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D.C. schools are fastest improving

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You don’t hear a lot of good news about public schools in Detroit or Cleveland, but they rank among the fastest-improving urban school districts, according to a study by the Council of the Great City Schools.

District of Columbia schools are improving faster than any other city system, the study found, reports Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week. Miami-Dade and Boston continued to improve. So did Cleveland, Dallas and Detroit.

“The study . . . takes into account the changing demographics of students in each city over time to rule out other factors that are often cited for academic gains or losses,” writes Sawchuk.  For example, D.C. isn’t getting better just because it’s enrolling more affluent students in gentrified neighborhoods.

Test scores for students in big-city schools lag behind the national average. But gaps are closing in some places.

While Detroit “became dramatically more effective at boosting learning between 2009 and 2019,” Philadelphia is slipping, writes Sawchuk. Houston “lost ground,” but is “still outperforming expectations.”

What effect will remote education have on urban students? Many have had very little in-person learning since March, 2020. In Texas, which has released its end-of-year test scores, “the pandemic erased the last seven years of academic progress,” writes Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute. Remote-ed students did worse.

D.C. also leads the nation in charter school quality and access, according to the Educational Freedom Institute‘s new charter ranking approach.

Looking just at value added in reading and math, charter schools in Rhode Island, District of Columbia, Tennessee and Louisiana produced the largest learning gains for students, relative to their peers in traditional public schools. Nevada ranked at the bottom in learning gains for both reading and math.


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