NEWS
- Charter schools still a D.C. hot-button issue [FOCUS, Harmony DC PCS, and Washington Global PCS mentioned]
- Latino children’s language skills are lagging by age 2, study says
- Why can’t we have more teachers like the ones we loved?
Charter schools still a D.C. hot-button issue [FOCUS, Harmony DC PCS, and Washington Global PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
April 3, 2015
For years, District residents have forecast — for better or worse — a future where charter schools consumed neighborhood schools. And with charter school enrollment growing every year for nearly two decades, that day has seemed not too far away.
But this year, the percentage of students attending charters in the District has leveled off, with 44 percent of school-age city residents enrolled. At the same time, the city’s traditional public schools marked their third consecutive year of growth.
Leaders of the D.C. Public Charter School Board said in a Washington Post op-ed recently that the city’s balance — “with a thriving public charter sector and strong traditional schools — is about right.”
The message from Executive Director Scott Pearson and board Chairman John “Skip” McKoy was met with relief by advocates of neighborhood schools and disbelief from some who want to see more aggressive charter school growth in one of the most closely watched school reform efforts in the nation.
“They said the mix is right now, but the mix cannot be right, because there are still thousands of kids who are in schools that are not working,” said Andy Smarick, a charter advocate and partner at Bellwether Education Partners in the District.
He argued in an education blog that the board’s position signaled the close of an “exhilarating chapter of reform” and suggested that the District should approve a second charter school authorizer that would be willing to take the city to the next level of growth.
Pearson and McKoy later clarified the statement they made in the op-ed in The Post, saying they are not calling for a pause in charter school growth. The charter board is considering six applications for additional charter schools this spring. But Pearson and McKoy reiterated support for a neighborhood school system that has been making substantive improvements and also cautioned that growing much larger could lead charter schools to sacrifice some of their autonomy.
Their comments come as Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer C. Niles is poised to launch a task force to study how charter and traditional schools can increase their collaboration.
There has been a groundswell in recent years for the city to make more efficient use of taxpayer funds and streamline duplicative school programs in an environment in which additional schools are cropping up every year.
Last year, many criticized the location of a campus of Harmony Public Schools, a Houston-based network, which opened a science and technology-focused elementary school across the street from Langley Elementary in Northeast. Langley is a traditional public school with the same academic focus as the Harmony school.
This year, advocates of neighborhood schools are protesting plans by Washington Global, a charter middle school approved in May, to open less than a half-mile from Jefferson Middle School, near L’Enfant Plaza. Jefferson has a program similar to Washington Global’s school and is working to gain support.
Charter advocates note that the scarcity of school facilities hinders location-based planning. And many argue that the competition, even in close quarters, is good for school quality.
D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), chairman of the Education Committee, said he thinks the location of schools is a key issue the task force should take on.
Locating new schools is just one of many issues facing charters in the District, as well as in cities across the country where charters are growing, including Kansas City and Cleveland. Charter leaders are looking at how to handle families that move into the district in the middle of the year, as well as how to meet the needs of special-education students in new ways.
“This is the question of the future in the charter school world — how each city will manage growth,” said Greg Richmond, president of National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
In New Orleans, where nearly all children are enrolled in charters, the schools offer preferences to neighborhood students in a lottery, something that D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has advocated and the D.C. charter leaders have largely resisted.
New Orleans charters also offer the same number of seats each year and “backfill” them when there are vacancies, something District charters are not obligated to do.
“Having two strong systems reduces the pressure to regulate charter schools as though they were the only public schools in the city,” Pearson and McKoy wrote recently in Education Next, an online publication that covers reform.
While many charter advocates resist regulation, they disagree that a slowdown is the best way to handle growing pains.
Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS, a charter advocacy group in the District, said the city could come up with more creative solutions to manage a charter-dominant system.
Ultimately, he said, it is parents who should decide how many charter schools there will be and that the long waiting lists at charter schools are a sign of what parents think.
“Parents are speaking, and what they are saying is that we need more charter schools,” he said.
Latino children’s language skills are lagging by age 2, study says
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 2, 2015
Nine-month-old Latino babies have the same language and cognitive abilities as their white peers, but by the time they reach age 2, they lag significantly behind, according to new research from the University of California at Berkeley.
The research suggests that prekindergarten may be too late to start trying to close persistent academic achievement gaps between Latino and white students, said Bruce Fuller, the study’s lead author and professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.
According to Fuller, preschool could narrow the language gap by one-third, suggesting that policymakers should consider how to ramp up efforts to reach babies and toddlers earlier, especially by helping parents understand how they can help their children learn.
“Extending quality pre-K is one piece of the puzzle. But our new findings reveal how gaps in early language and preliteracy skills open up in toddlerhood, long before children enter preschool,” Fuller wrote in an e-mail.
The study, published this week in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, was based on a nationally representative sample of 4,550 white and Mexican-American children.
Latino students work on reading skills at the Detroit Public Schools' Academy of the Americas in Detroit. (Carlos Osorio/AP)
Researchers visited the children’s homes twice: when they were nine months old and again when they were 2 to 3 years old. On the first visit, the researchers assessed babies’ ability to manipulate simple objects, such as a rattle, and use and comprehend words; on the second visit, they assessed the toddlers’ memory, vocabulary and basic problem-solving skills.
The parents were allowed to decide whether the child would be assessed in English or Spanish.
The Berkeley team found that about 80 percent of Mexican-American toddlers grew more slowly than white toddlers, and by 2 years old were three to four months behind their white peers.
The children of immigrant mothers tended to lag further behind than the children of Mexican-American mothers who were born in this country, a difference that researchers linked in part to immigrant mothers’ weaker education.
In addition, native-born Mexican-American mothers tended to read more frequently with their children and use richer language with them.
“It appears that acculturation exposes mothers to more inventive and stimulating educational practices in the home,” Fuller wrote in an e-mail.
Latino toddlers’ cognitive abilities also tended to be higher when the mother worked outside the home and when the mother was more generous with praise and encouragement during difficult tasks.
This is the first study to establish that Latino children start out with the same abilities as their white peers and then fall behind in the first few years of life. But similar data have been published for other groups, including African-American children, and there is a growing body of evidence that academic achievement gaps begin to open before children enter formal schooling.
In 2010, the Obama administration funded the nationwide expansion of home visiting programs, which aim to improve children’s outcomes by educating parents about subjects ranging from health and domestic violence to language development and school readiness.
Congress is currently debating whether to continue investing in that program, known as the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program.
Why can’t we have more teachers like the ones we loved?
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
April 5, 2015
My favorite teacher, Al Ladendorff, died March 20 at the age of 93. At Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., he was known as “Big Al.” Educators like him enhance our lives, for reasons not always in sync with what policymakers are doing to try to improve teaching.
The guarantees of highly qualified teachers for all students in the federal No Child Left Behind law are a sham. The law gives states that responsibility, but they have done little to inspire the intelligence, imagination and perseverance that so impressed me about Ladendorff. The replacement for that law, now being fashioned in Congress, does no better.
Also, the current fad for motivating teachers with individual ratings based on test scores is not working. Raising educator quality is always a heavy lift, politicians seem to say, so why bother?
Yet we know what we like about our best teachers. Why can’t we figure out ways to encourage such qualities in more classrooms?
My U.S. history class could have been a disaster. It was stuffed with nearly 40 students, as were many classes in the 1960s. The state-sanctioned textbook was dull. The class convened after lunch, when a lot of us would have preferred a snooze. But the minute our tall, angular and bespectacled teacher strode in, we could feel the electricity.
What I found most exciting about Ladendorff was that he encouraged us to think for ourselves, many years before “critical thinking” became a fashionable bit of edspeak. He did things I had never seen before, such as encouraging us to criticize the textbook.
For an argumentative type like me, this was mischievous fun. I wrote an essay noting the textbook’s long discussions of agriculture bills and their political consequences. Why was the book bothering with that stuff when just 5 percent of the population lived on farms? The real America, I said, was in rapidly expanding suburbs such as San Mateo. The essay had many juvenile flaws, but it was a big step for me.
Ladendorff was famous for his challenging exam questions, such as “Fair trade laws are unfair. Disagree.” He conducted some government and history classes in the school’s little theater, confronting 100 adolescents at a time. He was funny but also quick to stifle signs of inattention. My classmate Bob Padgett, who later became a physician, remembered him as a “superb lecturer and challenge provider.” He also was the faculty adviser to the yearbook and the student store.
Padgett and his friend Don Leydig, who later became Hillsdale’s most innovative principal, teamed up to tackle a typical Ladendorff project: “Pose a change in our federal system of government that, if included in the original framing of the Constitution, would have resulted in consequences more favorable to the country. Illustrate with two examples demonstrating how this change would have accomplished that goal.” Padgett remembered feeling intrigued and excited, even if their detailed argument for balancing the budget every year had big holes.
Maureen Wilbur, from the class just behind ours, went on to teach math for 30 years. She told me Ladendorff was “the most influential person in my life.” She loved his reminders to “dig deep.”
Ladendorff puzzled and upset some students. One girl in my class called him a communist, to which he responded with a laugh. His personal politics — never revealed to us — were probably in the other direction. He liked shaking things up. He knew unpredictability helped engage teenagers.
I had other great teachers, such as Mike Callahan, John Glancy and Geraldine Palazzi. Ladendorff was less smooth, but that was not necessarily a bad thing.
Teachers do best when they have a deep love and knowledge of their subject and of children, and a principal who encourages them on bad days and praises them on good ones. There must be some way for schools to hire more people like that, with teachers like Al Ladendorff as an inspiration.
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