FOCUS DC News Wire 1/13/14

 

 

My wife Michele and I had a packed schedule on Saturday ecstatically immersed in public education activities in our nations’ capital. We started the morning off at the National Cathedral School with one of our favorite organizations, the Latino Student Fund.

 

Their student tutoring program is about to begin for the second half of the school year but today we were gathered with other volunteers for orientation and to hear from the co-founder, chief operating officer, and vice president for policy & research, of Excelencia in Education Deborah A. Santiago. Ms. Santiago was here for one primary purpose: to assist us in being better tutors for our kids.

 

She began her presentation by explaining that educators can take a deficit or asset view of students. It was clear which side she was on. Others may want to focus on obstacles to teaching Latino youth. It is the natural position to hold since, as Ms. Santiago pointed out, only about 20 percent of adults of this ethnic group living in the United States have an associate degree or higher. But the Excelenica in Education Vice President would have nothing to do with this perspective.

 

Ms. Santiago explained that kids often find grown-ups talking at them, constantly calling out directives for what they can and cannot do. She asked us to take another approach with our tutees. “Let them find their voice,” she offered. “Listen to their story. Raise your expectations about what they can achieve. Help your students to have high aspirations and dreams to match.”

 

She confidently asserted that if we make our time with them interesting and engaging, and we truly learn from these young people by consistently allowing them to speak instead of having to constantly hear only what we are saying, we will be able to make a life-changing contribution to those with whom we work.

 

Wow. For most people that level of inspiration would be enough for one day. But we were in for much more. Next on the agenda was heading over to the Washington Convention Center to the D.C. Education Festival. The event was organized by the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, D.C. Public Schools, and the D.C. Public Charter School Board.

 

Over 100 schools, both charter and traditional, had tables where representatives from each institution provided parents and guardians with information and answered questions. In the front of the ballroom was a stage for student performances. Another section contained hands-on demonstrations of STEM projects. In rooms adjacent to where the main activities were taking place visitors could attend workshops on subjects such as “Strategies for Effective Communication Between Parents and School Personnel” and the one we thoroughly enjoyed entitled “Data Dashboards and How to Improve Your School Search, led by FOCUS’s Steven Taylor.

 

The room was overflowing with individuals intimately involved in the comprehensive turnaround of public education in the District of Columbia. Deputy Mayor of Education Abigail Smith introduced a panel discussion on the state of education in our city. Joining the group was Martha Cutts, head of Washington Latin Public Charter School. Her Performance Management Framework Tier 1 charter was recently informed that it has the highest high school graduation rate of any non-selective school in town. I had a chance to catch up with Irasema Salcido, the founder of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy and learned all of the exciting things she is doing. Linda Moore, of the also Tier 1 Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, greeted me warmly at her booth. I interviewed her several years back and will have new information about this charter coming soon. Kaya Henderson, the DCPS Chancellor, shook my hand. Just last week I published my conversation with her. I even had the opportunity to spend several minutes with the FOCUS team of Robert Cane, Michael Musante, and Ram Uppuluri. Scott Pearson, the executive director of the PCSB said hello and Darren Woodruff, PCSB vice chairman, provide me with kind words.

 

This is the first time that DCPS had joined the fair and it is now gaining in importance. This year of course will be the initial one for the unified student lottery with includes out-of-boundary DCPS applications and those of the great majority of charters. In addition, the Washington Post’s Emma Brown pointed in an article about the event that only 25 percent of students attend their neighborhood school, so this is a real opportunity for parents to learn about all the educational offerings available in this city. But for someone like me, who has fought for school choice here for 17 years, the sight across the expansive space was emotionally almost too uplifting to endure.

 

 

Thousands of parents descended on the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday for the D.C. Education Festival, a one-stop school shopping event meant to help families navigate the city’s growing — and sometimes overwhelming — number of school choices.

 

The city’s increasingly popular charter schools have long marketed themselves at this annual event, but this year, for the first time, traditional D.C. middle and high schools were on hand to sell themselves, too.

 

 

 

Dunbar High School, once renowned as an elite institution for African American students and now one of the District’s worst-performing schools, has been quietly working on a proposal to seek greater autonomy within the D.C. public school system, according to interviews and documents.

 

A group of Dunbar alumni and parents have spent months discussing what Dunbar needs to do to regain a reputation as a standout school. After considering and rejecting the idea of turning it into an independent charter school, the group is preparing to ask Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson for greater freedom from central office policies and procedures, according to draft talking points obtained by The Washington Post.

 

The reimagined Dunbar would exist within the D.C. school system but would exercise far more control over the people it hires, how it spends money and — perhaps most controversially — which students can attend.

 

Dunbar is a neighborhood high school, legally obligated to serve students who live nearby in a gentrifying section of Northwest Washington known as Truxton Circle, northwest of Union Station. The group is hoping to give administrators the power to select students, who would have to apply for admission. Such a change could make it far more difficult for neighborhood children to attend and probably would give Dunbar the ability to turn away the lowest-scoring and most-troublesome students.

 

Application-only high schools are in demand in the city; last year, nearly 1,200 students applied for 150 spots at the well-regarded School Without Walls. And shuttered D.C. schools have been resurrected as selective high schools.

 

But converting an existing neighborhood school into a self-governing, application-only institution would be a novel step. The concept echoes controversial “parent trigger” laws adopted in California and other states to give parents the power to transform struggling neighborhood schools into independent charters.

 

Although preliminary, the Dunbar proposal has been criticized as an attempt to raise test scores and graduation rates by shutting out the most challenging students, those the city struggles to help.

 

“It seems to be a shortcut to school improvement,” said a Dunbar community member, who was among those people who agreed to speak about the proposal on the condition of anonymity to protect their relationships at the school. “It’s resigning to the notion that it can’t be done: ‘We don’t want to be bothered with the difficult part of urban education. Let someone else deal with it.’ ”

 

Those involved in developing the Dunbar plan have quietly researched the possible move toward greater autonomy and have shared details with few others. Principal Stephen Jackson declined to comment on the proposal, as did Carrie Thornhill, a 1961 graduate, who said the group has made no final decisions and is not ready to discuss the matter publicly.

 

“Based on the rules that we established with the work that we’re doing, my group will not give me the authority to talk with the press,” Thornhill said.

 

A spokeswoman for Henderson also declined to comment. But Henderson has indicated that she is willing to entertain ideas for overhauling city high schools.

 

As chancellor, Henderson has campaigned for authority to create her own charter schools, arguing that complete freedom from the city bureaucracy might be necessary to turn around chronically underperforming schools. She has also spoken about the need to redesign the District’s high school offerings, floating the idea last year of replacing neighborhood high schools with citywide, theme-based academies that students would choose to attend based on their interests.

 

“We have to rethink our approach to high schools,” Henderson said in an October speech. “High schools, as they are, aren’t engaging and succeeding with all of our students.”

 

Dunbar was the country’s first public high school for African Americans, founded in 1870 as the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth. It produced generations of black leaders in such fields as law, education, science, engineering and civil rights. D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) is a Dunbar graduate as is Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.).

 

But as schools were integrated and middle-class families fled to the suburbs, Dunbar could not escape the problems that beset so many urban schools, including high rates of poverty, truancy and academic failure.

 

In 2008, then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee brought in a private operator to turn the struggling school around, an experiment that ended two years later as concerns arose about increasing violence and other disorder.

 

By 2013, about six in 10 Dunbar students graduated on time. Fewer than 20 percent of Dunbar students were proficient in reading and math on the most recent citywide tests, far below the D.C. averages of 50 percent in reading and 53 percent in math.

 

Truancy rates are declining, according to administrators, but truancy remains a problem. More than one-third of the school’s students missed at least five weeks of school in 2012-13.

 

This school year, Dunbar left behind its 1970s-era building — a drab, prisonlike tower — and moved down the street into a striking, new $122 million campus. The transition triggered both hope and nostalgia, highlighting just how much Dunbar had changed.

 

The new building intensified the desire among alumni to revitalize the school.

 

“Dunbar needs additional resources, flexibility and latitude to produce the student outcomes it desires to live up [to] the name, reputation and legacy of Dunbar,” according to one of the prepared talking points.

 

James E. Pittman, chairman of the Dunbar Alumni Federation, said he is aware of preliminary discussions about Dunbar autonomy but said the federation has not been presented with any proposal for the school’s future.

 

But at Dunbar, the idea has become a topic of discussion. Two Dunbar employees, and the skeptical Dunbar community member who spoke to The Post, said that Jackson had mentioned and endorsed the idea of becoming an autonomous, selective school in conversations with staff members.

 

“It’s not been kept a secret,” said one employee, who does not favor the plan. “If the strategy is only to accept top students, I want nothing to do with it.”

 

Another employee expressed concern about turning the brand-new building into an asset that is off-limits to neighborhood children. But the idea “has a certain appeal,” the employee said, describing the pressure that teachers and administrators feel to raise achievement, particularly after Dunbar’s math and reading test scores fell last year as the city’s scores overall saw notable improvement.

 

In the District, the jobs of teachers and principals depend, in part, on their ability to lift student achievement as measured by standardized tests. That is an outsize challenge at schools such as Dunbar, where many students arrive years behind. A teacher might succeed in pushing a sophomore from a fourth-grade to an eighth-grade reading level, for example, but that student still would not be proficient on a 10th-grade exam. The situation punishes high schools that serve those students who are furthest behind, some educators say.

 

Following the model of other selective schools, the Dunbar plan calls for students to apply for admission to one of the school’s existing academies, which have themes such as education, public policy, and science, technology, engineering and math.

 

Students attending Dunbar now would be allowed to continue through graduation, according to the talking points, which also call for giving neighborhood children admissions preference. But if enrollment standards are established, Dunbar officials could have the authority to remove students who fail to live up to those standards.

 

Cathy Reilly, executive director of the Senior High Alliance for Parents, Principals and Educators, said she is not familiar with Dunbar’s proposal but believes that any move to convert a neighborhood school should be part of a larger vision for D.C. Public Schools, produced with input from the entire community.

 

“DCPS has to figure out, how do we serve all the kids in the city?” said Reilly, who expressed concern that establishing selective high schools serves to concentrate the most challenging students in other city schools. “It means that kids that don’t get into the magnet high schools are grouped without the benefit of the wide range of income, ambition and interests that you can get in a neighborhood high school.”

 

Six D.C. public high schools admit students by application only. The Dunbar group is seeking to emulate one in particular: the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Georgetown, according to the talking points.

 

Ellington is a D.C. public school whose students graduate with a D.C. diploma, but it is run by a nonprofit board that includes representatives from two key partners: George Washington University and the Kennedy Center. The board sets school policies, hires and supervises the principal, with the chancellor’s consent, and directly hires and employs teachers, who are not bound by union work rules.

 

Charles Barber, president of the Ellington board, said the increased autonomy ensures that Ellington can offer a full program of both arts and academics.

 

Barber said he believes that other D.C. schools could benefit from additional flexibility, but he cautioned that with autonomy comes accountability, including responsibility for school finances and academic achievement. “The question is: Do you have the personnel who have the commitment and the resources to make it work?” Barber said.

 

 

One Saturday in December, a group of 24 data scientists spent 24 hours in their Arlington office, racing to make sense of information about how students at a Northeast Washington charter school learn.

 

It was tech company Applied Predictive Technology’s first “data dive” — a hackathon-type blitz in which data scientists volunteer to crunch numbers over a short period of time, often for a nonprofit group. Employees from APT, which sells predictive analytics software, combed through data collected from educational tablet apps used at D.C. Prep, a District charter school with 1,200 pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade students distributed across four campuses.

 

D.C. Prep is part of a growing group of public and charter schools inviting data scientists to analyze their progress. In November, Arlington Public Schools announced it would give a $10,000 cash prize to any team of data scientists who can create algorithms to identify students at risk of dropping out, for instance.

 

The data dive was a first attempt to assess programs D.C. Prep had not yet had time to analyze, said the school’s founder and chief executive Emily Lawson, and it highlighted which groups of students benefited the most from new tablet-based typing and reading programs.

 

For the past year, D.C. Prep has been testing two apps: Raz Kids for first- through third-graders, which reads aloud to students as they follow along, and then quizzes them on content; and Typing Club, a typing game for second- through seventh-graders. Both apps keep track of students’ progress. APT used its proprietary software to process the information.

 

The reading program was most effective for first- and second-grade students — less so for third, APT found. First-graders who read more than 30 books showed a significant increase in literacy scores, while second-graders who read more than 20 books showed a similar increase. Students showed significant growth in literacy if they read new books, instead of frequently rereading the same books to gain mastery.

 

Understanding how students behave in the reading program could help teachers decide which students should use it, Lawson explained. “We had this hypothesis that [Raz Kids] might influence fluency, and some of the insights APT found confirmed that. Now, earlier than we would have, we can start to tailor which students, and when, should use Raz Kids, and which students might be better served by doing something else.”

 

APT also found students followed two separate patterns in the typing game: Some tried to advance as quickly as possible, achieving the lowest minimum score required to get to the next level, while others tried to achieve the highest possible score on a level — repeating it until they did — before moving on.

 

Over the same time period, students who aimed for mastery showed a 36 percent improvement in typed words per minute, while “fly-through” students showed a 17 percent improvement. Girls tended to focus on accuracy more than boys, achieving 94 percent accuracy as compared to 91 percent in boys, while boys focused on speed, achieving an average 16.1 words per minute, with girls averaging 13.6.

 

Though she said it’s too early to translate these findings into a new teaching method, Lawson said understanding these patterns could help teachers vary their instruction style based on a student’s behavior pattern.

 

“The most actionable [findings] right away are focused on individual students, and grouping the students whose learning needs are similar,” she said.

 

APT also examined D.C. Prep’s teacher observation program, in which teachers are rated based on teaching skills, classroom culture, instruction and planning. Very generally, teachers who scored high by “asking higher-order questions” — beyond simple recall — were linked to greater student progress, Lawson noted.

 

The data scientists also built an application D.C. Prep can use to track student progress and compare it to observed teaching traits, including a way to benchmark teacher scores.

 

Experts say it can be difficult to generalize whether D.C. Prep’s approach would work for other schools, since each is likely at a different stage in collecting data beyond standardized test scores, age and grade-point averages. Depending on a school’s resources, schools may collect data on the effectiveness of digital learning programs, or on which students need the most extra attention, said Frank Ganis, general partner at Gilfus Education Group, a consulting firm based in Washington.

 

For widespread educational change across school districts or states, Ganis said, “I think the goal is to collect the same type of data for all students.”

 

 

How hard is teaching? Here’s one answer to that question from an e-mail by a veteran seventhgrade language arts teacher in Frederick, Md., who says she is quitting because of what she considers students who don’t work, parents who want their children to have high grades no matter what, mindless curriculum and school reformers who insist on trying to quantify things that can’t be measured. The teacher asked not to be identified because she fears retaliation at her school.

 

The following are excerpts of a longer piece, which you can find online on the Answer Sheet blog at wapo.st/iwouldlovetoteachbut: It is with a heavy, frustrated heart that I announce the end of my personal career in education, disappointed and resigned because I believe in learning. . . . I worked hard to earn the title of “classroom teacher,” but I became quickly disillusioned whenmy title of teacher did not in any way reflect my actual job. . . . When I was in middle school, I studied Shakespeare, Chaucer, Poe, Twain, O. Henry — the founding fathers, if you will, of modern literary culture. Now, I was called to drag them through shallow activities that measured meaningless but “measurable” objectives. . . .

 

I resigned myself to the superficial curriculum that encouraged mindless conformity. I decided that if I was going to teach this nonsense, I was at least going to teach it well. I set my expectations high, I kept my classroom structured, I tutored students, I provided extra practice and I tried to make class fun. . . . I quickly rose through the ranks of “favorite teacher,” kept open communication channels with parents and had many students with solid A’s.

 

It was about this time that I was called down to the principal’s office. . . . She handed me a list of about 10 students, all of whom had D’s or F’s. At the time, I only had about 120 students, so I was relatively on par with a standard bell curve. As she brought up each one, I walked her through my grade sheets that showed not low scores but a failure to turn in work — a lack of responsibility. I showed her my tutoring logs, my letters to parents, only to be interrogated further. Eventually, the meeting came down to two quotes that I will forever remember as the defining slogans for public education: “They are not allowed to fail.” “If they have D’s or F’s, there is something that you are not doing for them.”

 

What am I not doing for them? I suppose I was not giving them the answers, I was not physically picking up their hands to write for them, I was not following them home each night to make sure they did their work on time, I was not excusing their lack of discipline. . . .

 

Teachers are held to impossible standards, and students are accountable for hardly any part of their own education and are incapable of failing. . . .

 

I was constantly prodded both inside the classroom and out by condescending remarks like, “It must be nice to have all that time off.” Time off ? Did they mean the five or less hours of sleep I got each night between bouts of grading and planning? Did they mean the hours I spent checking my hundreds of e-mails, having to justify myself to parents, bosses and random members of the community at large? Did they mean the time I missed with my family because I had to get all 150 of these essays graded and the data entered into a meaningless table to be analyzed for further instruction and evidence of my own worth? Did they mean the nine months of 80-hour work weeks, 40 of which were unpaid overtime weekly, only to be forced into a two-month, unpaid furlough during which I’m demeaned by the cashier at Staples for “all that time off ?” . . .

 

I got a new administrator who preached high standards and accountability, and I decided to try to hold my students to a standard once again. Combined with a brand-new curriculum that I had to learn basically overnight, I took the chance to set the bar high, especially when it came to the gifted and talented program. I was now teaching these “highly able learners,” and all of the training I received told me to challenge them, push them, take a step back in order to “tap the genius inside our schools.” So, I did. I created an intense environment that required students’ best work. I created opportunities for students to rise to the challenge. I provided choice and tapped creativity. And I required that students take ownership of their work and be proud of genuine effort. I felt like a “good teacher.” . . .

 

[But] I was lambasted by parents as being ineffective because their child had a B or a C. “S/he has always been an A student,” they screamed at me during frequent meetings. “How dare you give them a B?” Give them? Give them? . . .

 

My job is to be debased by an inescapable environment of distrust which insists that teachers cannot be permitted to create and administer their own tests and quizzes, now called “assessments,” or grade their own students’ work appropriately. . . . In a world where I am constantly instructed to “differentiate” my methods, I am condemned for using different resources than those provided, because if I do, we are unable to share “data” with the county and the nation at large. . . .

 

Originality, experimentation, academic liberty, teacher autonomy and origination are being strangled in ill-advised efforts to “fix” things that were never broken. If I must prove my worth and my students’ learning through the provision of a measurable set of objectives, then I have taught them nothing, because things of value cannot be measured. Inventiveness, inquisitiveness, attitude, work ethic, passion, these things cannot be quantified to a meager data point in an endless table of scrutiny. . . . I sample educator Kris Nielsen when I say: I would love to teach, but, as he said in his own 2012 resignation letter [from a North Carolina school system], “I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for which it is supposed to be responsible.” . . .

 

I would love to teach, but, as Nielsen wrote: “I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important.” . . .

 

I quit because I’m tired of being part of the problem. . . . Could I be part of the solution? Of course. But no one ever asks the teachers, those who are up to their necks in the trenches each day, or if they do, it is in a patronizing way and our suggestions are readily discarded. Decisions about classrooms should be made in classrooms. Teachers are the most qualified individuals to determine what is needed for their own students. Each classroom is different. It has a different chemistry, different dynamic, different demographic, and the teacher is the one who keeps the balance. He or she knows each student, knows what they need, and they should be the ones making the decisions about how to best reach them.