Building Strong, Well-Rounded Neighborhood Schools

Ensuring Schools Have the Resources They Need to Be Successful

As your Councilmember, I will work to:

• Reform a flawed budgetary model. Essential positions should not be at risk year-to-year because of quirks in a formula. We know what successful schools look like. They are not campuses with skeleton staffs.

  In many Ward 3 schools, parents raise significant funds for additional programming and staff, including partner teachers in elementary school classrooms. Why? Because going beyond the bare minimum when it comes to staffing improves education. That is even more the case for at-risk, ELL, special education, and other students with higher needs. Our teachers are more effective when they have additional support. It makes differentiation easier and improves academic performance.
  When considering the budget, the Council must recognize that successful schools are multifaceted and dynamic institutions.  Learning does not just happen in classrooms.  Many different adults play a role in helping to guide and mentor young minds.  We undercut our schools when we fail to invest in those other adults (e.g. specialists, coaches, librarians, mental health professionals, and counselors). PTOs should not have to raise significant money to fund partner teachers and other positions.  Budgets are about values and we need a Council that prioritizes strong schools above all else. 

• Demand that DCPS engage in a real dialogue with families and community-members about the MacArthur High School project. The 1st stage of this process was terrible. Parents and community members engaged in a one-way dialogue with DCPS and got little in return. The deadlines kept getting pushed back and parents and students have little clarity about what the new school will look like. There is real anxiety about whether the new school will offer the same range of academic and extracurricular offerings that their child would have had access to at Jackson-Reed (formerly Wilson) High School. We need a better process, including real planning around the transit-related concerns.

I do not support proposals to reduce out-of-boundary access to Ward 3 schools, including the new MacArthur site. Doing so will simply result in Ward 3 schools becoming wealthier and less diverse. Unless and until every family has access to a excellent neighborhood school, we must ensure that we continue to offer families throughout the city the opportunity to lottery into high performing DCPS and public charter schools.

• Invest in additional school facilities to address overcrowding in Ward 3. With few exceptions, Ward 3’s public schools are at or well-beyond capacity.  According to DCPS projections, this is a problem that will only get worse.  By 2028, DCPS expects around 1300 more elementary school students in the Wilson feeder pattern than there are seats. A similar deficit is projected just at Deal and Wilson.  The District needs to proceed with construction of a new elementary school and high school in the Foxhall/Palisades area, planning for which is already underway.  Doing so will help reduce overcrowding at the high school level. Going forward, it will be important to push DCPS to explore ways to reduce overcrowding at Deal, something that will likely require significant investment in expanding or building new facilities.  

Addressing overcrowding will also improve the ability of local schools to serve the full range of student needs. A lack of sufficient facilities has, unfortunately, prevented some families from sending their child to their local neighborhood school.

• Ensure that schools with higher needs receive the funding they deserve.  Kids in every ward deserve to have excellent neighborhood schools and we shouldn’t tolerate anything less.  I will fight to make sure Ward 3 schools get the resources they need, but I will also be equally focused on ensuring that all DC public schools receive the support they deserve.  

• Demand that new policies and initiatives be developed through an open process and good faith engagement with principals, teachers, and parents, and not behind closed doors in a conference room. New policies and requirements should not be rushed without time for consultation with all stakeholders, analysis by experts, and some space for introspection. I am not opposed to “education reform” by any means — we must do more to improve outcomes for all students in all schools. But I am extremely wary of top-down plans dreamed up by adults sitting around a conference table, especially when it seems like those plans were hatched without much consultation with classroom teachers or principals. I can recall many examples of laudable initiatives that had the right goals and that could have greatly improved outcomes for my students but largely fell flat because of design flaws that could have been easily avoided by thorough real engagement with teachers and principals.

Investing in Teachers

At the end of the day, people—teachers, administrators, parents, and others—are the key to making a school successful.  High expectations of these people are important.  But we cannot hope to improve the quality of public education when we do not empower and support our educators. Far too often, policymakers ignore the importance of sufficiently investing in professional development.  Teaching is hard.  Really, really hard.  Planning, preparation, grading and paperwork extend a teacher’s workday well beyond the seven hours between bells.  And we expect our educators to not only to put in those hours but to also summon herculean amounts of critical reasoning, quick thinking, and emotional intelligence each and every day.  If we want results, professional development cannot just be a box that needs to be checked, nor can it be outsourced.

As your Councilmember, I will:

• Champion investments in strengths-based, retention-focused training, coaching, and evaluation practices. Excessive turnover happens in a system where teachers are not sufficiently supported or developed.  And we have a turnover problem.  Research regarding effective private sector management has shown that people do not perform best under micromanagement.  Each dedicated teacher brings their own strengths to bear and effective teacher training and management will use these strengths as starting points to foster growth.   For best results, we need to manage and train teachers in a way that fosters their growth as educators.  This is particularly true of new teachers, who are at greater risk of becoming alienated and leaving the classroom if they feel unsupported and at sea.  

  As with trauma informed training, it is not enough to look for something with the word “strengths-based” and assume that does the trick. Teaching requires an extremely specific — and varied — set of skills. Teachers need to be intellectually engaged and engaging — they must think critically about how best to communicate a specific standard to a variety of learners with different learning styles and life experiences. They also need to think quickly — when a student asks a question, a teacher does not have the luxury of mulling it over or getting lost in their own train of thought. They must be able to address the question meaningfully and quickly, making a note to look into it further if need be. And all this for pay that isn’t particularly great.

  When evaluation and “support” focus only on those aspects of the job a teacher needs work on, the risk of demotivation and disengagement runs high. This flies in the face of the actual goal of evaluations, coaching, and other professional development should be to help a teacher grow as an educator, not to hound them out of the profession. The best way to do that is to help each teacher — particularly new teachers — zero in on their strengths. What are they naturally good at and how can this teacher capitalize upon these talents to serve their student community? A school community in which teachers and evaluators have a robust understanding of — and appreciation for — each teacher’s strengths, is a community in which growth areas can be identified and worked on collaboratively without risking teacher disengagement.

• Demand that professional development be differentiated and useful.  In their own classrooms, we expect teachers to differentiate their instruction.  We must do the same with respect to professional development for teachers and principals.  A new teacher or principal will have different needs than an experienced one, each in a different place on their journey as educators.  Professional development, like classroom instruction, is most impactful when it is thoughtfully planned and targeted.   

There are a great many companies hawking technology solutions, curricula supports, and professional development courses to schools.  It can be tempting to use off-the-rack training or contract for the program that is getting the latest buzz. While these solutions can be useful, it is essential that professional development be developed organically by and with DCPS teachers and principals to address and reflect the issues and conditions in our schools.  

• Support efforts to empower teachers to be leaders and innovators. Empowering teachers, parents, and other adults can help build stronger, more dynamic school communities. One reason we know this is true is that highly effective principals invariably recognize the importance of nurturing a strong and engaged school community and take steps to empower their educators. We know from research of effective private sector management that people perform best when they are given the opportunity to demonstrate leadership and creativity.

• Back policies that recognize and address teachers’ emotional needs. To build thriving schools, we must also unapologetically recognize and address teachers’ emotional needs, so they are best equipped to absorb and implement these techniques. Research on talent acquisition across sectors shows that emotionally healthy workers are more effective works, and the same is true of our schools. Strong schools start with healthy teachers, and our children need strong schools — now more than ever.

Centering the Importance of Social and Emotional Development 

We will likely not even know for years how profoundly our children have been impacted by the experience of living through a pandemic—the sense of isolation, the corrosive impact of being glued to a device from morning to night, including (especially) during school hours, and the sense of loss and sadness when sports, performances, clubs, proms, and all the other things that punctuate and give meaning to a teenager’s life are canceled or moved to a format that is a poor approximation of real life.

But many kids were already in a crisis before the pandemic. One in six DC children, according to a 2016 report, said that they had actively considered suicide. 

Academic intervention does not, by itself, address social, emotional, and mental health challenges impacting a student’s ability to learn and perform on grade level.  Test prep does not cure depression.  The health risk is real.  We must ensure that are our students have access to robust mental health services and that school leaders understand that fostering a loving learning environment is not secondary, but core, to their mission.  

As your Councilmember, I will work to:

• Establish clear and high expectations for school culture and environment and hold school leaders accountable when schools fall short.  Creating a loving environment where children’s needs are met starts at the top.  When teachers are supported, their cups are full enough to best support students.  School leaders have an obligation to not just focus on test scores and academic achievement and that cannot be the primary metric by which we evaluate their performance.  

• Establish zero tolerance for developmentally inappropriate discipline practices. Schools should be safe and loving spaces. Expert after expert states definitively that a punitive discipline model is counterproductive and affirmatively harmful. And yet, we see plenty of examples of schools doing just that. Ending these practices is essential if we want to fully disentangle our schools from the criminal justice system.

• Provide schools with sufficient funding to serve the full range of student needs.  Per Maslow’s hierarchy, schools must first address children’s physiological and emotional needs for safety in order to set the stage for intellectual development. It is my personal belief based on my classroom experience and understanding of education reform debates that too often, well intentioned policy officials who genuinely want to address achievement gaps and learning loss focus only on academic standards and fail to fully account for the emotional work that must be done in order for learning to occur. Not only does this myopic oversight undermine efforts to increase academic progress, it puts too many children, disproportionately Black and brown children, on the path to prison. A successful school is a learning community where children are richly supported. We should not lower our expectations, but we also cannot expect schools to adequately meet student needs when the District fails to provide sufficient funding to make possible. At a minimum, the Council must ensure that school-based mental health services reach all students.  

• Give teachers adequate training and support.  Teachers can play a transformative role in the life of a child, but DCPS must ensure that they have receive robust, trauma-informed training and professional development so they can better support their students. To better support our students, it is essential that trauma-informed thinking be infused throughout the system. That does not just mean adding the word “trauma-informed” to existing materials as an empty buzzword. It means that principals, school leaders and teachers need specific, skills based training, on tone of voice, on appropriate disciplinary measures, on specific techniques in structuring their classroom’s physical environment to meet the needs of students grappling with deep, often unseen, emotional challenges. That means ensuring that schools have sufficient funding to provide school-based mental health services that meet student needs.

WE NEED A MORE PRODUCTIVE RELATIONSHIP WITH TEACHERS AND THEIR UNION

It’s time for a reset. The pandemic was a fantastic opportunity to move on from the toxic dynamics that have defined education policy debates in DC, but that did not happen.

We cannot build a successful, thriving public school system in the District of Columbia without engaging — in a good faith manner — with our teachers and their union. Our educators take on such a high-stress job, for inadequate pay, because they care deeply about the children in their classrooms and because they believe in the mission — something that some policy leaders have failed to recognize.

On my first day as a teacher in Texas, I joined the local AFT affiliate, even though I knew my union was effectively powerless due to draconian anti-labor laws. I believe in and value unions, especially teachers’ unions. I also believe that we cannot tolerate a status quo where the academic outcomes for children attending neighborhood public schools in Ward 3 are dramatically different from children elsewhere in the city. I don’t see any tension there.

Real Oversight 

Over the past two years, students, parents, and educators have suffered the consequences of the Council’s hands-off approach to oversight. Communication from DCPS has consistently been terrible. Teachers and students have been forced to constantly adjust to sudden policy changes — many announced without much consultation or discussion with stakeholders.

In both this and the previous academic year, DCPS botched the return to in-person learning, in large part because the plans were poorly thought out, drafted in a vacuum behind closed doors, and absurd. There isn’t any excuse for why every school wasn’t fully equipped for outdoor learning in August 2020, let alone 2021. It is deeply shameful that DCPS made little real effort to facilitate outdoor learning when countless private schools in Ward 3 safely continued in-person instruction in tents while DCPS kids learned math and reading on Zoom and Teams. Creative thinking and productive engagement with stakeholders, might have mitigated the impact of school closures on kids and families while recognizing teachers’ health concerns and labor rights. Instead, DCPS proved itself to be insular and anything but agile; its sheer lethargy in the face of an urgent pandemic, despite months of opportunity for planning and preparation, pitted working parents, gender equity and essential educational workers against each other unnecessarily. The Council looked the other way — not wanting to come near the political football that was COVID and schools — and no one was held accountable.

As your Councilmember, I will work to:

• Restore the Council’s Education Committee.  Inexplicably, Chairman Mendelson chose to dismantle the Council’s Education Committee during the pandemic.  This move would supposedly not impact the Council’s oversight capacity, but that proved to be wishful thinking.  The Council must reestablish an Education Committee and commit to vigorous oversight. DCPS’s lack of transparency, poor communication, and lackluster planning around the return to in-person learning was truly astounding.  Heading into the third academic year impacted by COVID, how is it possible that so many schools lacked the facilities and resources to engage in outdoor learning? In the fall of 2020, parents and educators called on DCPS to develop an outdoor learning plan so that kids could return in-person, but DCPS never appeared to seriously consider the idea at scale.  It is embarrassing that, given the missteps of the past 2 years, the Council has effectively abdicated its responsibility to engage in rigorous oversight of DC schools.

• Ensure that our schools are meeting their obligations to students with special needs, English language learners, and at-risk students. A re-formed Education Committee, in partnership with SBOE and other players, must actively investigate to ensure that the needs of students with special needs are being met, that budgetary requests are sufficient, and that funds are being spent appropriately. This kind of oversight must extend way beyond simply holding hearings, although that is important. Councilmembers must engage teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders where they are. That means visiting schools over and over. Holding conversations in the community and meeting with organizations that are close to these issues. With respect to students with special needs, we must ensure that individual schools have sufficient funding and resources to serve the full range of student needs.

• Require DCPS to Produce and Execute a Real Plan for Reducing Teacher Attrition.  The retention crisis is not a new phenomenon.  According to pre-pandemic estimates from the State Board of Education, half of DCPS teachers leave within three years. By year five, that number climbs to 70%.   Some of these teachers had struggled in the classroom and received IMPACT ratings of Ineffective or Minimally Effective, but 57% of the nearly 4,000 teachers that left between 2013 and 2020 were rated Effective or Highly Effective.  Even in Ward 3, which has lower teacher attrition rates, one in five teachers cycle out of DCPS within three years. 

Schools staffed by experienced teachers have better results, both for students and for novice teachers working alongside veteran educators.  DCPS needs to come up with real solutions and deliver, just as they expect teachers and students to do each year.  

• Require OSSE to publish detailed statistics regarding teacher and principal turnover at all DC schools.  These statistics must be reported to the Council, school leaders, LSATs, and be prominently included on the DC School Report Card site and other platforms.  Whether a school is retaining or not retaining its educators is an essential thing for policymakers and parents to know.  Excessive turnover is a sign that something is not working, full stop.  

• Set aside “Retention Crisis Funds” for schools with excessive turnover. Excessive turnover is a sign that a school is in trouble.  Typically, turnover is highest at schools that already have the biggest challenges.  The scrutiny and intense pressure to turn things around and deliver results can easily destroy morale and trigger a counterproductive rush for the exits, by both novice and experienced teachers.  Retention Crisis Funds, designed to supplement and not replace other dollars, would be reserved specifically for evidence-based initiatives to boost retention.  Teacher turnover rates are driven by multiple factors and some issues may be more relevant at certain campuses—a negative, unsupportive relationship with administrators, for instance, will be a factor at some but not all schools. Thus, a first step would be to conduct a school-specific root cause analysis that can inform the specific interventions.  

• Develop Better Metrics for Assessing Student Mental Health and School Culture.  For parents, understanding a school’s culture and learning climate is just as essential as knowing the percentage of students reading on grade level.  It can be difficult, however, for parents to assess whether a school has a punitive discipline culture or whether there is a toxic relationship between educators and administrators.  Suspension rates and teacher retention figures give parents a sense, but while very important, these are just two data points reflecting a school’s culture.   

• Maintain Mayoral Control while Ensuring that Decisions are Subjected to Rigorous Oversight. It should go without saying that strong oversight is essential in a mayoral control system.  We need to do much, much better on that front.  What we do not need to do is revisit the District’s current system of mayoral control of schools.  The change to mayoral control has been a success.  Significant progress has been made in improving DC schools.  Moreover, given the importance of education, it makes much more sense to place ultimate responsibility for setting education policy and managing schools with the District’s chief executive, its most high-profile and best-known elected official.  Mayoral control means that the debate over education policy plays a central role in mayoral elections, which tend to have the most qualified candidates, the most professional campaigns, and be the subject of the most attention from the media and voters.  Put differently, it is easy for voters to know exactly whom they should blame if they are dissatisfied and want a new approach.  In contrast, candidates for state board of education are often inexperienced, first-time candidates with limited experience managing large organizations. Their campaigns are entitled to less funding under the Fair Election system and their positions, by and large, are not heavily scrutinized—except by the warring interest group factions that dominate education policy debates.  Once elected, the mayor operates under a media microscope, while SBOE members remain unknown by voters and under covered by the press. 

• Establish an independent oversight agency to audit and report school data transparently. Strong, independent oversight is essential in a mayoral control system. The Council needs access to data that is compiled and published independently from the executive in order to exercise its oversight responsibilities effectively. While I do not believe that OSSE should be that agency, given the role it plays in our system making OSEE independent would weaken mayoral control without any clear benefits, I would favor creating a new agency, either answerable to the Council or truly independent, to audit and report on academic performance and other issues. (This role could be filled by the DC Auditor, but I think it would be preferable to create an education-focused agency staffed by education experts and supported by sufficient resources.)

• Explore ways to give SBOE greater oversight power without compromising mayoral control. The SBOE can and should play a bigger role in helping the Council hold school leaders accountable. There are ways to empower the SBOE without compromising the ability of the Executive to establish and implement school policies.