The Washington Post’s Perry Stein reported on Tuesday about the students caught up in the inflated graduation rate mess that has engulfed DCPS:

“Taahir Kelly, a junior at Roosevelt in Northwest Washington, said he never knew accruing 30 unexcused absences in a course would automatically result in a failing grade. He has eight older brothers who graduated from the school, and they also did not realize that such a policy existed, he said.”

Tragically, there are going to be many Taahir Kellys this year.  Last week DCPS announced that the 2018 high school graduation rate is expected to be 42 percent.  Last year it was 73 percent.  That is a lot of students who, with three months remaining in the school year, are finding out that their future path is about to take a detour.  Again from the Post article:

“Kelly said he and his friends think the school’s attendance policy is reasonable. But they object to the sudden enforcement and believe the city should have waited until at least next year to adopt the tougher policy.”

The grownups in the traditional school system have let these young people down, pure and simple.  By setting low expectations and failing to hold these children accountable, they set them up for failure.  They have reignited the school-to-prison pipeline.

All I can really think about at this moment is Dr. Howard Fuller’s words at this year’s FOCUS Charter School Conference:

“On Feb. 1, 1960, 58 years ago today, four Black students from North Carolina A&T sat down at a lunch counter and demanded to be served. And by doing so they changed the course of history. And here we are in 2018: four Black students sit down at a lunch counter where they are welcomed and can’t read the menu.

Here is my question – quoting Beyonce from “Drunken Love” – How did this shhhhh happen?  It has happened because there is no real political commitment in this country to create excellence and equity for Black and brown children, particularly poor Black and brown children. And furthermore it has happened because we have allowed it to happen and continue to do so today. We talked about leaving no child behind a few years ago and now we are talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a few years there will be some new buzz words. We have conferences, give out awards, and praise ourselves for being awesome but where is the anger. Where is the outrage that year after year we continue to allow them and us to fail far too many of our neediest students.”

Three people that I am aware of have lost their jobs after it was discovered that over 30 percent of kids received high school diplomas who should not have been allowed to graduate.  This includes Jane Spence, the DCPS chief of secondary schools, who has been placed on administrative leave; Ballou High School principal Yetunde Reeves, who has been reassigned; and assistant principal Shamele Straughter, also been placed on administrative leave.  But both the Chancellor Antwan Wilson and the Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles were able to stay in their positions until the latest controversy erupted about the transfer of Mr. Wilson’s child from one school to another while avoiding the lottery.

Today, the Post’s Peter Jamison revealed that Mayor Muriel Bowser is refusing to testify under oath in front of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee about Mr. Wilson’s discretionary school placement of his daughter.  Ms. Bowser has asserted she learned of it on February 12th from the D.C. Inspector General.  Mr. Wilson now states that the Mayor was first told that his child was attending Woodrow Wilson High School last October. Councilmember Grosso, who, when he found out about the school transfer initially, said he was going to hold an emergency Education Committee meeting, now has stated, according to Mr. Jamison, that he “preferred a public hearing but might settle for some alternative.”

I’m completely out of patience and I feel that both Ms. Bowser and Mr. Grosso have to go.  If you want to know how I came to this conclusion, recall what Dr. Fuller remarked about charter schools at the 2017 FOCUS Charter School Conference:

“The strength of the charter school effort is not just our existence; it is understanding the purpose of our existence.  I support charter schools as long as they work for our children. If they don’t work, then they have no value. Work for me is more than test scores: It’s treating our kids with respect; It’s understanding all of the issues that impact them before they ever get to school; It’s confronting the issues of race and class in our facilities and in our behavior towards our children; In the rules and regulations that we set up in so many instances to control our children because we are unable to manage them. It’s recognizing that as Paul Tough said in his latest book, that poor children are capable of deep learning.”

These people have abandoned their responsibility to our children.