FOCUS DC News Wire 5/9/13

 

 

D.C. to establish a hybrid traditional-charter school in Southeast [Achievement Prep Public Charter School mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

May 9, 2013

 

A long-struggling Southeast D.C. elementary school will undergo a renovation and then reopen under the management of a high-performing charter school, Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced Wednesday evening.Malcolm X Elementary was among five city schools that the chancellor proposed to close last fall but later decided to keep open. Now the school, after the completion of a $21 million renovation next year, will be operated by Achievement Prep Public Charter School.

 

Henderson described the effort as a first-of-its-kind partnership that will produce neither a traditional school nor a charter school but something in between. Neighborhood children will have a right to attend the new Malcolm X, she said, but the school’s leaders will have charter-like freedom to run the building as they see fit. Charter operators have won contracts to run city schools in the past, but this would be different, according to the chancellor, who called the hybrid a “new school model.”

 

“It’s an animal that we’ve never seen before,” said Henderson, adding that she hopes it inspires future partnerships between the school system and charters, two sectors that have more frequently competed for resources than collaborated. “If I can provide a set of high-performing seats, an opportunity where kids are going to get more than we were able to give them at Malcolm X, I’m good,” Henderson said. “I don’t care whose shingle they’re under.”

 

Fewer than one in five Malcolm X students are proficient in reading and math, according to their scores on the city’s standardized tests. Meanwhile, Achievement Prep — a middle school that serves children in the same part of town — 86 percent of children are proficient in math and 69 percent are proficient in reading.

 

The school system has not signed any agreement with Achievement Prep yet and the two sides are still working out important details of the arrangement, including how to navigate rules and regulations that require charter schools to be open to children across the city.

 

“We’ve had real strong philosophical alignment, lots of talk about what we want to do for the District’s children,” said Shantelle Wright, the founder and head of school at Achievement Prep. “We’ll just leave it up to lawyers to figure out how we get past the bureaucracy to make that happen.”

 

It is also not yet clear whether the school’s teachers will be subject to collective bargaining– a key difference between unionized school system and union-free charter schools. Malcolm X and Achievement Prep students and teachers were notified of the plan this week, and leaders of the two schools will ask for parent feedback at a community meeting on May 21.

 

Trayon White, who represents Ward 8 on the State Board of Education, said he admires Achievement Prep’s success with neighborhood children. But he said he sees no signs that the school system has a strategic plan to improve education across the city for all children — and that’s troubling. “The overall agenda is still moving forward without a comprehensive plan explained to the public,” he said.

 

Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) set aside money in the fiscal 2014 capital budget to pay for the school’s renovation. While that work is being done next year, Malcolm X students and teachers will hold classes at Green Elementary.

 

Achievement Prep, which is expanding into elementary grades, will also house some of its students at Green. The following year, the two schools will merge into a K-8 campus at the renovated Malcolm X. Wright will hire the staff, which means some Malcolm X teachers may lose their jobs. “At the end of the day we want the best teachers in front of children, so like any principal or school leader I want to be able to pick those best teachers,” Wright said.

 

Henderson said this could be the first of many similar arrangements between DCPS and charter schools. “We are in multiple conversations with a number of schools about very interesting partnerships,” she said.

 

But she pushed back against critics who argue that she is hastening a transfer of power from the school system to fast-growing charters, which now enroll 43 percent of city students. Charter schools are not the answer to fixing education in the city, she said — but they can help. “I’m interested in radically improving my neighborhood schools. Where I can’t do it fast enough or good enough but there are other people who can, I want to partner with them,” she said.

 

Worrisome expansion of Achievement Prep PCS [Achievement Prep PCS and Septima Clark PCS mentioned]

The Examiner

By Mark Lerner

May 9, 2013

 

When Achievement Prep Public Charter School was last in the news, it was over the proposed takeover of Septima Clark, the only all boys charter in the nation's capital. At the February 2013 meeting of the Public Charter School Board the move was approved meaning that about 178 students from Septima Clark would be offered admission to Achievement Prep for the 2013 to 2014 term. At the same session Achievement Prep was granted a charter amendment to increase it enrollment ceiling from 315 students to 765, including 393 new pupils in grades Pre-K 3 to 4 which the school has never educated in the past.

 

Today word comes that Achievement Prep has additional plans to expand. The Washington Post's Emma Brown reveals that DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson has announced a deal in which the charter will manage Malcolm X Elementary, a Preschool to 5th grade traditional school located in Ward 8 which currently instructs 220 pupils. On last year's DC CAS the combined proficiency rate for reading and math for this facility was 16.7 percent, virtually unchanged from the previous year.

 

Ms. Henderson views the merger has a new kind of "hybrid school." Neighborhood kids would attend unlike a charter; however Achievement Prep would have control over staffing, curriculum, hours, and enjoy all of the other freedoms that the alternative school system enjoys. “If I can provide a set of high-performing seats, an opportunity where kids are going to get more than we were able to give them at Malcolm X, I’m good,. “I don’t care whose shingle they’re under,” Ms. Brown quotes Ms. Henderson as commenting about her decision.

 

The PCSB should take a hard look at the arrangement. Achievement Prep's combined proficiency rate on the DC CAS in 2012 to 2013 school year was 76.9 percent while working with some of the most disadvantaged children in our town. However, what we are talking about here is increasing its size by over 300 percent between the Septima Clark takeover, the enrollment growth into the lower grades and now the management of Malcolm X Elementary. In the history of D.C.'s charter school movement we have seen schools take an academic fall with significantly smaller enrollment jumps.

 

The only problem is that the Board may have no say about the change. Achievement Prep is taking on oversight of a regular school that it appears is outside its charter agreement. Let's hope for the sake of our kids that this well intentioned institution is not taking on more than it can handle.

 

Schools Budget Hearing Hits on Key Issues

The Washington Informer

By Stacey Palmer

May 8, 2013

 

At-Large D.C. Council member David Catania made the point during a recent schools budget hearing that he wants to ensure that the proposed spending plans for city and charter schools are in compliance with Mayor Vincent C. Grays's Fiscal Year 2014 expenditures. Catania, chair of the council's Education Committee said there's a lack of clarity between the two school systems' spending allocations that needs to be dealt with prior to the mayor's budget being approved later this month. "While it is difficult to put an exact dollar on the existing inequity between charter and public schools, it is clear to me that one exists," Catania said. "Some advocates have put the number at as much as $80 million per year," he said, adding that facilities maintenance, legal services, teacher retirement funds and truancy reduction initiatives are just a few of the items identified that are funded for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) system but not for charter schools.

 

To that end, Catania, 45, said during a May 2 hearing at the John A. Wilson Building in Northwest, that the Public Education Reform Commission – an entity that Gray helped to create in 2010 – issued a report last year that highlighted the inequities and made a number of recommendations to improve transparency and uniformity in funding. "You are left to defend a budget, that in many ways is indefensible," Catania later told Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who fielded questions from the eight-member, committee, who included Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), and Mary Cheh, 63, who represents Ward 3. ,According to Gray's latest budget proposal, spending investments will actually increase for District schools, despite Henderson's controversial plan to move forward to shutter 15 of the 129 DCPS buildings by the end of next year.

 

Overall, DCPS will receive about a one percent increase over its current budget of $811 million, to the proposed $818 million earmarked for 2014. While the 2013-14 school year budget outlined by Henderson's administration includes significant reductions within the Central Office, it emphasizes investments in recruiting and retaining highly-effective teachers. However, due to sequestration issues, DCPS anticipates an 8 percent reduction in federal funding, thereby justifying many of the cuts in the school system's programs and services. "Our budget proposal reflects input from parents, community members, and teachers. It sets us on a course to meet the goals we established in A Capital Commitment," said Henderson. "Most importantly, it balances the investments we make to ensure that all students have access to the opportunities they deserve."

Over the past few decades, DCPS enrollment has dipped from 80,000 students to 46,000 students, and along the way, the District's 57 free public charter schools – which educate 41 percent of all District students – have been opening at the average rate of approximately three facilities each year since they were launched in 1997.

Alluding to schools in the poorest areas of the city, and particularly those in Ward 8 where large pockets of poverty exists, Barry said, referring to DCPS's budget, that schools in greatest need don't necessarily receive the greatest amount of funding.

 

"But many parents are stuck in [those] areas," Barry, 77, said of their inability to enroll their children at other schools. Barry also touched on low reading and math scores, saying parents regularly ask him about the abysmal test results. "It's a serious problem and parents [who can] are choosing charter schools, because DCPS is not meeting parents' [or] students' needs." Cheh mentioned programs for talented and gifted students as a means of getting more parents to enroll their children in the DCPS system.

"No, we do not have a tested talented and gifted program," said Henderson, 44. "In fact, we have the enrichment program in part, because some of the [Rose L.] Hardy Middle School parents I met when I first became chancellor, said they wanted their children to be able to have advanced course work," she said, adding that they all agreed on the enrichment model. "[The enrichment model] doesn't say that one child is gifted and the other is not, but it might say that one child is gifted in English and the other is gifted in math," Henderson explained. "And this is where both [students] get access to advanced course work."

 

Two D.C. high schools dare to require deep research [Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Jay Matthews

May 9, 2013

 

I often despair over the sorry state of writing and research in our high schools. Only private schools and public schools with the International Baccalaureate diploma program require research papers of significant length. Two million new high school graduates head to college every year — but only 10 percent, by my reckoning — have had to write a long paper or do a major project.

 

The only traditional public school in this region requiring that for all students is Wakefield High School in Arlington County. It is a remarkable feat for a school in which half the students are from low-income families.

 

Recently I discovered that two public charter schools are doing this in the District, providing more encouragement to those of us who think working through a complex, long-form research problem is the essence of a good education. The Capitol Hill and Parkside campuses of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy require all seniors to write a 12- to 15-page paper on a policy issue of their choice and then defend it before a panel of outside experts. Eighty percent of students at the two schools are from low-income families.

 

Last year’s research topics included euthanasia, use of mercenaries, gay marriage, fracking, cyberbullying and standardized testing. A paper on child abuse analyzed the tension between parental rights under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause and local governments’ responsibility for protecting children.

 

Ayo Magwood, the social studies teacher who runs the Chavez programs, told me a student with learning disabilities last spring wrote a thesis on same-sex marriage “in which she analyzed and applied the due process clause, the equal protection clause, the full faith and credit clause, the 10th Amendment and the establishment clause.”

 

Writing a “thesis was not only an educational experience but also a life lesson in both time management and in being the voice of the community you represent,” senior Kevin Jamisson said. “It challenged me to think far beyond what I expect of myself,” senior Ashley Thomas said. De’Ricka Crooks said “it has made me a more critical thinker.”

 

I witnessed the happy chaos of the first Chavez school opening in 1998 in the basement of a Safeway store in Southwest Washington. Its leader was a remarkable educator named Irasema Salcido. She has been true to her vision, won many awards, and produced what are apparently the only public schools in the District that take student research this seriously. If a school full of kids whose parents never went to college can insist on research projects, why can’t we have such programs at Yorktown, McLean, Churchill and River Hill high schools, where the majority of the parents have college degrees?

 

Teachers in schools such as those have told me that the time necessary to guide all students through the selection of topics, search for sources, drafting and redrafting isn’t available to them. It would require a massive rewrite of their English or social studies curriculums to create such programs. Maybe a big change is just what we need. The faculty at Wakefield manages to do it. Magwood said having all students dive into constitutional issues illustrated by real cases significantly improved their attitude about thinking and writing.

 

The assignments “transformed the regurgitating, knowledge-telling, book report thesis presentations of previous years into exciting, insightful, analytical presentations that made even our expert judges on public policy reflect,” she said. “Students were using constitutional law to analyze public policy, instead of just memorizing and spouting a litany of facts about their topic.”

 

I know many teachers as innovative and energetic as Magwood. They might not be a majority, but there are enough of them to staff required research programs in more than the three Washington area public schools doing that now. I would like to see more students surprise both themselves and the people who decide what high schools should teach.