FOCUS DC News Wire 8/8/13

 

 

WASHINGTON — What’s one way to ensure that a new Hebrew-immersion public charter school isn’t a Jewish school? Hire a priest to run it.

 

Sela, which means “rock” or “foundation” in Hebrew, opens in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 19. As a public school, Sela may not teach or show preference to any religion. But the intimate connection between Hebrew and Judaism makes some people wonder whether the separation is truly possible.

 

The question is not just for Sela, but for the dozen or so other public Hebrew charter schools from Brooklyn, N.Y., to San Diego that have started since the first one opened in Florida in 2007. And more Hebrew language charters are in the design stage.

 

Making things even more complicated is Hebrew’s ties not only to Judaism but to Israel. When the Sela staff began naming classrooms for major cities in Israel this summer, the school’s executive director, Jason Lody, said there would be no class named after the disputed capital of Jerusalem.

 

“We want to be a public school of excellence,” Lody said. “We don’t want to be sidetracked by political conversations that don’t focus on getting our 4-year-olds ready for kindergarten.”

 

Lody knows something about keeping religion out of public schools. A former cop and now a priest at the independent St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in suburban Virginia, Lody was tasked with transforming seven Catholic schools run by the Archdiocese of Washington into religion-free public charter schools.

 

“They were all Catholic schools on Friday and on (the next) Monday they were public schools,” said Lody, who holds a doctorate in education. “There were holes in the wall where the crucifixes had been.”

 

As a public school, Sela can’t ask students about their religion, but Lody estimates that only about 20 percent of the school’s 120 students will be Jewish, and more than half will be African-American.

 

Sela sits in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, and its principal, Wanda Young, is a veteran of Baltimore’s public schools and an African-American woman. Like Lody, she is not Jewish, does not speak Hebrew and has never been to Israel.

 

“Parents like the diversity” of Sela, said Young from her office at the school, which occupies a two-story former public charter high school. An Israeli flag decorates the wall behind her desk. “I’ve never had a parent ask about the Jewish part at all.”

 

Sela officials are working hard to counter perceptions that the school has a Jewish character — and to stress its diversity.

 

Lody notes that a Muslim family has signed their child up for Sela, and that the school will teach Arabic starting in the third grade. He won’t allow the Torah — the Hebrew Bible — to be brought into the school to teach Hebrew, and he noted that only one of four members of the school’s leadership team is Jewish.

 

Lody says support for Sela has greatly outweighed skepticism, and the speed at which his class rosters have been filling up is heartening. He’s read some “borderline anti-Semitic” remarks in online discussions of the school.

 

 

 

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana’s top education official on Wednesday acknowledged “manipulation” in the way the state’s schools are graded, the latest fallout from an Associated Press report that found her predecessor worked behind the scenes to improve the score of a charter school founded by an influential Republican donor.

 

Superintendent Glenda Ritz told state school board members that this year’s school ratings would be held up, at least temporarily, as a result of the independent review into the A-F grading system and left open the possibility some of last year’s grades could be changed.

 

The system was established by Tony Bennett, a rising star in the education reform movement, who last week resigned from his new job as Florida’s schools chief amid the scandal in Indiana.

 

“Upon our preliminary examination, the department has verified that there was manipulation of calculation categories and the department has also determined that there are broader issues that need to be examined,” Ritz said.

 

Ritz, a Democrat, brought up the scandal at Wednesday’s school board meeting, but Bennett’s allies on the Republican-dominated board had little to say. She met privately Wednesday afternoon with Indiana’s Republican legislative leaders, who have started their own investigation.

 

Ritz declined to discuss specifics of the review but said a final report could be ready by Sept. 2.

 

The AP published emails showing a frantic effort by Bennett and top staff to rewrite the state’s school grading formula after the Indianapolis-based Christel House Academy, founded by GOP donor Christel DeHaan, scored a C. The school’s grade was changed twice in the following days, eventually ending at an A. Several other schools also saw their grades improve as a result.

 

Indiana’s school report card website still shows the school with an A.

 

Bennett has maintained he gave no special treatment to DeHaan’s school, whose founder has given $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998 — including $130,000 to Bennett. He called the report “malicious and unfounded.”

 

But the emails obtained by The Associated Press show that over the course of a little more than a week last September, Bennett ordered his staff to find a way to get an A for Christel House, which he’d held up as a model for other charter schools.

 

“They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12, 2012, email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.

 

In the following days, the school’s grade jumped from 2.9 to a 3.5, and, finally, a 3.75 on a 4-point scale. Along the way, Bennett and his staff debated the legality of changing the grade for the school only and changing the public presentation of graphs to make a high B look like an A.

 

At one point, Bennett suggested revising the cutoff for an A from a 3.51 to a 3.50. By Sept. 21, when grades were released for all the state’s schools, Christel House had a 3.75.

 

Leaders in the national education overhaul movement, who helped build Bennett into a star following Indiana’s passage of sweeping education changes in 2011, flocked to his support in the wake of the scandal. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush penned an op-ed for the Miami Herald in which he blamed political opponents for Bennett’s demise.

 

The scandal has put a new focus on school grading systems, pushed by Bush and other leaders as a means of holding schools accountable. The grades are used in part to determine school funding and teacher pay and to determine whether “failing” schools are turned over to charters for operation.

 

Critics, including the American Federation of Teachers, have said the scandal is proof that “accountability” systems are scams designed to move control of public schools to charter school operators bankrolling the national movement.

 

In his resignation speech, Bennett called on Indiana’s Republican-appointed inspector general to review the case.

 

 

The number of New York students passing state reading and math exams dropped drastically this year, education officials reported on Wednesday, unsettling parents, principals and teachers and posing new challenges to a national effort to toughen academic standards.

 

In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the tests in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department.

 

The exams were some of the first in the nation to be aligned with a more rigorous set of standards known as the Common Core, which emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving over short answers and memorization. Last year, under an easier test, 47 percent of city students passed in English, and 60 percent in math.

 

City and state officials spent months trying to steel the public for the grim figures.

 

But when the results were released, many educators responded with shock that their students measured up so poorly against the new yardsticks of achievement.

 

Chrystina Russell, principal of Global Technology Preparatory in East Harlem, said she did not know what she would tell parents, who will receive scores for their children in late August. At her middle school, which serves a large population of students from poor families, 7 percent of students were rated proficient in English, and 10 percent in math. Last year, those numbers were 33 percent and 46 percent, respectively.

 

“Now we’re going to come out and tell everybody that they’ve accomplished nothing this year and we’ve been pedaling backward?” Ms. Russell said. “It’s depressing.”

 

Across the state, the downward shift was similar: 31 percent of students passed the exams in reading and math, compared with 55 percent in reading and 65 percent in math last year.

 

The Common Core standards have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. Although not technically national standards, they are ardently backed by the Obama administration and education officials who contend that outdated and inconsistent guidelines leave students ill prepared for college and the work force. New York was one of the first states to develop tests based on the standards. Kentucky, the first state to do so, also reported plummeting scores.

 

Even with the drop in scores, New York City still outperformed the state’s other large school districts — in Rochester, for example, only 5 percent of students passed in reading and math. And despite its large number of disadvantaged students, New York City almost matched the state’s performance as a whole.

 

But striking gaps in achievement between black and Hispanic students and their counterparts persisted. In math, 15 percent of black students and 19 percent of Hispanic students passed the exam, compared with 50 percent of white students and 61 percent of Asian students.

 

Students with disadvantages struggled as well. On the English exam, 3 percent of nonnative speakers were deemed proficient, and 6 percent of students with disabilities passed.

 

Despite the drop in scores, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appeared on Wednesday at a news conference just as he had in years when results were rosier. He rejected criticisms of the tests, calling the results “very good news” and chiding the news media for focusing on the decline. He said black and Hispanic students, who make up two-thirds of the student population, had made progress that was not reflected in the scores.

 

“We have to make sure that we give our kids constantly the opportunity to move towards the major leagues,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

 

In the past, Mr. Bloomberg has bristled at suggestions that the tests were too easy, and too easy to prepare for, to be considered an accurate measure of student ability. Critics of Mr. Bloomberg latched onto the disparities in the scores, arguing that the mayor’s 12-year effort to overhaul city schools had neglected the most vulnerable students. The politicians vying to succeed Mr. Bloomberg, who leaves office at the end of the year, quickly seized on the results.

 

William C. Thompson Jr., a Democratic candidate who has been endorsed by the city’s teachers’ union, said the results showed that for years the city had put too much of an emphasis on tests at the expense of deeper learning.