FOCUS DC News Wire 2/11/2014

 

 

Education Secretary Arne Duncan paid a visit Monday to Southeast Washington’s D.C. Scholars Stanton Elementary to recognize the role that young City Year volunteers have played in helping spur the school’s transformation in recent years.

 

“Turning around a school is some of the hardest, most controversial and most important work in the country,” Duncan said before a group including City Year leaders, Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. “You guys together are doing something remarkable.”

 

Located in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and long known for chaotic classrooms, Stanton has become a success story in the three years since Henderson asked Scholar Academies, a Philadelphia-based charter school operator, to take over the school and turn it around.

 

Parents and teachers say that the school is now safe and calm, and the change is beginning to show up in student achievement: Since 2011, reading proficiency rates have doubled, from 10 to 20 percent, and math proficiency has quadrupled, from 10 to 42 percent.

 

Stanton teacher Sheryl Garner has experienced the transformation firsthand. “Before, I was stabbed with pencils, kicked and punched on a daily basis,” she said. “But I’m glad I decided to stick with it, because I’ve seen so much growth.”

 

Garner attributed the change to three things: school leaders’ attention to hiring staff members who dedicate themselves completely to their jobs; the advent of routine home visits by teachers, a relationship-building effort that drew praise from Duncan last year; and volunteers from City Year, a nonprofit organization that trains young people ages 17 to 24 to work with students who are having trouble with attendance, behavior or academics and who are most at risk of dropping out.

 

That one-on-one and small-group attention makes a big difference, Garner said, especially when class sizes are larger than one teacher can manage alone. “Having that extra body just really, really helps,” she said.

 

City Year volunteers have worked at Stanton for the past six years, but this year, the organization was able to increase the number of members by at least 50 percent, to 18, with a grant from the U.S. Education Department and the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps.

 

Across Washington, City Year has 156 corps members working in 13 D.C. public schools. Most volunteer for one year, but some stay on longer. Eight former City Year corps members have gone on to work in staff positions at Stanton.

 

“We’re included in everything,” said Adam Hiatt, a second-year corps member at Stanton. “It’s very easy to want to come back to a place where you feel like you’re making a difference.”

 

Stanton has received many extra resources to bolster its turnaround effort, including a $1.3 million federal School Improvement Grant that runs out this year. Henderson said her team is studying what has worked at Stanton and which of its additional resources should be given to other low-performing schools.

 

“We simply need to bottle this and figure out how to proliferate it all around the city,” Gray said.

 

 

WASHINGTON — Columbus McKinney is taking his fifth Advancement Placement course at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, undeterred even though he didn’t score high enough to get college credit on two of the AP classes he took previously.

 

McKinney said he thinks the extra workload is worth it no matter the grade on the final exam. “It prepares you for what it’s going to be like when you get to college,” the 17-year-old said during a break from his AP Physics course.

 

McKinney is part of a larger trend: The number of U.S. public school students taking Advanced Placement classes nearly doubled over the last decade. The class of 2013 took 3.2 million AP exams, according to a College Board report to be released Tuesday.

 

Advanced Placement exams, which started in the 1950s, offer a way for students to earn college credit while still in high school and are offered in 34 different subjects. The classes are designed to be rigorous and are graded in a uniform way, meaning students’ grades from one school can be matched up against those from another. Proponents say they help transition students to college and allow graduates to stand out in the college admission process.

 

Much of the expansion stems from an effort at the district, state and federal levels to make AP classes available to low-income and minority students. The report finds that the number of low-income graduates who took an AP exam has quadrupled in the last decade.

 

The College Board points out there’s room for more expansion: About 40 percent of public U.S. high schools don’t offer any AP classes. And nearly 300,000 students who were identified by standardized tests as having potential to succeed in AP graduated without taking the classes. It is reaching out directly to students identified as potentially ready for AP classes to encourage them to take them and has teamed with Google to get more female and minority students into AP science and math classes.

 

There are questions, though, about whether doors to AP classes have been opened too wide and whether schools are doing enough to assist students in them.

 

In 2013, about 57 percent of AP exams had a score of 3 or higher — the grade many colleges and universities require to award college credit — compared with 61 percent a decade earlier, according to the College Board. That means students did not score a 3 or higher on about 1.4 million exams.

 

Looking at it in another way, about 20 percent of graduates in 2013 earned a 3 or higher on an AP exam, compared with about 12 percent of graduates in 2003.

 

Research is unclear on whether there are long-term benefits to taking an AP class if the student fails, said Kristin Klopfenstein, executive director of the Education Innovation Institute at the University of Northern Colorado, who has studied the issue. Among those students, she suspects it’s only those who were on the cusp of passing who get much benefit.

 

Klopfenstein said from an equity standpoint, it’s good to increase the availability of AP classes. But students may not truly have “access” to the exams unless they’ve been given a quality education to prepare them for the class or extra support to help them succeed.

 

“Access is much more than about offering the courses, it’s about offering wrap-around support, so that kids who are coming in farther behind have a chance to take AP and actually be successful,” Klopfenstein said.

 

Philip Sadler, a Harvard University professor who has also studied AP outcomes, said that for some students coming in unprepared for AP level work, it would be like enrolling in an advanced French class without having taken a previous French class. “AP can be a really good thing for the right student,” Sadler said.

 

At McKinney’s high school, which is in an affluent part of Washington and has a diverse population from around the city, more than 20 AP classes are offered. About 600 students took an AP exam last year — about twice as many as a decade earlier. The doubling wasn’t an accident.

 

Principal Peter Cahall said when he arrived at the school about five years ago, he noticed that almost all the honors and AP classes were taken by white students. An effort was made to bring more students into AP classes if they had scored high enough on standardized tests to indicate they could do AP-level work. No student who wants to take an AP class is turned away.

 

“Sometimes you have to invite kids and say, you can do this,” Cahall said.

 

As the number of students taking the AP classes at the high school has doubled, the percentage of students passing the exams with a 3 or higher at his high school has remained consistent at a little less than 50 percent. Cahall said the school’s goal is to improve pass rates. With the assistance of a grant, the school is offering extra prep time and mock exams for the students on Saturdays.

 

In McKinney’s AP physics class, students excitedly surrounded teacher Angela Benjamin’s desk on a recent day as purple glowed from a plasma globe in the darkened classroom.

 

Benjamin said there’s no doubt in her mind that students benefit from her class even if they fail the AP exam. She said she became a believer about 10 years ago when two students who sat in the back of her class could orally answer all the questions, but didn’t pass the AP exam. She said she later learned they took physics and engineering in college.

 

“I don’t think either one of them would’ve done that without that class,” Benjamin said.

 

 

The D.C. Council's nod toward a scholarship program crafted and introduced by at-large member David Catania could mean the end of the long-running, federally funded DC Tuition Assistance Grant (TAG) program.

 

The tentatively-passed DC Promise Scholarship bill, which is currently unfunded and set for final approval next month, would provide low-income high school graduates up to $60,000 over four years of college. Upon passage, it could cost the city nearly $8 million in its first year and about $20 million each year afterward.

 

Catania, who asserts that the programs could coexist, specified that the scholarship funds not be used as tuition at TAG-eligible schools.

 

"We're not going to do anything that threatens TAG," he said. "And if, God forbid, anything happens to TAG, there is the will on this [governing] body to support it locally in addition to DC Promise."

 

More than half of TAG students come from low-income households, with 20,000 District students having been assisted with about $317,000 million in college assistance funding since the program was created by Congress in 1999.

 

While the national program offers students up to $10,000 per year to attend out-of-state public colleges, DC TAG also provides up to $2,500 per academic year toward tuition at private colleges and universities in the District and private historically Black colleges and universities and two-year colleges nationwide.

 

But D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has warned that the scholarship program could be a detriment to local TAG assistance. She said that in passing Catania's bill, council members would have to consider how much money, if any, should be set aside for TAG.

 

Norton, who reiterated her commitment to saving DC TAG, said the program has been at risk "ever since congressional appropriators caught wind of" Catania's legislation. She also said in recent correspondence to the council that if the District loses its program, the council would be held accountable to replace whatever funds are lost.

 

"I continue to encourage last dollar funding, if D.C. students are both to retain DC TAG funds and secure additional D.C. government funding," Norton said.