- Helping children from low-income families succeed in class
- DC students flock to afterschool programs, but many low-income students are still left out
- For D.C. Schools, Race And Class Still Define The System
- Common Core math can be a mystery, and parents are going to school to understand it
Helping children from low-income families succeed in class
The Washington Post
By Jenny Reed and Soumya Bhat
October 31, 2014
Poverty makes it harder for children to succeed in school. And every day, tens of thousands of D.C. schoolchildren walk into a classroom with a heavy weight on their shoulders. That’s because children in poverty are more likely to be hungry or malnourished, exposed to trauma, stress or violence, affected by family or neighborhood turmoil or faced with severe health problems.
Addressing the effects of poverty, then, is key to unlocking opportunities and closing the achievement gap in the District.
The good news is that the District has a unique opportunity to strengthen services for low-income students. This year, D.C. Public Schools and each charter school received an additional $2,000 per at-risk student. Investing in school-based supports that go beyond classroom instruction — from mental health services to robust after-school programs — is a proven way to increase attendance, raise grades and test scores and reduce behavioral problems.
Schools are naturally and rightly focused on learning. But schools are also an ideal location to deliver services, because it is easier for children and families to take advantage of them and because social services staff can team up with teachers to meet a child’s academic and other needs.
The District offers a number of programs that help low-income students succeed in the classroom, but there are still large gaps. The number of homeless students is rising, but federal funding is low and falling. More than 5,000 children in the District don’t have access to needed mental health services. There are after-school slots for less than one-quarter of children who need them. And school nurses, social workers and psychologists at several schools have caseloads well beyond industry standards.
Here are some important things that can be done:
- Help for homeless students: In some schools, as many as one-fourth of the students are homeless. The District should provide additional support for school-based staff coping with a sharp rise in homelessness, and the city should reassess supports for homeless students to identify gaps.
- More resources for after-school and summer programs: Because of limited resources, D.C.’s schools open their doors to after-school providers, but more could be done to help these nonprofits cover program costs. The District should ensure that all low-income students have access to meaningful activities after school and in the summer, when low-income students lose ground.
- Better school-based health services: The School Behavioral Health Program serves slightly more than one-third of schools and should be expanded, and the District should add needed social workers and psychologists. School-Based Health Centers, now limited to some high schools, should be opened in middle schools, and every school should have a full-time nurse.
- Focus on parent and community engagement: The District is making progress to engage parents in their children’s education through privately funded parent-teacher home visits that give families information to support their children’s learning at home. The District should help more high-poverty schools participate. It should also scale up its Community Schools initiative that partners with community organizations to turn public schools into hubs for key services such as health care or adult literacy. There are six grantees (at 11 schools) operating Community School partnerships in the District, but the model should be expanded to all high-poverty schools.
Poverty shouldn’t be seen as an excuse to say that low-income children can’t succeed. They can. However, poverty puts tremendous pressure on children and makes it so much harder for them to take advantage of the quality education system that the District is building. Expansion of these non-instructional supports is critical to removing barriers to learning and unlocking opportunities for children living in poverty.
DC students flock to afterschool programs, but many low-income students are still left out
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
October 31, 2014
A new nationwide survey of parents shows the District has the highest afterschool participation rate in the United States. On the other hand, DC is 49th in the percentage of low-income children enrolled.
The survey, conducted by a nonprofit called the Afterschool Alliance, ranked DC second only to California on overall measures of afterschool, including both participation and quality. But DC achieved that rank partly because so many children here participate in an afterschool programs: 35%, the highest proportion in the nation. DC also ranked fourth in average time spent in afterschool, almost nine hours a week.
The percentage of low-income children participating in afterschool, however, is only 20%, putting DC near the bottom of the list in that category.
DC's low-income participation was lower than any of the other jurisdictions that made it into the survey's top ten. In California, which ranked number one overall in the survey, 47% of low-income students participate. In Florida, which ranked third overall, 52% do.
DC also does poorly in the percentage of children left unsupervised after school: 26%, the second-highest percentage in the nation.
In addition, the survey noted that DC has the highest unmet demand for afterschool programs. Two out of three children who are not enrolled in an afterschool program would participate if one were available to them.
Of course, as with many comparisons between the District and the 50 states, the survey's results are skewed by the fact that DC is an entirely urban area with a much higher concentration of low-income residents than most states have. Demand for afterschool programs is higher among low-income and minority families, which probably explains why there's so much unmet demand here.
The survey didn't break down the participants in DC's afterschool programs by racial or demographic category. So it's possible that DC's afterschool participation rate is so high because middle-class and affluent kids are disproportionately enrolled. But it's also possible that most participants are low-income, and DC has so many low-income children that the programs can still only serve 20% of them.
Mixed results on quality
DC also got mixed results on measures of afterschool quality. On the positive side, DC was fifth in the nation when it came to parents satisfied with their program's quality of care, with 95% putting themselves in that category. And while only 53% agreed that their program provided a "high quality of care," that was enough for DC to rank eighth in that category.
But the District ranked dead last in the nation in terms of parents who were satisfied with their program's variety of activities (55%) and its cost (45%). And it did almost as badly when it came to parents who were "extremely satisfied with their afterschool program overall," a category DC ranked 50th in after only 34% responded yes.
The Afterschool Alliance began doing the survey in 2004, but this is the first year that DC has been included. A research firm screened over 30,000 households across the country, with at least 200 interviews conducted in every state and DC. The interviews were done primarily online, with some conducted by phone.
The report on the survey gave credit to two nonprofits for raising awareness of the importance of afterschool programs: the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates and the Youth Investment Trust Corporation.
Afterschool funding may be on the rise after a troubled past
The Youth Investment Trust has had its problems in the past. Last year, former DC Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. was sentenced to three years in prison for embezzling $350,000 from the organization.
According to the Washington Post, even before that incident there was a general perception that the public-private organization, designed to leverage private contributions for youth services, served as a slush fund for DC politicians.
More recently, the Trust has been putting reforms in place in an effort to regain public confidence. This week, in fact, the Trust is unveiling a new name and a new logo.
That reinvention effort may be paying off. According to the survey, investments in afterschool programs for DC Public Schools decreased from over $11 million in 2011 to about $7 million in 2013. But in 2015, that number will go up to $8 million.
Another factor in declining private funds for afterschool programs may be the availability of other options and a sense that the classroom experience is more fundamental to improving outcomes for children. Many philanthropists and foundations contribute to DC charter schools, as well as to a fund that DCPS has set up to funnel private donations to its programs.
But afterschool programs remain important, especially for low-income and minority students, who generally have less access to enrichment opportunities outside of school than their middle class peers. Some advocates for an extended school day have called for schools to partner with community organizations to provide those additional hours.
Some DC afterschool programs, such as Higher Achievement, have begun to move into that role and already have an impressive record of success with low-income and minority students.
It's fine to celebrate DC's overall ranking as second in the nation for afterschool programs, as Mayor Vincent Gray recently did. But that shouldn't distract us from the fact that many of the kids who need afterschool the most are still left wanting.
For D.C. Schools, Race And Class Still Define The System
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
October 31, 2014
One of the issues that consistently shapes politics in D.C. is education, and how to improve public schools that were long among the worst in the nation.
And as the debate continues, the reality is that many D.C. schools have long been separated along race and class lines. So the key question we’re posing today is: How did they get that way, and what does that mean for the future?
Sousa Middle School in Southeast D.C. looks like a regular 1950s-era red brick building. But this school was once an education battleground. In September 1950, 11 black students tried to enroll in what was then an all-white school. Back then, D.C. schools were segregated by law and schools were not equal. The students were turned away. But they took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1954, the court ruled in their favor. The ruling in the case, Bolling v. Sharpe, came down the same day the court struck down segregation in the rest of the country in Brown v. Board of Education.
But today, this school is still not integrated: Now, 99 percent of Sousa students are African American — there are no white students. So, in some ways, things haven’t changed so much in the 60 years since desegregation. In 2005, one local group issued a report looking at what exactly had changed in the years since 1954.
“Where are we, 50 years, literally, after desegregation?" asks Rod Boggs, executive director of the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, the group behind the report. "Unfortunately the conclusions were, and I think they’re pretty well documented, is that if you had to really look at the education the average child in the city was getting, particularly an African-American child, the education was considerably inferior to what was being offered during the era of segregation. It was a shocking indictment of the neglect that had taken place.”
Some of the very basics were missing, such as safe school buildings. At one point, there were close to 6,000 fire code violations at schools.
Maria Tukeva is the longest-serving principal in DCPS, at 34 years. She founded Columbia Heights Education Campus because of the inequities she saw in the educational system.
“From a school point of view, there were very low expectations for African-American and Latino students," she says. "And this was reflected in the number who were taking college courses, who had access to special programs. That was one of the inequities I wanted to change.”
Her first school recruits were poor minority students who were pushed out or were on the verge of dropping out of other DCPS high schools. She says school buildings all over the city were crumbling, including hers. “Well, we never had a building, we were given spaces in other buildings. We had to move four times in five years and when we finally got a building it was built in the early 1900s it didn’t have a cafeteria, it didn’t have a gym.”
In 2007, Columbia Heights Education Campus got a brand new facility. Tukeva is trying to level the playing field academically as well. Students go on study abroad trips to expose them to a different world, literally. All 11th and 12th graders have to take AP English; there is no regular English. And she has started hiring teachers much earlier so she can recruit the best for her school.
The Rhee Effect
In 2007, Michelle Rhee was brought in to turn around D.C. schools. She was viewed differently by different groups. For some, she was standing up for poor kids who were stuck in an ineffective bureaucratic system. She famously or infamously appeared on the cover of Time, starred in a popular documentary on school reform and attracted millions of dollars in private funding. At the same time, she fired hundreds of teachers and closed dozens of schools. There were also those who would scream at her during public meetings and protest whenever she went. Posters read “Rhee-ject her" and “Rhee-diculous.”
“Her central argument was that the children of the District were being shortchanged in many fundamental ways. One of her biggest issues was that teachers overwhelmingly got very good evaluations either met or exceeded expectations," says Bill Turque of the Washington Post, who covered Rhee for many years. "At the same time the students in the schools they worked were failing miserably. And it was hard to argue with the disconnect as she explained it. And that was at the core of her intolerance for things as they were. I think she also felt was the system and it was hard to argue with her again, was that a student in Anacostia was not getting the same education as a student in Tenleytown and that made it a civil rights issue in her way of thinking.”
Turque says Rhee was blunt about how she used to explain things — and that became her political problem.
“She, as a change agent, didn’t think about who she was offending. And what set her apart was she immediately called out a very powerful political constituency: organized teachers, the teacher’s union," Turque says. "By making it clear that she thought they had failed at their jobs, she was not only taking on a union, but she was taking on really what was the core of the black middle class in the District."
Turque says she did understand how race and class plays out in the District but he says she didn’t think it was important. “What was more important was to see the performance of the schools rise," he says. "She was aware that the optics did not work in her favor. She was a very blunt spoken, very impolitic Korean woman calling out an African-American dominated political system and that was bound to cause sparks.”
Many people would say a major reason Mayor Adrian Fenty was voted out in 2010 was Rhee’s education reform. But much of her changes are still in effect. Now in D.C., a teacher’s evaluation is linked to students’ test scores. There are large bonuses and additional pay for top-performing teachers. There is also far more of the belief across the board that all students can, should and will learn.
But one thing that hasn’t changed as much is the demographics in schools. One report calls this “racial isolation.” In almost 95 percent of DCPS schools in 2010, white students made up less than 5 percent of the student body.
Richard Kahlenberg of the think tank The Century Foundation says that ratio is “hugely problematic.” He’s written several books about diversity in schools. Kahlenberg is critical of efforts to improve education in recent years — he says we’ve been “trying to make separate but equal” work.
“We’re all about let’s try to improve the high poverty schools, where we pack all the poor kids into one educational setting. But there is a half-century of research to suggest that probably one of the best things you can do to improve the education of all children is to give them access to an economically integrated environment.”
Class Matters
In fact, Kahlenberg says, low-income students who get the chance to attend more affluent schools are two years ahead of low income students in high-poverty schools. “So it’s not that low-income kids can’t learn. It’s that they will do better if given the right environment. An environment where your peers are academically engaged, where the parents are in a position to be actively involved in school affairs, and where you have strong teachers, is one where low-income kids will flourish.”
Race and class are often used interchangeably in the District because they overlap considerably in the city. But Kahlenberg says it’s really not about race.
“The social science research always suggested that it’s low-income kids who do better in middle-class schools, as opposed to African-American kids benefiting from the white skin color of their classmates," he says. "The research never backed up that notion. So to give you a couple examples, in Boston, there was an effort to desegregate the schools in the seventies, that mixed low-income whites and low-income blacks. There were no achievement gains there. By contrast, in Charlotte, North Carolina, low-income African American students had the chance to go to school with upper-middle-class whites, and did quite a bit better.”
DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson talks about the race/class divide in D.C. schools by noting her personal experience with a similar situation.
“I grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. My family grew up in the projects for 47 years. And education is what changed my family’s trajectory. We went from being very, very poor to being solidly middle class because of the public education system in Mount Vernon," she says. "My mother was the first person in our family to go to college, the first person to buy a home, the first person to become a professional. Part of the reason I’m so passionate about the work that I do is I do think it’s the great equalizer.”
Henderson talked about some of the systemic programs in place to try and close the race and income gaps among the city’s students. “We’ve put things in place like AP for all, I’m very proud to say we have the highest AP participation rate in the country. We believe that AP is not just for kids from Wilson, or [School Without] Walls or Banneker, but also for kids from Anacostia, Ballou and Roosevelt. We’ve put programs in place art and music and foreign language and library because those aren’t just things that should happen if your PTA can pay for them," she says. "For me a lot of the work we do is about raising the ceiling and raising the floor.”
She says it’s important that schools are diverse, and that every child should have a chance to go to a great school. “Would I love it if every single school was completely racially and socioeconomically diverse? Yes. But given that many of our schooling choices are made on housing, we know that there are many segregated neighborhoods and there are going to be many segregated schools. Since nobody is going to socio- engineer us into complete diversity, it’s important for us to focus on both.”
Still Talking
So this brings us back to the question we started with: Will we ever be able to get past race and class divisions in D.C. schools? Kaya Henderson says “no.”
“In America we haven’t moved past race and class in 200 years of the republic. So I’m not hopeful that in any short time race and class won’t be relevant in D.C.," Henderson says. "I think it’s complicated but it doesn’t have to be a barrier, people can be proud of who they are, but at the same time we have to equip our students to relate to folks in an ever increasing globalized world. While race and class aren’t going anywhere, the expectations as a result are something we can manage."
Henderson says D.C. classrooms are no longer just black or white. There are more and more Hispanic students, more and more international students from Somalia, Ethiopia and Vietnam. There are also more native-born whites as well as more affluent people are moving in, and many are sending their kids to public schools. She says schools are changing as well to meet these different needs.
While it can be challenging when politicians discuss education, Henderson says, at least elected leaders are talking about a topic that is crucial to the city’s future.
Common Core math can be a mystery, and parents are going to school to understand it
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
November 1, 2014
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Jennifer Craig stared at her daughter’s fifth-grade math homework. It was a three-digit multiplication problem, and it seemed simple enough. But her 10-year-old was supposed to solve it by drawing a chart, breaking apart numbers, multiplying, adding and maybe more.
“I’m lost,” said Craig, a 31-year-old stay at home mother of three.
And that’s how she found herself in her daughter’s classroom Monday night, sitting alongside other parents in child-size chairs and listening as teacher Alyshia Thomas explained new math strategies.
Most U.S. public school students are learning math very differently than their parents did, due to Common Core State Standards, national K-12 math and reading benchmarks that have been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia.
The changes have confused many parents — particularly at the elementary level — leaving them flustered by a basic parental duty: Helping with homework.
“Almost every parent comes in and says, ‘This is not how I learned math,’ ” said Melissa Palermo, an energetic fourth-grade teacher who coaches other teachers in math at the Nathaniel Hawthorne school here.
Palermo is a believer in the Common Core, a wholesale and controversial change in American public education, because she says her students are reaping the benefits of the new standards. They are showing a more sophisticated understanding of math and are able to perform operations they otherwise wouldn’t have learned until they were older, she said.
But parents are another matter.
“The toughest part is the homework part because parents, it’s so hard for them,” Palermo said. “A lot of parents, they doubt themselves because there are all these models and things they’ve never seen before.”
Rochester is one of many school districts across the country teaching parents the new Common Core math in addition to their children. From New York to California, school districts are holding special math sessions for parents and caregivers, sending home “cheat sheets” and offering homework hotlines answered by math teachers, all in an effort to explain and demystify the new approach.
“The kids who come to us are a clean slate,” said Jennifer Patanella, an instructional coach with the Rochester public schools. “It’s the adults who have to be retrained.”
In Las Vegas, Bill Hanlon is teaching a five-month course in new math strategies to a group of approximately 50 parents.
“They’re a little frustrated because they can’t help their kids,” said Hanlon, who directs professional development for math teachers in five Nevada school districts. “One of the messages I give to teachers is that if you’re going to send home stuff that parents have not seen before, send a note explaining, this is what we’re doing and why and a couple of examples. Otherwise, you’re going to get a lot of complaining.”
Diane Dunaskiss, principal of the Pine Tree Elementary School in Lake Orion, Mich., about 40 miles from Detroit, has been looking for ways to make Common Core math relevant to her students and their parents.
Two weeks ago, her school hosted a Common Core math night for families the local Kroger’s supermarket. Children and adults were given everyday challenges requiring math operations, such as figuring out how many boxes of pasta to buy for a dinner for six if each box contains four servings.
“The new math standards are encouraging students to think deeper,” Dunaskiss said. “Part of that deeper understanding is to take what you’ve learned and apply it to what you’re doing in real life.”
A bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs created the Common Core State Standards in math and reading in 2010 as a way to inject consistency into K-12 academic standards, which have varied wildly from state to state. The standards spell out the skills and knowledge students should possess by the end of each grade. They are not curriculum — states and school districts decide how to teach to the standards and what materials to use.
In the past, math was learned as a series of memorized facts, formulas and shortcuts or tricks. The result, experts say, is that U.S. students struggle with math. Nearly two out of every three U.S. fourth-graders and eighth-graders were not proficient on recent national math tests. The Common Core standards differ from that previous approach in that they emphasize the concepts behind mathematical operations and stress that there are multiple ways to arrive at the same answer.
In primary grades, math instruction begins with “manipulatives,” such as blocks or beads, and progresses to drawings, number lines or graphical groupings. The idea is to teach children to think about a number as more than just a symbol. The Common Core standards expect students to not just calculate the answer but to explain how they arrived at the solution. Word problems are heavily used, and that has raised concerns by some that Common Core math is particularly hard for English language learners and students with learning disabilities.
Despite the fast and widespread adoption of the Common Core standards, opposition has been growing from critics across the political spectrum. Some of that outcry has been fueled by classroom materials that are poorly designed and confusing.
In St. Tammany Parish, La., the school board voted on Oct. 9 to ditch Eureka Math by next school year after parents complained that it is overly complex. Board members, many of whom generally oppose the Common Core standards, made the move over the objections of some teachers who argued that the curriculum was worth keeping. U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), also voiced concern, asking the state education department to stop recommending that districts use Eureka Math.
Lynne Munson, executive director of Common Core Inc., the nonprofit organization that created Eureka Math, said there have been “extraordinary stories of success” in Louisiana and elsewhere.
It would be a “terrible disservice” if school districts stopped using Eureka Math, Munson said. About 15,000 people have downloaded a free version of Eureka Math from Common Core Inc.’s Web site, and the organization has trained about 7,000 teachers to teach the curriculum, she said.
Because the rollout of the Common Core has been fast — the standards were written just four years ago and publishers have been rushing to develop classroom materials — many say the quality teaching materials, worksheets and homework is uneven.
In April, comedian Stephen Colbert ripped into an example of a math problem that had lit up the Web after it was posted on Facebook by a frustrated North Carolina father. The homework problem showed a horizontal number line with a series of half domes scribbled on top and said “Jack used a number line below to solve 427-316. Find his error. Then write a letter to Jack explaining what he did right and what he should do to fix his mistake.”
“That’s a great question. It teaches two important workplace skills: math and passive- aggressive note-writing,” Colbert quipped. “That word problem couldn’t be easier to solve. All you have to do is check the semi-circles on the two-sided arrow, put the numbers up in it and bing, bang, math. It’s the same thing I do when I get a check in a restaurant. Draw a bunch of shapes and tell the waitress to find my error.”
The parent who posted the math problem, Jeff Severt, wrote the note required by the problem: “Dear Jack, Don’t feel bad. I have a bachelor of science degree in engineering which included extensive study in differential equations and other higher math applications. Even I cannot explain the Common Core mathematics approach, nor get the correct answer. In the real world, simplification is favored over complication.”
Then, he solved the problem using simple subtraction, which he said took less than five seconds, to come up with the answer: 111.
In Rochester, more than 200 parents, guardians and students showed up for the recent “Family Do the Math Night,” one of seven the district is holding this school year. The school district, where 84 percent of the 30,000 students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, offered free dinner and door prizes as an incentive.
“I’m not prepared for this. I’ve been out of school since ’77,” said Vivian Gambill, the mother of an eighth-grader. She said the event was helpful, but she remained baffled by some of the material. “I’m still having some struggling moments. But now I have some Web sites I can go to.”
Willie Howard, 65, sat in the cafeteria with his two granddaughters and followed the teacher’s directions to subtract 23 from 46 by drawing a series of circles. He understood the method but wasn’t entirely sold.
“I don’t know about this,” he said, considering all the circles he’d drawn. “There’s a whole lot more process to this. And kids, they get distracted easy. They say it’s better. But I don’t know.”