Class Struggle

My colleague Bill Turque has another great story on the dispute between D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the many teachers and readers who were offended by her statements that some of the teachers fired for budget reasons in October had also abused kids. Turque discovered that D.C. school officials reported more than 200 allegations of teacher abuse last year, but their validity is still being investigated.

I spent a lot of time on this issue and produced a series of columns in 2007. The most relevant was the story of Dawn Mosisa, a Montgomery County parent whose elementary school child was in a classroom where the teacher abused other students, but not her daughter. Her story exposed a major flaw in the way such cases are handled. Because her child was not touched, but simply observed the abuse, Mosisa and her husband could not get the school to tell them anything specific about what had actually happened, and what was being done about it.

That is the reason why I wish Nathan Saunders, general vice president of the Washington Teachers Union, had given more thought to the statement he gave to Turque. He said "the corporal punishment rules and regulations that exist are not problematic" in the District schools. I think a lot of parents and teachers would agree with me that he is wrong about that.

Snowed in over the weekend with no chance of newspaper delivery, I had a taste of what my mornings will be like when we move to California. I will have to read the Post online. It is, I learned, blessedly convenient: click on "TODAY'S NEWSPAPER" at the very top of the home page and you get each story lined up from front page to last.

People like me worry that the newspaper habit many of us picked up in school will be lost in future generations. I remember being required to read enough of the San Francisco Chronicle front page when I was in elementary school to pass a short current events quiz. In high school, there were many projects and papers that required familiarity with the news.

For the next few weeks I am going to explore the future of news reading---and more broadly the whole matter of non-fiction in schools---to see if there isn't a way to both preserve my generation's allegiance to written news coverage with some depth and detail, and to add to schools something they have never had---a mission to instill a love of book-length non-fiction.

I hope you have some ideas about this, and can point me to teachers and schools that provide good examples. Newspapers may someday die, but my weekend experience proved that great news writing will survive online. Fiction has an iron grip on school reading assignments, but the histories and biographies that have made my adult reading so often a joy should be able to win more student attention than they have up to now.

Tablets, iPads, investigative web sites, news cooperatives---all the changes are bewildering. But we can't let schools wander away from connecting students to writing about what is real, and keeping them in touch with the forces that will change their lives, and those of their children and grandchildren. We just need some creative ways to do it.

For more from Jay, go to washingtonpost.com/class-struggle. For more on schools, go to washingtonpost.com/education.

Some days when Alexis Robertson was in the heavy-duty International Baccalaureate program at South Lakes High School in Fairfax County, she arrived at 7 a.m. and didn’t leave until 8 p.m. The 4,000-word IB paper she wrote was longer and more detailed than anything she has had so far as freshman at the University of Virginia. She passed six college-level IB exams, did 150 hours of community service and received the IB Diploma, one of the highest honors bestowed by American high schools.

Yet U-Va. gave her only nine college credits. She said a friend who had a similar load of Advanced Placement courses (a similar but older college-level program for high schoolers) received 39 credits, and already started taking classes in her major.

That means AP is a better than IB, right? No.

After the release of every new Washington Post Challenge Index list, my rankings of local high schools based on college-level test participation, I get many questions, complaints and even an occasional compliment from readers. Here is a sample of this week's mail. There are some surprises.

Q: When you were compiling your list, I was developing my own, which I feel is equally important. I decided to look at the graduation rates for students with disabilities from the Virginia school report card. Last year Centreville High School had a graduation rate for students with disabilities of 63%. While it’s not the lowest in this category in Fairfax County – Edison and West Potomac have that esteemed title at 49%-- I still think that a rate where over one third of the students with disabilities do not graduate is a compelling statistic, and one that should be spotlighted. Here are the graduation rates for students with disabilities for the other high schools from your Challenge Index – Woodson 90%, McLean 72%, Langley 88%, Madison 81%, Herndon 52%, Oakton 84%, Lake Braddock 75%, Fairfax 61%, Marshall 61%, South Lakes 57%, Chantilly 71%, West Springfield 70%, South County 66%, Westfield 70%, Stuart 51%, Falls Church 55%, West Potomac 49%, Hayfield 61%, Lee 52%, Mt Vernon 61%.

Why should I be excited about my son attending a school where in all likelihood he will not take an AP, IB or college level class, and where he has a 37% chance of not graduating? ---JoNell M. Doyle

Jack Gillum and Greg Toppo of USA Today (bias alert: my wife works there) have two good stories on the growing percentage of failing scores on Advanced Placement tests. They've gone from 36.5 percent in 1999 to 41.5 percent last year--and a 48.4 percent failure rate in the southern states.

Neither AP fans like me nor the AP critics who often write me should have any problem with this factually deep and wonderfully illustrated package of stories. Gillum and Toppo show the impact the growing movement to coax average and below-average students into AP has had on the percentage of students who pass the 3-hour college-level exams. They also give Trevor Packer, the College Board vice president who oversees AP, a chance to make the equally important point that opening AP to everyone who wants to work hard has significantly increased the number of students who are passing the tests and giving themselves a head start on college.

I have only two thoughts to add, both of which Gillum and Toppo would likely have included if they had had enough space:

Marni Barron, an innovative educator, shares my discomfort with many Washington area school districts that rate nearly 100.percent of their teachers as satisfactory. (I’m not kidding: Alexandria says 99.percent, Fairfax County, 99.1.percent, Montgomery County, 95, Loudoun County, 99, Prince George’s County, 95.6, and so on.)

But we disagree over the region’s most daring effort to assess educators honestly, the D.C. schools’ IMPACT program. I think it is a worthy experiment. Barron thinks it needs to do much more than it is designed to do to train teachers in its intricacies and demands.

Barron, 38, has been teaching, or coaching teachers, for 15 years. She works with the IMPACT system daily as the instructional coach assigned to help 15 teachers achieve and maintain excellence at Phoebe Hearst Elementary School in Northwest Washington. I (age withheld) have never taught a day of school in my life, and know no more about IMPACT than what I have read and heard from teachers.
Which of us are you going to believe?

Jason Kamras, who runs the IMPACT program, had these comments on a slightly different draft of the column:

Mathews: In that rush forward, Barron says supervisors are changing the rules. Barron interviewed last year to be a Master Educator. When she asked if these evaluators could provide extra advice and support to teachers who needed it, as was done by coaches in Michigan, she was told no. When she was asked at the end of the interview if she thought she would be a good fit for the job, she said no. But recently some Master Educators told Barron that those were the old rules. They now encourage teachers to meet with them after hours to discuss their weaknesses.

Kamras: This is simply not accurate. We never told Master Educators that they were prohibited from providing additional advice and support to teachers. On the contrary, the position description explicitly indicated that providing professional development would be expected. Furthermore, I have always encouraged the MEs to provide guidance to teachers. The only constraint on this is their time. Some MEs have taken it upon themselves to conduct “mobile office hours,” during which they visit classrooms (upon request), model lessons, discuss pedagogical challenges, examine student work, etc. Others have conducted professional development sessions for specific content areas. Still others have developed resource packets to help struggling teachers. Next year we are increasing the number of MEs so that each one will have fewer observations to complete and more time to conduct professional development.

Mathews: Barron was told to observe and fill out a classroom visit form for each of her teachers identical to the one used by the official evaluators. This was to get them in tune with the process, but Barron concluded it was a violation of the D.C. teacher contract, which bars teachers from evaluating their peers. She had declined to do that. Instead invites her teachers to fill out the form themselves, and come see her to discuss improvements they want to make in their classroom methods.

Kamras: Again, this is simply not accurate. There is absolutely nothing illegal or inappropriate about an Instructional Coach using the IMPACT evaluation form to provide feedback to teachers. Such feedback is not part of the formal evaluation process. I would argue that using the form helps teachers as it aligns the feedback with the expectations of the evaluation process.

Some time ago a faithful reader and commenter on this blog, dccitizen1, asked me a good question about the School Without Walls. It was a small issue, but concerned how D.C. schools really work, a favorite topic of mine.

The question was why Rhee "abruptly and unilaterally dropped the Senior Research Paper from the School Without Walls curriculum."

When I contacted Rhee about this, she quickly replied: "I am not involved in decisions like that. They are made at the school level. Do you want me to connect you with the principal?"

I forgot to pass that on right away to dccitizen1. It was Thanksgiving week and I was in California. But dccitizen1 asked the question again recently and I finally sent dccitizen1 Rhee's two-month-old response.

Dccitizen1 said Rhee's account was different from one in the The Examiner, and her response was a lie.

I said I would check the story with the principal at Walls, as the school is commonly called. His name is Richard Trogisch, and he has been very successful in sustaining Walls' long tradition of excellence.

Here is what I found, after hearing from Trogisch, from D.C. instructional superintendent of high schools John Davis, who is Trogisch's supervisor, and more from Rhee. I know this seems like a small issue, but I think it illustrates the problem we have had lately of accusing each other, and the Chancellor, of lying, when a careful look at the facts shows something less clear and more interesting.

Let me know what you think:

Late last week I had an interesting telephone conversation with D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She called with a comment on a post in which I suggested she be more careful of her public words--like her statement that some of the teachers she fired hit or had sex with kids--in order to make sure she stays in her job and applies her considerable skills and knowledge to fixing our failing school system.

I suggested she apologize for offending teachers with her words so that we could get past this point and back to helping kids.

She said, in essence, that she is not going to do that. She said she wished that the Fast Company magazine item that sparked the controversy had included her statement that many of the teachers she had to fire for budget reasons were good people. But, she said, she was not going to compromise her methods or her beliefs. Some teachers did hit kids and have sex with kids, she said. She thought that was something people should know. It was important to root out such behaviors.

Public officials who try to make big changes to solve crises often risk their popularity. That is why favorability ratings for Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama dropped when they tried to revive devastated economies in the first years of their presidencies. That also explains why D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, pushing hard to raise student achievement in her low-performing district, has lost so much public confidence in a new Washington Post survey.

The ratings for both Rhee and her patron, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, have plummeted. This suggests he might lose the next election, and she might be forced to leave sooner to free him of the taint of her reputation for offending parents and teachers.