Potomac/Sterling Community Survery

As you may have read, Loudoun's Department of Planning "has undertaken a community outreach effort in the Potomac and Sterling communities that engages citizens in a public dialogue that captures their concerns, needs, and desires and gives them an opportunity to suggest creative solutions that can improve the quality of life within their neighborhoods" with an initiative called the Potomac-Sterling Outreach.

As part of this effort the department conducted an online survey of residents regarding their community. Preliminary results from the survey (PDF) were released this week. I spoke to the man in charge of the study, Miguel Salinas, on Wednesday morning and he stressed to me that because this is a self-selected group of respondents the survey is by no means a scientific poll. Nonetheless there were a significant number of respondents and their opinions are meaningful and representative of different folks throughout the communities. I thought I'd highlight the school-related results for you here.

1. "Stakeholders were asked to identify the places, people and characteristics they valued the most within their neighborhoods and the larger community. Top among these were: 1.) Proximity and accessibility of residents to jobs, services, and retail, 2.) The sense of community, 3.) The amount and quality of the area’s parks, trails, and open spaces, and 4.) Quality public schools and libraries, in that order."
2. "Schools are identified by stakeholders as the area’s biggest asset. Stakeholders noted the quality of the public schools and their dedicated staff and liked the fact that neighborhoods are organized around schools, providing opportunities for children to walk. They also value the smaller school sizes - feeling they are not as overcrowded as the public schools immediately to their west."
3. School issues were not among the top concerns listed.
4. Respondents noted the "need to maintain the quality of schools in the area and to upgrade older facilities such as Park View High School and Sully Elementary School;

Suggestions from some respondents:

1. "Collaborate with schools, community leaders and local businesses to create a sense of community."
2. At least one "Collaborate with schools, community leaders and local businesses to create a sense of community."
3. Expand opportunities for use of schools as community spaces
   
4. Maintain and renovate older schools such as Sully Elementary
5. Playground renovation at Guilford Elementary
6. Offer full-day kindergarten for children

This process is far from over, and the report specifies that "Citizens and stakeholders will continue to have an opportunity to provide written comments via e-mail at any time." The email address is Potomac_Sterling@loudoun.gov.

What Should a B Be?

This front page Washington Post story about the different grading systems is more than a month old now, but I held onto it until this week because on Wednesday LCPS parents will see first semester report cards come home. The story has to do with grading disparities between localities, and compares Fairfax to Montgomery.

Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.

The article discusses the various impacts this can have on a student's college admission prospects and scholarship opportunities, and reviews the very few studies done on the issue.
I hadn't been aware of or given any thought to this issue until a parent brought it to my attention, so I'm not taking any position, I'm just bringing up the issue for your consideration. Michelle Zuckerman writes the following, printed here with her permission. She makes a number of statements that I have not attempted to verify and a number of others which are her opinion. LCPS would surely dispute much of what she says. I'm sure many parents would agree with her and many will disagree. I leave it for you to judge. I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

I put the Loudoun grading scale up against the Fairfax and Montgomery County scales and found the results interesting.

I have long maintained that our grading scale is too harsh, particularly at the lower end of the scale. The adjustments made several years ago really didn't fix all the problems. It seems to me that earning a grade of 80-81 should not earn you a "C" and that an 82-84 should get you more than "C+". In addition, I don't understand why a "+" added to a grade is only worth .3, rather than .5 points (as it is in Fairfax and Montgomery).

The comparison laid out in the paper highlighting the differences between two students taking the same courses in Fairfax and Montgomery resulting in drastically different GPAs is made even more interesting when you figure out the GPA a Loudoun student would earn for the same courses. We're right there with Fairfax's 3.5, far away from the 4.6 a Montgomery County student would earn.

As the woman interviewed in the article points out, our students are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to college admissions and scholarships. Now the standard line the guidance counselors offer is that "All the colleges know that Loudoun has the toughest grading system." While that may be true for VA schools, it is certainly not the case everywhere else. GPA is the first thing that admissions counselors look at. The same is true when applying for scholarships, particularly for merit scholarships. Loudoun students are at a definite disadvantage because the difficulty of our grading system makes earning a good GPA harder, not so much for the brightest students, but for the average to above average student.

It also fuels the competitiveness of grades at the high school level. The pressure on our kids to succeed is out of control. The push to get as many kids into AP courses and for students to take as many AP courses as they can before they get out of high school is beyond reason (and caused, I believe, in great part, by LCPS' desire to score high on the Post's Challenge Index). We congratulate ourselves on the record number of kids taking AP exams, but conveniently forget that we eliminated the honors courses in all of our history and government courses, forcing many kids into AP classes before they're ready or because their parents don't want them in the academic courses because that's where the behavior problems are. And the pressure and competition lead to all kinds of undesirable behaviors, among all students.

Four Good Questions

I received an email yesterday with some important questions. Sharing seemed like a good idea.

1) Do we need to be competing with Fairfax for teachers? Quality of Life should count for something. Loudoun beats Fairfax in that department for families -- hands down.
LCPS caught up with Fairfax salaries over the past several years to make it easier to recruit and retain the best teachers. The fact is that we have a major challenge finding several hundred new teachers every summer, and most of them are coming right out of school and are looking partly for quality of life (and quality of career) but largely at the bottom line. Quality of life doesn't pay the rent or the college loans. Beyond that, you might consider that if you're 22 years old and single, quality of life looks different than when you're 40 and have a family. Loudoun is a great place to live, but the night life is lacking. And finally, we aren't just competing with Fairfax anymore, or even with the rest of the DC region. We have to recruit nationally to ensure there's a highly qualified professional in every classroom. Our teachers are the most important people in our community, and I would triple their salaries given the opportunity.

2) Are there areas of administration which can be streamlined and / or made more efficient? As organizations get larger, scale efficiencies dictate that administration should rise at a smaller rate than operations.
Realizing economy of scale is important and at LCPS, the number of administrators has steadily declined over the years in comparison to the number of students. While the student population has grown 141% in the past ten years, the number of administrators has grown only 90%. Of the ten DC-area public school districts, only the City of Manassas has a higher percentage of school-based personnel.

3) Do the long term enrollment projections support constructing buildings which will last 50-100 years? Is the ramp up merely a 5-10 year bump which will cause us to start closing schools or having significant over capacity 15 years from now? Trailers, while despised by most parents, are an economical alternative to new school construction and can stretch capacity at critical times.
The projections of both LCPS staff and the Washington COG project continued growth for at least the next 10 years. While it is difficult to do demographic projections past 10 years, the folks LCPS employs to make projections have an exceptionally good track record through the unprecedented growth of the past 20 years. It is difficult to imagine that Loudoun will grow so fast as to have 85,000 students ten years from now, but it was difficult to imagine LCPS with our current 54,000 ten years ago when we had just 20,000. It's also important to note that some of the schools still in use in Loudoun are nearly 100 years old. There is no reason to believe that any of the schools we build now will be at anything less than capacity for decades to come.

4) Is our commitment to keep up with the latest technology keeping us from adequate staffing? Computers are an aid to teaching, not a replacement for humans.
Strong teaching is always the foundation of great education, and LCPS will never lose sight of that. That said, our teachers cannot prepare our children for a technology-driven world with a chalkboard, and the School Board has made a strong commitment to technology that enhances instruction. While that investment is significant, the LCPS technology budget is a tiny fraction of our teacher salaries, and not holding us back from adequate staffing. What *would* hold us back from adequate staffing would be not trying to compete with Fairfax for teachers.

Have your say on Elementary Math

There has been rumbling lately about an elementary math program called "Math Investigations." Some folks in neighboring Prince William County are trying to push their school system into repealing its use, and my favorite nay-saying blogger Elise would like to see the same effort in Loudoun. I heard a parent at a Special Education meeting dismiss it as well, so I know that discontent is out there.

Folks, here's your opportunity. LCPS is seeking parents for an elementary math evaluation committee. There are five meetings (plenty will say that they are at inconvenient times, so if that would keep you from serving then say so, maybe there's room to adjust if others feel the same way).

For what it's worth, I'll quote from an email I wrote to a parent this past weekend:

I generally start in support of LCPS decisions, as they are made with much more information, expertise and experience than I have.

LCPS Gifted Programs

There is an interesting conversation about Gifted programs in LCPS over on Loudoun Schools Feedback. This is a blog that I read regularly for a critical parent's view of the system. I'm not going to respond directly to the points made on that blog because I don't want to undercut those views and because I'm not the LCPS PR department. I do want to add my thoughts to the blogosphere though.

First, for more information about our Gifted programs, see the Gifted Programs page on the LCPS website. You might be particularly interested in the Gifted Programs FAQ. Second, if this is an area that really concerns you, please get involved with the Gifted Advisory Committee, which meets next on November 15th.

LCPS and all other districts are required to issue a local plan for the gifted to the state every five years, and our report was issued just this past June. The Gifted Advisory Committee worked together on the report, which is on the LCPS website as Proposed Local Plan for the Education of the Gifted. When this plan was put forward I needed extra time to read and understand it, and it was held from the board agenda until I was able to sit down with Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Services Sharon Ackerman, Director of Curriculum and Instruction Peter Hughes and Gifted Program Supervisor Julie Kelly. We talked for over an hour about the LCPS approach to gifted programs.

I think that they are the best folks to represent to you what the program philosophy and execution is, so I refer you again to the LCPS website and the Gifted Advisory Committee if you want to learn more. For my part, I am satisfied that this is an area of considerable emphasis for LCPS and that at the administrative level we have the best people available working with the best available knowledge on the subject. As with many areas, other school districts come here to learn how to run a successful gifted program.

One note of interest is that our programs are different than in Fairfax County Public Schools, where kids are labled "Gifted & Talented" and then pulled into separate classrooms from their peers. I have friends with "GT" kids in the Fairfax system who find this to be a problem for a number of reasons. One is that gifted kids are not gifted in all areas. Another, that a kid who shows gifts at one age may have gotten ahead of peers who may well catch up in a few years. Most importantly, isolating kids as gifted apart from their peers in Fairfax has a tendency to create enormous pressure to get into Thomas Jefferson HS among that group, and no encouragement among students who aren't in it. Finally, the whole concept of separating these kids almost entirely from their peers is just elitist.

LCPS is also developing programs for kids who are "Twice Exceptional," meaning that while in one area they are gifted, in another they need special education services. This is leading-edge in public schools, and illustrates directly the incredible complexity surrounding kids' intellectual abilities.

One final note, especially for those of you who champion the SOLs and NCLB standardized testing. When every kid must pass the same test at the end of the year, every teacher must teach from the same text and our schools are judged entirely on how many kids pass and not on how many kids excel, the emphasis will be on the bottom line and not on the leading edge. This was the design of NCLB... to not allow schools to ignore the kids who are struggling while trumpeting the kids who are soaring by basing evaluations entirely on the kids who are struggling. I think there is plenty of room to argue in favor of this approach, but there is no room to deny that it is a shift in our emphasis in which some kids will win and some will lose.

So as you think and talk about Gifted programs in LCPS remember that this is a complex issue, that our folks are doing their very best for every child, and that there is an opportunity for you to get involved and make it better.

Public Speakers

I took some heat last night at a community meeting for comments I made late into last week's board meeting. Here is what I said:

"I was going to say to people who are speakers who come that I think we need new perspectives from public speakers, and I think we need reminders of things, issues that may have slipped off the agenda or out of our focus. I think we don’t need allegations of bad faith or intentional discrimination based on class, race or region of the county and you get no traction from me coming in alleging that staff or other board members are not doing their damndest to do a great job for all the kids in Loudoun County."

Video link

Someone was sitting in the audience who had come because he was very concerned about employment discrimination against minorities at LCPS. My comments were made some time after the conclusion of a presentation on the minority student achievement gap for the benefit of the local chapter of the NAACP. Most of the NAACP members had left by the time I made my comments, and the impression that this one man got was that I had waited until they were gone to target them.

In truth I was making a very broad comment, triggered more by a speaker on western Loudoun schools earlier in the evening (who was still sitting in the room) than at the NAACP who spoke nearly a month before. I do not recall the NAACP speakers alleging intentional discrimination, but if they had my response would be the same. This Administration and this Board are made up of people trying hard to do the right thing. They aren't perfect, and they can't do everything they wish to do. But starting with a recognition that we're all in this together, doing our best, is the best way to begin a discussion of how to solve a problem.

Back to School Before Labor Day?

LCPS published its proposed 2008-2009 school calendar this week and is currently seeking comments. Among the highlights:

• School would start on Tuesday, September 2nd, after Labor Day.
• School would end on Friday, June 19th.
• There are two full weeks for winter break
• Spring Break comes in the second week of April
  

The comments we have received so far are about the desire to finish school earlier in June, and a willingness to start prior to Labor Day. Unfortunately the state legislature doesn't see it that way. In Section 22.1-79.1 of the Code of Virginia, it states that no school may open prior to labor day unless it has had lots of snow days in the previous 10 years or is embarking on an innovative new instructional program.

Curiously, it also allows for a 4-day-a-week school schedule.

Please let me know your thoughts on this proposed calendar.

Textbooks Available for Review

Did you think that the work of education stops just because it's summertime? LCPS yesterday gave citizens two weeks to review new textbooks being considered. Read the story.

You have the opportunity to see what our kids will be learning in:

• the elementary music program
  
• the middle school health and physical education program
  
• the high school health & physical education
  
• high school driver education
  

I have to admit that I'm not a fan of textbooks. I'm a child of the digital age. My guess is that these very expensive textbooks have one big advantage in that they ensure standardization. So for instance, the kids at Loudoun Valley HS in Purcellville have the same resources and are taught the same facts as the kids at Dominion HS in Sugarland Run.

This is your chance for input ladies and gentlemen. If you seek to influence education in this county, here's a place to start.