FOCUS DC News Wire 1/31/2014

 

 

Charter Board Partners announced yesterday that it is expanding to Washington State. I interviewed the founders of CBP, Carrie Irvin and Simmons Lettre, last November during which they announced plans to open offices in cities across the United States. The effort is being supported by a $500,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, funds that will also be used to create a national membership program available to charter school boards wherever they are located. The growth of Charter Board Partners is also being backed by the NewSchools Venture Fund and the Walton Family Foundation.

 

The timing of this news could not be better. Washington State voters gave the green light to legislation allowing the formation of charters just over a year ago. Within the last seven days the first charter school was approved, and 12 other applications will be considered next Thursday. Can you imagine the learning curve for this local movement and their governing boards?

 

The growth of charter schools in America has been explosive. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools estimates that 2.5 million children this school year will receive their education in a charter. This statistic represents an 100 percent increase since only the 2008 to 2009 term. With so many students and families now taking advantage of these alternative schools it will become crucial that they demonstrate they are worth the financial investment. Charter Board Partners, by strengthening the governance of these non-profits, is making a significant contribution to proving their value in raising academic achievement. Now the only question is whether Friends of Choice in Urban Schools will follow CBP's lead in providing public policy support wherever these schools are found?

 

 

This week's DC Council hearing on school boundaries and feeder patterns gave the public some clues to the kinds of changes Chancellor Kaya Henderson has in mind for DCPS middle schools as she works on a plan to improve them.

 

The ongoing review of how DC students are assigned to public schools has generated a lot of anxiety. With a number of low-performing elementary schools now on the upswing, parents are focusing on the state of DCPS middle schools. That's the point at which many families have either been leaving the system or competing to apply for out-of-bounds spots at one or two desirable options.

 

Appearing at an education committee hearing on Monday, Henderson made no commitments to any particular package of reforms. But her exchanges with Councilmembers point up some of the questions she's grappling with as she devises a middle school plan she has promised to incorporate into her budget proposal for the 2014-15 school year.

 

Here are two of the issues that came up. We'll take up some of the others in another post.

 

Timing and the pace of planning

 

At a previous hearing in November, Catania chastised Henderson for not already having a plan in place to improve middle school quality. (At Monday's hearing, he also pointed out that much of the anxiety surrounding the boundary review process would disappear if schools were of the same quality across the District.) He gave Henderson a deadline of mid-December to come up with a plan.

 

Instead, Henderson responded with a letter outlining the system's "measured approach." The overarching DCPS plan, she said, was this: First, improve the quality of teachers. Second, align the curriculum to the Common Core State Standards. Third—this year—standardize elementary school offerings. Fourth—next year—do the same thing for middle schools. (High schools will be the focus the year after that.)

 

Catania and others have expressed impatience with this deliberate pace. A parents' group in Ward 6 has complained that there's already a DCPS-approved plan to improve that area's middle schools and wants to know why it can't just be implemented. Ward 5 parents have questions about another middle school initiative there, apparently stalled in part because of concerns about attracting students.

 

Catania has urged that DCPS beef up the academic offerings at Hardy Middle School in affluent Ward 2, which draws almost 90% of its students from other neighborhoods, many of them from Wards 7 and 8. If more neighborhood families could be drawn to Hardy, it would relieve the pressure on the overcrowded Deal Middle School in Ward 3, which is currently the only DCPS middle school that is in high demand.

 

But Henderson prefers a District-wide approach. These "one-off" improvements, she said at the hearing, would lead to "inefficiency" and the "disproportionality that forced us to close schools last year." In other words, if you put desirable options at some schools and not others, you'll end up with an exodus out of the unimproved schools and into the improved ones.

 

As evidence that the across-the-board approach eventually works, Henderson pointed to the fact that some previously undesirable elementary schools, such as Powell and Bruce-Monroe, now have students "flocking to them." She also pointed to some middle schools that are seeing increases in enrollment, including Jefferson in Ward 6 and Hart in Ward 8.

 

There may be another reason for Henderson's District-wide approach: making improvements at some middle schools and not others might also produce negative political consequences in the areas that get left out. But by holding off on individual changes, Henderson may lose parents who already have their kids enrolled in neighborhood elementary schools that are improving and want a high-quality middle school option immediately, if not sooner. It also seems that she's reneging on, or at least delaying, some plans that DCPS set in motion years ago.

 

Cooperation between DCPS and charters

 

Henderson waded into this subject with some apprehension, noting that she got "clobbered" when she suggested at a previous hearing that DC could "funnel" some students into charters for middle school. This time, however, she got a warmer reception, at least from Councilmember Tommy Wells.

 

Wells made it clear that, like Henderson, he sees DCPS and charter schools as part of a common fund of public schools for District families to draw on. When a student leaves a DCPS school for a charter school, he said, it doesn't have to be viewed as DCPS's "failure." For the student that ends up with a high-quality free education, it's a success.

 

Against that background, he asked whether the committee that is currently reviewing boundaries and feeder patterns is considering patterns that would include both traditional public and charter schools.

 

"That is certainly on the table," said Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, who also appeared at the hearing and who is chairing the advisory committee. (The committee may need to get an additional table, considering how many things Smith said were on it.)

 

Smith issued one caveat: While the mayor has the authority to change school boundaries, and Henderson has control over feeder patterns, neither of them directly controls charter schools. Smith indicated that the Council might need to step in before cross-sector feeder patterns could be implemented.

 

Henderson said she's been in conversations with charter schools about this kind of cooperation, including the possibility that a new language-immersion charter middle and high school might give a preference to DCPS students coming out of elementary-level language immersion programs. (DCPS has no dual-language middle or high schools.) While there's no agreement with the school on this yet, Smith said the advisory committee is also looking into the possibility.

 

More generally, Henderson said that DCPS has "learned some lessons" from charters, but she acknowledged that the system "still struggles with" some things that charters seem to do better.

 

Catania, who did some of the "clobbering" the last time DCPS-charter cooperation came up, made it clear that he had some cross-sector cooperation of a different kind in mind. He urged Henderson to go talk to the head of KIPP DC's KEY Academy middle school and ask him how they manage to achieve impressive results with a high-poverty student body. KEY, he said, is second only to Deal in student achievement among District middle schools.

 

Henderson said she would do that. That's a fine idea, but she probably already has a pretty good sense of what KIPP schools do to get their results. The problem, in a system as large and unwieldy as DCPS, is more likely to be the implementation.

 

DCPS has been trying to beat high-performing charter schools for years. And while the attempt has led to some improvements, particularly at the elementary level, it hasn't yet worked for middle schools. Maybe instead of trying to beat them, it's time—at least in some areas—to join them.

 

 

Teachers’ union officials in 2010 directly e-mailed D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson telling her that the principal of a D.C. elementary school had reported seeing employees cheating on a city-issued test, according to e-mails obtained by the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request.

 

The e-mails — which offered no specifics about the allegations and said the principal’s claims were uncorroborated — show that Henderson quickly referred the matter to the school system’s then-chief of accountability, Erin McGoldrick, sending an e-mail about the matter less than two hours after she received the report. Henderson asked McGoldrick to be in touch with union leaders about the allegations and wrote to the union official: “Thanks for alerting us.”

 

McGoldrick replied, writing that the school system had already been informed of allegations at the school, Northeast Washington’s Noyes Elementary, and was in the midst of finalizing an investigation.

 

It’s not clear from the e-mails — in early November 2010 — whether McGoldrick knew that the allegations the union officials forwarded were new and had occurred only the day before; the union officials’ e-mails don’t specify a date. At the time, the school system was in the midst of investigating older cheating allegations at Noyes.

 

Adell Cothorne, the principal of Noyes at the time, left the school in 2011 and went on to file a whistleblower lawsuit claiming that school system officials ignored her efforts to raise an alarm about cheating.

 

Cothorne said that in 2010, she immediately reported the alleged cheating incident by phone to two central office administrators, who never investigated it. Henderson disputed that account at the time, saying there was no record that Cothorne had reported any such incident to school system officials.

 

The e-mails show instead that union officials contacted Henderson, and that union officials also investigated. Clay White, who was then the union’s chief of staff, said the next day that union leaders directed two field representatives to fully investigate the matter, according to an e-mail White sent to Henderson, McGoldrick and others.

 

The whistleblower suit prompted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, which did not find evidence to support Cothorne’s claims. Cothorne withdrew the case last year.

 

Cothorne told the Associated Press that the union’s 2010 e-mail exchange with Henderson shows that officials didn’t take cheating seriously because they didn’t follow up with her to ask what she had seen. School system officials said they take every cheating allegation seriously, and pointed out that Noyes has been the subject of multiple investigations during the past several years.

 

“It is perhaps the most investigated school in the city,” Pete Weber, the school system’s chief of data and strategy, said in an interview Thursday. Weber said that the school system investigated Cothorne’s claims when they became public in 2013 and found no substance to them.

 

Noyes and its fast-improving test scores became a model for success during the tenure of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. But the school came under scrutiny after a 2011 USA Today investigation found an unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures at Noyes and more than 100 other schools in the city.

 

Educators’ jobs and merit bonuses depended on improving test scores, and between 2007 and 2009, some schools saw huge increases that later reversed after test security was tightened.

 

Several employees have been fired for cheating at Noyes, but investigators have said they did not find evidence of the widespread cheating suggested by USA Today’s report.

 

 

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) used an executive order to strip the name “Common Core” from the state’s new math and reading standards for public schools. In the Hawkeye State, the same standards are now called “The Iowa Core.” And in Florida, lawmakers want to delete “Common Core” from official documents and replace it with the cheerier-sounding “Next Generation Sunshine State Standards.”

 

In the face of growing opposition to the Common Core State Standards — a set of K-12 educational guidelines adopted by most of the country — officials in a handful of states are worried that the brand is already tainted. They’re keeping the standards but slapping on fresh names they hope will have greater public appeal.

 

At a recent meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of the organizations that helped create the standards, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) urged state education leaders to ditch the “Common Core” name, noting that it had become “toxic.”

 

“Rebrand it, refocus it, but don’t retreat,” said Huckabee, now the host of a Fox News talk show and a supporter of the standards.

 

The changes are largely superficial, giving new labels to national standards that are taking hold in classrooms across the country. But the desire to market them differently shows how precarious the push for the Common Core has grown, even though the standards were established by state officials with bipartisan support and quickly earned widespread approval, including the endorsement of the Obama administration.

 

Supporters say the standards emphasize critical thinking and analytical skills, as opposed to rote learning, and will enable American students to better compete in the global marketplace.

 

But the wholesale changes in K-12 education that have come with the standards have provoked a raft of critics. Opponents include tea party activists who say the Common Core standards amount to a federal takeover of local education and progressives who bristle at the emphasis on testing and the role of the Gates Foundation, which has funded the development and promotion of the standards. Some academics say the math and reading standards are too weak; others say they are too demanding, particularly for young students.

 

Across the country, teachers are struggling to revamp their lessons; states are hastily working to adopt standardized tests tailored to the Common Core; and parents are left to wonder about all the changes taking place in the classroom.

 

Now, with new names, the idea that the standards are “common” might not be apparent.

 

“You got a whole bunch of politicians, increasingly cross-pressured between activists who don’t want this and the obvious imperative that we have to improve our public schools,” said Andrew Rotherham, a former Clinton White House aide and a co-founder of Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving education for low-income students. “The anti-Common Core folks clearly have the momentum right now, so politicians are trying to figure out ways to address the politics of this without tossing it out the window.”

 

In each case, the new name is designed to impart a local flavor to the standards. One of the main criticisms of the Common Core is that national standards are replacing homegrown benchmarks.

 

“Here’s what we’re going to ensure: These are Florida standards,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) told a gathering of state GOP officials this month. “They’re not some national standards; they’re going to be Florida standards. This is our state. We’re not going to have the federal government telling us how to do our education system.”

 

Also this month, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who is facing reelection, told a gathering of Republican women: “We don’t ever want to educate South Carolina children like they educate California children. We want to educate South Carolina children on South Carolina standards, not anyone else’s standards.”

 

Christopher Johnson, a branding expert, doubts that new names will quell opposition to the Common Core.

 

“It’s something that might be politically expedient in the short term,” said Johnson, who writes the Name Inspector blog. “They might succeed in bamboozling people who are opposed to the idea of nationwide standards by giving them local names. . . . But I think it’s skirting around the issue.”

 

Sponsored by a group of governors and state education officials — with the endorsement of the federal government and funding from the Gates Foundation — the Common Core standards are designed to prepare students for careers or college at a time when many high school graduates lack the necessary skills. Recent studies have found that as many as 40 percent of first-time undergraduates need at least one remedial course in English or math when they arrive at college.

 

In a country with a long tradition of local control over education, the Common Core standards are a sharp departure. They mark the first time that nearly every state has agreed to a common set of skills and knowledge.

 

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have fully adopted the standards, which are being implemented in classrooms across the country. Maryland is one of the states that have adopted the standards, while Virginia is one of the few that have not. The Common Core standards are not a curriculum; it is up to each state to decide what and how to teach.

 

The goal is for all students to possess certain “common” skills by the end of each grade so that a first-grader in Maryland will acquire the same skills as a first-grader in Maine or Montana. New standardized tests, which all participating states will be giving by next school year, are intended to offer a way to compare student performance across state lines so that parents, students and public officials can better measure how their school systems are performing relative to the rest of the country.

 

The pushback in Florida illustrates how quickly opposition developed. The state adopted the standards in 2010, in no small part because of the influence of former governor Jeb Bush (R), one of the nation’s most outspoken champions of the Common Core. Florida became a leader in the effort by two groups of states to develop tests aligned with the standards — work funded by the Obama administration — and Florida classrooms have already made the shift to the new benchmarks.

 

But Bush’s successor, Scott, has faced growing pressure from conservatives within his party to abandon the standards. In November, Scott, who is facing reelection this year, pulled Florida from the group of states writing the Common Core tests. He said Florida will prepare its own tests instead. Then he directed state education officials to hold hearings on the standards and suggest revisions.

 

Florida’s Education Department recently unveiled 98 proposed changes to the way the state will implement the Common Core standards, such as requiring that cursive writing be taught in elementary school. Most of the changes appear to be on the margins, leaving the standards largely intact.

 

State Rep. Janet Adkins (R), who chairs a K-12 subcommittee in the Florida House of Representatives, proposed deleting “Common Core” from official references to the standards. She said she wants to drop “Common Core” because it refers only to math and reading standards and the state also has requirements for science, social studies, fine arts and other subjects.

 

“We simply are saying we don’t need to have a different name for a subset for our standards,” Adkins said. “We will refer to all our standards under one name.”

 

She declined to say whether she thinks the Common Core standards are good for Florida students, but she did say the revisions proposed by state education officials will be an improvement.

 

Debbie Higginbotham, a Jacksonville mother of six and co-founder of Florida Parents Against Common Core, said no amount of rebranding will ease her concerns.

 

“What they’re trying to do is pull the wool over the eyes of regular parents who are not as engaged,” said Higginbotham, who is home-schooling three of her children to avoid the Common Core. “They’re trying to say these are Florida standards when they’re not.”