- Gearing Up To Get To College [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
- Charters Challenge Fairness of $21 million to DCPS
- Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain
Gearing Up To Get To College [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
The Current Newspapers
By Donald Hense
January 4, 2012
For many children growing up in the metro area of the nation’s capital, child and parent alike look forward to—and expect to make—the journey of going to college. But in the low-income neighborhoods Friendship Public Charter School serves in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, college is not the norm for parents or children. This is not because these communities and their children would not benefit from the presence of college-educated adults and college-bound children—but rather because of society’s low expectations of children from low-income families.
Earning a college degree offers students from low-income families access to opportunities that are simply not available without one. Adults with a bachelor’s degree earn over 60 percent more on average than those with only a high school diploma, according to U.S. census data; over a lifetime, the earning gap could be as high as $1 million. Moreover, adults who have only graduated high school are twelve times more likely to be incarcerated compared to college-educated peers, according to research by the College Board.
My school, which has 11 campuses serving nearly 8,000 mostly disadvantaged students, attempts to provide the many resources that support middle-class children on their journey to college. One example involves our work with the U.S. Department of Education’s Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP). This innovative program provides an organized and systematic pathway through high school to college starting in the seventh grade, and continuing through the first year of college. Friendship then follows the students through college graduation.
Many of our students participating in this program at our flagship charter high school, Collegiate Academy, have benefited from taking college courses with partners such as the University of Maryland. The GEAR UP program also offers financial aid to apply to and graduate college, organizes campus tours for high-school students and helps them through the application process. After launching our first cohort of 350 GEAR UP students in the fall of 2006, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan honored us with a visit to our Collegiate Academy campus to support the program and meet participating students.
The funding from this important program has enabled us to enlist the expertise of guidance counselors and mentors—important resources in supporting our students’ path to college. Choosing a college can impose strains on students and their families. Thankfully, the GEAR UP funding enables us to invest in resources to raise the comfort level of everyone involved, around every related issue—from living away from home, to matching college coursework with career aspirations and abilities.
The GEAR UP program also has helped our students in the financial aspect of going to college—by offering support to families to meet the compliance requirements for financial aid and, where necessary, counseling about money and credit. And GEAR UP has helped students make site visits to dozens of college campuses—important learning trips that would not have taken place without this funding.
These activities can be as critical as mentoring or tutoring. They reinforce the idea that college can be part of a student’s future. Getting students to think of themselves as college bound changes the way they approach their schoolwork, and increases their personal commitment. It also changes the family dynamic. GEAR UP understands that students need family support to enter and complete college, so significant resources are devoted to parent involvement.
This spring, our first group of GEAR UP students will graduate. Further GEAR UP funding would enable us to build on the lessons learned and launch a new cohort of 350 more students. A new grant would expand our Advanced Placement and pre-AP programs in middle school. These courses provide the academic rigor that we believe is necessary for students to succeed in college. It also would enable us to expand our Early College program with our college partners, and our work with corporate partners providing internships in STEM—science, technology, engineering and math—subjects. We would also be able to build on our partnership with George Washington University, through which health professionals mentor and support students interested in pursuing healthcare careers.
Providing urban youth with the well-proven supports that enable children at selective and private schools to succeed is central to our mission. Three in four students at our charter high school are economically disadvantaged. GEAR UP has been a major contributor to the success of our charter high school students in achieving a 96 percent graduation rate and having 100 percent of their graduating class accepted to college.
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
January 5, 2012
DCPS got an early Christmas present last month when District Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi revised his revenue forecast to include an additional $42.2 million. Mayor Vincent C. Gray quickly announced that he will ask the D.C. Council to appropriate half of it to the city’s 123-school system to cover “spending pressures”--the polite term for cost overruns--in the current fiscal year.
As for the stockings of the city’s 53 public charter schools, Gray left not a candy bar or sensible pair of socks. This is not unusual, despite laws and regulations that seem to require public and public charter students of similar grade level and need to be funded equally through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula.
These rules would also seem to cover money from supplemental appropriations, such as the one announced last month. But when there is extra cash for education in the middle of a fiscal year, it almost always goes to DCPS.
“One emergency after another, onetime payments year after year. It’s untenable,” said Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools. “We understand that there are financial pressures at DCPS, and we’re not suggesting that the mayor not meet them. But there are also pressures in the charter schools.”
Edelin and other charter advocates find this latest supplement especially objectionable because it comes from Gray, who has said repeatedly that charters are full partners in the city’s public school system. It was on Gray’s watch as chairman in 2010 that the D.C. Council created the commission that is now studying equity and uniformity issues in school finance.
“This is the way it has traditionally been done,” said Gray spokesman Pedro Ribiero when asked about the supplemental funding. He said that as D.C. attorney general, Peter Nickles wrote an opinion advising then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty that he was not obligated to share supplemental appropriations with the charters.
Ribiero said Gray has asked D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan to revisit the issue.
Ed Lazere, chairman of the D.C. Public Education Finance Reform Commission, said that while the law seems to call for charters to get a cut of any money designed to serve student needs, it needs to be more explicit.
“There isn’t a lot of clarity,” Lazere said. “The Uniform Per Student Funding Formula is intended to be uniform and intended to be the main source of funding for students. But there is nothing in the law currently that prevents mid-year appropriations, either to DCPS or DCPCS that are not uniform...It is a legitimate policy question that the commission needs to take up.”
DCPS said the extra $21.4 million budgeted by Gray is needed to address several issues: Congressional cuts in federal payments ($4.5 million); overruns in food service caused by higher labor and food costs and lower federal reimbursements ($10.7 million); mandated merit-based salary increases for teachers ($2.8 million); and the rising cost of excessed non-instructional employees who were removed from school budgets but are being carried on the central office books.
Privately, senior Gray administration officials said DCPS finances have historically been plagued by cost overruns, attributable to persistent overspending by school system leadership and weak oversight by Gandhi’s office. The senior officials, who asked not to be named so they could speak candidly, said Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright pushed for the recent reassignment of George Dines, the Gandhi deputy overseeing DCPS. Gandhi’s new point person at DCPS is Deloras Shepherd.
David Umansky, Gandhi’s spokesman, vehemently disputed suggestions that Dines was pushed out.
“Absolutely not true,” he said.
The New York Times
By Annie Lowrey
January 6, 2012
Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.
The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, all economists, examines a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term.
“That test scores help you get more education, and that more education has an earnings effect — that makes sense to a lot of people,” said Robert H. Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which studies teacher measurement but was not involved in this study. “This study skips the stages, and shows differences in teachers mean differences in earnings.”
The study, which the economics professors have presented to colleagues in more than a dozen seminars over the past year and plan to submit to a journal, is the largest look yet at the controversial “value-added ratings,” which measure the impact individual teachers have on student test scores. It is likely to influence the roiling national debates about the importance of quality teachers and how best to measure that quality.
Many school districts, including those in Washington and Houston, have begun to use value-added metrics to influence decisions on hiring, pay and even firing.
Supporters argue that such metrics hold teachers accountable and can help improve the educational outcomes of millions of children. Detractors, most notably a number of teachers unions, say that isolating the effect of a given teacher is harder than it seems, and might unfairly penalize some instructors.
Critics particularly point to the high margin of error with many value-added ratings, noting that they tend to bounce around for a given teacher from year to year and class to class. But looking at an individual’s value-added score for three or four classes, the researchers found that some consistently outperformed their peers.
“Everybody believes that teacher quality is very, very important,” says Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and longtime researcher of education policy. “What this paper and other work has shown is that it’s probably more important than people think. That the variations or differences between really good and really bad teachers have lifelong impacts on children.”
The average effect of one teacher on a single student is modest. All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college.
Perhaps just as important, given the difficulty of finding, training and retaining outstanding teachers, is that the difference in long-term outcome between students who have average teachers and those with poor-performing ones is as significant as the difference between those who have excellent teachers and those with average ones, the study found.
In the aggregate, these differences are potentially enormous.
Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.
“If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income,” said Professor Friedman, one of the coauthors.
To do the study, the researchers first tackled the question that has swirled controversy in so many school districts, including New York City’s: whether value-added scores are in fact a good measure of teacher quality. Mr. Jones might regularly help raise test scores more than Ms. Smith, but maybe that is because his students are from wealthier families, or because he has a harder-working class — factors that can be difficult for researchers to discern.
While Professor Rockoff, at Columbia, has previously written favorably about value-added ratings, the Harvard pair were skeptics of the metrics. “We said, ‘We’re going to show that these measures don’t work, that this has to do with student motivation or principal selection or something else,’ ” Professor Chetty recalled.
But controlling for numerous factors, including students’ backgrounds, the researchers found that the value-added scores consistently identified some teachers as better than others, even if individual teachers’ value-added scores varied from year to year.
After identifying excellent, average and poor teachers, the economists then set out to look at their students over the long term, analyzing information on earnings, college matriculation rates, the age they had children, and where they ended up living.
The results were striking. Looking only at test scores, previous studies had shown, the effect of a good teacher mostly fades after three or four years. But the broader view showed that the students still benefit for years to come.
Students with top teachers are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, more likely to enroll in college, and more likely to earn more money as adults, the study found.
The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, and to remove the lowest performers, despite the disruption and uncertainty involved.
“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,” Professor Friedman said.
Professor Chetty acknowledged, “Of course there are going to be mistakes — teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.” But he said that using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more.
Still, translating value-added scores into policy is fraught with problems. Judging teachers by their students’ test scores might encourage cheating, teaching to the test or lobbying to have certain students in class, for instance.
“We are performing these studies in settings where nobody cares about their ranking — it does not change their pay or job security,” said Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work criticizing other value-added assessments unions frequently cite. “But if you start to change that, there is going to be a range of responses.”
Many other researchers and school administrators say that even if imperfect, well-calculated value-added scores are an important part of evaluating teachers.
“Very few people suggest that you should use value-added scores alone to make personnel decisions,” Dr. Hanushek, of Stanford, said. “What the whole value-added debate has done is push forward the issue of how to evaluate teachers, and how to use that information.”
The new study found no evidence for one piece of conventional wisdom: that having a good teacher in an early grade has a bigger effect than having a good teacher in later grades.
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