On March 26, 2026, the DC Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education published remarks from Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn at the State of D.C. Schools, 2024-25 release event:
The state of schools in Washington, DC is strong. We beat ourselves up all the time because we ask the question, is it strong enough? And the answer to that is, of course, no. But the state of the schools is strong and getting stronger every single year. We have a lot to be proud of.
How do we know that the state of the schools is strong? When I think about our strength, I think about teacher retention, which is now up at 78% same school retention across the city. While across the country, high-need schools usually see about 30% or more of their teachers leave every year.
Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth. This year, we saw 3.6% growth in ELA [English Language Arts] and Math in our very rigorous DC CAPE [Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education] assessments. You’ll recall last year, on NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress], we learned that DC as a location was the same or better across all four of the tested areas, unlike the country that saw declines. So, our academic achievement remains strong.
And of course, our graduation rate is remarkable. This year, we’re up at 78.7%. In 2011, it was just over half. That’s 26 points over that period of time that we’ve improved. Think of the number of young people now who are walking across the stage because of the work that we’re all doing.
Now, of course, it’s not just enough for us to say the state of the schools is strong and reflect on it. We have got to ask the question, why? Why have we seen this dramatic improvement across our city in our public schools? We have to ask why, because if we don’t understand why, or have a perspective on that, we are not going to sustain the things that actually are working. We are at risk of abandoning the drivers of our success. And so today I want to share a couple of reflections on why I think the schools have been improving.
First and foremost, of course, is the incredibly hard work of teachers, leaders, and entrepreneurs. Recently, I have, as many of you, been celebrating Susan Schaeffler’s tenure at KIPP DC. And when you listen to the stories of 2001, 2002, schools in church basements, anti-Charter advocacy, and a split City Council, it is remarkable the work that went into creating the system that we now take for granted.
Leadership is another core element of why we’re here. We have seen remarkable leadership over the last 30 years in the city, in our Mayors, in council, amongst our systems, at schools. Leadership is courageous. Leadership is as good as its people. We’ve been very, very fortunate.
Another important reason for our success is, of course, the money. The city has monumentally invested in our public schools. In the past decade, that investment has doubled to $2.8 billion. And if you account for enrollment increases, we have increased our per-student funding 75%. I’m not an economist, but that’s quite a bit higher than inflation. And that’s an incredible investment in our young people.
Now, the money, of course, only matters if you spend it well. And I would argue we have been spending it well. We have a best-in-class per-student funding formula that is no accident. Our money follows our students, contributes more to those with greater needs, and goes to wherever they choose to go in our system. We have invested in our young people.
Our teachers’ starting salaries are the highest in the country. The highest. We respect and honor our teachers. And we have made very important investments in structured literacy, high-impact tutoring, and other things that we do as a system. So, we’ve been spending our money very, very well.
Now, when people say to me at cocktail parties, well, what’s going on in the DC schools? Why are they so good? I don’t talk about leadership or hard work or money. I talk about two things.
The first of those things I say is our schools are doing well because of 30 years of the public charter sector in the first instance. And our schools are doing well because of DCPS’s turnaround and mayoral control that allowed us to invest heavily in our teachers and develop an evaluation system that is focused on individual development and performance, and growth.
It’s the charter sector, DCPS’s turnaround and mayoral control. Those are precious commodities in Washington, DC, and we have to continue to value and sustain them.
When you combine those together, you see that we are building more and more coherence. And the cross-sector collaboration has been an extraordinary contributor as well. For example, My School DC-what a gift for families and parents. The Advanced Technical Centers led by OSSE (Office of the State Superintendent for Education), is the product of incredible cross-sector collaboration to provide access to college credit and advanced career and technical education coursework that otherwise students wouldn’t have.
So that’s why I think we’ve gotten better. Those are the things that I think we should cherish and honor and sustain. And we’re going to need it because we have a lot of hard work in front of us.
Enrollment, that is a headwind. This year, we declined slightly. And we know that we’ve been expecting a decrease in enrollment, and now it’s likely going to hit us hard.
We have a chronic absenteeism challenge in the city. It’s stubbornly stuck at 39%. That’s more than a third of our young people that we’re working extremely hard to resolve.
We’ve got stubborn equity gaps that we all know about and work on every single day.
And there are very strong economic headwinds. AI is the elephant in every single room. And this world and the world of work and the world that our children are inheriting will look very, very different whether we want it to or not. And we’ve got to make sure we’re getting them ready.
So, we’ve got to keep doing the very hard things. We’ve got to keep working together. We have to keep expanding access to quality schools.
These are the hard things we’ve got to do. We have to get better and more creative about training our educators and working with students with special needs. In the charter sector, we have to hold the line on quality and accountability and be more strategic about our openings to focus on quality and unmet need.
So too in DCPS, where we have to recommit to the excellence of every single neighborhood school so that families, through their by-right schools, have access to meaningful choice. And we have to sustain fair and equal funding across all of our students, and we cannot lose sight of that.
We have to embrace AI. We’ve got to teach it in schools, unleash our teachers on it, get our youth ready for this vastly new world that we are handing to them.
We’ve got so much left to do, but in the midst of this work, we cannot forget that together we have built something incredibly special. Something that no other place in the country has. And it’s really, really important that we sustain it.
The story is clear. The state of DC schools is strong and getting stronger. Let’s keep it that way.
Read more: The State of Schools in Washington, DC Is Strong — and Getting Stronger
Additional reading: State of D.C. Schools, 2024-25: Forward momentum