Josh Boots: At 24 campuses serving low-income students, the well-worn narrative about DC schools is wrong

A Washington Post columnist wrote something earlier this year that I keep handy because it encapsulates so well a prevailing but erroneous impression of DC schools: “The District’s public school system,” columnist Petula Dvorak wrote, “has a distressingly small number of fantastic schools, some acceptable ones and a lot of schools with résumés that go from mediocre to tragic.”

Professionally, I spend my days (and a lot of my nights, if I am being honest) poring over data about DC’s public schools and students for the nonprofit I lead, EmpowerK12. My colleagues and I dig into the numbers daily to help schools get better. Yes, our city has many schools in need of major improvements, but close examination of the data uncovers many bright spots often hidden to those narrowly focused on overall school proficiency rates.

Good schools run on data. Please do not take that as an impersonal statement. Of course, people are the primary drivers of school success. Students work hard for teachers and principals whom they know, love, trust and respect — and who give them the same in return. However, the information that schools collect reflects on the adults in charge. For instance, where you see extraordinary student achievement, you are virtually guaranteed to find an extraordinary principal leading that school. Where you see students excelling in one classroom and a similar group of students floundering in another classroom, there is almost certainly a teacher who needs support.

Data points allow us to see patterns; patterns help us make predictions.

Stubbornly, one measure of demographics in DC schools — the percentage of students classified as “at-risk” — continues to be closely aligned with school outcomes. An at-risk student is a child whose family qualifies for public assistance, who is placed in foster care, who is homeless, or who is a high school student over age for their grade. Life can be exceedingly hard for these kids, and they represent almost half of students in DC’s traditional public schools and charter schools.

When you chart a school’s percentage of at-risk students against its performance on standardized tests — DC uses tests from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC — you find a tight correlation. Draw a line through the dots that emerge all over the city, and you find the lowest-performing schools often have the highest enrollment of at-risk students.

The correlation stands to reason — except it’s not true in a set of public schools that 6,700 DC students attend.

These two dozen DC public schools — District-run and charter — veer from the trend line. EmpowerK12’s analysis found that the proficiency rates of at-risk students in these schools were higher than those of at-risk students attending DC’s most coveted schools in higher-income neighborhoods. (On the flip side, there are schools serving highly advantaged populations that significantly underperform relative to expectations. But that’s a topic for another column.)

We call these exemplars Bold Performance schools, and DC education officials and EmpowerK12 honored them earlier this month at an award ceremony. No local media accepted our invitation to attend or even noted the honors. (The DC Line did post our press release and invite us to write this commentary.)

Together, the Bold Performance schools educate 8 percent of students in DCPS and charter schools. Fifty-eight percent of the students at these 24 schools are considered at-risk. Twelve of the Bold Performance award-winning and honorable-mention schools are located east of the Anacostia River in Ward 7 and Ward 8, three in Ward 6, five in Ward 5, two in Ward 4, and two in Ward 1. See, they are not hard to find.

When a columnist at our region’s largest newspaper dismisses schools like these, I get mad. Just as I keep the quote on my desk, I hope everyone who shapes the narrative about our public education system will keep the Bold Performance list handy and seek to learn from these schools.

Here they are, in alphabetical order:

• DC Prep Benning Elementary School (Ward 7),
• DC Prep Benning Middle School (Ward 7),
• DC Prep Edgewood Middle (Ward 5),
• Friendship Blow-Pierce Middle (Ward 5),
• Friendship Chamberlain Middle (Ward 6),
• H.D. Cooke Elementary (Ward 1),
• Ketcham Elementary (Ward 8),
• KIPP Heights Elementary (Ward 8),
• KIPP KEY Middle (Ward 7),
• KIPP Lead Elementary (Ward 6),
• KIPP Promise Elementary (Ward 7),
• KIPP Quest Elementary (Ward 7),
• Marie Reed Elementary (Ward 1),
• Rocketship Rise Elementary (Ward 8),
• Thurgood Marshall Academy (Ward 8),
• Truesdell Education Campus (Ward 4), and
• Washington Leadership Academy (Ward 5).

Honorable mention goes to seven additional schools that nearly made the cut:

• Barnard Elementary (Ward 4),
• Friendship Tech Prep High School (Ward 8),
• Ingenuity Prep (Ward 8),
• KIPP Spring Elementary (Ward 5),
• Noyes Education Campus (Ward 5),
• Stanton Elementary (Ward 8), and
• Walker-Jones Education Campus (Ward 6).

These schools and the people who lead, teach and learn in them are showing the way, and we should show them some love.

Josh Boots is executive director of EmpowerK12, a nonprofit that helps DC public schools and public charter schools implement data-driven instructional practices. More information about the Bold Performance Award winners is available at empowerk12.org/bold-performance-schools.