- D.C. Explores Using Grants to Create 'Community Schools'
- Malcolm Ware [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
- For D.C. Students, a Tale of Two Call Centers
- More School Hours Don’t Guarantee Better Test Scores
- Stay Informed
DC Explores Using Grants to Create 'Community Schools'
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 13, 2011
The D.C. Council is moving forward with legislation to transform at least five at-risk public schools into "community schools," providing adult-education classes and hosting health clinics on evenings and weekends.
The Community Schools Incentive Amendment Act would create grants of up to $200,000 per year to schools that develop a plan approved by an advisory committee made up of leaders from D.C. Public Schools, the parks department, the health department, and other agencies. The council has scheduled a community roundtable on the bill for Wednesday.
Lawmakers say the idea is to turn schools into community hubs -- free, public space for health clinics and tutoring sessions alike. At-large Councilman Michael Brown, who introduced the bill in 2010, said he hopes adult-education classes in nutrition and literacy would result in better-fed students with more involved parents.
"On a PTA night, or a back-to-school night, you go to the eastern part of the city and only see a handful of parents -- it's not that they don't care, they might be working," Brown told The Washington Examiner. "But you go to the western part of the city, and you can't even find a seat."
Expanding such services for DCPS and charter school students isn't a new idea, but is a requirement of the Public Education Reform Act of 2007, which put schools under mayoral control and mandated the modernization of school facilities.
Council Chairman Kwame Brown, who is co-sponsoring the bill with Ward 5's Harry Thomas Jr. and Ward 1's Jim Graham, said these services got lost.
"The implementation of school reform was so focused on firing teachers, and so focused on school modernization, that this part clearly didn't get as much attention as it should have," the chairman said.
At least 30 percent of D.C. children come from families living in poverty, and well over half of children live in single-parent households.
Chicago, Cincinnati and Portland, Ore., have introduced community schools, with encouraging results: In its first year, nine Cincinnati pilot schools saw student enrollment increase 10 percent, behavior incidents drop 10 percent, and 10 percent more students pass state exams.
Michael Brown's staff estimates that the program would cost $1 million to $2 million each year, a piece of the puzzle he and city leaders are still figuring out. Officials want the program to be covered by a mix of local, federal and private dollars.
Malcolm Ware [Friendship PCS is mentioned]
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
December 13, 2011
The 17-year-old from Southeast Washington was recently chosen to participate in a mentoring program with President Obama. He is a junior at the Academies at Anacostia, which is run by Friendship Public Charter Schools.
How did you get selected for the mentorship program?
My teachers recommended me 'cause I'm a good student.
What's your best subject?
Math. Next semester I'll be studying trigonometry. Geometry is my favorite.
What do you want to be when you're older?
I want to be a computer engineer. When I was 7, I went to a summer camp, and the teacher I had -- we went and got some junk computers and he taught us how to rebuild them from what we just had. And I felt like that was my calling. It had to do with math, and you know all the skills that you learn in school.
What do you hope to get out of this mentorship?
A new view of college and a new view of the world.
Have you started thinking about where you want to go to college?
I can give you two schools: Michigan and Mercer.
Do you think the mentorship program will help with preparing for college?
It helps me to get into college and it helps me look at different things just in case I change my mind -- [in case] I don't want to be a computer engineer, I want to be something else in a new subject.
Are you scared to meet the president?
I'm not scared because I'm used to keeping my cool. When lots of other people are intimidated, I'm used to being in situations like that where I can just keep my cool.
What's the number one question you want to ask?
How is it difficult being the president?
For D.C. Students, a Tale of Two Call Centers
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
December 13, 2011
When something goes wrong, parents of D.C. special-education students dial the call center.
The call center is housed in the Office of the State Superintendent for Education's Department of Transportation, and handles 330 calls a day — about one call for every 11 students who the city buses to school, because their neighborhood school can't provide the special-education services the student requires.
Depending on whom you ask, the call center is a place where inspirational messages are passed out every morning and volunteers are extremely responsive to parents' concerns. Or it's a place where annoyed employees tell you the bus broke down, but can't tell you where the bus is -- or just tells you to keep your child at home.
At a hearing on special-education transportation convened by D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown on Monday, parents and local officials testified to concerns with the call center and progress it may have made.
"You should be happy someone is coming to pick up your child and take them to school," is something that Marty Clark, a parent and Ward 7 resident, says he was told by call center operators.
When the air conditioner broke on the school bus that takes his special-needs daughter to Baltimore, Clark says he was asked, "If you knew the AC was broken on the bus, why didn't you keep your baby at home?"
Clark testified that he had to investigate the Individual Education Plans, or IEPs, of other students on his daughter's bus until he could prove that one of the student's special needs entailed a comfortable air temperature.
He recalled a time when he was told the bus was broken down, but officials couldn't give him a location. His daughter called to let him know she was three blocks from home. He picked her up.
Ja'Sent Brown, a member of the D.C. State Advisory Panel on Special Education and OSSE's program manager for homeless education, says she was similarly disillusioned when she volunteered with the call center a year ago.
"I can recall a bus that caught on fire and there was no sense of urgency in the parent call center from the staff," Brown testified. Buses were late, or didn't show up at all, and parents were kept on hold for too long. At the center, Brown felt "belittled."
But when she returned this year, at Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley's urging, Brown says she discovered a completely changed system.
"Everyone had a clear assignment and was trained properly to perform it," she said. A dedicated line for bus dispatchers had been implemented to keep them off the parent lines, and every morning, the director, Kim Davis, passed out an inspirational message.
In an urgent situation, Brown discovered a dedicated response team. When a student was sent to the wrong school, the team coached the school through accommodating the student's needs until another bus could arrive.
But the experiences Clark testified to occurred this summer and this semester, he said, creating a disparate picture of the call center's effectiveness.
The council chairman said he was concerned by the conflicting picture. "This was this summer, this didn't happen two years ago," he said. "If the bus is broken down, someone should call you and say the bus is running late, and they should know exactly where the bus is broken down at."
OSSE began outfitting its fleet with GPS tracking in October, and Mahaley testified to a new dashboard system at the call centers that records everything from who's on the line to how long the call lasts. OSSE also hired in-house mechanics to cut down on repair times of broken buses.
"We do not tolerate disrespect of anyone," Mahaley said. She urged parents who have been disrespected by the Department of Transportation to call 202-421-1029 to register the complaint.
The city spends about $92 million to transport 3,500 special-needs students across D.C., Virginia and Maryland. In January, officials plan to expand a program that trains special-education students to use Metro transit to get to school.
More School Hours Don’t Guarantee Better Test Scores
The Washington Times
By Ben Wolfgang
December 13, 2011
Time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Students who spend more hours in the classroom aren’t guaranteed higher test scores, and many nations that outpace the U.S. on standardized reading and math assessments keep their children in school for much less time, according to a report from the National School Boards Association.
“There is a perception among policymakers and the public that U.S. students spend less time in school. The data clearly shows that most U.S. schools require at least as much or more instructional time as other countries,” said Jim Hull, senior policy analyst at the NSBA’s Center for Public Education.
The findings challenge a popular theme in education debates, one espoused by federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
“Right now, children in India … they’re going to school 30, 35 days more than our students,” he said at an education forum in September, explaining one reason he thinks the American education system is falling behind those of global competitors.
“Anybody who thinks we need less time, not more, is part of the problem,” Mr. Duncan said.
While Mr. Duncan is technically correct that Indian students have a longer school year when measured in days, they spend fewer hours in class than almost all their American counterparts.
India requires 800 “instructional hours” at the elementary level, well below the thresholds mandated by most states. Florida and New York require 900 classroom hours for elementary students. California calls for 840, while the Texas school year lasts 1,260 hours, the report states.
There is no federally mandated number of hours in a school year, and the figures differ greatly from state to state. Eight states require less than 800 hours for elementary-school-age children, the report says.
South Korea, which boasts some of the highest scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, keeps its elementary students in class for 703 hours. Hungarian elementary students, who score only a few points below their peers in the U.S., attend school for 601 hours each year, the second-lowest among the 24 nations in the study — almost all wealthy First World countries.
As in most other nations, the school year is longer for U.S. high school students than their elementary counterparts. They spend, on average, about 1,000 hours in class each year.
In Poland, high school students need 595 hours in the classroom, the lowest of all the countries in the study, yet they top U.S. students on the math and science portions of the PISA exams, the most widely used measuring sticks for international comparisons.
Finland, Norway, Australia and other nations also show higher levels of student achievement while requiring less instruction.
The reverse is also true. Mexico requires its high school students to spend 1,058 hours in class annually, but Mexican students perform much worse on international tests. France has mandated a 1,048-hour school year, but the extra time has resulted in scores roughly equal to those of U.S. students.
Mr. Duncan made the India comparison in Washington at a Sept. 30 forum co-sponsored by the National Center on Time and Learning, which advocates for more schooling as one way to cure to the nation’s educational ills.
NCTL President Jennifer Davis said Tuesday that the report, while interesting, simplifies the issue of school time.
“The picture is a lot more complicated than the data reveals,” she said. “Families in South Korea, for example, spend about 10 percent of their annual income on outside tutoring, resulting in 58 percent of their students participating in those programs. A much lower percentage of U.S. students are able to access similar programs. Therefore, our country’s most disadvantaged students must rely exclusively on their time in school to get the education they need.”
South Korean students also report spending nearly five hours per week on a combination of “out-of-school” mathematics lessons, such as homework, and “independent study” not assigned by teachers. For U.S. students, it’s about three hours a week, according to PISA.
Adding more time to the school day, Ms. Davis said, would begin to level the playing field.
But Mr. Hull, the study’s sole credited author, argues that lengthening the school year, while maintaining the same curricula and teaching methods, isn’t the answer.
“Providing additional time can be an effective tool for improving students’ outcomes, but how that time is used is most important,” Mr. Hull said.
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