By Sarah Livingston, on June 13th, 2013 
From left to right – Adrian Fenty, Vincent Gray, Kaya Henderson and Michelle Rhee.
Although the injunction that would have stopped the closing of 15 DC Public Schools was denied and we’re still waiting to find out the date for the hearing that will decide the actual merits of the case, it might make sense to remind ourselves of the events that led to the lawsuit in the first place.
In my experience, the seeds for the lawsuit were sown in the first week of January, 2007, when the newly elected Council chair (Vincent Gray) dissolved the Committee on Education and the newly elected mayor (Adrian Fenty) announced his intention to take over the schools.
There was strong opposition to that idea expressed in testimony at the hearings and through protests and demonstrations. There was a call for the matter to be decided by the people in a referendum since a mayoral takeover required a change to the Home Rule Charter that would decrease the people’s power in determining their own affairs for themselves.
By June, Fenty had, through the Public Education Reform Amendment Act of 2007 (PERAA), stolen the power of the people and taken it unto himself. The law further decreased the power of the people by putting the elected Board of Education way over there to the side as an advisory body with little if any power, while the Council’s power to focus on education matters through a committee was weakened to near nothing by being dispersed among all thirteen members.
With the people shoved aside–no more Board of Education responsible for hiring the best qualified school Superintendent and no more Education Committee on the Council–Fenty used his power to appoint into the PERAA created position of “chancellor,” a woman who had never run a public school district before in her life. This too was opposed because the mayor bypassed the provisions of the law that first, required a search committee be formed to find candidates for the position, and second, required that the person be qualified by education and experience. That opposition was ignored as well.
Rhee’s experience in education consisted of attendance at private schools herself, three years of Teach for America experience in a pilot program to test a profit making company’s idea in a Baltimore public school, and 10 years as the founder and president of a teacher placement agency called the New Teacher Project in NYC. Nevertheless, Fenty handed DCPS over to her on a silver platter and the two of them quickly adopted an attitude that DCPS belonged to them in a very private manner and no one else had any say in it. Within two years of the establishment of the Ombudsman’s office, it was “defunded” and never heard about again.
Parents protest the closing of their children’s schools.
Throughout their tenures, opposition arose to many of the actions they took. Hundreds of people, elementary, middle and high school students among them, testified at innumerable Council hearings about the way teachers and their union were being treated–closing 23 schools, budgets that were all over the place, the assignment and reassignment of principles in all manner of nonsensical ways and much, much more. For the most part, the Council’s response was to shrug their shoulders claiming there was nothing they could do.
In 2010, Fenty was defeated by Gray; Rhee left; and Gray, also ignoring the provisions in PERAA for filling the position of “chancellor,” simply calls up Rhee’s Deputy, Kaya Henderson, who had no more idea of how to run a public school system than Rhee. Henderson came from public schools in a middle class suburban district, also got into teaching the Teach for America way and spent 3 years teaching Spanish before she became the Vice-president of the New Teacher Project (NTP). In that position she acquired a contract for NTP with DCPS to place teachers in it and eventually moved to DC to manage the contract on site.
Henderson and Gray have continued what Fenty and Rhee started–keeping the public’s voice out of any say in how the schools are run, despite the fact they they are funded by the public’s money.
The five year report on the mayoral takeover required by PERAA came due in 2012. But it has not been forthcoming. What the public got instead was another so-called Five Year Strategic Plan, “A Capital Commitment” that reads as nothing more than a list of many of the same problems DCPS started . . . → Read More: Events Leading Up To DC Public School Closings Lawsuit
By Guest Contributor, on December 17th, 2012 Cross-Posted from The Examiner Written by Lisa Gartner
Third-graders in DC Public Schools have failed to show any gains in math or reading since aggressive school reforms began in 2007, according to an independent analysis of the city’s standardized test scores.
The report, to be released Monday by the nonprofit DC Action for Children, also suggests the city’s public charter schools do not outperform the traditional school system on the DC Comprehensive Assessment System exams.
“We are spending way too much effort and money in education reform not to see results,” said HyeSook Chung, the organization’s executive director. “If the data isn’t lying, what are we doing wrong? Why aren’t we seeing improvements in test scores, which everyone is obsessed with, if we are indeed making change, as the city claims?”
Elder Research Inc. conducted a statistical analysis of test scores from 2007 to 2011 by weighting schools’ performance by the number of students who score “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or “advanced” on the exams. Schools were given one to four points for each student in the respective brackets, then averaged and aggregated. Chung says this allowed the researchers to create a more nuanced picture than the results released by the city each year, which have showed an upward trend by examining only whether students are proficient or not.
The group chose 2007 because many of former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s reforms began then with the passage of the School Reform Act. It chose the third grade because research cites third-grade proficiency as a key indicator of whether a student will graduate from high school. The third grade is also the first year that students take the exams.
On the one-to-four scale, DCPS’ average weighted score in math has inched up from 2.15 to 2.2 from 2007 to 2011 — an insignificant statistical move. Reading moved from about 2.25 to 2.2.
A spokeswoman for the school system deferred comment to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the agency that regulates DCPS and the city’s charter schools. A spokeswoman for OSSE did not return phone calls seeking comment.
David Grosso, who will begin his term as an at-large D.C. Council member in January, said the report provides “good direction.”
“We have to try to be more open and transparent about what’s going on in the school reform effort,” Grosso said.
The report also suggests that charter schools, which enroll 43 percent of the city’s public school students, do not statistically perform better than DCPS. On the weighted scale, charters moved from 2.05 to 2.25 in math, and from 2.25 to 2.3 in reading.
Naomi DeVeaux, deputy executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, said she would like to see data on older students, as she believes charters help students improve their scores over time.
“Without knowing that, you can’t judge a school,” DeVeaux said. “How low did students come in? How low below ‘basic’ were they? And then what growth occurs?”
By Liane Scott, on August 31st, 2010 
Having had parents who put a premium on education and having a daughter myself who is in DCPS, I try to follow what’s going on with the public schools. I have to admit being greatly disappointed every time Michelle Rhee makes an appearance on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show. She was on again this last Friday August 28, 2010. You can find a copy of the transcript at the following link – http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-08-27/politics-hour. A lot of what she says sounds great, but if you’re looking for specifics, you have to wait for a knowledgeable listener to make it on the air with a question.
Michelle Rhee’s Great Disapearing Act
For example, when Rhee was asked what she would do to improve special education in DCPS she gave a two paragraph answer, but the only specifics she gave came in these two sentences: “We spend upwards of $90 million a year transporting our students to a lot of private schools throughout the region. And we really need to look at what we’re doing to build the capacity within DCPS to serve a lot of those students better, so that they can attend their neighborhood schools.” So hopefully, Rhee is gonna ask her people to “look at what they’re doing,” with regard to special education. That’s reassuring, I guess.
Another caller asked about the drop in AYP test scores, which much of her reform was designed to improve. Rhee said that despite the fact that test scores have dropped, the huge gap between black and white student achievement has narrowed, has in fact narrowed significantly at the secondary level. But after looking at the statistics provided by Epsilon, the caller who posed the test score question, I’m wondering how she defines significant. According to Epsilon, “the most recent scores that came out for AYP shows that 88 percent of the schools in Ward 3 made AYP while 86 percent of the schools in Ward 8 failed. The achievements gap between blacks and whites is even more telling. The lowest achievement level for whites is at Watkins on Capitol Hill, which was 83.78 percent and then it goes up to 95.69 percent at Murch. While in Ward 8, we have Stanton School with the achievement of black — I mean, the achievement level for blacks is 12.72 percent. At Terrell, it’s 28.23 percent. At Savoy, a brand-new school, is 21.62 percent.”
I’m wondering how bad the gap was before the “significant” improvement. I also wonder if the gap wouldn’t have narrowed further and perhaps without the pain of school closings and teacher firings if Michelle Rhee and the Fenty Administration had taken a look at the funding gap between low-income schools and wealthier schools. I know that schools in DC are funded on a per pupil basis, but some pupils cost more to educate than others. No doubt, a look at the individual school budgets will verify this. Special education and special needs students, as Rhee herself seems to be aware, cost the city a significant amount of money in transportation alone. So what does it mean when these students attend low-income schools at a higher rate than wealthier schools? As far as I know, DC public schools don’t get more money for students that require specialized instruction.
How the city deals with special education students isn’t the only thing that contributes to the achievement gap between black and white students, but it is one thing that Rhee doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about. What else is she missing? Kojo Nnamdi and his guest analyst Tom Sherwood seemed more concerned about whether or not Rhee would stay on the job if Mayor Fenty loses his re-election bid. (Sounds like the answer is no by the way.) Neither of them questioned her about the controversies at Bruce Monroe or Hardy Elementary Schools. They praised the physical renovations taking place in schools on Capital Hill, but no mention was made of other schools, like Parkview Elementary (which currently houses students from the recently demolished Bruce Monroe) continue to deal with rodent infestations in the food supply. Rhee’s answers sounded like those of a politician, rather than an educational professional with an intricate understanding of the system she hopes to reform.
On the other hand, if you do in fact want to hear an educational professional willing to give detailed analysis and an honest assessment of the DC public school system, the place to turn would have to be WPFW. Reporter Pete Tucker . . . → Read More: Covering Education: Tucker vs Nnamdi
|
Subscribe to Blog via Email
|
Comments are closed 
