High-Poverty D.C. Charter School Students Outscore Wealthy Neighbors in Math

Charter school students in Washington, D.C.’s high-poverty Ward 8 far outshined their peers citywide in mathematics last year — besting children in even the wealthiest communities — a triumph staff attributed to co-teaching and data collection, among other factors.  

For the first time in its 17-year history, every eighth grader inside Center City Public Charter School’s Congress Heights campus completed Algebra I last school year. And a full 70% scored proficient on statewide assessments in 2024-25.

Just 25% of all D.C. students and 64% of those in wealthy Ward 3 scored the same. Ward 8 as a whole lagged dramatically, with just 15% of children meeting or exceeding the math proficiency benchmark.

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The Congress Heights school serves 251 students pre-K through 8: 98% are Black and 60% receive government assistance for food and/or housing. 

Principal Niya White came on board in 2012, when the school was slated to be closed by the DC Public Charter School Board because of a poor school culture and student performance, she said. 

“This is one of those turnaround stories no one ever expected to come to fruition,” White said. “By just the demographics, not too many people expect our students to be able to win and show up in the ways that they do.”

The victory comes after years of reassessing how and when math standards would be taught, White said, and making sure the students were prepared.

“We extended the school year last summer for four weeks to get students ready,” White said. “We finished the accelerated learning by merging their seventh- and eighth-grade standards to make sure they completed all course work prior to starting Algebra I to guarantee we weren’t moving forward with any gaps.”

Eighth-grade access to Algebra I is critical because it sets students up for higher-level math in 12th grade. This is particularly helpful for those who seek to study STEM in college, hoping to land a job in a high-paying field. 

The Congress Heights campus has tracked these eighth graders’ scores as they moved through elementary and into the higher grades. In 2019-20, third graders there scored in the 68th percentile on the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, math exam, a computer-adaptive assessment designed to measure students’ growth over time. 

These children did not take the test as fourth graders because of the COVID closures, but their fifth-grade scores — they reached only the 49th percentile — reveal what was lost. 

This group has made steady improvements in the years since: they reached the 60th percentile in math in 2022-23 and the 85th in 2023-24 and 2024-25.  

The Congress Heights school is one of six in the Center City charter network, which serves 1,440 children in total. 

Jessi Mericola, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade math, spanning everything from interest rates to algebra, credited several factors for the school’s success, including her prior knowledge of students’ ability in addition to relatively small class sizes — a maximum of 25 children.

The Congress Heights campus also uses a co-teaching model for math, which Mericola said allows her and her co-teacher to better serve all students’ needs. 

Oftentimes, she said, one educator stands at the classroom whiteboard to impart lessons while the other identifies and helps struggling students in small groups or individually. 

The setup, Mericola said, allows the adults in the room to spot-tutor kids who have trouble catching on, their struggle made obvious by the quizzical looks on their faces.

“Those are the things you would notice and pick up on,” Mericola said. 

Kennedy Morse, 13, and in this year’s eighth-grade class, was once one of those puzzled kids. She is now thriving in a subject that used to elude her. 

“Before I came to Center City, math was something I struggled with,” she said. “I didn’t have proper guidance. Now, it’s one of my strongest subjects.”

Principal White said the school’s success hinged in part on a change in attitude about students’ ability. She and other educators recognized the profound impact COVID had on learning but didn’t want to treat these children as if they were incapable of mastering on-grade tasks. 

“If we kept saying the students aren’t going to be able to do something, then we will never be able to move them forward,” White said.

Rather than fret about what they lacked, she said, the school decided to simply teach the material, progressing students through the curriculum while also plugging in what they had missed.

“We can’t hold somebody back because they don’t have all of their multiplication facts through 25 memorized,” White said. “That is not the answer or the way.” 

Students, as evidenced by their test scores, are meeting the challenge. 

White said, too, the school gives teachers the time they need to plan lessons that permit for this. 

And, she said, the Congress Heights campus runs on data, assessing students’ knowledge throughout the school year, starting shortly after the bell rings: Math teachers frequently begin their lessons with two questions. Sometimes, it’s a measure of what students learned the day before. Other times, it’s a preview of a lesson to come. From this simple exercise, teachers learn whether they need a quick review or if they can forge ahead. 

And the data collection is not solely focused on academics. Josh Boots, founder and executive director of Empower K12, a nonprofit that supports data collection and analysis for both charter and traditional D.C. public schools, said the Congress Heights campus uses all manner of metrics to learn if what they are doing is working. 

For example, Boots said, when the school began using city government-funded transportation to shuttle kids in high-crime areas to and from campus starting in the 2024-25 school year, they didn’t simply make the program available: They checked to see if safe passage actually improved attendance. 

Money was limited for the program so not all eligible students were able to use it. But, Boots said, those who did had seven more days of school attendance last year and 12 fewer late arrivals than the students who didn’t have access to the program. 

“It is critical,” Boots said of the data the school tracks. “It helps us know how students are feeling and doing on a regular basis. We can sometimes see it but the harder data confirms it — or doesn’t confirm it.”

He said, too, school leaders know they are not going to solve every problem right away. 

“But we need to be able to fail forward,” he said, quoting White. “We need to know as quickly as possible that something is — or is not — working, so we can change and improve so that every student gets the opportunities they deserve.” 

And, Principal White said, all of the math lessons are video recorded so students can go back and review their teacher’s instructions. 

“They have a play list for every lesson,” she said, adding students can also retake some in-classroom tests to improve their scores. “If they got a 60 on their first try, that 60 doesn’t stand. They can go back for the week, redo it, ask questions and use videos to see what (they) got wrong and resubmit it to make the grade higher.”

White said, too, the school addresses the math mindset at the start of the school year so students don’t begin their classes convinced they can’t succeed. 

“We make sure they know in order to be a math person you just have to be a person and manipulate math,” she said. “That really does get them out of their own way, especially if they are coming to us new. If you do math, and you’re a person, you are a math person.”