Short version: D.C.’s school system has had a number of scandals over the past year, leading many parents, community members, and even elected officials to lose confidence in the glowing improvements reported by the district. I published a cover story this week in Washington City Paper on the fight to independently assess education data in a city that many fear has grown too politicized under mayoral control.
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Long Version: In 2007 D.C’s city council voted to dissolve its local school board and transfer control of its public education system to the auspices of the mayor. This was no small sacrifice for a city with few elected bodies. (Unlike other places, elected D.C. officials must compete with federal legislators for authority over the city’s public schools, and DC’s delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives can’t vote on legislation.)
Supporters of what’s known as “mayoral control” say that challenging the status quo of chronically underperforming urban school districts is easier if one elected official (the mayor) has expansive decision-making power, rather a divided school board sharing it. The mayor can also theoretically better leverage the school system with other governmental agencies, the private sector, and civic institutions. Researchers find that cities with diffuse civic capacity tend to be less effective in promoting urban school improvement than cities that can take coordinated civic action. Mayoral-control supporters also argue that it can increase political accountability for schools’ performance: School board elections have notoriously low turnout, and theoretically it could be easier to hold a highly visible politician responsible for the success or failure of a district.
Shifting to mayoral control was a huge deal, but local officials ultimately felt drastic action was needed given the school system’s long history of poor achievement.
For more than a decade since, Washington D.C.’s education reforms—offering more school choice, weakening teacher union power, and creating new accountability systems (with incentives like pay-for-performance and teacher evaluations based partly on student test scores)—have been hailed as a model for the nation.
In 2013, The Washington Post editorial board concluded that there was “unassailable” evidence that the reforms introduced by the city in 2007 worked. In 2014, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said D.C. was “by every measure the fastest-improving big city school district in the nation.”
And there was some evidence to show DC’s school system was improving. Studies suggested D.C. charter schools made strides in student learning compared with the city’s traditional public schools, and the city’s overall test gains could not be explained by demographic changes alone.
In 2013, two researchers published a paper suggesting that D.C.’s new teacher evaluation system, IMPACT, induced teachers with low evaluation scores to voluntarily leave DC Public Schools, and improved the performance of teachers who stayed. In 2016, they published another paper that found the city’s teacher turnover between 2011 and 2013 led to a net positive effect on student test scores—suggesting that turnover is not necessarily harmful if low-performing teachers can be replaced with higher-quality ones.
This all led Jonathan Chait, a liberal writer for New York magazine (whose wife helped craft some of D.C.’s new policies and now works for a local charter school), to declare, “The dramatic improvements registered in places like Washington show the revolutionary possibilities of education reform.”
Still, there were some lonely, dissenting voices. I wrote about this in April 2017, noting that aside from the large chorus of cheerleaders, a number of local residents noted it was mightily difficult to access certain pieces of education data, and that even with the limited access they had, troubling signs were starting to emerge. Critics pointed to things like widening socioeconomic achievement gaps, a precipitous decline in black educators, and funding that had been inequitably distributed to some of the city’s most impoverished schools. Critics also observed it was exceedingly difficult to get independent reviews of the reforms.
And when it came to things like the teacher evaluation study, observers noted how the school district tended to exaggerate the study’s results, falsely claiming the research showed teachers and students improved because of IMPACT, and that IMPACT caused low-performing teachers to leave. The researchers had repeatedly emphasized that their work was not an evaluation of IMPACT, per se.
But then over the past year, everything started to change. A series of news reports led to findings that more than a third of high school seniors graduated in 2017 in violation of DCPS policy. A subsequent scandal with the city school’s chancellor showed him knowingly violating a policy he himself wrote—fueling more public mistrust.
Suddenly everyone started asking questions: have we been misled? What’s real and what’s PR? Why is it so hard to get control of information? Why are education research requests reviewed by political appointees, anyway?
This led to a new idea, introduced in April by a DC councilmember, for a so-called “Education Research Collaborative.” This entity would be designed to provide a more independent look at city education data, and be housed outside of the executive branch and mayoral control. The research entity would also be endowed with subpoena power—a legal investigative tool—to ensure it had the authority to collect what it needed to.
A six hour hearing was held this month to explore the Council’s proposal. It was a heated hearing, as these things go. News also emerged at this event that the executive branch is now exploring its own separate research partnership with the Urban Institute, a DC think tank, raising quick questions about whether this is an attempt to undercut the Council. (The Urban Institute maintains it hopes the two efforts can be complementary.)
At the core of all this politicking: Who gets access to data about D.C.’s public schools, and how do they get to use it?
You can read the full story here.
Education Data Mining
This is great as always! I've always wondered how Dee and Wyckoff got
access to the DC data on Impact. Also has anyone else heard of any other
university researchers successfully being able to get the student or
teacher level data he/she has requested from DCPS or other DC entities?