Tag: DC

A Public Charter School Is Trying to Model Itself After A Private School: Is That A Good Thing?

Posted on | by Sam

Yesterday, Senator Lamar Alexander stuck his foot in it when he suggested that not all charter schools are, in the end, public.

“There are some private charter schools, are there not?” Alexander said at a Brookings Institution event about school choice.

In fact, charter schools are publicly funded, privately run entities, although the extent to which they err on the public or private side of the equation has become grist for an increasingly contentious public debate about the future of American public education.

That debate matters greatly: after all, charter schools exist to inject more creativity and autonomy into perhaps our most sacred public trust: our public schools. Yet there’s also another side of the debate that is much less contentious, and much less talked about – the extent to which public charter schools can learn from, and then export, some of the best ideas that undergird our nation’s most outstanding, innovative private schools.

It was this impulse that led Marlene Magrino and Emily Bloomfield, the founding principal and executive director of Monument Academy, a not-yet-opened new charter school in Washington, D.C., to spend a few days in the bucolic Pennsylvania countryside late last fall.

Magrino’s and Bloomfield’s school is designed to be a residential boarding school for children who have experienced stress and trauma – especially young people who are either in foster care or in contact with the child welfare system. As a start-up school, they have no students, no staff, and, until last month, no building. What they do have is a well-thought-out idea about how to provide the requisite supports and services that can help their targeted student population learn and grow. And so they were in Pennsylvania to observe the inner workings of the Milton Hershey School, a private boarding school that works with children with acute financial and/or social needs, a school with more than a century of history, nearly 2,000 students, and an endowment of nearly six billion dollars – making it one of the wealthiest schools in the world.

At first blush, such a visit could quickly feel like a fool’s errand – or an inadvertent lesson in discouragement. When you have nothing, and you’re trying to make something, does it help or hurt to see an example of someone else that has everything?

But Bloomfield and Magrino didn’t spend their time traversing Hershey’s lush campus and endless resources feeling overwhelmed; they spent it taking notes on what design principles could most easily be borrowed in order to improve their nascent, public project.

“I started thinking about this school after getting involved in trying to close the achievement gap,” Bloomfield explained. “What I saw was lots of charters that were doing good work – but there were still all these kids who were falling through the cracks. And a lot of those children were either homeless or in the foster care system.

“That led me to wonder, how might we create a public school that could give those kids the sort of round-the-clock treatment and support they needed to become successful? And that question led us here.”

Magrino, fresh from a tour of the school’s expansive auditorium, agreed. “This hall will probably be the size of our entire school,” she said. “But being here is helping me think about how to maximize the spaces that we will have – and how to make do with less in order to provide our kids with as many opportunities as possible.

“This school has a dance studio; will we have a dance studio? No. But setting up electives like Tap Dancing aren’t expensive. Can we sponsor a band? Probably not. But we can probably afford to establish a choir. We can match the people, and we can match the practices, even if we can’t match the money. It’s thinking about what’s most important, and then figuring out how to make that work on our scale and with our resources. So it doesn’t make me wish for things we don’t have. It makes me think about how we can choose wisely about where we’re putting our resources.”

Monument will open its doors for the first time in August 2015, with an inaugural class of just forty students. Its ability to translate the essence of a model like Hershey, and to make it available to increasing numbers of underserved young people, remains to be seen. But its willingness to try is precisely the sort of bet the charter experiment is designed to incentivize people into making.

So let’s keep guarding against the proliferation of for-profit entities in the charter space, and insisting on financial transparency, and demanding that charters and districts find ways to work collaboratively. And let’s start seeing how well some of our most celebrated models of private education can be transported into our most sacredly held public spaces.

In the end, having some public charter schools with the right amount of private in them might actually be a good thing.

Is it time for schools to rethink, well, time?

Posted on | by Sam

On a recent weekday morning in Washington D.C., several hundred teenagers hurriedly made their way through their high school’s hallways in a frantic effort to get to class on time.

I know – nothing new there. Except that in this particular school, the hallways had ubiquitous electronic clocks that measured time in bright red numerals down to the second, and these particular students had just three minutes to move from one class to another. “They had five minutes last year,” principal Caroline Hill told me, in between passionate exhortations for her students to keep moving. “And it was a complete waste of time.”

Admittedly, Hill – the founding principal of the E.L. Haynes Charter High School – is a little time-obsessed. That’s because she’s also obsessed with making sure that the most timeless experience in American public life – the school day – jettison its anachronistic habits and enter the modern age. “We can’t transform school,” she continued, “until we transform the way we think about time and its relationship to learning.”

Ostensibly, Hill’s school is as good a place as any to try to bring about such a mindshift. One of D.C.’s most sought after public options, the Haynes high school building reflects a mixture of traditional and innovative roots. Formerly a neighborhood public school until it was closed in 2008, Haynes secured the right to the building a year later, in 2009, and launched an ambitious renovation plan soon after. The end result is a $25 million, space capsule-style addition to the original building – and more than 46,000 additional square feet. The main entrance opens onto a sun-filled atrium that feels more like a university student center than a high school. And although the pace of the day still feels a lot like the high school you and your parents (and your grandparents) probably attended – with classes in fifty-minute increments, spread across a seven-hour day – what happens during those classes feels a lot different. That’s because E.L. Haynes is determined to rethink the two most important parts of the high school experience: ninth grade, and the way students start; and twelfth grade, and the way they finish. “And what we’re learning,” Hill told me, “is that in order for those experiences to be meaningfully different, adults and young people first need to completely rethink what it means to be a teacher or a student.”

Hill’s interest in reimagining the entry and exit points for her students was piqued shortly after the school welcomed its first group of ninth graders. “We had assumed that all of our high school kids would come directly from our lower school,” she explained, “but three-fourths of them were coming from other schools across the city, which meant the skill-levels and expectations each student had about what school was about were all over the map. Meanwhile, our ninth grade was structured as this typical one-size-fits-all experience, regardless of where the kids were at individually.”

Hill and her faculty quickly decided that if they wanted to ensure that all students were ready for life after high school, they had to get serious about closing those gaps. “And it’s really hard to create a more personalized high school experience when you have constraints on time and talent, and all these pieces that say you have to do ‘school’ a certain way.”

In particular, Hill means a timeworn way of thinking about school in which, simply put, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. Typically, American schools are structured this way, such that if a student doesn’t master the material presented in the allocated time, he or she fails the unit, the class marches on, and whatever skills or information were supposed to be acquired simply get left behind. Sound familiar?

But Haynes and a growing number of other schools around the country are trying to flip the script by making learning the constant, and time the variable. “If we’re not willing to have a revolving door on our talent and our students, then something’s going to have to change in the way we do ‘school,’” she said. “Why not, on the first day, give students everything they need to succeed, as opposed to this lesson today, and that book tomorrow. Instead, say these are the books we’re going to read this year. Here. Have them. These are the lessons and models we’re going to do in math. Here. Have them. And then spend the rest of your time tending to individual needs and letting everyone proceed at their own pace.”

Of course, that sort of culture shift is easier said than done. American schools have conferred degrees based on Andrew Carnegie’s century-old notion of the “Carnegie Unit” – aka the credit hour – for generations. This is especially ironic since the Carnegie Unit was never supposed to be a measure of learning; instead, its original purpose was simply to measure how much teachers were working, as a way to differentiate high school from college – and as a method for determining teacher pensions. If learning is to replace time as the constant, however, our methods for evaluating each individual’s learning must become much more nuanced and precise. And yet once again, time looms large. As Lee Shulman, president emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, puts it: “The reason students fail . . . is not that they’re not smart. It’s that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them.

“Learning should never result in a normal curve,” Shulman argues. “It should result in a kind of ‘J curve’ in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.”

I saw firsthand what this looks like after entering Shane Donovan’s ninth grade physics class. An early adopter of this approach, Donovan received the Citybridge Foundation’s Education Innovation Fellowship, a yearlong program that introduces teachers to promising innovations in personalized learning, as well as the chance to pilot personalized learning models in their schools. While Donovan surfed the room, his students – all but two of who are either designated as special-needs learners, or English-language-learners, or both – worked in small clusters based on whichever standard in the curriculum they were working on.

Occasionally, Donovan would address the entire room, but it was only to remind them to monitor their own needs. “If you’re not done with Standard Seven by the end of the period,” he bellowed at one point, “you have homework. If it’s just a matter of time, finish it on your own. But if you’re stuck, come find me so you can get yourself unstuck.”

Donovan is bouncy and bound, with glasses, a lanyard around his neck, and rolled-up sleeves. After the period ends, I asked him what it takes to run a class this way. “I spent the summer making screencasts of all the traditional lectures I would have to give this year,” he said, “but the hardest part has been learning to let go so I can let the kids do, without the typical minute-to-minute feedback.

“For me,” he continued, “the important question was not how to make school self-paced; it was how to stop getting crappy projects that didn’t show depth of understanding. How can we shift what we do as adults so that if kids are doing assessments, they’re doing them well?”

Since making that shift, Donovan says something surprising emerged: a much clearer demonstration of high-impact life skills that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with physics – skills like learning how to organize your time, keep track of your own progress, and get help when you need it, but not before. “I’ve come to believe that the most important thing happening here isn’t the physics; it’s them understanding how to correct their own mistakes. We still have kids who are always pressing the ejector seat – ‘I need a teacher! I need a teacher!’ – but it’s much easier now to see who got it and who didn’t, and who knows how to organize their time, and who doesn’t.”

That transparency is key for the school’s plans to reimagine twelfth grade as well. “We need to teach our students how to work with independent time,” Hill explained.  “If they’re flailing with us, that’s a gift, because it means we still have some time to teach them how to manage their time before they leave us and have to do it on their own. It’s like peeling back an extra layer of the onion.”

Donovan agrees, and is surprised by how much it’s changed the way he thinks about teaching. “In a way, I don’t really care how much physics they learn,” he admitted. “I want them to learn how to correct their own mistakes. That can make it harder – to see kids struggle – but if our boys don’t graduate, we know what the statistics tell us will await them. So helping them learn how to struggle and become more self-aware matters much more than, say, Standard Twelve in the ninth grade Physics curriculum.

“To teach this way is definitely messy and weird,” Donovan said while welcoming his next group of students into class. “And I’m definitely never going back.”

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

This is what a community conversation about school reform looks like

Posted on | by Sam

Now that my new book is out, I’m doing a series of public talks around the country to explore core issues of choice, reform, and community.

My first event was at the legendary DC bookstore, Politics & Prose, and they videotaped the conversation, which featured everything from high-stakes testing to E.D. Hirsch to a quick crowdsourcing of the core characteristics of the ideal graduate.

See for yourself, and let me know if it was helpful.

Something’s Happening Here . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Something’s Happening Here . . .

In the span of a few weeks, all of DC seems to be abuzz with the prospect that our elected officials may actually try to ensure greater racial and socioeconomic equity in the city’s public schools — apple carts be damned.

First, there was the Op-Ed two colleagues and I published in the Washington Post, calling for the adoption of controlled-choice policies as part of the city’s current effort to reconsider neighborhood school boundary lines.

The next day, the Department of Education released new guidelines that would allow charter schools to employ weighted lotteries that gave preference to disadvantaged student populations.

Meanwhile, the latest edition of Washington City Paper features a cover story about Roosevelt High School that places the issue of integration and school boundaries squarely in context, by way of a crumbling beauty of a school building that is currently under renovation — and seriously under-enrolled. And listerves like this one are burning up with a mixture of interest, anxiety and vitriol at the idea of such a dramatic departure from the norm (does someone really think I should be tarred and feathered?).

What do you think? Is integration worthy of being prioritized as a policy goal in a city like Washington, DC? If cities have a responsibility to ensure greater equity in their public schools, are there other, better ways to do so? And, in the end, is there any way to strike the right balance between honoring people’s individual choices against a community’s shared sense of values and responsibilities?

Looking forward to hearing people’s ideas and concerns.

Turning School Chance Into School Choice

Posted on | by Sam

There are a lot of smart people in Washington, D.C., and one of them is Evelyn Boyd Simmons.

A longtime D.C. resident, an effective parental advocate, and a firm believer in the unmatched promise of public education, Evelyn has a way of cutting to the quick on complicated, contentious issues. And so it was when in a recent conversation, she summarized the state of affairs in American public education with a clever turn of phrase.

“What people like to call school choice,” she said flatly, “is nothing more than clever marketing. What folks really have is school chance.”

I’d never heard it described that way, and she’s right. In cities like ours, where an increasing number of families are opting into the chaotic dance of the charter school waiting lists – or trying their hand at an out-of-boundary admission to a sought-after neighborhood school – what we like to celebrate as an enlightened era of self-determination is in fact little more than a citywide game of craps.

Which begs the question: when it comes to something as important as a city’s public schools, can’t we do better than hoping enough people come up “Boxcars?”

I believe we can, which is why my colleagues Mike Petrilli, Rick Kahlenberg and I have urged the city to adopt policies that can transform a system of chance into a city of choice.

To do that, we need to eliminate the historic notion that each family has a property right to their neighborhood school, while at the same time guaranteeing admission to a high-quality public school that is within a reasonable proximity. Let people rank the schools closest to their home, and build a system that balances parental preferences with a commitment to evenly distribute children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. What we’ve proposed is only a first step – it does not address, for example, the areas of the city that remain largely segregated – but we believe it’s a way to begin building more racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. And, significantly, it’s an idea that has been tested, and proven effective, in many cities across the country.

It’s also, needless to say, an idea that raises complicated issues of race, class and privilege, and already our proposals have sparked a number of heated responses, accusations, and dismissals. This, to me, reinforces why it’s a conversation worth having. Indeed, it’s the conversation Thurgood Marshall tried to have with us forty years ago – and no, I don’t mean Brown v Board of Education.

The case was San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the year was 1973, and the issue was whether Texas’s method of funding its schools (via property taxes) constituted a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Marshall and three of his colleagues on the Court believed that it was, meaning we came that close to overturning our country’s historic (and historically inequitable) way of funding public schools.

Think about that for a second.

What strikes me most, however, is what the five Justices in the majority said. “Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state,” they wrote – and even though the way we fund schools in America “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust” – the promise of a more equitable system of schools “is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.” If it were, the majority conceded, “virtually every State will not pass muster.”

To Marshall, that was precisely the point: something as vital as a high-quality public education for every child should not be left to chance. And while there’s nothing that can be done about the Court’s decision in 1973, there’s plenty that can be done in cities like Washington, D.C., where rapid changes in schooling and geographic diversity are making possible some new ways of thinking about how best to ensure that every child has the same opportunity to receive a high-quality public education.

History has shown that when we let the goal of school quality be determined by the invisible hand of the market, our schools do not regress to the (positive) mean: they bunch at the poles. School choice cannot, therefore, be left to chance; it will require simple sorting structures that are grounded in our founding values as a nation – liberty and equality – and that respond to the ever-present challenge that is as old as the country itself: E Pluribus unum—out of many, one.

Boxcars!

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Should Integration Be a Goal of DC Public Schools?

Posted on | by Sam

From 2000 to 2010, the white share of the District of Columbia’s population grew from 30.8 percent to38 percent . And from 2000 to 2012, the median household income in the city rose 23.3 percent while the nation saw a 6.6?percent decline, adjusted for inflation. This rapid gentrification provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create racially and socioeconomically integrated public schools. The D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, which is redrawing school boundary lines and feeder patterns, should seize this opportunity.

Middle-class families have moved into neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights and Petworth in large numbers. And many of these families are staying in the District even after their kids are old enough to attend school.

Meanwhile, more parents in D.C. neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park are sending their kids to public schools, resulting in fewer spots for “out of boundary” students in the most sought-after neighborhood schools such as Lafayette, Murch and Eaton elementary schools or Deal Middle School.

As a result, more-affluent parents in the transitioning neighborhoods — squeezed out of schools west of the park and unable to afford private schools — are taking a shot at either the elementary school down the street or a diverse charter school nearby. In several cases, this has been an orchestrated effort, organized via community meetings or e-mail discussion groups. The trend is particularly pronounced in both district and charter preschool programs, resulting in class rolls that are much more diverse than those in the upper grades.

If you believe that the overall value of a community is enhanced when it can support high-quality, integrated schools, these shifts mark a significant development for the city. There are plenty of reasons to cheer school integration beyond promoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful dream of creating a multiracial “beloved community.” Evidence shows that poor and rich kids benefit when they attend integrated schools. Indeed, research finds that students of all backgrounds experience civic, social and cognitive benefits from learning in diverse settings — benefits that are increasingly important as students prepare to enter an economy that values critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.

But these changes are not without their challenges. At some D.C. elementary schools, rather than settling into a healthy racial and socioeconomic balance, student populations are flipping from one extreme to the other, with fourth-grade classes dominated by minorities and preschool classes that are mostly white.

At these rapidly changing schools, mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class families are pushing out poor or working-class “out of boundary” minority families. Many of these middle-class parents want their schools to remain diverse, and lower-income families want to be a part of these successful schools. Yet both are powerless to keep this Big Flip from happening.

Even some charter schools — which don’t have “in boundary” families — may face kindred challenges as they gain popularity among more affluent families. Because charter schools in the District generally are required to select students via a blind (unweighted) lottery, the more affluent parents who apply, the more who are likely to get in.

We can do better. Here’s how:

The first strategy we propose is to create controlled-choice zones in strategic parts of the city (namely, Capitol Hill, Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Dupont/Logan Circle and Petworth). In these neighborhoods, school attendance zones would eventually go away, as they have in a number of other districts across the country that use the controlled-choice model. Parents would express preferences among a cluster of schools, and an algorithm would make matches by balancing personal preferences with the shared civic goal of maximizing socioeconomic integration. Ideally, this list of options would include both district schools and public charter schools. Neighborhood schools in these zones that are disproportionately low-income would be reformed as magnet schools with attractive educational programs and themes to appeal to more middle-income families. Because all of the school options would be in the general neighborhood, no one would be forced to trek across town.

The second strategy we propose is to allow public charter schools and magnet schools to use weighted lotteries to create or maintain socioeconomic diversity. With a weighted lottery, charter schools could ensure that their proportion of poor students served never drops below 50 percent, even if a large number of middle-class families enters the lottery.

The D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment has the opportunity to shape school enrollment patterns in the city in this pivotal time of demographic change. We encourage the committee to include policies that preserve and promote socioeconomically integrated options for families in their recommended strategies and guidelines for student assignment and school choice.

Sam Chaltain is a D.C. educational consultant. Richard Kahlenberg is senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Michael J. Petrilli is executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

DC’s Plan to Assess Early Childhood Programs: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

Posted on | by Sam

In case you missed it, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) of DC has proposed a common framework for assessing the quality of all preschool and lower elementary programs. The original proposal sparked arguments for and against the plan; led to a petition campaign of protest; and anchored a lively hourlong discussion on public radio. Lots of people wrote the board to share their own ideas and feedback, and, earlier this week, the Board unanimously approved a revised policy.

What did the PCSB get right, and where is its plan still lacking? First, here’s what they proposed (with all changes highlighted in yellow):

 

 

To evaluate these changes, I reviewed the modifications against my three central design principles of a good assessment framework.

  1. Measure the Essential Skills: On the positive side, any school that opts to measure social-emotional growth will be held to roughly equal percentages of importance (14% v. 12% in preschool, and 25% v. 20% in lower elementary). Not what I would do, but I can live with it. On the negative side, SEL measures are still not required, and the past twelve years or so of education policy would suggest that, despite one’s wishes to the contrary, a school that is only required to do A is less likely to do B, C or D with the same degree of intensity. Will a majority of schools opt in to the SEL framework? Time will tell, but I’m skeptical. I do think, however, that the addition of a mission-specific goal provides another way for schools to elevate an essential skill, such as creativity. In sum, a mixed bag.
  2. Default to the Highest Common Denominator: As I wrote previously, “One of the biggest problems with the PCSB’s framework is that even though all schools would be held accountable to the same categories, not all schools would be using the same tools to assess their progress.” The danger of this was pointed out to me by the founder of a prominent charter school in DC, who cautioned that any school that chooses a less challenging assessment in, say, math will be more likely to score higher than a school that chooses a more challenging one. “This,” she says, “creates an incentive for schools to choose less challenging assessments which may provide less actionable/useful data for teachers to use in the classroom, which is what the real point of assessment is.” As far as I can tell, this design flaw is unaddressed by the revisions. That’s a big problem, and one the PCSB will need to get right in the coming year.
  3. Identify the other elements of a healthy school culture: This is where the original proposal was closest to the endgoal, and that’s still true here. Its metric for evaluating teachers has three separate components — emotional support, instructional support, and classroom organization — and its attention to attendance and re-enrollment make sense. Here, too, the addition of a mission-specific goal, depending on what schools choose, could apply to this category (measuring school climate, for example).

Overall, then, I think the PCSB heeded much of what it heard from the public, and its final proposal still needs some small but significant tweaks. What do YOU think?

How Should We Evaluate Our Preschools?

Posted on | by Sam

Imagine, for a second, that you are in charge of more than $600 million in taxpayer money. You live in a city that has made deep investments in early education, and that aspires to provide universal preschool by 2014. You have a thriving network of public charter schools, and you want to help parents make more informed choices about where they send their children.

What would you do?

Continue reading . . .

The PCSB Responds

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The PCSB Responds

As the deadline for public comment on the PCSB’s proposed accountability framework for early childhood programs nears (August 28) — and as public reactions to the proposal intensify — PCSB’s executive director, Scott Pearson, published a formal reply to the change.org petition that is asking for greater balance in how schools are evaluated. Here’s Scott’s response:

I appreciate your sharing your concern about assessments in early childhood testing.

It’s important to note that the proposed early childhood PMF was developed in close collaboration with charter school leaders who broadly support this proposal.

Among most important features of the PMF was to incorporate the very assessments that these schools are already giving to students, and that have been used for years for school accountability purposes. Schools may choose from a menu of over two dozen assessments – a menu that includes virtually all of the assessments already used by our schools. These bear little resemblance to “fill in the bubble” tests. They are administered one-on-one, by teachers. They are authentic and designed to be developmentally appropriate and to feel low-stakes for the child.

Let me repeat. All of our schools already use these assessments for accountability purposes. The Early Childhood PMF does not impose new tests. It creates a framework for comparing the results at one school using one test with the results at another school using a different test.

Indeed, far from imposing new assessments, the Early Childhood PMF restricts the use of these assessments. For example many schools currently evaluate their youngest students for literacy and numeracy proficiency. The Early Childhood PMF now looks only at whether these students abilities have improved, not at the absolute proficiency levels of students.

PCSB has a vital role to ensure that charter schools, which are public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars, are high quality. We seek to play this role in a way that preserves the maximum autonomy and flexibility for school leaders to run their schools as they see fit. While every school is different, virtually all agree that the vast number of students who enter the third grade unable to read or perform basic math is a crisis in our city and that a basic function of a school is to prepare students to be literate and numerate.

The core bargain of charter schools is greater autonomy in exchange for greater accountability. This means there will inevitably be high stakes reviews of charter schools. Almost all charter schools prefer to be left alone to develop their own educational programs. High stakes reviews focusing on *how* they run their schools run counter to the philosophy of most of our school leaders. They want the freedom to decide the “how” and to be judged on the outcomes.

While it would be hard to find an educator who did not value the social and emotional development of children, most would also agree that valid assessments of social and emotional progress are not yet well-established. For this reason many school leaders are reluctant to have significant portions of an evaluation of their school be based on an assessment of their students’ social and emotional development. This concern influenced the work the task force developing the Early Childhood PMF.

We take the public comment phase of the process very seriously. The views of those who signed this petition, along with those who submitted comments directly to me and to PCSB, will be taken into account. Beyond this, we recognize that no system of accountability is perfect. For this reason, the committee of schools who designed the Early Childhood PMF will continue to meet to consider ongoing improvements.

We continue to discuss this issue on our blog, which can be found at www.dcpcsb.org.

Scott Pearson
Executive Director
DC Public Charter School Board

I’m grateful for Scott’s response, though I don’t feel it addresses the central complaint. As I wrote yesterday, “the problem with the PCSB’s proposal has less to do with requiring schools to choose from a common pool of math and reading assessments and more to do with attaching a disproportionate weight (60-80% of the total) to reading and math. This immediately transforms those assessments from diagnostic to accountability tools. It is guaranteed to modify the behavior and strategic planning of the schools. And it perpetuates the shell game of American public education, in which we use partial information to pronounce complete judgment on whether a given reform effort is working or not.”

I don’t see how Scott’s response addresses that central critique. Am I missing something? What do you think needs to be done?

 

Is It The Tests or the Stakes?

Posted on | by Sam

As DC grapples with whether or not to adopt an accountability framework that would assign between 60-80% of a charter preschool’s overall rank to its students’ reading and math scores, it’s worth asking: What’s at the root of the problem here — the tests, or the stakes attached to those tests?

When it comes to the debate over the Early Childhood Framework (which you can access here — just click “Public Hearing” in the left column and then click “Early Childhood PMF”), I would suggest it is overwhelmingly the latter.

Here’s the thing: just about every early childhood program worth its salt is already assessing children in a variety of ways, including, and not limited to, reading and math. Usually, these assessments are administered in a 1-on-1 format, and if a teacher does his or her job skillfully, the child won’t even register that it’s a “test.” So the Public Charter School Board is correct when it says that testing children in these subjects is not new.

What their explanation glosses over is the impact children, educators and parents can expect once these assessments have high-stakes attached to them. Rankings matter to all schools, but they are particularly important to charter schools, which are always in the midst of raising money, searching for a permanent facility, and recruiting families. Here in DC, “Tier 1” status is a gateway to better fundraising, preferential treatment when it comes to facilities, and longer waiting lists.

The problem with the PCSB’s proposal, therefore, has less to do with requiring schools to choose from a common pool of math and reading assessments (indeed, the list boasts more than thirty options to choose from, many of which were submitted by the charters themselves), and more to do with attaching a disproportionate weight to reading and math. This immediately transforms those assessments from diagnostic to accountability tools. It is guaranteed to modify the behavior and strategic planning of the schools. And it perpetuates the shell game of American public education, in which we use partial information to pronounce complete judgment on whether a given reform effort is working or not. (And, more importantly, in which we allow ourselves to assign credit or blame in ways that correspond to a political timetable.)

In reality, as both common sense and research would tell you, it’s not that simple. “True standards of intellect do not lend themselves wholly to quickly collected, precise, standard measurement,” wrote Ted Sizer in his classic book, Horace’s Compromise. “We need to devise clusters of instruments to probe our students’ ability to think resourcefully about important things. Indeed, we need time to reflect deeply on what we mean by ‘think resourcefully’ and what we feel are the most ‘important things.’”

In his 2009 book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz makes a similar point. “Careful testing can give us tremendously valuable information about student achievement that we would otherwise lack,” he says. The question is how well we understand what standardized tests can, and cannot, tell us about American schools. “There is no optimal design,” he asserts. “Rather, designing a testing program is an exercise in trade-offs and compromise – and a judgment about which compromise is best.

Systems that overvalue one set of test scores fail to heed this advice, but they also fail to highlight a sufficiently clear picture of what is actually happening in a school. “Certainly, low scores are a sign that something is amiss,” Koretz says. “But the low scores themselves don’t tell why achievement is low and are usually insufficient to tell us where instruction is good or bad, just as a fever by itself is insufficient to reveal what illness a child has. Disappointing scores can mask good instruction, and high scores can hide problems that need to be addressed.”

So let’s vigorously debate ideas like the PCSB framework, and when we do so, let’s follow the lead of experts like Lydia Carlis, the chief of Research and Innovation for the AppleTree network of preschools. “The ongoing conversation will be so useful to all children if we focus on both/and rather than either/or when discussing teaching and (developmentally appropriate) assessments of academics and SEL in early childhood, ” she says. “The early childhood interventions that have been evaluated longitudinally and shown effective demonstrate that low-income children at risk for school failure need early access to high quality, evidence based academic and social supports. Social emotional skills are both necessary and insufficient for closing the academic achievement gap. Children who begin demonstrating cognitive gaps as early as nine months need skill and concept development on academic content and strategic support for social emotional learning. And clearly, all children will benefit from a high quality, balanced instructional program.

Works for me. PCSB, are you listening?