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D.C. Parents Raise Concerns About Middle Schools [E.L. Haynes PCS is mentioned]
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Me vs. the Movement to Opt Students Out of Tests
- 6 Wild Ideas for Ideal Schools
D.C. Parents Raise Concerns About Middle Schools [E.L. Haynes PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 25, 2011
Alice Deal Middle School in Northwest Washington is bursting at the seams, and with good reason.
For foreign language, students can choose French, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese. The school offers football, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, track, baseball, softball, volleyball and fencing. The list of after-school clubs includes international cooking, African drumming, gardening, Scrabble and Gay-Straight Alliance. This fall, the school has 1,014 students in a building designed for 980.
At Brookland Educational Campus at Bunker Hill, serving preschool to eighth grade in Northeast’s Ward 5, the menu of offerings for middle-grade students is quite different. There is one part-time Spanish teacher. Students are offered basketball, track, cheerleading and chorus. And there are parents who say the situation in their community is untenable.
“I spent five years driving across town . . . so my kids could have a decent education,” said Raenelle Zapata, who sent her children to Deal, Hardy Middle and Eaton Elementary, all in Northwest. “There are parents who don’t have the opportunity to do that. . . . We’re going to have to clean this up.”
Middle schools are the latest hot spot in D.C. public education. With preschool and elementary enrollment ticking up for the first time in decades, parents and policymakers are scrutinizing the lack of attractive middle-grade options with increasing urgency.
Everyone agrees that far too many poorly prepared students are entering D.C. high schools. An Education Week analysis has found that more than half of the city’s public students fail to graduate from high school on time. Many drop out in the ninth grade.
Without dramatic improvement in middle school quality, the long-term prospects for reform are bleak.
“Every child entering the sixth grade should have access to the same quality of education,” said D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D), who will convene the second of two hearings on middle schools Tuesday. “Their science lab should look the same, the same computer lab, offerings of foreign language. Clearly that’s not happening.” Brown, a Ward 7 resident with a son at Eaton and a daughter at Deal — seats in cross-town schools he secured through the annual out-of-boundary lottery — said at a recent hearing that on a tour of a PS-8 school in Northeast, he told the principal that he would never send his children there.
“And the principal said, ‘I agree with you,’ ” Brown said, declining to name the principal.
Middle schools pose Chancellor Kaya Henderson with sticky political and educational questions in virtually every quadrant of the city. In Georgetown, Hardy Middle has a heavy out-of-boundary enrollment and has been roiled by recent leadership changes. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) has called for a new middle school for her Northwest constituents.
On Capitol Hill, where hundreds of new students are moving through revitalized elementary schools that now have waiting lists, parents say the dearth of traditional middle school options imperils that rebirth.
The best middle school in the neighborhood, Stuart-Hobson, is aging and packed. Two others close by, Eliot-Hine and Jefferson, have plenty of room but moribund academic records that make them unattractive.
“Let me be very frank with you. My husband and I are not willing to stay in the District if we don’t see significant improvement in our middle school options,” Ana Maria Linares, a parent at Maury Elementary, told the council this month.
Henderson, who is scheduled to appear before the council Tuesday, said school systems across the nation have historically struggled with middle schools, when grades and discipline falter as students make the often-turbulent transition into adolescence.
“There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Henderson said. “We have to figure out what works best in each community.”
The locus of discontent is Ward 5 in Northeast, where the closing of seven under-enrolled schools in 2008 — part of a citywide round of 23 closures — left the community without a traditional middle school. The District instead consolidated some of the remaining schools into six PS-8 “campuses.”
Then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee promoted the hybrid model on several fronts. She cited research — widely disputed — that showed improved academic performance. Rhee also saw it as a way to retain families that tended to leave the system after fifth grade for public charter or private schools. PS-8 schools aimed to offer comfort and continuity for parents leery of the middle school options — either because of the schools’ poor academic records or because parents felt their rising sixth-graders were not yet prepared to deal with the adjustment.
On that count, the 17 PS-8 schools created in 2008 have been a modest success, officials say. District data show that as of this year, fewer students are leaving the system after fifth grade than were doing so in 2008.
While the growth of Deal, Hardy and Stuart-Hobson have contributed to that trend, PS-8 schools “have been a major factor in stemming that enrollment loss,” said Abigail Smith, the District’s outgoing chief of transformation management.
On other fronts, the PS-8 model has not shown success. Standardized test scores are no better overall than at traditional middle schools, according to a study by veteran D.C. schools analyst Mary Levy. In some cases, they are astonishingly poor.
At Browne Education Campus, a Ward 5 amalgam of a middle school and two shuttered elementary schools, less than 16 percent of the 49 sixth-graders read at proficiency level or better on 2011 city tests. Six percent of 33 eighth-graders at Wheatley Education Campus were proficient in math last year. Deal produced pass rates of 83 percent in reading and 89 percent in math.
The other issue is size. Although retention has improved, middle grades in most PS-8 campuses do not have high enough enrollment to generate the per-pupil funding necessary for the rich academic and elective offerings that experts say children at that age need. Fifteen of the city’s 18 PS-8 schools had a middle grade enrollment of fewer than 120 in the last school year.
That means that schools such as Langdon Education Campus in Ward 5 offer no foreign language and few sports teams. Laboratories and libraries at many of the consolidated schools also remain threadbare. There are no regulation-sized athletic fields or gymnasiums with locker rooms. Adolescents sweat through physical education classes in their school uniforms.
There is widespread sentiment in Ward 5 in favor of a new freestanding middle school. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5) introduced legislation this month that would allow D.C. public school students in grades six through eight to attend any middle school in the city without entering the out-of-boundary lottery.
“This is our issue in Ward 5, and we’re not going to go away,” Thomas said.
Many educators say a skimpy middle school program can alienate kids at a crucial moment in their lives.
“It’s the time when we need to sort of hyper-engage them so we can carry them through high school. If they are not hooked by sixth grade, it gets progressively harder,” said Jennifer Niles, founder and head of E. L. Haynes, one of several public charter schools that has had more success with the hybrid model. One big reason is that Haynes and other charters built gradually, starting at the lower grades, allowing staff to build a cohesive school culture and bonds with families. The plan is to eventually expand to PS-12.
The public PS-8s were pressed together because of closures that generated considerable bitterness and mistrust.
Haynes’s well-appointed Georgia Avenue NW campus has 250 middle-grade students and will expand to 300 next year. It offers Spanish and Arabic, with electives that include robotics, songwriting and video game strategies. Its middle grades show strong achievement compared with those in other city schools.
Henderson defends the PS-8 programs, citing pre-algebra and algebra at Langdon, Browne and Brookland, and Chinese and Spanish at Langley Education Campus, also in Ward 5. But the low enrollment has forced some parents to make painful decisions.
Mary Melchior acknowledges that she pushed for Langdon to become a PS-8 as an alternative to the available middle school options. She invested years of energy as an active parent, serving on the parent-staff committee that reviewed school budgets. Her triplet sons’ third-grade teacher last year, Perea Brown-Blackmon, was one of the District’s “highly effective” educators honored last week at a lavish Kennedy Center ceremony. The boys were scheduled to have her again in fourth grade.
But Melchior pulled them from Langdon, securing fourth-grade seats this fall through the lottery at Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan. Melchior said she wants her children to get a middle school program that will help them compete for a top academic high school, such as Banneker or School Without Walls.
Last year, one Langdon eighth-grader made it to Banneker, but none went to School Without Walls. But nine Langdon students were admitted to McKinley Technology High School, one of the city’s other application-only high schools.
The spots at Logan put Melchior’s sons in the feeder pattern for Stuart-Hobson.
“I would have loved to stay [at Langdon],” she said, “but I know we’re not going to get the funding we need to provide a decent middle school.”
Me vs. the Movement to Opt Students Out of Tests
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
September 23, 2011
Shaun Johnson is a blogger and assistant professor of elementary education at the College of Education at Towson University in Maryland. He has been active in the movement to protest overuse of standardized tests by persuading parents to opt their children out of the testing, an option few exercise or even know they have.
I told him I thought that was a bad idea. He agreed to debate the issue here. I start:
Mathews: You realize, I assume, that the vast majority of parents approve of testing and want their schools to be accountable in this way. Politicians who embrace the notion that we have to junk standardized tests don’t go far. You are never going to get much support for an opt-out. Why do it? Why not instead come up with an alternative that makes sense to most parents? You don’t have that yet.
Johnson: There’s a lot of assumptions being thrown around here. I think you assume incorrectly that a vast majority of parents approve of testing and want “schools to be accountable in this way.” It’s the only “way” that’s been offered to them within the mainstream conversation on education. As a result, parents, and even many educators, don’t necessarily receive the perfect information to make rational decisions. The test-driven mandate is what predominates in educational discourse in both traditional and non-traditional media.
Now, I would neither be so quick to diminish the support for an opt-out movement nor the clarity of which it can be presented to parents. Think about it. Parents, students, and educators alike are expected to grapple with complicated terminologies like value-added, high-stakes, choice, charters, vouchers, and Adequate Yearly Progress. Yet, it does not seem complicated to me to give parents the hope that their children are more than test scores, that they no longer need to relinquish the data to those who seem less accountable to actual education and more accountable to profits.
Proponents of opt-out movements — and there are several — are troubled by the deleterious effects of data-obsessed “reforms” within education. Parents with whom I speak and work clearly want their schools funded, but they don’t want the money going to testing companies, their materials, the graders, and ultimately the curriculum they’ll be forced to deal with, which will inevitably include millions more for professional development and consultants. Remember, this is not a fight about accountability. It’s an argument about who gets to define it and on what terms. I don’t think you can seriously make the claim that what has been done so far has the best interests of students and teachers in mind, and in turn the parents. Can you?
Mathews: Sure I can. The current testing system was the result of democratic processes. Voters elected the state governors and legislators who appointed the state school board members who made these decisions. In some cases they elected the state school superintendent. Folks who opposed that kind of testing had an opportunity to make their arguments known. The people who preferred these systems, whose growth began with Democratic governors like Dick Riley and Bill Clinton, won those various democratic encounters. They and the people that voted for them felt they were acting in the best public interests.
As you said, voters, taxpayers and parents have not been shown a reasonable alternative. What have you got to show them now that has worked in real schools and will win their confidence?
Johnson: There’s a kernel of truth to your initial statement: the democratic process certainly sent D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee packing in just a few short years. In her case in particular, Rhee seemed to quickly ditch the public sector in favor of the private, raising a boatload of money to impact legislation in several states that, to a casual observer, seems to have little to do with educating young persons.
Don’t you get the impression that private interests, from business leaders and financiers to philanthropists, wield an inordinate amount of influence on public policy? I thought schools, at least for now, were venerable public institutions within American-style democracy. You might also assume too much that our democratic process is representative of the electorate. And this might not be the best of political climates to assert that our democracy is truly representative of the people. Yet, you also erroneously conflate high-stakes testing with accountability, as if they are one and the same. They are not.
This implies that those who are against testing in its current form must be against all accountability; moreover, that opponents of the high-stakes environment advocate for simply crossing our fingers and praying that students learn something. Both of these statements are untrue. But the more I think about it, it’s interesting that the burden of proof is on myself and others who have been cautioning against high-stakes testing for the last decade or more. Innumerable education research studies and reports from the likes of the National Academy of Sciences, for instance, and thousands of anecdotal accounts, underscore the ineffectiveness of and the damages caused by the current high-stakes and punitive brands of accountability.
An opt-out movement against high-stakes assessments is not just an argument for alternative paradigms. It’s an empowerment movement for parents, educators, and parents who are educators who have been shut out of the negotiations. I’m well aware of the history of NCLB. It’s origins can be traced as far back as A Nation at Risk, perhaps earlier still. Bi-partisan support is a relative term, and the so-called bi-partisanship surrounding NCLB does in no way strengthen the contention that current education “reforms” are anything other than the purview of well-heeled special interests.
Mathews: Business groups are made up of voters, taxpayers and parents who have a right to participate in public life, as do the voters, taxpayers and parents who make up another very influential group of organizations in forming education policy — teachers unions. But you still haven’t answered my last question: What alternative means of assessment do you have to show people that has worked in real schools and will win their confidence? You can’t expect the smart parents you are asking to opt out to reject something in favor of nothing.
Johnson: I agree that business folks are everything you’ve identified and are entitled to a voice in the public square. But I think many reasonable persons would argue that the fundamental democratic credo of “one person, one vote” is being undermined by, for example, the relatively recent Citizens United decision out of the US Supreme Court.
What I don’t quite understand is this constant push from you for alternatives. Do you simply want alternatives or do you want the “right” kind of alternatives? Project methods and portfolio assessments have been around for decades. Innovative ideas like Connoisseurship and Portraiture have been around since the 1980s. School quality reviews handled by experienced educators are used in several nations. Classroom-based assessments prove to be more effective indicators because we can actually respond to classroom-level conditions. (When I taught in a “real” elementary school, the data from the previous March’s test was not made available until the following November. What good is that?)
Massachusetts produced a Statewide Authentic Accountability System and reform groups proposed an ERA Plan in Chicago. The list can go on. Nations with superior education systems seem to do quite well without large-scale assessments, better than us in fact. More affluent students in private and other independent schools are spared from the drill and kill methods and the pressures of high-stakes assessments plaguing our inner cities. DC parent empowerment groups are currently meeting to discuss alternatives to the kinds of reforms that have been imposed upon them.
If test-based accountability is so thoroughly effective, then why do Presidents and CEO’s spend the equivalent of college tuition to exempt their children? We certainly do know that an education fundamentally premised upon scores on high-stakes, standardized assessments does much more harm than good. Despite more than a decade of this focus, our public education system has yet to demonstrate significant improvements in safety, student well-being, equality, desegregation, and fair distributions of educational resources. So why keep doing it? Seriously. Why keep implementing and doubling down on these programs if the evidence is proving otherwise? It is insane to implement destructive methods just because there haven’t been alternatives proposed. That is, alternatives with which you see fit to agree.
Mathews: All I know is if you are asking me to opt out of one system, I would first like to know if there is an alternative that is working for existing schools and which I can embrace. I don’t think we have anything like that yet.
You’re wrong about private schools being free of test-based accountability. Most give their students some kind of standardized test to reassure parents that they are doing their jobs. The SAT rules those schools as cruelly as it does public schools.
Johnson: I think we do have the alternatives available, but a certain version of education reform dominates the conversation. Accountability in public education is not synonymous with high-stakes testing, and an undercurrent of this sentiment is already taking shape in many real schools that assuredly exist.
Mathews: Thanks Shaun. Please keep us in touch with how this movement is doing.
6 Wild Ideas for Ideal Schools
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
September 25, 2011
A month ago, I suggested that readers stop asking me what’s a good school and come up with their own ideas. I wanted fresh concepts, including some that were already operating and producing better achievement without putting too much strain on staffs and students.
I gave two thriving models as examples, the New York Performance Standards Consortium and the KIPP schools. Reader suggestions poured in. Some were crazy, but so what? Look for details on my blog on Friday. Here are the ones I thought most interesting. What do you think of them?
Quest Early College High School, Houston (submitted by Katie Test of the ASCD educational leadership organization). This 16-year-old public high school focuses on both academic and emotional needs with an advisory program that keeps students in regular contact with educators and emphasis on health, including a personal wellness plan. They start college courses freshman year and do community service every Friday.
One World Secondary School (submitted by Bruce William Smith). Smith played a central role in the teachers’ revolt to reform Locke High School in Los Angeles. He is proposing a new school resembling an American version of the International Baccalaureate program as offered in the United World Colleges, although under his curriculum the students would study 10 or 11 subjects in the last two years instead of the IB’s six subjects. The school would spend as little time on state tests as possible. At least one course, usually geography, would be taught in a foreign language. Smith would use UCLA professor William Ouchi’s ideas on staffing and scheduling to minimize each teacher’s total student load.
No Max School (submitted by Stephen Frank). This proposed school provides more time for teachers to work with small groups of students, as well as collaborate with each other, by having teams of three or more teachers group and regroup students through the day. If a teacher has to lecture one period, that class would be big, maybe 60 students, with an assistant to monitor behavior. Much work would be done in a computer lab with room for 50 students.
Uplift Education Schools, Dallas (submitted by Britni Bradford). These charter high schools emphasize careful selection and clear professional pathways for teachers, as well as regular formative assessments to catch learning problems early. They recruit disadvantaged students and have counselors at each school assigned to provide emotional and academic support to graduates when they are in college. All 26 graduates in 2010 of one Uplift School, Peak Prep, went to college and all have stayed for sophomore year.
New Tech Schools (submitted by Lydia Dobyns). The New Tech Network partners with 87 schools in 16 states to create project-driven learning. It is similar to the High Tech High network, with 11 schools in San Diego County. One 11th-grader at a New Tech school in Carrollton, Texas, said that “collaboration, presentations and evaluations have become an everyday thing for me. . . . Students learn through projects, presenting their proposals and evaluating their peers.”
Alice in Wonderland Schools (submitted by John F. Lyons). This Olney parent and grandparent sent in a list of “six impossible things” his ideal school would do. They include assessing prospective teachers with old SAT tests, teaching only calculator use until sixth grade and building critical thinking by handing out SAT answers and telling students to provide the questions. My favorite — because it seemed completely daft before I thought about it — was making the grade of each student the average of what the class got. Peer pressure would kick in, Lyons said, and achievement would rise.
Notice the themes here — close teacher-student contact, teamwork, projects. The best schools of the future might take different approaches, but these seem promising.