With chronic absenteeism down, citywide investments soaring, and public school enrollment surpassing pre-pandemic levels, District education officials are celebrating achievements and hoping for continued growth at the dawn of the 2025-26 school year.
However, local educators like Tom Pollack note there is still a ways to go for D.C. schools, and it starts with recruiting more tutors and mentors.
“Most people in the education space certainly feel like these things are heading in the right direction, but just way too slowly, is the bottom line,” said Pollack, executive director of the DC Tutoring & Mentoring Initiative (DCTMI). “There are a lot more people that could rearrange their schedules to be able to help the one to two hours a week that can make a difference.”
In the months following the March expiration of COVID relief funds that supported the District’s high-impact tutoring program, Pollack issued a call for volunteers who can support classroom sizes of up to 30 students. As some youth continue to experience literacy challenges, Pollack said he’s focused on ensuring a path to academic success that extends beyond a child’s formative years.
“[When] students start their school career reading below grade level and struggling at math, they can easily become discouraged,” Pollack told The Informer. “When they become discouraged, they don’t work as hard, they fall further and further behind, and that’s when they start disengaging from school. That’s when ‘problem kids’ become problem kids.”
Established in 2016, DC Tutoring & Mentoring Initiative works to shape academic equity through partnerships with more than 50 regional nonprofits, and recently, some District public schools, including Malcolm X Elementary School in Southeast, where DCTMI is diverting much of its resources this school year.
As DCPS officials focus on learning acceleration, student safety and well-being, and forging college and career pathways, Pollack said that DCTMI will embark on its scaling recruitment efforts, via attracting more bilingual tutors, mentors, and volunteers across all wards.
“The more we can push volunteers into classrooms and help students learn after school, the more success they’ll have, the better able teachers will be to do their jobs, and the happier they’ll be,” Pollack told The Informer. “We can create this upward spiral of success instead of what feels like…a modest upward trajectory.”
Test Scores Show Students Still Struggling as D.C. Officials Tout Growth
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as NAEP, shows more than 60% of District students are still reading below grade level, and three out of four students are behind in math.
In Ward 1, an enclave for English language learners, students haven’t seen much progress, with English and language arts (ELA) and math proficiency decreasing by less than a percentage point.
District fourth graders remain five percentage points behind their peers nationwide, and one percentage point behind young people living in major cities. This is in spite of a 23 percentage point increase from what the National Assessment of Education Progress reported more than 20 years ago.
Even so, District education officials continue to extol what they call significant strides made in local education.
“The NAEP results tell the story of how D.C. became the fastest improving urban school district in the country, and now, how we are relentless in our work to get students back on track,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser wrote on X earlier this year.
On Sept. 4, Bowser and members of her education team converged on Stuart Hobson Middle School in Northeast for a “State of D.C. Schools” presentation that highlighted the District as a national model for urban education.”
Bowser — flanked by Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn, State Superintendent of Education Dr. Antoinette Mitchell, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Dr. Lewis Ferebee, and Dr. Michelle Walker-Davis, executive director of D.C. Public Charter School Board — touted increased ELA and math proficiency, a 15-point surge in the citywide graduation rate over a 12-year period, and parent satisfaction standing at well above the national average.
For Kihn, the data was nearly 20 years in the making for a school system unique from that of other jurisdictions.
“This remarkable achievement is the direct result…of two decades of mayoral control with council oversight and our investments,” Kihn said. “It is a reminder that when we invest strategically, we get the governance right, we hold ourselves accountable, we can build one of the strongest public education systems in the nation.”
During the latter part of last month, Kihn, Ferebee, Walker-Davis, and Mitchell unveiled the most recent results of the the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education, also known as DC CAPE.
The results, which officials described as the best in 15 years, showed student improvement in English and language arts, mathematics and science. Economically disadvantaged students across the District had higher English and language results than in years past, while more than 40% of schools also experienced an increase of at least 5% in either ELA or math. Results also showed 57.7% of students in third through eighth grades designated as proficient and approaching proficiency.
ELA proficiency increased by 3.6% percentage points from what was reported (37.5%) in 2019, while the proportion of struggling students (26.4%) dropped by 2.4 percentage points.
“We’ve got a lot to be proud of as we’ve stayed focused on this work,” Kihn said. “The future of our city depends on the success of our students, and we will keep pushing…until every family in every ward has access to the education they deserve.”
Maintaining Progress: Absenteeism, Volunteers, and More
As the District stands in the top 5% of absolute growth across the nation, Chancellor Ferebee expressed confidence in DCPS holding the “blueprint and recipe” for continued success, which includes doubling down on literacy and math investments.
Plans include establishing task forces and math boot camps, training more than 750 teachers on “the science of reading,” providing High-Impact Tutoring (HIT), developing materials and resources for instruction material, and more, along with the already adjusted curricula and course offerings in elementary and middle schools.
“[We’re] thinking about every transition in the journey for students in DCPS,” said Ferebee. “For 3-year-olds’ and 4-year-olds’ transition into kindergarten, [ensuring] they have the prerequisite skills, ensuring that our middle school experience is strong as students transition into high school…[and] the points around career and technical education.”
Additional DCPS plans to ensure student success throughout the school year include expanding safety squads, including a rollout in charter schools; “reimagining” high school to prepare students for fulfilling, sustainable careers; and fueling a chapter of growth within the charter sector.
The local officials shared a goal to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50% from SY 21-22, utilizing investments such as High-Impact Tutoring, EveryDay Labs attendance nudge technology, and a truancy pilot program in partnership with the D.C. Department of Human Services (DHS).
Additionally, Walker-Davis eased some looming concerns on cuts to the Department of Education, assuring that special education has received its funding for the year, and the public charter school board doesn’t anticipate any problems.
She also boosted the launch of ASPIRE, a new academic accountability system that will provide a “more granular look” at schools’ performance.
“This particular version of our framework allows us to look not just at the high level, but at performance at particular student groups, and also emphasize where we’re seeing the greatest growth,” Walker-Davis explained. “I’m excited about that happening, and you’ll see the first public reports on that yet this school year. “
Engaging D.C. Students Amid Current Challenges
Hannah Hong, connected schools manager at Malcolm X Elementary School, touted the significance of hands-on and one-on-one attention that programs like DCTMI provide, noting its role in supporting the underserved students coming from “very, very traumatic and violent backgrounds” in the heart of Ward 8.
In its third year partnering with DCTMI, the impact across the Southeast institution exceeds test scores and core subjects, said Hong, as many students benefit from mentorship that rebuilds confidence in academic abilities, personal goals, and instills themes of consistency and transparency particularly needed in the 2025-2026 school year – which kicked off amid a federal occupation and heightened law enforcement throughout D.C.
“We haven’t seen the armed forces in our neighborhood, but we know that it’s out there,” Hong said, while emphasizing the role of social media in what elementary students are exposed to. “They might not be able to understand the full depth of the scope of it, so our staff is willing to have those conversations and try to communicate and explain in a way that the students can understand.”
During the Sept. 4 briefing, Kihn and Bowser noted that, as of now, attendance is “about the same level” as this time last year across the District, with no signs of increased absences due to concerns of ICE agents infiltrating minority neighborhoods – or academic institutions.
Kihn further clarified that DCPS does not track data on whether “students are documented or not,” making it unlikely to ever directly correlate an increase in absences to the presence of ICE.
“I think it stands to reason that if people are concerned about ICE, then they’re making decisions every day about their daily lives,” Bowser added, noting that principals and staff are continuously reaching out to “any families that we expect to see at school.” “I think we might expect to see different activities at schools – I don’t know, however, if that also means students.”
A longtime education advocate, Pollack told The Informer molding future leaders is a task best served in the classroom, but the mission holds part of the solution “to what ails the country now.”
In doing his part, the DCTMI director shared plans for weekly appearances at festivals, farmers markets, and other large gatherings in hopes of recruiting more “changemakers” directly in the neighborhoods, while amplifying the path to a brighter future for all communities.
“If ordinary people take a little more responsibility for their community, recognize how interconnected we all are, it will be a different world politically, economically, environmentally, socially,” he explained. “We can create a just, a much kinder and wiser civic culture that can help sustain us through what could prove to be a couple difficult decades ahead.”