See Ya, Kaya: ‘Legacy of Progress’?

By Guest Contributor, on October 7th, 2016

Cross-Post from The Fight Back written by Pete Tucker

This is the first in a three-part series on Kaya Henderson’s time atop DCPS.

After six years as head of D.C. Public Schools, Kaya Henderson is calling it quits Friday.

According to the Washington Post, her biggest booster, Henderson is leaving behind a “legacy of progress.”

Not everyone agrees.

Kaya Henderson and Michelle Rhee. Photo: Washington Post

Before ascending to chancellor, Henderson served three years as top deputy to her close friend, Michelle Rhee, known for mass teacher firings and school closings.

Henderson has continued in Rhee’s footsteps, albeit with less bombast.

Throughout the Rhee and Henderson years, the Post has played the role of lead-cheerleader (even collaborating on coverage). Now the Post wants the good times to continue.

Instead of conducting a search for the next chancellor, the Post’s Jay Mathews says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser should just ask Henderson to name her replacement since “she knows better than anybody what the job is.”

But after nearly a decade atop DCPS, some don’t give the Rhee/Henderson team such high marks.

‘Haters’

Improving test scores has been central to Henderson and Rhee’s claims of turning DCPS around.

But when retired DCPS teacher Erich Martel dug into the data, he found the gains were largely due to D.C.’s rapid gentrification, which has pushed lower-income African American students out, while ushering in wealthier whites, who score higher on tests.

Associated Press reporter Ben Nuckols similarly noted, “The gains in test scores have… coincided with the city becoming wealthier and the white population increasing.”

“Literally, I just got to just let this out,” Henderson has said in response to such critiques, “Haters are going to hate.”

Cheating Scandal

Within a year of Rhee’s 2007 DCPS takeover, test scores started climbing, dramatically at some schools.

While the Post was busy touting the results, out-of-town news organizations questioned them. A 2011 USA Today investigation found a higher than average wrong-to-right erasure rate the prior three years at “more than half of D.C. schools.”

Erasure rate refers to the number of changed answers on a test and can be used to identify possible cheating.

“A high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety,” Henderson said in response.

But some of the erasure rates were very, very high. At Noyes Education Campus, for example, USA Today found,

The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance.

After USA Today’s exposé, scores at Noyes dropped, according to data posted at Guy Brandenburg’s education blog.

“Real students may be fidgety and jumpy, but their scores on yearly high-stakes tests… do NOT jump around like this,” wrote Brandenburg, a retired DCPS teacher.

“Look at those scores,” wrote historian and education scholar Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. “First the soar up, then they plummet down. Nothing suspicious there, right?”

Not for D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby, who found no evidence of widespread cheating, despite only investigating one school, Noyes. The U.S. Education Department Inspector General, in a “tandem” investigation, came to a similar conclusion.

Meanwhile, DCPS failed to conduct its own investigation, even after an internal memo called for one, as PBS’s John Merrow reported at his blog.

“There have been no meaningful investigations of the evidence of widespread cheating,” civil rights attorney and D.C. budget expert Mary Levy wrote in response to the inspectors general’s findings.

“Among the top 10 DCPS erasure schools… scores plummeted at all but one by 2010,” noted Levy. “The bottom dropped out by chance at all those schools?”

Atlanta

Public schools in Atlanta experienced similar testing irregularities around the same time DCPS did. In Atlanta, however, superintendent Beverly Hall was unable to thwart an investigation.

“There’s one key difference between Atlanta and Washington,” wrote PBS’s Merrow, “the role played by the local newspapers.”

Unlike the Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution kept a spotlight on the issue.

The result? Dr. Hall and 34 educators were charged with racketeering.

The co-leader of Atlanta’s independent investigation, former DeKalb County District Attorney Robert Wilson, also followed the situation in D.C., concluding, “the big difference is that nobody in D.C. wanted to know the truth.”

‘Legacy of Progress’

As Henderson prepares to step down Friday, she does so amidst a wave of positive press, led by the Post.

“For a decade… Henderson has worked to turn around one of the nation’s most troubled school systems,” the Post reported Tuesday, pointing to “better . . . → Read More: See Ya, Kaya: ‘Legacy of Progress’?

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Resolution Honoring the Life of Brian Anders

By Liane Scott, on October 2nd, 2012

On behalf of the many friends and colleagues of longtime DC homeless advocate Brian Anders, who passed away on August 28, 2012, Empower DC Co-Founder Parisa Norouzi requested that the city council pass a resolution honoring Brian’s life. Unlike so many other requests made by members of the progressive community, the council agreed. The resolution is being sponsored by Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham and was on the Consent Agenda of the council’s first legislative session (Wednesday September 19, 2012). Unfortunately, we still don’t know when it will be presented or when (or even if) community members will be permitted to speak about Brian in memoriam.

Interview of Brian Anders by Pete Tucker on the Closing of La Casa Shelter. [haiku url=”http://www.grassrootsmediaproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Brian_Anders_2010-10-04.mp3″ title=”Brian_Anders_2010-10-04″]

As a reminder why this resolution is so appropriate, I’ve cross-postied an an audio podcast of an interview of Brian Anders discussing the closing of La Casa Shelter produced by Pete Tucker for his website The Fight Back. Following that is an article about Brian by David Zirin, that was originally published in The Nation. Perhaps after reading the article and listening to the audio you’ll find the time to call or email your councilmember and remind them to put Brian’s resolution prominently on the council’s agenda. Click here for a link to the names and addresses of DC’s City Council. Also, mark your calendar for a celebration of Brian’s life, October 13, starting at 6:30PM at the Potter’s House. More on that later.

The Last Wish of Brian Anders Dave Zirin on September 4, 2012 – 10:23 AM ET

We are all taught from birth that the world is shaped exclusively by the wealthy and powerful. The brave souls, who put their bodies on the line and organize people to pressure the powerful, are erased from the historical record. Last week, we lost one of those brave souls, and he deserves to be remembered. A man died in Washington, DC, who did more to affect change than any of the empty suits that scurry about on Capitol Hill. His name was Brian Anders, and although he’d reject this description, he was very special.

Dynamic, charismatic and razor sharp, Brian could have done anything with his life but was compelled to be a fighter for social justice on the streets of DC for nearly thirty years. The bulk of his work was focused on fighting for the rights of the homeless and affordable housing by any means necessary. If there was a protest, a speakout, or an occupation, Brian Anders was there. Brian was also an African-American Vietnam War veteran who wrestled with his own PTSD for decades and always, particularly since 9/11, made every effort to connect imperial wars abroad with the war on the poor at home. He saw the connections and put his passion, his pain and his personal history at the service of getting others to see that connective tissue as well.

Brian always reminded me of Julian Bond’s line about Muhammad Ali: “He made dissent visible, audible, attractive and fearless.”

Brian Anders worked with everyone but was associated most closely with two remarkable institutions. In the 1980s, he was at the heart of organizing at the homeless shelter CCNV (the Center for Creative Non-Violence) and over the last decade sat on the board of the social justice organization Empower DC. Both entities, due in no small part to Brian, have distinguished themselves by the fact that they don’t fight on behalf of people but organize affected communities to fight for themselves.

As his friend Kirby ably described in her remembrance of Brian, CCNV became in the 1980s “a vibrant community of anti-war and social justice activists, who succeeded, through direct action, in forcing the federal government to hand over the massive building at 2nd and D St. NW, so that CCNV could turn it into a shelter and community center for people without housing.”

CCNV’s activism was at the heart of the passage of the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, one of the precious few federal actions that has actually aided the homeless. He showed all the professional politicians what real politics could look like when removed from the lobbyists and big-money donors, and reclaimed by the people.

But Brian’s most lasting contribution was how he affected those closest to him.

Fellow Empower DC board member Farah Fosse said at a service/rally for Brian after his death, “He spoke truth to power, motivated people, worked tirelessly for justice, provided direct services . . . → Read More: Resolution Honoring the Life of Brian Anders

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Covering Education: Tucker vs Nnamdi

By Liane Scott, on August 31st, 2010

Having had parents who put a premium on education and having a daughter myself who is in DCPS, I try to follow what’s going on with the public schools. I have to admit being greatly disappointed every time Michelle Rhee makes an appearance on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show. She was on again this last Friday August 28, 2010. You can find a copy of the transcript at the following link – http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-08-27/politics-hour. A lot of what she says sounds great, but if you’re looking for specifics, you have to wait for a knowledgeable listener to make it on the air with a question.

Michelle Rhee’s Great Disapearing Act

For example, when Rhee was asked what she would do to improve special education in DCPS she gave a two paragraph answer, but the only specifics she gave came in these two sentences: “We spend upwards of $90 million a year transporting our students to a lot of private schools throughout the region. And we really need to look at what we’re doing to build the capacity within DCPS to serve a lot of those students better, so that they can attend their neighborhood schools.” So hopefully, Rhee is gonna ask her people to “look at what they’re doing,” with regard to special education. That’s reassuring, I guess.

Another caller asked about the drop in AYP test scores, which much of her reform was designed to improve. Rhee said that despite the fact that test scores have dropped, the huge gap between black and white student achievement has narrowed, has in fact narrowed significantly at the secondary level. But after looking at the statistics provided by Epsilon, the caller who posed the test score question, I’m wondering how she defines significant. According to Epsilon, “the most recent scores that came out for AYP shows that 88 percent of the schools in Ward 3 made AYP while 86 percent of the schools in Ward 8 failed. The achievements gap between blacks and whites is even more telling. The lowest achievement level for whites is at Watkins on Capitol Hill, which was 83.78 percent and then it goes up to 95.69 percent at Murch. While in Ward 8, we have Stanton School with the achievement of black — I mean, the achievement level for blacks is 12.72 percent. At Terrell, it’s 28.23 percent. At Savoy, a brand-new school, is 21.62 percent.”

I’m wondering how bad the gap was before the “significant” improvement. I also wonder if the gap wouldn’t have narrowed further and perhaps without the pain of school closings and teacher firings if Michelle Rhee and the Fenty Administration had taken a look at the funding gap between low-income schools and wealthier schools. I know that schools in DC are funded on a per pupil basis, but some pupils cost more to educate than others. No doubt, a look at the individual school budgets will verify this. Special education and special needs students, as Rhee herself seems to be aware, cost the city a significant amount of money in transportation alone. So what does it mean when these students attend low-income schools at a higher rate than wealthier schools? As far as I know, DC public schools don’t get more money for students that require specialized instruction.

How the city deals with special education students isn’t the only thing that contributes to the achievement gap between black and white students, but it is one thing that Rhee doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about. What else is she missing? Kojo Nnamdi and his guest analyst Tom Sherwood seemed more concerned about whether or not Rhee would stay on the job if Mayor Fenty loses his re-election bid. (Sounds like the answer is no by the way.) Neither of them questioned her about the controversies at Bruce Monroe or Hardy Elementary Schools. They praised the physical renovations taking place in schools on Capital Hill, but no mention was made of other schools, like Parkview Elementary (which currently houses students from the recently demolished Bruce Monroe) continue to deal with rodent infestations in the food supply. Rhee’s answers sounded like those of a politician, rather than an educational professional with an intricate understanding of the system she hopes to reform.

On the other hand, if you do in fact want to hear an educational professional willing to give detailed analysis and an honest assessment of the DC public school system, the place to turn would have to be WPFW. Reporter Pete Tucker . . . → Read More: Covering Education: Tucker vs Nnamdi

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Maturing Mortgages. Sounds Like A Good Thing, Right?

By Liane Scott, on June 29th, 2010

For the homeowner who’s been beholden to the bank for 30 years, finally paying off that mortgage is definitely a good thing. But when a landlord who has a contract with HUD to provide affordable apartments, pays off his or her debt to the bank, not everybody wins.

Everybody knows that DC has an affordable housing crisis. One source of housing for moderate and low-income residents of Washington, DC has been apartments regulated by the department of Housing and Urban Development. DC residents whose income is less than the median of $57,936 have turned to HUD for rent subsidized apartments. Property owners, looking for a good deal on a multifamily unit have bought these buildings at reduced rates. In exchange, they made the apartments available to residents receiving rental assistance. That arrangement stands for as long as the mortgage on the property is still in service, but once the building belongs to the landlord outright, he or she can do whatever they want with it. So, where does that leave the residents who live in the property?

Empower DC’s Linda Leaks is educating tenants who live in HUD properties whose mortgages are on the verge of expiration about their rights, and lobbying Congress to implement legislation that would safeguard low- and moderate-income tenants. WPFW reporter Peter Tucker interviewed her on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It’s another story that you won’t hear on the nightly news or even read about in the Washington Post, but we have it here. A Massive Maturing of Mortgages [audio:http://www.grassrootsdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Linda-Leaks-6-13-101.mp3]

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