Posts Tagged ‘ Adrian Fenty ’

DC Schools Shine

Friday, August 27th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Long one of urban America’s ugly ducklings, Washington D.C. is beginning to shine as a national showcase for school reform.

Two developments this week burnished the capital city’s growing reputation as a laboratory for tough-minded reforms in the areas of school choice and teacher accountability. Education Secretary Arne Duncan named Washington along with nine states as winners in Round 2 of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grants. And a new Fordham Foundation survey, America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform ranked D.C. second among the 26 cities most receptive to change.

The $4.3 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) program is arguably one of President Obama’s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. To qualify for the competitive grants, states have been obliged to change their laws to make them more reform-friendly. For example, many states have lifted legislative caps on charter schools, adopted common performance standards, and, perhaps most controversially, agreed to use student test scores in evaluations of individual teacher performance.

Reformers and skeptics alike nonetheless slammed this week’s awards as arbitrary and political (some pointed out, for example, that a lot of the winning states happen to have Democratic governors.) Reformers fretted that RTTT’s vague selection criteria rewards states for winning teachers’ union acquiescence in modest reforms, while overlooking states like Colorado that have pursued bolder experiments. In any case, Washington will receive $75 million to be shared by the traditional school system headed by Chancellor Michele Rhee and the city’s robust charter school sector.

So what makes Washington, D.C. so special?

The Fordham study gave the District high marks for attracting talented educational entrepreneurs and organizations, like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, that recruit and train highly qualified teachers. It praises D.C.’s new contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union, which permits teachers to be paid according to performance, and merit-based layoffs.

The study notes that, with the help of private philanthropy, the District invests generously in school improvement and innovation. The city’s “thriving charter sector” also comes in for praise (full disclosure: I’m a member of the Public Charter School Board here), though the chronic shortage of suitable and affordable facilities for charters is also acknowledged. D.C. also gets high marks for quality control in both the traditional and charter sectors.

Rising test scores in the District attest to Rhee’s single-minded devotion to closing achievement gaps, as well as the charter board’s increasingly tough stance toward persistently low-performing schools in its portfolio. Last spring, 40 D.C. elementary schools achieved double-digit gains in pass rates on the citywide math exams, while 19 had double-digit losses. In reading, 26 elementary schools gained at least 10 points in pass rates on standardized tests, while 19 lost ground. Scores also rose at public charter schools, which enroll fully 38 percent of D.C.’s students. While far from perfect, these numbers represent dramatic progress for a school system that has habitually dwelt in the cellar in comparisons with other urban systems. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081402168_pf.html)

Rhee also has done battle with the school system’s notoriously inefficient central bureaucracy. Now the schools open on time with a full complement of textbooks. Now we know how many people the system employs. And then there are the all-important intangibles: A new cultural of accountability is being systematically instilled in the system as bad schools are closed or merged with better ones, new principals are brought in and teachers are evaluated and paid based on classroom performance.

On a less positive note, the survey highlighted a polarized D.C. municipal environment. No doubt there’s been a backlash against Rhee’s disruptive reforms and hard-charging style. Lots of comfortable employment arrangements have been upended. Here’s the Fordham Foundation survey: “respondents report that Mayor Adrian Fenty is the only municipal leader willing to expend extensive political capital to advance education reform.” Fenty is locked in a tough reelection battle against D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray. If he loses, it’s widely assumed that Rhee will have lost her lone protector and will be forced to step down as Chancellor. (She may be gone soon anyway; next month she’s getting married to Sacremental Mayor and former NBA standout Kevin Johnson.)

Whatever happens, Washington’s business, political and civic leaders need to find a way to unite behind a firm commitment to finishing the job Fenty and Rhee have begun, as well as strengthening the innovative charter sector. It’s the only way to give D.C. students a decent shot at a quality education, to close achievement gaps between black and Latino kids and others, and to staunch the steady flow of middle class families with kids from the city to the suburbs.

Photo credit: marada’s photostream

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Get Ready for School Turnaround Fight

Monday, May 24th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Improving urban schools is slow, laborious work, like turning around the proverbial supertanker. But last week brought heartening evidence that Washington, D.C.’s schools have a competent skipper at the helm.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that the District’s traditional public schools boosted fourth-grade reading scores faster than any of the 18 urban school districts taking its test. Those scores rose six points over the past two years, while eighth-grade reading scores increased by four points. These gains have been widely hailed as proof – even by erstwhile skeptics — that D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s controversial efforts to boost student performance are beginning to get traction.

They are also good news for Mayor Adrian Fenty, who took over the schools three years ago and brought Rhee in to shake things up. Fenty is locked in a tough reelection fight with D.C. City Council Chairman Vincent Gray, who has sought to capitalize on a local backlash against the Fenty-Rhee reforms.

These changes, however, are likely to look like child’s play compared to the challenge Rhee faces now. She and other school leaders are under mounting pressure from the No Child Left Behind law and the Obama administration to turn around the city’s worst-performing schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has challenged struggling districts to turn around the nation’s 5,000 lowest-performing schools, and he’s dangling big carrots as an inducement.

What exactly does ”turning around” schools mean? In order for districts to get the federal money, they must choose one of four strategies to improve their worst schools: turnaround, restart, closure or transformation. Under turnaround and transformation, districts must fire principals, reform instruction and expand learning time. Turnaround also requires that they fire 50 percent of teachers in failing schools. Closure entails shutting such schools down and sending students to better schools in the district. Restart means closing the schools and reopening them as public charter schools or under another type of education management organization.

Why such drastic measures? Because a quarter-century of national attention on such schools, including big increases in funding, haven’t made much of a dent in the large achievement and graduation gaps between suburban, largely white students and urban minorities. Despite the gains in D.C. students’ NAEP scores, for example, the District still ranks well below the average of all U.S. schools, as well as schools in comparable large cities. Says Rhee, with characteristic bluntness, “We still have a ridiculously long way to go.”

It’s not that there haven’t been plenty of individual success stories, especially in the charter school sector which now includes more than 1.5 million students. The big question now is how to scale up the number of high-performing schools available to low-income kids, while dealing with chronic underachievers.

Progressive school reformers, led by President Obama and Duncan, have grown impatient with the agonizingly slow pace of improvement in poor urban and rural areas. With its $3.5 billion Race to the Top Fund, the administration is offering districts incentives to speed things up.

But not all Democrats are ready for more radical, and disruptive, change. Rep. Judy Chu of California last week released a report criticizing school turnaround approaches as unduly drastic and rigid. She won backing from the big teachers’ unions, including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Skepticism about turnarounds isn’t confined to Democrats, either. Andy Smarick of the American Enterprise Institute believes that efforts to raise the bar for low-performing public schools almost always fail. The more realistic solution, in his view, is to shut them down and replace them with new and better ones, including charters.

But other reformers point to encouraging signs of successful turnarounds in places like Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. A key obstacle to success, they say, are district bureaucracies and collective bargaining agreements that undercut the autonomy of school leaders and prevent them from firing bad teachers, extending school days and assessing teachers on the basis of growth in student performance.

PPI will illuminate the pros and cons of school turnarounds in a Capital Forum this Wednesday in Washington. It will feature Chancellor Rhee, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), and several prominent turnaround experts and critics. The event will be webcast on ProgressiveFix.com starting at 11:30 a.m.

With Rhee driving change in traditional schools, and one of the nation’s largest public charter sectors, Washington is on the front lines of the school reform debate. Stay tuned for the coming battle over turnarounds.

Photo credit: The National Academy of Sciences

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Charters and Civil Rights

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor, has long been the nation’s foremost chronicler of racial segregation in schools. According to today’s Washington Post, a new study by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project shows that public charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional schools.

“As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools,” the report concludes.

This assertion seems suspect on several grounds, and it illustrates the pitfalls of viewing the public charter school movement through the frame of the nation’s great school integration battles of the 1960s and 1970s.

For one thing, minority families are freely choosing charter schools. In the bad old days of Jim Crow, they were forced to attend segregated schools. Later, as many whites fled the cities to avoid sending their children to integrated schools, black families were left behind and had no choice but to attend their local district school. As Orfield and others have documented, this “re-segregation” in impoverished urban neighborhoods was a disaster for big city school systems.

Public school choice arose in Minnesota in the late 1980s to give parents the option to send their children to schools outside their local districts. The charter school idea was conceived in part as a way to bring innovative public schools to the students, rather than forcing them to travel to other districts to find them.

The Charter Record in D.C.

As it happens, Washington is in the vanguard of the public charter movement (full disclosure: I’m a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board). About 84 percent of charter school students here are black, compared with 78 percent in traditional public schools. Why have so many charters located in poor and working-class minority neighborhoods? Because it is precisely the kids in those communities who urgently need better education options. The city’s regular public schools have historically ranked near the bottom in comparisons of major urban education systems, although Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michele Rhee have launched a determined effort to lift their performance.

The city’s 58 charter schools have given low-income black and Latino children something they never had before: a choice of where to attend school, as well as an array of innovative learning programs tailored to diverse interests and learning styles. That 28,000, or 38 percent, of D.C.’s students have exercised that choice — in effect voting with their feet — attests to the need for new options. And the shrinking of the traditional school sector’s “market share” was no doubt a big factor behind Fenty’s decision to take it over.

The important question, as Charter School Board Vice Chairman Brian Jones observed to the Post, is not the racial composition of charters, it’s whether they are providing a better education than traditional schools.

The answer is fiercely contested in the research community. Here the evidence is mixed: Many of the District’s best schools are charters, but not all charters are performing well. That’s why our Board has shut down four schools and accepted the voluntary surrender of charters from seven more since 2003.

Why Segregation Is Not the Issue

There’s considerable irony here. When I was advocating for charter schools back in the early 1990s, many Democrats in my native Virginia and other southern states were suspicious. Given the region’s bad racial history, they feared that charters would become a new, publicly funded version of the old “segregation academies” – private schools to which white families turned to avoid sending their children to school with blacks. That’s one reason Virginia has lagged in charter school innovation.

In this respect, the Orfield report indirectly raises a very interesting question: Why aren’t there more charter schools in white neighborhoods in Washington and other major cities? Given that the dismal reputation of urban education is a chief catalyst for suburban flight, more charters might be a good way to keep more middle-class families (white and black) in the urban core.

If charters are less racially diverse than other public schools, it’s largely because they are cropping up in the urban communities that desperately need school innovation and choice. Since many charters aim at closing the educational achievement gap between white and minority students, it seems perverse to cast them as agents of school segregation.

There is a civil rights issue here, but with all respect to Gary Orfield, it’s not segregation. It’s that too many low-income black, Latino, and immigrant students are trapped in dysfunctional urban school systems.

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