- Charter Board’s Search for Director Back to Square One [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS is mentioned]
- Black Leaders to Address Students in Classrooms Across the Country Sept. 23 [Dorothy I. Height Community Charter School is mentioned]
- The New Face of the SAT
- Coming Soon: High Quality, Equal Education
- D.C. Ed Reformers Toast Brill
- City Heightens Focus on Middle Schools
- Most Teachers Exchange Security for Salary Increases
- How Sports Can Help High Schools
Charter Board’s Search for Director Back to Square One [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 16, 2011
Five weeks ago, the D.C. Public Charter School Board was this close to naming a new executive director, according to Chairman Brian Jones. He said the panel would be making its selection from a “first-rate slate of applicants” by early September, in time for the rollout of a new school management performance system for the city’s 53 charters.
Two sources familiar with the search — who asked for anonymity to speak candidly — said the names on the short list were Thurgood Marshall Academy co-founder Joshua Kern, DCPS transformation management chief Abigail Smith and DCPS innovation director Josh Edelman.
Jones confirmed late Thursday that the job was offered to Kern, but that he declined after “a pretty lengthy negotiation.” Jones would not elaborate and Kern’s cellphone mailbox has been full for the past few days. Speculation in the charter community is that the sticking points involved how much authority Kern would have.
While Kern and the board were negotiating, Smith and Edelman withdrew, Jones said. Smith has since announced that she is leaving DCPS to become a consultant on school reform issues.
So, four months after the retirement of founding executive director Josephine Baker, the board still has a big hole in its operation — and at a particularly inopportune moment. The Illinois Facilities Fund study of District school capacity is expected to make recommendations about the future placement of schools. A major District study of school financing issues will also soon be underway.
“We’re going to return to the search process,” Jones said.
Black Leaders to Address Students in Classrooms Across the Country Sept. 23 [Dorothy I. Height Community Charter School is mentioned]
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
September 18, 2011
Five hundred African-American trailblazers will descend upon classrooms in 107 cities and 34 states across the United States (including Puerto Rico) on Fri., Sept. 23 as part of the second annual Back-to-School with the HistoryMakers program.
The one-day program, which comes as students are getting settled in classrooms throughout the country, is designed to bring renewed attention to the needs of the nation's educational system and its students.
This year's participants include: Massachusetts Gov. Patrick Deval; Senior Advisor to President Obama, Valerie Jarrett; former U. N. Ambassador Andrew Young; entertainer and author Common; activist and talk show host the Rev. Al Sharpton; and political commentator and talk show host Roland Martin, as well as other notables -- all of whom will recount their own school experiences and the struggles they encountered on their paths to success.
The theme is "COMMIT," and the goal of the program is to put black leaders in direct and sustained contact with young people in schools all across the nation, while encouraging youth to commit to excellence, learning their history and achieving beyond what they think is possible.
HistoryMakers, the nation's largest African-American video oral history archive, consists of 2,000 videotaped personal histories of both well-known and unsung African Americans.
Subjects include President Obama, General Colin Powell, Marion Wright Edelman and the oldest living black cowboy, Alonzo Pettie, co-founder of Colorado’s first black rodeo.
The oldest person interviewed is Louisiana Hines of Detroit, who is 113, and the youngest is Ayisha McMillan, 33, a prima ballerina from North Carolina.
At last year’s launch, 200 HistoryMakers spoke at 107 schools in 25 states and 50 cities. Participants included former Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes, civil rights activist C. T. Vivian and broadcast journalist Carole Simpson.
In D.C., Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Sharpton and Roger Wilkins at the Dorothy I. Height Community Charter School, and in New York, CNN's Soledad O’Brien spoke with former New York City Mayor David Dinkins at the Harlem Children's Zone.
Through the group's efforts, more than 25,000 students were reached and many HistoryMakers adopted the schools they addressed.
"Our HistoryMakers embody our commitment to education and are a wonderful example of true service -- service that can literally change the course of the lives of thousands of young people," said HistoryMakers founder and Executive Director Julieanna Richardson. "This is just the beginning as we are making our digital collection of more than 8,000 hours of video testimony available, free of charge, to all participating schools."
Organizations that have joined forces with The HistoryMakers for the second annual Back-to-School event include the Faison Firehouse Respect Project; DC-CAP; Illinois Network of Charter Schools; National Education Association; Arnold Family Foundation; the Science, Engineering and Mathematics Link; and Fernbank Science Center.
For more information, visit www.thehistorymakers.com or The HistoryMakers digital archive at http://www.idvl.org/thehistorymakers/.
The New Face of the SAT
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 18, 2011
With SAT reading scores at a four-decade low and results for some Washington area schools down sharply, we asked around after last week’s College Board report to find out what happened.
We learned that the college entrance test, once a rite of passage for elite students, is increasingly being built into the high school experience for everyone, and that a new generation of college prospects will need far more academic preparation for a successful transition. Here are some key factors behind the scores.
First, a technical shift
The College Board has traditionally calculated average SAT scores for graduating seniors through March of that year. For the Class of 2011, it began including scores from tests taken through June.
The switch added about 50,000 test- takers, or 3 percent of the total. While not a huge number, these late entrants to the college process are more likely to be “VERY low performers,” a College Board spokeswoman said in an e-mail.
Some school systems recalculated last year’s average to account for the late test-takers. In Montgomery County, the new students brought the 2010 average score down to 1647 from 1653 on a 2400-point scale.
More test-takers than ever
A record 1.65 million graduating seniors took the test, more than half of the Class of 2011. That increase was reflected in nearly every Washington area school system. In Arlington County, the portion of seniors who took the test increased to 73 percent from 69 percent. In Loudoun County, participation rose to 80 percent from 73 percent, and in Calvert County, it grew to 65 percent from 60 percent.
Greater participation often brings lower scores.
Another factor is the growing popularity of the ACT, a rival college entrance exam. While the SAT is dominant in the Washington area, more local seniors are trying both tests, rather than seeking to improve their SAT scores by retaking it.
Exams not just for college-goers
Increasingly, the SAT and the ACT are being used to encourage students to apply to college, not just to enable them.
Delaware has a new four-year contract with the College Board to administer the SAT to all high school juniors. Texas offers all students vouchers to take the SAT or ACT for free, and Idaho is moving in the same direction. Seven states offer the ACT to all juniors: Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.
“Obviously, not all these students go to college, but it helps to focus them on the idea of going to college,” said Ed Colby, an ACT spokesman.
Trends to watch
Grade inflation? Even as scores declined over the past decade, the portion of students reporting that they earned an A average in school has grown to 45 percent from 41 percent, according to a College Board survey of SAT test-takers.
Gender gap? Even though fewer boys go to college than girls, boys are outscoring girls on the SAT. In 2011, boys scored 531 on the math section, 31 points above girls, and they scored 500 on reading, five points above girls. On the writing section, girls were ahead by 14 points with an average score of 496.
Coming Soon: High Quality, Equal Education
The Washington Examiner
By Jonetta Rose Barras
September 18, 2011
"I can be nothing but optimistic for the chances of kids in this city," Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, told me last week as we discussed the new three-year academic plan D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson is expected to roll out this month.
I called Casserly after having breakfast with Henderson at Ted's Bulletin. She and I had talked about a bunch of things, including the event some have called the "Academy Awards for teachers" being held Monday at the Kennedy Center. But what captured my imagination, making me deliriously excited, was our conversation about "common core" curricula development and implementation in which she and others in DCPS have been involved. If all goes well, it will revolutionize classroom instruction while equalizing the quality of education.
The "common core" initiative was launched in 2009 by the National Governors Association, Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. It requires national academic standards in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12 to be "research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked" and "aligned with college and work expectations."
There wasn't a specific road map to that destination, however.
Last year, Henderson was scouting for curricula that would align with the standards. She spoke with David Coleman, who helped write the "common core." It turns out he and his crew were looking for a school system with which they could collaborate to write companion curricula. The two teams have been working together since November, creating an academic plan that could serve as a national model. DCPS teachers also spent two weeks in the summer going through intensive training to ensure mastery of the plan.
"The District is not only ahead of many cities, but the quality of the work was really quite good," said Casserly, whose organization conducted an independent review of the plan. "We were impressed."
In this first year, the focus is on literacy. Next year it's math. The final year deals with writing.
"The big push in literacy is reading primary source materials and complex text," explained Henderson. The movement is away from "an overreliance on textbooks, while helping students deconstruct what's happening in the source materials.
"It's a significant shift," she said.
"Kaya's doing a super job of revamping and reinvigorating the instructional side of the house. It's the real meat and potatoes of why and how kids learn," said Casserly. "It's the hard stuff."
Henderson said that, for some folks, "This is all inside baseball."
Parents will understand this: Every DCPS child will be taught the same section of the plan at the same time. "It gives us the ability to equalize, to ensure kids in Ward 8 are getting the same content and same level of rigor as kids in Ward 3," Henderson said.
There's much more work to do. But, said Henderson, "I think the staff, students and families will have a dramatically better year in D.C. Public Schools."
D.C. Ed Reformers Toast Brill
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 16, 2011
Big names from all corners of Washington’s education reform world turned out Thursday evening to toast journalist and media entrepreneur Steven Brill, whose new book, “Class Warfare,” celebrates the rise of the movement they’ve helped underwrite and sustain--one that supports charter schools, tougher teacher evaluations and policies to weaken the hold of teachers’ unions.
Former education secretary Bill Bennett, D.C Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D), philanthropist Mark Ein and charter advocate Mike Peabody were among those who packed the Embassy Row home of Katherine and David Bradley, whose CityBridge Foundation is major supporter of D.C. Public Schools and public charter schools. The gathering was also co-hosted by Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham.
They heard Brill tell his story of an education system strangled by archaic tenure rules, creating a 3.2 million-employee workplace “where performance doesn’t count; how long you’ve been breathing counts.”
He spoke evocatively of the experience at Harlem Success Academy, a New York City charter that shares a building with with P.S. 149, a traditional public school. He said he found the environments in the two schools so wrenchingly different (the charter stable, orderly, studious; the public school chaotic and dysfunctional) he wanted to grab kids from one side of the building and carry them to the other.
Brill was preaching to the choir. During a brief Q and A, Peabody, the grandson of Groton School founder Endicott Peabody, asked: “When did the unions get the right to strike, when they could shut down cities without recourse?”
Reprising some of what was in his book, Brill said that unionized teachers were the product of years of underpayment and mistreatment, including mandatory two-year leaves of absence from the classroom for women who became pregnant.
But as their influence grew under union leaders such as Albert Shanker, Brill said, it became “much too much of a good thing.”
City Heightens Focus on Middle Schools
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
September 18, 2011
D.C. City Council Chairman Kwame Brown announced the next series of roundtables on the District's troubled middle schools. Students are asked to provide insight about their experiences at a special session on Sept. 24, while government witnesses are invited to testify on Sept. 27. With enrollment in D.C. Public Schools continuing to drop off after the elementary grades, Brown is zeroing in on Ward 5, where many parents are frustrated about the lack of middle schools: He'll hold a third, separate roundtable -- the "Ward 5 Great Schools Initiative" -- on Sept. 29 at Luke C. Moore High School in Northeast.
Most Teachers Exchange Security for Salary Increases
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
September 18, 2011
More of the top-rated teachers eligible for bonuses took them this year than in 2010, when 40 percent declined the awards to keep some job guarantees.
"People realize this is actually happening, we're really going to pay them and follow through," said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for D.C. Public Schools. "They've realized the changes in terms of job security are not really significant, and the economy's down and times are tight -- families may need the money."
Under an evaluation tool called Impact, teachers are rated from "ineffective" to "highly effective" based mostly on classroom observations and students' test scores. In 2011, 663 teachers received the top rating, making them eligible for bonuses of $3,000 to $25,000, depending on subject taught and area of the city.
Of those teachers, 290 received "highly effective" ratings for the second consecutive year, and school officials offered them base salary increases of about $10,000 to $20,000.
By cashing these checks, top teachers concede some of the job security granted by their teachers union membership. If the school system eliminates their position, for instance, these teachers could be more vulnerable to termination.
But 80.5 percent of eligible teachers accepted their salary increases this year, and 70 percent accepted their bonuses.
"It's the type of thing where I feel like if I'm considered highly effective here, then I feel like I'd continue to be wanted in the classroom here," said Shira Fishman, a math teacher at McKinley Technology High School in Northeast.
Fishman, who accepted both her bonus and her salary increase, was named DCPS' teacher of the year on Friday. She and hundreds of other highly effective teachers will be honored at a star-studded gala dubbed A Standing Ovation for D.C. Teachers on Monday evening at the Kennedy Center.
"If it ever came to the point that it was no longer the case [that I was rated well], maybe D.C. wouldn't be the right place for me, or I'm losing steam as a teacher and it makes sense to do something different," Fishman said.
The uptick in teachers accepting their bonuses has generated some buzz in the donor community, said Cate Swinburn, executive director of the D.C. Public Education Fund, which solicits donations to fund Impact's bonuses and raises.
"There is excitement and optimism there [about] rewarding and retaining great teachers," she said.
How Sports Can Help High Schools
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
September 18, 2011
Education writers rarely examine high school sports, but something is happening there that might help pull our schools out of the doldrums.
In the last school year, a new national survey found, 7,667,955 boys and girls took part in high school sports. This is 55.5 percent of all students, according to the report from the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the 22nd straight year that participation had increased.
Despite two major recessions and numerous threats to cut athletic budgets to save academics, high schools have found ways not only to keep sports alive but increase the number of students playing. We have data indicating sports and other extracurricular activities do better than academic classes in teaching leadership, teamwork, time management and other skills crucial for success in the workplace.
Coaches may be the only faculty members still allowed by our culture and educational practice to get tough with students not making the proper effort. They have the advantage of teaching what are essentially elective non-credit courses. They can insist on standards of behavior that classroom teachers often cannot enforce because the stakes of dismissing or letting students drop their courses are too high.
I thought about this as I watched for the first time in many years my high school’s football team, the Knights of Hillsdale High, in San Mateo, Calif. It was an exciting, high-scoring game, even though we lost 49-35 to a team of behemoths from Mountain View. I understood why that sport is still number one for boys. Last year it had 1,108,441 participants, almost twice as many as number two track and field, which draws 579,000 students.
The other top ten boys’ sports, in descending order, were: basketball, baseball, soccer, wrestling, cross country, tennis, golf and swimming/diving. (I was a nerdish poor athlete, but participation helped me. I got a letter jacket I wore everywhere I went.)
The influence of sports on girls is growing even faster. Their participation is up 63 percent in the last 20 years compared to 31 percent for boys. Their top sport is track and field, with 475,265 participants, followed by basketball, volleyball, fast pitch softball, soccer, cross country, tennis, swimming/diving, competitive spirit squads and lacrosse in that order. (The survey missed some smaller schools which account for about 4 percent of the U.S. high school population, according to federation official Elliot Hopkins.)
We Californians can grumble about pigskin worship making Texas number one, beating us in participation 786,626 to 774,767 even though the Golden State’s population is 42 percent larger. (Virginia ranks 15th with 175,435 participants. Maryland is 22nd with 114,223.) But the fact is that all states would benefit from more after school activity.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has published a list of what it calls life and career skills, including flexibility and adaptability, productivity and accountability, leadership and responsibility. Many teens find the most congenial way to acquire such competencies is after-school activities.
A 2008 paper by Christy Lleras in the journal Social Science Research said students who participated in sports and other activities in high school earned more 10 years later, even when compared to those with similar test scores. A 2005 paper by Peter Kuhn and Catherine Weinberger in the Journal of Labor Economics found similar results for men who occupied leadership positions in high school. They cited evidence that leadership is not just a natural talent, but can be learned by participating in extracurricular activities.
Students do better in activities they choose. If we provide more of them, led by committed adults, maybe even part-timers or volunteers, that can make a difference.
We know the bad news about American education. SAT scores are down. Drop-out rates are high. But sports participation is going up, despite pressure to cut it back. Let’s cheer about that, and look for a way to draw more students in. With more depth on defense, for instance, Hillsdale might win next time.