Huffington Post Former DC Chancellors Kaya Henderson (2010-16) and Michelle Rhee (2007-10). Henderson was also deputy chancellor under Rhee.

On Dec. 5, 2016, retired D.C. teacher Erich Martel sent an investigation request to D.C.’s Attorney General Karl Racine. In short, Martel is asking Racine to investigate two issues: 1) the failure of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to follow procedure in nominating Antwan Wilson as the next chancellor of schools (Kaya Henderson left effective Oct. 1, 2016), and 2) inconsistencies in reporting D.C.’s NAEP improvement from 2007 to 2015 and the failure to report a more thorough picture of D.C.’s NAEP story by excluding info from 1998 to 2007.

Martel has painstakingly compiled his evidence and explanations in his Dec. 5, 2016 letter to Racine, which can be accessed here.

(Martel also includes the following supplemental documents: dcps-naep-tuda-2007-to-2015-11-district-comp, dcps-weberp-discov-email-1352-54, and naep_2015_sped_ell_exclusion_district-1.)

In this post, I focus on a single issue related to D.C.’s NAEP results and the shaping and selectively reporting (and outright misrepresenting) of said results in order for former D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson to be credited with making D.C. “the fastest improving urban school district in the country.”

A single issue, and it’s a big one.

DCPS’s reporting D.C.’s NAEP “improvement” only as far back as 2007 conceals the fact that D.C. was making greater gains on NAEP prior to Henderson’s chancellorship as well as that of her predecessor, the notorious and polarizing Michelle Rhee. As Martel reports:

Under Rhee and Henderson student improvement slowed dramatically. Rhee and Henderson suppressed data showing that Black and Disadvantaged students’ averages rose twice as fast from 1998 to 2007 as from 2007 to 2015; White & Hispanic averages rose four times faster.

As Tables A – D (renamed by me) show, under Rhee and Henderson, the subgroup that has made the greatest NAEP gains for D.C. is the group of students who are not eligible for free/reduced lunch: D.C.’s advantaged students.

Martel offers this summary:

Black, Hispanic and Disadvantaged students’ improvement rates were two to three times faster in the nine years that ended in 2007 than in the eight years from 2007 to 2015.

Rhee took the DCPS helm in June 2007; when she left in 2010, her deputy, Kaya Henderson, took over.

According to NAEP, they both failed. So has the mayoral control of schools responsible for both Rhee and Henderson. And what is particularly striking is that these “reformers” would rather lie to the public about their success by concealing information than confront their failure and change their corporate-reform-fed course.

I challenge D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to offer a public response to Martel’s NAEP story as publicized in this post and in my original post, and I challenge DCPS to post the full spectrum of D.C.’s NAEP results, beginning with the 1998/2000 results; to make such posting easily accessible on the DCPS website, and to use accurate numbers.

***

Longer version originally posted 12-10-16 at deutsch29.wordpress.com.

***

Released July 2016– Book Three:

Don’t care to buy from Amazon? Purchase my books from Powell’s City of Books instead.