NEWS
- Planting Seeds in Baltimore [SEED PCS mentioned]
- Report: Despite D.C. school reforms, disparities persist in system
- The ultimate in school choice or school as a commodity?
- New Nevada school voucher law could provide model for D.C.
Planting Seeds in Baltimore [SEED PCS mentioned]
The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
June 3, 2015
On a warm Saturday in late May 2008, my wife, Ann, talked me into going to an auditorium in Baltimore to watch a lottery. It was no ordinary lottery. Numbered balls were cranked out of a bingo machine, and the winners got a ticket to a better life. It was the lottery to choose the first 80 students to attend a new public college-prep boarding school: the SEED School of Maryland based in Baltimore. (My wife chairs the foundation behind the SEED schools.) SEED Maryland — SEED already had a branch in the District of Columbia — was admitting boys and girls from some of the toughest streets and dysfunctional schools in Maryland, and particularly Baltimore, beginning in sixth grade. Five days a week, they would live at the school in a dormitory with counselors — insulated from the turmoil of their neighborhoods — and take buses home on weekends. Last Saturday, I attended the graduation of that first class.
In a city that has made headlines lately for police brutality against African-Americans and inner-city rage, the graduation was a balm. The audience was packed with mostly African-Americans who had come to see, in many cases, the first in their families graduate from high school and head to a four-year college. But it was also filled with supporters, funders and teachers of all races. Starting such a school, persuading parents to send their kids to the first class, persuading kids to live away from home and take buses back all over Maryland every weekend, was hard. And the black and white SEED community did that hard work together.
As the saying goes: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Unfortunately, not everyone made it to the finish line: Of the 80 who won the lottery that day in 2008, only 29 stuck it out or made it from sixth grade to graduation. The good news is that the graduates are going to the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, U.S.C., Villanova and others; one is joining the Coast Guard.
Several things struck me. One was the kindness with which the young men and women who had been living together in dorms since sixth grade treated one another. The class valedictorian, Stephanie Keyaka, who is going to Penn State, spoke touchingly about her classmates in her speech and seemed to speak for all when she said, “Today we say goodbye to the world of lockers without locks, to the world of having the confidence to leave a laptop in a hallway certain that it will be there when we return.” The next phase will not be so nurturing, she added, but that didn’t matter — SEED left them all with a lot of “grit.”
Then she concluded: “SEED’s greatness, however, doesn’t lie in what SEED did do, but what SEED did not do for us. SEED never made us feel inadequate; SEED never discouraged us from daring to dream. ... And, most importantly, there was never a time when we felt unwanted or unloved.”
When I asked Devin Tingle, who’s going to the Illinois Institute of Technology, what he took most from SEED, he cited the summer science internships and the fact that “this school teaches eight core values,” which he then ticked off: “respect, responsibility, self-determination, self-discipline, empathy, compassion, perseverance and integrity. This school teaches these core values from sixth grade until we graduate.”
I asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan what he thought generally about the public boarding school model, which is expensive. He said, “Some kids need six hours a day, some nine, some 12 to 13,” but some clearly would benefit from a more “24/7” school/community environment. “I went to Baltimore and talked to teachers after the riots,” Duncan added. “The number of kids living with no family member is stunning. But who is there 24/7? The gangs. At a certain point, you need love and structure, and either traditional societal institutions provide that or somebody else does. We get outcompeted by the gangs, who are there every day on those corners.” So quality public boarding schools need to be “part of a portfolio of options for kids.”
All the SEED graduates seemed to have some family present at the ceremony. Indeed, these kids are visibly bearing the hopes of a lot of people. (I was in the men’s room and overheard a father telling his young child that he had to learn to go “pee-pee” so he could attend nursery school next fall and one day be like his sibling who just graduated SEED.)
The incoming C.E.O. of SEED, Lesley Poole, remarked to me: “I passed a family coming in, and I turned to them and asked: ‘Do you have a student graduating?’ And they said, ‘Yes, and we are so excited.’ What you see today is a victory for not just the students graduating, but also for a community. No family just has the mom or the grandmother here. There are cousins and neighbors — people who were skeptical of this whole model. ... Dreams are coming true today, and not just the dream of high school graduation, but the dream of college graduation. At a time when our country is facing a number of challenges and so many places where it is clear we don’t agree — and the fear among some people that the American dream is not for everybody — for them, the American dream may just be one step and one day closer.”
Report: Despite D.C. school reforms, disparities persist in system
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
June 3, 2015
The District’s public schools have made promising improvements after seven years of intensive reforms, but many disparities persist in academic resources and performance between poor and affluent students, according to the National Research Council.
In a much-anticipated report released Wednesday, the council offers an independent evaluation of the effects of sweeping school reform measures put in motion in 2007, when then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty took control of the city’s schools and appointed Michelle A. Rhee as schools chancellor.
The council said that the District’s poor and minority students are still far less likely to have a quality teacher in their classrooms, perform at grade level and graduate from high school in four years. Although performance on standardized tests has improved for all groups, the city’s academic achievement gap has not diminished.
Rhee’s efforts to change the schools attracted national attention as she clashed with union leaders and vowed to upend the status quo. Many urban school systems have regarded some of the changes, including new teacher evaluations and academic standards, as models. But what researchers told the D.C. Council’s Education Committee on Wednesday is that there are no quick solutions and that many years of hard work remain ahead.
“Patience is of great importance in all these endeavors,” said Diana C. Pullin, professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College, who helped write the report.
The report recommends that the city make addressing disparities its primary objective. It emphasizes a need for more centralized data collection across all D.C. public schools, including charters, which now enroll 44 percent of the city’s public school students. The data would be maintained by a single agency that has ultimate responsibility for monitoring and overseeing the quality of public education.
Currently, multiple agencies with confusing missions and lines of authority report different information in multiple formats, and the report’s authors were often unable to obtain information they sought. Such gaps in data make it difficult to draw basic comparisons between charter and traditional schools or to meet the needs of struggling students, the authors said.
“What we know about urban school reform efforts around the country is that a comprehensive look at data is often the beginning of sustained school reform efforts,” said Carl Cohn, director of the Urban Leadership Program at Claremont Graduate University and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report.
Jennifer C. Niles, deputy mayor for education, said she agrees with many of the report’s findings. She said the city is making some headway in clarifying lines of authority and has made better coordination a priority. As of this year, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson reports to her instead of directly to the mayor. And the city plans to announce a new “cross-sector task force” charged with improving coherence across all public schools.
Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said the board is taking part in collaborative efforts such as LearnDC, which compiles information about college and career readiness.
The report is agnostic about which agency should host a common “data warehouse,” although it said that in most places that role would fall to a state agency. In the District, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is not “consistently functioning as an effective state education authority and has not yet earned the full confidence of officials in other agencies who rely on it,” the report said.
The National Research Council of the National Academies is an independent organization chartered by Congress. The committee that assembled the evaluation included professors and other researchers with expertise in school reform. A series of reports produced by DC EdCore, a consortium of research institutions led by George Washington University, were included as part of the research base.
The D.C. Public Education Reform Amendment Act of 2007, which called for the independent evaluation, set up a new governance structure that replaced the local Board of Education with a State Board of Education removed from day-to-day oversight, and created OSSE and a deputy mayor for education.
Rhee had unusual flexibility to make changes to the city’s school system. She pursued many strategies prominent in the national school reform movement, including new recruitment, evaluation and compensation schemes for teachers, uniform academic standards, and heightened accountability for schools through tests and other measures.
The main policy outlines have changed little in the intervening years despite the departure of Rhee and Fenty, a new chancellor and two subsequent mayors.
Cohn said that the stability in leadership and vision is “cause for hope” for long-term improvements.
Overall, test scores for all public school students improved in local and national standardized tests. The portion of all students scoring proficient or above in reading and math on the District’s standardized tests increased between 2007 and 2014, with larger gains in math than in reading.
Test scores have improved for all students, but about 60 percent of black and economically disadvantaged students in the city’s traditional schools score below proficient in both subjects, and have seen only small improvements over time. The report called these results “disturbing.”
While graduation rates are on the rise nationally, they have fluctuated in the District and remain much lower for male students, poor students and special-education students.
Ernestine Benedict, chief of communications for D.C. public schools, said officials are working “urgently” to address the achievement gap through new initiatives focused on males of color, investments in more Advanced Placement courses at every high school, and the introduction of more-challenging lesson plans for all classrooms next year.
“While we have much work yet to do, the NRC evaluation makes it clear that there is a great deal of success to build on,” she said.
The most polarizing of the post-2007 changes was the creation of a teacher evaluation system, known as IMPACT, that led to the dismissal of more than 400 teachers in its first years. It was later extended to evaluate principals.
The system, which includes measures for performance and opportunities for feedback and support, reflects research on teacher evaluations, the researchers found.
The school system’s efforts to improve teacher quality are falling short in many schools, however, because effective teachers are distributed unevenly across wards or even within wards, with fewer talented teachers working in the highest-poverty schools.
The report said there is no systematic information reported about the quality of teachers in charter schools, and it said additional information would help policymakers and parents understand disparities.
The ultimate in school choice or school as a commodity?
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown and Lyndsey Layton
June 3, 2015
Starting next school year, any parent in Nevada can pull a child from the state’s public schools and take tax dollars with them, giving families the option to use public money to pay for private or parochial school or even for home schooling.
The new law, which the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed with help from the education foundation created by former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), is a breakthrough for conservatives, who call it the ultimate in school choice. And they are working to spread it nationwide: Lawmakers in Georgia, Iowa and Rhode Island considered similar legislation this year.
Democrats, teachers unions, public school superintendents and administrators are alarmed, saying that the Nevada law to provide private school vouchers is the first step toward dismantling the nation’s public schools.
Although other states increasingly have allowed tax dollars to be used for private school tuition, most limit the programs to students with disabilities or from low-income families. A few states, such as Indiana, have expanded the option to the middle class.
Nevada’s law is singular because all of the state’s 450,000 K-12 public school children — regardless of income — are eligible to take the money to whatever school they choose.
“It’s just a huge victory for the children of Nevada and all of us who have been working on this for so many years,” said Robert Enlow, chief executive of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an advocacy group dedicated to the principles of free marketeer Milton Friedman. “What this will do is continue to spread ripples across the country. . . . This bill shows that you can actually politically get it done.”
Supporters of the Nevada plan said lawmakers were obligated to give students alternatives to public schools in the state, which regularly scrapes bottom when compared with other states on academic achievement.
“Nothing works better than competition,” said state Sen. Scott Hammond, the chief sponsor of the legislation. The Las Vegas Republican said he was inspired when he attended a Friedman Foundation seminar during a vacation to Utah last year.
“I think a healthy public school system has choice, and we’re going to see all kinds of schools pop up to serve the individual needs of students,” said Hammond, a longtime public school teacher who will soon become an administrator at a charter school. “I don’t think we’re going to see an exodus from the schools. I think it will be more of a slow, measured response, at least in the beginning.”
In January, Republicans took control of the Nevada legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time since 1929, generating the political momentum to enact the country’s most expansive voucher plan.
School choice is primed to become a top education issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, as several would-be or declared GOP candidates, including Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), seek to spread school choice and vouchers. Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has long been opposed, saying vouchers siphon away scarce dollars from public schools.
“I am terrified that there are more and more state legislators and state governors who have bought into this very dangerous idea that school is a commodity,” said Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, which represents 3 million educators.
Vouchers will exacerbate the gap between rich and poor by giving a public subsidy to affluent families that choose elite private schools, which are unlikely to admit students who struggle academically or cannot afford tuition even with a voucher, Eskelsen García said.
“It’s not profitable for very good private schools to allow in children who are disabled, kids who don’t speak English, kids whose parents are struggling to put food on the table,” she said.
Bob Farrace, a spokesman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said the Nevada law is a betrayal of the American commitment to public education.
“Funneling public funds to private schools means fewer teachers, fewer counselors, fewer supplemental services and, in general, fewer opportunities for the vast majority of kids who remain in public schools,” he said. “It really violates the public trust when policymakers place individual benefit before public good.”
The measure passed on a party-line vote in both houses of the Nevada legislature. Assemblyman Elliot T. Anderson, a Las Vegas Democrat, said the new program could face a legal challenge because the state constitution prevents “public funds of any kind or character whatever” spent for sectarian purposes.
Friedman, the late University of Chicago economist, presented the idea of school vouchers in 1955 as the ultimate expression of free choice for families. The idea was long thought to be moribund but came roaring back to life in 2010 in states where Republicans took legislative control.
In many ways, vouchers are where the public-charter-school movement was about 20 years ago, a novel idea that is gaining traction, said Patricia Levesque, chief executive of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which Bush founded in 2008. He resigned from the foundation late last year in anticipation of a presidential bid.
“This is the wave of the future,” said Levesque, whose foundation helped Nevada legislators draft the measure while its nonprofit sister organization, Excel National, lobbied to get it passed. “In all aspects of our life, we look for ways to customize and give individuals more control over their path and destiny. . . . This is a fundamental shift in how we make decisions about education.”
Since 2006, 27 states have opted for one of three methods that transfer public tax dollars to private schools: Vouchers for students from low- and middle-income families or disabled students; tax credits, up to 100 percent of tuition, for donations to private school scholarships; and education savings accounts, which allow qualifying families to use public funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, online education and other services.
Under the law that Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed Tuesday, children must be enrolled in a public school for at least 100 days before they can receive a voucher. Low-income families or students with disabilities can receive the same amount the state spends per public school student, or an average of about $5,700, while middle- and upper-income families will receive slightly less, about $5,100 a year.
Nevada has been among the 10 lowest-spending states when it comes to funding public education. According to the U.S. Census, Nevada spent $8,339 per student in 2013, a combination of local, state and federal money. The national average that year was $10,700.
The money is to be set aside in an educational savings account administered by the state treasurer, and parents can withdraw the funds to pay for tuition, fees and textbooks at a private school, or for tutoring, tuition and fees for online learning programs or at a college or university in Nevada that offers dual credit. Home-schoolers can use the money to buy curriculum materials or supplies. Parents can carry over unspent funds from one year to the next.
One Las Vegas parent, identified by the Friedman Foundation as a supporter of the law, said she thinks it will give her daughters access to opportunities.
Aurora Espinoza, a single mother who works as a solar-panel sales representative, said her children’s current public schools — which are among the nation’s fastest-growing — are so crowded that it’s hard for them to learn. She plans to enroll her daughters in private school next year, but she isn’t sure where, nor whether tax dollars will cover the tuition. “I just want the best for them,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the year that Milton Friedman introduced the concept of school vouchers. The year was 1955, not 1962.
New Nevada school voucher law could provide model for D.C.
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 4, 2015
The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown wrote yesterday about a recently passed law in Nevada that provides families an average of $5,700 that can be spent to send their child to the private school of their choice or allocated toward home schooling. Middle and upper class households, the reporters explain, will receive slightly less at $5,100 per pupil.
The legislation is groundbreaking in that there are 450,000 Kindergarten to grade 12 public school students in the state who will become eligible to exercise school choice. Ms. Layton and Brown indicate that legislators in Georgia, Iowa and Rhode Island thought about instituting similar plans in 2015.
Although Washington, D.C.'s non-voting representative to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton called a couple of weeks ago for the termination of the Opportunity Scholarship Program here in the nation's capital, and for the $20 million a year being allocated to the private school voucher plan to be turned over to charters, in reality exactly the opposite should occur. The OSP should be immediately expanded beyond the approximately 1,500 children it is currently serving so that all 80,000 public school students here can attend a private or parochial school. The reasoning is simple.
After 20 years of local school reform students enrolled in the traditional public schools have barely reached the 50 percent proficiency rate in math and reading with scores in 2014 of 54.4 percent and 49.9 percent, respectively. For charters the numbers are slightly higher with a math proficiency rate of 59.6 percent and reading at 53.4 percent. But when it comes to those living in poverty the numbers are much worse. For DCPS the math proficiency rate is 40.9 percent and for reading that number is even lower at 36.3 percent. In the charter sector the figures are better with a math proficiency rate of 56.1 percent and a reading percentage at 49.1. But still these numbers are nothing to celebrate. In addition, it is estimated that we still need approximately 40,000 quality seats to provide one to every child in this city.
I don't know about you but I've waited long enough. In addition, there are many other advantages to instituting a universal educational marketplace. If parents doesn't like the the common core curriculum let them find a school that uses a different pedagogy. If they feel that a Catholic school is a better fit for their kids then provide them the funds to afford this option. In a world where individuals have expanded choice in every avenue imaginable it seems silly and outdated to limit pupils to attending only traditional and charter schools.
Unfortunately, the Washington Post reporters demonstrate their bias against vouchers by writing this paragraph:
"Since 2006, 27 states have opted for one of three methods that transfer public tax dollars to private schools: Vouchers for students from low- and middle-income families or disabled students; tax credits, up to 100 percent of tuition, for donations to private school scholarships; and education savings accounts, which allow qualifying families to use public funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, online education and other services."
As the U.S. Supreme Court's Zelman decision explained in 2002 school vouchers do not represent a transfer of funds to private schools. The money is provided to students so that they can learn in the institution that best fits their needs. Isn't this what public service is all about?
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