News Wire 2/20/2014

 

 

The D.C. Public Charter School Board has postponed its decision about whether to close Options Public Charter School in order to accommodate a request for a public hearing on the matter.

 

Options has been in turmoil since October, when the D.C. Office of the Attorney General filed a complaint alleging that three former managers of the school funneled millions of dollars meant for students to two for-profit businesses they owned.

 

The city charter board voted in December to take the first step toward revoking Options’ charter for fiscal mismanagement. The board been scheduled to take its final vote Wednesday evening on a proposal to revoke the charter but allow the school to continue operating through the 2014-15 school year.

 

But Josh Kern, the court-appointed receiver who is overseeing Options, has asked for a public hearing to discuss the future of the school and its students.

 

He had previously said he would not request such a hearing in order to avoid a prolonged period of uncertainty for students, parents and staff. But the proposal to keep the school open for another year “creates new concerns that warrant attention,” he wrote in a Feb. 5 letter to the charter board’s leaders.

 

Kern has argued that the school’s at-risk students — most of whom have behavioral or learning disabilities, or are homeless or in foster care — would be best served if Options is allowed to remain open under new management. City leaders have been in talks about the possibility of turning over operations of Options to D.C. Public Schools, at least for a year.

 

The charter board is working to schedule the public hearing, a spokeswoman said. After the hearing, the charter board has 30 days to make its final decision.

 

 

In January I wrote that I really didn't know what was going on at the D.C. Public Charter School Board right now. I was downcast because on the heels of voting to close Options PCS, in the midst of a heroic effort by court appointed Receiver Josh Kern to save the institution, the body correctly decided to close Arts and Technology, but without first securing a high performing operator to continue teaching its 624 Pre-Kindergarten to fifth grade students.

 

This morning it appears that one of these mistakes has been corrected and the other is in the process of being rectified.

 

Last night the PCSB approved the takeover of Art and Technology by KIPP DC. The Board disclosed that the soon to be shuttered charter had actually received three Requests for Proposals and selected KIPP as the winner. Excellent choice. KIPP announced that it intends to expand the school to go up to the eighth grade. All current Arts and Technology students are automatically admitted to the reinvented school.

 

Earlier in the day the Board revealed that it would organize a public hearing in its consideration on whether to close Options. Remember that after the unanimous vote to begin the revocation proceedings Mr. Kern stated that he would not challenge the ruling. But his frame of mind changed and he requested the public hearing when the Board balked at closing the school at the end of this term and instead quietly decided that it would be best to keep it going until the summer of 2015. Although this move gave the site's highly vulnerable students a place to go for another 17 months it also created new challenges for Mr. Kern in keeping the staff together in what is the definition of an unstable situation.

 

In the past the PCSB has mostly cast aside passionate constituent arguments against charter school revocation decisions. Let's hope that this singular school falls into a singular scenario.

 

In other news, the Pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade Perry Street Preparatory Public Charter School, the old Hyde Leadership PCS, was approved for another 15 years as long as it closed its Performance Management Framework Tier 3 high school at the end of the 2014 to 2015 school term. Finally, it was announced that board member Emily Bloomfield had resigned and this was her last meeting. Ms. Bloomfield is working on an initiative to provide education to teens and pre-teens living in foster care.

 

 

Start with the District’s enormous range of public school quality and reputation, add the city’s enthusiastic embrace of school choice, and here is what you get: Very few D.C. students attend their assigned public school, particularly outside of a few pockets west of Rock Creek Park and on Capitol Hill.

A map from a story that ran earlier this week about the District’s struggle with middle schools offers a glimpse of that phenomenon, showing the portion of public school students who lived in each school’s attendance area and attended the school last year.  Overall, only 24 percent of the students attended their home middle schools.

 

Across the city, only about a quarter of D.C students attend their assigned school. But that hardly begins to tell the whole story of how students scatter from their home neighborhoods to schools across the city, according to eye-opening data recently released by Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith as part of her effort to overhaul school boundaries.

 

On average, elementary-age kids living within one D.C. school boundary attend 64 different schools. But the diaspora is much broader in some neighborhoods, especially those served by long-struggling schools.

 

Of the nearly 550 children who live in the attendance zone for Aiton Elementary School in Ward 7, for example, only 148 — or 23 percent — actually attended Aiton last year.

 

The remaining 400 children living near Aiton attended 83 different schools, including DCPS and charter schools. And Aiton is hardly unusual: The majority of city schools attract fewer than one-third of the kids living within their boundaries.

 

Other data recently released by Smith’s office shows that students living east of the Anacostia River, in wards 7 and 8, tend to travel much further than their counterparts in other parts of the city.

 

The fact that so many students are already traveling in search of better schools makes the city’s effort to overhaul school boundaries and student-assignment policies more complicated. Parents are clearly willing to forgo their assigned schools if they don’t find them suitable.

 

At Ross Elementary, for example, only one of 47 fifth-graders who have graduated during the past three years have actually matriculated at Ross’s assigned middle school.

 

Ross parents asked Chancellor Kaya Henderson last year to change their destination middle school to Hardy Middle in Georgetown, arguing that their children would stay in the school system if they could stay together as a cohort.

 

Henderson denied that request in the fall, saying that such a decision would need to be part of the larger school boundary review. The decision drew protest from parents, who said that without change, children will continue to leave the school system.

 

“We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” said Jonathan Grossman, a parent leader at Ross Elementary, at a D.C. Council hearing last fall. “You can’t draw a line and magically expect people are going to follow that line and go to school.”

 

 

DCPS evaluates its teachers in a way that penalizes and discourages those who work in its lowest-performing schools. Its IMPACT system has been tweaked in the past, but as a teacher in a high-poverty school I hope that negotiations on a new teachers' union contract result in an IMPACT 3.0.

 

In part 1 of this post I discussed how the IMPACT system evaluates some teachers in high-poverty schools unfairly by basing their scores in part on standardized tests that don't accurately measure their students' achievement. Today I'll turn to another critical aspect of the system that discriminates against teachers at low-performing schools: classroom observations.

 

Each teacher is observed 5 times a year, 3 times by administrators at the teacher's school and twice by independent, expert practitioners called master educators. The observations are random and unannounced, and all observers use the same scoring rubric.

 

The fundamental question about these observations is what their objective is. If the aim is simply to generate a numerical average based on a rubric, the current system is ideal.

 

But if the intent is to support and develop teachers, as it should be, then conducting 4 or 5 random observations a year isn't effective. Observers aren't in the classroom often enough or long enough to provide meaningful feedback.

 

And a one-size-fits-all observation rubric isn't flexible enough to help teachers improve, especially new teachers. Observers need to be able to address the specific challenges faced by an individual teacher and the tools he can use to overcome them. Too often master educators are simply scoring teachers, not developing them.

 

In addition, the DCPS system doesn't explicitly instruct or model what a highly effective practice looks like, especially within a specific classroom. That means the observations are akin to assessing students based on a list of standards they have not been taught.

 

Jason Kamras, the DCPS Chief of Human Capital, pointed out in an email that "teachers have access to instructional coaches, professional development opportunities, and rigorous curricular resources to support them in improving their practice."

 

It's true that the instructional coach at my school has been tremendously helpful, and some professional development opportunities have proved useful as well. But in my experience, not enough of them are focused on classroom management techniques and students' social and emotional development, particularly in the context of high-needs schools. And a rigorous academic curriculum is of limited use without those things.

 

Just this week, DCPS announced some changes in its classroom observations. After meeting with master educators about their observations, teachers will be asked to complete an anonymous survey about the experience. In addition, in some of their reports master educators will suggest an area of focus for each teacher, recommend best practices, and include "resources and ideas about how to implement" those practices.

 

These could be steps in the right direction, but it remains to be seen whether they will translate into meaningful discussion and teacher development.

 

Classroom management

 

All teachers in high-poverty schools are at a disadvantage when it comes to classroom observations, but that's particularly true in cases where test scores don't figure into a teacher's evaluation. For that group of teachers, which is the majority, 75% of their final score is based on observations.

 

In the high-poverty neighborhood middle school where I teach, class sizes are 25 to 30. And it's common for each class to have between 4 and 8 students who either receive behavioral counseling or have been flagged as needing it.

 

As a result, teachers often have to focus on classroom management rather than content. And if a master educator lacks an understanding of the school context or views "redirection" as a sign of ineffective teaching, teachers in low-performing schools may be penalized.

 

The most damaging aspect of random classroom observations is that they discourage risk-taking. If teachers are walking around the school building in perpetual fear, their performance will undoubtedly suffer.

 

Classroom observations can be critical to ensuring best practices and providing meaningful professional support, but only if they're done well. A high-quality observation has a specific learning objective, such as classroom entry procedures. The observer must have time to model the technique and the teacher to practice it without risking a bad evaluation score. And observations must encourage risk-taking and innovation.

 

According to an independent report commissioned by the DC government, almost one-third (32.4%) of DCPS teachers in high-poverty schools left the school system during the 2010-11 school year. In contrast, only 13.2% of teachers in low-poverty DCPS schools left, and 9.2% of teachers in medium-poverty schools.

 

This isn't difficult to understand. The last thing a teacher needs is an evaluation system that punishes his or her decision to work in a low-performing school. On the contrary, the District needs a system that encourages teachers to sign up for the most challenging assignments, not avoid them.

 

Bonus system

 

DCPS and the Washington Teachers' Union have tried to provide that encouragement through a bonus system called IMPACT Plus. Under that program, teachers who are rated "highly effective" can earn as much as $25,000 a year in additional compensation if they work in one of the district's lowest-performing schools. The problem is that a "highly effective" rating is virtually unattainable in those schools, especially for teachers whose evaluations depend on test scores.

 

According to data compiled by the DC Committee on Education, the difference in the proportions of highly effective teachers in Ward 3, DC's most affluent neighborhood, and Ward 8, DC's most economically disadvantaged neighborhood, is immense.

 

During the 2011-2012 school year, 41% of Ward 3 DCPS teachers earned a "highly effective" final rating (175 of 426 total teachers). Contrast this to Ward 8, where only 10% of teachers earned that rating (54 of 536 total DCPS teachers).

 

But there's another stark contrast in that data: the disparity in student achievement between those sections of the District. Only 19% of students in Ward 3 scored below proficient on DC's standardized tests. In Ward 8, about 66% of students were in that category.

 

Education policy-makers say that IMPACT is working because it's identifying and terminating "ineffective" teachers. But this data poses an age-old dilemma: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does a teacher who is rated ineffective contribute to academic deficiencies in students, or do students' academic deficiencies contribute to the teacher's "ineffective" rating?

 

Let's hope an IMPACT 3.0 comes out of the WTU contract negotiations. We need an evaluation system that is fair and reasonable. We simply cannot afford a perpetual revolving door in our most vulnerable public schools.

 

 

The head of the nation’s largest teachers union said the rollout of the new Common Core academic standards has been “completely botched” in many states and that wholesale changes taking place in U.S. classrooms need an immediate “course correction.”

 

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, had been a steadfast supporter of the new K-12 academic standards that have been fully adopted by 45 states and the District since 2010.

 

But Van Roekel said Wednesday that after talking to about 10,000 teachers in listening sessions and focus groups over several months, he is convinced that implementation of the new standards in most of the country is chaotic.

 

“My greatest fear for the students of America is that we may lose the promise of the Common Core standards because we screwed up the implementation,” Van Roekel said.

 

Supporters of the Common Core say the 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. Education Department officials, in publicly supporting the Common Core, have said the standards are pushing communities and states to make long-needed improvements to their schools.

 

Nevertheless, dissatisfaction among the teaching ranks with the way the Common Core is being handled has built from a rumble to a roar, Van Roekel said. Seven out of 10 teachers the union surveyed said the switch to the Common Core was going poorly in their school districts, Van Roekel said.

 

In too many states, educators have not been given the training, time and classroom materials to properly make the shifts necessary to teach to the new standards, Van Roekel said. New curricula are being developed on the fly, and teachers lack textbooks and materials that align with the standards, he said. Most teachers say they have been shut out of the implementation process, Van Roekel said.

 

“It took us six years to develop the standards,” he said. “To think you can just roll it out, you can just do this without time, resources or support is crazy.”

 

Governors and state education officials need to slow down and work with teachers to help them thoughtfully enact the new standards, Van Roekel said.

 

Meanwhile, states are poised to administer annual standardized tests — as required by federal law — but new tests matched to the Common Core will not be ready until next spring.

 

That is forcing many states — including Maryland — to administer outdated exams in order to satisfy federal requirements to test every student in grades 3 through 8 in math and reading each year.

 

“It’s beyond me how anyone would ask teachers to administer tests that have no relation whatsoever to what they have been asked to teach,” Van Roekel said. “Why would you spend the resources and take the time away from instruction to do that?”

 

States should eliminate outdated tests that are not aligned with the Common Core, Van Roekel said.

 

He echoed an earlier call by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, for a moratorium on using new Common Core tests to evaluate teachers and make other accountability decisions for several years while schools transition to the new standards.

 

Though the Common Core has faced vocal opposition from political groups that characterize them as a federalized takeover of local education, and from academic groups that say the standards are either too lax or too challenging, Van Roekel made it clear that he still supports the idea of the standards.

 

“I’m saying it’s not working and we have to change what you’re doing, listen to the teachers and give them what they need to do this well,” he said.