I'm a DCPS Parent. Here's Why Janeese Lewis George's Big Education Plan Worries Me.

I don’t think Janeese Lewis George has any bad intentions when it comes to schools.

The councilwoman seems to genuinely care about both student and teacher wellbeing. She has a record of working on important, non-ideological issues like getting broken HVAC systems fixed so kids don’t boil on warm days. She very appropriately says her top education priority as mayor would be tackling DC’s truancy crisis.

The problem is that, for seemingly well-meaning but misguided reasons, Lewis George is planning to dismantle successful education reforms that have helped the District achieve more than a decade of progress on math and reading. Above all, she has said she wants to “end” IMPACT, the pay-for-performance system in place since 2009 that rewards our best teachers with large bonuses while cutting loose our worst.

This issue has earned oddly little attention during the campaign, possibly because it’s a bit abstruse compared to something like a brawl at Chipotle. Lewis George also tends to downplay the topic; her plans to ditch IMPACT only get a short, vague bullet point low down on her official education platform, though she’s been more upfront in interviews and questionnaires. But it’s a potentially profound change that would affect DC’s schools for years, if not decades, to come.

Lewis George has only offered a fuzzy outline of how she’d replace today’s system. But her public statements suggest we could wind up with a weaker alternative that puts less emphasis on concrete measures of student success. Speaking as a DC public school parent, that leaves me deeply concerned.

DC’s Schools Have Been Getting Better

Stepping back for a moment, I think any conversation about how to improve K-12 education in D.C. needs to start by acknowledging three basic points.

The first is that our schools obviously face some daunting challenges. We’re a large urban district where a huge chunk of children are struggling with poverty, mental health, and neighborhood violence, frequently while trying to learn English as a second language. None of that is easy to overcome in the classroom.

The second is that our schools could still be much better. Too few students are mastering fundamental skills, to say nothing of more advanced material. It isn’t tolerable that just 15% of D.C. high schoolers are proficient in math while less than 40% are in reading.

The third is that, in spite of all their handicaps, our schools have still made some remarkable gains over the last 15 years. We were the country’s fastest improving school district or state during the 2010s, measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Our students have recovered quicker from COVID learning loss than in any state with enough data to measure, according to a report released last month by Education Scorecard.

As the New York Times recently noted, reading scores in most states have crashed far below their 2015 levels — but not in DC. Instead, we’re one of five states (or state-like entities) where reading scores are now higher than they were that year. That makes us a rare good news story in a time of collapsing academic performance.

Skeptics will sometimes suggest that DC’s progress is just an illusion created by gentrification. But while it is true that the influx of wealthier white students into our public schools has helped increase test results, researchers at the Urban Institute and Mathematica have shown that changing demographics alone cannot explain the city’s gains. Just a quick glance at kids’ scores over time suggests much the same: The share of Black students scoring proficient in reading on DC’s standardized CAPE exam roughly doubled over the last decade, despite COVID. Math proficiency has improved dramatically among white 8th graders.

IMPACT has been a part of our success

That brings us back to IMPACT, which was the centerpiece of former Mayor Adrien Fenty 2007 education reforms. The idea, which was admittedly a bit more in vogue then than it is today, was to attract and retain the best teachers by treating them like other skilled professionals, pairing incentive pay with high standards.

If for some reason you want to wade deep into the weeds of how IMPACT works, you can check out this 58-page handbook. But in brief: Every year, educators are evaluated on five different measures, including their classroom teaching methods and students’ standardized test scores. Those components are then blended together into a single rating; the best performers, deemed “highly effective,” get bonuses of up to $25,000 in high-poverty schools, and $3,000 in low-poferty ones. The worst performers — the fewer than 2% each year who are deemed “highly ineffective” — are fired, with just a handful of exceptions. Teachers are also dismissed if they fall into the second lowest category, “minimally effective,” for two years running.

IMPACT was controversial from its start. The Washington Teachers Union opposed it for weakening its members’ job protections and its emphasis on test scores, among other reasons. Hundreds of teachers were dismissed after being rated ineffective during the program’s first couple years, and the backlash helped sink Fenty’s reelection campaign. It didn’t help matters that his polarizing schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, appeared on the cover of Time magazine brandishing a broom, as if she was going to sweep out some trash.

Still, IMPACT survived. And all of the rigorous research we have suggests that it worked basically as intended. The canonical studies on this issue — by teams from the University of Virginia, Stanford, and Brown — found that when teachers rated “ineffective” left schools, they tended to be replaced by better-performing educators, and students’ results improved. Even though some effective teachers exited too, turnover had an overall positive impact on achievement — suggesting the good of the policy outweighed the bad of any “instability” it created, as one DCPS report noted.

The same was true later years, after IMPACT underwent revisions that lessened its emphasis on test scores. What’s more, a separate paper found compelling evidence that the system was spurring educators who stayed in D.C. to improve their teaching skills. (Mathematica’s research also found that Fenty’s broader set of reforms, including IMPACT, bore fruit).

Nonetheless, nixing IMPACT has remained one of the teachers’ union’s major goals. Now it’s backing Lewis George, who has promised to deliver on it.

The arguments for ending IMPACT are weak

Her case for doing so strikes me as fairly flimsy.

First, Lewis George has echoed the union’s claim that IMPACT is fueling a teacher turnover crisis. Yet our retention rates have risen since the system was introduced, and are now roughly in line with other big cities. Last year, about 10% of teachers left DC’s schools; that’s below the 11.1% average turnover rate in urban school systems covered by the American School District Panel and the most recent average of 12.8% in the large urban school districts tracked by ERS.

In an email responding to some of my questions, Lewis George’s campaign also criticized IMPACT as being racially biased, based on a high-profile 2021 study by American University that found white teachers score 17 points higher on the scale than Black teachers on average. But much of that gap appears to be driven by the fact that black educators tend to work at schools in poorer neighborhoods, and you could probably erase some of the difference by giving educators more points for doing just that.

Finally, she told DC Citycast that IMPACT focuses too “punitively on test scores” rather than teachers’ “competency.” Yet only 25% of its rubric is currently based on standardized test results, compared to 50% when it very first rolled out. More than half is based on factors like in-classroom observations of a teachers’ skills and their commitment to the school community.

At most, it seems like there’s a case for reforming parts of the system, which D.C. has done in the past. But to “end” it would be a mistake.

Her plan to replace IMPACT raises questions

Again, Lewis George has not outlined exactly how she would replace IMPACT. But she has said she would collaborate with the teacher’s union on revisions. And in an email responding to some of my questions, her campaign suggested she might seek to emulate Montgomery County’s Teacher Professional Growth System:

There are plenty of alternate, effective models which use quantitative tools to support teacher retention and development. Councilmember Lewis George supports teacher evaluation models that focus on development and continuous improvement of staff. One potential model is Montgomery County Public Schools’ Teacher Professional Growth System (TPGS) where experienced teachers help train and support both novice and underperforming teachers to improve their craft. We must hold teachers accountable for student achievement (including their test scores) while leaving room for principals to identify the individual strengths and weaknesses of their staff. We want a system where teachers who are excellent stay, where teachers who can become excellent are supported in rapidly mastering their craft, and where teachers who aren’t likely to become highly effective move on to other roles better suited to their skills.

Under MoCo’s process, which it debuted in 2001 after developing it in partnership with its own local union, teachers are graded primarily based on classroom observations, and are placed on a professional improvement plan if they don’t meet certain set standards. If they fail to shape up, they can eventually face termination. But it doesn’t happen very often. As Bethesda Magazine noted, 550 teachers lost their jobs due to performance issues in the roughly two decades after the system was implemented, while another 475 resigned after a bad review. That’s a rate of just over 50 exits per year in a system that stands at 14,000 teachers today.

That Lewis George intends to keep at least some weight on test results is relieving, but we can all see where this would be headed: A much less demanding teacher assessment system where objective data on performance take more of a back seat. In general, the candidate has said she wants to cut back on testing for students too, though her campaign says it has no plans to move away from CAPE.

And look, some parents might think they prefer that. Testing fatigue is real. We all want to support our kids’ teachers, who work hard and face enormous stress.

Here’s the thing to consider: Researchers have found that most evaluation systems fail to distinguish much between high and low-performing teachers and don’t actually improve student outcomes. The vast majority of educators just get easy passing grades and move on. IMPACT is unusual in the simple fact that it was well-designed enough to succeed at identifying talent in the classroom who could do a better job helping kids learn. It seems foolish to give that up for something untested.¹

Our next mayor should obviously take the views of teachers seriously; it’s also both wrong and self-defeating to treat their unions as an adversary to squash, the way conservatives tend to. But like any large, organized group, teachers are sometimes right about issues and sometimes wrong, and you generally want political leaders who are impartial enough so that they can make a fair judgment about their demands. Lewis George, on the other hand, comes from a progressive activist world that tends to view educators and their labor leaders as the most important authorities on how we ought to run schools, and wave away contrary evidence even when their desires are in tension with parents’ or students’ interests. When it comes to education reforms, I think that impulse is leading her, and potentially the city, down the wrong path.

About the author

After spending fifteen years as a journalist, I recently became the editorial director at PPI, a center-left think tank that has championed charter schools and K-12 accountability among its many causes. Early in the mayoral campaign I acted as an informal, unpaid advisor to the McDuffie team on issues mostly related to housing policy. But I’m primarily a dad who is more or less pot-committed to living in this city and would like to see it, and its public schools, thrive. You can probably find me on weekends standing over my grill in Petworth.

Correction: The original version of this post stated that turnover at DCPS last year was 12%. It was 10%. The 12% figure covers all schools, including charters that don’t use IMPACT.

1. This would be grist for a whole other article: Teacher evaluation is not the only issue in education where Lewis-George is proposing major, potentially ill-conceived reforms. For instance, she’s supported handing additional powers to the State Board of Education that reduce the mayor’s ability to influence learning standards for students. She’s also backed the idea of giving teachers more scheduling flexibility and time outside the classroom, which if done well could benefit both educators and their students, but if done poorly could end up reducing learning time for kids.