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About half of DC students currently qualify for ‘at-risk’ funding because they are growing up in families struggling to make ends meet. Both DC Public Schools and public charter schools receive additional funds for at-risk students. But the underfunding of schools often results in the misuse of these extra resources. . . . → Read More: A Closer Look at ‘At-Risk’ Funds: How Limited School Funding Can Lead to the Misuse of Extra Resources for Low-Income Students 
For those following the ins and outs of District of Columbia Public Schools, here in it’s entirety is the March 2018 edition of the Citizen Reader. . . . → Read More: Citizen Reader: Information about DC’s Schools, March 2018  Comments are closed  Education, School "Reform"  Citizen Reader, DC Public Schools, DCPS, Sarah Livingston, School Reform 
Cross-posted from EducationDC [Ed Note: On Friday, December 15, the education committee of the city council held TWO related hearings on graduation rate accountability, arising from reporting that students at DCPS’s Ballou high school graduated without earning appropriate credit. Below, DC education activist Peter MacPherson puts the official investigation of what happened at Ballou into historical and civic perspective.] It’s a big deal in a democracy when two branches of a government decide a third just isn’t working well, needs to depart this mortal coil, and then administers the coup de grace. That’s what happened in 2007 when former Mayor Adrian Fenty and every member of the city council—save one—decided to dispatch the elected Board of Education from this realm. It was a decision made by a small number of actors, with the support of elite institutions like the Washington Post and with no meaningful opportunity for District residents to express whether they wanted one of the city’s few vestiges of democratic life to disappear. The elected Board of Education has now been gone for a decade. Those who eliminated it made the argument that putting the final authority for DCPS under the aegis of a single person, namely the mayor, would be the antidote for what was commonly described as a failing school system. It’s been a popular narrative in our country: that uninhibited executive power is what’s needed to fix the badly broken. Fire the non-performing and eliminate the bickering and the need to build consensus on an elected board. Develop a bold plan for improvement and then implement it without the barriers that an elected board represents. After a decade of mayoral control, few would say that the city’s schools are actually fixed. Huge improvements have been made in renovating or reconstructing school buildings. But the benefits of the school modernization program have not been experienced equally, with improvements closely tied to race and class. The achievement gap between white and non-white students remains as jarring as ever. Nonetheless, there is a persistent narrative that our schools have dramatically improved, that DCPS is “the fastest improving urban school district in the United States,” as the mayor and her lieutenants frequently note. These kinds of statistics are often cited by the editorial page of the Washington Post. Besides scores on standardized tests, significant improvements in high school graduation rates are also mentioned as evidence of improvement. The latter, if the numbers are to be believed, is a success that DCPS Chancellor Antwan Wilson wishes to build on: In the next 5 years, he wants 85% to graduate from high school within four years and 90% within four to five years. But it’s difficult to judge that goal, because the current state of achievement in our schools is actually unknown. For instance, reporting by WAMU and NPR has raised considerable doubt about the actual graduation rate at Ballou in Ward 8. The school had reported an improvement in its graduation rate from 50% in 2012 to 67% in 2017. And the school also reported that all of its 2017 graduating class had been accepted to college. However, the WAMU/NPR reporting makes clear that those numbers are illusory. Evidence of excessive absenteeism on the part of students as well as the massaging of grades indicate that many were allowed to graduate when they in fact were not eligible to do so. Our mayor and chancellor desperately want this scandal to be isolated to a single school. And if only Ballou is investigated, that’s where it will remain. As it now stands, the Office of the State Superintendent for Education plans to only investigate Ballou. This is exactly why education reform in the District of Columbia is failing. Those running education in the District are deeply invested in the reform model adopted a decade ago. Eliminating the elected school board and embracing a high-stakes testing paradigm were supposed to transform our schools. Those brought in to run the schools were sold as pedagogic alchemists who possessed the secret formula. That narrative is paramount: The political and media class are not invested in all students succeeding academically. Essentially, they care about the perception that students are learning and achieving in our schools. When scandals appear, like the one involving cheating on standardized tests that USA Today uncovered (and even more since then), scenarios have been constructed to give the appearance that what was reported was limited to a few isolated examples. Unlike in Atlanta, where a similar scandal had taken place and . . . → Read More: Investigating Ballou Means Investigating Ourselves Comments are closed Education Ballou High School, D.C. Public Schools, DC City Council, DCPS, Education DC, graduation requirements 
Cross-Post from The Fight Back written by Pete Tucker This is the first in a three-part series on Kaya Henderson’s time atop DCPS. After six years as head of D.C. Public Schools, Kaya Henderson is calling it quits Friday. According to the Washington Post, her biggest booster, Henderson is leaving behind a “legacy of progress.” Not everyone agrees. Kaya Henderson and Michelle Rhee. Photo: Washington Post Before ascending to chancellor, Henderson served three years as top deputy to her close friend, Michelle Rhee, known for mass teacher firings and school closings. Henderson has continued in Rhee’s footsteps, albeit with less bombast. Throughout the Rhee and Henderson years, the Post has played the role of lead-cheerleader (even collaborating on coverage). Now the Post wants the good times to continue. Instead of conducting a search for the next chancellor, the Post’s Jay Mathews says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser should just ask Henderson to name her replacement since “she knows better than anybody what the job is.” But after nearly a decade atop DCPS, some don’t give the Rhee/Henderson team such high marks. ‘Haters’ Improving test scores has been central to Henderson and Rhee’s claims of turning DCPS around. But when retired DCPS teacher Erich Martel dug into the data, he found the gains were largely due to D.C.’s rapid gentrification, which has pushed lower-income African American students out, while ushering in wealthier whites, who score higher on tests. Associated Press reporter Ben Nuckols similarly noted, “The gains in test scores have… coincided with the city becoming wealthier and the white population increasing.” “Literally, I just got to just let this out,” Henderson has said in response to such critiques, “Haters are going to hate.” Cheating Scandal Within a year of Rhee’s 2007 DCPS takeover, test scores started climbing, dramatically at some schools. While the Post was busy touting the results, out-of-town news organizations questioned them. A 2011 USA Today investigation found a higher than average wrong-to-right erasure rate the prior three years at “more than half of D.C. schools.” Erasure rate refers to the number of changed answers on a test and can be used to identify possible cheating. “A high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety,” Henderson said in response. But some of the erasure rates were very, very high. At Noyes Education Campus, for example, USA Today found, The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance. After USA Today’s exposé, scores at Noyes dropped, according to data posted at Guy Brandenburg’s education blog. “Real students may be fidgety and jumpy, but their scores on yearly high-stakes tests… do NOT jump around like this,” wrote Brandenburg, a retired DCPS teacher. “Look at those scores,” wrote historian and education scholar Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. “First the soar up, then they plummet down. Nothing suspicious there, right?” Not for D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby, who found no evidence of widespread cheating, despite only investigating one school, Noyes. The U.S. Education Department Inspector General, in a “tandem” investigation, came to a similar conclusion. Meanwhile, DCPS failed to conduct its own investigation, even after an internal memo called for one, as PBS’s John Merrow reported at his blog. “There have been no meaningful investigations of the evidence of widespread cheating,” civil rights attorney and D.C. budget expert Mary Levy wrote in response to the inspectors general’s findings. “Among the top 10 DCPS erasure schools… scores plummeted at all but one by 2010,” noted Levy. “The bottom dropped out by chance at all those schools?” Atlanta Public schools in Atlanta experienced similar testing irregularities around the same time DCPS did. In Atlanta, however, superintendent Beverly Hall was unable to thwart an investigation. “There’s one key difference between Atlanta and Washington,” wrote PBS’s Merrow, “the role played by the local newspapers.” Unlike the Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution kept a spotlight on the issue. The result? Dr. Hall and 34 educators were charged with racketeering. The co-leader of Atlanta’s independent investigation, former DeKalb County District Attorney Robert Wilson, also followed the situation in D.C., concluding, “the big difference is that nobody in D.C. wanted to know the truth.” ‘Legacy of Progress’ As Henderson prepares to step down Friday, she does so amidst a wave of positive press, led by the Post. “For a decade… Henderson has worked to turn around one of the nation’s most troubled school systems,” the Post reported Tuesday, pointing to “better . . . → Read More: See Ya, Kaya: ‘Legacy of Progress’? Comments are closed Education DCPS, District of Columbia Public Schools, Kaya Henderson, Michelle Rhee, Pete Tucker, The Fight Back 
The April issue of the Citizen Reader highlights the DCPS fiscal year 2017 proposed budget and financial plan. . . . → Read More: D.C. Public School Budget 2017 Comments are closed Education Citizen Reader, D.C Public School budget, D.C. City Council, DCPS, Sarah Livingston |
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