Prima donnas don't want to do the blocking and tackling, they want easy prestige.

From DC Is Only the Latest 'Model' School System to Disappoint by Frederick M. Hess & Connor Kurtz. Complex systems (such as education) are not easily amenable to one-size-fits-all monolithic solutions. Outcomes are driven far more by basic fundamentals around the particular cohort of students (and them as individuals), resources, politics, local social norms and culture, etc.

Other than basic safety, there are few universal truths. Beyond a relatively low minimum, amount of money spent has only marginal impact. Teacher credentials are uncorrelated with outcomes. Class size doesn't matter. Etc.

It seems it all about the basic blocking and tackling. Hours with directed instruction. Balance of intense classroom time with exercise and recreation. Sufficient food. Committed teachers (rather than credentialed teachers).

We seem locked in a statist model where there is a single trick that will make everything better - high graduation rates, great test scores, and so on. Well, actually, based on the examples provided, there is this one unexpected trick. You won't believe what happens next. CHEATING BY ADMINISTRATORS.

Why work to achieve the hard outcomes when you can just lie about the numbers.

Hess and Kurtz start out:

A wonderful thing about school is that every September promises a fresh start. That goes for students as well as for reformers and educational leaders eager to leave inconvenient realities behind. In Washington, D.C., for instance, just a few short months ago, the schools were reeling from the fallout over a graduation scandal in which more than a third of D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) seniors graduated despite not meeting minimum graduation requirements. Some students graduated despite missing more than half the school year. Analysts calculated that the city’s “true” graduation rate wasn’t much over 50 percent, and was actually lower than it had been in 2011. The scandal was a blow to the advocates, foundations, and pundits who had heralded DCPS as a national model.

Indeed, it was barely a year ago, in 2017, that now-deposed DCPS chancellor Antwan Wilson declared, “For the past five years, DCPS has been a national model of a district on the rise. On nearly every metric, from enrollment rates to graduation rates, from student achievement to student satisfaction, we have made progress.” Yet, by last spring, the Washington Post was forced to ask on its editorial page if DCPS’s apparent success was a “sham” and a “fraud.”

Conveniently for Washington D.C.’s leaders, nobody seems to feel much obligation to answer that query. Rather, they’ve rapidly moved to turn the page — and nobody seems to mind. This is not just a problem for D.C. schools, but for American education more broadly. The truth is that DCPS is just the latest in a series of troubled school systems that have been held up as exemplars based on test scores or graduation rates, only to later be found guilty of data manipulation and troubling practices.

In the early 1980s, Atlanta schools seemed to have turned a corner. Under the leadership of Alonzo Crim, the city’s test scores showed remarkable gains. A New York Times headline proclaimed Atlanta an example of “urban education that really works” and termed its test gains “undeniable.” The president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching said Crim brought “stability and sustained credibility” to Atlanta’s schools. In 1984, Harvard University gave Crim an honorary doctorate and labeled him “a wise and perceptive schoolman.”

Well. It later turned out that Crim’s secret sauce involved having Atlanta schools evaluate lagging students by using tests from lower grades — instead of those from their actual grade levels. When Georgia ordered Atlanta to assess students based on their actual grade level, the gains evaporated. Today, the Crim era is remembered as an embarrassing chapter in the history of test manipulation.

They then elaborate the same pattern again and again. Dramatic claims of improvement followed by a dramatic collapse of the claims. Money is wasted, children don't receive the education they should receive. And no one is held accountable. Atlanta makes a second appearance with a second cycle of failure in the 2000s after the embarrassment of the 1980s.

Basic blocking and tackling of local conditions is pretty undramatic but it is what works. Prima donnas don't want to do the blocking and tackling, they want easy prestige.