FOCUS DC News Wire 10/17/13

 

 

Rewards and punishments embedded in the District’s controversial teacher evaluation program have shaped the school system’s workforce, affecting both retention and performance, according to a study scheduled for release Thursday.

 

Hundreds of teachers have been fired for poor performance since the evaluations were implemented four years ago. But low-scoring teachers who could have kept their jobs also have been more likely to leave than teachers who scored higher, according to the study, published as a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

 

The study found that imminent consequences inspired two groups of teachers to improve significantly more than others: low-scoring teachers who faced the prospect of being fired and high-scoring teachers within striking distance of a substantial merit raise.

 

Written by James Wyckoff of the University of Virginia and Thomas Dee of Stanford University, the study suggests that incentives such as those pioneered in the District “can substantially improve the measured performance of the teaching workforce.”

 

The study is among the first attempts to understand the effects of the District’s teacher evaluation system, known as ­IMPACT. Then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee introduced the system in 2009, and it was among the first in the nation to link teachers’ job security and compensation to student test scores.

 

Chancellor Kaya Henderson hailed the new research as evidence that IMPACT — which has stirred criticism and spurred similar initiatives in other jurisdictions — is having its intended effect. “We’re actually radically improving the caliber of our teaching force,” Henderson said.

 

But while average teacher evaluation scores rose during the first three years of IMPACT, the study is silent about whether the incentives have translated into improved student achievement.

 

“This is a very important first step in looking at how teacher evaluation programs rolling out all across the country are going to impact teachers and students on the ground,” said Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University who was not involved in the study. “But a lot more remains to be done.”

 

IMPACT combines observations of teachers in the classroom with their students’ test results. It scores teachers on a scale of 100 to 400, and until 2012, it sorted them into four categories: ineffective, minimally effective, effective and highly effective. (In 2012, the school system added a fifth category, developing.)

 

“Ineffective” teachers are immediately fired, as are teachers rated “minimally effective” twice in a row. Teachers rated “highly effective” get a bonus; the second time they earn that rating, they get a base-salary increase worth up to $27,000 per year.

 

Wyckoff and Dee tried to understand the effect of those incentives by examining the relationship between teachers’ ­IMPACT scores at the end of one year and their retention and performance the following year.

 

Effects were minimal after the first year of IMPACT, but they were statistically significant after the second year, perhaps, the authors reasoned, because teachers did not immediately believe that the incentives were real and permanent.

 

Teachers rated “minimally effective” for the first time, the researchers found, were more than twice as likely to leave their jobs voluntarily than teachers with higher ratings.

 

The researchers zeroed in on teachers who scored near 250, the threshold separating “minimally effective” and “effective.”

 

Teachers who scored just beneath that threshold — and faced a pay freeze and the threat of dismissal — made larger average gains the next year than teachers who scored just above that mark.

 

That suggests that the prospect of losing their jobs was a key factor that encouraged those teachers to improve, Wyckoff said. Teachers showed similar outsized gains when they scored on the threshold between effective and highly effective — presumably because they faced the potential of a substantial raise.

 

Wyckoff cautioned that the results do not speak to the effect of IMPACT on the performance of teachers who do not score near the thresholds.

 

Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond cautioned against assuming that IMPACT scores accurately reflect a teacher’s effectiveness, pointing to studies that have shown that test-score growth can be an unreliable measure, especially when a teacher has a lot of students who are working far below or above grade level.

 

Middle school teacher Angel Cintron, who was rated “highly effective” last school year, said IMPACT can motivate teachers to get better. But the emphasis on test scores can be demoralizing in a high-poverty school where many students are far behind, he said, adding that he has worked with excellent teachers who quit after low test scores pushed their rating down to “minimally effective.”

 

“The teachers I’ve seen leave, I know they’re high quality,” Cintron said.

 

 

I'm sure many people attending last night's monthly meeting of the D.C. Public Charter School Board came to hear the discussion regarding the closing of Options Public Charter School. However, just that day the court appointed receiver for the school, Josh Kern, had received a letter from Judge Iscoe instructing him that he was not allowed to publically discuss details of the legal action surrounding the past executives of the school and its board chair. So Mr. Kern arrived lawyered up at the session and the PCSB members appeared annoyed but understanding that their questions could not be answered. The body had already decided that no action would be taken at this time because Mr. Kern had requested that he be given an opportunity to determine what was happening at the school.

 

Mr. Kern did reveal, however, that his sealed report regarding the school's operation would be delivered to the court on Monday, October 21st. He stated that it was then up to the judge in the case as to whether it would be made public.

 

For anyone keeping score, the Friendship Public Charter School renewal charter agreement was signed after many months of postponement. Friendship CEO and Chairman Donald Hense pointed out that the negotiation had taken a full year which is something most charter schools simply do not have the capacity to do. He asked for a streamlined process. In other news, Eagle Academy was denied an emergency enrollment increase after it had accepted over 50 students for this term above their allowable level.

 

The surprising activity yesterday revolved around the applications for new schools by experienced operators. The representatives of Harmony School of Excellence and Democracy Preparatory gave two of the most prepared and comprehensive presentations I believe I have seen in my years of observing this process. Another applicant, the Frederick Drew Gregory Academy, the school for students with behavioral problems, had apparently withdrawn its submission and will go through the regular charter school approval process in the spring.

 

Democracy Preparatory had brought about 30 of its students from New York to attend the meeting as part of a planned trip to Washington, D.C. 18 of them spoke at the hearing and I must say they were a uniformly articulate and extremely well behaved group of young people. This proposed Pre-Kindergarten three through fourth grade charter serving special education and English as a Second Language school should win approval without difficulty.

 

Harmony School of Excellence did not fare as well. All went perfectly through the initial presentation and the board questioning. Eleven people signed up to testify regarding the application and the first nine offered glowing support. But with the last two individuals came strange revelations. It turns out that Harmony was associated a few years ago in a long New York Times article with the Cosmos Foundation, a group of Turkish businessman and educators. According to the piece "Some of the schools’ operators and founders, and many of their suppliers, are followers of Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish preacher of a moderate brand of Islam whose devotees have built a worldwide religious, social and nationalistic movement in his name."

 

The most controversial part of this scenario is that the schools run by the Cosmos Foundation often do business with groups of people of Turkish descent. Some of these contracts have been called into question as to whether they are really the best deal for the schools and whether they are being awarded to support the Foundation.

 

Last February, Loudoun County denied a charter school application from people opponents said were associated with Mr. Gulen. However, the Washington Post's Michael Alison Chandler reported at the time that the charter was denied opening based upon the weakness of its application.

 

It appears to me that the PCSB will need more than 30 days to sort this whole thing out. Based upon the controversy regarding Options PCS the last thing our local movement needs is to approve a charter that has questionable contracting patterns regarding public money. This would be Harmony's first charter outside of the 25,000 students it teachers on 40 campuses in Texas. A few of the board members asked why Washington, D.C. would become their first location outside of the state. Perhaps the time for this charter in our neighborhood is not now.

 

 

A group of activists is suing the District to prevent the closure of under-enrolled DCPS schools. When a judge allowed their lawsuit to go forward last week, it looked as though they'd snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. But maybe they've just snatched a longer, more drawn-out defeat.

 

In March, after DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced plans to close 15 schools east of Rock Creek Park, activists with Empower DC filed suit to block the closures. In May, a federal judge refused to issue an injunction that would have required DC to keep the schools open, saying that the plaintiffs had "no likelihood of ultimate success." But last week he issued another ruling allowing the suit to go forward, saying plaintiffs were entitled to a chance to gather evidence to support their claims. What changed?

 

 

The plaintiffs in the suit—parents or guardians of children attending one of the closed schools—have alleged that the closures discriminate against poor, minority, and learning-disabled children. It's true that the schools being closed have higher proportions of children in those categories than DCPS has district-wide. In DCPS schools as a whole, for example, about 9% of students are white. In the schools that were closed, only 2 out of 3,053 students were white.

 

But in this context, just showing that a government action has a discriminatory effect isn't enough to prove that federal law has been violated. That requires proof of intent. In other words, the plaintiffs need to show that District officials closed these schools because of, not just in spite of, the race of their students.

 

Proving intent

 

Intent is notoriously difficult to prove. And it's doubtful that even the activists themselves think that Henderson or Mayor Vincent Gray (both of whom are being sued personally) sat around in their offices planning to harm poor black children—and then recorded it in a memo. Instead they're pinning their hopes on a very tiny loophole: sometimes, the Supreme Court has said, you can look at a discriminatory effect and infer a discriminatory intent if there's no other possible explanation for the government's action.

 

That's still a high bar, and in May U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg was skeptical that the plaintiffs could meet it. But in the most recent round of litigation, the plaintiffs added another argument. In the 1970s, they say, majority-white schools on the west side of Rock Creek Park were under-enrolled. And instead of closing them, DCPS bused students in from east of the Park. The plaintiffs argue that this shows DCPS has adopted different policies on school closure depending on the race of the students affected.

 

Boasberg clearly found this argument less than compelling. He pointed out that in the 1970s it wasn't unusual to bus students long distances, whereas today it's far less common. He wasn't sure that it made sense to call decisions separated by 40 years a "policy." And he noted that there may still be reasons for the closures that have nothing to do with race.

 

So why did he allow the lawsuit to go forward? Basically because, at this early a stage in litigation, the court is required to give the plaintiffs the benefit of the doubt. Even if their claims seem to rest on, as Boasberg put it, "a slender reed," they're entitled to try to find evidence to support them.

 

DC Human Rights Act

 

In addition to the claim that the school closings violate federal law, the plaintiffs also say they run afoul of the DC Human Rights Act. Here they may stand on slightly stronger ground, since that local legislation only requires them to show a discriminatory effect—specifically, that the government has limited or refused to provide some benefit "on the basis of" an individual's race, disability, or place of residence. A separate clause extends the definition of "discriminatory practice" to any action that "has the effect" of violating the law's provisions.

 

But matters don't end there. As with the federal claims, the District can counter that it had a legitimate reason to close the schools that had nothing to do with race, and that's what it's done: it says the closures will save $8.5 million. But the plaintiffs respond that former Chancellor Michelle Rhee also projected savings when she closed schools in 2008, and they never materialized.

 

Back in May, Boasberg called the District's cost-savings estimate "realistic and sensible." Last week, though, he said the plaintiffs were entitled to look for evidence that it's "just a mirage," as they claim.

 

It's true that DCPS's estimates of cost savings, from both the 2008 round of closings and from the recent ones, have been questioned. But to prevail on their discrimination claim, the plaintiffs would need to show not only that DC's projections might be wrong. Rather, the projections need to be so implausible they wouldn't constitute a legitimate reason for closing schools. It seems unlikely that a court would conclude that: some of the schools were only 20-25% full, and yet they required many of the same overhead costs—including everything from utility bills to the principal's salary—that a school operating at capacity did.

 

Besides, Henderson has identified benefits to school closings beyond saving money. With a larger school, she's said, it's easier to provide amenities like art and music classes, athletics, and full-time librarians. And with more than one teacher per grade, class sizes in larger schools can actually be smaller.

 

Policy decisions

 

It's not a matter of whether the District is right or wrong here. It's a matter of whether the District is so wrong that a court will substitute its own judgment for that of District officials. As Judge Boasberg says more than once in his opinions, it's not the court's role to second-guess policy decisions.

 

Although Empower DC has hailed the ruling as a victory, it seems highly unlikely that the group will ultimately prevail. What is likely, in fact almost certain, is that DC and DCPS will have to expend a good deal of time and money responding to the plaintiffs' demands for evidence. Although Boasberg says he isn't going to allow "a fishing expedition into decades of DCPS files," presumably it will be no easy task to dig up documents dating back as far as the 1970s.

 

If the activists of Empower DC really want to promote the welfare of DCPS students, as they say they do, they'll ask themselves whether diverting the school system's resources into defending a nearly baseless lawsuit is really the best way to go about it.

 

 

A majority of students in public schools throughout the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades, according to a new study that details a demographic shift with broad implications for the country.

 

The analysis by the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education philanthropy, is based on the number of students from preschool through 12th grade who were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price meals program in the 2010-11 school year.

 

The meals program run by the Department of Agriculture is a rough proxy for poverty, because a family of four could earn no more than $40,793 a year to qualify in 2011.

 

Children from those low-income families dominated classrooms in 13 states in the South and the four Western states with the largest populations in 2011, researchers found. A decade earlier, just four states reported poor children as a majority of the student population in their public schools.

 

But by 2011, almost half of the nation’s 50 million public-school students — 48 percent — qualified for free or reduced-price meals. In some states, such as Mississippi, that proportion rose as high as 71 percent.

 

In a large swath of the country, classrooms are filling with children who begin kindergarten already behind their more privileged peers, who lack the support at home to succeed and who are more than likely to drop out of school or never attend college.

 

“This is incredible,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University, who was struck by the rapid spike in poverty. He said the change helps explain why the United States is lagging in comparison with other countries in international tests.

 

“When you break down the various test scores, you find the high-income kids, high-achievers are holding their own and more,” Rebell said. “It’s when you start getting down to schools with a majority of low-income kids that you get astoundingly low scores. Our real problem regarding educational outcomes is not the U.S. overall, it’s the growing low-income population.”

 

Southern states have seen rising numbers of poor students for the past decade, but the trend spread west in 2011, to include rapidly increasing levels of poverty among students in California, Nevada, Oregon and New Mexico.

 

The 2008 recession, immigration and a high birthrate among low-income families have largely fueled the changes, said Steve Suitts, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and an author of the study.

 

Maryland and Virginia were the only Southern states where low-income children did not make up a majority of public-school students. About one-third of students in public schools in Maryland and Virginia qualified for the free and reduced meals program in 2011.

 

Hank Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education, said the country needs to figure out how to educate the growing classes of poor students and reverse the trend.

 

“Lots of folks say we need to change this paradigm, but as a country, we’re not focusing on the issue,” said Bounds, who was previously Mississippi’s state school superintendent. “What we’re doing is not working. We need to get philanthropies, the feds, business leaders, everybody, together and figure this out. We need another Sputnik moment.”

 

National efforts to improve public education — from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind to President Obama’s Race to the Top — have been focused on the wrong problems, said Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at the Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

Most of those changes, including the rise of standardized testing, holding teachers accountable for their students’ academic performance and rewriting math and reading standards don’t address poverty, Rothstein said.

 

“If you take children who come to school from families with low literacy, who are not read to at home, who have poor health — all these social and economic problems — and just say that you’re going to test children and have high expectations and their achievement will go up, it doesn’t work,” Rothstein said. “It’s a failure.”

 

Instead, schools must adapt to the new low-income majorities, Suitts said.

 

“We have an education system that continues to assume that most of our students are middle class and have independent resources outside the schools in order to support their education,” Suitts said. “The trends and facts belie that assumption. We can’t continue to educate kids on an assumption that is 20 years out of date. We simply have to reshape our educational system.”

 

Policymakers, politicians and educators should reconsider the $500 billion the nation spends annually on K-12 education, with an eye toward smarter investments to help poor children, Suitts said.

 

Because they show up for kindergarten with a working vocabulary half as large as their more privileged peers, low-income children should be enrolled in quality preschool, Suitts said. Poor children also need more time in school with an extended day or school year, and they need health care as well as social and emotional support, he said.

 

“We have to do something different by the way we educate, but we do it by understanding who are the students and what are the needs,” Suitts said.

 

On average, the country spends about $10,300 annually per student, but that figure varies wildly among states and even within school districts. In 2011, for instance, New York spent $19,076 for each student, while Utah spent $6,212.

 

Between 2000 and 2010, average per-pupil spending increased, but more slowly than the growth in low-income students in every region but the Northeast, where per-pupil spending grew faster, the study found.

 

All three levels of government -- federal, state and local — pay for public schools. The federal contribution is about 10 percent, with states and local governments providing the rest.

 

Because local governments draw on property taxes to provide their share of school funding, poor districts with a limited tax base don’t raise as much money as more affluent communities. That often means that children in poor communities attend schools with fewer resources, substandard facilities and less-qualified teachers.

 

States with some of the biggest proportions of poor children spend the least on each student, the new study found. Mississippi, for example, spent $7,928 per student in 2011.

 

“More and more of these kids are in economic distress,” said Gene Nichol, who directs the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina and wrote a recent series of stories published in the Raleigh News and Observer that chronicle poverty in that state. “And there’s less and less political will to do the things needed to fix it.”