FOCUS DC News Wire 10/8/13

 

 

Last evening public educations leaders gathered at the Wilson Building to listen to the preliminary findings of an Education Adequacy Study completed by the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Education Abigail Smith. The analysis, 13 months in the making, was created by The Finance Project and Augenblick, Palaich, and Associates. For those of us gathered in the cramped quarters there was a real reason for optimism.

 

After the two presenters completed an exhaustive overview of the report, which took almost all of the allotted one and a half hours of meeting time to explain, they revealed that they are recommending adding legal, technology, nurses, mental health support, and procurement assistance, which DCPS currently receives at no charge, into the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. There would be a separate allocation for maintenance and operating costs related to building upkeep, custodial services, and utilities that the authors say provides equal funding for the two education systems. In other words all revenue for DCPS and charters would go through the UPSFF except for crossing guards and Student Resource Officers.

 

To say this is a victory for Robert Cane, FOCUS, and many others involved in the local charter school movement may be the biggest understatement of the last 15 years.

 

There are a few worrisome aspects of the document. First, the suggestion is to leave the charter school facility allotment at $3,000 a pupil for now until a better system is created for reporting capital expenditures by this sector. Charters are suffering under this limitation in both the renting of space and the acquisition of permanent buildings. The facility problem is so fundamental and intractable as it relates to the success of these schools that I hope we can change the Deputy Mayor's view on this issue.

 

In addition, DCPS would continue to receive money for excess space that it currently holds in its inventory but is not now using. This $43 million a year is felt by FOCUS to be problematic since it comes outside of the UPSFF. Also, there was no mention of retirement plan funding for DCPS teachers, also outside of the UPSFF, which in fiscal year 2014 totals $30 million.

 

Finally, assurances were lacking that the recommendations of the Adequacy Study will make it into the Mayor's 2015 fiscal year budget. It is possible that some of the suggestions will be accepted and others ignored or rejected. Perhaps most importantly is the fact that the revised UPSFF represents an increase in spending of $135.7 million, $56.5 million for DCPS and $79.2 million for charters, not including the $43 million in additional building costs for the traditional schools, so the concern is where the Mr. Gray would obtain the necessary additional financial resources.

 

But this morning we need to give the Mayor credit. He ran on the promise of funding equity between charters and the traditional schools and here at last we have a solid proposal which makes highly significant progress in this regard. Now, let's see if it is actually implemented.

 

 

A coalition of education activists from across the District has released a critique of legislation now before the DC Council. This guest post by two of those activists highlights the group's goals and examines whether the proposed legislation supports them.

 

Debate about education in the District is almost as old as the District itself. Now, spurred in part by a package of bills proposed by DC Council Education Committee Chair David Catania, we are entering a critical new chapter in that ongoing conversation.

 

The discussion comes in the context of dramatic changes flowing from the advent of mayoral control in 2007, which is just now beginning to be evaluated, and the growth of charter schools.

 

The size of the charter sector in DC has increased from 160 students when launched by Congress in 1995 to well over 40% of the students now served by public education. Virtually all of these students come from east of Rock Creek Park.

 

 

Some parts of the District face wrenching closures and consolidations of neighborhood schools. Others confront the challenges of overcrowding and the prospect of difficult decisions about changing boundary and feeder patterns. Many worry about an overemphasis on standardized testing and the erosion of programming in schools, particularly those serving low-income communities.

 

In June, after working with the law firm of Hogan Lovells, Councilmember Catania leapt into this fray rolling out a package of seven bills on education, touching on:

 

 

Until recently, no one had conducted a rigorous outside analysis of the bills to assess their implications and how they might be improved. To fill that void, a group of education community leaders teamed up to develop such an analysis, as well as a summary of principles and recommendations. We are proud that that analysis was signed by a diverse group of leaders from across the District.

 

The signers support many aspects of Chairman Catania's bills and hope we can work with him to ensure the enactment of legislation that can make a positive difference. That said, and as outlined in our analysis, we think important changes should be made to accomplish what we hope are our shared goals.

 

For example:

 

We believe it is imperative that we provide successful matter-of-right neighborhood schools from preschool through high school in every community. Chairman Catania's accountability bill works against that goal by encouraging the transfer of neighborhood schools to citywide charter and innovation schools. Similarly, his facilities bill aggressively transfers public school buildings out of public control.

 

We recognize that to provide all of our children a great education will require devoting more resources to communities where the students come to school with the greatest needs. We applaud Chairman Catania for taking the lead in pressing this point, but are concerned about the efficacy of some of the mechanics of the current draft of his proposal.

 

We are convinced that to achieve and maintain great schools, we must embrace a culture of planning and fully engage our communities. Catania's facilities bill is styled as a comprehensive planning bill but does not meet that description. It has no provisions for public engagement.

 

As the recent controversy over DC's test results has underscored, schools should be measured by multiple metrics including the achievement growth of their students, not predominantly by percentages of students achieving proficiency. (Chairman Catania has recently indicated he too questions the heavy weight that has been placed on tests). The accountability bill, however, potentially places great emphasis on percentages of students achieving proficiency as measured by one test.

 

Issues like these can and should be addressed as we go from drafts of bills to the enactment of laws.

 

But first, we, the larger DC community, must decide where we want to go with our education infrastructure and then make a plan for how to get there. The alternative is that we continue to drift where the river takes us, which in this case is further toward a system in which access to a strong education requires either living in the right zip code or winning a lottery.

 

We can do better.

 

DC's Office of Planning has issued a prediction, ironically cited in a DCPS report on neighborhood school closures, that our school-age population will grow by close to 50% by 2022. Our current baby boom is both a challenge and an opportunity, further underscoring the need for us to do better.

 

The debate this fall—on Catania's bills and other major initiatives in the education space—will be critical. As we enter that debate, a central question is whether we are committed to having great matter-of-right schools in every neighborhood.

 

Without such a commitment, the internal logic of the laws on the books and some of the ones so far proposed by Councilmember Catania, will result in further erosion of the matter-of-right system, and even its potential demise. If that is the path we choose, we should do so consciously and with our eyes wide open. 

 

 

At the beginning of the school year, I start off my class with a quote. In my best orator voice, I exclaim, “We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated but the winner of the science fair. We need to teach them that success is not a function of fame or PR but of hard work and discipline.” President Obama said that in his 2011 State of the Union address.

 

I use this quote not only to inspire my students but also to remind myself of how necessary it is to promote science in our country.

 

Luckily, science is a subject in which children quickly invest. A simple fizzing reaction, loud pop or (controlled) explosion can convert nearly any bored, slouching student into a wide-eyed wonderer. I have seen an open-ended discussion of natural phenomena turn a classroom wallflower into a curious questioner.

 

Recently, however, this quote from just two years ago began feeling as if it had been dredged up from the history books. Instead of creating Super Bowl scientists, the Common Core State Standards Initiative seems to be asking me to put away my beakers, hang up my lab coat and crack open more nonfiction texts.

 

Conversations with peers who also teach science reveal that our courses are rapidly being converted into classes in which informational texts are read to support a nationwide shift in standards. Science educators are constantly asked: What can you do to support our students in highly tested subjects?

 

Personal experience reinforces this trend: My class periods have been chopped this year while reading, and math classes have been elongated significantly.

 

For anecdotal evidence, Google the words “science” and “Common Core.” Many of the search results are resources on how to teach nonfiction reading.

 

To allow for content, I wonder: Should I cut out that blood-typing lab or get rid of the week of hands-on gardening? Maybe this year my students don’t need to experience the bed of nails at the Maryland Science Center to teach them about forces. I could save a lot of time if I cut out their camping trip. Surely an informational text could show my students the same things they would take in while crabbing on a boat in the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Of course I won’t eliminate these incredible experiences from my plans this year.

 

Please don’t get me wrong. I am a proponent of Common Core standards, which have many benefits for students. I am also aware of excellent resources such as Project 2061 and Next Generation Science Standards, both of which promote hands-on learning. Today, however, many schools are systematically deprioritizing science, and it makes me uneasy about our nation’s future.

 

I recently had the opportunity to attend with my students the Congressional Black Caucus’s (CBC) Science and Technology Brain Trust. This fantastic event, hosted by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), placed in front of my students 20 incredible scientists from Facebook, NASA, Google X and elsewhere.

 

We heard from some of our nation’s most prolific and successful scientists. National Education Association Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle noted in her speech that no amount of money could replace seeing students’ eyes light up when they learn something new.

 

That day, seeing my students’ faces as they heard about new inventions and career paths nearly made me tear up. I realized that the only way to reach the president’s goal was to pursue a slightly uncommon approach to the Common Core. I must methodically insert both informational texts and inquiry-based hands-on laboratory investigations to fulfill systematized requirements and children’s insatiable thirst for hands-on learning.

 

I hope that science teachers everywhere will continue to advocate for their students’ scientific futures. Create the next Bill Nye in your classroom; inspire the next Neil deGrasse Tyson to shoot for the stars; or just let one kid put Mentos in Coke and teach that child why the soft drink bursts into bubbles.

 

My goal is that, sooner rather than later, I get to head back to the CBC science and technology event and watch one of my former students stroll onstage and explain his latest discovery or invention. Or maybe when I am old and gray, I will be quoting one of my scholars from her State of the Union address, as she thoughtfully reminisces about how long ago, in our nation’s past, science education was not a priority.

 

 

WHEN Cynthia Stevenson, the superintendent of Jefferson County, Colo., public schools, heard about a data repository called inBloom, she thought it sounded like a technological fix for one of her bigger headaches. Over the years, the Jeffco school system, as it is known, which lies west of Denver, had invested in a couple of dozen student data systems, many of which were incompatible.

 

In fact, there were so many information systems — for things like contact information, grades and disciplinary data, test scores and curriculum planning for the district’s 86,000 students — that teachers had taken to scribbling the various passwords on sticky notes and posting them, insecurely, around classrooms and teachers’ rooms.

 

There must be a more effective way, Dr. Stevenson felt.

 

InBloom, a nonprofit corporation based in Atlanta, seemed to offer a solution: it could collect information from the district’s many databases and store it in the cloud, making access easier, and protect it with high-level encryption.

 

The company has name-brand backing: $100 million in seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Beyond storing data, it promised to help personalize learning — by funneling student data to software dashboards where teachers could track individual students and, with the right software, customize lessons in real time. Also, districts could effortlessly share student records with developers seeking to create educational tools for schools. In other words, for Dr. Stevenson, it represented not just a fix to a narrow technical problem, but also a potentially revolutionary way to help educate students.

 

“We are joining the new generation of data management,” Dr. Stevenson said enthusiastically in the March issue of “Chalk Talk,” the school district’s newsletter for parents.

 

She did not imagine that five months later, she would be sitting in a special school board meeting in the district’s headquarters, listening as a series of parents, school board members and privacy lawyers assailed the plan to outsource student data storage to inBloom. What troubled the naysayers at that August session was that the district seemed to be rushing to increase data-sharing before weighing the risks of granting companies access to intimate details about children. They noted that administrators had no policies in place to govern who could see the information, how long it would be kept or whether it would be shared with the colleges to which students applied.

 

“Students are currently subject to more forms of tracking and monitoring than ever before,” Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington who appeared via video conferencing, told the room packed with parents. “While we understand the value of data for promoting and evaluating personalized learning, there are too few safeguards for the amount of data collected and transmitted from schools to private companies.”

 

Jefferson County is not the only place where parents have challenged the adoption of inBloom. Parents in Louisiana raised a ruckus after discovering that their children’s Social Security numbers had been uploaded to inBloom. In April, Louisiana officials said they would remove all student data from the database. Of the nine states that originally signed up this year to participate, just three — Colorado, New York and Illinois — are actively pursuing the service.

 

Still, that accounts for a lot of children. New York State has already uploaded data on 90 percent of 2.7 million public school and charter students — data stripped of identifiers like students’ names — into inBloom; state education officials plan to upload a complete set soon, including names.

 

But New York parents have no say in the matter, said Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit group that has been the leading challenger of inBloom.

 

“We are officially the worst state in the country when it comes to student privacy,” she said, speaking of New York. Educators are naturally excited about the potential for new tools to improve learning. But the Jeffco controversy is a reminder that it can be easy to leap at new and unproven technologies before considering potential risks.

 

EDUCATION technology software for prekindergarten to 12th grade is an $8 billion market, according to estimates from the Software and Information Industry Association. One major reason is the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a program to standardize English and math curriculums nationally. To prepare for assessment tests for those standards, many districts across the country are investing in software to analyze individual student performance in more detail.

 

Services like inBloom want to speed the introduction and lower the cost of these assessment tools by standardizing data storage and security. The idea is that inBloom’s open-source code could spur developers to create apps for all its clients, reducing the need for them to customize software to each school district. In theory, that would make the products cheaper for schools.

 

 

 

Policymakers and politicians who wring their hands about the mediocre performance of U.S. students on international math and reading tests have another worry: The nation’s grown-ups aren’t doing much better.

 

A first-ever comparison of adults in the United States and those in other democracies found that Americans were below average when it comes to skills needed to compete in the global economy.

 

The survey, released Tuesday, measured the literacy, math and computer skills of about 5,000 U.S. adults between ages 16 and 65, and compared them with similar samples of adults from 21 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEDC).

 

The Americans are “decidedly weaker in numeracy and problem-solving skills than in literacy, and average U.S. scores for all three are below the international average and far behind the scores of top performers like Japan or Finland,” said Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the data collection arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

 

When it comes to literacy, adults in the U.S. trailed those in 12 countries and only outperformed adults in five others. The top five countries in literacy were Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia and Sweden.

 

U.S. adults did worse in mathematics, where they trailed 18 countries and beat just two — Italy and Spain.

 

And in the category of “problem-solving in technology-rich environments,” or digital skills, U.S. adults lagged behind their counterparts in 14 countries.

 

Among the most educated test-takers — those with graduate or professional degrees — U.S. citizens scored higher than average in literacy, but lower than average in math and digital skills.

 

The achievement gap between white test takers and black and Hispanic test takers, a stubborn problem in U.S. K-12 public education, showed up in the adult survey. There were significant differences in test scores between whites and minorities.

 

“These findings should concern us all,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a written statement. “They show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete — or position our country to lead — in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.”

 

Duncan said the study highlights a group that has been “overlooked and underserved: the large number of adults with very low basic skills, most of whom are working.”

 

“Adults who have trouble reading, doing math, solving problems and using technology will find the doors of the 21st century workforce closed to them,” Duncan said. “We need to find ways to challenge and reach more adults to upgrade their skills.”