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 is lost," he says. The campaign—which included a back to school campaign in the fall—will cost between $500,000 and $700,000 "spread across several agencies."

There will be radio ads targeting parents on stations like Majic 102.3 and Praise 104.1, and banner ads on buses and bus shelters for teenagers (one slogan:"The more you learn, the more you earn"). The greatest challenge, Wright says, is reaching ninth graders, a group whose school attendance tends to predict future success.

But as we noted a couple of days ago, there are predictors that are helping researchers find potential dropouts as early as the third grade. An ad campaign is certainly a well-meaning effort, but it's hard to believe that ninth graders will all of a sudden be moved to stop cutting class because an ad says they should. I asked Wright whether there would be metrics for measuring the success of the campaign; half a million bucks is a lot of money, after all.

He says that while the message is intended to help create a "schoolgoing culture" citywide, they'll be targeting three truancy-heavy high schools in particular: Cardozo, Ballou, and Anacostia. Students at those schools will be asked to sign an attendance pledge, and there are plans to measure student response and attendance over the course of the school year.

Photo by WzrdsRule via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

"Those are alarm bells in the system that for years and years and years have gone ignored," says John Bridgeland, who heads the public policy firm Civic Enterprises and has done a significant amount of research on dropouts.

Students' attendance can be a teacher's biggest challenge. Because if children aren't in school, they don't learn and eventually fall so far behind, they get discouraged and drop out. Nearly 12,000 or 20 percent of students attending public schools in D.C. had more than two weeks of unexcused absences last year.

Many children don't come to school because they have to deal with a "constellation of stressors," often beginning at home, according to Amoretta Morris, who is in charge of student attendance for D.C. Public Schools. The problem often snowballs from there.

"Very rarely do you have a student who goes from perfect attendance to dropping out of school," she says. "There's this process of disengagement."

Photo by alex drennan via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

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 the Post:

“We wanted to make sure we were increasing the number of athletic opportunities for our females,” said Evans, whose office surveyed high school girls last year and adopted the two most-requested sports, flag football (debuting in the spring) and bowling. “And so, in the process of doing that, we didn’t want to go in and push any sports on the girls.”

Fair enough. Except, that sports is often about pushing kids outside of their comfort zones. Anyone forced into doing wind sprints in P.E. can attest to that. Really, this seems like an issue of money more than anything else. The Post notes that bowling is cheaper and has a lower bar to entry for students who wouldn't play sports normally. But why not spend the money and resources (hmm, here's something to do with the city budget windfall, perhaps?) to build up competitive women's teams that would get girls into more physically demanding sports? That—unlike five weeks of hanging out at bowling lanes—would be a better-faith attempt at complying with federal law.

Photo by Dale Gillard via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

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 is supposed to hand out decisions within 120 days. But that wasn't happening, and with hundreds upon hundreds of teachers fired in the last few years, the backlog became startling.

We've said this before, but the speedy mass dismissal of teachers—including, yes, bad teachers—probably wasn't the best move. At least based on the repercussions the system is dealing with now.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

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 struggled with in the past would be corrected and improved by now,” Glorious Bazemore, deputy chief procurement officer for the school system, wrote in a letter to Chartwells officials. “However, we have continued to struggle with daily problems that disrupt the rhythm of a regular school day.”

Problems include: Moldy breakfast bars (which the company denies), improperly portioned meals, and a failure to deliver breakfast to early childhood education classes. More troubling than that, however, is that Chancellor Kaya Henderson points out the $32 million-a-year contract itself is a problem: DCPS is required to pay for every meal provided by Chartwells, whether or not a student buys it.

The contract is up at the end of the school year, giving DCPS an opportunity to find a (hopefully) better provider of student meals. Then again, considering how bad this city is at properly awarding contracts, who knows?

Photo by whitneybee via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

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 a young girl living in the Swiss Alps. Last night, Comcast viewers in D.C. watching the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants play to determine who went to the Super Bowl must have wanted to yodel. Local ads for the cable company's Xfinity service cut into the football feed late in the game, prompting outrage on Twitter. Probably not as much outrage as 49ers punt returner Kyle Williams later prompted, though. -2

School's Out: District officials have gone to some lengths lately to tout progress made in D.C. Public Schools, boosting enrollment and slowly changing the system's reputation. Maybe a bit too slowly, though, for word to reach the deputy mayor for education, De'Shawn Wright. Wright told a forum in Ward 4 recently that he wouldn't send his kids to Roosevelt or Coolidge high schools—which, as it happens, quite a few Ward 4 parents do send their kids to, as they're the DCPS high schools in the ward. Wright says that's not what he meant. Wisely, he did not add that the Ward 4 parents probably misunderstood him because they'd gone to crappy Ward 4 schools. -2

Memorial Trench Warfare: It's not enough that Congress gets to muck around in the District's budget and our laws; now some House Republicans want to take our memorials, too. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is trying to resist an effort by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to turn the District of Columbia War Memorial to the dead of World War I into a national monument instead. Of course, Norton doesn't actually get a vote on the matter, so if Poe really wants to seize the memorial, there's not much she can really do. +1

Always Low Prices (On Pot): The District hasn't finished deciding who will get to sell legal medical marijuana yet, but it turns out you may not need to wait around too long. A store popularly known as "the Walmart of Weed," hydroponic supplier WeGrow, is set to open up on Rhode Island Avenue NE, selling everything necessary to produce massive amounts of medicine, for anyone lucky enough to get a license. Or of weed, for anyone who doesn't. +1

Friday's Needle rating: 42 Today's score: -2 Today's Needle rating: 40

Kayleen Irizarry, the assistant superintendent of elementary and secondary education for all D.C.'s public schools, both traditional and charter, says there are a lot of aspects of No Child Left Behind she supports, but she echoes the Obama administration's call to move beyond "bubble tests and dumbed down standards."

She says the problem with NCLB is it only focuses on whether a school has made the target or not. And the bar is continually being raised.

"It applied a standard that was uniform to all schools and didn't take into account the uniqueness of a school or other contributions that get at how a school is performing," she says. "Such as how many students are taking advanced courses, how many teachers are rated highly effective, what is our truancy rate."

And USA Today notes that the Department of Education is simultaneously trying to cut out teacher cheating on tests in the wake of scandals in both D.C. and Atlanta.

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 were nearly six times as likely to be suspended as their white peers.

In Fairfax, where the suicide in January of a white high school football player who had been suspended brought an outcry for change, African American students were four times as likely that year to be suspended as white students, and Hispanic students were twice as likely.

The problems extend beyond the Washington area to school districts across the country and are among a host of concerns about school discipline that sparked a joint effort by the U.S. Justice and Education departments in July to look into reforms.

Experts say disparities appear to have complex causes. A disproportionate number of black students live below the poverty line or with a single parent, factors that affect disciplinary patterns. But experts say those factors do not fully explain racial differences in suspensions. Other contributing factors could include unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles.

Donna St. George interviewed an array of school officials and parents who note that a huge part of the problem is the suspension-happy treatment of discretionary offenses. When committing these non-violent infractions, black students are far more likely to be punished more harshly than whites who commit the exact same offenses. Meanwhile, poverty and its attendant behavioral issues don't entirely explain why, as one researcher pointed out, "affluent black kids get suspended more than affluent white kids."

It's always dangerous to dive into the comment sections of newspaper stories, but the piece has picked up a notable 3,400 comments since it ran yesterday. Unsurprisingly, nearly everyone in the comment section is an expert on the behavior of blacks, and it doesn't take much to find miles of racist and uninformed musings. A sampling:

Ms. St. George... Has it occurred to the you that "In Washington area, African American students suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites" because African American students COMMIT OFFENSES warranting suspension and expulsion with two to five times the FREQUENCY of whites?

And:

The problem is that Blacks break the rules more often so they get suspended more often. Its time we teach all of our children ethics and morality and how to act properly. This problem can be fixed if we fix the overly permissive, excuse making culture in our society. (Basically liberal Democrats) This corrupted culture seems to be negatively affecting minorities much more than whites.

And:

Is Donna St. George aware that black people refer to making good grades and attending school every day, "acting white"? If so, she failed to mention it in her article. For anyone wanting the answer to this "problem", simply Google "black pathology".

And:

This article is ridiculous. Black students get suspended more because their behavior is awful. Their culture has been corrupted. They are mostly being raised by a mother only. They have no positive male role models. The women are getting pregnant on a whim. The morals and ethics of the poor black person is horrific. Stop blaming the schools for mythological racial bias. Start blaming black people who just simply have worse behavior. Liberals are just making the situation worse for Black people.

Obviously, race-based stories like this tend to attract the angry id of racism, but when these kinds of viewpoints still exist, it's not a surprise that black kids are being sent to the principal's office and getting written up more frequently than their white counterparts. The comments, in other words, may do an even better job than the story does of explaining the phenomenon.

Photo by Colette Cassinelli

TBD has also made the list available in a downloadable spreadsheet, and they're viewable in nearly every conceivable way.

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 calendar.

According to Gray's office, Safeway paid $100,000 in cash and will contribute $50,000 worth of what are called "in-kind" donations, meaning barter.

Brand new DCPS athletic director Stephanie Evans says that to satisfy the "in-kind" requirement, Safeway will provide things like in-store advertising space to DCPS to promote the title game.

For old school types, these name-selling ventures that have taken control of big-game sports are unseemly, particularly when students are being used to promote products and causes that they have no control over what brand or cause they're being exploited for. (The Weedeater Bowl, Humanitarian Bowl, etc.)

But DCPS sports are in such trouble, the more folks in the community paying attention, the better. And Safeway frequently has sirloin steak sales for $4.99 or less a pound if you buy side-of-beef quantities, which I take advantage of.

And Gray follows local high school sports more closely than any mayor the city's ever had.

So if the DCPS/Safeway relationship goes swimmingly, look for a spate of naming-rights sales with other school events.

I'm not so sure of the real-world value of advertising space in grocery store aisles. But this "in-kind" concept has all kinds of possibilities beyond the high school realm.

It'd be cool, for example, if organizers of next month's Military Bowl Presented by Northrop Grumman at RFK Stadium accepted the sponsors' cluster bombs as payment.

In the future, all veggies will come in tubes.

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, allow public schools to count a small amount tomato paste that is put on top of pizzas to be counted as a vegetable.

A couple of teaspoons of tomato paste—which is about as far from a raw tomato as a byproduct can be and still have "tomato" in the name—and kids are supposed to be satisfying a veggie serving? Come on. Then again, this is the same Congress that hit its lowest approval rating in, well, ever, last month when polls showed that only nine percent of Americans approved of the job they were doing.

Hopefully the District of Columbia Public Schools ignores this foolishness and continues to serve healthier lunches. On the menu today at area middle schools:

• Spicy Asian Glazed Chicken
• Stir-Fried Brown Rice w/ Veggies
• Stir-Fried Fresh Vegetables w/ Napa Cabbage & Local Bok Choy
• Locally Grown Pear

Photo by Ross Catrow via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

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 counselors, deemed effective or even highly effective. These employees lost their jobs through a process known as “excessing.”

Reasons for excessing vary from school to school, with principals making the final call. They include budget cuts, rising teacher salaries, enrollment declines, changes in academic programs and staff overhauls mandated under federal law.

About 70 percent of the 522 teachers excessed since 2010 found other jobs in the system, school officials report. Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders said schools can ill afford to lose any effective educators. He contends that a push for younger, lower-cost hires — some recruited from programs such as Teach for America and D.C. Teaching Fellows — has wrongfully forced out seasoned practitioners.

Though Chancellor of Schools Kaya Henderson says most of the teachers let go are in "specialized" fields where there isn't great demand, records suggest that DCPS actually is just hiring inexperienced, cheaper teachers to replace the older ones pulling down higher pay.

But principals are only a small portion of the members of the Council of School Officers union that negotiated the raises:

The CSO represents not just 116 principals but another 600 or so assistant principals, early childhood coordinators, psychologists, social workers and business managers who are getting nothing. A small group of principals, while pleased with their situation, asked for a meeting with human capital chief Jason Kamras to protest the lack of fairness to their assistant principals and other staff.

“I don’t think Jason or chancellor realize the negative impact this will have,” said CSO president Aona Jefferson. It’s wrong. All of our members are due an increase.”

Chancellor of Schools Kaya Henderson defended her position to the Post, saying, "We prioritized bringing principals up to par with their peers as a first step instead of giving both principals and assistant principals smaller raises."

Besides, it's entirely possible DCPS is going to some other financial issues to figure out.

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, 8 and 10.

The District’s rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy are among the country’s highest. Periodic surveys have detailed student attitudes toward risky behavior, but officials said the annual test will fill gaps in their understanding of what young people know and why they might behave the way they do.

I checked out the Post's sample quiz, which has nine questions—three for elementary students, three for middle school students, and three for high schoolers. The sample questions lean toward the kind of common or gut-level knowledge that people typically pick up as they grow older, and may or may not learn in gym class. One question for elementary kids:

Tomorrow morning Beth wants to go on the fifth-grade mile run. To be at her best, Beth should:

• eat very little for lunch and dinner the day before the run.
• relax the night before the run and go to bed early.
• run an extra mile for practice the day before the run.
• have a big breakfast the morning of the run.

Aside from the first answer, which would put Beth on the path to an eating disorder, lots of people might do any or all of the last three options to prepare for a mile run. The correct answer, however, is the second one: "relax the night before the run and go to bed early."

One question for high schoolers is about healthy relationships:

Jeffrey and Maria, seniors in high school, have been going together for two years. During the Thanksgiving holiday Maria suddenly breaks up with Jeffrey. What would be the most healthful way for a friend to help Jeffrey?

• Tell him that Maria isn't worth it, so forget about her.
• Suggest activities that he and Jeffrey can do together.
• Find out from Maria why she broke up with Jeffrey.
• Suggest that he quickly find another girlfriend.

If this were a sitcom, Jeffrey's friends would probably do all four things, but in real life, students are supposed to select the second choice, "Suggest activities that he and Jeffrey can do together."

There are more concrete questions that gather how much students know about the transmission of HIV (people who have other STDs are more at risk) or which food is better for getting calcium (yogurt, not corn), but some of the squishier ones make me wonder how useful this test will actually be.

Obviously there is a problem in how DCPS students—who are 79 percent black, and part of the demographic most at risk for STDs, obesity, and health issues—are being taught about health. But this test can only be the first step in fixing that problem.

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, of course, varies based largely on how you feel about the neo-liberal education reforms Rhee and Kaya Henderson, her successor, put in place. We're just glad we don't have to take any. -1

Lottery On Wheels: Food trucks have gone from a novelty item in D.C. to a fixture in the urban landscape. Now the D.C. Lottery is hoping it can join in the fun. Lottery officials will unveil their new "Lucky Lottery Mobile" next week, apparently inspired by the mobile food vendors. Unless they're serving food and/or Chuck Brown drives it, we suspect it won't be quite as popular. +1

Beer Is The New Wine: Being a sommelier requires an encyclopedic knowledge of wine varieties, food pairings, which glasses to use—and now, apparently, hops. Food & Wine named Greg Engert, the beer director at ChurchKey and Birch & Barley, one of its sommeliers of the year, citing the seriousness with which he and the chefs he works with approach suds. (John Wabeck, at Inox, in McLean, also made the list.) And you thought there was a long line to get in to ChurchKey before! +1

D.C. Is Hot: And now, time for another installment of arbitrary rankings by national magazines! In this case, actually, it's more like national networks. The Weather Channel declared the District the hottest city in the Northeast, actually using the line, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity" in the process. Other regional winners: Medford, Ore.; Wichita, Kan.; Montgomery, Ala.; Laredo, Texas; and Yuma, Ariz. So don't plan to move to any of those spots to escape. -2

Yesterday's Needle rating: 50 Today's score: -1 Friday bonus: +2 Today's Needle rating: 51