Happy New Year DC Public Schools

From the urbanists list:

Richard, Do you favor a different solution? Are there any examples of successful school reform that could serve as a model?

My response:

Read the work of the NSF multi-city study led by Jeffrey Henig and Clarence Stone. (Stone is also the dean of the political science theory school of the "urban regime.") (See for example "Civic Capacity and Urban Education.")

The real issue, and this is tough, is to get schools to be outcomes based, and to develop the support and professional development systems necessary to make schooling successful for all students regardless of their household income status. And to engage civic capacity in making these changes.

Montgomery County Maryland is not the only school system that is successful at doing this. There are others.

The next time the weekly trade newspaper Education Week has free open access to their backfile (likely this will be soon), I will send to the list a couple articles about it.

Hedrick Smith also did some PBS programs on this topic.

Anthony Alvarado's work in both NYC and San Diego is featured in one of the Smith episodes and is another model.

I can't speak to the Milwaukee experience with charters. I can to the DC experience. Again, I understand why people are driven to that model as a last resort. At the same time it consigns the regular school system to deeper mediocrity and when charter schools get preferences in a variety of ways, it can trump neighborhood and city planning in substantive ways that should be opposed as a matter of course by people committed to sound planning principles. E.g., there is no real master plan for education in DC incorporating both "public" charter schools as well as the traditional system. And the charters get public monies but the public doesn't have ownership of the school buildings. And there is no master curriculum planning etc. But Congress mandated that charter schools get first dibs on public school buildings, etc.

The DC Public Schools "reform" effort is a whole other issue separate from the charter schools. The new mayor and the Chancellor get great press, but it is clear other than busting unions, firing older teachers, and hiring young "energetic" inexperienced teachers, that they don't really have a plan for building solid, robust and resilient management and professional development systems along the lines of successful school districts such as Montgomery County (or Alvarado's efforts) which manage to succeed without wholesale destruction of unions and teacher firings.

(Although I am the first to admit that DCPS, like many of the DC Government agencies, has plenty of deadwood hired during the time when people such as Marion Barry saw the role of government as providing job and contract opportunities for those favored by the people in power. See _Black Social Capital_ by Marion Orr for a discussion of this wrt Baltimore.)

Therefore, in a few years, it is likely we will see continued failure in DC public education, except for some charter schools, and some public schools which because of special programs, including Montessori education, or being located in higher income neighborhoods and having children from higher income households as the primary students.