The National Research Council Makes Its Report, Finally

It feels like forever that DC Public Schools have been known as one of the worst (if not the worst) public school systems in the nation. Low test scores and high dropout rates back up the perception. Twenty years ago, DC School Reform Act of 1995 (a gift from Congress, not a District initiative) gave us charter schools. Many Washingtonians with an investment in the school system (i.e. parents, students, teachers, etc. ) believed that this was the answer. But after ten years, the numbers hadn’t improved—not in the new charters or in the traditional public schools.

In 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty and his supporters put their money on Michelle Rhee and the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA). The law gave control of DC Public Schools to the Mayor and more flexibility to administrators like Chancellor Rhee. To make sure that the changes instituted under PERAA worked, the mayor was required to submit either an independent annual evaluation or a five-year evaluation of the DC public school system. Mayor Fenty chose to go with the five-year assessment, which was due September 15, 2012. The National Research Council—the independent agency that received the contract to do the evaluation in 2009— has finally completed their 300-page report An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia: Reform in a Changing Landscape. On June 3, 2015, the Council of the District of Columbia’s Committee on Education held a public round table to discuss the results.

Surprise! Despite more than eight years of mayoral control, DC’s public schools still have ridiculously low test scores and high dropout rates. The Report states:

“while there have been some improvements in the public schools of the District of Columbia since a 2007 reform law, significant disparities remain in learning opportunities and academic progress across student groups and the city’s wards.”

Retired math teacher and stalwart DCPS advocate Guy Brandenburg is not impressed with the results. According to Brandenburg:

“if you care anything about reducing the gaps between achievement levels of white students and those of color, the poor, special ed students, and English language learners (i.e. immigrants), then mayoral control has been a spectacular failure.”

Brandenburg breaks down the numbers in his blog post A Quick Look at the National Academy Report on Mayoral Control of Schools of Washington, DC: “The gaps between the pass rates on the DC-CAS standardized tests of those groups under mayoral control or the Public Education Reform Amendment Act are enormous and have essentially remained unchanged since 2007, when the law was implemented, according to the data in this report.

Note that the report combines the data for both the DC public schools and charter schools, combined, at all grade levels, in both reading and math. Here are two graphs, made by me from data in the report, which show the lack of change. …. HIGH NUMBERS ARE BAD because they show large gaps in proficiency rates. Low numbers are good. Notice that there has been almost no change since mayoral control; some lines go up a tiny bit, some go down a bit, others waver back and forth a bit. Not a success story.”

To rectify the problem, Chancellor Rhee implemented the DCPS Effectiveness Assessment System for School-Based Personnel otherwise known as IMPACT. Believing that DCPS’ failures rested largely with the teachers, Rhee implemented IMPACT in order to weed out the good from the bad. Once done, she would shuffle the deck and place “highly effective” teachers at more difficult schools. But as Brandenburg points out, “every single teacher remaining in DCPS has been repeatedly measured as effective or better. Yet the ratings for teachers at schools with high poverty rates remains much lower than those at schools with low poverty rates … these low-ranked teachers are not holdovers from the ‘bad old days’ – they are either brand-new hires or have been repeatedly measured as good or excellent under IMPACT.”

The report makes several recommendations, including that the city take a more coordinated approach to monitoring learning conditions in schools, such as school environment, discipline, and academic support, to better understand what progress is being made for students.

Mary Filardo executive director of the 21st Century School Fund was interviewed on the radio program, the Education Town Hall. No doubt, she has some recommendations of her own to share. The episode can be found at this page – http://educationtownhall.org/2015/06/10/mayoral-control/. You must scroll down a little to find it.

. . . → Read More: Evaluating School Reform in the District of Columbia