How DC Schools Fell Behind London and Singapore on STEM and Equity Funding

Washington DC spends more per pupil than almost any school district in the United States — roughly $23,000 per student annually, according to DC Office of the Chief Financial Officer figures — and yet DC Public Schools consistently ranks near the bottom of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in fourth- and eighth-grade math. Singapore's Ministry of Education, working with a fraction of that per-student expenditure in raw dollar terms, produces students who outscore American counterparts by roughly three grade levels in mathematics by age 14. London's state secondary schools, buoyed by the 2019 overhaul of England's Pupil Premium funding formula, have narrowed their own equity gaps measurably. The District has done neither.

The timing matters. With the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency cuts gutting the Department of Education's Title I oversight office this spring, and Mayor Muriel Bowser's fiscal year 2027 budget proposal already absorbing a projected $700 million federal funding shortfall, DCPS now faces the tightest resource environment in more than a decade. The question of how the city arrived at this point is not academic. Decisions made — and deferred — over the past fifteen years explain nearly everything about the present crisis.

The Decade That Built the Gap

The story starts around 2011. DC was then riding a wave of reform energy: Michelle Rhee's tenure at DCPS had ended, but the structural changes she championed — expanded charter sector, merit pay experiments, school closures in Wards 7 and 8 — had reshuffled the system without resolving its foundational inequity. Ballou High School in Congress Heights and Anacostia High School on Good Hope Road SE remained chronically under-resourced while newer STEM-focused campuses like the School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens on New Hampshire Avenue NW attracted more affluent, connected families.

Federal Race to the Top dollars, which DC won in 2010 to the tune of $75 million, were supposed to turbocharge STEM curriculum development. Most of that money went to teacher evaluation infrastructure instead. By the time the grant period closed in 2015, the District had a more elaborate HR system and roughly the same eighth-grade science scores it started with.

Singapore, during that same window, was piloting its Applied Learning Programme in 28 schools, a structured initiative that embedded STEM problem-solving into core curriculum rather than treating it as an elective enrichment add-on. London's boroughs were beginning to coordinate through what became the London Challenge framework's successor programs. DC had no equivalent coordinated strategy.

Where the Money Actually Went

The equity funding picture is harder to defend. The DC School Equity and Transparency Act of 2018 required DCPS to report per-school spending in a standardized format. When those reports came out, they confirmed what Ward 7 and Ward 8 principals had been saying for years: schools east of the Anacostia River received, on average, fewer experienced teachers, older instructional materials, and less discretionary per-pupil funding than schools in Wards 2 and 3, even after controlling for enrollment-based formula allocations.

The DC Council's Committee on Education held hearings on the disparity in 2022 and again in 2024. Both rounds produced recommendations. Neither produced a binding reallocation mechanism. The District's Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, last comprehensively revised in 2019, still does not weight for concentrated poverty at the building level the way London's Pupil Premium does, which in 2024-25 allocated an additional £1,455 per disadvantaged primary pupil directly to school budgets with accountability strings attached.

Charter schools complicate the picture further. Roughly 48 percent of DC students now attend charter schools, the highest share of any American city. Some charters, particularly those affiliated with the DC International School network and several KIPP campuses in Columbia Heights and Petworth, post strong STEM results. But charter expansion has also drained the per-pupil formula payments that DCPS depends on, creating a structural revenue leak that no administration — Fenty, Gray, Bowser — has fully patched.

What happens next depends heavily on whether the DC Council uses its FY2027 budget reconciliation process, scheduled for a final vote in September, to adopt an equity weighting proposal currently backed by six of its thirteen members. Absent that, schools in Anacostia and Congress Heights will enter the 2026-27 academic year with the same structural disadvantages they had in 2011 — and a federal oversight apparatus that is now considerably thinner than it was before January.