- Deputy Chief of D.C. Charter Schools to Step Down
- New D.C. School Scorecards Due Out Tuesday
- New DCPS 'Scorecards' Released to Parents
- D.C. Behind Schedule in Meeting Race to the Top Promises
- GOP Bills Press the Case for School Reform
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 9, 2012
The second-in-command of the District's charter schools is stepping down this month to pursue consulting with charters, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Public Charter School Board said.
Tamara Lumpkin, deputy executive director of the board, will conclude her 13 years with the District's public charter schools on Jan. 13.
She was a leading force in the development of the Performance Management Framework, which debuted last month and provides first-time rankings of the charter campuses on a 100-point scale and organizes them into three performance tiers.
Lumpkin also developed the board's process of closing underperforming and financially struggling schools, as new ones opened. During her tenure, the city's charter portfolio grew from eight schools to 53 and now enrolls more than 40 percent of public school students.
This is the second recent, big turnover for the charter school board, which has remained stable relative to D.C. Public Schools' revolving door of leaders. Executive Director Josephine Baker retired in March, and her position was filled just last month.
In a statement, Lumpkin said it was "with a mixture of joy and sadness" that she resigned.
"Joy because I leave knowing that I’ve contributed to the PCSB’s reputation as a leading charter authorizer across the nation," she said. "Sadness because I have grown so fond of those I’ve come to know through the charter school and education reform movement."
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
January 9, 2012
DCPS is scheduled to go on line with its new school scorecards Tuesday afternoon, providing parents with what it calls “unprecedented transparency and information.” The format is similar to the new performance reporting system introduced late last year by the D.C. Public Charter School Board, designed to give families a window into schools that goes beyond annual test scores and extracurricular activities. Like the charter version, the DCPS scorecards will for the first time offer data on test score growth.
If a draft that circulated last fall remains intact, DCPS will delve a bit deeper than charters, with information on long-term suspensions, expulsions and retention of effective and highly effective teachers as determined by IMPACT. There is also a “school safety” section, although it is based not on crime statistics but on parent and staff perceptions drawn from surveys conducted every two years.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
January 9, 2012
Scorecards grading each D.C. Public Schools campus's performance will be coming home in backpacks Monday and Tuesday — a first for the chronically-troubled school system as it grapples with reforms.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson is expected to release the results of the school-by-school performance data to the public on Tuesday afternoon, but spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said some parents will receive the scorecards on Monday.
"New school scorecards will provide an unprecedented view of school performance so that families can make informed decisions about their child's education," according to the press release.
The DCPS scorecards have the potential to create the first apples-to-apples comparison between DCPS and charter campuses, allowing parents more insight as they make choices about their kids' schooling.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board released its own scorecards in December, assigning each campus to one of three tiers based on scores on a 100-point scale.
Fifteen campuses fell in the underperforming Tier 3, and four were up for revocation of their charters for scores below 20 points. Forty percent of the city's public school students attend charters.
DCPS's scorecards are also likely to highlight the achievement gap between the city's poorest schools and its more affluent, whiter counterparts in Northwest, a recurring frustration as the D.C. City Council holds public hearings on a slew of pending education bills.
For example, 83 percent of Ward 3's Alice Deal Middle School students demonstrated proficiency in reading on state exams last spring. At Ward 8's Johnson Middle School, the exact opposite — 17 percent of students — could read proficiently. It's not difficult to imagine how different these two schools' scorecards are.
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
January 10, 2012
n the first year of Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s signature effort to reform education, Maryland met its obligations, but the District has fallen behind schedule because of leadership turnover within its school administration, according to a report card to be released Tuesday by federal officials.
The Department of Education has been tracking the performance of the District, Maryland and 10 other states that were awarded $4 billion as part of a nationwide competition that the administration held to encourage rapid adoption of its brand of education reform.
To win the money, each state and the District crafted its own plan to improve education from kindergarten through 12th grade. All pledged to install new systems to evaluate teachers, use data to measure how well students are learning, pump new resources into troubled schools and allow or encourage public charter schools.
Federal officials found that Maryland, Massachusetts and Ohio had delivered what they promised in the first year of the four-year program, while Hawaii, New York and Florida had run into significant hurdles that threatened their grants.
Maryland, which received $250 million in the competition, had some trouble designing a teacher evaluation system acceptable to both state officials and teachers. In the end, the state moved ahead with a system over the objection of teachers, but the dispute meant a two-year pilot program had to be reduced to a single year. Still, Maryland is on track to meet its commitments, federal officials said.
The District and the other grantees — Delaware, Georgia, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Tennessee — ran into challenges but are seen by federal officials as making progress.
None of the grantees has been ordered to return federal funds to date.
“Over the last year, D.C. made a great deal of progress while also facing some setbacks,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. “This is challenging work that will take continued commitment and collaboration. As D.C.’s work continues, we will support their efforts to overcome any obstacles and move forward with reform.”
Specifically, the federal report card said the District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, responsible for managing its $75 million grant, “experienced significant turnover among leadership and staff” in the past year. A series of staffers oversaw the grant, none of them for more than six months, the report card found.
As a result, there were delays in a districtwide system to educate teachers and parents about a new common core curriculum, in providing help to the lowest-achieving schools, and in approving plans for teacher and administrator evaluations from charter schools, among other things.
Marc Caposino, a spokesman for the superintendent of education’s office, acknowledged turnover was an issue but said a permanent manager to oversee the Race to the Top program will begin work at the end of this month.
The superintendent’s office has had a troubled history. It was created in June 2007 when D.C. schools came under mayoral control and the city’s Board of Education — which controlled budgets and hired and fired school chiefs — was disbanded.
The office, led by State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley, faces several structural challenges. It serves as a state education agency in a jurisdiction that is not a state, dealing with a school system led by a chancellor who is the city’s dominant educational figure amid a growing number of public charter schools that are separate school districts in the eyes of the law. About 40 percent of public schoolchildren in the District are now in charter schools.
Mahaley was hired nearly a year ago to run the agency, but she has been slow to fill key positions. It was mid-October before she had an assistant superintendent of early childhood education and nearly Thanksgiving before she named a director of data management, who will start work this month.
The Washington Times
By Ben Wolfgang
January 9, 2012
Despite signs that federal school reform legislation is all but dead until at least next year, House Republicans have released the final two pieces of their proposed replacement for the decade-old No Child Left Behind law.
Led by House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline, Minnesota Republican, the House GOP late last week released a pair of bills that would eliminate the widely maligned “adequate yearly progress” system of school assessment; reduce the number of federally mandated tests that districts administer each year; and “increase access to or develop alternative certification or licensure routes” for teachers, a move designed to give schools more freedom in hiring instructors.
While the legislation could clear the Republican-led House, it is expected to get little or no support from Democrats, many of whom believe Mr. Kline and his colleagues have derailed the process by pushing partisan bills that will would face an uphill battle in the Senate.
“By abandoning efforts to reach a consensus, this partisanship shuts the door on NCLB reform in this Congress,” Rep. George Miller, California Democrat and his party’s ranking member on the education committee, said in a statement.
“Our nation’s children will be stuck under an outdated law for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Fixing the NCLB law, viewed by most lawmakers, education specialists and school leaders as deeply flawed, has been a priority for the Obama administration, but so far, very little has been accomplished on the legislative front. Blocked by what he labeled a “dysfunctional” Congress, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced last summer plans to grant waivers from NCLB mandates and deadlines to states that design their own detailed reform plans. About a dozen states have submitted their proposals so far, and nearly 30 more are expected to do so soon.
The waiver initiative, dubbed “Plan B” by Mr. Duncan, was also meant to spur congressional action. Mr. Kline hopes that’s still possible, even as both parties dig in for the hyper-partisan politics of a presidential election year.
“Regardless of the differences between elected leaders in Washington, education reform is an issue that will shape future generations, and we cannot afford to let the conversation stall,” he said, adding that the two most recent bills are still in draft form and open to suggested changes from either side of the aisle.
With the exception of a bill promoting and providing start-up money for charter schools, Mr. Kline’s agenda has met stiff resistance from Democrats. After the House panel passed a bill giving states and districts much greater freedom in how they spend federal dollars, Mr. Miller threatened “trench warfare” amid concerns from fellow Democrats that money meant for poor, disabled and minority students would be used for other purposes. That bill has yet to reach the House floor.
Senate reform efforts have fared better in attracting bipartisan support. A package crafted by Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, Wyoming Republican, cleared the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in October with support from both parties, though that legislation also faces an uncertain future when it eventually hits the floor.
Democrats are expected to offer a number of controversial amendments which would likely erode bipartisan support and make the measure even more unpalatable to House Republicans.
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