FOCUS DC News Wire 3/12/2015

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS) is now the DC Charter School Alliance!

Please visit www.dccharters.org to learn about our new organization and to see the latest news and information related to DC charter schools.

The FOCUS DC website is online to see historic information, but is not actively updated.

NEWS

New Charter Schools in Rosedale Spark Heated Discussion [Monument Academy PCS and Community College Prep Benning PCS mentioned]
The HillRag
By Ana Mulero
March 10, 2015

The statement by representatives of the new charter schools opening in the former Gibbs Elementary School that the community had an input in the decision for the schools to locate there, sparked tumult last Monday at a public forum. Gibbs, located at 500 19th St. NE, has been vacant since 2008.

At least 30 residents attended what was supposed to be an informational session at the Rosedale Community Center. While charter school officials managed to share some of their plans, the session quickly turned fractious.

The Plans

Initially, three schools bid for Gibbs Elementary. The DC Department of General Services selected Monument Academy and Community College Prep Adult Education (CCPA) in December. The two were chosen for their approaches to educating youths dealing with environmental challenges and temporary hardships.

Monument is a residential program aimed at educating children in grades five to eight who are at-risk for foster care placement. Such students typically struggle to graduate and often exhibit complex social and emotional needs. Monument will operate as a free weekday boarding school and run Sunday evenings through Friday afternoons with 22 full-time employees and some additional part time staff.

Emily Bloomfield, CEO and founder of Monument, plans to have 40 fifth-graders starting in August and add one grade each subsequent year. The program is aimed at eliminating the achievement gap and providing students with the “academic, social and emotional pillars they need to succeed,” Bloomfield stated.

CCPA, on the other hand, is an adult eduction education program. “Our goal is to help adults reach those outcomes that we think are most important, first being  that they complete high school at a college-readiness level,” said Connie Spinner, CEO and head of school at CCPA.

Monument will occupy the majority of the building but CCPA will have its own entrance, one classroom and one computer lab as teaching space. The plans for security include having controlled access at all of the building’s entrances, staff members carrying fobs to enter different wings of the school and exit doors being secured with alarms. An overnight resident assistant will also walk the inside and outside of the building to ensure everyone’s safety and there will be one houseparent for every five students, representatives for the charter schools stated.

Despite of the community’s reaction, Monument and CCPA are slated to open in August 2015 and construction will occur in two phases.

By this summer, the first floor will be renovated. The renovation of the second floor and the building’s exterior will be completed by 2016. Construction traffic and parking will be limited to the property’s parking lot.

A number of community members supported CCPA's focus on adult education, Monument's plans encountered a more hostile reception.

A Fractious Reception

“We need an investigation. We really need to bring in a higher office to investigate this entire process,” said Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner 6A Sondra Phillips-Gilbert.

“I am (the) higher office,” responded Jennifer Niles, DC deputy mayor for education.

“The process was followed according to the law, the law that talks about how buildings are disposed of, how they are given to other schools. Empty schools can be used for new schools,” stated Niles despite repeated interruptions.

“When I was on the ANC, we knew all about the meetings and we were well-informed on what was going on. There was at least one community meeting that I attended here,” said Nick Alberti, former ANC 6A chair. “So, I was a bit surprised at the opinion that they hadn’t reached out to the community and hadn’t informed the community.”

Anxiety abounds as DC schools roll out new, harder tests [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
March 11, 2015

DC's public school students, like those around the country, are taking new, more rigorous standardized tests this month. And teachers are anxious about whether students are prepared to do the kind of reading and writing the tests require.

Students in both DC Public Schools and charter schools are taking new tests designed to align with the Common Core State Standards. Questions on the old tests were almost all multiple choice, and they related to one reading passage at a time. But the new tests ask students to provide written responses comparing two or three challenging texts and citing specific evidence for their answers.

In addition, for the first time, almost all DC students are taking the tests on computers or tablets rather than in paper-and-pencil form. That means children as young as third grade will need to demonstrate keyboarding and other computer-oriented skills.

Students in grades three through eight and some high school students are taking the DC tests, which come from a multi-state consortium called PARCC.

The tests have drawn criticism around the country. Parents in some states are refusing to allow their children to take the tests, saying they're too hard and badly designed.

There's no sign that DC parents are engaging in an organized opt-out movement, and teachers and administrators I've spoken to say they believe the rigorous tests are part of a worthy effort to revamp education.

"PARCC is the best accountability test I've ever seen," says Phyllis Hedlund, chief academic officer at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School. "This is the way we should be asking kids to think." The old tests set such a low bar, she says, that they were really "a waste of time."

Still, at a recent meeting to prepare for the tests, many DC teachers voiced anxiety about whether, at this point, we might be asking too much.

Worries about computer skills and writing ability

The meeting was part of an effort spearheaded by E.L. Haynes to help teachers in both DCPS and the charter sector adjust to a new era in education. Some of the teachers had been meeting since 2011 to learn how to meet the demands of the Common Core, but recent sessions have focused on the practicalities of the PARCC tests. While the tests include both math and reading sections, the meeting I attended focused on reading.

Many of the concerns raised by teachers had to do with the mechanics of a computer-based test. Most schools have many fewer computers than students. So, rather than having the entire school take the test at the same time, schools will have classes take turns on the computers. That means the entire testing window can run as long as four weeks.

And once students get onto the computers, they'll need to know how to type and use a cursor. They'll also need to scroll down, highlight or drag-and-drop text, navigate between tabs, and be able to compose an essay without writing it out first in longhand.

Even some teachers at relatively affluent elementary schools, where children are most likely to have computers at home, say their students don't have these skills. Schools are trying to teach them, but it's not clear kids will have learned them by the time they take the tests.

More fundamentally, teachers don't know whether students—especially low-income students and those still learning English—will understand the complex reading passages on the test. Even if they do, they may not be able to comply with directions to write essays analyzing the material rather than just summarizing it, and to cite specific evidence in support of their answers.

"They don't understand what it takes to put something in writing so that someone else understands it," one teacher said.

And even if students can do those things, they may not have the time to demonstrate it. Under the old tests, students had unlimited time to answer the questions, at least theoretically. The new tests are not only harder, they impose a time limit.

Teachers at last week's meeting traded ideas on how to make it easier for students to do well on the reading tests. Have them first focus on the question they have to answer, one teacher said, so they'll know what to look for. Tell them they don't need to read the different passages in the order they're presented, said another, because later ones may be easier to understand.

For students to do well, schools need to make fundamental changes

But if schools want kids to do well on these tests in the long term, they'll need to change both what and how they teach.

Many elementary schools focus on reading comprehension skills at the expense of subjects like social studies and science. But comprehension depends on a reader's background knowledge and vocabulary. Affluent students often acquire that knowledge and vocabulary at home, but many low-income students don't. And if they don't acquire it at school beginning at an early age, they'll fall further and further behind their middle-class counterparts.

Schools also need to change the way they teach writing. To the extent that students have gotten formal writing instruction, it's mostly been focused on writing about themselves, or perhaps on how a story relates to their own experience.

But the Common Core and the PARCC tests ask students for detailed written analyses of texts. One DCPS elementary school teacher at the meeting told me her school has no program that teaches students to engage in that kind of writing.

And many of the readings on the tests relate to scientific or historical subjects. As another teacher at the meeting complained, English teachers may not feel equipped to help students write about those topics. That's a good point, but the answer is to have history and science teachers also incorporate writing instruction into their classes.

Some schools have already begun focusing more on content rather than comprehension skills and on teaching analytical writing across the curriculum. But even there, change will take time.

Jessica Matthews-Meth, an instructional coach at a low-income DCPS school where many students are still learning English, says the writing program her school has been piloting for the last two years has helped students with the kind of writing PARCC calls for. But many students are still struggling to write good sentences, let alone well constructed multi-paragraph essays. (Disclosure: I have contributed to the pilot program and serve on the board of the nonprofit organization that promotes the writing method it uses.)

One comment I heard frequently from teachers at last week's meeting is that, even with all this preparation, no one really knows what to expect from PARCC. But one thing we can safely expect is a decline in scores.

That won't mean schools—or teachers or students—have gotten worse. It might mean that some of the questions on the tests aren't well designed. But it will almost certainly mean that long-standing deficiencies in the way schools have been teaching are finally coming to light.

Gender Gap in Education Cuts Both Ways
The New York Times
By Eduardo Porter
March 10, 2015

Why do the best-educated girls do worse at math than top-educated boys?

Concern about this deficit exploded into public consciousness 35 years ago, when researchers in the department of psychology at Johns Hopkins University published an article suggesting the gap might be caused by a “superior male mathematical ability.”

The debate that ensued was furious. It was so hot that a quarter of a century later, a similar controversy contributed to the ouster of Lawrence Summers from his post as the president of Harvard.

Was there anything “natural” about the performance gap? Or was it the product of gender bias working its way through schools? As the debate raged, ending the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering and math became a critical policy priority.

Amid the din over top girls’ mathematical abilities, something important was forgotten: What is happening that so many boys are falling behind in pretty much everything else?

Last week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — a collective think tank of the world’s industrialized nations — published a report about gender inequality in education, based on the latest edition of its PISA standardized tests taken by 15-year-olds around the world.

The gender gap in math persists, it found. Top-performing boys score higher in math than the best-performing girls in all but two of the 63 countries in which the tests were given, including the United States.

Test scores in science follow a similar, if somewhat less lopsided, pattern. And women are still steering clear of scientific careers: Across the O.E.C.D. nations, only 14 percent of young women entering college for the first time chose a science-related field, compared with 39 percent of men.

But these are hardly the most troubling imbalances. The most perilous statistic in the O.E.C.D.’s report is about the dismal performance of less educated boys, who are falling far behind girls.

Six out of 10 underachievers in the O.E.C.D. — who fail to meet the baseline standard of proficiency across the tests in math, reading and science — are boys. That includes 15 percent of American boys, compared with only 9 percent of girls. More boys than girls underperform in every country tested except Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.

Across the board, girls tend to score higher than boys in reading, which the O.E.C.D. considers the most important skill, essential for future learning.

At the bottom, the gap is enormous: The worst-performing American girls — who did worse in reading tests than 94 out of every 100 of their peers — scored 49 points more than bottom-ranked boys, a 15 percent gap. And the deficit across the O.E.C.D. was even bigger.

These deficits have not made it to the top of the policy agenda. But they pose a direct threat to social cohesion and economic prosperity.

“The message you get is that girls around the world don’t get a chance in education, but that is not true for most of the world,” said Gijsbert Stoet, who teaches psychology at the University of Glasgow and has studied educational inequality globally. “Boys around the world don’t do well in education. What surprises me is the lack of eagerness to solve the problems that boys face.”

Men’s educational attainments have fallen decidedly behind women’s. By 2012, 34 percent of women aged 25 to 64 across O.E.C.D. countries had attained a college degree, compared with 30 percent of men.

“Trapped in a cycle of poor performance, low motivation, disengagement with school and lack of ambition,” as the O.E.C.D. puts it, many young men are in no shape to succeed in a job market that requires increasing skill levels.

And it is not only the least educated boys who are falling behind. Research by Mr. Stoet and David Geary of the University of Missouri based on PISA tests from 2000 to 2009 concluded that on average, boys score worse than girls across the three subjects in 70 percent of the countries tested.

“What will be the implication for society 20 years down the line, given that men have a larger potential for violent action?” Mr. Stoet asked. “Shouldn’t we actually be worried about this?”

The question is what to do about it.

Part of the answer is about raw development. The O.E.C.D.’s latest report suggests that economic and social progress reduces boys’ deficits. The gaps are usually smaller in more developed countries. While the O.E.C.D. did not find a systematic relation between the gender gap and socioeconomic status in the United States, the general pattern meshes with findings that American boys from poor, single-mother families tend to do worse than girls.

And yet one thing to understand is that while social and economic development might help boys, research suggests it won’t reduce girls’ math deficits. Over all, girls outperform boys on the standardized tests by some of the widest margins in relatively poor countries, like Malaysia and Thailand, and in nations like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that have little in the way of women’s rights. The gender gap in math at the top actually widens as living conditions improve. Girls’ scores improve, but boys’ scores improve more.

Moreover, the dismal performance of so many boys in well-developed countries like the United States suggests development alone is not enough to lift their educational prospects.

The O.E.C.D.’s suggestions to close gender gaps in education are hardly earth-shattering. Top-performing girls suffer from a lack of self-confidence in their mathematical abilities. Boys, by contrast, are much more likely to be disengaged. They play more video games. They devote less time to homework and read less for fun, especially complex and demanding books.

Parents, it suggested, could do more to encourage their daughters to enter scientific and technical fields. And they could force their sons to do their homework. Teachers could be better trained to encourage girls in math and educate boys from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. Notably, they could stop typecasting boys as troublesome, and giving them lower grades than girls. “It is unclear how ‘punishing’ boys with lower grades or requiring them to repeat grades for misbehavior will help them,” the O.E.C.D. noted. “In fact, these sanctions may further alienate them from school.”

Genes alone cannot explain educational inequality. But recent research from Mr. Stoet and others has put in doubt the prevailing belief that education gaps are mostly due to broader gender disparities. Other research suggests women’s lack of interest in scientific careers might reflect deeply ingrained preferences. Girls who perform at the top in math might pursue something else because they are even stronger in other subjects.

The bottom line is that strategies premised on the belief that gender gaps in education merely reflect discrimination in society have not closed the longstanding deficits of the best-educated girls. And they have done nothing for boys.

 

 

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