Last month, DC education analyst and advocate Mary Levy died, after a protracted battle with cancer.

To say Mary’s work in education was essential to our city is an understatement. As others have noted, she was a fixture at practically every DC council education budget hearing for decades, patiently explaining how school budgets work; why school funding was insufficient; and what could be done to make it more equitable. Mary Levy also fought against school closures. While her excellent and accurate analyses live on in almost every sphere of education advocacy in DC, her death marks an incalculable loss to DC.

For me, Mary Levy’s loss is also personal—and I am hardly alone in that.

I calculated that since 2013, I sent around 700 emails to Mary, asking for information or clarification around our schools. She always answered all my questions.

For almost as long, I have mentioned or otherwise used the work of Mary Levy in dozens of blog posts here.

Indeed, for years I have derived immense personal comfort from Mary and her work, whether with her letter of support for my lawsuit to get parent, teacher, and student involvement in the chancellor selection panel or her always-immediate understanding of problems I asked her about and her supplying of logical solutions.

Perhaps fittingly, my first communication with Mary was about my child’s National History Day project. I asked what I thought was a simple question about Julius Hobson’s seminal court case that resulted in a federal order to end to de facto segregation and racial inequity in DC’s public schools:

How has Hobson v. Hansen held up over time in DC?

In the years since, Mary Levy answered that question thousands of times. Whether with analyses of teacher attrition, money (not) saved via DCPS closures, DCPS modernizations, budget inequities, or at risk funding allocations, Mary’s answer to my question was always the same: The decision in Hobson v. Hansen has never been enforced, such that the racial inequities it attempted to rectify remain largely unchecked in almost every aspect of our publicly funded schools.

We have Mary Levy to thank that this tragedy is not as bad as it could be.

Mary’s analyses and data sets (many of the latter painstakingly compiled from FOIA productions) have not only served as exhibits of that inequity in DC’s publicly funded schools but also as important guides to move past it. Simply put, without Mary we would never have as much understanding and knowledge to move forward to that better place that Julius Hobson dared to dream (and sue!) about. We are not there yet by any means–but Mary ensured we knew the way.

Ironically, Mary Levy’s most unsung accomplishment may have been when she chose not to do something:

By refusing to endorse the cross-sector task force’s report in November 2018, Mary (along with fellow cross-sector task force member Caryn Ernst) made clear that the report’s cynically indirect validation of the continuing destruction of DC education rights (and DCPS schools of right) was neither the focus of the task force nor representative of all the voices on it, including her own.

Rest in power, Mary—and thank you.