Testimony of Danica Petroshius – Committee on Education Roundtable Graduation Rate Accountability – December 15, 2017

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today at the Roundtable on Graduation Rate Accountability. I am Danica Petroshius, a parent of a second grader and a fourth grader at Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan (CHML) and a co-Vice President of CHPSPO.

As a future high school parent on the outside looking in on this topic, I’m so glad to learn so much from the student, parent and community testimony today. We have an opportunity to take this entire situation and all we are learning and finally tackle the high school challenges in our city. My message to the Council is: now is the time for strong, consistent, heavy-handed oversight and leadership. My message to the Mayor and her Administration is: shame on you. These practices and policies were known and you turned your back on our city’s high school teachers, parents and students and let them down, missing opportunities along the way for progress. The solutions moving forward should not just to focus on attendance and graduation rate policy. Accountability measures are for keeping an honest dialogue going – they are not substitutes for new resources and improvements in teaching and learning. We need more support and more attention to all of the factors that influence high school success.

From my vantage point, I see the following key problems:

• Teachers testified as early as March 2017 about the issues at Ballou and city leaders didn’t listen – you only listened when media reported on it;
• The Mayor and Chancellor made rising graduation rates more important than ensuring students are being supported, engaged and taught well, caring more about city leader reputation than our students’ futures; and
• The Mayor’s response to have OSSE – one of the agencies that manages the data in question – oversee a limited investigation into Ballou is unequivocally the wrong response if you want full transparency and change.

The evidence of the city’s failures is clear. We hear city leaders herald high and quickly increasing graduation rates.

In a November 6, 2017 press release, Chancellor Wilson said, “DC Public Schools is thrilled to see six continuous years of progress with rising graduation rates, DCPS has made great strides in the last few years to prepare students for postsecondary success…”

We have heard them try to minimize the Ballou story by talking about increases in PARCC scores.

On November 29, 2017 in a letter, Chancellor Wilson said, “We have…made progress across the city on several measures including the PARCC assessment…”

In isolation, these data points sound promising and I don’t deny us the opportunity to celebrate successes. But when you unpack both data points together for high schools, you get a different, troubling story. While I believe that we need many more indicators than just graduation rates and test scores to tell the story of a school, I also believe that just these two data points should have been signals to our city leaders a long time ago to sit up, take notice and start to ask questions and act.

In DCPS, 13 of our 19 high schools have graduation rates above 60% in the 2016-17 school year. However, in that same school year, only 1 DCPS high school had more than 60% of students achieving at levels 4 and 5 (the college and career ready standard) on PARCC in math. And only two high schools had more than 60% of students achieving at levels 4 and 5 in English Language Arts. Of our 19 DCPS high schools, a whopping 10 high schools had zero or one percent of students at levels 4 and 5 in math; and 10 of our high schools had 10% or less college and career ready in ELA. If you take out selective high schools, almost all of the scores are in single digits. This is a significant crisis of equity and broken trust. I’ve attached the data. Anyone can get this data, it’s public available and easy to find. And it’s been available to all of us for a long time.

It doesn’t appear to be any better in our charter high schools. 12 of the 16 charter high schools have graduation rates above 60% yet the percent of students achieving a college and career ready standard on average is 22% in ELA and 13.5% in math.

I’m not saying this is the perfect test for judging whether a high school is successful for students. But it certainly makes me want to learn more and not to sit by and be complacent. The moral of the data is not that students are failing. The moral of the data is that:

• when tests scores are terrible and graduation rates are high, it’s a loud signal that we need to take a look immediately because there is likely something wrong and we may be failing our students;
• since this data is publicly available, none of us – not the Mayor, not the Council, not the Chancellor, not the State Superintendent – should have been surprised by the NPR story;
• the same issues are present at other high schools in both the charter schools and DCPS, not just Ballou High School;
• this is a system that has gotten complacent and focused only on headlines that make our elected officials look good; and
• we need to do something now to forward an honest dialogue and not let up until significant change is made.

I ask that the Council do better than the Mayor did. Insist on a full, independent investigation that is not run by any agency that has decision-making power over the schools. Investigate charters and DCPS for practices and policies that affect our high school success. Provide full transparency. And dig in and provide ongoing, intensive oversight. Only when we truly know where we are can we come together to develop the solutions that will turn the corner.

I am not testifying to blame or tear down the system. I am a believer in the potential of DCPS and I work countless hours to help it succeed. But we all need to be able to have confidence in the system and its leaders. I stand with the students, teachers, principals and parents who want to get this right. Councilmembers, I hope you will join us. Thank you.

DCPS High Schools