- Catania plans to announce bills that would overhaul D.C. public schools
- The chartering chancellor
- Councilman Catania tops Mayor Gray's education reform moves
- Teacher Assessments Extending to Art and Gym
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 3, 2013
D.C. Council member David A. Catania plans to announce wide-ranging legislation Tuesday that could substantially reshape the city’s public education system, as he seeks to increase funding to educate poor children, give more power to principals, change the city’s school lottery system and end social promotion of children who are performing below grade level.
The legislation, a package of seven bills Catania drafted privately, represents the council’s most aggressive attempt to overhaul the District’s education policy since it approved mayoral takeover of city schools in 2007. Catania (I-At Large) described the proposals as an effort to build upon previous school reforms that aimed to spur student achievement but have instead left the city’s traditional public schools stagnating in recent years.
“So long as our school system fails, and it disproportionately fails poor people and people of color, it permits a culture of division,” said Catania, who in January became chair of the council’s newly reconstituted education committee. “If we don’t tackle this issue of the achievement gap, if we continue to relegate this city to a city of haves and have-nots that fall very hard across race lines, we’re never going to be the city we need to be.”
Besides funding initiatives for the city’s poorest students, Catania’s bills aim to boost outreach to parents. The legislation also would allow city officials to link standardized test scores and student grades — creating an incentive for students to care about the tests — and would create a new accountability system under which schools could be closed or turned over to an outside operator if they fail to meet improvement targets.
While some of Catania’s proposals could garner broad support, others are almost certain to face battles, particularly among council members who question whether the proposals overstep the legislators’ role in overseeing schools under mayoral control. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson answers directly to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D).
“I’m not looking to take authority away from the chancellor,” said council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), a member of the education committee. “I’m not sure we want to start legislating as if we’re the new school board.”
Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), also a member of the education panel, said that even if Catania’s proposals do not pass, or if they undergo substantial revision in the coming months, they will drive needed debate about how to improve the city’s schools.
“What we’ve done in the District of Columbia is kind of triage. We’ve gotten books on time, we’ve paid bills, we’ve gotten buildings fixed,” Grosso said. “We’ve gotten to a point where we’ve got to say how are we going to move forward to improve outcomes for kids. And this will create the conversation we need; this will create the engagement we need.”
Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) said he looks forward to “massive hearings” on the proposals: “I agree with a lot of it; however, much of it needs further scrutiny.”
Henderson said Monday afternoon that she could not comment on the legislation because she had not yet seen it. Council members and Gray also had not seen the legislation as of late Monday.
Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro, responding to a summary of Catania’s proposals provided by a reporter, said that some appear to duplicate projects already underway. Administration officials announced last week, for example, that they are working with D.C. public schools and charter school leaders to develop a unified enrollment lottery.
“There are a lot of things that he has in this proposal that are good ideas, and we know because we’re already working on them,” Ribeiro said. “There are other items that are more troubling, that we have to look at the legislative language to see exactly where this is going to lead.”
Catania produced the legislation during the past three months with the help of outside law firm Hogan Lovells, whose work has been funded with private donations. The lead lawyer working with Catania has beenMaree Sneed, a former Montgomery County principal who has taught education courses at Harvard University and served on the board of Teach for America.
The proposals emerged from the law firm’s research as well as from conversations Catania has had with parents, principals and teachers while visiting schools this year, he said. Catania also invited Henderson and others — including philanthropist Katherine Bradley, Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders and representatives from the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education and the State Board of Education — to meet individually last month with him and the lawyers.
Catania did not offer a full outline of his proposals at those meetings, which a reporter from The Washington Post observed. Instead, he asked attendees to respond to a series of questions in attempts to gauge support for individual parts of his plan. Their responses informed the final draft of the legislation, Catania said. Henderson, in an interview after her meeting with Catania on May 20, said she walked in expecting to be briefed on the team’s progress and proposals. “You can imagine my surprise when I sat down and got asked a bunch of policy questions that had huge implications that I didn’t have time to prepare for,” she said.
Catania also met with council members Grosso, Wells and Barry, but he did not meet with Gray. The two discussed a meeting in late May, according to e-mails exchanged by their staffs, but Gray wanted to meet one-on-one and Catania insisted that Hogan Lovells lawyers be allowed to attend. And he met with council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who said he thinks “it’s a good package.”
In those meetings, Catania demonstrated a desire to hold students and adults accountable for their work. He is seeking to repeal a regulation that prohibits most students from being held back. Instead, he would allow principals to decide who should be promoted, a proposal likely to be controversial in a city with low proficiency rates. Unless a principal recommends otherwise, third- through eighth-grade students would be held back if they fail to pass certain classes. The legislation calls on principals to notify parents mid-year when their child is at risk of being held back and to prepare a plan for helping that child catch up. Children who are retained would be required to attend summer school unless their parents seek a waiver.
Another bill would raise per-pupil funding for children who qualify for free and reduced-price meals, a common measure of poverty, as well as for students enrolled in career and technical education programs and schools with low graduation rates. Those increases aim to provide strong job-training programs for teens not bound for college and acknowledge that schools with high concentrations of poor children face substantially different challenges, Catania said.
The legislation doesn’t specify how many additional dollars should be allocated, but the cost is likely to be substantial. “It will take additional investment,” Catania said.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith questioned whether it makes sense for the council to legislate funding changes given that her office has already commissioned a study to determine what changes are necessary to ensure adequate funding at city schools. “We think it makes a lot more sense to have a comprehensive look before making new policy recommendations,” Smith said.
Catania is also proposing to send 80 percent of local funds directly to principals — instead of having that money flow through the schools’ central office — giving individual school leaders greater freedom to design their own budgets. It’s an approach modeled on Baltimore City’s budgeting, and one that would give principals the ability to meet their communities’ individual needs, Catania said.
But it also runs counter to Henderson’s efforts to ensure equitable offerings across the city by mandating certain programs, such as foreign language, at all schools. And it raises questions about whether principals, who are trained in education, would have the tools necessary to manage budgets as well. Catania proposes an alternative to Gray’s plan to give Henderson the authority to approve new charter schools, instead pushing “innovation schools” that could request freedom from the teachers union contract and burdensome regulations. Such schools would continue to be part of the traditional system.
Catania also proposes that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education create a performance metric for traditional schools, which could include a number of measures, including test scores and attendance rates. Should a school fail to meet performance targets for two years, the chancellor would be able to turn it into an innovation school or ask the principal to develop a turnaround plan in consultation with teachers, parents and community members. If, after three more years, the turnaround school was failing to meet its improvement targets, the chancellor would be required to either close it, turn it over to an outside operator or turn it into an innovation school. Catania is also seeking to make it easier for the D.C. Public Charter School Board to close schools with low test scores.
Finally, Catania is proposing a new Office of the Student Advocate that would run parent education centers across the city, offering help navigating traditional and charter schools. The advocate would help represent parents before the public education ombudsman, who is charged with resolving student complaints. Catania’s staff is soliciting feedback on the proposals online and plans to schedule hearings before the council’s summer recess.Catania said he welcomes the input and recognizes that his proposals could undergo radical changes before a final vote. “Everything we’re doing here, I might have it completely wrong,” Catania said. “But at least I’m trying.”
The Washington Post
By Mike DeBonis
June 3, 2013
The unabated growth of charter schools in the District could soon enter a new phase, with Mayor Vincent C. Gray now proposing to grant Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s wish to become her own chartering authority. The chancellor’s chartering power would join that of the Public Charter School Board and, Emma Brown reports in The Washington Post, would be used “to attract successful charter operators and a tool to turn around chronically low-performing traditional schools.” Those who know their D.C. educational history remember that the old Board of Education had chartering power for a decade but it was widely seen as being less successful than the independent PCSB. Henderson said she would use her charter powers “only in the right situations, as strategically as possible, to provide better outcomes for students.” Gray, announcing the proposal in his weekly radio address, justified the move thusly: “I want to see more gains, and I want to see them faster.”
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 4, 2013
Not to be outdone by Mayor Gray's proposals last Sunday to allow DCPS Chancellor to createcharter schools and implement a single lottery for charters and the traditional schools, D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman Catania plans to announce seven bills today to reform public education in the District of Columbia.
The introduction of this legislative packagesends a clear signal that Mayoral control of DCPS is over. Two of the acts mimic Mr. Gray's goals. Mr. Catania would implement a unified lottery for charters and regular schools. He would also allow Chancellor Henderson to create "innovation schools" similar to charters in their freedom to set their own rules.
As promised earlier, the Councilman would change the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula to provide additional money for students living in poverty and those attending vocational programs. It would also give school principals the ability to decide on thier own how 80 percent of their school funding should be allocated. Another bill would end automatic promotion of students from one grade to the next. He also wants to open an Office of the Student Advocate to provide parents assistance with determining which schools their child should attend in D.C.'s extremely complicated public education landscape. The sixth act would allow the State Superintendent of Education to be fired only for cause or if approved by the State Board of Education. The Washington Post's Emma Brown says this bill would also allow schools to request waivers from government rules and regulations they find overbearing.
Finally, there is legislation to dictate the turning over of closed DCPS facilities to charters. From my chair it appears that we now have in our city just what I feared was taking place. Once again there are too many hands in the pot of educating our children. It is a recipe for disaster that says to parents loud and clear that they should run for their lives. Perhaps Michelle Rhee did know what was coming.
The New York Times
By Javier C. Hernández
June 2, 2013
New York City students have grown accustomed to the restless routine of state tests in math and reading every year. But soon they will face assessments in subjects typically spared from standardized testing, including art, gym and foreign languages.
A new system for evaluating educators, announced by the state on Saturday, will reshape how teachers are hired and fired in the city. It will also have a profound effect on students, who will take part in a series of new exams designed to help administrators grade teachers in specialized subjects. Under the new evaluation system, which was imposed by the state after months of feuding between the city and the teachers’ union, teachers will be graded next school year on a variety of measures. Student test scores will make up 20 percent of their rating, while classroom observations will account for 60 percent. Principals and teachers will work together to decide how to evaluate the remaining 20 percent.
But many educators teach subjects for which there are no widely used tests. In response, the city is developing assessments in a range of subjects, including English as a second language, special education and music. City officials are also working on assessments for kindergarten, first grade and second grade, where exams are less common. Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief academic officer of the city’s Department of Education, said the assessments were designed to be more rigorous and wide-ranging than traditional standardized tests.
“We don’t want to just invent hundreds of new bubble tests in order to satisfy these requirements for teacher evaluation,” Dr. Polakow-Suransky said on Sunday. He said the exams would instead focus on challenging students to think critically and creatively. An English class, for instance, might require students to complete a long-form research paper, and ask them to repeat the task in the spring to gauge how much students had learned. Still, some critics of standardized testing question the use of more exams, especially for younger children.
“What’s the test for kindergarten teachers or gym teachers?” said Bob Schaeffer, director of public education for FairTest, a national advocacy group. “Those tests don’t exist, and they’re being cobbled together very rapidly.” The assessments used in teacher evaluations will be put into place over the next three years, Dr. Polakow-Suransky said, and will eventually expand to include all subjects and grade levels. They will be given in the fall and spring to measure how much students learn over the course of a school year.
Across the country, school systems are grappling with the challenges of fine-tuning complex teacher evaluation systems after decades of relying on simple satisfactory-or-unsatisfactory ratings. As the ratings alter school culture, they have also thrust difficult questions upon school administrators. What should an exam on vocational education include? How should learning in kindergarten be measured? Should teachers who handle students with behavioral problems be judged the same way as their peers? In Tennessee, the state recently released guidelines on how teachers would be graded on art instruction. They will be graded on a scale of one through five depending on how well students perform in portfolios of work. A visual arts student, for instance, is expected to be able to describe symbols in artwork and make connections to other disciplines. In New York, questions about the evaluation system are widespread, given that state guidelines grant significant authority to principals and teachers to decide how student learning should be measured.
“It’s hard to move away from a system where everybody’s getting a ‘we’re-all-O.K.’ rating,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. “It’s a cultural shift.” Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said he had heard complaints from teachers that the new system would be confusing and burdensome. “This is going to be a very, very difficult path,” he said. The city said that it would begin offering training on Thursday to allay concerns among teachers, and that workshops would be held throughout the summer.
Some principals are also uneasy about the new guidelines. Their role in schools is expected to change significantly as they begin observing teachers more frequently — as much as six times a year. Ernest Logan, president of the union that represents principals, said he hoped the city would offer adequate training. “The burden falls on principals to implement something we really had no input in,” he said. On Sunday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the evaluation system as a landmark in the effort to reform education in the city. “It gives New York confidence that our schools will be able to give the kids the education they will need going forward,” he said.
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