- Maya Angelou inspired students at D.C. schools that bear her name [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
- The battle over D.C. public schools [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
- KIPP DC begins work on new high school near Ivy City [KIPP DC PCS]
- Common standards for nation’s schools a longtime goal
Maya Angelou inspired students at D.C. schools that bear her name [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 9, 2014
Poet and memoirist Maya Angelou’s death late last month triggered a torrent of appreciations for her life from public figures, including President Obama, Oprah Winfrey and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
But Angelou touched plenty of people whose names are not widely known, including hundreds of students at a D.C. charter school that bears her name.
James Forman Jr., a co-founder of the Maya Angelou Public Charter School for court-involved and at-risk teens, recalled in a recent essay how the writer not only agreed to lend her name, but also developed a real relationship with students during many annual visits.
“For 17 years, even when her health was failing and she needed an oxygen tank nearby, she would get on the bus and log the miles from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to D.C. There were no inaugural throngs at our events. No television cameras, no glamour. Just a few kids whom most of the world had abandoned,” Forman wrote in the piece, which originally appeared in Al Jazeera America. “Teachers like to say, ‘Character is who you are when nobody is looking.’ Maya Angelou was there when nobody was looking.”
In 2009, Angelou left a lasting impression after visiting a group of students incarcerated at a youth detention facility about 20 miles outside the District. David Domenici, another co-founder of the Maya Angelou schools, recalled that episode in a recent message to supporters of his organization, the Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings. Here is a slightly abridged version.
— Emma Brown
essay
In the spring of 2007, 10 years after James and I had started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, our nonprofit was asked to take over the school inside Oak Hill, the District’s long-term youth correctional facility.
Oak Hill had a long and troubled history as one of the nation’s most notorious juvenile prisons. But in 2006, Vinny Schiraldi took over the agency in charge of Oak Hill, and he was determined to reform it. At his invitation, we created the Maya Angelou Academy.
I served as the school’s principal for four years, working with an incredibly dedicated team of teachers, many of whom are still there today. In the spring of 2009, with our organization’s annual fundraiser approaching, I decided to call Dr. Angelou and ask if she would be willing to come to Oak Hill to spend some time with our students.
I remember trying to describe Oak Hill over the phone — wanting to make sure she knew that she’d have a long drive, that she’d be meeting with us at a youth correctional facility, that she would have to come inside a razor wire fence.
“David, honey, stop it,” she said. “Do you think I’m afraid of some razor wire? Tell your children I will be there.”
I always loved how Dr. Angelou called all of our high school students “children,” but I remember feeling particularly giddy when she used that term to describe kids that most others called juvenile delinquents.
Dr. Angelou arrived at Oak Hill mid-afternoon on April 29, 2009. She was 81 years old. Many of the students just didn’t believe us when we told them she was coming out to see them — and right up until she arrived, students were telling us she would find a way to cancel.
Nobody like Maya Angelou had ever come out to Oak Hill — and they all knew that.
The scene was totally electric as her car drove through the sally port and onto the grounds. Students wore shirts and ties, patiently awaiting her arrival. Staff prayed that the students would be on their best behavior.
Dr. Angelou wasn’t feeling well. She had to be lifted out of her car into a wheelchair. She had an oxygen tank by her side. I remember thinking, for just a moment, that she looked frail and vulnerable. I had never seen her that way — she was always larger than life, imposing, when she was with us. But she was dressed to the nines, wearing a long, black sequin dress, lots of jewelry and high heels. She wasn’t going to dress down for her children just because they were locked up. Not a chance.
We gathered together under a tent — about 100 students, staff from the facility, plenty of security guards. Dr. Angelou sat in her wheelchair on a little stage we had set up.
Three students spoke. Darius Watts went first and gave a brief welcome. He told Dr. Angelou that he had just read “Animal Farm” and that his class was studying the Holocaust. She cheered him on.
Then Johnny Sorto, a terrific artist, stood up and presented her with a wooden plaque he had made for her in his craftsmanship class. He had chiseled her name, her likeness, and the word “Freedom” into the plaque.
As Johnny made the presentation, Dr. Angelou could hear that he spoke English with a slight accent. She asked him where his family was from, and when he replied, she started speaking to him in Spanish right on the spot.
Next, Leonte Butler shared a poem he had written for her, titled “Phenomenal Man,” based on her poem “Phenomenal Woman.” When Dr. Angelou heard the title, she smiled and then belted out laughing — thoroughly and all the way through, as she was prone to do. Now, as Leonte recited his poem, she looked grand, and joyous, and right at home on our little wooden stage. Leonte was a big, strong kid, and his poem was candid and earnest. It started:
A phenomenal man is what I am
My heart is bigger than a creek, ocean or dam
I’m not the best looking, but I’m sure not the least
Not trying to be a thug, but a man of peace
Dr. Angelou raised her hands to her face, cupped her cheeks and rocked side to side when Leonte read that fourth line.
After Leonte spoke, Dr. Angelou took over. She was brief, her words coming out hard and choppy. I don’t recall too much of what she said, but two things ring in my memory.
First, she said that she was the “mother of a black man” and the “grandmother of a black man” and that they, too, could have been sitting right there, locked up at Oak Hill. Second, she told the students that if they ever had the chance to come see her perform, all they would need to do is tell the people in charge, “Hey, I’m her nephew,” and they would be let in.
Dr. Angelou, thank you for coming to visit your children at Oak Hill. Thank you for letting them know you cared about them, understood them, were with them and wanted them to be with you.
The battle over D.C. public schools [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
Politico
By Maggie Severns and Katie Glueck
June 9, 2014
Statehood and corruption used to be the talk of this town, but for the third straight election cycle, education issues are dominating Washington, D.C.’s mayoral race.
The candidates are duking it out over who will best steer D.C. public schools, which are at a crossroads after years of painful overhaul kicked off by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The city is changing, fast: It’s become home to more white, middle- and upper-class families while simultaneously emerging as a poster child for urban school reform. And parents in all corners of the city are clamoring for more from their schools.
Mayoral candidate David Catania, an independent on the City Council, is seizing the opportunity. He’s betting his record on the Council and granular knowledge of education issues will give him an edge against fellow Council member Muriel Bowser, who holds the coveted Democratic nomination but tends to talk in generalities, both on the stump and in interviews. As tension mounts, Bowser — who has largely avoided engaging with Catania’s aggressive campaign style — has said this could be the “nastiest” campaign fight in the city’s history.
Urban school districts that are run by mayors, like D.C.’s, are grappling with fundamental questions of equality. Despite billions spent on improvements and reforms in cities including Washington, Chicago and New York City, the districts remain a patchwork of schools, some with national recognition, others with notoriously poor test scores and reputations.
The course that leaders in each city will chart has the potential to affect whether those divisions, and access to a high-quality education, remain based on race and class.
In D.C., current Mayor Vincent Gray set the stage for a blowout over education. In April, he floated options for fixing uneven enrollment in the city, which has crowded some schools and left others underused. Many parents cried foul, fearing they would be forced to send their children to low-quality schools while others complained they have never had high-quality choices.
“I want a rock-solid commitment to creating schools that serve neighborhoods,” said Evelyn Boyd Simmons, a parent and former Capitol Hill aide who has been a vocal opponent of Gray’s proposals.
Catania and Bowser say they would bring Gray’s school plan to a halt if elected, although, arguably, neither has specifics on how they would resolve the issue of uneven enrollment.
The sitting mayor’s proposals also triggered a larger debate over how the school system should evolve now that enrollment and tax revenue are on the rebound. D.C. schools have been under mayoral control since 2007, when then-newly elected Mayor Adrian Fenty won the power to take over the troubled system. Fenty installed Rhee, a relative unknown who quickly set about transforming the district by growing the charter system, overhauling the teachers union contract and closing nearly two dozen low-performing schools.
Rhee quickly became a lightning rod in the national education reform debate, appearing on the cover of Time magazine and later in a PBS documentary. The school closings — which involved firing hundreds of teachers — contributed to Fenty’s loss in the 2010 elections.
But the way students enroll in schools hasn’t evolved: D.C. students can attend a neighborhood school, apply for an open slot at a school in another neighborhood or try the charter lottery. Charters enroll 45 percent of the district’s 81,000 students — the third-highest percentage in the country — but students attending charters or schools outside their neighborhoods may face long commutes. And some charters have lengthy wait lists: Two Rivers Public Charter School had 1,722 students on its wait list as of April — but has space for only 520 students.
Gray’s changes would shuffle boundaries for neighborhood schools and the enrollment process — possibly taking away the guarantee that students can enroll in their neighborhood school.
Bowser and Catania say that rather than carry out Gray’s proposals, they would work on improving neighborhood schools enough that most parents will want to send their kids to nearby schools, making sweeping boundary changes unnecessary.
But Bowser fumbled. She sent a news release indicating support for many of Gray’s ideas — including one that would affect students’ right to attend schools closest to home. She quickly tweaked her position as public opposition to Gray’s plans became clear.
She now says she could be open to changing the assignment process but strongly supports maintaining neighborhood schools, and she insists this has always been her position. She’s called on Gray to take his proposition slow.
Catania has planned a council hearing June 26 on Gray’s school plans and launched a campaign group called Public School Parents for Catania.
He has served as chairman of the education committee for the past two years and zealously dives into conversation on the nitty-gritty details of D.C. schools, peppering his talk with school performance stats and the names of principals he has gotten to know during visits to more than 130 schools. As he spoke in a recent interview, his energetic dog — a frequent companion on the campaign trail — bounded through the halls of his campaign office in a white and blue “Catania for Mayor” T-shirt.
But Catania is still a long-shot candidate, despite garnering attention from the press even before his campaign launched. D.C. has been electing mayors for 40 years, and in a city where identity politics matter, Bowser — an African-American Democrat — has a steep advantage.
Bowser can boast of winning upgrades for the two high schools in her ward, Coolidge and Roosevelt. She said she wants to focus on improving the district’s middle schools — to give everyone the option of attending a school like the district’s coveted Alice Deal middle school in the wealthy Tenleytown area.
She won a low-turnout primary in April by slamming Gray, the target of a federal investigation, over ethics questions. The even, measured Bowser has run largely on being a candidate who cares about “all eight wards” of the district — a campaign rally refrain — emphasizing her commitment to education, good jobs and affordable housing in her neighborhood.
She proposes adding a neighborhood preference for parents applying to charter schools so students living near a charter would have an edge in lotteries. It’s a stance that could win support from families in charter-heavy areas but anger other parents.
Catania doesn’t hesitate to pan Bowser’s platform, saying her plans are “platitudes” that don’t include any “evidence-based solutions” for the city. Replicating Alice Deal’s features may not work at a school serving many students from low-income families.
KIPP DC begins work on new high school near Ivy City [KIPP DC PCS]
ElevationDC
By Barbara Pash
June 9, 2014
Work has begun on a new high school for KIPP DC. The public charter school is relocating the school from the KIPP DC Anacostia campus to the site of the former Hamilton Center, at 1401 Brentwood Parkway NE, which DCPS turned over to KIPP after it closed the special-ed and special-needs schools there.
The project, estimated at $45 to $50 million, will be done in stages on the site, for which KIPP DC has a long-term lease from the District. For the 2014-2015 school year, KIPP DC high school students will occupy half of the former Hamilton School, which is being renovated for their use.
Simultaneously, construction of a new high school building will begin on the site, according to Lindsay Snow, KIPP DC real estate manager. KIPP DC is the developer; Whiting-Turner, contractor; Studios Architecture, designer.
The new school building, at 125,000 square feet, is expected to open for the 2015-2016 school years. It is aiming for LEED certification.
“We’re still working on the design,” said Snow. “It will be a state-of-the-art high school campus, with 40 classrooms and science laboratories.”
When the new school building is ready for occupancy, the former Hamilton School building will be demolished and the land turned into a multi-sport and track athletic field.
Snow said the new KIPP DC college preparatory academy, for grades 9 through 12th, allows KIPP DC to enlarge its high school division from the current 400 students to 1,000 students over the next several years.
The KIPP DC high school currently shares space on the Anacostia campus with preK through eighth grades, a total of 1,400 students including the high school. The relocation of the high school also enables KIPP DC to increase the number of students in the lower grades.
“We will add 100 students in preK to eighth grades next year and grow subsequently over time,” said Snow. “The new space opens the opportunity to further develop our academic and athletic programs.”
Common standards for nation’s schools a longtime goal
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 9, 2014
The notion that U.S. students should share core knowledge is not new.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower suggested national academic standards were needed as early as 1959. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both proposed that states voluntarily adopt national standards, efforts that crumbled under charges of federal overreach.
By law, the federal government is prohibited from telling states what or how to teach. Over the decades, organizations of educators have developed math, science and English standards, but acceptance by states was scattershot. Some states lacked standards entirely.
No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law crafted by President George W. Bush, required states to adopt math and reading standards, and test students annually in grades 3 through 8 against those benchmarks.
The law also stipulated that all students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, or their schools would face severe penalties, such as closure. But Congress left it to each state to choose its own standards, tests and definition of “proficient.”
That created an incentive for states to lower standards, in effect the exact opposite of what the government was trying to accomplish. As states found it impossible to bring 100 percent of their students to proficiency, 20 states eased their standards to make it appear as if more of their students were “proficient,” according to an analysis by the federal government.
In the years that followed No Child Left Behind, federal reading and math tests given to a sampling of students in every state revealed the lie: In several places, students scored high on state exams but did poorly on federal tests. Georgia, for example, reported 88 percent of eighth-graders proficient in reading in 2007, according to state tests, while just 26 percent scored at or above proficient on the federally administered test.
“It created a ‘race to the bottom’ concern, and I think, more than anything, that started to fuel the push for the Common Core,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, which has received $4 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the Common Core State Standards, which aim to set national educational benchmarks.
The disconnect between how their students scored on state and federal exams was embarrassing to governors, and they increasingly talked about the problem at national gatherings.
“For the umpteenth time, we were having discussions about whether we ought to have common standards,” said Michael Cohen, an assistant education secretary in the Clinton administration who since 2003 has run Achieve, a nonprofit organization focused on improving college readiness. Achieve was founded by a bipartisan group of governors and major corporations such as IBM.
With most of its budget coming from the Gates Foundation, Achieve created the American Diploma Project, a kind of forerunner to the Common Core State Standards. The project spelled out academic benchmarks that high school seniors should meet in order to be considered ready for college or the job market. It didn’t address standards for younger grades. Thirty-five states embraced the diploma project by 2004, a signal that the states were warming to the idea of common standards, Cohen said.
“Everybody was realizing the timing was right, and we could no longer continue as we were,” said Gene Wilhoit, former executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We could no longer continue as we were.”
Six years later — with the financial backing of the Gates Foundation and a network of education leaders pushing the idea nationwide — 45 states and the District of Columbia had signed onto the Common Core.