- District Unveils First Ranking of Public Charter Schools [Achievement Prep, DC Preparatory, KIPP DC, Thurgood Marshall Academy, Washington Latin, Two Rivers, Howard University Middle School, Maya Angelou, Center City, Options and Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS are mentioned]
- First-Ever Rankings Place 15 D.C. Charter Schools at Bottom of Pile [Ideal Academy, Friendship, DC Preparatory, Maya Angelou, KIPP DC, Latin American Montessori Bilingual, Septima Clark, Options, Community Academy and Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS are mentioned]
- D.C. Education Agency’s Progress Questioned
- How to Rescue Education Reform
District Unveils First Ranking of Public Charter Schools [Achievement Prep, DC Preparatory, KIPP DC, Thurgood Marshall Academy, Washington Latin, Two Rivers, Howard University Middle School, Maya Angelou, Center City, Options and Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS are mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
December 6, 2011
The District unveiled its first rankings of public charter schools Tuesday, part of a new rating system that offers parents a broader assessment of school progress than annual standardized test results.
The new performance evaluation shows how test scores of students have grown over the last year, relative to their academic peers across the city. Schools also are assessed against a series of leading indicators and “gateway” measurements that researchers regard as predictors of future educational success. They include third-grade DC CAS reading scores, eighth-grade math scores and 11th-grade PSAT results.
The new system raises the bar of accountability for the 53 publicly financed, independently operated schools that educate more than 30,000 D.C. students across 98 campuses. While some of the information in the assessments is already available in annual performance reports, the new system creates a more detailed and easily accessible snapshot for parents and families.
“The idea here is that we really do want to shine a light on what’s going on in our charter schools,” said Brian Jones, president of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the body empowered to authorize the opening and closing of charter schools. Joined by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), Jones unveiled the new rankings at a news conference at one of the top-rated schools, Achievement Prep in Southeast Washington.
The new ranking system, developed by the board over the past three years with the help of outside consultants, also represents the leading edge of a new generation of more-detailed school report cards that will soon be available to parents across the region.
D.C. Public Schools and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education are expected to release their own school ratings emphasizing academic growth over time rather than annual test scores. Virginia and Maryland are also committed to making similar changes in reporting school data.
The 71 charter campuses are listed in three tiers of overall quality, based on a 100-point scale. The rankings unveiled Tuesday, which cover the 2010-11 school year, delivered few surprises. Among the 22 charter campuses in Tier I were schools with established records of high student achievement. They include D.C. Preparatory’s Edgewood middle school campus; the three KIPP middle schools (AIM, KEY and WILL) and its College Preparatory high school; Thurgood Marshall Academy and Washington Latin high schools; Two Rivers, a PS-8 school; and Howard University Middle School.
The 15 Tier III schools, considered the weakest performers, include the middle and high school campuses of Maya Angelou; Center City’s Congress Heights campus, a PS-8 school; and Options, serving grades six through 12.
The remaining 34 campuses were ranked in Tier II.
Schools that win top-ranking are exempt from further in-depth monitoring by charter board staff. Officials said Tier III schools will get additional scrutiny, including consideration for possible closure by the board.
Other so-called “non-standard” schools — those offering early childhood programs, or serving adult or exclusively disabled populations, were not ranked. Officials said the charter board will be developing an alternate system to appraise their performance.
The new rating system does not address the condition of the schools’ finances or governance, frequent trouble spots for charter schools. Charter board member Darren Woodruff, who played a key role in developing the new system, left open the possibility that such information could be added in the future. The board monitors those issues through its other oversight measures, Woodruff said, and for the moment, “we want the focus to be on academic performance.”
The newest wrinkle in the rating system is the “growth model” for gauging academic progress. Each charter school student taking the DC CAS standardized test is compared to other students citywide with similar test score histories and is given a growth percentile. For example, a student with a growth percentile of 60 has done as well or better than 60 percent of his or her academic peers.
The individual student data is developed into schoolwide median growth rates. At the Petworth campus of Center City, a Tier I charter school in Ward 4, for example, the median growth rate in reading in grades three through eight is 66.5 percent. At Center City’s Congress Heights campus in Ward 8, the same median growth rate is 52.7 percent.
The rating system is the product of considerable wrangling between the charter board and schools. Some schools protested so vehemently to a version developed last year that it was pulled back for retooling.
“I think they’ve made a lot of progress,” said Linda Moore, executive director of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom charter school in Northeast Washington, adding that the new edition is less confusing and more user-friendly
First-Ever Rankings Place 15 D.C. Charter Schools at Bottom of Pile [Ideal Academy, Friendship, DC Preparatory, Maya Angelou, KIPP DC, Latin American Montessori Bilingual, Septima Clark, Options, Community Academy and Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom PCS are mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 6, 2011
Fifteen D.C. charter schools were placed in the bottom tier of the first-ever rankings of campuses by the D.C. Public Charter School Board on Tuesday.
Four of them may have their charters revoked, while the 22 schools in the top tier are being examined to see what makes them work so well.
The Performance Management Framework, or PMF, has been in the works for three years. Schools are ranked based on factors such as performance on state exams, attendance, re-enrollment rates, and attention to critical grades. In the elementary and middle schools, a school's year-to-year improvement accounts for the lion's share of the rating at 40 percent.
Schools whose composite score is between 65 and 100 percent are considered to meet high standards, landing them in Tier I. Those that fall short, but score at least 35 percent, are classified as Tier 2, meeting minimum requirements.
For the 15 schools labeled Tier 3, their "inadequate performance" merits increased academic oversight as they were told they are under serving their students. The four that fell below 20 percent will be reviewed for revocation at the board's next meeting on Dec. 19.
It's a swift axe, with school closure decisions made by February and schools possibly closed at the end of the school year.
"If we don't see that a school has a clear path toward improvement in a short amount of time, we'll probably close them," said Darren Woodruff, chairman of the charter board's schools committee.
Any school that is Tier 3 for three years in a row, as well as any school that falls five or more points in one year, also will be considered for closure in the years ahead.
The new rankings held a few surprises. Ideal Academy Public Charter School received an adequate, Tier 2 rating, after being considered for revocation last spring, when the board charged the Ward 4 campus with failing to implement a curriculum.
Friendship Public Charter Schools, which runs the turnaround effort at D.C. Public Schools' Anacostia Senior High School, saw its four campuses fall into Tier 2.
The top rating went to D.C. Preparatory Public Charter School's Edgewood campus, at 92.3 percent. The lowest was Maya Angelou Public Charter School's high school campus in Shaw, which met just 13.6 percent of expectations.
Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School received a 67.2 percent rating, eking into Tier 1 by two points. "I think there has always been competition among the schools," said Linda Moore, founder and CEO of Stokes. "Whether we're competing against each other, against the status quo, or against our own visions, I think we all want the best for kids."
D.C. Education Agency’s Progress Questioned
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
December 6, 2011
Nearly a year ago, Mayor Vincent C. Gray hired the former chief of staff of Chicago public schools to clean up an education agency widely regarded as a dysfunctional mess.
D.C. State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley said she is up to the task. “I’m comfortable with chaos,” she said. “And I like turnarounds.”
But questions are emerging about how much Mahaley has accomplished since she took over an office with a $400 million budget meant to play a crucial supporting role in school reform. A top aide to Gray strongly defended Mahaley’s performance but acknowledged that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, known as OSSE, has been plagued by problems since its creation in 2007.
“Let’s face it, things have been bumpy at best,” said De’Shawn Wright, deputy mayor for education. “Hosanna inherited a troubled agency and a daunting challenge. I’m pleased with the important progress that has been made but recognize there is much more work to be done.”
Last month an employee of the agency was fired following allegations that she approved as much as $200,000 in fraudulent payments to a transportation company operated by a friend.
Town hall meetings the agency had planned for a bid to secure a waiver from parts of the federal No Child Left Behind Law fell apart after the public received little or no advance notice and dates conflicted with other community events. A Nov. 10 town hall at Oyster Bilingual School in Northwest Washington drew one resident. Subsequent meetings were canceled. An agency spokesman said they will be rescheduled for January.
Mahaley has left several senior positions unfilled for much of the year and has missed five out of nine D.C. State Board of Education meetings since taking office on Jan. 10, including four of the past five. The elected board advises the superintendent and sets policies on such matters as graduation requirements and teacher certification.
As a mayoral appointee, Mahaley does not report to the board. But her predecessor, Kerri Briggs, made a point of regular attendance at the meetings. Briggs missed three of 18 in her tenure.
“I didn’t think my presence was valued or needed,” Mahaley said in an interview last week.
Board members disagreed.
“Where’s Waldo?” asked Mary Lord (Ward 2). “I think Hosanna is great, but she’s been kind of absent.” Lord and others in the government and the education community also said it is difficult to get basic information from the agency in a timely manner. “You can’t find who’s in charge of anything,” Lord said.
This year, Mahaley has taken week-long trips to Brazil and China for conferences to explore teaching methods. The trips, sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers, were not at public expense.
But the mid-September Brazil conference was paid by a grant from the Pearson Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the giant textbook and educational testing company. The company won an $860,000 contract from the agency in September 2010 — three months before Mahaley’s appointment — to provide alternative standardized tests for students with significant cognitive challenges, according to OSSE officials. A $700,000 option under the contract was renewed for this school year.
Mahaley and a Pearson spokesman said that while company executives joined school officials in Brazil, no agency business was discussed.
“No one pitched me a sale,” Mahaley said. “No one talked to me about a Pearson product.”
Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright, whose agency has contracts with Pearson, also was on the trip. Wright has said that she followed all conflict-of-interest laws.
Mahaley, 43, a former math teacher, was chief of staff to Arne Duncan when he ran Chicago’s schools. Now U.S. education secretary, Duncan recommended Mahaley to Gray in fall 2010. At the time, she was an executive with Wireless Generation, an education company in New York.
As superintendent, Mahaley earns an annual salary of $179,000 and oversees about 320 employees. Her agency was created in June 2007 when city schools were placed under mayoral control and the old Board of Education — which controlled budgets and hired and fired school chiefs — was disbanded. The reorganization put the superintendent in charge of programs and policies that touch every corner of public education, from administration of standardized tests to college tuition assistance to compliance with federal laws. Special education and other longtime areas of weakness were also put into OSSE’s portfolio.
Even supporters of mayoral control concede the agency has yet to find its footing. Under the 2007 law, it is a kind of shunned stepchild: a state education agency in a place that it is not a state, dealing with a school system led by a chancellor who is the city’s dominant educational figure, and an unwieldy collection of public charter schools considered separate school districts in the eyes of the law.
Mahaley does not have a chief of staff, which is unusual for the leader of a big government agency. She said that structure enables her to work closely with senior managers.
However, Mahaley has been slow to fill key positions. It was mid-October before she had an assistant superintendent of early childhood education (Annette Bridges, from the Kentucky Department of Education) and shortly before Thanksgiving when she added a director of data management (Jeff Noel, former assistant director of school quality for a charter group called Friends of Choice in Urban Schools).
One of OSSE’s biggest challenges is to help the District escape a rating from the U.S. Education Department as a “high-risk” grant recipient. The rating stems from OSSE’s historically poor management of federal money. Mahaley said the agency is close to exiting the high-risk status, having resolved “96 percent” of its financial issues with the Education Department.
In special education, bus service for about 3,600 special education students has been the focus of an eight-year-old class action lawsuit over on-time performance. Service has improved, but a court-appointed special monitor continues to raise questions about OSSE’s oversight of busing.
The monitor, David Gilmore, said he doesn’t trust the agency’s on-time data because it depends on dispatchers’ logs, which are unreliable. Gilmore also said the system does not have enough spare buses to cover breakdowns. Mahaley said that the District has hired a private contractor to fill any vehicle gaps, and that all buses have new GPS systems that record precise arrival and departure times. She said OSSE will seek to exit court oversight in April.
Another major trouble spot is the construction of an education data “warehouse,” envisioned as a portal for “360-degree” information on the progress of students, teachers and schools. It is at least two years behind schedule.
Mahaley was less than sanguine about the data project. Two years after the District fired and then sued original contractor Williams, Adley and Co., officials have identified a new vendor but are still working through procurement. Mahaley acknowledged that it might be a long time before the project achieves its vision.
“It’s not going to be everything that everyone wants right away,” she said.
She might well have been speaking for her entire agency.
How to Rescue Education Reform
The New York Times
By Frederick M. Hess and Linda Darling-Hammond
December 5, 2011
The debate over renewing No Child Left Behind, the education reform act that will be 10 years old in January, has fallen along partisan lines even though school improvement is one of the few examples of bipartisan cooperation over the last decade.
Though the law was initiated and signed by a Republican president, presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who once supported it, now talk about getting the federal government out of education, echoing Tea Party members who deem federal involvement a constitutional travesty. Democratic reformers, meanwhile, insist that the federal government has a role in telling states how to identify, punish and fix low-performing schools — despite little evidence that Washington has been good at any of these tasks. To existing mandates, they would add heavy-handed, unproven teacher-evaluation requirements that could stifle innovative teaching and school design.
We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and teachers’ unions that want money with no strings, and activists with little patience for concerns about federal overreach.
When it comes to education policy, the two of us represent different schools of thought. One of us, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an education school professor who advised the Obama administration’s transition team; the other, Rick Hess, has been a critic of school districts and schools of education. We disagree on much, including big issues like merit pay for teachers and the best strategies for school choice.
We agree, though, on what the federal government can do well. It should not micromanage schools, but should focus on the four functions it alone can perform.
First is encouraging transparency for school performance and spending. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind’s main contribution is that it pushed states to measure and report achievement for all students annually. Without transparency, it’s tough for parents, voters and taxpayers to hold schools and public officials accountable. However, No Child Left Behind also let states use statistical gimmicks to report performance. Instead of the vague mandate of “adequate yearly progress,” federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertising — on reliably describing achievement (or lack thereof) and spending. To track achievement, states should be required to link their assessments to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or to adopt a similar multistate assessment). To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement.
Second is ensuring that basic constitutional protections are respected. No Child Left Behind required states to “disaggregate” assessment results to illuminate how disadvantaged or vulnerable populations — like black and Hispanic students and children from poor families — were doing. Enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring that dollars intended for low-income students and students with disabilities are spent accordingly have been parts of the Education Department’s mandate since its creation in 1979. But efforts to reduce inequities have too often led to onerous and counterproductive micromanagement.
Third is supporting basic research. While the private market can produce applied research that can be put to profitable use, it tends to underinvest in research that asks fundamental questions. When it comes to brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring, federal financing for reliable research is essential.
Finally, there is value in voluntary, competitive federal grants that support innovation while providing political cover for school boards, union leaders and others to throw off anachronistic routines. The Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition tried to do some of this, but it ended up demanding that winning states hire consultants to comply with a 19-point federal agenda, rather than truly innovate.
Beyond this list, the federal government is simply not well situated to make schools and teachers improve — no matter how much ambitious reformers wish it were otherwise. Under our system, dictates from Congress turn into gobbledygook as they travel from the Education Department to state education agencies and then to local school districts. Educators end up caught in a morass of prescriptions and prohibitions, bled of the initiative and energy that characterize effective schools.
The federal government can make states, localities and schools do things — but not necessarily do them well. Since decades of research make it clear that what matters for evaluating employees or turning around schools is how well you do it — rather than whether you do it a certain way — it’s not surprising that well-intentioned demands for “bold” federal action on school improvement have a history of misfiring. They stifle problem-solving, encourage bureaucratic blame avoidance and often do more harm than good.
Perhaps No Child Left Behind’s most enduring lesson is the value of humility — a virtue that must be taken to heart in crafting a smarter, more coherent federal role in schooling.