- Harry Jaffe: Mayor Gray's early childhood crusade paying off
- Council Member Catania Outlines Plans For 'Reform 2.0' In DCPS
- Catania Questions Summer School Plans
- Bad advocacy research abounds on school reform
The Washington Examiner
By Harry Jaffe
April 30, 2013
A colleague at work has a daughter who just turned 3, the time to begin pondering her education. Best to start early. She and her husband have been considering their options: Flee the District for stellar public schools across the suburban line? Beg the grandparents for part of the $34,000 a year it takes to send even a young child to one of D.C.'s private schools? Or hunker down in the District and hope that the public and charter schools continue to improve.
They chose option three, got on a waiting list for a charter and celebrated their daughter's acceptance. Celebrated? A D.C. public school? I remember when my friends in the suburbs thought I was committing a form of child abuse by sending my daughters off to kindergarten in D.C. public schools in the 1990s. Now the District finds itself leading the nation in early childhood education. Believe it.
"D.C. enrolls a higher percentage of both 3- and 4-year-olds in public pre-K than do any of the states," the National Institute for Early Education Research reported Monday. "D.C. also provides a higher level of funding per-child than any of the states, at $13,974." The District is spending $140 million on early childhood education, according to the mayor's office. Throwing money at educating kids early might just be one of the few government programs that pays off. Study after study shows that children who enter first grade with strong math and reading skills are the ones who excel in elementary school through college.
Writing in the New York Times on Sunday, Stanford education and sociology professor Sean Reardon noted that children of wealthy Americans are more successful in school that their less well-off classmates. Sounds obvious, but Reardon drills down to point out that children of the rich start earlier. "Maybe," Reardon wrote, "we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children's educational opportunities from the day they are born."
Mayor Vince Gray took that lesson to heart and to the schools. Say what you will about the mayor, he has championed early childhood education from his early days as city council chairman. In 2008, he pushed through a major expansion of universal pre-K programs. Now they are bearing fruit. About 13,000 of the District's 15,000 kids who are 3 and 4 are enrolled in school programs. The city says 90 percent of 4-year-olds are in public school. "This isn't some random day care center in someone's home," says mayoral spokesman Pedro Ribeiro. "These are programs that teach cognitive skills."
The District wraps poor families into education at two levels: The kids spend their days in safe places and get two square meals a day; their parents get access to adult education and job training. "It can help the whole family," Ribeiro says. Gray's early childhood programs can help keep families in the District. When toddlers were ready to go to school, young families would leave. Now they have reason to stay -- and they are.
WAMU 88.5
By Kavitha Cardoza
April 30, 2013
D.C. Council member David Catania has recently taken over as head of the Committee on Education for the city. He's been visiting public schools every week and is creating what he calls his "Reform 2.0" plan, which includes more money for low income students, those at risk of dropping out and vocational programs. Catania gave education reporter Kavitha Cardoza a preview of what to expect.
You've hired a law firm funded through private donations to look at how we can streamline functions. Aren't a lot of people already looking at things like this?
"Yes, we have a lot of foundations that are reviewing progress that we're making. The District government itself has essentially done nothing substantively about school reform since 2007, when we had what I call "Reform 1.0," which was a change in management where we went from a school board system to mayoral control at the point of the chancellor. It was a very important moment but it didn't result in reform cascading down into the classroom."
What have you tasked them with?
"I believe there ought to be an additional weight on the formula for children who are eligible for free and reduced lunch" When you say weighted you mean they should get more money? "That's right. Typically you have a formula of 1.0, one may be $9,000. So you might have 1.1, 1.25 etc. and you simply multiply it times whatever the basic formula is. The children who are coming to us from low income families face different challenges than those who are coming from the more affluent. And so what you have is a school from an affluent area able to spend its per pupil formula on instruction. And a struggling communities is spending it on social services. And it cheats the child twice. There's actually not enough for social services or instruction, so they don't do either well." "But I'm also looking at a couple of other ideas I think are important. In our DCPS schools, 41 percent of our kids don't graduate. So one of the things I'm looking at is additional weight for our high school age students to help them prevent dropouts, which would be the first of its kind as far as our research indicates. And another weight that's directed at that population: I want a robust vocational education program in DCPS and our charters. Not everyone is going to be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer."
How much is this going to cost?
"We're right now going through the DCPS budget with a fine tooth comb. I have to tell you it's a really opaque budget. The budget that the chancellor sends over is not the budget she operates under. And so we really have to cross walk from one set of books to another. And it looks like an offshore shell game. I'm not being pejorative towards her, but these budgets are not transparent."
"In addition to having greater transparency, I want to make sure we peg a percentage of the money that we actually spend on education devolve down to schools, and that's not what happens. We may send money out to the schools but we under cover of darkness claw a bunch of it back to central administration costs. And I think the Baltimore model where 80 cents on the dollar actually goes into the schools and you can prove it is a model that's well worth replicating"
I want to go back to cost, you must have some estimate?
"It really is a function how aggressive we are with the weighted formulas. I want to see what research tells me is the right number but I imagine this is going to be a proposition that over time will dramatically increase the budget of our schools, absolutely."
You've said you want to end social promotion in public schools where children move up to the next grade without being able to read and do math at grade level.
That's right; in the District we have an inexplicable municipal regulation that prohibits the schools system from holding back any child except in the grades 3, 5 and 8 unless the parent insists. The ninth grade is the first time you need credits in order to become a tenth grader. And last year more than a third of our ninth graders failed. I think the number is 922 of our ninth graders failed." "By comparison, in 8th grade the last year one of the grades we could retain, we had retained 14 kids. So the system is geared towards passing kids along. These schools don't want kids in them who can't succeed because it hurts their test scores, but boy, we pay the fiddler come the ninth grade where we have this massive problem."
Critics of ending sending social promotion say research says these children have low self-esteem, it promotes all kinds of behavioral issues because you have kids who are developmentally a certain age with younger children. It also affects low income minority students disproportionately, as well as boys. And so why not just fund after school and summer school programs so these kids get extra support during the school year and can move along?
"I think this obsession with self-esteem, I don't believe when kids drop out in the ninth grade because we don't want to hurt their feelings and tell them they are not ready builds their self-esteem in the long run. And we try obviously our best to make sure they're on grade level. You know we have to be creative with how we look at this." "I had a great conversation with one of our charter schools. They've created what they call '5th grade tenth graders.' So they actually let the child move on to the tenth grade but they tell the child you'll need five years to graduate. So it's not exactly holding them back with the next class, but there is a facing of the consequences."
One of your proposals early on was to prosecute parents if their children were truant. Some people have suggested that you advocate these politically popular measures prosecuting parents, ending social promotion, and talk the politician "tough talk" that voters love but educators are skeptical about, because you're thinking of running for mayor.
"People said the same thing when I was transforming healthcare in the city; that I'm doing it because I want another job. No, I like the jobs I'm doing. I'm not measuring for drapes in the mayor's office."
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
April 30, 2013
David Catania, who chairs the D.C. Council's Education Committee, wants answers from Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson regarding a significant dip in the number of students attending summer school this year, and plans to make the 5-week session available only to students who need a little boost in reading. The school system is reportedly targeting students who are lagging behind in their reading, rather than those who are reading below grade level. While there has been a cut in funding for the summer school program, reports state that council member Catania -- who noted a $1.6 billion surplus in city coffers -- believes it's not too late for money to be earmarked in Mayor Vincent Gray's Fiscal Year 2014 budget.
"The notion that we don't have the money to give kids the kind of remedial assistance they need, so they can be on grade level to success, just strikes me as wrong," Catania said in an interview.
Meanwhile, Henderson is scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Thursday, May 2 during a schools budget hearing that's being held by Catania.
Greater Greater Education
By Steven Glazerman
April 30, 2013
DC school reform was a failure, claims a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). It's a proven success, others insist. All sides of school reform debates are guilty of misinterpreting federal test data in ways that serve advocacy goals rather than finding truth. The EPI report blasts recent DC's sweeping 2007 school reforms and similar efforts in Chicago and New York City. One of the report's most amazing claims is that school reform in DC actually lowered student test scores and increased achievement gaps. It reaches that conclusion through a flawed analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores.
They're not the only offenders. In January, the Washington Post editorial board assured readers that despite alleged cheating on the DC CAS, NEAP data demonstrates that school reform has succeeded. A letter to the editor the next day from Alan Ginsburg, director of policy at the Department of Education from 2002-2010, argued that NAEP shows the exact opposite. Beware of arguments that use NAEP to defend or attack policies like charter expansion or teacher layoffs. The reality is that NAEP is not meant for this purpose. You will not find typical peer-reviewed research drawing such conclusions from NAEP data, because it's a fairly well known error that's been widely discredited. I have decided this needs its own term: "misnaepery."
What is wrong with using NAEP data in this way? NAEP is the test given to a random sample of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 across the country. It's designed to gauge long-term trends in student academic proficiency. It doesn't look at how a fixed group of students learns over time. Each test looks at a different set of students from the one before. Those who take the test one year in grade 4 are usually in grade 5 the next year, where they won't take the test. Those still in grade 4 wouldn't necessarily be in the random sample again anyway.
A test that looks at different groups of students in different points in time ("trend" or "repeated cross-section" measures) doesn't clearly tell you whether a school is doing better at educating those students, because they are different students. Maybe the demographics of the neighborhood or city changed. Maybe some moved to or from charter schools. The 8th grade NAEP is measuring not what that middle or junior high school has done since a previous group of students took the NAEP, but the effect of everything those students did up to grade 8. If something changed in the district's kindergarten 9 years prior, that would affect the scores of 8th graders who entered kindergarten before and after the change.
These shifts are called "cohort changes." In short, when you measure a group of students and then a different group of students at another time, the second group could be very different for many reasons. I wrote a more technical paper about this if you want to see a more mathematical analysis of the bias inherent in these types of measures. In the case of DC school reform, misnaepery is especially inexcusable because a panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences specifically warned that the NAEP does not provide causal evidence on the DC reforms' impact. The EPI report's authors may be right that reform proponents made exaggerated claims that reform was successful when test scores rose. But making even more exaggerated claims in the other direction is the wrong response.
We need better data and more objective research
Instead, we must be humble about what can be learned from existing data. We must also invest in better data and more focused data-gathering efforts. Instead of repeated cross-sections, we need longitudinal "growth measures," where you take a group of students who were exposed to a policy (and ideally others who were not) and follow those same students over time. The NAS experts in 2011 recommended a set of metrics, mostly longitudinal, that DC could use to evaluate school reform policies. That would help, though it wouldn't entirely prove reform worked or didn't, unless there were another group of kids who didn't benefit from reform at all to serve as a control group.
Better data would also help estimate the impacts of specific, replicable reforms, rather than trying to settle a pointless debate about whether the broad suite of DC education reforms as a whole were collectively good or collectively bad.
Some researchers do use data intelligently to answer focused questions about specific changes, such as this paper from last summer about school closures. To improve DC education, we need purposeful experiments that try out promising practices and then collect the data to evaluate them. We need to collect more useful data and to recognize the limitations of the data we have. Researchers have a responsibility to their audiences to not oversell what existing data can tell us.
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