- When it comes to public education in D.C. incremental change is not what we need
- Henderson Says Extended Days At D.C. Schools Are Helping Students
- Trying to get better teachers into nation’s poor classrooms
- Charter School Authorizers Grapple With Closures
When it comes to public education in D.C. incremental change is not what we need
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
November 12, 2013
The Washington Post's Mike DeBonis has an article today anticipating the administration of incoming Mayor Muriel Bowser. He comments:
"Even since the election, Bowser has indicated by word and deed that the transfer of power Jan. 2 could be marked more by an exchange of political tribes than any appreciable change in policy, pace or tenor."
When it comes to the D.C. public schools incremental change is exactly the wrong recipe. The 2014 DC CAS standardized test scores show those living in poverty having a math proficiency rate in DCPS at 40.9 percent. For reading that number is even lower at 36.3 percent. For charters the figures are higher with a math proficiency rate of 56.1 percent and a reading percentage at 49.1.
While we have made progress over the last 15 years of school reform, the numbers are still depressingly low, especially considering all of the political capital that has been expended over controversial unpopular decisions by the charter movement and two DCPS Chancellors. It is time to decide how we want to be remembered as a society.
Are we willing to continue to make extremely difficult choices to turn public education around in the nation's capital or are we going to say that we gave it a good try but the job was too hard? Should we simply throw up our hands and admit that the needed 40,000 seats that we are short to provide everyone who needs one a quality seat in our schools just too big a number to accomplish? Do we take the normal route and concentrate on our own job security and families?
The answer is no. We will not turn our back on the final civil right that should be guaranteed to our children as a right of being a member of our community. We must prepare every student through for future success through all of our public schools. If Ms. Bowser does not have the urgency and passion to turn the current situation around then she should turn the job over to someone who does.
Henderson Says Extended Days At D.C. Schools Are Helping Students
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
November 10, 2014
Several traditional public schools in D.C. have extended their days, and Chancellor Kaya Henderson says that it's already making a difference for students.
According to Henderson, 25 schools have adopted extended days. "By the end of the year these schools will have added 300 more hours to the school year. That’s an additional month of learning time added to the calendar," she says.
She says students at some schools like Johnson Middle School are learning how to take notes and be more organized, while students at School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens have enrichment activities including a math club and a student newspaper.
Maria Tukeva, the principal at Columbia Heights Education Campus, says that twice a week 400 students get additional help in math and reading and twice a week they get to take part in activities. "We have everything from yoga, cooking club, foreign language, robotics — and all this came from the students," she says.
Tukeva says it’s too early to know how this extra time is affecting test scores at her school, but last year students in extended-day schools improved almost 11 percentage points in math and seven percentage points in reading, more than twice the improvement seen on average.
Trying to get better teachers into nation’s poor classrooms
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
November 10, 2014
The Obama administration on Monday ordered states to devise plans to get stronger teachers into high-poverty classrooms, correcting a national imbalance in which students who need the most help are often taught by the weakest educators.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to state education chiefs, giving them until June to analyze whether too many of their “excellent” educators are absent from struggling schools and to craft a strategy to spread them more evenly across schools.
The Education Department plans to spend $4.2 million to launch a new “technical assistance network” to help states and districts develop and implement their plans. States will be required to identify the root causes of their “excellent” teacher imbalance, craft a strategy to correct the problem and publicly report their progress.
The requirement that states file this type of “equity plan” is part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, the main federal education law. But most states haven’t filed plans with the federal government since 2006.
“We are all dismayed by the lack of compliance,” Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, said in a call with reporters Monday. “We’re saying this is critical for us.”
She didn’t explain why the Obama administration hasn’t enforced the law in the nearly six years it has run the department. Lhamon and Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education Deborah Delisle struggled to say what specific actions their agency will take if states fail to submit an acceptable plan.
“The states will comply with the law,” Lhamon said. “What we’re trying to do is make clear what compliance looks like and what we . . . we hope and expect this experience will be consistent with our past experience as well.”
Raymonde Charles, a department spokeswoman, said the fact that the corrective plans will be public will create pressure on school systems to improve.
The initiative doesn’t address the thorny problem of how to identify an “excellent” teacher, the central challenge of teacher evaluation systems rolling out across the country with varying quality and results.
The Obama administration is leaving it to the states to define what makes a teacher “excellent,” although officials suggested it is an educator who “is fully able to support students in getting and remaining on track to graduate from high school ready for college or careers.” Department officials also indicated what is not “excellent,” including educators in their first year of teaching, those without certification or licensure and those who are absent from class more than 10 days in a school year.
Low-income students tend to have teachers who have less experience and fewer credentials or sometimes no credentials at all compared with their peers in more affluent schools.
While the department has instructed states to submit their new plans by next June, there is no timeline by which they would have to equally distribute their “excellent” teachers.
“This is a nothing-burger,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “There is very little the federal government can do from Washington to fix these problems.”
Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said the move by the Obama administration is well-intentioned but will have little impact.
“Effective teachers tend to be attracted to districts that pay higher salaries and have what might be referred to as better working conditions,” he said. “This just ignores the whole question of poverty. There seem to be blinders on the part of our policymakers in that they refuse to acknowledge the impact of poverty on our educational system.”
Charter School Authorizers Grapple With Closures
Education Week
By Arianna Prothero
November 5, 2014
When the results of a yearlong investigation by the state of Indiana confirmed widespread cheating at an Indianapolis charter school, the mayor's office, which oversees a majority of charters in the city, took the drastic step of closing the school just weeks into the academic year. But the office went several steps further—holding enrollment fairs and buying new school uniforms—to help students transition to new schools.
The charter sector has long stood by the premise that if the independently run public schools fail to perform, they are shut down—an idea often referred to as the "charter bargain." But as the movement matures, it increasingly faces the messy reality of closing schools—a situation that could become more common.
Although there are many examples of failing charters closing abruptly, blindsiding parents and sending them scrambling to find new schools, the city of Indianapolis is among several charter authorizers that have been pioneering new best practices in school closure.
"A lot of people in the school choice movement like the idea of accountability, but when accountability hits home, it's really hard to maintain your focus on results," said Brandon S. Brown, the director of charter schools for the Indianapolis mayor's office. "It's the authorizer's responsibility to hold an absolute bar for performance, which means that, sometimes, low-performing schools will not continue to operate."
Managing Transitions
Although closure rates for charter schools nationally have fluctuated over the past five years, according to survey data collected by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the number has stabilized, and NACSA doesn't expect it to go down. If anything, the organization said in a 2013 report, closures may rise because of growing pressure on authorizers to close underperforming schools, and the effect of state laws that do so automatically.
For the most part, charters are closed when authorizers choose to not renew their contracts at the end of the term limit, most often because of poor academic performance and financial reasons. More than 15.7 percent of charter school contracts were up for renewal during the 2012-13 school year, and of those, 11.6 percent were denied. For charters outside their renewal period, the closure rate was 1.9 percent in that school year, according to NACSA.
Whatever the justification for closure, the decision to shut a school down is perhaps the easy part; execution is a different story. Closing a school is disruptive and emotional for students, teachers, and parents, but, experts say, there are ways to soften the impact by having a plan in place and meticulously managing student transitions.
When the Indianapolis mayor's office decided to close Flanner House Elementary School over a cheating scandal, it assigned charter-office employees to communicate with parents on a biweekly basis.
"We had a tracker that listed when we called families, the nature of that communication, next steps that we agreed to, and then we worked with those families to meet their needs," which included buying school supplies and new uniforms, Mr. Brown said.
The mayor's office also hosted two enrollment fairs where parents could talk with leaders from nearly 30 schools and could enroll their children on the spot.
"What we saw is that we had a lot of angry families at first that, over time, came to really value the support we gave them, to the point that we had multiple families call our office and say, 'We are so thankful that you made this decision,' " said Mr. Brown. "We didn't feel like it was appropriate to close a school and then make the families unilaterally navigate a complex choice system."
As an authorizer, he noted, the Indianapolis mayor's office has a unique relationship with the families in the schools it oversees: They can help vote the mayor out of a job, come election time.
Flanner House was a special circumstance; generally, the mayor's office makes contract-renewal decisions for the following school year early in the second semester of the current year. That time frame allows schools whose charters aren't renewed time to wind down their operations and gives families time to make new arrangements for their children. But the timing doesn't allow such schools to languish in limbo for too long.
'Zombie Year'
In Ohio, when the time between the announcement of a charter closing and the actual shutdown stretches the full academic year, it is referred to as a "zombie year." Teachers and administrators learn as early as September that their school—as well as their jobs—will cease to exist come May or June. That situation is generally a product of Ohio's closure law, which mandates the automatic shutdown of the state's poorest-performing charter schools, as well as the timing for when student-assessment data gets released.
When announced that many months in advance, authorizers say, there's a risk that school personnel won't remain invested for an entire academic year. That's an issue even under shorter closure timelines.
"We did get to a point where we did have to be there [at the school] almost every day, because we would have teachers go to lunch and not come back," said Kathryn Mullen Upton, the vice president for sponsorship at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Dayton that began authorizing charter schools in Ohio in the mid-2000s. "That was a big lesson."
To avoid that, the Fordham Foundation, like the city of Indianapolis, prefers to make closure announcements in the spring, even though it's not always ideal, particularly because they occur after the deadline for parents to apply for private school vouchers.
Whether or not an authorizer is faced with a closure in a given year, Ms. Mullen Upton recommends having prescribed steps to follow that include templated letters, talking points, and answers to frequently asked questions for parents.
A plan for storing and maintaining student records is also crucial, according to DeAnna L. Rowe, the executive director of Arizona's state board for charter schools.
"When a school is going to close, one of the things that you talk about is who is going to be the custodian of those records," which can be the home school district, another charter school, or, in Arizona's case, the state charter board, Ms. Rowe said. "The worst-case scenario is when the school disappears, the building is not even there anymore or it's not functioning as a school, and a student is trying to find those records."
The Receiving End
But regardless of how smoothly charter students make the transition to new schools, the influx affects campuses on the receiving end, which are often regular district schools.
The effect can be especially acute in Florida, where a constitutional amendment caps district class sizes. The arrival of a few extra students can mean a school has to hire additional staff.
"Depending on the timing of the closing, if those students are returning after the numbers [for per-pupil funding] are sent back to the state in October, we can have a large influx of students coming in without the funding that's supposed to come with them," said Stephen R. Frazier, the principal at Silver Trail Middle School in Pembroke Pines, Fla. "That can really be challenging for a principal when you're left having to hire more teachers and buy materials."
Some authorizers are trying to address that issue by recruiting new charter operators to open shop in the same facility as a recently or soon-to-be shuttered school.
But that approach, like templated letters and special enrollment fairs, is just an example of how to deal with a worst-case-scenario. The better strategy, experienced authorizers say, is adhering to solid vetting practices during the charter-application process.
"It really starts on the front end," said Ms. Mullen Upton. "It's much easier to say no on the front end than it is to close it down on the back end."