- D.C. Public Schools will take a hiatus from test-based teacher evaluations with move to Common Core exams
- Field test of Common Core exams went well, officials say
- How not to blow $100 million on schools [KIPP PCS mentioned]
- City revises proposals for school boundaries
- Signs of progress
- Why Do Other Parents Care Where I Send My Kid to School? [LAMB PCS mentioned]
D.C. Public Schools will take a hiatus from test-based teacher evaluations with move to Common Core exams
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 19, 2014
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced Thursday that test scores will not play a part in teacher evaluations next year, a move meant to alleviate anxiety and account for unexpected complications as the city shifts to exams based on the Common Core State Standards.
Principals’ evaluations also will not include scores from the new exams next year.
“I want my teachers focused on teaching and not worried about whether or not the hiccups that come with implementing a new test are going to impact their livelihood,” said Henderson, who told teachers of the change in a letter Thursday.
Data from classroom observations will take the place of test scores in teacher evaluations next year, and the school system will continue to award bonuses of up to $20,000 to high-performing teachers at low-income schools. The school system will return to using test scores in the 2015-2016 school year.
The District was an early leader in using student test scores to evaluate educators, an approach that the Obama administration has pushed nationwide.
Henderson’s decision to pull back from that approach next year is a sign of the tension many states are confronting as they prepare to administer new and tougher Common Core exams while facing federal demands to hold teachers and principals accountable for student achievement.
Jason Kamras, the school system’s chief of human capital, said that no one should interpret the decision as a retreat from the school system’s commitment to the Common Core, the national education standards that have come under fire from both sides of the political spectrum. Nor is it a retreat from using value-added measures — a complex statistical tool that assesses a teacher’s direct contribution to student test scores — as key evaluation factors, he said.
“We continue to believe that student learning is a key indicator of teacher performance, and we believe that the fairest way to do that is value-added measurement,” Kamras said. “So we are 100 percent committed to returning to value-added” in the 2015-2016 school year, he added.
D.C. educators immediately praised the decision to delay using Common Core in teacher evaluations, calling it an important recognition of teachers’ concerns.
“It allows teachers the time to work with the standards and get comfortable with them,” said Wagma Mommandi, a science teacher at Cardozo Education Campus.
“It also gives the District the opportunity to provide quality professional development to support teachers in the transition and to work out any and all issues that will arise in this massive shift in assessment.”
Said Eugene Pinkard, principal of Marie Reed Elementary School: “It’s clearly the right thing to do.”
The U.S. Department of Education, which has often highlighted the District’s school system as a model for urban school reform, was lukewarm. “Although we applaud District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) for their continued commitment to rigorous evaluation and support for their teachers, we know there are many who looked to DCPS as a pacesetter who will be disappointed with their desire to slow down,” department spokeswoman Raymonde Charles said in an e-mail.
Under then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee in 2009, the District became one of the first jurisdictions in the country to link a teacher’s job security and compensation to student achievement on standardized tests. Since then, more than 400 city teachers have been fired for poor performance.
In 2010, the D.C. school system also became one of the first to implement the Common Core, which proponents say will better prepare students for life after high school by encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving instead of rote memorization.
States across the country have followed the District’s lead, many in pursuit of rewards — such as billions of dollars in federal Race to the Top funds and waivers from the most onerous provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law — that the Obama administration granted to states that agreed to use student test scores in teacher evaluations. Most states also promised to adopt the new Common Core standards.
Those twin promises mean that the states are wrestling with how to fairly judge teachers according to their students’ scores on new exams. Some educators and officials who support the Common Core have called for accountability delays because they don’t want to see it derailed as the result of poor implementation.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested more than $200 million in developing and implementing the Common Core, last week urged states to hold off for two years before using the tests to evaluate teachers.
Previously, the leaders of the nation’s two largest teachers unions called for delaying test-based consequences for teachers as schools become used to the new exams.
Randi Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers, praised the District in a statement Thursday, saying she wished that the decision had been made sooner.
“If we are serious about making them work for every child, then we need to give teachers the time, support and flexibility to meet the individual needs of children — and that means focusing on learning first, not testing or rushing to impose high-stakes consequences,” Weingarten said.
Rhee called the one-year hiatus a “reasonable decision” and the “result of significant thought” that would still leave the District far ahead of the federal deadline for implementing test-based teacher evaluations.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has resisted the call for a blanket moratorium on test-based accountability but has offered to consider individual states’ requests for one-year delays. At least five states have been granted a delay, according to Anne Hyslop, a policy analyst for the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Even with a one-year hiatus, the District is “light-years” ahead of other states in using test-based accountability, Hyslop said. Many states are not slated to begin making personnel decisions based on test-based measures until 2017 or 2018, she said.
D.C. schools officials said they do not believe that they need permission for the one-year pause and did not formally seek a delay from the federal government, but they did notify the Education Department of their intent.
Officials with the Office of the State Superintendent, a citywide agency responsible for monitoring schools’ compliance with federal mandates, said they viewed the school system’s move as a proposal that OSSE can submit for federal approval only after soliciting feedback from the community.
The District’s move directly affects only teachers who have students in tested grades and subjects — about 15 percent of the city’s teaching corps. Value-added scores account for 35 percent of their overall score on the school system’s IMPACT evaluations; next year, that 35 percent will be replaced by data from classroom observations.
Test scores also play a large role in principals’ evaluations. Scores on next year’s Common Core exam will not affect principals’ evaluations.
Instead, Kamras said, the school system will use other measures of student achievement — such as scores on DIBELS literacy assessments for young children or on Advanced Placement exams for high school students — to judge principals’ performance.
Field test of Common Core exams went well, officials say
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 19, 2014
More than 1 million students in 14 states tested new Common Core standardized exams this spring, and the experiment went well, the test creators said Thursday.
The field tests — administered to students in grades 3 through 11 in Maryland, D.C. and elsewhere — were meant to help fine-tune the online exams before they go live next year.
“We think the field tests were a huge success,” said Jeff Nellhaus, director of policy, research and design at the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, one of two consortia of states that have developed new exams with the help of $360 million from the federal government. “They provide the data and experience we need now to implement the program next school year.”
Nellhaus and others at PARCC will now spend several months analyzing the results and feedback from the pilot tests, deciding which test questions need to be changed or tweaked and what technical issues need to be addressed.
There were no major mishaps or problems associated with the pilot test, officials said.
As The Common Core State Standards are being implemented in most states and the District, new aligned tests are being designed for students to start taking next year. See how you would do on sample questions. Take the quiz.
The new exams are designed to be taken on computers, but a paper-and-pencil version is available for schools that lack equipment. About 75 percent of students took the exams on computer, with 25 percent using paper and pencil.
Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts’ commissioner of elementary and secondary education and chair of the PARCC governing board, said students were generally very positive about the notion of taking online tests, and they easily adapted to the technology.
“I watched children as young as third graders in some of our high poverty districts take the test online,” he said. “And they were quite facile. Some used tablets, some were using desktops, some were using laptops. They had no difficulty maneuvering through.”
Students with disabilities and English language learners said they were happy with the tests, Chester said. “They were quite positive,” he said.
Students with disabilities liked that they could highlight parts of the reading passages, or increase the text size, on the computerized tests, he said. And English language learners were glad to see images, video and other non-verbal cues embedded in the text, he said. “They found it very engaging,” Chester said.
The pilot tested more than 10,000 questions in math and reading, and after further analysis, some of those questions will be cut or amended if a significant number of students got them wrong, Nellhaus said.
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia belong to PARCC. On Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), sent a letter to PARCC to declare that his state was leaving the consortium and pulling out of the Common Core. But two leading education officials in that state have insisted that Louisiana will stick with the Common Core and remain in PARCC.
“I know there’s a lot of things happening in Louisiana and internal conversations there,” said Laura Slover, PARCC’s chief executive. “How it’s going to play out will be determined. It’s too early to know what the outcome will be.”
Student scores on the PARCC field tests will not be shared with students, families, schools or states. Instead, officials will use the results to see how the technology functions and to examine the responses to test questions.
“The purpose of this was to test the test,” Nellhaus said.
Although the District committed to PARCC years ago, city officials have been mulling a switch to a different test developed by the other group of states. That test is known as Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC.
SBAC also had field tests this spring, administering its pilot questions to more than 3 million students in 22 states.
The SBAC test is an adaptive exercise, which means that when a student answers a question correctly, the computer increases the difficulty of the next question, a feature that proponents say can give educators a more exact idea of a student’s strengths and weaknesses.
The Common Core State Standards are expectations for what every student should know in math and reading at every level from kindergarten through 12th grade. Initially, 45 states and the District fully adopted those standards. But this spring, lawmakers and governors in three states — Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina — decided to drop the standards.
How not to blow $100 million on schools [KIPP PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
June 19, 2014
In a recent New Yorker piece, my former Washington Post colleague Dale Russakoff exposed the realities of big-money school reform. She described, in depressing detail, how the $100 million donated by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to transform public education in Newark was sucked into the vortex of that troubled school system, leaving few traces of improvement.
This is nothing new to veteran teachers. Many of them assume that if they see big headlines about huge cash gifts that will revolutionize their classrooms, disappointment is near. As happened in Newark, consultants charging $1,000 a day swarm into town to grab the first new dollars. Much of the money is used to honor much-delayed teacher raises, which is not a bad thing but is unlikely to improve what’s happening in classrooms.
Education policymakers are haunted by the $500 million grant provided by billionaire Walter Annenberg in 1993 — the largest single private gift to public education — that passed through their systems without discernible effect.
Some schools and school districts do change for the better, but usually not because of big-money injections. The genuine improvements that I have witnessed in the past 30 years have stemmed from cultural and political changes, not financial windfalls.
Those reforms were hard to achieve. Sometimes they were the result of nothing but luck, such as former Boston mayor Thomas Menino managing to stay in office 21 years — long enough to keep smart school board members and superintendents in place — so that intelligent reforms could evolve without interruption.
The best thing that could happen to D.C. schools right now is not a big check from some celebrity billionaire, but public promises from the two main mayoral candidates, Muriel Bowser (D) and David Catania (I), to reappoint D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. I have complained about some of her decisions, but she is a smart former teacher who has pushed efforts to improve teaching and expand learning time. She has established relationships that are vital to raising achievement. Replacing her would create an unholy mess, a sadly frequent occurrence in the District.
I have followed closely two examples of productive reform in public schools. One was the growth in the use of college-level courses and tests to raise the level of high school instruction. The other was the growth of charter schools capable of raising the achievement of low-income students. (Most charter schools do not do this, but the ones that do represent a significant improvement in urban and rural public education.)
The rise of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses and tests in high schools was inspired by East Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante and the 1988 film about him, “Stand and Deliver.” He and his colleague Ben Jimenez in 1987 produced 26 percent of all Mexican American students nationally passing AP calculus. This caused other schools to experiment with letting average kids take AP and IB, usually reserved for top students. Schools found money to support it because they had good results, the opposite of what happened in Newark.
The rise of successful charters followed a similar pattern. KIPP, the largest and one of the highest-performing charter networks, began with two teachers, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who started middle schools in Houston and the South Bronx, respectively. When their-low income students outperformed similar students in regular schools, they won political support from both Democratic and Republican mayors and governors. To this day, the leaders of both parties support charters, making it easier for the best charters to get funds.
These schools are happy to take rich people’s money, but they are the rare educators who know exactly what to do with it to raise achievement. That happens too infrequently in schools full of dashed hopes.
City revises proposals for school boundaries
The Northwest Current
By Graham Vyse
June 18, 2014
D.C. education officials have released a new proposal for overhauling the city’s public school boundaries and student enrollment policies, responding to citywide feedback supporting a system of neighborhood schools.
The new plan is the product of an ongoing process led by Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, aimed at addressing overcrowding and underutilization of school facilities, among other issues. This latest iteration puts forth the goals of improving the interplay between charter schools and traditional public schools, reopening some closed neighborhood schools and investing in public transportation to help students travel to school.
But it is the renewed focus on guaranteed access to neighborhood schools that sets this draft apart from initial options for reform released in April. Those proposals included consideration of lottery-based admissions at the elementary, middle and high school levels. That idea was met with widespread public opposition, and it has since been abandoned.
The latest proposal does include provisions to foster school diversity, which could prove tricky to balance with a focus on neighborhood schools. The plan would set aside 10 percent of seats for out-of-boundary students, starting in the fall of 2015 for elementary schools and later applying to sixth-grade seats at middle schools and ninth-grade seats in high schools. By that same school year, schools with low numbers of at-risk students would begin to give at-risk out-of-boundary students priority in their lotteries. By the fall of 2018, sixth and ninth grades would set aside an additional 10 percent seats for out-of-boundary students.
The new plan would also have a series of specific effects on the boundaries of Northwest schools, though there would be a phased-in approach that would limit the immediate effects for current students.
The Crestwood and 16th Street Heights neighborhoods would lose rights to Deal Middle and Wilson High. Although there would be grandfathering provisions, these neighborhoods ultimately would feed MacFarland Middle, a closed facility proposed to be reopened, and Roosevelt High. Meanwhile, Shepherd Elementary, now in-boundary for Deal but not for Wilson, would be an official feeder school for both.
Overcrowded Murch Elementary would give up an area north of Military Road to Lafayette Elementary. Also, a portion of the current Murch area north of Albemarle Street would be moved into Hearst Elementary’s territory. Officials dropped plans to shift an area near Janney Elementary to the less convenient Hearst.
Eaton Elementary would lose its right to Deal and feed into Hardy Middle exclusively, a proposal that drew opposition Monday night from the Cleveland Park advisory neighborhood commission.
As in the earlier proposals, Burleith would shift from Stoddert Elementary to Hyde-Addison Elementary, an idea that Burleith’s advisory neighborhood commission opposes. The revised plan would send Foxhall Village students to Hyde-Addison, but other areas near the Georgetown Reservoir would continued to attend Key Elementary.
Matthew Frumin, a Tenleytown advisory neighborhood commissioner who serves on the deputy mayor’s advisory committee, said many families in feeder patterns for Wilson and Deal are likely to be relieved by the latest proposal. But he stressed that “the long-term sustainability of any feeder pattern will turn on the success of feeder patterns across the city.”
A public meeting about how the latest proposals would affect schools in Northwest — particularly Coolidge, Roosevelt and Wilson — will be held tomorrow, June 19, at Takoma Education Campus, at 7010 Piney Branch Road NW. The meeting will begin at 6 p.m.
The D.C. Council Education Committee will hear testimony about the subject of school boundaries more broadly on June 26, beginning at 9 a.m.
Signs of progress
The Northwest Current
By Davis Kennedy and Chris Kain
June 18, 2014
There’s little question that last week’s proposal on new school boundaries and enrollment policies represents a vast improvement from the initial draft, which offered three generally unpalatable options that would have left much of student assignment up to chance through lotteries or “choice sets.”
In contrast, the new draft prepared by the deputy mayor for education and an advisory committee expresses a commitment to neighborhood schools, and some of the ideas get at the need for more high-quality programs. For instance, the plan suggests two new standalone middle schools in Ward 4 — in part to handle surging student enrollment, but also to address the lack of enthusiasm for the pre-K-through-eighth-grade programs foisted on the ward several years ago during a time of consolidation.
Reconstituting Ward 4’s former MacFarland Middle School in itself will do little to restore parent confidence. With proper planning, however, establishing a coherent feeder system into a well-planned middle school with a strong curriculum could. Proposals for a dual-language immersion program are promising, but they must be fleshed out and paired with further planning for a Roosevelt High School that has an international focus and invigorated academic programs.
To this end, the draft policy makes a worthwhile but incomplete commitment: “Students whose new feeder pathway relies on the opening of a new school shall retain their current feeder pathway and geographic rights until the new school is open.” The commitment should be broadened so that parents can have assurance that the new school, once opened, is not only functioning but also providing a quality offering.
Though the draft policy is only 20 pages, the ramifications are many, and certainly too varied to digest in a few days. We commend the deputy mayor for education for establishing a process with substantive meetings across the city. The D.C. Council will also hold a public hearing next week.
Though we’re hesitant to suggest even more meetings, we think that a session like the daylong Citizen Summits favored by former Mayor Anthony Williams might help sort out these issues by bringing key players into the same room — D.C. officials, parents and other concerned citizens from throughout the city. Scrutinizing student assignment policies and boundaries has offered a reminder of the interconnectedness of the questions at hand: Without establishing quality programs throughout the city, no parents are going to be satisfied losing access to those that have proved successful.
The conversations elicited by the latest proposal are both important and worthwhile, which is one reason we’re not ready to suggest the process be put off until the next mayor takes office. But the discussions ought to address the fundamental question of how changing boundaries and assignment policies can contribute to something that the act cannot in itself achieve: the long-awaited provision of a quality education for all D.C. children.
Why Do Other Parents Care Where I Send My Kid to School? [LAMB PCS mentioned]
Washington City Paper
Conor P. Williams
June 18, 2014
A little over a month ago, the Washington Post ran a map of how proposed boundary reforms would adjust various D.C. public schools’ feeder patterns, and my neighborhood erupted. The Petworth Parents email list was suddenly afire with messages from parents trying to kickstart coalitions and campaigns to keep their kids and homes in-boundary for in-demand schools like Powell Elementary, rather than Bruce-Monroe at Park View or Barnard or Truesdell or Raymond or fill-in-the-blank. Mothers on the playground literally wrung their hands while worrying over how the proposals could “change the character of our [strong, relatively gentrified elementary] school.” In most cases, these folks’ kids were already admitted and enrolled at the higher-performing schools. They were just concerned that the schools could weaken if the boundary shifts increased the percentage of less-wealthy students who had in-boundary rights to attend.
I’ve been watching it all with equal parts amusement and shock. My wife and I played the pre-K lottery because we can’t afford an apartment (let alone house) large enough for us and our two kids within the existing boundaries of any of D.C.’s handful of strong elementary schools. Since our in-boundary school is relatively weak, changes in the school boundaries don’t matter much for us. (The revised map DCPS put out last week in response to the reaction to the original proposal won’t do much to make weak schools stronger, either.)
My (nearly) 3-year-old son was admitted to our 11th choice in the lottery (which lets you rank up to 12)—a Ward 4 DCPS elementary school segregated by race and class. Nearly 100 percent of the students’ families qualify for free and reduced lunch. Nearly 100 percent of the students are African-American or Latino. While it wasn’t our first choice, we weren’t especially troubled—we included the school on our lottery list because we decided it was somewhere we would feel comfortable sending our (white, middle-class) kid. It wasn’t our optimal outcome, in other words, but perfectly fine.
So I was relatively satisfied with our school—until I had a few conversations with folks with kids going to more popular elementary schools in the neighborhood. Turns out they have really strong feelings about how important it is that we enroll at our assigned school. I thought this was weird, and I chafed a bit at the form the argument took: “Oh hey, we’re having a great DCPS experience over at Powell, so you’ll love this DCPS school that is not Powell. Also, charters are horrible and tools of the Koch brothers.”
Then one day, during a conversation with a smug, satisfied DCPS elementary school parent, it all clicked. MacFarland Middle School closed last year, and there’s been a concerted effort to pressure DCPS to renovate and replace it (and in fact, the new DCPS boundary proposal would do just that). Upper-middle-class Ward 4 parents with relatively strong DCPS elementary school assignments, either purchased via in-boundary property or won through the lottery, have this in mind when they’re begging parents assigned to relatively weak DCPS elementary schools to tough it out. Otherwise, their bargaining position is much weaker vis-a-vis the new middle school. They want an International Baccalaureate program and glitzy facilities and etc…but if there’s only one strong Ward 4 elementary school feeding the new middle school, it’s going to be harder to get DCPS to provide all that.
Demand for DCPS elementary schools varies considerably—and the lottery results roughly track student achievement. After this year’s lottery, Powell had 148 students on its 3-year-old pre-K waitlist. The data on nearby schools is telling: Bruce-Monroe Elementary had 47, West Education Campus had 41, Barnard Elementary had 23, Raymond Education Campus had 11, and Truesdell Education Campus had zero (with 11 unfilled seats). There’s a reason that President Barack Obama announced this year’s budget proposal at Powell and not Truesdell.
If middle-class families like mine stay ambivalent about our low-performing DCPS elementary schools while eyeing Ward 4’s top-notch charters, our fellow yuppies at Powell won’t have the critical mass to push the district into building a hot new middle school. They need lottery losers and relatively less affluent middle-class families to put up with DCPS’ weaker options in order to keep their relatively stronger position. They need families who look to be served relatively poorly by our elementary school option to stay in so that their families can retain their advantage. That way, their strong elementary school becomes a higher value commodity because it feeds into a strong middle school.
And, hoo boy, debates over this as-yet unformed middle school suffer from the same “separate but equal” dog whistle problem as the “change the character of our elementary school” line. Ward 4’s playgrounds are awash with proposals to set up a “multitrack” school with the aforementioned International Baccalaureate program and a “more vocationally oriented option.” Can you guess which track the white, wealthy parents want for their children? Can you guess which of these tracks would get more attention and resources from DCPS?
Their outreach continued through May. A few weeks ago, a group calling itself the Ward 4 Educational Alliance tweeted me (and three others): “#Ward4 parents: what would it take for families to invest in a new MS at MacFarland?”
And that about covers the disconnect (by the way, they didn’t respond). For parents like me, who struck out in the lottery and can’t afford the high mortgage hurdle of buying access to a great DCPS elementary school west of Rock Creek Park, a quality middle school is a second-order problem. My son would have to navigate eight years in a chronically low-performing elementary school before he’d benefit from any glitzy middle school programming. I don’t care if the middle school offers internationally themed dual-immersion Spanish-English curricula and locally sourced, homemade food in the cafeteria. I don’t care if it has a helipad, solar panels, a holistic wellness center, and a college placement office: We’ll worry about middle schools once we’re sure we’re staying through, say, kindergarten. The charter lottery and Montgomery County are ever-present temptations. Plenty of Ward 4 parents are interested in leaving DCPS—Ward 4’s Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School had 533 3-year-olds on its pre-K waitlist this year (note: LAMB also has a campus in Ward 5).
Ward 4’s middle school coordination problem offers some lessons for the school boundary fight, as well as the broader project of improving education in D.C. It’s going to be tough to get young families to unite around protecting existing in-boundary school privileges. After all, many middle- and low-income parents see boundaries as barriers: They prevent us from sending our kids to good schools nearby. By contrast, many parents with fewer resources see citywide lotteries and open enrollment as ways to access a quality education even if we can’t purchase a high-quality public education by means of a half-million dollar (or more!) mortgage. Yes, lotteries are frustrating—only about 60 percent of lottery participants wound up in one of their top three choices this year. Still, they offer more hope than an ironclad link between my paycheck and my children’s public schools. Whatever else these lotteries do, they give families of all classes a chance at enrolling at a school of their choice.
I research and write about public education for a living, and I’m far from confident that I know what parents like me—and my neighbors satisfied with their DCPS schools—should do about their various education situations. The ethics are complicated. But the empirics aren’t. My family’s educational needs and priorities scarcely overlap with these luckier parents. They’re concerned with building a new middle school—we’re worried about our elementary school situation.
That’s why the coming fights over neighborhood boundaries, access to quality schools, and elementary to secondary feeder patterns look as likely as anything to realign political coalitions throughout our ward—and the District.
While I understand these lucky parents’ anxieties, I’m still astonished to hear what so many ostensibly liberal folks have to say on these topics. It’s perhaps a bit tin-eared that they’re pressuring middle-class families like mine to push through our ineffective DCPS elementary schools to help them preserve their advantages. But when it comes to my kid, an ineffective school is a manageable frustration. While his parents can’t afford to purchase him a better public education in D.C., he’s still awash in privilege. When it comes to children from low-income families, an ineffective school is often an unavoidable catastrophe. That’s why it’s offensive that these exceptionally fortunate families are so concerned with insulating their children as much as possible from D.C.’s neediest students.