Tomorrow, Monday July 6, the DC council is holding a hearing on legislation for charters to have a lottery preference for students from closing schools.

Note that this date is a change from the previously scheduled date for that hearing, which was July 9. While the date change may ensure fewer people testify about the many problems with this legislation, another event appears to have eclipsed it, which is a July 9 hearing for the (apparently fast track) appointment of Ahnna Smith to replace Lea Crusey on the charter board. While one can wonder whether this new nomination is the outgoing mayor’s last handshake for charters (or a little wave to the mayor’s former acting deputy mayor for education around some memorably anti-public public service–see here or here or here for a refresher), we do not know why Crusey is leaving well before the end of her term.

Naturally, the charter board said nothing about any of this—although members at the June 29 board meeting, Crusey’s last, praised their colleague effusively. Perhaps as with the disappeared former board chair Shantelle Wright, we (the little people) will never be told why Crusey is leaving.

But not to worry! 

At that same June 29 meeting, the charter board responded to a DC Prep parent’s tale of student bullying (and the school’s apparent nonresponsiveness) with a promise of follow-up by the charter board’s community complaint team. (See the exchange starting at minute 40 of the video.) Those would likely be the same folks who outlined at the March 9 charter board meeting the board’s community complaint process—without differentiating health and safety complaints; without explaining how complaints could be categorized as non-complaints; and without explaining how a pie chart showed 99 complaints for SY24-25 while a staff member said there were actually 115 complaints and how the SY25-26 pie chart showed *both* 55 complaints and 83. (See it all on the March 9 video, starting at the 2:13:30 mark, and in the slide presentation.)

Now, if this doesn’t inspire confidence, DC can take heart that our local government seems united on not taking (swift? substantive? any?) action to help parents with such complaints. For instance, at the June 17 state board of education public meeting, parent Lorena Flores publicly outlined (again) the nonresponsiveness of, well, everyone to reports of a teacher hitting a student at Yu Ying. (See Flores at minute 35 of the video, with questions starting at minute 51.) As the state board lacks authority over most issues in DC education (including directly intervening), at least the response was kind enough.

(Interestingly, despite the DC council’s rather abysmal track record advancing legislative proposals related to education, the state board did succeed in getting the council to take up the state board’s proposal to set standards for deferred enrollment of children in kindergarten, which the state board passed at their June 17 meeting—see the discussion of this (and so-called “academic redshirting”) at the 3:26:40 mark of the video.)

The state board meeting of June 17 also featured a number of public witnesses representing a movement against tech in DCPS. The witnesses appear to be part of a DC chapter of a national group started in 2025 called Schools Beyond Screens. This is fascinating, given that some DC parents have been working for years to ensure digital equity in DCPS schools, which have historically had (and continue to have) huge, and disturbing, digital divides. The testimony of parent Alex Simbana (at the 1:25:55 mark of the video) provided a good outline of that divide, which several board members appeared to understand.

Before that state board meeting, the efforts of the DC anti-tech group were apparently directed at defeating DCPS’s iReady (which to be fair is not exactly a shining star of tech or anything else)–including the disapproval of DCPS’s contract for iReady. Though the contract was ultimately approved, the outgoing chancellor, Lewis Ferebee, issued a statement to the council about responding to parent complaints about tech and iReady. 

And speaking of influence outside DC:

The former DCPS chancellor has just begun leading a privately funded organization whose mission is to review instructional material for schools. The question is (as always) how are these reviews done—and how does this organization square that with its funders, at least a few of which appear to be big ed reform supporters. That move naturally ties into recent calls by (among others) PAVE for so-called “high-quality instructional materials” (HQIM)–which would be funny but for the fact that proliferation of charters (and DC’s lax oversight of them) have left many DC students in schools with what can be charitably called variable experiences, whether with curriculum, teachers, or facilities (to name a few things). 

Indeed, after 30 years of DC charters—and 30 years of promises that everything would get better in DC education—we can see that “better” is completely in the eye of the beholder (and/or the pen of the propagandist). For instance, while much official heavy breathing has been devoted to how DC is leading in academic growth, the reality is that every student is not part of that happy saga. As parent and education researcher Betsy Wolf points out, the picture is very bleak regarding students who are poor and/or Black. (See the recent study Wolf examined here.)

Now, if this ugliness sounds familiar, it may be because it was one of many reasons given to justify foisting charters on DC 30 years ago. Yet perhaps unsurprisingly in a town filled with astroturf propaganda, such inequities did not even slow down the DC council in giving charters yet more money (> $15M) in approving a tight FY27 budget. In fact, the council chair, Phil Mendelson, took up FY27 budget shortages in an argument with the CFO about reserve funds—again, what would be funny but for the real consequences of years of Mendelson and others literally ignoring any rational analysis of need in the charter sector. (Too many examples of the ignoring to count—but here’s a recent outline.)

And here we come full circle back to tomorrow’s July 6 hearing:

The office of the deputy mayor for education recently published a five-part series on enrollment trends, including discussion of DC’s decreasing student population. Setting aside the fact that this office has been almost entirely silent for years on the terrible effects of expanding DC schools endlessly, there are several interesting aspects of this analysis. 

For instance, part 4 (on charter closures) doesn’t mention at all the main source of problems in those closures: the sidelining of parents, families, and staff in the decision making around closures. Then part 5 (on where students from closed schools go after closures) neglects to mention that DC lost track of some students entirely after their school closed. But such blithe synopses tee up nicely for the charter lottery preference for closures—naturally, without the messy detail that the decrease in student population will likely result in DCPS closures, too, such that this lottery preference could provide even more advantages to charters.

Tangled webs indeed.