NEWS
- DCPS Chancellor Henderson wants to keep school buildings under her control
- Students become ‘citizen scientists,’ track D.C.’s wildlife with cameras [SEED PCS mentioned]
- How video games could make our kids smarter and learning more engaging [Rocketship PCS mentioned]
DCPS Chancellor Henderson wants to keep school buildings under her control
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 4, 2015
Last Tuesday DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson testified for about four hours before D.C. Council education committee chairman David Grosso as part of a budget oversight hearing. During the session she was asked about her plans for traditional school buildings that are not currently being utilized. Her answer was that she would like to maintain them within her system and she is hesitant to give them over to charter schools. The Chancellor announced earlier in the year that she is planning on starting four new schools in 2015.
Ms. Henderson went on to say that DCPS must have the ability to be "accordion-like" in the use of buildings. She stated that when there are times when enrollment is decreasing she should have the ability to close schools and when there are periods when more students are coming into DCPS she needs to have these facilities in her inventory so that she can open them back up. She added that this is especially important because of projections that her system is expected to grow into the year 2020. Ms. Henderson would also like the Council to revisit a legal requirement which states that if school modernization funds are not available for closed buildings for two years then these sites must be surplussed. Surplus buildings by law must be offered to charter schools before being used for other purposes.
Ms. Henderson tried the same line of reasoning four years ago during the start of Mayor Gray's term in office. But back then the size of her student body was smaller and Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith would have none of this argument. The Gray Administration went on to turn 13 shuttered DCPS schools over to charters.
DCPS student enrollment has increased by approximately 2,800 students during the last five years from a low of 44,718 pupils during the 2009 to 2010 term. FOCUS has estimated that there are about 20 empty school buildings that could be offered to charters. This translates into 1.7 million square feet of available space.
The securing of permanent facilities is the greatest problem facing charter schools. The time and effort it takes charters to find buildings often diverts vital attention and energy away from the academic program. Many kids attend charters in inadequate facilities such as church basements, storefronts, and warehouses.
However, I have to admit that I see her point. If the goal of our public education reform leaders is now to all get along rather than to generate controversy then perhaps charters need a new way of obtaining classrooms. As completely absurd as it is, it looks like the only choice is for a plan B.
Students become ‘citizen scientists,’ track D.C.’s wildlife with cameras [SEED PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
May 3, 2015
Jasmyn Hill had been attending the same charter school in Southeast Washington for five years before she ever ventured into the woods that surround the campus.
“I had no idea what was in there,” said the 16-year-old junior with long turquoise nails and waist-length braids. She described herself as “not really the type who goes camping.”
But the city kid joined a “Green Team” at her school, and she now spends afternoons taking walks in the woods to learn about what lives there. She also helps set up cameras to record the wildlife. The experience has kindled an interest in environmental science, she said.
Hill and other students at the SEED Public Charter School are joining a growing army of “citizen scientists” who are gathering data about wildlife for the Smithsonian collection, information and images that can be used for scientific research and conservation efforts.
It’s part of a Smithsonian eMammal project, which recruits and trains volunteers to set up infrared-activated cameras — or “camera traps” — in parks, back yards or other natural areas. The cameras take pictures when something warm-blooded moves in front of the lens.
Carnivores and wildlife are rebounding in many urban areas, and researchers have a lot of questions about what kind of animals are living where and how they interact with humans and with one another.
“We need the data from these urban sites, and these students are collecting it for us,” said Bill McShea, a research scientist at the National Zoo’s Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
The photos represent a more modern way of gathering specimens, in part replacing the historical collection of skulls and animal skins that wildlife biologists took back to museums for tagging and storage. Now, cameras can capture similar information and, when carefully documented, the photos can become part of the Smithsonian collection.
The eMammal project began in 2012. In its first two years, volunteers and scientists placed more than 2,000 cameras in 32 parks across six mid-Atlantic states, collecting more than 200,000 animal detections. The program is expanding.
D.C. students are among the first to participate in the program as volunteers, and the city has proved to be a good place for them to learn about wildlife.
“People may not realize how much wild area or forest there is in D.C.,” McShea said. “You’d be surprised at what mammals are sitting in those woods.”
SEED is a public boarding school, an unusual model that aims to help students from poor communities by offering them concentrated services around the clock. Located not far from Minnesota Avenue SE, the gated campus is in an area that is considered urban but is surrounded by green space. Fort Dupont Park, which is maintained by the National Park Service, is steps away.
On a warm afternoon this spring, Hill and her friend Isaiah Thomas met up with the Green Team, an after-school club organized by a group called Groundwork Anacostia, which helped adapt the eMammal program for D.C. schools.
They were joined by wildlife biologist Megan Baker and other volunteers, setting off for a walk to check on cameras that have been in place for a few weeks.
The trail began as gravel, then went to dirt. They walked until the crunch of leaves and the din of bird song drowned out the traffic noise. New green leaves were visible in every direction.
Thomas used a GPS device to find the first camera trap, which took him off the trail and into a patch of trees. The students strained to find the camera, which was strapped to the base of a tree three weeks earlier and was purposely camouflaged. When they spotted it, they removed a padlock, retrieved the memory card and took the camera so they could move it to a new location.
While searching for the next camera, the GPS device took them into thick woods. They passed a fox den, made of sand, with three big holes. Some climbed over it, but Thomas stopped short. “I don’t want them coming to my house,” he said. “I’m not going to their house.”
They continued past thorny bushes, up and down hills. The group stopped again when they found a pair of antlers, left behind by a deer, white and pristine on the dried brown leaves. They posed for pictures and carried them on as a souvenir.
Back at school, they downloaded the pictures from the first camera onto a laptop and gathered around, excited to see what it had captured.
The series of pictures showed raccoons with bright eyes, the blur of a running deer, a black squirrel. “Wild turkeys!” they exclaimed, spotting a flock of three turkeys on the screen. “Where are the foxes?’ they wondered.
A second memory card, which had been retrieved earlier from a different camera, showed more deer, including one that lay down and took a two-hour nap in front of the camera. They saw a raccoon standing on two legs, a possum, a house cat, and, finally, a red fox.
Baker said some camera traps have ended up recording other types of wildlife: Occasionally people have mooned the lens. But usually, surprises come in the sheer variety of animals that wander by or what they do when they think no one is watching.
One series of pictures from a volunteer who set up a camera in a park in Centreville, Va., captured a fox playing with a ball. Some student volunteers from the British School of Washington who set up a camera trap in Rock Creek Park captured images of two battling deer.
The next step is to upload the images. The students use a software application that helps sort the pictures and identify the animals. Experts check the images, and then they go into the Smithsonian’s archive.
As part of the school program, seventh-grade students at SEED also will visit the camera traps and study the photographs as they learn about ecosystems and habitats and how to classify animals.
During their first lesson, science teacher Ibari Iheanyi-Igwe asked the students to make a hypothesis about the kinds of animals they might find in the woods next to their school.
“We got all kinds of answers — mountain lions, jaguars, kangaroos,” she said. “Now we will go out and investigate what’s really there.”
How video games could make our kids smarter and learning more engaging [Rocketship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
May 3, 2015
I don’t do video games. I never have. I don’t own any pocket-size devices that would allow such activity. If I’m bored waiting in line, I pull out the latest Washington Post Outlook section — which I always carry wadded up in my back-right pants pocket — and catch up on books and contrarian thought.
I realize this puts me out of step with the modern world, particularly as I watch my grandson Ben trying out video games on my wife’s laptop. His parents discourage this at home, but the morning-care class at his school, where he is an afternoon kindergartner, has introduced him to many games, such as “Monsterland Junior vs. Senior.”
It is an amusing pastime, a smiling little box that he manipulates to drop down on a scowling big box. No mayhem. No blood. So despite my anti-game tendencies, I am willing to accept many of the arguments in USA Today reporter Greg Toppo’s new book, “The Game Believes in You: How Games Can Make Our Kids Smarter.”
Toppo is a former teacher and one of the best education writers in the country. He recognizes there is not much conclusive research on how video games affect children for good or ill. But his wonderfully written book tells the stories of many game makers and scholars who have found clear signs of such activity promoting learning.
Teaching machines, Toppo explains, go back to the 1920s. They experienced many downs and ups, and our current era might be the most promising. In 1960, the National Education Association’s Department of Audio-Visual Instruction published a source book on such devices that was 724 pages. A 1965 report ended that boomlet by concluding that the machines had no advantage over a good teacher with a textbook. A teaching machine might motivate pigeons, one expert said, “but in the long run bored people.”
Toppo writes that “schools have long relied on games — they call them sports, clubs and band competitions — to get students excited about coming to school. In fact, these are often all that keep kids there long enough to graduate. But schools have rarely used academic competition to reach more than a few top students.”
That is changing. Toppo describes fourth-graders at the Rocketship Si Se Puede Academy charter school in San Jose doing math puzzles on ST Math software. Playing the game is fun and engaging, with a cartoon penguin named JiJi tottering across the screen to celebrate each solution. About a half-million students in 26 states learn math this way.
The book delves into the work of learning-game enthusiasts such as James Paul Gee, a former linguist. He and other thinkers bemoan the ravages of classroom boredom. A 2006 survey of high school dropouts found that only a third left school because they were failing. Nearly half said that classes were not interesting, and more than two thirds said that they were not inspired to work hard.
The learning-game activists question “many of our basic assumptions about learning,” Toppo writes. “Students, they said, may be checking out at school, but they were learning deeply at home, spending hours and hours immersed in MySpace, Facebook, World of Warcraft, and SimCity.”
That notion led to experimental public schools such as Manhattan’s Quest to Learn, organized around games. Students become adept at problem-solving, useful in many professions, even if their standardized test scores are only respectable. “We’d think we were failing in our vision if our school had the top test scores,” one Quest to Learn educator said.
Toppo finds more than enough to convince him that breaking away from the standard American school routine is worth the risk. We need to give students better tools, “then trust their creativity,” he says. He wants them to have “a chance to explore, to fail, to pick themselves up and try again.”
It’s too late for me to wander off old paths, but play has its uses. It is key to creative thinking. Ben just might have the right idea.
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