- D.C. names Height charter school as defendant in fraud case [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- Report: D.C. youth more likely to attend preschool, have health insurance
- DCPS and its teachers' union are at an impasse over extending the school day.
- Minority Teachers Abandon Classrooms
D.C. names Height charter school as defendant in fraud case [Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 24, 2014
D.C. government lawyers have filed court documents naming Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School as a defendant in an ongoing fraud case, citing the school’s failure to stop making allegedly improper payments to its management company.
The amended complaint, filed Wednesday, comes seven weeks after the District’s attorney general filed a lawsuit alleging that the school’s founder, Kent Amos, had created the management company as a vehicle to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars to himself and two co-owners.
The company received more than $13 million in fees for work that was in many cases performed by employees of the school, according to the District’s complaint. Amos’s attorney, Fred Cooke Jr., has said that his client has done nothing wrong.
Cooke said Wednesday’s filing doesn’t change anything for his client. The complaint is “still without merit,” he said. An attorney for the charter school’s board did not respond to a request for comment. The board’s spokesman also did not comment.
Since the allegations against Amos became public, the school’s board has allowed continued payments to his company worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to the documents filed Wednesday. The District’s filing stopped short of seeking an immediate halt to further payments but signaled that the attorney general may request such an injunction at some point.
Officials with the attorney general’s office declined to comment on why — if they are concerned about the continued payments to Amos’s management company — they have not yet sought an immediate stop to those payments. Absent court action, Amos’s company is eligible to receive up to $2.3 million in fees for the 2014-2015 school year, according to the complaint.
Report: D.C. youth more likely to attend preschool, have health insurance
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 23, 2014
Children in the District are attending preschool at higher rates, performing better academically and are more likely to have health insurance, according to an annual report of child well-being indicators released this week.
But challenges remain steep for many children in the nation’s capital, where poverty rates are well above the national average.
Here are some of the findings from the 25th annual Kids Count data report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
— 27 percent of children came from families living below the federal poverty line in 2012, down three points from 2011 but eight points higher than in 1990.
— 31 percent of D.C. children live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty, where opportunities for success are harder to come by. This is a 2 percent increase from last year.
There were also some positive trends in the data:
— More than half — 55 percent — of D.C. children were from single-parent families in 2012, down from 65 percent in 2005
— The portion of D.C. children who lack health insurance dropped to 2 percent in 2012, down slightly from previous years.
— The portion of 3- and 4-year-olds not attending preschool dropped by 10 points between 2007 and 2012, from 37 percent to 27 percent.
— The portion of fourth-graders scoring at or above proficient on a national reading test increased from 11 percent to 23 percent between 2005 and 2013.
Despite signs of progress, the report showed that there is still a lot of work to do, children’s advocates said.
“Too many of our children are growing up in conditions that do not support their success in school and in life,” said HyeSook Chung, executive director of DC Action for Children. “All of us need to work smarter to ensure all of our children, youth and their families have what they need to thrive, regardless of their ZIP code.”
DCPS and its teachers' union are at an impasse over extending the school day. Could this be a way out?
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
July 23, 2014
After experimenting with an extended day for students, one New Haven school realized it made more sense to extend the day for teachers, so they would have time to collaborate. Could that work in DC?
Citing gains in test scores at charter schools and a few DCPS schools that have tried adding more hours to the school day, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced her intention to extend hours at dozens more schools. But the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) has blocked those plans, saying the school day should be made better before it's made longer.
The experience of one school in New Haven seems to bolster the WTU's position—up to a point. Brennan-Rogers, a pre-K-through-8th-grade school that was one of the city's lowest-performing, extended its students' day by an hour and 25 minutes during the 2010-11 school year. The idea was to close the achievement gap between the school's mostly minority and low-income students and their wealthier peers.
The results: kids felt like they'd been punished, teachers were exhausted, and test scores actually dropped. After one year, the students returned to their traditional 6-and-a-half-hour day.
But the principal felt that the most promising part of the experiment—additional time for teachers to collaborate—was worth keeping. She proposed that teachers show up an hour early every day, and the teachers agreed to try it. They've been doing it for the past 3 years.
Even though the school day is shorter than it used to be, kids seem to be learning more. For the past two years, Brennan-Rogers has posted the largest gains in the New Haven district on state standardized tests. The atmosphere is calm and orderly, and teachers are happy with the arrangement. And the district as a whole has shifted its focus to adding time for teachers rather than kids, starting with 15 minutes a day under the latest union contract.
The power of collaboration
Lately, there's been a good deal of attention focused on the importance of teacher collaboration. A report on ways to increase teacher retention has recommended more time for collaboration, as has a DCPS teacher who recently lunched with President Obama. And a writing program being piloted in DCPS, which is having dramatic results, depends largely on teachers having time to work together on planning.
New teachers obviously benefit from being able to talk with and learn from their more experienced peers. But even veteran teachers value the opportunity to compare data about students, coordinate teaching and behavioral strategies, and discuss the merits of different approaches. That's true both within schools and between schools—including between charter and traditional public schools.
Right now many schools in DC don't allow teachers time for these opportunities, possibly undermining efforts to improve student achievement. Ideally, both students and teachers would get more well-planned time in their day at under-performing schools. But if that's not possible, why not try giving it to the teachers? Many of them might actually jump at the chance.
Minority Teachers Abandon Classrooms
The Washington Informer
By Stacy M. Brown
July 23, 2014
Minorities are significantly underrepresented in public schools, despite the fact that the number of black and Latino students have increased.
A new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) in Northwest — “The Leaky Pipeline for Teachers of Color: Getting More Teachers of Color into the Classroom” — revealed that while much has been done in the past 25 years to substantially increase the number of minority teachers, high levels of attrition has offset that success.
“If you spend time in almost any major school district in America today, you will notice that the students often do not look much like the teachers. In fact, in some areas, the students don’t look anything like their teachers,” said Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at CAP. “There is a significant demographic gap in the largely white teaching profession and an increasingly diverse student population,” he said.
Released on July 7, the report revealed that black and Latinos are more likely to work and remain in high-poverty, hard-to-staff urban schools and districts than their white counterparts; in fact, they often consider it their duty to do so.
What’s more, minority teachers usually are committed to the success of children of color, and they affect a wide range of student academic outcomes, the report’s authors said. They also serve as powerful role models for all students and prove that teaching can be a viable career for minorities.
Deaundra Francis, of Northeast who holds a Master’s of Public Administration, said there are three major hurdles facing minorities who aspire to become teachers.
“After working at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the Teacher Prep Student Support Services program, we found that black, low-income, first-generation college students had barriers that prevented them from completing their education degrees,” Francis said.
“Because it’s required by most states and higher education institutions to pass the Praxis I and II exams as well as all required courses, minorities have not been able to do so and they change their majors to something more compatible,” she said. “The second barrier is the financial and family obligations which may hinder future progress toward an education degree and the third barrier that I propose has to do with culture.”
Melissa Mesku, also of Northeast, who works for New Worker magazine, said she once taught at a high school in a poverty-stricken New York neighborhood and circumstances made it difficult for her to continue her career.
“I’m a woman of color and I taught English as a second language [ESL] for refugee and immigrant students and most of the newer teachers were also minorities at my school,” Mesku said. “I stayed for a year. Coming from a disadvantaged economic background, I simply couldn’t afford to continue to live on a teacher’s salary. If I wanted upward mobility, I had to move on to more lucrative work, especially considering the difficulties and commitments required to work in a hard-to-staff school and spending my own money to clothe and feed students and working 13 hours per day with no resources or books.”
To get a better handle on what’s happening across the country, CAP officials ranked states on the demographic differences between teacher and student populations.
The national average registered at 30 percentage points. The District of Columbia registered 28 percentage points for diversity, two percent below the national average.
The District’s number might be a surprise given that 52 percent of teachers are black, 36 percent are white, 7 percent Latino, 5 percent are considered of other races, and 7 percent are identified as having two or more races.
The report revisits a similar CAP study from 2011, which noted that students of color made up more than 40 percent of the school-age-population, while teachers of color represented only 17 percent of the teaching profession.
Today, the gap between teachers and students of color has continued to grow.
Over the past three years, the demographic divide between teachers and students of color has increased by 3 percentage points, and now, minority students make up almost half of the public school population.
“The student population of America’s schools may look like a melting pot, but our teacher workforce looks like it wandered out of the 1950s,” Boser said. “It’s overwhelmingly white.”
In an effort to address the lack of minority teachers and to retain those currently in the classrooms, CAP’s report suggests that states should develop innovative approaches to teacher preparation in both university-based and alternative-certification programs.
Researchers also proposed higher benchmarks for teacher-training programs and officials cited the U.S. Department of Education’s recruitment campaign aimed at preparing 80,000 black teachers for classrooms across the country by 2015 to provide students not only with high-quality educational experiences, but also to present them with role models with a variety of cultural experiences, as well.
“I believe that kids of color benefit greatly from role models that look like them and even sound like them. That is, teachers who come from similar ethnic, socioeconomic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds as their students can make great strides in promoting success for their kids both in school and upon school leaving,” said Dr. Holly Hansen-Thomas, a professor of Bilingual Education, ESL, and Multicultural Education at Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas.
“Teachers who look like their students, or who really know how to communicate with them in their own language like Spanish, or dialect, like African-American Vernacular English, can reach their students in ways that white teachers, or teachers who do not share much background, cannot,” Hansen-Thomas said.
Despite the barriers in the educator pipeline, there’s great opportunity ahead to make improvements, Boser said, noting that the report includes a set of policy recommendations for the federal government and for states and local school districts.
He said enlarging the pool of talented, well-educated teachers of color who are effective in improving student achievement in schools will require aggressive and targeted recruitment and appropriate support.
“It will demand a steadfast determination to remove the barriers in the educator pipeline that limit and discourage strong candidates from the teaching profession,” Boser said. “At the same time, policies must be in place to offer clear and meaningful monetary incentives, support, and professional development to ensure that the best and brightest students of color enter into teaching and succeed once in the profession.”