By Grassroots DC, on June 23rd, 2015 When our elected officials ask for our input, we should give it to them. So if you have time, please join Councilmember Grosso for community town hall events between June 16 and July 11, 2015. The Councilmember will hold a meeting in each Ward to hear from residents, parents, students, and education stakeholders about public education in the District of Columbia. Below is the schedule for the upcoming town hall events:
Ward 1 Town Hall
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
Frank D. Reeves Center
1401 U St. NW
2nd Floor Community Room
Ward 8 Town Hall
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
William O. Lockridge/Bellevue Library
115 Atlantic St. SW
Main Meeting Room
Ward 4 Town Hall
Monday, June 29, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
Petworth Library
4200 Kansas Ave. NW
Meeting Room
Ward 2 Town Hall
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
The Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives
1201 17th St NW
Richard L. Hurlbut Memorial Hall
Ward 5 Town Hall
Thursday, June 18, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
Lamond-Riggs Library
5401 South Dakota Ave. NE
Meeting Room 1
Ward 6 Town Hall
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
Southwest Library
900 Wesley Place SW
Meeting Room
Ward 3 Town Hall
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
6:30-8:30 PM
Tenley-Friendship Library
4450 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Large Meeting Room
Ward 7 Town Hall
Saturday, July 11, 2015
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Francis A. Gregory Library
3660 Alabama Ave. SE
Meeting Room
In order to best prepare for the community meetings, we are asking that participants sign up and let us know your concerns. The Councilmember is looking forward to hearing from the community and engaging in these discussions on education issues throughout the District of Columbia.
By Liane Scott, on June 11th, 2015 The National Research Council Makes Its Report, Finally
It feels like forever that DC Public Schools have been known as one of the worst (if not the worst) public school systems in the nation. Low test scores and high dropout rates back up the perception. Twenty years ago, DC School Reform Act of 1995 (a gift from Congress, not a District initiative) gave us charter schools. Many Washingtonians with an investment in the school system (i.e. parents, students, teachers, etc. ) believed that this was the answer. But after ten years, the numbers hadn’t improved—not in the new charters or in the traditional public schools.
In 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty and his supporters put their money on Michelle Rhee and the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA). The law gave control of DC Public Schools to the Mayor and more flexibility to administrators like Chancellor Rhee. To make sure that the changes instituted under PERAA worked, the mayor was required to submit either an independent annual evaluation or a five-year evaluation of the DC public school system. Mayor Fenty chose to go with the five-year assessment, which was due September 15, 2012. The National Research Council—the independent agency that received the contract to do the evaluation in 2009— has finally completed their 300-page report An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia: Reform in a Changing Landscape. On June 3, 2015, the Council of the District of Columbia’s Committee on Education held a public round table to discuss the results.
Surprise! Despite more than eight years of mayoral control, DC’s public schools still have ridiculously low test scores and high dropout rates. The Report states:
“while there have been some improvements in the public schools of the District of Columbia since a 2007 reform law, significant disparities remain in learning opportunities and academic progress across student groups and the city’s wards.”
Retired math teacher and stalwart DCPS advocate Guy Brandenburg is not impressed with the results. According to Brandenburg:
“if you care anything about reducing the gaps between achievement levels of white students and those of color, the poor, special ed students, and English language learners (i.e. immigrants), then mayoral control has been a spectacular failure.”
Brandenburg breaks down the numbers in his blog post A Quick Look at the National Academy Report on Mayoral Control of Schools of Washington, DC: “The gaps between the pass rates on the DC-CAS standardized tests of those groups under mayoral control or the Public Education Reform Amendment Act are enormous and have essentially remained unchanged since 2007, when the law was implemented, according to the data in this report.
 
Note that the report combines the data for both the DC public schools and charter schools, combined, at all grade levels, in both reading and math. Here are two graphs, made by me from data in the report, which show the lack of change. …. HIGH NUMBERS ARE BAD because they show large gaps in proficiency rates. Low numbers are good. Notice that there has been almost no change since mayoral control; some lines go up a tiny bit, some go down a bit, others waver back and forth a bit. Not a success story.”
To rectify the problem, Chancellor Rhee implemented the DCPS Effectiveness Assessment System for School-Based Personnel otherwise known as IMPACT. Believing that DCPS’ failures rested largely with the teachers, Rhee implemented IMPACT in order to weed out the good from the bad. Once done, she would shuffle the deck and place “highly effective” teachers at more difficult schools. But as Brandenburg points out, “every single teacher remaining in DCPS has been repeatedly measured as effective or better. Yet the ratings for teachers at schools with high poverty rates remains much lower than those at schools with low poverty rates … these low-ranked teachers are not holdovers from the ‘bad old days’ – they are either brand-new hires or have been repeatedly measured as good or excellent under IMPACT.”
The report makes several recommendations, including that the city take a more coordinated approach to monitoring learning conditions in schools, such as school environment, discipline, and academic support, to better understand what progress is being made for students.
Mary Filardo executive director of the 21st Century School Fund was interviewed on the radio program, the Education Town Hall. No doubt, she has some recommendations of her own to share. The episode can be found at this page – http://educationtownhall.org/2015/06/10/mayoral-control/. You must scroll down a little to find it.
By Grassroots DC, on March 23rd, 2015 Cross-Posted from GFBrandenburg’s Blog
The results may surprise you.
To answer this question, I used some recent data. I just found out that the DC City Council has begun requiring that schools enumerate the number of students who are officially At-Risk. They define this as students who are
“homeless, in the District’s foster care system, qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or high school students that are one year older, or more, than the expected age for the grade in which the students are enrolled.” (That last group is high school students who have been held back at least one time at some point in their school career.)
So, it’s a simple (but tedious) affair for me to plot the percentage of such at risk students, at each of the roughly 200 publicly-funded schools in Washington, DC, versus the average percentage of students who were proficient or advanced in math and reading on the 2014 DC-CAS.
I was rather shocked by the results. Here are my main conclusions:
1. For almost all of the schools, to get a rough idea of the percent of students passing the DC-CAS, simply subtract 90% minus the number of students ‘At-Risk’. The correlation is very, very strong.
2. There are only THREE DC charter schools with 70% or more of their students At-Risk, whereas there are THIRTY-ONE such regular public schools. So much for the idea that the charter schools would do a better job of educating the hardest-to-reach students (the homeless, those on food stamps, those who have already failed one or more grades, etc).
3. The only schools that have more than 90% of their students ‘passing’ the DC-CAS standardized tests remain, to this day, the small handful of schools in relatively-affluent upper Northwest DC with relatively high percentages of white and Asian students..(Unless you include Sharpe Health school, where students who cannot feed or dress themselves or hold a pencil are somehow deemed ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ by methods I can only guess at…)
4. As I’ve indicated before, it appears that for the most part, DC’s charter schools are mostly enrolling smaller percentages of At-Risk, high-poverty students but higher fractions of the students in the middle of the wealth/family-cohesion spectrum than the regular DC public schools. There are a few exceptions among the charter schools: BASIS, Yu Ying, Washington Latin and a few others are succeeding in attracting families and students at the high end of the socio-economic and academic scales.
5. It looks like we are now turning into a tripartite school system: one for affluent and well-educated familes (relatively high fractions of whites and Asians; mostly but not all in regular Ward 3 public schools); one for those in the middle (mostly blacks and hispanics, many enrolled in charter schools), and one for those at the seriously low end of the socio-economic spectrum, overwhelmingly African-American, largely At Risk, and mostly in highly-segregated regular public schools.
Very, very sad.
Here is the graph that sums it all up. Click on it to see a larger version.
In blue we have the regular public schools of Washington DC for which I have DC-CAS data for 2014, from grades 3 through 8 and grade 10. In red we have the privately-run but publicly-funded charter schools. Along the horizontal axis, we have the percentage of students who are officially At Risk as defined by the DC CIty Council. Along the vertical axis, we have the average percentage of students who scored ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ in math and reading on the DC-CAS at those schools. The green line is the line of best fit as calculated by Excel. Notice that the data points pretty much follow that green line, slanting down and to the right.
To nobody’s surprise, at both the charter and regular public schools, on the whole, the greater the percentage of students at a school who are At Risk, the smaller the percentage of students who ‘pass’ the DC-CAS standardized tests.
The colors do help us see that at the far right-hand end of the graph, there are lots of blue dots and only a small number of red ones. This means that the vast majority of schools with high percentages of At Risk students are regular DC public schools. You could interpret that to mean that parents in more stable families in those neighborhoods are fleeing from what they see as the bad influence of potential classmates who are extremely poor, homeless, have already repeated a grade, and so on, and are flocking to charter schools who have the freedom to expel or ‘counsel out’ such students and to impose a relatively strict behavior code that the DC Council forbids the regular public schools from using. (Their latest initiative is to forbit ALL out-of-school suspensions, no matter what…)
Dots that are above the slanted green line supposedly represent schools that are doing a better job at teaching to the tests than would be predicted by the At-Risk status alone. Dots below the line are doing a worse job than would be predicted. Notice that there are dots of both colors both above and below the line.
=====
I wish to thank the indefatigable Mary Levy for collecting and passing on this data. You can find the original data source at the OSSE website, but I’ve saved the larger table (all 2008-2014 DC-CAS data) on Google Drive at this link. I took the average of the percentage of students ‘passing’ the DC-CAS in math and in reading as the proficiency rate. The note on the at-risk data table reads as follows:
| Data Source: SY2013-14 student-level data from OSSE. The list includes DCPS traditional, DCPS citywide specialized, DCPS selective schools, and public charter schools, but excludes any DCPS or public charter adult education or alternative school. The definition of at risk students includes students who are homeless, in the District’s foster care system, qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or high school students that are one year older, or more, than the expected age for the grade in which the students are enrolled. |
By Guest Contributor, on February 9th, 2015 Cross-Posted from Hyacinth’s Place
Written by Vanessa Wellbery
 Here we go again – budget season!
Every year, District government lays out a plan for how much money it will take to meet our residents’ diverse needs—and keep the city running. It’s not just how much money, but where the money should go. Everything under the sun is in the budget, from street repairs to the police force to school lunches.
I say budget season because the whole process will go on for a number of months. Don’t be intimidated! It’s going to be fun!
Here are some of the important parts of the process:
Agency oversight hearings. Yesterday marked the start of agency oversight hearings. Between February and March, City Council committees will get to ask D.C. government agencies questions about their programs and how they use their funds. These hearings are one tool Councilmembers use to make decisions about what funding streams are effective and whether they are serving their purpose.
The Mayor’s budget proposal. While the council is holding oversight hearings, the Mayor will be preparing her own budget proposal, which she will release on April 2. Every year the Mayor sends the City Council a budget proposal outlining how she’d like to see all the services and programs the city provides funded. Mayor Bowser has indicated she is committed to putting resources behind fighting homelessness, and her budget proposal will send a clear message on whether she intends to stand by that commitment. One way to keep reminding her that it matters to us is by attending one or more of her three budget engagement forums this month.
Public hearings. Members of the City Council have another way of gathering information—public hearings. Through April and May, public hearings will be an opportunity for the citizens of D.C. to weigh in on the budget. By testifying, organizations and individuals can illustrate how budget decisions have a real impact on Washingtonians’ lives. As just one example, Hyacinth’s Place testified before the Committee on Housing and Economic Development last year about the Housing Production Trust Fund, one funding stream that makes permanent supportive housing programs like ours possible.
Mark-ups. Now that the committees have gathered information from government agencies, reviewed Mayor’s budget priorities, and heard input from real Washingtonians, they hold mark-ups, where they will craft the actual budget and vote to approve it. These mark-ups also take a number of weeks! But once the council has agreed on and passed a full budget in the form of a bill, they send it to the Mayor, who also has to approve it.
Hyacinth’s Place has hit the ground running, and we’ll be active throughout budget season. Like last year, we’ll advocate for the Housing Production Trust Fund and the Local Rent Supplement Program. We’ll also lend our support to our diverse partners who advocate for the many other programs that fight poverty in the District.
Here are some ways you can be involved.
– Check out the Fair Budget Coalition’s (FBC) budget priorities. Hyacinth’s Place worked with FBC to craft this comprehensive list of funding recommendations. It’s a great primer for all the important programs we’ll be fighting for this budget season.
– Tweet using the FBC’s hashtag #WeAreALLdc. You can also retweet us!
– Like us on Facebook for an easy way to get updates and see our latest blog posts.
– Come to the Mayor’s budget engagement forums over the next month. Email Vanessa@hyacinths.org if you’d like to attend.
– Attend council hearings or, if you can’t be there in person, stream them online.
– Testify at the public hearings! We’ll let you know when the time to sign up comes closer.
– Check out these other great resources: the Fair Budget Coalition, the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute
It’s going to be a long haul, but we’re excited to be a part of the effort to make D.C. a safe and healthy place for all its residents to thrive!
By Grassroots DC, on October 23rd, 2014 Cross-Posted from Sociology in My Neighborhood: DC Ward Six
Written by Johanna Bockman
As many of you know, there is much discussion about the future of the DC General homeless shelter. This morning, the Post’s Petula Dvorak stated, “Developers are salivating over D.C. General. It’s a huge property with plenty of potential. So there’s no question that it will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about.” Mayor Gray is rightly calling to rehouse those at the DC General shelter before closing it, but his plan is based on an unfounded belief that private apartment owners will now come forward and house the hundreds of families at DC General at rents far below market rates. Thus, in the interests of “salivating” developers, hundreds of homeless people are going to be displaced again? DC General is District property and could be renovated, maybe even employing homeless or near-homeless workers, if the District wanted to do so. However, developers and homeowners in the area are working hard for the “revitalization” of the DC General area, which they see as requiring the removal of their homeless neighbors. The deterioration of DC General is required as proof of the need for “revitalization.”
A few weeks ago, I went to a great panel discussion, “Racism in the New DC,” organized by Empower DC, which spoke to these issues from a very refreshing perspective. The speakers were three public housing residents working to maintain public housing and public schools in DC (Marlece Turner, D. Bell, and Shannon Smith), as well as Dr. Sabiyha Prince (the author of African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, DC), Ron Hampton (a former police officer and activist against police abuse), and Post columnist Courtland Milloy.
The main takeaway from the panel discussion was that institutional racism (not individual racist people but a racist system) works based on the idea that brown and black people do not deserve as good things as white people do. Improvements in the city are made for white people both because they often have more money and also because they are seen as deserving better things, like better schools and better services.
I asked the panel about a recent Post article that had said that, “Almost 10 years after the District vowed to assure low-income residents in four areas that they wouldn’t be displaced if their neighborhoods were revitalized,” the District decided that this was “overly optimistic.” The District was considering a policy change to “no longer guarantee that residents have a right to stay in their neighborhoods, and the promise that existing public housing won’t be demolished until a new building is constructed to replace it would be abandoned.” Empower DC and others have been warning people about these false promises for some time.
So, I asked the panel, is this a new policy? or is this a statement of what the District was already doing? Courtland Milloy immediately said, “They do what they can get away with.” He explained that, when District officials made these promises, they had to to make their redevelopment plans and the destruction of public housing palatable. Earlier, Milloy had stated that we need to acknowledge institutional racism and that these “revitalization” policies are in the interest of property owners and not in the interests of the homeless and other poor DC residents.
How can we change the situation in which “They do what they can get away with”? As a start, we might recognize that the journalist’s statement “So there’s no question that it [DC General] will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about” is not a statement of fact but rather a statement supported by those who are interested in this outcome and “can get away with” it. It is a political statement in the battle over space in the District. The next step would be to support a range of policies, including permanent public housing and permanent affordable housing in the District.
|
Comments are closed 
