Moving from Fair to Good to Great: Human Capital Leaders in DC Public Schools Reflect and Look Ahead Case Study September 2015 In March 2015, President Obama – during a conversation with urban school district leaders from across the United States – held up Washington, D.C.’s school system as an example of what was most promising in public education.1 It was a shining moment for a district with a longstanding reputation as one of the nation’s worst. For years, Washington D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) had spent more money per student than the vast majority of other districts but had little to show for it. In 2006, for example, only 12 percent of DCPS eighth graders were proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and less than half of its students completed high school. Even so, more than 95 percent of DCPS teachers received positive evaluations. Beginning in mid-2007, however, a series of major changes were launched in DCPS by new leaders who were determined to provide a high-quality education to the district’s 46,000 students, three-quarters of whom were economically disadvantaged. (See Attachment A.) And they were willing to challenge vested interests and uproot entrenched policies and practices in order to do so. Over the following years, their efforts – in particular, initiatives aimed at instilling accountability and improving principal and teacher quality – reaped results. From 2007 to 2014, math proficiency scores in DCPS rose 23 percentage points, and reading scores rose 13. (See Attachment B.) In fact, the district’s students made larger performance gains than peers in any other state in the NAEP assessments. Yet despite the progress, DCPS leaders like Kaya Henderson (Chancellor), Jason Kamras (Chief of the Office of Human Capital), Scott Thompson (Deputy Chief for Teacher Effectiveness), and Hilary Darilek (Deputy Chief for Principal Effectiveness) were keenly aware in the spring of 2015 that there was still much work to be done. Student proficiency in the district still lagged far behind other urban school systems, and large achievement gaps persisted. Moreover, DCPS’s lowest performing schools were still struggling to attract and retain great teachers. And so, even as they basked in the president’s praise, the district’s human capital leaders were taking stock and considering what their next steps should be. Part I: 2007-2010 Creating a Culture of Accountability DCPS’s reform journey began in 2006 when Washington, D.C. residents elected a new mayor named Adrian Fenty who was determined to fix the city’s woefully underperforming school system. Soon after his election victory, Fenty crafted a reform plan that stripped the elected board of education of its decision making authority and gave unprecedented control over DCPS to the mayor and his newly appointed chancellor, Michelle Rhee. Known for being a tenacious leader, Rhee had founded – and, for the past decade, led – The New Teacher Project (TNTP), where her work had focused on strengthening the teacher 1 Michael Alison Chandler, “Meeting with Obama highlights D.C. Public Schools as Leader in Reforms,” Washington Post, March 18, 2015. This case study was written by Lynn Jenkins for the Urban Schools Human Capital Academy. Copyright 2015. Please do not quote or distribute without permission from Urban Schools Human Capital Academy. workforce in urban districts. Rhee chose TNTP vice president Kaya Henderson as her deputy, whose role would include human capital leadership. Rhee and Henderson were keen to tackle their top priority: improving student achievement. But before they could make much headway in strategic work such as improving teacher and principal effectiveness, they knew they had to do something about central office. During her initial weeks in DCPS, Rhee met with principals, teachers, and parents across the district who provided countless examples of unresponsiveness and ineptness among central office staff. Repair work orders were frequently ignored, many schools lacked textbooks and supplies, teachers’ paychecks were delivered late, and more. When Rhee tried to fire central office employees who were performing poorly, though, she found that this was almost impossible because they had never been evaluated. Determined to end this untenable situation, she drafted new legislation giving her the authority to terminate central office staff for performance reasons, and the city council passed it despite union opposition.2 With her newly granted authority, Rhee fired 10 percent of the central office employees in her first year, but she emphasized that this was not going to solve the district’s problems. “What’s going to solve the problems,” she said, “is creating a culture of accountability in central office first and then everywhere in the district.”3 To that end, Rhee and her senior team moved promptly to establish a new accountability and performance management system. From now on, every department in central office would have specific goals, and progress toward them would be closely monitored. Expectations for central office employees were also defined, and a system for evaluating their performance was created. Other early central office initiatives, such as establishing a robust information management system, would take longer – but observers were encouraged to see that severe problems, which had festered for years were finally being addressed.4 Seizing a Window of Opportunity Rhee and Henderson knew from the outset that human capital reforms would be vital to their efforts to dramatically improve student achievement and eradicate achievement gaps throughout the school system. As Deputy Chancellor Henderson noted at a city council hearing in January 2009: This administration believes, in no uncertain terms, that the key lever to change in any organization is the quality of its people. With that in mind, we are working diligently to ensure that we attract and select high-caliber candidates to DCPS, create the conditions in which great people can be successful, reward those who excel, and fairly transition-out those who are ineffective or unqualified. [Our] goal is to have the highest-performing, highest-paid, best supported, most satisfied, and most honored educator force in America. Our students deserve nothing less.5 Efforts to make good on these promises began during Rhee’s first year, when she and Henderson started to shake up the existing school leadership based on evidence that many campuses lacked strong leaders. At the end of the 2007-08 school year, 39 percent of DCPS’s 131 principals left the district. The next year, 22 percent left. (Years later, a Mathematica study would validate these changes, finding that the principals who replaced those who left generated significant gains in reading and math.)6 Keenly aware of the research evidence that high-quality teachers are the most important school-based factor for improving student achievement, Rhee and Henderson were also intent on improving teacher 2 Non-union staff could choose between being reclassified as “at-will” or resigning and getting a severance payment. Union employees were not affected. 3 PBS, Interview with John Merrow, Air Date November 19, 2007, p. 4. 4 Mike DeBonis, “The Office,” Washington City Paper, November 15, 2007. 5 District of Columbia Public Schools, Testimony of Kaya Henderson, Deputy Chancellor, Oversight Hearing of the Council of the District of Columbia, Human Resources and Human Capital Initiatives, January 16, 2009. 6 Mathematica Policy Research, The Impact of Replacing Principals on Student Achievement in DC Public Schools, December 2014. DCPS Case Study 2 quality in DCPS. A recent study conducted by The Parthenon Group documented the severe challenges they faced, describing “a lack of systemic emphasis on basic teaching and learning” in DCPS. “Quality of teaching is the leading pain point,” the report stated, “and adult job-saving is prioritized over student achievement.”7 To provide the backbone for DCPS’s teacher quality efforts, Rhee and Henderson believed that a robust evaluation system was urgently needed in order to accurately assess performance among the district’s teachers. At the time, principals rated teachers based on infrequent classroom observations that were largely seen as meaningless. Teachers complained that principals lacked the time and subject matter expertise needed to assess their practice. Moreover, implementation was inconsistent, so the results lacked credibility – especially since nearly all teachers were rated as meeting expectations, even as student achievement remained very low. To lead the development of a new evaluation system, Rhee tapped Jason Kamras, a seasoned DCPS teacher who had been named the 2005 National Teacher of the Year. (See Attachment C.) Kamras became the Director of Human Capital for Teachers, a new role within the newly formed human capital department. As Kamras later reflected, the convergence of various forces provided a window of opportunity to make major changes: We had strong mayoral support and the district’s contract with the teachers union had recently expired, so we began by negotiating with the union to shift from a seniority- based system to a performance-based one. But when you stop using years of service as your primary indicator of who gets hired, who loses their position during tight budget times,8 and who gets paid more – and instead use performance – you need an evaluation system. These things go together. That’s why tackling the evaluation system was so important.9 Eventually, the new IMPACT evaluation system would cover all 7,000 school-based staff, from custodians and aides to teachers and principals.10 A new era of accountability in Washington, D.C.’s public schools had begun. Developing IMPACT From 2007 through 2009, Kamras led an intensive research and design process to develop a new teacher evaluation system for DCPS informed by input from educators. To ensure that IMPACT focused on what mattered most, Kamras and his team spearheaded the creation of a new Teaching and Learning Framework for DCPS, consisting of nine instructional practice standards.