FOCUS DC News Wire 3/12/13

 

KIPP DC proposes new high school in Southwest Washington [KIPP DC mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

March 11, 2013

 

One of the District’s highest-performing charter schools is proposing to build a high school on public land in Southwest, drawing mixed reviews from those with a stake in that part of the city.

KIPP DC officials said they are aiming to put a campus at the Randall Recreation Center, in the shadow of Interstate 395 on South Capitol Street. KIPP officials said they spent 18 months looking for a centrally located site for the school; Randall is within walking distance of four Metro stations and is about four blocks north of Nationals Park.

 

Along with building the school, which would include a medical clinic to be operated in partnership with Georgetown University, KIPP DC is promising to renovate or rebuild Randall’s swimming pool, its playing fields and the recreation center.

 

The nonprofit organization, which has won wide admiration among philanthropists and government officials for its record of preparing poor children for college, would finance the $40 million project privately. There is also an ambitious timeline: KIPP hopes to break ground within a few months so it can open doors to students by summer 2014.

 

“KIPP DC is always going to operate with a sense of urgency, because we’re on the front lines of trying to educate our city’s kids and reach as many kids as we can,” chief executive Susan Schaeffler said.

Although city officials generally said they would encourage the addition of a high-performing high school, the location has sparked concerns from city and community leaders who worry that it would exclude neighborhood children and conflict with development slated for an adjacent parcel of private property.

 

The debate illustrates challenges that charter schools face as they seek room to grow. Meanwhile, the city is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to renovate traditional high schools that are struggling to retain students. KIPP DC considered moving into a closed D.C. public school facility, but officials didn’t find any of them suitable.

 

“This is Exhibit A as to what happens when there’s no facilities planning with regard to public education,” said D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large), chair of the education committee, who said he supports KIPP DC’s proposal because the city needs more good schools.

 

KIPP DC’s sole high school, in Southeast, enrolls about 400 students and can’t grow unless it moves. The organization educates about 3,000 students on three city campuses. A fourth campus is under construction. But the organization aims to serve 5,000 students by 2017, and it needs more space to expand, Schaeffler said.

 

(The chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Co., Donald E. Graham, serves on KIPP DC’s board of trustees.)

 

KIPP DC would like to sign a 50-year lease for the 8.5-acre Randall site, including terms specifying that the rebuilt community center, pool and fields would remain open for public use, said general counsel Alex Shawe.

Shawe said the organization is confident that it can successfully compete for the land once Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s administration puts it up for public bid. But it’s not clear if or when that will happen.

 

KIPP DC proposes new high school in Southwest [KIPP DC mentioned]

The Washington Business Journal

By WBJ Staff

March 12, 2013

 

KIPP DC, one of the District's highest-performing charter schools, wants to build a high school on public land at the Randall Recreation Center in Southwest Washington, The Washington Post reported.

Along with building the school, which would include a medical clinic to be operated in partnership with Georgetown University, KIPP DC is promising to renovate or rebuild Randall’s swimming pool, its playing fields and the recreation center. The nonprofit organization would finance the $40 million project privately and hopes to break ground in the next few months so it can open its doors by summer 2014.

 

 

35% of Gates Foundation scholarships go to Friendship Charter students [Friendship PCS, Maya Angelou Public Charter High School, and Thurgood Marshall Public Charter High School mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Rachel Baye

March 11, 2013

 

More than 300 District public school students have received full college scholarships for next year through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 

Of the 316 scholarships awarded, more than a third -- 111 -- went to students at Friendship Collegiate Public Charter School, Dan Cronin, a spokesman for Friendship Public Charter Schools, announced Monday.

 

The D.C. Achievers Scholarship Program is awarded to students across six high schools in the District -- three public charter schools and three D.C. Public Schools. In addition to Friendship Collegiate, the other participating schools are Ballou Senior High School, HD Woodson Senior High School, Maya Angelou Public Charter High School, Thurgood Marshall Public Charter High School and Anacostia Senior High School.

 

At last, education leadership in D.C.

The Washington Examiner

By Jonetta Rose Barras

March 11, 2013

 

In just a few months, at-large Councilman David Catania has demonstrated why many people were excited about his appointment as chairman of the Committee on Education and Libraries. He has awakened the District's comatose education reform movement, bringing to the public square issuesMayor Vincent Gray has seemed reluctant to discuss.

 

For example, Catania has asked how the government should hold parents more accountable for their children's excessive absences from school. What damage is done by promoting a child to the next grade before he is academically ready; should the city eliminate social promotions?

 

"[He] is a welcomed tonic for the whole environment. I haven't agreed with everything," said Ward 6 education leader Peter MacPherson, who has called publicly for DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to resign. "Now that we have an education committee, a more skeptical eye is being brought to things."

 

Last week, Catania proposed an "application" middle and high school east of the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8.

 

Undoubtedly parents shouted hallelujah. Each year, hundreds of parents seeking high-quality academic programs have been forced to take their children to schools outside their neighborhoods. Catania has called that dynamic a "morning diaspora."

 

In 2009, it seemed DCPS was going in that direction. A highly regarded principal was assigned to Sousa Middle School. Dwan Jordon immediately restructured the staff and faculty. Then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee told me she hoped families in Ward 7 "who had been sending their kids to Hardy or [Alice] Deal [middle schools in Wards 2 and 3, respectively] actually will look at [Sousa] and say we don't have to drive across town."

 

But Jordon left DCPS. Then-Mayor Adrian Fenty wasn't re-elected. Rhee was sent packing. Gray interpreted his 2010 mayoral victory as rejection of the Fenty-Rhee agenda. Some parents may have wanted a kinder DCPS, but they have continued to plead for significant change.

 

They have urged the firing of low-performing instructors and consistently demanded academic programs that would compete with charters and private schools. That, they have said, means librarians in every school, more music and art teachers, and creation of more language immersion, International Baccalaureate and gifted-and-talented programs.

 

DCPS may soon announce an expansion of its gifted-and-talented programs, according to sources. But parental issues have not been sufficiently addressed -- although increasing amounts of taxpayers' dollars have gone to public education.

 

Reviewing DCPS' proposed 2014 budget, MacPherson said problems surrounding school librarians "could actually get worse" than they are currently. Henderson appears to be limiting full-time librarians to schools with 400 or more students, ignoring a key recommendation of her own library task force. DCPS spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz promised to get back to me about the library issue but didn't.

 

Since entering the education arena, Catania has said he expects measurable improvements from charters and DCPS. Oddly, some people have characterized his attention to critical issues as micromanaging.

But Catania has been providing much needed oversight. That's a good thing. District children shouldn't wait any longer for the quality education they deserve.

 

Defining Bullying Down

The New York Times

By Emily Bazelon

March 12, 2013

 

THE March 3 death of Bailey O’Neill,a 12-year-old boy in Upper Darby, Pa., was widely attributed to bullying, based on allegations that a classmate hit the boy in the face in January. He suffered a concussion, his family said, and eventually seizures.

 

Bullying was also the headline in the death of Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old Canadian girl who committed suicide after making a viral video in which she described being seduced, stalked and blackmailed online, probably by an adult.

 

Were these instances of actual bullying? It’s hard to say. But what’s notable is that observers automatically assumed they were, even though we know that “bullying” isn’t the same as garden-variety teasing or a two-way conflict. The word is being overused — expanding, accordionlike, to encompass both appalling violence or harassment and a few mean words. State laws don’t help: a wave of recent anti-bullying legislation includes at least 10 different definitions, sowing confusion among parents and educators.

 

All the misdiagnosis of bullying is making the real but limited problem seem impossible to solve. If every act of aggression counts as bullying, how can we stop it? Down this road lies the old assumption that bullying is a rite of childhood passage. But that’s wrong.

 

Bullying is a particular form of harmful aggression, linked to real psychological damage, both short and long term. There are concrete strategies that can succeed in addressing it — and they all begin with shifting the social norm so that bullying moves from being shrugged off to being treated as unacceptable. But we can’t do that if we believe, and tell our children, that it’s everywhere.

 

The definition of bullying adopted by psychologists is physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance. In other words, it’s about one person with more social status lording it over another person, over and over again, to make him miserable.

 

But when every bad thing that happens to children gets called bullying, we end up with misleading narratives that obscure other distinct forms of harm. In the case of Bailey, the district attorney has said he has found no evidence of bullying as he properly defines it: a history of intimidation over time. It’s a tragedy if the evidence ends up showing that he died from head injuries caused by another child’s punches, but it’s a different kind of tragedy if that child was known for bullying, and that his parents and his school failed to stop him.

 

In the video Amanda Todd made before her death, her account of online seduction, stalking and blackmail cries out for condemnation and police investigation. Yet because she also reported conflicts with kids at her school, her death was mostly ascribed simply to bullying.

 

On the other extreme of the spectrum, overly broad legal definitions of bullying — for example, ones that leave out the factors of repetition or power imbalance — can lead parents to cry bully whenever their child has a conflict with another child.

 

Sorting through the accusations is a burden for schools, especially when state laws straitjacket their response to a bullying accusation, rather than allowing them to use their judgment and take account of context. And the “bully” label carries a stigma that’s hard for a child to escape. It makes a child seem permanently heartless, rather than capable of feeling empathy, which almost all are.

 

Crying wolf about bullying isn’t good for the children who play the victim, either. Those who hold onto that identity are less likely to recover from adversity. Bullying victims need sympathy; they also need help learning to be resilient.

 

One way to better identify real bullying is to listen to how teenagers themselves describe their interpersonal conflicts. Most teenagers can identify bullying, but they can also distinguish it from what they often call “drama,” which, the researchers Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have shown, is an accurate and common name for the ordinary skirmishes that mark most children’s lives. In fact, it’s drama that’s common, and bullying, properly defined, that’s less so.

 

Understanding what bullying means to children is integral to the success of every smart bullying prevention effort, because it harnesses the power of the majority. One effective strategy is for schools to survey their own students about bullying, and then broadcast the results to students. When they see evidence of what most of them know intuitively — that bullying is outlier behavior — they’re even less likely to engage in it.

 

It’s also crucial for the adults in the school to set the tone. They have to understand what bullying is and what it’s not, respond when they see a domineering child going after a victim, and foster the strong ties with students that make all the difference for children’s sense of belonging and decisions about where to turn when they need help.

 

Adults can also often do more good by asking questions that push children to come up with their own strategies than by dictating solutions themselves. By many measures, teenagers today are faring better than they were a generation ago. The rates of teenage pregnancy, binge drinking and drunken driving are down. So is violent juvenile crime and even fighting on school property.

 

Those heartening developments help explain why bullying is holding our national attention: as a society, we have the wherewithal now to attend to a psychological harm that has long deeply affected kids, but which adults used to mostly ignore. Bullying is a problem we can and should address. But not if we’re wrongly led to believe that it’s everything and everywhere.