- Meet Julia King, D.C. Teacher of the Year [DC Prep and Excel Academy mentioned]
- When Teachers Leave, Students Lose Out [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]
- D.C. releases results of nation's first-ever standardized test on health and sex ed
- D.C. students score low on nutrition, disease prevention tests
Meet Julia King, D.C. Teacher of the Year [DC Prep and Excel Academy mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 12, 2012
Mayor Vincent Gray surprised Julia King in her classroom last week with the news that she had been named the city’s teacher of the year.
Just a few hours earlier, King, a seventh-grade teacher at D.C. Prep Public Charter School, hadn’t been feeling much like a superstar.
A morning math lesson hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped. It could have been more rigorous, could have better nudged students to think on their own. “I was really hard on myself, just feeling really disappointed,” King said.
She set about redesigning the lesson for her afternoon students, wholesale rethinking her teaching strategy. The revamped version was a success.
That kind of drive and relentless self-reflection are just part of what makes King an outstanding educator, school officials say.
“She is a passionate and infinitely creative and inspiring teacher,” said Cassie Pergament, principal of D.C. Prep’s Edgewood middle school campus, which serves primarily poor and minority children.
King pushes students not just to achieve academically but also to be “great citizens of the world,” Pergament said.
King was selected for the award from a group of nominees that included teachers at public charter schools as well as D.C. public schools. Other finalists were Laura Good of Excel Academy, an all-girls charter school, and Shajena Erazo of Ballou Senior High School.
King decided she wanted to become a teacher after reading Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities” while a student at George Washington University. She wanted to help make sure that all kids, including those living in the nation’s poorest communities, got the kind of education she received.
“I was brought up learning that education is the silver bullet to solve any problem,” she said. “I wanted to be a part of the solution.”
She spent two years as a Teach for America corps member in Gary, Ind., before returning to the District in 2010. She chose to work at D.C. Prep because of its efforts to weave academics with character development.
“As teachers and as schools, we have the opportunity to teach students really strong habits that will help them long-term,” King said.
She was also drawn to the DC Prep, she said, because of its emphasis on collaboration among teachers.
“Teaching is a constant process of learning and adjusting,” she said. “There are so many amazing things happening in education, and we can really learn from each other.”
Rick Cruz, who recently took the helm of D.C. Prep from founder and outgoing chief executive Emily Lawson, said King has kindred spirits in her colleagues — teachers and administrators who not only collaborate but also are never quite satisfied with their work. It’s a culture that defines D.C. Prep and has helped make it successful, Cruz said.
The Edgewood middle school is the highest-ranked charter school in the city.
“There’s no secret sauce, it’s just that kind of hard work of reflection and attention to improving,” Cruz said. “Everyone’s hard on themselves.”
When Teachers Leave, Students Lose Out [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]
The Huffington Post
By Alexandra Fuentes
December 7, 2012
Seniors at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., where I've taught biology for four years, have begun to ask me for recommendation letters for college. I enjoy reflecting on each student's growth as I write those letters. But I am also struck by a jarring reality--the senior class has only one remaining science teacher to ask for recommendations; all the others have left.
This level of teacher attrition is not unique to my school. D.C. Public Schools lose 12 percent of their top-performing teachers each year. By the time entering freshman graduate, 40 percent of that group of top teachers will have left DCPS. A recent report from TNTP offers strategies to retain top-performing teachers, and acknowledges that DCPS has made progress with exiting low-performers. These strategies are important, but their study has a significant oversight: by focusing on the best and worst teachers, they give schools permission to disregard the loss of effective teachers. We must hold schools accountable for retaining the best teachers and for developing effective teachers into top performers. How do we do that?
1. It starts with convincing principals that teachers are not easily replaceable.
I often wonder how much more successful my student Darrel would be if his 10th grade English teacher--who had been able to inspire him to do his best work--had stayed. Students lose out when the teachers with whom they built relationships are no longer there, yet TNTP found that retention is not a top priority for more than two-thirds of DCPS principals. When I considered leaving Chavez to teach in DCPS, my principal convinced me to stay. I wish that kind of conversation would happen with all top-performing and effective teachers who consider leaving, but only ten of the more than thirty teachers the senior class started with are still here.
2. Schools must focus on developing effective teachers into top performers.
Two years ago, Chavez Schools held a roundtable discussion to ask us how to increase retention. More than anything, teachers wanted the school to help us help students learn. Chavez Schools responded by giving us more planning time than the national average, putting teacher leaders in charge of professional development, and making constructive feedback an integral part of the teacher evaluation system. Last month, my principal and I used data from my evaluation to create goals that will help me become a more effective teacher.
Chavez Schools are doing many of the low-cost retention strategies that TNTP recommends. The Board and top leadership have made teacher retention one of their top goals. Why then, despite significant improvements, are teachers in my school still finding the working conditions unsustainable and starting to seek other jobs in education?
3. Schools must involve teachers in decision-making; survey data is not enough.
Rather than merely survey teachers for ideas, schools must establish working groups of teachers to respond to key issues of leadership, workload, and school culture. That would send the message that school leaders trust and view teachers as capable, talented professionals. Cities and districts that have worked with teachers as equal partners have achieved unprecedented success in attracting and retaining teachers in the lowest performing schools. More recently, a working group of teachers from cities nationwide, convened by Teach Plus, published a report with actionable recommendations to increase retention in public charter schools.
When teachers are not empowered to make changes in schools that would enable us to better serve our students, teachers leave and students lose out. It's time schools across the nation make it a priority to keep and develop their effective teachers and to involve teachers in that process.
D.C. releases results of nation's first-ever standardized test on health and sex ed
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
December 12, 2012
Fifth- and eighth graders in the District are pretty well-versed in emotional-health issues but have a lot to learn about the human body, according to results from the city’s (and the nation’s) first-ever standardized test on health, physical education and sex ed.
High school students, meanwhile, correctly answered an average of three out of four questions about sexuality and reproduction — but knew far less about how to locate health information and assistance.
Overall, city students correctly answered an average of 62 percent of questions about nutrition, wellness, disease prevention and sex education.
That’s better than D.C. students’ average percentage of correct responses on math and reading standardized tests (about 49 percent each). But there’s clearly room for progress, said Adam Tenner, executive director of the community health organization Metro TeenAids.
“In a city with such high rates of HIV, teen pregnancy and STDs — let alone obesity and other diseases that plague our community — we’re not where we should be,” Tenner said in an interview.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education developed the 50-question exam and administered it last spring to more than 11,000 students in DCPS and public charter schools.
At the time, the effort engendered concern about excessive standardized testing and jabs from critics who said city schools should be concentrating on improving D.C. students’ lagging abilities in math and reading.
But the exam was also hailed by advocates as a step toward understanding — and ultimately decreasing — the city’s high rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy.
Tenner called the test “historic” and praised officials for their willingness to begin examining the root causes of the city’s health problems. Now the question is what needs to be done to make sure schools have what they need to improve health education, he said.
OSSE officials developed the test in response to a provision of the D.C. Healthy Schools Act of 2010, which was sponsored by Council Member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3). Cheh is holding a hearing on the exam results Thursday, Dec. 13, at 11 a.m. in Room 412 at the John A. Wilson Building.
“I’m so pleased by this because it focuses on these dimensions of our students that really I think had been pretty much neglected,” Cheh said.
She said she has a lot of questions for OSSE about what the results mean — and what schools might do differently now that they have this data.
Here are the citywide results, separated by grade level and content category. Percentages don’t reflect proficiency rates, as we’re used to seeing with other tests, but average percent of questions answered correctly.
According to OSSE, 9 percent of 5th graders’ parents opted out of sex-related questions. The opt-out rate was lower for older kids: about 2 percent each for 8th graders and high school students.
D.C. students score low on nutrition, disease prevention tests
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 12, 2012
D.C. students have significant lapses in their knowledge of personal health, safety skills, disease prevention and other health topics including alcohol and drugs, according to the results of a first-time standardized test released Wednesday.
State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley Jones said the scores will allow the District to establish "subject and skill-specific instruction needed to align students' knowledge at all ages to the standards required of them to live safe and healthy lifestyles."
The District is the only state to include health as part of its standardized testing regimen. The D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System's health and physical education test was administered for the first time this spring to more than 11,000 fifth-grade, eighth-grade and high school students.
When it came to questions of basic nutrition, eighth-graders on average answered only 50 percent of questions correctly, as did 62 percent of high schoolers.
High school students had only a 60 percent accuracy rate for disease prevention, while they answered 75 percent of questions about sexuality and reproduction correctly.
"I look at these and see a D-minus," said Adam Tenner, executive director of Metro TeenAIDS. "But I also look at these and see the potential for an A-plus. Knowing where we are is an important place to start."
Physical education was a topic largely unknown to most D.C. students: Only about half of fitness questions were answered correctly by eighth-graders and high schoolers. Fifth-graders did better on fitness questions, answering 63 percent of them correctly.
More than 35 percent of D.C. children are overweight or obese, one of the highest rates in the nation, according to the National Survey of Children's Health.
"We're clearly missing something," said Maggie Riden, executive director of the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates.
Mahaley Jones has created a task force to determine the best ways to teach health at each grade level. Tenner, who serves on the task force, said it has been "slow-moving."
Unlike the other DC CAS exams, the health test will not affect teachers' evaluation scores. Additionally, students and teachers will not receive individual results.