- DC charter schools add mobile app to compare data
- Student expulsions at D.C. charters are a symptom not cure
- Rhee's Students First gives District education policies a middling grade
- D.C. education policy ranks 4th nationally: Study
- Five key questions about the Common Core standards
- Federal complaints details cheating allegations at D.C. public school
- What's missing from Michelle Rhee's memoir
DC charter schools add mobile app to compare data
The Washington Examiner
January 5, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — The District of Columbia Public Charter School Board is launching a new mobile app to provide information on each school.
The app was introduced Saturday at the fourth annual Charter School Expo. It provides information on a school's performance, application deadlines, program offerings and transportation options.
The free MyDCcharters mobile app was launched for Android, Blackberry, Java and Windows platforms. It's coming soon for the iPhone.
The public charter school board oversees 57 schools, serving more than 35,000 students.
Mayor Vincent Gray helped launch the new mobile app with the wireless industry association CTIA. The group says mobile devices are an important way to access information on the Internet for low income and minority populations.
Another charter schools app was launched for parents in New Orleans last year.
Student expulsions at D.C. charters are a symptom not cure [KIPP DC mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
January 8, 2013
The Washington Post's Emma Brown revealed yesterday that the student expulsion rates at D.C.'s charter schools are at a much higher level than DCPS. The reporter states that Friendship Collegiate Academy expelled 56 pupils last year and that KIPP's D.C. College Prep let go 17 students, each statistic representing five percent of the schools' total enrollment. The article states that D.C. College Prep has expelled no students in 2012 to 2013.
While the expulsion rates have caused charters to revisit disciplinary policies, this in itself will not fix the problem. In their effort to close the achievement gap between well-off and poor students charters have adopted a number of strategies to raise the level of instruction offered to low income kids. However, I am not sure that these same institutions have focused as much energy on the social and psychological components that will allow children to learn.
Last year I described two excellent presentations by the CityBridge Foundation that shined a bright light on this aspect of education reform. Paul Tough's book How Children Succeed taught us about how living in poverty profoundly changes behaviors in young people that severely interfere with their ability to succeed in life. We learned that an organization called Turnaround for Children has created specific interventions to combat these negative outcomes so that principals and instructors can reach those often thought to be un-teachable.
It is not sufficient to review levels of punishment in the face of high expulsion rates. We need to implement programs that concentrate on the soft side with as much vigor as we have spent raising standardized test scores. Only then are we educating the total child.
Rhee's Students First gives District education policies a middling grade
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 7, 2013
The District ranks fourth in the nation for reform-minded education policies, according to state report cards released Monday by Students First, the national lobbying organization headed by former D.C. Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.
The report cards rate states according to how well their policies align with those championed by Rhee — such as eliminating teacher tenure, linking teachers’ job security and pay to student achievement and giving parents more school choice.
Rhee is a tough grader— she handed out failing grades to a dozen states, as the New York Times reports today. The highest mark she assigned — to Louisiana and Florida — was a B-minus. Washington earned a middling grade of C+.
“The most powerful way to improve student achievement from outside the classroom is to shape policy and implement laws at the state level that govern education,” Rhee said in a statement. “And when we look solely at policy, it’s clear that we have a long way to go toward improving our education system in America.”
The District won high marks for its controversial teacher evaluation system, IMPACT. No surprise there: Rhee created IMPACT, one of the first evaluations in the nation to make teachers’ jobs contingent upon their students’ scores on standardized tests.
Also worthy of praise, according to Students First: The District’s mayoral control of city schools, its large and growing number of public charter schools and its private-school voucher program for low-income students.
But the city should go further, Rhee’s group says. The school system should throw out the teacher salary schedule that allows for automatic pay increases based on experience and education. Compensation should be solely based on performance, the group says.
Other Students First recommendations for the District demonstrate the kinds of reform Rhee is pushing for around the country:
The city should get rid of its traditional defined-benefit retirement plan and replace it with a “portable” plan, more advantageous for educators who don’t stay in the profession for their entire careers.
Schools should be required to notify parents when their children are placed in classrooms with teachers deemed ineffective, and the city should pass a “parent trigger” law that allows parents to vote to close and reconstitute low-performing schools.
And — in a suggestion that will be perhaps the most agreed-upon by education watchers across the philosophical spectrum — the school system and public charter schools alike should be more transparent about budgets and spending.
Rhee’s approach to reform has found as many fans as critics across the country. A Frontline television documentary to be broadcast Tuesday takes a close look at the impact of her reforms in Washington, including suspicions that turning standardized tests into high-stakes events may have encouraged teachers and principals to cheat.
D.C. education policy ranks 4th nationally: Study
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
January 7, 2013
The District has the fourth-best education policy in the country, according to a report released Monday by former DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's nonprofit StudentsFirst.
The report grades all 50 states and the District on whether each jurisdiction's education system prioritizes high-quality teaching, provides parents with information and choices about their children's schools and manages its finances well -- measures that StudentsFirst advocates in its work toward school reform.
Based on those criteria, the District earned a C+, behind top-performing state Louisiana, which earned a B-, and Florida and Indiana, which earned a B- and C+, respectively.
Maryland received a D+ and was ranked 17th, while Virginia received a D- and was ranked 38th.
"The vast majority of states received a D or an F," said Eric Lerum, vice president of national policy at StudentsFirst. "They are pretty tough grades, but I think they are reflective of the environment."
The District earned particularly high marks for its Impact teacher
evaluation system, which was created by Rhee. The system relies on a combination of classroom observations and students' standardized test scores to rate teachers. Teachers who receive poor ratings risk being fired, while teachers who perform well are eligible for bonuses.
StudentsFirst also rewarded the District for giving parents access to teacher evaluation information and for offering alternatives to a student's neighborhood school, such as charter schools and scholarships that allow low-income students in chronically failing public schools to attend private schools.
The only "A" that the District received was for giving the mayor control of the public school system in 2007, when Rhee was chancellor and Adrian Fenty was mayor.
Across the Potomac, Virginia was criticized for its lack of "meaningful" evaluations for teachers, for not providing equal amounts of funding to both charter schools and traditional public schools and for not allowing mayors to take over low-performing districts.
Likewise, the report criticized Maryland for failing to decide whether to promote or fire a teacher based on teacher effectiveness and for its strict limitations on the number of charter schools. Montgomery County, for example, just opened its first charter school in the fall.
But the report did not consider student performance, like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP -- known as the "Nation's Report Card" -- which is commonly used to rate school systems, Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle pointed out.
Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the District ranked last in both reading and math on the 2011 NAEP. On the other hand, Maryland's fourth-graders ranked fifth in math and third in reading, while Virginia's ranked ninth in math and eighth in reading. Education Week has ranked Maryland schools the best in the country for four years.
The report also offers a narrow definition of state education policy, said D.C. school board member Mary Lord.
"State-level policies are a lot broader than charter-school-enabling legislation or an individual school system's teacher-evaluation system," she said. "New Hampshire, for example, flunks, according to StudentsFirst. Yet the state is a national leader in innovative education policies."
Five key questions about the Common Core standards
The Washington Post
By Yong Zhao
January 8, 2013
The Common Core State Standards are inexorably coming to the 46 states and the District of Columbia, which have approved them. We’ve heard pros and cons of them in previous posts but here’s a broader look at what they may mean for public education. This was written by Yong Zhao, presidential chair and associate dean for global education at the University of Oregon’s College of Education, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education. He is a fellow of the International Academy for Education. Until December 2010, he was director of both the Center for Teaching and Technology and the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, as well as the executive director of the Confucius Institute/Institute for Chinese Teacher Education. This appeared on his blog.
By Yong Zhao
If you are reading this, you know the world didn’t end in 2012. But the world of American education may end in 2014, when the Common Core is scheduled to march into thousands of schools in the United States and end a “chaotic, fragmented, unequal, obsolete, and failing” system that has accompanied the rise of a nation with the largest economy, most scientific discoveries and technological inventions, best universities, and largest collection of Nobel laureates in the world today. In place will be a new world of education where all American children are exposed to the same content, delivered by highly standardized teachers, watched over by their equally standardized principals, and monitored by governments armed with sophisticated data tools.
This is the last year to ensure that happens: parents and school boards have to be convinced to remove any lasting resistance; teachers have to be fully trained so they can be turned on automatically when 2014 arrives; school leaders have to be readied so they can identify and incentivize good Common Core practices and exterminate bad ones; and data systems have to be developed so they can be deployed anytime. As American schools pour their resources into products, programs, and services to be Common Core ready in 2013, please keep in mind that the Common Core is a bet on the future of our children. While I have written about the Common Core many times before (e.g., Common Core vs Common Sense, Common Core National Curriculum Standards). I wanted to ask all of us to ask again if the new world of education ushered in by the Common Core will be better than the old one scheduled to end in a year.
The Bet
The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy. Common Core Mission Statement
Questioning the Bet
The Common Core is placing this bet on behalf of millions of children. But how good is it? I cannot answer the question with as much certainty as the Common Core proponents, but I invite them and you to consider the following questions.
1. What makes one globally competitive?
With only a few exceptions (e.g., North Korea), geographical distance and political boundaries no longer divide the world in terms of economic activities. Virtually all economies are globally interconnected and interdependent. Employment opportunities are thus no longer isolated to specific locations. Jobs can be outsourced to distant places physically or performed by individuals remotely. In a world where jobs can be and have been moved around globally, anyone could potentially go after any job he or she desires. Whether she can be employed depends largely on two factors: qualifications and price. All things being equal, those who ask for a lower price for the same qualifications will get the job.
With over seven billion people living on Earth today, there is plenty of competition. But due to the vast economic disparities in the world, there exists tremendous differences in labor cost. The hourly compensation costs in manufacturing in 2010 varied from $1.90 in the Philippines to $57.53 in Norway, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2011 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). If a Norwegian were doing exactly the same job as a Filipino, it is very probable that his job would be gone soon. For the Norwegian to keep his job, he’d better be doing something that the Filipino is unable to do.
If all children are asked to master the same knowledge and skills, those whose time costs less will be much more competitive than those with higher costs. There are many poor and hungry people in the developing world willing to work for a fraction of what workers in developed countries need. Thus for those in developed countries such as the United States to be globally competitive, they must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries. And that something is certainly not great test scores in a few subjects or the so-called basic skills, because those can be achieved in the developing countries. Yet the Common Core claims to be benchmarked with internationally high-performing countries, i.e., countries with high scores.
2. Can you be ready for careers that do not exist yet?
Old jobs are being replaced by new ones rapidly as old industries disappear due to technological changes and existing jobs move around the globe. For example, existing firms in the U.S. lost on average over one million jobs annually in the period from 1977 to 2005, according to a report of the Kauffman Foundation, while an average of three million jobs were created annually by new firms (Kane, 2010). As a result, there is no sure way to predict what jobs our children will have to take in the future. As the head of PISA, Andrea Schleicher, recently said: “Schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies that have not yet been invented and problems that we don’t know will arise” (Schleicher, 2010). If one does not know what careers are there in the future, it is difficult, if not impossible, to prescribe the knowledge and skills that will make today’s students ready for them.
3. Are the Common Core Standards relevant?
Jobs that require routine procedure skills and knowledge are increasingly automated or sent to places where such skills and knowledge are abundant with lower cost. As a result, as best selling author Daniel Pink observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Right-brained directed skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning, will become more valuable (Pink, 2006). Economist Richard Florida noticed the increasing importance of creativity in the modern economy ten years ago in his best seller The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2012). And economist Philip Auerswald convincingly proves the case for the need of entrepreneurs to bring the coming prosperity in his 2012 book (Auerswald, 2012). These are just antagonistic to the core subjects prescribed by the Common Core and tested by international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which are mostly left-brained cognitive skills.
4. Does Common Core support global competence?
The world our children will live in is global, not local as before. Given the interconnectedness and interdependence of economies, the rise of global challenges such as climate change, and the ease of movement across national borders, one’s birthplace no longer determines his or her future living space or whom he or she may be working for or with. Thus to be ready to live in this global world requires the knowledge and abilities to interact with people who are not born and raised in the same local community. But the Common Core does not include an element to prepare the future generations to live in this globalized world and interact with people from different cultures.
5. What opportunities may we be missing?
Globalization and technological changes, while presenting tremendous challenges, bring vast opportunities. Globalization, for example, greatly expands the pool of potential customers for products and services. Niche talents that used to only be of interest to a small fraction of people may not be of much value locally, because the total population of a given community is small. In the globalized world, the potential customers could number seven billion. Even a small fraction of the seven billion can be significant, and talents that may be of little value in a given location can be very valuable in another country. Globalization and technology today enable products and services to reach almost any corner of the world. But the Common Core, by forcing children to master the same curriculum, essentially discriminates against talents that are not consistent with their prescribed knowledge and skills. Students who are otherwise talented but do not do well in these chosen subjects are often sent to spend more time on the core subjects, retained for another grade, and deprived of the opportunity to develop their talents in other ways.
In summary, the efforts to develop common curricula nationally and internationally are simply working to perfect an outdated paradigm. The outcomes are precisely the opposite of the talents we need for the new era. A well organized, tightly controlled, and well-executed education system can transmit the prescribed content much more effectively than one that is less organized, loosely monitored, and less unified. In the meantime, the latter allows for exceptions with more room for individual exploration and experimentation. The question is what matters in the future: Do we want individuals who are good at taking tests, or individuals who are creative and entrepreneurial? I believe the answer is the latter.
Federal complaints details cheating allegations at D.C. public school
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 7, 2013
The former principal of an award-winning D.C. public school has accused teachers and administrators of systematically cheating on standardized tests in order to win cash bonuses and a steak dinner, according to recently unsealed federal court documents.
Part of a complaint filed in May 2011, the allegations triggered an investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s office of the inspector general. That office said Monday that it had concluded its work and found no evidence of widespread cheating in D.C. schools between 2008 and 2010.
The announcement came one day before a scheduled broadcast of a “Frontline” television documentary in which Adell Cothorne, who was principal of Noyes Education Campus in 2010-11, describes some elements of her allegations. But the details in a whistleblower complaint Cothorne made against the D.C. government in 2011 are far more extensive and allege that cheating occurred at other schools as well.
“The falsification of DC CAS test scores is systemic, and the veracity of the testing process and DC CAS scores has been questioned by other DCPS principals,” the complaint says, referring to the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests, which measure student performance and were used to determine teacher and administrator bonuses.
Cothorne’s complaint was filed under the False Claims Act on behalf of the federal government, and Cothorne sought a percentage of any potential financial proceeds had the case gone to trial.
The Education Department’s probe was the latest in a string of investigations into alleged cheating in D.C. schools, which had an unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets between 2008 and 2010.
D.C. schools officials have maintained that widespread cheating did not occur in the city. Officials cite investigations by Caveon, a company that the school system retained to investigate those erasure rates, and by the D.C. inspector general’s office, both of which discovered only minor test-security problems.
“We are pleased that this report corroborates the findings of all other investigations - there is unequivocally no widespread cheating at DCPS,” D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said in a statement Tuesday morning.
“We hope this will finally put the issue to rest. Our teachers work hard every single day in our classrooms and deserve credit and support, not unwarranted suspicions and doubt.”
Cothorne’s attorney declined to comment.
The D.C. inspector general investigated Noyes for 17 months before concluding in August that no widespread cheating occurred there. The inspector general interviewed dozens of teachers and parents to reach that conclusion.
Education Department investigators worked with the D.C. inspector general, but federal officials focused on whether possible cheating meant city officials might have misrepresented the truth about test scores in their claims for payments from Race to the Top and other federal programs. Those programs provided millions of dollars to D.C. schools.
Federal investigators found only one instance of cheating that may have affected federal funding. That incident had already been reported by the D.C. inspector general, and the individual involved was fired. “Our investigation was unable to substantiate the allegations that false claims were made to [the Education Department] for payment of funds, and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene,” the federal inspector general said in a statement Monday.
The lawsuit details the impressive test-score gains made under Cothorne’s predecessor, which resulted in cash bonuses of $10,000 to the principal and $8,000 to teachers in both 2008 and 2010.
After scores rose by more than 20 percentage points in 2007, former Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee allegedly challenged the principal to match those gains in 2008, according to the complaint. The reward was to be dinner for the staff at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
In 2008 scores jumped again, and the Noyes staff was treated to dinner, according to the documents.
In her complaint, Cothorne says that shortly after she arrived at Noyes in 2010, a teacher pulled her aside and said: “You know, they cheat on their tests.”
Cothorne identifies three staff members she says she saw in November 2010, sitting in a room with hundreds of test booklets and erasers following the administration of a midyear practice exam, according to the complaint.
Cothorne also alleges that she reported what she saw to two central office administrators.
When Cothorne tightened security for the end-of-year standardized tests in 2011, students’ math and proficiency rates dropped more than 25 percentage points from the year before, she told “Frontline.”
The complaint alleges that other Noyes staff approached Cothorne and confirmed a “long history of cheating” at the school. The complaint also alleges that two other D.C. principals raised questions about test score gains at their schools.
Julie Tate contributed to this report.
What's missing from Michelle Rhee's memoir
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
January 7, 2013
Michelle Rhee will soon be publishing her memoir, “Radical, Fighting to Keep Children First,” and I thought it would be interesting to see what the Washington Post reporter who covered her tenure as D.C. schools chancellor thought about it. Bill Turque agreed to review it, and here’s his piece. You can see a piece I recently wrote about the book here.
By Bill Turque
Michelle Rhee left town more than two years ago, but the debate about her stint as D.C. schools chancellor shows no signs of cooling. It remains a hot button for the education commentariat and is the subject of a “Frontline” documentary that airs Tuesday evening. And now Rhee has produced “Radical, Fighting to Put Students First,” a memoir/manifesto to to be published next month.
She offers some interesting coming-of-age detail, especially about life with her staunchly traditional Korean immigrant parents who expected her to wash the dishes after every meal and clean up after her brothers. We learn that she was a college sophomore the first time she fired someone, while managing a deli called Grumpy’s. As a lefty Cornell undergrad in the early nineties, she registered her opposition to President George H.W. Bush’s policies on reproductive rights with a button on her backpack that read “Bush, Stay Out of Mine.”
But aside from some gringe-inducing prose (“His head shined. His eyes burned,” is how she described her first meeting with then-mayor and political patron Adrian Fenty) what’s most striking about Rhee’s narrative is what’s missing.
Gone are some of the signature stories that were challenged as misleading or untrue, such as the claim that her students at Baltimore’s Harlem Park Elementary moved from the 13th to 90th percentile on standardized tests over a two-year period–an assertion she attributed to her principal.
There are also holes in the account of her centerpiece accomplishment: the groundbreaking 2010 labor contract. Negotiations were a rancorous, politically charged two-and-a-year marathon that featured American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and the services of a mediator — former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke — to complete. In the end, pact dramatically expanded the city’s ability to remove under performing teachers and established classroom results, not seniority, as the standard for personnel decisions.
Rhee blames Weingarten for prolonging the bargaining “because she did not want to give an inch. She often showed up late to bargaining sessions and left early.” Schmoke recalls it a little differently. He told me in a 2010 interview that bargaining was all but complete in the summer 2009 when Rhee’s “human capital” czar, Jason Kamras, reopened a long list of items thought to be settled.
”It was Jason’s take on language that Kaya [Henderson, then deputy chancellor and chief D.C. Public Schools negotiator] had agreed to,” Schmoke said. “It was using flowery language where you didn’t need it.” It took until April 2010 to get a deal. (Kamras said he was trying to clarify contract language that had been rewritten by the union)
Rhee also writes that the union became more malleable after October 2009 firings of more than 200 teachers for what she described as a budget shortfall. Schmoke said anger over the dismissals effectively froze the talks for weeks.
Rhee was gone before the other watershed event of her tenure unfolded: the March 2011 USA Today story revealing high rates of answer sheet erasures on standardized tests. Here also are some nips and tucks. It’s no surprise that she glosses over 2009 stories in the Post about two attempts by then- D.C. State Superintendent of Education Deborah Gist to convince DCPS to investigate schools with high erasure rates. Her requests languished in the chancellor’s office until Gist resigned to become Rhode Island education commissioner. Rhee said she never resisted or quashed any probe. She didn’t have to. Fenty’s hand-picked replacement, Kerri Briggs, promptly announced that the investigation was no longer necessary. DCPS ultimately hired Caveon, a private test security firm, to look into selected instances of suspected cheating, but the scope and rigor of the firm’s work has been questioned.
Toward the end of “Radical,” however, are some new notes of humility struck by the educator who blew through the school system from 2007 to 2010 like a derecho with a Blackberry, hellbent in her conviction that she knew how to lift DCPS. Now head of StudentsFirst, a lobbying group, Rhee seems to acknowledge that fixing public education will be a far more complex undertaking than raising test scores or toughening teacher evaluations. She vents her frustration at a political system that has Democrats in thrall to teachers unions and Republicans devoted to market solutions that aren’t always in the best interests of students.
And in one of the book’s few revealing passages, she recounts an attempt to enlist the support of former President Bill Clinton, which culminated in a meeting with top aide Doug Band, who bluntly explained that bringing drinking water to a Nigerian village would always be easier — and more demonstrably successful — than wading into the murk and muck of education reform.
Mustering the political will to make real and sustainable progress will always be difficult, she concludes, because ”neither the solutions nor the payoffs will be easy to describe and quantify. The journey will be long, the route circuitous, the finish line forever ahead.”
That sounds like a radical humbled by a dose of realism.