More Flat Lines: 4th Grade Reading for Hispanic and White Students, DC and Nationwide

Here I present graphs and tables taken from the “Nation’s Report Card” showing how Hispanic and white fourth-grade students have done, on the whole, over the past 20 years of educational reforminess, and especially over the past decade, when a clueless but know-it-all Chancellor by the name of Michelle Rhee was imposed on the Washington, DC public school system.

She promised incredible gains for the students in DCPS and in the charter schools here. If you actually look at the data, you will see that any tiny gains on the NAEP during certain years have been balanced by years when the scores went down.

This is not a success story.

First, Hispanic students in DC & elsewhere on the 4th grade reading NAEP:

If you look carefully, you will see that the scores for DC’s 4th grade Hispanic students in reading were going up fairly steadily from 19978-2007, when Michelle Rhee took over. They are now lower than they were at that time.

I follow this with by a similar graph for white students, in which you will see that once again, scores for this group in DC is either equal to or slightly lower than they were when the DC school board was abolished.

(Once again, Washington DC has the highest-scoring white students of any town or state for which we have data – because the white working class pretty much all moved to the suburbs or exurbs several decades ago; nearly all of the white families with kids have a parent or two with graduate or professional degrees. Parental income and education levels correlate very, very strongly with the scores of their children on just about any standardized test.)