Walking the Line with
Kaya Henderson
On October 1, 2016, Kaya Henderson stepped down from six years as chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools. Shortly after her resignation, The Line Editor-in-Chief John E. Deasy sat down with Henderson to talk about the reforms she led that yielded significantly better outcomes.
By just about every account, your tenure at District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) was a success. President Obama and former Secretary of Education John B. King have praised your work as an example of promising reform. What are the top three things that were critical to your record?
K. Henderson: There are three big ideas underlying our theory of change at DCPS. The first part is getting great people. I think that in many cases, school districts haven’t paid enough attention to creating an environment where you get and keep the best people. Everything from the teacher evaluation system, to the pay-for-performance system, to the professional development system, to the teacher recognition ceremonies we put in place were built to create an environment where the best people want to come and stay.
The next piece is engaging students, because school has to be a place where kids want to be, where they feel safe, where they feel happy, where they get to explore their passions and learn new things. Engaging families is also important to creating great educational experiences for young people. How you do things matters, and I think on the administrative side of school districts and schools, too often we don’t take the time to engage families and communities. But these are not my schools, these are our schools. So whatever big work we need to do, we need to do it with the community and seriously partner with them on solutions.
The third step was a rigorous academic curriculum. We made it a priority to develop a set of raised academic expectations for all of our young people. It’s all about giving kids what we refer to as rigor and joy. We wanted to make sure that in every single classroom, kids experience a rich, well-rounded curriculum.
And how were you able to accomplish putting that rigorous academic curriculum into place?
K. Henderson: Engaging teachers was the first step. We worked together for three years with the architects of Common Core to design an academically rich curriculum. Over a three-year period, we rolled out the curriculum and took time with our teachers to make them partners in the design. We tapped our very best teachers to write the curriculum with us. Our teachers felt good about the curriculum and, importantly, could communicate the benefit to parents. When teachers are confident about something, it communicates to parents that things are good. At the end of the day, all teachers want that and all families want that for their kids.
Kaya Henderson //
modeled civil discourse throughout her tenure at DCPS by seeking input from all stakeholders, encouraging transparency and setting and articulating goals that became widely understood by everyone in the district.
What was the biggest challenge that you faced at DCPS, and how were you able to overcome it?
K. Henderson: I had to do the terrible thing of closing about 15 schools in 2013. I had been a part of school closings once before that, and it was horrible. So when I was faced with having to do that again, I decided I was going to do it a very different way.
As a school district, we put together all of our best information and shared that with the community. We tried to help them understand why we think we need to close schools and what that will really mean. Then we formatted a proposal based on the data we had. But the community also has data. They have data that we don’t have. I wanted us to be open to them contributing data and helping to shape the proposal in a different way. When we have our data plus their data, we get to a better answer. So we released every piece of information that we had, from historical trends and enrollment, to what we were spending per student in a school, to what percentage of the building was underutilized. Through this effort, parents started to understand what we were trying to do and why, and we were able to craft a solution that included the school closures and consolidations, but that also delivered everything that the parents and the community wanted.
Fundamentally, I think you first have to recognize that parents are part of the solution. As a DCPS parent myself, this was an important piece for me. I think so many of us as educators are tempted to feel like we’re the experts, but in reality, every community has assets to contribute.
Civil Discourse
in Action //
2011–2012 & 2014–2015
SCHOOL YEARS
Henderson and her team worked to engage parents in new and meaningful ways, making data public and meeting parents at home. The DCPS home visit program recorded 848 visits during the 2011-2012 school year and 12,095 in the 2014-2015 school year.
You worked under multiple mayors and city councils. What best practices did you uncover for working collaboratively with different civic leaders in your city?
K. Henderson: In the first three years that I was at DCPS when I was deputy chancellor, I saw that every single constituent — from the mayor, to the city council, to parents, to neighborhood associations, to teachers — everyone had their own metrics to evaluate how well the school district was doing, and they were completely different sets of metrics depending on who you asked. It was very difficult to be successful when there were these wide variations for what success looked like.
In 2012 I decided that we were going to ask our parents and our families, “10 years from now, what do you want to see at DCPS? What should it look like?” We called this the Hopes and Dreams Campaign and we had close to 10,000 people who told us what was important to them. We took that information and set five big goals to determine how we were going to measure our success over the next five years. We set a goal around test scores increasing, a goal for our lowest performing schools to move faster, a goal around graduation rates, a goal around student satisfaction, and a goal around enrollment. These goals became a purpose that everyone in the city understood.
We were all on the same page about where we were trying to go, and we were able to bring an alignment amongst our stakeholders. People all felt like they were a part of these five goals and I felt like we had a clear destination and clear metrics.
Under Henderson’s leadership, expectations changed //
“We built a constituency now that will demand that level of academic rigor and joy. I think we’ve gotten to a place where we want to guarantee that every single kid gets what they need from their schools, not just some kids,” she says.
Any key takeaways on funding as it relates to that goal-oriented work with public officials?
K. Henderson: As a government agency, it’s really hard to fund new things. If it wasn’t in the budget last year, you have to make a strong case for why you are doing something new. And in a district where you’re trying to make a total transformation, you’re doing new things all the time. I think that cities and states have to recognize that if you want big change, you have to make some investments. You just have to.
I think that superintendents need to get savvy about where in their own budgets they can make changes, because people are not just going to keep piling money into education. They want to see that you’re being disciplined about the resources that you have. For example, we realized that at one point we were spending about $185 million on private placements for kids in special education, so we created programs in our own district instead of sending our kids to private schools. As we started to build the program internally for special education, we were able to get some of those kids to come back. Over four years, we moved from 2,200 kids in private placements to 900 kids in private placements, and from $185 million to $65 million spent on that population of students.
Then, I was able to go back to the city and show them this money that we wanted to reinvest in Public Schools, funding a “Proving What’s Possible Fund” to support innovative ideas that individual schools in our system had. Out of that program, we were able to do trial runs of different interesting initiatives throughout our district. Then, we could go to our lawmakers with an idea that had already seen success and tell them confidently that this is something that is really worth funding.
Kaya Henderson
Looking back on your time at DCPS, of what are you most proud?
K. Henderson: I think we shifted the conversation to focus on what amazing things we want for all of our kids, and we built a constituency now that will demand that level of academic rigor and joy. I think we have gotten to a place in our city where we want to guarantee that every single kid gets what they need from their schools, not just some kids. And I think that’s a good place to be.
5 Comments
Jo Ann H.
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Parents are a part of the solution. This is first a mindset which then becomes a series of meaningful actions.
Jo Ann H.
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The Hopes and Dreams campaign envisions the future- state which is critical to moving a system forward.
Juliet Correll
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I agree and the theory of change defines all of the possible scenarios or pathways to get there.
Juliet Correll
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I really appreciate how Kaya starts by making her assumptions and logic visible, and her emphasis on nurturing great people!
Juliet Correll
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Recognizing and transparently engaging the community in the change process helps to jointly form new ways of thinking and shared aspirations for the future.