NEWS
- Goodwill wants to help adults in D.C. earn a high school degree [Goodwill Excel Center PCS mentioned]
- Should teachers be evaluated on how ‘gritty’ their students are? [KIPP PCS mentioned]
- Charter Schools must play bigger role in U.S. education
- Crumbling school facilities causing anxiety for parents
Goodwill wants to help adults in D.C. earn a high school degree [Goodwill Excel Center PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
May 12, 2015
Goodwill of Greater Washington wants to help adults who have dropped out of school earn a high school degree by establishing a charter school in Washington, D.C.
Goodwill Excel Center Public Charter School would be the first adult charter school to offer a high school diploma instead of a GED.
Catherine Meloy, president and CEO of the Goodwill of Greater Washington and founding member of the charter school, said at a hearing last month that earning a “living wage” in D.C. without a high school diploma is difficult.
“For individuals left behind, and desiring a second chance, there are a small handful of education and training options but these options combined don’t meet a fraction of the need of the District,” she told the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
According to the founders’ application, an estimated 10 percent of D.C. adults do not have a high school diploma. The GED is the most common method of education for D.C. adult learners, but in 2014, only 21 percent of residents passed.
The academy would model off of the Excel Center, an adult education program founded by Goodwill in Indiana, Texas and Tennessee. The program focuses on coaching its students to help them obtain a degree and learn the skills they need to get a job after graduation. The school would provide flexible class schedules, individualized instruction, and free child care.
Goodwill is one of five charter schools that have applied to open next year. The approval rate for charter schools is about 40 percent.
While graduation rates for traditional public high schools in D.C. rose slightly to 58 percent, it remains far behind the national average of 80 percent. The graduation rates of charter schools are slightly better, with 69 percent of students graduating on time last year.
There are 11 charter schools and three D.C. Public Schools, as well as D.C. government agencies that serve about 8,000 adult learners.
The board votes on the applications May 18. The public has until 5 p.m. May 11 to submit written comments regarding each school.
Should teachers be evaluated on how ‘gritty’ their students are? [KIPP PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 12, 2015
A growing number of education policymakers are interested in judging schools and teachers in part on whether they contribute to the growth of children’s character, pointing to research that shows a solid link between success and the strength of traits such as self-control and resilience.
But now two of the researchers who helped establish that link are sounding a note of caution, arguing in an essay published Wednesday that existing measures of children’s character traits aren’t sophisticated enough to be used for decisions that would affect the lives of teachers and students.
“We have a simple scientific recommendation regarding the use of currently available personal quality measures for most forms of accountability: not yet,” the researchers wrote in the journal Educational Researcher.
One of the authors is Angela Lee Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who won a 2013 MacArthur “Genius” award after establishing the notion that a student’s success in and after school is correlated to that student’s level of self-control and “grittiness,” or ability to keep working toward long-term goals.
“School districts and state legislators are in some cases so enthusiastic about grit and mind-set that they want to tell people to measure it, to make salaries dependent on it,” Duckworth said in an interview.
Duckworth outlined her view with fellow researcher David Scott Yeager of the University of Texas. Yeager studies how a child’s mind-set — his or her belief in whether abilities are fixed or can be improved — affects outcomes.
Character traits, such as tenacity or emotional intelligence, can be measured accurately enough for research, the professors argue, but not accurately enough to hold schools accountable or evaluating teachers and principals.
For example, student questionnaires are a common way to measure a student’s “non-cognitive skills,” such as persistence and hard work. But there’s a paradox: The lower a school’s standard for any one quality, the more likely a student is to rate him or herself highly. As school standards rise, students are more likely to give themselves low ratings.
“It’s basically a statistical law,” said Yeager, pointing out that on international exams, students in countries with low performance tend to rate themselves highly on measures of conscientiousness. “Anyone who becomes an expert at something becomes better at assessing their flaws in that thing.”
Duckworth, a former middle school teacher, is known for helping to popularize the notion that a student’s success is correlated to that student’s level of self-control and “grittiness,” or ability to keep working toward goals.
Her research has shown that grittier students are more likely to graduate from high school, score higher on SAT and ACT exams and be more physically fit. Grittier students also are less likely to get divorced, and they typically experience fewer career changes.
KIPP charter schools have become known for their approach in this area, called social-emotional learning or character education. But it has become more common around the nation as schools seek ways to improve outcomes, especially for struggling students.
The researchers argue that if schools are judged according to the results of student self-ratings, schools that are worst at teaching social-emotional learning are going to appear to be the best and are going to be asked to share their tactics with other schools that are actually doing better. Teacher questionnaires are another measurement tool that shouldn’t be used for judging teachers or students, the researchers say. Teachers’ definitions of “self-control” at one school might be different from the accepted standards at another.
Some researchers assess a child’s traits via a task such as the “marshmallow test,” which measures how long a young child can withstand the temptation of a marshmallow when alone in a room. Such tasks have promise, the researchers said, but they are still too weak to serve as the foundation of decisions about a teacher’s employment status.
One key problem: Teachers whose jobs are at stake might feel pressure to fudge their evaluations of students. Another problem: When teachers repeat tasks in order to measure growth over time, students catch on — the second time they sit in a room with the marshmallow is a different experience than the first.
The flaws in existing measurements mean they should only be used cautiously, if at all, for diagnosing a problem with a student’s character or for judging whether a particular program is working, the researchers argue.
Some states and districts have begun incorporating measures of character in their systems for judging schools’ success, according to Yeager. Recent federal grant competitions have asked applicants to explain the character measures they will use to gauge whether their approach to change is actually working.
At stake are millions of dollars, Yeager said, “and the measures that people are likely to use are not suitable for evaluating program effectiveness.”
Charter Schools must play bigger role in U.S. education
The Reporter
By Kara Kerwin
May 12, 2015
Today in the U.S. there are approximately 3 million students being served by nearly 7,000 charter schools across 43 states and the District of Columbia. We’ve come a long way since the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota back in 1991, but I ask myself as we celebrate National Charter Schools Week, have we come far enough?
Across the country students are stuck on charter school wait lists – with most schools reporting wait lists of nearly 300 students each – and demand continues to outstrip supply, suggesting that charter schools could grow significantly faster to serve more students if the policy environments were more supportive.
For nineteen years, The Center for Education Reform (CER) has evaluated state charter school laws to address these fundamental issues with a thorough review of what the words of laws actually mean in practice, not just on paper. Interpretation and implementation vary depending on how the regulations are written, and frankly, who’s in charge.
Charter school growth does continue at a steady, nearly linear pace nationally, especially in states with charter laws graded “A” or “B,” but an even more accelerated pace would allow charter schools to play a more central role in addressing the demands and needs of our nation’s students. Even the top five charter school laws in the nation – D.C., Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, and Arizona – while earning “As,” are still ten or more points away from a perfect score!
Public charter schools are an essential piece of the puzzle when it comes to giving parents power over their children’s education and the freedom to choose the best environment for their children’s unique individual learning needs. Parents deserve access to a portfolio of excellent education options – from public charter schools, to traditional public schools, brick and mortar, completely online, blended, homeschool, or some other learning innovation we have yet to think of – regardless of their zip code.
The lack of progress made in state houses across the country over the past few years to truly improve the policy environment for charter schools can be chalked up to a lack of political will leading up to a major mid-term election. It also explains why two-thirds (69 percent) of Americans rated their state lawmakers track record on education “fair” or “poor” on CER’s recent poll.
The biggest culprit however, is a lack of information, or perhaps a growing body of misinformation, as to what constitutes strong, responsible charter school policy. Pressure from opponents and proponents alike to increase regulation, biased media reporting and inconsistent data have become a distraction.
Regardless of one’s position on charter schools or the principles of parent choice and performance-based accountability, those engaged in the lawmaking process must understand the impact of their interpretation of charter school policy. They must also take responsibility for whether the implementation yields the intended result, which is to ensure the creation of excellent and numerous learning opportunities for children.
At The Center for Education Reform we take responsibility for holding ourselves and the charter school movement to high standards in pursuit of great policies that meet four proven criteria for improving student outcomes: provide families new and meaningful choices; hold them accountable for results; ensure autonomy for educators to innovate; and guarantee fiscal equity for both students and schools.
And we stand ready to help advocates and policymakers bring about meaningful change in their communities.
Crumbling school facilities causing anxiety for parents
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
May 12, 2015
Benita Douglas has been looking forward to sending her son to the middle school in her Capitol Hill neighborhood so he could stay with friends he has known since kindergarten.
But a planned renovation of Eliot-Hine Middle School recently got pushed back from a scheduled start next year to 2019. Now she is getting nervous about sending him to a building with broken bathroom doors, rusting pipes and overheated classrooms.
“I would feel like I’m sending my child to some kind of developing country,” said Douglas, a nurse’s assistant and the mother of two children at Maury Elementary.
The Eliot-Hine renovation is one of more than 40 school projects that were delayed in a $1.3 billion, six-year school construction plan Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) proposed last month.
The delays — a result of cost overruns and a slowdown in capital spending — have stoked parental anxiety in neighborhoods with still-crumbling schools and have prompted city leaders to call for an overhaul of the way capital projects are planned and prioritized.
D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), chairman of the Education Committee, was expected to release a revised capital plan Wednesday. He also was expected to propose new rules to govern school construction decisions, basing those decisions on criteria such as a school’s condition and enrollment.
The intention is to move the city away from a planning process that many have criticized as opaque and driven mainly by political pressure, with projects’ fortunes shifting with the priorities of the sitting mayor and D.C. Council.
“The past six to eight years have been a real free-for-all when it comes to capital budgets in the schools,” Grosso said. “I think there can be some objective ways to do this that are fair and can have a better impact on a broader number of schools.”
More than $3.2 billion has been spent on school renovations since 2007, when then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) accelerated a capital program to reverse decades of neglect in the public schools.
Since then, building renovations have become the most visible symbol of the city’s efforts to improve the school system, a campaign that has produced glass-covered atriums, swimming pools and energy-saving features such as rainwater harvesting and photovoltaic panels.
All the amenities have served to heighten a a sense of the public schools being divided into haves and have-nots, particularly as funding slows.
City leaders are working to draft “education specifications” that would offer a common starting point for future projects. Grosso said it is time to rein in spending: “I’m tired of Taj Mahals.”
The six-year capital budget for public schools dropped 20 percent — to $1.27 billion from $1.6 billion — as the city prepares to pay down what amounts to a major debt load after several years of aggressive borrowing.
This year, the system expects to spend $434 million on school projects. Bowser’s capital plan includes $335 million for school projects next year. By fiscal 2018, annual spending would drop to $123 million before it begins to increase again.
“Parents will be patient if they know their turn is coming,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, which advocates for facilities improvements. “But people are feeling like they are going to turn off the hose.”
Delays have been exacerbated by construction cost overruns.
Duke Ellington School of the Arts was budgeted for $81.5 million in 2013. The current plan calls for $178 million.
Jennifer Niles, deputy mayor for education, said construction costs have increased by 20 percent in recent years, driving up costs at Ellington and elsewhere. The Ellington design also calls for expensive performance spaces and an underground parking garage in the school’s cramped Georgetown location, she said.
Ellington has become a sore point, with calls for more scrutiny of how tax dollars are being spent. Many have questioned the size of the investment for just 600 students when thousands attend schools with leaking bathrooms and no space for physical education. And some of those schools might not see improvements for many years.
At a public hearing last month, children from Orr Elementary, a Ward 8 school whose capital funding had been delayed a number of times, talked about mice-infested classrooms, an outdated “open floor plan” and a 40-year-old boiler that makes some rooms unbearably hot.
Orr is one of two dozen schools that Grosso has dubbed “phase zero,” meaning they have not received any dedicated funds from the capital budget beyond basic maintenance or “stabilization.”
Five of those schools are in Ward 7, which is one of the poorest parts of the city and also has a large concentration of young families.
Jimell Sanders, a Ward 7 mother with a toddler, said not all of the schools in her ward have active parent groups that can call attention to their schools, so she and others are trying to advocate for all the schools in the ward. She said that she is glad that Grosso is calling attention to untouched schools but that she is disappointed that Grosso is scaling down his vision for them.
“So the first in line, they get the atriums and the aesthetic design elements,” she said.
As spending slows, some parents are questioning the decision to prioritize high schools early in the process. The redesigned high schools were supposed to be proud cornerstones of their communities, but many have low enrollments and empty classrooms.
Coolidge High School in Ward 4, with a projected enrollment of 401 students next year, will be the last neighborhood high school to be renovated, at a cost of $119 million over six years, according to Bowser’s capital plan.
In the meantime, the school system is struggling to attract families back to outdated middle schools, and a growing wave of young families is shopping for elementary schools.
Martha McIntosh, co-president of the Home and School Association at Murch Elementary in Ward 3, said the condition of the building is very much on the minds of families when they visit schools.
“The first question they are asking is, ‘When is it going to be modernized?’ ” she said.
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