- D.C. principals: When is there too much choice?
- New charter school may boost Congress Heights housing market [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Exclusive interview with Dr. Marco Clark, CEO Richard Wright PCS for Journalism [Richard Wright PCS mentioned]
- Charter school enrollments increased by 13 percent nationally
- David Boies, eyeing education through a civil rights lens
D.C. principals: When is there too much choice?
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 15, 2014
What happens to students who attend five schools in six years? How can schools attract enough students to balance their budgets and stay competitive when new schools are opening all the time? How does school choice benefit families who are the least prepared to make informed decisions?
Three D.C. principals recently discussed some of the challenges of educating children in a system that is increasingly defined by school choice, with growing numbers of charter schools and high mobility in traditional schools.
“For me, what keeps me up at night is how much choice is too much,” said Andria Caruthers, principal of West Education Campus, at a forum at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. “I think especially for me in Ward 4, it’s a tipping point right now.”
Caruthers said there are 10 schools within a five-minute walking radius of her school in Northeast Washington. She’s concerned about schools not having the enrollment to qualify for funding to provide quality services. And she worries about families who are not well versed in how the lottery works, particularly at the preschool level, when they are not guaranteed access to their neighborhood school and could miss out on the opportunity for early learning.
The forum, which included principals from two traditional public schools and one charter school, was part of a series called District of Change, produced by Slate editor David Plotz and author Hanna Rosin and funded by the D.C Public Library Foundation. It was moderated by Amanda Ripley, author of “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way.”
The conversation touched on teacher evaluations, testing and demographic changes as the principals explored whether efforts to improve public education over the past few years have been successful. They lauded the city’s renewed focus and energy around school improvement, improved academic results in some areas, as well as efforts to make more data available to the public.
While they appeared to agree on the principle of choice and offering families more opportunities to pursue quality academic opportunities, they also highlighted the need to provide more coordination in the disjointed system of charter and traditional public schools.
“People look at these like two separate systems, but we have so many students that are shared,” said Scott Cartland, principal at Wheatley Education Campus in Ward 5. “Unfortunately, we have a lot of students who will be in four or five different schools in a five- or six-year period.” He said that if students are struggling in one school and then just move on to another school, their challenges go unaddressed.
“They are always starting over, and ultimately it has a detrimental effect,” he said.
Alexandra Pardo, executive director of Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School in Southeast, agreed.
“For us at the high school level, we get students who have been to five or six different middle schools,” she said. “You’re not surprised if they are not there in May of their ninth-grade year, because every six months, seven months, eight months, kids are moving around.”
She described students learning from different reading programs at multiple schools and the gaps in learning that result.
“We have a ton of choice, but we are not having targeted or strategic choice,” she said.
New charter school may boost Congress Heights housing market [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michele Lerner
September 15, 2014
Some real estate experts are projecting a boost in the housing market in Congress Heights based on the future relocation of the Department of Homeland Security to a new building at the St. Elizabeths site and now the completion of the $18 million state-of-the-art Friendship Public Charter School.
A recent study in New York City showed that a new charter school in a neighborhood can boost home values there by four percent. Morgan Knull, an associate broker with Re/Max Gateway in D.C., says a similar effect could happen here.
“General interest charter schools add appeal and enhance property values in gentrifying parts of D.C.,” Knull says.
“This is particularly seen in neighborhoods in which the in-boundary schools are low performing, as proximity to public charter schools provides a viable option for young families that wish to remain within the city,” he adds. “In addition, we’re finding some families consciously relocating to sections of the city that have greater concentrations of charter schools, such as Petworth and Brookland.”
Friendship Public Charter School, which serves nearly 4,000 students in the District from preschool through 12th grade, recently opened its new building on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue adjacent to the St. Elizabeths hospital site currently being developed into the new DHS headquarters.
Friendship’s Technology Preparatory Academy, which serves sixth through 12th grade, specializes in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — and environmental sciences. The new school includes a greenhouse, a research and technology lab and science labs. Tech Prep has been chosen as a career academy site for IT and all 11th and 12th grade students are dual-enrolled at the school and in college to earn college credits.
The St. Elizabeths site is anticipated to offer potential career-oriented alliances for the Tech Prep students when DHS opens there and plans also call for a college or university and high-tech companies to have a presence on the site.
Exclusive interview with Dr. Marco Clark, CEO Richard Wright PCS for Journalism [Richard Wright PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
September 15, 2014
I had the distinct pleasure recently of sitting down for a conversation with Dr. Marco Clark, founder and chief executive officer of the Richard Wright PCS for Journalism and Media Arts. The school is located in Ward 6 in the Navy Pier section of Southeast, right down the street from Nationals Stadium. This entire section of Washington, D.C. is currently experiencing a revolution regarding new commercial and residential development. After my visit with Dr. Clark, I became convinced there is an academic revolution occurring simultaneously within the walls of this charter school.
Dr. Clark has spent almost 20 years as an urban educator in the roles of school founder, principal, assistant principal, and teacher. He decided to create Richard Wright after becoming frustrated with the slow bureaucratic operation of traditional school systems. Dr. Clark became convinced that he could do better.
His pedagogical philosophy works like this: The Richard Wright CEO’s first academic goal with students is to get them reading at the proficient and advanced level. He explained that this achievement would naturally lead to improvements in the ability of students to write. Then, Dr. Clark revealed, their writing skills would translate into development of their oratory abilities. “Once kids have reached this stage they can use their voice to bring true positive advocacy to the world,” the Richard Wright CEO asserted.
A closely associated aim of the charter school is to make a contribution to 21st Century technology. Dr. Clark detailed that the school wants to be able to create their own form of media in a positive manner that would remove barriers to access. But he again emphasized that “curing illiteracy is the key to curing neighborhoods.”
It was at this point, early on in our discussion, that my eyes began to tear. I wanted to delve deeper into the reason behind the founding of the school. “Did you do it because of the influence of someone in your life,” I inquired. “Was it a teacher or perhaps a parent?” Although initially reluctant to directly answer my question, eventually his motivation became clear.
“When I was 11 years old,” Dr. Clark recalled, “a guidance counselor told me that I was functionally illiterate. I carried that label for a long time. It severely damaged my self esteem. When I got to college professor Johnny Wilson discovered that I had a problem with comprehension and provided me with techniques to improve my academic ability in this area. We see kids today with the identical issue.” Dr. Clark impressively went on to earn a bachelor of arts in political science with a minor in secondary education, a master’s degree in special education and another in educational administration, and then a doctorate in higher education.
The Richard Wright Public Charter School is currently in its fourth year of operation serving 400 students in grades 8 through 12 that come primarily from Wards 7 and 8. The school’s charter allows a total enrollment of 550 kids. 100 percent of these children qualify for free or reduced lunch. This year will be the first graduating class. Dr. Clark related to me that kids generally enter the school three to four years behind grade level.
The academic progress the school has made in three years in absolutely astounding. The first class had a reading proficiency rate of 23 percent and an 18 percent proficiency rate in math, detailed Dr. Clark. The 2014 DC CAS scores demonstrated a 52 percent proficiency in reading. Math proficiency jumped to 40 percent. The D.C. Public Charter School Board recently recognized Richard Wright as being one of the top 10 schools with the greatest one year increase in overall DC CAS scores at 10.2 percent. I asked Dr. Clark for the reasons behind these gains.
“The improvements in the standardized test results are good, but of course they are not where we want them to be,” Dr. Clark said as he started his explanation. “I think the main reason is that this is not your ordinary school. Our culture is based upon relationships. We prove that we buy into these kids and then they buy into us. We show them that we really love them. We are creating scholars here, not inmates.”
All children are issued a computer notebook which they are allowed to work with at home. The school utilizes Testourkids.com as a reading enrichment program. Students are not allowed to progress unless they have proved that they have mastered the previous lesson. Students are pulled out for additional reading work if necessary. There are daily enrichment blocks focused on reading and math. Kids can obtain extra assistance on Friday afternoons. A Saturday Academy prepares students for the PSAT and SAT examinations. Students can also take advantage of the availability of Advanced Placement courses. Assessment data is heavily relied upon to determine students’ academic pathway.
Dr. Clark’s overall goal is nothing less than the perfection of one school. “We accept the triumphs and ask how we can get better,” the Richard Wright CEO expounded. “We are always trying to improve and always attempting to grow in knowledge. In fact, we take each and every challenge as a learning experience.”
He is proud of their recent accomplishments even beyond the strengthening of academics. “The media program is gaining in momentum due to new partnerships,” Dr. Clark informed me. “We now offer instruction in film, photography and digital arts. We have extracurricular activities of football, Marshall Arts, an audiovisual club, and our flag football team just won a championship.”
But I received a strong sense that Dr. Clark is most excited about the overall direction of the charter school. He explained, “We have some great young teachers here. We are all on the clock 24 hours, seven days a week. Our culture is growing stronger every day which I am confident will translate into a continued strong growth in academics.”
Charter school enrollments increased by 13 percent nationally
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 16, 2014
Nationwide, about 2.5 million public school students were enrolled in charter schools last school year, up from 789,000 a decade earlier, according to the most recent enrollment estimates from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Last year, the number of students enrolled increased by 12.6 percent from the year before.
There were 6,400 charter schools in the 42 states that permit them in the 2013-2014 school year. In recent years, between 500 and 600 new charter schools have opened each year, and between 150 and 200 schools have closed annually for low enrollment, low academic performance or financial concerns.
Here is a look of the most recent accounting of charter school growth in every state. The District added four new charters last fall and closed three. With 60 charter schools on 107 campuses, the District had more charter schools than most states.
California, one of the most populous states, led the nation in charter school growth last year with 104 new schools. It also closed 39 schools. Arizona added 87 and closed 16, and Florida added 75 and closed 26.
Visit link above to view chart.
David Boies, eyeing education through a civil rights lens
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
September 15, 2014
David Boies, the superlawyer who chairs a group that is trying to overturn teacher tenure laws in New York and elsewhere, said Monday that his organization is not looking to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court — at least not in the short run.
Boies, who helped lead the legal team that won a Supreme Court victory allowing same-sex marriages to resume in California, said his organization is focused on challenging tenure in state courts.
Last month, Boies became chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, a group founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown to challenge teacher tenure laws. The group says that tenure laws make it too costly and difficult to get rid of weak teachers and that poor students are saddled with the worst educators.
A similar group based in California — led by lawyers Ted Olson and Ted Boutrous, with whom Boies worked on the Supreme Court case regarding gay marriage — challenged and won a judgment in a Los Angeles court against that state’s tenure laws. The judge found that tenure laws violate students’ civil rights under the state constitution. The teachers union and Gov. Jerry Brown are appealing.
Boies said in an interview with The Washington Post that he is crafting a state-by-state strategy regarding teacher tenure because many state constitutions explicitly require the provision of an equal education to all public school students.
“Our initial approach is state law,” he said. “And we’ll see how much progress we can make using state law.”
The U.S. Constitution does not include the right to education. But civil rights activists used the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — which says that no state shall deny to any person “the equal protection of the laws” — as the basis for Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that put an end to racially segregated schools.
Bringing arguments in state court can help lay the groundwork for an eventual Supreme Court case, Boies said. He noted that the fight for gay marriage was initially waged state-by-state. “It helped frame the issue,” Boies said. “It helped raise people’s knowledge about the issue.”
The Partnership for Educational Justice filed a legal challenge to New York’s tenure laws in July. The New York City Parents Union, a better-established group, already had filed a similar suit weeks earlier.
There has been tension between the two groups, with the parents union accusing Brown of trying to run roughshod over the parent group. Last week, a New York State Supreme Court judge decided to combine the complaints.
But tenure is just one factor that creates uneven educational opportunities for poor children, Boies said. He said disparate school funding based on real estate taxes means that public schools in poor communities have fewer resources than those in more affluent neighborhoods. And despite efforts by the federal government and some state governments to make up for those shortfalls, “the children who need the most get the least,” Boies said.
Getting rid of tenure, evening out school spending and allowing parents some choice among public schools would improve outcomes for students, he said.
“If you had fiscal equality and promotion and retention [of teachers] on merits and you had family choice, these three things would go a long way to radically improving our education system,” said Boies, the son of two public school teachers.
Boies, 73, has been quietly involved in education groups for several years. He is on the board of StudentsFirstNY, which is part of the national organization founded by Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. Schools Chancellor who recently announced she is stepping down as chief executive of that group. Boies also supports Teach for America and hosts an annual picnic for TFA members from the New York metropolitan area.