New Food Allergy Safety Guidelines for Schools

Oct. 31, 2013 -- The first guidelines outlining how schools should protect children with food allergies have been released by the U.S. government.

Restrictions on nuts, shellfish and other foods that can cause allergic reactions, and making sure that emergency medicines such as EpiPens are available are among the voluntary strategies , the Associated Press reported.

The recommendations were posted Wednesday on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 15 states, along with many schools or school districts already have their own policies.

However, experts say that many of these policies are probably not comprehensive, the AP reported.

About 1 in 20 U.S. children have food allergies, according to a recent CDC survey.

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Models for D.C. schools? Try next door, in Arlington, Fairfax and Montgomery.

I have been arguing with readers on my blog about how to improve D.C. public schools. It may sound like the same old fight over D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, which should be resolved soon. (This column's deadline was Monday, before the polls closed on the mayoral race.) But our online quarrel has evolved into something deeper.

All of us want to help low-income kids. Readers say Rhee is too aggressive and uncompromising. I say other school leaders have been similarly pushy, with good results in raising standards, removing low-performing teachers and fighting the apathy that has led many school systems to assume disadvantaged children can't learn much. Readers, not believing me, have asked for examples.

My first instinct is to mention charter schools across the country that have shown great gains with low-income children by refusing to compromise. But those aren't school systems. They don't have large headquarters staffs used to doing things their way. They don't provide much of a model for the District.

Better answers, I realize, are found here in the Washington area. Some of our suburban districts have made great strides with energetic policies that had to overcome resistance.

People in the District tend to dismiss places such as Arlington, Fairfax and Montgomery counties as atypical, because they are among the wealthiest school districts in the country. But they don't spend much more, and often spend less, per child than the District does. According to fiscal 2007 figures compiled by Mary Levy of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, D.C. schools had an operating budget of $14,405 per pupil, compared with $17,958 for Arlington, $12,853 for Fairfax and $13,446 for Montgomery. (With its new teacher contract, D.C. is spending even more.) Our suburban counties, like the city, have large pockets of poverty where test scores have been low. But they have had more success dealing with that.

The Foundation for Child Development and Pre-K Now, a campaign funded by the Pew Center on the States, has released a report saying Montgomery's programs for disadvantaged children in early grades are a national model. "Almost 90 percent of kindergarteners enter first grade with essential early literacy skills," the foundation said in a statement. "Nearly 88 percent of third graders read proficiently." The county succeeded despite criticism that it was putting too much stress on kids.

Fairfax County was the first district in the area, and one of the first in the country, to open Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses to all students, another initiative that challenged old habits. From 1997 to 2008, Arlington raised the percentage of black students passing the Virginia Standards of Learning exams from 37 to 74 percent and Hispanic students from 47 to 82 percent, by making minority improvement its priority, despite some predictions of failure.

To me, these programs succeeded because the suburban districts, unlike the D.C. schools, had a critical mass of involved families. Most but not all of these families were middle class and supported better teaching for all students, rich and poor. That dynamic has worked in certain parts of the District, particularly in Northwest, to which families from other parts of the city, some middle class, some not, transferred their children to join the affluent children attending public schools there.

They were willing to sanction tougher principals, more homework and careful documentation of progress through standardized tests. If standards slipped, they got mad. We seem to have more parents like that in other parts of the District these days, if you count those flocking to high-performing charter schools. They form a base of support for more determined school improvement, if the chancellor, whoever that may be, takes advantage of it.

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Urban schools don't need gifted-and-talented chief

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson told me recently that a plan to hire a gifted-and-talented coordinator had been cut from her budget. Times are tough, she said. Sacrifices have to be made.

But I don't think this is any great loss at all.

God dispenses his blessings and talents to poor and minority kids, too, so our cities have many gifted children. But public schools, including those in the suburbs, rarely have the resources or teaching expertise to challenge them. For urban schools, the standard gifted and talented system is often a waste of time.

I was reminded of this in a new book by the best inner-city high school principal I have ever known.

Henry Gradillas, who ran two large high schools in Los Angeles, including Garfield in low-income East L.A., figured this out nearly 30 years ago. He had listened to his most talented teacher, Garfield Math Department Chairman Jaime Escalante, make fun of designating some kids gifted on the strength of a second-grade intelligence test. Gradillas began to see why Escalante (later made famous by the film "Stand and Deliver") was right.

In his book "Standing and Delivering: What the Movie Didn't Tell," Gradillas (with co-author Jerry Jesness) describes how Garfield's high poverty - also a key factor in D.C. schools - distorted the effect of the Los Angeles Unified School District's gifted and talented (GT) rules in the 1980s.

"We had a number of what I call NFGT [non-functioning gifted and talented] students," said Gradillas, a former Army ranger. "They had IQs that qualified them for the gifted and talented program but not the grade-point averages. A lot of them were taking Mickey Mouse classes and were in no way living up to their potentials. A lot of these kids lacked both motivation and study skills."

He said, "We also had a lot of bright, hardworking kids who never were labeled gifted and talented because they lacked English skills in elementary school when monolingual English-speaking kids were being tested for GT. Others may have not had the IQ to qualify for GT, but they had the ganas [an Escalante word for drive], and they did well in higher-level classes."

When I was finishing a book about Escalante in 1987, Gradillas identified, at my request, every GT student in the famous Garfield classes that produced 26 percent of all Mexican Americans in the country that year who passed Advanced Placement Calculus exams. The GT students made up only 20 percent of the total test takers at Garfield. They had a lower passing rate on the AP exams than Garfield students not designated GT.

This amused Escalante. As Gradillas describes in his book, when a GT student from another class sought help after school with a trigonometry problem, Escalante said, "I'll let one of my students who's not gifted explain it to you."

Gradillas was a genius at finding loopholes in school regulations. Most districts let only GT students into GT classes funded by state grants based on the number of GT kids. But Gradillas discovered the rules actually said 49 percent of the class could be non-GT, so he added many undesignated students who were doing well. To appease GT teachers who feared dilution by these outsiders, he promised to remove any non-GT student who fell below a B in the course.

The GT label fixation appears similarly useless these days in the District, where the most successful schools try to raise the achievement of all students, no matter how high or low they start the year. If Henderson uses money saved by the GT coordinator budget cut to train more teachers in how to do that, Henry Gradillas (still doing some teaching in Wisconsin at age 76) will approve.

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D.C. schools' performance should not be measured by focusing on achievement gap

The D.C. mayoral race is deeply split on most issues, but everyone agrees on one thing: We must reduce the achievement gap between minority and white students. It is too bad, then, that the gap is such a mindless measure of school progress.

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray says: "The achievement gap . . . really has not been reduced over the past three years irrespective of test scores. It really is an important thing." Mayor Adrian Fenty's campaign Web site endorses the gap's significance but insists the mayor has "narrowed the achievement gap by as much as 20 percent . . . from 2007 to 2009." The Post's columnist Colbert I. King says the gaps in test scores between children of the city's affluent and poor, between white and black, "go to the heart of school reform efforts."

The numbers tell another story. Here is what my colleague Bill Turque reported in his Aug. 19 story on education issues in the mayoral race: "Average math scores of white D.C. fourth-graders [on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)] grew from 262 in 2007 to 270 last year (on a scale of 500). Scores rose three points for D.C. African American students, from 209 to 212. So the gap widened from 53 points to 58."

He compared students in Ward 7, relatively low income, with the more affluent students of Ward 3 on the DC-CAS tests. "In Ward 7, reading proficiency rates for secondary students rose from 17 percent in 2007 to 28 percent in 2010 -- 11 points," he wrote. "But Ward 3's rate rose almost 13 points in that time, and the disparity between the two wards remains about 50 points."

So, nearly everyone seems to agree, math scores of black D.C. fourth-graders went up three points, reading scores of mostly black and low-income Ward 7 secondary school students went up 11 points, and somehow that's bad news. Why? Because the scores of white students and Ward 3 students went up more. If their scores had not changed, or gone down just a bit, we would all be celebrating a narrowing of the achievement gap, our favorite measure of city schools.

Here are some other dubious ways to make the gap smaller and be happy: Have no improvement in black scores but a drop in white scores, or have black scores decline but white scores go down even more. We seem to have taken our concern about the income gap in America and adopted the same vocabulary when we talk about schools, even though making more money and learning to read are very different activities. Achieving proficiency in math, and particularly in reading, is key to the futures of both black and white children, both rich ones and poor ones. Focusing on the gap encourages us to ignore or downplay the success of children in one group in favor of comparing their gains with others. Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless says this has, among other things, led us to overlook meager improvement in some groups.

Worse, it has denied recognition to hardworking minority and low-income students, and their teachers, when they score gains but don't close the gap. We know some D.C. minority children have been improving, but a large chart accompanying Turque's recent story on the gap made it impossible to determine how much. The numbers were about differences, not gains.

Why not work at raising achievement for every child, in every demographic category, instead of obsessing about the gap? I don't blame politicians or journalists for enabling this deceptive mind-set. Everyone does it. It is woven into the way we think about schools, from the president on down. But that doesn't mean it makes any sense, or that we shouldn't try to rethink school progress in a more useful way.

For more Jay, go to washingtonpost.com/class-struggle.

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When schools don't communicate well with parents

A seventh-grader at River Bend Middle School in Loudoun County is getting little homework. Under a new system called standard-based grading, teachers are supposed to use quick quizzes in class, not overnight assignments, to assess how students are doing. It is fairer and more dependable, many experts say, but it is also preventing the student's mother from helping her child learn.

"Parents don't find out until after a child has been assessed whether the child knows the subject or not," said the mother, who asked not be identified out of fear of stigmatizing her child. When her child was still doing homework, she could check it for signs of comprehension. Now, she said, "all I see are in-class work sheets and study guides, which tell me nothing about understanding of the subject."

The surge in quizzes and tests is also frustrating, she said, because her child has a learning disability that makes test preparation a hard slog.

Her efforts to find out why this is happening, and what she can do about it, suffer because of the difficulty of any public school sending parents a consistent message about what is going on. The miscommunication that results is one of the least-reported and most aggravating parts of the American education system, so I decided to look more closely at the parent's complaint.

The school has a very experienced principal, Bennett Lacy, who has run River Bend since it opened 10 years ago. River Bend was one of only two among Loudoun's 13 middle schools to make adequate yearly progress last year under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Lacy has embraced the standards-based grading system as a way to raise achievement for all students.

With frequent quizzes, teachers check for comprehension before going on to new lessons, he said. They grade only on how much has been learned, not on classroom behavior or homework completion or other matters shown by research not to reflect achievement.

"Grades should be comprised of clear and precise evidence over time of what a child knows, understands, is able to do and carry forward," Lacy said.

Just how to communicate that to parents, Lacy indicated, is a work in progress. He said he did not think the complaints about too little homework and too many quizzes were the fault of standard-based grading but instead could be handled by individual teachers.

According to the mother who spoke to me, teachers say they can't change the homework policy and many don't like it. Their solution to the wear-and-tear of so many quizzes and tests is to give students a chance to take breaks, and to retake tests if they have poor results.

Lacy said he asked the teachers who had the child of the parent who spoke to me why they gave so little homework and was told students would not do it because it didn't count on their report cards. He said that wasn't true of that particular child, but he did not discuss the individual case with the teachers because he did not want them to treat the child differently because her mother had complained. I asked whether that meant he feared some of his teachers might act unprofessionally. "Well, it has happened," he said.

So the parent still does not know the teachers' candid view of what will help her child. Some schools have paid parental advisers to bridge such communication gaps, although the jobs are often cut when budgets get lean.

This mother has gone outside the school, spending $550 on tests to determine the nature of her child's disability so she can help with the surge of quizzes. The student is doing better in retests at River Bend. The mother said she hopes that continues but that she still yearns for a chance to understand why the school is pursuing a course that does not make sense to her.

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Harriett Ball dies: Teacher who inspired KIPP charter schools was 64

Harriett Ball, a well-known teacher trainer who inspired the most successful charter school network in the country, died Feb. 2 at a Houston Northwest Medical Center after a heart attack. She was 64.

A lively classroom performer with a rich sense of humor, the elementary school teacher stood 6 feet 1 inch tall and had a deep, vibrant alto voice. Most of her fame stemmed from the role she played in the creation of the Knowledge Is Power Program, now known as KIPP, which has grown to 99 schools in 20 states and the District.

She trained the KIPP co-founders, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, when they were novice members of the Teach For America program. She gave them a host of original songs, chants and games to encourage learning. They took the name of their network from her most popular chant:

"You gotta read, baby, read.

You gotta read, baby read.

The more you read, the more you know,

'Cause knowledge is power,

Power is money, and

I want it."

KIPP's initial fifth-through-eighth-grade public charter middle schools used some of Mrs. Ball's methods, her iron doctrine that all children will learn, and a longer school day and year to produce the largest gains in achievement ever seen in low-income children.

The founders say that would not have happened if Levin had not lied about a non-existent English as a second language certificate that got him his first teaching job in 1992 at Bastian Elementary School in southeast Houston.

Across the hall he met Mrs. Ball, the school's star teacher. She had developed what she called "disposable crutches," a stream of mnemonic chants that attached essential rules of grammar and mathematics to the brains of fourth-graders. They learned the words as easily as rap lyrics. The more they used them, the more they became second nature.

She showed Levin and Feinberg how to move quickly to quell any rebellion, protect children from teasing and motivate learning. Often she used a practiced urban lingo.

"You're not doing the work?" she said to one child. "You got three choices." She spoke slowly. "You . . . can . . . change . . . rooms. You . . . can . . . change . . . schools." Her pace quickened: "But don't nobody else want you but me."

"Or you can change your attitude and actions . . . because I'm not changing. . . . You gonna pick one. This ain't Burger King. You don't 'have it your way.' Change rooms, change schools, or you change."

She was particularly close to Levin, sometimes pointing at his curly hair and suggesting he was one of her children.

He begged her in 1995 to transfer with him to Feinberg's school, where they had permission to start the first KIPP class. She said she was comfortable at Bastian and would not move.

He tried again when he moved to the south Bronx to start a second KIPP school. She said she couldn't take the risk, as a single mother with four children and a mortgage. "You're young and can start over," she said. "I don't have that luxury."

She gave Levin and Feinberg permission to use her chants and methods as long as they promised to tell anyone who asked the name of the women they got them from. Mrs. Ball believed she got her inspirations from God. In 1996 she received what she considered divine guidance to vest her pension, borrow on her mortgage and start her own business helping other teachers improve.

In a statement, Levin and Feinberg said "KIPP would not exist without Harriett." Watching her, they said, "was akin to watching any genius in action - she made one of the world's most difficult endeavors seem effortless." KIPP schools, including seven in the District, have 27,000 students and are growing rapidly, particularly in Houston.

Harriett Jane Hill was born July 1, 1946, in Rosenberg, Tex. She received a teaching degree from Huston-Tillotson University in Austin and then taught in Austin and Houston for 35 years.

Her first and third marriages, to Paul Franks and Duke Lacal Johnson, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Herman Ball, was shot dead in 1991 while trying to protect his sister's car from a reckless driver.

Survivors include four children from her first marriage, Rochelle Franks of Houston, Pamela Franks of Austin, Paul Franks of Greenwood, Miss., and Priscilla Franks of Spring, Tex.; a brother, Hubert Hill of Houston; and nine grandchildren.

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To gauge safety better, schools need to survey teachers regularly

There was something strange in The Washington Post a week ago. A chart on page A16, using data provided by the D.C. public school system, showed that in late summer and fall 2009, Spingarn High School had by far the lowest number of assaults, thefts, threats and other crimes. There were just six incidents in four months compared with an average of 31 in the other eight high schools assessed.

At that time, teachers at this allegedly safest of all regular D.C. high schools were reporting a rash of crimes and classroom intrusions. The situation became so intolerable that by January they had persuaded D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to replace the Spingarn principal.

How could the incidents being reported by security guards under school district rules be so different from what people at the school were experiencing? Why did Rhee ignore the data in changing the school's leadership and her successor, Kaya Henderson, use data from the same source last week to replace the principal at Dunbar High?

I asked D.C. school officials those questions several times last week. They declined to answer. There is no question that Dunbar, which recorded a system-high 46 incidents this summer and fall, had much disruption, including the arrest of six students on rape charges (which were later dropped). Its high total reflects what teachers and parents were telling school headquarters.

But the likely phony count from Spingarn is too typical of security accounting in the District and many other school systems. Educators agree that not much learning can take place when students don't feel safe. Many urban schools suffer from absenteeism, tardiness and disorder, which rob their students of a chance to concentrate.

School safety figures have been considered notoriously unreliable for decades. "Generally speaking, the tendency is to downplay incidents," said Mel Riddile, associate director for high school services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "Some principals pressure school resource officers to downgrade some incidents."

More than eight in 10 school-based police officers in one survey said school crime was underreported. The federal rules requiring states to report all "persistently dangerous" schools were so inadequate that in 2004 only three states - Pennsylvania, New Jersey and South Dakota - admitted to having any.

School crime reports can be distorted for many reasons. D.C. teacher Anthony Priest, who kept a diary of disruption at Spingarn, said: "I had one special-ed student that assaulted me several times only to be placed back in my room the next day. . . . The determination was that this behavior was due to his illness, which was bipolar, thus he couldn't be suspended for it."

A Maryland high school teacher said administrators often think, "If the kid is special ed, it is exceedingly difficult to expel, so why even charge?" That leads to deceptively low incident counts and false confidence in the school's climate. The numbers are also distorted by state rules designed to make sure there are not too many schools listed as persistently dangerous. One experienced Northern Virginia school official said Virginia often records only incidents serious enough to lead to at least a suspension.

D.C. officials say security guards generally report security incidents. They are often young and malleable, willing to do whatever school officials tell them. Teachers can also make reports, but the paperwork is time-consuming and the likelihood of serious action small. Some experts said the District once had a more accurate system, but it was dismantled to make sure the city did not look too bad on the federal persistently-dangerous schools list.

The solution, most of the experts I spoke to said, was regular surveys of school climate that depend heavily on interviewing teachers. "What teachers say is a much better indicator of school climate than incident reports," Riddile said.

Neither the District nor any other local school system does regular surveys of teachers on school safety. They might start trying that, because all efforts to improve achievement will fail if the school climate won't support a feeling that this is a place to learn.

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Democratic primary could determine fate of D.C. schools, for better or worse

School opens today in the District. For the next three weeks, Americans who care about the future of urban schools will watch the city closely.

If Mayor Adrian M. Fenty loses the Democratic primary, Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee -- the most divisive D.C. educator in my 39 years at The Washington Post -- will probably leave. If Fenty wins, she probably stays. Whether that is good or bad depends on your point of view.

While my wife and I were taking our toddler grandson to see his favorite fountains in California, early returns from what I call the Rhee primary were pouring in. Elementary students in regular public schools lost between four and five points in reading and math proficiency after two years of gains. Regular public secondary school students continued to improve.

Rhee briefly united her friends and foes by persuading the Washington Teachers' Union to accept a far-reaching contract. That burst of amity ended when she fired 76 teachers who received poor evaluations under her assessment system and 76 others for licensure problems or other issues. She also put another 89 teachers who had been judged "minimally effective" in jeopardy of termination.

Fifth-grade scores declined at two of the high-performing charter schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a mild blow to Rhee since she is one of the few big-city superintendents who actively support charters, particularly KIPP. The number of District schools, regular or charter, meeting adequate yearly progress goals dropped from 47 to 15, but that is no longer a big issue. The No Child Left Behind law is rapidly deteriorating as nearly all U.S. schools head for its bad list, which Congress will tear up and toss away when it rewrites the law.

Those of us who support Rhee because of her emphasis on hiring strong principals and creating dynamic teacher teams applauded the results from some well-led schools. Dunbar and Coolidge high schools, run by the veteran New York innovators of the Friends of Bedford group, showed good gains.

But faculty tumult at Sousa Middle School, where a Rhee hire alienated teachers, and a midyear change of principal at chaotic Spingarn High School show that her leadership team is a work in progress. My colleague Bill Turque calculated that Rhee has made 91 leadership appointments in three years, but 39 are no longer in those jobs. She understands that principals who establish creative school cultures are key to raising student achievement. "I'd love to have a better batting average," she told Turque.

People I respect who want Rhee to go say she is too impulsive, too disrespectful of community leaders, too quick to dismiss experienced teachers, too wedded to test scores and always convinced that she is right. Reasonable arguments, yes, but they contradict what I have learned about improving schools from educators who have done so.

When first faced with schools as mired in apathy and inertia as D.C. schools, these ultimately successful school leaders were as divisive as Rhee has been. They moved quickly to change personnel and procedures. They sought community support but ignored leaders who opposed their methods. They fired or refused to hire teachers, many of them experienced, who warned against expecting much from poor children. They took standardized test scores seriously and changed methods when achievement did not rise.

Like Rhee, they acquired many critics and many supporters. How the chancellor does in that ultimate accounting, we will learn after the elections of Sept. 14.

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