- D.C.'s school master facility plan
- A new school year at the new Anacostia
- D.C. students test 'Teach to One' learning system
- Schools dilemma for gentrifiers: Keep their kids urban, or move to suburbia?
- Want to Ruin Teaching? Give Ratings
- Reforming a nation of bad note-takers
D.C.'s school master facility plan
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 15, 2012
Tonight at the monthly D.C. Public Charter School Board meeting the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Education is scheduled to present its master facility plan. Here’s what I imagine De’Shawn Wright saying to the audience:
“This evening I am both excited and proud to announce a new path going forward for school facilities in the nation’s capital that the Mayor and I believe for the first time treats charter schools as the public schools that they are as defined by law. We have developed a plan that will provide high quality facilities to any charter school that needs a permanent home.
Over the next five years our office will move aggressively to close both under-enrolled and under-performing DCPS locations and turn these buildings over to charters. The only criterion for a charter being awarded one of these sites is that it be in good standing with the PCSB. We will base the decisions as to which school gets which location upon the enrollment demographics of the individual charter, the needs of the children in the community, and the Illinois Facility Fund Report.
We recognize that many charters have miraculously already secured permanent facilities and have entered into bank loans for this purpose. Others lease their current spaces. Therefore, so that charters can afford the buildings they have purchased or are renting, the Mayor is proposing as part of his fiscal year 2014 budget an increase in the facility allotment from the current $2,800 per pupil to $6,000. This approximately $102 million increase markes a major step in closing the revenue gap of $72 million of $127 million per year that DCPS currently receives from the city but that charters do not get as identified in the Levy Study.
We have been talking for many years in this town about school reform. It is about time that we admit that true change will not occur until every child is learning in an environment comparable to the quality we expect in instruction. The Mayor promised during his campaign that he would bring equity to public spending on charters. This plan makes good on his commitment. Thank you.”
A new school year at the new Anacostia
The Washington Post
By Dr. Ian Roberts
October 14, 2012
I recently cut the ribbon on a $62 million renovation at the Academies at Anacostia, the school where I am privileged to serve as the principal. Perhaps the change that parents and students will notice first is the newly renovated and refurbished main building, which the city had let fall into a state of disrepair over seven decades.
The main building joins the three-story annex and gymnasium, also fully modernized last year. The old, neglected building that I first entered when I became principal sent exactly the wrong message to students. Now our gleaming, pristine, modern facility lets them know we mean it when we say we care about them and want them to succeed.
For too long, negative assumptions and low expectations held our students back. This is changing. In fact, the change in our school's culture is even bigger than these external changes.
The catalyst was a partnership, started three years ago, between District of Columbia Public Schools and Friendship Public Charter School, an African-American-led D.C. education provider. Born out of a community service nonprofit, Friendship educates nearly 8,000 students in the District and Baltimore.
One sign of the new Anacostia is a growing enthusiasm for school among our students. Before the partnership, barely half showed up on any given day, but attendance has shot up sharply now. A school that once was constantly visited by the city's emergency services has taken control of its hallways, classrooms and common areas.
Anacostia's high school graduation rate last year was 78 percent, up from only 56 percent only three years ago. Before our partnership began, no record was even kept of how many students were accepted to college -- a sign of where that aspiration fell in the scheme of priorities. Last year, half of our graduating students were accepted to college.
It's central to my job to make sure our students are prepared for college. But so is providing the scholarship opportunities that enable students to attend who otherwise would not be able to afford it. To date, some 75 Anacostia students have earned D.C. Achievers Scholarships, which pay a full-ride through college. Two students have been awarded Gates Millennium Scholarships, which pays all the tuition costs of an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree.
This year, our student reading and math test scores increased over last year's, and we hope to improve student proficiency still further. We now offer our students Advanced Placement courses, which are typically offered by the city's specialized schools and at suburban and private schools. Some 150 students are taking them this year.
School also is coming alive in other ways. After a lengthy absence, there is a school yearbook again. We have fielded a team on the long-running local television quiz show, "It's Academic." Our debate team is flourishing, and there are now many afterschool activities available. On our recently improved track and field, a number of athletic opportunities are available to our students. This fall, the school is investing more resources in Anacostia's football team. The Academies at Anacostia hired NFL pro-bowler and Super Bowl champion Cato June to lead the athletic department and football team.
Taken together, all of the new developments at the school are beginning to receive attention. Our students and our parents have more opportunities to connect with our teachers and our school community.
Stedman Graham, who founded a nonprofit educational foundation aimed at helping teens discover their full potential, attended our college signing day last year. He is now running a professional development workshop at the school. And first lady Michelle Obama recently gave the commencement address to our graduating class. The first lady has visited students at the school and continues to take an interest in their progress. I believe this interest is based on a sincere belief in our students and our community.
The last phase of the renovations we completed to the main building last month is just one example of our commitment to the students and community we serve. As principal, I can't think of a more encouraging way for our students to start off the new school year.
D.C. students test 'Teach to One' learning system
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 14, 2012
It might seem to be a less-than-realistic plan: Put nearly 200 preteens in one large classroom space and expect each of them, with the help of laptops and a few teachers, to learn math at his or her own pace.
But that arrangement is at the core of a new instructional approach that one of the District’s lowest-performing middle schools adopted this fall.
Pioneered in New York and expanding to other cities, “Teach to One” puts a computer algorithm in charge of figuring out what each child needs to learn and do each day, a design meant to ensure that students master one concept before moving onto another.
“If it works like we think it will, it’ll be a game-changer,” said D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson of the new program at Hart Middle School in Southeast Washington, where less than 30 percent of students are proficient in math.
This is the leading edge of the larger “blended learning” movement that many reformers think could transform education in the United States, harnessing technology to help teachers deliver personalized lessons to every child.
Schools are experimenting across the country and in the Washington region. Alexandria high school students at risk of dropping out can take all classes online, with the requirement that they spend at least 20 hours per week working at a satellite campus in a storefront at Landmark Mall. Many schools in the District are using blended approaches, including at Kramer Middle, where students take all core classes online with classroom teachers offering one-on-one tutoring and small-group help.
The federal government is throwing its weight behind the effort, too, offering $400 million in competitive Race to the Top grants to school systems that put forth innovative plans for tailoring education for individual students.
Many unknowns
But for all the buzz and investment, experts say there is scant evidence that such blended approaches are more effective than traditional teaching, and there are many unanswered questions about what it means for school budgets and teachers’ working conditions.
And the programs don’t come cheap: It cost $1 million to bring Teach to One to a single classroom at Hart this year, including $600,000 from D.C. Public Schools’ central office for renovations, and $400,000 in donations from the CityBridge Foundation and the D.C. Public Education Fund.
Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron, a prominent critic of full-time online schools where students learn entirely by laptop at home, said he is far more optimistic about blended programs. But he urged caution, saying each model should be tested and evaluated before it is expanded.
“I certainly think it’s worth a try on a small scale to test these ideas, and be willing to back out if it doesn’t work,” Miron said.
The unanswered questions about blended learning are no deterrent for educators grasping for a solution to persistently low student achievement.
“To me it was a no-brainer: Very little risk and big return,” said Dominick D’Angelo, principal of Boody Junior High School in Brooklyn, among the first three schools to try what is now Teach to One, in 2010. “I thought, ‘It can’t be worse than traditional instruction.’ ”
See link above for full article.
Schools dilemma for gentrifiers: Keep their kids urban, or move to suburbia?
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
October 14, 2012
When his oldest son reached school age, Michael Petrilli faced a dilemma known to many middle-class parents living in cities they helped gentrify: Should the family flee to the homogenous suburbs for excellent schools or stay urban for diverse but often struggling schools?
Petrilli, who lived in Takoma Park with his wife and two sons, was torn, but he knew more than most people about the choice before him. Petrilli is an education expert, a former official in the Education Department under George W. Bush and executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education think tank.
He set out to learn as much as he could about the risks and benefits of socioeconomically diverse schools, where at least 20 percent of students are eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program. And then he wrote about it.
The result is “The Diverse Schools Dilemma,” which is being published and released next month by the Fordham Institute.
Petrilli said he wanted his son to have friends from all backgrounds because he believes that cultural literacy will prepare him for success in a global society.
But he worried that his son might get lost in a classroom that has a high percentage of poor children, that teachers would be focused on the struggling children and have less time for their more privileged peers.
As Petrilli points out in the book, this dilemma doesn’t exist for most white, middle-class families. The vast majority — 87 percent — of white students attend majority white schools, Petrilli says, even though they make up just about 50 percent of the public school population.
And even in urban areas with significant African American and Latino populations, neighborhood schools still tend to be segregated by class, if not by race. In the Washington region, less than 3 percent of white public school students attend schools where poor children are the majority, according to Petrilli.
Gentrification poses new opportunities for policymakers to desegregate schools, Petrilli argues.
One solution is public charter schools, which now educate 41 percent of D.C. public school children, Petrilli said. Enrollment is not based by neighborhood; charter schools draw students from across the city. Some of the most popular charters are among the most diverse schools in the city.
But some middle-class parents find themselves at odds with the culture of some charter schools, Petrilli said.
“Many of the charters have uniforms and a rigid discipline code,” he said. “It’s not a culture that celebrates a lot of individualism, personal style or autonomy, the kinds of things that middle-class parents may want. So there are significant differences and cultural clashes that take place.”
Another route is a controlled choice system, where a portion of seats in a neighborhood school are set aside for children who don’t live in the neighborhood but meet poverty standards.
Controlled choice, first adopted by Cambridge, Mass., in 1981, is controversial. “You need political will to do this,” Petrilli said.
In the end, Petrilli moved from his Takoma Park neighborhood school — diverse Piney Branch Elementary, which is 33 percent low-income — to Wood Acres Elementary in Bethesda, where 1 percent of the children are low-income, 2 percent are black and 5 percent are Hispanic.
“It’s hard to get much richer or whiter than that,” Petrilli writes.
And it haunts him.
“I think about it every day,” he said. “Now we live in the suburbs and miss the urban vibe of Takoma Park quite a bit. . . . At the end of the day, we all do what’s best for our kids. I hope writing about it honestly can help people make their own decision.”
Want to Ruin Teaching? Give Ratings
The New York Times
By Deborah Kenny
October 14, 2012
AS the founder of a charter school network in Harlem, I’ve seen firsthand the nuances inherent in teacher evaluation. A few years ago, for instance, we decided not to renew the contract of one of our teachers despite the fact that his students performed exceptionally well on the state exam.
We kept hearing directly from students and parents that he was mean and derided the children who needed the most help. The teacher also regularly complained about problems during faculty meetings without offering solutions. Three of our strongest teachers confided to the principal that they were reluctantly considering leaving because his negativity was making everyone miserable.
There has been much discussion of the question of how to evaluate teachers; it was one of the biggest sticking points in the recent teachers’ strike in Chicago. For more than a decade I’ve been a strong proponent of teacher accountability. I’ve advocated for ending tenure and other rules that get in the way of holding educators responsible for the achievement of their students. Indeed, the teachers in my schools — Harlem Village Academies — all work with employment-at-will contracts because we believe accountability is an underlying prerequisite to running an effective school. The problem is that, unlike charters, most schools are prohibited by law from holding teachers accountable at all.
But the solution being considered by many states — having the government evaluate individual teachers — is a terrible idea that undermines principals and is demeaning to teachers. If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale.
Education and political leaders across the country are currently trying to decide how to evaluate teachers. Some states are pushing for legislation to sort teachers into categories using unreliable mathematical calculations based on student test scores. Others have hired external evaluators who pop into classrooms with checklists to monitor and rate teachers. In all these scenarios, principals have only partial authority, with their judgments factored into a formula.
This type of system shows a profound lack of understanding of leadership. Principals need to create a culture of trust, teamwork and candid feedback that is essential to running an excellent school. Leadership is about hiring great people and empowering them, and requires a delicate balance of evaluation and encouragement. At Harlem Village Academies we give teachers an enormous amount of freedom and respect. As one of our seventh-grade reading teachers told me: “It’s exhilarating to be trusted. It makes me feel like I can be the kind of teacher I had always dreamed about becoming: funny, interesting, effective and energetic.”
Some of the new government proposals for evaluating teachers, with their checklists, rankings and ratings, have been described as businesslike, but that is just not true. Successful companies do not publicly rate thousands of employees from a central office database; they don’t use systems to take the place of human judgment. They trust their managers to nurture and build great teams, then hold the managers accountable for results.
In the same way, we should hold principals strictly accountable for school performance and allow them to make all personnel decisions. That can’t be done by adhering to rigid formulas. There is no formula for quantifying compassion, creativity, intellectual curiosity or any number of other traits that make a group of teachers motivate one another and inspire greatness in their students. Principals must be empowered to use everything they know about their faculty — including student achievement data — to determine which teachers they will retain, promote or, when necessary, let go. This is how every successful enterprise functions.
A government-run teacher evaluation bureaucracy will make it impossible to attract great teachers and will diminish the motivation of the ones we have. It will make teaching so scripted and controlled that we won’t be able to attract smart, passionate people. Everyone says we should treat teachers as professionals, but then they promote top-down policies that are insulting to serious educators.
If we don’t change course in the coming years, these bureaucratic systems that treat teachers like low-level workers will become self-fulfilling. As the great educational thinker Theodore R. Sizer put it, “Eventually, hierarchical bureaucracy will be totally self-validating: virtually all teachers will be semi-competent.”
The direction of education reform in the next few years will shape public education for generations to come. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that in the next decade, “over 1.6 million teachers will retire,” and our country will be hiring 1.6 million new teachers. We will blow that opportunity if we create bureaucratic systems that discourage the smartest, most talented people from entering the profession.
Reforming a nation of bad note-takers
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
October 14, 2012
I have never learned how to take lecture notes. I had notebooks in high school, of course. I scribbled in them when the teacher spoke because I was a nerd and that was my claim to fame, my unfashionable love of learning.
But I didn’t know what I was doing. No one ever showed me how best to break down a lecture or book. This is common. Most high school and college students write what seems important but are rarely satisfied with the result.
It never occurred to me what I had missed until I encountered a college readiness program called Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) that is getting rave reviews from teachers. One of its most radical and effective tactics is teaching students the neglected skill of taking notes.
Visiting an AVID class, I realized how much time and energy I had wasted not learning to do this right. Teachers new to AVID have a similar reaction, because our education system and our education schools have not made note-taking a priority.
Fairfax County social studies teacher Eric Welch first tasted the power of thoughtful summarizing at a 2005 AVID summer training on teaching what are called Cornell notes. “I saw that this fed into so many different aspects of learning,” he said. Seven years later, he is the AVID coordinator for J.E.B. Stuart High School, which has become one of the highest-achieving schools in the country with a majority of students from low-income families.
AVID began in 1980 with an English teacher, Mary Catherine Swanson, who was upset that her suburban San Diego school was doing so little to help low-performing students bused in from poor neighborhoods. Her mix of multi-subject tutoring and instruction in note-taking, time management and critical thinking began with 32 students. AVID now has 425,000 students in 48 states, the District and 16 territories and foreign countries. There are AVID programs in Alexandria and in Montgomery, Prince George’s, Fairfax, Loudoun, Anne Arundel and Charles counties.
The note-taking system taught by AVID was developed by Cornell University education professor Walter Pauk in 1949. The student divides a sheet of note paper into two columns, the one on the right twice as wide as the one on the left. The student adds a horizontal line about two inches from the bottom of the page.
The student take notes in the right column, using a number of symbols and abbreviations. Questions and key words go in the left column. Afterward, the student reviews the notes, revises and adds questions and a brief summary at the bottom of the page.
The process deepens learning and augments review, but it takes practice and perseverance, qualities not common among the middle school and younger high school students in introductory AVID classes. AVID students have just one class a day with their AVID teacher. The rigor of the rest of the day depends on how much their other teachers — not all of them AVID-trained — reinforce AVID values.
Some teachers hand out worksheets with all the relevant information. Students tell their AVID teachers there is no point taking notes in those classes. The AVID teachers try to persuade their colleagues to change their ways, or suggest their students take Cornell notes on the worksheets.
In his government classes, Welch said, he has had success encouraging note-taking by giving weekly quizzes at which students are allowed to use their Cornell notes. “When they come back from college, they say they learned how much note-taking helps,” he said.
It is too late for me to become a good note-taker, but there is hope the next generation will be better than I was in organizing what they learn in class, and seeing how it all fits together.