NEWS
- Teachers hit the road over the summer to recharge, build new skills [Capital City PCS and Paul PCS mentioned]
- Study: D.C. ranks near bottom of U.S. school systems
- Schools are able to hire stronger teachers when economy is weak, study finds
- To get support for education bill, senators conjure lost art: Compromise
Teachers hit the road over the summer to recharge, build new skills [Capital City PCS and Paul PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 28, 2015
For teachers across the country, the summer months mean training, not just vacation. They get called back to school to learn about the latest curriculum, reading strategies or behavior management techniques.
And every summer, hundreds of teachers embark on their own professional development that they design themselves to pursue research or enhance their instruction, and they apply for grants to pay for them. Often, such training happens far from their schools, taking them to the rain forests of Costa Rica or the drumming circles in Brazil for field research and new skills they can share when they return.
“We ask teachers to tell us, ‘What do you need to be better with your students and your school and your community, and how are you going to share what you learned?’” said Karen Webb, executive director of the Houston-based Fund for Teachers, which gives teachers grants to pay for their professional development plans.
The individual grants, worth up to $5,000 for individual teachers or $10,000 for teams of teachers, help them pinpoint a specific need as it’s happening. The projects can also give teachers a way to recharge and reconnect with their passions and interests as scholars — an energy they bring back to the classroom, she said.
Started in 2001 by Raymond Plank, the founder of Apache Corp., an oil and gas company, the fund has given out $23.5 million to 6,300 pre-school through high school teachers who have pursued research in 141 countries. This year it paid $1.8 million to 487 teachers across the country.
Teachers in the District have taken part in an excavation of the ancient Roman port city Ostia, an experience designed to help connect students with Roman history, and visited Hiroshima, Japan, where an atomic bomb was dropped, to create an educational documentary about history and cultural memory.
This summer, they are studying conflict resolution in Israel, Arabic language in Morocco, and martial arts in Brazil. One teacher from Capital City Public Charter School is traveling in Tanzania and Kenya to learn about Masai culture, so she can build on a project that is offered at her school.
Another teacher from Paul Public Charter School travelled to Accra, Ghana to learn about a “Reusable Bag Project,” so she can promote recycling and social entrepreneurship at her school.
Heidi Batchelder, a reading specialist at Capital City took part in two trainings to learn how to respond to students who have experienced trauma, as a number of students who live in poverty have, as well as the impact trauma can have on learning. She attended workshops in the District and Eastern Mennonite University in Bethlehem, Penn., and plans to share what she learned with other teachers when she returns to school.
Some teachers, like Batchelder, use the grants for workshops or coursework that they pursue close to home.
Michael Martini, a World Geography teacher at Alice Deal Middle School, said he seeks out travel opportunities whenever possible. He recently returned from a trip to Western Europe where he studied organizations dedicated to international cooperation.
With stops in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, he visited the International Red Cross and the International Olympic Committee. In Paris, he visited UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. And in Brussels, he met with someone at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Headquarters and toured the European Union Parliament.
He learned about different forms of diplomacy, through sportsmanship or trade or humanitarian aid, and he is bringing back ideas for new lessons and assignments for his students and those who are part of his Model United Nations club. For example, he plans to ask his students to nominate new landmarks to be recognized as World Heritage sites by UNESCO.
“I want my students to understand they can find diverse ways of connecting with people across the world,” he said.
Study: D.C. ranks near bottom of U.S. school systems
Washington's Top News
By WTOP Staff
July 28, 2015
D.C. has the second to worst public school system in the United States, according to a new study from WalletHub, which analyzed dropout rates, math, reading and SAT scores, among other metrics.
The city has the lowest math, reading and SAT scores of any school system in the U.S. It has the highest dropout rate and ranks last in school safety, according to the study.
“Comparing D.C. to other states in these sorts of lists is misleading,” says Michelle Lerner, a spokeswoman for D.C. public schools. “What we and Secretary Arne Duncan have consistently said is that D.C. public schools is the fastest improving urban school district in the country.”
Lerner says the school system showed greater growth in student outcomes than any other district on the national Trial Urban District Assessment exam. The district has shown steady increases in student enrollment, student satisfaction, and graduation rates, she says.
In June, a 10-member committee found that while the city’s public and charter schools showed improvement in student performance, achievement was low and wide disparities remained among student groups and wards.
The city’s graduation rate is disturbingly low, committee members reported: In 2014, the rate was 59 percent for public schools and 69 percent for charter schools. In the findings, the committee discovered low proficiency rates on math and science exams, and inadequate monitoring of English language learners and students with disabilities.
While Alaska — with more than 50,000 students — has the worst school system in the nation, it ranks 35th in safety, the data show. Virginia and Maryland placed 11th and 16th in overall rank. While Maryland tied for second in highest reading scores, it ranked 31st in school safety.
Massachusetts has the best public school system, WalletHub found. They have the safest schools, and the highest reading and math scores.
Schools are able to hire stronger teachers when economy is weak, study finds
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 28, 2015
A weak economy appears to have at least one upside: Schools are able to hire more effective teachers, according to new research.
Teachers hired during recessions were significantly more effective, as judged by their students’ performance on standardized tests, than teachers hired during better economic times, according to working paper published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The paper provides the first direct evidence of what would seem to be common sense: The state of the overall job market affects the quality of new teachers. It was written by Harvard education professor Martin R. West and economists Markus Nagler of the University of Munich and Marc Piopiunik of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich.
So what does this mean for policy? It doesn’t make sense to rely on recessions to improve the teacher candidate pool. But the study suggests that school districts could attract higher-quality teachers by paying new teachers more. Or in the words of the authors: “Increasing the economic benefits of becoming a teacher may be an effective strategy to increase the quality of the teaching workforce.”
The research is based on an analysis of the “value-added measurement” scores of 33,000 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in Florida. Value-added measurements, or VAMs, are the product of complex and controversial statistical formulas that attempt to figure out how much of a student’s learning can be attributed to her teacher.
(Teachers unions have criticized value-added measurements as arbitrary and unfair, and a growing number of groups, including the National Research Council, have cautioned against using value-added scores to make personnel decisions.)
Teachers who entered the profession during recessions were roughly one-tenth of a standard deviation more effective in raising students’ math test scores than teachers who entered the profession during better economic times. The recession effect was smaller in reading — about half as large.
Other factors — such as teachers’ age and race, and the characteristics of the schools they worked in — could not explain the differences that researchers found between teachers hired during recession vs. non-recession periods.
To get support for education bill, senators conjure lost art: Compromise
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
July 28, 2015
Sen. Lamar Alexander walked into Sen. Patty Murray’s office and closed the door.
Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, had just taken control of the education committee in the new GOP-led Senate and was determined to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the main K-12 federal education law. It was early February, and he had released a draft of his ideal bill, inviting lawmakers to amend it with their own ideas in committee before bringing it to the full Senate.
Murray, the committee’s ranking Democrat from Washington state, was equally serious about crafting a new law. But she bluntly told Alexander that his way wouldn’t work.
Using a Republican draft as a starting point would only lead to yet another partisan logjam that has come to define Congress, and it would doom their chances of passing an education law that was eight years overdue, she said.
As their staffs anxiously waited in an ante room, Murray and Alexander made an old-school deal —they would find common ground and together write a bipartisan bill. They would compromise.
“I know the general atmosphere of Congress today is ‘Whatever they do is bad’ and ‘Whatever they do is bad’,” Murray said in an interview. The only way to slice through that dysfunction, she said, is to start with a “document at the outset that both of us said we could support and live with and work from.”
It wouldn’t be easy, she told Alexander. “It takes really listening to each other, working it, member by member, line by line, idea by idea,” she said.
Alexander, 75, and Murray, 64, had never worked closely but they were suited to the task. Murray had a growing reputation as a dealmaker after negotiating a budget with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2013; Alexander had stepped down from Republican leadership in 2011, saying he wanted to focus on bridging divides rather than scoring political points.
Alexander accepted Murray’s suggestion.
“And it turned out to be good advice,” he said later in an interview. “I gave up something, but I gained more — not only a working relationship with her but a lot of support from the Democratic members of the committee.”
The result was remarkable. On a Senate committee that spans the political spectrum from progressive Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the left to tea party favorite Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on the right — and includes two declared presidential candidates — the bill Alexander and Murray wrote sailed through on a unanimous vote. The full Senate overwhelmingly approved it 81 to 17.
“It’s an extraordinary accomplishment,” said Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat and former Senate majority leader who founded the Bipartisan Policy Center.
It was a throwback to the way Congress once operated, said Mary Kusler, lobbyist for the National Education Association, the largest teachers union.
“It’s such an odd, odd thing to see that happening in the way it used to happen all the time,” said Kusler, who closely watched the process play out over six months. “Which was essentially that members ofCongress, senators and members of the House, kind of moved from their corners into the center to meet each other.”
Their 601-page bill dealt with the role of the federal government in the nation’s 100,000 schools and touched a number of hot-button issues, including standardized testing, school vouchers, protections for gay and transgender students and how the federal government allocates billions of dollars to schools.
“It was a very complicated piece of legislation with crocodiles lurking every 100 yards,” said Alexander, a former governor, university president and U.S. secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush.
Alexander and Murray each had to navigate conflicts within their own parties over education policy, and Murray carried the extra weight of also representing the interests of the Obama administration.
They convinced committee members to save controversial amendments for debate before the full Senate, fearing that if political arguments consumed the committee, the bill would never make it to the floor.
That meant Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) withdrew an amendment to allow federal tax dollars to be used to pay tuition at private schools, while Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) withdrew his proposal to extend federal civil rights protection to gay, lesbian and transgender K-12 students. Both later were introduced on the Senate floor during full consideration of the bill; neither got enough votes to pass, but the lawmakers felt gratified that they had an opportunity to make their arguments.
One issue that nearly derailed the deal was early childhood education.
Murray, a one-time preschool teacher, insisted that the bipartisan bill include some provision for preschool for low-income children, a top priority of hers as well as the Obama administration. Alexander and Senate Republicans are opposed to any expansion of the federal role in education.
“From the start, he told me ‘no way,’ ” Murray said. “And I brought it up every minute, every time, every day.”
They had a final standoff in early March inside Murray’s hideaway, a private office in the U.S. Capitol with a view of the Supreme Court.
“They just had very different views about what was appropriate and what was the right thing to do,” one Republican staffer said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. “I remember looking out her window and thinking, ‘this is where this bill dies.’ ”
Then Alexander got an idea. If Murray could work out a preschool proposal with Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), a committee member she knew and had worked with in the past, Alexander said he would accept it. If Isakson signed on, Alexander knew it would get some support among Republicans. That enabled Alexander to “not own it, but to allow it, in a bipartisan way,” Murray said.
Murray and Isakson wrote an amendment that would create competitive grants for states to help them coordinate various state, federal and local early childhood programs. The amendment was adopted by the committee and added to the bill. It wasn’t as strong as Murray wanted, but it was something, she said.
“If you walk into any piece of legislation, I don’t care if it’s the budget with Paul Ryan, or this, or workforce investment or anything else I’ve ever worked on, if you say these are my words, not one of them is going to change until signed by the president, you’re in the wrong business,” she said.
Later, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) introduced a more robust early childhood proposal that would have provided universal access to preschool for low-income children, but it got just 45 of the 60 votes needed for passage on the Senate floor.
During the weeklong debate, Alexander and Murray worked as a team, alerting each other if there was a lawmaker within their own caucus with an objection and brainstorming a way to resolve it.
“We were careful not to surprise each other,” said Alexander, who tried to follow the example from the 1980s of the working relationship between Howard Baker and Robert Byrd, two of the Senate’s statesmen. “You don’t succeed if you spend your time or your staff’s time trying to make each other look bad.”
Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate majority leader from Mississippi, said Alexander and Murray are “right up there at the top.”
“Lamar is probably one of the best Republicans that I know, he knows how to make things work in the Senate,” Lott said. “And for the Democrats, I conclude that Patty Murray is probably their best legislator.”
Their bipartisan approach stands in stark contrast to the way the House handled its rewrite of No Child Left Behind. House Republicans barely passed a partisan bill on July 8 — 218 to 213 — without a single vote from Democrats. President Obama has threatened to veto the House bill, largely due to a provision that would change the way federal dollars are distributed in a way the White House says will hurt poor schools.
Pragmatism drives the difference. In the GOP-controlled House, Republicans can pass bills with a simple majority and don’t need Democrats. But Senate rules require 60 votes to pass legislation, which means Republicans need at least a handful of Democrats to pass anything.
Now, Alexander and Murray have to negotiate a compromise bill with House leaders that can pass both chambers and earn the president’s signature.
“It’s not really brain surgery,” Alexander said. “It’s basic human relations, listening to other people, accepting their ideas and asking them to help you work towards a result.”
The pair intend to move otherpending legislation that has the potential to affect millions of Americans, including a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act and a bill to spur innovation at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
Alexander and Murray celebrated the passage of the K-12 education bill by exchanging bottles of wine.
And then they made an appointment to get back to work.
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