- Two applicants seek to restart D.C.’s Options Public Charter School [Options PCS, Democracy Prep PCS, and KIPP DC PCS mentioned]
- In-seat attendance up in D.C. schools [Washington Latin PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, BASIS DC PCS, Options PCS, and Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
- More Schools Embrace Extended Day [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
- Letting families decide homework amount
- Good charter school governance begins with respect for the individual
Two applicants seek to restart D.C.’s Options Public Charter School [Options PCS, Democracy Prep PCS, and KIPP DC PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 10, 2014
The D.C. Public Charter School Board has received two applications for potential new charter schools, both of which seek to take over Options, a school for at-risk students that is under court receivership.
The future for Options has been uncertain since the city sued the charter school and its former leaders, alleging that they diverted more than $3 million from the school through contracts to companies they founded.
Josh Kern, a court-appointed receiver who is overseeing the Northeast Washington school, issued a request for proposals in August to find a new operator. Applicants first must be approved by the charter board to operate a school in the 2015-2016 school year.
The charter board announced the two applications Wednesday. One is from the current leaders of Options, who propose to continue efforts to turn around the school and to reopen it as Kingsman Academy. The second is from Phillips Programs for Children and Families, an organization that operates special education and nontraditional schools in Maryland and Virginia.
Charter board members are expected to vote on the applications at a meeting Nov. 20, and the receiver plans to make a final decision in December.
The process is similar to the selection process for two charter school takeovers approved last year. New York-based Democracy Prep was granted a charter to open a new school, but it instead was selected by leaders at Imagine Southeast in Ward 8 to take over that school. In addition, KIPP DC was selected to take over Arts and Technology Academy.
Options, which received its charter in 1996, was one of the city’s first charter schools. The school focuses on serving students who are the most at risk of dropping out of school.
Kern’s request for proposals to take over the school detailed some of the challenges that the school’s 386 students last year face: Nearly two-thirds had disabilities, one in five was overage and short the credits needed to graduate on time, and nearly one in 10 was homeless.
“In any given week, 7 to 10 students were absent because they were incarcerated,” the request said.
The charter board has two application cycles each year. During the most recent cycle, it received nine applications and approved three in May.
The board plans to have a hearing about the current applications Oct. 14.
In-seat attendance up in D.C. schools [Washington Latin PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, BASIS DC PCS, Options PCS, and Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 10, 2014
D.C. law requires schools to track attendance and get involved when children rack up unexcused absences. But schools are also paying closer attention to students who send in doctors notes or accumulate other excused absences.
The District is monitoring “in-seat attendance” — a measure that shows how many kids are actually present on any given day. It helps D.C. Public Schools and the D.C. charter school board figure out which schools have the biggest attendance challenges overall, and also flags days or weeks when attendance falls off.
It’s part of an overall effort to improve attendance in the city’s schools. More than 13,000 public school students in D.C. were chronically truant, meaning they had racked up 10 or more unexcused absences. Thousands more had multiple excused absences.
When it comes to reporting data, Scott Pearson, the charter board’s executive director, said focusing on truancy alone can backfire. It encourages schools to relax policies and accept almost any excuse as valid, he said.
“We spend a lot of time talking about in-seat attendance, what percent of kids are at school, period,” Pearson said. “If you are not in school, you are not in a learning environment.”
DCPS in recent years has shifted away from measuring “average-daily attendance” which counts students with excused absences as attending on any given day, according to Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national organization that has worked with DCPS. The new “in-seat attendance” measure only counts students who are actually there, which is a more meaningful number, she said.
Chang said children in kindergarten and first grade tend to miss more school with excused absences, because they get sick more frequently or have transportation issues or because their parents don’t think it’s problematic to miss school in the early grades.
But chronic absence early on can set a pattern for later school attendance problems that take away from valuable instructional time, she said.
D.C. schools are seeing some improvement in this measure.
DCPS reported Wednesday its average in-seat attendance rate rose from 86.4 percent in the 2012-2013 school year to 88.5 percent last year. It has not yet released school-by-school results.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board reported last week a nearly 1 percent increase in in-seat attendance — from 90.7 percent in 2012-2013 to 91.5 percent last year.
Some of the charter schools with highest in-seat attendance last year included Washington Latin and Washington Yu Ying with 97 percent each, and Basis DC with 96 percent.
Some of those with the lowest rates included Booker T. Washington, which has since closed, with 67 percent, as well as Options with 75 percent and Maya Angelou - Evans High School with 76 percent.
More Schools Embrace Extended Day [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
September 10, 2014
Last year, nine schools participated in the extended-day program, an outgrowth of the $10 million “Proving What's Possible” initiative launched in 2012 to help improve test scores, enrollment and graduation rates among District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) students.
Although school officials aimed for the participation of 42 schools this year, the number still increased significantly and Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who set aside $5.1 million in her latest budget to accommodate an extra hour of instruction, couldn’t be happier.
“We have 25 schools that have decided to extend their day, and in some cases they are extending it by an hour, and in some cases longer,” Henderson, 44, said. “Some in the morning, some in the afternoon [which] gives our [faculties] more flexibility and time to spend with students, so I think we’ll see more and more schools opting to do this as we make the opportunity available.”
On the other hand, Henderson voiced her disdain with the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) stance on extended days.
“What’s frustrating is that we have a contract that allows us to let teachers elect to do an extended day, and in some cases, the building representatives didn’t even allow their votes to go forward,” Henderson said. “We’ve never been in the business of forcing anybody into an extended school day. We’ve never mandated anything [as] there are lots of teachers [who asked to be in the program], and to have the organization that represents teachers say ‘no you shouldn’t do this,’ I think was kind of confusing.”
Henderson added that her administration treats its teachers as professionals and that those who wanted to spend more time with their students have an opportunity to do so.
“And even if the whole school didn’t vote, we had a number of teachers who said ‘I’ll do an extended day with my class anyway,’ and so we’ll pay our teachers [the extra $34 an hour] to do that,” she said.
The longer days begin at 8:45 a.m. and end at 4:45 p.m. Schools that participated last year include C.W. Harris, Garfield, Nalle, and Orr elementary schools in Southeast; Noyes in Northeast; Kelly Miller and Johnson Middle schools in Southeast; and Dunbar Senior High School in Northwest.
Ward 5 School Board member Mark Jones said that while he supports longer days, it’s too early for DCPS officials to make sound assessments regarding effectiveness.
“I’m all for it. I think that if DCPS has a good plan it’ll work,” Jones, 56, said referring to the success of charter schools like DC Prep in Northeast. Based on results from the 2014 District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System, DC Prep received honors this summer as the top-performing network of public schools in the nation’s capital.
“I think a lot of that is the result of an extended school day,” said Jones. “However, while I believe the longer schedule is working for District public schools, I don’t have the hard data to prove it,” he said. “It’s going to take time to find out – such as three or four years of test scores – and it’s going to involve a lot of research.”
WTU President Elizabeth Davis could not be reached for comment, but like Jones, has voiced skepticism surrounding previous “progressive” test scores and their correlation to extended learning sessions.
“We should be looking more at students having a more productive day, than basing everything on test scores,” Davis said in an earlier interview. “More research needs to be conducted to [prove a correlation] between student performance and longer school days.”
In most cases, the extended day focuses on the District’s lowest performing schools, with the expectation to have their students achieve increased proficiency in core subjects like reading and math by 40 percent, and to get 75 percent of first-time freshmen to graduate from high school on time in accordance with Henderson’s aggressive five-year strategy to rebuild DCPS into a high-quality, vibrant system.
But veteran schools advocate Delabian Thurston said Henderson’s team needs to make sure their extended-day programs are available at all District public schools.
“Students who are already doing well, are going to do even better with extended-day programs and those at the bottom aren’t going to realistically catch up with the students at the top if they lack access to the same programs,” said Thurston, 69.
“The students who aren’t doing well may need a longer day because they’ve got to have more input in order to catch up,” she said. “If you’re not going to do more for the students who need more than you’re doing for those who don’t need more, you can’t effectively play catch-up with the students who are already behind. So, in the end, it’s not a question of fair input, it’s a question of how to get the outcomes we want.”
Letting families decide homework amount
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
September 10, 2014
My grandsons don’t get much screen time. By that I mean they are almost never exposed to television, laptops, tablets, smartphones and whatever is the latest thing keeping our youth awash in entertainment.
I thought my son and daughter-in-law might be too strict on this. Was it right that the boys — 5, 3 and 1 — knew nothing of the hit film “Frozen” other than what their friends told them at school? My children had watched TV while growing up without any noticeable harm.
But my kids, I realized, had been outdoorsy types who did not spend much time with the tube. As a new book reminded me, research is showing that screen time is a much bigger problem now, with consequences not only for learning but also having healthy lives. The book’s recommendations of a 45-minute daily limit on passive watching and a regularly scheduled homework period — more than twice that number for high school students — make sense to me.
“Technology has . . . become an ever-present influence on our lives,” say Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, Rebecca Jackson and Robert M. Pressman, authors of “The Learning Habit: A Groundbreaking Approach to Homework and Parenting That Helps Our Children Succeed in School and Life.”
When you exceed 45 minutes of what the book calls “daily media time,” the negative effects on educational, emotional and social development begin to kick in. Ninety minutes of screen time a day can lower a child’s achievement nearly one grade level, according to their book.
The authors are a bit hysterical about teen culture, but reasonable people can disagree on that. The book’s major weakness is its reliance on the authors’ very large online survey. It yielded 50,000 responses, but, as they acknowledge, such a flood of volunteered, self-reported data can be skewed. The book benefits from several smaller, more scientific research results.
We have known for decades from solid data, such as the University of Michigan time diaries, that high school students on average spend less than an hour a day on homework and more than twice as much time with TV and video games. Those of us who remember the ill effects of not doing our homework know that poor time management has something to do with our learning slump.
So how do you get teenagers to study more and spend less time with their gadgets? The authors offer a clever approach I have never seen seriously discussed in our long national homework debate. Each family should pick a reasonable amount of homework time, perhaps 10 minutes for every grade — so second graders do 20 minutes a day and 12th graders do 120 minutes. Once the student has worked the allotted time, he or she should stop, even if the assignments are not done.
The authors provide research and case studies that convince even me that if teachers have assigned more than what fits into the reasonable period a family has adopted, they have probably included some useless busy work that is best not done at all.
Once the homework is done, under the Learning Habit system, students are free to play with their devices, catch up on “The Walking Dead” or shoot some baskets. Learning should not be a nightly battle, the authors say, but a dependable part of the day. Good time management, once internalized, makes college and life easier.
My grandsons are getting a gradual introduction to screen-heavy popular culture. They got to watch “Frozen” twice during a vacation last month. Their parents, and others, will find “The Learning Habit” a helpful addition to their shelves.
Good charter school governance begins with respect for the individual
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
September 11, 2014
The school year has started and all around the nation's capital charter school boards of directors are meeting for the first session for the new term. There are so many factors that go into these bodies operating at a high level but if I had to choose the fundamental characteristic that increases the probability for governance success I would start with an emphasis on respect for the individual.
Think about it. These boards are composed of around 15 diverse people who often live extremely busy lives. They are now being asked to serve as volunteers to review and comprehend mounds of information, much of it foreign to their professional training. These individuals are expected to attend regularly scheduled meetings, often at night after they have put in a hard day at their regular jobs. On top of this members take time consuming leadership positions on board such as being chair, vice-chair, treasurer, or secretary, or to run one of the standing committees through which the group organizes its work. Add to these pressures the fact that the quality of the governance of a board can mean whether a charter school prospers or fails. There is much on the line and that line is composed of the future leaders of this nation.
Therefore, strong leadership of these boards becomes crucial. This job most often falls to the chair. However, it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. The head of school plays a vital role in setting the tone of the relationship between the board and the school, and committee heads also significantly drive the level of governance. But no matter where the leadership originates the operation must be grounded on respect.
It is not like once people join boards they are automatically ready to roll up their sleeves to get to work. Good leadership means that these individuals become engaged. They look forward to meetings and enjoy each others company. They are excited about the tasks ahead and about making meaningful progress over the next 12 months.
What I'm describing is not any different from employee engagement at work. Engaged employees perform at a elevated level. Firms that have positive staff engagement have lower vacancy rates. The environment is also safer than those in which employee engagement is low.
One way to improve engagement is to listen to the ideas of others. Accepting others opinions and giving everyone a say in what is going on is the primary means though which we can demonstrate respect. Another method is to divvy up responsibilities so that everyone feels that they are providing value to the board.
There are many other ways to raise engagement levels. Setting high standards gets people excited about the organization and makes them want to contribute toward these goals. Bringing levity to this terribly serious responsibility also helps.
But boards will fails to advance and may even self-destruct if they fail to pay strict attention to the first stepping stone of good governance. That pillar is respect for the individual.