Closing a School, Opening a Door for PK-3

Just seven months into her tenure as Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), Michelle Rhee faces a major test over her plan to close 23 underenrolled public schools. After years of enrollment losses to charter school competition and families leaving the District for the suburbs, Washington, D.C. desperately needs to consolidate its school facilities to match capacity to enrollment. But parents and community-members strongly oppose closure of their neighborhood schools. [slideshow]

The case for school closures is typically made in economic terms: excess facilities are a financial drain on the District and underenrolled schools lack the resources to deliver quality educational programs. But school closure–and the resulting restructuring of remaining schools that absorb students, teachers, and in programs from closed buildings–also offers an important opportunity to catalyze reform.

Specifically, Rhee should take advantage of school consolidation to transform DCPS’s hodgepodge of early elementary program into a network of PK-3 academies offering children a high-quality, aligned early learning experience. How would this happen? More than half of the schools Rhee has proposed closing are elementary schools. The students they currently serve (as well as teachers currently working in those schools) will transfer to more than a dozen other elementary schools. Making this happen will require significant increases in capacity at new schools; more importantly, Rhee and her team must support principals at the newly expanded schools to build a cohesive faculty united around shared educational goals. A focus on PK-3 reform offers a vision for doing that, and the transition caused by school consolidation provides an opportunity for implementing a PK-3 reform agenda.

What would PK-3 academies entail? Two key elements–universal pre-k for 3- and 4-year-olds and full-day kindergarten–are already in place at many DCPS elementary schools. And legislation currently before the city council could–if key changes are made–help support a PK-3 reform agenda by providing much-needed resources to further expand DCPS pre-k offering to serve all children who need them. PK-3 academies would also offer small class sizes in grades PK-3.

These features are important–but the most important part of a PK-3 reform strategy involves creating communities of practice around coherent and shared expectations for curriculum, instructional practice, and student outcomes in each school that are aligned across all classrooms in a single grade level and from grade to grade so that each new concept builds on students’ existing knowledge in an ascending ladder of learning. Such communities must be supported by high-quality, aligned professional development, including observation and feedback that helps teachers improve the quality of their instructional and emotionally-supportive interactions with children, as well as plenty of time for teachers to work and plan together in grade-level and multi-grade teams. School culture and professional development encourages everyone–administrators, teachers, parents, even children–to focus together on a shared outcome goal: grade-level proficiency in core academic subjects by the end of third grade, as well as social and emotional competencies needed for success in school and life.

Creating such communities is hard work. But it’s essential if DCPS is to achieve Rhee’s lofty goals for its students. A shared PK-3 reform vision, implemented by an effective principal, can be a critical tool in catalyzing schools towards this goal. Further, a strong PK-3 vision can help make the case to parents for how their children will benefit from school closures in tangible ways. And Rhee doesn’t have to look far to see examples of this in practice: A PK-3 vision helped turn around Baltimore County’s Deep Creek Elementary School, and neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland, has used a PK-3 strategy to boost student achievement in schools serving its most at-risk students.

Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty’s staff have expressed a desire to use consolidation to create more PK-8 schools in the District, which they believe would do a better job of offering challenging academics and an emotionally and socially supportive environment for kids who currently struggle in the District’s too-often abysmal middle schools. But, in creating these schools, Rhee and her staff should pay at least as much attention to the PK-3 side of the equation. That’s where children must build the critical skills they need to succeed in the middle grades, so if we don’t get reform right there, what kind of building we locate middle grades students in becomes meaningless. Moreover, implementing distinct PK-3 academies within PK-8 schools can help address the concerns of parents who fear mingling their little ones with middle school-aged students.

A host of factors currently at work in the District of Columbia–Council legislation to expand pre-k offerings, school closures, efforts to restructure failing schools, a move towards PK-8 schools to replace troubled middle schools–could potentially catalyze real improvements in early elementary education: but only if Rhee seizes the opportunity to implement an aggressive PK-3 reform agenda.