Council of the Great City Schools
Restoring Excellence to the District of Columbia Public Schools
Draft Report
December 2003

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Superintendent Elfreda W. Massie's Statement on The Report of the Strategic Support Team of the Council of the Great City Schools

"The Council of the Great City Schools' report signals a new sense of urgency for the District of Columbia Public Schools. We welcome its direct and honest assessment of DCPS. The Council of the Great City Schools has provided us with a road map to implement an educational plan that calls for accountability for student achievement at every level. DCPS intends to swiftly incorporate the recommendations of the Council of the Great City Schools in a comprehensive and coherent plan to improve student achievement."

Restoring Excellence to the District of Columbia Public Schools
Report of the Strategic Support Team of the Council of the Great City Schools

Submitted to the DC Public Schools By the Council of the Great City Schools Council of the Great City Schools

December 2003

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Purpose and Origin of the Project
Summary of Challenges and Key Proposals
Chapter 1. Background on the D.C. Schools    
Chapter 2. Findings and Recommendations    
Chapter 3. Summary and Discussion   
Appendix A. Timeline for Recommendations    
Appendix B. Benchmarking DC    
Appendix C. Individuals Interviewed    
Appendix D. Documents Reviewed   
Appendix E. Biographical Sketches of Strategic Support Team
Appendix F. About the Council
Footnotes

Tables

Table 1. Comparison of the DC and the Great City Schools 
Table 2. Reading Gaps (White minus African American) by Race, SAT-9
Table 3. Reading Gaps (White minus Latino) by Race, SAT-9
Table 4. Math Gaps (White minus African American), SAT-9
Table 5. Math Gaps (White minus Latino), SAT-9
Table 6. Trends in SAT Scores and Test Takers
Table 7. Preliminary AYP Status of D.C Public Schools, 2003

Figures (Not available here — see PDF version at http://www.k12.dc.us/dcps/frontpagepdfs/Draft%20of%20DCPS%20Report--Final1.pdf) 

Graph 1. Percent of Students Scoring at Proficiency Level or Above on SAT-9 Reading, Grades 1-5
Graph 2. Percent of Students Scoring at Proficiency Level or Above on SAT-9 Reading, Grades 6-11
Graph 3. Percent of Students Scoring at Proficiency Level or Above on SAT-9 Math, Grades 1-5
Graph 4. Percent of Students Scoring at Proficiency Level or Above on SAT-9 Math, Grades 6-11
Graph 5. Comparison of D.C. Schools 4th Grade NAEP Reading Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation
Graph 6. Comparison of D.C. Schools 8th Grade NAEP Reading Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation
Graph 7. Comparison of D.C. Schools 4th Grade NAEP Math Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation
Graph 8. Comparison of D.C. Schools 8th Grade NAEP Math Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation
Graph 9. Proposed Organizational Chart for Curriculum and Instruction Department

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Council of the Great City Schools thanks the many individuals who contributed to this project to improve student achievement in the DC Public Schools. Their efforts and commitment were critical in presenting the district with the best possible recommendations. First, we thank former Superintendent Paul Vance. It is not easy to ask one’s colleagues for this kind of review. It takes courage and openness. It also requires a commitment to the city’s children that is uncompromising.

Second, we thank Acting Superintendent Elfreda Massie. Her assistance and support during this review were critical. Her eagerness to spur student achievement was central to making this study happen.

Third, we thank the DC School Board who provided the leadership and support to conduct this type of self evaluation. Without their cooperation this review could not have occurred.

Fourth, we thank the members of the DC Public Schools staff who provided their valuable time and gathered all the documents and data that the Council needed to do their work. Staff’s openness and enthusiasm were critical to our understanding of the challenges that D.C. faces.

Fifth, the Council thanks the many groups, organizations, and associations with which we met. We apologize that we were unable to meet with everyone we know had something valuable to say.

Sixth, the Council thanks the cities and school districts that contributed staff to this effort. They included Boston, Houston, Long Beach, and Sacramento. We also wish to thank the state of Pennsylvania for allowing their staff to join our team. The enthusiasm and generosity of these districts is another example of how the nation’s urban public school systems are banding together to help each other improve student performance.

Seventh, the Council thanks Darla Marburger, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education, which provided $35,000 for this project. Ms. Marburger served as project director for this effort.

Finally, I thank Council staff members Sharon Lewis, and Janice Ceperich, whose skills were critical to the success of this effort.

Michael Casserly
Executive Director
Council of the Great City Schools

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INTRODUCTION: PURPOSE AND ORIGIN OF THE PROJECT

OVERVIEW OF THE PROJECT

The Council of the Great City Schools, the nation’s primary coalition of large urban public school systems, has prepared this report to summarize its recommendations to the District of Columbia about improving student achievement in its public schools.

This analysis, requested by former D.C. schools superintendent Paul Vance and acting-superintendent Elfreda Massie, was funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council. The request came on the heels of the district’s performance on the 2002 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).

Vance and Massie asked the Council to study why student performance in the D.C. schools was not improving and to propose ways to boost it. To carry out this charge, the Council assembled a Strategic Support Team (SST) composed of curriculum and instructional leaders who have worked to address some of the same issues as those faced by the D.C. Public Schools. Each of the team members came from urban school districts that have significantly improved student achievement over the last few years. Council staff accompanied and supported the team and prepared this report summarizing the findings and proposals of the SST.

The team made its site visit to the DC Public Schools on October 15-17. Its meetings began with a briefing by Superintendent Vance and Dr. Massie on the challenges the district faces and the efforts its leadership was making to meet them. That briefing was followed by two days of fact finding and a day devoted to synthesizing the team’s findings and proposing preliminary strategies for improving the situation. Vance and Massie were debriefed at the end of the visit and voiced their support for the direction the team was suggesting. Additional time after the site visit was devoted to conference calls, data analysis, and the collection of further information.

We commend Paul Vance, Elfreda Massie, the school board, and staff for requesting this review. It is not an easy decision to subject oneself and the institution one leads to the scrutiny that an analysis like this entails.

PROJECT GOALS 

Superintendent Vance and Elfreda Massie asked the Council to —

• Determine why reading and math achievement in the D.C. Public Schools was not improving.
• Propose ways to boost reading and math achievement in the school system.

THE WORK OF THE STRATEGIC SUPPORT TEAM

The Strategic Support Team made its site visit to the D.C. Public Schools on October 15-17, 2003. The team was composed of curriculum and instructional leaders from other urban schools systems that have made substantial progress in improving student achievement.

The team began its work with a detailed briefing from then-Superintendent Paul Vance and now Acting-Superintendent Elfreda Massie on the academic status of the D.C. schools. At that briefing, Vance laid out the charge to the team. The review that followed focused on the broad instructional strategies of the school system and included extensive interviews with D.C. school staff, board members, outside organizations, principals, teachers, and others. The team also reviewed numerous documents and reports and analyzed data on student performance. (See Appendix.)

Superintendent Vance and Chief of Staff Massie were briefed by the team on its preliminary findings and proposals at the end of the site visit. The team then conducted conference calls after their site visit, gathered additional information, analyzed data, and refined their initial recommendations.

This approach to providing technical assistance to urban school districts that are struggling with instructional and operational problems is unique to the Council and its members and is proving effective for a number of reasons.

First, the approach allows the Superintendent to work directly with talented, successful practitioners from other urban school systems that have established strong track records for performance and excellence.

Second, the recommendations developed by these peer teams have validity because the individuals who developed them have faced some of the same problems confronting D.C. It can not be said that these individuals do not know what working in an urban school system is like or that their proposals have not been tested under the most rigorous conditions.

Third, using senior urban school managers from other communities is faster and less expensive than retaining a private firm. Team members know all the ways that school administrators can obscure reality. It does not take long for the teams to determine what is going on. This rapid learning curve permits services to be delivered in a faster and less expensive manner than could be secured with experts who are less versed on the folkways of urban education.

Finally, the teams comprise a pool of experts that the superintendent, school board, and staff can use to implement the recommendations or to develop other strategies.

Members of the Strategic Support Teams included the following individuals —

STRATEGIC SUPPORT TEAM MEMBERS

CONTENT OF THIS REPORT

This report begins with an Executive Summary of the issues facing the D.C. Public Schools as it struggles to boost student achievement and an outline of the proposals the Council and its SST are making. Chapter 1 presents a brief overview of the D.C. Public Schools and a synopsis of student performance in the district. Chapter 2 summarizes the findings of the Strategic Support Team and its recommendations for improving student achievement. It also contains proposals for bringing the district into greater alignment with No Child Left Behind. Chapter 3 synthesizes the report.

The appendices of this report include a number of items that may be of interest to the reader. Appendix A presents the results of the team’s comparison of the D.C. schools with key instructional practices of some of the nation’s fastest improving urban school systems. Appendix B lists the people the team talked with during its site visit. Appendix C lists the documents that the team reviewed. Appendix D presents brief biographical sketches of team members. Appendix E presents a brief description of the Council of the Great City Schools and the Strategic Support Teams it has conducted to improve urban education across the country.

The Council has now conducted over 70 Strategic Support Teams in over 22 major cities in a variety of instructional and management areas. It has shied away from using a specific template to guide its fact-finding or its recommendations. Instead, reports by the organization are specifically tailored to each district and the particular challenges they face.

In the instructional arena, however, the Council has been guided by its own research on why some urban school systems improve and others do not.¹ This research has focused on the key organizational and instructional strategies behind the academic gains of some of the fastest improving urban public school systems in the nation and how those strategies differ from those of districts that are not seeing much traction under their reforms.

Finally, we should point out that we did not examine everything that could possibly be analyzed in the D.C. schools. We did not spend time, for example, looking at noninstructional operations in the D.C. schools. We did not review staffing patterns or personnel credentials. And we did not look at the district’s finances or a host of other issues that often find their way into the headlines. Our focus in this report is exclusively on student achievement and how to improve its.

PROJECT STAFF

Council staff working on this project included:

Michael Casserly
Executive Director
Council of the Great City Schools

Janice Ceperich
Research Specialist
Council of the Great City Schools

Sharon Lewis
Director of Research
Council of the Great City Schools

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SUMMARY OF CHALLENGES AND KEY PROPOSALS

CHALLENGES

“DCPS is failing.” These were the opening words of the report, Children in Crisis, prepared in 1996 by the D.C. Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority (DCFRA) about the condition of the city’s public schools.

The report detailed serious failures of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) to teach its children, manage its affairs, provide a safe environment for its students, and deliver basic education services. Children in Crisis and the media coverage it received shocked Washington and resulted in the exit of the School Superintendent, the suspension of the School Board’s powers, the naming of a new Chief Executive Officer, and the appointment of a new Board of Trustees to oversee reforms.

In many ways, the city’s public schools have made substantial progress since 1996. It has substantially reduced the size of its central office. It has improved many of its operations. And it has built a stronger cadre of senior staff than it had before.

Yet, the academic performance of the children in the district’s charge is only marginally better than it was when the 1996 report was written. Some evidence, in fact, suggests that it may be one of the lowest performing big city school districts in the nation.

One message stands out clearly to those who worked on this project. The D.C. school system is facing a critical choice. It can take the steps necessary to substantially improve student achievement, play a central role in the city’s economic revitalization, and increase the public’s confidence in its schools. Or it can keep things pretty much as they are. The first path is steep and risky and requires energy, skill, and determination. The second path is easy and safe but lined with regrets about what might have been for the next generation of the city’s children.

Other urban school systems have faced similar choices between progress and stagnation, including Cleveland, Boston, Houston, Fort Worth, Long Beach, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and others. Some of these districts initiated major reforms on their own, while others had the choices made for them by external powers. But none of the cities that took the tougher path has regretted it. In all of these cities, children are learning more than before. Test scores are up. And optimism is returning.

The message for the D.C. Public Schools is that greater payoffs often come from choosing the path of most resistance.

The instructional leaders from cities across the country who worked on this report were asked a simple question when we started our review. “Why is student achievement in the D.C. schools not improving any faster?” Our answer is also simple. “The district hasn’t done anything to improve achievement.”

The district did pursue the imperative that the public seemed to want, however. It paid teachers on time (mostly). It counted, transported, and immunized students. It kept food from spoiling. It quieted the political noise from the school board. It brought in the Army Corps of Engineers to fix some of the buildings. It put into place a universal, fullday kindergarten program. And it generally kept things running on time.

While the school district was trying to solve the problems it thought the public wanted solving, it delegated the challenge of raising student achievement to the schools and individual principals. The result is a school district where everyone could claim that their work was consistent with the goals of the organization no matter what they were doing. The district has lost its instructional focus; its efforts have become fractured and incoherent; its instructional moorings have loosened; and its unity of purpose has splintered. To make matters worse, the district has piled one program on top or another for so many years that one cannot tell what the system is trying to do academically or why.

In short, the D.C. school district abdicated its leadership responsibility for student achievement to the schools and has had trouble hitting its instructional mark over the years because so many people were aiming in different directions. The result is what one sees today: no plan for improving student performance, low expectations for children, no accountability for results, haphazard instruction, incoherent programming, and dismal outcomes.

It gives an organization like ours no pleasure in coming to this conclusion. But we want to do everything we can to improve the D.C. schools, even if it means being publicly critical. It also means that we have an obligation to propose specific steps for improvement, for it gives us even less pleasure to see one of our members flounder. It reflects poorly on everyone. We make our proposals in this spirit.

Ironically, the city is about to embark on another conversation about issues that probably won’t do much to improve student performance, governance. The governance debate is necessary because legislation establishing the current hybrid school board is about to expire. But, if the conversation doesn’t include a parallel discussion about how to improve academic performance, then the city is likely to look back in another four years and wonder why things didn’t improve.

The truth of the matter is that there is no magical governance structure that by itself is likely to produce better schools. There are cities with very traditional school structures — elected board, traditional superintendent, and independent taxing authority — that are seeing significant gains in student achievement. There are also cities with the same setup that have not seen any gains. Conversely, there are cities whose schools are run very untraditionally that are seeing important improvements. And there are cities whose schools are run nontraditionally that have seen little academic progress. In many ways, the organizational boxes don’t mean as much to the improvement of achievement as what the people in the boxes do.

To improve student achievement, the people in the positions — however they are arranged — have to focus relentlessly and single-mindedly on instruction, something noticeably missing in most discussions about who gets to control the D.C. schools.

To address this void, Paul Vance, the outgoing Superintendent of the D.C. schools, asked the Council of the Great City Schools to review the instructional program of the D.C. Public Schools and propose ways to improve it and to boost student achievement. The Council assembled a Strategic Support Team, composed of senior managers from other urban school systems that have made substantial gains in achievement, to do the work. The teams looked specifically at the district’s curriculum and instructional program.

The team visited D.C. in October 2003 and has prepared a detailed list of recommendations for the Acting Superintendent, the school board, and the city. The proposals are summarized below.

KEY PROPOSALS

The Council of the Great City Schools benchmarked or compared the instructional program of the D.C. Public Schools against those of other urban school districts that were making rapid progress. The organization then drew up a set of recommendations to make D.C.’s instructional practices more like those of districts seeing progress. For D.C.’s progress to be more like these other cities, the district will have to take the following bold steps:

1. Develop a coherent and common vision for where the D.C. school system wants to go.

The D.C. Public Schools currently lack a comprehensive plan for improving student achievement. But developing one will require the school board and the superintendent to develop a shared vision for where they want the district to go and what they want the schools to look like. The district’s leadership will need to —

• Convene the school board at the earliest possible date and begin establishing with the Acting Superintendent a clear vision for improving academic achievement in the school district.
• Charge the superintendent with drafting a concrete, five-year instructional plan for improving the academic performance of the district’s schools.
• Express a sense of urgency for improving student achievement in the strongest possible terms.
• Commit to sustain a new reform agenda for a prolonged period. 

2. Set measurable goals for academic improvement.

The D.C. Public Schools currently lack a set of goals beyond those for attaining accreditation that would more rapidly improve student achievement across the district. The district needs to —

• Set measurable districtwide and school-by-school academic targets in reading and math that set the highest expectations and are tied to No Child Left Behind.
• Attach timelines and benchmarks to the attainment of goals.
• Ensure that the new instructional plan includes explicit goals for attendance, graduation rates, dropouts, course taking patterns and the like.
• Revise the School Improvement Plans to build in new academic targets. 

3. Establish a new accountability system for attaining academic goals.

Academic goals for the improvement of the D.C. Public Schools are of little use unless they are accompanied by the means to hold people responsible for attaining them. The district currently holds only one person accountable, the superintendent. To devise an accountability system that works across the system, the district will need to —

• Place the superintendent and central office instructional staff on performance contracts tied to the attainment of districtwide academic goals.
• Begin placing more emphasis in principals’ contracts on school-by-school academic.
• Continue the latitude for principals to interview, select, and hire their own staff and shape their own budgets.
• Tie the evaluations of staff and principals to the attainment of the district’s goals. 

4. Standardize districtwide instructional strategies and curriculum.

The D.C. Public Schools currently have numerous programs to boost student performance, many of which are selected and implemented at the school level with little coordination or alignment — and little evaluation as to which ones work and which don’t. To create instructional cohesion and focus, the district will need to —

• Recentralize school district instructional decisions about curriculum and professional development.
• Place a moratorium on the acquisition of all new materials, programs, and comprehensive school reform models.
• Develop a comprehensive reading plan, including a core program, supplemental materials, and interventions.
• Adopt a single, core reading and math text for systemwide adoption and implementation.
• Begin phasing out all instructional programs that are not consistent with the new adoption and that do not work.
• Align the new curriculum with National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math frameworks.

5. Provide focused and sustained districtwide professional development on the implementation of the new curriculum.

The D.C. school system currently has a very disjointed professional development program that mirrors the incoherence of the instructional strategy. To be more effective, the district needs to —

• Centralize and standardize the professional development provided to teachers and organize the district’s training around the implementation of the new comprehensive reading and math plan and the use of data.
• Limit school-by-school designed professional development to classroom management, character education, parent involvement, and instructional training that addresses a unique school academic challenge.
• Centralize federal Title I and Title II professional development set asides and allocations to pay for the districtwide training.

6. Ensure that reforms are implemented at the classroom level.

The D.C. school system currently allows each school to pursue almost any programs or strategies it wants to. This approach has not proved to be effective. The district not only needs to take primary responsibility for raising student achievement districtwide but also needs to —

Develop a plan that can be used by central office administrators, principals, content specialists, and teachers to monitor implementation of the comprehensive reading and math plan.

Finish developing a standardized process that can be used by principals and content specialists to monitor curriculum implementation.

Retain additional reading and math specialists to work directly in the schools to support training, school improvement planning, data-based decisionmaking, coaching, and monitoring.

7. Use data to monitor progress and decide on instructional interventions.

The D.C schools are getting ever more sophisticated in and committed to the use of data to decide on instructional strategies. But it is unclear whether the district’s data tools are aligned to and consistent with its curriculum. The district needs to —

• Begin implementing a series of quarterly or interim assessments that will benchmark how students are doing over the course of the school year.
• Replace the SAT-9 with a new criterion-referenced assessment.
• Use the results on the interim assessments to help shape, inform, and place professional development and instructional decisionmaking.
• Begin putting the district’s reform initiatives on a regular schedule of evaluation. 

8. Begin system reforms at the elementary level but start reforming high schools.

The D.C. schools have a large and longstanding early childhood program that needs to be upgraded and tied to reading and math reforms at the early elementary school level. The district needs to —

Overhaul the literacy component of the district’s preschool and full-day kindergarten programs and align them instructionally with the full-day kindergarten program.

Increase the required amount of time spent each day on language arts and math.

Standardize the district’s special education referral process so that it is not driven by subjective judgments and redefine the criteria for placements.

Differentiate the instructional program offered in the district’s summer school program so that it addresses the varying needs of students by subject, level of performance, and skill level.

Begin the process of increasing the rigor of the district’s high school courses.

9. Focus on the district’s lowest performing schools.

D.C has a number of schools that are unusually low-performing. Many urban school systems across the country are learning that they can improve their overall performance by targeting efforts on boosting the performance of its lowest achieving schools. The district needs to —

• Continue but overhaul the district’s Transformation School program.
• Develop specific criteria by which schools enter and exit the transformation school process.
• Create a new set of incentives for encouraging the district’s best teachers to teach in the transformation schools.
• Begin phasing in a set of individual education plans for every student enrolled in a Transformation School.
• Intensify the instructional program in each Transformation School.

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CHAPTER 1. BACKGROUND ON THE D.C. SCHOOLS

LEADERSHIP

The District of Columbia Public Schools is governed by a school board of nine members, five of which are elected and four of which are appointed by the Mayor of the City. The President of the Board is elected citywide. All members serve four year terms. The board meets twice monthly and operates four committees, which meet once a month: Committee on Facilities and Finance; the Committee on Teaching and Learning; the Committee on Special Education and Student Services; and the Committee on Operations and Vision. Each committee has a chair and sometimes a co-chair.

Over the past twenty years the district has had seven superintendents or about one new CEO every 2.9 years.

Elfreda Massie was appointed Acting Superintendent in November 2003, when Paul Vance announced his resignation. The school board is currently discussing the process it will use to appoint a permanent superintendent.

The governance structure of the school system has undergone a number of revisions over the last several years. The city was placed under the aegis of the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority (Control Board) in 1996. The Control Board named a Board of Trustees in the same year that operated for a time side-by-side the eleven-member elected school board. (The elected board had three at-large members and eight members elected by ward.) The Board of Trustees was replaced on January 1, 2000, by the current board.

STUDENT CHARACTERISTICS

The DC Public Schools enrolled about 68,449 students in the 2001-2002 school year, the most recent year on which comparable national data are available for other major cities. (Statistics for the current school year, 2003-2004, show that the district enrolls 65,099 students.) Some 60.9 percent of the district’s students were eligible for a free or reduced price lunch in 2001-2002, compared with about 39.7 percent nationwide. (See Table 1.)

About 84.4 percent of DC’s enrollment is African American, compared with about 16.9 percent nationwide. In addition, about 12 percent of the district’s enrollment is composed of English Language Learners and about 18.4 percent are students with disabilities. The district enrolls a high percentage of students in both cases than national averages. In general, the D.C. Public Schools look more like other major urban school systems across the country than they look like the national average.²

Table 1. Comparison of the D.C. and the Great City Schools, 2001-023

The average school in D.C., moreover, enrolls about 415 students, significantly smaller than the average city (708 students per school) or national averages (504 students per school). The district also has more teachers per pupil than either the national average or the Great City Schools average. Finally, National Center for Educational Statistics data indicate that D.C.’s current per pupil expenditure was $10,836 in FY2000.

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

The Stanford Achievement Tests (Ninth Edition) in reading and math have been administered to all district students, grades 1-11, since 1999. Student reading scores in grades 1, 3, and 4 showed small increases between 1999 and 2003, with the greatest gains among first graders, who improved 8.6 percentage points over the period. Reading scores among third graders increased 0.5 percentage points over the five years and scores among fourth graders improved by 1.1 percentage points.

Reading scores for second graders and students in grades 5-11 decreased over the five year period. Scores among second graders decreased by 1.0 percentage point. And reading scores among fifth graders dropped by 2.1 percentage points; among sixth graders declined by 1.7 percentage points; among seventh graders slumped by 3.6 percentage points; eighth graders by 6.4 percentage points; ninth graders by 2.6 points; tenth graders by 0.5 points; and eleventh graders by 1.5 percentage points. Fewer than 25 percent of D.C. students in grades 5-11 scored at or above proficiency levels on the SAT9. (Graphs 1-2)

Graph 1. Percent of Students Scoring at Proficiency Level or Above on SAT-9 Reading, Grades 1-5

Graph 2. Percent of Students Scoring at Proficiency Level or Above on SAT-9 Reading, Grades 6-11

The trends are slightly more promising in math. Over the five year period, math scores on the SAT-9 improved in every grade tested, except the eleventh. The greatest math gains were made among first graders, as was the case in reading. Students in grades 1-5 generally made greater gains in math than students in grades 6-10. Students in grade 11 declined.

Math scores in first grade increased by 13.0 percentage points between 1999 to 2003; second grade scores increased by 7.1 percentage points; third grade scores increased by 9.7 percentage points; fourth grade scores increased by 6.2 percentage points; fifth grade by 4.2 percentage points; sixth grade by 3.0 percentage points; seventh grade by 2.4 points; eighth grade by 1.0 point; ninth grade by 1.5 points; and tenth grade by 0.7 points.

Math scores among eleventh graders declined by 3.4 percentage points between 1999 and 2003. Fewer than 25 percent of D.C. students scored at or above the proficiency level in math in grades 6-11. (Graphs 3-4)

Graph 3. Mathematics SAT-9 Grades 1-5
Percent Scoring Proficient & Advanced

Graph 4. Mathematics SAT-9 Grades 6-11
Percent Scoring Proficient & Advanced

SAT-9 trends are also available by race. The gaps in reading scores between racial groups are generally large, ranging from about 15 points to around 74 points depending on grade and subject. The gaps between white and African American students ranged from 36.5 percentage points in the first grade 1 to 70.4 percentage points in the tenth grade in 2003. The gaps between white and Latino students ranged from 37.5 percentage points in first grade to 72.3 percentage points in tenth grade. (Tables 2-3)

Table 2. Reading Gaps (White minus African American) by Race, SAT-9

*The reader should interpret with caution since fewer than 100 white students were tested in these grades in 2003.

Table 3. Reading Gaps (White minus Latino) by Race, SAT-9

Between 1999 and 2003, the gaps improved in some cases and worsened in others. For instance, the reading gap between white and African American students decreased in grades 1 and 3-7; and the reading gap between white and Latino students decreased in grades 1 and 6-7. All other grades showed the gaps becoming wider.

Gaps in math scores are similar to those in reading. The difference in math scores between white and African American students in 2003 ranged from 28.4 percentage points among first graders to 69.8 percentage points among ninth graders. The gaps between white and Latino students ranged from 36.9 percentage points in first grade to 72.1 percentage points in ninth grade. (Tables 4-5)

Table 4. Math Gaps (White minus African American), SAT-9

Table 5. Math Gaps (White minus Latino), SAT-9

The final indicator on which we have achievement data for the D.C. Public Schools is NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The D.C. schools have been participating in NAEP for a number of years, but it is only recently when the district’s scores could be compared with those of other major cities. The results are consistent with data from the SAT-9. The D.C. schools scored lower in 2003 than the nation or any other city reported in reading and math. (Graphs 5-8.)

Graph 5. Comparison of D.C. Schools 4 4th Grade NAEP Reading Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation⁵

Graph 6. Comparison of D.C. Schools 8th Grade NAEP Reading Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation

Graph 7. Comparison of D.C. Schools 4th Grade NAEP Math Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation

Graph 8. Comparison of D.C. Schools 8th Grade NAEP Math Scores with Other Large Cities and the Nation

Finally, the SAT scores for the district have declined somewhat over the last couple of years, as the numbers of students tested increased from 1,684 in 2000-2001 to 1,994 in 2002-03. Only four of the district’s 18 high schools have average SAT verbal and math scores that exceed 400.⁶ (Table 6.)

Table 6. Trends in SAT Scores and Test Takers

ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS

The D.C. school district has 165 schools, 129 of which are Title I schools that serve 42,940 of the systems’ 65,099 students. All but three of these Title I schools are “schoolwide” schools. Data from the 2002-2003 testing cycle indicate that the district did not have any schools that were in school improvement (level I) under No Child Left Behind, but fifteen schools that were in school improvement (level II), meaning that they will be required to offer choice and supplemental services. No D.C. schools are in corrective action or restructuring status. (See Table 7.)

Table 7. Preliminary AYP Status of D.C Public Schools, 2003

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CHAPTER 2. FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This chapter summarizes the findings and recommendations of the Strategic Support Team.⁷ Our findings are subdivided into ten subsections. These subsections are defined around themes that the Council of the Great City Schools has identified as critical to the academic improvement of urban school systems nationwide.⁸ The themes include political preconditions and governance, goal setting, accountability, curriculum, professional development and teacher quality, reform press (or the ability to get reforms into the classrooms), assessments and use of data, low-performing schools, elementary schools, and middle and high schools. The Team’s findings are further subdivided into positive areas and areas of serious concern.

The recommendations to accelerate student performance and to improve systemwide achievement are presented in the same categories in which the team presented its findings. The proposals are based on practices that research is demonstrating make a difference in improving student performance systemwide in urban school districts and what the Team believes that D.C. needs to do to be more like districts that are getting strong achievement gains.

A. Political Preconditions and Governance

Urban school districts that have improved significantly over the last several years have a number of things in common. These commonalities also set them apart from urban school systems that have not seen significant improvement. One of these key features involves the political unity of the school board, its focus on student achievement, and its ability to work with the administration on the improvement of academic performance. The Strategic Support Team did not conduct a special analysis of the board or its governing structure, but did observe a number of things that bear on the ability of the district to improve student achievement. The Team found things that were worthy of recognition and things that appear to hamper the district’s instructional reforms.

Positive Findings

• The school board appears to have an increasing sense of urgency about raising student achievement in the school district and a growing consensus that academic performance must be improved. The board’s Teaching and Learning Committee, for instance, has been focused recently on finding effective instructional models across the country.
• The school board’s Teaching and Learning Committee has defined four priority areas on which it wants the district to focus on over the next several years. These priorities include improved literacy in grades k-5; stronger teacher induction efforts; stronger principal evaluation; and high school reform.
• The school board appears to support the new Acting Superintendent and is meeting weekly with her, as it did with Superintendent Paul Vance.
• The Acting Superintendent appears to have the skills, experience, and commitment necessary to begin putting an academic reform plan into place for the D.C. schools.
• The former Superintendent, Paul Vance, the Acting Superintendent, Elfreda Massie, and board members, particularly on the Teaching and Learning Committee, were receptive to this academic review of the school district. (This study was initiated by Paul Vance and Elfreda Massie.)
• The American Federation of Teachers and its local affiliate, the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU), seem particularly eager to help the leadership of the district with a new instructional plan that would boost student performance in the district. (The AFT has its reading program in three of the district’s schools.)
• The district has some very talented staff people at the central office and in the schools who want the district to do better than it is.

Areas of Concern

• The district — either at the board level or the administrative leadership level — has no vision or strategy for raising student achievement across the system. There is a strategic business plan for the district, which is quite thorough, but there is no strategic plan for how the district works to improve student performance. (The SST was told by the Superintendent that a review of the district’s instructional program had not been done for many years, nor had a strategic plan for improving instruction been developed recently.) In general, the district’s leadership appears more reactive than strategic. The board has a sense of increasing urgency about student achievement, but has not voiced it in a strong and public way.
• The large number of political stakeholders in the district’s schools — Congress, City Council, Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, the Mayor, the school board, and others — makes it difficult to achieve a single vision for how student performance should be improved.
• The upcoming debate on school board governance is likely to distract the district, its leadership, and the city from coming up with an instructional plan to improve student performance. The preliminary proposal from the Mayor, for instance, has some academic components (e.g., set uniform standards for early childhood education, accelerate the district’ special education reform plan, reestablish vocational education programs) but focuses mostly on governance, financial, and control issues that are not likely — by themselves — to do much to improve student achievement across the board.⁹
• The district’s leadership has not articulated its role in the improvement of academic performance. The central office appears to take little role in improving student achievement, leaving the task largely to individual school principals. The result is a system that is not coherent and is aiming in too many different directions at the same time.
• The district’s annual budget and business plan appear to be disconnected from any instructional priorities or strategies, partly because there is no real strategy for improving student achievement.
• A scan of the school board’s agendas indicates that the body does not spend a lot of time on student achievement or how to improve it. This priority appears to have been left to the Teaching and Learning Committee. The board does appear to devote itself to a good bit of operational detail. It is not clear that the board has received much training on its role in supporting student achievement.
• There appears to be a meaningful split between old and new staff, and a serious inability to “honor the past” while recognizing the need for serious reforms. Staff members are not on the same page about how to improve student achievement and many members lack any sense of outrage about the poor state of student achievement now found in the district.
• There is a general sense of low expectations for student performance and excusemaking for that performance. The Strategic Support Team heard this skepticism about whether the students could learn at high levels in many ways as it interviewed staff and teachers throughout the district’s schools, although the team did not hear it from parents.
• The number of retirees working at the central office appears to signal short-term leadership and a vacuum in future leadership. Staff members are perceived as temporary, allowing teachers, principals, and others to wait out or resist reforms. There are also a number of staff members who are simply interested in protecting the status quo.
• The district acts as both a local and a state educational agency, but the state function does not provide the district with the kind of support (e.g., technical assistance, professional development, testing, and finances) that the district needs.
• Local constituency groups appear to be losing confidence in the district’s ability to reform its instructional program. There appears to be a sense that central office leadership has become disconnected from the community.

Recommendations

1. Convene the school board at the earliest possible date (probably in retreat form) and begin establishing with the Acting Superintendent a clear vision for improved academic achievement for the students in the D.C. schools. The board should charge the Acting Superintendent with drafting a preliminary instructional plan based on this shared vision that begins to put the board’s broad goals into place. The board should review the draft plans prepared by the staff until it is in general accord with the academic direction of the school system. (A1)

This process need not occur in a single meeting. A series of discussions that are facilitated by an external person that the board trusts and respects might be more in keeping with the scope of the task.¹⁰ The board should also come to some agreement about the extent of the community input it will seek. Some districts hold community forums, summits, or town hall-style meetings. Others conduct hearings or school-based forums. Others handle the task internally. No method is necessarily better than another.

Finally, the Mayor and the city counsel have a role in this instructional vision setting process, regardless of the governance discussion. The school board should find a way to ensure that the perspective of the Mayor and City Counsel are obtained.¹¹

• Charge the Acting Superintendent with developing a concrete, five-year instructional plan for the improvement of academic performance in the district schools. This plan should go back to the board for approval and should be reviewed on a regular basis throughout the year. (A2)
• Articulate in the strongest possible terms — at the school board and superintendent leadership levels — a clear sense of urgency for and commitment to raising student performance for all the children in the D.C. Public Schools. (A3)
• Begin the search for a permanent Superintendent for the district’s schools (including consideration of Elfreda Massie) who is in general agreement with the vision and broad goals articulated by the board, rather than searching without a vision for a superintendent who brings his or her own. (A4)
• Revise the details and tactics — but not the overall goals — of the instructional plan once a new Superintendent has been retained. The school board and the Superintendent need to work out the final details together and be in harmony about the direction of the school district and the overall theory of action. (A5)
• Devise and roll out a communications and engagement plan to the community for discussion. It will be important that the school board, the Mayor, city counsel, the superintendent, Congress, the U.S. Department, and others be willing to speak out in favor of the instructional plan that they have had a hand in developing. (The district also needs a more convincing plan for how it is going to strengthen communications between the central office and the individual schools.) (A6)
• Begin restructuring the agenda of the school board meetings over time to ensure that some portion of each gathering is devoted to an update on the status of the instructional strategic plan, on efforts to boost student performance, and on the results of those efforts. (A7)
• Conduct a formal review of the plan at least annually and modify it as necessary. (A8)

B. Goal Setting

Urban school systems that have seen significant gains in student achievement often see this improvement because they have a clear sense of where they are going. This clarity is exhibited in academic goals for the district at large and for individual schools. These goals are measurable and are accompanied by specific timelines for when specific targets are to be attained. The Strategic Support Team looked specifically at the goalsetting process in the D.C. Public Schools.

Positive Findings

• The district has developed a five-year Business Plan for Strategic Reform. The plan contains goals for high student achievement, increased graduation rates, higher student achievement, lower dropouts, and the better measurement of performance. (These goals are not well-known throughout the district, however.)
• Some schools in D.C. have set their own student achievement targets.

Areas of Concern

• Some schools in the district have set their own academic target but the targets across all the schools do not sum up to any districtwide goal for improving student achievement. School goals are disconnected from any larger academic objective and are inconsistently measured, reported, and understood in the school improvement plans.
• Neither the district’s instructional goals (articulated in the Business Plan) nor its school-by-school academic targets reflect goals and benchmarks established under No Child Left Behind. (To meet Adequate Yearly Progress targets under NCLB this year, D.C. schools are to have 41.9 percent of their students reading at or above proficiency in grades 3-8 and 28.1 percent in grades 7-11. D.C. schools, moreover, are to have 48.7 percent of their students doing math at or above proficiency levels in grades 3-8 and 33.2 percent in grades 7-11. The minimum subgroup size is 40 students.) These targets are either not reflected in each school’s targets or are not well known throughout the district.
• The Business Plan sets its reading benchmarks in “grade equivalent” scores rather than in performance levels.
• Individual school improvement plans are not necessarily tied to any larger strategy for improving district-wide achievement. There is no district improvement plan that individual school plans link to.
• Principals receive their funding in lump sum allocations and hav