- D.C. bill would prevent fourth-grade illiteracy
- Douglas Development buys Northeast D.C. site for $2.2M [Sela PCS mentioned]
- D.C. charter school board objects to Rhee's report card
- When it comes to Michelle Rhee take the high road
- D.C.'s Charter Schools Maintain Higher Expulsion Rate
- D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson disputes cheating allegations
- Gates Foundation study: We've figured out what makes a good teacher
D.C. bill would prevent fourth-grade illiteracy
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
January 8, 2013
A D.C. lawmaker introduced a bill Tuesday to prevent students from progressing to the fourth grade until they can read at or above a third-grade level.
The measure, sponsored by at-large Councilman Vincent Orange, would require students to take an "Annual Skills and Reading Diagnostic Assessment" at the end of each year, kindergarten through the third grade. If a student is not reading proficiently by the end of the third grade, the student will remain in that grade and be required to attend summer reading classes.
At the end of the third grade, "you're reading to learn, you're not learning to read," Orange said. And by the end of the third grade, "a kid that's not reading independently more likely than not will make contact with the criminal justice system in the long run."
In 2012, less than half of the District's third-graders -- across DC Public Schools and public charter schools -- were proficient in reading, as only 40.5 percent reached that level on their standardized tests, the DC Comprehensive Assessment System. That was a drop by slightly more than 1 percent from 2011.
A report released last month also found third-graders in the District saw no statistically significant improvement in their test scores between 2007 and 2011.
"Our children still are not proficient with reading, but we still are not coming up with ways to address it," Orange said. "We can't keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting that we're going to get a new result."
Deciding not to advance students who are not ready makes sense, said David Pickens, executive director of the nonprofit DC School Reform Now. But basing that decision on a single assessment is also risky.
"They have to factor in many different things," he said. "Just taking one high-stakes test into consideration is usually not enough to get a clear picture of where a specific student is."
Representatives of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education and of DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson declined to comment, saying their offices are reviewing the legislation.
Douglas Development buys Northeast D.C. site for $2.2M [Sela PCS mentioned]
Washington Busines Journal
By Daniel J. Sernovitz
January 8, 2013
Douglas Development Corp. has acquired the former Young America Works charter school in Northeast D.C. for $2.2 million, and has already signed up another District-based charter to occupy the single-story building on Chillum Place just south of Kansas Avenue in Takoma.
Douglas paid roughly $70 per square foot for the space at 6015-6017 Chillum Place NE in mid-December, according to property records. Douglas Development Principal Norman Jemal said the company was able to strike a deal to lease the building in full to the Sela Public Charter School after agreeing to buy the property from City First Real Estate LLC.
“We came across the opportunity, it was a great value play in the fact that it was fully built out, and we leased it to Sela,” Jemal said.
Sela Public Charter School is District-based Hebrew language charter school, and it announced plans in mid-November, before the deal closed, to open in the former Young America Works space in the fall of this year. The announcement drew praise from city officials, including Ward 4 Councilman Muriel Bowser. And in a statement at the time, the school's executive director Jason Lody said the site was the ideal location for Sela.
“We are thrilled to be locating in Ward 4, a part of the city that truly represents Sela’s commitment to providing D.C. students from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to achieve academic excellence,” Lody said.
The building is the latest of a handful of recent acquisitions for Douglas Development, which recently paid $5.3 million for a Logan Circle building at 1401 14th St. NW. The company also bought a site at 1313-1317 14th St. NW, which currently includes a Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken, and Jemal said the company will look at redeveloping that site in the future into a mixed-use project.
D.C. charter school board objects to Rhee's report card
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 8, 2013
When Michelle Rhee’s Students First lobbying organization released its first state policy “report cards” this week, one of the fiercest critics to emerge was an important policy player from her old backyard: The D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Scott Pearson, the charter board’s executive director, released a strongly worded statement calling Rhee’s report cards error-ridden and fundamentally flawed.
“Ms. Rhee’s service as Chancellor of DC Public Schools was largely characterized by ambivalence towards the DC charter sector. That ambivalence appears to rear its head in this report,” Pearson’s statement said.
“Unfortunately, and despite repeated attempts by PCSB to correct the record with Students First, the Report Card issued for the District of Columbia grossly mischaracterizes the educational policy environment in DC, particularly when it comes to charter schools.”
Students First rated the District fourth in the nation for reform-minded education policies — but that was only good enough for a C+.
Eric Lerum, vice president of national policy for Students First, stood by the organization's work.
“We understand the PCSB’s concerns and we believe we have taken them into account in our grading of DC’s state policies,”Lerum said. “D.C. should be recognized for having a robust charter movement that encourages growth of high performing charter schools.”
Among the D.C. charter leaders’ complaints: The report dings charters and DCPS for failing to publish standardized school report cards that grade each school on an A through F scale. The charter school board does publish report cards via its “Performance Management Framework,” which grades each school on a 100-point scale and places each school into one of three performance tiers.
Charter leaders were also galled by the high marks — four out of four points — Rhee assigned for “equitable access to facilities.” One of the charter sector’s biggest complaints is that the city has made it overly difficult for charters, which are constantly challenged to find suitable real estate, to move into old public school buildings.
Pearson also objected to the low scores Rhee assigned for “charter school accountability” in the city, pointing to the charter board’s record of closing schools that don’t pass muster. (Just today, the charter board announced that it will vote Thursday on whether to revoke the charter belonging to Imagine Southeast, a chronically low-performing school.)
The Students First report does praise the charter board’s record on school closures and other measures, but says that city law ought to require more accountability — including a requirement that charters come up for renewal every 15 years instead of every 5.
Full statements from Pearson and Lerum are below.
Pearson:
Unfortunately, and despite repeated attempts by PCSB to correct the record with Students First, the Report Card issued for the District of Columbia grossly mischaracterizes the educational policy environment in DC, particularly when it comes to charter schools.
Significantly, the report never mentions that 43% of DC public school students attend charter schools. This is emblematic of the fundamental flaws in this report, where the significant and fast-growing DC charter sector is ignored when ratings are given to the state.
For example, the report grades DC a “0 out of 4” points for “School Report Cards,” ignoring the significant contribution made by PCSB’s School Performance Management Framework, that grades every charter school on a clear and transparent 100-point scale and assigns schools based on that score to Tier 1, 2 or 3 status. The report makes no mention of charter schools in such areas as fiscal transparency, alternative certification, pensions, and teacher pay.
When the report does look specifically at charters, it usually gets it wrong. For example, the report grades DC a “0 out of 4” points for “Charter School Accountability”, ignoring that fact that PCSB was recognized last year by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers for its aggressive policy towards closing low-performing charter schools. Indeed, of the 82 charter schools that have opened in DC since 1998, 25 have closed, a rate of over 30%. Most of these closed under pressure from PCSB. Similarly, the Center for Education Reform, which annually ranks state charter school laws rated DC first in the nation in 2012, noting “[DC] once again took the top spot in the rankings because of their strong independent authorizer [PCSB], charter autonomy and nearly equitable funding.”
The report also erroneously gives the district high marks for “Equitable Access to Facilities”, ignoring the enormous obstacles that Ms. Rhee herself, as DCPS Chancellor, placed to charters gaining access to closed DCPS buildings. The District has made significant improvement in this regard during the tenure of Mayor Vincent Gray and DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson, but still has more to do to ensure equitable access to facilities for charters.
Ms. Rhee’s service as Chancellor of DC Public Schools was largely characterized by ambivalence towards the DC charter sector. That ambivalence appears to rear its head in this report, yielding a disconcerting disconnection from the facts on the ground. DC public schools are in fact on the move, evidenced by a growing enrollment and improving accountability and performance, led by a charter sector now educating nearly half of the public school students in the city. It’s a shame that Students First and Ms. Rhee have chosen to avert their eyes from that progress in this misleading “Report Card.”
Lerum:
We share their desire to create high quality options for parents. DC should be recognized for having a robust charter movement that encourages growth of high performing charter schools. The PCSB also has worked to ensure accountability with its Performance Management Framework, despite having a weak state law in place to support that work.
When it comes to Michelle Rhee take the high road
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
January 9, 2013
Yesterday, the executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board Scott Pearson put out an extremely terse statement regarding the C+ ranking of the District of Columbia's education policies issued by Michelle Rhee's organization Students First. I say when it comes to Ms. Rhee, forget about her.
The fact that she and her group got many facts wrong about education reform in the nation's capital, specifically about charters; in a town where she was the traditional public school Chancellor does not surprise me for a second. I know that with all the scandals that have engulfed our elected officials it is difficult to remember, but when she worked here Ms. Rhee was off track on almost everything she did and said. Mr. Pearson was not in his current role at the time, however he and the rest of us need to recognize that the primary reason Mr. Gray won the resounding victory he did in the Mayoral election was that the great majority of citizens wanted her kicked out of town as quickly as was possible.
Mr. Pearson points out the great strides charters and his organization have made over time. Our movement now educates 43 percent of all public school students with over 35,000 kids enrolled. We expect to add another 10,000 pupils next year. Charters have been held accountable with many of the low performing facilities shuttered by the PCSB. The Performance Management Framework has provided all of us with a groundbreaking method for benchmarking one school against another. But most importantly, several of our schools are now closing the achievement gap between rich and poor, something that has never been successfully done in the history of public education in this country. We can all be extremely proud of these accomplishments.
And we have much more work to do. Let's maintain our focus on providing every child in the District of Columbia with a seat in a quality school. Until we reach this point we don't have time for those who try to distract us from this critical mission. The future looks bright, but only if we continue to concentrate on fighting the good fight.
D.C.'s Charter Schools Maintain Higher Expulsion Rate
WAMU
By Meymo Lyons
January 8, 2013
The District of Columbia's public charter schools are expelling students at a far higher rate than traditional public schools.
Charter schools expelled 676 students over the past three years, while the traditional public schools expelled only 24.
According to an analysis by The Washington Post, the discrepancy underscores the autonomy of the publicly funded charter schoolswhich have more latitude in deciding what student behavior they will not tolerate. When charter schools expel students mid-year, those students then enroll in public schools, which are legally bound to take them.
In a written statement last year, D.C. public charter school board executive director Scott Pearson said they are "reexamining their discipline policies" after numbers first surfaced for the 2011-12 school year.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson disputes cheating allegations
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 8, 2013
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said Tuesday that allegations that school employees tampered with standardized tests between 2008 and 2010 are “fictitious” and pointed to a series of investigations that have yielded no evidence of large-scale cheating.
“There is no widespread cheating at DCPS,” Henderson said in a statement released Tuesday, responding to renewed attention to the cheating allegations this week. “Our teachers work hard every single day in our classrooms, and deserve credit and support, not unwarranted suspicions and doubt.”
D.C. schools officials released Henderson’s statement one day after news reports about a recently unsealed whistleblower complaint filed in 2011, in which former Noyes Education Campus principal Adell Cothorne outlined numerous allegations.
Cothorne alleges that one evening in 2010, shortly after the administration of a midyear practice exam at Noyes, she stumbled upon three staff members in a school office, surrounded by hundreds of test booklets and erasers.
Cothorne says she reported the incident to two central-office administrators, neither of whom took action.
Henderson disputed that account. “Ms. Cothorne claims to have reported this to DCPS. We have no record of this report,” the chancellor’s statement said. “Staff close to the school and staff named in her complaint have no record of these alleged conversations.”
D.C. schools have been scrutinized for their unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System — the annual exam that measures student performance and is used to determine which teachers and principals receive cash bonuses.
Cothorne says that because of the after-hours encounter with the three staff members, she tightened security for the end-of-year exam, and that test scores dropped more than 25 percentage points from the year before. She tells her story in a “Frontline” television documentary that was scheduled to air at 10 p.m. Tuesday.
Cothorne’s attorney said she would comment for this story but had not done so as of late Tuesday. Reached late Tuesday, Cothorne said she had not yet seen the “Frontline” episode and declined to comment.
Henderson said the former principal never mentioned the allegations when she was interviewed twice by an independent investigator.
“Even when asked if there was anything else she wanted to bring up to these independent investigators, she also didn’t identify any testing problems,” Henderson said in the statement.
Cothorne’s allegations of “systemic” cheating at Noyes triggered a U.S. Education Department investigation. Officials with the inspector general’s office at the Education Department said Monday that they had concluded their work and did not identify widespread cheating.
The federal investigators worked in tandem with the D.C. inspector general, who investigated Noyes for 17 months before concluding in August that there were isolated test-security problems but no rampant cheating at the school. Cothorne has said she was not interviewed as part of that probe.
Henderson said in the statement that investigators had found one incident of cheating at Noyes and said an employee was terminated as a result.
Henderson questioned Cothorne’s motivation for filing the whistleblower complaint; the former principal sought a percentage of funds recovered by the federal government had the case gone to trial, according to court documents.
“The fact that she has decided to attempt to personally profit financially through fictitious claims, rather than improve educational opportunities for our students, is extremely disappointing,” Henderson said.
Gates Foundation study: We've figured out what makes a good teacher
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
January 8, 2013
Even as most of the nation’s 15,000 public school districts roll out new systems to evaluate teachers, many are still struggling with a central question: What’s the best way to identify an effective educator?
After a three-year, $45 million research project, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes it has some answers.
The most reliable way to evaluate teachers is to use a three-pronged approach built on student test scores, classroom observations by multiple reviewers and teacher evaluations from students themselves, the foundation found.
“We identified groups of teachers who caused students to learn more,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and principal investigator of the Gates study, also known as the Measures of Effective Teaching project.
The findings released Tuesday involved an analysis of about 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte; Dallas; Denver; Memphis; New York; Pittsburgh; and Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa. Researchers were drawn from the Educational Testing Service and several universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Virginia.
The large-scale study is the first to demonstrate that it is possible to identify great teaching, the foundation said.
Researchers videotaped 3,000 participating teachers and experts analyzed their classroom performance. They also ranked the teachers using a statistical model known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much an educator has helped students learn based on their academic performance over time. And finally, the researchers surveyed the students, who turned out to be reliable judges of their teacher’s abilities, Kane said.
They used all that data to identify teachers who seemed effective. And then they randomly assigned students to those teachers for an academic year.
The teachers who seemed to be effective were, in fact, able to repeat those successes with different students in different years, the researchers found. Their students not only scored well on standardized exams but also were able to handle more complicated tests of their conceptual math knowledge and reading and writing abilities.
Researchers found that multiple classroom observations of teachers by several people — a principal, a peer, an outside expert — result in the most accurate assessments. Many school districts currently rely on observations by just one person, usually a principal.
The Gates Foundation hopes that states and school districts will use the research to create evaluation systems to help teachers improve, not just in hiring and firing decisions, said Vicki Phillips, who directs its college-ready education programs in the United States.
Denver is already doing so, said Tom Boasberg, superintendent of the Denver public schools. “There’s not some clear dividing line in the middle, with some folks on one side who are clearly not effective teachers and some on the other who are clearly effective,” he said. “You have a lot of folks in the middle who want to get better. The key is to use multiple measures and feedback to help them get better in this enormously complex job.”
For decades, teacher evaluations were little more than a formality in most school systems, with most educators getting top ratings based on little more than a principal’s checklist. Tenure, rather than student achievement, largely determined whether a teacher was rehired at the end of a school year.
But reformers have been pressing for evaluations that judge teachers at least in part on how well their students perform on tests. The Obama administration has accelerated that change by requiring states to adopt such evaluation systems to compete for Race to the Top funds or to receive waivers from No Child Left Behind, the federal education law.
Critics have said that some of the new evaluation systems place an unhealthy emphasis on test scores.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the findings from the Gates study “reinforce the importance of evaluating teachers based on a balance of multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, in contrast to the limitations of focusing on student test scores, value-added scores or any other single measure.”