- Charters Quick to Suspend, Expel, Council Told [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
- Kwame Brown’s College Prep Bill Gets Cool Reception from DCPS Officials
- New Guidelines Planned on School Vending Machines
Charters Quick to Suspend, Expel, Council Told [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
February 17, 2012
Public charter school officials pushed rarely seen suspension and expulsion data into public view at Friday’s D.C. Council oversight hearing, some of it astonishing if accurate--and some school leaders contend that it is not.
Perhaps the most alarming stat comes from Friendship Collegiate Academy-Woodson, the Ward 7 high school, which expelled eight percent (102 of 1,231) of its students in 2010-11, according to numbers compiled by the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
“How do you expel eight percent of your total population?” asked an incredulous Council Chairman Kwame Brown, who requested the data from the board. At Tech Prep, a Friendship middle school in Ward 8, 35 percent of the student body (35 of 100) was suspended for ten days or more in 2009-10, officials reported.
No one from Friendship, which educates 8,000 District students on 7 campuses (including Anacostia High School), was around to respond. Friendship chairman Donald Hense said in an e-mail that he was traveling but that there would be some comment soon.
The discipline numbers are kind of a muddle. Figures reported to the charter board often conflict with those collected internally by the schools, according to the spreadsheet supplied to the council. Friendship Collegiate, for example, claims only 67 expulsions (5.4 percent) in 2010-11.
We’re still getting comfortable with the data,” said charter board executive director Scott Pearson, a benign way of saying that the exact figures are still in doubt.
While the numbers are in dispute, they will likely stimulate more debate about whether charter schools — which are free to frame their own disciplinary policies-- “dump” challenging kids who then wind up in DCPS. The board also reported to the Council Friday that charters shed 1,223 students between Oct. 5, 2010 and May 1 2011, about four percent of total enrollment during that period.
Pearson said that about a third moved to DCPS and a third left the city. Poor coding of data, he said, has so far made it impossible to determine what happened to the other third. Pearson added that it’s not clear that all 400 left because of academic or discipline problems.
He also said his staff was still working identifying the specific schools where attrition occurred, but that it was likely concentrated in lower-ranked schools. But he said the numbers don’t support the notion that charters push students out in large groups after the Oct. 5 enrollment count. The attrition is steady across the academic year, Pearson said.
Other data suggests that charters are pretty quick to lower the disciplinary hammer on their smallest students. Officials reported 434 “suspension incidences” at the Pre-K (76) Kindergarten (112) and first grade (246) at public charter schools in 2010-11
“Incidences” means the total includes kids who drew multiple suspensions for offenses that included biting and hitting teachers and classmates. Some other suspensions were in response to chronic tardiness, officials said.
Even allowing for multiple offenders, Brown said the situation was alarming. :"That’s an incredible set of numbers,” he said.
Pearson, on the job for all of five weeks, didn’t have much of an explanation.
“I share your concern,” he said.
The statistics dovetail with reporting by my colleague Donna St. George, whose story last Sunday described suspensions of kindergartners in school systems across the region. Comparisons between charters and DCPS are problematic because the charter data may contain duplications. But for what it’s worth, DCPS suspended 192 small children in 2010-11: in preschool (5), preK (16) Kindergarten (21) and first grade (121).
Unlike traditional public schools, charters enjoy broad latitude when it comes to instructional methods and internal policies covering matters such as discipline. But Pearson said the charter laws give the board more than enough power to intervene, and that he intended to investigate. Still, he said he did not anticipate setting citywide guidelines.
“I don’t think this problem has to be solved by creating a uniform discipline policy,” he said.
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
February 17, 2012
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D) tried asking the question every way he knew how. And to avoid answering, DCPS chief academic officer Carey Wright did everything but invoke the Fifth Amendment.
The result was a more-than-awkward standoff near the end of Thursday’s hearing on Brown’s two latest education initiatives. One would require all D.C. high school students to take either the SAT or ACT and apply to at least one post-secondary institution. The other is an early warning and intervention pilot to track students in grades 4 to 9 using indicators of high school and college readiness.
The bills got a mostly favorable reception from education advocates and community representatives. But a trio of top District school officials devoted most of their prepared statements to how wonderfully their agencies were already doing with the issues targeted by Brown’s measures.
Wright finished her prepared testimony without ever saying whether Chancellor Kaya Henderson supported the college prep bill. An increasingly frustrated Brown persisted in an attempt to find out.
“We certainly share the goals of the act and are excited to work with you to strengthen the bill,” said Wright.
“Is that a yes or is that a no?”
“What we would like to do is work with you on some of the things we have in place.”
“Have I ever not worked with you?”
“We’ll support the bill but we’d like to work with you to strengthen it little bit.”
A little later he tried again to get Wright to say whether she supported a compulsory SAT and college application.
“Do you support that or not support that?”
“I think we would support the bill. We will work with you to support the bill.”
“What does that mean? I don't understand that.”
Eventually Wright--speaking for herself--acknowledged that while she supported expanded participation in the SAT, she opposed adding new graduation requirements.
D.C. State Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley was the most favorably disposed to Brown’s bills, although she deferred to the State Board of Education on the question of graduation requirements.
D.C. Public Charter School Board executive director Scott Pearson said the college prep bill was a non-starter because it stepped on the rights of the publicly-funded, independently-operated schools to decide on instructional methods. He said it was an example of a “creeping re-regulation of charter schools that steadily erodes the very basis of their success.”
The New York Times
By Ron Nixon
February 20, 2012
The government’s attempt to reduce childhood obesity is moving from the school cafeteria to the vending machines.
The Obama administration is working on setting nutritional standards for foods that children can buy outside the cafeteria. With students eating 19 percent to 50 percent of their daily food at school, the administration says it wants to ensure that what they eat contributes to good health and smaller waistlines. The proposed rules are expected within the next few weeks.
Efforts to restrict the food that schoolchildren eat outside the lunchroom have long been controversial.
Representatives of the food and beverage industries argue that many of their products contribute to good nutrition and should not be banned. Schools say that overly restrictive rules, which could include banning the candy sold for school fund-raisers, risk the loss of substantial revenue that helps pay for sports, music and arts programs. A study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that about $2.3 billion worth of snack foods and beverages are sold annually in schools nationwide.
Nutritionists say that school vending machines stocked with potato chips, cookies and sugary soft drinks contribute to childhood obesity, which has more than tripled in the past 30 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about one in every five children are obese.
No details of the proposed guidelines have been released, but health advocates and snack food and soft drink industry representatives predict that the rules will be similar to those for the government’s school lunch program, which reduced amounts of sugar, salt and fat.
Those rules set off a fight between parents and health advocates on one side, who praised the standards, and the food industry, which argued that some of the proposals went too far. Members of Congress stepped in to block the administration from limiting the amount of potatoes children could be served and to allow schools to continue to count tomato paste on a pizza as a serving of vegetables.
Nancy Huehnergarth, executive director of the New York State Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Alliance in Millwood, N.Y., said she expected a similar fight over the vending machine rules.
“I think the food and beverage industry is going to fight tooth and nail over these rules,” Ms. Huehnergarth said.
But representatives of the food and beverage industry say they generally support selling healthier snacks and drinks in schools.
“But we are a little concerned that they might make the rules too stringent,” said James A. McCarthy, president of the Snack Food Association, a trade group in Washington.
Mr. McCarthy said the industry supported nutritional snacks and was working with the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, headed by the former president, in an initiative called the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to establish voluntary guidelines for healthier foods in schools.
The foods include baked rather than fried potato chips, dry-roasted nuts and low-sodium pretzels, Mr. McCarthy said.
Christopher Gindlesperger, director of communications for the American Beverage Association, whose members include Coca-Cola and Pepsi, said his industry had also worked with schools to reduce or eliminate sugary drinks and replace them with healthier alternatives.
“Our members have voluntarily reduced the calories in drinks shipped to schools by 88 percent and stopped offering full-calorie soft drinks in elementary school vending machines,” Mr. Gindlesperger said.
But a study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine released this month shows that despite industry efforts and those of others, snacking behavior among children remains largely unchanged. One reason is that healthier snacks were being offered alongside less nutritious offerings.
Between 2006 and 2010, the study found, about half of the schools had vending machines, stores and cafeterias that offered unhealthy foods.
The availability of high-fat foods in schools followed regional patterns. In the South, where rates of childhood obesity are the highest, less nutritious food was more prevalent. In the West, where childhood obesity rates are lower, high-fat food was not as common, the study found.
Health advocates say the study points to the need for national standards.
Jessica Donze Black, director of the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, gave the food industry credit for trying to reduce sugary drinks and fatty snacks, but said the voluntary guidelines did not go far enough.
“What we have is a fragmented system where some schools do a good job of limiting access to junk food and others don’t,” she said. “We need a national standard that ensures that all schools meet some minimum guidelines.”
Still, some school districts question whether students would buy healthy foods offered in vending machines and school stores. Frequently vending machines with healthy alternative snacks are ignored, and children bring snacks from home or buy them at local stores off-campus during lunch periods. Roger Kipp, food service director for the Norwood school district in Ohio, said children could be persuaded to eat healthy foods and schools could still make a profit.
Two years ago, Mr. Kipp eliminated vending machines and school stores in his district and replaced them with an area in the lunchroom where they could buy wraps, fruit or yogurt. Children ate better, and the schools made some money.
“It took a while, but it caught on,” Mr. Kipp said. “You have to give the kids time. You can’t replace 16 years of bad eating habits overnight.”
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