- D.C. Mayor Gray adopts new school boundary recommendations
- Who’s Affected by the School-Assignment Changes
- Gray Adopts Changes To D.C. School Boundaries And Feeder Patterns
- D.C. Charter Leader Objects To Plan Setting Aside Seats For At-Risk Students
- Experience of Shining Stars PCS finding a home is the norm, not the exception [Shining Stars PCS, Harmony DC PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS, Washington Latin PCS, and William E. Doar, Jr. PCS mentioned]
- Teaching Is Not a Business
D.C. Mayor Gray adopts new school boundary recommendations
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler and Mike DeBonis
August 21, 2014
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) authorized new school boundaries Thursday that are slated to go into effect for the 2015-2016 school year and that will in coming years change the assigned schools for tens of thousands of students.
The plan is the first comprehensive overhaul of the city’s school boundaries in more than 40 years, and it aims to create a more coherent school system while encouraging residents to invest in neighborhood schools.
Gray’s decision to accept the final recommendations of an advisory committee caps a contentious and emotional 10-month process, in which residents have worried about how the new lines will affect their children’s academic opportunities and their real estate values in a city where school quality varies dramatically, often along racial and socioeconomic lines.
“An enormous amount of thought has gone into this effort,” Gray said in an interview Thursday.
By acting now, he said, he relieved the next mayor of having to make a politically perilous decision.
“I don’t have any political motives at this point, obviously,” he said. “The ball got punted down the field repeatedly. No more punting.”
The announcement, made just days before the school year begins Monday, was timed to comply with a law that families should have at least a year’s notice before any boundary changes go into effect.
Mayoral candidates Muriel E. Bowser (D) and David A. Catania (I) said through their spokesmen that they would reserve comment while they review the final plan. Both have in the past called for the process to slow down to give the next mayor more influence.
Mayoral candidate Carol Schwartz (I) had also called for a delay, but on Thursday she praised some aspects of the plan, including those that aim to distribute at-risk students more equitably throughout the school system. At this point, she said, “it is what it is.”
Each D.C. home now will be assigned to one elementary, middle and high school, a departure from the current patchwork system, in which more than a fifth of all public school students have rights to attend multiple schools, a result of school closings and consolidations.
The new map of neighborhood schools reflects a strong public desire for predictability, District officials say. While only about 25 percent of city students now attend their assigned school, earlier proposals to replace neighborhood schools with schools that have regional or citywide lotteries were widely unpopular.
About 28,500 of the 83,000 students in D.C. public schools — traditional and charter — live in areas that have been rezoned and are expected to receive letters soon informing them of the new plans.
The changes will have an immediate impact on families enrolling in a D.C. public school for the first time when the annual lottery opens in December. But the vast majority of families will not be affected in the short term, as city officials have worked to phase in the changes to minimize disruptions.
Anyone already enrolled in a school will be able to stay there, and students in third grade or higher have the option of continuing through the middle schools and high schools they now plan to attend. Younger students will be rezoned into their new middle and high schools unless they have a sibling attending their former school at the time they will be there.
Many parents have said the District should slow down and focus on improving the quality of all schools before addressing boundaries. Some have said that any long-term changes to school assignment policies should be coordinated with charter schools that now serve about 44 percent of D.C. public school students.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith, who led the advisory committee that developed the boundary recommendations, said waiting any longer would be detrimental because of overcrowding at some schools and school assignment policies that no longer makes sense.
“We have so much pressure and such a cacophony of feeder patterns and boundaries; we don’t think it makes sense to push this back yet another year,” Smith said.
The most sweeping changes will come at the middle-school level. The plan includes the opening of three new neighborhood middle schools in the central part of the city, and one new selective middle school east of the river, which would be open to students citywide.
New attendance zones for Alice Deal Middle and Woodrow Wilson High — two Northwest schools that are among the most in-demand — are smaller, with some neighborhoods that had access to them now sent to other schools.
Residents in Crestwood, a neighborhood east of Rock Creek Park, lobbied unsuccessfully to stay in-boundary for both schools. Smith said the committee’s goal was to keep elementary schools “stacked” together and feeding into the same middle and high schools. To move one neighborhood out would disrupt that consistency, she said.
Karen Howard, president of the Crestwood Citizens Association, said that neighbors are frustrated but that they will continue to work with the mayoral candidates.
“We are not going to sit back idly and watch this transpire,” she said.
The attendance zone for Eastern High School also will change, with students east of the river reassigned to Anacostia High, another proposal that met with opposition from families.
Gray accepted the boundary changes along with a broader set of policy recommendations. He directed the deputy mayor and the chancellor to develop a plan to implement them.
One provision, popular with many parents, will give children zoned into Title I — or high-poverty elementary schools — the right to attend preschool there, part of an effort to encourage families to start and stay with their neighborhood schools. Currently, preschool seats are determined through a lottery.
Another, more controversial plan aims to distribute more evenly students who are considered at-risk for dropping out or other academic problems.
The plan sets aside at least 10 percent of seats in every elementary school for out-of-boundary students, along with 15 percent of middle school seats and 20 percent of high school seats.
The plan says that at-risk students should have a preference in the lottery for 25 percent of all out-of-boundary seats in any given year in more-affluent schools.
An earlier proposal did not put a cap on the number of seats that would go to at-risk students, but many middle-class parents expressed concern that they would lose opportunities to attend higher-performing schools outside their neighborhoods.
The committee also recommended that the District’s selective schools as well as public charter schools give priority to at-risk students.
Applying a similar policy to charter schools would require a change in law. The idea has already been met with opposition from the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which resigned its seat on the advisory committee in protest.
In a statement, John “Skip” McKoy, chair of the charter school board, said the board did not support the final recommendations based, in part, “on the lack of comprehensive analysis to measure impact on public charter schools.”
Who’s Affected by the School-Assignment Changes
Washington City Paper
By Aaron Wiener
August 21, 2014
Now that Mayor Vince Gray has adopted a set of changes to the city's school-assignment policies, the question many D.C. parents are likely asking is: How will this affect me? The office of Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith has released some data that help answer this question. Here's a rundown.
High School
Most families—63 percent—won't experience any change to their school assignment. Twenty-six percent will be assigned to a new high school, while 11 percent—all currently in the Spingarn boundary—will lose their ability to choose from multiple schools.
The ward with the most affected students is Ward 7, where 1,266 students will be reassigned to a new school and 945 will no longer have a choice. Ward 3 will be the least affected, with no students reassigned. Cardozo, Dunbar, Roosevelt, and Eastern high schools will have the most new students in their boundaries.
Nearly half of affected students would move to a school with worse scores on the DC CAS test; fewer than one in 10 would move to a school with better scores. This change is most acute in Ward 7, where nearly every affected student would move to a school with worse scores, given the shift of many Eastern students to HD Woodson High School.
Middle School
Middle school is the level at which most students will be affected by the changes, due in part to the proposed opening of three new neighborhood middle schools. Just 51 percent of students will remain within their current assignment, while 40 percent will be reassigned to a different school and 9 percent will lose the ability to choose between multiple options. The greatest changes will take place in the north and central parts of the city.
Ward 4, which currently lacks a standalone middle school, will be the most affected ward, with nearly 90 percent reassigned to a new school boundary (the reopened MacFarland Middle School or a new school in the north section of the ward. Ward 3 will see the least change, with only 73 students assigned to a new school.
For nearly 60 percent of affected students, the changes will mean a longer walk to school; fewer than 20 percent will experience a shorter walk. This effect is most pronounced in wards 1 and 4. Unlike at the high-school level, very few students will move to schools with worse CAS scores, while more than 30 percent will move to better-performing schools, although these figures do not include the schools that are not yet open.
Elementary School
Elementary school is the level at which fewest students will have new assignments. For 68 percent, boundaries will remain the same, compared to 15 percent who will be assigned to a new school and 17 percent who will lose the ability to choose between multiple options. Ward 8 will have the most reassigned students, although it also has the most total students. Ward 2 will have the fewest reassigned students, although it also has the fewest total students.
Unlike at the middle-school level, more elementary-school students (about 18 percent) will now have a shorter walk to school than will have a longer one (about 7 percent). However, more will move to schools with worse DC CAS scores than with better scores. Wards 7 and 8 have both the most students who will gain a shorter walk and the most students who will move to schools with worse test scores.
Gray Adopts Changes To D.C. School Boundaries And Feeder Patterns
WAMU
By Martin Austermuhle
August 21, 2014
Mayor Vincent Gray today adopted recommendations for changes to the city's school boundaries and feeder patterns, but the fate of the politically sensitive proposal remains uncertain as two leading mayoral contenders have said the changes should be put on hold.
Under the third and final proposal from the 22-member D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, the city's neighborhood-based school will remain in place, with students enjoying by-right access to neighborhood elementary schools and more predictable paths through middle and high school. It is the first change to the city's boundaries and feeder patterns in over 40 years.
The plan redraws boundaries to account for population changes, shrinks high school boundaries, calls for the opening of four new middle schools, and sets aside a specific percentage of seats at all schools for out-of-boundary and at-risk students. Parents living in a boundary of a Title I school will also gain by-right access to pre-K programs; they are now only available via lottery.
City officials say that feeder patterns will be established by "stacking" boundaries: various elementary boundaries will create a new boundary for a middle school, and the boundaries for that middle school will create a new boundary for high school. That, they say, will create more predictability in the system.
The proposal also address transportation for students — high school students will travel on Metro free of charge, for one — and establishes a mechanism for future changes to boundaries and feeder patterns. It also creates a mechanism for traditional public schools and charter schools to share best practices and information.
Currently, overlapping boundaries that do not take into account schools closed over the years have created confusing paths for many students; according to D.C. officials, 22 percent of students enjoy rights to multiple schools. That, say officials, has led to some schools being persistently over-enrolled, while others suffer a dearth of students. Additionally, students travel across the city for schools; only 25 percent of students attend their in-boundary school.
City officials say that many of the changes were prompted by parents asking for more predictability in where their children would go to school, and doubles down on a neighborhood-based system of schools. A proposal in the first draft for "choice sets" — groups of schools that parents would have access to via a lottery — was removed from a second draft after some parents complained that it chipped away at the foundation of by-right neighborhood schools.
The first changes will take place in the next school year, and many will be phased in over a number of years — a rising third-grader, for example, will retain their current feeder rights through the end of high school — to accommodate concerns from parents whose kids are currently at a school with feeder patterns that will change. Current students will also benefit from "extensive grandfathering provisions," said one official.
The majority of the changes will be felt at the middle school level: 40 percent of students will be reassigned to a new school, compared to 15 percent at the elementary school level and 26 percent in high school.
Still, it is unclear how much of the proposal will remain in place after January 2015, when a new mayor takes office. Both Muriel Bowser and David Catania have said they would like to slow down the adoption of the changes, and instead focus on improving quality at individual schools. But city officials say that many of the changes in the proposal cannot easily be undone.
"The changes are being coded into the system. Anything can be changed... the question is, how much disruption will that cause?" said one senior official, speaking on background. The citywide lottery, which opens in December, will take into account the changes adopted by Gray, meaning that if the next mayor wants to stop the changes from taking effect, they would have to restart the entire lottery early next year, said the official.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson similarly dismissed any plans to slow down implementation of the changes. "It took us 40 years to get to making the changes that are good and right for kids. I don’t know what we gain by delaying," she said. "What I find ironic is when people say, ‘We’re not moving fast enough on education reform in this city.’ But here’s a key way to help that, but we want to slow this down."
Still, the next D.C. mayor will have a say over the construction and opening of the new middle schools, some of which have money set aside for planning but not for construction. MacFarland Middle School, which was closed in 2013 and is currently being used for high school students as neighboring Roosevelt High School is renovated, could open as soon as the 2016-17 school year, though officials admit that that's an optimistic assessment.
In a letter to the committee that made the changes, Gray said that moving forward on the proposal was more important than waiting for a new mayor to act on them.
"Although there will never be a good time to make changes to our assignment policies and DCPS boundaries, the benefits of moving forward with your recommendations far outweigh the ongoing price of inaction. The path of education reform we embarked upon in 2007 can go only so far without taking this next critical step," he wrote.
D.C. Charter Leader Objects To Plan Setting Aside Seats For At-Risk Students
WAMU
By Martin Austermuhle
August 22, 2014
The leader of the D.C. Public Charter School Board is objecting to a provision in a broader plan to change the city's school boundaries that could affect what type of students charter schools admit.
In a series of tweets this morning, Scott Pearson, the executive director of the board, said he opposed setting aside seats for at-risk students at certain charter schools, arguing that the policy had not been properly studied.
Though the changes to school boundaries and feeder patterns primarily affect the city's traditional public schools, one provision adopted by Mayor Vincent Gray would require any school — traditional, selective admission or charter — with less than 25 percent at-risk students to give priority to at-risk students for 25 percent of seats in lottery admissions.
An at-risk student is defined as one who is homeless, in foster care, whose family is receiving welfare benefits or food stamps, or is in high school and a year behind their peers. Currently, 43 percent of all D.C. students are considered at-risk.
City officials say that the provision — along with requirements for a certain amount of seats for out-of-boundary students at all schools — would ensure that students facing difficult circumstances could attend the city's best-performing schools. There has been an increased emphasis on the needs of at-risk students; $116 million in additional funding is being directed to at-risk students in the school year beginning next week.
According to data compiled by the D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education, 511 at-risk students would be given preference at 18 public schools and 14 charter schools where average at-risk enrollment stands at 11 percent. Based on 2013 enrollment numbers, between two and 38 seats, depending on the school, would be set-aside for at-risk students.
In an interview, Pearson said that he could not support the recommendation because it had not been properly considered.
"This recommendation was formulated in the final weeks of an eight-month process, there were no consultations with affected schools or communities and there was no analysis of impact. So it really had nowhere near the level of thoughtfulness and consideration that the other recommendations in the report had," he said.
Pearson said one of his concerns was how the set-asides would affect students that are economically disadvantaged but not formally defined as at-risk.
"We don’t know whether giving those students preference might negatively impact other students who are economically disadvantaged but who do not, for example, receive welfare. There’s a whole category of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch but are not characterized as at-risk, and we don’t know what the impact will be on those students," he said.
Charter schools enroll 44 percent of the city's 83,000 public school students, and 72 percent of students at charter schools are low-income. Pearson said that all students — no matter their background or circumstances — has the same chance to get into a good charter school.
"There is a very strong appeal to a straight-forward lottery where everyone is treated the same. It’s fair, and it’s easy for everyone to understand," he said.
The fate of the overall school boundary proposal — and the at-risk set-asides — remains uncertain. While it would start taking effect for the 2015-16 school year and be phased in over a number of years, leading mayoral candidates Muriel Bowser and David Catania have said that the process should be slowed down.
City officials say that with Gray signing off on the plans, they will be harder to reverse. As for the set-asides at charter schools, they would require a change in city law by the D.C. Council, allowing charter schools to lobby against the proposal. Pearson did not say whether the board would lobby against any change, but would want a longer debate and analysis if it came to pass.
"Before we decide whether we'd actively lobby against it or for it, we would want to go through the thorough process that such a significant recommendation deserves," he said.
Experience of Shining Stars PCS finding a home is the norm, not the exception [Shining Stars PCS, Harmony DC PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS, Washington Latin PCS, and William E. Doar, Jr. PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
August 22, 2014
“It’s normally a little more rational than what has been happening, but they’ve had a series of fluke-y events — it’s bizarre. This shouldn’t happen again. More broadly, can we find a process whereby a charter looking for space can cut a deal to lease a vacant D.C. public school space?”
This is the comment by Skip McKoy, the chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board to the Washington Post's Karen Chen in reaction to the second permanent facility deal collapsing for Shining Stars PCS just days before the start of its school year and less than 48 hours after his organization voted to approve a move to Ward 3.
Now I hate to disagree with my friend and co-worrier in the local charter school movement but his observation could not be more inaccurate. The torture in attempting to secure a building is the experience charter school after charter school goes through routinely to land a temporary or permanent facility. In fact, I contend that the average number of failed contract negotiations a charter must endure before knowing where they will be situated is the number three.
I recently documented the tremendous difficulty Harmony PCS faced in identifying a home. I have now served on the board of directors of three charters and it was as if I was watching the same bad movie playing on a repeat reel. I think perhaps the most absurd time for me was when a group of us were trying to open the William E. Doar, Jr. PCS for the Performing Arts. We held multiple open houses in D.C. libraries during the summer before the first term began. When parents asked where the school would be located we had to say that we didn't yet know the answer to this fundamental question. Unbelievably, 150 brave parents signed up for the innovative program without having a clue as to the address of where they would be dropping off their elementary school children.
I have also served on the boards of Cesar Chavez PCS and Washington Latin PCS and these institutions have gone through completely identical scenarios. Look, there are some extremely smart people in this town and we have been at this charter thing for about two decades. Are you telling me that no one can figure this out?
Teaching Is Not a Business
The New York Times
By David L. Kirp
August 16, 2014
TODAY’S education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.
Neither strategy has lived up to its hype, and with good reason. It’s impossible to improve education by doing an end run around inherently complicated and messy human relationships. All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to make it in school. They need a champion, someone who believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the picture. The most effective approaches foster bonds of caring between teachers and their students.
Marketplace mantras dominate policy discussions. High-stakes reading and math tests are treated as the single metric of success, the counterpart to the business bottom line. Teachers whose students do poorly on those tests get pink slips, while those whose students excel receive merit pay, much as businesses pay bonuses to their star performers and fire the laggards. Just as companies shut stores that aren’t meeting their sales quotas, opening new ones in more promising territory, failing schools are closed and so-called turnaround model schools, with new teachers and administrators, take their place.
This approach might sound plausible in a think tank, but in practice it has been a flop. Firing teachers, rather than giving them the coaching they need, undermines morale. In some cases it may well discourage undergraduates from pursuing careers in teaching, and with a looming teacher shortage as baby boomers retire, that’s a recipe for disaster. Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration. Closing schools treats everyone there as guilty of causing low test scores, ignoring the difficult lives of the children in these schools — “no excuses,” say the reformers, as if poverty were an excuse.
Charter schools have been promoted as improving education by creating competition. But charter students do about the same, over all, as their public school counterparts, and the worst charters, like the online K-12 schools that have proliferated in several states, don’t deserve to be called schools. Vouchers are also supposed to increase competition by giving parents direct say over the schools their children attend, but the students haven’t benefited. For the past generation, Milwaukee has run a voucher experiment, with much-debated outcomes that to me show no real academic improvement.
While these reformers talk a lot about markets and competition, the essence of a good education — bringing together talented teachers, engaged students and a challenging curriculum — goes undiscussed.
Business does have something to teach educators, but it’s neither the saving power of competition nor flashy ideas like disruptive innovation. Instead, what works are time-tested strategies.
“Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service”: That’s the gospel the management guru W. Edwards Deming preached for half a century. After World War II, Japanese firms embraced the “plan, do, check, act” approach, and many Fortune 500 companies profited from paying attention. Meanwhile, the Harvard Business School historian and Pulitzer Prize-winner Alfred D. Chandler Jr. demonstrated that firms prospered by developing “organizational capabilities,” putting effective systems in place and encouraging learning inside the organization. Building such a culture took time, Chandler emphasized, and could be derailed by executives seduced by faddishness.
Every successful educational initiative of which I’m aware aims at strengthening personal bonds by building strong systems of support in the schools. The best preschools create intimate worlds where students become explorers and attentive adults are close at hand.
In the Success for All model — a reading and math program that, for a quarter-century, has been used to good effect in 48 states and in some of the nation’s toughest schools — students learn from a team of teachers, bringing more adults into their lives. Diplomas Now love-bombs middle school students who are prime candidates for dropping out. They receive one-on-one mentoring, while those who have deeper problems are matched with professionals.
An extensive study of Chicago’s public schools, Organizing Schools for Improvement, identified 100 elementary schools that had substantially improved and 100 that had not. The presence or absence of social trust among students, teachers, parents and school leaders was a key explanation.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the nationwide mentoring organization, has had a substantial impact on millions of adolescents. The explanation isn’t what adolescents and their “big sibling” mentors do together, whether it’s mountaineering or museum-going. What counts, the research shows, is the forging of a relationship based on mutual respect and caring.
Over the past 25 years, YouthBuild has given solid work experience and classroom tutoring to hundreds of thousands of high school dropouts. Seventy-one percent of those youngsters, on whom the schools have given up, earn a G.E.D. — close to the national high school graduation rate. The YouthBuild students say they’re motivated to get an education because their teachers “have our backs.”
The same message — that the personal touch is crucial — comes from community college students who have participated in the City University of New York’s anti-dropout initiative, which has doubled graduation rates.
Even as these programs, and many others with a similar philosophy, have proven their worth, public schools have been spending billions of dollars on technology which they envision as the wave of the future. Despite the hyped claims, the results have been disappointing. “The data is pretty weak,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies. “When it comes to showing results, we better put up or shut up.”
While technology can be put to good use by talented teachers, they, and not the futurists, must take the lead. The process of teaching and learning is an intimate act that neither computers nor markets can hope to replicate. Small wonder, then, that the business model hasn’t worked in reforming the schools — there is simply no substitute for the personal element.