FOCUS DC News Wire 8/5/13

 

 

Local and federal officials are scrutinizing BASIS DC, a charter school known for its accelerated curriculum and rigorous expectations, in the wake of allegations that the school has failed to provide special-education students with legally required services.

 

The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has opened an investigation into a complaint that BASIS DC discriminated against students with disabilities, according to federal officials.

Multiple parent complaints also prompted the D.C. Public Charter School Board’s staff to conduct a two-day review of the school’s special-education program.

 

Board staff found that decisions to reduce students’ services often had not been properly documented, according to a summary of findings posted on the board’s Web site. In many cases, legally required documents called individualized education programs (IEPs), which describe in detail a student’s goals and required services, were either missing from confidential student files or lacked required parent signatures.

 

In addition, board staff found that BASIS DC placed special-education students in a remedial classroom for failing students, where the special-education students were not provided the reading instruction they needed, according to the summary.

 

The board has required BASIS DC to fix the problems identified during the review and improve staff training in special-

education teaching methods and law. Board officials plan to meet with school officials four times during the coming school year to ensure that they are making progress.

 

“I want to underline and highlight the fact that this is a huge area of concern,” Darren Woodruff, vice chairman of the Public Charter School Board, told BASIS DC officials at the board’s July 29 meeting. “We would be very remiss for this to be an ongoing problem or challenge.”

 

The school, part of an Arizona-based charter network, recognized that the special-education program had problems and in the spring hired a consultant to help design an overhaul, according to BASIS spokesman David Schulz.

 

BASIS DC has since hired a new special-education coordinator and is hiring two full-time special-education teachers.

 

“We knew there were areas for growth,” Schulz wrote in an e-mail. “We want to get this right — we have an accelerated and challenging curriculum, and we want all learners to have every opportunity to succeed at BASIS.”

 

BASIS DC won approval to open its doors in 2012, despite questions about whether its model would work for struggling District students. At BASIS schools, middle-school classes are accelerated and students must take and pass a heavy load of Advanced Placement courses to graduate from high school.

 

BASIS DC opened in Penn Quarter last fall with 443 students, according to an October enrollment audit. By April, nearly 10 percent of the students had withdrawn, including seven of 23 special-education students. The charter board in April denied the school’s request to expand enrollment in 2013-14, citing concerns about the attrition.

 

One of the students who departed was Joshua Baskey, a sixth-grader who was failing when he withdrew in December. His mother, Nasima Hossain, said school officials did not provide the academic help required in his IEP — a legally binding document that describes the services a child with a disability must receive. Hossain said school officials indicated that her son should just work harder.

 

“They just weren’t dealing with him or helping him at all,” Hossain said. “It was all about the kid fitting their model rather than how can we help this kid excel.”

 

Students who transfer out of a school midyear do not count toward that school’s standardized test scores. BASIS DC posted some of the city’s highest math and reading scores, according to results released last week, with 81 percent of students proficient in reading and 77 percent proficient in math.

 

 

WASHINGTON (WUSA9) -- The school test culture changed in the District. In one school, the standardized test highlights a complete transformation. IDEA public charter school, or Integrated Design Electronics Academy, is a high school in the Deanwood section of Northeast. It is one of the oldest charters in the city started by five military men 15 years ago.  The school of 300 was on the chopping block last year but thanks in part to community and parent involvement the charter school board gave it another shot. 

 

A new administration moved in and together with committed teachers helped bring much needed change. Principal Justin Rydstrom says IDEA was the lowest performing high school in the district. It was a job no one wanted, but he took knowing the children's successmeant he and the team would have to go the extra mile mentoring kids one-on-one and even on weekends.

 

"The same things I did as a teacher, as a dean, I'm still doing now to show kids that I care...about them and their families. It's about creating a family away from home and that's what kids respond to," said Rydstrom.

 

English teachers Nicole McCrae and Ashley Johnson were some of the keys to the school's success. "We are competing with so much on the streets. It's about making teaching relevant in their lives, explained McCrae whose father help establish the school 15 years ago. "It's about the kids, and it's easy to say that but hard to do. And this year, they taught me you really have to make it all about them and what they need," added Johnson.

 

The secret to their success lies in committed community members, parents, teachers, and staff. Teachers have raised the bar and expectations for their students and many have met those goals.

 

The senior class valedictorian is heading to Ohio's Central State University to study computer science. He says just like his parents and teachers believed in him, he believed in the school even when the Public Charter School Board deemed it failing. "I knew we would get better, it would take a lot of hard work but if you put your mind to it you can succeed," he said, "it's a state of mind."

 

 

 

EIGHT SCHOOLS in the D.C. public school system last year started experimental programs built around a longer school day. Students at seven of the schools posted gains in both reading and math as shown on recently released test scores; four schools showed double-digit growth. The results are yet more evidence of the effectiveness of a longer school day in boosting student achievement; hopefully, that will spur expansion of extended hours to more schools.

 

Data from the 2013 Comprehensive Assessment System showed significant gains in test scores at schools where instruction isn’t cut off at 3:15 p.m. but continues until 4:15 or 5 in the afternoon. Gains at these schools exceeded those at schools with the traditional schedule by an impressive margin: 10.6 percentage points to 3.3. percentage points in math and 7.2 percentage points to 3.7 percentage points in reading. “We simply felt we had to have more time with our children . . . if we were to catch them up, we had to have them longer,” said Kennard Branch, principal at Ward 8’s Garfield Elementary School, where math scores increased 13.2 percentage points over last year and reading by 6.2 percentage points.

 

Garfield was one of eight schools that used a “Proving What’s Possible” grant to build 90 more minutes of instruction into the school day. Key to the success at Garfield and the other schools was not simply doing more of the same but coming up with new strategies and interventions tailored to the specific needs of students.

 

School officials told us they knew even before the test scores were posted that the longer school day — cited by effective public charter schools as a factor in their success — was having beneficial effects, so plans were made to extend the program to two more schools this fall. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson would like to extend it even further, but she must contend with a contract with the teacher’s union that limits the workday to 7.5 hours. Teachers at the schools piloting the longer days had to vote to work beyond the contract hours and are paid for the extra time.

 

A new contract is being negotiated, and school officials were said to have been close to an agreement on a longer school day. But the president who negotiated that tentative agreement was voted out of office. It’s unclear what Elizabeth Davis, the newly installed president, will do. She has expressed skepticism about longer school days.

 

Money probably will also be an issue, but the money the school spends on after-school programs might better be leveraged to lengthen the school day and allow for enhanced instruction.

 

There can be “no doubt,” to use the words of Garfield’s principal, that everyone — teachers, parents, children — benefits when children have more of an opportunity to learn.

 

 

Recently released test scores show that extended school day programs work, says Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. Whether she'll be able to expand them to more schools may depend on the newly elected president of the Washington Teachers Union. Last year 8 DCPS schools experimented with an extended school day, and 7 of them showed gains on the 2013 DC CAS in both reading and math.

 

Four of them had double-digit gains. Overall, gains at the extended day schools exceeded those at schools on a traditional schedule by a significant margin: 10.6 percentage points as compared to 3.3 points in math, and 7.2 points as compared to 3.7 points in reading. Based on those results, Henderson said, "We will be looking at how we can deepen and expand that work." But, she added, there are two possible barriers to expansion. One is money. The other is the need to renegotiate the teachers union contract to allow some form of extended hours.

 

The former WTU president, Nathan Saunders, had agreed in principle to some form of extended school day. But that agreement was thrown into doubt by the election of Elizabeth Davis, a longtime union activist, in early July. Davis hasn't yet taken a position on the issue. To make matters even more uncertain, Saunders is now challenging the election results, a process that could drag on for some time. Saunders appealed the election results but then decided to withdraw the challenge, and Davis took office August 1.

 

Henderson said that she's worked with Davis in the past and seemed optimistic that the two sides will reach a satisfactory agreement.

 

The 8 schools that experimented with extended day last year did so in a variety of ways. Some had extended hours three days a week, others had five-day programs, and one included hours on Saturdays. The programs were funded through a DCPS grants program called Proving What's Possible.

 

Henderson emphasized that an extended school day doesn't necessarily mean that teachers will work longer hours. Teachers' hours could be staggered to accommodate an extended day, and outside organizations could be brought in as partners.

 

"We want to be creative," she said, "but we need the flexibility that the contract doesn't allow us."

 

The one expanded-day school that didn't post gains in its scores was Dunbar High School, the only secondary school in the group. The other 7 schools were elementary schools. Dunbar's scores fell by 2.9 percentage points in math and 9.8 points in reading.

 

Dunbar has also pioneered a 9th grade academy program, which separates first-time 9th-graders from students who are repeating the grade and provides them with extra support. Henderson plans to expand the 9th grade academy program to all neighborhood DCPS high schools this year. She dismissed the suggestion that Dunbar's score slippage indicated that the program doesn't work.

 

"You can't go by just one year," she said.

 

DCPS is basing its expansion of the program not solely on Dunbar's experience, Henderson said, but on extensive research on the success of 9th grade academies around the country. In addition, this year's Dunbar 9th graders didn't take the DC CAS, which at the high school level is given only to 10th graders. Although Dunbar's 10th graders had a version of the 9th grade academy experience the previous year, the program was strengthened and expanded this past year.

 

Henderson also said that she has no second thoughts about closing one school, Macfarland Middle School, that achieved significant gains in both reading and math. The closure decision was based on under-enrollment rather than academic performance, but there's a possibility that Macfarland's improved scores could have attracted more students.

 

"We make bets every year," Henderson said. "Sometimes they're wrong, sometimes they're right."

 

She said that the closure will save resources, and that the students from Macfarland have been reassigned to other good schools.

 

Overall, middle school students made some of the most significant gains on the DC CAS. Henderson said she hopes the improvement in performance will stem the attrition of families from the school system after elementary school.

 

 

These are really hard words for me to write: D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray deserves a lot of credit for improving education in his city. In 2011, as I was finishing a book about Michelle Rhee’s (interrupted) term as D.C. schools chancellor, I predicted that despite Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s best efforts, the city schools would enter a slow death spiral — the result of reform being undermined by Gray.

 

At the time, there was every reason to assume the worst. When Gray was chairman of the D.C. Council, he was Rhee’s biggest critic. When he ran for mayor, his biggest supporters were the teachers unions, especially the American Federation of Teachers, whose president, Randi Weingarten, so badly wanted to see Rhee get the boot that her union kicked in $1 million to oust former mayor Adrian Fenty, Rhee’s protector. Sure enough, after beating Fenty, Gray forced Rhee out.

 

Gray, I assumed, would pay back his funders and supporters by returning D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) to the pre-Rhee years, when it was a contender for the title of worst school district in the nation.

 

After assuming office, though, Gray did the unexpected: He left the Rhee reforms untouched. He not only embraced Henderson, he lifted not a finger to dismantle Rhee’s controversial plans, which included firing low-rated teachers and evaluating teachers partly based on how much their students learned. Why would Gray not do what his key backers most wanted? My cynical take was that the scandals that grew out of his campaign prevented him from taking on anything controversial.

 

But then Gray did the unexpected once again. He appointed one of Rhee’s top deputies, the talented Abigail Smith, as his deputy mayor for education. Now he had two of Rhee’s top aides, Henderson and Smith, holding the top education posts. Then we got the announcement that D.C. charter schools, which had been mostly blocked from taking over closed DCPS schools, suddenly had options for using those buildings. At that point, my “scandals” theory was looking shaky.

 

Now come this good-news test scores. True, the results must be placed in context. With urban school districts, good news one year has a tendency to become bad news the following year. Plus, the assessments that really matter are federal ones, which are both cheat-proof and comparable to other urban districts. We’ll see.

 

Keeping that in mind, however, there was certainly some good news this week, especially the boost in academic proficiency rates among low-income black and Latino kids in charter schools — schools that Gray, unlike some previous mayors, properly sees as giving D.C. parents important academic choices for their children.

 

So why did Gray stand by the much-reviled Rhee reforms that his supporters counted on him to dismantle? I don’t pretend to know anything about Gray. When I was researching the Rhee book, he refused an interview. But everything I’ve read about Gray leads me to believe that he is, through and through, a Ward 7 guy. And there in Ward 7 sits Sousa Middle School, a school that for years was properly regarded as a local and national disgrace.

 

Under the tough-love principal Rhee appointed, Sousa transformed itself into a showcase. You can walk through the school’s quiet hallways and see actual learning taking place. Gray may not have been a Rhee fan, but no real Ward 7 guy is going to deny that her reforms made a huge difference for the kids at Sousa. For the first time, they had a shot at life. Something that crazy lady was doing had to be right.

 

 

Smithsonian Magazine recently published an article on blended learning, and when the Smithsonian talks, we all should listen. Blended learning is a teaching method that has long been used in private schools and college classrooms, but only in recent years has it been trending in public K-12 classrooms.

 

The academic results for young people in public grade schools are still up in the air, but for now that’s OK. Indeed, that students who attend a public school in an impoverished section of the District are using computers on a daily basis proves school officials, principals and students are moving in the right direction. 

 

 

The online program, ST Math, “challenges each student based on his or her skill level,” the magazine reported. “For example, one student could tackle multiplication tables, while someone in the next row completes double-digit addition problems. Some do all their work by typing and touch-screening their way through problems and solutions, while others swivel between scouring the screen and scribbling on scrap paper. Teachers rotate through the room, helping students when they stumble on a given problem.”

 

Interestingly, Stanton’s principal, Caroline John, and administrators weren’t unaware of blended learning, but they ran across the term while searching for innovative ways to engage students in their core mission — teaching and learning.

 

In addition to Ms. John, Smithsonian quoted several education specialists about the pros and cons of blended learning, including how it empowers students and its effects on online learning versus brick-and-mortar schooling.

 

One is Michael Horn, a blended- learning specialist with the Clayton Christensen Institute, which released a 2012 white paper that cited four blended-learning categories: rotational, flex, self-blend and enriched virtual.

 

Like most other grade schools that offer blended learning programs, Stanton falls into the rotational category, offering traditional class work with online learning. When the third- and fifth-graders finish their online instruction, the computers move to another class.

 

Currently, the most common blended courses offer math and English/language arts, while “high schools are perhaps the most likely to operate a self-blend model, where a student takes one or two online courses — often Advanced Placement or credit recovery courses — to supplement their in-class education,” the magazine said. (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offers blended learning grant money to secondary schools.)

 

The other two categories are the School of One math program in New York, a flex model tailored to individual students, and enriched virtual models, which call for students to periodically meet with a teacher or teacher’s aide.

 

Whatever the model, it’s clear that innovative online/classroom teaching and learning is trending — even here in the nation’s capital, where school officials have been moving away from the wholesale move-in-lock-step models.

 

 

News last week that Tony Bennett, the former Indiana superintendent of public instruction, quietly altered the state grade for a charter school founded by a campaign donor has raised questions about the validity of the trendy A-to-F grading system used to assess schools in more than a dozen states.

 

Bennett resigned from his job as Florida education commissioner on Thursday amid revelations that he directed staff members to alter the grade of the charter school last fall, when he was Indiana’s schools chief.

 

E-mails obtained and published last week by the Associated Press show that Bennett was alarmed in September 2012 when Christel House Academy, a charter school founded by Republican donor Christel DeHaan, was about to be labeled a “C” school by the state’s annual grading system. DeHaan has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett, who was elected Indiana superintendent of public instruction in 2008.

 

Christel House had been kindergarten through eighth grades until grades 9 and 10 were added in 2012. The new students struggled — just one-third of 10th-graders passed Algebra 1, enough to pull down the school’s overall rating from A to C. At Bennett’s direction, his staff took advantage of a regulatory loophole to toss out the performance of ninth- and 10th-graders, bringing the school’s grade to an A, according to the e-mails. Bennett later said grades for 13 other schools were similarly adjusted.

 

He has maintained that he intervened in the rating process because he knew Christel House to be an A school and was trying to ensure that its grade was fair.

 

Critics, including the teachers union in Indiana, say Bennett gave preferential treatment to a favored school. Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz, a Democrat and former teacher who unseated Bennett in November, said her department will review the validity of the state’s grading system.

 

The high-profile episode underlines some of the pitfalls of grading schools.

 

“It should give us pause,” said Anne Hyslop, an education analyst at the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. “Any accountability system should be examined, analyzed and updated as needed. You may see some states changing their A-F systems or looking for other models, but it’s a little bit too early to tell.”

 

Maine, which unveiled school report cards for the first time in the spring, changed the grades for three of 600 schools after errors were caught in the calculations and made those changes public, said Samantha Warren, a spokeswoman for the state education department.

 

“If there are legitimate things that got screwed up within the accountability system, you want to make sure everyone understands what you did and why,” said Kathy Christie of the Education Commission of the States. “You do not want to do that in a backroom. “

 

Florida was first to grade its schools on an A-to-F scale in 1999; then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R) touted it as a simple way to boil down complicated information for parents.

 

But simple isn’t always better, said RiShawn Biddle, who writes the DropoutNation blog. “It’s seductively simple,” Biddle said. “But it doesn’t provide families the information they need to be able to make decisions. If you’re a parent, you want to know growth over time. Are they providing AP courses? How are they doing in algebra? If you’ve got young black sons, you want to know: Can this school serve your son well? You can’t get that from a letter grade.”

 

In addition to Florida and Indiana, other states that are grading schools on an A-to-F scale include Arizona, Alabama, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah, along with New York City. Virginia plans to implement an A-to-F system in 2015, and Ohio intends to do so that year as well.

 

Many of those states made the grading system central to the accountability plan they submitted to the Obama administration to receive a waiver from the requirements of No Child Left Behind, the federal education law. Several states, including Indiana, use the grades to make decisions about funding, closure and state takeovers.

 

Every state with a grading system uses a different methodology, assigning varying weights to test scores, graduation rates and students’ academic growth in a given school year.

 

“It’s important to acknowledge these school grades represent a bundle of different judgments based on different values,” said Michael Petrilli, a senior vice president at the right-leaning Fordham Institute. “This is not science. When you get results back and they don’t match up with reality, you’ve got a problem. I think there’s going to be a good conversation about whether boiling it all down to a single grade makes sense.”