- DC teachers union president faces challenge in runoff election
- What if Mr. Catania does have it completely wrong?
- Letter to the editor: School reform must address key issues
- Continuing the conversation
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 13, 2013
Washington Teachers Union President Nathan Saunders will face challenger Elizabeth Davis in a runoff election for his seat, union officials said.
Saunders and Davis were among four candidates in the first round of voting, which ended last week. Saunders got 45 percent of the votes, and Davis got 41 percent.
Under union rules, a candidate must have more than 50 percent of the votes to win an election. Dates for the runoff election have not yet been set.
The race comes amid a flurry of education legislation that could have far-reaching implications for the teachers’ union, which already faces important questions due to the rise of nonunionized charter schools in recent years.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) has introduced a bill that would give Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson authority to approve new charters, potentially accelerating the shift away from unionized teachers. And D.C. Council Member David A. Catania (I-At Large) has introduced a legislative package that would transform some underperforming schools into “innovation schools” that would offer Henderson freedom from union rules.
Despite the pending legislation, turnout was low in the first round of union voting.
Of the 4,000 teachers working in the District’s school system, about 400 cast ballots, according to Davis and her supporters, who were present when votes were tallied June 7.
WTU officials declined to confirm that number, referring questions to the union’s elections committee. Cheryl Gillette, chairman of that committee, did not respond to requests for comment.
Saunders also declined to say how many teachers voted, but he acknowledged that “there could have been a better turnout in this race.”
Turnout could improve in the runoff election, Saunders said. After months of negotiating with school system officials over terms of a new collective-bargaining agreement, he plans to release details about that contract in coming days.
“We’re going to talk about it and I think it’s going to pique some interest,” Saunders said.
Davis has criticized Saunders for not speaking out more forcefully about recent D.C. public school administrators’ decisions to close 15 schools and to undergo “reconstitution” — in which all teachers must reapply for their jobs — at two others.
“He is so embedded with management at this point,” Davis said.
Saunders rejected that charge, saying that he has worked effectively to advocate for members, sometimes vocally and sometimes behind the scenes.
“Doing this job is not just about standing up and raising hell, it’s about actually getting something done that helps people at the end of the day,” Saunders said, arguing that he has worked to help teachers find jobs after being displaced by school closings and reconstitutions.
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 14, 2013
A recent column by the editors of the Washington Post echoed my concerns about D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman Catania inserting himself into control of our public schools which under Adrian Fenty was placed under Mayoral authority. In introducing seven bills impacting all aspects of the operation of DCPS the Post's Emma Brown quotes Mr. Catania as saying, "Everything we’re doing here, I might have it completely wrong. But at least I’m trying.”
I don't give any credit to trying. Instead of going off on his own on some egotistical drive to turnaround the schools all by himself he should be turning to Mayor Gray, Deputy Mayor for Education Smith, and Skip McKoy of the D.C. Public Charter School Board to determine how he can best support their efforts to increase academic achievement.
On the charter side he may get some valuable advice. Mr. Catania could learn how the competition for students has raised standardized test scores and sent hundreds of young men and women to college who in the past may have ended up in prison. He might find out why policy changes that on the surface sound innocuous, such as neighborhood preferences and capping the loss of school funding when kids leave facilities, may shatter the very foundation that has led bold leaders to ending the seemingly intractable problem of closing the achievement gap.
School choice has created structural incentives for educational entrepreneurs to enter where well meaning bureaucrats have failed generations of our children. Many of us can tell Mr. Catania how to improve upon the current system. Perhaps instead of talking and writing he should first try listening.
The Current Newspapers
By Greg Boyd
June 12, 2013
David Catania’s attempt to take a whack at the educational piñata that is both Washington, D.C., specifically, and America in general, is well intentioned but will ultimately prove to be yet another act of futility.
Improving schools nationally and locally would be remarkably simple if we could focus on three specific areas. I taught secondary school for a decade in D.C., Hawaii and Maryland, and it became apparent that, all things being equal, there is a strong correlation between achievement and attendance. Secondly, we must return to tracking. Placing students in Advanced Placement courses for which they are unprepared is a waste of time and money. Let’s not play games for the sake of feel-good rankings that have little association with future success. I strongly believe that you can teach most anyone, if they’re motivated, how to do most anything, but differences in interest and preparation exist. Curriculums have become diluted in an attempt to create a one-size-fits-all approach to learning that actually pushes stronger students into private and charter schools.
Finally, we have to change our culture. For years we’ve been told that income is one of the strongest predictors of educational success, and while that tends to be true one has to step back and take a more nuanced view of what income generally means in regard to education. Without regard to color or income, those who embrace books and newspapers and who seek the nuanced and the novel will succeed. If engaged parents send prepared and interested students into the schools, the teachers will be free to focus on educating our young people. Today’s political landscape surrounding education more closely resembles a low budget Western in which the “good guys” and the “bad guys” have become so disoriented that they’ve begun shooting at anything that moves.
Mr. Catania’s “legislative package” is another barrage of dummy rounds that, like former Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s reforms, will attract some attention, but will ultimately prove to be “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The Washington Post
June 14, 2013
An op-ed by Leslie T. Fenwick, dean of the Howard University School of Education, arguing that urban school reform has more to do with land development than fixing schools, sparked a robust, sometimes-heated discussion.
Several weeks ago, The Washington Post’s education blog, The Answer Sheet, published a controversial op-ed by Leslie T. Fenwick, dean and professor of educational policy and leadership at the Howard University School of Education. In the piece, she argues that urban school reform is not about fixing schools but, rather, about urban land development. The op-ed was shared by thousands of Facebook and Twitter users and sparked a robust, sometimes heated discussion. The RootDC is republishing excerpts of the op-ed and including some of the discussion that it started as a means of continuing the conversation.
The truth can be used to tell a lie. The truth is that black parents’ frustration with the quality of public schools is at an all-time righteous high. Though black and white parents’ commitment to their child’s schooling is comparable, more black parents report dissatisfaction with the school their child attends. Approximately 90 percent of black and white parents report attending parent-teacher association meetings, and nearly 80 percent of black and white parents report attending teacher conferences.
Despite these similarities, fewer black parents (47 percent) than white parents (64 percent) report being very satisfied with the school their child attends. This dissatisfaction among black parents is so, whether these parents are college-educated, high income or poor.
The lie is that programs like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents’ concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. These programs are not designed to cure what ails under-performing schools. They are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving black and poor students; displace authentic black educational leadership; and erode national commitment to the ideal of public education.
Consider these facts: With a median household income of nearly $75,000, Prince George’s County is the wealthiest majority-black county in the United States. Nearly 55 percent of the county’s businesses are black-owned, and almost 70 percent of residents own homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. One of Prince George’s County’s easternmost borders is a mere six minutes from Washington, which houses the largest population of college-educated blacks in the nation. In the United States, a general rule of thumb is that communities with higher family incomes and parental levels of education have better public schools. So, why is it that black parents living in the upscale Woodmore or Fairwood estates of Prince George’s County or the tony Garden District homes up 16th Street in Washington struggle to find quality public schools for their children just like black parents in Syphax Gardens, the Southwest Washington public housing community?
The answer is this: Whether they are solidly middleor upper-income or poor, neither group of blacks controls the critical economic levers shaping school reform. And this is because urban school reform is not about schools or reform. It is about land development.
In most urban centers such as Washington and Prince George’s, black political leadership does not have independent access to the capital that drives land development. These resources are still controlled by economic elites. Additionally, black elected local officials by necessity must interact with state and national officials. The overwhelming majority of these officials are those who often enact policies and create funding streams benefiting their interests and not the local black community’s interests.
Local control of public schools (through elected school boards) is supposed to empower parents and community residents. This rarely happens in school districts serving black and poor students. Mayoral control, Teach for America, education management organizations and venture-capital-funded charter schools have not garnered much grass-roots support or enthusiasm among lower- and middle-income black parents whose children attend urban schools because these parents often view these schemes as uninformed by their community and disconnected from the best interest of their children.
In the most recent cases of Washington and Chicago, black parents and other community members point to school closings as verification of their distrust of school “reform” efforts. Indeed, mayoral control has been linked to an emerging pattern of closing and disinvesting in schools that serve black poor students and reopening them as charters operated by education management organizations and backed by venture capitalists. While mayoral control proposes to expand educational opportunities for black and poor students, more often than not, new schools are placed in upper-income, gentrifying white areas of town, while more schools are closed and fewer new schools are opened in lower-income, black areas, thus increasing the level of educational inequity. Black inner-city residents are suspicious of school reform (particularly when it is attached to neighborhood revitalization), which they view as an imposition from external white elites who are exclusively committed to using schools to recalculate urban land values at the expense of black children, parents and communities.
So, what is the answer to improving schools for black children? Elected officials must advocate for equalizing state funding formulas so that urban school districts garner more financial resources to hire credentialed and committed teachers and stabilize principal and superintendent leadership. Funding makes a difference. Black students who attend schools where 50 percent or more of the children are on free/reduced lunch are 70 percent more likely to have an uncertified teacher (or one without a college major or minor in the subject area) teaching them four subjects: math, science, social studies and English. How can the nation continue to raise the bar on what we expect students to know and demonstrate on standardized tests, and lower the bar on who teaches them?
As the nation’s inner cities are dotted with coffee shop chains and boutique furniture stores, and the skyline changes from public housing to high-rise condominium buildings, listen to the refrain about school reform sung by some intimidated elected officials and submissive superintendents. That refrain is really about exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner-city land and using schools to recalculate urban land value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it’s about the business elite gaining access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation’s public schools. It’s about money.
The original March 28th article and comments can be found at the link above.
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