Originally posted on Teachers for Education Reform
During a professional development session I attended several years ago while teaching, someone offered me advice that I’ve carried with me throughout my career: “If there’s no learning in a classroom, there’s no teaching.” And, if this is true, surely its correlate is true: if there is a lot of learning, there must be a lot of teaching.
There are few cities where more teaching is going on than in Washington, D.C. Over the past ten years, students have been on a roll at the District of Columbia Public Schools, with each class improving its average performance on the previous year’s at a more rapid rate than any other state in the country. Last week, the DCPS website released a celebratory press release: “DCPS Students Achieve at Highest Levels Ever in Recent History.”
But what changed in DC public schools to account for this improvement? To better understand what brought about these gains, let’s start by reviewing the timeline in two five-year periods: from 2002 to 2007 and from 2008 to 2013.
2002 to 2007: If DC reform is viewed over a ten-year period, it starts with a low point. In 2003, student outcomes were so poor that Congress took action to offer students in the city a route out of its public schools through the DC School Choice Incentive Act of 2003. The Act provided vouchers to students who wanted to leave DCPS altogether for a private school of their choice in the District. Alongside abysmal student test scores and significant mismanagement, it would not be an overstatement to say the future of public schooling in DC at this time was in jeopardy.
As educators worked to improve DC classrooms, sweeping reforms of the system began with an education bill passed in 2007. Known as the Education Reform Act – no one said DC policymakers earned points for creativity during this process – the bill transferred control of DCPS to then-Mayor Adrian Fenty. Yet this shift in governance only became well-known after Mayor Fenty announced the woman who would control the District’s schools: Michelle Rhee.
2008 to 2013: In 2008, her first year as chancellor, Rhee closed 21 schools, fired 36 principals and brought on a world of criticism. (She did not help matters either, posing in a classroom with a broom on the cover of Time magazine.) In spite of the controversy surrounding her management of DCPS, she pushed through reforms to the teacher evaluation, development and recruitment systems. After two years in her role, Rhee’s tenure ended in 2010 when Fenty lost the election to DC’s current mayor, Vincent Gray.
Vincent Gray named Kaya Henderson as Rhee’s replacement. With a different management style and tone, Henderson has largely extended Rhee’s changes: she’s continued efforts to strengthen DCPS’ teaching force while also leading the nation in implementing Common Core in DC’s schools.
The announcement from DCPS earlier this week can be viewed, in part, as the dividends on the ten years of investments into improving DC’s schools. Those gains are evident elsewhere: since 2003, students in DC public schools have made greater progress on the NAEP than any other region in the country. District students added nearly 50 points on their composite NAEP score, far outperforming the national average gain of 20 points.
In this case, more learning is clearly evidence of more teaching. Although many of the reforms in DC’s schools were controversial at the time, today’s evidence speaks for itself. District of Columbia Public Schools have never been so set up for teaching and success as they are today.
Mac LeBuhn is a policy analyst at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Before joining DFER, Mac was a fourth grade teacher at Rocketship Si Se Puede, a charter school in San Jose, CA. He became involved in education policy through internships at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston.