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MAYOR FENTY: Well, thank you very much and good morning to you all.
First of all, I want to start out by thanking you for your consideration thus far, for supporting
our application getting to this point and we certainly are excited about your considering
us to go even further. Let me introduce the team. Of course, my name
is Adrian Fenty, Mayor of the District of Columbia. To my right is Kerri Briggs, our
State Superintendent of Education, who is the person in the office responsible for overseeing
the Race to the Top grant, and, of course, working with all of our LEAs to raise student
achievement. To her right is the Deputy Mayor for Education, Victor Reinoso.
In education, you have lots of agencies outside of the traditional school cluster that support
schools, and the Health Department is just one example how the Deputy Mayor pulls all
the agencies of the government together to help make sure that the schools succeed.
To his right is the Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the person who is in charge of the entire
school system. She has responsibility for about two-thirds of the children educated
in the public schools of the District of Columbia. To her right is Jennie Niles, who is the head
of one of our best charter schools in the District -- best charter schools in the country,
and there really is a great working relationship between the charters in Washington, D.C. and
the traditional public schools. Let me just do the intro. We, of course, in
my term have taken a step that only three other cities have taken, New York, Boston,
and Chicago, is to have the school system report directly to the mayor.
As we said at the time that we took over the schools, we didn't believe the mayor needed
more power, we believed that the school system needed more accountability, having been a
city council member, been a lawyer for the city's education committee, what we saw for
the past couple of decades was a city that knew the problems and saw them slowly but
consistently deteriorate in the school system, also, a city that knew a lot of the solutions,
but never had the appetite to take on those solutions head on, because of the controversy
or because of the disparate decision-making, and under the Board of Education model, a
good idea would come to the Board, but because of special interests or because of hearings
and debate, what have you, the decision would never get approved.
We believed as they did in those other three cities, that we needed to change that, and
for the past two and a half years, under a much more focused and accountable system,
we have been able to move a lot of the great proposals that have been around this city
for a long time, and because of that we believe that we are on the cusp of the type of reform
changes and improvements to student achievement that the residents of this city have been
demanding for a long, long time. The team will talk a little bit about it,
but the only other thing I would add is that the mayor is the person who is in charge of
the entire government and can wield great influence on the private sector.
We have not only made education our number one priority, but in large measure have tied
the entire City's political future and political results, including my own, towards making
sure that we fix the schools, and we are really excited to be here to talk to you all about
it. I am going to turn it over to Superintendent
Briggs, and she will tell you a little bit more about our application.
MS. BRIGGS: Thank you. For me, it was when I was thinking about the
work that had been going on with our charter districts DCPS, I was very drawn to the City
and to think about why D.C., why D.C. for Race to the Top. For me, it's a lot about
reform is happening here in ways it's not happening anywhere else in the country.
You see it with the Mayor, you see it with Michelle or with Jennie, with Victor, I was
really drawn to the focus and the courage and the purpose. All 16 of the States that
you have probably heard from or read through will say they have courage. I think we have
demonstrated here, to put more of a face to it, why D.C., why are we a smart investment.
One it’s about our students. Race to the Top is designed for them. Ninety-four percent
of our students are minority students, 70 percent of our students live in poverty. These
are the very kids that when we talk about reform, these are the children that we think
about reform for, and that is our City. It is also about our schools. We have a very
interesting mix of schools in our city. Two-thirds of our students are educated under the traditional
public school system by Michelle Rhee, and then the rest of them are in 57 different
charter districts, so that is about a third there.
It has created a lot of innovation and it has also created, on the grounds, conditions
that make Race to the Top a very viable and vibrant opportunity for us.
We have 200 schools, around 75,000 students, so we are able to move quickly, we are able
to make change happen in a way that, as faster like when you were saying, we have kind of
don't have to work through a lot of bureaucracies, we got things done, we can move quickly.
The last thing is to point out about our City. I mean we are the Nation's Capital, the world
is watching us. We are able to attract talent. We have aside from the folks here, we have
tons of folks back in our office that are very focused on this work and have the capacity
to do it, and we are also willing to be bold and aggressive.
Many of us know that work on reform that these daily decisions take a lot of courage, and
they take a lot of commitment, and we are not afraid, and I think that probably one
of our best persons for why we are not afraid is Michelle.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: Good morning. Before I took this job in D.C., I was in education for 16
years and probably, like you, the reputation of the jurisdiction preceded itself, so I
knew a tremendous amount about D.C. including the fact that it was the only school district
in the country that was on high-risk status with the U.S. Department of Education, that
of all of the ninth graders who began high school in the District of Columbia, only 9
percent of them would end up graduating from college within five years, that there was
an enormous achievement gap in the City, that in some cases, was up to 70 percentage points
between white students and black students, and probably most disheartening was the fact
that according to the [inaudible] examination, only 8 percent of the City's eighth graders
were on grade level in mathematics, which meant that 92 percent of the young people
in the City did not have the skills and knowledge necessary to be productive members of society.
So, when the Mayor first called me about taking this job, I was skeptical, but somewhat intrigued,
and I remember in one of the first meetings that I went to with him, I said, "So, what
are you hoping to accomplish?" And he said, "Well, I want to have the top performing school
system, public school system of any urban jurisdiction in the country, and I want to
close the achievement gap." I thought, okay, that's crazy, number one,
but incredibly inspiring and one of the reasons why I thought it made sense to come here and
take this job, and over the last two years, we have actually made a tremendous amount
of progress. According to the D.C. CAS [ph], which is our
local examination, we have seen about 19 percentage point gains in elementary math in DCPS, which
is tremendous. The gains that we have seen in two years, in the last two years, has actually
eclipsed the prior decade all put together. We have, the State has seen significant gains
for every single subgroup in the City, and we have made some good progress in closing
the achievement gap. Also, on examination, which as you know is the gold standard, also
is the standard by which D.C. had always been dubbed the laggard or the worst performing
school district in the country, we just recently got the results of the 2009 examination, which
is a good indication of our work, because of that two-year time period.
What it showed is that although we still have an incredibly long way to go, we actually
changed the story from D.C. is last to D.C. was actually first in the country in a number
of different areas. First, we were one of the only jurisdictions
that saw solid gains in both the fourth and eighth grade in mathematics. Our fourth graders
actually led the nation in gains. Our eighth graders saw about triple the national average
in gains, and we were the only jurisdiction in which every single subgroup of fourth graders
saw academic progress. So, again, although we have a long way to
go, we think that the progress we have made in the last two years has been pretty significant.
There are a few reasons why we feel like we have been able to achieve what we have over
the last couple of years. The first is the Mayor's leadership. He has,
as he said, put education at the forefront of this city, and he has given us the charge
of being bold. He is saying as long as you think that what you are doing is in the best
interests of kids, then, I am not scared of the opposition or the blowback that you might
get, just go. So, we focused on a few things across the
City. The first is human capital and one example of this is about teacher evaluation systems,
which I think everyone in public education knows needs to be revamped.
I talked earlier about the fact that in 2007, 8 percent of the children in the City were
on grade level in mathematics. It was interesting because if you were to have looked at the
performance evaluations of the adults in the City at that same time, you would seen that
almost everyone was exceeding expectations. So, how do you have a system where all the
adults are running around thinking they are doing an excellent job, and what they are
producing in terms of outcomes are these dismal, you know, sort of 8 percent of kids being
on grade level, it just doesn't make any sense. So, what we knew is that we thought we had
to bring those two things into alignment, and so we created a new teacher evaluation
system called IMPACT in DCPS, and basically, one of the things that distinguishes IMPACT
is the fact that 50 percent of the teachers' evaluation is based on student achievement
gains, and this was the one way that we knew we were going to be able to bring the achievement
levels of students and the way that we were evaluating ourselves as adults into alignment.
So, that is one example. The second example is we have been incredibly aggressive about
turning around failing schools. Within my first few months in office, we made the announcement
that we were going to close 23 of the District's failing schools. It was 15 percent of our
inventory, which was very significant, but we have also been aggressive about school
transformations and turnarounds. One example of this is a story I like to tell
about Sousa Middle School. When I first got here in 2007, Sousa was one of the worst performing
middle schools in the City. I went to visit one day, I mean the kids were all over the
hallways, they were swearing at teachers, nobody was learning.
The next year, my second year, I brought a brand-new principal in who was incredibly
aggressive about both professionally developing teachers, but also evaluating poor performers
out. That year, his first year as principal, the school saw 17 and 25 percentage point
gains in reading and math separately, which was a huge improvement.
So, in December of this year, I actually went to the school, I wanted to see what was going
on, and it was amazing to walk through the hallways and the kids were focused, things
were structured, there was quality instruction going on, and so I decided that I wanted to
actually talk to the teachers. So, I went to the school one day and I pulled
up, I got out of the car, and the school was just letting out. Usually, when I show up
at a school, the kids look around like, well, who is the crazy Chinese lady running around,
but I got out of the car at this particular school, and the kids were like, "Chancellor
Rhee, Chancellor Rhee, can we take a picture with you?"
I said, "Sure." I was talking to one of the students and I said, "So, do you think that
your elementary school prepared you for the rigors of Sousa?" And he said, "Well, it was
very different." I said, "How?" He said, "Well, the teachers here teach."
I thought, well, that is sort of low bar, so I said, "Well, what does that mean to you?"
He said, "You know, they really push you to think outside of the box here." It was a sixth
grader, which I was impressed by. When I went in to talk to the teachers, it
was interesting because basically, you know, I walk in, and they seemed very nervous, and
I wanted to kind of put them at ease, so I said, "Look, you know, you saw huge gains
last year, and after a gain like that, my expectation is that you are not going to see
those kinds of gains again. If you saw, you know, 4 to 6 percent every year from this
year out, I would be satisfied." I thought I was going to kind of, you know,
put them at ease, and they looked at me and they said, "You know what, Chancellor Rhee,
the horse is out of the barn with the children at this school. They will not be satisfied
with 4 percent, they are shooting for 20 percentage point gains in reading and math, and anything
short of that, they are not going to be happy." And they said, "So, we need more lesson plans,
more unit plans, more standards, more mapping, because the kids here, you can't hand them
a worksheet anymore, they won't accept it from us," and it was this incredible dynamic
where within 18 months, not only had the culture of the school turned around, but the pressure
to perform was actually coming from the students themselves.
That is an example of an aggressive turnaround that we have had. We have also adopted and
partnered with our charter partners to take one of the things that they are best at, and
one of the things that has improved their academic gains the most, which is data-driven
instruction. So, we have partnered with them. Actually,
a number of our schools came to us and said, you know, we heard that a number of charter
schools are using something called AchievementNet, which is benchmark interim assessments.
They are aligned to the standards and to the CAS [ph] and we want to use them, as well,
so through that partnership, we have begun to actually use data in a much more significant
way as well. That is sort of what we have accomplished
to date. In terms of moving forward, you know, I have recently had a conversation with a
guy named Lou Gerstner who used to run IBM, and one of the things he said to me is, you
know, when you are trying to transform an organization, the first couple of years are
relatively easy to see gains in, because you are picking all the low-hanging fruit.
He said the second part, the middle years, he is like those are the hardest. If you can
muscle your way through those years, then, the years after that, you have got the wind
at your back, and so we think that one of the ways that we can muscle through our middle
years is with Race to the Top support. Our goals are very significant, as you saw
from our application. We are hoping to get to the point with Race to the Top support
that approximately 70 percent of our kids would be at proficiency, which is a huge jump
given that, for example, less than a third of our children were on grade level proficiency
in mathematics when we entered the District in 2007.
We want to make significant progress in closing the achievement gap, hoping to get from a
gap of about 57 percent in 2006, shrinking that to about 25 percent at the end of the
grant period, and ensuring that all of our kids are college and career ready by drastically
improving the high school graduation rates and our college enrollment rates.
We are going to do that through a number of different areas. The first and foremost, as
you read in our application, our theory of change is really around human capital. We
want to make sure that we have the most aggressive evaluation tool of any city in the country,
but also that we have good professional development to couple with that.
We want to turn around our struggling schools, not just at the rate that the Administration
would like us to, which is the bottom 5 percent, but we are going to be even more aggressive
within DCPS and tackle the lowest 20 percent, hoping to create more Sousa-like environments.
We think that we have what it takes in terms of nimbleness and flexibility in the District
to ensure that within very short order, we have not only adopted the new Common Core
standards, but we have implemented them and we are using new assessments in a time frame
that most other States will still be arguing about the Common Core in their legislatures
and making sure that we have data at the fingertips of every single teacher, principal, and parent
in the District to drive everything that we are doing.
I am going to hand it over to Jennie, one of our charter partners, to talk through our
vision of how Race to the Top will play out in D.C.
MS. NILES: I hope you could hear the impatience in Michelle's voice, because as the charter
leader in this city, I am somebody who runs a school, I, too, share that impatience. We
have made tremendous gains, but we are nowhere near where we need to be.
When you look at where we are now, we have a disproportionate number of low performing
schools, and we do have some high-performing schools, but as you will notice in this graphic,
with Race to the Top we flipped that and we drastically reduced the number of low- performing
schools, we have moved the mid-performing schools into high performing and have a significant
number of high performing schools, so that it dominates the District.
As Michelle referred to, our theory of action is in some ways quite simple. It's about human
capital, and the human capital manifests itself in many ways. You heard Michelle talk about
IMPACT. One of the things that is clear, that we decided
as a team across the State, was that we wanted every LEA who participated in this grant,
and actually wanted every LEA in the State, to say that we wanted each one of them to
use achievement gains for 50 percent of those teacher evaluations.
What we also wanted to do, though, was give the flexibility to the different LEAs, so
that that is the criteria, but every LEA can come up with their own system, so it is not
about adopting IMPACT wholesale, but rather this core piece that we knew would be critical
to achieving student gains. Interestingly, in my conversations with teachers
in DCPS, I have often asked them about how IMPACT is going, because we are already in
full swing for this year, and they said it is the first time that they actually know
what is truly expected of them, and instead of grumbling, I have heard at times reluctance,
but that clarity is exactly what we need to make sure that our kids get there.
In terms of data systems and assessment, Michelle mentioned some ways that we are already partnering.
What Race to the Top will do is allow for every single school, not simply the schools
that I believe that D.C.P.S. is going to be able to turn things around, but not every
single charter school would necessarily have those data systems in place, and that acceleration
of making sure that teachers have in their hands the data about where students are and
what they can do the very next day. One of our partner schools is a DCPS school
that is using it in their middle school, the Columbia Heights Education Campus, and in
talking to the leaders at that school, they have been using it in the sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade. It turns out that while their high school
doesn't have interim assessments per se, they have adopted the data analysis system that
is mirroring what is happening in the middle school, and that is happening on the ninth
grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, and twelfth grade teams, so we are already seeing that
impact, and the leaders of that school have described it as "transformative."
Lastly, the school turnaround. Clearly, this is one of the key issues, and in the proposal,
you will see that one of our strategies is to create a leadership degree that really
focuses on, not just the mission-specific and the educational instructional team, but
also the change management, budget management, resource allocation to make sure that we are
training both for DCPS and for charter schools, the ability to turn around schools.
The undergirding piece of this is the schools are a unit of change, and in D.C., that can
actually truly be the case, not just in a theoretical sense, but in a real sense.
So, what Race to the Top will do for D.C. is not only accelerate and get us further
and faster, it would also give us the affirmation from the Administration of the work that we
have been doing and give us that rocket fuel, in a sense, that takes us not just from steaming
along, but getting us through over this hump, if you will, that Lou Gerstner and Michelle
were talking about. MR. REINOSO: So, we recognize that our Race
to the Top plans are ambitious and that ambitious plans are meaningless without the courage,
capacity, and commitment necessary to implement. It has taken a long time for D.C. to get to
where it is today, but today we stand out across all three of these elements. We have
demonstrated across our traditional public schools and our charter schools, the courage
to make tough decisions. Just in the last three years, we have closed
30 failing DCPS schools and 12 failing charter schools. That is 20 percent of DCPS schools
closed down, 12 percent of charter schools closed in three years alone.
So, we are talking about real aggressive and meaningful change. In addition to those closures,
we have put 24 other schools into other forms of turnaround.
These haven't always been easy or popular decisions, but they have been the right decisions
for kids and I think our willingness to demonstrate that courage has led to a surge in our capacity
across all sectors. We are now drawing talent across the city,
the region, and the country here to D.C. to join Kerri's team to build a high-functioning
state agency, Michelle's team to turn around one of the country's lowest performing school
districts, and to Jennie and her colleague's teams to build what has to be the Nation's
most robust charter sector. As a result, all three of them have an incredibly
deep bench, and we, as a city, have an unprecedented level of capacity to implement across all
sectors, capacity that Race to the Top will allow us to leverage to get further, faster,
and for the first time we have an aligned governance structure in which all the key
players, the State Board of Education, the Public Charter School Board, the City Council,
all of us here are on the same page, committed to aggressive reform.
We may not always agree on all of the details, but we share that commitment to aggressive
reform, and just a determination to invest whatever is necessary to succeed.
We now have a State Agency that just two years from its inception is already tackling head-on,
shortfalls in grants management, providing LEAs with the tools and information they need
to be successful, and is ready to hit the ground running to implement these Race to
the Top plans. So, clearly, we have made tremendous progress
in terms of demonstrating courage and capacity, but in many ways, a commitment is the most
important. We have today I think an unprecedented level
of commitment because the folks you see here, and the dozens of people behind them, are
committed to these plans, because they put these plans together.
This is not an application that was drafted in some distant state capital and is now being
foisted on cash start LEAs we are signing up out of desperation.
This is a plan that from its very inception was written collaboratively by the folks responsible
for implementing it, and as a result, I think we stand out in our commitment to make sure
that we follow through on our plans. The Mayor has charged me with ensuring that
all these reform efforts stay on track. I am absolutely confident that they will.
Mr. Mayor. MAYOR FENTY: So, in closing, we want to emphasize
to you that we believe that the District, as much as any other jurisdiction that you
will hear from, has the opportunity to really make the types of gains and reforms that we
all know are necessary. We think there is a couple of reasons for
that. When I interviewed Chancellor Rhee and tried to sell her on taking the chancellor
position, we agreed on two things. The ones she talked about, that every decision we make
would be in the best interests of the kids, and if it was, we would be willing to let
the chips fall where they may. The second, however, was just as important.
She and I both instinctively believe that the District, maybe more than any other of
the other cities that had taken on mayoral control had the opportunity because of its
size and because of the talent that we would be able to attract being in the Nation's capital,
to really move fast and to be able to show the types of dramatic improvements that a
bigger jurisdiction like in New York or Chicago would take more time to show.
Two years in, I think that has been proven true as we have made probably double the gains
that we thought we would make in about half the time when you look at student achievement
and test score increases, but we are on the verge of doing some great things from our
collective bargaining agreement and the impact that is going to have on teacher flexibility
and the ability to really do different things inside the classroom.
We believe that the Race to the Top dollars and the wind behind our sails that it will
give our school system and our charters is going to move us even faster, and that together
by us being able to be a showcase city for what you are trying to do and what the President
is trying to do in making education the highest priority in the country, and then again what
you can do for us in giving us that extra support to move even faster in tough economic
times is just a great partnership and a great marriage, if you will, and something that
we think lends even more credibility to our application.
So, thank you very much. As is obvious, we have eliminated all the blurring of the governance
structure. The other thing I have been able to do is to hire great people, which is the
best thing that a mayor or governor can ever do, and I was just very proud to hear the
presentation. Hopefully, you all were excited by it, as well.
Thank you. MS. SCOTT: Thank you for your presentation.
All right. We will begin the questions and answers. You will have 62 minutes.
REVIEWER 1: Thank you. I am going to try to facilitate the question and answer period.
Thank you for your presentation. We deeply appreciate it. I do want to mention that your
application was read by five reviewers, unfortunately, he could not be here today because of illness,
because we did receive input regarding his questions, so we will try to integrate them
before us. Let me start by this issue of [inaudible].
You have a very unique application, you point out you have a unique set of circumstances
in the District. Could you help us by explaining or clarifying
how the proposed plan will integrate these unique circumstances in which you have charter
schools, you have a new state system, you have a large district, and you have a charter
board. All these essentially are different entities.
What we would like you to do is help us understand how those entities essentially what roles
they play, what responsibilities they have in moving to your very ambitious goals, your
very ambitious targets, particularly around data assessment, student achievement, how
you do that across the system that is that unique, and then, secondly, professional development,
which you argue is key, human capital, to try to ensure that you have that human capital
in this unique set of circumstances, please. MS. BRIGGS: Why don't I take the State piece
of it, and then I can have the District chime in with how their role fits into it.
One of the things that we have done, the State agency, is that we are responsible for the
things that go across all of the different LEAs and what you see in our application,
and what we have been doing is we have a bigfocus on standard assessments and also data.
So, the State agency is the one that is responsible for designing and implementing the assessments,
we are responsible for developing and analyzing the data to do the accountability work.
So, with Common Core, we will continue that, but we are doing it in a way that is collaborative,
so the State agency is the convener of people to come together and think about if we are
going to make the Common Core, and we are, we will adopt within a couple of months, what
do our teachers and our principals need, and so we will bring those folks together from
the districts to convene and think about these are our current standards, and these are the
new standards, what’s that gap and what do the teachers and principals need.
So, we have set forth some pieces in the application, so the State will take responsibility for
doing that, so the standards counsel that we will be building, we are introducing some
website work, so that there is information that will sustain the process in all the districts.
From that, what we have done, you can see there is a lot in our application that we
are providing money to our districts to do on the grounds of special development for
their teachers and to work with parents, so the parents understand what these new standards
mean. So, the state of the convener, particularly
around standards and assessments, and the move to your Common Core with the districts
to kind of fill in what they need and can build on their unique skill set.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: I think one of the things that is unique about this jurisdiction, that
you probably are not going to see in any other State, is the fact that the Mayor convenes
us on a weekly basis. He has what is called the "Education Front
Burner Meeting," where the State Superintendent, the Deputy Mayor, who represents the interests
of the charter schools, myself, the City Administrator, and then Allen Lou, who is the head of our
Public Education Facilities Management Department and other agencies, are actually represented
in the same room. On a weekly basis, we are in a meeting where
we are aligning ourselves, we are having the conversations, we are sort of slogging through
the tough issues with the Mayor actually engaged in this, so that ensures that as we leave
that meeting every week, we all know what the priorities of the other folks are and
making sure that we are aligned in all of those actions.
I know that we lay out in our application the fact that we are going to have a human
capital task force, that we also are going to have a student growth measurement task
force, a Common Core task force, and although they may seem like, you know, random entities
for this jurisdiction, it will actually be meaningful, because we will pull together
the top members of our staff to work hand in hand on these things, and I think it will
go much like the application process did, where we were in rooms together saying that
50 percent of the teacher evaluation based on student achievement makes sense, should
everybody adopt IMPACT or not. We actually, as the principals worked through
all those issues together and came up with this application, we feel like with that momentum,
we are going to continue to do that kind of hard work together through these task forces,
and I think we will be more aligned and acting in concert in a much more significant way
than you are going to see in other States. MS. NILES: In terms of one way to think about
the question you ask is also how do the charter schools, as independent LEAs, come together
and are coherent around this. I think that the way that we had thought of
operationalizing, for instance, the assessment systems and having every school embrace those
is that the Office of the State Superintendent would actually put forward criteria, and so
this part of the grant, what we did was we created the non-negotiables for every LEA
that signed on. All of those non-negotiables were funded through
the formula, but that said, there is still going to be an application creating the criteria
with which every charter school who wants to receive those funds will meet around data
and assessment. So, for instance, not only could there be
preferred vendors who are articulated, but it will allow schools to develop their own
interim assessments if they so choose, but it is that criteria that we already in our
human capital meeting and in our data meetings, have already set out that criteria, so that
the coherence comes from having those core principles around those or having those criteria
be common. Then, also, we have some outside support,
for instance, from new school's venture fund who is very interested in helping the charter
sector in particular get up to speed and with guidance about how to make those choices,
for instance, around vendors, for instance, because that is something that Michelle's
staff has the horsepower to do that analysis, and so we are already talking with other groups
that could help give charters that are smaller, for instance, the horsepower to make those
smart decisions. In many ways, the Race to the Top dollars
are really going to be able to propel the charter sector, as a whole, perhaps to even
further or in a different way than what DCPS is able to do, because we are like herding
cats, but all of the folks who signed on to the MOU absolutely believe in the core components
of what is in this proposal. So, now, we just need to use those criteria
to create the commonalities that will allow us to get every school that is participating.
REVIEWER 1: Just a follow-up on the particular since you place such a high regard on human
capital, the professional development assessment systems, like IMPACT, 40 percent or so of
the students are not in your district, they are in the charter schools, how do you see
that role particularly in the human capital area, professional development and assessments,
teachers, and the rest of that? MS. NILES: Why don't I start with evaluation
and then we can switch to professional development. For the evaluation piece, this, too, was very
similar in that it was going to set out this criteria starting with the only -- the key
point was having 50 percent of the evaluation be based on student achievement.
One of the things that is dynamic within the charter group, although we are herding cats,
we do have the highest performing charters, have many commonalities among them, so while
not identical in their human capital system, they share some things, and just that [inaudible]
alone had 300 visitors from both D.C. and around the world to come and visit us last
year. We are constantly being asked by our colleagues
in the District, everybody wants to become a high-performing school. That is the conversation
that is now happening throughout the District. It is not DCPS versus charter anymore, it's
how do I become high performing. So, the same way I think that there is the
analogy to the assessment would be around the evaluation system, but there again we
are also going to need the support of both the high-performing charters and also taking
the best elements from IMPACT and then probably having to help us, outside organization, help
smaller charters be able to make those decisions around human capital decisions.
Michelle, do you want to talk a little bit about the PD part and then I can tag on?
CHANCELLOR RHEE: Sure. From the personal development standpoint, I do teach our listening sessions
a couple of times a week as where I just go out into the community, any teacher at any
school can come and talk to me. It was interesting because a few weeks ago,
one of the teachers said in that session, you know, I don't mind being a part of a system
that has the most rigorous teacher evaluation and accountability system in the country,
as long as we also have the best professional development to go with it.
That is exactly what we aspire to. So, what we have envisioned is an entire PD platform
that would be linked to the evaluation system. We affectionately refer to it in DCPS as the
"world of wizards and unicorns," because it sort of seems way out there, but we can get
there faster with the Race to the Top funds. Basically, what we are looking to do is to
have the ability for any teacher, once they receive their impact evaluation, to be able
to go on-line and say they are weak in Teach 8Subsection 3, they would be able to click
on to that and they would be able to open one link and watch videos of other teachers
in the district, teaching lessons who are very strong in that area.
They could click on another link and they could download lesson plans or unit plans
that were specifically focused on that. Another link would allow them to access readings and
books that were specifically focused on that strategy.
They could, you know, find a list of master educators both in the charter and DCPS schools
that they could go and observe, and so what we are hoping to create is very teacher-centered,
also very sort of self-service oriented, so that what we envision is a teacher having
a PD wallet or voucher, say it's $3,000 a year, and with that money if you are the kind
of person who needs to see something in action, you could take $180 of that and hire a sub,
so that you can go out and watch one of those master educators.
We think because this entire thing is going to be on-line and accessible to teachers at
any time, that it would be very easy, not only to have the charters be part of the development,
so that we are going out and videotaping the best charter teachers, as well, but that charter
educators could also access that PD platform. So, that is one of the most important things
that we are doing. The second thing that we share is teacher
pipeline. The State Board of Education made some changes that are much better in terms
of teacher certification and principal certification rules that allow providers much more flexibility
and to allow alternative certification providers more flexibility.
That benefits all of us, and so one of the things that will be a subgrant were we to
receive the Race to the Top dollars, is more alternative pathways. If you look at the major
pathways like D.C. teaching fellows through TNTP, Teach for America, et cetera, they bring
in cores of core members and teachers, and they actually serve both in the charter sector
and in DCPS, so the more that we can broaden those pathways specifically focused on areas
like science, technology, math, et cetera, that is going to benefit both of us.
Then, I would say last is we have sort of the feelings of a lot of collaboration. We
have actually one collaborative school that involves Jennie's school, it is called "The
power of planning." It also involves some DCPS schools, and they actually work together
on planning, on professional development, on data analysis.
One of the things that we outlined in our grant proposal is to create more of those
collaborative approaches. We have a DCPS specific one that is called a D.C.-3 collaborative.
We have got The Power of Planning, and so what we have outlined in our proposal is a
pretty significant amount of money going to grow that concept and make sure that there
is collaboration and professional development across the sectors.
REVIEWER 1: Thank you very much. MS. NILES: Just to pick up on that, just to
look at The Power of Planning project alone, we already have the seeds, because I think
that with the wizard and unicorns is something that charters actually will be very interested
in. That said, no charter would have to do that.
Not only our charters are already using uncommon schools has a taxonomy that was actually highlighted
in the recent New York Times Sunday Magazine section, but many of our schools, us included,
are using those video clips. So, the Power of Planning project alone, we
have actually created a Wiki site, that we had a number of experts come over the summer
and we videotaped all of those, and so all of the schools have access to those three-hour
workshops, and then we have a whole host, in fact, I think it would have stunned the
recent folks who came from the Department, who got to see, it's part of the dissemination
grant from Title 5B of all of the -- we have individual lesson plans for every grade level
from pre-K now to twelfth grade. We have video clips from all the different
teachers involved, so many of the things that are the wizards and unicorns are actually
already taking place in a very sort of simple way, but the schools are already using that,
and so there is going to be tremendous opportunity for the professional development to take hold
through all the ways that Michelle described, and we are already doing that, so that coherence
and consistency is just a couple of steps away.
REVIEWER 1: Thank you. REVIEWER 2: I am going to follow up with a
question about the PD, the pipeline, and the platform.
What is your timeline on that? I mean that is partly answered because you have got some
groundwork and some "seeds," quote, unquote, but what do you think?
CHANCELLOR RHEE: Well, we are actually in the midst of the planning for this now, and
what I have told the teachers is that -- because we have been thinking about this prior
to Race to the Top, and we were really looking at sort of the three- to five-year time horizon
to be able to do that. Given where we are now, if we are able to
get the Race to the Top funds, what we anticipate is that we would start to build the interface
in the winter of 2010. We would do most of the acquiring of the content by spring of
2011, and then we would add the external providers and resources by the spring of 2012.
So, we want it to be functional as we build it, so some of the early pieces that we use,
we will be able to do now, like the videotaping, we are bringing teachers together right now
to do some development of lesson plans. We want to start infrastructure now, but in terms
of the major milestones, those are exactly what they will look like.
REVIEWER 2: Great. Thank you. REVIEWER 1: As a follow-up on the PD, let's
[inaudible] that. REVIEWER 2: Uh-huh.
REVIEWER 3: Earlier, you had a slide that showed your theory of change and one of the
strategies by which you get great teachers and leaders is professional development. For
several minutes here, you have been going through in great detail, it's obviously a
really key part of getting to where you want to go.
If you look at the summary information regarding MOU elements for various aspects of Race to
the Top, only 2 of 31 LEAs signed on or bought in to the professional development provisions.
What is going on there, why only 2, and tell us how you will deal with that, and doesn't
that somehow signal real problems for you and getting to where you want to go with your
professional development? CHANCELLOR RHEE: I think that if you look
at the three areas where charters in large part did not sign on, it was in the assessment
of that professional development and then the access of data for researchers.
I think that you are talking about the two LEAs that did sign on, but having talked to
a number of the other LEAs, many of whom are incredibly high quality LEAs, I think the
biggest concern on their side was really making sure that they had the capacity to be able
to sort of match what the expectations were, so especially on the research side, you know,
when you have researchers coming in and trying to gather all this data, do you really have
the capacity to be able to serve their needs. On the professional development side, I think
the worry was more about is there going to be a set of requirements around what professional
development looks like because so many of our best charter schools, the way that professional
development happens is incredibly organic, incredibly customized for the specific school
and circumstance, because they are dealing with such a small group of teachers.
I think that they were worried somewhat about how the PD would be assessed and what kinds
of requirements would be put on. Is that what you think, as well?
MS. Niles: I think that one of the pieces of the wizards and unicorns that is going
to be so incredibly useful is how it is going to pull from the evaluation data to dictate
what PD is going to be most necessary. Most charter schools don't need a whole system
to do that, because they are small enough so that we can assess what is needed even
in our school without doing a pull from a data system, so I think that one of the things
that the charters, while very -- the charters that signed on were absolutely focused on
becoming high performing schools, were anxious that between compliance and other, that they
didn't want to sign on to too many things that they would not be able to execute within
this time frame in the same way that would make it coherent, I mean, excuse me, consistent
with the way that we framed it in the application. The amount of professional development in
charter schools, I would actually venture is probably higher than the typical DCPS school
at this time consistently, even though schools that are not yet high performing.
It is something that because we can craft the schedule, so for our school, for instance,
we are open earlier and later every single day, and then on Fridays, we have an early
dismissal, but we have an after-school program that has all the kids, but we have from 1:30
to 4:00 every single Friday for professional development, every year, along with five professional
development days, two weeks in the summer. REVIEWER 1: I want to get back to this.
REVIEWER 2: I want to change the direction for a moment. We are a bit concerned about
the lack of involvement from the Washington Teachers' Union. That is a big concern of
ours. Can you address how you will secure the involvement
of teachers who are members of the union? You state in your application that while the
union would not openly support the proposal, the District strongly believes that broad-based
reform oriented teachers and school leaders would support the plan.
What gives you evidence for that, and has any progress been made since the application?
CHANCELLOR RHEE: Yes. Actually, contrary to popular belief, we have a very strong relationship
with the WTU. Although we have locked in negotiations on this particular contract for a while, I
think the union would also say that there is more communication and more collaboration
with our administration than they have had before with any other administration.
Just to give you a couple of examples of this, in the development of the teaching and learning
framework which was rolled out this year, that was developed by teachers. So, we had
somewhere between 50 and 60 both focus groups and working sessions with teachers to develop
that. We are right now in the midst of implementing
our first year of IMPACT, but are already in development for the second phase of IMPACT.
We have 75 working group sessions scheduled right now with teachers by grade level and
subject area to get their input and insight on how we can improve IMPACT.
So, we really feel like we have a robust infrastructure through which we can ensure that teacher feedback
is coming in to what we are doing. At the end of the day, my sense based on my
conversations with George Parker from the WTU, is that they felt that signing on to
our Race to the Top application would mean that they wholeheartedly endorse IMPACT, because
as you have read, a lot of our focus is on the redevelopment of that.
Because of the precedent that IMPACT sets with putting this 50 percentage point mark
on, and because of the ramifications that I think they believe that would have on other
evaluation systems across the country, and how that would become political, I understand
what their hesitance was, but despite that, we are very confident in our ability to have
the teachers collaborate with us all along the way in terms of everything having to do
with human capital, but also on the standards and data print as well.
REVIEWER 2: So, do you think that these meetings, these 75 meetings that you have scheduled,
and I don't know what your timeline is in terms of your collective bargaining and the
next contract, do you think -- well, maybe I should ask the Mayor, do you think that
this is going to actually be resolved enough that it can be included in the collective
bargaining agreement that the teachers will vote on, and therefore, then support?
MAYOR FENTY: Well, the Chancellor knows the details of the collective bargaining agreement.
Let me just say, though, having been around the government going back to 1998, what the
Chancellor said about the working relationship between the Washington Teachers' Union and
management, I think needs to be emphasized. There is real substance in the discussions
wherein before it really was just two sides demanding from each other and little meeting
of the minds. Now, I think one or two disagreements are bookended by eight or nine things that
we really do work together on, so I think you have got a foundation for whatever things
haven't been agreed upon, to be agreed upon in a very professional way.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: So, we are very close to coming to a final agreement on the collective
bargaining agreement, and we actually think that it is going to be a good synergy between
what we have in the Race to the Top application. I can't talk about the specifics of what is
in the agreement, but let me sort of, in a broad way, say that one of the areas of emphasis
is stronger professional development for our teachers.
So, I think that you will see once that collective bargaining agreement actually is ratified,
that there is going to be a tremendous amount of alignment between the things that we outline
in the contract and the priorities that we laid out here in the application.
REVIEWER 1: Thank you very much. REVIEWER 2: Thank you.
REVIEWER 1: [Reviewer 4], please. REVIEWER 4: In this next question, we will
allow Superintendent Briggs maybe to respond to this one.
The D.C. application certainly establishes a sense of urgency for the proposed ambitious
achievement targets. In order to determine if the targets and the achievement trajectory
are realistic and attainable, could you clarify for us two aspects of your plan?
The first is what growth expectations did you use to establish the annual percentage
point gain in achievement, and the percentage point reduction in subgroup achievement gaps,
and the second question is have you experienced an achievement plateau?
If so, what do you plan to do if a plateau occurs during the four-year window of the
Race to the Top funding, and particularly if you experience a plateau during the transition
to new standards? MS. BRIGGS: Good question. A lot of our --
when you look down at the growth targets that we set in place with Race to the Top,
we were looking at historical trends, and so D.C. has certainly achieved a great deal
in the last two to three years in student achievement.
We kind of took what we had done and said, okay, if we are able to do the kinds of things
that we think matter for student data, new standards, professional development, folks
on turnaround, what kind of gains can we see, and so we projected out sort of ambitious
targets for what we would have to see in both the D.C. CAS and NAPE, and grad rate, and
college enrollment. So, it's kind of looking at historical trends
like where do we think we can go with Race to the Top. I don't think we have gotten to
an achievement plateau. We at this point have around half of our students that are on grade
level in reading and math. That is no place to plateau.
We have to go further. I think we absolutely feel, like Michelle said, we have done some
of this sort of early work where we can start to see some gains, but we are all very aware
of where we need to go next in order to see additional gains.
We need to focus more on our students' disabilities, which is why you saw that piece in our Common
Core discussion where we want to have these entry points for kids who need kind of access
points into the curriculum, so we are building that in because we know that that in particular
is a challenging subgroup for us. So, we have tried to put in place, in this
application, those places where we are like, okay, we have to focus here, because this
is a tough group. I mean students with disabilities have different needs, and if we can help our
teachers understand best how to get them into the curriculum and help them achieve grade
level, that is going to be great for everybody. So, not at a plateau, we definitely think
we can go up. MR. REINOSO: I should say just to emphasize
that the slope of our projections are certainly better under Race to the Top, because Race
to the Top allows us to double down on some of these efforts and to compress time frames
for these, and to be intensifying the PD and accelerating our interventions in the turnaround,
et cetera, and so we are aware of the risk of a plateau.
As Kerri said, we are not there yet, but we need Race to the Top in essence to help us
keep a steep slope on that curve in terms of our achievement gains.
REVIEWER 4: So, you use the historical percentage gains factored in your current two-year accelerated
gains, and then just added percentages on to that?
MS. BRIGGS: We have tried to estimate. One of our big gains is we are hoping for five
points a year with our D.C. CAS. I mean that is pretty aggressive to be able to every year
say we want 5 percent more improvement in our assessments.
We know what we have achieved. Like I said, even that has been tremendous, and we feel
like this is what we can get to with Race to the Top, adding on to that.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: As an example, when we were setting the goals for the NAPE growth, we
set those as 10 scale score points within a four-year period, which would really be
historic for any district that either participates in tutor or the statewide.
Without the Race to the Top funding, we think we could probably compete with some of the
jurisdictions who have really been pushing the envelope on reform, which would look more
like four to six scale score points six at the fourth grade level, four at the eighth
grade level, because there is a little bit more difficulty there.
So, we are not saying that without the money, we are not going to grow. We still think that
we can, without the money, we can keep pace probably with some of the other, more aggressive
reform efforts. We just think that with the Race for the Top
money, we can see historic growth as opposed to what the other jurisdictions are seeing.
Ms. Niles: Lastly, we did spend some time looking at the specific schools, especially
the D.C. [inaudible] colleagues and looked at each school and said how much can this
school do with these kinds of -- so it wasn't simply a statistical suggestion, it was actually
we know all the schools in the District, and we could do that.
So, I participated with the Public Charter School Board in estimating where we thought
different charter schools could go if they implemented interim assessments, and if they
had this professional development that was provided. So, it also is sort of like a zero-based
budget, you know, a ground up for each institution, each school and what gains they could make.
REVIEWER 4: Thank you. REVIEWER 1: With regard to that kind of achievement
gain, just a technical question. Does D.C. CAS include the charter schools?
MS. Niles: Yes. REVIEWER 1: They started in 2006, 2007?
MS.Briggs: 2006. REVIEWER 1: So, that is when you got your
first sort of statewide assessments that were common. You did make achievement gains in
areas that Hispanic students do not do as well as instituting in terms of achievement
gap reduction. How do we deal with the issue of sort of floor
effects and ceiling effects, so you have, as you said, you have students who are not
doing well, 9 percent, so you can pick off the low-hanging fruit.
Talk a little bit more how you are going to, in your IBM metaphor, how you are going to
move essentially from that when you are really down, the only way to go is up, but when you
are getting there, how do you really move and what are the key elements?
I am thinking here of the data systems itself that are unique. You talked of the human capital
issue, but talk a little bit more about how, in sort of the two sectors, the charter and
the public district, how you are going to essentially move on that, given that you have
some mixed results with some students? Chancelor Rhee: I just want to be clear that
actually, our Hispanic students are outliers on the positive side. They have seen growth
that have outpaced the other subgroups, and right now for our English language learners,
interestingly, they are outperforming the average students in the District.
So, that is a huge achievement, and on the NAPE, as well, our Hispanic students are now
performing at the national public school district average, not the average for Hispanic students
across the country, so they have essentially closed the achievement gap that existed there.
REVIEWER 1: Okay. I will look at that again. CHANCELLOR RHEE: Sure, so if you look at the
application, we actually talk about our low achieving or sort of failing schools, what
interventions we are going to put in place there.
We talk about the need to quickly accelerate the learning in our mid-range schools, and
then we want our highest performing schools to share what they are doing with other schools.
When we are talking about the mid-range schools, so schools that may have seen some growth
over the last couple of years, but making sure that they continue on their projectory,
we are going to focus on a few things. One that we think is incredibly important
is the adoption of the Common Core, because part of what I think for those mid-range schools,
what is happening is the rigor is not there. So, they may have gathered some low-hanging
fruit in terms of improving the general quality of what is going on in classrooms, but because
the rigor is not there, if they don't adopt the Common Core and have a very clear set
of aligned assessments of, well, then, then they are not going to get to the next level
of achievement. So, that adoption, the partnership that we
will have with the State on the professional development of those standards, for those
standards, and then the aligned assessments are going to be incredibly important.
So, that is one. Two, we are hoping that through the collective bargaining agreement, we are
going to be able to reward the best performing teachers, and so we think that that is going
to provide an increased incentive for our folks.
We think that both the PD platform and the increased data access is really going to help
support those teachers, as well, and to have all of these things connected, which is what
we are hoping to do. So, for example, one of the things that we
hope to do with Race to the Top dollars and IMPACT is to be able to, for a particular
school, say, you know, run a query to say what are the weakest areas of the faculty
in this school, and then can we actually customize our professional development specifically
towards that group. So, for example, one of things was mid-range
schools and what makes a determination about whether it was able to break out or not, is
their ability to differentiate instruction for a variety of learning levels.
So, if we find that is a weakness in the faculty overall, then, we would be able to deploy
those professional development resources accordingly. MS. NILES: One of the things that really became
clear over the course of doing this proposal was that we really have shifted the conversation
in D.C., and so we are really talking about what it takes to become a high-performing
school, so everything that Michelle just talked about in terms of the mid-performing schools
becoming high-performing schools are a twin in charter schools.
I mean it's this spiraling of standards, long-term plans, interim assessments, and then taking
that up a level each time. We see schools coming to visit us, and we
are not -- while E.L. Haynes has had some terrific gains, we are not at the absolute
levels that we need to see, but just in regards to in our last four years, our latino students
have increased in their percentage point proficiency by nearly 70 percent on the D.C. CAS in that.
So, schools have been coming -- REVIEWER 1: Just to charters, and you broke
that up -- MS. NILES: That is the specific school where
I am. So, other charters in other schools, and colleagues from D.C. have also come to
see us and said what is happening. We say there is no magic wand there is no
magic ball, this is around being really careful, really thoughtful about knowing what the standards
are, aligning and having long-term plans, having interim assessments that are aligned
to those, and having the level of rigor match all the way along, and that takes honestly
years to continue to get better and better and better at.
I see that those charters continue to want to do those pieces.
MS. BRIGGS: I think just to add from the State's point of view, the things you hear from Jennie
and Michelle are kind of when we talked about the high- achieving schools, utilizing their
talents and their learning, and what they know about how students achieve and how schools
improve, it's how we are going to build out the State system.
So, instead of creating smart capacity around student achievement and how do we best train
all the professional development at the State level, this happened to folks like Jennie
and Michelle who have been doing this work, and say, okay, your school acts that aren't
achieving at the level that you need to, bring that structure, the places we talked to, the
structure where you can go and observe Jennie and sort of formalize some of these things
that have been slightly informal so far, provide some formal structure to that, provide some
funding and help more schools utilize the talent that is there and what they have been
learning, so that teachers can learn from their peers.
REVIEWER 1: I think [Reviewer 2]had some questions about performance issues.
REVIEWER 2: Yes. I think perhaps Ms. Briggs will be able to answer this, kind of focused
on your new office. According to your application, the Office of State Superintendent of Education
will be piloting new techniques in performance of measure tracking and reporting through
the effectiveness managers? MS. BRIGGS: Yes.
REVIEWER 2: Would you share with us what these techniques are and where they have been used
elsewhere, and the track record? MS. BRIGGS: Sure, yeah. It is something that
we have actually been developing throughout the City, particularly with the recovery work.
In D.C., we have something, the Mayor has, CAPSTAT [ph], Michelle has SCHOOLSTAT [ph],
where we bring together sort of people who have a real deep background on numbers and
looking at data, and can kind of go and analyze trends and think about, okay, if we are looking
at this problem around trust grants management, what is our history, how do we map out the
flow of things, where are we seeing things get slowed down, where are we not meeting
our targets, and we will set targets along each piece along the way.
It would be like, okay, if we are expecting to get the grant out within 60 days, what
is our flow and how do we get there. So, it's those kinds of systems that we have been developing
over the past couple of years with [inaudible] for us, and the different system pool use
dot [ph] learning in this model, to kind of track those numbers and have that be the grants
management tool. REVIEWER 1: [Reviewer 4], go ahead.
REVIEWER 4: Yes, thank you. Your theory of change is all around human
capital, so the next question I want to drill down into your theory of change and particularly
in human capital. In the D.C. application, you propose to attain
the achievement targets by having the LEA develop and implement an approved workplace.
How do you plan to build the structural and human capacity of the LEA to design, implement,
and monitor a work plan that will take them beyond, that would be a visionary work plan
that would take them beyond their current performance that they are already experiencing,
and how would you control for potential variability in the LEA work plan in the design, as well
as the final results? MS. BRIGGS: Sure, great question. We want
to make sure that what you propose you can implement. I think a big part of how we built
this application has set a great foundation for us in that work, and that this wasn't
an application that was really designed by the State.
The State was in the discussions for each of the different work groups that we had,
but frankly, the balance of work was done by our districts, and so they had people there,
and so as we crafted these things and we crafted these plans, we already have buy-in from everybody
in terms of what we are going to do for data and our teacher leaders, and turnaround.
So, that is part of it, like we set the foundation. People aren't going to be surprised when we
get this application and we say like okay, so now you are going to have to do your MOU
plan and your Scope of Work. They are not going to be surprised at what is there.
In terms of what we are going to do at the State level, we are starting the Race to the
Top team. We have got about half of our people focused on the grant management pieces of
it, kind of reporting financial tracking, all those kinds of operational pieces.
Then, we are going to have the effectiveness managers to help our districts understand
what it means to set up the data system or to deal with professional development, and
then like we said, we are going to set up these different work groups and rely on the
capacity at the local level to provide some of the real deep content that is needed, so
that we can connect Jennie with a charter school that maybe is struggling around if
I have to do this evaluation, and we have all agreed that 50 percent of it is going
to be on the student growth measure, what does the rest of it look like.
We can make those connections and make sure that if we have districts that are struggling,
we can put them together with them. So, I mean that is our thinking. That is our
plan is to kind of build on what we have done with the Race to the Top. We have got this
team that we are ready to get going, and we will get the work plans in place for 90 days.
We will use the web-based structure, like I said, a lot of what we have done with recovery
in terms of our ability to track as a city in some of the models that the Mayor's team
has put together will really help us with that.
A lot of it is on-line and web-based, so that people can get easy access to information.
A lot of it is actually covered with the available aside from what recovery asked for. To, those
are going to be a lot of our accountability measures, as well.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: One of the things that we struggled with when we actually wrote the
application was trying to strike a balance between making sure that there was consistency
in quality across the LEAs, but also that we weren't putting a stranglehold on the charters
and their autonomy. I think we sort of managed to do that. You
are not going to see a tremendous amount of variability in those human capital plans,
because we set out certain things that are non-negotiable, so it is not just about the
fact that the evaluation tool has to be created and that 50 percent have to be based on student
achievement. We also lay out what the other components
have to be. So, for example, the teachers need to click into four tiers of effectiveness,
highly effective, effective, minimally effective, or ineffective.
That means then that, you know, we don't have a definition of what a good teacher is from
Jennie, from Kip from D.C. press. We are all operating with the same definitions, and then
we have the same requirements to report back to the State on the percentage of our teachers
that fall into each bucket, and as it pertains to, you know, is this teacher sort of seeing
the adequate amount of growth. We are going to evolve a statewide growth
model and expectations, so that everybody can be on the same page, so that if I think
that Teacher X has a three point value, I am seeing that person in the same way that
Jennie would if she had the same person on her staff as opposed to all of us having different
expectations. We actually have laid a lot of that out or
will develop it in the working group together, and those will be the State standards.
REVIEWER 4: Thank you. REVIEWER 1: [Reviewer 2] had a follow-up.
I want to be sure that she gets a chance. REVIEWER 2: You did answer it, I got it, the
effectiveness managers. So, are the effectiveness managers going to be assigned, the D.C. managers,
the charter managers, or everyone is going to kind of work together, are they going to
be assigned to schools? MS. BRIGGS: Yes, we will have them assigned
to content for sure. There will be an effectiveness manager to assess the data. We will have a
line for evaluation, kind of the teacher leader piece, and we will have it for turnaround.
Within that, we will also have [inaudible] contact, so everybody will be very clear if
they have a problem, who they can go to. I think that maybe there are finer points
of that, too. We have also built into this, a monthly project, meaning for all the people
who have been involved in this, at the Mayor's level, and then we will be convening people
on a regular basis to make sure that things are moving along if they need to.
REVIEWER 3: This is really a related question. It has to do with evaluation, not teacher
evaluation, but evaluation of your efforts as a whole, and you have many different processes,
very ambitious, complicated undertakings, and if they are like most human endeavors,
some of them might not come off quite as planned in the contract, and so on.
Could you speak to how you will look at the implementation of your Race to the Top efforts
from a monitoring sense, from a continuous improvement and evaluation sense, to know
whether your processes are on track and working or not as you go?
MS. BRIGGS: Sure. I mean I think we will use a couple of different models in that. We will
obviously do the required monitoring that is occurring with any sort of Federal grant
that needs to be in place, but we will also have -- I mean we have got a reporting person
who will be collecting very regular data on the different plans as they are going along.
That is one of the Race to the Top people, and then the State's team. We will be collecting
information on some of the financial side in the way that we distribute grants and making
sure that the districts are spending the money in the way that they have committed to, in
the MOU and in the different competitive pieces that we have laid out.
Then, as we go along, we will have regular check-ins to make sure that if you decide
you are going to do the professional development piece, you know, we are getting to the evaluation
of teachers, we will collect that data we will monitor that data, and we will make sure
it is there. MR. REINOSO: Kerri made reference to the Mayor's
CAPSTAT program, which is the way that we monitor the performance of agencies and we
will have something similar to that to track our performance in addition to the work that
happens at the State level in terms of the day-to-day management and oversight of the
application. We will track is as a city, because as I said,
this is a citywide commitment, and so we will, at that level, independent of the operations
of the LEAs, also be tracking at the city level to ensure that we are on track and to
see if there is any point at which the City itself needs to intervene and to provide additional
support at any level of this process to get us back on track.
No doubt we will face challenges along the road, and will fall slightly off the planned
trajectory, and so we need to identify those things as early as possible in the CAPSTAT
structure that the Mayor has set up for the City as a whole allows us to do that, as well.
REVIEWER 3: In this evaluation, who makes the call? You have got an LEA that is not
doing what they ought to be doing, you have got every indication that that is the case,
you monitor them, you have looked at it, who is responsible? I imagine in your district
you are, or is it the State? Who is responsible in this set of circumstances?
MS. BRIGGS: We have built into the MOU that the State is ultimately responsible for making
the -- REVIEWER 3: So the State is ultimately, so
you could override a decision by any of the charter --
MS. BRIGGS : Yes, we could. REVIEWER 3: You could say to even the charter
board or wherever, you make that decision when it comes to the Race to the Top kinds
of things? MS. BRIGGS: Right, the State is ultimately
responsible for how this works, and I think that we have put in enough things along the
way that we hope that we never get to that point.
Reviewer 3: Sure, I understand. MS. BRIGGS: But we have been working with
everybody that we have got -- I mean there is 58 districts here. We are not talking about
a universe of 100,000, so it is pretty easy to get them together and figure out how is
it going and what will they be doing along the way, where are you having problems.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: I think that is the importance of the fact that all the application requires
is for us to be very clear about what the measures are, the success measures are.
So, all of the LEAs who signed on to Race for the Top understand very clearly what the
expectations are. They understand, for example, that we are defining what a failing school
is with a point system like we have never done before, and that that point system includes
what your AYP status is, how far you are from your proficiency targets, and that sort of
thing. So, we know that all the LEAs are sort of
doing their own calculations to figure out if I participate and I get this money, am
I going to be able to nationally meet these targets, and I think that is why you saw that
some LEAs didn't sign on, because of their lack of confidence in being able to actually
meet those targets. So, I think that from the beginning, both
the Deputy Mayor's Office and the State Superintendent's Office made very clear to us, as LEAs, that
there was going to be a very strong accountability system with this money.
REVIEWER 1: Very good. [Reviewer 4], do you want to ask a sustainability
question? REVIEWER 4: I will be happy to do that, [Reviewer
1], thank you. In the D.C. application, you indicate that
you plan to continue the reform initiative that are funded under Race to the Top grant.
Given the expansive nature of your plan and the high achievement levels that you intend
to attain within the four-year window, what do you plan to do under a sustainability plan
particularly if you don't achieve the goals that you want or you find, as Steve asked,
that some of your interventions are not being evaluated and are not proving to be as effective
as you want? Could you talk with us about your sustainability,
the plans and efforts? MS. BRIGGS: Sure, but there is a number of
things in the proposal that are the development of like a one-time kind of cost structure.
There is the Common Core adoption and the development of implementation. There is sort
of building out in terms of [inaudible], and the cost from that goes down.
We also anticipate that again with the real focus around ensuring that our teachers can
understand the standards and can differentiate instructions, particularly for students with
disabilities, that we will be able to use funds that we currently now have dedicated
for other special education services, that we can use those funds to come in on the back
end and continue to work with them doing. We talk about that in the proposal. Right
now we spend roughly $150 million for non-public placement of students with disabilities. That
number, we are intensely focused on both improving services for children to make sure that they
are being educated [inaudible] strict environment and that we can bring them back into the public
system. As we start to address that issue with a lot
of this work, then, we have new funds that have purposely been used for something else,
that we can use on the back of this to kind of continue the work.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: I think given the experience that we had with the error [ph] funding, we
were particularly cognizant about the funding cliff. So, if you look at our application,
we specifically said that about 74 percent of the funding of the Race to the Top dollars
would go specifically towards things that we felt could be sustainable in the long term.
So, 48 percent spent on infrastructure, so the development of the instructional management
systems at the charter schools, the teacher evaluation systems, once we create that PD
platform, those things then will be sustainable for the long term, 16 percent of the State
Superintendents that are really focusing in on the Common Core.
We believe that once we do the rollout, the web site development, the training of teachers
on that Common Core, then, maintenance of that will be relatively minimal from there,
and then about 10 percent of that funding is going specifically into the development
of the teacher and principal preparation program. We have outlined this in a way that beyond
the grant period, those should be self-sustaining through tuition dollars. So, we are really
talking about just 25 percent of the money that we are going to be spending, that we
would have to worry about how we are going to sustain it in the long term.
As the Superintendent said, we have actually had Parthenon come in to do a financial analysis
for us of the kinds of savings that we would need to see as a State from things like special
education, special education transportation, non-public placements, also food service recruitment
because of reimbursements, and that sort of thing, so we actually have a plan for how,
over the next five years, we can recoup some of those savings and push them back into these
initiative. REVIEWER 4: Thank you, [Reviewer 1].
REVIEWER 1: [Reviewer 3]. REVIEWER 3: One of the Race to the Top priorities
is STEM. Give us a review about STEM as you see it being implemented and particularly
address how you will be integrating STEM across grades and disciplines.
CHANCELLOR RHEE: I can talk about that from a DCPS perspective. There are a few areas
in which we are going to do this. One of the things that we know we have to
do -- and if you look at our five-year plan, one of the main things is to build more compelling
schools, and the way that we want to do that is to identify schools that are kind of in
that mid-range that we talked about earlier, and putting new programs in place in those
schools. So, we have something called the "catalyst"
school initiative, and this was within the school, the school improvement OSI, and you
will see in the grant application that part of the dollars that we are asking for are
going to the capacity development of that department.
So, we have a number of schools who are becoming STEM campuses, and this is across the grade
levels. They will be integrating science technology, engineering, and math through the entire curriculum.
We have already actually received some external funding for the planning year of those STEM
campuses, and then they will have three years worth of implementation money that we have
already garnered from external support to make sure that we are actually able to grow
that. The second thing that I would say -- and this
is sort of from the statewide perspective -- is that we have specifically identified
the human capital and teacher quality issues that are linked to our lack of movement in
both science and math. So, as you see from our application, we actually
set very specific targets and measures that I think are incredibly aggressive about increasing
the effectiveness of our science and math teachers.
We expect to see off of the baseline, in the first year 5 percent, the second year 10 percent,
and then ultimately, for the four-year period, 15 percentage point growth in the effectiveness
of both math and science teachers, and we think that is going to have a tremendous impact
long term on our ability to provide higher quality science and math education to our
students. MS. BRIGGS: On the standards front, we have
the math standard with the Common Core, that will drive a big part of just how we improve
overall, what we expect our students to know, and then consult on how a teacher will teach
towards that, so that is going to be one piece of it.
One of the places that [inaudible] into collaboratives, we think will be focused on STEM, as well,
to kind of build out across the City to kind of draw on the catalyst schools we are still
talking about, and there is also a number of charter schools that are STEM-focused as
well, and so we will use those higher achieving in some places to kind of build out across
the City. REVIEWER 3: Excuse me, but what are the grade
level ranges of the catalyst schools? CHANCELLOR RHEE: They actually span all of
the grade levels. The majority of our catalyst schools are actually at the elementary level
right now. We have a much more significant problem at our high schools, so more of our
high schools fall into the failing school category, so we are looking at whole school
turnaround models as opposed to the catalyst model for those schools.
The other thing I wanted to quickly add is that in the assessment that was done of the
current D.C. standard versus the Common Core, one of the things that was outlined was the
fact that we have got a pretty major measure shift to do in terms of math and moving to
it from more of the algorithmic fluency, to sort of the conceptual understanding, which
means fewer standards and much deeper in those math standards, and we think that again, more
training from the State Superintendent's Office on the shift to that is going to have a big
impact on our math achievement, as well. REVIEWER 1: Are there any other questions?
We have got three minutes. REVIEWER 3: I do.
REVIEWER 1: [Reviewer 3], go ahead. REVIEWER 3: Looking at your data and the progress
you have made, remarkable progress you went into it, one of the areas that I had some
question or a little concern about, had to do with graduation rates.
If I remember correctly, in the application for charter schools, no data were reported
for 2007 for graduation rates. Can you explain why?
And then the second part is it actually did show a drop in graduation rates of I think
4 percent or so from '08 to '09 for charter schools. Can you speak to that?
CHANCELLOR RHEE: We actually had a rise in graduation rates statewide from '08 to '09,
from 70 percent to 74.7 percent, and actually, that was mostly driven by the charter schools,
because from the DCPS perspective, we went from a graduation rate of about 69 percent
in '07, we are currently a little above 72 percent now.
We realize that from the fact that you are probably looking at those graduation rates
and thinking, really, that is because we actually use the lever rate calculation right now,
and we are now moving towards the cohort model, so within the next couple of years, we will
have a complete recalculation based on a couple of external organizations that have come in
to do that analysis. They are putting our graduation rate more in the mid-40s based
on the cohort model. MR. REINOSO: On the charter school drop, the
school board definitely, well, it raised a number of flags for them, and it appears to
have been driven by some issues at a couple of the charter high schools.
I should say there are not very many charter high schools, so any drop in the performance
of one of the charter high schools is reflected very directly in the aggregate rate.
They have intervened at the high schools where this happened and have put in place essentially
more monitoring and an intervention plan there to try to change the trajectory of that number,
so it did not go unnoticed. REVIEWER 3: What about where no data were
reported in a table for '07? Any explanation there?
MR. REINOSO: Honestly, I am not sure what happened there.
MAYOR FENTY: Let me just say that hopefully, in reviewing the application and some of the
benchmarks and projections of improvement that the team has put before you, you will
see what the Chancellor and I saw two and a half years ago, that because of the size
of our system, that in comparison with other jurisdictions, the opportunity to move fast
and efficiently is probably on our side; and then, second, because of the changes we made
in the bureaucracy, we will be able to make financial or management decisions fast, where
we see either the needs improve or do even better than we are doing.
So, thank you all again for your time. REVIEWER 1: Thank you, appreciate it.
That ends the session.