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Class Struggle
By Jay Mathews

Does Sousa story prove Rhee is right?

My colleague Stephanie McCrummen, a former Post foreign correspondent now on our education writing team, is not only a great journalist but has terrific timing. Her front page story today about rising test scores at Sousa Middle School in D.C. comes just at the local and national debate over the record of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee reaches a new peak.

I wished her piece could have been longer. My wife, a veteran editor at another newspaper, looked at me when she heard that as if I were a small child asking for eight more bags of candy. But I am not indulging myself in this matter. McCrummen always goes deep in her reporting. There was much more she could have told us. But this is an era of limits, even at the Washington Post, so I am grateful for the full page she got.

Hers is a tale of a very energetic and aggressive principal, the sort that Rhee has been recruiting the last three years, and the significant jump in the percentage of Sousa students testing proficient in reading and math that has resulted---from 23 to 39 percent in reading and from 17 to 42 percent in math in just a year.

I have five cautionary points to make about that. One, the Sousa starting point was terribly low, among the worst I have ever seen, so it is hard to imagine the school going anywhere but up. Two, a year is not nearly not enough time to see how well a school will do over the long haul. Three, McCrummen, as she said in the story, started working on the story knowing these gains "were the biggest of any public middle school in the city last year," so this cannot be considered a typical school of the Rhee era. Four, Rhee has given Sousa many more resources than you would find at such a small school---56 adult staffers for just 230 students. Five, the principal replaced most of the teaching staff AFTER that good first year of gains. McCrummen said he told her most of them resisted his changes, made them only because he was watching so closely, and he felt he could do better with a new team. It could have happened that way, but his story will be hard for many readers to accept.

Nonetheless, it is a good school to talk about because the principal created exactly the kind of distress among many of his teachers that has led Rhee to have such a bad reputation among many veteran educators here. Principal Dwan Jordon removed most of the teachers he found at the school when he arrived. Read the story and tell me if you think he was right. McCrummen told me she talked to eight of the teachers Jordon let go, mostly for failure to improve. She said most of them have since found jobs in other D.C. schools. They were angry at Jordon, she said, but also in many cases said they thought he was a good administrator.

The story also has a memorable quote from a teacher still at the school (I would guess not for very long) who does not accept Jordon's view that all kids can learn much if taught well. "If a teacher is sincere, I don't think everything needs to be stacked on test scores," the teacher said. "Also, it depends on the children you get."