- AmeriCorps volunteers play a big role in D.C. schools
- Wondering why a preschooler would ever need to be suspended? Here's an explanation.
- Why Poor Students Struggle
- Record number of public school students nationwide are homeless
AmeriCorps volunteers play a big role in D.C. schools
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 21, 2014
The District is increasingly turning to another pool of labor to support its efforts to improve literacy, reduce dropout rates and turn around schools: AmeriCorps volunteers.
Twenty years after the national service program started, the $665 million federal program helps fund corps members in 1,500 organizations around the country. In the District, about 800 AmeriCorps volunteers are working in public schools — both traditional and charter — and in community organizations that support education.
The program has left a distinct imprint on the city’s schools through one of its most well-known partner organizations, Teach for America, which has 85 teachers working in the schools. D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and former chancellor Michelle Rhee are alumni, as is Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith.
Hundreds more AmeriCorps volunteers work in schools, youth centers or after-school programs providing tutoring or enrichment, often in exchange for small stipends, a $5,600 check toward student loans or future degrees, and an early career step.
“A lot of kids in low-income communities need all kinds of help,” said John Gomperts, president of America’s Promise Alliance and a former director of AmeriCorps. “To just make schools and teachers responsible when their jobs are already so challenging is often not going to get the job done.”
National service programs, including AmeriCorps, offer a low-cost way for schools to intensify their improvement efforts and connect students with more caring adults, he said. Such relationships have proved to be pivotal in getting teens who have difficult lives to finish high school.
City Year, an AmeriCorps program with a 15-year history in the District, is focusing efforts to improve graduation rates. The program has 158 volunteers working in 13 D.C. public schools, including some of the high schools with the highest dropout rates, as well as elementary and middle schools that feed into them.
Volunteers greet students in the morning and help in classrooms throughout the day, focusing on students who are having trouble with attendance or behavior and are at risk of dropping out. They run lunch programs and develop relationships over the year.
“They are close enough in age with students to be friends but old enough to be mentors and role models,” said Jeffrey Franco, vice president and executive director of City Year Washington, D.C.
The corps members wear uniforms, including khaki pants and a red jacket with an American flag on one sleeve and an AmeriCorps badge on the other. When in uniform, they must follow certain rules as role models: no jay walking or gum chewing or headphones, Franco said.
Jay Savoy, a 23-year-old City Year volunteer, remembers meeting someone wearing that red jacket who gave her some encouragement on a stressful day when she was a student at Stuart-Hobson Middle School in the District.
“This person didn’t know me from a can of paint,” she said. But the volunteer lifted her spirits and made a lasting impression.
After graduating from college, Savoy became a City Year corps member at Kimball Elementary School, three blocks from where she grew up. Last year, she worked in a classroom, helping the teacher and working with small groups or individual students. This year, she oversees a team of City Year classroom aides.
“With a class of 23 kids and one teacher, it’s hard to give the attention to the kids who don’t have motivation or don’t really understand,” she said.
Kelly Meany and Alysha Brown are AmeriCorps members with Reading Corps. The program trained them to work as reading tutors to work one-on-one with students in the early grades.
Meany, 23, said they spend 20 minutes a day with each student, focusing on those who are behind but who can slip through the cracks because they are not the most-struggling students, who already receive services from the school. Brown, 26, said they are working to help them catch up.
“If we can get a child . . . to read on grade level by third grade, they will have a much better chance at succeeding,” Brown said.
Wondering why a preschooler would ever need to be suspended? Here's an explanation.
Greater Greater Washington
By Amy Rothschild
September 22, 2014
When people hear that schools in DC and elsewhere are suspending preschoolers, they can't fathom why these suspensions occur. Some policy-makers grab at quick fixes like banning the practice. But one underlying cause of preschool suspension is the slow process for identifying and addressing the needs of children with disabilities.
My experience teaching in a public preschool tells me we can achieve a more meaningful reduction in suspensions by addressing the root causes of the problem rather than simply banning suspension outright.
Preschool suspension has been a hot issue since March, when the federal government released stark findings. A study found that preschoolers not only get suspended, but African-American preschoolers get suspended at disproportionate rates.
Preschoolers with disabilities aren't disproportionately suspended, according to the study, but that may be because many haven't been officially classified as disabled yet. Looking at all grade levels, the study found that students with disabilities are twice as likely to receive one or more suspensions.
In July, DC's own data came out in a report from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). The DC data conformed to national trends, and OSSE recommended banning preschool suspensions.
That recommendation prompted Councilmember David Grosso to introduce a bill, now pending before the DC Council, that would ban suspensions in DC preschools except in the most extreme circumstances.
Arne Duncan found the national data on preschool suspensions "mind-boggling." Grosso, for his part, found the local data "ridiculous," saying he couldn't fathom why a school would need to suspend such young children.
The assumption seems to be that teachers who suspend young children lack common sense. Feeling distrust, teachers may be reluctant to share what they know. Kojo Nnamdi did a segment on preschool suspension on his WAMU radio show this summer in which he begged teachers to weigh in. He was met with radio silence.
Why some preschoolers get suspended
I participated in the suspension of preschoolers when I taught in another city. That experience was one of the reasons I chose to teach in a private school rather than entangle myself in the heartbreak of public school teaching when I moved to DC.
I taught in a highly regarded, socioeconomically diverse public preschool program that would make for an extreme reality show: 20 three- and four-year olds. One teacher, two part-time assistants. One classroom. No windows.
Two of my students, Will and Maya, clearly had profound special needs, which were undiagnosed when the children started school. (I have changed their names.) Both were low-income children of color. Their behavior made it hard, and sometimes impossible, to keep them and their peers safe.
Will liked things his way. Sometimes, if his preferred rest toy was not in his bag, Will would throw himself to the floor and bang his head against the linoleum tile. Hard. He hit it again, harder, then again. He would not stop.
Maya avoided eye contact, and her diet consisted only of Ensure. Her clothing often bothered her, and sometimes something like an itchy sock would send her into a tailspin.
She would take off the sock, throw it, and then begin shedding every other item of her clothing. Stumbling around the room in a tearful daze, she would scratch herself until she bled. She was inconsolable, and one day left sleeping in her mothers' arms. That was a suspension.
I and other school staff spent several months struggling to teach Will and Maya while maintaining a supportive educational environment for 18 other children, many of whom had developmental challenges themselves.
Then, once Will and Maya's parents consented to have them evaluated for services, we began the waiting game, during which we continued to struggle. Eventually we found more therapeutic settings for them for kindergarten, but only after a difficult year that included a suspension for each.
Shortening DC's evaluation time
One reason early childhood education is vital is that it allows schools to identify children with special needs early and get them the services they need. But, as my experience with Will and Maya shows, that does not happen neatly or overnight. In the meantime, a child may be sent home early—in other words, suspended.
In Connecticut, where I taught Will and Maya, government agencies have 60 days to evaluate a child for special services after parents give their consent. Even that seemed like a long time. But in the District, government agencies currently have 120 days—two-thirds of a school year.
Councilmember David Catania has introduced a bill that would cut that time to 60 days, the national standard. The bill, which comes up for a vote by the full Council tomorrow, is part of the controversial special education overhaul Catania introduced in March.
The bill also would also change the requirement that children have to show a 50% delay in a developmental area to qualify for services before age three, allowing them to qualify if they have only a 25% delay.
These changes would greatly expand access to special education services, and they could cut down on the number of situations where preschool teachers feel they have no alternative but to suspend students. But one question is whether DC's education agencies will have enough resources to implement them.
Catania's chief of staff, Brendan Williams-Kief, conceded that "some additional hires might be necessary" to carry out the mandates of the legislation. But he argued that OSSE already has ample special education staff, pointing out that the agency has a higher ratio of staff to students served than neighboring states like Maryland.
The District's chief financial officer has also predicted there would be "no cost" to implementing the bills over the next few years. In part, that's because other provisions of the special education package aim to reduce expensive private school placements for students with disabilities. The money saved would go into a "Special Education Enhancement Fund."
While a ban on preschool suspensions in DC would certainly reduce out-of-school discipline for three- and four-year-olds, it's a blunt instrument that would only go so far. To address the root causes of some of those suspensions, we have to ensure that young children who need special education services are able to get them, and get them as quickly as possible.
Why Poor Students Struggle
The New York Times
By Vicki Madden
September 21, 2014
I WAS rushing to change trains at Delancey Street in downtown Manhattan earlier this year when a tall young man stepped in front of me, blocking my way through the crowd. He said my name and I looked up.
“Kelvin!” I cried. As we hugged, I considered what month it was. March. Why wasn’t he upstate at school? He knew what I was thinking.
“I’m taking a year off. Everybody told me I should go to college, but I didn’t really know what I was doing there.”
I told him that I had taken a year off from college myself. And that when my son was unhappy at his small-town college, I had recommended a transfer to Hunter College, a return to the city. I suggested he get in touch with the college counselor at the secondary school in Brooklyn where I’d taught him. “Josh can help you with a transfer,” I said.
He nodded, but I walked away unconvinced that he would ask for help. A couple of months later, another former student came out from behind the cash register at a grocery store in Brooklyn to hug me and reassure me that she would be back in college in September — she just needed to earn some money. As we caught up, she told me that yet another classmate had left a top-tier college in Maine.
The effort to increase the number of low-income students who graduate from four-year colleges, especially elite colleges, has recently been front-page news. But when I think about my students, and my own story, I wonder whether the barriers, seen and unseen, have changed at all.
In spite of our collective belief that education is the engine for climbing the socioeconomic ladder — the heart of the “American dream” myth — colleges now are more divided by wealth than ever. When lower-income students start college, they often struggle to finish for many reasons, but social isolation and alienation can be big factors. In “Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College,” Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl analyzed federal data collected by Michael Bastedo and Ozan Jaquette of the University of Michigan School of Education; they found that at the 193 most selective colleges, only 14 percent of students were from the bottom 50 percent of Americans in terms of socioeconomic status. Just 5 percent of students were from the lowest quartile.
I know something about the lives behind the numbers, which are largely unchanged since I arrived at Barnard in 1978, taking a red-eye flight from Seattle by myself. The other students I encountered on campus seemed foreign to me. Their parents had gone to Ivy League schools; they played tennis. I had never before been east of Nebraska. My mother raised five children while she worked for the post office, and we kept a goat in our yard to reduce the amount of garbage we’d have to pay for at the county dump.
My former students are attending Franklin and Marshall, Barnard, Bard, Colby. They are so much more worldly than I was. They’ve grown up in New York City, so they’ve hung out on the High Line, eaten sushi, visited museums and colleges on class trips. Their adjustment to college life in small towns hits different bumps than mine did.
When a miscommunication about paperwork or a parent’s slight rise in income leads to a reduction in financial aid, however small, that can be enough for a student to consider withdrawing. If you don’t have $700, it might as well be a million.
Kids at the most selective colleges often struggle academically, but they are capable of doing the work. The real key is whether they feel comfortable going to professors to ask for help or teaming up with other students in study groups and to manage the workload. At that school in Brooklyn, I taught history, leading students through writing 10-page position papers with proper citations, as well as presenting and defending their work to a panel of adults. Other teachers did the same in their subjects. Through the college application process, these students had help with every step — including convincing their parents that going away to school would be a good thing.
But once those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive on campus, it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are and where they come from, that cause the most trouble, challenging their very identity, comfort and right to be on that campus. The more elite the school, the wider that gap. I remember struggling with references to things I’d never heard of, from Homer to the Social Register. I couldn’t read The New York Times — not because the words were too hard, but because I didn’t have enough knowledge of the world to follow the articles. Hardest was the awareness that my own experiences were not only undervalued but often mocked, used to indicate when someone was stupid or low-class: No one at Barnard ate Velveeta or had ever butchered a deer.
Urban students face different slights but ones with a more dangerous edge. One former student was told by multiple people in his small Pennsylvania college town not to wear a hoodie at night, because it made him look “sketchy.” Standing out like that — being himself — could put him at risk.
To stay four years and graduate, students have to come to terms with the unspoken transaction: exchanging your old world for a new world, one that doesn’t seem to value where you came from. The transition is not just about getting a degree and making more money. If that was all socioeconomics signified, it would not be such a strong predictor of everything from SAT scores and parenting practices to health and longevity.
Perhaps because I came from generations of people who had left their families behind and pushed west from Ireland, West Virginia and Montana, I suffered few pangs at the idea of setting out for a new land with better opportunities. I wanted the libraries, summer houses and good wine more than anything that I then valued about my own history.
In college, I read Richard Rodriguez’s memoir, “Hunger of Memory,” in which he depicts his alienation from his family because of his education, painting a picture of the scholarship boy returned home to face his parents and finding only silence. Being young, I didn’t understand, believing myself immune to the idea that any gain might entail a corresponding loss. I was keen to exchange my Western hardscrabble life for the chance to be a New York City middle-class museumgoer. I’ve paid a price in estrangement from my own people, but I was willing. Not every 18-year-old will make that same choice, especially when race is factored in as well as class.
As the income gap widens and hardens, changing class means a bigger difference between where you came from and where you are going. Teachers like me can help prepare students academically for college work. College counselors can help with the choices, the federal financial aid application and all the bureaucratic details. But how can we help our students prepare for the tug of war in their souls?
Record number of public school students nationwide are homeless
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
September 22, 2014
A record number of homeless children and teens were enrolled in public school last year, according to data released Monday by the federal government.
Elementary and secondary schools reported that 1.3 million students were homeless during the 2012-2013 year, an 8 percent jump from the prior year.
Most of those students — 75 percent — were living doubled up in the home of a friend or a relative, according to the government. Sixteen percent were living in homeless shelters, 6 percent in hotels or motels, and 3 percent had no shelter.
For the first time as part of this survey, the U.S. Department of Education required schools to denote whether homeless students were living with a parent or on their own. Schools reported that 75,940 homeless students were living on their own.
Advocates for the homeless say the official data underestimate the scope of the problem because they do not include homeless infants, toddlers and youngsters not enrolled in preschool and may also miss homeless children and teens who were not identified by school officials.
“The new data means that a record number of kids in our schools and communities are spending restless nights in bed-bug infested motels and falling more behind in school by the day because they’re too tired and hungry to concentrate,” said Bruce Lesley, President of the First Focus Campaign for Children.
The data collected by the U.S. Department of Education are available on the Web site of the National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE).