- Can traditional school systems be replaced by charters?
- Activists to U.S. Education Department: Stop school closings now
- 3-Minute Interview: John Ugorji, teacher at Friendship Collegiate Academy [Friendship Collegiate Academy PCS mentioned]
Can traditional school systems be replaced by charters?
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 30, 2013
When activists from the District and across the country gathered Tuesday at the U.S. Education Department to call for an end to school closures, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued a statement in solidarity: “It’s time to fix, not close, our schools,” she said.
A few miles away, Andy Smarick argued the opposite: it’s time to close, not fix, our schools.
A crowd of edu-minded folks gathered at Busboys and Poets to hear Smarick explain his way of thinking and debate his conclusions with a panel including D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
Smarick, of the reform-oriented nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners, formerly worked as an executive for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and as New Jersey’s deputy state superintendent of education. He’s the author of a 2012 book, “The Urban School System of the Future,” in which he outlines what he thinks it will take to improve public education.
It boils down to this: Traditional urban school systems are broken and can’t be fixed. They have to be replaced. And charter schools should be the blueprint.
“Chartering is the replacement system for the failed urban system in my view,” Smarick said Tuesday.
Smarick advocates for closing low-performing traditional and charter schools, allowing only successful institutions to continue operating. If that means that struggling school systems are forced to shrink into minor education players in their respective cities — well, so be it.
Who would decide which schools stay open and which close? A government authority (that doesn’t exist in the District) charged with creating a portfolio of schools that meets the needs of the city, and that has the power to oversee charter and traditional schools — as well as private schools that take vouchers.
As Smarick sees it, well-meaning education reformers have been trying to radically overhaul schools in America’s big cities for half a century. They’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars.
And they don’t have much to show for it, Smarick said. Academic achievement is still “tragically” low, whether you look at national test scores or graduation rates, he said.
“It’s a civil-rights, social justice disaster — and someone needs to talk about it,” he said.
That a school system should compete for its existence is not hypothetical in the District, where DCPS faces fierce competition from a growing number of charter schools, and where Henderson just announced plans to close 15 schools with low enrollment.
Henderson is not averse to chartering; in fact, she’d like to have the authority to charter her own schools, and she has repeatedly said that she recognizes that in some cases and in some neighborhoods, charters are succeeding where DCPS has failed.
Instead of closing Malcolm X Elementary, for example, she is in talks to allow a charter school to take it over, creating what she describes as “some kind of weird hybrid” between charter and DCPS.
If a charter “can do it better than I can do it in that neighborhood, I’m good,” Henderson said Tuesday. “I recognize that I’m both an education provider and I’m also a portfolio manager.”
But the chancellor on Tuesday pushed back against the idea that charters are the answer to what ails public education. DCPS has its failings, she said, but so do charter schools and private schools that take vouchers.
“I think everybody recognizes that urban school districts are not figuring out how to meet the needs of our neediest children,” Henderson said. ”But neither are any of the other sectors.”
Nobody, Henderson said, has really figured out how to create a system that consistently and equitably educates the neediest children.
D.C. charters on the whole post higher test scores and graduation rates than DCPS schools, but Henderson attributed the difference in part to the obligation that DCPS has to serve all students. Charter schools have more latitude to serve only students who succeed in meeting expectations.
Hinting that the District’s charter advocates have allowed low-performing charters to persist in order to claim growing market share — charters now enroll 43 percent of public school students — she called for the city to be more aggressive about shuttering charters.
Also on the panel was Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents several dozen of the nation’s urban school systems; and Louisiana State Superintendent John White, who previously headed the Recovery School District in New Orleans — the only city besides Washington with a higher proportion of kids in charter schools.
Conversation ranged from the role of politics in urban schools to the emotional disruption of school closures to critiques of Smarick’s rosy interpretation of charter schools’ academic performance.
But there was little talk about what it means for families and communities when school systems are replaced, in whole or in part, by a network of charter schools or other schools of choice. The anxiety of lotteries and waitlists, the difficulty of long student commutes to schools across town, the loss of ties to a neighborhood school — none of that came up.
Smarick said afterward that some of those problems — such as the lottery — can be addressed and eased. But for all the frustrations families might have, he said, across the country fewer and fewer are enrolling in their assigned schools as they choose options based on criteria besides location.
“The era of neighborhood schools is on the wane,” he said. “And I think that’s a good thing.”
Activists to U.S. Education Department: Stop school closings now
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
January 29, 2013
Activists fighting school closings across the country converged at the U.S. Education Department on Tuesday to demand federal action to stop the shutdowns, which they say disproportionately affect poor and minority students.
In a raucous meeting, parents, community organizers and students from as far away as California detailed how school closings are disrupting lives and destabilizing neighborhoods.
“I have been denied the right to a quality education,” said Gavin Alston, 12, whose Chicago school was shuttered last year. “We have no middle or elementary schools in my neighborhood anymore.”
Gavin is now home-schooled because he did not want to travel 22 blocks by bus to his reassigned school, which is in a different neighborhood across gang turf lines.
The pace of public school closings has been increasing during the past decade, driven largely by dwindling enrollments in urban districts hit hard by budget pressures and competition from public charter schools.
In the 2000-01 school year, 717 traditional public schools were closed across the country, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That figure rose to 1,069 schools a decade later in 2010-11. The data do not include public charter schools or specialized public schools such as vocational schools.
The Education Department is investigating complaints — filed under the 1964 Civil Rights Act — about school closings in six cities: the District, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York and Chicago. Seth Galanter, acting assistant secretary in the department’s civil rights division, promised to make the investigations a priority.
But Galanter told the crowd Tuesday that while school closings can be harmful, they are not necessarily civil rights violations. Since 2010, his department has investigated 27 other complaints about school closings and none resulted in a finding of a civil rights violation.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who closed dozens of schools as chief executive of the Chicago school system, pledged to close or revamp 1,000 schools a year for five years when he joined the Obama administration in 2009. At the meeting Tuesday, Duncan said he wanted to work alongside the activists but acknowledged that school closings are complex.
“I don’t know any educator who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to close schools,’ ” Duncan said.
The meeting was a high-water mark for activists trying to forge a national movement from rebellions that have been taking place largely at the local level.
“What’s happening to Oakland is also happening to all of us across the nation,” said Joel Velasquez, a father of three. “This is decimating our communities, and it can no longer be allowed to happen. Today, a national movement begins.”
The testimony from more than a dozen activists was interrupted frequently by audience members shouting and chanting encouragement in the form of “That ain’t right!” and “Sure was!” and chanting “You say cutbacks, I say fight back!”
In the District, Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced this month that she is closing 15 schools, all of them east of Rock Creek Park and many of them east of the Anacostia River in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
In New York, the nation’s largest school district, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has closed approximately 140 public schools since 2002, and he announced plans this month to shutter an additional 17 schools.
The Education Department has no legal authority to stop school closings nationwide, spokesman Daren Briscoe said.
“We don’t have the mechanisms to affect a nationwide moratorium of school closings of any kind,” Briscoe said. “These closings happen for myriad reasons. . . . We can’t just push a button and say ‘Stop.’ ”
But critics say the Obama administration has encouraged closings through its education policies, which call for states to fix the weakest schools by choosing from among four turnaround methods, one of which is shutting them down. So far, 18 schools have been shuttered under this process, Briscoe said.
There is little research about the impact of school closings on student achievement, according to Barbara Gross of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, a nonprofit educational research and policy group that has been giving technical help to the activists.
A 2009 University of Chicago study found that most students displaced by school closings between 2001 and 2006 showed no academic impact.
3-Minute Interview: John Ugorji, teacher at Friendship Collegiate Academy [Friendship Collegiate Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
January 29, 2013
Ugorji is in his first year teaching AP Computer Science at Friendship Collegiate Academy public charter school in Northeast Washington, where the 23-year-old graduated just six years ago.
How did you end up as a teacher at Friendship?
I was recruited by Microsoft's [Technology] Education and Literacy in Schools Program. The goal of that program is to expose computer science to high schools that don't offer that opportunity to students.
What made you want to return to teach at your old high school?
The idea of giving back is always something that I pride myself in... When the opportunity came, it just fell right into place. It was perfect.
Is it weird teaching students just a few years younger than you?
It's not weird. It's actually exciting. I really enjoy working with younger students. I would say that I'm pretty good at working with kids and motivating kids and getting them to stay focused. As far as my age, I think that helps out a lot because they can relate, they feel so comfortable with me and asking whatever. Especially in a topic like computer science where everything is so new, you want them to be comfortable and open to you with whatever question they have. I feel students relate better to younger [teachers], especially me being that I went to that school and I can tell them what it was like, and I can use my experience as a student to relate to them.
How do your students compare to you at that age?
Academically, most of these students have taken three or four AP [advanced placement] classes already. Compared to me, when I was in that situation, they feel a lot smarter. Computer science is pretty much like learning a new language -- new syntax, it's nothing like you've seen before in any other classes. When I look at them, they really inspire me sometimes.