At today’s DC City Council, Cherita Whiting was apparently given the task of coming up with a report card for DCPS. It’s supposed to be filled out and answered by current students and parents and staff as well as by community members, and then mailed back to her.
Here’s mine for public perusal. THE QUESTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS, and my answers are in blue italics.
1. WARD YOU LIVE IN: 5
2. SCHOOL YOU / YOUR CHILD ATTENDed (both graduated; was Banneker & SWW when they graduated)
3. WHAT WARD IS are THE SCHOOLs YOU / YOUR CHILD ATTENDed: 1 and 2, I think.
4. YOUR RATING OF DCPS OVERALL ON A SCALE OF 1-10 (BRIEF DESCRIPTION): 5. In some schools, students are on a par with the best students anywhere in the country. But they have tons and tons of parental support. In other schools, students are way, way behind national averages, and really don’t care about their academic futures at all; and they have no parental support at all. The gap between these two groups is huge, in every possible way.
5. YOUR RATING OF THE SCHOOLs YOU/YOUR CHILD ATTENDed ON A SCALE OF 1-10 (BRIEF DESCRIPTION): probably a 7. Some of the teachers at Banneker and SWW were really inspiring. Others, much less so, and could have used some help to become so. Some of the administrators at SWW were crazy and had no idea how to run a school. At Banneker, I suspect that the parents, while supportive of their own children’s academic drive, were simply too busy to support the school itself.
6. YOUR RATING PARENTAL / COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT SCALE OF 1-10
(BRIEF DESCRIPTION): I would say that on a scale of 1 to 10, the rating is 1 through 10, depending on the school and neighborhood. At Lafayette, Murch, Janney, and other upper-northwest schoools west of the park, parent involvement is on the lewvel of a 9 or 10. At places like Cardozo, Anacostia, Moten, Eastern, and many other schools in impoverished neighborhoods in Anacostia or southeast, parental involvement is negligable (sp?).
7. YOUR RATING OF MICHELLE RHEE AS CHANCELLOR SCALE OF 1-10
(BRIEF DESCRIPTION) I think she rates as a minus 3. She is the least honest big-city educational administrator I have ever seen. She says she’s all about the children, but is clearly much more ideologically driven to promote her own corporate, anti-union agenda. Her two big initiatives have been to try to destroy any sort of due process for teachers, and to try to bribe students to come to school. As far as the first initiative is concerned, in general, where there are stronger teacher unions, student achievement is higher than in states where there are no teacher unions and no due process for teachers. As far as the second initiative is concerned, Dr. Roland Fryer’s paper on this nationwide experiment showed that there were essentially no positive results except that in DC only, students who had been suspended the year before did a little better on the DC-CAS when paid to be good and to come to school. But that could simply be regression to the mean.
8. YOUR RATING OF THE 2007 DCPS SCHOOL REFORM ACT SCALE OF 1-10
(BRIEF DESCRIPTION) 3. I think it was a big mistake. The idea that there is some big expert out there that knows it all, and that it is best to dispense with democracy, is a mistake.
9. IF YOU HAD A WISH LIST FOR DCPS NAME YOUR TOP THREE CHANGES YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE HAPPEN.
a. Revamp the curriculum – and not by just copying from Massachusetts or California. A curriculum is no just a list of objectives or skills or “standards”.
b. Stop thinking that teaching to the DC-CAS test is thinking; data-driven is just drivel-driven.
c. Spend more so that those who are in most need get extended-day programs, Saturday classes, and serious summer school – all to include interesting hands-on projects, rather than standardized test preparation.
10. FINAL COMMENTS THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADD. Michelle Rhee needs to go. Somebody so mendacious and so incompetent should not be in charge of the school system of the nation’s capital.
PLEASE SEND YOUR RESPONSES DIRECTLY TO MY EMAIL AND DO NOT REPLY TO ALL.
Revamp the curriculum? The sad truth is that there IS no curriculum in DCPS, at least in the high school where I am teaching. You are correct to state that standards are not curriculum, but this basic truth escapes most of the people writing about education in DC, especially those in the Post and in the national media. Diane Ravitch alludes to this in her recent book, not that I think that the journalists touting Chancellor Rhee have taken the time to read this or much else serious work about education.
I agree with you 100%.
Guy this piece is great. Happy blogging !
Candi
http://thewashingtonteacher.blogspot.com/
It’s Roland Fryer, not Jordan Fryer. Your information about student achievement in “strong union” districts is also skewed.
Right. My bad. Every so often I write “Jordan” instead of “Roland”. Not sure how that started.
About union districts: Take a look at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/ and use your mouse to roll your cursor over the states. In the upper right-hand corner you will see how the state under your cursor compares to the national average.
The part of the country where unions have been traditionally been the weakest is the Old Deep South; it’s all “Right-to-work” country, also. You will notice that the scores in those states are almost ALL below the national average.
The part of the country where unions have been the strongest is the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Look how the scores compare.