Today Mayor Vince Gray will be introducing a new anti-truancy ad campaign alongside Deputy Mayor for Education De'Shawn Wright.
The District has long had an issue with truancy, Wright told me yesterday. "We think part of the issue is that parents and kids don’t understand the linkage between a day’s absence and how much learning [...]
WAMU has a depressing story about the factors researchers say predict who's going to drop out of high school—and the signs are there for kids as young as third graders. It's the ABCs: Attendance, Behavior, and Course Performance. Attendance is the biggie, since, as kids fall behind in their classwork, they simply stop caring about [...]
Of all the ways to get DCPS in compliance with Title IX regulations—the federal law that has effectively meant schools must provide equal opportunities for girls to participate in sports—a girls-only bowling program seems, on the surface, like an okay idea.
Stephanie Evans, DCPS' first woman athletic director (and fourth A.D. in as many years), tells [...]
Hundreds of teachers who were terminated under policies instated by former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee will finally be getting a chance to appeal, reports the Examiner:
The District's highest court ordered the D.C. Office of Employee Appeals to figure out a way to resolve delays in assigning judges to outstanding cases within the next 20 days.
The agency [...]
Teriyaki Chicken & Broccoli Stir‐Fry Over Whole Wheat Noodles
Stir‐Fried Fresh Vegetables w/Napa Cabbage & Bok Choy
Fresh Rotten Pear
All sounds pretty good. Well, aside from the last part. DCPS officials are complaining that their school meal contractor Chartwells has been delivering unsatisfactory meals "for some time." From the Post:
“The expectation was that issues that we have [...]
Heidi Goes Cable: On Nov. 17, 1968, the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets played an exciting football game that went down to the wire—and that no one watching on TV in the eastern half of the country saw the finish of, because NBC switched from football coverage to a made-for-TV movie, Heidi, about [...]
Now that the Obama administration is offering waivers to states that have been bound by No Child Left Behind—the Bush-era policy that forced schools to show year-over-year testing improvements—WAMU reports that D.C. is joining 40 states who are applying for a waiver.
Kayleen Irizarry, the assistant superintendent of elementary and secondary education for all D.C.'s public [...]
The Post has a new report up showing that black students in the Washington area are suspended and expelled "two to five times as often" as white students:
Last year, for example, one in seven black students in St. Mary’s County were suspended from school, compared with one in 20 white students. In Alexandria, black students [...]
I've been spending a good chunk of the morning sorting and re-sorting this list of the crimes that have occurred in District schools since 2009. TBD submitted a Freedom of Information Act request a few months ago and the documents finally started rolling in.
TBD has also made the list available in a downloadable spreadsheet, and [...]
Sign of the times: The city's public schools championship game is no longer just the Turkey Bowl. It's the 42nd Annual Safeway Turkey Bowl.
This year's game, featuring Coolidge and Dunbar, will be the first Bowl held since Mayor Vincent Gray sold the naming rights of the biggest event on D.C.'s scholastic sports [...]
Congress continues its race to the bottom:
If you put nutritious broccoli and kale on top of a chocolate-glazed donut, can the concoction be considered equivalent to a vegetable serving?
This is the same logic that Congress is about to incorporate into a new law as it gets ready to vote on legislation that would, among other things, [...]
Well, there goes the idea that good educators have kept their jobs in D.C. Public Schools:
Headlines about D.C. school reform efforts have often involved the firing of teachers who scored poorly on the IMPACT evaluation system adopted in 2009 — about 300 in the past two years. But the District has also shed 145 teachers, including [...]
The Post reports that principals in District of Columbia Public Schools will be getting hefty raises next year: Average pay will rise about 16 percent, retroactively to the beginning of this school year, from $106,000 to $123,000.
But principals are only a small portion of the members of the Council of School Officers union that negotiated [...]
District of Columbia Public Schools will be testing students on sex ed and physical and emotional wellbeing in the spring, reports the Post:
The 50-question exam will be the nation’s first statewide standardized test on health and sex education, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which developed the assessment for grades 5, [...]
Is Our Children Learning?: Get ready for the latest skirmish in the ongoing war to define Michelle Rhee's legacy. New data released by DCPS shows little improvement on standardized tests from last year to this year, though scores were higher than they were when the testing regime first started. How you feel about the tests, [...]
