- D.C. school budgets draw parent complaints
- Policymakers, business leaders say preschool can pay big dividends
- Fight for Children provides D.C. non-profits with $800,000
- Charter school awarded for being 'Safe School' [E.L. Haynes mentioned]
D.C. school budgets draw parent complaints
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 13, 2013
Some D.C. parents, teachers and activists are warning that their schools stand to lose key staff and programs next year despite a promised 2 percent increase in per-pupil funding.
At Maury Elementary on Capitol Hill, for example, enrollment is projected to grow by 18 students to 330 next fall. But according to initial 2014 budget allocations released late last week, several full-time positions would shrink to part-time — including the librarian, the art and music teachers, business manager, social worker and psychologist.
In addition, the school’s after-care program appears to be slated for elimination.
Meanwhile, under the current budget, the school is required to add new positions — such as a part-time foreign language teacher — that are not key priorities, according to parents, who organized a letter-writing campaign in protest.
The changes will quash the momentum that Maury has built in recent years, they argued.
“This proposed budget threatens to undermine the community’s support for our schools and our support for your leadership,” wrote Amy Weedon, Maury’s PTA president, in a letter to Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
The chancellor replied to several parents that her staff is working with the principal to figure out how to best support the school. School system spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz emphasized that this is just beginning of what will be a months-long process to finalize the budget.
The changes come as the chancellor takes a more prescriptive approach to budgeting, giving principals less latitude in spending and scheduling decisions than they’ve had in the past.
That approach is meant to funnel more money into the classroom and to ensure equitable offerings at schools across the city, according to school system officials and the 2014 budget development guide.
“DCPS has set ambitious goals that require dramatic gains. To get there, we’ve made a commitment to our schools for the upcoming school year by making an unprecedented investment in the classroom,” Salmanowitz wrote in an e-mail.
“At this point, we’ve given our schools their initial funding allocations, which is the starting-off point and the first steps. Schools are working with their school communities to determine a budget and staffing plan that best meets their unique school needs. Budgets are still very much a work in progress.”
One key change: The school system is reducing non-instructional staff, including social workers, psychologists and clerks. The District employs far more such personnel than other similar school systems, according to a consultant for the system.
Another key change: Schools with 300 students or more are currently eligible for full-time librarians and art and music teachers. Now the threshold is rising to 400 students — which means some schools like Maury are going to lose staff.
But other schools, which currently offer little in the way of arts and music, may see gains. C.W. Harris Elementary, for example, is budgeted for zero music teachers, a part-time art teacher and a full-time physical education teacher; next year, the school has three positions to split among P.E., art, music and world language.
Advocates for middle and high schools raised concerns Tuesday night about large class sizes and too few opportunities for electives at a sparsely attended hearing on school budgets held by Mayor Vincent C. Gray.
Though individual schools are wrestling with their budgets now, the chancellor has yet to present a comprehensive view of next year’s spending. That budget won’t be finalized and transmitted to the D.C. Council until March 28.
Public hearings are scheduled in March and April.
Policymakers, business leaders say preschool can pay big dividends
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
March 13, 2013
Educators, policymakers and business leaders trying to close the achievement gap between poor and privileged children are increasing focusing on the role of early childhood education.
President Obama has made a sweeping expansion of preschool education a priority for his second term. In his State of the Union address last month, the president called for universal preschool for 4-year-olds, saying that quality early childhood education pays huge dividends by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy and bringing down violent crime.
“In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job and form more stable families of their own,” Obama said. “We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids a chance.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls early childhood education “a game changer” — the nation’s best hope to reduce the achievement gap.
“I’ve said repeatedly we have to get out of the catch-up business in education. In every level, whether it’s middle schools doing work that didn’t happen in elementary, or high schools doing work that didn’t happen in the middle, ultimately our high school dropout rate is far too high,” Duncan said at The Washington Post Live’s March 5th summit on children and families. “How do we once and for all get out of the catch-up business? High-quality early childhood education.”
An expert panel created by Congress to develop a strategy to improve public education studied the issue for two years and made five recommendations last month, including providing universal access to early childhood education so that poor children are as prepared as their affluent peers to learn when they reach kindergarten.
The achievement gap has shown up as early as the toddler years. By age 3, children of white-collar parents have a working vocabulary of 1,116 words. Children in working-class families know 749 words and children whose families rely on welfare know only 525 words, according to a frequently cited 2003 study by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley.
With enactment of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, the federal government made closing the gap a priority and a reason for increased accountability in public education. A host of strategies has been deployed in schools across the country to narrow the gap, but few have resulted in substantial progress. A 2011 federal study of the country’s 21 largest urban school districts found that every city displayed a difference in performance between whites and blacks and between whites and Hispanics.
Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience over the last decade suggest that the window between birth and age 5 is a critical period of rapid learning and brain development.
Studies have suggested that early childhood education benefits society, because children who are enrolled grow up to be more productive adults, more likely to hold a job and less likely to receive public benefits. Early education for low-income children is estimated to generate $4 to $11 in benefits for every dollar spent on the program, according to a 2011 cost-benefit analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Nobel Laureate James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, says the return on investment for pre-K is stronger than the stock market’s average performance since World War II. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called early childhood education “crucial” to the economy because it reduces poverty and improves wages over the long term.
The potential benefits of preschool have led nine states and the District to fund free preschool for all 4-year-olds, growing from just three states a decade ago. The District also offers free preschool for 3-year-olds.
Nearly half of all 4-year-olds and about 20 percent of 3-year-olds were enrolled in state-funded or federally funded preschool programs in 2011, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. Those state-funded programs cost taxpayers about $5.5 billion, an average of about $5,000 per child.
The 2008 recession slowed or halted growth of programs but in recent months, lawmakers in several states are talking about how to expand access to preschool. In New Mexico, legislators are debating whether the state should add a guarantee of preschool to its state constitution.
Still, 10 states do not fund preschool of any kind. Several, including Indiana, do not compel children to attend kindergarten, so some children first enroll in school in first grade at ages 6 or 7.
The Obama administration has not yet released its estimate of how much its early childhood education plan will cost; officials said that information will be included in the president’s next budget.
The president is proposing that federal-state partnerships pay for preschool expansion, and competitive federal grants pay for an expansion of Early Head Start and other child-care programs that serve infants and toddlers. Federal funding would be given to programs that adhere to specific quality standards, with qualified teachers, state-determined academic standards and assessment systems.
Critics of an expanded government role in preschool say the country has plenty of experience with federal preschool education — the Head Start program — and the results are lackluster.
“Overall, there is very little evidence of lasting benefits from Head Start,” said Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “We’ve had Head Start for 50 years, and we still have an achievement gap. On the whole, the program doesn’t seem to have accomplished what it set out to accomplish.”
Head Start, created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, is designed for 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income families. Head Start services vary by location, but they include medical care, meals, social services and education.
Obama has said he is not proposing to expand Head Start. Instead, he wants to offer incentives to states to create quality preschool programs initially for poor children — those from families at or below 200 percent of the poverty line. For a family of four, that would be $47,100 and below, and for a single parent with two children, that would be $39,060 and below.
THE FACTS
22 percent of children who have lived in poverty do not graduate from high school. Children’s Defense Fund
The United States ranks 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds in early childhood education.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
Only three other countries in the developed world have a higher child-poverty rate than the United States.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Fight for Children provides D.C. non-profits with $800,000
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 14, 2013
Fight for Children announced recently that the organization had awarded $800,000 to non-profits in the nation's capital that focus on early childhood education and health. The funding originated from the Fight Night 2012 fundraiser that I attended last year.
Awardees include AppleTree, CentroNia, Children's National Medical Center, GreatSchools, and Unity Healthcare.
I was especially excited to read the description of the way the support will be utilized at CentroNia, which seems to dovetail nicely with the tutoring my wife and I do through the Latino Student Fund.
"Fight For Children is excited to work with CentroNia and the CentroNia Institute to fund the professional development and coaching of four community-based early childhood centers in the District of Columbia to improve program quality and strengthen school readiness. Through this effort, the CentroNia Institute will work directly with approximately 20-25 teachers, four center directors and four early childhood education center coordinators. In addition, Fight for Children's grant will fund the creation of a model classroom where a high quality learning environment for young children can be observed, best practices can be implemented and cohorts of teachers from multiple community centers can be educated."
All of these grantees appear to play an extremely valuable role in our community. You can read the details of the partnerships with Fight for Children here.
Charter school awarded for being 'Safe School' [E.L. Haynes mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
March 12, 2013
E.L. Haynes Public Charter School is receiving an award on Wednesday for its efforts to prevent bullying and otherwise maintain a safe school environment.
The top-performing charter school was selected from among the District's public charters to receive the Student Support Center's first-ever Safe Schools Award because of its "consistent efforts to better the lives of students," said Student Support Center Executive Director Carolyn Gardner. The award will be presented at a reception Wednesday night.
Among other factors, the honor is likely the result of E.L. Haynes' commitment to student health, such as efforts "cultivating students' skills in conflict resolution and relationship building," said Beth Hood, the school's director of student services.
Bullying has been a major problem in District schools. In a survey last school year of every middle school in D.C. Public Schools, at least 60 percent of students said they had been "made fun of for the way they look or talk," The Washington Examiner has previously reported.
Last April, Mayor Vincent Gray also announced an "Anti-Bullying Action Plan," which included a city-wide taskforce to combat bullying.