Policy Update: D.C.: Finding Signs of Progress

Vital Statistics
1	Public school districts
184	Public schools
77,500	K-12 enrollment
96.1%	Minority students
39%	Children in poverty
8.5%	Students with disabilities
$682.1 million	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

In the 1997-98 school year, when school started three weeks late and the district's leadership turned over, students at every grade level posted gains on the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition.

"There were modest gains that show steady progress," says Arlene Ackerman, who was promoted from deputy superintendent to superintendent last May. "I'm pleased. This was a beginning."

Last summer, she deposed 39 of the system's principals (some were reassigned, some retired, and some were fired) and announced that the staffs at two schools would be completely overhauled. She also reorganized the district's personnel office, laying off 33 of its 48 employees in the hope that a new staff would recruit better-qualified teachers. And she is preparing to hold teachers to the same strict standard that led her to fire or reassign principals.

Ackerman can take such sweeping action, one of her critics says, because she reports to a board of trustees that doesn't answer directly to voters. The emergency board was created to run the school system in late 1996 after the federal financial-control board running the city displaced the existing administration and stripped the elected school board of most of its powers.

Ackerman "has been able to do whatever she wants to do without any scrutiny from the elected framework in Washington," says Don Reeves, an elected school board member from a ward that includes many of Washington's wealthiest areas in the city's northwest quadrant.

While a member of the emergency board until early last year, Reeves was one of its severest critics. Reeves served on the emergency board when he was also serving as president of the elected school board. Last year, his colleagues on the elected board removed him as their representative on the emergency board after his term as school board president ended.

Despite Reeves' protests, the superintendent doesn't have carte blanche. She still must respond to political debates that extend beyond her reach, particularly as the head of a school system with a unique relationship to the federal government. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress has ultimate authority over the Washington city government.

Congressional Republicans, for instance, are trying to make the District of Columbia the only place to offer federally funded vouchers for impoverished children to redeem at private and parochial schools. So far, the GOP plan has not succeeded.

Charter school advocates in Congress, meanwhile, have created a system in which the elected board of education and a board appointed by outgoing Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. are allowed to establish 20 of the independently run public schools a year.

At the start of this school year, 16 charter schools were operating in the district, and one more was scheduled to open this month. Three more schools have charters to begin in September. Just three years ago, there were none.

In the fall of 1997, schools opened three weeks late because work to repair their roofs extended into the school year. A local judge overseeing a lawsuit monitoring fire-code violations in the school district ruled the roof-construction sites unsafe for children, leading the system's leaders to delay school openings throughout the system. Fallout from the postponement of the 1997-98 school year, as well as a midyear budget deficit, led to the resignations of the team recruited in 1996 to run the system.

Jr. resigned as the chief executive, and retired Army Maj. Gen. Charles E. Williams, the chief operating officer who had overseen the construction projects, left under pressure. Later, Bruce K. MacLaury, the chairman of the appointed board of trustees, also stepped down.

That left Ackerman, whom Becton had recruited from Seattle to serve as his No. 2 administrator, to take the reins.

Last Sept. 1, the district's schools--33 of them with new roofs--opened on schedule for the first time in three years, and Ackerman could point to progress in test scores.

In the spring of 1998, Stanford-9 test-takers showed gains at every grade level that had taken the reading and mathematics exams the year before.

Still, the results showed that the city's 77,500 students consistently scored below the national average, and that large numbers of students would have been retained in their grades if the district had stuck to its policy of requiring students to score at the "basic" level or above on the Stanford-9 to move ahead.

To avoid large-scale retention of students, the emergency school board softened the policy and granted school-level administrators the ultimate decision on whether students would advance.

Now, all students who score within 10 percentage points of basic in reading and math will advance; those within 25 percentage points will be sent to summer school in order to move a grade ahead.

Most students below that level will be held back, but some will advance a grade if their teachers and principals believe they are ready, Ackerman says.

By the time students now in grades 6 through 9 are juniors, they must reach the basic level on the Stanford-9 in reading and math to receive a diploma. They also will need a C average to graduate.

Reaching those goals will not be easy. As 8th graders, 20 percent of this year's high school freshmen scored below basic in reading, and 59 percent were at that level in math.