Kaya Henderson has a great house, her own car, a good job, and she earns enough money to pay her bills. The chancellor of DC Public Schools credits her public education with enabling her to live the American dream.
It’s “exactly what a good public education is supposed to do for you,” she said.
But “Kaya the mom” says she’s worried her children won’t enjoy the same outcome, and she blames educators, parents, and policymakers for drifting away from what’s important — teaching kids a variety of life skills — toward a preoccupation with one-stop policy solutions.
“We’re concentrating on the wrong things. We are measuring the wrong things,” she recently told an audience attending the American Enterprise Institute’s Vision Talks in Washington, DC.
“We’re trying to increase test scores or we’re trying to outcompete the Finns or we’re trying … to secure our economic future. But Kaya the mom doesn’t really care about our economic future. Kaya the mom cares about whether or not (sons) Robert and Marcus are going to come home after college and live with me.”
During her 17 years in the DC public school system, Henderson said she has watched many educators and parents grow disconnected from their primary objective — changing life outcomes for young people — to fixating on “policy levers” that define education reform, like teacher evaluation, charter schools, and high-stakes testing.
“Those are all important pieces of the puzzle, but the puzzle is so much more complex than that,” she said.
Henderson, the third longest-serving schools superintendent in DC public schools since the 1960s, despite being in the job for just four years, said that education reform, “whatever that means,” has gone wrong, because reformers have forgotten what problem they are trying to solve.
“In fact, the problem that we’re trying to solve is actually a universal problem. … The problem is producing consistent quality at scale.”
But trying to “delude ourselves” into finding the silver bullet is preventing reformers from the chance to “completely reinvent how we do what we do.”
“My vision is not one where my children only know how to read and do math. My vision is one where my children and every child in the city of Washington actually know how to read and do math. They can master science and social studies. They have technological facility. They can speak a foreign language, at least one, right? They can master an instrument. They play a sport. And they might do a few other things that I haven’t thought about because that’s what a great public education provides,” she said.
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