- D.C. nonprofit wins $25 million federal grant
- Discarded integration method sees new life [KIPP mentioned]
D.C. nonprofit wins $25 million federal grant
The Washington Post
By Susan Svrluga
December 21, 2012
Applause and cheers echoed off the cinderblock walls of an elementary school auditorium in Northeast Washington on Friday, as teachers and community leaders celebrated news of a $25 million grant for the Kenilworth Parkside neighborhood.
“The hunger for this kind of work in the nation is huge,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the crowd. Only seven grants were awarded out of more than 200 applicants. “So many communities are desperate to replace the cradle-to-prison pipeline with a cradle-to-career pipeline.”
The five-year grant, part of the national Promise Neighborhoods initiative targeting high-poverty communities, will go to schools and families in the area to create a network of support. The program is modeled after Harlem’s Children’s Zone, which aims to push not only students but entire neighborhoods to be successful, with help in areas including prenatal care for pregnant women, after-school tutoring and crime prevention.
“They ask everyone to take responsibility for helping children,” Duncan said at Neval Thomas Elementary School, one of the four schools included in the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative.
D.C. schools, which have long struggled with problems, are already investing lots of money, with some of the highest per-pupil spending rates in the country. But advocates of the program say this is a new way to help some of the neediest students.
The nonprofit will help build a completely integrated approach so children come to school more prepared, said Kaya Henderson, chancellor of D.C. public schools, after the event.
Ninety percent of children in the neighborhood are being raised in households headed by women, and half of them are living below the poverty level, said Ayris Scales, the executive director of the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative. So a program was designed to focus not only on children, but also on their moms. She said research demonstrates a huge benefit for children 8 and younger if their mothers graduate and are able to get better jobs. The program will work with 20-30 women to create individualized plans. Maybe they need a high-school diploma, she said, or help figuring out financial aid for college. “And literacy is a real issue here in this community,” Scales said.
The grant would help improve child care to make sure children are ready for kindergarten; build on mentoring, tutoring, after-school programs, and college and career counseling; and work with dozens of community partners on health and other issues.
“It’s a new beginning,” said Elisa Woods, a neighborhood leader who was so thrilled she brought her mother, a former teacher, to the announcement. The community “has been downtrodden for so long. Now it can rise up. It’s a blessing.”
Discarded integration method sees new life [KIPP mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
January 2, 2013
Few education experts have been as true to a seemingly unworkable idea as Richard D. Kahlenberg, author and senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Since the 1990s, he has been the nation’s leading exponent of socioeconomic integration. That means he wants as many low-income students as possible to attend schools with a majority of middle-class children.
As Kahlenberg says in an illuminating new piece in American Educator magazine, research shows that poor kids transferred to schools with middle-class majorities do better academically, on average, than in schools with low-income majorities. Why? Kahlenberg offers three reasons: predominantly middle-class schools have student peers with better study habits and behavior, parents who are more involved in the school and more likely to complain about problems and stronger teachers with higher expectations for their students.
Since this is a mostly middle-class country, why can’t we adjust school boundaries and provide transportation to let all low-income students have these role models and protectors?
People who ask that question get quizzical looks from know-it-alls like me. Don’t you remember the seventies? We tried putting poor black kids into affluent white neighborhood schools and vice versa. It was a well-intentioned, disheartening failure. Voters rebelled against boundary changes and busing. Affluent parents abandoned socioeconomically integrated schools. Politicians local and national, Democratic and Republican, gave up on the idea.
But Kahlenberg hasn’t, and his point of view has made surprising headway.
In his new piece, “From All Walks of Life: New Hope for School Integration,” he describes a small but increasing number of successful experiments in socioeconomic balance. Skeptics like me should at least acknowledge that many affluent American parents want their children to mix with low-income students, so long as everyone is getting a challenging education.
I asked Kahlenberg how Washington area schools might move in this direction. In suburban districts such as Montgomery County, he said, “greater integration could be facilitated by creating whole school (as opposed to within-school) magnet programs to attract more affluent students into schools located in tougher neighborhoods. Likewise, money could be used to provide a financial bonus for wealthier schools to accept low-income student transfers.” School boundary adjustments could help. Local activists, and even D.C. school chancellor Kaya Henderson, have shown interest in such approaches.
With socioeconomic integration still difficult to arrange, conscientious educators have tried instead to bring the habits and expectations of rich schools to poor ones. They hire only principals and teachers with high expectations for inner-city kids. They make the school day and year longer to compensate for the lack of middle-class enrichment at home. They insist on students obeying the same attendance and classroom behavior rules found in affluent schools. They prepare all students for college, as private schools do.
They are, in essence, embracing Kahlenberg’s point, that middle-class values produce better students. So I think Kahlenberg is wrong to suggest such schools weaken support for socioeconomic integration. I also don’t accept his view that the KIPP charter school network, a favorite of mine, looks significantly better than it is because of attrition and better parents. KIPP is not perfect, but many researchers have verified its progress. Kahlenberg’s arguments are weakened by out-of-date data and unexamined assumptions.
He is much better highlighting the growth of socioeconomic integration. When he started work on his 2001 landmark book, “All Together Now,” there was only one district with 8,000 students using that approach. Now, there are 80 districts with four million students. Wake County, in North Carolina, which briefly abandoned its experiment, has returned to integration because parents refused to let it go.
Teachers having success in schools without socioeconomic integration are rooting for Kahlenberg, as am I. We should pursue every possible way to help poor kids learn, including Kahlenberg’s enlightened explanations of how to give our schools a better mix of family incomes.