Once a national model, now D.C. public schools target of FBI investigation

Once a national model, now D.C. public schools target of FBI investigation
By Peter Jamison and Fenit Nirappil
Feb 2 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-public-schools-were-once-a-success-story-are-they-now-an-embarrassment/2018/02/01/fb15dd4c-069d-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html

For much of the past decade the D.C. school system has been the crown jewel of public policy in the nation’s capital, held up as a national model for education reformers and a shared source of pride for the District’s fractious elected officials.

Former U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan pointed to the District as an example of “what can happen when schools embrace innovative reforms and do the hard work necessary to ensure that all students graduate ready for college and careers.” Philanthropists have poured more than $120 million into the school system since 2007.

Many are now asking whether that confidence was misplaced.

With the revelation this week that more than 900 students — one-third of last year’s high school graduates — should not have been awarded diplomas because of truancy and other problems, the school system has turned virtually overnight into an embarrassment for the city and its elected leaders, who are publicly re-examining their assumptions about the system’s progress.

The FBI, U.S. Education Department and D.C. Office of the Inspector General are investigating the school system, with a focus on Ballou High School, where questions about graduation rates first emerged, according to a current and a former D.C. government employee familiar with the probe. 

The scandal is reverberating far beyond the District, as a busy cottage industry of education policy analysts takes stock of whether the inflated graduation rates point to basic flaws in reforms the city has exported to other struggling school districts.

Jack Jennings, founder of the Center on Education Policy and former general counsel for the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, said school leaders across the country are paying “a great deal of attention” to what is happening in the District — especially because high graduation rates have been so heavily emphasized by reformers as a measure of success.

“This has been identified by several presidents in a row, and by numerous governors and state legislators, as the primary goal in education,” Jennings said. He said the District’s problems with graduation rates could ultimately be a moment of reckoning similar to the 2009 cheating scandal in Atlanta’s public schools, which led to racketeering convictions for 11 teachers who tampered with standardized test scores to hide students’ poor performance.

That scandal, Jennings said, “caused educators around the country to pause a moment” in the headlong pursuit of better metrics.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the D.C. graduation problems illustrate the “toxic” consequences of overreliance on potentially misleading measures of success.

“It’s yet another wake-up call about this flawed logic that metrics are the be-all and the end-all,” Weingarten said. “When these metrics and targets become more important than learning, they create a fertile climate, an environment, for scandal and for abuse.”

At the local level, parents and activists are trying to gauge the extent to which the school system’s vaunted transformation may have been overhyped.

“This absolutely is a challenge to the image that D.C. has burnished as a leader in urban education reform — there’s no question,” said Conor Williams, a senior researcher in the education policy program at the New America Foundation and father of two children in D.C. charter schools. “It’s clear that there are systemic problems around rigor, around accountability and around transparency.”

But Williams said those problems should not distract from real improvements that have taken place since the District embarked on its school-reform project in 2007. He pointed to the system’s prekindergarten program, which provides near-universal schooling to 3- and 4-year-olds, and to the reshaping of D.C. Public Schools as a “working, functional bureaucracy.” The graduation scandal was an “embarrassing situation around only one metric,” he said.

Longtime backers of the city’s reform policies say they fear the graduation scandal could distract from other gains — such as improving standardized test scores and increasing enrollment — and supply ammunition to critics.

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