- Jonetta Rose Barras: More money for what?
- Answers to the questions regarding the merger of Septima Clark with Achievement Prep [Septima Clark PCS and Achievement Prep PCS mentioned]
- Education panel: To close achievement gap, urgent state, federal action needed
- Black men in schools lead by example
Jonetta Rose Barras: More money for what?
The Washington Examiner
By Jonetta Rose Barras
February 18, 2013
Mayor Vincent C. Gray has become a bona fide spendthrift: First, he pledged $100 million for affordable housing and $15 million for nonprofit grants. Then, last week, he proposed increasing by 2 percent the per-pupil allotment for students in the city's public schools -- traditional and charters.
His proposals, arriving at dizzying speed, are expected to be presented next month to the D.C. Council in his 2014 budget and financial plan. That document will be the foundation for Gray's re-election platform, should he seek a second term.
Unfortunately, several council members also are considering a run for mayor. Others, including Chairman Phil Mendelson, will fight to retain their seats. Translation: Don't expect help from the legislature in reining in Gray's spending.
Supporting it is a guaranteed crowd pleaser, especially since it's a major issue for District residents. Unsurprisingly, the mayor's announcement has drawn applause from several sections of the city.
But do District public schools really need more money?
The city already spends about $1.4 billion for public education -- pre-K through 12th grade. The mayor and council hiked by 2 percent the schools budget for this fiscal year 2013. That cost about $86 million, as The Washington Examiner's Rachel Baye reported last week.
Despite such an enormous investment, charter schools have whined about insufficient funds for facilities. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson, crying poor mouth, announced the closure over the next two years of 15 schools.
Most troubling, half the 80,000 students enrolled in the city's public schools, including charters, are not proficient in either math or reading or both. And education expert Mary Levy found an enormous achievement gap: 29 percent in reading scores and 74 percent in math between low-income fourth-graders and other DCPS students between 2007 and 2012.
Will more money alone alter those statistics? What's that adage about the definition of insanity?
Poor strategic planning and untargeted resource deployment are the primary causes for the District's public education afflictions. If elected officials want better results, creating undeniable quality experiences for all children, it may be time to consider revising the funding formula.
If no two students are exactly alike, it's safe to assert no two schools are the same. Consequently, funds should be allocated based on need and potential positive academic outcomes -- not some antiquated formula.
Gray and the council may want to consider using that proposed 2 percent increase and other redirected money to establish an Achievement Gap Fund. The money could be allocated to specific schools where there is a preponderance of low academic performers whose test scores have been historically stagnant.
The Achievement Gap Fund could finance extended school days and/or weekend sessions. It could help expand summer school. It also could fund tutors for select schools where additional resources would provide the final push over the 50 percent proficiency line.
Targeted strategic spending could result in documented improvements in student performance. Gray's generally distributed 2 percent hike won't. It will only produce a well-written paragraph in a glossy re-election brochure.
Answers to the questions regarding the merger of Septima Clark with Achievement Prep [Septima Clark PCS and Acievement Prep PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
February 20, 2013
Last evening I attended the D.C. Public Charter School Board's public hearing on the proposed merger of Septima Clark PCS with Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS. I must say I was impressed by Septima Clark's board chair James Costan. He presented a lawyers line of rational reasoning to show that the joining of his school with Achievement Prep was the only logical course of action.
All was going exceedingly smooth until PCSB member Don Soifer asked Mr. Costan why the whole decision making process looked to the parents and community as if it was done in secret behind closed doors. The overflow room packed with Septima Clark PCS supporters erupted with applause.
Mr. Costan explained that until a final determination was made by his board it would have put the school in an even worse situation if word had come out about a possible merger. Talk of joining Achievement Prep, he asserted, would have led to further teacher and student departures from Septima Clark. In essence it would have made an unstable situation even more unstable. But after listening to the parents' testimony I don't think this is the case.
What was clear from their consistent words was that they were completely caught off guard. They were not aware of the three options Mr. Kern in his consulting role had been asked to consider, namely whether to hire a turnaround specialist, merge the charter with another institution, or continue on the present path.
The conversation started me thinking about the never ending question of what boards should tell parents or similarly what managers should tell employees. The emphasis ethically should always be on being as open as possible, but when it comes to highly sensitive matters you don't want to scare people with suggestions that are only a possibility.
This is where I think the Septima Board stumbled. If they had truly fully explored the three possible future options and found only one plausible then this is when you go to your constituents. You do not wait until you must inform stakeholders because you are about to file a charter amendment.
I came away from the meeting feeling that the Septima Clark board had let down their school. First, it was obvious that the parents, teachers, and staff never understood that the trustees were convinced something drastic needed to be done about the charter's future direction. I don’t think those associated with the school realized their lease for space was ending and there was nowhere to go. They certainly did not know that three options had been explored, and the unique role Mr. Kern played in investigating these choices. Finally, they did not learn soon enough about the path on which the board was taking the school.
This all started by the board's inability to secure Septima Clark's permanent facility. As we have seen many times in the past the facility issue can kill a charter. They have had to move three times in their short history. So now we have our answer and pending a decision by the PCSB soon there will no longer be an all male public school in the nation's capital.
Education panel: To close achievement gap, urgent state, federal action needed
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
February 19, 2013
The nation must act urgently to close the achievement gap between poor and privileged children by changing the way public schools are financed, improving teacher quality, investing in early-childhood education and demanding greater accountability down to the local school board level, according to a report issued Tuesday by an expert panel.
Created by Congress in 2010 — with legislation sponsored by Reps. Michael M. Honda (D-Calif.) and Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) — the Equity and Excellence Commission aimed to propose ways to improve public education for poor American children. The 27-member panel included state and federal officials, civil rights activists and academics.
“This is about all levels of government,” said Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the University of California at Berkeley Law School and the commission’s co-chair. “This is a proposed agenda for everyone who’s concerned with the fate of our children and of our public education system.”
The panel released its recommendations to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
In a telephone call with reporters, Honda said the goal is to focus the public’s attention on a national crisis. “This is not a minority issue. This is not a poverty issue. This is an American issue,” Honda said.
The achievement gap has proved to be a stubborn problem and one of growing concern among educators, policymakers and civic leaders. With enactment of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, the federal government made closing the gap a priority and a reason for increased accountability in public education. A host of strategies has been deployed in schools across the country to attack the gap, but few have resulted in substantial progress.
Closely tied to race, the gap is creating an underclass that threatens the country’s long-term economic stability, the commission said.
A 2011 study of the country’s 21 largest urban school districts found that every city displayed a difference in performance between whites and blacks and between whites and Hispanics. That study was based on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which includes federal reading and math exams taken regularly by fourth- and eighth-graders across the country.
“While some young Americans — most of them white and affluent — are getting a truly world-class education, those who attend schools in high poverty neighborhoods are getting an education that more closely approximates school in developing nations,” the commission wrote in its report.
More than 40 percent of U.S. children attend high-poverty schools and 22 percent of children are living below the poverty line, the government said.
Public schools in poor communities have fewer resources, less-experienced teachers and worse facilities than schools in more-affluent communities — an imbalance that must be corrected by state and federal action, the commission said.
“Ten million students in America’s poorest communities . . . are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students,” the commission wrote. “These vestiges of segregation, discrimination and inequality are unfinished business for our nation.”
The country’s primary method for funding public schools — property taxes — is one reason for disparate resources, the commission wrote. Communities with elevated real estate values can generate more money for schools, at a lower tax rate, than towns and cities with lower property values.
While the federal government pays about 10 percent of the cost of public education, about half comes from states and 40 percent comes from local communities.
The commission urged states and the federal government to send more tax dollars to high-poverty schools to compensate for the imbalance in local funding. But it stopped short of recommending a new way to fund schools that does not rely so heavily on property taxes.
In 1972, a federal commission convened by President Richard M. Nixon to address school funding concluded that as long as property taxes funded schools, poor and privileged children would be condemned to different educational outcomes.
Black men in schools lead by example
The Washington Post
By Courtland Milloy
February 19, 2013
Where are the African American male schoolteachers and administrators?
It has been pretty obvious for years that if you really want to do something about high rates of truancy and suspensions among black students — to cap that “school-to-prison pipeline” — put more black men in classrooms and principals’ offices.
Bakari Ali Haynes is a case in point. He’s an assistant principal at Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring. Seven years ago, he started an after-school group for African American and Hispanic boys called Gentlemen of Distinction. The boys are eager to spend extra time with Haynes, who is for many the first black male authority figure they’ve met.
“When they come into my office, two things get their attention right away — my academic certificates and photographs of my family,” said Haynes, 36. “They won’t come right out and ask how you get those things, but you know that’s what they want, and it’s my job to show them what it takes to get it.”
That’s the kind of insight that helps keep a student in school. It’s not that other teachers can’t be effective, but when students can see themselves in their teachers and vice versa, it makes a difference. Some studies have even found that the test scores of black male students increase when they are taught by black men.
“When you have a well-prepared African American man teaching black boys, the impact can be phenomenal,” said Brenda L. Townsend Walker, an attorney and a professor of special education at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “I have interviewed African American male students who had pretty much written school off, whose teachers had given up on them, but whose lives were turned around when they got into a class with African American men. Generally speaking, they just have a better ability to relate to the students and mediate situations that others couldn’t handle.”
In Montgomery County, where Haynes works, there are 148,000 students enrolled in public schools. About 21 percent of the students are black. And yet there are only 282 African American male teachers, 38 assistant principals and 19 principals, according to school officials.
In 2010, 71 percent of students suspended for “insubordination” were black.
Haynes knows there are better ways to handle disruptive students.
“As much as they may curse you out or say they hate your guts, at the end of the day what they are looking for is someone who understands, someone who can say: ‘I’ve been where you are. This is how we’ll deal with it,’ ” Haynes said. “Sometimes they act out simply because they are hungry but don’t want to tell anyone.”
In Prince George’s County, there are 123,000 students — 93 percent of them black. Truancy and suspensions are chronic problems, and school officials have spent years trying to solve them. Perhaps more attention can be paid to this: Out of 7,772 teachers, only 983 are black men.
In Fairfax County, there are roughly 181,500 students in public schools, of which about 18,650 are black. Out of 14,728 teachers, only 231 are black men. The suspension rate for whites in 2010 was 1.5 percent; for blacks, it was 7 percent.
In the District, where there are about 76,000 public school students, the suspension rate is low — less than one per 10,000 students. But the truancy rate is among the highest in the region — around 20 percent. (Suspension rates for charter schools are 72 per 10,000 students.)
Out of 4,000 teachers in D.C. public schools, only about 400 are black men.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, black men make up 2 percent of the nation’s 4.8 million teachers. And black men comprise only 1 percent of those currently enrolled in teacher development programs.
Why the lack of interest? Low teacher pay? It can’t be just that, or else there wouldn’t be any teachers.
Haynes grew up in a household of educators. His grandfather was a professor at Southern University in Baton Rouge. His father, Leonard Haynes, was president of Grambling University in Grambling, La., and later headed up a White House initiative to strengthen historically black colleges and universities.
His mother, Mary Haynes, teaches at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
When I first met Haynes in 2004, he was teaching English to ninth-graders at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring. The black boys in his class weren’t just well behaved, they were enthusiastic — raising hands to answer questions, participating in discussions, helping one another in small groups and seeking him out during the school day for advice on personal matters.
As an assistant principal at Eastern, he engages students as if the school were just one big homeroom class.
“I’ve always wanted to be an educator,” he said. “It was like a calling.”
Hopefully, one day soon, more black men will hear it as well.