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The Washington Post's Breaking News Blog
D.C. teachers: We can make your test rock
By Mark Norton
Friday, April 23, 2010

We have to give it to E.L. Haynes Public Charter School administrators and teachers. They've put their cool cred on the line with a YouTube rap to encourage students preparing for standardize achievement tests.

Principal Eric Westendorf and staff members have recorded CASrock to the tune of Young Money's Bed Rock, WUSA 9 reports. (The CAS is short for the Comprehensive Assessment Systems.)

Teachers told WUSA that they wanted to motivate the students so they figured they would take one of the most popular songs out now and make it test worthy.

The video is said to be a hit with students. Watch it for yourself.

The Washington Examiner
Friendship Public Charter Schools' Teacher of the Year Ceremony
By Mark Lerner
Monday, April 19, 2010

My wife and I had the distinct pleasure last Saturday night to attend a ceremony announcing the Teacher of the Year for 2009 - 2010 for Friendship Public Charter Schools.  Allow me to set the set the stage.

The event was held at the J.W. Marriott in downtown Washington, D.C.  There hundreds of teachers mingled over cocktails and hors d'oeuvres with the schools' board members, supporters, and other staff in a setting equal to the elegance of a Presidential inaugural ball.  The attire of those in attendance matched the ambiance to perfection.

Professionalism was clearly on the mind of Friendship's founder and board chair Donald Hense.  "Every year I see more and more people here in tuxedos," he commented toward the beginning of the dinner.  "Perhaps one day in a few years all men will be wearing one."

Nine teachers were nominated by their co-workers for the award.  Michele and I had the honor of speaking to a couple of them.  Kun Ye Booth, a science teacher at Blow Pierce Junior Academy, explained why she thought she was selected.  Her face lit up as she tried to convey the enthusiasm and resources she brings to her classroom everyday.  She pointed out that when you are that engaged it is difficult for the kids not to be excited about learning.

All you have to know about Meyassa Baker, an English teacher at Chamberlain Elementary, is two numbers, 70 and 80.  80 refers the percentage of students in her classroom who qualify for free or reduced lunch.  Over 70 is the percent of her kids that are proficient in reading.

The others up for the award included Allison Crouch, Collegiate Academy; Tina Fletcher, The Academies of Anacostia; Christina Lee, Technology Prepatory Academy; Ethan Powe, Southeast Elementary Academy; Kelly Scheuermann, Friendship Academy of Engineering and Technology; Christopher Mason, Friendship Academy of Science and Technology; and Jimise Winston, Woodridge Elementary and Middle School.

The winner receives $15,000 and a trophy with each of the other contestants earning $5,000. In an especially classy move it was explained that the cash award include funds to cover all applicable Federal and state taxes.

During the formal program each teacher was introduced by the Principal of their respective school.  A short video, produced at the same high level of quality as everything else we witnessed, filled in the details behind the nomination.  A full color program also highlighted the work of each educator.  April Ryan, White House Correspondent for American Urban Networks, did a perfectly efficient job as Mistress of Ceremonies.

I don't think my eyes were dry during the entire event.

5 independent judges from outside of Friendship selected the winner.  The award for this school year was presented to Ms. Crouch. a math teacher with 11 years in the field.  In the video announcing her nomination her students attested to the fact that Ms. Crouch always works with her pupils until they understand the concepts before them.  "She makes math understandable," one of her students remarked, not forgetting to add, "and fun!"

In the end, of course, this night was really about the children.  During his closing comments Mr. Hense reminded us in a soft deliberate manner that he was active in this country's civil rights struggle.  In fact, he was the head usher at Dr. Martin Luther King's funeral.  I could see that he is still fighting the fight.

"We purposely open our schools in the poorest neighborhoods in this city," he said.  "That is because we believe in our hearts that every child can learn."

After spending a few hours with these teachers I am completely convinced that they will.  I am hoping I'll be invited again next year.  If I am fortunate enough to attend I'll be the one taking notes in a tuxedo.

Barnaby Towns is the director of communications for FOCUS, which is Friends of Choice in Urban Schools.  It's a D.C. nonprofit that supports the creation of public charter schools. Thanks for joining us.

MR. TOWNS:  Thanks.  Good to meet you.

MS. KAYE:  And Milton Shinberg is a partner in the firm Shinberg.Levinas and also a professor at Catholic University's School of Architecture and this is one of your creations we're standing in.

MR. SHINBERG:  It is and it's a creation that we -- the progeny of many, many efforts and we -- this building has many parents.

MS. KAYE:  And one of those parents --

MR. SHINBERG:  Is right here.

MS. KAYE:  -- literally and figuratively is Jessica Wodatch.  She is founder and executive director of the Two Rivers School and also a parent of a couple of kids who go here.  Thanks for letting us come to your school.

MS. WODATCH:  And thank you for coming out and seeing it.  We appreciate having you here.

MS. KAYE:  And Barnaby, for you at FOCUS, what would you hope that people in the neighborhood where a charter school maybe is trying to relocate, what would you hope that they keep in mind and maybe if they're -- they have issues or problems with that what do you recommend?

MR. TOWNS:  Some of the people who live near where charter schools locate or are trying to locate, especially if they are not actually currently parents of young children, they may not really understand what these things are, why do we have these kind of schools or why is it that they can come, and they need to find a space as opposed to already having one.

And I think what they really need to bear in mind is that the public education system in the District really collapsed.  And one of the reforms was to allow other people, educators to come in with public money and to create their own schools with autonomy to create their own educational program.

And where the District had failed the most was with economically disadvantaged children to the point of not only being able to provide basic academics for children but also just physical safety for children in school buildings.

Where the charters have really excelled in the city is in serving that disadvantaged population.  This has caused some, you know, unusual patterns of school location and that kind of thing.

MS. KAYE:  And I guess if you're raising kids trying to educate them, trying to make them good citizens that's -- benefits everybody in the community.

MR. TOWNS:  Right and the most successful charter schools have a strong character element to their educational program, so it's about teaching children how to become good citizens when they are adults it is about teaching them values, about teaching them respect for one another, and respect for their community and their environment and their surroundings; and the best among the charter schools and the typical charter schools are -- excel at this once they are established and if they're successful enough to keep their charter and keep going schools like this one that are really oversubscribed and very popular they're able to become good neighbors in the community.

They're able to make a contribution to the community and a number of charters where they've set up, it's really been the key to regenerating the community and bringing business and life back to neighborhoods where they disappeared, and one of the problems was you know empty warehouse building or empty former public school buildings, so I think they should keep all those things in mind.

MS. KAYE:  Now shall we go ahead on the tour and what shall we see next?

MR. SHINBERG:  The building is color coded and not only that the students really understand the building.  Well we've gone here a number of times and work with students as young as K-level and made songs about the floors, and the columns and the slabs, and the ducts and where the air comes, and where the air goes, and why they like the building and the things that they're curious about, and they point and they walk around.

MS. WODATCH:  Milton, who is one of the main architects, designed the building with a lot of inputs from us.  And if you look around we have a lot of teal columns and those are the original structure of the building and then the cobalt columns are the part of the building that we built and that we added.

It's part of -- we do an expedition -- we are an expeditionary learning school and so every year our kids do two expeditions, which are long-term in-depth investigations into a particular topic.  And in kindergarten -- in pre-K they work on construction.

And so Milton and his team have been very kind and returned a couple of times to work with the kids and help them understand architectural concepts and help them understand this building and why -- we think -- we put a lot of time and effort into how the building looks and how it was designed and making sure it was really appropriate and it supported the kind of learning environment we wanted, and Milton and his team were a key part of that.  So it's a really a partnership with the architects and we like the kids to understand that.

MR. SHINBERG:  And every charter school is different.  Every charter school has a different philosophy.  They have a different set of objectives and that is something that they talk about in terms of the relationships between curriculum and students and teachers and budgets.  We take those things and see how physical forms will result from that.

And one of the things we did with Two Rivers as we do with many clients is to try to understand an ideal solution before we see a building that might be a candidate for them and we did that for Two Rivers and we visited several sites before this one became the prime candidate.

It was a warehouse building and the last record of use that we found, and we needed this for some legal reasons, that it was a liquor warehouse.  And if it was liquor retail, that had a huge result in terms of whether we were legally able to use the site for parking calculations, I'm sure Jessica moans about all things we had to do together.

The problem with this building, there were two problems. The primary problem was that it wasn't big enough, and a two-storey warehouse sounds like, you know, like something you can build another storey on top of, but in fact, it's not so easy.  And that's why the cobalt columns that thread through the building were important.

Those hold up the third floor, and they reinforce this building. So we took a prefabricated building dropped it on to the top of the second floor to make a third floor with its own roof.  If you saw this building, when we first came to see the building, you wouldn't recognize it. It's a completely different appearance.

MS. KAYE:  Describe it.

MR. SHINBERG:  Ugly.

(Laughter)

MR. SHINBERG:  It had a structure that was a little ungainly.  There were some chipping and some spoiling and the infill between all the columns and the beams was half falling out.  The windows looked like somebody had been punching them repeatedly.  It was an abandoned building that looked like it had no spirit and was not a happy place for happy kids.

MS. KAYE:  And what's the workaround for not having a cafeteria or a playground or those kinds of things?  What do you do, you change your whole school day?

MS. WODATCH:  Our kids eat lunch in their classrooms.  And their libraries are in their classrooms.  So they have classroom based libraries, and then we just have some information about where the books are in the building in case people want to swap.  We now have two buildings.  So we have a middle school building across the street, and we were able to add a small gym in that building which has been very exciting for us.

But in this building, we really designed it around a couple of key concepts.  And one of them was community and another one was light.  And so we wanted to have at least one really big gathering space where we could get the whole school together, and so that space which we call the Green really serves as a place where we can do PE and recess and performances and things like that.  But it's really our only large gathering space.

MS. KAYE:  And just standing here in the reception area, the light really comes through. You've got this beautiful glass and these glass squares and some visitors too.  Hello.

MR. CALLAHAN:  Are we going to be on the news?

MS. KAYE:  You go to school here?

MR. CALLAHAN:  Yeah.

MS. KAYE:  So what's your name?

MR. CALLAHAN:  My name is Leon Callahan.

MS. KAYE:  Nice to meet you.

MR. CALLAHAN:  Nice to meet you.

MS. KAYE:  What's your name?

MR. FREEMAN:  Conness Freeman.

MS. KAYE:  Okay, and what grade are you guys in?

MR. CALLAHAN:  We are in the fifth grade.

MS. KAYE:  Okay, and what's it like going in the school here?

MR. CALLAHAN:  Well, it's really awesome because it's like all the teachers, like, let's say if you get one question wrong, the teacher would try to help you on it. And she'll keep helping you, like, until you get it right.

MS. KAYE:  Doesn't give up?

MR. CALLAHAN:  No.

MS. KAYE:  Well, where do you live?

MR. CALLAHAN:  I live --

MS. KAYE:  Nearby here?

MR. CALLAHAN:  Yes, I live nearby here.

MS. WODATCH:  You know, Conness actually was one of our students who was at the old building too.  Carnes, this is Ms. Stephanie and she is interested in what this building is like versus our old building.

MR. FREEMAN:  It's better because the old building, it was dirty, and this school is very clean and they -- and the principals and the janitors help to try to keep it clean.

MS. KAYE:  It's a pretty building.  Does it matter if the building you go to schooling in is pretty or clean or --

MR. CALLAHAN:  No.

MS. KAYE:  -- does it matter to you?

MR. FREEMAN:  Well, yeah.

MS. WODATCH:  Why?

MR. FREEMAN:  Because I want to feel like I don't have to clean up everything but have it already set when I get there.

MS. KAYE:  Now do you know this guy?

MR. FREEMAN:  Huh-uh.

MR. CALLAHAN:  Hello.

MR. SHINBERG:  Hi, I'm Milton.

MR. FREEMAN:  Hello.

MS. KAYE:  And he made this building.

MR. CALLAHAN:  He did?

MS. WODATCH:  He is the designer, yeah.

MR. CALLAHAN:  Awesome.

MR. SHINBERG:  I work with the school to make the right decision, so it would come up the way you would like it.

MS. KAYE:  How do you think he did?

MR. CALLAHAN:  He did a really awesome job.

(Laughter)

MR. SHINBERG:  Thank you.

MR. CALLAHAN:  You should do a high school.

MS. KAYE:  Do you have a high school in mind now so we can go on?

MR. SHINBERG:  Yes, we can do one of those too.  One thing that's worth noting is where the ideas come from for buildings and one of the ideas is pretty straightforward, how many square feet does a school need and how do you make that work in an existing building.  But another part is thematic and Two Rivers is about the two rivers in Washington, D.C. and rivers flow and so do the forms that you see on the outside of the building that come in and become part of the curve of this seating area here in the lobby bright and flowing.

MS. KAYE:  And how --

MR. SHINBERG:  And part of that roll around to the outside, you'll see it's blue.  And the blue wall has some pieces of glass block in it just -- so don't you talk about where --what that is about.

MS. WODATCH:  Sure.  One of our struggles was we are located on Florida Avenue, which is a challenge for an elementary school.  And on our first floor we wanted to have a lot of light in the classrooms but we didn't necessarily want to have windows that were open to everything that was happening on Florida Avenue.

MS. KAYE:  Traffic noise and --

MS. WODATCH:  And a lot of people walking by constantly and you know, when you are four sometimes that's very distracting.

MS. KAYE:  Distracting.

MS. WODATCH:  So what we did is we actually put glass blocks into the wall and so when we go into the rooms and you'll see them, which are little cutouts and you -- the kids love to peep through them.  But we also -- the way we have arranged them is if you actually look at them from the outside, they are in the musical notation of our school song which is "Somos El Barco," We Are the Boat.  So that's a little fun fact that we all enjoy.

MS. KAYE:  Now you are just showing off.

MS. WODATCH:  I'm showing off a little.  I'm very proud.

MS. KAYE:  And these are some of the inside stories that really kind of make a building special that really personalize it.

MS. WODATCH:  You know, we just sort of piece about how it is.  Sometimes it's difficult to get the support of a neighborhood to bring a school in and it seems like you at Two Rivers have really tried to make the building mean something, both to Washington, but also to try to make it a special piece in this neighborhood.  How do you do that architecturally?

MR. SHINBERG:  Well, one way to do it is what you see behind you and that's the amount of glasses in the entrance.  Many people in the school design would never ever consider putting this amount of glass in a neighborhood that has some history of crime.  But most schools say that the most important thing for them is community.

And you can't connect to a community with a fortress like building.  So this has glass and that's a self fulfilling prophecy.  Our experience is that when you show your connection and your trust in the neighborhood, you get back good treatment.

MS. KAYE:  And on that note, thanks so much for giving us the tour of Two Rivers Public Charter School.

The Washington Post
Jaime Escalante didn't just stand and deliver. He changed U.S. schools forever.
By Jay Mathews
Sunday, April 4, 2010

From 1982 to 1987 I stalked Jaime Escalante, his students and his colleagues at Garfield High School, a block from the hamburger-burrito stands, body shops and bars of Atlantic Boulevard in East Los Angeles. I was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post, allegedly covering the big political, social and business stories of the Western states, but I found it hard to stay away from that troubled high school.

I would show up unannounced, watch Jaime teach calculus, chat with Principal Henry Gradillas, check in with other Advanced Placement classes and in the early afternoon call my editor in Washington to say I was chasing down the latest medfly outbreak story, or whatever seemed believable at the time.

Escalante, who died Tuesday from cancer at age 79, did not become nationally famous until 1988, when the feature film about him, "Stand and Deliver," was released, and my much-less-noticed book, "Escalante: The Best Teacher in America," also came out. I had been drawn to him, as filmmakers Ramón Menéndez and Tom Musca were, by the story of a 1982 cheating scandal. Eighteen Escalante students had passed the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam. Fourteen were accused of cheating by the Educational Testing Service, based on similarities in their answers. Twelve took the test again, this time heavily proctored, and passed again.

Whether they cheated was an intriguing mystery, but not the one that kept me hanging around Garfield. I wanted to know how there could be even one student at that school taking and passing AP Calculus, perhaps the hardest course in American secondary education. Garfield offered the worst possible conditions for learning: 85 percent of the students were low income, most of the parents were grade-school dropouts, faculty morale was bad, expectations were low.

Yet the school had produced phenomenal results that would challenge widespread rules barring average and below-average students from taking AP classes. The stunning success at Garfield led U.S. presidents to endorse Escalante's view that impoverished children can achieve as much as affluent kids if they are given enough extra study time and encouragement to learn.

In 1987, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed the AP Calculus exams attended a single high school: Garfield. That meant that hundreds of thousands of overlooked students could probably do as well if they got what Escalante was giving out. But what was that?

Whenever I suggested that the great teaching I was seeing at Garfield might be the reason so many students were succeeding in AP, people at parties dismissed me as romantic and naive. I was living in Pasadena, where my children, like my neighbors' children, attended private schools. People there didn't believe in teaching; they believed in sorting. The idea that the sons and daughters of immigrant day laborers and seamstresses could be made to comprehend calculus, the intellectual triumph of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, made no sense to them.

"I bet if you checked out their backgrounds, you will find those teachers are skimming off the few kids whose parents went to college," one professor told me. More common was the assertion that Escalante, and the school's splendid history and government teachers, drilled enough facts and formulas into their kids to fool the AP tests but had no chance of giving them the conceptual understanding that well-prepared suburban students developed.

These theories quickly fell apart. I surveyed 109 Garfield calculus students in 1987 and found that only nine had even one parent with a college degree, and that only 35 had a parent with a high school diploma. The engineering and science professors at USC, Harvey Mudd and the other California colleges recruiting Garfield grads laughed at the "no conceptual understanding" myth, as did the Escalante students I started running into who had become doctors, lawyers and teachers.

It took me several years to understand how Garfield's AP teachers, and the many educators who have had similar results in other high-poverty schools, pulled all this off. They weren't skimming. It wasn't a magic trick of test results. They simply had high expectations for every student. They arranged extra time for study -- such as Escalante's rule that if you were struggling, you had to return to his classroom after the final bell and spend three hours doing homework, plus take some Saturday and summer classes, too. They created a team spirit, teachers and students working together to beat the big exam.

Escalante celebrated "ganas," a Spanish word that he said meant the urge to succeed. He was so convinced of the power of teaching that he lied to keep students with him. He said school rules forbade dropping his class. He told the parents of absent students that if he did not see their children in his classroom the next day, he would call the immigration authorities to check on their status.

I left Pasadena and moved to Scarsdale, N.Y., in 1992. At Scarsdale High School, I had a shock. My younger son wanted to take AP U.S. history. I assumed that, like Garfield, the school would welcome anyone with the gumption to take such hard course. Instead, he was told he could get in if he passed an entrance test. Once again I was in a land ruled by sorting, not teaching.

There are fewer schools like that now, largely because of a change in teacher attitudes. My annual surveys of AP participation for Newsweek magazine show schools like Garfield emerging all over the country, particularly in the Washington area. Low-income students are being offered a chance to challenge themselves. Those schools are full of educators who tell me they have read everything about Escalante.

When I discovered that his vocabulary was spreading even to grade schools, I knew that he had triumphed over those who wouldn't even open the AP door to some students. In 2001, a fifth-grade teacher in Southeast Washington told me that she had instituted "ganas points" for students who took an extra step to help themselves and others prepare for college. That school became the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, the city's top-performing public middle school.

Escalante liked that story when I called him in Bolivia. It was amazing, he said, what teachers could do if they believed in their kids. He said he was still teaching. He was never going to stop.

When I got a call a couple of days after his death about another school planning to open AP to all, I decided he was exactly right.

The Washington Examiner
Op-ed: Public schools should experiment like charter schools
By Marcus Winters
Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The new line of attack against charter schools is that they have failed to achieve their original mission. In her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch joins the chorus lamenting that charters were never meant to compete with public schools or offer alternatives for a large population of students.

When union godfather Albert Shanker first promoted charter schools, the argument goes, he saw them acting as laboratories for new strategies that could then be adopted in the public schools. According to critics like Ravitch, the charter school laboratories have not produced consistent lessons for the public school sector to adopt and thus the experiment has been disappointing.

Of course, we would be justified in embracing charter schools solely on the evidence that in some school systems, such as New York City's, they provide children with a better education while also improving public schools through competition. But the "laboratory" argument fails even on its own terms. Charter schools do experiment with alternative education strategies. The problem is, public schools don't like the results of these experiments.

Nearly two decades of experience with charter schools have yielded some lessons in what works for improving student performance. There are easily perceptible patterns among the few charter school networks -- KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Democracy Prep, Achievement First, and DC Prep among others -- that have systematically yielded impressive (even miraculous) results with the most challenging students. Attributes of these schools include: exceptionally high goals, rigorous standards, frequent analysis of performance data, longer school days and years, firm discipline, willingness and ability to remove ineffective teachers, and uniform adherence among students, staff, and faculty to the school's mission and community standards.

When you walk into a charter school that adheres to these standards, you see learning taking place. These schools have proven that demography is not destiny. All kids learn regardless of their race, class, or the income bracket of their parents.

Those attributes are vastly different from what is offered in urban public school systems, and for good reason. Educating low-income students in urban settings is hard work. We shouldn't be surprised that sustained success requires structural reforms and not just a redesigned reading strategy or textbook.

Public schools have not pursued the strategies that the best charter schools use. In fact, they routinely fight against adopting even watered-down versions of them. Utilizing student performance data in the public schools, for example, remains taboo. Collective bargaining agreements that keep teachers from supervising the lunchroom are hardly amenable to requiring the vigilance necessary to enforce strict discipline policies or partake in school culture exercises. Longer school days and years are a fantasy without a whole lot more money for teacher salaries. In fact, school calendars across the country are shrinking because rather than renegotiating contracts, the teachers' unions' best offer for handling the financial crisis is unpaid furlough days.

There is nothing inherent in the concept of "public" that keeps public schools from adopting successful charter-school strategies. Systematic changes seem inconceivable only because the structure under which public schools operate has become so rigid, and the organizations that benefit from that system have become so politically powerful. Perhaps that's the real lesson from the charter school laboratory: the structure of public school systems is incapable of enacting the policies necessary to serve our most disadvantaged students.

Marcus A. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The Washington Informer
Friendship Public Charter School Revamps Anacostia High School
New Teachers, Administration Creates a Learning Environment
By Norma Porter
Thursday, April 8, 2010

When D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee asked community partners to help her turnaround the lowest performing and most violent high school in the District in September, the Friendship Public Charter School organization jumped at the opportunity to improve the failing school. The school has seen four principals in the last four years and had the lowest teacher attendance rate in the city.

Now the Academies at Anacostia-formerly known as Anacostia High School-is beginning to look like a replica of the other eight schools under the charter school conglomerate. While some of the chaos of the Southeast school's turbulent history still lingers, students sport khaki pants and polo shirts. Administrators walk the halls and ask young men to remove their hats without fanfare. Teachers question students in hallways after the bell rings and they respond to faculty in a respectable manner.

This is a complete transformation from the violent fights and constant police and fire departments responses to the school.

"Anacostia had a lot of problems when we came here: transcripts were a wreck, kids were enrolled in classes that they've already passed and special education students were assigned the wrong IEPs [Individualized Education Programs]," said Shanika Hope, deputy chief of school turnaround.

"There has been a significant change primarily around the energy in the school and teacher-student commitment. We've had a reduction in disciplinary activity and the number of expulsions, and stabilization around suspension," she said.

While Anacostia remains under Rhee's leadership, Friendship has autonomy to hire school personnel.

Out of the 66 teachers assigned to Anacostia last year, Friendship kept only 10 teachers. Now, 70 percent of Anacostia's teachers are new and many of them have come to the school through the Teach For America program.

Friendship is also changing the structure of Anacostia to replicate the specialized focus on age-appropriate instruction and institutional structure of charter schools. The school is divided into four academies: the Sojourner Truth and Charles Drew Academies for incoming ninth graders, the Frederick Douglass Academy for existing sophomore through senior classes and the Matthew Henson Academy for students seeking credit-recovery. The school's leadership plans to steer the academies towards more career-oriented curriculums in allied health, humanities, criminal law and media and technology to expose students to different career paths, Hope said.

Students also see marked improvements at the school.

"There's more structure now and more students want to learn," Patrice Haney, a junior at Anacostia and recipient of a four-year college scholarship through The D.C. Achievers Scholarship, said. "The teachers actually teach and they also talk to us about their personal lives."

While the school has seen some progress during the short time that Friendship has been at Anacostia, Hope said, they have to prove that the change will last.

"We've got to build credibility with both the students and the community and that takes time," she said. "We're happy to see movement in the right direction, but we are not satisfied. We have a lot more work to do."

But some Anacostia parents like Melvin Tucker are unhappy about Friendship's takeover. Tucker, a Ward 5 resident and football coach at Anacostia, said he enrolled his son in Anacostia because of the school's track record for producing high achieving athletes like University of Michigan graduate and Chicago Bears linebacker Cato June.

Tucker's 15-year-old son is not an athlete, but he thinks Anacostia is a good environment despite its reputation.

"This process is not working for the school and it's a waste of time and effort for the students and teachers," he said.

"The teachers lack experience working in an urban environment and the charter school method is like the military-it is not working for our children."

The Current
Teacher brings history to life with trips and visitors
By Linda Lombardi
Wednesday March 31, 2010

The middle-schoolers spilling out of Ben's Chili Bowl on a recent Wednesday weren't just waiting for a chili dog and cheese fries. They were there because not every historic site in D.C. is a marble-clad monument.

"When I was a kid, there was never a line at Ben's," said their teacher, Julian Hipkins, as the students waited on the street full of new shops, with a tour group taking pictures at the end of the line. "I told them that when I was a kid, the only thing here was Ben's - everything else was dark."

Hipkins wants his students at Capital City Public Charter School in Columbia Heights to connect with history, not just read about it, and for a lesson on the civil rights movement, this was the perfect spot. Ben's is one of the few shops left from before 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination spurred riots in the neighborhood, and the story of its rise and fall - and rise again - illustrates the historical changes both national and local that have affected its community.

The students learned about the period - and studied the menu - beforehand. Now, sitting in the old red-vinyl chairs at the formica- topped tables, they watched a film about the 50th anniversary of the restaurant, which included a news clip featuring one of the men who just served them lunch. After the film, Marshall Brown, the official historian for Ben's (and father of at- large D.C. Council member Kwame Brown), talked about the time of the riots, when Ben's was allowed to stay open despite a curfew.

"Thousands of people were in line," Brown said. "Young and old, who didn't get along. White and black, who didn't get along. Upper class, lower class, middle class and no class. They all had to get along."

The trip to Ben's is only one of the ways that Hipkins has worked to bring his students together with people and places from recent history. When his students were studying World War II, veterans came to class and shared their experiences.

Via a live videoconference from Japan, they heard a survivor speak about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. "It was very powerful," said Hipkins.

"The high point was when one of the students was asking a question, and he said, ‘You remind me of my sister,'" who had died that day.

Hipkins is an exceptional person in some ways - statistically, for instance, he is a part of the only 2 percent of teachers nationwide who are black men. He also lived in Japan for eight years teaching English. But he wants his students to feel that anyone can do what he has done. When asked how he set up the conversation with the atomic bomb survivor, his answer is simply, "I sent an e-mail.

"The students are all, ‘How did you do that?'" he said. "I say, I asked. It's not magic, it's just effort. I wrote a letter, I called people. Anybody can do those things."

The story of how he ended up in Japan exemplifies this same "just do it" attitude. It wasn't the result of some lifelong study of the country; he'd heard someone talk about friends who'd done it, saw an ad in the paper, and decided to apply. "I didn't know how to use chopsticks, I didn't speak any Japanese," he said. "I learned chopsticks first, because I had to eat."

He says his Japanese didn't really start to improve until he began taking martial arts classes and none of his teachers spoke English. "When they gave instructions, if I didn't understand, I might get hit in the face," he said, laughing. "The eating, and not getting hit. That made me think, I need to study a little bit harder now."

Going to Japan might seem like a round-about way to end up teaching school essentially back in your own hometown - Hipkins grew up in Silver Spring - but he learned about Capital City from someone he met in Asia, and he says it was his experience overseas that inspired him to go into teaching. He felt that many of the Americans he met abroad "didn't have a good global awareness," he said. "I realized a lot of that had to do with the educational system in America - we're not teaching our children to be global citizens."

Hipkins hopes to convey that kind of awareness to his students, and he says it's also important to him that he can be a positive male role model for African-American boys. "I remember how special it was for me when I had my first African-American male teacher," he said. But his perspective and example are valuable to all students. "When I tell them things I've done, it's already breaking stereotypes."

The Current
Ensuring accountability
Editorial
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The D.C. Public Charter School Board will hear testimony tonight as it considers whether to close Young America Works Public Charter School, which board members say has been plagued by violence while also racking up "profoundly" low test scores.

Neighbors have complained about safety issues that surround the Ward 4 school, located in a neighborhood - Lamond-Riggs - that is home to seven charters. Another high school sits just steps from Young America, and residents say students at the two institutions clash.

In a news release, the charter board pointed out that only 12.7 percent of Young America's students tested proficient in math on the 2009 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, and 25 percent tested proficient in reading. "We found that we kept going back to the same things - that nothing seemed to change," said the board's executive director, Josephine Baker. "And some things had digressed or gone downhill."

All these factors are worth consideration, and we're pleased that the charter board is taking the time to examine them. One of the strengths of the charter school system is this built-in opportunity to close schools that don't live up to their missions. Shuttering a problematic traditional public school would be far harder.

Leaders of charter-school advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools even put out a news release cheering the board's action, which the organization says underscores the body's emphasis on accountability. We agree. The board's decision to consider closing a poorly performing school strengthens our confidence in the city's other charters.

Examiner.com
Chairman Gray at the FOCUS School Choice Awards
By Mark Lerner
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Last evening the weather was cool and rainy but you never would have known that inside the auditorium of the Carnegie Institution where FOCUS, and the organization's founder and board chairman Malcolm Peabody, held its ceremony honoring the city's high performing public charter schools.  Thurgood Marshall Academy, Meridian, and KIPP DC AIM, KEY, and WILL were singled out among 10 finalists for the progress they have made in closing the achievement gap for those kids who qualify for free or reduced lunch.

The other nominated charters included Achievement Prep, D.C. Prep, E.W. Stokes Community Freedom, SEED, and Tree of Life.

The warmth and energy that was undeniably felt in the room was delivered by D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray.  Having announced his run for mayor just a few hours earlier he looked much younger than his 67 years.  In fact, his enthusiasm brought the crowd to a rapt silence, only to be regularly interrupted by bursts of applause.

"I remember one number," he said, "3109."  Of course, he was referring to the facility allotment per child that Mayor Fenty sought to significantly reduce last year.  But this was far from the only statistic Mr. Gray could recite from memory.  "40 percent of all public students are now enrolled in charters," the Chairman reminded us, "57 of these schools are now in the District on 99 campuses."

He spoke of his fight to restore as much of the facility dollars as he could, eventually getting the allotment up to $2,800.  Mr. Gray talked about the task force he put together that worked over the last year to get a handle on the true facility expenses of charters.  He called it an injustice that students face inequalities in the amount of money being spent on school buildings depending upon the system in which they are enrolled.

The theme of equity is most certainly going to form the focal point of Mr. Gray's campaign for mayor.  It is one to which the D.C.'s charter school movement should rejoice.