Monday marks the end of sweet summertime for thousands of D.C. students, and the start of what likely will prove the most important year yet for gauging the successes of schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
Hundreds of teachers new to the District will fill classrooms left vacant by those who retired, relocated or were fired over the summer — about 240 — for unacceptable performance. In addition, more than 700 of D.C. Public Schools’ 4,400 teachers are on probation after receiving an evaluation of “minimally effective.”
While firing poor performers is standard in the private sector, in large school districts it has been almost unheard of because of reasons ranging from strong teachers unions to ineffective evaluation tools. Educators around the country will be watching to see if Rhee’s firings and hirings actually create better schools.
“D.C. is on the forefront” of changing schools’ outcomes by changing the adults in them, said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
The wealthier counties have always been able to focus on teacher quality, Walsh said.
“But here we’re holding poor kids’ teachers to account, too,” she said.
In addition, DCPS teachers will work under a new contract for the first time since Rhee arrived in 2007 — one that bumps them into a pay bracket nearly unmatched in urban districts nationwide. The $42,000 first-year teaching salary could jump to $70,000 for the highest-performing rookies, and the best veteran teachers could earn $140,000.
Between firing the worst teachers, paying more to the best, and convincing the Washington Teachers’ Union to sign on even as they will be held to far higher standards, Rhee has claimed her position as the standard-bearer of urban education reform. What remains to be seen is whether the changes she’s wrought will lead to the results she has promised.
Walsh said the changes won’t come immediately, explaining that a few years of intensive efforts can’t erase decades of declines.
“I’m absolutely confident that it isn’t enough,” she said. “You can’t fire 200 teachers and think you’ve solved the problem — and I don’t think there’s anyone in the school system who thinks it’s solved, either,” she said.
In addition to the new teachers, more than 30 of the school system’s 125 schools will open with a new principal. For 14 of those schools, including Anacostia, Dunbar, Roosevelt and Woodson senior highs, the new principal will be at least the second in two years.
Principals and their teachers will be met by an expected overall increase in students for the first time since the early 1970s, largely because of an influx of pre-kindergarten students and slight increases among fourth- and fifth-graders.
Rhee seemed at ease Friday awaiting an event with the mayor, touring the temporary home of Wilson Senior High at the University of the District of Columbia while Wilson undergoes remodeling.
“It’s a wildly different world” at the start of this school year, compared with her first autumns on the job, she said.
“We know every book order that’s been put in, we know exactly how many teachers are in every school,” she said, referencing fiascoes of Augusts past. “Everything is in place.”
At a nearby Target, parents shopping for back-to-school supplies voiced optimism typical of the start of the school year.
Joy Rodriguez said she’s “very proud” to have her first-grade son at Northwest’s Bancroft Elementary. A new principal who came on last year was “definitely an improvement — she’s an outreach principal, and has been great for the community,” she said.
Tosha Massey sent her kindergartener to a KIPP charter school, because “I went to DCPS and it wasn’t good.”
But her 3-year-old will enter pre-kindergarten at Southeast’s Moten Elementary.
“We’ll wait and see,” Massey said.
