School daze: DCPS edition

The Monday Post regular feature on education by Jay Mathews, "Arguing about school reforms that go nowhere," features Stanford Professor Larry Cuban's research on "reform," which shows for the most part, reform means change but not improvement.  From the column:

Cuban identifies what he considers three positive outcomes of the last three decades of reforms inspired by the view that schools should follow business practices. They are:

1.“Hastening the shift from defining school effectiveness as the level of resources that go into schooling children and youth to exclusive concentration on outcomes.” We stopped judging schools by how much they spent per student and how credentialed their teachers were, and started looked at test scores and graduation rates. This hurt trust in Cuban teachers, but says on balance it was better to focus on what schools were doing that raised student performance.

2. “Tapping nontraditional pools for new teachers and administrators.” Alternative routes to teaching and supervising were provided by mid-career programs and intensive college recruitment, giving university education schools some competition.

3. “Increasing parental choice of public schools—charters, magnets and portfolios of options.” This has a downside, he says. The new competition does not appear to have improved regular schools. But dissatisfied parents now have choices that don’t require them to pay tuition.

Cuban sees hope in the growth of schools that emphasize teacher creativity and collaboration. As always, he warns that those of us who think we know how to fix the black box of classroom learning that we just haven’t been paying attention.

As it relates to DC Public Schools, I have written a few hundred entries on K-12 education matters over the years. 

Since the "reform" effort commenced under Mayor Adrian Fenty (2007-2010), for the most part, all but the already existing successful schools (which tracks household income) have been consistently wrecked.

DCPS school enrollment for the K-12 grades has shrunk by 15% since Michelle Rhee was Chancellor.  Shrinkage continues under Kaya Henderson, albeit with a slight uptick in 2012 compared to 2011.

Published reports showing enrollment increases are based on the inclusion of DC's mandatory Pre-K program, which consistently shows growth--why shouldn't it, it's cheaper ("free") than daycare.
Despite this year's showing of slight increases in student enrollment, for the most part the student population continues to decline, with scalar declines once children reach 6th grade, and then again over the entire four years of high school.

My frustration with "reform" in DC is threefold.

(1) the charter school movement (+ vouchers) has spread organizational, financial, and community capital too thinly across the school universe.  In retrospect, it would have been better for the school system for it to have adopted innovative practices, rather than see the charter schools cream off both innovation and motivated parents.  On the other hand, I don't begrudge anyone seeking a better education for their children than what they expected they could get from DCPS.

(2) Mayoral control means a disconnection of accountability.  DC City Council lacks the ability to provide adequate oversight.  And it's not like the people in charge of the schools have been particularly great.

(3) The real issue with "poor" school performance for low income children is mostly due to poverty.  There are proven methods for dealing with that (see for example Montgomery County) but the DCPS "reform" program has instead focused on testing students and mostly blaming teachers for being unable to overcome poverty through teaching, even though research demonstrates that 15% of a student's ."success in school is attributable to "teacher inputs."

See "When ‘Unequal’ Is Fair Treatment" from Education Week. From the article:

When Jerry D. Weast became the superintendent of the Montgomery County, Md., public schools in 1999, he spent the summer poring over student-achievement results and demographic trends. Then he created a map to illustrate what he’d found.

The map divided the suburban district, just outside the nation’s capital, into two distinct areas, which he dubbed the “red zone” and the “green zone.” Most poor, minority, and English-language learners lived in the red zone, an urbanized core that was attracting a growing immigrant population. The green zone was predominantly white, affluent, and English-speaking. Academic performance closely mirrored the demographic trends, with the lowest-performing schools overwhelmingly concentrated in the red zone.

Without swift and deliberate action, the district faced the prospect of becoming split in two, divided by opportunity. To Mr. Weast, the solution was obvious. Montgomery County needed a differentiated strategy that funneled extra attention and resources to schools in the red zone, while increasing academic rigor for everyone.

“There’s this American thing about treating everybody equal,” he explained recently. “Our theory was, the most unequal treatment is equal treatment.”

By failing to set up a similar program--and note all the charter schools lauded across the US do provide special resources and programs that target the impact and repercussions of poverty--of course DC Public Schools are going to continue to decline to the point where the "traditional" public schools will only be operating in the high income areas where the schools (because the material and the matériel are superior) are successful already and in the most impoverished areas, where the charter schools don't want to operate.