- Philanthropists award $100,000 grants to encourage blended learning in D.C. [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
- Henderson faces questions on at-risk funds, renovations
- High school graduation rates at historic high
Philanthropists award $100,000 grants to encourage blended learning in D.C. [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 28, 2014
A coalition of local and national philanthropists has awarded grants to six groups that hope to lift the achievement of the District’s low-income children with schools that emphasize individualized learning, including programs that will use a combination of online and face-to-face instruction.
Two of the winners of the Breakthrough Schools: D.C. competition are traditional schools — Wheatley Education Campus in Northeast and Columbia Heights Education Campus in Northwest — each of which submitted proposals to redesign their approach to teaching and learning.
The other winners, chosen from among 23 applicants, included a charter school, E.L. Haynes High School, and three groups seeking to establish new charter schools.
All six will receive $100,000 to help them flesh out their proposals over the summer, and they will be eligible for as much as $300,000 in additional funds to help launch their schools starting in 2015.
D.C. philanthropist Katherine Bradley, whose CityBridge Foundation is a major funding source for the education initiative and many others in the District, said the grants are part of a larger strategy to rapidly increase the number of “transformational schools.” Such schools are designed from the ground up to help poor children reach the same academic achievement levels as their more affluent peers.
School improvement usually is incremental and slow, Bradley said, adding that she believes the city can rapidly improve the lives of poor children by introducing 100 transformational schools in the next decade.
“Schools need to reach a very high bar for performance; simply improving is no longer enough,” Bradley said. “We have high hopes that these Breakthrough Schools winners are creating plans and demonstrating capabilities that should get them there.”
The grant program was meant to reward innovative ideas for “blended learning” through online and in-person instruction, but there is wide variation among the winners’ plans.
E.L. Haynes officials are seeking to redesign their school to solve two challenges.
First, it’s difficult to meet the wide range of needs among freshmen, some of whom are advanced while others are reading years behind grade level. Second, in a small high school with a traditionally structured day, it’s difficult to prepare students for the reality of college life.
Haynes will establish a “Red Shirt Academy” for ninth-graders who need intensive help to catch up. Teachers will use the year to find and plug holes in each student’s basic skills before the students are allowed to move on to the regular ninth grade.
Seniors will enroll in the College Access Academy, which will have a much higher teacher-to-student ratio and where students will do more of their learning online and in the community, often working independently. The goal is to ease students into learning the time management and self-motivation they will need to succeed in college.
E.L. Haynes principal Caroline Hill said the goal is not to ensure that students graduate within four years, but that they leave Haynes with the skills they need to make it all the way through college.
“We do have students that need five years,” Hill said. “How thoughtful can we be about preparing students to be in a class with 500 students where no one knows their name?”
The Columbia Heights Education Campus would redesign its staffing and schedule so students can take courses online — including through massive open online courses (MOOCs) — while spending more time off campus, completing internships and study-abroad opportunities for credit.
“It’s fantastic,” D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said. “I count CityBridge as an important partner in helping us to innovate.”
Two of the winners have charter school applications pending before the D.C. Public Charter School Board. They are Washington Leadership Academy, which would operate a lower school for ninth- and 10th-graders and a residential upper school for juniors and seniors. Upper school students would complete internships on Capitol Hill and help develop online tools to teach students across the country lessons in U.S. civics.
Monument Academy would be a weekday boarding school for high-risk students, especially students who are in the foster care system, and it would pair academics with an effort to meet the particular social and emotional needs of foster children.
Emily Bloomfield, a former charter board member who is leading Monument Academy, said the Breakthrough Schools grant will allow for travel to schools that are doing an excellent job serving similar populations. “It will be incredibly helpful in our planning year,” she said.
The final winner is a group seeking to open Montessori schools in the District and around the country and to establish a teacher residency program to address the shortage of trained Montessori educators.
CityBridge and the national Next Generation Learning Challenges expect to donate $6 million to fund 18 “breakthrough schools” by 2017. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also are contributing.
Henderson faces questions on at-risk funds, renovations
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 28, 2014
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson defended her proposed budget Monday during a four-hour D.C. Council hearing that repeatedly circled back to questions about how the school system plans to spend tens of millions of dollars meant to serve at-risk youth.
Lawmakers also pressed Henderson to explain why she has proposed to delay some school modernization projects and accelerate others, a move that has triggered protest among communities that had been counting on now-delayed renovations.
Henderson acknowledged the frustration and the gaps yet to be filled but said she’s proud of the spending plan, which includes an increase of more than $50 million in city taxpayer funds. It focuses on three priorities: strengthening middle schools, extending the school day at more low-performing elementary schools and boosting students’ satisfaction across the city.
“We’re making big investments to really reinvigorate a school system that has been decimated by a lot of individual decisions,” Henderson said. “We just can’t do everything at the same time.”
The school system received $44 million for at-risk students this year, funds aimed at helping close the city’s enormous achievement gap. The D.C. Council passed a law late last year that allocated the money to schools based on the size of their at-risk population.
The school system did not do that, Henderson said, because officials didn’t have enough time to plan for the shift and didn’t want to undercut investments they have made in prior years, including a promise last year to fund librarians and art and physical education teachers at every elementary school.
“Other school districts who have made this shift do it over two or three years,” she said, pledging to implement the new law more fully next year.
Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large), who wrote the new law on at-risk funding, pointed out that some relatively affluent schools are slated to see an increase in per-pupil funding next year while some high-poverty schools will see a decrease.
Anacostia High, for example, is expected to add nearly 100 students next year, but its budget would shrink. “It seems anathema to what we’re trying to do,” Catania said, adding that he will look for ways to add funds back to Anacostia.
Henderson said the school system expects to make major investments in improving high schools in fiscal 2016 after investing in elementary schools this year and middle schools next year.
She plans to reopen Spingarn High in Northeast as a vocational education hub that would offer courses in transportation, hospitality and information technology to students from the city’s traditional and charter high schools.
More than $60 million has been set aside to reopen Spingarn, but council members Monday expressed skepticism about that investment. Catania and David Grosso (I-At Large) both questioned whether it makes sense to open a new career-education center when so many other schools are desperate for renovation and many city high schools — including Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering next door to Spingarn — are half-empty.
“I just think maybe the timing is not right here,” Grosso said.
Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) pressed Henderson to justify her decisions to strip some schools of expected renovation dollars, including Johnson Middle School in Southeast, which lost $11 million in next year’s budget.
Henderson said she needed to balance the budget because of the rising cost of construction projects at some schools and overcrowding at others. Barry called that unacceptable, echoing parents who have complained that renovation decisions are unpredictable and seem politically motivated.
“I disagree vigorously with balancing the budget for other schools on the back of schools in Ward 8,” Barry said, pledging to fight to restore Johnson’s funds.
Council members dwelled only briefly on proposals to overhaul school boundaries and student-assignment proposals, which have been controversial since Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s (D) administration released them early this month.
Catania pointed out that the proposals contemplate costly initiatives, such as several new middle schools, and asked why officials released the proposals without first analyzing the effect they would have on the school system’s budget and future enrollment.
Henderson is not in charge of the overhaul, which Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith is leading. But Henderson said she believed the goal was to “figure out which were the ideas that resonate most with the community” and to enable a more focused analysis of those ideas.
“Doesn’t that seem a bit cart-before-the-horse?” said Catania, who has vowed not to adopt any of the proposals if he is elected in November. “None of these plans have any analysis nor are they sustainable from a financial perspective.”
High school graduation rates at historic high
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
April 28, 2014
Calling it “a profound milestone,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that the country has reached its highest graduation rate in history, with 80 percent of students receiving a diploma in 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
“As a country, we owe a debt of gratitude to the teachers, students and families whose hard work has helped us reach an 80 percent high school graduation rate,” Duncan said at a gathering hosted by America’s Promise Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit founded by former secretary of state Colin L. Powell. “But even as we celebrate this remarkable achievement, our students have limitless potential, and we owe it to all of our children to work together so they all can achieve at higher levels.”
Nationally, girls had a higher graduation rate, at 84 percent, while boys had a rate of 77 percent.
The data, collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, estimate the graduation rate by dividing the number of high school graduates in a class by the number of students who entered that class as freshmen four years earlier, with some adjustments made for transfers.
Despite the high-water mark of 80 percent in the class of 2012, disparities persist.
In many states, one-third of students from low-income families did not graduate. Black students had a 69 percent graduation rate and Hispanic students had a 73 percent rate, while 86 percent of white students and 88 percent of Asian students earned high school diplomas. English-language learners and special-education students had below-
average rates of 59 and 61 percent, respectively.
And graduation rates varied from state to state. For example, while 79 percent of students with disabilities graduated from high schools in Arkansas in 2012, just 33 percent did so in Louisiana. While 83 percent of English-language learners graduated on time in West Virginia, 24 percent graduated in Arizona.
Locally, Maryland and Virginia were above average at 84 percent and 83 percent, respectively. The District of Columbia had a graduation rate below the national average, at 59 percent.
It is not unusual for major cities to experience a higher dropout rate and lower graduation rate than states. One study found the graduation rate for the class of 2005 in the nation’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.
High school graduation rates are one measure of school success, and educators and policymakers have been trying for decades to decrease the number of high school dropouts.
Official statistics had long overstated the nation’s high school graduation rates, with the Education Department putting the average above 80 percent and some states reporting rates above 90 percent. States used dozens of different reporting methods, with some figuring into their rates those dropouts who later earned the equivalency certificate known as a General Educational Development diploma, or GED.
In 2005, the Education Department began publishing an official estimate of graduation rates, and all 50 states agreed to adopt the same method of calculating those rates by 2013.
The country needs to focus on the students nationwide who don’t graduate from high school, Duncan said.
“Let’s talk in concrete terms about who is behind those numbers,” Duncan said. “That 20 percent represents 718,000 young people, among them a sharply disproportionate share of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans” as well as special-needs students and English-
language learners, he said.
Those students without high school diplomas face a bleak life of “poverty and misery,” Duncan said.
“High school graduation may have once been a finish line, but today it is just a beginning,” Duncan said, adding that the nation needs to also concentrate on college graduation rates, which have been slipping.
A generation ago, the United States led the world in college graduation rates. But today, 11 other countries have surpassed the United States, where 43 percent of young people have a college degree, Duncan said.