What DC Schools Won’t Report: Many NAEP Subgroup Gains Slowed under Rhee/Henderson
On December 05, 2016, retired DC teacher Erich Martel sent an investigation request to DC’s Attorney General Karl Racine. In short, Martel is asking Racine to investigate two issues: 1) the failure of DC Mayor Muriel Bowser to follow procedure in nominating Antwan Wilson as the next chancellor of schools (Kaya Henderson left effective October 01, 2016), and 2) inconsistencies in reporting DC’s NAEP improvement from 2007 to 2015 and the failure to report a more thorough picture of DC’s NAEP story by excluding info from 1998 to 2007.
Martel has painstakingly compiled his evidence and explanations in his December 05, 2016, letter to Racine, which can be accessed here: dc-ag-investigation-request-dc-chancellor-search-16-1205
(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 issues related to DC’s NAEP results and the shaping and selectively reporting (and outright misrepresenting) of said results in order for former DC Chancellor Kaya Henderson to be credited with making DC “the fastest improving urban school district in the country.”
NAEP is primarily a state-level assessment; however, in 2002, NAEP began administering a “Trial Urban District Assessment” (TUDA). NAEP TUDA was administered to six districts in 2002 in reading and writing and has grown to include 21 districts in math and reading by 2015. DC has participated in NAEP TUDA since 2002. However, DC is both a “district” and a “state” as far as NAEP is concerned; therefore, DC has scores for reading that go back to 1992 (grade 4) and 1998 (grade 8) and scores for math that begin in 1992 (grade 4) and 1990 (grade 8). (Those scores can be accessed using this NAEP search engine.)
One major issue with the sale of DC as “the fastest improving school district in the country” is that the 2015 NAEP results reported on DC Public Schools (DCPS) website have been misreported in a manner that makes two of the four 2007 scores appear lower than they actually were. Thus, the 2015 scores falsely show What DC Schools Won’t Report: Many NAEP Subgroup Gains Slowed under Rhee/Henderson | deutsch29:
