G.F. Brandenburg has been analyzing the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress for the District of Columbia to understand the alleged “D.C. Miracle” attributed to Michelle Rhee, who was appointed in 2007 and left in 2010. Rhee was succeeded by her deputy Kaya Henderson, who pledged to protect her predecessor’s punitive policies. Rhee and Henderson (and their successors) were appointed as a result of mayoral control, mimicking New York City’s alleged “miracle” (which seems to have disappeared when Mayor Bloomberg left office).
Brandenburg concludes, based on a 10-year track record, that mayoral control benefited the children of college graduates, not the children of high school dropouts.
The reason to replace the elected board with mayoral control, he writes, was to help the least advantaged students. Instead, it was the most advantaged students who saw the greatest gains.
This is proof, he says, that “education reform” is “a complete failure.”
Let me point out the obvious: white parents in DC are overwhelmingly college-educated. Those in DC who did not graduate from high school, or who graduated from 12th grade and went no further, are overwhelmingly African-American or Hispanic. So our ‘reforms’ have had a disproportionately negative impact on black and hispanic students, and a positive one on white kids.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Who benefitted?
You mean besides Michelle Rhee, what got paid more for her three years than most Americans earn in 2 decades?
People like Rhee, Duncan, Kopp, Moskowitz and other deformers have figured out how to milk the public for everything they are worth.
Is this what they are teaching at places like Harvard and Princeton these days?
Curious, what did Michelle Rhee get paid for her three years?
Washington, DC has undergone a great amount of gentrification in the last decade. As in so many other cities, gentrification has a symbiotic relationship with charters. Developers buy up older properties centrally located. The poor move out to be near the cheap charters that will serve minority students. The newly arrived white students attend a selective charter in the renovated neighborhood. As a result separate, unequal and highly segregated schools emerge. The cities are delighted because they collect a lot more tax on the new buildings. This process is very hard on poor students whose families get tossed to the wind. Sometimes siblings attend different schools in different parts of the city. Cash is king in most of our country, not people, and poor minorities are not a priority.
Indeed, charter schools have been a real estate play from the beginning, with the privatizer’s either expropriating public school space, or paying above-market rents to management companies affiliated with the charter operators, often family members.
An incestuous scam, enabled for years by venal politicians and a media that was at best lazy and complacent, credulously accepting their unsupported premises (“Failing Public Schools”) and broadcasting their bunkum and propaganda.
YES. I would only change the word WAS in this sentence to IS: “…a media that IS at best lazy and complacent, credulously accepting their unsupported premises” It is amazing how the media tone never, ever changes.
You can thank the Washington Post and education editorial writer Jo-Ann Armao, who trashed DCPS from her comfy perch in Montgomery County. She doesn’t seem to be penning much for the WaPo these days, but I well remember how her ignorant opinions were embraced by voters who didn’t look beyond the Post’s pontifications.
Another question should be to ask who benefited by ending up with fatter bank accounts.
Educaton reformers are all about th money. They are the darlings of Wall Street, because without an education people remain poor and living either in the for profit prisons or on the street. With the growth of A.I. and the marketing hype of stem, minorities are having fewer and fewer choices. Parents have been mislead and white people are in in charge. White people are running public education and our students are walking across the stage unable to read. Ms. Rhee and the rest of Wall Street were happy to ensure that our children remain ignorant. Her kids were in private schools. I don’t know why it is so hard to recognize and address what has gone on. So what are we the people going to do about it. Give up ? or hold people accountable and vote worthless mayors out of office. How many kids graduate with no future. How many kids get murdered in our schools. This is America, get mad and spring into action.