As District public and public charter schools continue to chart a path forward post-pandemic, education officials continue to analyze the latest statewide assessment results.
Although there were no significant gains in students’ overall math and English & Language Arts (ELA) proficiency, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) called the latest scores a step in the right direction for an administration working to improve learning outcomes — starting in the early childhood years.
“I’m proud to be the mayor of a city with free Pre-K3 and Pre-K4, which is real school,” Bowser said on Aug. 26 at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a state-of-the-art early childhood education center at Miner Elementary School in Northeast.
The new education center, which connects to the main Miner campus via a walkway, includes nine classrooms, a new playground for two to five year olds that’s designed for sensory stimulation, and an elevator, among other accommodations for up to 140 youngsters.
This $15 million project follows the completion of an early childhood education campus at Whitlock Elementary School, also located in Ward 7. In recent years, District officials have also made investments into other District public elementary schools, including: Whitlock Elementary School in Northeast; Garfield Elementary School in Southeast; and Dorothy Height Elementary School in Northwest.
On Monday, Bowser said that these Investments into early childhood education have produced long-term results, specifically the 2.2 percentage increase that third graders this past spring scored on the ELA portion of the statewide assignment compared to third graders from the previous year.
“I know when we put our children in school buildings with teachers and a fine-tuned curriculum, they will be ready for third grade,” Bowser said. “We’re getting them reading and math comfortable.”
Last spring, DC Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education, also known as DC CAPE, replaced PARCC as the standardized test for District public and public charter school students between the third and twelfth grades.
Students took DC CAPE along with the Multi-State Alternate Assessment, which is available for students with significant cognitive disabilities.
Like PARCC, performance on DC CAPE is graded by performance level, with 4 and 5 signifying the highest levels of proficiency in a subject area. Education officials said that the standardized test has the same format and rigor as its predecessor.
The Spring 2024 DC CAPE results showed that, during the 2023-2024 school year, 34% of District students are meeting or exceeding expectations in ELA while fewer than 23% of students are doing the same for math.
Overall, District students saw an increase of less than a percentage point within a year in each of those subject areas. A closer look however shows that one out of three District schools increased English proficiency by at least three percentage points while nearly one out of four District schools increased math proficiency by at least three percentage points.
Middle school students saw the greatest improvement in math, with a boost of nearly two percentage points compared to their counterparts in elementary and high school who either didn’t show any improvement or improved their overall score by less than a percentage point.
When it came to ELA, elementary school students fared better, though not significantly so, than their middle and high school counterparts, whose overall English proficiency decreased by less than a percentage point.
With the new school year in full swing, Dr. Carrie Broquard, the principal at Miner Elementary School, explained what lies ahead for early childhood learners as she endeavors to improve upon the small gains made.
“We will look to serve our children from six months to three years old,” Broquard told The Informer. “Literacy preparation and numeracy builds independent learners who are curious about the world around them. We use a play-based curriculum… based on motor skills, language fluency and early phonics. When language is being used, students are learning.”
School Leaders Eye Professional Development as a Strategy
This academic year, District public school teachers will take part in professional development with LEarning together to Advance our Practice, also known as LEAP. Each week, teachers spend 90 minutes in a content-specific professional learning community where they collaboratively deepen their knowledge of the content and study how to best convey that information to their students.
For public and public charter school teachers, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) provides professional learning opportunities in the areas of: English learner instruction, multilingual education, mathematics standards, STEM integration, dyslexia, multiple tiered systems of support, and restorative justice.
OSSE also doles out funds for instructors at public and public charter schools. During the latter part of August, State Superintendent Antoinette Mitchell delved into these projects a bit more while presenting the most recent state assessment results alongside D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee, Dr. Michelle Walker-Davis, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board (DCPCSB), and Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education.
“The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has awarded more than $13 million to support literacy coaching and instructional materials for D.C. public and public charter schools. Much of this work came out of recommendations from the OSSE reading workshop,” Mitchell said.
“OSSE is training 400 teachers in math bootcamp. We’re launching a citywide task force to create a statewide strategy to increase math scores. This brings an urgent focus to an area of critical need to identify actionable strategies to increase student learning.”
Some public charter schools, like Friendship Public Charter School, have also implemented professional development sessions where teachers, regardless of the campus where they work, learn about best practices, as actualized by colleagues who’ve produced the most significant academic outcomes in their content area.
Administrators at Friendship PCS credit this collaboration, along with what they call a time-tested curriculum, with the three percentage point gain that the public charter school network made in ELA, and its gain of two percentage points when it came to math.
These gains were four to seven times that greater than the average citywide gain.
“Every day, there’s something that’s available to address a child’s needs,” said Joseph Speight, head of schools at Friendship Public Charter School. “We’re not just waiting for an assessment. We’re being intentional about how we’re helping children. We also engage parents beyond data points. It’s a strategic pathway to address what we see in the data.”
A Closer Look: Small Group Instruction & High-Impact Tutoring
In the coming weeks, teachers at Friendship Public Charter School will closely examine their students’ DC CAPE results, and take that, along with baseline data from MAP assessments, to inform strategies they will implement to improve students’ academic outcomes.
For Brandon McCoy, a sixth and seventh grade ELA teacher at Friendship PCS – Ideal Campus, small group instruction counts among the most effective of educational models.
“Luckily, we have an ideal class size — between 15 and 20 scholars,” McCoy told The Informer. “We have a great system where they get one-on-one support and two teachers. That’s beneficial with grouping,” McCoy told The Informer.
Since 2019, McCoy and his colleagues in the ELA department at Friendship PCS – Ideal Campus have grouped students based on their assessment scores and areas of improvement. The differentiated instruction, McCoy said, has allowed him to provide extra support to students, connect with them and build their foundational skills.
“We’re being intentional on those skills and use interventions to target scholars who are struggling.” McCoy said.
“Having that classroom culture, being an active teacher and engaging them in group work and problem solving. We do group rotations that place students based off of data. That’s where I’m able to help them with their skills. It runs like a well-oiled machine.”
For nearly five years, students and faculty at Moten Elementary School have been involved in a similar arrangement known as high-impact tutoring.
The program, which includes daily one-on-one and small group sessions, has been cited as part of the reason that 25% of fifth graders at Moten met or exceeded expectations in math and English on DC CAPE.
As Akela Dogbe, principal at Moten Elementary, explained, such improvement has happened incrementally over the years with third, fourth and fifth graders who participated in one-on-one and small group tutoring sessions. In their role as on-site tutors, teachers and administrators leverage their rapport with students to focus on foundational skills that require reinforcement.
With the i-Ready assessment and curriculum app providing real-time data, teachers helped the youngsters under their purview close gaps that would’ve complicated learning in the traditional classroom setting.
For Dogbe, Such trends, whether they happen on in-school assessments or annual state assessments, speak to the power and necessity of high-impact tutoring.
“The biggest thing you’ll hear from teachers is that a child should have access to grade-level material, so you need somewhere where they can make up the skills gaps,” Dogbe said, emphasizing that Moten Elementary conducts its high-impact tutoring during the school day and mostly with the assistance of teachers and administrators who serve as tutors.
“This was going to be part of the school day. I didn’t want to leave it to chance. And I wanted to do it in an environment where you could see if it works.”
In 2021, upon their return to in-person learning, staff members at Moten Elementary facilitated a pilot high-impact tutoring program, partially in collaboration with LiteracyLab and Blueprint. That year, 30 young people received small group or one-on-one tutoring for 30 minutes a day.
After a year, once the program proved successful, administrators expanded it schoolwide. This school year, that arrangement will continue with some students taking above grade-level coursework. Regardless of what material covered, Dogbe expressed her confidence that her students will be in a setting where their confidence will grow, and their academic prowess along with it.
“Students love when they get the skill. It’s rare that if you’re working on skills with a child five times a week, they’re not going to close that gap. When they do that, they want more of that feeling. It’s a high. A lot of them like tutoring. They have a sense of belonging.”