. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on Aug. 19.

 

Both Mayor Vincent C. Gray and D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton are alumni of the original school, which is named for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and is considered the nation's first public high school for black students.

 

"It's a warm environment that's very conducive to learning," school principal Steve Jackson said. "When students return next week, they can expect a new state-of-the-art, green technology building that's spacious and full of light. The synergy here is extremely high."

 

Jackson said some students toured the facility and participated in an overnight lock-in as part of an orientation session.

 

"It was amazing," Jackson said. "They were very intrigued by their new surroundings are excited about attending classes."

 

 

Most Americans have never heard of the Common Core State Standards, the educational approach that is overhauling classroom instruction across most of the country and has triggered intensifying political and policy debate about the nation’s academic benchmarks, according to a national poll scheduled to be released Wednesday.

 

The disconnect between policymakers and the public is among the key findings of a PDK-Gallup poll that was the 45th annual effort to measure Americans’ views on key education issues.

 

The poll found that two in three people had not heard of the Common Core, which has been fully adopted in 45 states and the District. The new rigorous standards emphasize critical thinking and problem solving and are meant to better prepare students for success.

 

Of those who did recognize the term, most had major misconceptions about the standards and believed that they will have no effect or will make American students less competitive with their peers across the world.

 

Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of two groups that sponsored the Common Core initiative, said the poll highlights the need to intensify efforts to explain and build support for it.

 

“This is an important lens into the minds of parents across the country,” Minnich said. “It does appear from this data that we’re going to need to have a more detailed conversation about what these standards mean.”

 

The survey, conducted by the Gallup polling organization and Phi Delta Kappa International, a professional society of educators, repeats many questions year after year, offering some insight into how perspectives can shift.

 

Support for charter schools has grown during the past decade, said Bill Bushaw, executive director of PDK International. Nearly 70 percent of Americans favor charter schools, up from less than 40 percent 11 years ago. Charters, funded by taxpayers but run independently of traditional school systems, have grown in number as they have drawn support from President Obama and two of his predecessors.

 

Also, support for private-school vouchers hit an all-time low this year, the poll found.

 

As in the past, most people said they trust teachers and principals, and most felt more confident in their local schools than in U.S. public schools generally.

 

The PDK-Gallup survey also incorporates new questions relevant to current events. In the aftermath of the shooting massacre that killed 26 people at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary last year, people who were asked about ways to keep schools safe were about twice as likely to favor boosting mental health services over hiring security guards.

 

People were sharply split on closing underenrolled neighborhood schools to save money, a strategy that has made headlines recently in cities including Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia. Half of all respondents opposed such a policy; opposition was higher among those who were not white.

 

As lawmakers struggle to reach a compromise on comprehensive immigration reform, more than half of the poll’s respondents — 55 percent — said they opposed providing free public education to children of people who are in the country illegally.

 

The poll also tackled the charged issue of standardized testing.

 

The majority of Americans believe that testing has hurt the performance of public schools or made no difference, according to the poll. And nearly 60 percent opposed requiring the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.

 

Those findings seem to run counter to the results of a poll released this week by AP-Norc, which found that 60 percent of parents support using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers.

 

The muddled picture of Americans’ views on testing and teacher evaluations might stem in part from how pollsters phrase their questions or the order in which they ask them, experts said.

 

“There are certainly loaded terms that parents react to in different ways,” said Andy Rotherham, a co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, a D.C.-based nonprofit group.

 

The AP-Norc poll also found that a majority of parents believe that standardized tests are an effective measure of their children’s performance and school quality.

 

Six in 10 said the amount of standardized testing was “about right.”