Evaluating School Reform in the District of Columbia

By Liane Scott, on June 11th, 2015 The National Research Council Makes Its Report, Finally It feels like forever that DC Public Schools have been known as one of the worst (if not the worst) public school systems in the nation. Low test scores and high dropout rates back up the perception. Twenty years ago, DC School Reform Act of 1995 (a gift from Congress, not a District initiative) gave us charter schools. Many Washingtonians with an investment in the school system (i.e. parents, students, teachers, etc. ) believed that this was the answer. But after ten years, the numbers hadn’t improved—not in the new charters or in the traditional public schools. In 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty and his supporters put their money on Michelle Rhee and the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA). The law gave control of DC Public Schools to the Mayor and more flexibility to administrators like Chancellor Rhee. To make sure that the changes instituted under PERAA worked, the mayor was required to submit either an independent annual evaluation or a five-year evaluation of the DC public school system. Mayor Fenty chose to go with the five-year assessment, which was due September 15, 2012. The National Research Council—the independent agency that received the contract to do the evaluation in 2009— has finally completed their 300-page report An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia: Reform in a Changing Landscape. On June 3, 2015, the Council of the District of Columbia’s Committee on Education held a public round table to discuss the results. Surprise! Despite more than eight years of mayoral control, DC’s public schools still have ridiculously low test scores and high dropout rates. full story: http://www.grassrootsdc.org/2015/06/evaluating-school-reform-in-the-dist...