D.C.’s Education Miracle a Chimera

Despite glowing reports from the adoring media, D.C.’s education miracle is a chimera at best. There have been dramatic drops in standardized assessment scores, and, on closer analysis, the highly touted increases in D.C. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are a reflection of the changing demographics of the schools, not the result of any real improvement in the quality of education provided to D.C.’s poorest and neediest students.

Bergfalk has taught in the district for seven years, and was a finalist for D.C. Teacher of the Year in 2010. As a teacher, he is focused and energetic.He is also deeply skeptical. In March 2009, the district announced that the new NAEP scores showed dramatic student increases and progress in closing D.C.’s persistent achievement gap. Bergfalk decided to check it out for himself. Using NAEP’s own interactive website, Bergfalk deconstructed the data.

“These test scores are not the result of an increase in student achievement. Instead, they are a result of a change in who was tested,” says Bergfalk. He found that for the 4th-grade test, the percentage of African American kids in DCPS (the lowest scoring racial/ethnic group in D.C.) taking the test dropped from 67 percent of test takers to 53 percent of test takers between 2007 and 2009, while the percentage of Hispanic students (with average test scores 12 points higher) rose from 6 percent to 9 percent of test takers, and white students rose from 6 percent to 7 percent of test takers. Where aggregate scores appear to show improvement among DCPS students, the disaggregated data tell a different story. The district continues to have one of the highest achievement gaps among major U.S. cities.

Bergfalk found the same pattern on the 8th-grade NAEP reading test. The percentage of African American kids in DCPS taking the test dropped from 59 percent of test takers to 43 percent of test takers, which is why there was a statistically significant four-point increase overall from 2007 to 2009, but no statistically significant increase for any racial/ethnic subgroup. The overall increase, like that on the 4th-grade test, was again the result of a change in demographics rather than an increase in student achievement.

http://queensteacher2.blogspot.com/2010/09/price-of-rheeform.html

and rhee is the first to make some REAL changes. For that, I applaud her (and fenty). My daughters attended private/parochial schools, out of necessity.

Things are not and will not be perfect, but neither are they anywhere. I am glad to see substantive changes.

edit, from 'Confessions of a DC Teacher'

'But how has Rhee affected the children of Washington? That's really the only question worth addressing.

Every summer, Rhee welcomes hundreds of first-year teachers to the district—mostly mid-20s men and women joining DCPS through alternate certification programs like Teach For America and DC Teaching Fellows. They replace the people she has fired. The new teachers—some fresh out of undergrad, others career changers—participate in intense summer training sessions and assist veteran summer-school teachers around the city. They assume their spots at the front of the classrooms every August, usually in the neediest of the city's 150-plus public schools.

I felt fortunate when I was accepted to the 2009 summer cohort of DC Teaching Fellows—part of The New Teacher Project, which Rhee launched in 1997—and I felt ready for the school year by the time our summer session concluded last July. But readiness is relative, and I soon discovered how ill-prepared I was for what actually lay before me: ninth-graders with no grasp whatsoever of the eighth-grade standards they were supposed to have learned; kids with wildly inappropriate habits and little sense of right and wrong; children with absolutely no positive associations in a classroom; and a local dialect driven by what the kids call "joning"—ribbing, busting one's chops, giving people a hard time—that took me half a year to comprehend. . .


(T)here is learning taking place. Good students with serious college aspirations exist. Good teachers with exceptional command of their routines and their subjects and their students are working hard to close the achievement gap. The numbers prove it: In May, a study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that DCPS had made the most significant gains in reading achievement among urban school systems over a three-year span. "We still have a ridiculously long way to go," Rhee told the Washington Post at the time. She's right, of course, but in school systems like DC's, the small victories must be recognized.

There are other quantifiable reasons to feel good about Rhee, even for veteran teachers—certainly the good ones. On June 2, DCPS and the Washington Teacher's Union finalized a new contract that will increase DC teachers' average annual salaries by $14,000 a year and provide extra incentives for teachers identified as "highly effective" through the IMPACT ratings. George Parker, president of the WTU, called it "a great day for teachers and students."

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/09/back-to-school-dc

not sure why you think a 1st-yr teacher's testimony trumps his.

"there is learning" -- duh. there always is. there was before the first-year teacher came.
that's not the point. is there improvement?

analysis shows the vaunted improvement, measured by test scores, is an artifact of changing demographics.

DC's poor black population has been declining. that's the "improvement," & that analysis is supported by reports on demographic trends in DC & the long-standing correlation between income/class & performance on standardized tests.

1. learning is happening.
2. rhee cares
3. teachers got more pay


there's no 'there' there. it's a joke. the contract that gave them more pay was a major sellout.

the fact remains, no improvement under rhee's tenure by her own measuring stick.

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And, as the article points out, that is making aggregate test scores go up.

Eh. Unless Grey gets hit by a bus or something Fenty's out, so Rhee is going away too.

what's happening is poor black families are going away.

and that's the trend in most large urban areas, for a number of reasons, some of them deliberate.

DC is very different from "most large urban areas", and the racial politics is a lot of that. The parochial schools are mostly children of central american immigrants. The charter schools are mostly african-american students (though not children of african immigrants, which is a huge racial line in the city). The west of the park type (the "really" affluent) still go to private schools or their jealously-guarded neighborhood publics. The younger DINKs who became DIOKs (double income one kid) are who Williams and now Fenty are trying to keep in the city and in the public schools.

various means.

dc is not an exception, looking at the demographics.

And the teachers did agree to a new contract. 'Major sellout?'

The union president of the DC local has basically been behaving like a dictator, ignoring union regs and canceling an election where he was threatened. The national union and a local court have stepped in to clean up the mess.

So I wouldn't trust the results of any contract ratification vote coming out of DC in the last year.

Parker doesn't seem to care about teachers any more than Rhee does except as a proxy to keep his fiefdom large.

And this is why the teachers union draws ire just like the school system administration, the city council (unfairly, since it has basically been cut out of everything involving education except to rubberstamp a budget), and the mayor's office.

Though for what it's worth, WTU endorsed Gray.

I had a very interesting conversation with a teacher from DC at our national convention in July. Also spent time talking to teachers in Detroit, NYC, LA and Chicago.

I came home and literally kissed the ground in my own dysfunctional urban district. Thank the goddess we aren't dealing with anything that bad.

As always, there are brilliant things being done under the radar. The teachers and students I worked with were awesome; it was the school system they were all trying to overcome that made me want to slam my head against a brick wall.

A big tragedy of DC is that unlike most cities it creates more than enough jobs to employ every single unemployed resident, every year. But they don't have the training or the social acceptance by the bridge and tunnel crowd that would hire them to get the jobs. But even start talking about that at a "higher" level than a classroom, and you get shut down immediately. ("Vo-tech? Why bother? There aren't factories in the city" etc.)

who aren't college material become productive adults.

just posted a thread last night about a successful voc hs being shut down -- deliberately -- in nyc.

Or however the old Soviet joke went.

People (metaphorically) want to throw bombs at the school because the whole damn thing is a sham. One of the reasons I have positive feelings about charters is that they were the only place in DC that parents, teachers, and administrators actually seemed to be on the same side.

There was a job training component and several of the larger corporates here in our area developed some wonderful welfare to work programs. They provided transportation, taught these folks how to dress, how to work in an office, etc. Several of the moms of my students were participating and loved it.

Then once they were trained, these moms went to work at Wendy's and McDonald's or one of the local convenience stores. And made lots less than they were bringing home in welfare benefits. Plus they lost their health insurance.

It was just a sham.

I still see these moms working those fast food convenience store jobs. It's damn sad.

The idea was to get the kids able to pass the A+ and Network+ exams. In a way I feel like I did them a disservice, because about 3/4 of them ended up passing but still couldn't get a job, because nobody wanted to hire a 19 year old kid from Cardozo to watch a $200,000 computer network. I kept trying to get more support from the school itself (since they had asked me and people like me to do this, for pete's sake) to give these kids some kind of outplacement, networking, etc. No dice: everything had to be about going to college. But even more, it wasn't their idea, so it had to be killed off.

We aren't preparing our kids for life in the 21st century. We throw them this idea of all of them having to go to college. Then the ones who do go are saddled with decades of debt that rivals a home mortgage. Plus they can't find a job that matches their degree.

I'm all about learning for the sake of learning. But we need to be more realistic about outcomes for our kids.

This also proves we can't do this alone as educators. We can't create jobs. We can't build viable neighborhoods. Communities need to step up and help us.

Computer techs really don't know that much more about computers than other people; they're just more comfortable problem-solving. Teaching the ideas of differential diagnosis of a problem and evaluating multiple competing hypotheses was really fun (if House had been on TV back then I would have shown them episodes -- to me that is the best show about computer systems administration that there is, even though it's not really about that); even if they end up not being computer techs I think they're much better off in life for having learned that.

This is also why we teachers seem so defensive. We've been begging for help for years. Dealing with so many factors beyond our control. Then we finally get a Democrat in the WH who we believe is on our side (cause Clinton definitely was) and he supports programs we know aren't the answer. And puts Duncan in as sec of ed. Then he praises firing teachers.

We do this very hard work with few rewards and it's just demoralizing to come here to a Democratic site and be bashed. I know we come off as arrogant but we're just being defensive. I know sometimes I feel like a small fish in a stream full of sharks.

higher % of white/non-poor taking the tests.

ethnic/ecnomic cleansing is the only thing that's working.

falsely accused teachers of being child molesters and made fun of African American dialect.

She is a fucking monster. I wouldn't applaud her if she won the lottery and handed every student in DC a million dollars.

Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics knows that we can't compare apples to oranges and draw conclusions about a change in the apples.

I'm finding this data crap very amusing. They've been shoving this at us for years. We teachers have said no, examining data is not the answer. They don't listen and now the very data they shove at US is proving their theories are bullshit. ROFLMAO

A Visit to a Data-Driven School District

http://queensteacher2.blogspot.com/2010/07/educators-in-community-consolidated.html

There is so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin.

* The teacher is a data entry clerk, typing in responses instead of planning meaningful lessons.

* Good teachers have ways to evaluate lessons while they are in process, the old "monitor and adjust" we're so adept at.

* Why is the teacher forced to use instructional time on this? What is the value? If all they want to know is whether a kid got it or not, how about a thumbs up/down/sideways signal?

* Notice that it's a pretty homeogeneous class - what about sped or ELL kids?

* No behavior issues? Really?

Why can't you and I be in the same PD session? We'd have them spinning. :rofl:

can actually kick one in the behind, I know you were on the thread, just serving two kicks here, of a sort:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9113533

are what caused the change in the make up of test takers. If the schools of DC have become less African American and more Hispanic and White, then the data wasn't manipulated simply misinterpreted. If, on the other hand, the make up of those schools haven't changed, then the data has been manipulated and that would, indeed, be fraud.

At any rate, they are still comparing apples to oranges since regardless of the racial make-up, they are still different kids.

and that would require the kids being tested to significantly differ from those attending the schools. Unless we know that, we don't know it is fraud.

Sorry I wasn't more clear.

Fenty and Rhee are using aggregate data from an instrument that is meant to measure year-by-year progress of individual students (or at least specific groups of specific students).

A good example might be Bush saying "the mean income in the US went up by one million dollars over the course of my presidency." Or Doc Rivers saying "the average Boston Celtic is 6 inches taller now that I've signed Shaq."

These kids are starting to go to school.

Fenty and Williams before him wanted to avoid another round of white flight (this was also Duncan's goal in Chicago, and he was more or less successful). To put it bluntly, this involved convincing white parents that the DCPS was not a jobs program for Ward 8 anymore, and this took firing a lot of black teachers. "Mission accomplished". (And as incredulous as some DUers seem to be on this point: yes, some unbelievably unqualified teachers and administrators were hired during the Kelly and Barry years, as part of a patronage scheme.) But as Fenty and Grey both agree, DC's "school reform" project is much bigger than Michelle Rhee; she is not the beginning or end of it. She was brought in as a hatchet woman, almost explicitly.

Meanwhile, there has been a huge "black flight" towards charter schools, because parents feel like they can have some actual influence on them, unlike the traditional publics.

And one more point: DCPS can be put into receivership by Congress at any time (this seems to happen about once per decade), and they currently don't have a school board (the system governing the schools seems to change about once a decade too). If Rhee leaves with Fenty, the city will have burned through I think 6 chancellors/superintendents/whatevers (they keep changing the title along with the governing structure) in 8 years.

As an urban educator, I applaud the hipsters moving into the urban core. However, when low income minority families are displaced from THEIR neighborhoods, I can't applaud. I'd rather see resources going to improving those neighborhoods and the quality of life for the current residents.

and don't think many 'hipsters' have replaced many low income families, not sufficient, anyway, to noticeably effect data.

This was where they literally tore down the projects and built condos, a Target, and a Best Buy in their place (but "don't worry"! 1/12th of the condos were earmarked for section 8). There's still graffiti in Amharic, which I take as a good sign.

Then again, I was all for tearing down the projects and dispersing people to mixed-income developments. Just the way they did it sucked. Or maybe that's something that only seems good on paper. I don't know.

Generalizing is dangerous, but the two pulls on DCPS I kept seeing in neighborhood council meetings were:

1. Rich white people who wanted teachers they were "more comfortable" with (I think we can all read between those lines), and
2. Poor black people who wanted more charters because the principals at charters have to take their phone calls.

Though this gets to yet another idiosyncrasy, in that the chartering process in DC is absurdly baroque.

Not attending any of the meetings I was at were the immigrant parents, whose kids by that point made up a slim majority of students in the neighborhood schools (IIRC the immigrants are about 1/2 ethiopian, 1/4 central american, and 1/4 east asian. You try to find ELL support for that mix...) Where they wanted to pull the schools, I can't say, and as far as I can tell neither can anybody else.

We've been wanting diversity for years. But we've worked toward gaining racial diversity while ignoring the more necessary economic class diversity. And the immigrants just complicate the mix.

Wish I had a better answer.

As an urban teacher, I just pray for a more realistic understanding of the issues we deal with in our classrooms and less blame placed on us for results we have so little control over.

the data wasn't "misinterpreted," it was spun to get the headlines the deformers wanted.

It's a combination of distinct things?

Sure, they're overused, but sometimes they're well-deserved!