- Why much-praised KIPP D.C. expels kids [KIPP D.C. mentioned]
- In first annual report, Raise D.C. offers snapshot of D.C. youth [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
- Arlene C. Ackerman, former D.C. schools chief, dies at 66
- THE 3-MINUTE INTERVIEW: Jeff Heyck-Williams is a real wizard at teaching math [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
- The Boys at the Back
Why much-praised KIPP D.C. expels kids [KIPP D.C. mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
February 3, 2013
Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, founders of the KIPP charter school network, produced some of the best middle schools in the country by trying to keep every child safe from harm, including insults. A student who teased another student found herself surrounded by the two tall teachers, who asked if that was really the way she wanted to treat a teammate.
With KIPP having grown to 125 schools in 20 states and the District, including a few high schools, KIPP principals and teachers are finding it harder to create such a peaceful environment for adolescents. This is particularly true in the District. KIPP’s D.C. schools are considered a model for urban public education. But its small high school, KIPP College Prep, expelled 17 students in the 2011-12 school year for violence, weapons and drugs.
The KIPP statistics came from my colleague Emma Brown’s groundbreaking report on the surprising number of students being expelled from D.C. public charter schools. I wrote a book about KIPP and have been visiting its D.C. schools since 2001, so I asked KIPP D.C. Executive Director Susan Schaeffler and KIPP College Prep Principal Jessica Cunningham what was going on.
As independent schools, charters are allowed to expel students, but regular D.C. public schools except in extreme cases (three expulsions last year) can only do involuntary transfers. When I last checked in 2008, the expulsion rate for all KIPP D.C. schools was 1 percent, nine out of 900 students. Last year, that rate was up slightly to 1.4 percent, 39 out of 2,632 students. But expulsions at the high school last year jumped from seven to 17, about 6 percent of the student body, as the school had four serious fights and a drug incident.
Schaeffler said, “We have made changes in our procedures at the high school, things as big as revisions in our demerit system and as seemingly small as changing the procedures for passing periods.”
This school year, Schaeffler put 34-year-old former D.C. teacher Cunningham, one of KIPP’s most successful school leaders, in charge of the high school. Transition time between classes was cut from five minutes to three. Hallway pass rules were changed. Cunningham increased one-on-one meetings between students and their homeroom teachers and instituted a weekly community meeting for each grade, allowing students to share their thoughts with school leaders.
Violence has declined. Only two KIPP College Prep students have been recommended for expulsion this school year. Only 12 students have been expelled so far from all KIPP D.C. schools, just 0.3 percent of enrollment.
Charter school critics have said the expulsion figures in Brown’s report prove charters are keeping their test scores high by kicking out students who don’t do well academically. That is not the case with KIPP, where only students who have endangered other students are forced to leave. But Brown’s article indicates expulsions at other charters are sometimes for tardiness, truancy and dress code violations, which is bad policy.
Brown’s report raised a good question: Why are charters expelling so many students? It also introduced another issue: Why are traditional public schools forced to keep dangerous and disruptive students who make it difficult for other students to learn?
If we knew how to rid such young people of their damaging urges, expulsions would be unnecessary. But we don’t know how to do that consistently. Until we do, serving such students at a school just for them, as some districts do, is the only sensible option. The focus should be on giving the largest number of children a chance to learn, not sparing district leaders from making difficult decisions about students who cannot control themselves.
In first annual report, Raise D.C. offers snapshot of D.C. youth [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 3, 2013
Those sobering statistics are part of a snapshot of D.C. youths to be released Monday by Raise D.C., a coalition of public, private and nonprofit groups Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) convened last year with the aim of improving the lives of the District’s neediest residents from birth through age 24.
In its first annual report, the partnership has assembled baseline data describing how the city’s young people are faring in five targeted areas: kindergarten readiness; high school graduation; college completion; full-time employment; and reconnection with either education or job-training opportunities after dropping out of school.
The baseline numbers will be used in coming years to judge whether Raise D.C. — which operates on the principle that stubborn social ills can be addressed with more collaboration among city leaders — succeeds in making measurable changes.
“If you look at some of the challenges we’re facing, there’s no way you can solve them without getting people out of their silos and working together,” Gray said. “It’s not that people haven’t talked about collaboration before. But it never gets down to this level of specificity.”
Raise D.C. involves nearly three dozen leaders from the business sector, social service organizations and all corners of city government, including Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, United Way executive Bill Hanbury, PNC Bank Regional President Mike Harreld and Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Bebe Otero.
Leaders also include philanthropists such as Terri Lee Freeman, president of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, who said she believes that Raise D.C.’s clear goals will focus citywide efforts, helping nonprofits and city agencies make more efficient and effective use of donations.
“It’s not just pulling stuff out of the air, but looking at data to determine how should we use resources in the public school system, and in the community, to move young people to the points where we want them to be,” Freeman said.
The numbers in the group’s report offer a stark picture of the challenge.
About six in 10 students graduate from high school within four years, a number Raise D.C. aims to lift to 75 percent by 2017.
Nearly 10,000 low-income youths ages 16 to 24 are neither working nor in school. Raise D.C. wants to see that number shrink to 7,000 by next year.
And only 42 percent of youths ages 20 to 24 are employed full-time. Raise D.C. wants to raise that to two-thirds of that population by 2017.
They are ambitious goals, and skeptics wonder whether collaboration, data-gathering and planning are really enough to make a difference for kids.
“The jury’s out,” said Kim Y. Jones, executive director of Advocates for Justice and Education, a nonprofit that works on behalf of children with disabilities. “There’s been a lot of work put forth, a lot of people planning. There’s been a lot of research and data collection. That’s great, but what I want to see is kids achieving meaningful outcomes and goals.”
The city has spent about $159,000 to create Raise D.C., which includes $40,000 in private donations.
The District developed the partnership in consultation with the Strive Network, which has helped cities around the country establish similar “cradle to career” initiatives. The first of those initiatives launched in Cincinnati in 2005.
Mary Ronan, superintendent of Cincinnati public schools, said she has appreciated help dealing with issues that cause difficulties for students but over which teachers and principals have no control.
“Suddenly the community is taking ownership of some of our issues,” Ronan said, pointing to Cincinnati’s efforts to improve the quality of private preschools by pushing for a preschool rating system.
Since 2005, the proportion of 5-year-olds who arrive ready for kindergarten in Cincinnati has risen from about 40 percent to about 55 percent, Ronan said. Kindergarten readiness is one of several data points that Raise D.C. identified as important for the District to track, but currently missing. City officials are working on an assessment that would measure it.
Kindergarten readiness is one of several data points that Raise D.C. identified as important for the District to track, and city officials are working on an assessment that would measure it.
In Washington, proponents of Raise D.C. said they are hopeful that the partnership will shine a particularly bright light on teens who have dropped out of school and aren’t working — kids who have effectively become invisible to the government, but who nonprofits, health-care providers and others can still reach.
Working with those partners, the District can start to give disconnected youths a way back to education and job-training opportunities, said Lucretia Murphy, co-chair of Raise D.C.’s leadership council and executive director of the foundation that runs the city’s Maya Angelou alternative charter schools.
“We can start to have an idea of where they are and start to reconnect them,” Murphy said. “What Raise D.C. says is, it’s everybody’s responsibility to help these kids.”
Arlene C. Ackerman, former D.C. schools chief, dies at 66
The Washington Post
By Matt Schudel
February 2 ,2013
Arlene C. Ackerman, who had a stormy tenure as superintendent of the embattled D.C. public schools from 1998 to 2000 and who later led the school systems in San Francisco and Philadelphia, died Feb. 2 in Albuquerque, where she had lived for the past year. She was 66.
She had pancreatic cancer, her son Anthony Antognoli told the Associated Press.
Dr. Ackerman came to Washington in 1997 as an assistant to schools chief executive Julius W. Becton Jr., at a time when much of the District’s government and finances were overseen by the federally mandated D.C. Financial Control Board. She became the superintendent in April 1998 and began cleaning house at once.
Dr. Ackerman inherited a school system with a $62 million deficit and a record of chronic underachievement and mismanagement. In her first three months on the job, she dismissed almost 30 principals, several department heads and 600 administrative staff members, including most of the personnel office.
She realized how dysfunctional the school system was when she filed a change of address only to learn that her own personnel file was missing.
“We have a school system where you have all of these systems that are broken, and you have had no accountability,” she told The Washington Post in 1998. “Now we are insisting on it, and now everybody realizes that.”
During her two years leading the D.C. schools, Dr. Ackerman was credited with increasing student test scores and reducing administrative costs from 15 percent of the budget to 6 percent. She also instituted a new set of standards for teachers and administrators.
She was praised for working closely with parents and for efforts to improve schools in poorer neighborhoods, but she often clashed with members of the D.C. Council, with the teachers union and with people who favored the establishment of more charter schools.
She was criticized for a secretive leadership style, for micromanaging and for a confrontational manner of dealing with the city council, which ultimately controlled her budget. In 1999, Dr. Ackerman refused to draft a budget calling for a reduction in funding for the public schools.
“In this city, if you could walk on water, you wouldn’t get credit for it,” she said in 1998. “They would say, ‘Arlene Ackerman can’t swim.’ ”
Dr. Ackerman resigned in 2000 to take over the top schools job in San Francisco.
“She has laid a great foundation for the future,” Michael Casserly, executive director of the nonprofit Council of the Great City Schools, said at the time. “She has laid out very detailed standards, moved more responsibility to the individual school level [and] allocated the resources more fairly.”
Arlene Randle was born Jan. 10, 1947, in St. Louis. She was part of the first integrated class at a St. Louis high school and, in a 1998 interview with The Post, recalled that a white girl falsely accused her of carrying a knife to school.
She said she had to enter a school banquet for honor students unaccompanied when a white male student refused to walk beside her.
She graduated from Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis and received a master’s degree in educational administration from Washington University in St. Louis. She also had master’s and doctoral degrees in education from Harvard University.
Dr. Ackerman was a fifth-grade teacher early in her career before becoming a principal outside St. Louis. She was an assistant superintendent in Seattle before coming to Washington.
Her two marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include two sons and several grandchildren, but a complete list could not be confirmed.
During her six years in San Francisco, Dr. Ackerman was credited with making the school system one of the best in a large American city. After teaching at Columbia, she became the superintendent in Philadelphia in 2008.
Her tenure in Philadelphia was marked by repeated clashes with the mayor’s office and state political officials. Dr. Ackerman was criticized when she appeared to be deaf to complaints from Asian parents that their children were targeted for abuse and violence by other students. She was also accused of favoritism in dispensing contracts.
A Philadelphia Inquirer columnist dubbed her “Queen Arlene” for her “controlling, aloof [and] imperious” manner. By 2011, the schools in Philadelphia had a deficit of more than $625 million, and Dr. Ackerman was forced from office.
After she received a buyout of $905,000, plus $83,000 in unused vacation time, she further inflamed Philadelphia residents when she applied for unemployment.
THE 3-MINUTE INTERVIEW: Jeff Heyck-Williams is a real wizard at teaching math [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Taylor Holland
February 2, 2013
Heyck-Williams is an instructional guide at Two Rivers Public Charter School in Northeast Washington. To help improve dwindling math scores, he started dressing up as a wizard to make the subject more fun for students. Students' grades have climbed since the wizard was introduced.
What about math interests you? I've always loved math. I've been teaching for the last 15 years, and I transitioned into an administrative role nine years ago. Four years ago, we needed another math teacher, and I simultaneously noticed a disturbing trend that our math scores were trailing our literacy scores. I knew we had to do something to address this.
You decided to implement something new? It's important for kids to be able to solve open-ended math problems that have multiple solutions, and I wanted them to do it in a way that was fun. I wanted to present them with an opportunity to work on these kinds of problems and learn that just because they may have solved it in different ways doesn't mean it's wrong.
So what did you do? I became the mathemagical wizard. I dress up in a wizard costume -- I have a beard and a robe and a hat -- and go to our assemblies where the kids all introduce me as the wizard every week. The wizard appears and presents a problem they'd worked on during the last week and a solution, calling out the names of those who got it right. We try to get everyone involved -- custodians, teachers, the front desk -- and encourage families to work on the problem together.
What does this do for the students? It shows them that math is fun and changes their attitude towards math. They start to see problem-solving can be fun and learn perseverance around problem-solving. The problems are typically pretty challenging ... It teaches that you really can't take a single problem for granted.
The Boys at the Back
The New York Times
By Christina Hof Sommers
February 2, 2013
Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.
The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.
The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.
No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.
That boys struggle with school is hardly news. Think of Shakespeare’s “whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.” Over all, it’s likely that girls have long behaved better than boys at school (and earned better grades as a result), but their early academic success was not enough to overcome significant subsequent disadvantages: families’ favoring sons over daughters in allocating scarce resources for schooling; cultural norms that de-emphasized girls’ education, particularly past high school; an industrial economy that did not require a college degree to earn a living wage; and persistent discrimination toward women in the workplace.
Those disadvantages have lessened since about the 1970s. Parents, especially those of education and means, began to value their daughters’ human capital as much as their sons’. Universities that had been dominated by affluent white men embraced meritocratic values and diversity of gender, race and class. The shift from a labor-intensive, manufacturing-reliant economy to a knowledge-based service economy significantly increased the relative value of college and postgraduate degrees. And while workplace inequities persisted, changing attitudes, legislation and litigation began to level the occupational playing field.
As these shifts were occurring, girls began their advance in education. In 1985, boys and girls took Advanced Placement exams at nearly the same rate. Around 1990, girls moved ahead of boys, and have never looked back. Women now account for roughly 60 percent of associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees and have begun to outpace men in obtaining Ph.D.’s.
There are some who say, well, too bad for the boys. If they are inattentive, obstreperous and distracting to their teachers and peers, that’s their problem. After all, the ability to regulate one’s impulses, delay gratification, sit still and pay close attention are the cornerstones of success in school and in the work force. It’s long past time for women to claim their rightful share of the economic rewards that redound to those who do well in school.
As one critic told me recently, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy and unfocused workers. But unproductive workers are adults — not 5-year-olds. If boys are restless and unfocused, why not look for ways to help them do better? As a nation, can we afford not to?
A few decades ago, when we realized that girls languished behind boys in math and science, we mounted a concerted effort to give them more support, with significant success. Shouldn’t we do the same for boys?
When I made this argument in my book “The War Against Boys,” almost no one was talking about boys’ academic, social and vocational problems. Now, 12 years later, the press, books and academic journals are teeming with such accounts. Witness the crop of books in recent years: Leonard Sax’s “Boys Adrift,” Liza Mundy’s “The Richer Sex,” Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men.”
In a revised version of the book, I’ve changed the subtitle — to “How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men” from “How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men” — and moved away from criticizing feminism; instead I emphasized boy-averse trends like the decline of recess, zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, the tendency to criminalize minor juvenile misconduct and the turn away from single-sex schooling. As our schools have become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, collaboration-oriented and sedentary, they have moved further and further from boys’ characteristic sensibilities. Concerns about boys arose during a time of tech bubble prosperity; now, more than a decade later, there are major policy reasons — besides the stale “culture wars” of the 1990s — to focus on boys’ schooling.
One is the heightened attention to school achievement as the cornerstone of lifelong success. Grades determine entry into advanced classes, enrichment programs and honor societies. They open — or close — doors to higher education. “If grade disparities emerge this early on, it’s not surprising that by the time these children are ready to go to college, girls will be better positioned,” says Christopher M. Cornwell, an economist at the University of Georgia and an author of the new study, along with his colleague David B. Mustard and Jessica Van Parys of Columbia University.
A second reason is globalization. Richard Whitmire, an education writer, and William Brozo, a literacy expert, write that “the global economic race we read so much about — the marathon to produce the most educated work force, and therefore the most prosperous nation — really comes down to a calculation: whichever nation solves these ‘boy troubles’ wins the race.” That’s probably an overstatement, but we do know that the large-scale entry of women into the work force paid large economic dividends. It stands to reason that raising male academic achievement is essential to raising labor productivity and, ultimately, living standards.
A third reason: improving the performance of black, Latino and lower-income kids requires particular attention to boys. Black women are nearly twice as likely to earn a college degree as black men. At some historically black colleges, the gap is astounding: Fisk is now 64 female; Howard, 67 percent; Clark Atlanta, 75 percent. The economist Andrew M. Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University examined the Boston Public Schools and found that for the graduating class of 2007, there were 191 black girls for every 100 boys going on to attend a four-year college or university. Among Hispanics, the ratio was 175 girls for every 100 boys; among whites, 153 for every 100.
Young men from middle-class or more comfortable backgrounds aren’t lagging quite as far behind, but the gender gap exists there, too. Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, analyzed the reading skills of white males from college-educated families. She showed that at the end of high school, 23 percent of the these boys scored “below basic,” compared with 7 percent of their female counterparts. “This means that almost one in four boys who have college-educated parents cannot read a newspaper with understanding,” she wrote.
WHAT might we do to help boys improve? For one thing, we can follow the example of the British, the Canadians and the Australians. They have openly addressed the problem of male underachievement. They are not indulging boys’ tendency to be inattentive. Instead, they are experimenting with programs to help them become more organized, focused and engaged. These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose).
These efforts should start early, but even high school isn’t too late. Consider Aviation High School in New York City. A faded orange brick building with green aluminum trim, it fits comfortably with its gritty neighbors — a steelyard, a tool-supply outlet and a 24-hour gas station and convenience store — in Long Island City, Queens.
On a visit to Aviation I observed a classroom of 14- and 15-year-olds focused on constructing miniaturized, electrically wired airplane wings from mostly raw materials. In another class, students worked in teams — with a student foreman and crew chief — to take apart and then rebuild a small jet engine in just 20 days. In addition to pursuing a standard high school curriculum, Aviation students spend half of the day in hands-on classes on airframes, hydraulics and electrical systems. They put up with demanding English and history classes because unless they do well in them, they cannot spend their afternoons tinkering with the engine of a Cessna 411.
The school’s 2,200 pupils — mostly students of color, from low-income households — have a 95 percent attendance rate and a 90 percent graduation rate, with 80 percent going on to college. The school is coed; although girls make up only 16 percent of the student population, they appear to be flourishing. The New York City Department of Education has repeatedly awarded Aviation an “A” on its annual school progress reports. U.S. News & World Report has cited it as one of the best high schools in the nation.
“The school is all about structure,” an assistant principal, Ralph Santiago, told me. The faculty emphasizes organization, precision, workmanship and attention to detail. The students are kept so busy and are so fascinated with what they are doing that they have neither the time nor the desire for antics.
Not everyone of either sex is interested in airplanes. But vocational high schools with serious academic requirements are an important part of the solution to male disengagement from school.
I can sympathize with those who roll their eyes at the relatively recent alarm over boys’ achievement. Where was the indignation when men dominated higher education, decade after decade? Isn’t it time for women and girls to enjoy the advantages? The impulse is understandable but misguided. I became a feminist in the 1970s because I did not appreciate male chauvinism. I still don’t. But the proper corrective to chauvinism is not to reverse it and practice it against males, but rather basic fairness. And fairness today requires us to address the serious educational deficits of boys and young men. The rise of women, however long overdue, does not require the fall of men.