- D.C. school boundary proposal spurs citywide debate about quality
- Catania, Schwartz Express Opposition To School Boundary Change Proposal
- How teachers are solving the problem of incompetent teachers
D.C. school boundary proposal spurs citywide debate about quality
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown and Michael Alison Chandler
June 21, 2014
D.C. parents and activists are calling the District’s latest proposal to overhaul school boundaries an improvement over previous iterations, but many continue to voice concerns that the plan does not address some of the most pressing challenges facing the city’s public schools.
Chief among those is the uneven quality of schools across the city, parents said repeatedly at a series of public meetings last week. Some urged city officials to slow or stop the boundary overhaul until more schools improve, when redrawing lines on a map and rewriting rules for out-of-boundary enrollment might cause less pain and concern.
They said they don’t just want neighborhood schools that their children have a right to attend — they also want those neighborhood schools to be good. Parents expressed worries that new boundaries won’t fix struggling schools and could make it more difficult for children, especially those living outside a few affluent and gentrifying pockets of the city, to get into better options on the other side of town.
“We want to be able to go to our neighborhood schools, but until we feel we can do that, we need a choice,” said D.C. Council member Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7). Alexander said she would like to see the boundary overhaul put off until school quality improves enough that parents start volunteering to return to neighborhood schools.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, who leads the citizens advisory committee that developed the boundary proposal, said the effort is not meant to solve the problem of school quality on its own. But revised boundaries and student-assignment policies are a way to encourage improvement by giving parents a more predictable path from preschool through high school, she said.
Faith Hubbard, a member of the citizens advisory committee, said the boundary process already has triggered an intense citywide focus on school quality and is the first step in forcing the kinds of investment — both from D.C. Public Schools and from local communities — that families want to see in schools.
“This way, at least people are looking the lack of quality dead in the face,” said Hubbard, a Ward 5 parent. “There’s something at stake, something to respond to. Just waiting on DCPS to improve quality, it could be another 10 or 20 years.”
Some of the most intense opposition to the new proposal came from neighborhoods such as Crestwood, a leafy enclave east of Rock Creek Park that would lose access to Alice Deal Middle and Woodrow Wilson High, two of the city’s most sought-after schools.
Crestwood mother Christine Churchill said it isn’t fair to force families to attend lower-performing schools than they had before. Her children would be rezoned to MacFarland Middle and Roosevelt High schools.
“There’s just no comparison in the performance records,” she said Thursday at Takoma Education Campus in Northwest at a meeting that drew about 150 attendees, more than both other meetings combined. “It needs to be the professionals and adults that improve the schools . . . to make them so compelling that we will want go there,” she said.
Robin Appleberry, another Crestwood resident and the mother of two young children, said she respects her neighbors’ views but is open to the idea of a future without Deal and Wilson.
“We can’t just cling to the proven schools,” she said. “If parents like us, stable adults with stable jobs, won’t invest in a new school, then who will?”
The city’s proposal does provide a pathway for students to get into schools outside their attendance zone. Elementary schools would set aside 10 percent of their seats for out-of-boundary students, while middle and high schools would each set aside an additional 10 percent of seats for students entering at the sixth and ninth grades.
Almost all schools currently enroll more out-of-boundary students than they would be required to under the new proposal. One fear, particularly east of the Anacostia River, is that if schools west of the river succeed in attracting more neighborhood families, there will be less space for children from elsewhere.
Parents worry that “they’ll be forced to come back to neighborhood schools that really haven’t improved and in fact have gotten worse,” said Trayon White, the former Ward 8 representative on the D.C. State Board of Education.
Also contentious is the proposal to give priority to at-risk students in lotteries for out-of-boundary admission to about 20 of the city’s most affluent schools. The policy is meant to promote diversity and offer extra help for the neediest children, but parents at some schools worried that an influx of at-risk children might derail their school-improvement efforts, while some middle-class families said it would make it harder for them to get into good schools in other neighborhoods.
William Baltimore, a firefighter and Ward 4 father of three, said his children were able to enroll through the lottery at three desirable Northwest schools: Eaton Elementary, Deal Middle and Wilson High. But families like his would be at a disadvantage under the new proposal, he said.
The advisory committee plans to revise its proposal before submitting a final recommendation to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) in August. Gray plans to announce new boundaries in September, but it’s not clear how much of his plan will stick, because implementation will be up to whoever succeeds him in November.
Independent candidate David A. Catania said in a statement Friday that he has concerns about the proposal’s feasibility and impact and that he would not support any plan that pushes families into lower-performing schools. He said he would not throw out the work that has been done but would use it as a foundation for refining workable plans to move forward.
“It is in the best interest of current and future students that we take the time to get the final plan right rather than hastily move forward in order to meet an artificial deadline,” Catania said, adding that whatever Gray announces in September will be the “next phase of an important public conversation” that will undoubtedly need further study and planning.
Carol Schwartz, who also is running as an independent, said she appreciates the “good and healthy” discussion and believes a boundary overhaul is needed. But no final decisions should be made until the next mayor takes office, she said.
Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser has not said specifically what parts the proposal she would and wouldn’t support. In a radio interview last week with WAMU (88.5 FM) she alluded to the need to secure capital funding for new schools envisioned in the proposal and said it is important to make sure “that any boundary changes are happening once we as a city have invested across the whole city and the changes that we need.”
Catania, Schwartz Express Opposition To School Boundary Change Proposal
WAMU
By Martin Austermuhle
June 20, 2014
Two D.C. mayoral candidates have expressed concern with possible changes to the city's four-decade-old school boundaries and feeder patterns, saying that the process should be put on hold.
In a statement, D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large), who chairs the Council's education committee, said that boundaries should not be redrawn until all neighborhood schools improve.
"Shuffling students between schools and redrawing lines on maps without addressing the primary issue of school quality will only undermine parental confidence and may well result in families leaving DCPS," he said.
The revised proposal was unveiled last week by the D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, which has been discussing the changes since last year. Not only would elementary, middle and high school boundaries change, but the proposal would align feeder patterns to give parents a more predictable path through the school system.
The committee also did away with controversial choice sets, set aside seats for at-risk students at high-performing schools, encouraged collaboration with the charter school sector and proposed that up to four new middle schools be opened.
But at public meetings on the proposal this week, some parents expressed concern with the redrawn high school boundaries, primarily those feeding Wilson and Eastern high schools. Under the plan, Eastern's border would move west of the Anacostia River for the first time and extend across the city, while Wilson's boundary would shift north.
Speaking today on WAMU 88.5's The Politics Hour, mayoral candidate Carol Schwartz similarly expressed concerns with the proposals, focusing on the changes to high school boundaries.
"By redrawing the boundaries... we're going to have pretty much segregated high schools," she said. "I am certainly not in favor of some of the portions of the proposal. This dramatic change... I don't think it's needed."
According to an analysis prepared for D.C. Deputy Mayor of Education Abigail Smith, who is leading the effort, 79 percent of high school students would be assigned to a new high school that is less diverse than the one they currently attend.
The committee is expected to publish final proposals for boundary and feeder pattern changes in September, and the changes would start going into effect during the 2015-16 school year. But both Schwartz and Catania say that any changes to boundaries and proposals should be put on hold.
"I think we have a new mayor come in... I think they should be able to weigh in on this," said Schwartz.
"The District has waited more than 40 years to engage in this highly complex exercise and any decisions will have far-reaching implications for families and communities across the District," said Catania. "As such, it is in the best interest of current and future students that we take the time to get the final plan right rather than hastily move forward in order to meet an artificial deadline."
Smith and Mayor Vincent Gray have defended the process and the proposals, saying that changing boundaries while continuing to improve individual schools are process that can occur in parallel and at the same time.
Speaking earlier this week to WAMU 88.5, mayoral candidate Muriel Bowser said she was still studying the revised proposals.
Catania's education committee is holding a public hearing on the proposals on June 26.
How teachers are solving the problem of incompetent teachers
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
June 22, 2014
Greg Jouriles, one of the best high school teachers I know, still remembers a conversation 17 years ago with a top student. Jouriles was the teacher union bargaining chair. His team had just negotiated the best contract he could get, but he was irked there would be no raises that year. The student seemed unmoved. “Don’t you think we deserve a raise?” Jouriles said.
“Well, you do,” she said. She named two other teachers she thought deserved one, and two who did not.
“That made me realize,” Jouriles said, “that if a union makes collective demands, it has to also promote collective quality because no one likes groups who make demands that they can’t back up.”
Many teachers feel that way. That fact is overlooked in the national furor over California judge Rolf M. Treu’s decision to throw out the state’s teacher tenure laws in the Vergara case. The judge said the failure to remove bad teachers hurts students who need the best instruction they can get. Whether he is right or wrong, his ruling is unlikely to have as much impact as the actions of enlightened educators and union leaders such as Jouriles, who are making it easier to remove incompetent teachers.
Washington-area schools have played an important role in that change. Montgomery County’s Peer Assistance and Review system, in operation since 2000, has given struggling teachers a chance to improve with expert guidance but makes certain they will be dismissed if they do not improve. That system has generated little controversy because it was created by teacher union leaders in cooperation with school administrators.
The other development here was the D.C. teachers contract signed in 2010, as well as the D.C. teacher assessment system IMPACT, which makes it easier to dismiss teachers who do not perform well in the classroom. When she was D.C. schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee and her top deputy and successor, Kaya Henderson, failed to win union approval for a proposal to let teachers waive their tenure protections in exchange for big merit-pay increases. But union members approved language that ended emphasis on seniority in teacher assignments. Many teachers accepted this as a way to raise standards. IMPACT has its flaws, but it does reduce the chances that students will have to suffer teachers who are incapable of running productive classes.
This is happening across the country, mostly as the result of thoughtful discussions between state and local administrators and union leaders who share the views of Jouriles, a social studies teacher at my alma mater, Hillsdale High in San Mateo, Calif. The Vergara decision is unlikely to survive appeal. It relied on an estimate, which an expert said he pulled out of the air, that 1 percent to 3 percent of teachers had students who consistently performed poorly on state tests. Treu further distorted the expert’s statement, according to a Slate investigation.
Teachers are finding ways to improve their ranks that are better than relying on the courts, which are a crude instrument when trying to fix schools.
Jouriles, who is no longer a union leader, remains strongly pro-union. He opposes the Vergara decision and the D.C. teachers contract but still backs teacher-led reform. He once represented in a personnel matter a teacher he did not think belonged in a classroom but seemed likely to file a due-process suit against the union if not defended. Jouriles told district administrators the way to remove the teacher was through the evaluation process, but that did not happen.
“The teacher’s presence has hurt many students,” Jouriles said. “Why shouldn’t our union be willing to negotiate a more streamlined dismissal process or some kind of tenure review that will make it easier to dismiss this teacher without denying others’ rights?”
More teachers than ever before are asking that question. That will make a big difference.