Class Struggle

My column on Charles Hebert Flowers High School requiring a 3.0 grade point average to take an Advanced Placement course, then dropping the rule after I asked about it, inspired many people who have been barred from AP and college prep courses to offer their stories. Here are two accounts from people who suffered because of the still widespread and wrongheaded view that only top students should be challenged. Carolyn Elefant is a lawyer in Washington. Evelyn Nolan is a retired teacher from Prince George's County, where Flowers High is located.

From Elefant:

I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your column on the challenge of AP classes and your support for permitting all those who want to take these classes to do so.

I graduated from high school in 1981 and was not allowed to take AP English. At that time, the selection criteria was even more random, and though I'd gotten two A's and two B's in 10th grade, my teacher felt that I just wasn't up for it. i argued with the guidance counselor, but she wouldn't let me in either.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called me last week full of excitement over her Baltimore local's new teachers contract. Education leaders often exaggerate when talking to journalists, but Weingarten has taken some bold steps in Colorado and D.C. that were not popular with all of her members, so she is very credible, at least to me.

The contract between the Baltimore Teachers Union, led by Marietta English, and the Baltimore city schools, led by Andres Alonso, embraces the new Maryland state requirement that 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation be based on student achievement. That is not something union leaders welcomed, so the AFT decision to go with it suggests Weingarten and English are willing to meet school officials half way.

Based on new formula that gives credit to teachers for getting more training as well as raising achievement, a lead teacher (under the contract there can only be one per school) could eventually earn as much as $100,000 a year. Teachers at three lower levels also would earn much more than they do now.

Fifth grade scores dropped this year at the KIPP DC charter schools. Some people wondered if the Knowledge Is Power Program’s long record of raising D.C. student achievement was in jeopardy. The woman who created KIPP DC seems unworried. She has already made a change that may drive some average scores even lower next year.

With eight schools, more space and scores still among the highest in the city, Susan Schaeffler and her teachers appear as devoted to experimentation as they were when I visited the first KIPP school in a Southeast Washington church basement in 2001. With available space in a new building on Benning Road in Southeast, Schaeffler added fourth graders to what had been a fifth to eighth grade middle school.

The reading proficiency rate for KIPP DC fifth graders dropped from 51 to 41 percent and the math proficiency rate from 72 to 51 percent last year. Schaeffler shrugs this off as random chance, something that has happened before when fifth graders arrive at KIPP with lower grade levels than the previous year’s class. As a whole, KIPP DC students are still advancing from typical urban achievement levels to much higher suburban levels by the end of eighth grade.

With the new load of fifth graders plus the fourth graders, Schaeffler anticipates an increased number of low-performing students that may again depress average scores. She expects those students to respond eventually to the KIPP formula of well-selected and trained teachers and longer school days and years.

Then the KIPP culture may begin to shift.

Amid the chatter about the Obama administration's Race to the Top funds, NBC's Education Nation programs and the release of the film "Waiting For 'Superman'" (warning: I am in it), I am not hearing much about how education schools fit into this new 'saving our schools' ferment. A new survey of education school professors reveals traditional teacher training institutes are trying, sort of, to adjust, but still resist giving top priority to the hottest topic among young teachers, learning how to manage the kids.

When researchers Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett asked 716 randomly selected teacher educators at four-year colleges and universities about major challenges for new teachers these days, they did not seem that excited about them.

Only 24 percent said it was "absolutely essential" to produce "teachers who understand how to work with the state's standards, tests and accountability systems."

Only 37 percent gave the highest priority to developing "teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom." Only 39 percent said the same about creating "teachers who are trained to address the challenges of high-needs students in urban districts."

The Sept. 1 edition of Education Week had a provocative commentary, “All my favorite students cheat,” by high school teacher Christopher L. Doyle. He and I agree that cheating is rife, but we don’t agree on what causes that.

He thinks students are protecting themselves against widespread insecurity in a declining America. I think the larger problem is that teachers so love and trust their students that the teachers become easy marks.

America used to be tough on cheaters. Before World War II, miscreants could be suspended, expelled or caned. Schools went soft in the 1960s, and although we have little data, cheating probably increased. In a 1995 survey by “Who’s Who Among American High School Students,” 76 percent of high-schoolers with at least B averages said they had cheated at least once. In suburban, upper-middle-class, high-achieving schools, such as the place Doyle still teaches or many Washington area schools, cheating is still common.

Some students want their schools to do something about it. In the mid-1990s, I served on a citizen-teacher-student governance committee at Scarsdale High School in Westchester County, N.Y. When our chairman asked whether anyone had any personal complaints about the school, our two student members raised a topic we had never addressed: cheating. Non-cheating students, they said, felt abused by lax enforcement. They blamed teachers for not proctoring their own exams. Some teachers, they said, left the room for the hour to sip coffee in the teachers lounge.

I have followed the career of Maria Tukeva for a long time. I have attended classes at the school she founded, Bell Multicultural High, a D.C. public school. When it became the first school in the Washington area, and probably in the country, to require all students to take Advanced Placement English courses and tests, even though most were from immigrant families, I interviewed students and teachers and got a good impression of the daring experiment.

The school's name has been changed to the Columbia Heights Education Campus High School, sometimes known as CHEC. It continues to impress me. This year, because of its unusual level of student participation in AP, it ranked 39th on the list of top high schools I prepare each year for Newsweek.com.

But a teacher who recently worked at the school, James Boutin, sent me a detailed critique of Columbia Heights. He said it did not deserve its high rank or my praise. I invited him to state his case here, and promised to get the school's response.

On Sunday, the All Opinions Are Local page of washingtonpost.com ran a commentary by former D.C. Council member Kevin P. Chavous. I am rerunning it because I think it has unusual importance as we look toward the future of D.C. schools under Vincent Gray. The piece doesn't indicate ties to Gray. Nor does the identification of Chavous that ran with the piece. But Chavous is close to the presumptive mayor and the commentary provides many clues to what Gray might try to do.

I realize this is a throwback to my China-watching days, reading more into an editorial than it seems to say. But Gray has expressed his support for charters, a theme of Chavous's piece, so there are clear links between Gray and this line of thought. Chavous is worth reading in any case, and it is important to note that he is probably the best-informed and best-connected person in the Gray camp on educational innovation and education policy issues.

The Black Alliance for Educational Options, of which Chavous is board chair, has been the most aggressive African American organization in the country in pushing for increased parental choice in schools, particularly urban schools. It has supported not only charters, but taxpayer-funded vouchers that would allow students to attend private schools, such as the D.C. program that is being ended by Congress. It is always possible, once the Gray administration gets started, that it will be even more revolutionary (Chavous's word) and infuriating to some educators than the Fenty administration was. Whether Gray can be innovative and still remain in tune with community leaders, as Chavous recommends, remains to be seen, but it is an intriguing line of inquiry.

Read the full Chavous piece after the jump.

President Obama told NBC interviewer Matt Lauer on Monday that there was not a public school in Washington that matched the education his daughters are getting at Sidwell Friends, a private school. As a former Sidwell parent (I lost a family vote to send our daughter to a public school) and a longtime observer of the D.C. public schools, I think he is wrong.

Sidwell has fine teachers and high standards, but like all private and public schools it also had some mediocre teachers and some blind spots -- such as its reluctance to challenge some students because it would be wrong, as a teacher there once told me, to make them "uncomfortable."

The District does not have many public schools as good as Sidwell, but there are some that set the same high standards and have teachers just as good. Several elementary schools in Northwest Washington, which attract affluent families like the Obamas, match Sidwell. Deal Middle School and Wilson High School, into which those schools feed, are also just as good in every important way. There are also at least two other public high schools that match Sidwell, the School Without Walls and Banneker The Obama girls would have to apply to get in. I suspect both would be accepted.

The president, I think, realized his mistake at the end of his answer and said he thought he could have found as good a public school for his daughters if he had done some "maneuvering." That is a better answer. I hope he will correct his first shot at the question when he gets a chance.

Charles Hebert Flowers High School, one of Prince George’s County’s newer schools, has always set high standards for its students, and seems to be meeting them. It is one of only three high schools in the county with a science and technology program. In 2009 it met all federal targets for adequate yearly progress. Its graduation rate was 82 percent, well above the national average. Its 12th grade passing rate was above 80 percent on all state tests.

Yet it was one of the few schools in the Washington area refusing to let average students challenge themselves in an Advanced Placement course. Students were told this year that AP English, biology, American history, calculus and most of the other college-level courses at the school were open only to those with at least a 3.0 grade point average. They also had to have written permission from a teacher.

In an Aug. 22 e-mail to teachers of honors and AP classes, Flowers principal Helena Nobles-Jones emphatically endorsed this policy: “Please review last year’s academic progress of students enrolled in your classes! Students with average grades can not be enrolled!!!! These classes, by PGCPS standard, should be offered to HIGH ACHIEVING students only!!!”

That policy was, I hasten to say, in sync with most of the rest of the country. A common view among U.S. high school educators is that some kids are just not ready for such an academic challenge, including the long AP reading lists and three-hour final exams. They will get it in college, so why rush? Yet when they reach college they find that the students who were allowed to take AP, even those who struggled in the courses, often are better prepared for higher education’s tougher standards. About two-thirds of high school seniors go on to college each year. Many of them are average students, and only half took a college-level course in high school.

Earlier this month, I noted a point made by columnist Robert J. Samuelson about teacher salaries. We all think they are lousy, but looked at in a certain way, that is not quite right. Their average pay is $53,230 a year, nothing to brag to your parents about. But if two teachers were married to each other and making that much, they “would belong to the richest 20 percent of households,” Samuelson said.

Now McKinsey and Co., the giant management consulting firm, has taken a deep, detailed look at teacher recruitment and retention and come up with a similar finding. Teachers are making significantly more than many of us, particularly our most academically successful college students, think they are.

The firm surveyed 900 college students who were in the top third of their cohort academically. These otherwise bright young people were way off when asked what they knew about what educators make.

“More than half of respondents believed that teachers’ starting salaries were under $30,000, when the national average is actually $39,000, comparable to what 25 percent of top-third students expect as starting salaries in their preferred profession. Similarly, fully three quarters of top-third students not planning to teach believe that teachers’ maximum salary is below the current national average maximum of $67,000 per year -- and again a quarter of these students expect to earn less than what teachers will earn at the peak of their earning potential.”