School Community

FLINT, Michigan — A coalition of Flint congregations is hosting members from a nationwide parent-involvement initiative in the area this week in hopes to get local schools involved in a new program.

The group Flint Area Congregations Together, or FACT, this week is hosting leaders from the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, a California-based program which provides training and resources to help teachers work more closely with students’ parents and visit families in their homes.

“These are home visits that happen afternoons, evenings, weekends,” said Carrie Rose, executive director of the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, during a public presentation at Flint’s Sarvis Center Tuesday.

Typically, the home visits last 30-40 minutes and there are usually two per year, one in the fall and another in the spring.

Adopting the program would come at a cost — the amount depending on to what degree it’s implemented — mostly to reimburse teachers for time spent working in homes after school hours, FACT officials have said.

Paul Lumpkin, a Massachusetts father who now serves as a parent educator for the group, told of his early experiences with the group.

Lumpkin had just received custody of his two young daughters. The three lived in a shelter and a hotel room before finally getting an apartment, he said. Then a note came asking him to participate in a home visit from a teacher.

“You can imagine how shocked I was,” Lumpkin told the crowd of several dozen parents, teachers and community members gathered at the Sarvis Center.

But the home visit was one of the best things to happen for his daughter’s education, he said.

“That was the beginning of a flourishing relationship with that teacher that continues to this day,” Lumpkin said.

Nancy Fong, a teacher who works with the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, said her involvement with home visits has been incredibly helpful as a teacher.

“It brings you back down to where you understand what you came into the profession for,” Fong said. “Quite frankly, you don’t become jaded.”

In her visit to Flint, Fong said she sees a city where the program can work.

“You have the Mott Foundation, you have FACT, you have the community. … You can not fail … I’ve never seen so much support.”

The initiative is part of FACT’s ongoing efforts to improve education here.

Members of the group have embarked on fact-finding missions in which they observed practices from school districts across the country with demographics similar to Flint.

For example, parents, teachers and others traveled to California, New York and Virginia districts in 2009 that mirror Flint in poverty and minority population, but have higher academic achievement.

The trips were funded by a $166,000 Charles Stewart Mott Foundation grant.

FACT has been working to bring innovative ideas into local schools, especially the Flint School District, but have had mixed reactions from leadership there.

For example, the results of trips to other schools were shared with school leaders, though FACT officials shared concerns that their proposals weren’t being considered.

Posters from past student theater performances adorned the walls of Franklin Delano Roosevelt High Schools auditorium, where parents gathered Monday for a meeting on school turnaround.

The city has started running through its closure protocol at dozens of low-performing schools it wants to turn around.

At Brooklyns Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, Superintendent Aimee Horowitz held a tense meeting with teachers to talk about the closure plan Monday afternoon. Hours later, she defended the plan to about 50 angry and bewildered parents at an early engagement meeting that has for the last two years been the Department of Educations first step in letting schools know they could be closed.

The pattern is set to repeat this week and beyond at dozens of l0w-performing schools that were midway through federally mandated overhaul processes known as transformation and restart until earlier this month, when Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city would instead try to use a different process, turnaround, at the schools. The switch, aimed at letting the city sidestep a state requirement that it negotiate new teacher evaluations with the United Federation of Teachers, would require the schools to be closed and immediately reopened after having at least half of their teachers replaced.

The mass-replacement plan drew fire from parents and students who said FDRs teachers are essential if academic performance is to improve.

I feel tortured, said Abdul Sager, a ninth-grader whose first language is Bengali. If a new teacher comes who doesnt know about my feelings and strategies to learn English, its going to take more time.

Parents found out about Mondays meeting in letters shortly after Bloombergs announcement and through automated telephone calls over the weekend announcing a parent-teacher association meeting with Horowitz, according to Robin Piraino, the mother of a ninth-grader. She said the messages didnt say the meeting would deal with FDRs proposed closure, and some people who attended the meeting were visibly surprised by the news.

Principal Steven Demarco implored families to push back against the citys plan by contacting legislators and elected officials. He also promised that FDR would survive the citys latest efforts to reshape the school.

Weve always been a family, weve always gotten through, he said. Regardless of what were called — transformation, restart, turnaround — we are continuing every day to make progress. That will continue until Im dragged out of here.

Demarcos predecessor was in fact yanked from the school. Starting transformation in 2010 required Roosevelts longtime principal, Geraldine Maione, to be replaced, so the Department of Education appointed Demarco, a 29-veteran of the school, to take her place. Then the city installed Maione at William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School, another school that was undergoing transformation and could now be closed.

Since 2010, FDR had received millions of dollars in federal School Improvement Grants. Teachers said the funds had financed training sessions and overtime hours for leading after-school English classes for parents, tutoring students, and hosting a new advisory program called freshman and sophomore academies.

Weve invested our support in the English Language Learners, said Jorge Mitey, a Spanish teacher and FDRs union chapter leader, who had passed out large buttons showing Bloombergs face with a red strike-through to people attending the meeting. Theyre coming in on weekends, theyre coming after school. Weve given them more academic rigor to improve.

Forty percent of FDRs 3,400 students are considered English language learners, a data point that teachers said makes it impossible for the school to meet the citys expectations, especially for its four-year graduation rate. Of the students who entered as ninth-graders in 2006, 59 percent graduated four years later, giving FDR a graduation rate just two points below the city average. The school received Bs on its two most recent city progress reports.

Current policies do not reflect research on how students learn languages — many of our hardest-working students at this school are English language learners, said one teacher, who asked not to be named because she is worried about keeping her job. All research shows that it takes five to seven years to become academically proficient in a second language, and that is only if you have literacy in your first language. But many of our students come in with literacy challenges in their first language, Chinese, Spanish.

The meetings are a first step in the citys notification process for school closures. For the last two years, the city has held early engagement hearings at schools it is considering shuttering before finalizing the closure slate. Then the city must hold public hearings at each school slated for closure before the citywide school board, the Panel for Educational Policy, votes on them. The panel has never rejected a city proposal. By law, the city must also issue detailed reports about the closures impact, called Education Impact Statements, at least six months before the start of the school year when the closures would begin — a deadline that is just weeks away.

Other school communities are gearing up to protest the turnaround plan at meetings with superintendents later this week. On Wednesday, teachers at Brooklyns John Dewey High School say they will defend the progress the school has made under the restart model to department officials and ask them to let current teachers stay in the school.

• USDOE and the Department of Justice released advice for how schools can legally integrate.
• A task-force of state legislators is backing a resolution opposing the Common Core standards.
• Chicago is joining a privately-funded initiative for district-charter collaborations.
• Japanese double dutch jump-rope teams performed at P.S. 75 to promote exercise.
• A New York Times blog has a fill-in-the-blank quiz on historical December events.
• Analysis of No Child Left Behind waiver proposals from 11 states show vastly different foci.
• In Georgia, professors are teaching undocumented students barred from traditional universities.

Prep schools are reporting a rise in the number of boarders. 

Figures show almost 14,000 pupils aged seven to 13 are boarding at private preparatory schools in Britain this year – an increase of more than five per cent in just 12 months.

More schools are also building additional boarding facilities to cater for rising demand among parents, it was revealed.

School leaders claim that parents are attracted by “the value of the experience”, insisting it promotes greater independence among children and develops social and organisational skills.

The number of young girls choosing to board this year alone has soared by almost a fifth to just under 6,000.

But it was claimed that the rise may also be driven by the economic climate, with mothers and fathers forced to work increasingly long hours to make ends meet.

Beverly Hall says she was unaware of cheating in her schools. (AJC photo)

In a statement through her attorney today, a vacationing Beverly Hall reportedly in Hawaii says she was unaware of widespread cheating in the school system that she oversaw for 12 years.

Apparently, not one of the 82 persons who allegedly ‘confessed to cheating told the investigators that Dr. Hall at any time instructed, encouraged or condoned cheating, said attorney Richard Deane in a statement. The report’s conclusion that Dr. Hall actually knew of any such cheating is based entirely on supposition. The further conclusion that Dr. Hall should have known rests on negative inferences from selective, circumstantial evidence.

No, it doesnt. There is real evidence in the report that Hall and  her staff ignored or discredited bona fide complaints of cheating, especially when the allegations were about high-scoring schools that were winning accolades.  The report shows a willful effort within APS to maintain the pretense that Hall was a miracle-worker.

But Hall  had other evidence that  suggested something was amiss   tangible evidence that the high scoring students at Parks Middle, for example, did poorly on state math exams in high school. In the report, the cheating at Parks sounds like something out a CIA covert action manual with clandestine missions to steal tests  and trumped excuses to lure the honest testing coordinator out of the building.

After a visit to Parks with the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, I looked at the End of Course Test math scores for the high school in the feeder. Scores were awful. APS could have looked at whether similarly high performing middle school students from other schools saw their scores tumble so markedly in high school.

Two years ago, I asked Dr. Hall about whether there was any effort to reconcile astounding middle school performance on the CRCT with high school performance, She said that the students could not be followed to high school because they didnt necessarily move as a group to the same school. But a system that was data driven, as Dr. Hall often described APS, should have looked more deeply at waves of students who soared to unprecedented heights in middle school only to crash in high school.

Hall wasnt the only one who didnt want to look too closely at fantastic results. Many top education foundations, including the Annie E. Casey, Gates and Broad foundations, celebrated the data coming out of APS.

I talked today to Steve Dolinger, former Fulton superintendent and head of the Georgia Partnership, about whether groups, including his own, which featured Parks on its bus tour of great schools, failed to do their due diligence.

We relied on data that was published on the DOE website, he said. When we look at the data, we don’t think there is wrongdoing. We have no supposition that cheating is going on.

But there will be far more scrutiny now of meteoric rises in school performance, he said. This whole situation is going to cast doubt on success, especially rapid success. When success happens quickly, you are going to have to ask questions about what was going on.

I think there is plenty of blame to go around, including the media, but I have to wonder about the role of the state Department of Education. The agency mandates and administers all these tests. Should the agency make any effort to validate scores? If not, how can it eventually use the scores to reward or punish teachers?

In a joint 2003 investigation, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution/WSB Channel 2 Action News found that Gwinnett underreported its student discipline data to the state Department of Education by at least 85 percent. When the AJC questioned the incomplete and inaccurate discipline reports, DOE said that it only collected the data; it not review and verify it. I am not sure why the state collects data and then says it cant vouch for it.

In 2004, the AJC did another major APS investigation, this one on the systems blatant waste of technology dollars. The AJC series documented that Atlanta Public Schools misspent or mismanaged nearly $73 million from a national program intended to give poor children access to the Internet. At the time, Hall defended her lack of attention to technology, saying she was spending all her time focusing on classroom academics.

Apparently, she didnt focus enough.

From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog