Nightmare on the Potomac

A few years ago, I took a tour of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle outside of Prague (if you've seen The Illusionist, a lot of the scenes were shot there). After a while, it became apparent that our tour guide, while friendly, polite, and knowledgeable, was also completely insane. Not "kind of eccentric" insane but "I am the Messiah" insane. Years of living under the utter absurdity of life in the former Eastern Bloc had driven him over the edge, never to return.

After reading today's Washington Post article about DC Public Schools, I wonder how many DCPS employees are at risk of a similar affliction. More than anything, it's a portrait of a school system where common sense goes to die.

The article, which is worth reading in full, is a litany of bureaucratic incompetence. It also highlights one of the real challenges of urban school reform. When new leaders are hired, they naturally focus on reforms tied directly to classroom learning. You'll never hear a new superintendant say something like this at his or her first press conference:

"We're not going to adopt any innovative or fashionable reforms. Nor are we going to implement wholesale changes to the curriculum or recruit new learning specialists and teachers. Instead, we're going to start by getting to a basic level of competence in running this place. There are no new ideas here, we're just going to work at not doing things that will make us subject to ridicule. Only after we've gotten there--and it's going to take some time--will we move ahead with the rest."

Yet that might be exactly the right thing to do. Most people are able to keep their sanity in the face of constant absurdity, but it tends to sap their motivation and will, breeding cynicism and hopelessness. It prevent legitimate reforms from taking root. And, as the Post shows in some great graphics, it leads to a school system--pay attention, those who think demography is destiny--where the average 8th grade math score for non-poor students is the same as the average score for poor students nationwide.

Or to look at it a slightly different way--there's a gap of 23 scale score points (225 to 248) between the scores of poor and non-poor students nationwide in 4th grade math. That gap is only marginally bigger than the 19 point gap between the national average score for poor students (225) and the DCPS score for poor students (206).

In other words, poverty is drag on educational attainment, but so is gross incompetence, and the effects of the two seem to be pretty comparable. And of course, most DCPS students have the soul-crushing misfortune of experiencing both at the same time.

It's enough to drive you crazy.