Education Week - June 12, 2013 - 27

EDUCATION WEEK
n
JUNE 12, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Brian Pick, the head
of teaching and
learning for the
District of Columbia,
leads a close-reading
exercise during a
leadership academy
at Eastern High
School attended
by principals
and regional
superintendents
in the school system.
27
MULTIMEDIA:
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in this series, go to
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common-slideshow
reading aloud the first two pages of
David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas.
He leads the administrators through
a detailed explication, parsing words
to plumb the meaning of a challenging
53-word sentence.
Heads lowered, the administrators
read and annotate. They’re getting a
taste of what they should be seeing as
they observe teachers at their schools.
Mr. Pick urges them to ensure that
teachers use “rich texts” to facilitate
deep reading, high-quality questions
and good discussion and writing. The
district is investing heavily in thousands
of such books for its schools.
He gives a shoutout to the principal
of Thomas Elementary, a struggling
school that has extra district support
to improve its literacy. He reviews the
additional literacy resources that will
be flowing into schools.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson offers
the big picture into which the work
fits: The district’s literacy goal is to
have 70 percent of students proficient
by 2017, but it must more than double
its pace of improvement to do that.
In a visit to Thomas Elementary
weeks later, Mr. Pick sees signs that
the district’s approach holds promise.
One of the district’s lowest-performing
schools, it has made big strides. Spring
2011 reading proficiency was at 24 percent,
but a year later, it had risen to 39
percent. Infused with a special district
grant, the school is going full-bore into
literacy, from intensive interventions
for those with the weakest skills to enrichments
for those more advanced.
Principal Ruth Barnes leads Mr. Pick
on a tour of her all-hands-on-deck approach.
For 45 minutes every day, all
teachers read to or with students. In one
classroom, music teacher Gregory Lewis
is reading Sarah, Plain and Tall with
three 3rd grade girls, while another
teacher reads one-on-one with a boy in
the hallway.
As part of an additional daily two-hour
literacy block districtwide, Thomas’ kin-
ABOUT THIS SERIES
dergarten pupils are using the Tools of
the Mind program, drawing pictures
and writing about cowboys and cowgirls
to build their content knowledge. They
will build on their learning about the
Wild West with themed books from the
Magic Treehouse series. First graders
in another classroom are working on
phonics. In a 3rd grade classroom, students
are reading a story that’s part of
the Junior Great Books program. They’re
drawing pictures of the protagonist and
discussing how they envision him, using
the inquiry and discussion methods that
are the program’s trademarks.
n
Back at Stuart-Hobson, it’s the Friday
before the DC CAS. Ms. McNair-Lee is super-focused
today, but her students are
sluggish, straggling in late. “We have a
lot to cover today and not a lot of time,”
she says.
Rapid-fire, they hit key ideas in the lit-
erature standards: author’s tone, mood,
connotation, denotation. One after another,
students call out the right answers.
Good, maybe they’ve got this, the
teacher thinks. They’ve been reading
excerpts from The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and Little Women and articles
about the expeditions of Lewis & Clark
and Nathaniel P. Langford, and getting
ready to write brief paragraphs on them.
They were supposed to be annotating
in the margins about inferences, theme,
allusions. But many students, including
Mikel, haven’t done that.
Ms. McNair-Lee comes to his desk
and goes over his packet, marking with
black pen where he needs to complete
the work. In one margin, where the
packet asks him for conclusions he can
draw about the difficulties of Lewis
& Clark’s journey, he wrote “was a lot
going on.” Pointing to that, his teacher
says: “Be more specific.”
That afternoon, students pack the
gymnasium bleachers for a pep rally.
The 7th grade is dying to earn the
“spirit stick” back from the 8th grade.
But today’s top-line focus is the DC CAS.
Against a thundering backdrop of
drums and horns, Athletic Director
Leonard Booker yells, “Are you ready?”
He orchestrates a grade-by-grade cheer:
PAGE 28 >
How school districts move the Common Core
State Standards from the central office into
classrooms can make or break the undertaking.
Education Week spent six months reporting
on how the District of Columbia’s vision of the
common-core English/language arts standards
is being put into practice in one 8th grade
classroom at one school, Stuart-Hobson Middle
School on Capitol Hill.
PART 1, MAY 22: A school district reorganizes
itself to bet big on the common core
PART 2, JUNE 5: Beginning the second-semester
press toward common-core literacy skills
PART 3, JUNE 12: Doubling down
as year-end tests approach
PART 4, AUGUST: Analyzing the year’s work
Eighth grader Mikel
Robinson works
on an assignment
during the last unit
of the school year.
Students focused
on how point
of view affects
character and plot.
Photos by Jared Soares for Education Week
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Education Week - June 12, 2013

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