D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray stood before a group of high school students Saturday and defended pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into school building renovations while the students inside struggle to bring up languishing test scores.
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Students gathered for a Youth Town Hall at Woodrow Wilson High School expressed concerns on a wide range of subjects: from the number of community service hours given for donating blood, to college scholarships and the overall quality of the District’s education.
Fifteen-year-old Camilo Rivera, a student at the Lab School of Washington, worried that Woodrow Wilson High’s $115 million in renovations wasn’t enough to improve learning.
“I fear these are just cosmetic changes. We are giving students a graphing calculator but not teaching them to use it,” Rivera said.
But Gray told students that he felt D.C. schools were “on the right path.”
“The improvements in the building — they are cosmetic changes, but I think they’re important cosmetic changes. For me, walking into a place that feels good gives me a positive attitude about what you’re going to do there,” Gray said.
Gray pointed to his administration’s efforts to develop a new, city-wide curriculum, hire talented principals and teachers, expand pre-kindergarten programs and improve the Summer Youth Employment Program as reason to hope for future improvement.
“It’s going to change. It won’t be as quickly as we would like it to, because it took many, many years to get to this point, but this city is committed to being able to turn around the educational outcomes of our kids,” Gray said.
Gray praised the District’s charter schools for “giving families a choice” and Impact, the District’s controversial teacher evaluation tool created by D.C. schools chief Kaya Henderson.
“I think [Impact] is something that will continuously improve,” he said. “I think it will continue to get better. The most important thing is that we have committed to measuring teacher performance.”
