It was a very welcome sight to this citizen’s eyes to read Grassroots DC’s announcement a few weeks ago about the report on mayoral control of the schools—An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia: Reform in a Changing Landscape. Especially since the report has received far, far less attention in the other media than passing the law that gave the mayor control, the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA), did in 2007. The reasons for this difference in attention may have something to do with the fact that those who benefit from mayoral control probably aren’t so keen to have a report that shows several deficiencies in this form of school governance widely known amongst the public.
The saddest, but probably not the most surprising, finding the report makes is that in all the schools together, DCPS and charters, 49.9% of the 70,000 plus students are proficient or above in reading and 54.4% proficient or above in math. That means that about half the students in the two systems, some 35,000 of the city’s children and teenagers, have basic or below basic skills in two of the most important things they need to know in order to continue learning.
Without acquiring these skills in the early grades, kindergarten up to third or fourth grade, children are seriously impaired in their ability to go further in their learning and stay on grade level or better. Catching up is hard to do and even harder in schools that aren’t providing these students with what they need to learn the basics in the first place, much less catch up when they do fall behind. But mayoral control has put people in charge of DCPS who don’t seem to know what’s needed and even when the Council increased funds for “at-risk” kids in 2013, spent the money on other things.
Meanwhile, the charter schools have gained a reputation for finding ways to eliminate students who have fallen behind, which helps their reading and math scores look somewhat better—51.4% in reading and 59.6% in math—than the city-wide average shown above. But still, and especially with all the talk of charter school’s superiority and the charter school Board approving one charter after another, many of which go to people who don’t come from DC but are funded by DC taxpayers, these figures from the Evaluation are the “bottom line” of what mayoral control has added up to in its eight years.
This is a painfully telling finding especially to the honest who’ve been going along with it in a good faith effort to give it a try. And, perhaps, it’s a “bottom line” that those benefiting from mayoral control would rather not get much, if any, attention.
