This just in (via e-mail from the NewsHour PR dept.):

Friends,

When we decided to follow rookie superintendent Michelle Rhee one year ago, we had a feeling that we’d have a good story on our hands. After all, 37-year-old Rhee was new to Washington, a Korean-American in a predominantly African-American city who had never been a superintendent before (or even a school principal!).

She was also the 7th leader in 10 years to try and turn around Washington’s failing schools-and she was the first to do so under the charge of the city’s mayor, with no school board to answer to. But even we were surprised at what unfolded as Rhee fired more than 15% of her office staff, removed 36 principals and 22 assistant principals, and announced plans to close 23 underenrolled schools, all before the last day of school.

Now she’s promising to radically change 27 more schools before opening day at the end of August, and finish negotiations with the teachers’ union on a new contract that she says will be unlike anything the country’s seen before.

Tonight on The NewsHour, we’ll sit down with Rhee—and her critics—to reflect on the year.

Thoughts on the other five episodes? Missed ‘em? Find them here.

The D.C. Times wrote a nice story this week about the refurbishing of Cardozo’s football stadium, which should be the grandest in the city by fall.

But the article turns tragicomic when reporter Amanda McClure gives a brief and off-the-mark history of the venue and the school.

The stadium was built along with the school in 1916, and hosted Central High School football games and track meets until it was renamed Cardozo in 1928. The name honors Francis Lewis Cardozo, the first black to hold administrative office in South Carolina.

Cardozo became segregated as an all-black school in 1950 but was reintegrated in 1954.

Cardozo’s current plant was in fact named Central High School—with alumni that included J. Edgar Hoover—until 1950 and was the flagship of the white portion of the city’s totally segregated school system till its dying day.

The transfer of the building, located on a hill off 13th Street NW, from all-white Central to all-black Cardozo made for one of the ugliest chapters in the ugly racial history of D.C. Contrary to what the story infers, no public high schools in this city were ever “reintegrated”—they were all-black or all-white from Day 1 until the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

But, again, no matter its history, as the story points out: Cardozo is gonna have a helluva football stadium.

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray is currently in the midst of slamming, hard, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and his education deputies—DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso, and school facilities chief Allan Allen Y. Lew—for bigfooting the legislature.

Gray, in some of his strongest anti-Fenty statements to date, called Fenty et al.’s behavior “unconscionable” from the council dais.

“This started off as a partnership, and an enthusiastic partnership, to reform District of Columbia Public Schools,” he said. “There’s been more than a few days where it’s been a nightmare.”

His remarks follow a sharply worded but largely cordial six-page July 8 letter [PDF] explaining in detail why he and colleagues chose to disapprove recent construction contracts.

“As the Councilmember from Ward 4 for six years, you can clearly appreciate the important role the Council plays in providing oversight to Executive agencies,” Gray wrote, in one of his more condescending lines.

Today, with Lew and Reinoso no-shows and with Rhee choosing to leave early (at 4:25 p.m.) rather than testify, Gray is choosing to recess rather than close the contracts hearing. He deemed the executive branch’s behavior as “either an incredibly disingenuous act or an incredibly misinformed act.”

“We are the Council of the District of Columbia, and we have a right to ask these questions,” he said.

UPDATE, 5:30 P.M.: Mayoral spokesperson Dena Iverson points out that Gray & Co. knew very well that Rhee had to leave when she did; the mayor’s office informed the council days ago that she had a prior commitment out of town. Still waiting for word on Reinoso’s alibi.

This is a chaotic time for D.C. Public Schools. This year, Chancellor Michelle Rhee ordered the closing of 23 public schools. Then, she fired 24 principals, and later 22 assistant principals. Others, from shuttering schools, were reassigned throughout the system. And one can only imagine how many teachers, aids, and staff-members were floating around in the wake of the closure announcements looking for new jobs.

In that jumble of emotion, and financial and professional anxiety, new school leaders had to begin preparing for the upcoming school year (mind you, while the current one was still happening).

Recently, I spoke to one principal—Brearn Wright, formerly of Clark Elementary School and currently of Truesdell Elementary School, which are both in Petworth—about how he did it. The process was far more involved than I’d ever expected, especially in this particular moment in time. And that’s definitely a good thing. Here’s Wright’s explanation:

Truesdell is a restructuring school. So all of the staff at Truesdell have to reapply for their jobs. My biggest focus was to staff a good school, and find good teachers. We had an interview process where staff were interviewed by students, teachers, and they engaged in role-playing scenarios. So, in one room, students came up with questions for the candidates. In one room, they had a team of teachers asking them questions. And in another room, they engaged in a role-playing exercises… Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of this past school year, Ballou Senior High’s graduating class hauled in close to $2 million in scholarship money. This was one of Kimberly Morton’s many responsibilities. Morton worked at Ballou coordinating outside partnerships which translates into making sure students work the scholarship beat and corporations and charitable nonprofits take an interest in the Congress Heights school. At the end of the school year, Morton was laid off.

Kevin Green was the school’s parent coordinator. In March, he held a training for parents, schooling them on the academic, emotional, and social aspects of the school. The course is designed to turn these parents into advocates for their children’s education and leaders within Ballou. They wanted 30 parents. They got 15 to complete and graduate from the course.

“A lot of parents come up and don’t know how to get through the system,” Green explains. It’s his job to walk them through it. Sometimes, he will do home visits if the parent can’t make it to Ballou. He turned into a truancy officer on the day of standardized testing. Last school year, 63 percent of the 10th grade showed up for the test. This year, 98 percent showed up. At the end of the year, Green was laid off.

Both Morton and Green were victims of budget cuts in a school that needs all the help it can get. The school has a dysfunctional PTA at best and needs that go well beyond addressing peeling paint.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Photo by Darrow Montgomery)

H.D. Woodson Senior High School, a.k.a. the nine-floor “Tower of Power,” is set to be demolished this summer. But when and how exactly?

Yesterday, Woodson’s alumni association (and surely a multitude of other D.C. listservs) received word that the groundbreaking would occur Monday July 7 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Yet, less than two weeks ago, the school was still loaded with furniture, books, equipment, trophies, and with no clear leadership in the building (Principal Gwendolyn Jones was fired by Chancellor Michelle Rhee), many staff seemed confused about deadlines and moving dates.

So, what does this little event really kick-off? Well, not much, says Tony Robinson, spokesperson for the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization Projects. Groundbreakings are the most ceremonial of ceremonies, and this one is no exception.

Immediately after the event, “We’ll start some excavation out on the football field. Then, after that, they’ll start doing asbestos abatement in the school,” says Robinson, a 1980 Woodson alumnus.

The school demolition won’t occur until at least a few weeks after July 7, and will likely last until September. And don’t expect some wild explosion to rock the calm streets of Deanwood.

“No, No,” says Robinson. “Everyone wants to see [Woodson] implode,” but the building will brought down by a plain jane wrecking ball.

The new Woodson building will cover the old school site, as well as part of the current space of the football field. One thing’s for sure: it will not be a highrise, like its innovative and extraordinarily dysfunctional predecessor. Construction won’t begin until the old building is fully demolished.

Building plans were shown at Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander’s “State of the Ward” meeting late May, says her Chief of Staff J.R. Meyers, adding that the new Woodson was designed for 1,300 students. (As of last fall, the enrollment was just over 750.)

Woodson first opened in 1972. According to a February Washington City Paper article, “Neighborhood residents fought the tower on the grounds of its imposing height, but it got rave reviews from architectural types. Charles Atherton, secretary of the federal Commission of Fine Arts, said the school would “be a good symbol and an excellent landmark.”

The new school is slated to open in 2010.

“As a Woodson graduate, I can honestly say this building is going to be the crown jewel of the District’s new school inventory,” says Robinson. “It’s going to be a very contemporary building.”

Hmmm, sounds familiar.

The D.C. Public Charter School Board has voted tonight to convert seven Catholic schools to charters. The vote was unanimous, after about 15 minutes of discussion. More to come.

UPDATE, 10 P.M.: The Catholic conversions, to be known as the Center City Public Charter School, were the only application to be accepted unconditionally by the board this year. The application for the National Collegiate Preparatory Academy, a high school, was also approved unanimously, albeit with conditions to be specified. The board denied the applications from the other seven schools, all but two unanimously.

While introducing the charter-applications portion of the agenda, board chair Tom Nida mentioned that letters and petitions had been received in opposition to the Center City application, but during the discussion of the proposal, virtually every member spoke in praise of it.

“These have been well-run schools with a culture of achievement and high standards,” said member Will Marshall.

Member Dora Marcus called Center City’s a “strong application” and said it was “our duty” to keep the schools open.

The only even mildly negative comments came from member Karl Jentoft, who expressed concerns (somewhat self-servingly) at higher level of oversight and accountability the schools would have as a charter, and from member and executive director Josephine Baker, who expressed some dismay at the size of the proposed school—possibly more than 1,000 students across seven campuses. Both voted to approve.

Jentoft dismissed much of the hullabaloo surrounding the decision: “There’s been a lot of political stuff going on,” he said, “but our role is to look at the application and make sure the children get an education.”

Nida closed discussion after about 15 minutes with a defense of the board’s procedures. “We’re in a situation where I come back to our process,” he said. “The process has been followed….Has it been followed? Is it fair to the parties concerned? This is a test of our process.”

He included a poke at the old D.C. Board of Education, which used to share chartering authority with the Public Charter School Board before giving up that authority in 2006 with the achievement of its schools in doubt: “This is why we’re the sole authorizer. Our process has worked.”

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine is expected to announce today that Clifford Janey is his pick for the Newark School District “after months of meetings and at least a dozen interviews with prospective candidates,” according to the Star-Ledger. The district has been under state control since ‘95 and Janey will have to be approved by the New Jersey Board of Education.

The scuttle in Jersey about Janey’s time at DCPS is he received “mixed reviews” here. We’d like to say something snarky about that, but it’s about right, according to fomer LL James Jones, a close watcher of Janey’s over the years. This, from his “Requiem to a Superintendent” item:

Janey seems like a pretty nice guy. What he lacks in inspired rhetoric, he makes up for with clear-spoken luminosity. At least that’s what the city’s political class pointed out when he was hired about two years ago. Back then, you would have thought D.C. was about to get a taste of school-reform royalty, even if he wasn’t the first choice for the job.

Shortly after Janey’s hiring, the previous mayor, activists, and the D.C. Council delivered a united message: Give this guy a chance. Don’t run him out of town like other school reformers who tried to fix the city’s schools.

Just this past December, when Janey delivered the first-ever State of the D.C. Schools speech, he was greeted by a standing ovation. Even then Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty—who was already crafting a bill to take over the schools—rose to his feet.

But judging from the key defections from his inner circle and his abandonment by the city’s political leadership, Janey suddenly looks like yesterday’s hero.

Janey’s coffin nail, according to LL, was a lack of patience. Funny, that, when the oft-heard gripe about Michelle Rhee is she moves too fast. Will you people never be happy?

(photograph by Darrow Montgomery)

At 9 a.m., Hart’s graduating 8th grade class of 2008 gathered in the hallways leading to the school’s small auditorium. Wearing their Sunday best, students snapped photos of each other, hugged their favorite teachers and generally basked in the one commodity the hallways had over the auditorium: air conditioning.

If the scene was chaotic, if the ceremony blew past its 9 a.m. start time, you could forgive the students and their parents for wanting to linger in the AC. The cool hallways were the only evidence of buff-and-scrub, Michelle Rhee’s shiny optimism and blunt accountability, and Mayor Fenty’s stubborn focus. Everything else about Hart’s graduation was depressingly old school.

As parents walked into the auditorium, they were handed a program. The program’s cover bore a picture of a gold cap, a crisp rolled-up diploma, two white rosees, and a quote—”Success Is Determined by the Choices You Make.” It all suggested Hart had its act together for at least the moment it took to design and print the program. After the processional, parents and students settled into the stifling room. And several things became immediately clear:

*There were not enough seats for everyone.

*Hart’s P.A. system might have been considered high-tech in the ’60s.

*It was too damn hot.

*The scheduled program that parents were now using as a fan wasn’t exactly an indicator of how things were going to go.

*It was too damn hot.

Audience members could hear every third word. If you were inclined to be against prayer in school, it was hard to muster any anger at hearing the opening benediction rendered as sort of oral Mad Libs in which sentences ended in muffled blanks and verbs and nouns were left up to you.

Soon enough, Ward 8 Councilmember-for-Life Marion S. Barry Jr. skipped possibly six places in the program to give a quick off-the-cuff speech that swerved between confessing his own missteps and encouraging the audience to call Fenty about the busted AC. At one point, he labored through a call-and-response with the crowd— getting them to shout back the 727 number they were supposed to dial to register their beef with the heat.

The P.A. was no help to the aging politico. Only phrases could be easily heard: “Work for it,” “But I got up,” and then the rousing finale: “Respect each other. Love each other. So I can’t stay long.”

Read the rest of this entry »

As LL first reported, city legislators are gearing up to put additional restrictions on the expansion and oversight of the city’s charter schools. Yesterday, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray, along with Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells and Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr., introduced legislation toward those ends.

Well, charter backers are wasting no time fighting back.

The city’s main pro-charter group, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), is planning a Wilson Building press conference tomorrow morning, to be followed by a door-to-door lobbying tour of the hallways, where politicos will be given copies of a pro-charter petition signed by 5,700 charter supporters. The petition, according to a press release, “asks the mayor and Council to continue to let the parents decide how many charter schools are open in D.C.”

A meeting was scheduled this afternoon in the office of Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, but it was rescheduled due to scheduling conflicts.

In an e-mail circulated to charter parents asking them to attend, a FOCUS employee explained that, “We just want you to tell your story and why you chose your charter school….It’s an election year and we want the DC Council members (especially those that are anti-charter) to know that they have to answer to parents who choose to send their kids to charter schools.”

Press release after jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Minutes ago, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray introduced a bill containing several changes to charter school oversight, the School Reform Amendment Act of 2008—as LL reported in his column last week.

The legislation, as described in comments by Gray and co-sponsors Tommy Wells of Ward 6 and Harry Thomas Jr. of Ward 5, contains several components. The first is to change the process by which members of the Public Charter School Board are nominated; currently the mayor selects nominees from a list provided by the federal education department. The bill proposes making the members direct mayoral appointees with a District residency requirement, a move likely to attract congressional scrutiny.

Other parts:

• A requirement to match quarterly payments to charters to enrollment figures, making sure money better follows the movement of students between schools
• A required 15-month planning period for new charter schools. Virtually every charter school has followed this to date; the grand exception, of course, is the pending Center City application, which would convert seven Catholic schools to charters in only three months.
• A requirement to open only a single campus upon a school’s initial chartering (also a poke at the parochial schools), and, as a corollary to that, a requirement that a charter school meet certain academic benchmarks before expanding.

In his remarks, Wells made the point that charters schools were intended to be places of “innovation and best practices” in educational methods. “Failure to make adequate yearly process in five years is not a best practice,” he said.

Members Marion Barry of Ward 8, Mary Cheh of Ward 3, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, plus at-large members Kwame R. Brown and David A. Catania, signed on as co-sponsors, giving the bill immediate majority support.

Is D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee nuts?

That’s the question I had after reading the account in yesterday’s Washington Post about her firing of Marta Guzman, the principal of Woodley Park’s Oyster-Adams Bilingual School. Rhee’s own two children attend the school.

And based on the report by the Post’s Bill Turque, Rhee had an awfully weak explanation for parents who wondered why she’d fired Guzman. Here’s Rhee’s side of the story:

Rhee said that as a parent “in the school three days a week,” and with information from her own staff, she had a broad base of opinion to draw on. She said a major concern she had, for example, was that while the “English dominant” students, such as her daughters, were learning Spanish, they were “not truly bilingual in the way we would want.” For that to happen, bilingualism needed to be more deeply embedded into all moments of the school day.

So I’m thinking–Rhee’s daughters aren’t yet running around the house using the imperfect subjunctive to perfection, and so Rhee fires their principal. Now, I am not an Oyster parent and haven’t done a lick of reporting on this matter, nor will I. But I do want to state one thing: No new principal is going to come in, snap some fingers, and make bilingualism more deeply embedded into all moments of the school day. Kids speak their dominant language, and if that language is English, they’re going to be speaking English in the hallways, English in recess, English in the lunchroom and so on. Even some Spanish-dominant kids go through a phase when they reject the language they speak in the home and go with English.

So, Rhee: Good luck getting a principal who can reverse these tendencies.

I just stopped by Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest, hoping to talk to kids about the breaking news that at least one of their own is suspected in connection with a mostly-suburban drug ring with “plans” to sell marijuana to high school students. After finding more than $6,000 in cash and more than three pounds of marijuana in one student’s home (which leads me to believe the “plans” had already been realized), Montgomery County police arrested two students, from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, and two adults. More arrests were promised–potentially at Wilson. Police said they were proud they caught the little buggers before they had a chance to sell any drugs. Um, right.

Anyway, I figured this news would be the talk of the town at Wilson. Even though the campus was relatively busy this afternoon, I found only one student who’d heard anything. The gossip, she said, was something about “a white, 17-year-old girl” involved with selling drugs with kids from Maryland. The rest of the students I talked to were more concerned about another police action on campus today: the closure of Fort Reno park due to high arsenic levels in the soil. According to a group of students sitting on some steps at a business across from the school, at about 1:30 p.m., the park was their favorite place to ditch class. Now where will they go???

I understand their frustration. When I was in high school, we would sneak away to a place called Hamburger Mary’s in Portland. We would order home fries, douse them with Tabasco, nurse coffees and smoke Marlboro Reds. I was really not that much of a rebel, so we only skipped during assemblies or when we’d done something to make showing up in class riskier than getting caught skipping. When Hamburger Mary’s closed, we were distraught. We tried going to the fancier brew pub down the street, but the waiters quickly caught onto our game and gave us a time limit. The next year, our school started locking the doors during assemblies. That meant we actually had to go. And they were really, really bad. Wilson students, I feel your pain.

Several parents of students at the Coeus International School have told the Washington City Paper that the school is closing after the end of classes in May. Coeus founder and headmaster Daniel Hollinger, when questioned by a reporter at the school this afternoon, refused to confirm or deny that classes will not be held in the fall.

Hollinger founded Coeus in the fall of 2006 after being ousted by the board of trustees of his previous school, Rock Creek International, which closed last year under financial distress. With Coeus, Hollinger ditched the usual non-profit model used by most private schools. He told the City Paper last year that he hoped being able to attract investors would eventually allow the program to expand on a global scale.

Coeus is located on the sixth floor of an office building on Connecticut Avenue near the Van Ness Metro station.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty might be a Barack Obama supporter, but his hand-picked education czar is opting for a different approach, at least when it comes to improving schools. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, in comments on Thursday night at a gathering of the Korean-American Coalition’s D.C. chapter, endorsed the education plan of Arizona Republican John McCain “far and away” over those of either Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Rhee, in a speech at Tony Cheng’s Restaurant in Chinatown, referred to herself as a “card-carrying Democrat” (LL forgot to ask to see the card), yet endorsed McCain’s approach based on his willingness to reauthorize the controversial “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Both Clinton and Obama have been highly critical of the law and its effects.

“I think they’re pandering, quite frankly, to the teachers’ unions and other folks,” she said.

In comments after the speech, Rhee explained that her support for NCLB arose from her belief in accountability and the need for hard goals for school systems. She called herself as a “huge proponent” of the federal law and said she was “incredibly disappointed” with the lack of Democratic support for the law—though she did say she had a “laundry list” of things she would change with the statute.

Why might an urban school superintendent favor No Child Left Behind? Well, for a cynical view, look at the political cover it provides: Long-failing public schools are required to be “restructured,” a process Rhee is going through currently with several DCPS schools. Without such a federal impetus, big changes—which can extend to the brink of privatization—can be difficult to justify to parents. “Blame NCLB” certainly is a handy refrain to bring to parent meetings explaining the need for such drastic measures.