- Gray Defends Education Policies to Students
- Low Enrollment Forces River Terrace Closing
- Virtual Schools Booming While States Mull Concerns
- Schools Race Teaches States a Hard Lesson
- The Pre-K Underground
- FOCUS School Quality and Education Policy Dashboards
Gray Defends Education Policies to Students
The Washington Examiner
By Liz Essley
December 17, 2011
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray stood before a group of high school students Saturday and defended pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into school building renovations while the students inside struggle to bring up languishing test scores.
Students gathered for a Youth Town Hall at Woodrow Wilson High School expressed concerns on a wide range of subjects: from the number of community service hours given for donating blood, to college scholarships and the overall quality of the District's education.
Fifteen-year-old Camilo Rivera, a student at the Lab School of Washington, worried that Woodrow Wilson High's $115 million in renovations wasn't enough to improve learning.
"I fear these are just cosmetic changes. We are giving students a graphing calculator but not teaching them to use it," Rivera said.
But Gray told students that he felt D.C. schools were "on the right path."
"The improvements in the building -- they are cosmetic changes, but I think they're important cosmetic changes. For me, walking into a place that feels good gives me a positive attitude about what you're going to do there," Gray said.
Gray pointed to his administration's efforts to develop a new, city-wide curriculum, hire talented principals and teachers, expand pre-kindergarten programs and improve the Summer Youth Employment Program as reason to hope for future improvement.
"It's going to change. It won't be as quickly as we would like it to, because it took many, many years to get to this point, but this city is committed to being able to turn around the educational outcomes of our kids," Gray said.
Gray praised the District's charter schools for "giving families a choice" and Impact, the District's controversial teacher evaluation tool created by D.C. schools chief Kaya Henderson.
"I think [Impact] is something that will continuously improve," he said. "I think it will continue to get better. The most important thing is that we have committed to measuring teacher performance."
Low Enrollment Forces River Terrace Closing
The Washington Times
By Tom Howell Jr.
December 18, 2011
The D.C. public schools system is implementing a plan to close a Northeast elementary school with the lowest enrollment in the District and move its students to another school about a half-mile away.
River Terrace Elementary School has had persistently low enrollment. Its students will be shifted to the “improved, updated facilities” of Thomas Elementary School, a notice in the D.C. Register said Friday.
School officials proposed closing River Terrace a year ago, but an impassioned community meeting in January led to a decision that the school would have one more year to increase its student body. But River Terrace began the 2011-12 school year “severely under-enrolled, and as the smallest elementary school in the system is unable to sustain a viable” program, the notice states.
River Terrace students are expected to switch to Thomas Elementary at the start of the 2012-2013 school year, said DCPS spokesman Fred Lewis.
The move comes as city education officials analyze the best way to distribute resources and deal with uneven enrollment.
Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson told a D.C. Council committee in September that Prince William County in Virginia places 80,000 students in 90 schools, while the District spreads 47,000 students among 125 schools. She and her staff are examining the issue, since schools with lower enrollment often do not receive enough funding to match the program offerings of larger counterparts.
Ms. Henderson pointed out that her predecessor, Michelle Rhee, closed 23 schools as part of her hard-charging reform efforts, citing underenrollment at the facilities.
Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown has held hearings on how the program-offerings issue affects the city’s middle schools, in particular.
DCPS will rely on information from its ongoing Illinois Facilities Fund study to analyze how resources are spent in the public schools ahead of the fiscal 2013 budget process.
River Terrace is between the Anacostia River and I-295 in Ward 7 — just south of Benning Road. Thomas Elementary School is on Anacostia Avenue north of Benning Road. DCPS recommends that buses be available to students from River Terrace so they don’t have to cross the busy thoroughfare.
Ms. Henderson wrote a letter to parents Feb. 4 to explain the year-long effort to build enrollment. It referred to the “extraordinary importance” of the school to the community, “especially given the unique geographic isolation of the River Terrace neighborhood.”
But enrollment there has declined by 44 percent in six years, with 137 students now in grades pre-school through the fifth grade.
DCPS says the median enrollment for its elementary schools is 309 students.
Thomas Elementary had an enrollment of 235 students as of October and it has a building capacity of 500. The school was renovated in the summer of 2010.
Virtual Schools Booming While States Mull Concerns
The Washington Times
By Kristen Wyatt and Ivan Moreno
December 18, 2011
More children than ever are taking classes online, using technology to avoid long commutes to school, add courses they wouldn’t otherwise be able to take and save their school districts money.
But as states pour money into virtual classrooms, with an estimated 200,000 virtual K-12 students in 40 states from Washington to Wisconsin, educators are raising questions about online learning. States are taking steps to increase oversight, but regulation isn’t moving nearly as fast as the virtual school boom.
The online school debate pits traditional education backers, often teachers unions, against lawmakers tempted by the promise of cheaper online schools and school-choice advocates who think private companies will apply cutting-edge technology to education.
Is online education as good as face-to-face teaching?
Virtual education companies tout a 2009 research review conducted for the Department of Education that showed K-12 students did as well or better in online learning conditions as in a traditional classroom.
But critics say most studies, including many in that 2009 review, used results from students taking only some, but not all, of their courses online. They also point out wide gaps in state oversight to ensure students, and not their parents or tutors, are actually completing tests and course work.
Still, virtual schooling at the K-12 level is booming. For example, one of the nation’s largest for-profit online education providers, Virginia-based K12 Inc., saw its earnings more than double in the first quarter of this year, fueled in large part by a 42 percent enrollment spike.
“Online learning is the future of American education. Precisely because it’s so transforming, it’s threatening to the established institutions,” said Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies the online school boom.
The conflict has boiled over in Colorado, which expects to spend $85 million this year educating some 14,200 students online. The state’s online school industry is growing by double digits a year, bankrolled by a state government that pays private companies to teach students as young as kindergarten entirely via computer with limited oversight.
Online schools aggressively court new students in Colorado, where they are paid the same as brick-and-mortar schools. But so far the results have been discouraging.
A 2010 report by the state Department of Education showed below-average test scores, dropout rates near 50 percent in some cases and a student-to-teacher ratio as high as 317 to 1 at one school. Still, enrollment grew more than 12 percent between 2008 and 2009, and Colorado’s online schools get paid for an entire school year even if a student drops out after Oct. 1, the date the state tallies student enrollment.
“I know there are millions of dollars being bled from the system that have no accountability tied to them,” said state Senate President Brandon Shaffer, a Democrat who requested an audit of online schools but was blocked by Republicans.
“If you’re the person bringing this up, you’re labeled anti-choice, anti-reform.”
Schools Race Teaches States a Hard Lesson
The Washington Times
By Ben Wolfgang
December 18, 2011
Every race has losers, and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education grant competition is proving to be no exception.
As nine states await their prize money after coming out on top late last week in the Education Department’s Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, the rest are left empty-handed, having spent thousands of hours carefully crafting plans that ultimately fell short.
“We invested a ton of time. That time equates to money,” said Bobby Cagle, commissioner of Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning.
Mr. Cagle estimated that he and his staff spent more than 2,000 hours on the effort, and said his agency is greatly disappointed by the result.
Thirty-five states, along with the District and Puerto Rico, submitted applications for the Early Learning Challenge, the latest round of the Obama administration’s popular competitive grant program. The nine winners — California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington — each will receive at least $50 million to implement reforms to their pre-kindergarten programs. The applications were graded by Education Department officials.
Several states, such as Delaware, are repeat winners. Delaware received $100 million last year as one of two winners in the first round of Race to the Top, which focused on K-12 school reforms. Massachusetts was a victor in round two, pocketing $250 million.
Other states have come up short, repeatedly. Connecticut applied in both K-12 rounds and missed out on the money both times. The state took another stab at badly needed federal grant funding with the Early Learning Challenge, but the outcome was the same.
Gov. Dan Malloy, a Democrat, blamed the state’s poor showing on the previous administration, which he said failed to have the “proper infrastructure in place, or have a well-developed or coordinated early learning system.”
“That will change,” he said in a statement. “This federal funding would have accelerated our efforts, but we are determined to move forward and keep our commitment that all of Connecticut’s students receive a high-quality education.”
Of the winning states, seven are governed by Democrats. But Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters on Friday that he and his staff looked only at the quality of the pre-K reform plans, with no regard for the political leanings of the states.
“We spent zero percent of our time and energy thinking about politics,” Mr. Duncan said.
Mr. Duncan and other administration officials encouraged the losing states to continue moving forward with their plans, and said they should not be discouraged by the results.
Mr. Cagle said Georgia will keep pressing on, with or without federal rewards.
“I don’t think it was time wasted. We developed some good plans,” he said. “We’re undeterred.”
Colorado, another three-time Race to the Top loser, also isn’t giving up.
“Colorado has seen so much progress already in the quality of early learning programs that help ensure every child starts school ready to learn,” Gov. John Hickenlooper and Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia said in a joint statement. “We will continue to build on the solid foundation,” despite losing out on grant funding.
Colorado and other states have one more crack at securing federal dollars for school reform. Colorado is one of nine finalists in the third round of Race to the Top’s K-12 competition, and the state could garner $17.9 million if it is declared a winner. The victorious states will be announced later this month.
The Pre-K Underground
The New York Times
By Soni Sangha
December 16, 2011
It was 6 p.m. on a Friday in early June, and my children’s dinnertime coincided with the moment the New York City Department of Education posted acceptance letters online for 4-year-olds seeking prekindergarten spots in public school.
I was standing at our dinner table hunched over a laptop as my two children tugged at my T-shirt and swung from my legs trying to pry me away from the computer; they didn’t know that the older one’s early education hung in the balance.
The Web site was painfully slow, jammed with parents simultaneously logging on. After two snack cups worth of Cheerios and four recorded episodes of “Yo Gabba Gabba,” my heart sank. We had not gotten a spot at the school on our block — or at any of the six other schools that my husband and I had listed on our application.
Everyone knows that getting into private preschool in New York City can be absurdly cutthroat and wildly expensive, but getting into public pre-K is not any easier. For the current school year, there were 28,817 applicants for 19,834 slots in the city’s public pre-K programs. Those numbers do not tell the entire story. The school on our street had 432 applicants — for 36 seats. With 12 children fighting for each slot, lots of families shared our predicament.
For parents like us, options are limited. Private pre-K can run more than $30,000 a year at the fanciest schools. Depending on the neighborhood, spaces with community-based organizations — private preschools that partner with the state and accept state subsidies but handle their own applications — can be as elusive as public pre-K spots. If home schooling is daunting, and if not schooling feels wrong, the only other choice, it seems, is to join the many parents who have taken matters into their own hands and formed co-ops.
In a co-op pre-K, parents work together to create a school that matches their educational philosophy and worldview. They also run it, finance it, staff it, clean it and administer it — whatever is necessary to keep costs as low as possible. Often, schools operate from members’ homes. Some pupils are taught by parents; others by professional teachers. The downside to such an arrangement? It’s a lot of work. We had learned that a year ago, when we were priced out of private options for our son and banded together with some parents from the neighborhood to form a co-op.
Beyond the effort was the challenge of getting different families to work together. When matters as personal as education, values and children are at stake, intense emotions are sure to follow, whether the issue is snacks (organic or not?), paint (machine washable?) or what religious holidays, if any, to acknowledge. Oh, and in many cases, forming a co-op school is illegal, because getting the required permits and passing background checks can be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming that most co-ops simply don’t.
Our first co-op school nearly collapsed when families disagreed over how much power our teacher should have, and my husband and I had said we were done with co-ops. And yet, without a seat for my son in a public program, and feeling convinced that he needed the academic and social benefits of prekindergarten, I found myself once again e-mailing friends and surreptitiously recruiting families on the playground.
My introduction to the world of co-op education had come the previous summer at a neighborhood park, when another mom and I began chatting as our nearly-3-year-old sons zoomed their Matchbox cars around in a patch of dirt. When she asked what we were going to do about school, I told her that I had banked on one popular option, but the day I toured it the children were barely engaged in an art project, which left me unable to justify paying nearly $7,000 a year for two half-days of school a week.
She told me she was part of a group starting a co-op and that it would cost $30 a week — roughly $1,200 for the year. I could not think of a reason not to join.
She invited me to a picnic to meet the other interested families. On a sunny day, we sat on blankets as our children hunted for rocks and sticks under the shade of some trees. We got acquainted over intimate details such as where we gave birth — a number of the other women had delivered in their living rooms. I was embarrassed to admit that I had had a Caesarean section in a hospital while high on an epidural.
As different as I thought we were, we all said our children had basically never left our sides. We did not know how they would react to school, and we wanted their first experience to be in a place where they felt loved. Those women, smart, funny and warm, were exactly the type I wanted my son — and myself — around.
The dearth of high-quality preschool education for poor children has been widely reported, but there is a growing middle-class gap when it comes to prekindergarten. “Access is actually lower for middle-income people than it is for people that are poor,” said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a research and advocacy group that supports universal prekindergarten. Those who say middle-class families should just pay for preschool themselves, Mr. Barnett said, “don’t understand how expensive it is.”
My husband and I, products of suburban public elementary schools, certainly were not prepared for the cost of early education in New York City. In our brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, a full-time program at even the least expensive schools can cost $13,500, about what an out-of-state student pays for a year’s tuition at one of the City University of New York’s four-year colleges. And they go up from there.
An audit of the public pre-K system by the city comptroller’s office places the blame for the lack of seats squarely on the city’s Department of Education, saying that in 2010, it got enough money from the state — $29 million — to finance an additional 8,000 seats. When those funds went unspent, they had to be returned to the state. But the department said those funds would have paid for only 2.5 hours of teaching daily, making the programs impractical for working families. What city families need is full-day programs, according to the department, and the state money will not pay for those.
The lack of affordable pre-K means that middle-class children lag behind their more affluent counterparts when they get to kindergarten. More than one quarter of upper-middle-income children entering kindergarten do not know the alphabet, and almost 20 percent of middle-income children do not understand numerical sequence, according to national statistics from the advocacy group Pre-K Now, financed in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Research shows tremendous long-term benefits of schooling before kindergarten. Adults in Michigan who had attended pre-K had a 33 percent higher average income than their peers who had not, according to the 2005 update of a long-term study, The HighScope Perry Preschool Study, often cited by pre-K advocates. Despite these findings, only about 30 percent of 4-year-olds in this country are enrolled in prekindergarten.
In New York, advertisements for co-op schools pepper online parent groups once every month or two, especially in spring or early summer. But you will mostly hear about them quietly, on the playground or on play dates.
Sometimes the groups are low-key because the school is formed by a circle of friends and there is no need for other children to join. The other big reason is their questionable legality.
In New York City, child care outside the home is overseen by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The city requires a permit for any child-care setting where there are at least three children who are not each accompanied by a parent and who meet for more than five hours a week. Inside the home, the state’s Office of Children and Family Services oversees regulation for any group that meets for more than three hours a day. Getting a permit means red tape. Lots of it. There are background checks, required teaching certifications, written safety plans and site inspections.
“The health department’s primary concern with parent co-ops is that individuals responsible for providing care have not undergone criminal and child-abuse background checks,” said Chanel Caraway, a spokeswoman for the department, who added that it would shut down programs that lacked permits. “These programs rarely have made provisions for adequate care.”
Even if we could wade through the bureaucracy, we would never get a permit for our current co-op. Not all the children are immunized as the health department requires. We could not find a space to rent that had the required separate bathrooms for children and adults, or the two exits excluding fire escapes, for the children to get out to a sidewalk. We would have to hire an architect, file plans with the Department of Buildings and redo the space.
“There’s a fairly stringent code and byzantine process for getting certified and code-compliant,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, a Democrat from Brooklyn, whose office held a meeting over the summer for any co-ops interested in pooling their resources and securing permits. “Some are genuinely for the safety of kids, and some are more debatable.”
We began our first year full of optimism. We hired a teacher with a soft voice and warm smile who had studied at a respected teaching college and specialized in social-emotional development. Twice a week for three hours, the children sang songs, made sculpture with homemade play dough and, when they had trouble expressing themselves, used a box that had faces with different emotions pasted on each side to help articulate things like “I feel frustrated.” Each family took turns hosting the school in their home for five weeks — two in the fall, three in the spring. That involved rearranging furniture, preparing balanced snacks, assisting the teacher and cleaning up afterward, which took up 10 to 12 hours a week.
In the winter, two families moved away and were quickly replaced by two others. Our teacher thought one of our new children needed her own aide. We original six families talked among ourselves to figure out how to proceed but ended up going around in circles: Was an aide necessary? Were we saying that if the family did not get an aide, the child would have to leave? If we did hire an aide, would the one family pay for it or would we all shoulder the burden? Were we willing to authorize our teacher to make assessments like this one?
Then things got ugly. Our broad existential questions spawned a maelstrom of 53 e-mails over four days that laid bare personal, cultural and socioeconomic biases and that pitted us against one another. E-mails previously had sign-offs like “love to all”; now they had words like “breach of ethics” and “priorities.” Some members supported the structure we had set up, in which parents acted as administrators while the teacher oversaw day-to-day operations. Other members felt that our setup had gone astray and that a teacher requiring something of one family gave her more weight in the co-op than the family had.
Two families withdrew from the school over what boiled down to a difference in the way we defined the word “co-operative.”
“I think what happened is we all thought we were on the same page,” said Piper Harrell, whose family left the school over this issue and ultimately decided to home school their child. “What really rocked my soul was that I thought I knew people and I didn’t know people all of a sudden, and that made me really sad. To be in a community like that was messier than I think people were able to let it be.”
Spring was brutal. A new family joined, but pulling extra shifts to support the co-op in our homes was overwhelming. We did what we could to make it to June, but we ended our school year three weeks early.
Emotionally burned and mentally depleted, my husband and I vowed never to do it again.
But then my son turned 4, and it felt as if the Department of Education left us with no alternative. We and the few families left over from our last co-op regained our composure and started again. Our goal was to have a complete school year, so we tried to minimize the ways in which we could get shut down. Operating out of our homes was a logistical nightmare, so we sought a neutral space. We explored the possibility of going legit and determined that it was too labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive for four families to attempt. Even if several co-ops joined forces, we were unlikely to navigate the red tape by September.
Though it was difficult, we managed to find a small, sunny performance space that was not used during the day. We stayed off the radar, filling a number of our seats by word of mouth. We wrote a handbook to lay out our goals; it bans e-mail communication and encourages face-to-face dialogue. We adapted contracts from the Internet to help us set clear expectations for parents and the teacher. We demanded deposits. We were ready for school, and we crossed our fingers that we would make it to June.
A month and a half after we opened our doors, the public school on my block called to say that a family had moved to New Jersey. A seat was open for my son.
I imagined all the free time I would get back if he went, and all the stress I would avoid. But I also had to think of our co-op. Leaving would put a financial strain on the other families. Another family could throw off the dynamics, and the trust that was just in its nascent phase. Our school was meeting just three hours a day, after which my son took a midday nap. At the public school, sessions ran from 8:20 a.m. to 3:10 p.m. I worried that he would not be able to adjust.
We ultimately declined the spot, even though his attending the public pre-K would have more or less guaranteed him a seat in the kindergarten class — and the previous year the school had ended up with a kindergarten waiting list for the first time in 30 years.
The day after we declined the seat, I went to pick up my son from the co-op. On our way home, we passed the public school and I told my son, “One day, you might go to school here.” He responded by stopping in his tracks long enough to stomp his feet and emphatically yell, “No!”
He did not want to leave his friends, he told me, and he did not want to leave his teacher. I was thrilled by how positive he was about the experience and felt drunk on my first clear view of our school’s success. Then my mind flitted to a vision of a future co-op university running out of our living rooms. The moment we got home, I called our local school’s secretary and asked her when the first day of kindergarten registration would be.
FOCUS School Quality and Education Policy Dashboards
The FOCUS School Quality Dashboard has been updated with the 2011 DC CAS results. Available at www.focusdc.org/data, this easy-to-use, interactive tool allows users to see school performance on the state test and compare progress from 2006 to the present for all public schools in the District, both traditional and charter.
The FOCUS Education Policy Dashboard is a collection of sector level information on performance, enrollment, funding, poll data, facilities, and ward facts. It is available at www.focusdc.org/education-