- D.C.’s Banneker High produces two Gates Millennium Scholars [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
- New boundary proposals may have a better chance of increasing the number of high-quality schools
- Another school term ends, another year of hope concludes for charter schools
D.C.’s Banneker High produces two Gates Millennium Scholars [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 16, 2014
D.C. high school senior Avery Coffey set the Internet abuzz earlier this spring when he was accepted to five Ivy League universities, proving that a child’s circumstances — Coffey was raised by a single mother in one of the District’s poorest neighborhoods — don’t have to determine his future.
A few weeks later, Coffey received more good news: He was the recipient of the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholarship, which not only covers the cost of college but also helps pay for graduate school, up to and including a doctorate.
Coffey is headed to Harvard University. A student at the District’s selective Benjamin Banneker Academic High, he is not alone. Fellow Banneker student Jide Omekam was also named a Gates Millennium Scholar, making Banneker one of a select number of U.S. high schools that has produced more than one Gates scholar in the same year.
“It took me a while to realize, ‘Okay, I’m going to get my PhD,’ ” said Omekam, 18, who is headed to Brown University in the fall to study economics and computer science. “I might be the next Steve Jobs,” he said.
Banneker is an application-only high school that is known for strict rules and high expectations and that has a reputation for helping driven students reach their goals. Not everyone who starts at Banneker in ninth grade sticks with it for four years, but of those who do, all are accepted to college.
Coffey and Omekam speak highly of their school, and it’s clear that their teachers and counselors have played a key role in helping them get where they’re now going.
Omekam, for example, had never heard of the Ivy League until a Banneker orientation before ninth grade; when he heard about it, he made it his goal to get there. And the school’s menu of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses has given both students the kind of challenges they need to better prepare them for college work.
But ask these young men why it is that they have managed to overcome the odds — only 38 percent of black males graduate from high school on time in the District — and the first thing they mention? Family.
“I’m the first-born, the first to go to college. There’s no room for failure. If I fail, it may cascade down to my siblings,” Omekam said.
“My mother, she’s always preached the value of education,” said Coffey, who said his mom had him practicing multiplication and division before he entered kindergarten, and who aims to be the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company someday.
Coffey said his mother taught him that there is a connection between working through even the most tedious tasks — doing tonight’s homework, studying for tomorrow’s test — and realizing big dreams. “I think that separated me from a lot of other people growing up. I didn’t want to take the easy way out,” he said.
Coffey said he’s thrilled at the prospect of being surrounded by smart and motivated students. Omekam said he’s a little nervous about next year, about “not being the big fish in a little pond anymore.”
Both said they’re proud of the Banneker Class of 2014, which together pulled in nearly $30 million in scholarship funds and is sending students to schools as varied as Duke University, Columbia University and Pomona College. “It’s a matter of how hard someone wants to work,” Coffey said. “We’re always hungry.”
The Gates Millennium Scholarship was originally funded with a $1 billion grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since 1999, it has paid for more than 16,000 students to go to college. Besides Coffey and Omekam, two other D.C. students received the scholarship this year: Meheret Mekonnen of the School Without Walls, another selective public school, and Stewart Gray of the Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter school.
New boundary proposals may have a better chance of increasing the number of high-quality schools
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
June 16, 2014
The second round of proposals issued by DC's committee on student assignment backtracks from the idea of lotteries and returns to a system of neighborhood schools. But the new, less radical proposals may actually have a better chance of improving school quality, at least in some parts of the District.
The original impetus for revising school boundaries and feeder patterns was clear: it hasn't been done since 1968. Much has changed. Some schools, particularly Deal Middle and Wilson High school, are seriously overcrowded, while many others are under-enrolled. Because of school closures, almost a quarter of DC students have the right to attend multiple schools.
But, to the mystification of some, the members of DC Advisory Committee on Student Assignment didn't limit themselves to fixing overcrowding and correcting irrationalities in the assignment system. They also tried to promote diversity and address inequities in the school system as a whole, through policies designed to distribute middle-class students more widely and break down the isolation of high-poverty schools.
A frequently heard criticism of that now-defunct first round of proposals, and this one as well, is that they don't address the underlying problem of school quality. But the committee wasn't charged with addressing that question, and it's not clear it has either the authority or the expertise to do it.
In fact, the more radical proposals floated by the committee may have been an effort to use assignment policies to jumpstart the process of improving school quality, and they didn't go over very well.
Two ways to turn around a school
One way to turn around a low-performing school is to bring in a visionary principal, replace the teachers, and introduce partners and programs that will raise quality and test scores. The problem with that approach is that it takes a long time, and success is far from certain.
But another way to improve a school is to change its demographics. Not surprisingly, schools with more affluent students generally have higher test scores and other indicators of quality. And although the research is far from clear, there's evidence that low-income students who go to school with affluent students do better.
The affluent students do no worse, at least if they're in the majority. And both sets of students also benefit from going to school with kids from a different socioeconomic group.
While this kind of change sometimes happens naturally as neighborhoods gain more affluent residents, the committee apparently saw an opportunity to try to engineer some of it through its recommendations about student assignment policies. One model for that approach is the citywide lottery system adopted by San Francisco some years ago.
That's an understandable and even laudable impulse, at least in my view. But perhaps it was politically naïve. Many DC residents made it clear that, dedicated as they may be to the ideals of diversity and equity, they're more concerned about being sure their kids can go to an excellent school nearby, within walking distance if possible.
The committee, to its credit, listened to what parents were saying, disproving the accusations of skeptics who said it was all a done deal. (San Francisco is now having second thoughts about its system, too, because of complaints from parents.)
Back to original mission
So the committee has now returned to its original mission. The Deal and Wilson boundaries have been shrunk, which should reduce overcrowding. Ideally, the citywide, selective Duke Ellington School of the Arts would have been convinced to vacate its building in Upper Georgetown, allowing for a second neighborhood high school west of the park. But apparently the committee concluded that wasn't going to be possible.
Many other boundaries have been redrawn, and the committee has made sensible recommendations about ancillary matters as well, such as the criteria for expanding and closing neighborhood schools. It has also called for much-needed cooperation between the traditional and charter public school sectors in planning for those kinds of decisions.
The committee members did not, however, entirely abandon their goals of promoting diversity and reducing inequity. They've recommended, for example, that low-income DCPS schools offer guaranteed preschool.
And they are still calling for set-asides for out-of-boundary students at certain grade levels, albeit more modest ones than in the previous proposals. In addition, low-income and other at-risk students would get a preference through the common lottery at schools with relatively few such students. That could ensure some measure of diversity at affluent schools and provide a safety valve for some kids whose neighborhood schools are struggling.
As for more fundamental change in school quality, the less radical proposals that committee members have come up with may ultimately do a better job than lotteries, which could have resulted in an exodus of middle-class families from the District. That would have left the school system with even fewer affluent students than it has now, likely resulting in fewer high-performing schools.
Even if some middle-class parents decided to take their chances with the lottery, it's not clear how much that would have accomplished in terms of improving schools. To the extent that middle-class families can have a positive effect on the quality of a particular school, there need to be more than just a smattering of them.
High school boundaries
While this round of recommendations clearly won't improve school quality across the board, it does stand a chance of increasing the number of desirable schools.
The new proposal calls for some high schools, notably Cardozo and Eastern, to undergo significant changes in their boundaries that could bring in more affluent students. Cardozo's catchment area would move westward to include Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Foggy Bottom, and the West End.
And Eastern, located on the eastern edge of Capitol Hill, would no longer have a boundary extending across the Anacostia to the Prince George's County border. Instead it would extend all the way west, across Capitol Hill to the Potomac.
If the affluent parents within these new boundaries begin to send their kids to these schools in significant numbers, we may well see some changes for the better. While there's no guarantee that parents will choose to do that, it's more likely when they know who else is in their catchment area.
When families have a guaranteed destination school, they can start forming alliances with other parents and working to improve the school even before their own kids are enrolled there. And if middle-class parents can foresee a critical mass of middle-class students attending a school, they may well feel more comfortable sending their kids there. The uncertainty inherent in a lottery system makes it difficult, if not impossible, for either of those things to happen.
It's true that some low-income kids will be pushed out of these improving schools if more middle-class students attend, particularly at Eastern. But the low-income kids who remain will probably benefit.
It's also true that the new boundary proposals won't do much for schools east of the Anacostia River, where affluent families have yet to move in significant numbers. But assignment systems, by their nature, are limited in what they can do to improve school quality. For some schools and their students, the hope must lie in the more conventional, if slow and uncertain, path to improvement.
Another school term ends, another year of hope concludes for charter schools
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 17, 2014
As high school graduation pictures fill Facebook and Twitter bursting with jubilant students and their parents celebrating successfully completing four years of attendance of a school of choice combined with the realization that the next step is college for the first time in a family's history, the charter school movement lets out a collective sigh. For another year has gone by without a resolution to the funding inequity that plagues these alternative schools that educate 44 percent of all public school students in the world's leading capital city.
The foremost candidates for Mayor, Councilwoman Bowser and Councilman Catania, are making the rounds speaking at many of the graduation ceremonies. At the same time that they are given a forum in front of crowded auditoriums not one word is uttered about the disparity that these politicians perpetuate. It is as if the advice they are giving these young people filled with hope is that life will be unfair and there is nothing that grownups will do about it, so do not expect anything to change.
It is about as far as you can get from the vision of the founders of so many of the high performing charters giving out diplomas in the month of June. These individuals had the notion that they could create schools that would permanently reverse the pervasive environment of exceedingly low expectations that uniformly characterized attending a DCPS institution. The charters these heroes created would not only have textbooks on the first day of school, but the water fountains and bathrooms would be functional, and it would actually be safer to come to these facilities then be out on the street facing a world of gangs, drugs, and violence. On top of that, to the shock of many parents who knew nothing better, actual learning would take place in the classroom. The kids would be told that they would go on to attend college, words that had up until this time never come out of the mouths of adults. Unbelievably, as a life preserver, scholarships were provided that for many pupils meant that they would not have to spend a dime during their time attending universities like Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and Yale.
Education reformers feel like the Adequacy Study, so seriously assembled by Deputy Mayor for Education Smith, never existed. Writing flows from publications as if from an eternal fountain regarding proposed changes to school feeder patterns, something the charter movement finds non applicable. Yet when someone is brave enough to ask if justice will one day be brought to charters, the question is answered by an interminable silence.
Numerous folks know better. In our lifetime civil rights were extended to many for whom inequality was a way of life. That is why, unbelievably, there is still optimism that someone or a group of people will finally fix what so desperately needs to be corrected. Until that time all we can do is to take no action to disrupt the joy of our high school graduates.