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Building Organizations and Engaging Communities

10/30/2014

D.C. is full of overachievers. Particularly for young education professionals, the overachieving instinct, when combined with energy, ideas, and a great desire for change, can lead to exciting work on behalf of students. But it’s also hard to resist the constant drive to give more.

Adam Barr is an excellent example of someone who has done great work while pushing his own limits. Adam is president and co-founder of Grassroots Education Project, one of two organizations he has established since 2007. The Grassroots Education Project empowers communities to serve their local schools by putting residents to work on the most pressing school needs. The organization logged more than 16,500 volunteer hours in its first three years at Tubman Elementary. Adam’s other organization, DC for Obama, was a grassroots political organizing group that grew to 21,000 members during the 2008 election. Both organizations have been successful, but both have required substantial community investment.

Adam grew up in Los Angeles but moved to D.C. soon after college. He began working at the Institute for Responsible Citizenship and then moved to several campaigns, Deloitte Consulting, GreatSchools and, most recently, Democracy Builders. I interviewed Adam about community organizing, Grassroots Education Project and its struggles, and his dad. Check out more below.

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DC Mayoral Candidates Face Off on Education

10/28/2014

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What do the District’s mayoral candidates think when it comes to education? Two of the candidates made their views heard last week during a YEP-DC co-hosted debate in a packed church in Ward 4. Here’s what David Catania and Carol Schwartz, both independents, had to say about several key issues:

Carol Schwartz, far left, and David Catania, second from left, field questions.

School Boundaries
Each candidate was asked to state their perceptions on D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray's proposal to redraw school boundaries. The proposed system was drawn with the intent to help underprivileged children attend better schools outside of their neighborhoods and to fix the problem of overcrowded versus underused schools. Though Catania agreed with the proposal on the premise that disadvantaged families should be given school preference, he cited harmful "unintended consequences" that would come about as a result. Johnson Middle School in southeast, for example, would be closed under this plan. Rather than overhauling boundaries and risk closing underused schools, critics say more energy should be spent toward improving existing schools. “What we should talk about is how we need to set up our schools to succeed," said Catania.
Schwartz also disagreed with parts of the school boundaries plan, adding that the proposal should be delayed until the new mayor is chosen. "What I don't want to do," she said, is "go back on Brown v. Board. My children were lucky to go to an integrated school." An unintended ramification of the plan includes the further segregation of racial and socioeconomic classes because of the gentrification of certain areas in D.C., Schwartz reasoned.

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Olivia Pope, Stereotypes, and Educating Black Girls

10/23/2014

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I wonder if Olivia Pope would have ever got suspended for being disrespectful.

Scandal’s Olivia Pope is the fixer extraordinaire who commands attention whenever she enters a room. Confident in her skills, she has no qualms about voicing her opinions to benefit her clients. Depending on your lens, however, Pope could be an “angry black woman,” whose presence is more “intimidating” than impressive. At least that’s how New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley described Olivia Pope in a much-criticized (really, a lot) article about producer Shonda Rhimes and the expansion of black female leads on television.

Stereotypes about black women reach far beyond the New York Times and television, trickling down from colleges to elementary schools. The belief that black girls are “angry” and “aggressive” has an adverse impact on their educational experiences, according to a report by NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Women’s Law Center. Twelve percent of all African-American girls in prekindergarten through 12th grade receive an out-of-school suspension, which is six times the rate of white girls and more than any other group of girls and several groups of boys. When it comes to achievement, black 12th-grade girls score lower than any other group of girls in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

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The Teachers Unions' Campaign Spending Spree: Follow the Money

10/21/2014

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Teachers unions have announced they will spend more than ever in the upcoming election—for the National Education Association, $40 to $60 million this cycle, and for the American Federation of Teachers, $20 million. That makes education unions among the biggest spenders this election. The donations also provide insight into how one of the most active education interest groups reads the politics of school reform.

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School Spending Bears Little Relationship to Student Need

10/15/2014

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Fair is not always equal. Some students simply need more—funding, teachers, support services—to graduate college-and-career ready like their classmates. But states and districts do a notoriously bad job of targeting additional financial resources to schools serving high concentrations of students in need. And a new tool from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute allows us to see just how bad it is in our local schools—even when accounting for state and federal dollars.

The tool provides education spending and other important demographic data for each school in the D.C. metro area. This is the first time that holistic school-level finance data has been compiled for local schools, allowing researchers, advocates, and parents to compare school spending across districts and between schools to understand whether resources are truly directed to those students who need them the most.

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about

YEP-DC is a nonpartisan group of education professionals who work in research, policy, and practice – and even outside of education. The views expressed here are only those of the attributed author, not YEP-DC. This blog aims to provide a forum for our group’s varied opinions. It also serves as an opportunity for many more professionals in DC and beyond to participate in the ongoing education conversation. We hope you chime in, but we ask that you do so in a considerate, respectful manner. We reserve the right to modify or delete any content or comments. For any more information or for an opportunity to blog, contact us via one of the methods below.

Bloggers

MONICA GRAY is co-founder & president of DreamWakers, an edtech nonprofit. She writes on education innovation and poverty.

LYDIA HALL is a legislative aide in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she works on education, civil rights, and other issues. Lydia is interested in helping to bridge the gap between Capitol Hill and the classroom.

MOSES PALACIOS is an advocate for student rights and works as a Research Manager for the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) - a coalition of urban school districts across the nation. He writes on issues regarding the children of immigrants and students learning English as a second language. His views are his own and not representative of CGCS.

PATRICIA RUANE is a
research associate at an education nonprofit. She is an editor of Recess.

LESLIE WELSH is a high school social studies teacher in DC. She is an editor of Recess.

﻿Building Organizations and Engaging Communities

DC Mayoral Candidates Face Off on Education

Olivia Pope, Stereotypes, and Educating Black Girls

The Teachers Unions' Campaign Spending Spree: Follow the Money

School Spending Bears Little Relationship to Student Need

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