- Mike Peabody’s focus on city schools led him to help establish D.C. charters [FOCUS and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
- D.C. charter schools deserve fair funding [KIPP DC and E.L. Haynes Public Charter School mentioned]
- The First Race to the Top
Mike Peabody’s focus on city schools led him to help establish D.C. charters [FOCUS and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 21, 2013
Malcolm E. “Mike” Peabody began lobbying to establish charter schools in the District nearly two decades ago. At the time, D.C. charters were just a concept; now they are a thriving part of the city’s education landscape, serving nearly half the children in D.C. schools. “Who’da thunk?” said Peabody, an octogenarian real estate developer, at a March gala honoring his advocacy. “I certainly never imagined we would get to this level so fast.”
Peabody is a descendant of an old New England family: His grandfather, Endicott Peabody, founded the prestigious Groton School, and his brother, also named Endicott Peabody, served as governor of Massachusetts. Peabody came to Washington in the late 1960s to work in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He saw improving the city’s schools as an issue of civil rights. In 1996, he founded Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, or FOCUS, to lobby for alternatives to a dysfunctional public school system. Around that time, Newt Gingrich — then speaker of the House — began pushing for legislation to allow charter schools in the District. Peabody lobbied for that bill, which passed as the School Reform Act of 1995, and then became a fixture advocating for charters at hearings at the D.C. Council and on Capitol Hill. FOCUS became one of the most visible and aggressive voices advocating on behalf of charter schools in the city, demanding equal funding and fair access to city-owned buildings. Peabody served as chairman of the FOCUS board until stepping down in March to tackle campaign finance reform, another issue about which he cares deeply.
Even early on, when only a few hundred students were enrolled in D.C. charters, Peabody believed that choice would change public education in the city. “We have a revolution going on,” Peabody told the Washington Times in 1998, “and no one knows about it.” It was a time when few parents or politicians understood what charter schools were, said Josh Kern, who co-founded Thurgood Marshall Academy — a law-themed charter high school — in 2001. Peabody played a key role in spreading the word. “People don’t appreciate now how hard that kind of education was,” Kern said, adding that Peabody provided advice and friendship to many of the early charter school founders. “It was a new concept, unfamiliar, and people had a hard time grasping it.”
While Peabody says charters have made an important difference in Washington, he thinks more needs to be done, especially in working to close the achievement gap between poor children and their middle-class peers.
At the gala in his honor, Peabody called for the creation of a citywide commission that would study how the city can change the prospects of its neediest kids — not only in charter schools but in traditional public schools, too.
“I would like the two to compete with each other,” Peabody said. “Competition seems to do a very good job. I think it would be too bad for the charter schools to take over the whole city.”
D.C. charter schools deserve fair funding [KIPP DC and E.L. Haynes Public Charter School mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
April 20, 2013
One of the arguments that has been used to justify the shortchanging of D.C. charter schools for public dollars is that they have the advantage of being able to draw on more private funds. The findings of a new study shatter that defense and underscore the need for the District to come up with a funding scheme that ensures equity for all of its public school students. A report released by the Walton Family Foundation, which is pro-charter, showed that charter schools receive significantly less money per student than the traditional system’s schools. The analysis, examining federal, local and state tax dollars as well as private support from foundations, showed $16,361 spent per charter school student in fiscal 2011 compared to $29,145 spent per traditional school student. System schools do have higher costs because of special education, but those costs can’t account for the $13,000 disparity — which, The Post’s Lyndsey Layton reported, is the nation’s largest.
D.C. law mandates equity between the two sectors, but charter school advocates have long complained that the Uniform Per Pupil Spending Formula is implemented in a way that allows the city to funnel more capital and operating funds to the legacy school system. A study last year by Mary Levy, a longtime analyst of public education in the District, found that charters were underfunded by about $1,500 to $2,500 per student in operating funds and $3,000 per student in facilities funds. Most unfair has been the District’s reluctance, if not refusal, to make shuttered schools available to charters; the difficulty KIPP DC is experiencing in finding new facilities to accommodate its top-performing high school is evidence of the District’s indifference. (Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is a member of the KIPP board).
Officials long ago acknowledged the problem of inequity. The D.C. Council in 2010 called for establishment of a study commission that, once formed, couldn’t come up with solutions. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who campaigned on a pledge of equity, has contracted with the Finance Project, a Washington policy research and technical assistance firm, to examine funding policies and come up with specific recommendations, ideally by September. Even more encouraging, he has named Abigail Smith as his deputy mayor for education. Ms. Smith, in charge of school transformation for former chancellor Michelle Rhee and former chair for the top performing E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, understands the need for the city to use its resources in the way that best serves student interests.
Even with less money, charters have outperformed the public school system: Their students score higher on standardized tests and graduate at greater rates. More than 40 percent of public school students attend charters and thousands are on waiting lists. It’s time the District give them their financial due.
The New York Times
By William J. Reese
April 20, 2013
FOR the nearly 50 million students enrolled in America’s public schools, tests are everywhere, whether prepared by classroom teachers or by the ubiquitous testing industry. Central to school accountability, they assume familiar shapes and forms. Multiple choice. Essay. Aptitude. Achievement. NAEP, ACT, SAT. To teachers everywhere, the message is clear: Raise test scores. No excuses. The stakes are very high, as the many cheating scandals unfolding nationally reveal, including most spectacularly the recent indictment of 35 educators in Atlanta. But we should also be wondering, where did all this begin? It turns out that the race to the top has a lot of history behind it.
Members of the Boston School Committee fired the first shots in the testing wars in the summer of 1845. Traditionally, an examination committee periodically inspected the local English grammar schools, questioned some pupils orally, then wrote brief, perfunctory reports that were filed and forgotten. Many Bostonians smugly assumed that their well-funded public schools were the nation’s best. They, along with many visitors, had long praised the local system, which included a famous Latin school and the nation’s first public high school, founded in 1821.
Citizens were in for a shock. For the first time, examiners gave the highest grammar school classes a common written test, conceived by a few political activists who wanted precise measurements of school achievement. The examiners tested 530 pupils — the cream of the crop below high school. Most flunked. Critics immediately accused the examiners of injecting politics into the schools and demeaning both teachers and pupils. The testing groundwork was laid in 1837, when a lawyer and legislator in Massachusetts named Horace Mann became secretary of the newly created State Board of Education, part of the Whig Party’s effort to centralize authority and make schools modern and accountable. After a fact-finding trip abroad, Mann claimed in 1844 in a nationally publicized report that Prussia’s schools were more child-friendly and superior to America’s. Boston’s grammar masters, insulted, attacked Mann in print, and he returned the favor. In December, some Whig reformers, including Mann’s close friend Samuel Gridley Howe, were elected to the School Committee and soon landed on the examining committee.
Howe masterminded the use of written tests. His committee arrived at Boston’s grammar schools with preprinted questions, which angered the masters and terrified students. Pupils had one hour to write down their answers on each subject to questions drawn from assigned textbooks. The examiners explained in a lengthy report that they wanted “positive information, in black and white,” to reveal what students knew. For further comparison, Howe’s committee gave the same test in towns outside of Boston, including Roxbury, then a prosperous suburb. All summer, Howe and his colleagues hand-graded the tests, evaluating 31,159 responses. The average score was 30 percent. The committee wrote a searching commentary on the outcome and prepared tables ranking the schools by average score. They all fell short of the standard achieved in Roxbury.
At the School Committee meeting in August, when masters were traditionally reappointed, the three examiners presented their findings. Newspapers were packed with editorials and letters to the editor, attacking or praising Howe’s report, which Mann publicized in his influential Common School Journal. Urban districts across the nation started giving similar tests. The examiners’ report lambasted the schools. “Some of the answers are so supremely absurd and ridiculous,” the committee noted, that one might think the pupils were “attempting to jest with the Committee.” Pupils had memorized material they often did not understand. Those who could repeat lines from the famous poem “Thanatopsis” could not define the word in the title. Students could not explain whether Lake Ontario flowed into Lake Erie or the other way around. Anyone who has ever listened to children who just took a standardized test can imagine their consternation. The examiners believed that the teacher made the school, a guiding assumption in the emerging ethos of testing. Tests, they said, would identify the many teachers who emphasized rote instruction, not understanding. They named the worst ones and called for their removal.
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