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Washington Yu Ying Public Charter Schools is one of three charters vying to occupy the city's empty Franklin School building. Yu Ying executive director Mary Shaffner said moving into the historic structure at 13th and K streets would require some work, but “it's not like we'd be turning it from a farm into a school.”

We don't know of any local charters that have converted barns into educational structures, but we have seen charter schools move into church basements, Laundromats and office buildings.

As the city selects entities to lease and buy buildings that used to house traditional public schools — including the Franklin building — we hope it will focus on charters.

One reason charters should move into empty school buildings is that churches and commercial buildings often lack necessary facilities for students, such as play areas and cafeterias. School officials can spend large amounts renovating these spaces simply to provide basic needs. It seems the taxpayer dollars that go to charters would be better spent on teachers and materials than on converting inappropriate buildings — especially when empty schools are there to be had.

Moving charter schools into empty school buildings isn't just appropriate: The law urges it. The city is required to offer charters a right of first refusal on empty school buildings.

The deputy mayor for planning and economic development has done just that with the Franklin school, and now he will decide whether any of the charter proposals is adequate. According to city officials, he has the power to reject all three and to release a new request for proposals, opening the process to developers and other bidders. We trust he will have the good judgment not to.

The Washington Post
Study shows how dumb we can be
By Jay Mathews
Monday, January 11, 2010

A little-noticed but unusually detailed study of teaching practices, reported by Robert Rothman in the November/December issue of the Harvard Education Letter, delivers a depressing message you should keep in mind whenever you read anything about raising school achievement. I don’t care if it’s by an education school dean, or a state governor, or the U.S. secretary of education, or even me. If this new study is true then none of us really knows what we are talking about.

Consider all the ink and electrons my Post colleagues and I, plus the leaders of our local schools and commentators far and wide, expend on how each of our public schools have performed on the annual tests. These assessments are required under No Child Left Behind. They are wired into the culture now. They will continue in some form no matter how Congress changes that law.

Some of us freak out over even relatively small differences between schools, like a ten percentage point gap in proficiency rates. Districts have changed principals and curriculums based on such results. Give that low-performing elementary school more phonics. Get some reading coaches into that middle school where the scores dipped.

But the Study of Instructional Improvement document described in Rothman’s article rips a big hole in the idea that changes in those schools’ reading programs will have much effect on what going on in their classrooms.

The study led by Brian Rowan of the University of Michigan found extraordinary differences in what teachers in adjoining classrooms were doing, even in schools supposedly ruled by comprehensive reform models that dictated how everyone used every hour of the day.

“For instance,” Rothman reported, “the study showed that a fifth-grade teacher might teach reading comprehension anywhere from 52 days a year to as many as 140 days a year. Similarly, first-grade teachers spent as little as 15 percent to as much as 80 percent of their time on word analysis. Thus, the study found, students in some classrooms may spend the majority of their classroom time on relatively low-level content and skills, while their peers in the class next door are spending much more time on higher level content.”

Okay, you say, that’s easy to fix. Just watch the teachers more closely. Make sure they are all using the higher level content. Guess again, said Rowan’s colleague Jenny DeMonte. She discovered the student gains from highest level practices, such as examining literary techniques and sharing writing with others, were no better than those produced by low-level practices, like asking questions that have answers at the back of the textbook chapter and summarizing story details.

I know. It’s just one study. But few others have tried so hard to gauge educator choices. Teachers at 112 schools kept daily logs of the amount of time they spent on reading and language arts, what they emphasized in particular topics, and what content and methods they used.

I am excited about a new Web tool devised by Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a non-profit organization that promotes D.C. charters schools. Go to the focusdc.org site and watch it display changes in proficiency rates of individual D.C. schools, both regular and charter, over the last three years. This is an obsession for those of us following the efforts to turn the school district around.

Does the Michigan study mean that group’s work was wasted? Many experts don’t think so. The Michigan data show that on average some reform models did better than others. We have long known that teacher practices vary widely. We can work at that, and study some of the team-oriented schools that have closed those gaps. We can try to figure out why high-end methods don’t work better than low-end.

But we ought to resist what history shows is our instinct to forget inconvenient results and keep doing what we are doing. Ignoring hard truths is not the best way to help our kids.

The Washington Post
Clickable data on D.C. schools
By Jay Mathews
Friday, January 8, 2010

I am, I admit, surrounded by cool technology and young people who know how to use it. I also confess I am, in at least a technical sense, a blogger, knight errant of the Internet age. But you also may have noticed that there isn't much tech stuff in this column. I am a word guy, just barely able to log myself on and click the right icons to get what I have written on the Web.

So it both shocks and pleases me that this weekly column, exclusively online since its birth ten years ago, is revealing today a new Web tool from Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS) that many school wonks like me are going to find irresistible.

Its inventor, Jeff Noel, assistant director of school quality at FOCUS, is one of those young people who live for this stuff. He has been working on ways to help kids learn, and help adults understand how to aid them, in several states and for several enterprises. As he sat next to me in our little conference room in the Post's Alexandria bureau, he smiled tolerantly as I yelped in excitement at what this new toy could do.

My children and young colleagues at this point would be asking me to hand them the laptop so they could play. Okay, here are two links to the new school quality data tool designed by Noel for FOCUS, a non-profit organization that promotes charter schools in D.C. They are working on more, but these are good examples of what they are up to.

Here is a set of graphs showing the weakness of the current way of rating schools, using the No Child Left Behind "adequate yearly progress" measures.

Here is the site's School Data Explorer, its central feature, showing not only how schools are doing now, but how they have improved, or not, over time.

............................Oops. Sorry. Got distracted. I was trying out the various features. They are addicting. I can't wait to see what more talented analysts, like the D.C. schools blogger GF Brandenburg, find interesting--or frustrating-- about this approach.

For those of you who don't have time right now to check it out, the data explorer offers a scatterplot of D.C. public schools, both regular and charter,
with the percentage of students who scored proficient in 2009 on the vertical axis and school change from 2006 to 2009 in percent proficient on the horizontal axis.

You can search for individual schools. The Cesar Chavez-Capitol Hill public charter school is in the upper right quadrant, a good place to be, with 2009 proficiency of about 60 percent and improvement of about 25 percentage points, both above the D.C. average. Janney Elementary, a regular school in an affluent part of Northwest D.C., is much higher in proficiency, about 85 percent, but improved by only about 5 percentage points between 2006 and 2009, below the D.C. average. So it is in the upper left quadrant.

Another part of the data explorer presents the growth of various categories of students at each individual school, both charter and regular. Proficiency rates are shown with vertical bars. I looked up Ballou High, one of the lowest-performing of the regular schools. The bars were barely visible in 2006, but as I clicked up the line to 2009, they got higher.

Barnaby Towns, the director of communications for FOCUS, said "this new tool allows us to get at school performance data that has been hard to obtain in D.C. and pinpoint the schools that are registering strong growth in student proficiency as the potential high-performing schools of the future: those doing a good job now which will produce the right results in future."

It matters, he said, "because accountability is as important to the health and vitality of the public charter school movement as the autonomy which allows schools the freedom to innovate in their school policies and educational program. D.C.'s public charter school reform introduced the principle that underperforming public schools should lose their right to operate and that no school has an automatic right to operate. The Public Charter School Board rejects two charter applications for every one it approves and has removed the right to operate from one in four charter schools. It should take appropriate action with underperformers."

I have been calling for quicker action to close poorly performing charter schools, as President Obama has asked. But you have to be careful when you do that. This tool can distinguish schools, both charter and regular, that have special missions that affect their test scores.

"A few charters serve disproportionately special needs student populations which, out of fairness to these students and schools, should be compared among each other, rather than with schools that have a more typical and lower proportion of special needs students," Towns said.

Noel has worked with school data systems in Michigan, Ohio, California and Hawaii. He is now assisting both the D.C. Public Charter School Board and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in sorting out the data for both regular and charter schools.

It took him three months to create this tool. Please use the comment function on this column to tell me, and him, how it works for you, and what you think should be added, or changed. There are very few cities that offer such an intriguing look at how their schools are changing. Have some fun with it, and pray that I learn enough from this to risk more discussion of how best to use the Web to help schools.

The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU 88.5
The future of the charter school movement
Monday, January 11, 2010

*At approximately 46:39 into the broadcast, guest Jay Mathews highlighted the interactive school quality database that FOCUS has recently made available on its Web site.

To listen to the clip, please click the following link: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/audio-player?nid=16056

Program description: The District is at the epicenter of a recent nationwide explosion in charter schools. Once seen as an experiment in applying "private sector" solutions to public education, charters are now proliferating in many urban-- and some suburban-- school districts. D.C. now boasts nearly 60 charter schools. We begin a multi-part conversation about the future of the charter school movement in the Washington region.

Guests:

Thomas Nida
Chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board; Executive Vice President at United Bank

Jay Mathews
Education columnist for the Washington Post

The Washington Post
Police posted to D.C. charter schools to help avert violence
By Michael Birnbaum
Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced Monday that the city had posted police at more than two dozen D.C. charter schools, further normalizing charters within city life and attempting to address a spate of violence that plagued some of the schools this fall.

But the plan -- which maintains the overall number of police dedicated to schools but spreads them among both charter and traditional public schools -- have some worried that all the schools will be shortchanged in the end.

Police haven't been posted to charters for several years, although they have a presence in other D.C. public schools. After after-school assaults and robberies near the Minnesota Avenue Metro station this fall, pressure mounted to give charter schools the same services as other schools.

"If you've followed education in D.C., . . . you know that the same challenges that exist in the traditional public schools exist in the public charter schools," said Fenty (D).

Nearly 100 police officers serve as school resource officers, receiving special training and spending their time posted in school hallways. Education advocates and police say those officers' presence can help ward off problems before they descend into violence.

That makes the new plan an especially important milestone for the city's charter schools, which have long complained of being given short shrift in city services, despite educating an ever-increasing chunk -- 38 percent this year -- of public school students.

Charter leaders expressed relief at the policy change.

"I take it as a positive sign," said Thomas A. Nida, chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. He called it "a small but important level of equity between two different parts of the D.C. school system."

The plan calls for using existing resources more thinly, increasing the number of police officers assigned to schools by three to 98 but spreading them among 88 schools, up from 60 when they were protecting only traditional public schools. Twenty-six charter schools will receive full- or part-time school resource officers, alongside 34 regular D.C. public schools. In a new approach, 28 other middle and high schools (23 charter and five traditional) will receive daily visits from roving officers.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Monday that she didn't think anything would be lost with the new approach.

"I'm no fan of police officers fixed to buildings," she said. "The majority of issues we had were on the way to and from school. I don't think anyone's losing anything here."

Still, the police union expressed concerns about the policy change. Kristopher Baumann, who heads the D.C. Labor Committee for the local Fraternal Order of Police, said having the same number of officers covering additional buildings means an overall decreased police presence in schools.

"The math is the math," Baumann said. "We can only be in one place at one time."

Ron Moten, co-founder of Peaceoholics, a nonprofit group that works with at-risk youths in the District, agreed that police are needed in charter schools but added that spreading officers more thinly would inevitably have an effect. "It's a catch-22 situation," he said. "The charter schools need the same protection as the public schools, but it's going to have an impact on the safety of the [regular] schools."

Even with officers, schools can face difficulties with crime. At Friendship Collegiate Academy, the Northeast charter school where problems with violence around dismissal time inspired the policy change, two students were assaulted just outside the school last month, even though a police officer had already been splitting his time between the school and two other charters in the area in advance of Monday's permanent posting. Peggy Pendergrass, Friendship Collegiate's principal, said that dismissals have otherwise been quiet.

Staff writer Theola Labbé-DeBose contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - First Lady Michelle Obama, who attended Princeton and Harvard, admitted at a high school graduation ceremony in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday that as a teenager, she doubted her own abilities.

Mrs. Obama made the comments at the graduation ceremony of the Washington Science Mathematics Technology Public Charter School.

Mrs. Obama said she vividly remembered feeling uncertain at her own high school graduation ceremony despite the fact that she had been accepted for undergraduate studies at Princeton University.

"I was excited," explained the First Lady. "But I was also worried. I was worried about whether or not I was ready-- whether or not I would fit in."

Michelle Obama ultimately graduated from Princeton, and then went to law school at Harvard. She urged the members of the Class of 2009 to push aside their fears and ignore naysayers.

"With common sense, hard work, confidence, and faith, you can achieve anything you can set your minds to," Mrs. Obama said. "That's for sure."

The First Lady posed for photographs with each of the 98 students who were graduating from the public charter school. Virtually all of them have been accepted at various colleges and universities.

Some of the students said they appreciated Mrs. Obama's candor.

"I was one of those kids that had doubts about going to college," admitted Julia Jones. "But listening to her, all that just went out the window."

Jones says she is now determined to graduate from college so she can better take care of her mother.