- Arabic charter seeks to open Ward 3 school [FOCUS mentioned]
- City set to reopen bids for Grimke School site
- Catania urges creation of uniform curriculum as part of school reform
- With more data, parents can make better decisions about changes in education policy
Arabic charter seeks to open Ward 3 school [FOCUS mentioned]
The Northwest Current
Bt Katie Pearce
April 23, 2014
Plans for a new Arabic immersion school would bring the first program of its kind to the District, as well as a public charter school to Ward 3 for the first time in several years.
The new SPACE (short for Student Parent Achievement Center of Excellency) school would offer a full Arabic language immersion program from pre-K through eighth grade. The goal is to launch with 180 students in fall 2015. The D.C. Public Charter School Board received SPACE’s application last month, and will vote on whether or not to formally approve it in May. The board will hold a public hearing on the plans tonight.
SPACE’s board members declined to be interviewed for this article. According to the application, if the charter is approved, the school hopes to open at a site somewhere in Ward 3 with at least 10 classrooms and outdoor space. The application doesn’t mention specific locations, but it says board members are work ing with a real estate firm.
Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, noted that the area doesn’t offer any obvious spaces for new schools. “That’s a big reason why you don’t have any charter schools in Ward 3,” he said. “They would almost certainly have to find some sort of commercial space, and that’s expensive.”
Cane also said that charter school founders are generally “not particularly interested in Ward 3” because most focus on “serving kids who are more disadvantaged,” but he encouraged the idea of operating charters in every ward of the city.
This is SPACE’s second round with the D.C. charter board, after submitting an application in 2012 but ultimately not winning approval.
The latest application touts the concept as fitting for both its time and proposed location.
Arabic language programs have seen an “unprecedented jump” in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks, and Arabic is now “the fastest growing spoken language of study at U.S. colleges and universities,” the application notes. A public charter school in D.C. focused on this interest in the lower grades “will significantly increase the number of diplomats, linguists and informed citizens who can better promote democracy in an emerging Arabic democratic world,” the application says.
Cane said this trend “is not surprising,” given the research showing positive results from early language immersion, as well as Washington’s international bent.
As proposed, SPACE would initially include pre-K through fifth grade, then expand incrementally to eighth grade. For the first year, full Arabic immersion would take place only at the pre-K level, while other grades would have half their classes in Arabic and half in English before shifting later to full immersion.
For guidance, SPACE is turning to Wafa Hassan of Michigan State University’s “Arabic Flagship Program,” which is working nationwide to support K-12 Arabic education and develop a standard curriculum.
SPACE’s board members include Rhoi Wangila, executive director of the child-focused Ark Foundation of Africa, and Michael Kaspar, a senior policy analyst for the National Education Association.
In turning down SPACE’s application in 2012, the D.C. charter board cited a number of reasons — “most importantly, [that] the founding group could not clearly explain how its proposed Arabic language immersion program met the principles of total language immersion, which requires that academic content be delivered in the second language.” According to board meeting notes, SPACE’s proposal framed Arabic more as a second language than as a vehicle for content-area instruction.
This year, SPACE’s application is one of a batch of eight that also includes an adult education institute and a K-8 special-needs school. In years past, the charter board has typically approved only a fraction of the original applications.
“It’s a really grueling and difficult process, and they’re very careful about who gets a charter,” Cane said of the board. “They don’t want to be dealing with failed schools.”
The hearing for SPACE will take place today at 7 p.m. at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School. The board will vote May 19 on the applications, which are available at tinyurl.com/chartersdc.
City set to reopen bids for Grimke School site
The Dupont Current
By Katie Pearce
April 23, 2014
The stop-and-go process of redeveloping the old Grimke School in the U Street area is now lurching forward once again, with the city ready to open up the bidding next month.
The ripe real estate opportunity includes not only the former school building at 1925 Vermont Ave., but also a parking lot at 912 U St. currently used for a weekend flea market, as well as a smaller building behind Grimke on 9 1/2 Street. The smaller building, a former gym, now houses the African American Civil War Museum.
The city’s request for proposals should go out in late May, according to supervisory project manager Reyna Arrollo. She said her agency, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, hopes to receive proposals in August and, after evaluation and review, make a selection by the end of this year.
The drawn-out development process has already seen various starts and stops over the past half-decade. The entire time, one community group has been ardent in promoting daytime uses for Grimke, as opposed to adding to the area’s glut of nightlife venues and upscale housing.
“Let’s not bring another bar, restaurant, nightclub, or more high-end apartments,” said Jeffrey Willis, coordinator of the Grimke Redevelopment Community Working Group.
According to Willis, the Torti Gallas architecture firm has expressed interest in relocating its offices there from Silver Spring, and representatives from CityDance have also attended several meetings.
In addition to encouraging daytime activity at Grimke through potential office and retail space, the group is pushing two other primary goals: to limit the school building to its current size, rather than expanding it; and to encourage a mix of nonprofit and for-profit uses, ideally focused on arts and culture.
The group has brought up ideas like art gallery space, and a heritage center telling the story of U Street’s past as the “Black Broadway.”
This week the group won backing for its goals from the Design Review Committee of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1B. The full commission will vote on the issue on May 1, and its recommendations will be included as part of the city’s request for proposals.
The city expects the project to take the form of a “planned-unit development,” which grants developers extra zoning flexibility by requiring community amenities.
One of the only certainties about the development is that the African American Civil War Memorial Freedom Foundation will remain on the site. A covenant approved by the D.C. Council secures at least 10,000 square feet at Grimke for the foundation’s museum in the future.
The museum moved in 2011 from its storefront spot at 1208 U St. to Grimke’s former gym. The foundation’s memorial wall, honoring the over 200,000 United States Colored Troops soldiers who served in the Civil War, is located right in front of the Grimke building at the eastern entrance of the U Street Metro.
In a recent news release, Frank Smith, the museum’s founding director, wrote of the development deal as a “chance to provide a permanent endowment to the museum and the cause for which it stands.”
But Alorro contradicted rumors that the development request might require rent waivers for the Civil War museum. She said the request will ask development teams to work with the museum on the financing and build-out of its new space, but won’t include requirements regarding the rent.
The request will also not mandate that the Grimke site be used to house a public charter school. There has been confusion about whether this development process would have to conform to a federal law that requires vacant school buildings to be offered first to charter schools.
Ward 1 D.C. Council member Jim Graham, in a recent email to stakeholders, said the attorney general had cleared the city of this requirement for the latest go-around at Grimke.
“[Attorney General] Irv Nathan has issued a legal opinion that a second offer (the first was made several years ago) to charter schools for Grimke use was not required,” Graham wrote. “This permits the District to move forward with the general RFP for the development.”
Catania urges creation of uniform curriculum as part of school reform
The Northwest Current
By Graham Vyse
April 23, 2014
Creating a uniform school curriculum by grade should be the next major initiative of D.C.’s education reform, according to at-large D.C. Council member David Catania, an independent candidate for mayor and chair of the Education Committee.
Speaking Thursday at a budget hearing, Catania said the city needs to ensure that all students are taught the same material in each grade, regardless of which school they attend. To achieve this goal, Catania said, D.C. should follow the example of Massachusetts, a state with some of the nation’s top public schools.
“They have not shrunk from a rigorous curriculum that is uniform,” he said.
Catania suggested that the absence of standardized curricula in D.C. may be contributing to the city’s academic achievement gap, especially if students are arriving at high schools with dramatically varied levels of preparation.
Washington Teachers’ Union president Elizabeth Davis said this issue is frustrating for teachers, who end up constructing their own curriculum based on proficiency standards.
Teacher David Tansey cited his own experience at Dunbar High School. He said he supplements the material for his ninth-grade honors students because the curriculum assumes students are behind by two grade levels. “Basically, we just move forward in our current curriculum, so that you start with the new material, rather than the old material,” he said.
Tansey appeared to push back a bit on Catania’s ideas, saying he was “more inclined to say what teachers need is accurate data of what kids do know, because the expectation that kids will always advance at a linear pace is unrealistic.”
But Tansey and Catania agreed on the risks of promoting students who haven’t truly mastered material. “I think we ought to have end of year exams, especially in high grade levels,” Catania said. “To do that, it seems to me, you need some horizontal similarities in terms of how the courses are taught. Otherwise, passing algebra at Hart may look very different than passing algebra at Deal.”
D.C. Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.
With more data, parents can make better decisions about changes in education policy
Greater Greater Education
By Sandra Moscoso
April 24, 2014
Most government decisions are imposed from above, with ordinary citizens having only limited knowledge of the data that went into them. The current reassessment of DC's school boundaries and feeder patterns is different. But how can we ensure that all families are engaged in the process?
Government efforts to involve citizens in major changes seem to follow a predictable formula: big announcements, surveys, working groups, decisions, and more big announcements at the end, with the media reporting here and there on bits of information that are leaked or made public.
As a parent of children in the DC public schools, I have participated in more of these efforts than I can count. I'm always happy to share my opinions and experiences, but are they helpful if I don't know the whole context? Doesn't it make more sense to educate parents about how existing policies are actually playing out before asking what they think?
It's exciting to see various DC education agencies beginning to release more information that helps to do just that. We've gotten data from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), glimpses of data from DC Public Schools (DCPS), and most recently, the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Education (DME). These agencies are making data public not just for the sake of transparency, but to enlist the public's help in getting work done.
The most visible recent example is the boundary review process headed by the DME. It started with the usual formulaic elements: an advisory committee, surveys, working groups, and promises of engagement.
But now the DME has begun to infuse its conversation with the broader education community with more information and data.
A more meaningful discussion
That's important because the data enables parents and education stakeholders to contribute to the process in a more meaningful way. We can now react to policy questions based not just on our own or our neighbors' experiences, but also on how they play out at the ward and District-wide level. We can begin to understand the impact of proposed changes on all students, not just those who attend our schools or live in our neighborhoods.
The information packets that the DME distributed at working group meetings earlier this month contain a ton of rich data, including demographic projections and scenarios at the school, school cluster, and ward levels. It's clear that the DME's team and the advisory committee are carefully weighing not just today's situations, but also what our city will look like in 2017, based on projected numbers of children in different age groups.
Because the information has been published in a spreadsheet format, anyone with basic Excel skills can compare data across schools and wards. An enthusiastic Greater Greater Education reader recently weighed in on the DME's policy examples by citing this data.
Of course, access to data does not mean much for folks who are not equipped to work with it. This is where the media and other intermediaries come in. After the committee released proposed changes in elementary school attendance zones, the Washington Post was able to build dynamic maps using the proposed new boundaries.
The DME has also released an analysis of the actual flow of students in and out of various DC schools, at the elementary, middle and high school levels.
And because OSSE released the same data in February, Code for DC civic hacker Chris Given was able to create a dynamic view of actual feeder and destination patterns for each DCPS and DC charter school.
Given has also created an app called Our DC Schools that allows you to enter your address, see how the proposed boundary changes could affect you, and give feedback.
New Problems
But exciting as these data-related developments are, they also come with their own new problems. As I looked around at the participants in the Center City Working Group on April 5, I couldn't help but notice that the crowd was full of the usual suspects. I saw many parents and advocates who are engaged and data-savvy, or at least connected with data-savvy networks.
More working group meetings will take place this evening and Saturday. The DME has also set up a website where parents and other community members can participate in the conversation online.
But what about families who are not able to attend the discussions and working groups, or who may not even be aware of this effort? Will access to additional data help them? Not if they cannot reach the data or access support networks to help make sense of the data.
I don't have any ready-made solutions to this problem. But I imagine that we could reach many, if not all, of these families if DC's various education agencies worked together. Parent-driven community networks and perhaps the public library system and the Department of Parks and Recreation could also get involved.
The boundary review, and all efforts of this nature, should not be something that happens to us, but something that happens with us. How will you help?