Erich Martel
School Governance, Academic Accountability, and Student Achievement
March 26, 2004

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School Governance, Academic Accountability and Student Achievement.

The release in December of the 2003 NAEP 4^th and 8^th grade math and reading achievement results, reconfigured as comparative urban assessments of nine cities, found DCPS last. It exposed former Superintendent Vance's attempt, last June, to excuse as unfair the initial state comparisons results. That same week, the report of the Council of Great City Schools found the central administration with "no plan for improving student performance [and] no accountability for results" and "lack[ing] any sense of moral outrage about the poor state of student achievement" in DCPS.

Yet, as in previous school crises, governance proposals portray a fictional image of recent superintendents as competent academic leaders whose efforts to improve achievement were obstructed by meddlesome, micromanaging bosses. On the basis of that imaginary problem, they want future superintendents to enjoy even greater freedom from transparency and accountability. In short, we are again offered the promise that a miracle-worker superintendent will fix the schools – if left unaccountable.

The fictional superintendent as academic leader is periodically revived, because failed student achievement is a proxy for the real political issue: the control of school finances. The mayor, influential political and business leaders and most city council members promote this imaginary superintendent, because they don't know - and don't want to know - how academic policies are made and implemented or how the DCPS central academic staff has long been a job trust for the well-connected. By promising us a miracle-worker "super superintendent," they can shift governance talk away from academics to school finance, since their choice of superintendent, they assure us, will improve student achievement. That's how they absolve themselves of responsibility for failure.

Accountability requires an elected oversight body independent of the appointive power, possessing both statutory authority and political motivation to hold school officials answerable, even when they are unwilling. The Board of Education lacks the political will to use its existing authority to hold the superintendent accountable, because, having appointed him/her, it becomes his/her uncritical advocate and defender. The same problem will exist, if the mayor acquires the power to appoint the superintendent.

It was the Council Education Committee, not the Board of Education that held a public oversight hearing into the Superintendent's response to my discovery of falsified student records at Wilson H.S. It was Members Schwartz, Fenty, Patterson and Chavous, not members of the Board, who challenged the evasive answers of Vance's Chief of Staff.

For the Council to effectively exercise DCPS oversight, the following must be enacted:

1. Transparency Laws Covering Top DCPS Officials, Policies, Programs

When the decisions and actions of public officials are hidden from public scrutiny, accountability is compromised. DCPS failures begin in the absence of transparency.

DCPS accountability requires mandatory transparency in the

• Nomination of candidates for superintendent AND all top-level academic positions;
• Proposal of academic policies and programs (including subject standards, curricula, major assessments, major textbook orders, teacher certification requirements).

The names and resumes of nominees for superintendent AND top-level academic leadership positions AND all proposed academic policies and programs must be posted on the Council website for a period of 30 days to allow both the public and the Council adequate time for review.

Public hearings on nominees and proposed DCPS academic policies and programs must be open with opportunity for members of the public to testify.

The discovery of large numbers of falsified student academic records at Wilson H.S. in 2002 documented a policy of "social graduation" and the absence of accountability within the school and between central administration and the school. It led to an external review of student records in all high schools. The "Independent Accountants' Report," released by DCPS in December 2003, found student academic records in all high schools "incomplete, inconsistent and unreliable [concluding that] tampering with respect to student grades may have occurred." The examiners determined that student records were "confidentially maintained," i.e. "only persons permitted by law to access the student's (sic) files were able to do so." This confirmed that the records were altered by those with authorized access, shielded behind the wall of student confidentiality.

The Student Records Task Force set up to propose improvements in the integrity of student academic records recommended the establishment of a "Student Records Review Committee," elected by teachers in each junior & senior high school, with authority to review samples of all student academic records as a check against errors, alterations and the improper granting of graduation credit. This proposal is presently before Superintendent Massie and Board, awaiting action.

The falsification of student academic records and standardized test sheets (e.g. Moten Elementary School in 2002) gives students a false illusion of achievement and conceals the schools' failure to properly educate students. At present, only the Board-Union contract prohibits changing grades without teacher approval. A statutory prohibition, such as the following from the Maine Code, would strengthen integrity:

"#4708. Grades final

"When grades are given for any course of instruction offered by a school, the grade awarded to a student is the grade determined by the teacher of the course and the determination of a student's grade by that teacher, in the absence of clerical or mechanical mistake, fraud, bad faith or incompetence, is final [1991]."

In March 2001, the Board allowed Vance to ignore search firm Isaacson Miller's short list of candidates for Chief Academic Officer and appointed an insider who lacked the posted qualifications. The Board perceived no abdication of responsibility when Vance announced that his "A-Team" would run the schools on a daily basis so he could "spend more time dealing with the city's political leaders." This is the pattern of delegating responsibilities without oversight.

In 1998, Academic Chief, later Superintendent, Ackerman threw out the promising draft history standards developed under a three-year Department of Education grant, replacing them with the present confusing, contradictory and structurally incoherent standards, filled with historical errors, promotion of group stereotypes and historical gaps. Both she and the Trustees, then Vance and the present Board, ignored teachers' complaints and national evaluations by the Fordham Foundation in 2000 and 2003 that found them "useless" and assigned them grades of "F."

Vance's much-touted "Business Plan for Strategic Reform," is on the Board's web page. It rosily projects a 25% rise in the graduation rate and in the number of seniors taking the SAT. Since increases in the number of test takers usually come from groups of students whose scores are in the lower ranges, the effect is to lower system-wide averages. Undeterred by such inconvenient realities, the Business Plan projects a rise in the combined SAT score average from 822 (in 2003 it was 800) to an "expectation" of 1000 and an "aspiration" of 1100, a 200-300 point increase - all without any analysis of how to improve instruction, student performance expectations and accountability.

Vance's Fall 2003 Facilities Master Plan Update, also on the DCPS/Board website, contradicts this illusion. It projects a sobering five-year enrollment decline and equivalent charter school growth of 6000 students - not what one expects of such historic SAT increases. Board members approved both plans – did they read them?

Vance's high school reform plan, purportedly to "prepare students for post-secondary education and career readiness," will require all students to lock into one of ten "academies" organized around fictitious "industry/career clusters." Instead of giving students grounding in core subjects or supporting vocational programs linked to real trades, they will be forced to take pseudo "career readiness" courses.

One such "industry/career cluster" is the Academy of Human Services, which purports to "provide students with a strong academic background and specialized understanding and knowledge of concepts and skills in the career areas of cosmetology and barbering, teacher and counseling education and childcare and development (sic)."

This is the education-lite future that DCPS academic experts have in store for the next generation of students.

The arrogant disregard of documented research on reading instruction by New York City's current mayor-appointed school chief is a warning of the abuse in unchecked power over academics. With his draconian support, Deputy Chancellor of Teaching and Learning Diana Lam (forced to resign on 3/8/04 for ethics violations) adopted an untested anti-phonics reading program, deceptively titled "Month by Month Phonics." Protests by reading specialists and parents were ignored. Only the threat of loss of federal reading funds forced a retreat. See "Tragedy Looms for Gotham's School Reforms." http://www.city-journal.org/html/issue_13_4.html.

MINNESOTA: TRANSPARENCY, WEBPOSTINGS AND AN AGGRESSIVE STATE LEGISLATURE

A positive contrast to New York City and DCPS is the current debate over the adoption of social studies standards in Minnesota. After the first draft was written and posted on the state website, public comments were solicited and also posted. I was one of nine national reviewers asked to review drafts of the standards. When my reviews were not posted, I sent them to members of the Education Committees of both houses of the state legislature, which were [and are presently] reviewing the standards. Within days, the reviews were posted the state website. See: www.education.state.mn.us. The discussion was then reopened and the State Commissioner of Education suddenly came up with a new, third draft, citing my review as one of two that guided her!

This is an example of a responsive elective body possessing the political will to question and probe. It's time for the Council to accept this responsibility and for the Mayor to help open this system to full and permanent academic transparency and accountability.