Giving Compass' Take:

· Education reformers use to taut D.C. schools' decrease in suspensions and increase in graduation rates, but Lindsey Burke and Max Eden report on the fraud and failure in the D.C. schools.  Bureaucrats were pressuring schools for accountability, but accountability will only come when parents and communities are putting the pressure on the schools.

· What can parents and the community do to put pressure on schools?  How can improvements be made to D.C.'s education system?

· Read more about D.C.'s public school system.

Syllogisms have gone out of style in education, but the conclusion to this one ought to keep parents across the country up at night: (1) Washington, D.C.’s “expert driven” education reforms were hailed as a national model and emulated in districts nationwide; and (2) Most of the alleged progress in D.C. public schools turns out to have been fraudulent.

Education reformers used to celebrate D.C.’s dramatic decline in school suspensions. Then a Washington Post investigation revealed that it was fake; administrators had merely taken suspensions off the books. The same reformers used to celebrate D.C.’s sharp increase in high-school graduations. Then an NPR investigation revealed that it, too, was fake; almost half of students who missed more than half the year graduated.

For people who talk ceaselessly about “accountability,” experts have been curiously silent in the face of these revelations. Worse yet, the top-down mandates they implemented in D.C., intended to hold principals and teachers “accountable” for improving “outcomes,” have long since caught on across the country.

Read the full article about accountability in DC public schools by Lindsey Burke & Max Eden at The Heritage Foundation