A DC education bombshell buried in a letter to the editor of the Washington City Paper

A couple weeks ago, the City Paper ran what I thought was a pretty good story about neighborhood organizing for school improvement in the Dupont Circle area, at Ross Elementary School, which is up 1/2 block from 17th Street's little commercial strip. The story, "A Line in the Sandbox: When affluent urban parents don't get their way, they take their ball and move to Bethesda," is still online for a couple more weeks.**

After reading the story, I was sympathetic to the principal, because the story's designated "bad guy," Dan Putterman, seemed pretty impatient. Being impatient myself, I am empathetic, but I thought how could this guy start to do stuff and then within a period of just a bit less than 2.5 years, decide to bail?

Change takes time (not that anyone should be accepting of how difficult it is to change very resistant municipal institutions, which ends up being a big chunk of the content of this blog, which in theory, is supposed to be about more physical aspects of placemaking).

But now I am not so sure about my initial reaction to the City Paper story, because of a two-part letter in response to the article. The first part was ho-hum, but the second letter has 20 words that are a bombshell. The letter, "Parent Trap,", by Christopher McKeon, now resident of Crofton, Maryland, is essential reading. Among other points, he writes:

Ross is using a curriculum that is two years behind the standard used throughout public schools in the United States, and many Dupont Circle parents want better and think everyone’s children will benefit. ...

At one of the few meetings between Gloria Smith, Ross’ principal, and prospective in-boundary parents, parent Gloria Borland asked if Ross could institute the same at-grade-level curriculum used at Mann and Lafayette. Smith answered no, because her students and teachers at Ross were not prepared academically and culturally for an at-grade-level curriculum. ...

Like Putterman, my children’s future compelled me to move to a better public school district in Maryland as my oldest prepares to enter middle school. My three children will attend a Maryland school with scores around 95 percent. What D.C. public or charter school can match that? And why not? Because DCPS is wedded to a remedial education. But because the curriculum in Maryland is more than a year ahead of Stoddert and more than two years ahead of schools like H.D. Cooke and Ross, I must hire tutors and hold my children back a grade to help them catch up to their at-grade-level classmates, because they had the misfortune of receiving a remedial education in D.C.! This is the real disaster awaiting Ross parents that Grim should have investigated.

How many DC Public Schools are teaching at grade level? That is a story that the Washington Post needs to investigate.

This does remind me of an experience I had back in 1987. When I first started working at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of my first tasks was working on the marketing of a new book for teachers, called Eat, Think and Be Healthy, designed for use in the middle-school grades. This book followed on the very very successful Creative Food Experiences for Children. Written by a local teacher from Montgomery County, CFE targeted preschool and younger grades, and CSPI sold more than 100,000 copies of this book. CSPI hoped to extend this success to older children, hence the creation of ETBH.

Well, I called around to teacher supply stores to try to get them to carry ETBH, and didn't have much success (for a variety of reasons this book was difficult to market--and this is how I learned about critical mass, agglomeration and distribution systems in marketing and publishing; the lesson here was figure that out for a particular book in advance of publication, although I didn't work at CSPI when the project was conceptualized).

One proprietor asked me what the reading level was for the book, I said, "well, it's for teachers, certainly high school or college level, although the exercises were written to be used with children." He replied "I can't take it." I uttered somewhat incredulously, "it's for the teachers." He said "I can't sell any book with higher than a sixth grade reading level. Not for schools in DC."
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** Note that I have been critical of the City Paper for a few years now, about what I thought of as a lackadaisacal and snarky coverage of DC issues (the Loose Lips column excepted). The last three cover stories have been excellent--the above-cited story on Ross Elementary (although I guess they missed the point about the remedial curriculum), last week's story about the maturation of a baseball player at Cardozo High School, and this weeks story about the bureaucracy and overly friendly to business orientation of DC's Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

Index Keywords: education