- D.C Council member David Catania takes charge of new Education Committee
- SIMMONS: With parents making choices, bad schools left behind
- Security at the door: Schools tighten up
- Dartmouth's unresearched swipes at AP
D.C Council member David Catania takes charge of new Education Committee
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 27, 2013
Two weeks after taking the helm of the D.C. Council’s new Education Committee, David A. Catania walked through the front door of Burrville Elementary School and started asking questions.
Why, Catania quizzed the social worker stationed in the lobby, were 11.6 percent of Burrville’s students absent for a month or more last year? What is the school doing to improve attendance?
The ensuing back-and-forth lasted nearly 15 minutes.
Not your average political photo op, the visit was the beginning of what Catania (I-At Large) promises will be a hands-on, full-bore effort to reduce chronic student absenteeism and improve the District’s long-struggling schools.
“I want to engender an outrage in the city about the level of truancy and educational failure. We’ve lost that,” Catania said. “We’ve all become accustomed to it.”
As education chairman, Catania occupies a powerful perch that hasn’t existed since 2006, when the schools were transferred to the council’s Committee of the Whole. They were later put under mayoral control. That arrangement, critics said, diluted lawmakers’ focus on education and shielded the topic from public scrutiny.
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) has resuscitated the Education Committee. Many observers hope that Catania — who is known for his intensity, and who already has assembled dozens of three-ring binders full of data on each city school — will force an honest assessment of schools’ performance and spending.
“To be able to really scrub the numbers, to see what is being spent, is really important and something we’ve been missing these last few years,” said Kathy Patterson, a former council member and Education Committee chair. “We’ve seen a lot of things go forward without a lot of tough questioning.”
But Catania’s new leadership position also has engendered some heartburn, including among labor leaders, who have never seen him as an ally. Catania has suggested, for example, that teachers rated “minimally effective” on annual evaluations be fired immediately instead of being given a year to improve, as they are under current policy.
Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said he hopes to establish a strong relationship with Catania but chafes at the council member’s stance on quicker firing.
“It definitely puts Mr. Catania at odds with the vast majority of teachers who have to perform this very difficult function every single day,” Saunders said.
Some activists fear the council member — a lawyer by trade who is not known for his patience — will decide what needs to be done without first listening to teachers, parents and others who have direct experience in education.
“He has a lot of ideas about what he wants to do with the committee,” said Cathy Reilly, a longtime D.C. education advocate. “What I hope is that he will allow those ideas to be impacted by the public and by the people whose children are in the schools, the people who have worked in the schools.”
* * *
A Republican-turned-independent, Catania was first elected to his at-large council seat in 1997. He has built a reputation as a smart, hardworking and often sharp-tongued politician, equally aggressive with colleagues as with witnesses during contentious hearings.
He chaired the Health Committee for the past eight years, a period in which the proportion of uninsured D.C. residents fell by half. He successfully pushed to increase the number of publicly funded HIV/AIDS tests in Washington. The first openly gay member of the council, Catania played a key role in passing the 2009 law that legalized same-sex marriage in the District.
Catania gave up the health post and left a $240,000-a-year job at a local construction firm to focus on education.
He takes over at a critical moment for the public school system, which faces low enrollment and increasing competition from fast-growing charter schools. The city needs a thoughtful plan for how the two school sectors should coexist, said Catania, who believes the committee should help create a plan for the future of D.C. public education.
Another top priority will be wrangling school budgets, which he calls “a disaster” and a “hornet’s nest” of conflicting numbers. “My intent is to demand that every dollar we put into this system be associated with academic excellence,” Catania said.
The District’s traditional public school system spends about $800 million a year on 46,000 students — one of the highest per-pupil rates in the country. Yet fewer than half of the students are proficient in reading and math, and just six out of 10 graduate from high school in four years.
Catania has been careful not to blame Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, whom he said he likes and respects, for the system’s shortcomings. “We see the world the same way,” Catania said. “We find the educational outcomes and the lack of opportunity inexcusable, and the low expectations criminal.”
And Henderson carefully embraces Catania’s energy.
“I appreciate his focus and his intensity. I think he’s super smart, and I think he’s going to help push us farther, faster,” Henderson said. “I’m not afraid of the accountability.”
A focus on accountability could come quickly: Catania plans to introduce legislation to tighten test security measures, a response to persistent allegations of cheating on standardized tests between 2008 and 2010. He also aims to establish an independent authority to decide what should become of schools that have closed and are now empty — a constant source of frustration for charter-school leaders, who often struggle to find affordable real estate.
Henderson has argued that she needs those buildings, either to hold students whose schools are under construction or in the future, in case enrollment increases.
But to Catania, it is “madness” that the city shells out $100 million to help charter schools pay for real estate when there are suitable buildings that are unused.
* * *
Catania’s most forceful push is likely to be in confronting truancy. Thousands of D.C. students, including children under 13, miss more than a month of school each year.
“The degree of chronic truancy that goes on in this city is breathtaking,” Catania said. “But no one seems much interested in fixing it.”
A D.C. law allows parents of elementary school students to be criminally charged if their children have two or more unexcused absences in a month. But that law is almost never enforced, Catania said.
He introduced a bill last week that calls for parents to be criminally charged when their children reach 20 or more unexcused absences in a year. They would be sentenced to parenting classes or community service at their child’s school — and if they fail to show up, could get five days in jail or a $100 fine.
Charges can be dismissed if parents swear under oath that they can’t compel their teens to go to school; that would trigger intervention by the District’s family court.
Some see such prosecution as a simplistic response to a complicated problem — and one that doesn’t address the root issues that keep students out of class.
“We know that the punitive approach doesn’t work,” said Suzanne Greenfield of Advocates for Justice and Education, a nonprofit organization that advocates for children and families. “We have to figure out why our kids are not coming, and we need to get them there.”
Catania believes the measure is a way to demand that parents take responsibility for their children. He said he and his fellow committee members — Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7), Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) and David Grosso (I-At Large) — will visit the homes of truants in an effort to understand what keeps them from school.
Catania also wants to tour all city schools, both traditional schools and charters — an ambitious plan, given that there are more than 200 campuses across the city. His visit to Burrville, in Northeast Washington, was his first.
He arrived carrying a red pen and a three-ring binder filled with Burrville’s stats, and he walked away impressed: with the principal, with the teachers, with a room devoted to charting each student’s progress on every math and reading standard. And with the social worker, Anita Lewis, who thoroughly explained Burrville’s efforts to improve student attendance.
Lewis hadn’t expected the politician to ask so many questions, she said afterward. But once her nerves settled, she appreciated his interest.
“You can see he’s done his homework,” Lewis said. “I like that.”
SIMMONS: With parents making choices, bad schools left behind
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
January 27, 2013
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Now is the time for all good education advocates to come to the aid of school choice.
It’s National School Choice Week, so pay attention if you truly want a way forward.
The numbers do not lie.
Nationwide, 2.3 million students attend public charter schools and an estimated 255,000 students use tax-credit scholarships and vouchers to attend private schools of their parents’ choosing.
The number of school-age children whose families do not have such options are estimated at 49 million. These are the very children who deserve being turned around because of poor schooling, revolving doors for principals and teaching staffs, school violence, school boundaries and school bullying, and any or no other reason at all.
In other words, from Alaska to Florida and New England to the Bible Belt, families frustrated with the sluggish school reform movement are taking matters into their own hands with game-changers that focus on turning around students instead of turning around schools.
Their by-any-means-necessary efforts, which have long pushed such popular options as magnet and charter schools, and home schooling, are increasingly persuading statehouses to add vouchers, tax credits and online learning to their arsenals in order to boost student achievement and graduation rates and to broaden the definition of school choice.
The governor of Indiana wants the state’s 2011 voucher law to make it easier for military families to receive vouchers, and the governor of Mississippi has proposed scholarships for students in underperforming schools.
Meanwhile, Alaska’s lawmakers are pondering statewide vouchers regardless of a family’s income, the Statehouse in Maine is considering an opportunity scholarship program and Texas lawmakers are weighing tax credits for donors of nonprofits that offer private-school vouchers for poor families.
The District, which has a federally funded voucher program, remains in a rut after voters rejected 89 percent to 11 percent a 1981 voter initiative that would have provided tax credits to families who use their own money to cover tuition for private and parochial schools.
So, even today, instead of allowing parents to put students first, D.C. officials are taking the bricks-and-mortar approach, arguing that closing schoolhouses and renovating schoolhouses will turn around schools.
In Texas, did a new start-of-the-art stadium make the Dallas Cowboys a Super Bowl contender?
In the nation’s capital, did closing and consolidating 23 public schools in 2008 make students any smarter, increase graduate rates or raise the academic impacts that teachers have on learning?
Let’s face it, either a school fits a child or it doesn’t, and the power to decide where a child is educated rests with parents and guardians.
Here’s how the U.S. Supreme Court put it in a parental school-choice case in 1925: “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State.”
I rest my case, for now.
Close to home
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray wants to rebuild an amphitheater in Langdon Park and name it as a memorial to go-go Godfather Chuck Brown, who died last spring.
The proposition really has the mayor wound up; taxpayers and businesses not so much.
Why?
The typical government carrot-and-stick approach.
Much-needed public safety, traffic, restrooms and other upgrades to Langdon Park Recreation Center are tied to the plans for the amphitheater.
No new Chuck Brown amphitheater, no upgrades.
Residents and homeowners who live near and visit the park, located in Ward 5, love Chuck but are not keen about the apparent take-it-or-leave-it offer.
Several angry residents at a public meeting Saturday said the Gray administration is beginning to resemble that of his predecessor, Adrian M. Fenty, a fellow Democrat who lasted but one four-year term.
Security at the door: Schools tighten up
The Washington Post
By Donna St. George
January 27, 2013
In the anxious weeks after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the idea of bringing more police into the nation’s schools has picked up support. But for many parents and educators, there is a more immediate priority: protecting schoolhouse doors.
Some schools in the Washington area lack buzzer entrance systems. Some leave a main door open, with a sign asking visitors to report to the office. Some, according to parents, do not closely screen all visitors or use different rules for after-school activities and child-care programs.
What happened at Sandy Hook on Dec. 14 — when gunman Adam Lanza overcame a security system, shooting out glass near the school entrance, police said, before killing 20 children and six staff members — sent the nation reeling and brought new attention to school entry points.
Across the Washington region, officials in many school systems — including those of the District and Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties — say they have strong practices already in place and are taking a close look for areas of improvement.
But the aftermath of the Connecticut tragedy has spotlighted inconsistencies at schools, funding concerns and a heightened interest in basic security measures, even if they would not prevent an attack like the one at Sandy Hook.
In Virginia, 2012 data show that controlled access systems are in place at 59 percent of elementary schools, 51 percent of middle schools and 37 percent of high schools.
Seventy-three percent of schools said they lock up during school hours, and 46 percent said they had someone posted at the front entrance to ensure that visitors check in. Just more than half of schools said all classroom doors could be locked from inside and outside. Maryland and D.C. officials said they could not provide similar figures last week.
“We just have to do everything possible . . . and just say a prayer,” said Montgomery County Board of Education member Patricia O’Neill (Bethesda-Chevy Chase) moments before a January vote to speed up a $364,000 project to install buzz-in systems, with exterior cameras and intercoms, at a final group of elementary schools.
In Maryland, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) has proposed spending $25 million in construction money in the coming year to tighten physical security at public schools, with cameras at entrances, automatically locking doors, shatterproof glass and buzzer entrance systems.
“A lot of what we’re doing is strengthening what’s already in place,” said State Superintendent Lillian M. Lowery, who noted that Maryland is reviewing every district’s emergency plans while seeking best practices and looking to “put in as many safeguards as possible.”
In Virginia, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) created a school safety task force that is expected to issue a set of recommendations Thursday.
At a Jan. 16 public meeting about security in Rockville, the father of a kindergartner focused on beefing up security at elementary schools. The mother of a high-schooler asked about doors near portable classroom trailers.
Then there was parent Mike Richman’s pointed question: Shouldn’t all middle school doors be locked?
“Are they?” Richman asked.
Officials in local systems say schools lock exterior doors, but not all entrances are locked in all school systems. In some districts, schools with younger students often have tighter building controls, and schools with older students have more security staff or police on the premises.
“Security is always a balance,” said Robert Hellmuth, safety and security director for Montgomery schools. The goal, he said, is to control who gets inside schools while not turning them into fortresses.
Experts say schools are among the safest places for the young. Researcher Dewey Cornell, who studies school safety at the University of Virginia, says 99 percent of homicides of children ages 5 to 18 occur outside of school.
Nationally, schools became more vigilant about locking doors, and some installed buzzer systems, after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, said Kenneth Trump, a school security consultant.
“The momentum faded four to six years after Columbine,” Trump said. “The mind-set became more and more lax.”
Trump said secure entrances are critical in schools — and need to be paired with well-trained school staff so that visitors are noticed and screened.
At Sandy Hook, the security system might have prevented more deaths, Trump said, because it slowed the gunman’s entrance.
“Those were seconds that gave people on the inside time to lock down,” he said. “Seconds count.”
Police officers, although the focus of many proposals nationally, are primarily used locally in secondary schools, with the greatest number in the District, which has 100 “school resource officers” and 300 security guards in its 118 buildings.
Elsewhere, there are 53 armed school resource officers in Fairfax, 27 in Loudoun County, 22 in Prince George’s, 19 in Prince William County, and six each in Montgomery and Alexandria. Many systems rely on unarmed security staff in large numbers.
Elected leaders are now rethinking how much security is enough.
An effort to boost the law enforcement presence in Montgomery schools has gained momentum since Sandy Hook. “I think people are thinking about it now and connecting the dots,” County Council member Craig Rice (D-Upcounty) said.
The tragedy also has spurred new action in Prince George’s, where a push is underway for increasing the number of buzzer systems and closer monitoring of school visitors. Other recommendations expected to come before the school board include hiring 10 more resource officers and buying panic buttons to allow a surreptitious call for help in an emergency.
“Certainly, this has heightened everyone’s awareness,” said Michael Blow, director of security services in Prince George’s schools.
Prince George’s County Council member Ingrid Turner (D-Bowie) raised concerns at a meeting last week about visitors appearing to enter schools unnoticed. “When I’m home, my door is locked,” she said later. “It’s a question that needs to be discussed and dialogued.”
In Fairfax, every elementary and middle school is equipped with buzz-in systems except three that will have the work completed in coming weeks. “We’ve asked our vendors to step up, and they’ve been great,” said Fred Ellis, director of safety and security.
Still, Ellis says access control systems are not “a panacea” and all security measures rely on good judgments inside a school, such as questioning someone who buzzes at the door or stopping a visitor without a pass.
Ellis and others also pointed out that security measures often reflect what people are “willing to give up in terms of convenience, access, the whole environment of the school, and what are they willing to pay to fund it.”
School Board member Megan McLaughlin (Braddock) said any security changes in Fairfax should be thoughtful and made with a focus on preserving a welcoming learning environment. “I would rather have all of our doors locked and secured than have armed officers in our schools,” she said. “To me, that’s a healthy trade-off.”
The project to install buzzer entrance systems in Montgomery’s 139 elementary schools was in the works before Sandy Hook. But a final group of 26 schools was not due for the improvements until next school year.
Parents wrote letters.
“I’ve never seen anything go through local government so quickly,” said Arielle Grill, a Bethesda parent who urged the project be accelerated. Grill said she does not want schools to become fortresses but thinks that “locking the front door of an elementary school is just so fundamental to keeping kids safe.”
The project is to be completed by June.
A national nonprofit safety group, Safe Havens International, which has developed safety plans for thousands of schools, said that in recent years, it has defeated security systems in more than 90 percent of the 200 schools it has been asked to test with in-person visits.
In but one example, Michael Dorn, the group’s executive director, said he has made his way into schools a number of times after introducing himself as Ted Bundy — the name of an infamous serial killer — and explaining the purpose of his visit as “an ax to grind with the principal.”
Dorn says the problem is often lack of training or the culture of a school.
“Sometimes the culture is, ‘We don’t want to offend anybody,’ ” he said. “They have not been taught to politely screen people in an effective manner. They just hit the buzzer.”
The message of Sandy Hook, Dorn said, is not to rush to spend lavishly on security extras but to take a look at potential gaps.
“It should not be a knee-jerk, big purchase but a thoughtful assessment of what school systems need and can afford,” he said.
For Sharon Burns, a first-grade teacher in Reston, Sandy Hook brought classroom doors into more urgent focus. Her elementary school, built in the “open classroom” era, was designed without individual room doors.
Burns had long wanted doors, she said, and the week after the Connecticut tragedy she collected 300 signatures on a petition. “I started thinking, what would I do with my 20 kids? Having that door could make all the difference,” she said.
Just after winter break, she learned the project had been approved. Officials say the last seven schools with an open design are getting doors, a $467,000 project. “I was so excited,” she said.
In D.C. schools, security is heavy, with guards at entrances, a buzzer system at most schools, and scanners for visitors at entrances to most middle and high schools. School leaders are working with the D.C. police to determine what else might be needed, officials said.
In Loudoun, all schools have buzzer entrance systems. Officials said the school system is reviewing all security practices, with plans to increase safeguards.
In Prince William, some schools have buzz-in systems, and processes are in place to monitor access, officials said. “We are, like everyone else, taking a hard look at our security arrangements, ” spokesman Phil Kavits said, “and seeing where they can be enhanced.”
Dartmouth's unresearched swipes at AP
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
January 27, 2013
Most college professors rightly consider themselves part of an elite. They have doctorates. They have tenure. They’re special.
Few professors objected when the College Board’s Advanced Placement program began in 1955. It granted college credit for good grades on college-level courses taught only at elite high schools such as Exeter, Bronx Science and New Trier. Many professors’ views of AP have diminished now that the program is in more than 60 percent of U.S. high schools, including many where most of the students are low-income and low-achieving.
College professors tell me they don’t believe AP teachers can match the erudition and depth of published experts in their fields, like themselves. When I point out that many of the high school teachers they are complaining about have more experience and more demonstrated success teaching introductory college courses to teenagers than they do, they change the subject.
Almost all colleges give credit for good scores on AP tests because the program prepares students for the rigor of higher education and in many cases, according to research, teaches them more than they would get in college introductory courses. But a few colleges have succumbed to their faculty’s resentment of high school teachers showing them up.
The latest to do so has gotten extra attention because it is an Ivy League school. The Dartmouth College faculty, without considering any research, has voted to deny college credit for AP, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education courses and tests, all taught by those high school teachers who can’t be as good as they are.
Dartmouth classics professor Hakan Tell, chair of the faculty committee on instruction that proposed the change, said the show-of-hands vote was nearly unanimous, though nobody bothered to count. Tell said the faculty decided that the high-school-taught courses did not match the quality of Dartmouth’s introductory courses and should not get credit.
The Dartmouth admissions office still strongly recommends students take AP classes. AP scores will still be used in course placement decisions.
Tell said his committee looked at no research. He did not know, for instance, of a 2007 study by testing experts Rick Morgan and John Klaric. It found that college students who scored at least a 3, the equivalent of a college C, on AP exams in most subjects did better in the next level course than students who had taken the college’s introductory course. The study included students at 27 highly selective colleges, including Dartmouth.
The same conclusion was reached by a 2009 study in which researchers Daniel Murphy and Barbara Dodd looked at University of Texas data and by three College Board researchers in 2011 studying nearly 150,000 students at 110 colleges.
In recent years, Dartmouth’s Psychological and Brain Sciences department has given nearly 100 multiple choice questions to new students with top AP psychology scores who want introductory course credit so they can take a higher level course. In nearly every case, the students have failed to pass the placement test and have not received credit. Tell said those results were not scientific and not the basis for the faculty decision to drop AP credit, but that leaves unanswered this question: Why drop credit for all AP subjects without any research?
Competition is healthy. AP teachers are judged by their students’ results on exams written and graded by independent experts. Professors teaching introductory college courses don’t get that scrutiny. Maybe they should, if we are ever to know if their self-regard is warranted.