- Obama tells students: Discover new passions
- Obama urges D.C. students to start innovating now
- Ward 5 pleads for middle school
Obama tells students: Discover new passions
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 28, 2011
For an incumbent president facing a tough reelection campaign, no public appearance is completely free of political content. But President Obama’s annual back-to-school speech to the nation’s students, delivered Wednesday at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Northwest Washington, was about as close as it gets.
In a 20-minute address to Banneker’s 415 students, streamed live to schools across the country by the White House, Obama urged students to take their work seriously but also to experiment.
“That’s what school’s for. Discovering new passions,” Obama said, speaking under the basketball backboard in a packed gym turned steamy from the extra lighting.
“That’s why one hour you can be an artist; the next, an author; the next, a scientist,” he said. “Or a historian. Or a carpenter. This is the time when you can try out new interests and test new ideas.”
Obama told students he didn’t want to be “another adult who stands up to lecture you like you’re just kids,” prefacing a series of fairly lecture-like remarks.
“It starts with being the best student you can be,” said Obama, accompanied by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and addressing a crowd that also included Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D).
“Now that doesn’t always mean you have to get a perfect score on every assignment. . . . It means you have to keep at it,” Obama said. “It means you have to work as hard as you know how.”
As the setting for a presidential speech to inspire and exhort school kids, Banneker might not have been the best fit. Students there seem to be doing just fine without Obama’s work-hard-dream-big pep talk.
Banneker, where admission is by application only, is the top of the pyramid for D.C. public high schools. Ninety-four percent of its sophomores read at proficiency level or better on the 2011 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System. The pass rate in math was nearly 98 percent. Only the School Without Walls did better. In addition, Banneker boasts a better than 95 percent graduation rate, more than 20 points above the citywide average, according to the latest available data. Half the students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch.
But this was no ordinary motivational talk, of course.
“We are very proud the president chose Benjamin Banneker,” said Donae Owens, the student body president and an aspiring architectural engineer, who introduced Obama “president to president.” She called it a “historic event for all of us.”
“What he said was very meaningful to us,” said Monet Little, a senior who wants to study international affairs at Penn State. “Students tend to block out a lot of this stuff.”
Benjamin Acquah of Jefferson Middle School, who had been invited to the event, observed that the speech “was shorter than I expected,” but that was okay.
“He socialized,” Acquah said of Obama’s speaking style. “He made sure we understood what he was talking about.”
No one was more pleased than Banneker Principal Anita Berger.
“Be proud. Be proud that we’re D.C. public schools,” she said before Obama took the stage.
She said later that despite its selective admissions process — more than 450 applications for 140 seats this fall — Banneker’s success could be duplicated in any of the District’s open-enrollment high schools.
“You have to have a group of committed adults” — that means everyone from administrators to custodial staff, said Berger, who has led the school for seven years.
Not everyone seemed to buy in completely. After the speech, a group of Banneker teachers seated in the bleachers briefly flashed a small sign that said, “No More Standardized Testing.”
------------
Obama urges D.C. students to start innovating now
Washington Examiner
by Lisa Gartner
September 28, 2011
President Obama told D.C. Public Schools students on Wednesday that they're on the hook for helping America get back into intellectual shape.
"With all of the challenges that our country faces today, we don't just need you for the future -- we actually need you right now," Obama said in a "back-to-school" speech at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Columbia Heights, where he stressed the need for students to complete college degrees to compete in the global economy.
But before that, Obama urged Banneker students -- and all those nationwide watching -- to begin innovating while they are still in school. He talked about a 16-year-old who used light to kill cancer cells, and others who founded nonprofits and volunteer efforts in their community.
"A lot of the time, you've got better ideas than the rest of us, anyway," Obama said.
The charge comes on the heels of Obama's announcement that his administration will allow states to seek waivers from No Child Left Behind, stringent federal standards for improvement based on standardized testing.
As a district, D.C. Public Schools has never met the law's annual benchmarks, called Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP.
Just 43 percent of secondary students in DCPS demonstrated proficiency on state reading exams, with 44 percent in math.
But Banneker, an International Baccalaureate magnet, is considered one of the system's top high schools with 100 percent graduation and college admission rates. All students showed math proficiency on exams last spring, as did 96 percent in reading.
The application-only school is not some anomaly in the school system: 85 percent of students are black; half of students qualify for free or reduced lunch; and 19 percent are English-language learners.
Banneker students and staff fanned themselves in the packed gymnasium as they waited for Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, then greeted both men with roaring applause and screams.
Donae Owens, president of Banneker's student government, welcomed Obama "from president to president."
Owens said she hopes to become an architectural engineer after studying at New York University, thanking her parents and teachers for instilling self-determination.
"If it is to be, it's up to me, because we are the controllers of our own destiny," she said.
Obama thanked Owens -- calling her "Madame President" -- and urged her peers to lift the United States from its 16th-place finish in the proportion of young people with a college degree.
"I don't like being 16th; I like being number one," Obama said. "We need your generation to bring us back to the top of having the most college graduates relative to any country on Earth."
------------
Ward 5 pleads for middle school
Washington Examiner
by Lisa Gartner
September 28, 2011
Preteen and adolescent students sit on desk chairs and toilets designed for kids half their size in Ward 5, the only area of the District without a standalone middle school.
And many of these D.C. middle schoolers don't have access to a wide range of extracurriculars, like music and art and athletics, because there aren't enough students to draw big dollars under the city's per-pupil budget formula. Most attend elementary schools refurbished into pre-K-8 campuses.
Now, almost a year after the community gathered 1,000 signatures for a middle school, D.C. Public Schools officials are starting the Ward 5 Great Schools Initiative at a meeting Thursday evening at Luke C. Moore High School.
Education advocates in Ward 5 say they're done with "lip service and rehashing," and want school officials to come ready with a plan to build a state-of-the-art middle school.
"Everywhere I turn in Brookland there are kids in strollers, and we lose them to charter schools, or we lose them to other schools in the city," said Raenelle Zapata, president of the Ward 5 Education Council. "It's like 'Field of Dreams': If you build it, they will come. If you have a great school, who would drive their kids across town?"
The seven other wards in D.C. have middle schools, with varying levels of success. The Washington Examiner first reported that Ward 3 D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh is proposing a new middle school in the Palisades, because Alice Deal in Tenleytown is severely overcrowded. But enrollment in most of the city's middle schools has been declining over the past several years, with proficiency rates on standardized tests entrenched below the 50 percent mark in math and reading.
In Ward 5, leaders are worried that they can't address quality until they have facilities and basic offerings.
"They need to have full cafeterias, they need to have full gymnasiums, so they can have full athletic programs and physical education programs," said Mark Jones, the Ward 5 member of D.C. school board.
"We lack so much. We're told we have music in all our schools, but that's not accurate at all," Jones said. He pointed to Hardy Middle School in Georgetown, and other standalone middle schools with chess and debate clubs, and several foreign language options.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson committed to revitalizing Ward 5 schools at a hearing on the schools budget, after Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. said his community felt DCPS failed to invest in them.
A spokesman for Henderson said DCPS hopes to present a final plan early in 2012.
"I expect more out of you on this than anybody," Thomas told Henderson, a Ward 5 resident.
------------