- Disappointing night at the Washington Post’s State of Education Forum [FOCUS and DC Prep mentioned]
- Pep rallies, music videos and cash aim to inspire students on D.C. tests
- Admissions 101: why smart, poor students are dumb
Disappointing night at the Washington Post’s State of Education Forum [FOCUS and DC Prep mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
April 25, 2013
Last evening I attended a panel discussionsponsored by the Washington Post on the state of education in the nation’s capital. Participants included the Post’s education reporter Emma Brown, Chairman of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee David Catania, D.C. Empower’s Daniel del Pielago, Public Charter School Board executive director Scott Pearson, Cathy Reilly from the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators (SHAPPE), and Abigail Smith, the newly named Deputy Mayor for Education. The discussion was facilitated by the Post’s Natalie Hopkinson. Right from the beginning the evening’s theme became clear. With the sole exception of Mr. Pearson there was one word on the tip of each of the panelists’ lips. Destabilizing. The growth of charter schools without coordination withDCPS has been destabilizing. The lotteries parents enter to enroll their children in high performing schools are destabilizing. The closing of underperforming DCPS facilities has been destabilizing. Destabilizing is the loss of funding for traditional schools when kids leave. The application process is destabilizing. You get the idea.
It was as if the entire 15 year history of D.C.’s charter school movement has been some tragic public policy mistake. Mr. del Pielago and Ms. Reilly practically begged for the education landscape to be frozen at this point in time so that we can obtain the parental input which has been sorely lacking and so that we can once and for all figure this thing out. Most depressing and worrisome were the comments by Councilman Catania. Enemy number one on his list is the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. He asserted that the notion that money follows the child is, well, destabilizing, for our traditional middle and high schools. He would press the restart button and stabilize school budgets by legislating that they can only decrease by a maximum percentage from one year to the next no matter how many parents pull their kids out. He would also tinker with the amount of money schools receive for each pupil based on what seemed like a plethora of new factors including the income level of parents, whether a student lives in poverty, or if a kid enrolls in a vocational program. So in just a few short seconds the head of our government’s Education Committee admitted that he was out to destroy the bedrock behind the theory of school choice, and take away the one method we have of measuring funding equity between DCPS and charters. It was as if the life work of FOCUS’s Robert Cane was about to be flushed down the toilet.
It also appears that charters are not going to get any reinforcement in what will almost certainly be the coming revenue battle from Mr. Gray’s new Deputy Mayor of Education. I watched as Ms. Smith nodded her head in agreement with all of the claims of dysfunction in our current educational landscape. At one point she commented that “I think we have too many schools overall,” leaving me with the sense that her office would love to decide just how many charter are allowed to operate.
At this point Mr. Pearson joined the conversation to say that we don’t have too many schools; it is just that we don’t have a sufficient number of quality seats. The PCSB Executive Director was definitely the star of the evening, pointing out in a low key professional style the multiple positive contributions various charters have provided to children in our town. Here’s an example. Ms. Brown relayed her unhappiness in the fact that she had heard that a set of middle class white parents were told that DC Prep may not be the best fit for their child. The reporter was astonished that this advice would be given regarding the highest performing charter school in the nation’s capital. She wondered out loud if race played a role in this interaction.
Mr. Pearson explained patiently and correctly that charters have specific missions. DC Prep’s is to take students who are underprivileged and bring them up to their academic grade level and beyond. In this regard this school may not be the best match for these parents. Never mind the fact that closing the achievement gap is something educators have been trying to achieve for decades without success, and that DC Prep is not only doing it but recording standardized test scores better than any D.C. public school no matter where it is located. As with the rest of the discussion, it was clear that charters are believed to be an unnecessary distraction that are playing havoc with the daily lives of citizens. It was time for me to go home.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 24, 2013
The cafeteria at Savoy Elementary in Anacostia was rocking. Cheerleaders cheered, students in school T-shirts chanted and the principal gave a go-get-’em speech. But this was no pep rally of yore, building excitement for a football team. This was all about getting psyched for a standardized test — the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, or D.C. CAS, a bubble exam that students across the city are taking this week. “D.C. CAS!” called the Savoy emcee, Beverly Gamble Williams. “I’m gonna pass!” hundreds of students called back.
The D.C. CAS has spurred swirling public debates over cheating and the wisdom of hitching teacher evaluations to a test. It also has spawned another, less visible phenomenon. Teachers and principals, who are under great pressure to raise test scores, are finding creative ways to inspire students to show up and take the exam seriously. School staff stage academic pep rallies, produce rap videos and raffle off prizes. Some schools add sticks to those carrots, promising to ban students from sports if they don’t complete their exams. Faculty say it’s a sign of a fundamental imbalance: The tests matter deeply for teachers and principals, whose jobs and salaries depend on improving scores. But the lengthy exams don’t matter much to students, because unlike in Maryland and Virginia — where students must pass standardized tests to graduate from high school — the D.C. CAS has little bearing on a student’s future.
“In D.C., a kid doesn’t really have an incentive to come to school for the D.C. CAS,” said Peter Cahall, the principal of Wilson High School in Northwest Washington. Cahall said the system would make more sense if students had to pass the test to graduate or had some other stake in the outcome. At Wilson, officials have appealed to students’ material appetites. Last year, Wilson doled out prizes to hundreds of test takers, including a $50 gift card for anyone who scored at the proficient or advanced levels. The incentives cost about $30,000 and were paid for through school fundraisers, officials said. Wilson administrators expect to spend about half that much this year. Students who took the test Tuesday received an off-campus lunch pass plus a raffle ticket for a chance to win two iPad Minis, five $50 Visa cards and five $20 gift cards to Chipotle. Those who score advanced and proficient will be entered into a separate raffle for Apple products and cash gift cards. Meanwhile, students who fail to show up for their assigned tests will be barred from participating in school sports next year. And D.C. CAS scores will show up on report cards, according to Cahall, who explained the new policy in an e-mail to parents last weekend.
“Colleges, employers, and other service providers will see this information, and scholars will want to make sure they see a score that best reflects their abilities,” Cahall wrote. Some were surprised to learn of the prizes and threats at Wilson, including parent Anne Lindenfeld: “It defeats the purpose of the assessment, which is to tell us where our children are right now.” Greg Dohmann, a seventh-grade math teacher at Jefferson Academy in Southwest, has tried a different approach, spending countless hours after school working with students to create test-themed music videos that debut as testing begins. “It’s not high stakes for the kids,” Dohmann said. “It’s hard to get them invested.” Last year, Dohmann and his students made “Proficient and I Know It,” a takeoff on then-ubiquitous “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO. The year before, it was “Math and Reading,” a rewritten version of “Black and Yellow” by Wiz Khalifa.
This spring, Dohmann and three middle-schoolers collaborated on “Rock That CAS” to the tune of “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore. “I’m gonna rock that CAS, only got 20 sharpened in my pocket,” raps one student, clutching 20 No. 2 pencils in his hand. “Harvard wants me with what I got on that math section,” raps another. “I scored ‘advanced’ on both, my brain’s incredible,” sings a third. The video features dance scenes with dozens of Jefferson students and cameo appearances that include the school’s principal, wearing roller skates; Claribelle, the ghost rumored to live on Jefferson’s third floor; and Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. The music video premiered at a Jefferson pep rally last week. It was a hit.
“Everybody was congratulating us,” said William Harrell, 12, one of the three stars. “People were singing it in class.” Music videos have become an unofficial D.C. CAS thing, produced by teachers at schools across the city each spring. This year, “Harlem Shake” was among the most popular songs to parody. “However you can get a really positive culture around this experience, the better the end result is going to be,” Dohmann said. “That’s my motivation for doing this, taking that pressure away, getting everyone excited.” Teachers say the pressure they feel to improve test scores inevitably affects students. “Everyone’s uptight,” Carol Foster, who coordinates the arts-integration program at Savoy Elementary, said on the eve of testing Monday. Savoy’s pep rally was a chance to let some of that pressure go. The crowd erupted in dance. Students sang for their classmates, pre-K youngsters offered messages of encouragement, and teachers donned tiger masks in honor of the school’s mascot.
“Scandal” star Kerry Washington, a George Washington University alumna, sent a good-luck video. When the children returned to their classrooms, they received orange T-shirts imprinted with a slogan similar to the Adidas shirts that players wore in the past NCAA basketball season: “Savoy Elementary School Tigers: Rise to the Occasion, April 2013.” Principal Patrick Pope is trying to use the arts to transform Savoy, a school where poverty is pervasive and fewer than one-fifth of students are proficient in math and reading. It’s an effort that will be judged largely on the results of the D.C. CAS, this year and in the future. “We know how smart you are,” Pope told his students. “We know how talented you are. We know how hard you’ve worked all year. Now is your chance to show it.”
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
April 25, 2013
Selective colleges get plenty of applications from the top-scoring children of affluent parents, including many in this region. What the colleges need, their admissions officers say, are more high-achieving, low-income applicants. Places such as Georgetown and Duke don’t like being called country clubs for the rich. They want more academically talented poor kids. Why aren’t they applying? Now we know, thanks to remarkable research by economists Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia.
Many analysts have suggested that low-income high-achievers don’t apply to the most famous schools because such places are often far from home and they don’t want to be away from family and friends. Hoxby and Turner discovered a more influential reason: Such students think the prestigious campuses are unaffordable. That is a shame because the opposite is true; the more selective the college, the better their chances are to get financial aid.
High-achieving, low-income students, as defined by the researchers, are in the top 4 percent of all high school students by grades and college aptitude test scores, and in the bottom quarter of high school seniors by family income (no more than about $41,000 a year). Most of them are non-Hispanic whites. They are mostly urban and suburban kids, like their counterparts who do apply to big-name colleges, but are less likely to be in the big metro areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Miami or Washington.
The researchers calculated that 25,000 to 35,000 high-achieving, low-income students are part of each year’s high school graduating class, about 1 percent of the total. A large majority of them are not applying to the 236 most competitive colleges and universities rated by the 2008 edition of Barron’s “Profiles of American Colleges.” Hoxby and Turner said the students were handicapped by having few, if any, counselors who understood what they were missing. Some high-achieving kids were so ill-advised that they would apply only to Harvard and the local community college, and nowhere else. Seasoned counselors would have told them to apply to two safety schools and five or six selective colleges whose middle range of successful applicants is within 5 percent of their strong SAT and ACT scores and grade point averages.
Hoxby persuaded the U.S. Department of Education and several foundations to fund an unusual experiment. Letters were sent to 40,000 low-income high achievers, revealing the relatively low costs of selective schools compared with the less selective ones they appeared to prefer. Then, after the admission season was over, the researchers asked the students what happened.
The results were startling. Those who received the letters were 53 percent more likely to apply to a college that matched their high achievement level. They were 70 percent more likely to be admitted to one of those schools and 50 percent more likely to attend. Hoxby said colleges do a better job finding and admitting black and Hispanic students in the high-scoring, low-income category because their race and neighborhood are often a clue to their family income. Smart, poor kids of every race are difficult to identify because they resist disclosing their family income and colleges don’t require the information.
Should all college applicants be required to reveal their family income? Hoxby said no, at least not yet. The College Board has agreed to keep sending letters to low-income high achievers that explain their options. Hoxby wants to see whether that produces enough new applicants to give selective colleges significantly more students whose parents thought they could never afford such an opportunity.
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