FOCUS DC News Wire 9/23/13

 

 

FOR FIVE years, the former Charles E. Young Elementary School has sat empty, its facilities slowly rotting and fast becoming a neighborhood nuisance. Elsewhere in Northeast Washington, Two Rivers Public Charter School has been bursting at the seams and turning away students attracted by its high standards. So the District’s decision to make Charles E. Young and other shuttered schools available to public charters is to be applauded — even if it doesn’t help those students who missed out on educational opportunities because of the city’s previous reluctance to provide space to charters.

 

Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) announced Wednesday that Two Rivers and another highly acclaimed public charter school, KIPP DC, will enter into long-term leases for the two public school buildings. The award of the historic Young facility to Two Rivers and the former Hamilton School to KIPP DC is an important step by the District government in helping charters solve what’s been a chronic shortage of appropriate classroom space. It’s also clearly a recognition of the central — and increasing — role charters play in the District; they now enroll more than 40 percent of public school students.

 

In May, the administration advertised 16 surplus schools for possible use by charters, and it is now considering other applications that could lead to placing charters in abandoned city buildings. Particularly noteworthy is the emphasis Mr. Gray’s education team is placing on educational quality. A city-commissioned study last year found the District in need of nearly 40,000 additional high-quality school seats. One of the best ways to meet that demand is by encouraging growth from charter networks with proven records of success in boosting student achievement.

 

Two Rivers and KIPP DC (on whose board sits Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham) hope to complete new building plans in time for the 2015-16 school year. Both charters plan major expansions: KIPP envisions the construction of a new high school that would allow its preparatory school to double in size to 850 students, while Two Rivers, currently with 500 students in preschool through eighth grade at its Florida Avenue location, will be able to accommodate 500 more with the addition of the Young site. For a city so sorely in need of better education choices for students, the addition of high-quality seats from two of the highest-performing charter operators in the city is invaluable. Doubters might just ask the parents of the 1,800 students who last year applied for 35 open spots at Two Rivers.

 

 

The four-point gains D.C. public school students achieved citywide on the most recent annual math and reading tests were acclaimed as historic, as more evidence that the city’s approach to improving schools is working.

 

But the math gains officials reported were the result of a quiet decision to score the tests in a way that yielded higher scores even though D.C. students got far fewer math questions correct than in the year before.

 

The decision was made after D.C. teachers recommended a new grading scale — which would have held students to higher standards on tougher math tests — and after officials reviewed projections that the new scale would result in a significant decline in math proficiency rates.

 

Instead, city officials chose to discard the new grading approach and hold students to a level of difficulty similar to previous years’, according to city officials as well as e-mails and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

 

The decision — made after students took the tests in April and May and about six weeks before city officials announced the results at a celebratory news conference in July — resulted in the largest overall testing improvement since 2008.

 

Experts said that the District’s approach is generally a reasonable one but that it does not track with those of other jurisdictions that have made recent high-profile transitions to tougher tests, including New York, Kentucky and Virginia. In those states, more-difficult tests and tougher scoring resulted in students’ scores immediately plummeting. Officials in those states presented the lower scores as a temporary price that must be paid to spur higher expectations and more rigorous instruction.

 

In the District, the discarded grading scale would have yielded a mixed picture of achievement on the 2013 tests. The reading proficiency rate would have been 6.6 points higher than was reported in 2012, but math would have been 3.6 points lower.

 

The choice that D.C. officials faced suggests that proficiency rates — which are used to make employment and pay decisions for teachers and principals and to judge the city’s efforts to improve public education — are as much a product of policymakers’ decisions as they are of student performance.

 

“Proficiency is not an immutable thing. Proficiency is a judgment call, and there’s a lot of things that go into making that judgment call,” said Charlene Rivera, an education research professor at George Washington University. Rivera serves on the technical advisory committee for city officials who administer the test but was not involved in the decision.

 

Officials at the District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) — the agency responsible for administering exams for the city’s traditional public and public charter schools — said they decided not to adopt the teacher-recommended grading scale because it was important to continue comparing student performance consistently from year to year.

 

The OSSE made an unwritten commitment years ago to maintain that trend line as a way to judge progress and the effectiveness of reform efforts, said Jeffrey Noel, who oversees testing at the agency. Adopting a new grading scale for the city’s test program — known as the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, or D.C. CAS — would have made such comparisons complicated or impossible, disrupting teacher evaluations, charter school rankings and other accountability systems, he said.

 

 

 

Two high-performing charter schools have won bids to lease former DCPS school buildings in Ward 5, the Gray administration has announced. Two Rivers will redevelop the former Charles E. Young Elementary School in Carver Langston, and KIPP DC will build a new high school on the site of the former Hamilton School near Gallaudet University.

 

Pending DC Council approval, the schools hope to begin serving students at the new locations in time for the 2015-16 school year. KIPP DC expects to move and expand its high-performing KIPP College Preparatory school from Ward 8 to the Hamilton site. Two Rivers will double its enrollment by replicating the successful pre-K-through-8th-grade program it currently runs at its NoMa campuses. The moves will bring high-quality educational options to underserved parts of Ward 5.

 

Both sites were awarded through a process that began with a Request for Offers (RFO) from DC's Department of General Services (DGS) in July. The same RFO included two other DCPS sites, the Winston school in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Ward 7, which has received bids from three top-performing charter schools, and the Alice and Ernestine Shaed school in Ward 5. DGS plans to announce its recommendations for the Winston and Shaed sites in the coming weeks.

 

KIPP DC College Preparatory currently serves 450 students at a campus in Ward 8 and has been looking to move the program to a larger site for some time. The new location will allow the school to almost double its size to 850 students. The school, which has a Tier 1 rating from the DC Public Charter School Board and graduated its first class last year, has a 99% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate.

 

KIPP DC, which operates 12 schools at all grade levels, will raze the existing Hamilton school to build a 120,000-square-foot structure. It will also renovate the multi-use athletic fields, which will be made available for community use. KIPP hopes to partner with Gallaudet University on joint teacher training, student internships, security, transportation, and community service programs.

 

Hamilton was formerly the site for DCPS' C.H.O.I.C.E program, an alternative school for students who have been suspended from their regular high schools. At the end of the last school year the program was relocated and the building closed.

 

Two Rivers, also a Tier 1 public charter school, will maintain its existing 500-seat program and add another 500 seats at the Young site. More than 1,800 students applied for fewer than 35 open spots at Two Rivers in the 2012-2013 school year, according to the school's CEO, Jessica Wodatch.

 

As with its existing schools, Two Rivers expects to draw a majority of its students from Wards 5, 6 and 7. Students from anywhere in the city are eligible to apply to any charter school, and if the school is oversubscribed seats are awarded through a lottery.

 

DCPS closed the Young school in 2008. and it has since undergone demolition by neglect. In a message on the Two Rivers' website, Wodatch says that the school was attracted to certain qualities of the site, such as its abundant outdoor space and proximity to the Anacostia River. But she acknowledges that the building will require considerable renovation before it can be occupied. 

 

 

Today, there will be a grand opening for the new Washington Latin Public Charter School on Second Street, N.W. I’m sure it will be an elegant celebration as ceremonies at this school traditionally are; however my own personal commemoration took place last Friday evening.

 

On that night 10,000 charter school students, staff, and supporters gathered at Nationals Park to mark the tenth anniversary of Building Hope’s founding. The first thing you noticed upon arriving at the venue was the purple tee shirts. Everywhere you looked were kids and adults sporting attire with the words “Next stop, college” on the front and “We are D.C.’s future” on the back. A classy and clever addition to the wardrobe for students was the furnishing of snack bags equipped with pizza, water, and chips.

 

It was then off with my wife Michele to our suite to view the festivities. How perfectly appropriate that they started with the Washington Latin PCS chorus performing an exquisite rendition of our national anthem. Building Hope’s President Joe Bruno then threw out the first pitch. Just in case anyone was thinking of asking, I will refute for eternity that the ball actually hit the ground before reaching home base.

 

The next event brought tears to my eyes. Nine designated outstanding charter school students ran out onto the field to take their positions as if they were facing the team at bat. The Washington National’s players then jogged over to replace them, shaking each child’s hand and introducing themselves in the process. What a thrill it must have been to these young individuals.

 

As the game began my wife and I caught up with Brian Tracey, a Bank of America community development lending and investments executive with whom Building Hope has worked for years on charter school facility projects. In fact, he was the key in Washington Latin obtaining the loan and New Market tax credit financing for our approximately $20 million Rudolph Elementary renovation project. Michele asked him how he originally began working with this sector.

 

“Thirteen years ago three of us came up with the idea that we could help charters gain financing to build or renovate permanent facilities,” Mr. Tracey revealed. “Almost no one was doing this at this time. The notion came from our experience with affordable housing,” he explained. “The financial model for building these homes is based upon the subsidies from the tenants that occupy the space. In reality, this is almost identical to the facility allotment that is tied to the number of students a school enrolls.”

 

I asked Mr. Tracey if a financial loan to a charter school has ever gone bad. He was eager to answer this question. “We have done over $500 million in commitments to charter schools over time,” Mr. Tracey remarked. “Not only has not one loan ever been in default, but there has never been as much as one late payment.”

 

As the stands became full we circulated with more of the guests. Early on we ran into Building Hope’s Paul Lelick and Tom Porter. This was another purely serendipitous encounter because over the last twenty four months I have spent numerous hours with these gentlemen as they expertly guided our team in successfully going through the arduous process of identifying the future home for Washington Latin PCS, securing the Second Street, N.W., location, and renovating a 75,000 foot former school.

 

Tonight, I again adhered to their direction. The two had many people to greet and so we followed them on a rapid pace throughout National’s Park. They took us to rooms I never knew existed, where we rapidly shook the hands of clearly elated individuals, quickly sampled the bountiful refreshments, and then moved on as if choreographed to the next location.

 

The highlight of stadium tour was a stop at the Lexus Presidents Club. We were sitting right behind home base almost as close to the players as the umpire positioned by the catcher. We relaxed for awhile under the stars on a crisp clear September nightfall as the Nationals were able to build a seven to zero lead over the Miami Marlins. The team would eventually go on to shutout the visiting team with a total of eight runs.

 

It was an apropos end of an excellent evening and to a highly rewarding journey that now has 642 of the District of Columbia’s future leaders in classrooms they can now call their own.

 

 

Last winter, my husband and I almost moved back to Brooklyn with our only child. We got as far as hiring movers and boxing up our home. Instead, we stayed in Washington, D.C., and achieved my long-nagged-at dream of having child No. 2. A big reason for this turnaround? Universal preschool.

 

Not just pre-K for 4-year-olds, as in Oklahoma’s widely praised program, or for poor children, as President Obama has proposed. Preschool that is (at least theoretically) for everyone, starting at age 3. That’s what we get in D.C.: five days a week, for nearly 10 months a year, from 8 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., my taxes pay for my toddler’s education.

 

We live on Capitol Hill, which has one of the greatest concentrations of elementary schools in the District, and I often wonder if my neighbors appreciate our luck. Who else has the luxury of sending a 3-year-old to school free? Still, every spring, when the preschool lottery results come in, the listserv explodes with parents raging about their 3-year-old’s not getting into their top-choice or in-bounds school. God forbid they have to drive 18 blocks to the closest acceptable charter school!

 

Hello? I want to reply to every “Waitlist Woes” subject heading. Just across the river in Virginia, Loudoun County recently put off implementing full-day kindergarten. And while it’s true that there still aren’t enough spots for every 3-year-old in the District, the summit is certainly in sight. This spring, only about 66 percent of applicants received a spot in District of Columbia Public Schools’ early-childhood program, but there are an additional 65 charter schools with 3-year-old classes. In my empirical experience, if you can drive, and you’re open to a less-competitive program, you can almost always find a spot.

 

A year later, I still haven’t gotten over how remarkable that is. When you have young children, it’s hard to imagine a time when you won’t spend much of your income on rearing them. There are the diapers and the gear and the batteries for all those educational toys, but mostly there’s the child care. The income-halving, savings-draining, vacation-precluding child care.

 

But what if the years of shelling out those outrageous sums were three instead of five? Trust me, it’s a big difference. For three months this fall, between my 3-year-old’s move to public school and the birth of my second child, I remembered what the term “disposable” meant when preceded by “income.”

 

That’s why we did it — to save money. Despite misgivings about uprooting our son from his fancy federal day-care center, we gave the D.C. public school a chance partly because the facilities were nicer, partly because the commute was nonexistent, but mostly because it was free.

 

Unexpectedly, another big benefit soon emerged: My son was learning much more at preschool than he had at day care. That’s because — surprise, surprise — his public-school teachers are exponentially better educated and (see any causality here?) far better compensated. The average starting salary for a D.C.P.S. elementary-school teacher, even at the early-childhood level, is just over $50,000. The average salary of a day-care provider is $19,300.

 

I’d cringe through the misspellings and grammatical errors riddling the “My Day” reports from day care, where only one teacher I knew of had a bachelor’s degree. My son’s D.C.P.S. teacher is close to getting her master’s, and she tosses off terms like “phonemic awareness” between reminding the students not to insert live spiders into their nostrils.

 

The diversity of the school has also been instructive. The 3-year-old classes are about half-African-American, half-white, with some Hispanics and Asians here and there — a solid introduction, for my half-Jewish quarter-Indian offspring, to America in the Age of Obama. Parents are cancer researchers and vet techs and government lawyers and aspiring fireworks-stand operators. Some kids at the school live in million-dollar row houses; some live in homeless shelters.

 

While these disparities have stirred some tensions among the adults, the kids have taken no notice, or not yet anyway. And though I’d always liked my fellow day-care parents’ high-powered Ivy-burnished résumés, I like even more how comfortably my now-4-year-old can talk about race in a neighborhood that was all but burned to the ground during the 1968 riots.

 

I know that universal preschool wasn’t started for families like mine. D.C. instituted it for the same reasons President Obama proposed it: to close the so-called achievement gap, and to prepare low-income children to enter kindergarten on the same level as their higher-income counterparts.

 

I also understand that with or without preschool, my son still has long-term educational advantages over his classmate who had never seen the letter “J” before starting school. Will those extra two years in school improve that child’s prospects in life? I’m not such a liberal fantasist to claim preschool will make all the difference. But from what I’ve observed of his progress at pickup, it certainly hasn’t hurt.

 

It hasn’t hurt my cohort, either. In the day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck calculations that we working parents are constantly performing, free school from age 3 makes life a lot easier. Without it, my husband never would’ve consented to child No. 2.

 

As we push the stroller around the Hill, I point out how many professional families have three children — far more than in any of the other expensive urban centers where we’ve lived. “It’s all because of the free preschool,” I say. “If you’re only paying for child care for three years per child, it’s way more reasonable to consider a third.”

 

My husband always shakes his head balefully: “Do NOT get any ideas.”

 

 

The largest and, as far as I can tell, the most effective college readiness program in the country is called AVID, short for Advancement Via Individual Determination. It was created by a San Diego English teacher in 1980 to help 32 average kids from low-income families develop academic and life skills. Now it has 250,000 students in 48 states, the District and several foreign countries, more than 90 percent of whom go on to college.

 

Hardly anyone has heard of it. Its founder, Mary Catherine Swanson, dislikes self-promotion. The program has grown mostly by word of mouth. Until recently, it has not been very active in big cities, where successful programs get more media attention.

 

That includes the District, with just three regular public schools and two public charters that have AVID. But it has been growing rapidly in the Washington suburbs, being used in 93 public schools, with more on the way. That is one of the reasons I am writing a book about it, in hopes of understanding its strong training methods, popularity with teachers, emphasis on children in the middle and the most unusual and promising tutoring method I have ever seen.

 

AVID students in Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, Charles, Montgomery, Fairfax and Loudoun counties, as well as Alexandria, the District and soon Manassas, spend 40 percent of their AVID class time working with tutors trained not to show them how to solve problems that are stumping them but to ask questions that will help them think through the solutions themselves. The students also are required to ask helpful questions of struggling classmates, so they will know how to break down any difficult issue when they are in college with no tutors to help.

 

AVID teachers show students how to manage their lives and time, prepare for college and navigate the college application process. They train students in the Cornell method of note-taking, which emphasizes key questions. They check student binders to make sure all learning materials are in good order. They monitor students’ progress in the honors and college-level courses AVID requires them to take.

 

Cathie Grant-Goodman, who recruits and trains AVID tutors in Fairfax County, said, “If they are well-trained and tutorials are strong, then you will see a significant impact on student achievement.” National data show higher percentages of AVID students than similar non-AVID students going to college.

 

The program does cost money. About 70 of the 100 AVID tutors in Fairfax County’s 23 AVID middle and high schools are paid. Most are in college, which AVID prefers. Those still enrolled at universities — George Mason University is Fairfax’s leading provider of AVID tutors — earn $14.50 an hour; the rate goes up to $16.50 after they earn a degree. That will cost the county $270,000 this year.

 

All of Anne Arundel County’s 31 middle and high schools have AVID, but it cannot afford to pay tutors, so only about 10 percent are college students. Most tutoring is done by high school juniors and seniors who have performed well. The lack of money to pay tutors is “our biggest roadblock,” said the county’s AVID coordinator, Jennifer Lombardi. Still, AVID has helped raise standards, tripling Annapolis High School’s college-level test participation since the program began there in 1999.

 

Teachers have embraced the program because of its emphasis on conceptual understanding and supporting students who take academic challenges. Some display an almost cultlike enthusiasm for their work. That makes it difficult to find AVID critics to help me understand the program’s weaknesses. My e-mail address is below. Tell me what you believe is bad and good about this unique approach to teaching as it quietly spreads through the region and the country.