An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia Reform in a Changing Landscape (2015) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-8
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The law's purpose was to allow leaders flexibility so they could make bold changes to improve a school system that had been performing poorly for decades. The law also called for an independent evaluation of how well the public schools fared under new governance, to be carried out by a committee of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
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The law called for a body that could coordinate across the city agencies concerned with the well-being of children, adolescents, and families: this body was created but was subsequently defunded. The law also called for a data warehouse that would support intergency coordination by allowing data sharing across agencies and a other functions: despite progress in data collections efforts, this data infrastructure is not in place.
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The current governance structure represents a reasonable response to the provisions of PERAA but leaves two issues for the city to consider: whether the current oversight structure provides sufficient monitoring of the educational opportunities provided to students attending DCPS and charter schools throughout the city, and how best to oversee the education of all students attending any publicly funded school. [Conclusion 3-5]
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WHAT IS KNOWN ABOUT LEARNING CONDITIONS 7 YEARS AFTER THE GOVERNANCE CHANGE? The conditions that should be in place to promote learning encompass not only academic offerings and resources, but also a healthy and productive school climate and supports for the challenges faced by many student groups.
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The increase is larger for math than it is for reading; however, indicators of proficiency in both subjects remain low. Graduation rates have fluctuated from year to year, with no discernable pattern, but they, too, remain disturbingly low.
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An optimal data warehouse would have the following characteristics: • It would integrate and track data that are relevant to schooling and students across DCPS and the charter schools and eventu ally across the education, justice, and human service agencies. • It would provide data about learning conditions in all public schools, DCPS and the charters, and their students covering students with particular needs, including those with disabili ties, English-language learners, and students in poverty; school climate, including discipline, attendance, safety, and facilities; and academic supports for learning.
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Our recommendation for a centralized data warehouse is more comprehensive than PERAA's specifications, and we believe that it should serve a broader purpose -- that is, that such a resource should not be used only for coordinating data across city agencies, but also for helping the city effectively monitor all of its public schools and students. At present, no single entity in D.C.
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RECOMMENDATION 3 The primary objective of the District of Columbia for its public schools should be to address the serious and persistent disparities in learning opportunities and academic progress across student groups and wards by attending to • centralized, systemwide monitoring and oversight of all public schools and their students, with particular attention to high need student groups; • the fair distribution of educational resources across schools and wards; • ongoing assessment of how well strategies for improving teacher quality are meeting their goals; • more effective collaboration among public agencies and with the private sector to encourage cross-sector problem solving for the city's schools; • accessible, useful, and transparent data about D.C. public schools, including charters, that are tailored to the diverse groups with a stake in the system; and • measures to strengthen public trust in education in a diverse, highly mobile city.
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