Reply to Cardozo: XQ is it Working?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]XQ is a gimmick. When will DCPS quit chasing shiny baubles and stick to doing a good job with basic education. [/quote]

Yep, exactly. The work of improving a school isn’t so flashy. It’s hard and requires leaders with a deep understanding of good instruction, building on a solid curriculum, supported with effective PD for teachers, and consistent, supportive administrators. XQ has been a scam since it was introduced and when it started being pushed centrally, some good people just left because it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. They had tried the approach at Anacostia and Ballou and had zero academic data to support its effectiveness when they decided to scale it to more schools. The people pushing it (Chancellor Ferebee, Sarah Navarro, Paige Hoffman) had no interest in engaging with serious questions raised by staff in the Office of Teaching and Learning, but they all wanted innovation without actually understanding what supports already existed and whether those supports were being used effectively or not already. And they tried to buy off school leaders, teachers, and key central staff by sending them on boondoggle “site visits” to XQ schools in other states for inspiration. Despite my skepticism, I went on one of these trips and saw a school struggling without any kind of proper curriculum, with kids who wandered around playing on laptops without anything specific to do, with vague project-based integrated units that had very little connection to any learning standards or the disciplines to which they were supposedly aligned. The experiences of the kids and teachers described in this thread are altogether predictable but still make me sad to see it’s going just as badly as many smart people assumed it would. [/quote]

It sounds like Ferebee and his minions don’t actually know how to improve schools and are just throwing anything at them to see if something might stick. They need to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work to turn schools around. This means actually spending time in schools. Ferebee should move his office to Cardozo for a week. He would learn a lot [/quote]

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