Last Friday, Empower DC, a local community advocacy organization, filed a lawsuit against the District of Columbia challenging the city’s plans to close 15 schools in predominantly minority neighborhoods.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson says the closures are due to under-enrolled schools—some of them utilizing less than half their available building space as overall DCPS enrollment has dropped and students have moved to charters and other schools in more affluent parts of the city. Henderson says consolidating the students into fewer schools will save $8.5 million, allowing the funds to be reallocated to special education, art, music, and the like.
Empower DC contests the numbers, pointing to a recent audit of the 24 closures under then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee in 2008 that found the decision ended up costing DCPS millions. Another analysis from the D.C. Fiscal Policy institute claims the closures slated for next year will cost $10.2 million, but doesn’t extend their study beyond 2014, when DCPS expects the most savings. Empower DC also accuses the District of racial discrimination, saying the closures will affect only two white students while displacing thousands of minority pupils.
To be honest, given the dueling economic analyses it’s difficult for me to ascertain if the closures are a good idea financially. But, there’s a more fundamental question festering underneath the rhetoric of each side, and it has to do with how DCPS makes policy.
Back during the first round of closures under Rhee, DCPS had to deal with a similar upwelling of public contempt. There wasn’t a lawsuit filed, but Rhee was subjected to numerous openly hostile community meetings in the weeks after her proposal was leaked to The Washington Post. At that time, she made an especially poignant comment to PBS reporter John Merrow about her attitude toward the peeved parents:
“People said, ‘Well, you didn’t listen to us.’ And I said, ‘No, I listened to you. I’m not running this District by consensus or by committee. We’re not running this school district through the democratic process.’”
That statement, more than any other, depicts how a large segment of the public views the DCPS decisionmaking process, both then and now. A principal complaint of many parents during both rounds of closures was that they—the affected parties—were almost completely disconnected from the policy making process. Things were being done to them, not with them, and in a realm as personal as education, that distinction breeds contempt.
This autocratic approach is often how government agencies work, but DCPS will tell you they’re different. During and after Rhee’s tenure, the chancellor and her staff have tried to include community organizations in their governance, meeting with the Education Councils of each ward, a number of PTAs, and even some everyday residents in their living rooms. But still, the affected communities say they have no voice, that the policy for the closures was made within the bubble of the D.C. political class.
DCPS is adamant they take community input into account when crafting policy, but if you listen to the soon-to-be displaced kids and their parents, the district still embodies Rhee’s statement. They’re either ignoring the input from the community, or they’re talking to local officials and parents as woefully disconnected from the public sentiment as they are.
Without a doubt, some things were different in 2008, and Henderson’s office rolled out her proposal more judiciously than was possible five years ago. Most notably, she allowed schools to submit alternatives to closure—accepting five of them, mostly from more affluent schools. But this hasn’t been enough to placate a large swath of parents who aren’t convinced DCPS has their interests at heart, and that suspicion will remain until the families the policies affect are actually listened to from the beginning.
No one’s arguing for a return to a traditional school board to foster more democracy in DCPS, but Henderson and her staff must change something in their approach to governance, and quick. The last round of closings precipitated an exodus of students from DCPS to charters around the city, and it’s easy to see why. Charters govern themselves almost autonomously, so a parent only needs to worry about dealing with the school’s individual principal, staff, and teachers, a far cry from the faceless bureaucrats in DCPS Central Office.
At its core, this is an issue of trust. If DCPS families aren’t legitimately brought into the policymaking process on every possible issue, they will quickly grow suspicious of the tough decisions, questioning whether or not these people actually care about their children first. That will make them leave in droves, to charters, private schools, or simply out of the city. And that, more than any lawsuit, predicates the death of a school district.
Shut Gavin down at gbade@georgetownvoice.com.
