FOCUS DC News Wire 9/11/13

 

 

Jesús Aguirre, director of the District’s parks department, will become the city’s new state superintendent of education, Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Tuesday.

 

Aguirre has spent most of his career in education and came to the District in 2007 as a member of the transition team leading up to Michelle Rhee’s tenure as chancellor. He served as the school system’s director of operations until Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) tapped him to head the Department of Parks and Recreation in 2009.

 

Aguirre will assume his new role Oct. 1, replacing Emily Durso, who has been leading the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) in an interim capacity since June. Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley Jones stepped down this year to care for her husband.

 

Gray (D) said in a statement that Aguirre is a “natural choice to direct OSSE’s efforts to ensure every child in the District has access to a high-quality public education.”

 

OSSE is responsible for policies that affect students from early childhood to adult education in the city’s traditional and charter schools. It administers federal grants and college tuition assistance, conducts an annual school enrollment census and oversees the administration of standardized tests.

 

Established by the same 2007 law that ushered in mayoral control of the schools, OSSE has been plagued by high staff turnover and has often struggled to find its footing. Charter-school advocates have pushed back against its attempts to craft citywide policies on discipline and other issues, arguing that charters are not subject to such regulation.

 

Aguirre is familiar with charters’ desire for independence, according to Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, whose office oversees OSSE. Aguirre and his wife — both Teach for America alumni — co-founded and operated an Arizona charter school for a decade.

 

“He is very clear on the importance of charter autonomy,” Smith said, adding that she believes Aguirre has the ability to build OSSE into “a stable place” that can attract and retain talent.

 

When Aguirre arrived as interim director in December 2009, the parks department was embroiled in controversies over construction contracts and frequent leadership changes. Aguirre said he was proud of his efforts to help the department move past that era, though he did run into disputes about park permitting and what constitutes appropriate swimwear at city pools.

 

An enthusiastic participant in the yearly cannonball dive to open city pools, he has overseen the effort to revamp playgrounds across the city.

 

Sharia Shanklin, chief of community programs for the parks department, will serve as that agency’s interim director.

 

Aguirre said he is looking forward to his new job.

 

“I believe we’re still at the hub of where folks want to be in terms of education reform, and I believe OSSE is a critical piece of it,” he said.

 

Aguirre’s wife, Monica Liang-Aguirre, is well known in the D.C. education world; she has been principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School since 2008. Rhee, whose children attended the Woodley Park school, hired Liang-Aguirre after firing the previous principal.

 

The couple live in Ward 4 with their three children, two of whom attend Oyster-Adams; one of their children attends St. Coletta Special Education Public Charter School.

 

 

After years of focusing their attention on the quality of teaching inside city classrooms, District public schools officials are turning to a new front in their efforts to improve the schools: family living rooms.

 

Hundreds of D.C. teachers will spend weekends and evenings this fall visiting students and their parents at home, hoping to lift academic achievement by creating stronger partnerships between families and the schools. The push to visit students on their own turf is a shift for the District’s school system, which often has been accused of alienating the families it serves. Now, the aim is to help teachers and parents become allies instead of adversaries in the day-to-day work of educating the city’s children.

 

Officials say teachers in 43 of the city’s traditional schools already have visited more than 1,400 families this year, setting up appointments with parents and then traveling to homes in pairs. Those visits, about 30 minutes each, are get-to-know-you sessions that serve as an anchor for ongoing communication by phone, e-mail, text and in person throughout the school year. Fifteen of the schools have comprehensive programs that aim to reach at least half of their student body through voluntary home visits, meaning thousands of families could get such visits this year.

 

“Like many other school districts, we’ve struggled with the best ways to engage families,” Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said. But with the help of the local Flamboyan Foundation, which trains and pays teachers to make home visits, “I think we’ve happened upon a model that actually is really effective.”

 

Henderson recognizes that strengthening schools isn’t just about changing what happens inside classrooms but also about changing how teachers relate to their communities.

 

Although it’s a new initiative for the District’s school system, the home-visit approach has been used for years in some local charters and in schools elsewhere. It offers no guarantee of improvement, but research has shown that when families are more involved in schools, students do better. Still, the District faces unanswered questions about how to administer home visits in a way that is affordable for the city and sustainable for teachers who already have heavy workloads.

 

But it is the recent success with home visits at Stanton Elementary, in Southeast Washington, that offers one of the main reasons such visits are taking hold in the District.

 

Scholar Academies, a Philadelphia-based charter operator, took over Stanton in 2010, aiming to turn it around. At the end of that first year, fewer than 10 percent of students were proficient in math and reading, and discipline was a chronic problem.

 

Two years later, behavior has improved and proficiency has doubled in reading and quadrupled in math. Stanton staff members say home visits are not the only reason for the improvement, but they are an important element.

 

The visits have helped parents see teachers not just as disciplinarians who call with bad news but as advocates for their children, staff members said. And they’ve helped teachers understand where students are coming from and that parents want to help their children succeed, even if they don’t always know how.

 

“It really made me understand that all parents care,” fourth-grade teacher Melissa Bryant said.

 

Several Stanton parents said they were wary the first time teachers asked if they could stop by for a conversation. Strangers poking around the house sounded a lot like a social-services inspection.

 

But it turned out to be something else: An easygoing conversation about their dreams for their children’s future and their desires for the school year.

 

For Natina Kiah, a Stanton mother, that first home visit was an invitation to build a new relationship with a school that had never seemed particularly welcoming.

 

Before, she said, she thought teachers judged her — and her tattoos and her piercings — when she walked through the schoolhouse doors, and she responded accordingly. “I was the parent you’d hate to see coming,” Kiah said.

 

Now she is in touch with teachers regularly. And she goes to meetings at school where teachers show her how to help her children with homework, right down to sharing some long-forgotten tricks for solving math problems. The meetings are a second strategy that Flamboyan helps schools use to engage parents.

 

“It gave me a sense of pride, because I could do it. I had the knowledge to help,” said Kiah, who works as a contractor for Flamboyan, training teachers for home visits.

 

“Every family wants a relationship with their teacher, and every single family wants to know what they can do to help their child succeed,” said Kristin Ehrgood, a former Teach for America corps member and president of Flamboyan, a private family foundation that focuses on education issues and philanthropy in public schools in the District and Puerto Rico. “It transcends race and economics and everything.”

 

The foundation piloted its strategies two years ago with Stanton and two other schools. By 2012-13, Flamboyan was working with 13 District public schools, 12 of which recorded gains in reading or math scores.

 

Now the foundation is partnering with 15 District schools, all of which applied for the program. The foundation has trained an additional 60 teachers at 28 District schools who will meet with families they select. Flamboyan also is working with nine D.C. charters.

 

Home visits are no magic elixir for a struggling school. Southeast’s Garfield Elementary suspended home visits after teachers were trained last year. It was too much work when coupled with other initiatives, according to school system officials. Garfield’s principal did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Many schools, including in Arlington County and in national charter networks such as KIPP, have been conducting home visits for years. Individual teachers and schools in the District also explored home visits before Flamboyan.

 

“I remember getting a home visit when I was young. It’s not necessarily a new, sexy strategy,” said Janeece Docal, principal of Powell Elementary in Petworth, where early childhood education teachers began visiting families five years ago and have seen the proportion of chronically truant students drop from 12 percent to zero. “It’s one of those traditional ones that makes a difference.”

 

With Flamboyan’s financial support and training, Powell has been able to ramp up home visits across the grades, aiming to visit all 425 students this fall.

 

Schools partner with Flamboyan for three years. The foundation provides training, stipends for teachers who coordinate family engagement efforts and funding for academic materials families can use at home. It also pays teachers $34 per hour for home visits. Each school pays a fee of $2,000 to $5,000 per year to help defray costs.

 

Docal wondered how and whether the District’s schools could sustain such a program without outside funding. School system officials said they are working to answer that question as they aim to expand the model citywide in the next five years.

 

It’s a new commitment for a school system whose leaders, in the past, sometimes discouraged teachers from visiting families.

 

“Your work was 8 to 3:30, and there was very much a sentiment that the work is hard enough as it is, so there shouldn’t be an expectation that you have to do more outside of that,” said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for the city’s public schools, who began teaching nearly two decades ago at Sousa Middle School.

 

Kamras visited parents and grandparents anyway. He found that it gave him a way to connect with students who were otherwise unreachable or difficult. But it was no insignificant choice; it took time. “It’s our job as a school system to figure out how do we support teachers and schools to be able to make these connections,” Kamras said. “It’s very clear that this is a priority.”

 

 

 

Teach for America, the nonprofit organization that places high-achieving college graduates in school districts in underserved areas of the country, hasn’t lacked for evaluations over the years. As I explained back in April, the majority of evaluations have shown either that TFA teachers are as effective as their peers, or that they are even better than traditional teachers in some categories. A vocal minority resists this conclusion, but the best data we have suggests that TFA either does no harm or does active good.

 

The best evidence we had before today was a randomized evaluation conducted by Mathematica Policy Research between 2001 and 2003, which found that TFA teachers bested other teachers at teaching math — with gains for students equal to about a month of additional instruction —  and were not significantly different from them on teaching reading.

 

A follow-up using the same data showed that that result held for students across the math score distribution, not just the average student. “These results suggest that allowing highly qualified teachers, who in the absence of TFA would not have taught in these disadvantaged neighborhoods, should have a positive influence not just on students at the top of the achievement distribution but across the entire math test score distribution,” the authors concluded.

 

That consensus was bolstered in a big way Tuesday by the release of a new Mathematica evaluation of both TFA and the Teaching Fellows program, which runs highly selective, city-specific teacher placement programs somewhat akin to TFA but targeted at both kids just out of college and at professionals looking for a career change (think Prez).

 

The report, which was sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, compares TFA and Teaching Fellow participants teaching secondary math (that is, math at both the middle and high school levels) to their peer teachers, who either came in through traditional routes or through a less selective alternative program.

The Teaching Fellow math teachers were no more or less effective than the comparison group, but the TFA teachers produced gains “equivalent to an additional 2.6 months of school for the average student nationwide.”

Who, what, where, when?

 

The study looked at both the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years, and looked at thousands of students and hundreds of teachers in a variety of states. “The final TFA study sample consisted of 4,573 students, 111 classroom matches, 136 math teachers, 45 schools, and 11 districts in 8 states,” the authors* write. “The final Teaching Fellows study sample consisted of 4,116 students, 118 classroom matches, 153 math teachers, 44 schools, and 9 districts in 8 states.”

 

The characteristics of the schools in the TFA study, compared to all secondary schools with TFA teachers and all secondary schools period, are summarized in this table:

 

Urban areas were slightly overrepresented and suburban schools underrepresented, but rural schools were pretty accurately represented). The racial demographics of the study sample were very, very close to those for all TFA schools, and the mean percentage of students eligible for free lunches was roughly the same too. The study sample over-represented the South and underrepresented the West, but the Northeast and Midwest had roughly the same shares of study sample schools as they do of TFA schools in general. The schools were, on average, slightly larger than the mean size of all TFA schools.

 

Interestingly, there were no charter schools in the TFA sample. Melissa Clark at Mathematica says this is due to the requirements of carrying out randomized experiments. “We could only choose schools that could support this kind of random study, and charter schools tended to be smaller, and did not have at least two teachers teaching the same course at the same time,” she explains. And if you don’t have at least two teachers in a school teaching the same course, you can’t compare teachers in the school to each other, which is what the study needed to do. Magnet schools, however, were slightly overrepresented relative to all TFA schools.

 

The demographics of the studied TFA teachers, and the teachers they were compared to, differed markedly as well as the following table shows.

 

TFA teachers are younger than both secondary school teachers nationwide and the comparison group teachers. They’re pretty similar in racial and gender terms to the full sample of secondary school teachers, but the comparison group is much less white, more black, and more female than the TFA group.

The TFA group is likelier to have gone to selective schools than the comparison group, but less likely to have majored in math or to have an advanced degree:

 

They also took fewer college math courses than the comparison group:

 

But if you look at the TFA and comparison teachers’ scores on the Praxis II Mathematics Content Knowledge Test or the Praxis II Middle School Mathematics Test, two standardized tests meant to evaluate math knowledge among secondary math teachers, TFA teachers do better:

 

The results on Teaching Fellows are broadly similar, with the exception that they’re older, male-er, and have taken more college math classes than TFA teachers. They’re still younger and less math-educated than their comparison group, however.

 

The results – TFA

Before we get into results, I should note that most of the numbers here are expressed as standard deviations, which can be an impenetrable metric for the layperson. Luckily, it’s easy to convert it into a more meaningful number. Hanley Chiang, a coauthor of the report, describes the process:

 

According to previous research by Carolyn Hill and her colleagues, students’ average growth in math achievement over a single school year is about 0.27 standard deviations in the middle and high school grades. Therefore, if a gain is expressed in standard deviations, then dividing that gain by 0.27 gives you the fraction of the school year that is equivalent to that particular gain. For instance, a gain of 0.07 standard deviations (the achievement difference between students of TFA teachers and students of comparison teachers) is equivalent to about one-fourth of a school year (0.07 / 0.27 = 26 percent). If you assume that a school year consists of roughly 10 calendar months, then 26 percent of a school year translates into about 2.6 months of math instruction.

 

So, in our report, there are two simple steps to converting any standard deviation gain into months of learning: First, divide by 0.27. Second, multiply by 10.

 

With that in mind, here’s the nickel summary for TFA:

 

These are, frankly, devastating for many critics of past positive TFA studies, who have relied heavily on the fact that they compare TFA teachers against both experienced veteran teachers and teachers who entered through less selective alternative routes, which they argue stacks the deck in TFA’s favor.

 

“Let’s say you go to Reagan airport, and Delta says you have three options: one pilot who has had 30 hours of training, another who’s had five weeks of training, and another who’s been piloting for five years and has been piloting this plane for a whole year. Which pilot do you want?” Julian Vasquez Heilig, an associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin and author of some critical research on TFA, said in April. “When they compared the TFA teachers to the certified teachers, they weren’t better. There’s no significant result. So they’re comparing five weeks to 30 hours.”

 

That was true when Heilig said it, but it’s not true anymore. TFA teachers beat not only the alternative entry teachers but certified teachers too. What’s more, they beat both novice and experienced teachers:

 

Again, the 0.07 standard deviation gain compared to experienced teachers is equivalent to 2.6 extra months, or a 26 percent increase in the length of the school year. That’s huge. TFA teachers do especially well among high school students, though middle-schoolers see gains from TFA teachers too.

 

Critics could still argue that this could mean TFA teachers are just better at “teaching to the test,” rather than teaching real math skills. But as the Mathematica researchers note, this concern is misplaced. ”At the middle school level, we measured performance on state math tests, high stakes tests. We knew they were taking them seriously,” Clark explains. “But the flip side is that they might have been teaching to the test. At the high school level, since students are assessed at every grade level, we instead administered a test which was subject-specific, for algebra I and algebra II, geometry, and general high school math. The teachers had never seen it before and could not have been teaching to the test, and we also found effects at the high school level.” Indeed, the effects at the high school level are stronger than at the middle-school level. If TFA teachers were teaching to the test, they weren’t doing a great job of it.