Cross-Posted from The Examiner Written by Lisa Gartner
Third-graders in DC Public Schools have failed to show any gains in math or reading since aggressive school reforms began in 2007, according to an independent analysis of the city’s standardized test scores.
The report, to be released Monday by the nonprofit DC Action for Children, also suggests the city’s public charter schools do not outperform the traditional school system on the DC Comprehensive Assessment System exams.
“We are spending way too much effort and money in education reform not to see results,” said HyeSook Chung, the organization’s executive director. “If the data isn’t lying, what are we doing wrong? Why aren’t we seeing improvements in test scores, which everyone is obsessed with, if we are indeed making change, as the city claims?”
Elder Research Inc. conducted a statistical analysis of test scores from 2007 to 2011 by weighting schools’ performance by the number of students who score “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or “advanced” on the exams. Schools were given one to four points for each student in the respective brackets, then averaged and aggregated. Chung says this allowed the researchers to create a more nuanced picture than the results released by the city each year, which have showed an upward trend by examining only whether students are proficient or not.
The group chose 2007 because many of former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s reforms began then with the passage of the School Reform Act. It chose the third grade because research cites third-grade proficiency as a key indicator of whether a student will graduate from high school. The third grade is also the first year that students take the exams.
On the one-to-four scale, DCPS’ average weighted score in math has inched up from 2.15 to 2.2 from 2007 to 2011 — an insignificant statistical move. Reading moved from about 2.25 to 2.2.
A spokeswoman for the school system deferred comment to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the agency that regulates DCPS and the city’s charter schools. A spokeswoman for OSSE did not return phone calls seeking comment.
David Grosso, who will begin his term as an at-large D.C. Council member in January, said the report provides “good direction.”
“We have to try to be more open and transparent about what’s going on in the school reform effort,” Grosso said.
The report also suggests that charter schools, which enroll 43 percent of the city’s public school students, do not statistically perform better than DCPS. On the weighted scale, charters moved from 2.05 to 2.25 in math, and from 2.25 to 2.3 in reading.
Naomi DeVeaux, deputy executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, said she would like to see data on older students, as she believes charters help students improve their scores over time.
“Without knowing that, you can’t judge a school,” DeVeaux said. “How low did students come in? How low below ‘basic’ were they? And then what growth occurs?”
Cross-Posted from DC’s Independent Media Center By Luke
On the 13th of December, a “Save Our Schools” rally was held at Malcolm X Elementary School in Anacostia, targeted by Mayor Gray to be closed along with 19 other schools in DC. The event was organized by Ward 8 State Board of Education Representative Trayon White.
Originally the parents, teachers, students and others were going to march on Mayor Gray’s home a couple miles away-but he agreed to meet with them when he got word that he was in for an evening of “pitchforks and torches” protesting outside his home. We shall see if the Mayor follows through on his commitment to meet with these folks.
Parents and students of Malcolm X Elementary School at Save Our Schools Rally.
The Mayor has been ducking a meeting with homeless advocates for months, with his schedulers saying it would be three months before he can get around to meeting with SHARC. Perhaps the only way to get a meeting with Mayor Gray is to plan a march on his home in a middle class section of Anacostia and make sure he knows you’re coming?
Background on the issue:
The school closings are one of the “suggestions” from the Walton Foundation, the Wal-Mart funded outfit Mayor Gray’s government is accepting funds and school “reform” advice from. The Walton Family Foundation page on the “DC Public Education Fund” gives glowing reviews among other things to the IMPACT testing program used to fire so many DC teachers.
The DC Public Education fund homepage lists in their “what’s new” section “Proposed Consolidations and Reorganization of Schools,” meaning closing schools like Malcolm X Elementary. Since they receive funding from the Walton Foundation, in effect we have Wal-Mart paying DC to close down public schools in favor of charter schools like the notorious and fascistic KIPP, or even a charter school that is designed to teach people specifically to work at Wal-Mart.
As DC public school advocates predicted, the school closings of 2008 didn’t improve test scores or student achievement and have negatively impacted community after community throughout the city. So here we are at the end of 2012, poised to take another dive off the school closings precipice, this time at the behest of Mayor Gray and Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. I’m betting that you have had enough. I know I have. No one who cares about children wants to hear any more stories like the one Empower DC member Marybeth Tinker recorded in the video below. In it two young students from Thurgood Marshall Elementary tell us why the proposal to close their school is just plain WRONG!
No one who cares about DC’s children and DC’s communities wants to hear any more stories like the one you’ll hear in the podcast below produced by La Palabra.
Break It Down: School Closures in Washington DC
Michelle Powell walks her granddaughter to Ferebee-Hope Elementary every day. Her family has already dealt with 3 school closures in Ward 8 and is now faced with a fourth school being closed (Ferebee-Hope). Listen to Mrs. Powell’s story and understand why school closures hurt our communities and our children.
Which is why you’ve decided to join the fight to stop school closings in the District of Columbia. You’ve been looking for a chance to take a stand. Here it is:
JOIN DC PUBLIC SCHOOL PARENTS, STUDENTS AND TEACHERS FROM WARD 8 @ THE
SAVE OUR SCHOOLS RALLY & MARCH Thursday, December 13, 2012 – 4:30 PM RALLY at Malcolm X Elementary School 1351 Alabama Avenue SE (Near Congress Heights Metro on the Green Line) then MARCH to the home of MAYOR VINCENT GRAY Branch Avenue SE
Ward 8’s Malcolm X Elementary, Ferebee Hope Elementary, MC Terrell Elementary and Johnson Middle School are all on the list of schools to be closed. Your school may not be on the list this year, but it might be next. It’s time to take a STAND! For more information, contact Trayon White, Ward 8 Representative to the State Board of Education at 202-316-7593.
Plans to consolidate twenty DC Public Schools were announced on November 13, 2012 followed by a rush of public hearings and neighborhood stakeholder discussions that gave precious little time for parents, teachers and administrators to respond. The edict sounded all too familiar to those of us who were around for the first round of closures in 2008.
In a nutshell, DC’s Chancellor Kaya Henderson proposes to close twenty public schools because they are under enrolled and in DCPS’s opinion are too costly to operate. The list of school closures includes 8 elementary schools, 3 special education schools, 4 middle schools, 2 education campuses, the Choice program, 1 High School STAY program (School To Aid Youth) and 1 high school.
Two days of City Council hearings that lasted until nearly midnight with over 50 witnesses followed the school closure announcement to allow for testimony from education stakeholders. Community stakeholder meetings were subsequently scheduled to get feedback at four ward-based meetings commencing November 27 at Savoy elementary school in Ward 8, a second meeting at Sousa middle school in Ward 7 on November 28 and a third meeting at McKinley senior high on November 29 in Ward 5. The last meeting will be held at Brightwood education campus on December 5. This meeting will represent multiple wards of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6.
Unlike the meetings of 2008 when stakeholders were escorted off to individual classrooms for private discussion, this year’s format for ward based meetings included small table group discussions in an open meeting space like the school gymnasium. The discussions were facilitated by a DCPS staffer leading the dialogue around three main questions: [1] What has DCPS not thought about; [2] What can be done to strengthen the proposal; and [3] What could make the transition smoother. Participants reported back to the larger audience sharing their tables’ response.
We need a moratorium on public school closings and charter school openings was a common recommendation expressed at the Ward 5 and 8 stakeholder meetings. When I attended the community meeting at McKinley, I couldn’t help but feel the participants frustration and distrust that DCPS has already made its mind made up about going forward with the school closures .Robert Vinson Brannum, VP of Ward 5 Council on Education questioned the school districts intentions. “The root question is are we working on the premise that the proposal is going forward. If at the end of everything, we say don’t do it (close schools), are you going to go forward anyway”, Brannum said.
Comments from the McKinley audience ended with an obtrusive presence- none other than Ward 5 ANC commissioner Bob King. King who lives in the Fort Lincoln neighborhood has been a long time commissioner for 30 plus years and a community advocate as well as supporter of Thurgood Marshall elementary school. Commissioner King left a memorable impression when he spoke directly to Chancellor Henderson about Marshall’s rich history, community support and the corporate sponsorships he garnered from Costco on behalf of the school.”I have a written contract for $10,000 yearly from Costco, backpacks for all the students in Ward 5 and I personally delivered 68 computers, 10 smart boards and 1 projector to Marshall. You might be gone and the mayor might be gone, so please right your proposal to keep Marshall open,” King said.
The ward 7 meeting at Sousa was markedly different than either of those in Wards 5 or 8. The Ward 7 education council took ownership of their meeting, decided not to entertain DCPS’ questions and presented a proposal of their own to keep schools open. Daniel del Pielago, education organizer of Empower DC said of the plan, “it reflected the concerns of parents and community and ultimately the plan said let’s work to save and make our schools better instead of let’s close more schools and see what happens as DCPS is saying.”
Through two weeks of excruciating meetings the majority of community voices clearly oppose the closures, with only a promise from Chancellor Kaya Henderson to take the community’s recommendations into consideration before she makes a final verdict in January of 2013. A visceral lack of trust in the process exists at the community level, as DCPS and local council representatives appear to be hell bent on closing 20 schools regardless of community input, while ignoring loud persistent cries from the community to stop the madness and consider a moratorium.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson stepped into her first major controversy when she announced last week that she wanted to close 20 public schools. Immediately, hundreds of parents and activists lined up to oppose her. One of the organizations that has worked long and hard to stop previous school closings is Empower DC. In an interview with The RootDC, Daniel del Pielago, an organizer for the group’s education campaign, argues that the closures will have a negative impact on thousands of school children largely because 40 percent of the students threatened with displacement this time were also affected by the 2008 school closings.
“Our school communities need stability, not repeated upheaval,”
Vanessa Bertelli, chair of the Garrison Improvement Project Committee, with Milo Negri, 4, (in dark yellow), Leo Sank, 3, and Richard Sowell, 3, try to stay entertained at the Wilson Building as D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson talks during a review of school closures in Washington. Negri and Sank attend Garrison Elementary and Sowell attends Francis-Stevens Elementary. (Katherine Frey – THE WASHINGTON POST) he said in the interview. Calling the schools marked for closing “dead schools walking,” he said Henderson’s plan will have a detrimental impact on teacher and student morale.
Pielago said that the group has called for an immediate “moratorium on all school closures until a community driven process is put in place to make these tough decisions and a true study on the impact school closures have had on our city’s students and communities.” He added: “We are concerned that thousands of students left DCPS after the last round of school closures, the biggest dip in enrollment in recent history. This coupled with the uncontrolled growth of charter schools does not give us any confidence that more closures are necessary.”
Why you are opposed to the school closings laid out by Chancellor Henderson?
This continuous cycle of school closures and attrition will lead to the loss of neighborhood public schools of right. Additionally. school closures have disproportionately affected communities of color. Of the 6,300 students affected by school closures in 2008, only 15 were white, while 99 percent were African American or Hispanic. This year, [based on a study done by local data analyst Mary Levy], out of the 3,800 students who will be displaced, only 36 are white students. Once again, the higher concentration of school closures are in Wards 5, 7 and 8. We feel this is unjust and actually leads to the destabilization of communities.
Some have argued that it’s ineffective to keep schools open that are (a) underperforming and (b) below capacity. In your view. what should be done with these schools, given the attendance/performance erosion cited in some schools?
Firstly, I think the communities who will be directly affected by these threats need to lead the conversations on solutions and not just be nominally included once decisions are made. For example, a school like Garrison Elementary, where parents are fighting and being active to improve programming so it can in turn raise enrollment, is not being given the time nor resources to make this happen.
A recent D.C. auditor report shows how the last round of closures actually cost our city more than originally estimated. The public has also not seen even a basic accounting on how much was saved from the last round and how it was used. I think we need to look at cutting down the inflated DCPS central office before we start to close the institutions our students and communities depend on.
I also think the mayor and City Council need to have a comprehensive plan for public education. This should include any DCPS school closings as well as recommendations for school boundary and feeder pattern changes. Charter school openings and closings should also be considered.
In an op-ed that appeared in The RootDC on Monday, Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. councilman and a senior adviser to the American Federation for Children, writes the following: “If school closures simply mean overcrowding already overburdened schools with more children and fewer resources to go around, we’re doing no better than when those underperforming schools were around in the first place. We must provide families with a legitimately better-quality option in lieu of where they were, and it’s also not fair to overburden teachers and students at the schools that are likely to see a new influx of students from the soon-to-be-closed schools.”
What’s your response to this?
The chancellor’s plan states that closure decisions are based on enrollment and not academic standings. I do agree that students and teachers should not be in a situation that is no better than their original situation. Replacing a closed school with a charter school would not necessarily mean that the situation would improve and that all students from the closed school would even be allowed to attend.
Instead of closing schools, DCPS should be focused on allaying concerns and misconceptions that folks may have about our public schools. The focus needs to be on growing strong programs and enrollment, not simply trying to make the school system smaller.
What are your general thoughts about the charter school movement and its place in educating D.C. school children?
I think charter schools are a reality in the District of Columbia. They enroll over 40 percent of school-age children. I do feel that this continued unplanned growth of charters and competition is not good for DCPS. The competition draws students and resources away from our traditional public schools. Additionally, on the whole charters do not perform any better than traditional public schools. Although charters are publicly funded, they are not subject to the same rules traditional schools are and are not subject to the same oversight.
What are your immediate plans to stop Henderson’s school closing effort?
We will continue to grow awareness to communities who are directly affected and work together to identify any next steps. We are currently looking at legal strategies, and our membership is planning continued direct action. We want to make sure that we are working with a broad base of individuals and organizations and not allowed to be split into a school-by-school fight. One of the major problems with all of this is that community members don’t really have a vehicle (such as an elected school board) to weigh in. Decision-making power is centralized with the mayor and chancellor.
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