- D.C. high school graduation rate ticks up, but wide achievement gaps remain [Washington Latin, Friendship Collegiate Academy, and KIPP DC College Preparatory mentioned]
- Progress in the D.C. schools: Many authors and a surprising path [KIPP DC, AppleTree, and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
- D.C. public school students making good progress
- Blog-The Big Message from NAEP TUDA
- Bill Day, Two River math teacher, named D.C. teacher of the year [Two Rivers and Thurgood Marshall PCS mentioned]
- District schools get new books and musical instruments
D.C. high school graduation rate ticks up, but wide achievement gaps remain [Washington Latin, Friendship Collegiate Academy, and KIPP DC College Preparatory mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 20, 2013
The District’s high school graduation rate ticked up to 64 percent in 2013, a three-point gain over the previous year, according to data that city officials quietly released last week.
But the city average — long among the lowest in the country — masks wide gaps between different groups of students and different schools, with charter schools and the school system’s selective high schools posting higher rates than traditional neighborhood schools.
Among charter schools, 79 percent of students graduated on time, an increase of two points over 2012. Meanwhile, just 58 percent of D.C. Public Schools students graduated on time, also an increase of two points. Citywide, 61 percent of students graduated on time in 2012.
“We’ve only just started to focus on strategies that will move our graduation rate, so we’re not surprised it hasn’t moved more quickly,” Chancellor Kaya Henderson said in a statement. “While we’re pleased the number is inching up and any progress is good, the real investments in high schools have only just begun. In the next two to three years, we expect to see much greater movement.”
In the traditional school system, on-time graduation rates ranged from 38 percent at Cardozo, a neighborhood high school in Columbia Heights, to 100 percent at Banneker, an application-only school just a few blocks away from Cardozo.
Across the school system, 55 percent of black students and 53 percent of low-income students graduated on time, compared with 87 percent of white students. Only 39 percent of students with disabilities graduated on time.
Only nine white students graduated from charter schools in 2013, and their graduation rate (75 percent) was lower than the graduation rate of black students (79 percent). But other gaps persisted in charters: Only 59 percent of students with disabilities and 29 percent of English-language learners graduated on time, for example.
The charter school with the best graduation rate was Washington Latin, where 95 percent of students graduated on time. Two schools east of the Anacostia River — Friendship Collegiate Academy, which graduated five times as many students as Latin, and KIPP DC College Preparatory — also posted graduation rates of 95 percent.
In both D.C. school sectors, there was a clear gender gap. Citywide, 70 percent of females and only 57 percent of males graduated on time. David Catania (I-At Large), D.C. Council Education Committee chairman and possible mayoral candidate, highlighted that difference Friday on WAMU-FM’s “The Kojo Nnamdi Show” and said it should raise questions for policymakers about what can be done to increase the success rate among males.
The graduation rates are calculated according to a federally mandated formula: The number of students who graduated in 2013 are divided by the number of students who were expected to graduate because they were ninth-graders four years ago, with adjustments for students who transferred in or out.
Of those students who did not graduate on time, about one-third were still enrolled in a D.C. public school, suggesting that they might graduate.
Advocates for neighborhood high schools have long argued that those schools tend to have lower graduation rates in part because they are legally obligated to serve all comers, which means they end up taking in challenging students who have transferred out of — or been kicked out of — selective and charter schools.
A list of each D.C. high school’s graduation rate is available online at www.osse.dc.gov. There is also a comparison of different subgroups of students and how the fared on the site.
Progress in the D.C. schools: Many authors and a surprising path [KIPP DC, AppleTree, and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Richard Whitmire
December 20, 2013
Nationally, the District has long been regarded as an educational embarrassment, one of the top spenders on kindergarten to 12th grade with little to show for it. The story used to be familiar: Better-off families flee to the suburbs or apply to one of the many private schools; low-income parents from the “wrong” side of the river desperately seek schools on the other side. It was sad but true.
But that was then. The education momentum has shifted so dramatically in the past few years that most Washingtonians have no idea why D.C. students suddenly are being singled out for making remarkable progress, as seen in federal testing results released Wednesday. D.C. Public Schools showed significant increases in math and reading scores in both fourth and eighth grades — the only city school system to do so. Earlier federal test data that included charter school students paralleled these gains, which means all students are advancing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan put it best: “A remarkable story.”
Allow me to flesh out this story. The first thing to know is that the rapid progress in Washington can be attributed to three school chiefs. Everyone knows about Kaya Henderson, the D.C. schools chancellor, who is so widely admired that she was approached about taking over the New York City schools. Henderson is the kinder, gentler version of controversial former chancellor Michelle Rhee. As a Rhee deputy, Henderson relentlessly championed improving teacher quality. She hasn’t changed.
Then there’s the lesser-known Scott Pearson, who oversees the city’s charter schools, which educate 44 percent of the city’s students. The important thing to know about Pearson: He has relentlessly cleaned up the mess left by the old school board, which approved too many lousy charters. Thanks to his clear accountability system ranking the effectiveness of schools, and his efforts to lure top performers, the District has moved to the top ranks of charter school innovators.
The third key player is Susan Schaeffler. Who? Schaeffler oversees the network of KIPP charter schools in the city, a system that has grown from 80 fifth-graders in 2001 to 3,600 students in neighborhoods that include Anacostia, Shaw and Trinidad. That number sounds small, but if you could calculate which of the three school leaders is most responsible for boosting the number of college-ready D.C. students from tough neighborhoods, my money would be on Schaeffler.
Together, these three leaders have dug the D.C. schools out of a very deep hole.
Preschool is also a big part of the improvement story. Members of Congress debate what really high-quality preschools might look like, when all they have to do is walk a few blocks to any AppleTree Learning preschool to see excellence in action. I once spent a day in an AppleTree classroom in Columbia Heights, watching three teachers, all of them college-educated, walk the students through the organization’s carefully scripted Every Child Ready curriculum. This is what preschool is supposed to be. And it’s being done right here in the District.
One interesting overlap with the charter growth story: AppleTree is likely to team up with Rocketship charters (a pairing Pearson suggested), which in 2015 is scheduled to open the first of eight charter schools it is planning for the District. AppleTree would handle the preschool years; Rocketship would pick up in kindergarten and seamlessly carry students through fifth grade.
In the District, education trends aren’t playing out as predicted, and that’s a good thing. Conventional wisdom holds that charter schools will suck up all of the motivated low-income students, leaving Henderson’s system with the special-education students and disruptive students who need parole officers. But a different future appears to be unfolding. Aggressive charters are gobbling up huge numbers of poor kids, and not just those with the most motivated parents, creating an unlikely narrative whereby DCPS could end up as a redoubt of wealthy, Ward 3 students. There’s a shocker for you.
The real education story here is just beginning to play out. The District may be the fastest-gentrifying city in the nation. Are all of those educated, middle-class couples snapping up homes in once-dicey neighborhoods really going to flee or pay expensive private school tuition? Not likely. For a glimpse into the future, watch what’s already playing out in elementary schools such as Ross and Brent and emerging in schools such as Garrison, Amidon-Bowen and J.O. Wilson.
Having a mix of low-, middle- and high-income students of all races and ethnicities is something to be cheered, not feared. The school districts in the country making the most progress with low-income students, places such as Tampa, Charlotte and Long Beach, have middle-class kids in the mix.
I’m not suggesting everything will always go smoothly. Inside DCPS there are those who yearn for the days when work rules favored teachers over students. Outside the District, many Rhee haters appear to be quietly rooting for D.C. kids to start failing again so they can paint Rhee as a failure. But while the naysayers can make noise, they have little influence over the outcomes.
Good education news out of D.C. approaches a man-bites-dog story. My advice: Embrace it.
D.C. public school students making good progress
The Washington Post
By The Editorial Board
December 22, 2013
A QUESTION NOT completely answered with the release last month of state scores on rigorous national assessments centered on how much of the District’s improvement could be traced to the public school system. Could it be, as some skeptics suggested, that the District’s thriving public charter schools were responsible for the remarkable growth?
Now we have an answer. Any doubt about the progress being made by the public school system — and the efficacy of its hard-won reforms — was erased last week by new data showing D.C. Public School (DCPS) to be the system with the greatest improvement of any urban district in the nation. Analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of 2013 urban district test scores showed the District to be the only city with statistically significant growth in both reading and math, and at both grade levels tested.
The gains of 5 points to 8 points since 2011 are the highest scores ever shown by DCPS students on these tests. Additional analysis, The Post’s Emma Brown reported, showed the system’s gains equaled or exceeded those of the city’s public charter schools in each tested subject and grade level.
And the results are not merely a reflection of the city’s changing population; analysis by the Council of the Great City Schools shows that demographic changes alone do not explain the growth in student achievement. While lagging behind the big-city national average, the District has moved up in ranking and is no longer at the bottom.
As Chancellor Kaya Henderson noted, D.C. schools are still far from where they need to be. Too many students can’t perform at grade level, and there is a significant achievement gap between white and minority students. But the progress seen in the NAEP scores, which are consistent with other measures, is an encouraging sign that the challenges can be met by undaunted leadership. “We’re coming on strong,” Ms. Henderson said, “and if we’re ever going to get where we need to go, it’s this kind of leapfrogging growth that is going to get us there.”
Credit goes to the District’s students, teachers and principals, whose hard work is reflected in the scores. Their success in turn depends on steady leadership. It is important that the District not stray from the course of school reform started in 2007 with mayoral control. Change is difficult, particularly in fraught areas such as closing underused schools or firing incompetent teachers. But tougher standards, strict accountability, consistent leadership and improved instruction are yielding measurable progress for D.C. students. That is what should count most.
Blog-The Big Message from NAEP TUDA
Center for Reinventing Public Education
By Paul Hill
December 20, 2013
It is tempting to squeeze the urban NAEP scores for evidence about what city is doing better or worse than other cities. But the big messages are that everyone's scores are very bad, and that cities with the highest concentrations of low-income and minority kids do the worst.
Some cities have gotten unstuck from the bottom and are regressing a little bit to the mean. That's better than staying stuck, but unless those cities increase a lot faster, and keep improving for a long time, most of their disadvantaged students will not be ready for higher education or good-paying jobs.
The deep message here is that nobody knows how to educate large numbers of disadvantaged kids successfully. A new curriculum or teacher training initiative can move the needle for a while, but results then level out. A great school can do wonders for a few kids, but efforts to replicate are seldom as successful.
As a country, we still haven't accepted the core fact that this problem remains unsolved. Nor have we decided to pursue the proven way to solve such problems—experimenting with many approaches, replicating the best, and constantly searching for options better than those currently available. For urban K-12 education, that experimentation would include new ways of using technology, organizing students' time, using teacher talents in new ways, integrating social services, allocating public money, and regulating public schools.
Today, we are stuck with competing certainties: Technology will be the answer… No! Standardization of teachers and teaching is what's needed… No! Social services and income transfer programs will do the trick… and so on. In the current environment of advocacy and counter-advocacy, we cherry-pick evidence and ignore ideas from other camps.
Experimentation will probably reveal that no one approach is best in all cases, but that kids with certain characteristics need different combinations of formal instruction, experiential learning, adult support, and ancillary services. It will also lead to continuous improvement, so that more and better options are constantly emerging. That is the point of the portfolio strategy, which CRPE is helping many cities adopt. It doesn't assume that one kind of school or provider is best, but opens up public education to ideas from many sources and allows students, teachers, and public funds to move from less- to more-effective schools.
As Robin shows in her post yesterday, the NAEP TUDA scores could become more useful in tracking progress and understanding what’s behind score changes. But for now all they can really tell us is that the problem of educating low-income and minority children in big cities is still waiting out there to be solved.
Bill Day, Two River math teacher, named D.C. teacher of the year [Two Rivers and Thurgood Marshall PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 20, 2013
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray stopped into an all-school assembly at Two Rivers Public Charter School on Friday morning to surprise math teacher Bill Day with the news that he has been selected as the District’s 2013-14 teacher of the year.
Hundreds of Two River students erupted in cheers for Mr. Bill, as he is known, as Gray (D) presented a $5,000 check and a heap of praise, calling Day “everything that a teacher should be.”
“Wow,” said Day, praising his fellow teachers as brilliant and creative thinkers and his students for their energy and hard work. “Every time you come into class ready to learn, every time you come into class ready to learn,” he said, “that’s what inspires me to work as hard as I have.”
Day started teaching more than a decade ago, and since 2011 has taught middle-schoolers at Two Rivers in Northeast Washington, a high-performing school rooted in experiential learning. Day is helping lead a “mathematical revolution” by using real-life problems to engage students in math, said Executive Director Jessica Wodatch.
His students recently learned the concept of unit rates by putting on a grilled-cheese sandwich sale for their fellow students — a task that involved all kinds of math, from calculating the cost of organic and non-organic ingredients to figuring out how much they should charge to ensure a profit.
“You want them to see that we do math to solve problems, not that we have problems so we can do math,” Day said.
Madison Williams, an eighth-grader at Two Rivers who was in Day’s math class two years ago, said she was proud of her teacher.
“There were some times he gave me hard problems ... but he helped me work through those times, he made me more confident with math,” Williams said. “Mr. Bill, he puts a lot of effort into his kids, so it makes learning more interesting.”
A panel of teachers, principals and other education experts chose Day from nominees that included teachers in both traditional and charter schools. Finalists for the award included Laurel Horn of Thurgood Marshall Academy and William Taylor of Wheatley Education Campus.
District schools get new books and musical instruments
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 22, 2013
Nicole Anderson figured it would take her about four years to raise enough money to buy the musical instruments she needed to give her students at Southwest Washington’s Patterson Elementary School the instruction they deserved.
And then, one day this fall, Anderson’s timeline changed. A truck pulled up outside the school and unloaded boxes upon boxes of the instruments Patterson’s music teacher had hoped for: xylophones, bongos, tambourines, bells, triangles and maracas.
“I was ecstatic,” said Anderson. “It was beyond my wildest dreams of what I was going to get.”
D.C. Public Schools announced this month that it purchased 4,000 new musical instruments for schools around the city, as well as 2,000 desktop computers, more than 1,300 laptops and tablets, art supplies and science lab equipment.
The school system also bought 85,000 new books for school libraries around the city, an investment that comes after years of pressure from parents and activists.
The new materials cost about $10 million, from money that had been left unspent because of unfilled personnel vacancies and reduced benefits costs, officials said.
“When we realized these funds would be available, we came up with a thoughtful and strategic plan to make purchases that would both help our students learn and achieve, and support our teachers with new, modern equipment and supplies,” Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said in a statement. “The action at DCPS is in the classroom, and that’s where we’re putting our resources.”
Several renovated and rebuilt schools, which opened with brand-new libraries but very few books, received full collections. They included Anacostia High School, Kramer Middle School and the McKinley and Cardozo Education campuses.
But every school in the city received some new books, and the infusion of current titles came as a thrill to librarians who are used to holding book sales and soliciting donations in order to improve aging collections.
“It’s wonderful,” said Currie Renwick, the librarian at Watkins Elementary on Capitol Hill, which received more than 200 fiction and nonfiction titles. “We’re just so pleased. . . . For many children, there are not books at home, so it’s critical we have the best books that we can get.”
Renwick said that before the new books arrived in November, the average copyright date in the Watkins library was around 1994, a vintage that is “unacceptable,” she said. Science books, in particular, need refreshing more often, she said.
“You know the phrase, ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’? That is true to some extent, but you certainly can judge a nonfiction book by its copyright date,” Renwick said. “And with fiction, you have to have fresh material.”
Renwick said she’s hopeful that in the future, the school system will make a practice of earmarking money in the budget for library materials.
Peter MacPherson, a parent who has long pushed for more investment in and attention to school libraries, said the libraries will need a regular influx of dollars in order to update their collections. But he described this infusion of books as “a fabulous development.”
“The work is not done, but it’s a great, great first step,” he said.
The school system is considering the possibility of budgeting for regular updates of library and other materials, spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said.
The new musical instruments were just as welcome as the books. On a recent afternoon at Patterson, third-graders eagerly volunteered to play the new xylophones, the new tinkling triangles and — especially — the new bongo drum.
“You just hear a beat and you go with it,” Paris Mercer, 8, said. “That’s what I like.”
Paris said that last year, and in years past, music class was filled with singing. There were no instruments.
“They like singing, but if you do singing for six straight years, they get a little zoned out,” said Anderson, who is in her first year teaching music at Patterson.
She started the year with homemade instruments she had built for her students, such as rattles made of tennis balls filled with beans. D.C. students deserve better, she said.
“Our goal is to have our classroom look like it would if you went out to Fairfax County or other places where families have a lot of money,” she said.