Mile Klonsky reviews Tom Toch’s paean to the “Revolutionary changes” launched by Michelle Rhee.
He is impressed by Toch’s data.
But….
“Okay, now that I’m done FBing about #convfefe, I can get down to more serious business — revolution. It seems a revolution has taken place in D.C. and I somehow missed it.
“But Tom Toch didn’t. Toch, a leading pro-reform, education policy expert and a highly regarded education writer, has published his study of the progress of school reform in the district, titled, “How D.C. Schools Are Revolutionizing Teaching.”
“I’d say, it’s about time somebody did it. But who?
“Toch says, it all began with former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, who, despite her various “mistakes,” cheating scandals and unfortunate picture on the cover of Time Magazine, got the ball rolling. But Toch’s study concludes that it was her successor chancellors who carried the rev forward, bringing radical changes to the teaching profession and miraculous gains in student achievement. DCPS has not merely revolutionized teaching, says Toch; it has created a “reform blueprint” for the rest of us to follow.
No credit given to teachers, of course. In fact, Toch clearly sees bad teachers and their over-protective unions as the problem, and different performance-based evaluations with high stakes attached as the r-r-r-revolutionary solution.
According to Toch:
“Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.
“Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.
“At last, a reformer who offers the possibility hope and transformation within the public schools themselves. A ray of sunshine in a very gloomy period.
“Toch reports that as a direct result of performance-based teacher evals, daily attendance in D.C. has reached 90%, up from 85% in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40% over the past four years and graduation rates (however they’re defined) have climbed to 69%, the highest in the city’s history.
“And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.
“In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.
“Now, don’t mistake my cynicism about the “revolution” for the joy I feel over any reports of progress in urban school districts, especially when that progress is reported in neighborhood schools competing for resources, students and teachers with privately-operated charters and private-school voucher programs like the ones started by Rhee in D.C. and now championed by Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos. Yes, I’m glad D.C. 4th-graders are scoring higher on the NAEP and that the district has finally made it to the middle of the urban school district pack score-wise.
“If that is really happening, and I have no reason to doubt Toch’s numbers, credit should mostly go those hard-working and dedicated teachers, not just to the string of top-level administrators like Rhee and her mentee and former D.C. Teach For America Director Kaya Henderson, and the others who followed in Rhee’s wake, usually lasting about 2 years each before they are run out or quit.
But as Toch himself points out:
“Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.
“If that’s his idea of a “revolution,” leave me out.
“But it’s mostly Toch’s line about how his study “takes into account the influx of [white] wealthier students” that gets me twitching. It’s such an easy way of dismissing the effects of concentrated poverty on measurable learning outcomes, and of the most dramatic democratic changes in D.C., Chicago, Philly and dozens of other large urban school districts. It’s what I and others have referred to as the whitenizing of the cities.
“In Chicago, for example, where a quarter of a million African-Americans have been pushed out of the city over the past three decades, by gentrification, de-industrialization and job loss, lack of social services, closing of neighborhood schools, gun violence, etc… Mayor Emanuel and his appointed school district leaders are also now reporting corresponding “miraculous” gains in reading scores and graduation rates.
“In 2008, DCPS was reportedly 84.4% black, 9.4% Latino, and 4.6% white.The racial breakdown of students enrolled in 2014 was 67% black, 17% Latino, 12% white, and 4% of “other races.”
Klonsky: “No credit given to teachers, of course.”
What?? The article’s subheading is: “D.C.’s traditional public schools, once among the nation’s worst, have become magnets for some of America’s best educators. The results are showing up in the classroom.” And its first sentence is: “Eric Christopher is the kind of young, gifted, committed teacher that any principal would want to hire.”
Just because the subheading says that, it doesn’t mean that it is true.
In St. Louis, Slay was mayor for 16 years. The us census bureau reports 2010 2000
Population: 319,294 348,189 -28,895 -8.30%
White alone: 140,267 152,666 -12,399 -8.12%
Black or African American alone: 157,160 178,266 -21,106 -11.84%
in those ten years, the black population decreased one and a half times the white population. Quick facts from the census bureau reports that the population of St. Louis has decreased to 315,685 for 2015, and 311,404 for 2016.
In 2000, the percentage of black was 51.20. In 2015 it was 46.9. The white percentage in 2000 was 43.85. for 2015 it is 47.1, Not sure how the loss of 4000 more in 2016 affects those percentages, but the white population is increasing enough that the state board of education is considering letting st. louis vote for its public school board for the first time in ten years.
There are a lot of stories about what has caused these changes….poorly reported. The school population has dropped about 10,000…unless you count the 10,500 in charters. Not much change if you include the charters.
A big city methodically gentrifying itself by using test scores as the logical reason to close deeply anchored neighborhood schools, to break up and divide communities, to blame, harass and denigrate tradition — and then pushing the scores produced by an influx of wealthier, more dominant-culture students as a reason to celebrate reform “success.” Sounds much too familiar here in Denver.
In many cases selective charters centrally located for white students, and cheap charters on the fringe for poor minorities are part of the equation of urban redevelopment.
“DC Miracles”
Walk on water
Birth to virgin
DC fodder
Mirth, for certain
Pardon my lack of excitement. Why do miracles occur somewhere else? If it seems too good to be true, it is usually false. Gentrification has been an urban trend for quite a few years. Nashville has 100 people a day moving in. Nonwithstanding their poor aim with catfish, they are going to raise the scores someday. Then the self-fulfilling prophecy of testing will bring in more and more stable families who read of the good test scores and want their children to reap the benefits of the good place. Teachers, meanwhile, will only be known to the few who know them. They will quietly do their best, and would do better if there were no test scores.
Toch’s propaganda is made possible by the following deep pockets.
Bezos Family Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
deLaski Family Foundation
Joyce Foundation
Raikes Foundation
Stuart Foundation
Walton Family Foundation
William T. Grant Foundation
Some of these are also major contributers to EdWeek. They pay for coverage of topics that they wish to promote.
Laura,
You will read more about D.C. Tomorrow.
Another reason to get up in the morning.
Too bad there wasn’t a pay incentive built in for teachers. I once received a significant amount of cash for our increased scores in a middle school. Not that I wasn’t great with the 25 or so students with special needs, but I think somehow it was the increase in monolingual English speakers brought in by the magnet program!