- DCPS's lowest in the nation high school graduation rates contrasts with charters [Friendship Collegiate PCS mentioned]
- Schools Ring Closing Bell [KIPP DC mentioned]
- D.C. Council candidate Matthew Frumin sees need for a vision on city education
- At D.C. school-closure forums, parents urge Henderson to consider alternatives
- Friendship Collegiate overwhelms Dunbar in inaugural DCSAA championship, 48-12 [Friendship Collegiate Academy PCS mentioned]
- Common Core sparks war over words
- D.C. paid $3 million to send nonresidents to private schools
DCPS's lowest in the nation high school graduation rates contrasts with charters [Friendship Collegiate PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
December 3, 2012
Last week the editors of the Washington Examiner pointed out that despite Mayor Gray's constant assertion that there is "One City, One Future," the story is quite different when it comes to public high school graduation rates. You see in 2011 the traditional schools recorded the percentage of students earning a diploma in four years at 59 percent, the smallest number across the entire United States. This compares to a rate of 77 for public charter schools, even though, as the editors explain, "more than half of all charter students live in Wards 7 and 8, which have the highest poverty rates in the city."
The Examiner highlighted one school, Friendship Collegiate Academy, where every senior was accepted to college and their overall graduation rate was an astonishing 90 percent. Collegiate Academy is located in Ward 7.
We have watched the regular schools try to change in the wake of a mass exodus of students to charters. There was mayoral takeover of the system, a highly controversial Chancellor plummeted into town to remake the product, teachers and principals were fired by the boat-load, billions of dollars were spent on school modernization, and scores of families were disrupted by closing and consolidating facilities. And what did we get for all of these interventions? As the editors conclude "less than half of all high school students are proficient in math and reading."
Inner-city children who lack a high school diploma are virtually guaranteed a life of misery. Isn't it past time that we turned all public schools into charters?
Schools Ring Closing Bell [KIPP DC mentioned]
The Wall Street Journal
By Stephanie Banchero
December 2, 2012
At Davis Elementary in this city's mostly poor southeast section, 178 students are spread out in a 69-year-old building meant to hold 450.
Three miles away, the new, $30 million KIPP charter school teems with 1,050 children. Toddlers crawl over a state-of-the-art jungle gym and older students fill brightly decorated classrooms. A waiting list holds 2,000 names.
Many students who live within the Davis boundaries instead attend the charter school, one of 125 nationwide run by KIPP, a nonprofit. The exodus helped land Davis on a list of 20 schools targeted for closure next school year.
Closing underused schools, however painful, will let the district shift resources to "improve the quality of education we provide to our students," Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said at a recent city council hearing packed with parents, teachers and students pleading for schools to be kept open.
Similar scenes are playing out in places such as Tucson, Ariz., Chicago and Philadelphia, where school systems are rolling out plans to close underenrolled and underperforming facilities. The efforts are driven by a drop in the school-age population, the Obama administration's push to shut poor-performing schools and competition from charters, the publicly funded schools run by independent groups.
During the 2010-11 school year, school districts nationwide closed 1,069 traditional public schools, uprooting nearly 280,000 students, according to data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by the National Center for Education Statistics, the primary federal entity for national school data. That was up from 717 closings affecting 193,000 students in 2000-01, according to the data, which don't include specialized schools, such as those for special-education students.
Even charters aren't immune. In 2010-11, 128 charter schools were closed, compared with 44 in 2000-01, the data show. This past week, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a nonprofit group that represents government and other entities that approve charter-school applications, called on its members to close hundreds of poor-performing charters and urged new state laws to improve accountability. The group said at least 900 of the nation's 6,000 charters, which also receive private donations, post test scores that land them in the bottom 15% of all schools in their states.
"We did not start this movement to create more bad schools," said Greg Richmond, president of the group. "We want smarter charter-school growth and stronger accountability."
Proponents of school choice say closing low-performing and underenrolled campuses is a natural outgrowth of heathy competition, while many teacher unions argue that struggling schools often need more resources to fairly compete. Meanwhile, many parents fear that closures will mean students end up in schools that are farther away or worse academically.
Tubrook Livingston, who has a child at Davis Elementary and heads its Parent Teacher Association, said he recognizes the school is underenrolled and low-performing, but he wants it kept open. "Unless they have a better place for our kids…I don't see any reason to close it," he said.
In Chicago, rumors that the city intended to close as many as 100 schools laid the foundation for the two-week teachers strike in September and sparked rallies protesting the closings and prompted protests citywide. Facing a Saturday deadline, city officials lobbied state legislators last week to allow a delay in identifying schools targeted for closure. State lawmakers granted the extension and the governor signed the bill Friday. Chicago schools officials have said they will implement a five-year moratorium on closings after next year's schools closings.
In Washington, enrollment in district-run schools has dropped to about 42,000 this year from about 61,000 in 2002, due partly to the city's dwindling school-age population and the growing popularity of charter schools. About 40% of D.C. public-school students now attend charters.
Research is scant on the academic impact of school closings. But two studies—one in Chicago and one in an unnamed district in the Northeast—found that, in general, students displaced by closures do no better, and sometimes worse, in other traditional schools, in large part because they transfer to similarly low-performing campuses nearby.
Closing schools doesn't necessarily yield a financial windfall, because teachers often are shuffled to other schools and vacant school buildings are tough to unload, according to a 2011 study by Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative. "There is nothing easy about closing schools and it is extremely difficult to find productive uses for the buildings," said Emily Dowdall, a senior researcher at Pew.
Still, underused schools like Davis, which has students from preschool through fifth grade, can be expensive to operate. Davis Elementary spends about $13,225 a pupil, with about 32% going toward classroom teachers, and the rest funding such things as instructional aides, office staff and custodians. Nearby Langdon Elementary, with more than twice as many students, spends $9,900 a pupil, with 55% going to classroom teachers.
"We get that we are small and it's not cost effective to run a small school, but we have a good thing going here and our students are making great progress," said Davis's principal, Maisha Riddlesprigger.
Since 2009, the portion of Davis students who tested proficient in reading doubled to 34%, while math proficiency jumped to 35% from 22%. At the nearby KIPP school, 59% are proficient in reading and 75% in math.
Nichole Young lives a few blocks from Davis but sends her 4-year-old son to KIPP. "I don't have anything against Davis," said Ms. Young, who teaches 12th grade English in a Maryland public school. "But we visited KIPP and observed the children in classes and they seemed so happy to be learning and that won me over."
D.C. Council candidate Matthew Frumin sees need for a vision on city education
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 30, 2012
Longtime education activist Matthew Frumin has decided to run in the April special election for an at-large D.C. Council seat, my colleague Tim Craig reported today.
Frumin is a Wilson High parent, advisory neighborhood commissioner and onetime Democratic U.S. House candidate in his native Michigan.
In the D.C. education world, he’s among many who have called on city leaders to develop a comprehensive plan for strengthening public education — and a vision for how traditional schools should coexist with fast-growing public charters.
“We have to come to grips with the role that we want charters to play in our system,” Frumin wrote in testimony prepared for last week’s council hearing on Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to close 20 schools.
Frumin argues that the city is on a track toward two school systems: excellent, oversubscribed matter-of-right DCPS schools west of Rock Creek Park, and a mixture of charter schools and struggling DCPS schools everywhere else.
Henderson’s closure plan neither changes that trajectory nor inspires confidence in parents, he told the council last week.
Frumin said he recognized that some schools need to be closed and some boundaries need to be changed, but officials should “match the bitter with the sweet.”
“Look at exciting ways that you can invigorate local high schools and imbue people with confidence that it will work for them,” he said. “That’s just not what this plan does. There's nothing invigorating about this plan.”
One idea Frumin particularly supports: Moving the selective Duke Ellington School of the Arts from its current home in Ward 2 to under-enrolled Roosevelt High, which is scheduled for a modernization.
Ellington students could end up with a newly renovated, centrally located and Metro-accessible campus, he argues. And the move would vacate a building that could be used for a neighborhood high school, easing enrollment pressure at Wilson High.
“We are now in week one of what will be an intense debate running up to the budget process for FY 2014 about the shape of our education system for the next decade,” Frumin said in his prepared remarks to the council last week. “Or at least let’s hope it is an intense debate, because the stakes are very high.”
At D.C. school-closure forums, parents urge Henderson to consider alternatives
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
November 30, 2012
Hundreds of District parents, teachers and activists showed up at three community meetings this week to challenge and critique Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to close 20 under-enrolled schools.
Speaker after speaker argued in favor of keeping the schools open, often saying that shuttering traditional schools shakes parents’ confidence and pushes students into fast-growing public charters.
“Instead of giving up on our schools, I want all of us to roll up our sleeves and compete. We can compete with charters,” said Nakisha Winston, a Langdon Education Campus parent who spoke at Thursday’s meeting at McKinley Technology High School in Northeast Washington. “We can fix our schools.”
The most full-throated cry against school closures came Wednesday night from a standing-room-only crowd packed into the gym at Sousa Middle School in Ward 7, where the chancellor has proposed closing five schools.
Eboni-Rose Thompson, president of the Ward 7 Education Council, presented an alternative plan: Keep all five open by adding programs — such as engineering, foreign languages and arts — to attract more families.
“All this came from parents telling us what would make them put their child back in a Ward 7 school,” Thompson said. “If you build it, they will come. We’re asking you to build it so they will come.”
Henderson applauded Ward 7’s “spectacular” turnout and promised to consider the alternative plan. “I introduced this as a proposal,” she said. “I’m serious about listening to community input, about using it to amend, tweak, strengthen the set of recommendations that we made.”
At each meeting, Henderson said she had learned from mistakes made in 2008, when 23 schools were closed. But she pushed back against criticism that those closures led to the exodus of thousands of students from the school system. A year later, she said, enrollment stabilized after falling for decades.
Activists who went to meetings expecting to rally to save schools at a town-hall style forum were instead asked to offer feedback in small groups, each of which had a facilitator taking notes.
A representative from each table then spoke to the whole group at the end of the evening, and some of the facilitators’ notes were posted online.
Daniel del Pielago, an organizer with Empower DC, called it a “divide and conquer” strategy meant to dilute protest. School system spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said it was designed to encourage constructive input from all participants.
“The purpose of these meetings is to have active and productive conversations, and this is the best way to get that,” she said.
Parents expressed near-universal concern about students’ ability to safely move into new schools.
Older students might face taunting and bullying, the result of neighborhood rivalries, they said, while younger students may be forced to travel more than a mile to school, walking through unsafe neighborhoods in the dark.
David Tansey, a Dunbar High math teacher, urged the school system to pay students’ public transit costs to avoid creating an obstacle to attending class. “I give money to kids every day so they’ll have money to get to school,” he said in comments made Thursday at McKinley.
Many teachers and parents pleaded for more time to show progress, saying their schools — such as Marshall Elementary in Ward 5, Davis and Smothers elementaries in Ward 7 and Malcolm X Elementary in Ward 8 — are gaining momentum.
The chancellor has planned another community meeting for Dec. 5 at Brightwood Education Campus in Northwest. She will also take public feedback during office hours in December before making final recommendations on school closures to the mayor in January.
Friendship Collegiate overwhelms Dunbar in inaugural DCSAA championship, 48-12 [Friendship Collegiate Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Roman Stubbs
December 1, 2012
Play after play in Saturday’s D.C. Statewide Athletic Association title game, Friendship Collegiate left tackle Derwin Gray battered former teammates on Dunbar’s defense, looking every bit like the 6-foot-5, 290-pound standout that he is. A year ago, this title game didn’t exist, and Gray was playing for Dunbar. But the Maryland recruit had no time for rumination Saturday.
Gray was dominant up front, leading a powerful Friendship Collegiate rushing attack that amassed 245 yards in a 48-12 rout of Dunbar at Howard University’s Greene Memorial Stadium.
It was the inaugural DCSAA championship between the champion of the District’s charter schools, Friendship Collegiate (8-3), and the DCIAA winner, Dunbar (9-3), but the game was a mismatch in physicality from the beginning. The Knights’ Jonathan Haden rushed for 148 yards and a touchdown, and backs Justin Watson and Jermaine Carter combined for 103 yards and four touchdowns. The Knights repeatedly ran at the left side of Dunbar’s defense, which was being pounded by Gray.
“I knew it was going to be a personal game . . . I knew friends over there,” Gray said. “I knew it started with us up front.”
After Friendship Collegiate’s defense forced a safety early in the first quarter, Haden returned the ensuing kickoff 68 yards to the Dunbar 6-yard line, and Watson mopped up with a six-yard touchdown run. Watson burned Dunbar’s defense in the red zone again midway through the second quarter with a slicing 15-yard run to the left side to make it 22-6.
The Crimson Tide cut it to 28-12 midway through the third quarter after Lamel Matthews hit James Duff for a 40-yard touchdown pass, but Friendship Collegiate answered with a methodical 51-yard drive capped by Haden’s four-yard touchdown run. Dunbar fumbled on the first play of the ensuing possession, which was scooped up by Carter and returned 37 yards for another score to put the game out of reach. Dunbar was held to just 145 yards of offense, with five first downs.
“We looked at it going in, whoever won up front would have the advantage,” Friendship Collegiate Coach Aazaar Abdul-Rahim said.
With about two minutes remaining in the game, the Knights’ sideline unsuccessfully tried to douse Abdul-Rahim with Gatorade, and ice spilled onto the field. Friendship Collegiate was flagged 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct, in what was the only thing that seemed to go wrong for the Knights all day.
“I’ve basically never had a championship,” Gray said. “Unfortunately I had to go against my old fellow team, but hey, you have to take care of business on the field, and be friends later.”
Common Core sparks war over words
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
December 2, 2012
As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts.
The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature. But as teachers excise poetry and classic works of fiction from their classrooms, those who designed the guidelines say it appears that educators have misunderstood them.
Proponents of the new standards, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say U.S. students have suffered from a diet of easy reading and lack the ability to digest complex nonfiction, including studies, reports and primary documents. That has left too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and demands of the workplace, experts say.
The new standards, which are slowly rolling out now and will be in place by 2014, require that nonfiction texts represent 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, and the requirement grows to 70 percent by grade 12.
Among the suggested nonfiction pieces for high school juniors and seniors are Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” published by the General Services Administration.
English teachers across the country are trying to figure out which poetry, short stories and novels might have to be sacrificed to make room for nonfiction.
Off the reading list
Jamie Highfill is mourning the six weeks’ worth of poetry she removed from her eighth-grade English class at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, Ark. She also dropped some short stories and a favorite unit on the legends of King Arthur to make room for essays by Malcolm Gladwell and a chapter from “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell’s book about social behavior.
“I’m struggling with this, and my students are struggling,” said Highfill, who was named 2011 middle school teacher of the year in her state. “With informational text, there isn’t that human connection that you get with literature. And the kids are shutting down. They’re getting bored. I’m seeing more behavior problems in my classroom than I’ve ever seen.”
But the chief architect of the Common Core Standards said educators are overreacting as the standards move from concept to classroom.
“There’s a disproportionate amount of anxiety,” said David Coleman, who led the effort to write the standards with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Coleman said educators are misinterpreting the directives.
Yes, the standards do require increasing amounts of nonfiction from kindergarten through grade 12, Coleman said. But that refers to reading across all subjects, not just in English class, he said. Teachers in social studies, science and math should require more reading, which would allow English teachers to continue to assign literature, he said.
See link above for full article.
D.C. paid $3 million to send nonresidents to private schools
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 2, 2012
Tuition, transportation for special-ed students costs $65,000 a year
The District spent about $3 million to send 47 special education students who were not D.C. residents to private schools last year, school officials told The Washington Examiner.
The students faked D.C. addresses to take advantage of a federal law requiring the city to pay the private-school tuition of any student the city can't educate in its public schools. Although the law applies nationwide, D.C.'s troubled special education system means students are shipped out of the public schools at about six times the national rate.
(See link above for chart.)
Between tuition and transportation -- school buses transport students to Baltimore and farther -- the average cost per student is $65,000 per year.
DC Public Schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz declined to comment on the results of the investigation beyond writing in an email that the school system will continue to work "to ensure we are providing high quality services to eligible families."
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which regulates DCPS and the city's public charter schools, started the investigation in May after the office was unable to verify the residency of 276 students: 126 in DCPS, 32 in charters and 118 placed in private schools by the city.
"Education is free, but not without cost," State Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley said at the time, noting that "Maryland and Virginia residents attending public school in the District place an unfair burden on D.C. taxpayers."
The investigation revealed that 94 students -- 26 in DCPS, eight in charters and 60 in private placements -- were "non-verified." They were referred to the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the Inspector General, which have been collecting tuition or kicking children out. Fourteen students -- 13 of whom were sent to private placements -- were verified by these agencies to be District residents or to be paying tuition, leaving 80 cases pending.
Students committing residency fraud were supposed to be paying the District nonresident tuition, which ranges from $9,124 to $12,226, but is often higher for those with extra needs, such as English-language learners.
In October, D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan filed a $31,294 civil suit against Jacinta Mason, a Hyattsville woman who fraudulently enrolled her child in a D.C. public high school for four years. Nathan also targeted D.C. charter school teacher Darnetta Paige in the suit for pretending to be the child's legal guardian while the girl lived with Mason in Maryland.
Last week, Wilson Senior High School's football team was booted from the Turkey Bowl after DCPS determined that a player actually lived in Prince George's County and was committing residency fraud.