FOCUS DC News Wire 9/12/13

 

 

Some D.C. charter school leaders are asking the city’s public charter school board to reconsider a proposal to rank preschools based largely on their performance on varying math and reading tests.

 

In written comments to the board, several leaders questioned the validity of comparing schools based on different assessments and said the proposed evaluation tool would have unintended consequences.

 

“In creating a tiering system for schools, this framework creates high stakes for all of our schools, and these high stakes will have a negative impact on our children’s learning environment,” said Maquita Alexander, head of school for Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School.

 

The board’s proposed “Early Childhood Performance Management Framework” would extend a system that is already being used to measure the success of charter schools serving older students and sort them into tiers. It was designed to give parents a better understanding of how charter schools compare to each other and to provide a common yard stick to show how they are meeting the goal of preparing the city’s children for success later in school.

 

Five school leaders were among about 50 people who submitted comments to the board. Most of the respondents were parents who urged the board to give social and emotional learning more weight in any kind of evaluation tool. They expressed concerns that the framework would lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and an overly academic preschool environment that would not be developmentally appropriate for very young students.

 

“I do not care AT ALL how well [my daughter] is learning to read, or do math, at ages three and four. I want to know that she is being taught self awareness, sensitivity to others, social skills, self-management, and strong decision-making,” wrote one mother of a first grade student at Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School. “THESE are the skills that will allow her to be a good student once she reaches first grade.”

 

Literacy and math would account for 45 to 60 percent of a preschool’s total score in the proposed framework. A social and emotional assessment, weighted at 15 percent, would be optional. Measures of teacher quality and school attendance would also be included.

 

For kindergarten through second grade, math and reading performance would account for between 70 and 80 percent of a school’s rating, with an optional social and emotional component weighted at 10 percent.

 

The board is considering changes to the proposal based on the public comments, said charter board spokeswoman Theola Labbé-DeBose. The vote is scheduled for Sept 16 at the next charter school board meeting to be held at DC Scholars Public Charter School at 5601 East Capitol St. SE at 7:30 p.m. (The board has launched an initiative to host meetings in different parts of the city).

 

Scott Pearson, the executive director of the charter school board, responded to many parents directly in an e-mail in which he explained that the board has “vital role” to ensure that taxpayer-funded charter schools are high quality.

 

He explained that the framework would not impose new tests, but instead allow schools to choose from the more than two dozen assessments already in use.

 

And he emphasized that the framework “was developed in close collaboration with charter school leaders who broadly support this proposal.”

 

But some charter leaders challenged this assertion.

 

“While there is widespread support for public accountability and transparency in our public charter school sector, including its early childhood programs, there are a number of schools with concerns about elements of this framework and others concerned about the process by which the [public charter school board] developed this framework,” wrote Kristin Scotchmer, executive director of Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School.

 

Scotchmer, as well as officials from Washington Yu Ying, Elsie Whitlow Stokes, and Capitol City public charter schools questioned the validity of comparing schools based on different assessments.

 

“The assessments measure different skills and will show different data about a student’s academic performance,” said Linda Moore, founder and senior adviser of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School. “Some assessments are multiple choice, much like the DCCAS, and others are observational, teacher-administered and scored. Some provide multi-layered evaluations of a child’s development over time, others provide a single snapshot of one skill.”

 

Some said that the proposed framework could create an incentive for schools to choose less challenging assessments that would yield high scores rather than tests that provide the most useful data for teachers to use in the classroom.

 

They also said the specifics of the framework could cause some school to introduce new tests for other reasons.

 

As a possible remedy, they suggested the board should publish performance data but not rank schools with it.

 

Some also requested that the board delay a vote until it can do more analysis on the results of a pilot of the framework that many schools participated in last year.

 

Moore and others expressed enthusiasm about the efforts to increase accountability but said the proposal still needs work. “We believe that the District of Columbia can be a national model for evaluation and public accountability,” Moore wrote.

 

 

The D.C. Public Charter School Board announced yesterday that it had received three applications under its revised Experienced Operator Guidelines Scoring Guide. The turnaround time for these applications is amazingly short with a public hearing being held on Wednesday, October 16th and final decisions being made on Monday, November 18th.

The new schools would eventually add 2,474 seats to the charter school movement. Harmony School of Excellence-DC currently teaches 25,000 students on 40 campuses in Texas. The operator already has three things going for it. Harmony specializes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, wants to teach underprivileged students, and has a 100 percent college acceptance rate. It has won a $30 million U.S. Department of Education Race to the Top grant. The charter plans to enroll 624 pupils in grades Kindergarten through twelve.

 

Frederick Drew Gregory Academy has been a dream of D.C.'s Association of Chartered Public Schools. The institution would focus on students who have problems learning in regular schools which include pupils with behavioral problems. The model for the school was established in California and currently encompasses 14 charters on 75 campuses. It would use Education Management Systems III, inc. as its charter management organization. The school would eventually teach 1,200 students in grades seven through twelve. Mr. Gregory is a D.C. native who became a decorated military pilot and astronaut.

 

The third application comes from Democracy Prep, a charter that would enroll 650 students in Pre-Kindergarten three through fourth grade. The operator currently serves 2.000 students in grades Kindergarten through twelve in Harlem and Camden, New Jersey on nine campuses. The charter focuses on students with requiring special education and English language learners. Democracy Prep prides itself on college preparation for its student body. Its slogan is "work hard, go to college, change the world."

 

If approved these charters would open in the fall of 2014.

 

 

There's been a lot of talk about the most recent DC CAS reading and math scores and what they mean. But another set of test scores, assessing students' writing skills, hasn't gotten much attention. What do they mean, if anything?

 

The DC CAS has included a composition section since 2011, but the 2012-13 school year is the first time the scores have been factored into a school's rating for purposes of federal law. (The scores still don't count for DCPS teacher evaluations.) Like the reading and math scores, writing scores went up this year. But measuring writing proficiency is even trickier than assessing skills in reading and math.

 

 

All DCPS and DC charter school students in grades 4, 7, and 10 took DC's standardized writing test last spring. The overall proficiency rate for DCPS students was just under 50%. For charter school students the rate was slightly higher, just over 52%. In both cases that represents an increase over prior years.

 

Although the one-year increases were fairly modest, the gains from 2011 were dramatic for both sectors: DCPS writing scores increased by 16.9 points, and charter scores by 19.5 points.

 

Does that mean that DC students are now aces at writing? Based on what I know personally and what I've heard from teachers and parents, I doubt it. And the data show that more DCPS students fall into the "below basic" category in writing (20%) than in either reading (17%) or math (18%).

 

On the other hand, there are also more students in the "advanced" category: 21%, as compared to only 11% in reading and 16% in math. So the writing results are more polarized than other categories: there are more really good writers, as measured by the test, but also more really bad ones.

 

In fact, in DCPS schools there are fewer students scoring at the "proficient" level in writing than in reading and math. Only 29% of students scored proficient in writing, whereas the figure for reading was 36% and for math 33%. Because the proficiency rate is a combination of "proficient" and "advanced," it's really the relatively high number of students in the advanced category who are pulling the writing proficiency rate up to 50%.

 

Breakdown of DCPS scores

 

DCPS has released a breakdown of scores by ward, subgroup, and school, so it's possible to try to draw some conclusions about which DCPS students are doing better or worse in writing. (OSSE has not yet released a school-by-school breakdown of composition scores for charter schools, although the schools themselves have received the information.)

 

For the most part, the DCPS writing score breakdown is what you would expect. Students in Wards 2 and 3 scored a lot higher than those in Wards 7 and 8, with over 75% proficient as compared to about 36% and 30%, respectively. White students were about 80% proficient, Hispanics about 50%, and blacks about 44%.

 

But there are some puzzling discrepancies. Common sense would indicate that reading and writing scores should track each other fairly closely, and in most cases that's true. But in some cases the two scores diverge significantly.

 

Perhaps it's not surprising that at 5 schools reading scores were much higher than writing scores, since writing is generally a harder skill to master. At Orr Elementary School, for example, reading proficiency was about 32%, while writing was only about 9%.

 

What's harder to explain are the 7 schools where the writing score was substantially higher than reading. At Stanton Elementary School, for example, reading proficiency was just under 20%, but writing was at 40%. Even more dramatic was Garfield Elementary. There, only about 15% of students scored proficient in reading, but over 55% scored proficient in writing.

 

And remember that overall, only 11% of DCPS students scored advanced in reading, while almost twice as many did so in writing.

 

Subjectivity in the scoring

 

One possible explanation for these inconsistencies is that scoring a writing test is not as objective a process. Multiple-choice reading and math tests are scored by machines, but the DC CAS writing assessment is scored by human beings.

 

According to OSSE, these human beings are hired and trained by CTB/McGraw Hill and Kelly Services, a temporary personnel agency formerly known as Kelly Girl. Steps are taken to ensure quality and consistency: all raters must have a bachelor's degree or higher, all are interviewed and screened, and all receive training in the scoring rubric. Raters review sample "exemplary responses," so they know what they're looking for. In addition, about 10% of answers are scored by a second person who doesn't know the score given by the first reader.

 

Still, it's inevitable that more subjectivity is involved in scoring a test for which there's no one right answer. A criterion like "Fully addresses the demands of the question or prompt," which is part of the scoring rubric, leaves a certain amount of wiggle room.

 

So it's not really clear what these tests are telling us about the state of students' writing skills. Nor is it clear that DC students will do as well on future standardized writing assessments.

 

Starting in 2011, DC revised its writing prompts to be more aligned with the rigorous Common Core curriculum, which emphasizes analyzing and interpreting texts. For example, the old sample 10th-grade writing prompt for the DC CAS was: "Who is likely to accomplish more—the person who adjusts to society as it is, or the person who attempts to change it?" In their answers, students were invited to draw on their reading as well as their own experience and observations, but they didn't need to interpret a text.

 

The new Common Core-aligned sample 10th-grade question for the DC CAS gives students a two-page story to read and then asks questions about how the author conveys a certain message through the characters. That may be more challenging than the previous DC CAS writing test, but it's probably a lot easier than the writing questions students will begin to confront in school year 2014-15.

 

More complex questions

 

That's when DC will replace its own test with a test devised by a consortium called PARCC, which DC and 19 states have joined. Like the current DC CAS, the PARCC test will ask students to read and respond to texts. But the texts for the sample 10th-grade PARCC questions are much more complex: an excerpt from a high-flown 1941 blank-verse translation of the Daedalus and Icarus myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and a poem on the same subject by Anne Sexton. One of the writing prompts asks students to analyze how Icarus's experience of flying is portrayed differently in the two texts. It's an assignment many college students would no doubt find challenging.

 

So if writing scores drop precipitously once the PARCC test comes in, that won't necessarily mean students' writing skills have suddenly plummeted. And although we'll be able to compare writing scores in DC to those in other jurisdictions that are using the same test, there may still be some subjectivity in the scoring, since the PARCC writing tests will also probably be graded by human beings.

 

Using a test to evaluate writing is inherently a tricky business. PARCC has said it is considering using computers to evaluate its writing tests, and the other Common Core testing consortium is actually trying to "train" computers to do the job. But that approach would inevitably bring its own problems.

 

And some students simply don't write well under pressure. It might make more sense to assess writing skills by means of a student portfolio rather than a time-limited test, but it's hard to see how that could be done on a mass scale.

 

On the other hand, if we don't test writing, it probably won't get taught. Surely one reason writing has been neglected in recent years is that the tests mandated by No Child Left Behind have focused exclusively on reading and math. And writing is too crucial a skill to be ignored. So the best we can do, it seems, is to administer writing tests and actually pay some attention to the results. But we also need to remind ourselves to take those results with a grain of salt.

 

 

TUCSON— Simone Ufondu, 11, stepped onto Bus 2001 Wednesday morning and slid into a seat next to a tall stranger. Simone, a sixth-grader at Dodge Middle School, didn’t recognize her seatmate, Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

 

But once he introduced himself, she told him all about her school, and the improvements she’d like to see.

 

“I want to be able to express our individuality,” Simone said after the ride. “They’re strict there. I’d like it to be more creative.”

 

Duncan was on the bus route as part of his week-long tour of schools through Southwest states. As part of his Wednesday stops, Duncan also will visit a high school in Tucson to learn about the use of technology in classrooms and Arizona State University in Tempe to discuss college affordability.

 

At Dodge Middle School, Duncan was swarmed by dozens of children who wanted their photo taken with him, even if they were a little unsure exactly who he was. A onetime professional basketball player, Duncan shot baskets with some of the kids and gave the school an autographed basketball – one of dozens he dispenses on his school visits. He met teachers and administrators, toured classrooms and fielded questions from sixth-graders in the library. Duncan was accompanied to the school by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.

 

Asked by one girl if he had ever eaten dinner at the White House with the president, and what was on the menu, Duncan answered “Pies. They have really good pies at the White House.”

 

Then he talked about President Obama’s path to success. “The president didn’t grow up with a lot of advantages. His dad, frankly, abandoned his family. He had a strong mom but they didn’t have a lot. They were on welfare for a while. . . . But he and the first lady are who they are because they got a great education.”

 

Asked about Arizona’s transition to the new Common Core standards in math and reading, Duncan said the new standardized tests that students will take should be an improvement over current tests. “We think a lot of the tests you take — fill in the bubble tests — are not that great,” he said. “Our hope is that the new tests will test more of your critical thinking skills. More thinking, more problem-solving, working together and less rote memorization.”

 

Duncan told the students that the transition may be bumpy. “There will be mistakes and things will be messed up — it’ll be a hard couple of years,” he said. “But if we can stay the course, we’ll be in a much better place as a nation in three to five years.”

 

Later, Duncan’s back-to-school bus tour pulled up to Sunnyside High School so Duncan could check out one of the few school districts in the country that has made the switch from paper materials to all digital.

 

The Sunnyside Unified School district stopped buying textbooks for grades 4-12 four years ago and is planning to convert its earliest grades to digital soon, Superintendent Manuel Isquierdo said.

 

“We are eliminating textbooks, we have invested in technology,” Isquierdo told Duncan before an auditorium filled with students, teachers and administrators. “Everybody needs technology, everybody needs Internet. It is our basic civil right.”

 

Duncan met some middle school students who showed him the online tutorial they are taking to learn computer-generated animation. “He is really cool — I like him,” said Sebastian Moreno, 13, an eighth-grader at Challenger Middle School, as Duncan walked away.

 

At the high school, Duncan heard from an English teacher who lets her students listen to “The Odyssey” on their cellphones, a science teacher who is leading his students in analyzing corn seeds for genetically modified DNA, and a student who had been unmotivated until she fell in love with 3-D printing and design.

 

“What you’re doing has national implications,” Duncan told the crowd. “We’re trying to move from print to digital. As a nation, we spend $7 to $9 billion a year on textbooks that by the time you receive them, are out of date. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

 

Duncan talked about the importance of technology in schools, especially in communities where children lack other resources. Eight-six percent of the students in the Sunnyside Unified School district are low-income.

 

While he called Sunnyside a national model, Duncan said he is worried about communities that lack the equipment and connectivity to use technology in the classroom. According to the Obama administration, fewer than 20 percent of teachers say they have the technology they need in their classrooms.

 

To extend high-speed broadband and wireless capacity to 99 percent of schools within five years, the administration has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to expand a program known as E-Rate. Created in 1997, E-Rate subsidizes Internet services and digital devices for schools and libraries. The program is funded by fees on monthly phone bills. The administration is proposing to increase those fees by about 40 cents, to raise an additional $7 billion to be used for schools. The FCC is accepting public comment on the proposal and is expected to make a decision later this year.