- D.C. charter board approves new preschool evaluation tool [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
- This Friday it's charter school night at Nationals Park [Building Hope, Washington Latin PCS, FOCUS mentioned]
- DC school lunchrooms put local, healthy products on kids' plates
D.C. charter board approves new preschool evaluation tool [Mundo Verde PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 17, 2013
The D.C. Public Charter School Board has approved a revised evaluation tool for preschools that is one of the first efforts in the country to tie the success of early learning programs to the academic performance of their students.
The original proposal prompted an outcry from parents who were concerned that the emphasis on academic testing could lead to a narrowing of what children learn in preschool.
The plan, approved Monday night, reflects these concerns by including an optional category that evaluates each school on its specific mission and gives social and emotional development a more equal footing with other criteria for schools that choose to measure it.
Sara Mead, a charter school board member, said the board is deeply committed to ensuring that the District's public charter schools are preparing students for success.
“This is going to give us a way . . . to understand whether schools are accomplishing that,” Mead said. “That’s an important step to fulfilling our commitment to parents and taxpayers in the District.”
Board members said school readiness remains an urgent issue in the District given that more than half of the city’s third-graders lack proficiency in reading and math.
The original proposal drew a large community response, including calls for a more-balanced approach to measuring schools that would factor in the broader developmental needs of young children. An online petition attracted more than 280 signatures, and more than 50 parents submitted written comments to the board.
A task force composed of representatives from most of the city’s 37 charter operators serving early learners began meeting three years ago to develop a framework for such evaluations. The group met last week to approve changes to the proposal based on community feedback.
The task force changed the formula for evaluating pre-kindergarten programs so that progress in math and literacy will count for 28 to 40 percent of the school’s total score, rather than the proposed 45 to 60 percent.
A separate, optional measure of social and emotional growth will be worth 12 percent. The rating of teacher-child interaction will be 40 percent of the total and emphasizes three different categories: emotional support, classroom organization and instructional support.
The formula also will include information about student attendance and one more optional mission-specific performance goal, reflecting individual school themes, such as performing arts or sustainability.
For kindergarten through second-grade programs, math or reading achievement or progress would make up 50 to 70 percent of the total score instead of the proposed 70 to 80 percent.
The majority of schools on the task force voted not to make social-emotional learning a required measure, in part because of questions about whether the assessments are reliable or predictive of future success. They plan to revisit the question in a few years, said Erin Kupferberg, a quality and accountability specialist for the charter school board.
Sam Chaltain, a charter school parent and public school advocate, said that he appreciated the board’s responsiveness to parental concerns but that he wanted the changes to go further.
“If almost everyone agrees these social and emotional skills are valuable in and of themselves, it does not seem it’s the kind of thing that should be made optional,” Chaltain said.
Several charter leaders also had requested changes to the proposal. They questioned the validity of using the results of a wide range of early childhood tests to compare schools’ performance and asked the board not to rank schools with the results.
Unlike state-level standardized tests used for older students, tests given to young learners are often observational, administered by the teachers while children are playing and learning in the course of their day. And schools can choose from among more than three dozen tests that are already being used.
For early childhood programs, the framework will look at “how good are you at the assessment you chose to do,” said Naomi Rubin DeVeaux, deputy director of the charter school board.
Some school leaders said that ranking schools could motivate them to choose the easiest assessments rather than tests that offer the most meaningful feedback.
The task force will analyze the different test results for comparability. And starting in kindergarten, they will look to see how well the results of the different assessments line up with performance on standardized tests in third grade, Kupferberg said.
Kristin Scotchmer, executive director of Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, said she was glad to see the board delay ranking schools for a year.
“They recognize we need a year to consider what the implications of tiering schools might be,” she said. “It gives us time for that conversation.”
This Friday it's charter school night at Nationals Park [Building Hope, Washington Latin PCS, FOCUS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
September 18, 2013
It's getting closer. Complete with pregame ceremonies featuring a Spirit Award, color guard, national anthem, and first pitch with charter school students and Building Hope President Joe Bruno, the organization is providing 10,000 three dollar tickets to charter school students and staff to see the Washington Nationals take on the Miami Marlins in their hunt for a wildcard spot in the playoffs.
Several unnamed sources have revealed that the chorus of Washington Latin Public Charter School will be performing as part of the pregame activities.
The event is a birthday celebration for Building Hope which has for the last decade often provided the only chance for charters in the nation's capital to obtain permanent classrooms for their students.
Many prominent organizations are providing generous support for the celebration, including Building Hope, MCN, Revolution Food, Arent Fox, BB&T, Brailsford & Dunleavy, Center for Education Reform, City Bridge Foundation, Dynamic Network Solutions, Eagle Bank, ED Ops, Focus, Forrester, Goldstar, Goulston Storrs, Howard Insurance, McGladry, Perkins/Eastman, Phil Battles, PMM, RAFFA, Ruppert Landscaping, Studio 27, Ten-Square, and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools.
The first base gates open at 5:30 p.m., opening ceremonies start at 6:30 p.m., and the game is at 7:05 p.m. Tickets can be obtained by contacting Mr. Mark Medema at 312 622-1203 or emailing him at mmedema@bhope.org.
DC school lunchrooms put local, healthy products on kids' plates
Elevation DC
By Whitney Pipkin
September 17, 2013
Though gorgeous weather during the first week of school can be a sore spot for students in the District, it happens to be a boon for the outdoor aspects of their education. These days, that category includes not only recess but, for many, a school garden.
Nearly half of all schools in the District have school garden programs, up 15 percent from the previous school year, says Karissa McCarthy, farm-to school-coordinator for the nonprofit DC Greens.
And inside the schools, more students are getting access to local and healthful foods through a combination of successful farm-to-school programs and new federal requirements about what’s on their plates.
For a city that’s lagged parts of the country in the farm-to-table movement (which it’s now embraced with gusto), the District has been a leader in farm-to-school policies. D.C. passed an act in 2010 that gives schools an extra 5 cents per meal if local ingredients are used.
“That’s pretty rare. The only other city that does that is Portland, Oregon,” says McCarthy.
New programs are working to strengthen the link between what happens in the gardens and what’s served in the lunchrooms, whether that means reimagining local food distribution or simply showing kids how to make a kale salad.
But, as any nonprofit or volunteer that works in this space will tell you, there’s always more work to be done — and only sometimes the funding to do it.
Kristy McCarron was part of a “dream” program at DCPS's Walker Jones Education Campus (grades pre-K through 12) last year, where she worked as a culinary instructor for the school’s Food Lab. There, she turned a sizable school garden into edible education for the classrooms, weaving garden-based meals and snacks into math and social studies and teaching the kids where food comes from.
But the position lost some key funding that had come from a hodgepodge of grants, and McCarron said it was no longer financially sustainable for her.
“It really comes down to funding,” says McCarron, who now works in a similar position with the YMCA in the District. “If [DCPS] had caught on to what we were doing and piloted programs through the school district, it could have been wildly successful.”
DCPS did hire its first full-time garden coordinator at Benjamin Stoddert Elementary School this year and has 39 part-time coordinators who often work alongside volunteers.
A program similar to the Food Lab, called FoodPrints, has taken root at Watkins Elementary School (grades 1-5), run by FRESHFARM Markets and funded by donations and foundations. FRESHFARM raised $60,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in 2011 to renovate the program’s classroom into a Food Lab that facilitates cooking.
Cooking demonstrations have become key to tying school gardens to school food, since most gardens do not meet federal standards — not to mention quantities — for their produce to be used in school lunches. But McCarthy says more schools are rethinking how they can put their produce to use outside of school lunches.
DC Greens is launching a school garden market at six area schools this month where parents and community members can buy produce that students "helped" grow.
“Our hope is that this not only showcases what’s going on in school gardens but also provides needed fruits and vegetables in communities that have a lack of access,” McCarthy says.
The seasonal problem
Some of the money that’s been made available to address farm to school’s most vexing problems has gone to D.C.-based innovators and institutions. Nearly $100,000 from the USDA’s first batch of farm-to-school grants last year went to D.C. Central Kitchen, a multi-pronged nonprofit that, besides feeding and employing the homeless and poor, now serves 5,500 meals a day at eight public schools in the District, using food from local farms.
The grant helped the organization build a second facility with a kitchen, expansive walk-in freezers and a produce-washing system that makes it that much easier to turn donations from local farms into meals. The freezers help them extend the bounty that's available in the summer into more of the school year.
By the beginning of last year, DCCK had increased its local farm spending by 40 percent, investing $43,500 with local farmers, says Alex Moore, director of development.
"Our hope is this not only showcases what’s going on in school gardens but also provides needed fruits and vegetables in communities."A big part of that increase, he says, comes from increasing the amount of produce kids are willing to eat. DCCK looked at what students were throwing away and conducted taste tests to see how they could improve the appeal of local produce.
“We doubled sweet potato consumption by adding cinnamon,” Moore says. “These are the sort of marginal improvements that we’re focused on.”
While farm to school programs like these have made great strides in recent years, Moore said many of the original obstacles remain.
Getting food from D.C.’s farm belt instead of from across the country — in quantities that can feed thousands of kids a day — continues to be the next frontier for innovation in this scene.
The Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture is in the process of creating a Food Hub, one that could help fill the gaps in local food distribution. It would work with farms within 150 miles of D.C. to aggregate and distribute their produce to restaurants, markets and institutional buyers like schools, says Matt Mulder, Arcadia’s director of development and communication.
The nonprofit already works in tandem with D.C. schools to host field trips at its farm in Alexandria. Arcadia also runs a Mobile Market bus that brings produce into District neighborhoods that might not otherwise have access.
“The work we’ve done with farm to school shows us that, when it comes to actually putting food on the plate… you really need to change distribution if you want to make an impact,” says Mulder.