- Court Orders District to Expand Preschool Special Education
- Rally Brings Focus Technology Shortcomings in DC Schools
- Essay Contest asks D.C. Students to Ponder Democracy
- USDA: Continuing to Serve Pizza to School Children Won’t Save Much Money
- Private vs. Public: No Advantage
- Stay Informed
Court Orders District to Expand Preschool Special Education
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 16, 2011
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the District has failed to provide special education services to hundreds of eligible preschool-age children and ordered that the city redouble its efforts to find, assess and treat those with special needs.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth issued a sweeping series of orders in a 2005 class-action suit (D.L. v. District of Columbia) brought by seven children and their parents, who encountered barriers and delays in securing special education services for which they were eligible under federal law. Lamberth set a series of performance benchmarks for D.C. special education officials and said if they were not met, more stringent intervention would follow, possibly in the form of a court-appointed special master.
Lamberth said Wednesday that District officials’ “persistent failure to live up to their statutory obligations, a failure that works a severe and lasting harm on one of society’s most vulnerable populations — disabled preschool children — is deeply troubling to the court.”
He added that because of officials’ “historic inability to keep their promises to the District’s disabled preschool children, this court hereby makes it crystal clear that failing to abide by the court’s order will earn defendants far more signficant court involvement and oversight than is ordered this day.”
Fred Lewis, a spokesman for D.C. Public Schools, said the District is reviewing the court’s orders and has no comment.
Lamberth’s decision is the latest in a series of federal court decisions finding serious deficiencies in the District’s efforts to meet the needs of disabled students. Special education services to older children, and their transportation, have for years been subject to various forms of court oversight.
About 700 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years currently receive special education services for learning and developmental issues, according to Bruce J. Terris, an attorney for the children and their parents. But Terris produced expert testimony showing that significant numbers of D.C. preschoolers who need special education don’t receive it. While the District serves less than 6 percent of the total preschool population — the national average percentage of special-needs children — the analysis presented by the plaintiffs concluded that because of poverty, HIV/AIDs rates and other risk factors, the proportion should be at least 8.5 percent.
Terris said the court decision could double the number of children receiving services.
Lamberth ordered the city to submit biannual and annual reports to the court showing progress in reaching the 8.5 percent level. He also ordered that over the next year the city increase by 25 percent the number or 3- to 5-year-olds referred to special education programs by parents, doctors, social workers or other professionals. Lamberth said the city must ensure that 95 percent of preschool children referred receive a timely evaluation (within 120 days). He also ordered that children from birth to age 3 who are in early-intervention programs receive a smooth and effective transition to preschool special education programs by their third birthdays.
Terris said the District has made strides in recent years, but “still has a long way to go.”
“It’s a wonderful day,” said Margaret Kohn, another attorney for the children and their parents. “Early childhood is the time when you can have the greatest impact.”
Staff writer Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.
Rally Brings Focus Technology Shortcomings in DC Schools
The Washington Informer
By Staff
November 17, 2011
While holding candles in CD Roms and chanting "my school needs the other apples," more than 150 students and parents rallied recently at Turner at Green Elementary School in Southeast to focus attention on technology shortcomings in city schools.
"I've been in D.C. schools where the computers are so antiquated that you can't even download a basic pdf file," said former technology teacher Toval Rolston, who shared technology horror stories. "Our children don't have the tools to compete in today's high tech world."
District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) would receive $85 million dollars to prepare students for the 21st century through a provision of the American Jobs Act that will help lessen the local technology divide and give District children a better chance at competing for jobs later in life. School sources say, currently, students at Turner at Green have access to a computer lab, but the lab has no teacher.
The contrast between educational outcomes and life prospects between the rich and poor is stark: west of the Potomac River virtually all students will go to college, while east of the Anacostia River, only 1 in 20 make it to higher education.
DCPS student Tyesha Kennedy told the gathering, "As hard as I work, it's tough knowing I'm going to graduate behind suburban kids when it comes to technology; it doesn't have to be that way."
Essay Contest asks D.C. Students to Ponder Democracy
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
November 16, 2011
Hey, D.C. students! Want to make money by writing? Of course you do. Journalism forever!
But also, D.C. Public Schools and charter school students can win $1,000 in a new city-sponsored essay contest. Brought to you by the D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative in partnership with the city's public libraries, the theme is, "As a citizen of D.C., what does democracy mean to me?"
All District public school students in grades 5 through 12 are eligible, with a winner picked in each grade level. That's $8,000 up for grabs. Exciting! Even the mayor thinks so:
"This is a great opportunity for students to express themselves, engage with what it means to be a citizen in our democracy, and call attention to our own quest for democracy in the District," said Mayor Vincent Gray, who has mentioned that pesky issue of D.C. statehood a couple times.
Details time: The contest started Wednesday. Each winner's school will be "rewarded with professional development opportunities for teachers." Information to enter at the collaborative's website.
Aaaand go.
USDA: Continuing to Serve Pizza to School Children Won’t Save Much Money
The Washington Post
By Dina ElBoghdady
November 16, 2011
The legislative push to enable school cafeterias to keep serving pizza and french fries won’t save nearly as much money as some lawmakers have suggested — if any, according to the Agriculture Department.
This week, a group of House and Senate lawmakers crafted an agriculture spending bill that barred the USDA from adopting the Obama administration’s proposal to limit the amount of tomato paste and starchy vegetables in federally funded school meals.
That proposal’s price tag — including the financial burden it would impose on strapped school districts — ranked as one of the top reasons for derailing it.
But on Wednesday, USDA officials said that scrapping the plan to limit tomato paste and starchy vegetables such as potatoes would not reap huge cost savings, and certainly not $7 billion as suggested by the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee.
The USDA’s plan to cut back on tomato paste and potatoes is part of a larger proposal to make school meals more nutritious. The USDA has estimated that revamping the entire school meals program would cost $6.8 billion over the next five years, in part because it would involve doubling the amount of fruits and vegetables served.
But barring the USDA from cutting back on tomato paste and starchy vegetables “will have little to no effect on the cost of the new standards” for school meals, said Aaron Lavallee, a USDA spokesman.
The USDA had proposed a one-cup-per-week limit on the amount of white potatoes and other starchy vegetables served to schoolchildren. The proposal also would have nixed the favorable treatment of tomato paste. Currently, one-eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as a half-cup of vegetables and thus counts as one vegetable serving. In effect, that enables food makers to market pizzas as vegetables.
The USDA wanted to bring tomato paste in line with the standards granted to fruit pastes and purees, such as applesauce.
With a strong push from the food lobby, a group of Senate and House lawmakers agreed to scrap the USDA’s tomato and potato proposal when negotiating an agriculture spending bill. The Senate and House expect to vote on the final spending bill this week.
As the USDA presses forward on finalizing its school meals proposal — without the tomato and potato language — it maintains that it will more than offset the costs associated with its plan by adopting revenue-raising measures.
Private vs. Public: No Advantage
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
November 17, 2011
People who live in affluent neighborhoods such as Northwest Washington may wonder: Will it hurt my kid’s chances of getting into Harvard if I let her stay in the public schools after elementary school?
Local elementary schools such as Murch and Lafayette have nearly all children of college-focused parents and excellent achievement results. But Deal Middle School and Wilson High School are more economically diverse, leading some to doubt that the learning standards will stay high.
I have met parents pondering this issue in many parts of this region and the country — in Alexandria, Silver Spring and Reston; in Hillsborough, Calif.; White Plains, N.Y.; Aurora, Ill.; and Dallas.
It makes for good Sunday barbecue chat because there are no available data favoring either side. So I was shocked when Northwest Washington resident and health-care technology analyst Leonard Jewler told me he had all the numbers and was ready to settle the argument.
Jewler has worked on this personal project for five years, since he realized that the 2006 reunion of the Lafayette Class of 2000 allowed him to find out which of those students went to private high schools, which went to public high schools and which colleges enrolled them.
In 2007, he shared his first results with my colleague Marc Fisher on his Raw Fisher blog. About a third of the Lafayette students went to private high schools, a third went to public ones and the other third could not be reached. Fisher noted that was too small a sample for any statistically valid conclusions, but the results were still interesting:
“The kids who went to the top state universities — places such as Berkeley, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia — seemed just as likely to be graduates of public high school as private high school,” Fisher wrote. “Turn to the top-ranked private universities and the survey reaches the same conclusion. An equal number of Lafayette kids who went to public high school and Lafayette kids who chose private high school ended up at universities in the top percent on the U.S. News list — Yale, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Georgetown among them.”
This doesn’t surprise me, because of a leveling mechanism employed by selective colleges. If you have straight A’s, a solid SAT score of 2200, and good activities and recommendations, your chances of getting into an Ivy League school are better if you are attending an average public high school than a competitive private one. As City University of New York Graduate Center scholar Paul Attewell showed in a 1997 study, more people will apply to selective colleges from competitive private schools than regular public schools, and selective colleges will take only a few from each school.
Jewler has a new study showing once again, with a much larger sample of 336 students, the graduating classes of Lafayette and Murch from 2000 to 2004. There are intriguing details, such as the exact number of students from these two elementary schools who enrolled in each college.
Here are the results for some of the more famous colleges, giving the number of public and private high school graduate enrollees. Jewler’s Web site evernowchronicles.org has the full report.
Brown: 2 public, 3 private; Columbia: 1 public; Cornell: 3 public; Dartmouth: 1 public, 2 private; Harvard: 4 public; Princeton: 1 public, 2 private; Stanford: 3 public; Vanderbilt: 1 private; Yale: 5 public, 4 private.
I suspect the numbers look similar in other such neighborhoods around the country. As Jewler notes, graduates of elementary schools such as those have family support that leads to college admission success no matter where they go to high school. Public or private, if they listen to their teachers, do their homework and pursue an interest or two outside of class, they will find a great college glad to have them.
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