NEWS
- Chronic truancy rates above 50 percent in D.C. high schools
- DC Charter Board may get to see financials of charter management organizations [Options PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- Preschoolers should not be suspended or expelled [Eagle Academy PCS mentioned]
- Some parents across the country are revolting against standardized testing
Chronic truancy rates above 50 percent in D.C. high schools
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
March 9, 2015
Despite intensified efforts to improve school attendance rates in D.C. Public Schools, more than half of high school students — 56 percent — were considered ”chronically truant” during the 2013-2014 school year, after accumulating 10 or more unexcused absences, according to a report scheduled to be released Monday by the Children’s Law Center and D.C. Lawyers for Youth.
The report found that schools are overwhelmed by new legal requirements designed to crack down on truancy and struggling to provide required services to students before they are referred to courts.
“Students miss school for many reasons, and a thoughtful approach is necessary to address the underlying causes of poor attendance,” the report said. “Unfortunately, the District’s current efforts to increase school attendance are not guided by evidence and ultimately fail students.”
Overall, attendance is improving. Last year, 8 percent of D.C. Public School students were chronically truant in elementary schools and 10 percent were chronically truant in middle schools.
The high rates of truancy among high school students are partly attributable to a new law that requires students who miss 20 percent of the school day to be marked absent for the day. Previously, students had to miss at least 40 percent of the day to be marked absent.
The report, along with many high school administrators and students, recommends revising that law, saying that it confuses chronic tardiness with absenteeism and leads to inappropriate interventions and administrative burdens.
The legislation, passed by the D.C. Council in 2013, focused new attention on chronic absenteeism, long a serious challenge in District schools.
It includes provisions for multiple interventions based on how many absences a child accumulates.
At five unexcused absences, a school support team, including administrators, teachers and social workers, meets to develop a plan with the family to improve attendance.
At 10 unexcused absences, a family must be referred to the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency. At 15 unexcused absences, students aged 14 to 17 can be referred to court.
Many schools are struggling to provide in-school support before students can be referred to outside agencies, the report said.
D.C. Public School officials reported that in the first half of the current school year, more than 4,000 students were referred for support team meetings for attendance concerns, but the compliance rate was only 38 percent.
Meanwhile, court referrals have increased dramatically. After one semester of the new law taking effect, there was a 92 percent increase in the number of new complaints in Family Court in the category that includes truancy cases, the report said. Before the law passed, the trigger for a court referral was 25 unexcused absences.
“The court simply was not created to address the root causes of poor school attendance, and also lacks the capacity to process the thousands of youth who accumulate 15 absences each year,” it said.
The report recommends improving school-based interventions and programs that have proved successful in improving attendance.
DC Charter Board may get to see financials of charter management organizations [Options PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 9, 2015
Last Tuesday, according to the Washington Post's Michael Allison Chandler, the D.C. Council's chairman of the education committee David Grosso brought forth legislation that would allow the DC Public Charter School Board to examine the finances of charter management organizations contracted with the schools it regulates. As explained by the Post reporter "the law would apply to organizations that receive 10 percent or more of a charter school’s annual revenue or those that derive at least a quarter of total revenue from a charter school."
The ability of the PCSB to review the books of CMOs is something that executive director Scott Pearson tried to get the previous council education chairman David Catania to get behind without success. Many individuals involved in the local movement knew of the strained relationship between Mr. Catania and Mr. Pearson which thawed over time. Mr. Grosso co-introduced the bill along with Councilwoman Elissa Silverman.
The PCSB has been extremely interested in being able to more closely monitor the activities of CMOs in the aftermath of the serious money problems with Options PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS. Both of these schools received clean bills of health from the CHARM report that evaluated the financial health of charters. However, the evaluations were conducted with two hands tied behind the reviewers' backs as they had no access to how public money was utilized by outside firms hired to manage charters. Then it was uncovered that millions of dollars was misappropriated by the two schools, leading to legal actions by the D.C. Attorney General that were highly embarrassing to the school reform movement in the nation's capital.
Let's hope that the rest of the D.C. Council and Mayor Bowser agree with this common sense bill.
Preschoolers should not be suspended or expelled [Eagle Academy PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Cassandra S. Pinkney
March 6, 2015
Over the past few decades, suspensions and expulsions have become the go-to punishment for disruptive behavior, regardless of age or infraction. As an educator with more than 30 years of experience, I think it is counterintuitive to deny students learning time when they need extra attention.
This is especially true when we are talking about prekindergarten students ages 3 or 4. That’s right: D.C. allows its publicly funded schools to expel 3-year-old students.
The Pre-K Student Discipline Amendment Act of 2015 is pending before the D.C. Council. If passed, along with changes to the student discipline practices and procedures in public schools, the act would outlaw suspension and expulsion of 3- and 4-year-old children in a traditional public school or a charter school.
I have seen my fair share of challenging prekindergarten students. Yet since we opened our doors more than 12 years ago, my school has never found it necessary or appropriate to suspend or expel a 3- or 4-year -old. We have considered it in a few extreme cases, but when we analyzed the situation, we found it would not be in the child’s best interest. Children need to be in a tailored learning environment.
Children at this age are not intrinsically bad. Acting out is often the only way a 3- or 4-year-old has of saying, “I need help!” It is our job to read that message and provide help, not rejection.
An antiquated school of thought says that removing misbehaving kids from the classroom will help the others learn and teach the misbehaving child a “lesson.” I disagree. At Eagle, we offer individual education plans if a child’s behavior interferes with learning — his or her own or that of peers. The child receives early intervention and has a greater opportunity of healing and not needing specialized education services later in school.
We practice the “inclusion model” of learning, which dictates that high-needs children interact and learn with the general population of students — a model that has proved to be extremely effective.
Children, especially very young children, need special attention sometimes. They need an outpouring of love and support, not condemnation and rejection. I urge the D.C. Council to pass the Pre-K Student Discipline Amendment Act of 2015 and keep our future leaders in school.
Some parents across the country are revolting against standardized testing
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 7, 2015
A growing number of parents are refusing to let their children take standardized tests this year, arguing that civil disobedience is the best way to change what they say is a destructive overemphasis on tests in the nation’s public schools.
The resistance comes as most states roll out new tests aligned to the Common Core academic standards and as Congress struggles to rewrite the federal law that has defined the role of testing in schools for the past decade.
Parents opting out of tests say that their children are losing valuable learning time as teachers prepare them for the exams, which some find of dubious value. In pulling their children out of exams, they see an opportunity to make a statement that they hope will force a course change on testing in statehouses and in Washington, though the symbolic act itself doesn’t get their children any additional instruction.
“What I’m hearing from the opt-out parents is maybe this is the last chance to get the legislature’s attention,” said Mark Neal, an Ohio superintendent who is an outspoken critic of the new Common Core tests.
Neal pulled his son, a third-grader, out of PARCC testing this year — one of the Common Core exams — as did the parents of about 20 percent of students who were supposed to take tests in his small district east of Columbus.
“We’ve never had anything like this before,” Neal said. “We’ve never had this many tests, we’ve never spent this much time testing.”
State education officials around the country have been urging families to allow students to sit for tests, arguing that the exams provide information that schools need in order to improve and that parents need in order to understand a child’s academic progress.
“We hope that parents will want their children to take the test. And not just because it’s required. This is a chance for children to shine, to show what they’ve learned, and — in the bigger picture — do something that will even help improve their hometown schools,” said Michael Yaple, a spokesman for the state education department in New Jersey, which began administering PARCC this week.
Joining Ohio and New Jersey in using PARCC this year for the first time are the District, Maryland and eight other states. Administered online, PARCC is designed to require more writing and critical thinking than the old bubble tests. In many states, it is expected to be more challenging.
The opt-out movement comes in response to the accountability push in education, which aims to boost student performance and close achievement gaps by using test scores to judge schools, teachers and principals.
The accountability era began in earnest in 2002 with the passage of the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, which required states to administer annual reading and math tests to children in grades three through eight and once in high school, and it continued with the Obama administration’s push to include student test scores in teacher evaluations.
Parents and teachers have long argued that attaching ramifications to testing have warped education, forcing schools to focus on math and reading at the expense of social studies, science, art and music.
The new Common Core tests — designed to set and evaluate common benchmarks nationwide — appear to have fueled that frustration and brought new voices into the coalition opposing tests, including some conservatives who decry the Common Core as federal overreach.
Though a symbolic move, opting out has the potential for real consequences that vary by state and by school district.
Skipping the tests has no impact for most individual students, but federal law says that at least 95 percent of students must participate in tests. The rule is meant to keep administrators from quietly discouraging low performers to stay home on exam day, something that could skew performance upward and hide racial or socio-economic inequities.
Schools and school districts that fail to hit 95 percent participation risk losing their federal funds and could see their ratings drop on state report cards.
Nearly every state has groups of parents boycotting the tests, but it is impossible to know how many parents are refusing tests nationwide, because many states neither collect data on it nor have clear policies describing whether and how parents may choose to have their children sit out of testing. The movement remains a tiny minority nationwide, but there are hotbeds where it has grown rapidly.
In New Jersey, where unions have been sponsoring television advertisements highlighting teachers’ concerns about PARCC, some districts have reported that more than a quarter of students are refusing the test. In New Mexico, hundreds of high school students walked out of the first day of PARCC testing last week; the number of parents refusing tests doubled in Albuquerque from last year to this year.
“We have a right to public education, and we don’t want it to just be tests all the time,” said Janelle Astorga, an 18-year-old senior who organized the walkout at Albuquerque High.
Mark Gilboard, an Albuquerque parent who had his fifth-grade daughter sit out of PARCC, said he was flabbergasted when she came home from school recently saying that she and her classmates had spent an hour sitting in front of computers to make sure that the technology was ready for the new online exams.
“They’re using up classroom time to test the test,” Gilboard said. “My thing is, how do we get these children the uninterrupted instructional time that they need from their teachers?”
New Mexico officials said that they expect more than 200,000 students to complete the test this year. The fraction of parents who refuse the test are losing “a valuable tool to know with confidence how their children are doing academically,” said Ellen Hur, a spokeswoman for the state education department.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties have railed against overtesting during hearings on rewriting No Child Left Behind. Legislation to reduce testing passed in Virginia last year and is pending in statehouses around the country, including in Maryland, where Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said last week that he thinks children are overtested.
In Ohio, both houses have passed legislation that would ensure schools don’t lose state funding because of opt-outs. State lawmakers also announced Wednesday that they were creating a committee to study testing and recommend changes.
John Marschhausen, a superintendent who will serve on that committee, said he has been encouraging parents not to boycott tests this year despite his concerns about the degree to which testing has interfered with education. He said he wants to give the democratic process a chance to work, and only 105 of his 16,000 students have opted out this year.
“We have elected officials who we put in places of authority and give the ability to make decisions. We should be able to work through them,” Marschhausen said. “But if we don’t see any changes, then my position might be a little bit different in the future.”
Amanda Ripley, who studied education systems in other countries for her 2013 book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” said there’s an irony that parents are protesting just as the Common Core tests are being introduced, given the hope among many educators that the new tests will spur richer instruction.
“On one side, you have a group of reformers who say that getting rid of federal mandates for annual testing would be apocalyptic, and that’s crazy,” she said. “On the other side, you have people who think that getting rid of it would lead to utopia. I think both sides have lost their minds on this.”
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