Tag: DCPS

Across the Country, a New Type of Partnership Between Charters and Districts Emerges  

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I’m hearing a question that drives me crazy: “Are you for or against charter schools?”

There can only be one legitimate answer to that question: It depends.

Are you speaking of the situation in Michigan, in which four out of five charter school operators are for-profit entities? Or the overall tendency for charters to be even more segregated than their public school neighbors? Or the reluctance by some charter leaders to hold themselves to the same standards of transparency and openness as traditional public schools?

If so, thumbs down.

But if you’re talking about places like Baltimore, where all charter school teachers are unionized (and the charters themselves are almost all locally conceived and teacher-led), or if you’re pointing to the growing movement among some charters to intentionally enroll and serve integrated student bodies – by way of the National Coalition of Diverse Charter Schools – the picture takes a very different shape.

And then there’s what’s happening with Summit Basecamp – a new sort of partnership between charters and traditional public schools that may very well offer the best evidence so far of what Al Shanker first called for back in 1988, when he imagined a new kind of school in which teachers could experiment with different ways of reaching students, and then inject that wisdom back throughout the public school system.

That’s what Diane Tavenner has done at Summit Public Schools, a successful network of charter schools in California and Washington that represent the bleeding edge of innovative approaches to personalized learning.

Unlike other models – I’m looking at you, Rocketship – whose efforts to leverage technology seem to be more concerned with creating magic in the balance sheet than in the classroom – Summit Schools have created scores of “playlists” that let students navigate their own pace and path through content knowledge, in order to free up more time for project-based learning, mentoring, and community-based work.

As a result, Summit Schools are besieged with visitors from around the world, all of them eager to see how technology can be used in ways that augment, not replace, the foundational social and emotional bonds between teachers and students.

And yet, as exciting as the attention has been, Tavenner felt it wasn’t going to allow her to fulfill her school’s overarching mission, so she sought out a transformative partnership with Facebook, whose engineers have helped her perfect the digital learning platform that allows Summit’s personalized learning system to function. And then she made that platform available for free, open source, to anyone who thought it would be useful to them.

You read that right. She perfected a product that could be worth millions – perhaps even billions – of dollars. And then she gave it away.

Still, Tavenner and her team realized that merely making the tool open source wasn’t optimal educationally. Surely, there must be schools and communities out there who would benefit from integrating the platform into their schools as a cohort, and continually learning from one another about how to get better at shifting to a different way of thinking about school – one that requires the kids, not their teachers, to be the hardest workers in the room.

From that idea, the Summit Basecamp project was born – a nascent, growing network of nineteen schools (across ten states) who are working to adapt Summit’s Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, to their own needs and norms.

Two of those schools are located near where I live in Washington, D.C., so I set out to visit both of them – Truesdell Education Campus and Columbia Heights Educational Campus, or CHEC – and see what all the fuss was about.

What I wondered was this: Is it possible that a charter school 3,000 miles away can exert a positive influence on the growth of a neighborhood school just a short walk from my home? Or is the reality of this transcontinental game of Telephone such that most of what makes a school special will get lost in translation somewhere along the way?

***

Truesdell and CHEC offer good test cases for the Basecamp idea, albeit for different reasons.

CHEC is located on a busy corner of one of D.C’s most racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods. Its students, who are overwhelmingly poor, Black and Brown, mulled about in their school uniforms the morning I visited, awaiting the start of the school day, while white-collar professionals passed hurriedly by on their way to the nearby subway.

When you enter the building, you must first pass through metal detectors that are staffed by a uniformed school resource officer. The halls of the school are wide and deep, evoking memories of an archetypal American public school. And while the 6th and 7th graders can still expect a rather traditional school day here – 65-minute classes, one after the other, divided by subject – for the 8th graders, Basecamp has meant the beginning of a very different school experience.

The day begins with individual goal setting – each student must establish daily and weekly learning goals, as well as a long-term aspirational goal (i.e., “to be the first in my family to go to college”) to which their daily decisions are pegged. It includes consistent time with an adult mentor. And it is anchored by personal learning time during which students must self-direct themselves through a series of content-specific playlists; and by group project time, during which kids and teachers can directly engage in more hands-on work together.

“The key,” Tukeva explained to me as we wandered CHEC’s cavernous halls, “is to target the kids who are not ‘buying what we’re selling’ in the old model. We have a lot of kids who are already thriving, but we also have a lot of kids who need different ways to get them engaged.

“Overall, this project represents a pretty intense jump for us. Before we signed up for Basecamp, we weren’t a 1-to-1 school; now, every student has his or her own computer. That’s a big jump. Before Basecamp, we didn’t have an integrated digital platform, so that’s a really big jump, too. We’d also never allocated time before for a mentor to work with each student intensively. So all of these steps are making our approach to personalized teaching and learning more comprehensive – it’s taking the different pieces we’d been working on and making them all more integrated.”

It’s true – it’s a big jump – and yet CHEC has also been piloting new approaches to teaching and learning for years. Consequently, it had already established an internal culture of experimentation. “We’ve been piloting different things for a while now,” she added, “so this doesn’t feel as foreign as it might in a different school. Our entire 8th grade team went out to Summit together this summer, where they worked as a team for two weeks. And so far, our kids are really liking both the technology and the increased levels of freedom.”

In that sense, early returns suggest that for a school like CHEC, which was already well on its way to becoming more student-centered and tech-savvy, a project like Basecamp is an effective accelerator. “We’ve had some small technological glitches,” she added, “and we have a much more bilingual population than Summit, so we have dual language needs they don’t which has forced us to do a lot of translating. But mostly it’s enabled us to go farther faster, because we can take everything that Summit has already done – from their playlists to their insights about how best to use the PLP – and modify it to our own purposes.”

By contrast, at Truesdell, Basecamp provided the impetus to start from scratch. “We’ve had crazy turnover here,” said Adam Zimmerman, a former classroom teacher at Truesdell and the school’s first-ever Director of Operations, Culture & Innovation. “But there’s a group of us that all arrived together about four years ago and feel some real continuity with one another and a desire to build something together. We’re all trying to find ways to keep growing as professionals. We also knew that if we just kept doing what we’d been doing, we weren’t ever going to effectively reach every kid. So we said, let’s bring in something that’s exciting that we can all get behind as a team. Basecamp is a retention tool for our teachers as much as a new learning strategy for our kids.”

I saw evidence of Truesdell’s upstart energy everywhere. One class I visited had been looking at injustice in the U.S. After spending a few weeks exploring topics together – police brutality, wealth inequality, etc. – they were able to choose their own for a culminating project. And as their teacher, Leah Myers, explained to me, “They’re allowed to decide if they want to work alone or in groups. The project is a public awareness campaign – either on social media, or in the local community – which they’re going to have to track the success of and then present a civic action project based on their findings.”

I asked Adam what was most exciting and most challenging about this new way of thinking about school – whereas, for example, organizing student projects had happened at Truesdell before, providing intense mentoring and unleashing kids to be the lead drivers of their own content acquisition had not. “It’s a new set of muscles we’re all trying to develop,” he explained. “Many of the teachers you’re seeing here were rated ‘Highly Effective’ before we ever brought Basecamp into the picture. That’s an important title to have in D.C. So how do you get teachers working towards something totally new and not merely reverting to what has worked best in the past whenever it gets challenging? We’re still figuring that part out.”

To be sure, both campuses still have plenty to figure out. Giving kids more freedom and authority over their own learning sounds great; but if what you’re giving them authority over is still not that interesting to them, there are limits. In one class, for example, I spoke to a group of students who were working on a project around percentages and figuring out how much a product might have been marked up.

“So you guys are using these rubrics all the time now to evaluate yourselves, huh?” I asked them.

“Yeah.”

“Is it better than what you did before, or worse, or do you not really care?”

“We don’t care,” they replied flatly.

Fair enough.

Yet for every exchange like that, there were ones like the kind I had with Diana, Leslie and Dania, three eighth graders who had decided to work together on a campaign about xenophobia.

I asked them what they thought about the new approach to learning. “It’s our choice now if we want to work together or alone,” Diana offered, a slight smile of embarrassment breaking across her face as she spoke. “It doesn’t really feel the same because last year we were used to having the teacher stand up and teach us but now we have this new program so we’re using the computer a lot. It’s hard, but I get to do it at my own pace so I can learn it more better and if I don’t understand it I can go over it again and I don’t get frustrated if other people are ahead of or behind me.”

Leslie nodded her head in agreement. “It just changes the way we interact with the teacher,” she explained in halting English. “Now she don’t stands up there teaching the whole class about migration. Now everybody’s doing different things and so she walks around answering questions. It’s given us more freedom. When a teacher stands up there she sometimes moves too fast and we’re behind. But now we can go at our own pace.”

Before I left, I spoke to another student – a young man named Kyree – who Zimmerman said embodied the potential of what schools like Summit, CHEC and Truesdell were trying to bring about. Kyree had been a Truesdell student, and then left – the result of instability at home – only to return after a rocky, violent tenure at another school. He spoke with a slow deliberateness, his eyes focused both squarely on me and on a distant horizon in which he was actively imagining the possibilities of his own future.

“I have a strain to be perfect at everything I do,” he began, “but sometimes it doesn’t actually come out to be what I want it to be. So I just strive to do more than usual, and do better the next time.

“I like this school better than my last one. At my old school, there wasn’t much learning or motivation to learn. But this school helps me learn faster than usual – I can go beyond the class or if I need to catch up I can catch up. I like that. You can find your own pace. But mostly I like hand work and there’s a lot more of that now.”

I love the way Kyree described what he liked – that there was more “hand work.” And we wonder why so many kids are so bored in school!

Because I get to visit schools all the time, I know how many Kyrees there are out there – young people with heavy burdens, great potential and a set of needs that have not been well met by the traditional classroom approach. I also know how many schools there are that are taking positive steps to support and inspire them more. So while it’s early, and the future is still a little murky, projects like Basecamp suggest to me what’s possible in the future of public education – and what type of standard we should establish for the charter sector.

As Summit founder Diane Tavenner has said, schools like hers – and projects like these – are “fueled by a deep dissatisfaction with the status of even our best schools, but also an extraordinary optimism that we can and will change them. We know that students are capable of so much, and so are our schools.

“Despite our hard work, we are far from realizing our full aspirations: classrooms, schools and systems where every student is joyfully realizing his or her potential. But we are optimistic that there has never been a better moment to harness this potential. We know more than we ever have about how people learn, what motivates them, and what drives success and satisfaction in life and work. We have access to technology that can help students and educators create and pursue knowledge more effectively than ever before, technology that can even bring communities together. And we are beginning to see glimpses of what’s possible when schools embrace the challenge of entirely redesigning the way they meet students’ needs and interests.”

(This article also appeared in Medium.)

Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign

Posted on | by Sam

Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame.

“I had my heart set on being a forensic psychologist,” she told me recently, amidst the busy midday shuffle of downtown Washington, D.C. “Then I felt what it was like to be part of a place that was changing people’s lives. And I decided I wanted to keep being that person.”

Eleven years later, Dixon has become that person for scores of young men and women at the Wheatley Education Campus in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad. In that time, she’d observed that the stereotype of how teachers spend their summer – a.k.a seventy-seven consecutive Saturdays – never corresponded to the reality of her and her colleagues. “Summer is always the time for reflection, for the research you can’t always complete during the year, and for doing the work you have to do to make the next year even better than the last.”

This year, however, Tanesha Dixon is still waiting for her first moment of summer respite. “Every day,” she confessed wearily, “I work all day, go home, eat something, and then work until three in the morning. I feel like I’m building Rome and the road to it, simultaneously.”

Tanesha’s principal at Wheatley, Scott Cartland, knows what she’s talking about. Six years ago, his first summer at the school coincided with the DC government’s decision to install military-like checkpoints throughout Trinidad to try and stop a spate of murders. He remembers well the first school assembly he tried to organize that September. “We couldn’t get the crowd quiet enough to say anything,” he recalled. “Security guards were chasing kids around the aisles, other kids were screaming – it was complete chaos. You realize you’re outnumbered, and the kids don’t know you or trust you. We were in for a long year.”

Since then, with the help of teachers like Dixon, Cartland had helped engineer an impressive culture shift at Wheatley. But even though crucial factors like trust, attendance and student achievement had risen considerably, “it still wasn’t fast enough. Most of our kids don’t have a lot of social supports in their lives, so it’s especially important here that they start to really assume control of their own learning. And dragging a whole class of kids through the same curriculum over an entire school year clearly ain’t the way.”

For educators like Cartland and Dixon, then, the conclusion was clear: summer could no longer be the place to reflect on how to get better in a system that was never going to meet the needs of all their kids. It had to become the laboratory for something radical – a complete redesign of the structure and purpose of schooling. “What we decided,” Cartland told me, “was that the best place to start was by shifting toward a competency-based model of learning, and putting every kid in a position to be able to determine their own pace and progress, all year long.”

Although the phrase hasn’t entered mainstream conversation, “competency education” is on the mind of lots of educators and policymakers. It emerged out of the logic that if you want to make learning more personalized, you can’t continue to assign credit hours to students based on Industrial-era notions like “seat time” or “Carnegie Units.” In response, a growing number of schools and states are starting to organize learning not by credit hours, but by competencies – or the extent to which a student can demonstrably transfer knowledge and skills in and across content areas. In such an environment, each student is allowed to move through a curriculum at his or her own pace, and no one moves on until s/he can demonstrate mastery of the core concepts.

“To do that well,” Cartland explained, “a school like ours has to rethink just about everything – from grades to tests to professional development to the structure of the school day.” And to do that at all, Dixon adds, requires a reorientation that calls into question just about everything that she and her colleagues find most familiar about their chosen profession. “Some days I feel like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future,” she confessed. “I’m in my DeLorean, and it’s the 1950s again, and I’m fighting Biff. But the future is now. We have more people coming out of DC with HIV than we do with four-year degrees. We have to be courageous enough to hold up a mirror and describe what we see. And if we’re being honest, I think we have to conclude that the whole way we do school is wrong. Teaching to the middle is wrong. Moving kids through the same curriculum at the same pace is wrong.

“Educators today have a choice to make: are we willing to be like those early civil rights activists who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or do we want to stand and observe from a safe distance so we can run when the cops come? I understand where the impulse to protect oneself comes from. I feel it, too. But this is what it means to be a teacher today, and we need to be accept the challenge of behaving in some very different ways.”

I saw evidence of Tanesha’s claims recently during a two-day workshop for her school and five others in DC – a mixture of existing neighborhood schools like Wheatley, and new charter schools that haven’t yet opened their doors. Each school had received a grant from the Citybridge Foundation (full disclosure: Citybridge has asked me to write a series of articles about school reform issues in DC) to reimagine its school in ways that make learning more personalized for each student. “The best and worst feature of competency education is that it never looks the same,” explained Rose Colby, a national expert on the subject who kicked off the meeting. “But let’s begin by letting you all share your most pressing questions or wonders.”

Scott Cartland raised his hand first. “At Wheatley, we’re struggling to design the right performance tasks for kids, and we’re wondering how we’re going to be grouping kids and allocating time. This model requires a much more open-ended system, and we’re still working in the old model, which breaks the day into lots of periods but pushes kids through that day in rigid groups.”

“At some point,” Rose replied, “we have to acknowledge that tweaking the old schedule won’t really work. The only way forward is to begin by thinking about what kids need, and then aligning everything to flow from that.”

Every night, late into the night, that’s exactly what Tanesha Dixon is trying to do. “We’ve built systems of curriculum that are basically grade-based and fixed. Starting this fall with our 6th graders, we’re going to try and do the opposite: to lay down the entire curriculum at the start of the year, and let kids move through it at their own pace. But meanwhile the education world is obsessed with standards, and the switch to the Common Core.”

Dixon took a deep breath. “The thing is, standards are not competencies – they don’t rise to an equal weight. Competencies are the transfer; they’re the performance component that bundles lots of standards together into one demonstrable concept. It’s big. It’s right. And I like that at Wheatley we’re not shying away from the challenge – but some days I wonder how we can pull off such a massive shift when so much of the old way of thinking about all this remains in the minds of so many.”

Cartland agrees. “Right now, I feel like everything we’ve done has been one giant sprint to the starting line. The summer has been invaluable. But this fall is when the real work will begin. That’s when we’ll find out if it was all worthwhile.”

(This article originally appeared in 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.

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?

 

What Happened in DC in 2008 – & Does it Still Matter in 2013?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What Happened in DC in 2008 – & Does it Still Matter in 2013?

If a prominent urban school leader told you he couldn’t recall being informed that half his city’s schools may have allowed the gross mistreatment of students to occur, would you believe him? And even if you did, would you still want him in charge of your children?

Now imagine that the leader in question is not just prominent locally, but nationally as well. Imagine that this individual has appeared on the cover of iconic news magazines and been interviewed on Oprah’s iconic couch. And imagine that this person has come to embody a singular approach to determining the effectiveness of schools and teachers – the rationale for which would be challenged if the allegations of mistreatment were ever proven to be true.

Would you want to know if any actual wrongdoing had occurred?

In fact this is not a hypothetical question, but an actual one we can apply to the nation’s capital, and to our nation’s most visible school reformer, Michelle Rhee. It is, therefore, a question fraught with potential implications for how we think about (and assess) modern American education reform. And it’s a question that has been given new life in the wake of PBS reporter John Merrow’s publication of a confidential memo in which an outside consultant suggested that as many as 191 teachers, scattered across nearly half the city’s public schools, may have erased and corrected their students’ answers on the city’s high-stakes standardized test, the DC-CAS, in 2008.

No one in a position of authority to inquire further is doing so – yet.  Both Mayor Vincent Gray and David Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee, say they do not plan to reinvestigate – even though all previous investigations forbade any sort of erasure analysis or an examination of the original answer sheets. Rhee herself, a self-described “data fiend,” stands by her original statement: “I don’t recall receiving a report  . . . regarding erasure data from the DC-CAS.”

The significance of a potentially uninvestigated cheating scandal in Washington extends beyond the personal reputation of Ms. Rhee. Other cities around the country have already suffered their own scandals, from El Paso to Atlanta. Increasing numbers of parents are opting their children out of standardized tests as a form of civil disobedience to what they see as the deleterious results of the high-stakes testing era. And anyone who spends serious time in schools knows how many educators are struggling to stay motivated in a policy climate that, albeit unintentionally, disincentivizes them from valuing anything other than literacy and numeracy.

If no subsequent investigation occurs, we will be witness in Washington D.C. to what happens when powerful people try to sweep uncomfortable subjects under the rug. Ironically, however, Atlanta has demonstrated what happens when the opposite occurs – and courageous public officials, combined with a watchful free press, commit to uncover the truth, whatever it may be. As Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (a Republican) put it: “When test results are falsified and students who have not mastered the necessary material are promoted, our students are harmed, parents lose sight of their child’s true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.”

Deal’s investigative team was equally forceful: “Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring,” they wrote in their 813-page report – a report based on interviews with more than 2,000 people and a review of more than 800,000 documents. “A culture of fear and conspiracy of silence infected (the) school system and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct.” As a lead member of the Atlanta investigative team told Merrow earlier this year, “There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that adults cheated in Washington. The big difference is that nobody in D.C. wanted to know the truth.”

Whether or not widespread cheating occurred in 2008 should matter greatly to all of us, even in 2013. What matters more is whether we are willing to find out. Because when we lose the courage and the curiosity to inquire deeply into our own practices – and the unintended consequences they may reap – we lose the capacity to reimagine education for a changing world.

(This article also appeared on the Smartblog on Education.)

The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

The decision by DC Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania to hire an outside law firm to craft school reform legislation is an awful one, worthy of serious public rebuke – and for two interrelated reasons.

The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the least likely path towards achieving imaginative and effective policy. Despite public stereotypes of the profession, K-12 education is a complex web of cognitive, social, emotional, language, ethical and physical challenges and opportunities. Its systemic barriers to change are as myriad as our complicated shared memories of what schooling is (and is not). And it’s a field in the midst of a major paradigmatic shift – away from the traditional notion that a student’s job is to adjust to the school, and towards the radical notion that a school’s job is to adjust to the student.

So while it’s true that the final stages of policymaking involve a certain amount of legalese, Mr. Catania’s belief that this process should start with a team of lawyers – and not end with one – speaks to a fundamental missed opportunity, and the second reason it’s a bad idea: We are ignoring the wisdom of our own community, and the chance to imagine DC’s future education policy as a city-wide, regenerative civic event.

Of course, surfacing and applying the insights of our own community is not something we do often – perhaps because so many of us secretly agree with Thomas Carlyle, who famously said: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

The thing is, Carlyle was wrong. As New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki writes in his 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds, “If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual.”

In other words, when our imperfect individual judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often extremely helpful. That’s why Surowiecki suggests, “we should stop hunting and ask the crowd. Chances are, it knows.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Mr. Catania is doing – hunting. It’s an impulse so common sociologists have given it its own name: “Chasing the Expert,” which references our tendency when facing difficult decisions to search for that one person (or small group of people) who will have the answer.

What Surowiecki discovered was that the opposite was true, but only if the core conditions of making a good large-group decision were present: diversity, independence, and a particular form of decentralization. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

Imagine if instead of seeking outside funds to hire a small team of lawyers, Catania had announced a citywide initiative in which the best wisdom around crowdsourcing would be utilized in order to help the entire community arrive at a thoughtful, informed collective decision around the future of education policy? After all, politics is about the impact of government on the everyday lives of citizens. Why do we think the way to do it well is by distancing ourselves from the voices of the citizens themselves?

Indeed, the most damning implication of Mr. Catania’s decision is his inattention to the mechanisms of democracy, to the wisdom of the community, and to the regenerative power of combining both in an effort to improve public education. As Surowiecki writes, democracy “is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental questions of cooperation and coordination: How do we live together? How can living together work to our mutual benefit?”

“The decisions that democracies make may not always demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd,” Surowiecki concedes. “But the decision to make them democratically does.”

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)