- A fight is brewing over tests in the Common Core age
- Do we need another selective DCPS high school? A group at Dunbar thinks so [Paul and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
- Disadvantaged children can hurt achievement of others in their classrooms, study finds
- Killing the golden goose
A fight is brewing over tests in the Common Core age
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
February 12, 2014
Testing season begins soon in U.S. public schools, requiring millions of students to spend days answering standardized questions in math and reading, as mandated by an outdated federal law.
But this year is filled with tumult. Educators are questioning the purpose of testing, lawmakers in several states are pushing back against federal regulations, and a momentous standoff between California — the state with the largest number of public school students — and the Obama administration looms.
California is defying the requirements of No Child Left Behind, the federal education law that was set to expire in 2007 but hasn’t been replaced by Congress. The law says every state must give annual tests in math and reading to every student in grades 3 through 8 and report those scores publicly.
But California says it can’t administer the tests this year because, like much of the country, it has adopted new Common Core national academic standards and the corresponding exams aren’t ready.
Nearly everyone agrees that No Child Left Behind is broken, and the Obama administration has excused most states from various aspects of that law. But for Education Secretary Arne Duncan, watering down the law’s testing requirement is a bridge too far. He has threatened to withhold at least $3.5 billion in annual federal funding — money that California uses to educate poor and disabled children — if the state does not satisfy federal concerns.
“Testing is a critical component of accountability,” said Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the Education Department. “Parents and community members want to know how we can measure student growth and student learning. We hold central to the fact that testing is an essential component.”
California is grappling with a problem facing much of the country this year. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia are teaching math and reading differently as a result of new academic standards. Known as the Common Core, the K-12 standards require new curricula, materials and teaching approaches.
But the accompanying standardized tests won’t be ready until next year.
That leaves states in a bind, as federal law requires that they test students and report the scores annually. Without new exams, most states plan to dust off their old tests, make some changes and hope for the best.
“That’s like teaching kids about Greece and Rome and then testing them on ancient Egypt,” said Eric G. Luedtke, a Montgomery County teacher and state lawmaker who is trying to stop Maryland from administering its old tests.
Teachers and administrators are particularly alarmed because student test scores on standardized tests are increasingly used to make decisions that reward or punish schools and educators.
Recognizing that states will be giving tests that are out of sync with instruction, federal officials are permitting them to suspend accountability decisions based on this spring’s test scores. In the District and 36 states, some students will be field-testing questions for the new Common Core exams, and the federal government is excusing those students in some states from also having to take the old state tests.
But the Obama administration will not back down from the requirement that every state test every student in certain grades, even if that means giving old tests that don’t match the current curriculum.
Maryland lawmakers say the federal government should not force the state to administer an outdated exam.
“Put yourself in the place of one of my students,” Luedtke, a Democratic member of the state House of Delegates, said during testimony last week about his bill to stop the state from giving the MarylandSchool Assessment.
“You’re 11 years old,” he said. “You come to school, and you want to do well. You want to prove to your teachers that you’re smart and you pay attention and you’re working hard. You come to class one day, and they put a test in front of you, and you open the first page, read the first question, and you have no idea what they’re asking you to do. All you know is that you’re failing, and you feel stupid, and you feel all the work you’ve put in is for naught.”
The state will waste days of class time and about $7 million to give a useless test to 360,000 students, he said.
Jack Smith, Maryland’s chief academic officer, told lawmakers that Maryland teachers can still glean information from the old tests. “There is some value,” he said, adding that results can help teachers identify student weaknesses.
But on the whole, there is little overlap between old state tests and new Common Core material, said Andrew Porter, dean of the education school at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the issue.
In California, legislators overwhelmingly passed a law to retire the old tests.
“Holding students accountable for old exams that don’t measure where you want to go, there’s a disconnect there,” said Deborah Sigman, a deputy superintendent with the California Department of Education. “Those old tests don’t send the right message.”
States that are giving old tests make it difficult for teachers to fully implement the Common Core, said Daniel Koretz, an assessment expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “The really serious harm may have already been done,” he said. “Teachers have been getting an inconsistent message about what they’re supposed to be doing.”
In place of the old tests, California intends to give field tests, with sample questions, of the new Common Core exam. Because a field test is not designed to be a reliable measure of student achievement, California will not score the tests, and the results will not be publicly reported, as required by federal law. The state intends to use last year’s test scores to make decisions about school performance, essentially maintaining the status quo for this transition year, Sigman said.
The argument over what kind of test to administer coincides with a raging national dispute over the Common Core standards themselves.
Supporters say the Common Core standards emphasize critical thinking and analytical skills, as opposed to rote learning, and will enable U.S. students to better compete in the global marketplace.
The opponents include tea party activists who say the new 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.
Meanwhile, educators across the country are watching California’s standoff with Washington.
California officials say that beginning March 18, they will give the math and reading Common Core field tests to all 3.4 million students in the designated testing grades, at a cost of about $51 million.
The federal government has not resolved what to do about California, but federal officials said a decision could come as soon as this week.
Do we need another selective DCPS high school? A group at Dunbar thinks so [Paul and Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
February 12, 2014
A group of alumni and parents are proposing to turn Dunbar High School into a selective school. What's behind this idea, and does it make sense?
Last month, the Washington Post reported that the group had spent months discussing the idea of giving Dunbar greater autonomy, including the ability to select its students, and intend to put the proposal before DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
Those in favor of the plan see it as a way of restoring the school to its former glory. Dunbar, the first public high school for black students, served the African-American elite during the era of segregation. Some students even moved to DC in order to attend.
The school had high academic standards, and many of its teachers held advanced degrees. Its alumni, six of whom have appeared on postage stamps, include leaders in law, medicine, science, and government.
Two recent developments may have spurred the Dunbar group to action. One is the construction of a new $122-million building with plaques bearing the names of illustrious alumni—along with others left blank in hopes that future alumni will make their mark.
The other is the publication of a book, First Class, that traces Dunbar's history and contrasts it with the school's present struggles. Last year the school's on-time graduation rate was about 60%, and only about 20% of students were proficient in reading and math on DC's standardized tests.
The author, Alison Stewart—whose parents went to the school—admits in the book that Dunbar is now in many ways a typical high-poverty urban high school. But, she writes, the sight of what it had come to was "shocking given Dunbar's rich history."
Do we need another selective high school?
It's understandable that alumni want to restore the school's once stellar reputation. But sentiment aside, does the District need another selective high school? DCPS already has 6 such schools with a combined enrollment of about 4,000 students. (Neighborhood high schools, which must take all comers, enroll about 7,000 students, and another 6,400 attend charter high schools.)
It's true that the two most selective DCPS high schools, School Without Walls and Banneker, get far more applicants than they admit. Last year Walls, in Foggy Bottom, received over 1,000 applications for a class of 130 to 150, according to a spokesperson for the school.
But a selective Dunbar would be more likely to draw students from the applicant pool for Banneker, in Columbia Heights near Howard University. It's not clear how different Banneker's applicant pool is from that at Walls, but Banneker's student body is 85% black and 60% low-income. Walls, in contrast, is 45% black and only 17% low-income.
Banneker received about 700 applications last year and, like Walls, ended up with a class of 150, according to a school employee who identified herself as Ms. Francis. Those figures, standing alone, seem to indicate that another selective school is needed.
But Francis also said that Banneker takes all applicants who meet the school's qualifications, which are based on grades, test scores, teacher recommendations, and an interview. (Unlike Walls, it has no entrance exam.) "If all the applicants were qualified," Francis said, "we would find a way to take them all."
So are there enough "qualified" students to fill up Dunbar, which has a capacity of 1,100, as well as the existing selective schools? No doubt many students apply to both Banneker and Walls, along with another application-only school, McKinley Tech, which is almost as selective as Banneker. So the applicant pool isn't even as large as it appears.
Dunbar would probably end up offering admission to students who, rather than being truly gifted or advanced, are the ones who show up for school, do the work, don't cause trouble, and aren't classified as special ed or English language learners.
Clearly, those kids deserve every chance they can get, and it would probably be easier to educate them if they were in a school by themselves. But once those kids are gone, the neighborhood schools will end up with higher concentrations of the most challenging students.
Charter schools are sometimes accused of "cream-skimming," but the argument actually applies with greater force to selective public schools. They have the legal right to skim the cream, whereas by law charter schools must admit all applicants or, if they're oversubscribed, hold a random lottery.
In fact, according to the Post, the Dunbar group initially considered turning the school into a charter. It's not clear why they decided against that, but perhaps it's because they knew they wouldn't be able to select their students.
School turnaround without selectivity?
So, what to do with Dunbar? One possibility would be to give the Dunbar group much of what it's asking for, but just not the right to be selective in admissions. According to the Post, the group is also seeking more autonomy for the school in hiring and spending decisions.
Freedom from DCPS restrictions, including at least some teachers union requirements, might help turn the school around. That was the theory behind the move some months ago to give chartering authority to DCPS in addition to the Public Charter School Board, which is now the only body in DC with the power to create charter schools. That initiative seems to have died, at least for now, but it's possible Henderson could achieve much of the same objective administratively.
But just giving a school more autonomy is no guarantee it will change for the better. You need a strong leader who knows what it takes to reinvent a school's culture. And it's possible Dunbar Principal Stephen Jackson fits the bill.
In the book First Class, he's quoted as telling a group of Dunbar alumni that he had "already turned around two schools in New York" before coming to Dunbar. Stewart is more cautious, saying that at one of them, a violence-plagued high school in Mount Vernon, Jackson introduced turnaround strategies that "met with varying levels of success."
Another possibility would be to bring in an outside partner to turn the school around. DCPS has done that at Stanton Elementary in Ward 8, and the results are promising. But DCPS tried a similar experiment at Dunbar itself under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee that ended in disaster, so the school may be wary of embarking on that path again.
Or the school could apply to the Public Charter School Board to become a charter. There's at least one precedent for that: Paul PCS in Ward 4 used to be Paul Junior High. Although it was probably never as low-performing as Dunbar, it's now one of the District's highest-performing charters and is adding a high school.
A possible model
It's not easy to turn around any low-performing school, and high schools are the toughest. Students come in years below grade level, with sometimes dangerous behaviors. No doubt it's far less challenging when a school can select its students.
But perhaps it can be done. One model to look to is Thurgood Marshall Academy (TMA), a charter school in Anacostia that is the District's highest-performing non-selective high school. Its demographics aren't all that different from Dunbar's, with 80% of its students low-income as compared to Dunbar's 99%.
TMA has some advantages that Dunbar may never have, including private contributions from a number of DC law firms. And it's a school that started from scratch, not one that needed to be turned around. But even if Dunbar achieved only a fraction of TMA's success, it would be doing far better than other neighborhood high schools.
Dunbar may never recapture its old academic glory. That was partly an artifact of segregation, and in many ways Dunbar's former role in the black community is now played by Banneker. But if Dunbar could show other high-poverty urban schools how to turn themselves around without excluding their toughest students, it could once again be a beacon of hope.
Disadvantaged children can hurt achievement of others in their classrooms, study finds
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
February 13, 2014
Large numbers of low-income children who begin formal schooling with many disadvantages - poor medical care, homelessness, an uneducated mother, for example - not only struggle with schoolwork but hurt the achievement of other children in their classrooms, according to a new study.
A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania studied more than 10,000 children who were enrolled in public schools in Philadelphia from kindergarten through third grade. They found that in schools with a high concentration of children with “risk factors,” the academic performance of all children - not just those with disadvantages - was negatively affected.
For example, researchers found that children who were homeless or mistreated disrupted their classrooms, pulling down reading achievement and attendance rates among children who were not homeless or mistreated. Along the same lines, schools filled with many students who did not receive adequate prenatal care had overall poor reading achievement, even among those children who did get prenatal care.
Led by John Fantuzzo, the peer-reviewed study was published last week in Educational Researcher.
The researchers created a sophisticated data system that combined information not just from the Philadelphia public schools but from a range of social service agencies and other public sources, to examine the risks and factors that affected thousands of children, even dating back to before they were born.
Fantuzzo’s research suggests that the national movement that holds schools accountable by tracking the academic performance of children by subgroups - defined by race, income, disability and whether English is a first language - may be too blunt and doesn’t recognize that “at risk” students can affect their peers. A better approach to accountability would be to target support and interventions to certain “at risk” children, so that the entire school could benefit, the researchers said.
Killing the golden goose
The Economist
February 15, 2014
OF THE 658 schools in Chicago, only 126 are charter schools—publicly funded but independently run and largely free of union rules. Fifteen more are due to open this year. More notable, though, is that four of the most recently-approved charters are in areas where the city recently decided to close 49 public schools—the largest round of such closures in America’s history.
Most of the closed schools served poor black children, and were in parts of the city with a shrinking population. The city government argued that these schools were under-used, and that closing them would save $233m that could be reinvested. So it has been: in new science labs, computers, wireless, libraries, art rooms and air conditioning in the charters that took in children from the closed schools.
Charters have worked well in Chicago. Most parents like them, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education are behind them. The Noble Network, which already runs 14 charter high schools, has just been given permission to open two new ones. Around 36% of the 9,000, mostly poor, children enrolled with Noble can expect to graduate from college, compared with 11% for this income bracket city-wide.
A 2013 study by Stanford University found that the typical Illinois charter pupil (most of them in Chicago) gained two weeks of additional learning in reading, and a month in maths, over their counterparts in traditional public schools. One city network of charters, Youth Connection, is credited with reducing Chicago’s dropout rate by 7% in a decade. Overall, however, the city’s public schools are in a sorry state: 51,000 out of 240,000 elementary-school pupils did not meet state reading standards in 2013.
Some will always argue that charters cream off the brighter children and leave sink schools, deprived of resources, behind. The teachers’ unions hate charter schools because they are non-unionised. So they remain a rarity nationwide, with only 5% of children enrolled in them. But a PDK/Gallup poll last year found that 70% of Americans support them. Small wonder: a study of charter high schools in Florida found that they boosted pupils’ earning power in later life by more than 10%.
Intriguingly, alongside the growth in popularity of charter schools, support is weakening for the sorts of restrictive labour rules that have long been demanded by teachers’ unions in public schools. A survey in 2013 by the Chicago Tribune and the Joyce Foundation found that locals want good teachers to be paid more and the least effective to be shown the door. Almost half of them thought teachers should not even be allowed to strike. Most also wanted it to be easier for charters to expand, especially in areas with bad schools.
According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), enrollment has grown by 80% in the past five years. The keenest cities are New Orleans (79% of children in charters), Detroit (51%) and the District of Columbia (43%). Newark is keen to expand its system. Los Angeles and New York, the biggest school districts, are enrolling the largest numbers.
Or they were. But New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, a union-backed Democrat, wants to hobble charters. First, he intends to curb their growth. On January 31st Carmen Fariña, his schools chancellor, announced a plan to divert $210m earmarked for charter schools to help pay for pre-kindergarten teaching. She also announced that, in future, every expansion plan will be reviewed—even those that are long settled, such as the plan of Success Academies, with the largest network in the city, to open ten more schools in August.
Mr de Blasio wants to charge charters rent if they are sharing space with the 1.1m pupils in district schools. Because charters receive no state funding for facility costs and rents in the Big Apple are so high, Michael Bloomberg, Mr de Blasio’s predecessor, allowed them free use of under-utilised space in traditional public schools. Of the 183 charters in New York City, 115 are “co-located”, sharing canteens, libraries and gyms. If they were suddenly charged rent, many would struggle. The 68 charters not sharing space with a district school have to fork out an average of $515,137 for facilities each year. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank, calculates that charging rent could force 71% of co-located charters into deficit.
These new policies are likely to be unpopular. New York City’s charter schools generally outperform their neighbouring district schools. In some cases charters have not merely closed the racial achievement gap, but actually reversed it. Most New Yorkers want more of them.
Parents, particularly those in high-risk areas, want choice. Demand for charter-school places outstrips available slots; entry is by lottery, and some 50,000 children are on waiting lists. Before the election, 20,000 parents, children and teachers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall in support of charter schools. Many in the charter world hope Mr de Blasio will back down, though the rhetoric from City Hall is not encouraging.
As controversy swirls, pupils in Bronx 2, a charter school in the South Bronx, are getting on with their education. Some are step-dancing. Down the hall, seven-year-olds lead group discussions in reading class. One little fellow ably explains what the word “regret” means. Bronx 2, part of the Success Academies network, serves black and Latino children from mostly low-income families. Its pupils did extraordinarily well in the 2013 state examinations—97% passed mathematics and 77% passed English. The school ranked third in the state, even beating children in well-heeled Scarsdale