- Greater transparency needed on PCSB funding increase [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- With ‘reconstitution,’ D.C. officials hope for school turnaround
- Friendship Collegiate assistant football coach, Khenny Wonson, placed on probation [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom
Greater transparency needed on PCSB funding increase [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 11, 2013
How disappointing it is to find out about a proposed doubling of the charter school financial contribution to the D.C. Public Charter School Board in a Washington Post newspaper article. Yesterday, I pointed out that reporter Emma Brown revealed in a story about the Mayor's bill to provide DCPS Chancellor Henderson with the authority to create charter schools that both Mr. Gray and Councilman Catania, in his own education bills, include an increase in the percentage of total revenue charters contribute to the PCSB from 0.5 percent to 1.0 percent.
For the average charter school of 400 students this will be an additional cost of about $25,000 (my calculation is based upon the average Uniform Per Student Funding Formula amount increased by the Mayor's FY 2014 budget to $9,306 and the $3,000 per child facility allotment. No Federal funds are included). This is of course, not a tremendous amount of money but will be meaningful to a new charter getting its feet off the ground. On the other extreme take the example of Friendship PCS which educates almost 4,000 pupils. Their cost would go up by about $245,000 a year. I think it's only natural for board chairman Mr. Hense to wonder what he gets in return for this added expense.
When issues of funding impacting charters are about to come before public officials it has been the tradition for these matters to be discussed first within the movement. I think here's a great opportunity for increased transparency to take place.
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 10, 2013
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson called it a “fresh start” and a “momentum-shifter” for Cardozo Senior High last month when administrators removed nearly half the staff at the school. Henderson had used her power to “reconstitute” the struggling school, requiring the entire staff to reapply for their positions. It is a dramatic response to chronically low achievement, built on a philosophy that has driven D.C. school restructuring in recent years, first under Michelle Rhee and now under Henderson: Clear out poor educators and handpick a set of new ones to transform a school’s culture and performance.
Federal policymakers also embraced this approach under No Child Left Behind, the sweeping 2002 law that named reconstitution as an option for turning around low-performing schools. But the District’s efforts to remake schools this way have largely failed to produce improved test scores, suggesting that replacing staff is not by itself a reliable route to addressing the challenges of high-poverty inner-city schools.
Rhee and Henderson have reconstituted more than two dozen schools in the past five years — including Cardozo, which was last remade in 2008. Of the 18 D.C. schools reconstituted between 2008 and 2010, 10 have seen their standardized test scores decline further. Two of the schools have closed. Six have improved.
While test scores can be a crude measure of progress, school and city leaders use them as a key metric in judging schools. Teachers say the District’s mixed record with reconstitution is a sign that urban schools and students face complicated problems — such as rampant truancy — that can’t be solved by trading one set of teachers for another.
“It seems like we’re always being told it’s our fault, like we should be superheroes,” said one Cardozo teacher who was rehired in May and who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their jobs. Reconstitution “doesn’t acknowledge the fact that there are a lot of issues outside the control of the teacher.”
Henderson said she agrees that reconstitution alone is not enough to ensure improvement. But she said the system has learned from its mistakes, and she continues to believe that remaking a school’s staff is the best way to jump-start change. “We have not always done reconstitution well,” Henderson said. “But reconstitution, coupled with a leadership change at the right time in a school’s history, can have tremendous effects.”
Wheatley Education Campus in Northeast is one school where reconstitution marked the beginning of substantial improvement. Principal Scott Cartland arrived at the school in 2008, fresh from a post at a school in affluent Northwest Washington. “When I went into that building, I had never seen anything that was that chaotic and broken,” Cartland said. “I was so in over my head.” Cartland replaced 80 percent of the staff, reconceived the literacy curriculum and poured resources into mental health and social workers. Working with an outside partner, New York-based nonprofit Turnaround for Children, the school connected particularly troubled students with a community health organization.
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Friendship Collegiate assistant football coach, Khenny Wonson, placed on probation [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Roman Stubbs
June 10, 2013
A Friendship Collegiate assistant football coach was placed on probation for a year Monday after the District of Columbia State Athletic Association found he violated state policy by influencing a student to transfer to the charter school for athletic purposes earlier this winter.
Documents released Monday spelled out the impropriety committed by Khenny Wonson, the director of football operations and assistant football coach at Friendship, namely two tweets Wonson sent out on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1. In one of those tweets, he fashioned himself as an “AGGRESSIVE RECRUITER,” and on the following day, he welcomed an H.D. Woodson student to the school, according to the documents. A Wonson tweet sent Feb. 1 references H.D. Woodson defensive back D’Andre Payne as a new Friendship transfer.
According to documents, the H.D. Woodson student named in the tweet has since transfered back to the school. Payne, a first team All-Met with H.D. Woodson last fall, committed to Tennessee while enrolled at Friendship earlier this spring. Payne could not be reached to comment Monday. Wonson was placed on one-year probation by the state athletic board for violation of code 5A DCMR, Chapter 27, Paragraph 2701.2, which states: “Neither a school nor a representative of a school shall seek to influence a student to transfer from one (1) school to another for the purpose of participating in interscholastic athletics.”
“We believe that there was a nexus between those two tweets that did violate the spirit of the rule,” DCSAA Athletic Director Clark Ray said. “There is no mention of ‘recruitment’ in the state rules . . . if you have coach that is tweeting: I love recruiting, recruiting is my job, I’m aggressively recruiting my next [player], while you sleep I’m recruiting, and then the very next day that same coach sends out a tweet that says welcome H.D. Woodson player (E) to Friendship, you’re now part of the family . . . I think you can draw a nexus between those two tweets.”
Friendship Collegiate finished the 2012 season 8-3 and won the inaugural DCSAA championship. Twenty seniors from that team earned college football scholarships and signed during a ceremony in February, which included three players who chose Maryland. The school boasts several high-profile rising senior recruits, including defensive back Jalen Tabor and running back Jonathan Haden.
The allegation of infractions by Wonson was brought to the attention of Ray by DCPS officials on May 8, just a day after Wilson High School had filed a formal complaint to DCSAA, alleging that Wonson was working to pry a player away from the school after taking the student-athlete to Maryland’s spring football game on April 12, in addition to interacting with the player on Twitter and inviting the athlete to Friendship workouts, documents show. Ray found insufficient evidence to support Wilson’s claim and dismissed the complaint Monday; he also dismissed additional complaints by DCPS that Wonson was inside McKinley Tech recruiting in December 2011, as well as influenced two former players at Dunbar to transfer to the school in 2012.
Friendship Collegiate Coach Aazaar Abdul-Rahim declined to comment when reached by telephone Monday, and a message left for Friendship CEO Patricia Brantley was not immediately returned. Wilson Athletic Director Mitch Gore and DCIAA Athletic Director Stephanie Evans also declined to comment.
“This is our first time that we’ve dealt with this issue since the state office has been created,” Ray said. “I think for us, it serves the purpose of letting all the member schools out there know that the state athletic office treats seriously any allegations that are put forward with information that could substantiate their claim . . . There will be a lot more scrutiny on Friendship Collegiate, on Coach Khenny within this next year, if anyone else can provide any credible information that it seems to be true after review that Coach Khenny or any other Friendship coach, football coach, has violated the rules of the you know, the DCMR 5A Chapter 27, then we could move to suspend Friendship’s membership in the state athletic association.”
Monday’s ruling comes on the heels of April’s proposal by the DCSAA to limit transfers between schools in the District, forcing students to sit out a year after changing schools. That proposal process is still ongoing, Ray said.
The New York Times
By Vivian Yee
June 9, 2013
It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups. Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country — a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use.
A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996. “These practices were essentially stigmatized,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who first noted the returning trend in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. “It’s kind of gone underground, it’s become less controversial.”
The resurgence of ability grouping comes as New York City grapples with the state of its gifted and talented programs — a form of tracking in some public schools in which certain students, selected through testing, take accelerated classes together. These programs, which serve about 3 percent of the elementary school population, are dominated by white and Asian students.
Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker who is running for mayor, has proposed expanding the number of gifted classes while broadening the criteria for admission in hopes of increasing diversity. (The city’s Education Department has opposed the proposal, saying that using criteria other than tests would dilute the classes.) Teachers and principals who use grouping say that the practice has become indispensable, helping them cope with widely varying levels of ability and achievement.
When Jill Sears began teaching elementary school in New Hampshire 17 years ago, the second graders in her class showed up on the first day with a bewildering mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some children coasted through math worksheets in a few minutes, she said; others struggled to finish half a page. The swifter students, bored, would make mischief, while the slowest would become frustrated, give up and act out.
“My instruction aimed at the middle of my class, and was leaving out approximately two-thirds of my learners,” said Ms. Sears, a fourth-grade teacher at Woodman Park Elementary in Dover, N.H. “I didn’t like those odds.” So she completely reorganized her classroom. About a decade ago, instead of teaching all her students as one group, she began ability grouping, teaching all groups the same material but tailoring activities and assignments to each group. “I just knew that for me to have any sanity at the end of the day, I could just make these changes,” she said.
While acknowledging that wide variation in classrooms poses a challenge, critics of grouping — including education researchers and civil rights groups — argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the practice inevitably divided students according to traits corresponding with achievement, like race and class. Some states began recommending that schools end grouping in the 1990s, amid concerns that teachers’ expectations for students were shaped by the initial groupings, confining students to rigid tracks and leading teachers to devote fewer resources to low-achieving students.
“The kids who are thought of as the least able end up with the fewest opportunities and resources and positive learning environments,” said Jeannie Oakes, author of “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality,” a popular critique of grouping. “The potential benefit is so far outweighed by the very known and well-documented risks.” Though the issue is one of the most frequently studied by education scholars, there is little consensus about grouping’s effects.
Some studies indicate that grouping can damage students’ self-esteem by consigning them to lower-tier groups; others suggest that it produces the opposite effect by ensuring that more advanced students do not make their less advanced peers feel inadequate. Some studies conclude that grouping improves test scores in students of all levels, others that it helps high-achieving students while harming low-achieving ones, and still others say that it has little effect.
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