Impact of 2007 DC School Reforms

Faced with a struggling public school system, the District of Columbia (DC) took a significant step toward school reform with the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA), implemented before the 2007-2008 school year. PERAA led to numerous reforms that changed nearly every aspect of DC public schools, including school governance structures, human capital policies, leadership, and resource management. Because of these broad changes and the need to inform continuous improvement of DC public education, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has called for an evaluation of the impact of the PERAA reforms.

As a contributor to the DC Education Consortium for Research and Evaluation (DC-EdCORE), Mathematica will provide descriptive statistics about the retention of effective teachers, the distribution of teacher quality across schools and wards, and the experience and tenure of principals. Additionally, we will examine trends in the effectiveness of DC public schools’ teachers over time. These analyses will contribute to a series of reports on PERAA and complement the work of other partners in DC-EdCORE, including American Institutes for Research, Policy Studies Associates, and RAND.