The Fight For DCPS & Democracy: The Living Work Of Peter MacPherson

DCPS advocate Peter MacPherson died last month. Among his many public education advocacy roles, Peter was for more than a decade DCPS’s school library champion.

For all the years I have had the great fortune of working with excellent public education advocates in DC, I never was pushed so relentlessly, and for so long, by anyone else. That tenacity was key to Peter’s extraordinary success on a variety of fronts, including DCPS school libraries, funding and resource equity, and modernizations.

Like countless others, my family has been the lucky recipient of the fruits of such activism. Most of the DCPS schools my children attended had libraries with beautiful collections of books curated by full-time librarians. And all my kids’ DCPS schools had fulsome modernizations–even when it appeared unlikely at several but for years of effort by Peter and other DCPS parents.

Peter’s death is hardly the end of such advocacy. Inequities across DCPS schools (and residents’ disenfranchisement from those schools) are longstanding and spread across multiple chancellors, mayors, and other elected and appointed officials. That is by design. For decades, wealthy proponents of education “reform” have ensured they control much of the conversation and resources around public education in DC, profiting by directing public funds to private interests and funneling cash to DC politicians to ensure that remains the status quo.

As a result, here in DC the simple reality of democracy in publicly funded schools (enjoyed by hundreds of millions across America as a matter of right) has been twisted into the idea of choice. It is, of course, a grand illusion. The vast majority of DC residents have no choice whatsoever in the defunding, closure, disposition, and growth of our publicly funded schools—much less the quality, equity, and extent of programming provided in them.

It is up to all of us here now that the hard, thankless work Peter undertook for democracy in DCPS–without pay and always for the public–is not in vain.

Toward that end, I have put below an inevitably idiosyncratic look at Peter’s career of advocacy for DCPS. Below that are links to some of the advocacy articles Peter wrote or contributed to; interviews he conducted; talk shows he participated in or contributed to; and a portion of his written appeals to friends, allies, and elected officials that I found among my own emails and in a few other places.

My hope is that those of us now engaged in this advocacy, and those to come, will partake of this subset of Peter’s work; see how entrenched and well-financed power preserves and enriches itself at public expense in DC’s schools; and learn from all of it.

For all his years of serious health challenges, and even living far from DC, Peter never stopped engaging in this always difficult, often lonely, and utterly necessary work–which others right now in DC are undertaking. For his part, Peter loved democracy, DC, and truly public schools as much as he loved his family and pets, fast food, and laughing at the absurdities of what he called “life’s rich pageantry.”

May we all be as alive in service of equity, justice, and democracy.

School Libraries

In almost every one of the thousands of conversations I had with him over many years, Peter MacPherson let his anger at DC officials “acting like the law is optional” inform his actions and words.

It is hard to overestimate how incredibly effective he was.

The fact that DCPS has school libraries and librarians right now is directly attributable to Peter and those who worked with him. When he began that advocacy, DCPS was proposing to do away with school libraries altogether in the wake of school closures and a relentless push for school privatization and defunding. In response to a library protest Peter planned in 2012, DC’s mayor petulantly wrote that advocates should “recognize the importance of school consolidation as a way of infusing cash into the classrooms and related services.”

(Yes: The old “let me cut off your arm and demonstrate how it helps you lose weight” trick.)

A few years later, the DCPS chancellor proposed that DC’s public libraries function like Amazon for DCPS students, delivering books to students at their schools within a day. (Because getting onto a computer database is always a good way for non-readers to browse.)

That all of this was patently undemocratic and against the entire idea of literacy, much less equitable public schools, infuriated Peter—and spurred him to action.

Over more than a decade, Peter sent hundreds of emails and personal appeals to secure DCPS libraries and librarians. He hosted protest bake sales and other civic actions to call attention to the defunding of DCPS libraries—including passing out flyers about DCPS libraries at the prestigious PEN/Faulkner gala and demanding that a settlement around DCPS food services be used to fund DCPS libraries. He gathered allies across the city. Through FOIA requests and research, Peter discovered that DCPS had not maintained library collections, with the inequity spread from west to east in a sadly familiar pattern. (DC has only ever had one map, it seems.) Peter calculated that he spent about $100,000 of his family’s money buying books and supplies for DCPS schools, most of which ended up being substantial parts of school libraries.

But the story of DCPS libraries is not triumphant. Funding for their spaces, their contents, and their staff remains a battleground as long as education reform interests continue to largely control DC elected and appointed officials.

School Modernizations

Early in the push to modernize all DCPS schools, Peter put a spotlight on modernization inequity. He advocated for tapping into the city’s reserve funds to more quickly renovate schools that languished low on the list with terrible physical plants. Not coincidentally, those were schools mainly in wards 7 and 8. If that speeding up had come to pass, it would have ensured that those wards would not have run out of swing space before all their schools were renovated. Sadly, that is the situation now that many EOTR neighborhood DCPS buildings have been given away to charters (notably, against the wishes of nearby residents).

Peter also pointed out the grotesque contrast between the city providing money for a soccer stadium but allowing DCPS buildings to remain in serious, sometimes dangerous, disrepair—and berated officials for holding closed meetings about DCPS renovations.

Perhaps most notably, Peter worked for years with another parent, Clayton Witt, to bring about the renovation of Stuart-Hobson Middle School. Without those two men, it is safe to say that Stuart-Hobson would have never been touched–and possibly would not even be a DCPS school now. City officials habitually left it off modernization lists, and it was repeatedly given only small funds to repair specific items, some of which were nearly 100 years old.

As a parent at Stuart-Hobson, I will never forget the distaste, and sheer contempt, that DC officials had for that school and everyone in it. I recall the director of DGS saying that if the school could show it was fully enrolled AND if the school had good test scores, then the city might build a structure for parking and athletics as it had for schools elsewhere. (That Stuart-Hobson had never been anything but fully enrolled—and had the second highest test scores for any DCPS middle school—meant nothing, apparently, when nearly 100% of its students were Black.)

I will also never forget the terrifying cracks in the walls of Stuart-Hobson’s north stairwell—and how Peter often said that after a certain point, the buildings began advocating for themselves.

Here’s what Clayton recently said:

“I was always ready for a fight for right, but Peter made me look like a piker. He was smarter, meaner, and more calculating than anyone I had ever met. Together, we got $65M for Stuart-Hobson and traded a grant with another school to secure the turf field. I never imagined that I would become the “good cop” in our fights with anyone other than ourselves. Peter was tireless and relentless. A conversation at 9 pm led to an email at 2:30 am. I would talk him out of a nuclear attack at 9 pm, only to receive a call from a political figure or contractor asking if I could forestall his one-man protest (with media in tow) at a grand opening or political stump. Peter made being his friend difficult because he set the bar so high. He loved you more than you deserved and helped you more than merited. His personality was like his hugs–comforting, assuring, embracing, and protective. Thanks for being you, Peter.”

Indeed.

The Hard Lift Against Inequity

Like other education advocates in DC, Peter knew well that many neighborhood DCPS schools east of Rock Creek Park with majority Black student bodies like Stuart-Hobson have long experienced inequitable treatment from DC officials with staffing, programming, and modernizations.

Unlike Stuart-Hobson, however, many of those schools are also under-enrolled, so consequent defunding and closure are constant existential threats.

In articulating all of these deep needs arising from DC’s purposeful inequity and the huge lift to change it, Peter was incredibly talented. He was able to quickly gather the facts about whatever injustice needed official attention, use his skills as a journalist to write something cogent about it, and then press forward relentlessly while gathering friends and allies until someone in the Wilson Building responded and relented.

And someone in the Wilson Building always responded.

Peter testified in hearings about DCPS dozens, if not hundreds, of times, often with no script or notes—which almost always ended with a testy admonition that Peter needed to submit his testimony in writing.

As Peter knew and experienced, one of the hallmarks of advocacy for basic democracy opposed by powerful, wealthy interests is relentless opposition. Sometimes the opposition is from those in power—and sometimes from allies and others who fear the powerful. Sometimes the opposition seems insurmountable—and sometimes it is just petty, like being pecked by irritable ducks.

Either way, here in DC opposition to democracy in our publicly funded schools is a constant feature—and Peter never backed down. As with all such effective people challenging the status quo, the critiques hurled at Peter were also a constant feature. In my experience, Peter was often deemed overzealous, or ridiculous, or asking too much and/or too fast, or simply being unrealistic.

Or, the most laughable (and in DC most unforgivable) sin of all: Peter was deemed impolite.

In a 2017 email, for instance, the chair of the council’s education committee chided Peter regarding his repeated concerns with years of unresolved leaks in the auditorium at Stuart-Hobson, complaining that “I have found over the years that your emails tend to be more confrontational and abrasive than is necessary to get things done. . . . Please try harder to be respectful of the public servants that are doing their best to solve issues like you have found at Stuart-Hobson.”

Peter responded by noting (sadly, without hyperbole) that for more than a decade, the agencies in question had been awful to work with, requiring “something close to a siege to resolve even the simplest issues.” Peter then noted the council member’s indifference to the fact that the leaking “has continued as long as it has and the fact that the agencies under which you have oversight have performed so poorly.”

(Those leaks, BTW, occurred both before and after Stuart-Hobson’s renovation—so Peter waged a campaign from his home near Chicago, to which he had moved several years before, to have the leaks fixed. Hundreds of calls and emails, from hundreds of miles away, ensued–and the leaks were fixed.)

For a 2014 protest about funding shortfalls in DCPS, Peter came up with the following slogans that are sadly still true:

“$2 billion locked away in the rainy-day fund. A bookless DC school is a rainy day!”

“It’s hard to be sick kid at school with no one to take your temperature.”

When told that the former executive director of DC’s charter board was pursuing elected office in the exclusive Colorado resort town he had retired to (after sending his children to private schools and waging years of disinformation campaigns against DCPS), Peter opined that destroying public schools was apparently “just a hobby to him.”

In a 1939 essay on the great novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, George Orwell noted that in reading Dickens’ work he envisioned the author “laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. [His] is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry–in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

Reminds me of someone I once knew here in DC. Rest in power, Peter.

School Libraries

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/10/09/school-libraries-without-books/

https://educationdc.net/2015/08/23/how-about-using-settlement-money-from-chartwells-for-dcps-libraries/

https://educationdc.net/2017/01/31/dcps-school-libraries-the-continuing-saga-of-the-inequitable-and-underfunded/

https://educationdc.net/2017/05/22/no-comment-3/

https://educationdc.net/2017/11/24/no-response-dcps-libraries/

https://educationdc.net/2021/07/07/no-response-dc-school-libraries/

https://educationdc.net/2022/10/29/come-on-dc-save-our-school-librarians/

Emails and other material: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rHrscRLCO2U0DTiGIFrEiIAwic6AHsaB?usp=share_link

School Modernizations

https://educationdc.net/2015/10/25/georgetowns-big-sink/