- Let Charter Schools Have Stevens [FOCUS Op-Ed]
- FOCUS On the Children [FOCUS is mentioned]
- Stunningly Reasonable Achievement Gap Approach
- Simmons: Mandates on Schools Just Keep Piling On
Let Charter Schools Have Stevens [FOCUS Op-Ed]
The Washington Business Journal
By Robert Cane
December 23, 2011
Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration has exhibited a welcome change in attitude toward the city’s public charter schools, compared to his predecessor Mayor Fenty. This new approach has included recognizing that D.C.’s public charter schools, which are publicly funded and run independently of D.C. Public Schools, should receive the same funding as city-run schools. Gray also has stated that he believes charters should be able to buy or lease school buildings no longer needed by D.C. Public Schools.
Charter leaders are therefore cautiously optimistic that the historic Stevens school has been offered both to developers and to educational institutions in a new bid process set in motion by Gray’s administration. No one in the city’s charter community was surprised by the previous Mayor’s attempt to sell Stevens to developers, despite the fact that D.C. law is supposed to put our children’s’ needs above developers’ deep pockets. The 1996 law requires charters to be given a “right of first offer” to bid on school buildings that are no longer being used as such by the city, before developers can do so. But the former administration, while giving lip service to the right, rejected four charter school bids for Stevens, which they’d already decided to put out for development. Since then, an assertive community-led campaign has been asking the powers that be to rethink that plan, leading to hope that the building may serve as a public school once more.
The recent ups and downs of this landmark school building at 21st and L Street, Northwest—an enticing location for private developers—are a far cry from its distinguished history. Stevens was the first public school for freed slave children in the District. Named for the abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. It speaks volumes about the values of local politicians and bureaucrats that they thought the best use for this historic school building was to turn it over to developers for luxury condominiums—the all-too-common fate of so many former D.C. public school buildings.
It’s easy to understand why private firms would seek to purchase Stevens to create a new development—it’s a prime downtown location. But it is important that District officials take seriously the needs of charter schools to buy or lease the building.
D.C.’s public charter schools serve a higher share of disadvantaged children—defined as those whose families’ low-income qualifies them for free or reduced-price school lunch—than the city-run public school system. Social justice demands that their need for a school building should come before developers’ search for a tidy profit, and well-to-do D.C. residents’ quest for high ceilings, stainless steel appliances and granite countertops.
Since their inception in D.C. fifteen years ago, charters have raised the city’s high-school graduation rate and massively increased the numbers of D.C. children accepted to college. In 1996, half of the school system’s high-school students dropped out before graduating. D.C.’s charter schools have raised the graduation rate to 83%, significantly higher than the city’s traditional public school system even after three-and-a-half years of reformist Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
The city’s public charter schools are located by choice in the District’s most underserved neighborhoods, where the need for a quality public education is greatest—and yet they have surpassed the DC school system in terms of results, outperforming school system students from the fifth grade up. Many are located in former warehouses, or in what was once retail or office space; some even began in church basements. One of the former Stevens bidders plans to open on the site of a former grocery store; another shares space with a city-run high school. Nonetheless, thousands of D.C. children are on waiting lists trying to get into charters which, due to lack of funds and space, are not able to expand to accommodate them. This shortage of space also imposes considerable burdens on new charter schools attempting to open in the District, reducing children’s educational opportunities and thereby preventing them from continuing to raise the quality of D.C.’s workforce.
It is scandalous that the city has sold off so many precious public assets like Stevens. Let’s hope that Mayor Gray insists that a public charter school be located in the building, avoiding the recent practice of selling to private real estate developers. Let’s put D.C.’s children first, and open up our former public school buildings to them.
Robert Cane is executive director of FOCUS, which promotes school reform in D.C. through the development of public charter schools.
FOCUS On the Children [FOCUS is mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Mark Lerner
January 5, 2011
Up until October of this year at metro stations and on metro buses in Southeast D.C., a new 12 month creative campaign is spotlighting the benefits of D.C.'s public charter schools. Friends of Choice in Urban Schools is funding the campaign after a poll of registered voters in the District revealed that although Southeast D.C. is home to some of the most under-performing traditional public schools in the city, residents knowledge about the public charter school alternative was lower than in other quadrants of the city.
The poll was conducted by TargetPoint Consulting of Alexandria, Va., for FOCUS. The campaign was designed and created by Pioneer Strategy for FOCUS. Provocatively asking questions such as "Will your child be ready for college?" the ads remind residents that charters are tuition-free public schools that are open to all D.C. resident-students and that their students are more likely to be accepted to college than their peers in D.C. Public Schools. You can see them on buses that begin their route at the Southern Avenue bus garage in Southeast and at the Anacostia, Eastern Market, Stadium Armory, Potomac Avenue and Congress Heights metro stops.
The campaign aims to extend knowledge about charter schools--that they are tuition-free, open-enrollment and have higher college-acceptance rates than DCPS--to residents of Southeast who, the recent opinion poll commissioned by FOCUS shows, are less aware of these facts than, for example, Northwest quadrant residents. This is despite the fact that it really is the only school choice open to many families in Southeast D.C. and the state of many DCPS schools there means that students who live there stand to benefit most from the city's charter school reform. Interestingly there are eight 'higher proficiency' (i.e. above the D.C. average on the DC CAS) charter schools in Ward 8 and no such DCPS schools there.
I saw one on the N2 bus I ride which goes from Wesley Heights to Dupont Circle.
Stunningly Reasonable Achievement Gap Approach
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
January 4, 2012
You cannot understand modern education policy without a grasp of the achievement gap. On average, low-income students have lower academic achievement than affluent students. Black or Hispanic students similarly score lower on standardized tests, on average, than white or Asian students.
School leaders say they want to reduce those gaps but are uncertain about how to do it. They should read a new book by Arlington County educators who mounted one of the most sustained assaults on the achievement gap ever seen in this area.
The book is “Gaining on the Gap: Changing Hearts, Minds, and Practice,” by Robert G. Smith, Alvin L. Crawley, Cheryl Robinson, Timothy Cotman Jr., Marty Swaim and Palma Strand. The main man is Smith, the Arlington school superintendent from 1997 to 2009.
When Smith took over Arlington schools, I thought he was headed for an embarrassing failure. He said he intended to do everything possible to reduce the achievement gap and report his progress every year, letting his reputation rise or fall on the results. I wrote that he was taking a big risk. Reducing the gap was too difficult to make it the prime issue.
He did it anyway and made me look bad:
From 1998 to 2009, the portion of black students passing Virginia Standards of Learning tests in Arlington rose from 37 to 77 percent. For Hispanic students, the jump was from 47 to 84 percent. The gap between non-Hispanic white and black passing rates dropped from 45 percentage points to 19. Between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, the gap shrank from 35 points to 12.
The power of the book is not so much in the numbers but how Smith and his well-chosen team of administrators and teachers did this. They made sure all staff knew how kids at all levels were doing and how important it was that they improve. There were startling differences between what Smith asked them to do and what the federal No Child Left Behind law mandated for all districts in the country.
Smith went far beyond the law’s focus on reading and math scores in grades three through eight and in high school. He insisted on measuring each major ethnic group, plus low-income students, students with disabilities and students learning English, on: the percentage passing first-year algebra with a C or better by the end of eighth grade; the percentage enrolled and passing advanced courses in grades six through 12; the percentage completing the third year of a foreign language by the end of grade 11; the percentage of sixth- through eighth-graders taking electives in art, music and theater; the percentage meeting or exceeding criterion levels on the Virginia Wellness-Related Fitness Tests; and several other measures.
No Child Left Behind put all districts on an improvement schedule that made few adjustments to reality. If a school had a bad year, it acquired an unattractive label and had to get moving or risk more sanctions. Smith, on the other hand, required detailed reporting of results at all levels, but then, he says in the book, the “emphasis shifted from results to recommended revisions to goals, objectives, indicators, or targets, depending on the results achieved. For example, if targets had been exceeded in the previous year and targets previously set for the next year had also been surpassed, the targets would be revised upward. In other instances, the data may have gone in the opposite direction, occasioning a need to adjust targets downward to keep their achievement within the realm of the possible.”
How shockingly reasonable. Smith didn’t insist, as the federal government did, that all schools strive toward 100 percent proficiency by 2014. He just wanted them to improve. I think there are problems with measuring schools by these gaps, but Smith and his splendid team produced a better school system.
That is worth copying if Congress ever gets around to replacing No Child Left Behind.
Simmons: Mandates on Schools Just Keep Piling On
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
January 4, 2012
In the beginning of the D.C. education-reform era in the 1990s, officials created charter schools and uniform per-pupil costs, and it was good. Later, school authorities established curriculum standards, reconstituted the elected school board, forged a groundbreaking merit-pay plan and began saving public dollars by closing unsafe and under-enrolled schoolhouses that unnecessarily drained coffers.
The march was noble: Improve the academic lot of D.C. youths.
Officials now, however, are turning reform on its head by wrongheadedly inserting themselves deeper and deeper into the classroom.
The latest missteps occurred Wednesday when D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown offered up two poorly contrived pieces of legislation aimed at preparing students for college.
The worst of the two [-] and trust me both measures are really bad [-] is the College Preparation Plan Act of 2012. It establishes three mandates: 1) Taking the SAT and ACT would become high-school requirements; 2) students must attend workshops on the college application process; and 3) applying to a post-secondary institution would become a graduation requirement.
Mr. Brown’s efforts toward helping students prepare for college, the military, trades or any aspect of the workforce could be considered worthy but for the fact that students would be filling out a form for the sake of filling out a form.
And before I grow furious, let me point out but one reason. Several years ago, D.C. officials mandated that students prove they have performed at least 100 hours of community service as a graduation requirement. Interestingly, school officials changed that requirement after learning high-school seniors all around the city during the 2010-11 school year had failed to fulfill that requirement and, consequently, would not have qualified for graduation.
The other measure introduced by Mr. Brown, the Early Warning and Intervention System Act, is simply bad public policy.
This bill would establish a pilot project that would track student performance in grades four through nine. And if a student is struggling for any reason, government intervention methods would kick in by any means necessary.
Now, you need not have ever filled out a college application or financial aid form to know this is a derailment waiting to happen since effective teaching and learning is a two-track system.
If students are tracked but their teachers are not, what, pray tell, is the point?
Filling out any type of application, be it for employment, Social Security card, driver’s license or schooling, is part of the normal, how-to flow of life.
But mandating that academically troubled students do anything that clearly falls outside the realm of a public education system’s basic mission [-] teaching and learning [-] is surely the height of hypocrisy when you factor in the point that every and any measuring stick proves that it is failing at both.
Mr. Brown, who mentioned those failures in a briefing Tuesday and repeated them on the dais Wednesday, and the administration of D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray need to fill in their own school-reform blanks before piling on mandates that force students to go through meaningless motions.
Ditto tracking students while their teachers remain outside the realm of accountability.
Speaking of piling on:D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh, she of the government-overreach healthy-schools law, now wants residents and businesses to shovel sidewalks within eight daylight hours of a snowstorm or risk being fined.
Fortunately, one of her colleagues, Muriel Bowser, raised a pertinent flag during discussions Wednesday by using the word “their” to refer to the ownership of sidewalks outside residential and commercial properties.
Indeed, Miss Bowser’s choice of pronouns raises a critical legal ramification that must be settled before any further consideration of the Winter Sidewalk Safety Amendment Act.
The question is: Who actually owns sidewalks in the District of Columbia?
Or put it this way: Does the city own the land, or does the homeowner or business owner?
And another thing: Why aren’t charter schools, which educate 41 percent of the city’s public school students, being allotted their share of the $21.4 million that Mr. Gray plans to hand over to traditional schools in his upcoming supplemental budget?
Taxpayers deserve answers from the mayor and all 13 council members before school-choice advocates open the floodgates of criticism.