- DCPS Schools to Become Charters? Union Sounds Off
- District's Science Education Standards Top the Nation
- How Many Students Really Graduate From High School?
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 30, 2012
Last week, D.C.'s deputy mayor for education released a report recommending that three dozen D.C. Public Schools campuses be closed or turned around, likely reinvented as charter schools.
Unsurprisingly, that's not sitting too well with Nathan Saunders, the president of the Washington Teachers' Union.
"A [union] member who works at one of those schools today, before it is transformed or reconstructed into a charter, would tomorrow end up being an employee doing the same job for less money, less job security, a lesser pension, and less voice in the management of the school," he told The Washington Examiner on Monday.
Charter school teachers don't belong to the union, and, depending on the charter school, may be at-will employees. Charter school leaders testified last week that they can't pay their teachers as lavishly as D.C. Public Schools does under Impact, its bonus-heavy teacher evaluation and pay system.
But the report eyes the successes that some charter schools have had with students — higher graduation rates and higher scores on the District's standardized reading and math tests — and sees reincarnation as charters as the best way to move some underperforming DCPS schools forward.
The Washington Post's Bill Turque reported last week that the study was underwritten to the tune of $100,000 by a foundation that happens to be the leading benefactor of charter schools; the Walton Family Foundation is also a major donor to DCPS.
Saunders said, "[The report] clearly has an albatross around its neck with regard to its partiality concerning charters."
In a letter to members — more than 4,000 DCPS teachers belong to the WTU — he wrote:
Some ideas and reports are a threat to your welfare and viability in addition to traditional public education. We must not react but plan to elect public officials who value traditional public education and teachers!
Saunders was hesitant to comment on the charge, but finally said that yes, public elections are coming up, and the WTU is going to get its voice and money out in favor of city council members who support "traditional public education," aka the non-charter public schools of DCPS.
"Everyone there [in the council] is saying what a strong advocate they are for public education, especially around election time, and that’s just not the case [for all of them]," Saunders said. "Those people there who voted for [former] Mayor [Adrian] Fenty's legislation to bring in public school reform, to bring in the chancellor's system, to bring in [former Chancellor] Michelle Rhee's agenda, cannot shy away from what they have done."
Saunders declined to say who on the D.C. Council was a fake-friend of schools, but said he would one day be ready to name names. Hmm.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 31, 2012
The District is providing its schools with the best standards for science education in the nation, according to an independent report.
It may seem counterintuitive to those familiar with D.C. Public Schools -- less than half of students demonstrate science proficiency on standardized tests -- but the report's key finding is that the District has the best blueprint for what a science education should look like. The city just has to figure out the rest of the puzzle: implementation, curriculum and teaching practices, among others.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute's "The State of State Science Standards" gave Washington a perfect 10 for its standards and one of two "A" grades in the country, alongside California.
Maryland and Virginia, whose students outperform the District's, received a B and A-, respectively.
"The District's standards really were best in class," said Kathleen Porter-Magee, senior director of the Thomas Fordham Institute's High Quality Standards Program. "Obviously writing great standards is maybe a tenth of the battle. But it is the first and most important step."
The report details the District's "clear" and "rigorous" standards that cover all K-12 content areas at an appropriate pace through grade levels. For instance, the District encourages young students to ask questions like "How do you know?" and to brainstorm new reasons for believing in theories, other than simply being told the ideas are true.
"Though not explicitly tied to content, if taken seriously, these standards could turn D.C. schools into a veritable wellspring of scientific and analytical thinkers!" the report reads.
The question is whether these standards are "taken seriously" in the absence of such a wellspring. Less than 40 percent of fifth- and eighth-graders in the District's public schools, including charter schools, scored "proficient" or "advanced" on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System in 2011. About 45 percent of 10th-graders passed muster on the biology test.
Tamara Reavis, director of assessment and accountability in the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, said she believes science has received less attention because the District is accountable only for math and reading performance under the federal No Child Left Behind legislation.
If the federal government accepts the District's waiver request for flexibility, science would become an accountability measure, Reavis said.
Vyshak Chandra, a second-year chemistry and anatomy teacher at Ballou Senior High School, said he agrees that the content standards are on the ball but would like to see more support from DCPS in turning those standards into lesson plans.
"We have to create the assessments and this and this and this, and the turnover rate in DCPS is so quick," Chandra said. "It'd be great if someone could organize a system where new teachers could see, 'This is how we've taught this standard before, here's a way to get started.'"
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
January 30, 2012
Ask a random sampling of D.C. residents about the dropout rate of District public school students, and their guesses actually aren’t that far off. Many of them guess that 70-80 percent of students graduate; the actual official graduation rate hovers around 76 percent.
That number is not exactly a true picture of what's going on, however, because until now, D.C. has used a formula researchers consider generous to calculate graduation rates. Now, for the first time, the federal government is requiring states to follow a standardized method.
As a result, D.C.'s public school graduation rate could drop by about 20 percent under the new calculation, according to the office of the state superintendent.
"We expect to see about a 20 percent drop district-wide," says Kayleen Irizarry, assistant superintendent of elementary and secondary education. That means just a little more than half of all D.C. public school children – including those in charter schools -- are graduating with high school diplomas in four years.
The new methodology, which requires tracking students individually from 9th grade all the way through 12th grade to determine if they graduate, means states across the country will be able to compare their graduation rates accurately. Many of them are bracing for lower graduation numbers; several states that have started using the formula have already seen the rates drop.
Maryland is one of them. Using the new calculation, the state's graduation rate fell by 5 points to 82 percent. Virginia has been using the new formula for a few years, and its rate is 83 percent. D.C. will report its new numbers for the first time next month, and Irizarry says the rate will fall "significantly."
Former rates based on flawed data
To determine how this new method could result in such a steep change for the District’s graduation rate, one needs to look at the extremely complicated system for calculating graduation rates, which has historically involved a lot of fuzzy math.
Just a decade ago, the percentage of students completing high school was measured using a survey conducted by the U.S. Census, and the reports were always positive, according to Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University professor and one of the nation’s top experts on dropouts.
When the national graduation rate appeared to hit 90 percent, Balfanz says, researchers decided to take a closer look.
"And then you recognize that that was based on a telephone survey that doesn't include people in prison, for example, doesn't include people who don’t want to talk to people who call them at night," he says. In addition, people know it's important to graduate high school, so they may say they graduated when they didn't.
"So on all sides, sort of inflating it and sort of all agreeing we don't have a problem when we really did," Balfanz says.
New method, less 'mess'
States can and have inflated graduation numbers for years using different methods. Some estimate how many students they think graduated, others count GED certificates as high school diplomas. Others only consider the graduation rate of 12th graders, without counting students who may have dropped out years earlier.
Even for Chris Chapman, author of the annual federal report [PDF] on graduation rates at the National Center for Education Statistics, the methods used to calculate the rates across the country are dizzyingly different.
"We've got the true cohort rates, we've got the averaged freshman graduation rate, we have a leaver rate," he says, with a laugh. "I'm trying to think if there are others I could describe in English."
While some might characterize the sheer variety of methods a mess, Chapman generously calls it a "mishmash." And the biggest problem with all the different calculations was that the rates couldn't be compared from state to state.
All that changes now. The new method, called the adjusted graduation cohort rate, requires states to follow every individual child from the ninth grade on until he or she walks across the stage to receive that diploma. It takes into account students who change schools and get held back. Balfanz says that will help provide a more accurate picture.
"You would see wild celebrations at the end of the year, when 150 kids would graduate," he says. "And then you would look and say, but they said they had 600 kids in 9th grade. And they are wildly celebrating 150 kids graduating."
Dropout rate not the inverse of graduation rate
To complicate matters further, the students not counted as graduates aren't necessarily categorized as dropout either. Some students may leave school and return, others may take five or six years to earn diplomas.
D.C.’s dropout rate is 7 percent under the old calculation, according to the latest data available. But that rate is expected to increase under the new calculation. Maryland’s dropout rate rose from 3.2 percent to 12 percent when it switched. The Virginia dropout rate is now 7 percent.
Certain things are known about the dropout population. For example, Irizarry says, a child most at risk for dropping out in DC fits a certain profile: male, Hispanic, and has an Individual Education Plan (IEP) that calls for special education services.
But beyond that, she doesn't quite trust the data. That too is about to change with the new State Longitudinal Education Database (SLED). In this new system, each child from kindergarten through 12th grade in D.C. public schools now has a 10-digit identification number.
Database will track each student’s progress
The database has information on a student’s date of birth, race, school, grade, test results. "English language learner status, special education status, whether they're a migrant student and it goes on and on," says Irizarry.
If a student doesn't move on to the next grade, schools have to provide specific reasons and documentation. For example, they can no longer just say a child moved to another state or migrated to another country or is enrolled in private school. They have to have the transfer paperwork.
There has never been a record this comprehensive or complete to track students, Irizarry says.
That's probably because following individual students is challenging and expensive. Often, students don't tell anyone at school they're dropping out, parents aren't always responsive, or phone numbers and addresses change. But even with all the challenges of collecting this data, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says it will provide "real transparency" which he calls "hugely important."
"Graduation rates will probably go down, and the dropout rates will probably go up, no one wants to see that happen but guess what, for better or worse that's the truth," he says. "When you have a baseline of facts, then we can learn much faster where strategies are helping to reduce dropout rates and increase graduation rates and we can transfer those best practices across states in ways that just haven't happened."
Remembering the students amid the statistics
In this complex world of calculations and statistics, Chapman, who has worked on the federal graduation rates for 15 years, tries to keep the human side of his work in mind. The most important thing to remember, he says, is behind every statistic is a real student: a young man or woman who might not realize how leaving high school will have dire real-life impacts.
Chapman saw in his own family how leaving high school without a diploma can lead to a lifetime of struggle. His younger brother dropped out of school in 9th grade.
After working for many years as a dishwasher and living in an unheated garage, Chapman says, his brother finally completed his GED certificate in his 30’s.
The first step to reducing the dropout rate might be to finally count those teenagers who researchers call 'America's forgotten children.' Because often, what you don;t count, you don't see on paper. And if it's not on paper, it's as if the problem doesn't even exist.
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