A Back-to-School Special: Mary Levy Discusses DCPS’s de Facto Segregation, Lack of Transparency, High Turnover and More

The DCPS school year is under way and many students are adjusting to an unfamiliar environment. They’re not alone. A surprising number of both teachers and principals are also completing their first month at their new digs. What impact DCPS’s high teacher and principal turnover has on students is less than clear, like most things with the school system.

Mary Levy is a DCPS budget expert. Her work sheds light on some very dark places. In an extended interview, directly following her Sept. 7 testimony at a D.C. Council hearing on middle schools, Levy discussed DCPS’s increasing de facto segregation, Teach for America, charter schools and more. She began by talking about the lack of transparency in the budget, which she says has gotten worse over the years, despite the internet.

“I think it’s shocking. I’ve been in this business for thirty years and we always complained that we didn’t have good budget information and the Council and the mayor complained bitterly about it… [T]echnologically, it was a lot more work for the school system to produce this information [in years past]. But they did better then. If someone had told me back in 1980 or 1990, that it was going to be worse in the future, I would’ve been astounded. How can it be worse? Well, I found out.”

Thanks to a hard-charging Council chair there was a brief moment in which a bright light was shown on DCPS, but last year’s election brought that to an end, Levy noted.

“[Then-Council Chair Vincent Gray] got a lot of information. As of the spring of 2010, I have very good budget information because Mr. Gray had asked for it and then he posted it on the Council’s website… But that came to an end when he was elected mayor. This has been a great disappointment because I truly expected that he would just open it all up, and I really don’t know why he won’t.”

Levy offered a present-day example of how this lack of transparency results in uncertainty about where large sums of money end up.

“[The DCPS budget] had a $77 million increase this year and yet they cut spending in the local schools. We do not know where that extra money is going, but they moved a number of functions out of central office accounts and charged the schools for them, while cutting the schools’ per-pupil funding. So there’s a tremendous amount of money some place, but I haven’t been able to find out where.”

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk from councilmembers and others about the importance of creating strong neighborhood schools. In a city like D.C., where neighborhoods tend to be racially and economically segregated, neighborhood schools are likely to reflect this reality, thus they’re likely to experience de facto segregation, Levy explained.

“The city’s demographics are really changing. My concern is that because of the way the real estate market works that we’re going to continue to have mostly white neighborhoods in some places, maybe mostly black neighborhoods in other places, and then neighborhoods that are integrated, but only temporarily because the middle class black population gets priced out.

“In fact, I have been told by one principal that her school, which is sort of upper northwest, but east of the park, has been losing its Latino students because their families are priced out. They can’t afford to live there anymore. I’d love to see those neighborhoods continue to be diverse, but I’m not sure the real estate market will permit it. Now, of course, if we have mostly de facto segregated neighborhoods and we have neighborhood schools and that’s where people have to go, then most people will be in de facto segregated schools. And it’s not just by race, it’s also by class and income.”

Levy discussed DCPS’s high teacher turnover rate, which has been a hallmark of the Michelle Rhee/Kaya Henderson era.

“We lose half of our new teachers, our new hires… within two years of their hiring. This is, of course, expensive because it costs money to recruit. We have a lot of teachers in their first three years of teaching. We have a lot at the high end, [too], and very few in between. This does not bode well for the future.”

“[A teacher’s first years are not just about] learning how to teach, but it’s also learning how to manage a classroom. When I was a child, our schools were run like prisons. Classroom management was not much of an issue because they were run like prisons. We don’t do that anymore, and we shouldn’t. But the genie is out of the box and if children are not motivated they can take over… It’s a very great waste to have most teachers leaving after a few years, and the rate has been rising steadily.”

In addition to teachers, DCPS churns over principals at an alarming rate, Levy explained.

“For some years, people would call and say, ‘Can you tell me what a good school is that’s not in rich neighborhood, but does well?’ So I would sort of look for schools like that. What I observed [was] that the outlier schools tended to have principals that stayed for a long time and they built a faculty with whom they could work and they built a consistent approach across the school. Teachers generally liked them very much and the students did much better than would be predicted by their background factors (for example, schools that had a lot of children with limited English proficiency, schools with a lot of low income students, particularly kids who came from public housing, who are generally the poorest of the poor).

“That just doesn’t happen anymore. Every year, at least 25 percent of our schools open with a new principal in place. And having a great principal is probably even more important than having a great teacher in every classroom because a great principal can make mediocre teachers into good teacher and good teachers into excellent ones. And now that you have [the controversial Impact evaluations in place], that’s very important because the principals do three evaluations a year of teachers, so you want to have a really high quality principal in every school. One who will recognize excellence, who will build a team, who will be fair… I don’t see how we can get that with the kind of churn we’ve been having. Many of the principals that Michelle Rhee brought in have left.”

Levy, who was initially a supporter of Teach for America, shared some of her concerns with the program, which some mockingly refer to as Teach for Awhile.

“When Teach For American first came to the District I was enthusiastic about it because I thought it would attract some good people into teaching and fill holes because that’s really what Teach for America started out as. They were recruiting what they called top college graduates who would be in a school in place of substitutes… But I think Teach for America has changed because it’s expanded so much and they now seem to be into replacing teachers, not filling holes. And there’s just too many of them that move on… Their commitment [is just] two years, so you can’t really blame them. I think we would be much better off if we called for four or five years commitment because [increasingly] it’s just a resume builder.

“But I also think that the people who come from these elite colleges and universities are the kind of people who don’t really want to accomplish their goals, however unselfish, one classroom at a time. I give the example of one of my daughters who had a double major in American history and social work and at the end of undergraduate school [she said], ‘I’m not going to be a social worker ’cause I can’t do this one case at a time. I want to do something systemic. I want to fix the system.’ I think that’s a way a lot of the Teach for America teachers are, they want to have a bigger impact. And in all fairness, when you look at the state education, you can see that there are some things that need to be fixed, systemically, but that doesn’t help the kids in the classroom, right now. I think that we need teachers who will stick with it.

“I think Teach for America has gotten too big. I think it concentrates too much on elite schools… Does your typical graduate of Yale know what to do with a Ward 8 school? Probably not… I think they need to look a lot more to the kinds of communities that are those of the children themselves. I mean, let’s maybe look at some teachers from Morgan State who grew up inner city Baltimore or inner city DC. I think they would have an easier time figuring out how to relate to the kids than your typical graduate of Harvard or the University of Michigan or places like that.”

Levy discussed how she came to be a leading DCPS budget analyst and watchdog.

“Well, originally it was my own children. They were in D.C. Public Schools, in first and third grade, when we had a big fiscal crisis. The school got turned upside down and I had been doing education finance lawsuits in Maryland and New York, so I stepped in as someone who knew about financial matters. I wanted my children to have more, but I also wanted other children to have more. I worked for probably the country’s leading small civil rights firm, which was right here in Washington, D.C. and I just felt strongly about equity for all children.

“The work itself was more fun than the Sunday crossword puzzle in The New York Times. I genuinely like to pour over data. I was originally trained as an academic before I went to law school and I love doing research and I love looking at the data and hunting for the truth. And I can do that. So that’s one of the things that keeps me going.

“But also I have to say that I receive an enormous amount of appreciation… I think about moving on since I’m now unemployed. I may eventually have to go to my fourth career, this is my third. [But then I think about the] parents who come up to me and they thank me and they say they really need me to keep doing this. And I enjoy the work and I feel like I’m needed. I never have done the work for a paycheck, not that I didn’t need one, [but] that wasn’t why I was doing it… I thought I was extremely lucky to have a job where I was eager to go to work in the morning, even though I hate to get up. So that all keeps me going. And the appreciation is an important part of it. People come up and they hug me, so I say, ‘Well I must be doing them some good.'”

Related Stories:

• School Reform in Black and White: The Fight to Save John Burroughs, 2/3/11
• Courtland Milloy vs. the Washington Post, 10/4/10
• Michelle Rhee Unedited and Unapologetic, 9/14/10