Reforming DC’s education system is an urgent matter of racial justice
/Over the past year, events have forced Americans to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy, policies of racial segregation and subjugation, and the systems that perpetuate racially inequitable access to resources and investment. These same issues have sparked a racial justice movement here in the District to push for reimagined systems that promote equity. It is a powerful call to give all communities — regardless of position, wealth or influence — agency over the decisions that impact them the most. Public education is one field where the severe inequality and imbalance of power show up particularly clearly; equally clear is that taking action now could have a lasting beneficial impact.
Markus Batchelor is the former Ward 8 representative on the DC State Board of Education and ran for an at-large DC Council seat in 2020.
DC’s public education system continues to disproportionately fail students of color. In DC, as elsewhere, the conventional wisdom of education reformers has been to address the crisis of tanking scores and crumbling buildings by pushing executives and lawmakers to seize control over schools from community-elected boards. Fourteen years ago, DC’s mayor and the DC Council took this step, firing the duly elected school board and putting the mayor and his appointees directly in control of DC Public Schools (DCPS). Although there is an elected State Board of Education, it has very little authority in terms of governance or oversight.
Leaders promised residents that this sweeping consolidation of power over their schools — the centers of their communities and the keepers of their children’s futures — was for the best; that the necessary things could get done better and faster; that if they weren’t happy with the direction of the system, they would have one person they could hold directly accountable; and that if they had an issue, complaint or good idea, the door would be open.
Scott Goldstein is founder and executive director of DC teacher advocacy organization EmpowerEd and a former teacher.
In the years since then, improvement has been slow and uneven, with massive and persistent gaps between Black students (a majority of the system) and their white counterparts. Investment remains deeply inequitable. Promised oversight and accountability have been lacking.
Scandals — from the fudging of graduation and attendance rates to information about sexual abuse being withheld from parents and students with disabilities being sent to an unlicensed facility that failed to uphold even their most basic educational rights — periodically rock the system but come to light only because of whistleblowers and investigative reporting from news outlets. Charter schools open and close in a constant churn, with little or no meaningful engagement with neighbors and the families they claim to serve. As a result, thousands of children are displaced and their education is destabilized.
While mayoral control of schools isn’t unique to the District, our education governance system is the most undemocratic in the country. At the same time the District garnered the national spotlight with demands to be enfranchised through statehood and equal representation at the federal level, we stood up an education system here at home where the voices of families, educators and students (especially those in communities of color) have been shut out and disregarded.
Opponents of more democratic control of our school system raise the specter of a return of the dark days of the school board before mayoral control, when “books were stuck in the warehouse” and “paychecks didn’t go out on time.” They ignore that these failures were tied to the District’s financial problems in that era, and had little to do with our education governance system. More than a decade later and with the city on more sound financial and administrative footing, it’s a poor excuse for the continued disenfranchisement of Black and Latinx families in education decision-making. It may be nothing but an excuse anyway: Research from Rutgers political scientist Domingo Morel shows that when elected school boards are stripped of power, it happens almost exclusively in majority Black districts and is primarily driven by race and power, not by concerns about a lack of academic progress. That raises an urgent question we must reckon with as we rethink our education governance system here in DC: Who do we trust with democracy?
In most school districts with mayoral control, there is still a school board with substantially more authority than DC’s State Board of Education; an independent superintendent’s office to ensure the integrity of the data on the city’s schools is uncompromised by political influence; and a public school sector with control over all of the city’s schools, including public charter schools. In contrast, here in DC our state superintendent of education and deputy mayor for education regularly respond to oversight questions from the DC Council that they can’t even provide certain data for our city’s charter schools because they do not collect it. We can no longer accept that we simply do not have answers to critical questions about the performance of public charter schools that cumulatively serve half of our city’s students.
In jurisdictions from Chicago and New York to Philadelphia and Prince George’s County, state and local executives seized control of systems from families and elected leaders of color — with outcomes in the classroom and in the community similar to those in the District. But here and across the country, voices from the grassroots — teachers, parents and students — are breaking down those barriers by making their voices heard and demanding power and influence over the education of our children.
The importance of more authentic community input in our education system isn’t simply about access or transparency, but rather our ability to seize on the best ideas for improving our schools. In testimony after testimony before the State Board of Education and the DC Council and in remarks at community meetings throughout our city, students, educators, parents and principals propose and elevate innovative ideas on how to close persistent opportunity gaps, ensure students receive adequate school-based mental health, reduce teacher and principal turnover and so much more. But our system is uniquely ill-suited to transform good ideas into policy because those closest to our schools are farthest from power.
On most matters, members of the State Board of Education who hear powerful testimony from students, teachers and parents lack the authority to act and are instead consigned to the role of advocates without formal power. When decision-makers do come around to support an idea, it’s often a day late and a dollar short, coming only after years of advocacy from stakeholders. This gap — between the solutions-oriented advocacy of stakeholders and the status quo defended by mayor after mayor — remains one of the biggest obstacles to the academic achievement and well-being of our Black and brown youth. We are glad to see that the State Board of Education has established a new ad hoc committee to study the District’s mayorally controlled education system, including public opinion about the current structure.
Last week, at-large DC Council member Robert White proposed a special committee to examine education governance in the District. The news was immediately met with enthusiastic support from families and grassroots activists who have long called for a community-led discussion about our system. Predictably, the announcement was also met with familiar, stale arguments by defenders of the status quo. But when even the thought of studying what’s not working for our children left furthest behind triggers such adamant opposition, you have to wonder who exactly these groups are looking out for. No one disagrees that our system is failing Black and brown students and families, so the burden of proof should rest not on those calling for change, but on those defending an indefensible status quo.
It’s time to tune out the tired arguments that protect a system that marginalizes and fails our Black and brown neighbors. Instead we must uplift the voices of our students, educators, parents, principals and community members whose ideas could truly make a difference in the lives of DC students — if only we had a system that noticed them. Pursuing efforts from council members to reexamine our education governance system, combined with the State Board of Education’s effort to examine its role in the city’s education system, is the best path forward to engage the public and craft meaningful change. At this moment of national reckoning on racial justice, DC owes it to our residents to look in the mirror and ask whether we’re doing everything we can to uplift communities of color. We must make equity more than a throwaway phrase. When it comes to our education system, we can’t honestly say we’ve done that, but there’s no better time for redress than the present.