- More Money Found in D.C. Budget
- Simmons: Keep a Watchful Eye on High Cost of School Reform
- In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay
- Prospective Bidders Get Tour of Stevens Elementary Parcel
- The New Year: Improving Public Schools [Hospitality High and Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS are mentioned]
- DC Looks to Bring in Outside Firm to Review Suspicious Student Standardized Test Scores
- Suspicious DC CAS Erasures Down in 2011, But OSSE Withholds School-By-School Data
- Report: Black Students at DC Area Schools Suspended and Expelled More Than White Students
- DCPS Achievement Gap Blamed on Officials, Demographics, Lack of Funding
More Money Found in D.C. Budget
The Washington Examiner
By Liz Farmer
December 23, 2011
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said on Friday that the city is on pace to accrue roughly $42.2 million in excess revenue during the 2012 fiscal year. The city's chief financial officer has made the projection less than three months into the city's 2012 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
Gray wants to divvy up the extra cash between the Department of Health Care Finance, Department of General Services and D.C. Public Schools. Here's his breakdown:
Department of Health Care Finance — $10.2 million
$6.0 million for more inpatient hospital care
$4.2 million to cover D.C. HealthCare Alliance funding shortfall
Department of General Services — $10.6 million
$6.5 million for cost increases for fuel and water/sewer service for District cars and buildings
$4.1 million for facilities maintenance
D.C. Public Schools — $21.4 million
$4.5 million to cover federal funding reductions
$10.7 million for increases in food-service contracts
$2.8 million for merit-based raises for teachers
$3.4 million for increased personnel costs for non-instructional staff
Gray plans to submit a supplemental budget to the D.C. Council soon. The city also had a funding surplus at the end of the 2011 fiscal year but the council opted to deposit it in savings after dipping into the account to balance the budget in previous years.
Simmons: Keep a Watchful Eye on High Cost of School Reform
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
December 25, 2011
There’s a nasty little trend coursing throughout America, and while I hardly want to toss a bucket of cold water on your warm holiday spirits, a warning is in order as federal, state and local governments broach the inevitable passionate debates about education funding in 2012.
The next few months portend a reality show based on school reform going very, very badly.
Here in the nation’s capital, tempers could start as early as mid-January, when the D.C. Public Education Finance Reform Commission begins drafting a per-pupil funding strategy that will guide the hands of lawmakers and the mayor in developing education budgets for many years to come.
And if you look at Texas, Colorado and other states, such deliberations are already messy political processes that put government budgets and policies between a rock and a hard place.
Consider, by way of example, Texas. On one side stand Hispanics and advocates for low-income families and English-language learners, who claim in a lawsuit that residents in impoverished school districts are paying higher taxes than those in affluent districts but aren’t receiving a solid education.
On the other side stand residents in wealthier districts, who claim in a lawsuit that the state is effectively imposing a state property tax to pay for schools and that by doing so it also is usurping local authority.
If that precarious scenario doesn’t raise your eyebrows, consider the perplexing bah-humbug picture in Colorado, where by judicial fiat a single judge declared that the state’s K-12 education funding system is uniformly unfair. The ruling left the Democratic governor wide-mouthed and the teachers union decreeing “Merry Christmas to us.”
But the teachers union and the state leaders actually should be ashamed of themselves because huge chunks of school-district funding is spent on union affairs outside the classrooms.
A few of Colorado’s costly unholy alliances recently uncovered by the Denver Post:
• Sixteen Colorado school districts pay all or part of their union president’s salary and benefits while the president is on either full or partial leave from the school conducting union business.
• Nine state school districts pay the salary and benefits for teachers on release time, as well as for the classroom substitutes who replace them.
• Ten school districts aren’t tracking the annual cost of union leave.
What’s more, the Obama administration used $137 million in taxpayer money to cover the cost of federal workers’ union activities.
D.C. taxpayers should fast-forward to next year, when Mayor Vincent C. Gray and the D.C. Council begin gazing at the dollar signs and policy recommendations that will be embedded in the school finance commission’s draft report. By the time we flip those new calendars we received for Christmas to mark our fling with the start of spring, school closings, teacher pay and evaluations, and facility costs will have nostrils flaring.
Truth acknowledged, there is an upside to the commission, whose primary objectives were to study funding equities and disparities between traditional and public-charter schools, and make recommendations to city hall. The creation of the finance reform commission was supported wholeheartedly by charter-school advocates and welcomed by regular public schools. But there are pitfalls to the panel, too.
The major rub lies in the possibility that city officials will be encouraged to continue shortchanging the spirit and the letter of the laws that created not only the uniform student-funding formula but the 1995 legislation that established charter schools and grants them a considerable measure of independence for bureaucratic authority.
Together, those laws helped to make D.C. charters among the most successful and largest systems in the nation.
Since the passage of the laws, however, D.C. lawmakers have added laws that force charters to provide services for which they are not provided public funding, chief among them on-site routine health and mental programs, physical education and feeding programs, safety and security, and resources for parents and families.
All reforms come with a price tag, and that includes the neat little bow that the D.C. school finance commission eventually will wrap around its package of school-finance reforms.
And consider as well that while the District is hardly the size of Colorado or Texas, the soul of city hall is as liberal as they come. (Think medical marijuana, and publicly financed abortions and condom giveaways just to name three issues.)
Here’s to hoping the luck of the New Year gives D.C. taxpayers a huge break that also avoids the District becoming legally embroiled in school-funding reforms.
In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay
The New York Times
By Sam Dillon
December 31, 2011
During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.
That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.
“Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay,” said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. “I know they value me.”
That is exactly the idea behind what admirers consider the nation’s most advanced merit pay system for public school teachers. This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises.
“We want to make great teachers rich,” said Jason Kamras, the district’s chief of human capital.
The profession is notorious for losing thousands of its brightest young teachers within a few years, which many experts attribute to low starting salaries and a traditional step-raise structure that rewards years of service and academic degrees rather than success in the classroom.
Many districts have tried over the last decade to experiment with performance pay systems but have frequently been thwarted by powerful teachers’ unions that negotiated the traditional pay structures. Those that have implemented merit pay have generally offered bonuses of a few thousand dollars, often as an incentive to work in hard-to-staff schools or to work extra hours to improve students’ scores. Several respected studies have found that such payments have scant effect on student achievement; since most good teachers already work hard, before and after class, there are limits to how much more can be coaxed out of them with financial incentives.
But Washington is the leader among a handful of large cities that are seeking a more fundamental overhaul of teacher pay. Alongside the aggressive new evaluation system that has made the city famous for firing poor-performing teachers — more than 400 over the past two years — is a bonus-and-raise structure aimed at luring talented people to the profession and persuading the most effective to stick with it.
“The most important role for incentives is in shaping who enters the teaching profession and who stays,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “Washington’s incentive system will attract talented teachers, and it’ll help keep the best ones.”
Under the system, known as Impact Plus, teachers rated “highly effective” earn bonuses ranging from $2,400 to $25,000. Teachers who get that rating two years in a row are eligible for a large permanent pay increase to make their salary equivalent to that of a colleague with five more years of experience and a more advanced degree.
Those rewards come with risk: to receive the bonuses and raises, teachers must sign away some job security provisions outlined in their union contract. About 20 percent of the teachers eligible for the raises this year and 30 percent of those eligible for bonuses turned them down rather than give up those protections.
One persistent critic of the system is Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, who argues that the evaluations do not adequately take into account the difficulties of working in poor neighborhoods. He also says that performance pay inappropriately singles out stars.
“This boutique program discourages teachers from working together,” Mr. Saunders said.
Several other big-city school systems have recently tried to break out of the mold of paying all teachers according to a single salary schedule.
In 2007, Denver enacted a merit pay system, which President Obama has praised but experts see as flawed. It gives larger monetary awards to teachers who earn advanced degrees than to those who significantly improve student achievement, though there is little evidence that students learn more when taught by teachers with advanced degrees.
The system in Houston, also adopted in 2007, defines classroom success so broadly that it rewards more than half of all teachers with bonuses. The amounts are smaller than those in Washington; the maximum possible bonus last year was $11,330.
This fall, the Miami-Dade County School District gave one-time bonuses, financed with $14 million in federal grant money, to 120 teachers. Eighty-four of them received $4,000 each, and 12 got the top payout of $25,000.
Karen Sutton, who teaches honors English at a Miami high school, was one of the 12.
“To have somebody say you’ve done a great job, that feels wonderful,” said Ms. Sutton, 56, who is in her 23rd year of teaching in Miami and has a salary of about $55,000. “But does it affect how I teach or whether I keep teaching? No. I’ve never thought, ‘If I get a bonus, I’ll stick this out.’ ”
Marta Maria Arrocha, who is 47 and teaches reading to fourth graders, was another $25,000 winner, which she described as exhilarating. Still, Ms. Arrocha, who has been teaching nine years, said she “would tend to discourage students who say they want to go into teaching.”
“I try to nitpick — is this really what you want to do?” she said. “A lot of people look down on this profession.”
Washington, like several other cities that have rolled out merit pay programs, first promoted the plan mainly by emphasizing the top compensation that someone could earn in a single year: about $130,000 annually in salary and performance bonuses. But earning that much is rare if not impossible — it requires the most experienced teachers, with the most advanced degrees, to have the best possible performance, something yet to be achieved.
Mr. Kamras, who helped design the Washington system, said he considered the most important aspect of Impact Plus to be the permanent increases awarded to outstanding teachers early in their careers, many of whom might otherwise leave the profession.
Take Mark LaLonde. At 32, he is in his seventh year as a social studies teacher at a high school in Washington. But he lives in Baltimore, where his wife works, and had considered working in the Baltimore schools to avoid the tiresome commute. But he gave up that flirtation after receiving the “highly effective” rating twice and having his salary increase to $87,000 from about $58,000 last year. He also earned a bonus of $10,000 for two consecutive years. In Baltimore, the union pay scale suggests that he would be making in the low $50,000s.
Jimmie Roberts, who is 28 and tutors slow readers, saw his salary increase to about $75,000 in 2011-12, from about $52,000 last year, in addition to receiving $30,000 in bonuses over two years. The money and recognition, he said, helped dispel the discouragement he had felt having to work a second job, as a greeter in a wine bar on nights and weekends, to pay off college loans.
Ms. Johnson, the seventh-grade special-education teacher, received her highly effective rating — and all the extra money — because her students’ test scores had improved significantly, and because administrators who had visited her classroom came away impressed.
“She’ll get a class full of kids who are below basic, who can’t read, and by the time they leave, they’ll be scoring well above basic or proficient,” said Remidene Diakite, the assistant principal at Ms. Johnson’s school. “A big part of her success is she puts so much effort into figuring out her students and teaching to their weaknesses.”
Prospective Bidders Get Tour of Stevens Elementary Parcel
The Northwest Current
By Brady Holt
December 21, 2011
Armed with floor plans, digital cameras and business cards, dozens of prospective occupants and developers of the former Stevens Elementary School site toured the vacant building last week to evaluate its condition and meet potential development partners.
The District hopes to sell the 1050 21st St. NW property, which includes the four-level school building and its L Street playground. Officials envision a commercial developer building on part of the property and using profits from that project to renovate the school for a new educational user.
The requirement to improve the vacant Stevens building, whose exterior has historic protections, didn’t dim interest in last week’s event. Although a final count of the attendees wasn’t available by The Current’s deadline, officials said more than 100 people had registered, and it was evident turnout was high. Many attendees said they weren’t ready to share overall feedback on the building, but it’s clear the former school has seen better days. Paint has peeled off many walls, and numerous ceiling tiles have disintegrated, littering the floors. Some commented on the skimpy bath room facilities and the building’s noncompliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which would likely force a developer to retrofit an elevator.
But while Jose Sousa, a spokesperson for the deputy mayor for planning and economic development, said meeting disability requirements “would take some creativity,” he noted that the former school is sound in many ways, cosmetic issues aside. “The building itself isn’t in terrible shape, generally,” said Sousa, who said he visits the site about once a month to ensure that no serious damage or break-ins have occurred.
As attendees noted, some new educational users would be able to utilize the building’s existing 16-classroom layout without major reconfiguring. The facility housed elementary school students just over three years ago, and the empty building is full of reminders. Some blackboards were never erased after the last day of school.
Attendance records still sit on a desk in the office. Children’s artwork and other decorations are still posted on bulletin boards. Refills for a soap dispenser are on a bathroom sink. Most furniture and equipment was moved to other District schools, and apparently no one had a reason to touch what remained. Then-Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee closed the Stevens School, which had been operating since 1868, over neighborhood protests in 2008, saying the site was underenrolled. Since then, community leaders successfully rebuffed a city plan to sell the entire property to a commercial developer who planned an apartment building for the site.
In keeping with community feedback, the economic development office’s latest requirements for developers is that they ultimately partner with an educational user. Developers and educational users will apply separately for consideration in the city process, with project proposals due March 1. Short-listed groups from each category will then team up to make final presentations in the spring.
The New Year: Improving Public Schools [Hospitality High and Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS are mentioned]
The Washington Informer
By Dr. Ramona Edelin, Special to The Informer
December 27, 2011
As 2011 makes way for 2012, I am reminded that Mayor Vincent Gray was sworn into office a year ago, after having placed fairness, high standards and community engagement at the heart of his education plan. One year on, how close has he come to realizing the plan that helped his campaign succeed?
Early last year, the mayor replaced outgoing D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee with her deputy, Kaya Henderson—a move seen by many as underscoring his commitment to education reform. The then-new mayor also pressed ahead with another priority of the previous administration: modernizing and bringing up to code the many often-dilapidated DCPS buildings. Finally, the children are getting the right message when they walk into these renovated and refurbished buildings—that adults care about you and your future.
There have been some other welcome changes under the new mayor. This year, the announcement of the state standardized reading and math test scores took place inside a DCPS school–with students and staff from Hospitality High Public Charter School invited, to recognize its rising scores on the state test.
The mayor's efforts to recognize the contributions of the city's chartered public schools to improvements in educational outcomes were long overdue—but still welcome. The same goes for his acknowledgement of public charter—DCPS cooperation.
Why is this attention to chartered public schools' role so important? Publicly funded, but run independently of the traditional school system, their contributions to improving outcomes for urban youth over the last 15 years have been remarkable. They have increased the numbers of students who are at grade level in reading and math, as well as those who graduate high school and are accepted to college. Charters are an established part of the city's educational landscape, and deserve equal consideration with DCPS, which also has made progress with students' academic success in recent years.
Another defining moment was the mayor's decision to set up a commission to look into public funding inequities between D.C.'s chartered public schools and DCPS. The city's charter school community eagerly awaits progress on equal funding, after years of frustration and unequal funding under previous administrations.
More recently, the mayor was present at Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS for the unveiling of the charter board's 'Performance Management Framework.' This framework measures schools according to various indicators, including: the share of students that score "proficient" or "advanced" on the state test; improvements in student test scores; and attendance and re-enrollment rates. As the framework develops, many D.C. charters hope that they can be measured—and held accountable—for how well they fare in living up to the often-ambitious missions that they have set for themselves.
These changes show that education in the District is headed in the right direction. There are, however, problems that must be addressed, such as the growing achievement gap in our city. According to the widely respected National Assessment of Education Progress, Washington, D.C. schools have the largest achievement gap between white and African-American students in the country. This situation is unacceptable, and threatens the progress we have made. In 2012, Mayor Gray and the City Council need to invest greater resources to help close the gap.
What other education policy goals might the mayor pursue in 2012? One should be ensuring that chartered public schools are treated in the same way as DCPS schools when it comes to decisions emanating from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education. I'm thinking of nagging per-student funding disparities between DCPS and chartered public schools, and taxpayer-funded city services enjoyed by DCPS, but not charters.
It's true that the order has come down from the mayor's office that officials are to change their old ways–but progress has been slow. If ensuring equal treatment of chartered public schools was a factor in performance evaluations, pay increases, promotions and dismissals, the mayor might get everyone's attention. That approach succeeded in ensuring diversity directives in government were followed, and it could become a powerful incentive to implement the mayor's policy.
At this time last year, I wondered how the new mayor would govern our city. So far, Mayor Gray has proven that he understands the critical role that the District's public chartered schools play in improving public education. A year from now, I hope we will look back on 2012 as a year when Mayor Gray eliminated bias against and resource disparities to D.C.'s charter schools, and delivered on his commitment to improve public education for every child in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Ramona Edelin is executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools.
DC Looks to Bring in Outside Firm to Review Suspicious Student Standardized Test Scores
The Washington Post
By Associated Press
December 25, 2011
An outside firm is being hired to check for irregularities in standardized test scores among District of Columbia students.
A spokesman for the state superintendent of education tells The Washington Post the firm will scrutinize suspicious 2011 standardized test scores.
The review will focus on individual classroom results and on test scores that show startling performance improvements and large numbers of answers that have been erased and changed from wrong to correct, among other irregularities.
In May, city officials said test results for three classrooms that took part in 2010 citywide exams were invalidated because of proven cases of cheating.
USA Today reported in March that more than 100 D.C. schools had unusually high rates of erasures on exams between 2008 and 2010.
Suspicious DC CAS Erasures Down in 2011, But OSSE Withholds School-By-School Data
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
December 31, 2011
After months of FOIA requests and general nagging, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education has finally released data that appear to show rates of suspicious DC CAS answer sheet erasures continuing to decline in 2011.
An analysis of 2011 reading, math, science and biology exams by their publisher, CTB/McGraw-Hill, shows that 128 classrooms in public and public charter schools in the District had high rates of wrong-to-right erasures.
That’s a drop of nearly 50 percent from 253 classrooms in 2009. The 128 classrooms represent less than 3 percent of the total number of classrooms in which students were tested.
Elevated erasure rates are widely regarded as possible evidence that teachers have tampered with tests or given improper assistance to students. The 2011 numbers continue a trend in which the decline in suspicious erasures--which officials credit to improved security--has been accompanied by flat or falling test scores.
OSSE’s nine-page version of CTB/McGraw-Hill’s report--completed in July but slipped under the tree by agency elves this week during the holidays--does not break down the data by school, only by citywide grade level. So if there are specific schools that remain hot spots of cheating, they remain unknown to parents and public. After a series of e-mail exchanges, Tamara Reavis, OSSE’s director of assessments and accountability, placed the number of public and public charter schools involved at 54.
The information is clearly available. The report refers to an omitted Excel file that lists each school and the teacher in each “flagged” classroom.
OSSE said it is holding back on naming the schools until a new outside contractor studies the classrooms in question under an expanded set of criteria that go beyond elevated erasures to include classroom patterns and performance on past tests.
Erasures “are only one data point to flag classrooms,” Reavis said in an e-mail. “Wrong to right erasures alone do not indicate improprieties.”
DCPS has retained the test security firm Caveon for the last couple of years to investigate high-erasure classrooms. The firm’s work led D.C. Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley to invalidate 2010 test scores last May in three classrooms (at Noyes, C.W. Harris and Leckie elementary schools). But Caveon founder John Fremer said that Chancellor Kaya Henderson never asked the company to use all the forensic tools at its disposal.
OSSE’s effort would be the first citywide attempt (covering both public and public charter schools) to have an independent contractor probe suspect classrooms.
The District released an RFP (request for proposal) on Dec. 23 soliciting interest from outside firms. But given the poky nature of the city’s procurement process and the District’s interest in keeping the whole issue of cheating on the margins of public discussion, it could be a year before such a study is completed and released.
The 2011 data released this week show the highest concentration of high-erasure classrooms in the third grade, where 21 of 303 rooms (6.9 percent) were flagged in math tests and 6.3 percent in reading exams. Why erasure rates are highest in the third grade is not clear.
Evidence of cheating has clouded the city’s standardized testing program since 2009, when the The Post reported that then-D.C. State Superintendent Deborah Gist asked schools to investigate instances of outsized gains on the 2008 DC CAS.
A USA Today investigation published in March found that classrooms in more than 100 D.C. public schools showed higher-than-average rates of erasures from wrong to right answers on the annual tests between 2006 and 2010 (It did not include public charter schools in its analysis). D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby, assisted by the U.S. Department of Education, is investigating the newspaper’s findings.
Report: Black Students at DC Area Schools Suspended and Expelled More Than White Students
The Washington Post
By Associated Press
December 29, 2011
A published report says black students in the D.C. area are suspended and expelled two to five times as often as white students, and the trend can be seen in both the Maryland and Virginia suburbs and inner city Washington.
The Washington Post reports that its analysis found that in the suburbs alone, more than 35,000 students were suspended or expelled from school at some point last school year — more than half of them black students.
Experts say potential reasons for the disparity are poverty, unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, Deputy Superintendent Frieda K. Lacey says officials are trying new approaches to close the gap, including involving a team of administrators in suspension decisions.
DCPS Achievement Gap Blamed on Officials, Demographics, Lack of Funding
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
December 29, 2011
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data shows the efforts of former D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor Michelle Rhee and current Chancellor Kaya Henderson failed to reduce achievement gaps, or guarantee to that children would receive at least an adequate, "average" education, regardless of the school they attended.
The report also concluded that in the DCPS system which is about 80 percent African-American, the gap in achievement between black and white students was the widest in the country.
For example, 4th-grade math students in the District scored an average of 212 points out of a possible 500 while white students scored 262 points. This equates to a 50-point difference—twice the national average. (The gap in New York City and Philadelphia, on the other hand, is about 20 points.) The DCPS findings were among test score data for 21 of the nation's largest school districts.
A spokesman for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education said the widening gap has long been a topic of conversation among D.C. educators.
"It's been looked at and talked about for a while," said Marc Caposino. "I know that there are programs in the DCPS system as well as within the charters that are targeting low-income kids as well as English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) kids to improve the numbers." He added that at one facility he recently visited, staff had displayed inspirational messages on walls to encourage better student performance.
Overall, "[the gap in DCPS] is not something that's much different than any other major urban," Caposino said. "I can also say that the District has one of the highest educated white populations in the country, which is also a significant contributor."
Asked who is to blame for the gap, Caposino responded, "no one in particular."
He said that instead of looking for blame, concerned parties should consider how to improve the situation. "And that's where our efforts are focused," he said.
One area Chancellor Henderson said she feels worthy of focus is the combination of teacher performance and school closings. During a radio broadcast interview last week, she said her office is carrying out a "Herculean effort" to ensure highly qualified teachers are in city classrooms.
Henderson also said in 2008, some 23 DCPS facilities were closed and several more are slated for closing next year.
"When enrollment and achievement have been declining, it makes the school a good candidate for closure," said Henderson.
Meanwhile, Dana Goldstein, a fellow at the non-profit Nation Institute in New York City analyzed DCPS's scores and compared them with the school system in Charlotte, NC. She found that demographics play a vital, yet limited role in students' academic performance.
"Poor, black, and Hispanic students do better in Charlotte than they do in D.C.," Goldstein wrote in comments pertaining to the NAEP study. "There are many reasons why this is so, starting with "peer effects:" The Charlotte district is more diverse than DCPS, with a greater percentage of white, Asian, and middle-class students, as well as individual schools and classrooms that are more socioeconomically-integrated."
Goldstein also concluded that while Rhee failed to significantly narrow achievement gaps, the gaps would be less disturbing if overall achievement levels were moderate or high.
"But what we continue to see in D.C. is that white students score well above both national and urban district averages for their race; [and that] black, Hispanic and poor children score well below national averages for their races and classes," Goldstein wrote.
Michael Casserly, executive director for the District of Columbia-based Council of Great City Schools, said although widening of the gap has not been a good sign, he's optimistic about what Henderson has done to close it. On the other hand, Casserly said he has yet to understand why the gap widened in the first place.
"You see these numbers bounced around a little bit, but you can't say they're [directly] attributed to testing cycles," Casserly told The Washington Informer. "[The numbers] move a little bit sometimes and it's hard to explain. However, in this case, [there's been a ] widening of the gap over one testing cycle, and I'm not clear what that means . . . you certainly don't want the numbers -- wide as they are -- to get any worse."
Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund in D.C. also said DCPS's progress has not been "close to" what's been expected.
"I think part of what's also going on in the District in terms of the gap is there has been a huge influx of students from affluent families in the system," Filardo said. "So what's being seen now -- as in the upper Northwest schools in Ward 3-- are [students in the DCPS system] who come from neighborhoods of some of the highest educated people on the planet."
Commenting on the impact for black students who've been attending DCPS facilities for the past 10 years, "it's been horrendous," said Filardo, alluding to inequity in funding surrounding spending per student.
"Right now in the District of Columbia, there is no extra funding [for students] who come into DCPS schools from low-income families," said Filardo. "So a wealthy family on the high end of that achievement gap, and a child whose family is in the most distressed financial condition, get the same amount per student from the city -- and that's wrong."
To that end, Filardo said part of what's caused the achievement gap, "is that we have not had a system of funding in D.C. that has really done what it needed to do to make sure that the kids who need the most help are getting it."