An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia Reform in a Changing Landscape (2015) / Chapter Skim
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2 Context for School Reform in D.C.
2 Context for School Reform in D.C.
Pages 23-40
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We first look briefly at how the basic characteristics of the students and schools have changed in the years since the law was passed. We then review the marked growth in the number of charter schools and the percentage of public school students enrolling in those schools.
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The population is now less than 50 percent black, down from 60 percent in 2000.2 The percentages of black students in both DCPS and the charter schools have also decreased, but they remain higher than in the general population. In 2013-2014, 71 percent of DCPS students and 79 percent of charter students were black, compared with 81 and 84 percent, respectively, in 2006-2007.3 The city also reports that the public schools are serving an increasingly low-income population: data supplied by OSSE show that between 20062007 and 2013-2014 the percentage of all public school students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches increased from 45 percent to 66 percent: see Table 2-1.
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) and the Public Charter Schools Board website (see http://focusdc.org/data [June 2015]
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. The Schools and School Enrollment Obtaining a definitive number of public schools in the city was not straightforward because agencies use different means of counting schools.6 Table 2-5 presents school counts from the website of Neighborhood DC, a project of the Urban Institute and Washington DC Local Initiatives Support Corporation; these counts do not precisely match the counts posted on the DCPS and PCSB websites.
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and 2014. A historical analysis shows that enrollment in the city's public schools began declining in 1969 and decreased in most years from then until 2010.7 That analysis also shows that total public school enrollment had declined to 70,919 in 2008-2009 (after PERAA)
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28 AN EVALUATION OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FIGURE 2-1 Ward map. SOURCE: Mollenbeck (2014)
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SOURCE: Data from website of Neighborhood DC, a project of the Urban Institute and Washington DC Local Initiatives Support Corporation; see http://www.neighborhoodinfodc. org/wards/Nbr_prof_wrde1.html [March 2015]
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. Audited Student Enrollment by Year 90,000 80,000 70,000 60,000 # of Students 50,000 Overall 40,000 DCPS 30,000 Public Charter Schools 20,000 10,000 0 FIGURE 2-2 Public school enrollment trends in the District of Columbia, 2001-2014.
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. This law also specified that public charter schools be exempt from "statutes, policies, rules, and regulations established for the District of Columbia public schools by the superintendent, Board of Education, Mayor, District of Columbia Council, or Authority" (P.L.
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Mayoral Control as an Education Reform Strategy Mayoral control is essentially a governance reform that shifts how responsibility and authority for the public schools are structured. Although the specifics vary from city to city, the overall effect is to move policy decisions about schools from single-purpose governance, overseen by an elected school board, to inclusion within the city government led by the mayor.
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The fourth rationale that proponents of mayoral control offer is that it increases democratic accountability for schools' performance. Instead of holding school boards to account in low-turnout elections, voters can hold the mayor, a high-visibility public figure, accountable (Wong and Shen, 2013)
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For a number of reasons, a positive relationship between governance changes and improved student outcomes is by no means assured. As a governance reform, mayoral control may be implemented differently over time and place, depending on the leaders who implement it and the choices they make with regard to personnel, curriculum, and other student supports.
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Some, including Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles, California, have adopted policies (e.g., charter school expansion and the use of student test scores in evaluating teachers) that are currently prominent on the national reform agenda.
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context: • Mayoral control may operate in very different ways, depending on the civic and school leaders who execute it, the programmatic choices they make, and how they structure the implementation process. • These factors, along with the organizational distance between city hall and individual classrooms, make it difficult to identify a causal relationship between governance changes and student outcomes.
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Most of the changes in the 20th century were prompted by the publication of reports documenting the public schools' failure to educate the city's students. For 70 years, these reports from a variety of civic organizations, along with media accounts and congressional hearings, pointed to several factors as responsible for unequal learning opportunities and chronic low student achievement: incompetent management and lack of fiscal oversight, unequal and inefficient distribution of resources to schools, and a political history of racially divided neighborhoods and wards (for a summary of this history, see National Research Council, 2011, Ch.
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The report implicitly suggests that these changes can lead to greater parental involvement, strengthened accountability, and expanded managerial capacity -- resources that can be used in addressing issues of student performance and parental satisfaction. At the same time, the report also cites research arguing that the abolition of elected school boards has sometimes reduced democratic decision making, which has disproportionately affected minority communities.
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PERAA transferred to the PCSB authority over the 18 charter schools that had been authorized by the local board of education that PERAA abolished. At the same time, the legislation broadened the PCSB's basis of authority by specifying poor academic performance as grounds for charter revocation and requiring performance reviews of charter schools every 3 years instead of every 5 years.
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Even though a new mayor, Vincent Gray, was elected in 2011, most commentators note that despite changes in leadership styles, the policy agenda and basic approach to managing public schools in D.C. have not changed significantly.15 Yet even with similar policy preferences, new leaders with different styles can shape the tenor and speed of implementation; how the concerns and interests of educators, parents, and the public are reflected in decision making; and the extent to which policies are altered in response to changing conditions.
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