- Big charter change seen in 2 D.C. schools [Capital City PCS and E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
- Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal sues Obama over Common Core State Standards
- The tools to rescue under-performing schools in the District
Big charter change seen in 2 D.C. schools [Capital City PCS and E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
August 27, 2014
Two D.C. charter schools you’ve probably never heard of have just been declared vital for our nation’s educational future. The reasons for focusing on these two schools are intriguing and mostly overlooked in the national debate about charters.
A remarkable new book identifies the Capital City Public Charter School and the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, both in Northwest Washington, as among the nation’s best charters in creating diverse student bodies.
Many people think diversity means schools with lots of minority kids. That’s wrong, says the book “A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education.” It has evidence showing the kind of diversity that helps raise achievement has a balance of several ethnicities, as well as a mix of affluent and low-income kids.
Century Foundation scholar Richard D. Kahlenberg, co-author of the book with researcher and former D.C. charter school teacher Halley Potter, is the nation’s leading advocate of improving schools by giving them a good mix of poor and affluent kids. He has been critical of charter schools, but in this book he says they could be an avenue to better learning if their enrollments are well mixed and their teachers have a voice in making school decisions.
Kahlenberg also wrote a 2007 biography of teacher union leader Albert Shanker. He promotes Shanker’s original vision of charters as “laboratories for student success that bring together children from different backgrounds and tap into the expertise of highly talented teachers.”
The authors provide one list of charters that have done well mixing students racially and socioeconomically and another list of those that give teachers a voice in governance. The two D.C. schools are on the former list. There are no Washington-area charters recognized for empowering teachers. The nearest is the City Neighbors charter network in Baltimore.
Balancing student enrollment by race and income is tricky in big cities, the book admits. It often requires that the school be near middle-class neighborhoods, which might conflict with many urban charter educators’ desire to fill their schools with minority kids in poverty-stricken areas that need them the most.
When Capital City began, in 2000, the book says, “it was housed in a space above a CVS Pharmacy on a street corner in Columbia Heights, one of the more racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in the city.” Still, some wealthy parents backed out because they thought the vacant lots on the other three corners of that intersection would breed crime.
Nonetheless, the Capital City teachers built a program that today has reading proficiency rates of 61 percent, compared with 50 percent for all District schools. Its math proficiency rate of 51 percent is slightly below the D.C. rate of 53. Its enrollment for pre-kindergarten to 12th grade is 984 students, of which 49 percent are Hispanic, 37 percent are black, 9 percent are white and less than 3 percent are Asian. Seventy percent are low-income.
E.L. Haynes also started in relatively diverse neighborhoods and recruited students of different cultural and economic backgrounds. Good teaching encouraged many parents to enroll their children. Both its math and reading proficiency rates are about 60 percent. Its pre-kindergarten through 12th grade enrollment is 1,200, a student body that is 52 percent black, 28 percent Hispanic, 12 percent white and 8 percent Asian/Pacific Islander. Sixty-six percent are low-income.
The authors offer studies showing that racial and socioeconomic balance produce better learning conditions. Charters could achieve a mix, the book argues, if jurisdictions allowed them to weight the selection lotteries, giving underrepresented students — such as those in wealthy Zip codes — more chances to be picked.
Would that be fair to poor studentswho have less opportunity for good schooling? The argument is just starting, but it’s worth having. Wise and energetic advocates such as Kahlenberg and Potter can take the charter movement in new and useful directions.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal sues Obama over Common Core State Standards
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
August 27, 2014
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday accusing the U.S. Department of Education of illegally coercing states to adopt the Common Core academic standards by requiring states that want to compete for federal grants to embrace the national standards.
Jindal also accused the department and Education Secretary Arne Duncan of forcing states to adopt the Common Core standards to win a waiver from some of the restrictive aspects of No Child Left Behind, the federal education law.
In both cases, the federal government violated the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which strikes the balance between federal and states’ rights, as well as federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering with local control over curriculum and other aspects of public education, Jindal alleges in his complaint.
“Common Core is the latest effort by big government disciples to strip away state rights and put Washington, D.C. in control of everything,” Jindal said in a statement. “What started out as an innovative idea to create a set of base-line standards that could be ‘voluntarily’ used by the states has turned into a scheme by the federal government to nationalize curriculum.”
Jindal, a potential Republican presidential candidate, was once a strong supporter of the Common Core, but he has become increasingly critical as popular opposition to the standards has grown, particularly among conservative Republicans and tea party groups. Republican activists say that opposition to the Common Core has become a litmus test for their candidates.
The Common Core State Standards spell out the skills and knowledge students should possess at the end of each school year, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The standards are not curriculum; decisions about what school districts teach and how they teach it are left to states and localities.
In June, Jindal tried unsuccessfully to pull Louisiana out of the Common Core but was stymied by the state legislature, the state board of education and Jindal’s own state superintendent of education — all supporters of the math and reading standards for K-12. Before filing the lawsuit Wednesday, Jindal also tried unsuccessfully to sue his state board of education over the Common Core standards.
Louisiana and 42 other states, as well as the District of Columbia, are fully implementing the standards in classrooms this school year.
Dorie Nolt, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, brushed aside questions about the lawsuit. “The most important thing is that children in Louisiana have gone back to school this year with high academic standards in place in their classrooms to help prepare them to succeed in college, career and life,” she said.
Duncan has accused Jindal of seeking political advantage.
“Gov. Jindal was a passionate supporter [of Common Core] before he was against it,” Duncan said in June. “That situation is about politics, it’s not about education. And frankly that’s part of the problem.”
Jimmy Faircloth, Jindal’s former executive counsel who is now a private attorney representing Jindal in his federal lawsuit, said the governor supported the standards before he realized the extent of federal involvement.
“Everyone supports the goals of the Common Core, but as you get into the program, you start to realize what it really is,” Faircloth said. “It kind of tangles a state into a situation it can’t get out of.”
The standards began as a state-led effort that originated with a bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs. The Common Core was created as a way to inject some consistency into academic standards, which vary widely from state to state. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation largely funded the effort to write Common Core, as well as the process to get the standards adopted and implemented.
Although the federal government had no official role in developing the standards, the Obama administration has supported them, giving $360 million to groups of states that are writing new Common Core tests.
Obama’s education department also used Race to the Top, its $4.3 billion competitive grant program, as an inducement, saying that states adopting “college- and career-ready” standards had a better chance of winning federal dollars under the program. Most states understood that phrase to mean Common Core.
When Louisiana applied multiple times for a grant under Obama’s Race to the Top program, Jindal never mentioned overreach, illegality or coercion. His state superintendent of education at the time wrote to the U.S. Department of Education “we proudly submit this application to Race to the Top because Louisiana’s children can’t wait.” Louisiana won on the third try in 2011, when it received a $17.4 million grant. The state also sought and received a waiver from No Child Left Behind after meeting the Obama administration’s requirements.
The tools to rescue under-performing schools in the District
The Washington Post
By Jonetta Rose Barras
August 28, 2014
I walked into the CityBridge Foundation one summer afternoon, responding to an invitation from its president, Katherine Bradley, to learn about the organization’s Tools to 100 Schools program. Bradley, a force in the national education reform movement for several years, has been extremely complimentary of the District’s efforts. Our assessments have differed, sometimes substantially.
But comments about the plight of low-income children that Bradley made weeks earlier, in our introductory breakfast meeting, persuaded me to take a closer look at CityBridge. I accepted her invitation — although I carried a load of skepticism.
The Tools initiative, Bradley explained, resulted from her asking what would it take “to get substantially faster progress for our lower-income students, who are the vast majority of our public school population.
“There are fundamental things at stake in our city around equity for all children,” she told me and other attendees during the afternoon presentation. “I believe this to my core: We should all feel tremendous urgency about the wide disparities between outcomes for children who live a scant [four to five] miles away from each other.”
Actually, the picture is bleak citywide. Test scores released this summer indicate a decline in proficiency rates at significant numbers of schools. D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson declared herself “disappointed.” A month later, however, she accepted a seat on the Board of Trustees of Georgetown University, which could distract her and force a recusal from some DCPS business. This happens as it becomes clear her goal of a DCPS proficiency rate of 70 percent by 2017 is unattainable. At the current pace, that target wouldn’t be reached until 2031, said Bradley.
“The shape of the world will not permit us the luxury of gradualism and procrastination,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “Why We Can’t Wait.” That sentiment is as true today as it was then.
The CityBridge plan, therefore, demands our attention. It would target 40,000 students over 10 years, placing them on a path of “rapid improvement or assuring their attendance in a school operating above a 60 percent proficiency threshold,” Bradley said.
Strategies that would be deployed fall into “two buckets: fresh start and restart.” Specifically, successful national charters would be encouraged to open schools in the District — hence the fresh start. The charter board seems to be on this course already. Third-party organizations would be invited to operate select schools, helping them to restart.
For DCPS, Bradley said, a strong principal working with “several focused, targeted nonprofits” could lead a turnaround. “We call that mix of interventions [a] ‘Cocktail Turnaround.’ We believe, however, that there is no mix of nonprofits that will succeed at restarting a school without very strong school-level leadership.”
I know. I know. Third-party operators have been used previously by DCPS, at Dunbar and Anacostia high schools for example, without much success. But the positive changes occurring at Stanton Elementary School under Scholar Academies suggest those past problems were caused by an imperfect match of operator and school.
“[Tools] is a very good plan,” said Andy Klingenstein, whose family foundation, the Andrew and Julie Klingenstein Family Fund, works on improving public education in the District. “It’s much more ambitious than the path we have been on for many years.”
Scott Cartland, principal of DCPS’s Wheatley Education Campus, said CityBridge was “smart to focus on whole school reform,” a concept that encourages investment in an entire facility instead of narrowly focused programs, such as tutoring for a select group of students.
“I do think we have a manageable scale in the District,” Cartland continued, citing the need for more coordination between traditional and charter schools. “It’s naive to think charters are not having an effect on DCPS. We need to look at it as a more holistic system.”
I don’t object to the sectors talking and learning from each other. But they need to maintain their unique identities and structures while ensuring that DCPS suffers no further erosion.
“We have to get off this artificial distinction between charters and traditional schools,” Klingenstein argued. “We need to focus more on good schools — forget labels. I’d like to see the mayor or somebody take ownership of all the schools.”
Bradley said there is “no all-charter answer for Washington, D.C.,” and CityBridge isn’t advocating one. Currently Tools to 100 Schools is being used to guide private business people and philanthropists in how best to invest in public education. Implementation by DCPS would require legislation similar to what D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large) “proposed with his ‘innovation schools’ bill, or to what other cities have done with autonomy zones,” said Bradley.
Catania, who is running for mayor, told me he “appreciates the strong focus and attention” Bradley has brought to “public school innovation in our city.” But he is worried about the potential adverse affect the strategy might have on “matter of right” schools. It could interrupt the feeder system, which remains one of DCPS’s advantages, he said.
“But,” he said, “placing provocative and interesting ideas into the public discussion is absolutely critical to improving schools.”
CityBridge’s Tools to 100 Schools certainly fits that bill. District officials and residents should seriously consider it, particularly since the mayor’s new boundary system doesn’t resolve the city’s principal public education dilemma: insufficient quality schools in all eight wards.