- Harmony PCS tired to coordinate location with Gray Administration [Harmony PCS and Democracy Prep PCS mentioned]
- Preschool tutoring program aims to close the literacy gap for low-income DC children
- Connecting school spending and student achievement
- Growing number of kindergarteners are Hispanic
- Study Examines Absence of Blacks in STEM Careers
Harmony PCS tired to coordinate location with Gray Administration [Harmony PCS and Democracy Prep PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 9, 2014
Yesterday I was able to touch base with Dr. Soner Tarim, a founder and Chief Executive Officer of Harmony Public Schools. You could hear the frustration in his voice as he explained to me that the last thing he wanted was to ignite a controversy over where his school would be located. He then went on to describe a facility hunt that for me was a broken record of the exasperating experience each and every charter opening in this city has had to endure.
Dr. Tarim related that his team had begun working on trying to secure a site even before his charter was approved. But the matter rose in seriousness on November 18, 2013 when the D.C. Public Charter School Board gave the green light for their application. The Harmony CEO reminded me that his school was granted the right to begin operating for the 2014 to 2015 school term under the Board's fast track experienced operator provision along with Democracy Prep PCS. The very next day he met with Building Hope to have the organization assist in finding a building.
Building Hope's Tom Porter provided him with a list of 50 potential options. On the spreadsheet was eight closed DCPS buildings, five available for long term leases and three which there going to be provided for use on a short term basis. Remember that in May 2013 Mayor Gray announced that he was turning over 16 surplus traditional schools to charters or other community organizations.
Right from the start Mr. Porter warned Dr. Tarim that his timeline for securing a DCPS property was too short. But he indicated that he was willing to give it a try, and the process of making one of these schools a permanent facility for Harmony began.
At the same time Dr. Tarim was extremely interested in introducing his school to the city. Toward that goal he scheduled a meeting with Kaya Henderson. He explained to me that he makes it a point to meet with the school superintendent wherever Harmony PCS goes. "We want to work with the local education officials," Dr. Tarim related. "There is no point in getting into fights with these individuals. We are all trying to do our best for kids," the Harmony CEO asserted, "and we want to see how we can work together.". Last March, four months ago, he sat down with the DCPS Chancellor who brought with her one of her system's STEM experts. He described the session as positive and he was immediately impressed by Ms. Henderson's friendly and upbeat demeanor. The conversation did not involve a discussion of a facility since Harmony was working hard to narrow the original list of potential sites.
As Harmony narrowed their possibilities the organization had many conversations with Brian Hanlon, the director of D.C.'s Department of General Services. It is DGS that is responsible for developing leases of shuttered DCPS facilities jwith charters. In a meeting last February the DGS head explained that there was most likely not sufficient time to conclude the process of turning over a closed school to Harmony.
There was one closed DCPS school that especially appealed to Dr. Tarim and that was the former Marshall Elementary located on Fort Lincoln Drive, N.E. in Ward 5. So about four weeks following his session with Mr. Hanlon he set up an appointment with Abigail Smith, the Deputy Mayor for Education. The Harmony CEO described a cordial discussion with the Deputy Mayor in which she discussed the possibility of the school co-locating with a future YMCA in the Marshall building. Dr. Tarim said he was open to the idea and the meeting concluded with Ms. Smith relating that she would be back in cotract if this proposal seemed possible to turn into reality. However, a follow-up call failed to materialize.
Harmony was now racing against the clock. Their first lottery was eminent and they needed to have a home so they could determine how many students they could admit. They narrowed the first list of classroom locations to eight, with none of these buildings coming from the city. Negotiations to secure one of these spaces concluded without success.
Finally, and in desperation, Harmony settled on the 19,500 square feet building across the street from Langley Elementary. Dr. Tarim said that he knew that McKinley Tech middle and high school was in the vicinity, but he did not realize there was an elementary school so close to this site that had the same STEM academic focus and grades. He added that this former home to a private school and City Lights Charter School is too small for his program, and therefore in only two years Harmony PCS will have to find another facility. Dr. Tarim made one final point. Of the 92 students admitted to Harmony's D.C. location only 10 come from Ward 5. Therefore, the presence of his school is not having a significant detrimental impact to the enrollment of the neighborhood school.
This story is really a tragedy. There are currently 23 surplus DCPS buildings that are sitting vacant. Many more current traditional schools are substantially under-enrolled. If these empty structures were turned over to charters, as the law requires, it would avoid future controversies like the one concerning Harmony PCS Langley Elementary. It would also allow these alternative schools to concentrate on their core mission of academics instead of real estate.
Preschool tutoring program aims to close the literacy gap for low-income DC children
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
July 8, 2014
Most low-income children start school with literacy skills that lag way behind their higher-income peers. A tutoring program that is coming to two DCPS preschools this fall is trying to change that.
Reading Corps, a tutoring program that started in Minnesota a decade ago, now operates in 8 states and DC. The program has two components that are organized differently: one for students in kindergarten through 3rd grade, and another for preschoolers.
In the DC area, Reading Corps operates under the aegis of a nonprofit, The Literacy Lab. During the last school year The Literacy Lab partnered with DCPS to bring the program to 10 DCPS elementary schools. Next year, the K-3 program will continue at those schools, and two of them—Aiton and Amidon-Bowen—will also be sites for Reading Corps' preschool program.
While the preschool program wasn't in place within DCPS last year, it did operate at one DC charter school and at 6 Head Start sites in Alexandria, with promising results.
All Reading Corps tutors receive training and work full-time under the regular supervision of instructional coaches. In the K-3 program, tutors pull students who are reading below grade level out of class for 20-minute sessions. But in the preschool program, tutors are embedded in high-need preschool classrooms throughout the school day.
A recent independent study of the K-3 program in Minnesota found that kindergarteners in the program performed twice as well as other students after only one semester of tutoring. More generally, students who were at-risk because they came from poor or non-English-speaking families showed significant gains.
Results of a similar study of the Reading Corps pre-K program won't be available until this fall, but the program seems to work best with younger children: the K-3 study found that it had the biggest impact on kindergarteners. And a 2011 study in Minnesota found that the presence of a Reading Corps tutor boosted student achievement, including the development of social and emotional skills, far more than factors like the number of hours of school or average monthly attendance.
Early literacy gap
Reaching children as early as possible is crucial in closing the achievement gap between low-income students and their wealthier peers. A frequently cited study has shown that children living in poverty hear, on average, 30 million fewer words than higher-income children during their first four years of life. And the words they do hear are more likely to contain negative, discouraging messages.
A follow-up study showed that those differences put low-income children at a huge disadvantage on measures of language development and reading comprehension by 3rd grade. And 3rd-grade literacy skills are highly predictive of future academic success or failure.
Some have concluded that the best way to overcome the early-childhood literacy gap is to work with low-income parents to get them to speak more, and differently, to their very young children. In fact, the developer of Reading Corps' pre-K program, Kate Horst, originally came up with the basics of its approach when she was working on a literacy program for parents.
But Horst points out that it's easier to implement a program that relies on teachers and schools rather than parents. To be truly effective, she says, you need to use both approaches.
Horst, who is now the lead trainer and master coach for the Minnesota Reading Corps program, came up with a model that focuses on building vocabulary and recognizing letters and their sounds, among other literacy skills. At the same time, it emphasizes interacting with children in a positive, encouraging way that will lead to a healthy self-image.
The program in action
I was able to see the program in action towards the end of the last school year at one of the Alexandria sites, the Head Start program at Jefferson-Houston Elementary School.
In one of the two Reading Corps classrooms at Jefferson-Houston, a young tutor started a session on letter recognition with a little boy. "Letters, letters, letters have … NAMES," she sang in an encouraging voice, following a required set of steps.
"This is the letter Q," she told the boy, and then repeated "Q" several times. "What's this letter? Can you trace it with your finger?"
The boy eventually said "Q," but he was distracted by the activity in the rest of the classroom, which on this particular day included the presence of several adult visitors who were hard to ignore.
In the other classroom, the tutor had set up a kind of cardboard fort around the table where she was working with a little girl, in an effort to minimize distractions.
In the Reading Corps K-3 program, tutors remove students from the classroom for tutoring. While tutoring within a preschool classroom can pose challenges—in one room at Jefferson-Houston, two boys were loudly parading around the room with musical instruments—Horst feels that it's important for a pre-K tutor to be seen as another adult in the classroom.
"I didn't want to do isolated interventions," she said, "because the way younger children learn is different."
In addition to working one-on-one or in small groups with children who have been identified as at-risk, the tutors participate in group activities like the morning sign-in, when children learn to write their names. And tutors can use mealtimes as learning opportunities, finding ways to introduce new vocabulary words or speak encouragingly.
The tutors, whose modest living allowances are paid partly through the federal Americorps program, are generally fresh out of college and usually stay for only one year. But there's fierce competition for the job: this year, The Literacy Lab got 500 applications for about 55 positions.
Promising results
Preliminary results from this year's DC-area pre-K program are encouraging. Reading Corps tracks student progress through a red-yellow-green system, with red indicating a student who is below the target level on various indicators and green indicating one who is at or above the target. The bar graphs of test results for the various schools showed far less red as the year progressed, and far more green.
The expansion to two DCPS preschool programs this fall will cost about $100,000. That will cover 4 pre-K tutors, two in each school. A DC nonprofit, Fight for Children, is funding the program in full for the 2014-15 school year, according to Tom Dillon, co-executive director of The Literacy Lab. The hope is that DCPS will bear the cost of the program in future years.
It's a small start, given the magnitude of DC's achievement gap. But Dillon says the program can be ramped up to a larger scale: in Minnesota, there are now 1,200 Reading Corps tutors in 750 elementary and preschool classrooms across the state, serving over 30,000 children annually. And per-pupil costs decline as the program serves more students.
Perhaps in 10 years, or even less, DC will be able to provide a literacy tutor for every child who needs one. While that won't be enough to ensure the success of low-income students, it seems like an excellent way to give them at least a fighting chance.
Connecting school spending and student achievement
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
July 9, 2014
In the roiling national debate about the best ways to improve public education, one aspect gets scant attention: the relationship between the tax dollars school systems spend and academic results.
In a report released Wednesday, the left-leaning Center for American Progress looks at how much “bang for the buck” taxpayers are getting from public schools.
Ulrich Boser, who wrote the report, analyzed budgets of 7,000 school districts across about 40 states — which enroll about about 80 percent of U.S. public school students — and found some surprising results.
Relatively affluent school districts in communities such as Montgomery County, Md., or Scarsdale , N.Y., spent a lot on each student ($15,421 in Montgomery and $24,607 in Scarsdale) and posted strong academic results, but other districts in their states got similar academic results with less money.
“We think of these districts as being careful with their money but they must also have productivity issues,” Boser said in an interview.
Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods are more than twice as likely to be among the least-productive school districts, according to the report, even when adjustments are made for the higher cost of educating low-income students as well as those with special needs or English language learners.
Hispanic students are twice as likely to attend schools in the least-productive districts than the most-productive districts, while black students are eight times more likely to be in the least-productive districts than in the most-productive districts, according to the study.
School districts often spend money on items that might do nothing to improve student achievement, Boser found. For example, many school districts pay a premium to teachers with master’s degrees, even though there is no evidence that advanced degrees translate into better student test scores. According to one 2009 study, the country spends about $15 billion a year paying out “master’s bumps” to teachers.
That doesn’t mean the U.S. should cut funding for public education, Boser said. Rather, school districts and states should spend more strategically, he said. The nation spends about $600 billion a year on K-12 public schools.
Boser created a Return on Investment index by rating school districts on how much academic achievement they attained for every dollar spent, relative to other districts in their state.
Academic achievement was measured using state reading and math tests in elementary, middle and high school. The data used were from 2010-2011 school year.
The analysis did not include thousands of small school districts in sparsely populated states that did not have enough districts to make comparisons within states. Excluded were Alaska, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Vermont.
States and school districts have reams of financial data and, as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind law, also collect mountains of academic data.
“In one side of the district office, they’re talking about achievement and on the other side of the office, they’re talking about spending,” Boser said. “What we need to do is to have a national conversation that looks at both of these, so that we can make the smartest decisions about the best way to spend money.”
Just two states, Florida and Texas, routinely examine productivity in school spending, Boser found.
And a few others are taking steps in the right direction, the report said.
Virginia analyzes school district budgets to find savings outside the classroom that can be used for instruction. The state sends consultants to review a district’s financial data, a cost that is split between the state and the district. In 2012, consultants examined Arlington Public Schools and made a raft of recommendations, from reorganizing the way custodial supplies were purchased to trying to entice more students to buy school lunches. The state estimates that since 2003, more than 30 school districts have undergone reviews and saved approximately $40 million.
Growing number of kindergarteners are Hispanic
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 8, 2014
At least one in five kindergarten students were Hispanic in 17 states, according to an analysis of 2012 census data by the Pew Research Center. That’s up significantly from 2000, when just eight states reached the same threshold for kindergarten enrollments.
Hispanics are the fastest growing immigrant group, now comprising about 17 percent of the population nationwide, according to the analysis, published Tuesday. Some of the states with the greatest increases in their young Hispanic population include Nebraska, Idaho, Washington, and New York.
Maryland, Virginia and the District did not register on the map below, though many school districts in the Washington region have seen an influx in Hispanic students in recent years.
A recent story in the Washington Post showed that the 2013-2014 kindergarten class in Fairfax County was the largest and one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse classes in its history, thanks to a growing number of Hispanic students as well as students from other minority and immigrant groups. The shifts are posing challenges for the school system as it tries to meet their needs: 40 percent of the new students this year required additional English instruction.
Study Examines Absence of Blacks in STEM Careers
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
July 8, 2014
A study on the lack of minority college graduates with STEM-related degrees show that efforts to get more minorities in STEM fields have been successful, but far less is being done to help them succeed.
The study, authored by Andrew W. Campbell, an associate professor of biology at Brown University, found that about one-third of white, black and other minority students intend to major in a STEM discipline when they enter college, but only 18.5 percent of minority students graduate with a STEM major.
"The pipeline we've laid? We're stuffing it but the yield is less than we expect," said Campbell, whose study is published in the July issue of the Oxford Journal of BioScience.
The study also found that only 30 percent of minority students with a bachelor's degree in a STEM field work in a STEM-related field or enter a STEM graduate program.
A report posted in June on the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education website states that blacks earn about 2 percent of the nation's doctorates earned in chemistry, with Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge leading the way for the highest number of African-Americans among doctorate recipients in the field.