FOCUS DC News Wire 10/22/13

 

 

De’Andre Anderson and his wife don’t have children yet. But when the couple bought a home in Southeast Washington after years of renting on Capitol Hill, Anderson, 43, began mulling what they could do to help the neighborhood schools. ¶ Now Anderson is leading a campaign to persuade Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to establish the first application-only secondary school east of the Anacostia River. 

 

“I would like to have some quality schools in my neighborhood — or at least on this side of the river — that I could send my kids to,” said Anderson, who moved to Hillcrest with his wife, Lemlem Meconen-Anderson, 35, last year. 

 

The District’s struggling school system shaped city demographics for decades, pushing countless young families and parents-to-be into the suburbs in search of a decent public education. 

 

But that long trend now appears to be shifting. Public school enrollment in the District has risen nearly 18 percent over the past five years, mostly in the early grades and charter schools, as an increasing number of parents have been persuaded

 

to give D.C. schools a try. The change comes as young, affluent people who have flocked to the District over thepast decade — millennials and members of Generation X, born in the 1970s and 1980s — seek to stay in the city, reluctant to give up their urban lifestyles for cul-de-sacs and long commutes.

 

They have been wooed by free preschool programs for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a growing number of charters that offer specialty programs and — in some parts of the city — newly revitalized neighborhood schools.

 

But whether young parents and those who plan to have families will stay in the city over the long term is an open question, and one that may depend on their collective willingness to participate in schools that previous middle-class generations have sought to avoid.

 

They grapple with angst over charter-school enrollment lotteries with admissions odds that rival Ivy League universities; lingering uncertainty about the strength of academic offerings; and simmering tensions over delicate issues of race and class that sometimes flare up in PTAs and community groups.

 

“If parents make the commitment to keep their kid in the neighborhood school, and their neighbors make the commitment to keep their kids in the school, they’ll find that they’ll create the school they want,” said Suzanne Wells, a D.C. parent whose organizing efforts helped turn Capitol Hill schools into some of the most sought-after in the city.

 

Still, many young people remain deeply ambivalent about how and whether the District’s schools will work for their children over the long term.

 

“This has been great, but for the next phase of life, we’re just going to have to suck it up and move to the suburbs,” said Columbia Heights resident Jennifer Thompson, 28, who said she and her husband are not willing to send their future children to city schools.

 

Cities across the country are wrestling with how to hold onto young parents, according to Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara, an assistant professor of urban education at Temple University, who wrote about Philadelphia’s concerted effort to court young professionals in her 2013 book, “Marketing Cities, Marketing Schools.”

 

But the influx of newcomers can stir tensions over race and class in any city, including in the District, where millennials and Gen-X’ers have turned the city into a whiter and more middle-class place over the past decade.

 

Lawyer Krista Robertson, 34, said that she and other middle-class parents who had bought into a gentrifying neighborhood southeast of Capitol Hill felt unwanted when they decided to enroll their kids at Payne Elementary and join the PTA.

 

“I was exhausted by the whole process,” said Robertson, who is black and Hispanic, and who said she felt as if longtime Payne parents and some teachers viewed her as a “race traitor” for seeking to raise money and improve the school. Robertson’s daughter attended Payne for two years before transferring to a private school this fall.

 

Payne’s principal didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Cucchiara said it’s common for poor and working-class parents who have invested in their schools for a long time to feel frustrated by newcomers’ attempts to fix those schools.

 

“There’s sort of an assumption that they should just be really happy that the middle-class people are there,” Cucchiara said.

 

Daniel del Pielago, an organizer for the community group Empower DC, said some parents he worked with last year at Tubman Elementary — a school of predominantly Latino and black students in Columbia Heights — reacted with skepticism when a white father took the helm of the PTA and laid out plans to raise money and make improvements.

 

“I know there was a lot of tension, feeling like ‘who are you to come in right now and want to change things,’ ” said del Pielago. Tubman was already making progress, he said, and the push to improve it — while well-meaning — seemed to ignore the efforts already underway.

 

Josephine Hodges, 61, whose two grandchildren attend Tubman, served as PTA vice president at the time. She said some black parents stopped coming to PTA meetings, assuming that their needs wouldn’t be considered. “No one gave him a chance. He came off strong — I told him you have to take baby steps, especially in our community,” said Hodges, who is black.

 

“We all bleed the same blood,” she said. “We need to get together and not let the little petty prejudice stand in the way of our children.”

 

Indeed, many families of all backgrounds say they want diverse schools, but such schools have been rare in a city with segregated housing patterns. “It is an important piece of the puzzle, and I would like to see more and more of them in the city,” said Abigail Smith, the city’s deputy mayor of education.

 

LUCK AND TRADE-OFFS

Tension aside, many young parents said they are doing everything they can to keep their family life in the city. Lowrey Redmond, 37, agonized for months about where to send her 3-year-old daughter, Adele, studying test data and visiting open houses across the city.

 

She wanted to contribute to the positive momentum at her neighborhood school, Garrison Elementary in Logan Circle, which parents saved from closure last year with a massive public relations campaign that garnered support from neighborhood shopkeepers, ­churches and politicians.

 

But Redmond wasn’t convinced that the city is committed to helping Garrison parents turn the school around. The aging school is in need of a renovation, and a sinkhole has made part of its athletic field unusable for months.

 

In the spring, Adele won lottery admission to one of the most sought-after charters in the city, Latin American Montessori Bilingual (LAMB), and Redmond decided to enroll there.

 

Redmond said she’s grateful for the good luck. But there are trade-offs: The school is four miles away, creating complicated drop-off and pickup routines, and making it harder to meet and befriend other school families.

 

Redmond is frustrated with the choice between commuting to a well-regarded charter school and walking a few blocks to a transitioning neighborhood school, which feeds into a high school where four in 10 students graduate on time

 

“Neither scenario is perfect for a family like mine,” she said, adding that she wants to live in a city where kids don’t have to be lucky to be assured a great school.

 

“I don’t want to move to the suburbs unless D.C. pushes me out,” she said.

 

Many D.C. parents are willing to at least try city schools — particularly for preschool, a free alternative to expensive day care or private nannies. But they often keep one eye toward the exit.

 

“You move into a neighborhood and you want to invest in the school just as much as you want to invest in the community,” said Ayana Thompson, 27, who recently bought a home in Southeast Washington’s Fort Dupont neighborhood.

 

Less than two months after her daughter started preschool at nearby Anne Beers Elementary, Thompson has already begun checking out private schools for next fall.

 

It’s not because Beers is a bad school, said Thompson, a graduate student at Catholic University. On the contrary: Led by a dynamic principal, Beers is thriving and beginning to attract neighborhood families who call it an overlooked gem.

 

Even so, Thompson worries her daughter won’t be challenged in classrooms where many students have profound needs. Fewer than half of Beers’s students are proficient in reading and math, and poverty is so pervasive that every child is offered a free lunch.

 

“It kind of makes me feel like a cop-out to take my kid out of the school,” Thompson said. “I felt like hey — if all the parents really rallied around the school, the school would be great — and maybe it is great,” she said. “ Maybe I just need to get over my fears.”

 

Coming Friday: A millennial, born in Washington, ponders what opportunities are available for him in a changing city.

 

 

In today's article about young D.C. parents' views toward the public schools the Washington Post's Emma Brown includes this statement:

 

"They grapple with angst over charter school enrollment lotteries with admissions odds that rival Ivy League universities."

 

While some high performing schools promote this statistic as if it is a badge of honor the lack of a sufficient number of quality seats for our children is nothing to write home about. We need to figure out a way to encourage rapid replication of our best offerings.

 

Solving the funding equity issue with DCPS would be a start. The Mayor's recent study on this issue looks promising as has been the turning over of vacant traditional school buildings to charters. But a final revenue solution is not yet in hand and the supply of classroom space could cease at anytime.

 

Moreover, no city officials have yet to propose an increase in the $3,000 per pupil facility allotment that is chocking future charter expansion plans.

 

With all of the support organizations for charters in the nation's capital don't you think one of them would spearhead the drive to provide an excellent teacher to each and every kid living in D.C. that needs one?

 

Challenging times call for strong leadership no matter what the profession or public policy sphere. I'm desperately waiting for someone or even a few people to raise their hand to say "I will do this!"

 

 

Two years ago, the leaders of Academy of Hope in Edgewood Terrace looked at how they could better prepare their adult students for a changing workforce, not to mention an entirely new GED test that’s coming in January.

 

In order to replace volunteers with trained teachers and continue its work toward literacy alongside workforce training, the nonprofit realized it would have to double its more than $1 million budget.

 

“Absent of some lottery win or a connection to some very wealthy people, we just weren’t going to get there quick enough,” said Lecester Johnson, executive director of the Academy.

 

The nonprofit is one of several in the District that uses education coupled with services to boost residents out of poverty. And when it comes to educating adults toward a GED, secondary education and careers that pay a living wage — all while helping with childcare or English proficiency — a handful of D.C. nonprofits have found the traditional fundraising model just doesn’t cut it.

 

In response, some of them are transitioning to a new model, operating adult charter schools that provide financial stability while allowing them to continue to raise funds for auxiliary services that improve student success.

 

The D.C. Public Charter School Board recently approved Academy of Hope as the seventh adult charter school in the District, which will launch in the fall of 2014. The board is one of a few in the country that approves adult charters, which serve students ages 16 to 24.

 

Charter schools receive public funds but are operated independently of the District school system. They have more autonomy in designing their curriculum and budgets in exchange for additional oversight by the board.

 

Without the charter, Johnson said her nonprofit has less than $3,000 per pupil to bring a student from about a sixth-grade reading level up to a GED or high school equivalent — and then launch them into the workforce.

 

The K-12 charter school system gets up to $14,000 per student, she said. As a charter school for adults, Academy of Hope will get closer to $10,000 per student and is fundraising to fill in the gaps.

 

Accountability

With that funding comes more accountability, says Allison Kokkoros, chief academic officer for the Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School. The school was the first adult-focused charter in the nation when it transitioned from a nonprofit model in 1998. Since its original start in 1970, Carlos Rosario has operated as a D.C. public school, a grant-funded nonprofit and, now, a charter school.

 

“It really is different from what we experienced as a nonprofit,” Kokkoros says, adding that nonprofits making the transition should come into the process with “eyes wide open about the expectations.”

 

As a charter school, Carlos Rosario’s funding is tied to enrollment levels and seemingly everything is audited. Kokkoros said the school had to establish a new registration department to ensure that its nearly 2,000 students are all District residents. Kokkoros says this can be tricky when working with students who aren’t required to be there.

 

But she says the oversight and stability that comes with the charter funding is “critically important” for the mission of their work, especially when it comes to brokering partnerships with other universities, nonprofits — and the bank.

 

Carlos Rosario recently completed a new workforce development campus outfitted with culinary arts kitchens to meet demands for workers in D.C.’s hospitality and retail sectors. And the school, which works primarily with adult immigrants, has a long waiting list of those who’d like to attend.

 

The need 

It’s estimated that some 9,000 young people in the District between the ages of 16 and 24 are not on pathways to careers or continuing education, says Lori Kaplan, president and CEO of the Latin American Youth Center.

 

LAYC focuses on students as young as 16 who’ve been disconnected from the workforce, often by a lack of education, language barriers or social issues.

 

The Center has founded three charter schools and operates one of them, a career academy that just finished its first year in operation. The schools serve some 600 youths each year. They function in the context of the center’s other services, which include childcare and English as a Second Language courses, elements Kaplan says are key to students’ success.

 

“A job often (comes) on the backend of a variety of social issues — whether homelessness or teen pregnancy or aging out of foster care,” Kaplan says, adding that a traditional job training model doesn't work for students “that are carrying so many challenges.”

 

While the Youth Center had been able to assist with many of these challenges, Kaplan said it was difficult to also bring the level of training students need to launch into a career without a more structured education system.

 

Students at the charter schools now can specialize in career pathways like construction, medical assistance or computer technology, gaining skills that the workforce is demanding.

 

Nonprofits like these are also pivoting to direct students more toward engaging careers, rather than just finding them any job.

 

Kaplan says sometimes adults without career skills just need to start somewhere, but the Center tries to place them with companies where they can advance into higher positions.

 

“Sometimes they think no one really cares about them,” Kaplan says. “If we don’t address the issues these young people are dealing with, it will carry on for a generation.”

 

 

THE TIMING couldn’t have been more propitious as Kaya Henderson delivered her first formal address since becoming D.C. school chancellor three years ago. A study had just been released attesting to the effectiveness of the system’s teacher evaluation program. Equally significant was the news that enrollment had apparently increased. The two developments are but the latest evidence of what Ms. Henderson called a “turning tide” that is transforming public education in the nation’s capital.

 

The sleekly redone Cardozo Education Campus was the backdrop for Ms. Henderson’s Oct. 17 “state of the schools“ speech. It represented the city’s strides in rebuilding once-disgraceful school facilities. But, as Ms. Henderson stressed, the changes wrought by school reform go far deeper than physical improvements. “We’re on the right track,” she said.

 

That was also the conclusion of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Virginia who examined how the system evaluates teachers. Their study, published as a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the IMPACT system put in place in 2009, with its controversial combination of big rewards and serious accountability, has resulted in low-performing teachers leaving the system. Equally significant was the finding that those who stayed — teachers with both strong and weak scores initially — improved their skills. “We’re actually radically improving the caliber of our teaching force,” Ms. Henderson told The Post’s Emma Brown.

 

The findings validate the reform agenda started in 2007 by former chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and continued by Ms. Henderson. So does the confidence that underlies the projected increase in enrollment this year. Despite the closure of 13 schools — a move that some feared might push students out — the school system saw a 2 percent uptick in its numbers, according to preliminary counts by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. Both charter schools and traditional schools gained students.

 

The school system, as Ms. Henderson acknowledged last week, still has a long way to go: Unacceptably high numbers of students remain unable to read or do math at grade level. Change is not easy — as evidenced by the controversy that surrounded IMPACT and school closures — but the success achieved should help pave the way for the work still needed.

 

 

WHOEVER coined that caustic aphorism should have been in a Harlem classroom last week where Bill Jackson was demonstrating an exception to the rule. Jackson, a 31-year classroom veteran, was teaching the mathematics of ratios to a group of inner-city seventh graders while 15 young teachers watched attentively. Starting with a recipe for steak sauce — three parts ketchup to two parts Worcestershire sauce — Jackson patiently coaxed his kids toward little math epiphanies, never dictating answers, leaving long silences for the children to fill. “Denzel, do you agree with Katelyn’s solution?” the teacher asked. And: “Can you explain to your friend why you think Kevin is right?” He rarely called on the first hand up, because that would let the other students off the hook. Sometimes the student summoned to the whiteboard was the kid who had gotten the wrong answer: the class pitched in to help her correct it, then gave her a round of applause.

 

After an hour the kids filed out and the teachers circled their desks for a debriefing. Despite his status as a master teacher, Jackson seemed as eager to hone his own craft as that of his colleagues. What worked? What missed the mark? Should we break this into two lessons? Did the kids get it? And what does that mean?

 

“Does ‘get it’ mean getting an answer?” Jackson asked. “Or does it mean really understanding what’s going on?”

 

At that point Deborah Kenny, the founder of the Harlem Village Academies charter schools, leaned over to me: “That right there, that is why we’re starting a graduate school.”

 

How America prepares its teachers has been a subject of dismay for many years. In 2005 Arthur Levine, then the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, shocked colleagues (and himself, he says) with a scathing report concluding that teacher preparation programs “range from inadequate to appalling.” Since then the outcry has only gotten more vociferous. This summer the National Council on Teacher Quality described teacher education as still “an industry of mediocrity.”

 

The heartening news is that the universities that have so long resisted pleas to raise their standards are now beginning to have change pushed on them from outside. Governors (including New York’s Andrew Cuomo, last month) are raising admission standards for state education colleges. Philanthropies like the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which Levine now runs, have been pouring money into reform. And academic entrepreneurs like Kenny are arising to compete with the established schools.

 

“Where charter schools were 10 years ago, that’s where teacher preparation is right at this moment,” Kenny told me. With start-up money from the media executive Barry Diller (who says he hopes to see the venture amplified via the Internet) and a core of master teachers like Jackson, Kenny has begun to build a graduate education school that will be integrated with her K-12 campuses in Harlem. It will join a young cottage industry of experimental teacher training.

 

Of all the competing claims on America’s education dollar — more technology, smaller classes, universal prekindergarten, school choice — the one option that would seem to be a no-brainer is investing in good teachers. But universities have proved largely immutable. Educators, including some inside these institutions, say universities have treated education programs as “cash cows.” The schools see no incentive to change because they have plenty of applicants willing to pay full tuition, the programs are relatively cheap to run, and they are accountable to no one except accrediting agencies run by, you guessed it, education schools. It’s a contented cartel.

 

Among reformers, there is a fair amount of consensus about what it would take to fix things. The first step is to make teacher colleges much more selective. According to one respected study, only 23 percent of American teachers — and only 14 percent in high-poverty schools — come from the top third of college graduates.

 

The importance of selectivity comes through vividly in “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley’s engrossing new diagnosis of why American education lags behind the likes of Finland and Singapore. Ripley says she was initially skeptical, since most research shows little correlation between a teacher’s grade point average and classroom results. Then she went to Finland, where only top students get into teacher-training programs.

 

“What I hadn’t realized was that setting a high bar at the beginning of the profession sends a signal to everyone else that you are serious about education and teaching is hard,” Ripley told me. “When you do that, it makes it easier to make the case for paying teachers more, for giving them more autonomy in the classroom. And for kids to buy into the premise of education, it helps if they can tell that the teachers themselves are extremely well educated.”

 

Once they are admitted, critics say, prospective teachers need more rigorous study, not just of the science and philosophy of education but of the contents, especially in math and the sciences, where America trails the best systems in Asia and Europe. A new study by the Education Policy Center at Michigan State, drawing on data from 17 countries, concluded that while American middle school math teachers may know a lot about teaching, they often don’t know very much about math. Most of them are not required to take the courses in calculus and probability that are mandatory in the best-taught programs.

 

“There’s a big range in this country,” said William Schmidt, who oversaw the study. “Some of our education programs are putting out math teachers at the level of Botswana, a developing country in Africa, and some rank up with Singapore.” Unfortunately, Schmidt reckons, the Botswana-level teacher programs produce about 60 percent of America’s future middle school math teachers.

 

Another missing component, reformers say, is sustained, intense classroom experience while being coached by masters of the profession. Too much student teaching is too superficial — less a serious apprenticeship than a drive-by. The Woodrow Wilson program, which has beachheads at 23 universities in four states, builds teacher training programs in partnership with local school districts, requires prospective teachers to spend a full year inside schools working alongside veterans, and provides three years of postgraduate mentoring in the classroom.

 

Kenny’s plan in Harlem is to integrate teacher training with her K-12 campuses so closely that it will be analogous to a medical residency.

 

After my morning in Harlem I dropped by the red-brick edifice of Teachers College to meet Susan Fuhrman, who succeeded Arthur Levine as president and is a leader in the industry under siege. She began by acknowledging the criticisms — “there is a lot of mediocrity” — and added a couple of her own. States make it far too easy to get a teaching license, she said. Bad schools are protected by politics: “There’s an ed school in every legislator’s district, and nobody wants to close ed schools.” She favors raising admission standards and figuring out ways to hold education schools accountable for their results.

 

But Fuhrman finds the birth of alternative teacher schools “upsetting.” “I worry about cutting that kind of preparation off from the scholarship and from emerging research” that a university offers, she said. “It can sound like I feel threatened. I don’t. But it just worries me as a trend.”

 

There are 3.3 million public school teachers in America, and they probably can’t all be trained by start-ups. Raising up the standards of our university programs should be an urgent priority. But one reason for the widespread mediocrity is that universities have had a cozy, lucrative monopoly. It’s about time the leaders of our education schools did feel threatened.