DC Schools

I'm with The New Republic in favoring efforts to make it easier to fire employees at the inept DC Public Schools central administrative office. I don't, howeve,r see why one would frame the issue this way:

Only three members of the 13-person board--one of them was Marion Barry--sided against Rhee. In short, the sclerotic establishment can no longer count on its old political patrons. And her victory was an important object lesson for other cities: Reformers can now battle the teachers' unions--and trounce them.

Back in the real world, this was a pretty mild reform limited to non-union employees. The public sector unions are bound to oppose it, of course, but the proposal was designed to minimize opposition, thus maximizing the odds of it passing and something useful actually getting done for DC kids. Framing every reform effort as a death blow to the unions seems like a good way to make sure reform efforts fail. Meanwhile, the reality is that the Washington Teachers Union is a relatively weak union. People know that DCPS is a low-performing system by big city standards, and people "know" that strong teachers unions are responsible for urban school systems being bad, so it just must be the case that DC's schools are bad because of a super-strong union.

Comments

Re teachers' unions

Of course, assholes like George Will like to place the entire blame for bad schools on teachers' unions. Administration, parents, and politicians are totally blameless in the fantasy world of the George Wills of the world. Just as a for instance, it ain't the teachers' unions calling for teaching intelligent design in science classrooms, it's numbnuts politicians.

Posted by SLC | December 31, 2007 4:46 PM

To be fair, SLC, if DC's hospitals had results as crappy as its schools, everyone would be blaming the doctors primarily, not parents, politicians and administration. If teachers want to be respected as professionals they need to take responsibility for producing results.

Posted by Harry | December 31, 2007 5:37 PM

Matt,

That article you linked under "a relatively weak union" is brilliant. It should be read by everyone interested in the DC school reforms.

Your interpretation of the article is, however, completely and utterly wrong. It clearly indicates that the DC teachers union was both very powerful and very corrupt until relatively recently:

"Meet the “New Washington Teachers’ Union,” as the organization is billing itself these days. Perhaps a decade ago, a more muscular WTU would have bashed any such ideas into oblivion. Under the leadership of imperious chief Barbara Bullock, the union won pay raise after pay raise, all while swatting away all but the most meaningless contract reforms.

But that was the “old” WTU. Later that year [2002], Bullock would be charged in one of the most outrageous city corruption scandals in recent memory, leading its parent union to assume leadership for two years." (emphasis mine)

The DC union suffered a tremendous loss of polical clout following the corruption scandal, and is at this moment relatively weak compared its counterparts in other major cities. But before the scandal, it really was a large part of the problem in DC's schools.

Please note that I don't believe this to be the case for teachers unions generally. DC has been uniquely awful on a whole host of "good government" issues, and the political corruption in the school system was larger than just the union. That said, DC was one place where it really was necessarry to tear down all of the old corrupt structures (including Bullock's teachers' union) in order to make headway in improving the schools.

Posted by heedless | December 31, 2007 5:55 PM

Re Harry

I didn't say that the teachers unions were innocent, only that there is plenty of blame to go around and that allotting them 100% of the blame, as shitheads like George Will do will solve nothing. One of the problems with the DC schools that hasn't received much attention was the elected board of education, many of whose members treated it as a stepping stone to higher office, rather then as an opportunity to improve the schools. Just for the information of the readers of this thread, a former colleague of mine at my former place of employment was a member of the DC school board and she had horror story after horror story of the shenanigans that went on at board meetings. Some of the clowns on the DC board were as clueless as William Buckingham, late of the Dover, Pennsylvania school board.

Posted by SLC | December 31, 2007 6:18 PM

But are the D.C. schools that bad? Sure, the DC NAEP scores are far below any state's NAEP scores, but absolute comparisons don't say much about how they are doing adding value to the students they have.

If you look at the improvement in NAEP scores between 4th graders in 2003 and 8th graders in 2007, which is an attempt at measuring the schools' "value added," then DC comes in better than any state. Audacious Epigone crunched the numbers here:

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2007/11/state-rankings-by-naep-improvement-from.html

Objectively, the DC schools sure look bad, with their terrible repair records and the like, but it's possible that they are doing a comparatively decent job relative to the quality of students entering the school system.

Posted by Steve Sailer | December 31, 2007 6:34 PM

Perhaps the DC public schools have better teachers on average than most cities? DC attracts lots of smart, idealistic, energetic young liberal arts majors from nice colleges across America. Maybe over time, a high proportion of them filter from working for nonprofits and little journals into stable employment (with health insurance) as public school teachers?

This model could explain why the DC schools are so notoriously badly led at the political level but the most sophisticated measure yet of school performance shows them to be pretty adequate. The school board is elected by local voters but the teaching staffs wind up being fairly national.

Posted by Steve Sailer | December 31, 2007 6:40 PM

Steve what sophisticated measures of performance show DC schools as adequate? Everything I have seen indicate they are awful, and that jibes with my experience in the limited amount of tutoring I have done with DC students.

Posted by nathaniel | December 31, 2007 6:51 PM

Steve Sailer, always being the vile degenerate racist we know so well. Could you be more of a disgusting degenerate racist, Stevie?

Posted by Jennifer | December 31, 2007 6:53 PM

Stevie is claiming that the problem is the intrinsic quality of students.

SLC is right. Teachers unions are simply a scapegoat, for people who dsepise unions and wish teachers to be treated as abusively as possible.

Posted by Jennifer | December 31, 2007 6:58 PM

"Steve what sophisticated measures of performance show DC schools as adequate?"

Follow the link above -- Audacious Epigone ranks the states plus DC from 1-51 on increase in federal NAEP test scores from 4th graders in 2003 to 8th graders in 2007. That's the best way I've ever seen to compare states in "value added" for the middle four years of school. It's probably not good enough, but it's the best we've got for 50 state comparisons.

DC does best in this value added measure, West Virginia does worst.

This is one of the few measures of school performance by state I've ever seen that aren't immediately predictable based on the ratio of Whites plus Asians to Blacks plus Hispanics.

If you just look at absolute NAEP scores,

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nde/statecomp/sortingSingleYear.asp

Massachusetts, North Dakota, Minnesota and a bunch of other "far northern" states do best, while DC always comes in last by a long margin. For example, in 8th grade reading, DC scores as far behind next to last Missisippi as Mississippi lags behind Connecticut.

But if you look at change from 4th grade to 8th grade, DC does best. Maybe DC is just awful at K-3 which artificially depresses 4th grade scores. I don't know. But it's worth considering the data that suggests that DC teachers might actually be doing a decent job under difficult circumstances.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 1, 2008 12:30 AM

Jennifer - if you're going to do nothing but sling insults, shut up.

nathaniel -
Everything I have seen indicate they are awful, and that jibes with my experience in the limited amount of tutoring I have done with DC students.

But is that because of the quality of the schools or the quality of the students?

Perhaps you can argue that the reason for poorer black and Latino performance is due to societal racism or something rather than innate intelligence differences. But the gap is real, and blaming it on the quality of the schools (as if blacks and Latinos always happen to get the low quality schools without exception) strikes me as ignoring Occam's razor.

Posted by Glaivester | January 1, 2008 8:38 AM

Matt, regarding firing and school improvement: I am working in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools in Arizona. One of the schools went into reorganization under NCLB and there was a lot of firings. One of the teachers pointed out to me that in 18 years working there, she'd had 19 principals. It was definitely true that there was no adopted curriculum for teaching reading, for example. This meant that each well-meaning and licensed teacher (many Navajos) was left on his/her own to provide some kind of reading instruction. This is definitely not the individual teacher's fault and definitely not the way to produce good educational results. In my view, a very important outcome of all this firing was that there were major vacancies and classes taught by an assortment of subs for an extended time-or in the case of special ed., simply no classes. How can this be better?! I realize you were talking about central administration firings.

Check this out: It seems to me that the agency (i.e. school district) was empowered to change staff and they did THAT instead of looking at what the school really needed, like adopting a research-based curriculum. I'd like to point out that in a lot of cases we're talking about teachers needing to take kids from a 2nd grade reading level to a 3rd grade reading level. This is not really rocket science, most teachers read above the 3rd grade level themselves (heh heh). If they have basically any acceptable curriculum, not "the newest and best," and a reasonable CLASS SIZE, and a good amount of instructional time (not a lot of paper shuffling and transitions-this is where the principal, or instructional supervisor, is needed), any teacher in the broad range of average should be able to produce average results. With a broad range of average, including minority, students.

Another problem I see a lot is poor support for classroom behavior problems. This seems to be an increasing problem, as parents side with their spoiled children against the mean old school. This is where I work quite a bit, as a school psychologist.

Thanks for reading this far, I'll end by saying that I don't know how you address corruption and nepotism at the central admin., which seems to be a problem in DC, in addition to incompetence. I noticed when working in New Mexico that the voters just seemed to simmer while the opposition families were in power and abusing it, then eventually the worm turned and those who had been down were up-so they abused their power in turn. Having grown up in Arlington VA, I tend to think regulation and oversight is central to solving these kinds of problems. Does anyone else know how you improve thisi?

Posted by Laurie | January 1, 2008 12:22 PM