With the first education oversight hearing of 2020 yesterday (on the office of the DC student advocate; education ombudsman; and state board of education), a busy season of education-related events awaits, including the Black Lives Matter at School week of action starting on Monday; hearings on oversight and legislation; and a transportation survey you can … Continue reading Important Upcoming DC Education Events

[Ed. Note: DC's office of planning has promulgated revisions to the city's comprehensive plan. The deadline for public comment was last week--but ANCs have additional time to review and comment on the draft document, which is here in a redlined version. The changes made to this planning document not only are long on celebration and … Continue reading DC’s Comprehensive Plan–Or, The End Of The Road For Education Rights In DC?

Washington Post op-eds are a major education media platform both locally and nationally. Despite (or possibly because of) excellent local print education reporting (here's looking at you, City Paper & independent journalist Rachel Cohen!) and superb TV and radio coverage of local education stories (hey there, Evan Lambert & Nathan Baca & Scott McFarlane & … Continue reading Gotta Ask: Who Benefits From Public Education Rights Dying In Darkness?

Though We The People are so much more (and better!) than the philanthropists and privatizers proposing to "fix" our public schools (while naturally endeavoring to get a piece of DC’s annual $1.8 billion in public education money), many events in late 2019 show that DC school governance appears to operate on a very different principle. … Continue reading Late 2019 Education Events In Brief (Anti-Democracy Edition)

Hello DC taxpayers: You may have just lost a lot of money! That is, depending on the fate of a bill (23-0256) to exempt four charter school properties from property taxes (which the DC council on December 3 voted to approve), the loss could be almost $11 million in lost property tax revenue. First introduced … Continue reading The Public Costs Of Legislating Private Wealth

While I was writing this blog post, on the November 25 DC council hearing on safe passage, a DC public school student who was shot during school hours died and DCPS announced the closure of an alternative high school whose students had poor attendance, quite possibly because many had to travel across town to attend … Continue reading Safe Passage To Nowhere

--In announcing an at risk lottery preference for the new early childhood facility at the old Stevens school, DCPS has now made a moot point of the 2018 study (by lottery head Cat Peretti) of an at risk preference in the lottery. Never mind that the study determined that the at risk preference didn’t do … Continue reading Calling 240-342-4170 . . . And Other Recent DC Education Tidbits

With a new DCPS chancellor mulling changing the school system’s budget model and the DC public charter school board (PCSB) executive director leaving, the two school agencies are asking for more public feedback. DCPS Two upcoming public meetings are being billed as community budget forums. They were announced at DCPS’s mandated public budget hearing on … Continue reading Feedback Time: DCPS And Charter Board

In a charter board meeting on October 28 filled with incredible events, perhaps the most incredible was when the charter board did not even let a kidnapping from the Rocketship school where they were meeting slow down their approval for a new Rocketship campus in Ward 5. In the first (and at the time only) … Continue reading Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Kidnapping (Stays DC Charter Real Estate Ventures)

For hours on October 21, supporters of Maret--the private school with whom DC’s department of parks and recreation (DPR) recently signed a 9-year extension of a previous 10-year, exclusive use agreement for prime hour use of the publicly owned field Jelleff--testified to the DC council about the brutal way in which their school had been … Continue reading Fields Of (Broken) Dreams: Jelleff & Ellington