All politics are local
Local actors try to back door Project 2025 into DC?
Last week, the DC State Board of Education discussed a measure that, if passed by the Council of DC, would give every child in DC the right to a “high-quality” education. But it’s never so simple in DC, the city of education reform.
The logistics of this “measure” are spelled out in a previously confidential memo. The memo was written by a lawyer in California working with another ed reformer in California. It’s unclear who paid for the ‘legal analysis’ in the memo.
At a high level, the memo sounds good because it proposes the right to a quality education for all DC students. But the devil is in the details. Here’s what the memo proposes:
The DC State Board of Education should pass a resolution to propose that the Council of DC revises a law to allow for DCPS families to sue if their DCPS school is not “high quality”, vaguely defined but explicitly including proficiency rates.
Courts then decide what the remedy should be, and the remedy could be anything, like redirecting the money to private schools, as promoted by Project 2025, school closures, or more.
But here’s the kicker: This opportunity to sue would only be available to families at DCPS schools, not families at DC public charter schools, who comprise about 50% of all public school students.
The memo defines “high quality” public schools as those that provide the “tools necessary to participate meaningfully in our economy, society, and democracy”. This definition is vague, yet the memo explicitly gives low proficiency rates as an example of schools that would NOT be “high quality”. For schools that are NOT “high quality”, the blame would be placed on school leaders who must then improve outcomes. BUT, according to the memo, additional resources cannot be allocated to these public schools to improve outcomes. School leaders must improve outcomes without additional resources.
If outcomes aren’t improved, then families can sue as a class of people from NOT “high-quality” schools, and then the courts would decide the remedy. Families can sue about anything really, the school, DCPS in general, as well as District regulations, rules, policies, patterns, and practices, but families themselves could not receive monetary damages.
The memo then clarifies that we’re only talking about DCPS schools, not charter schools. The memo argues that “similarly situated” charter schools are higher performing than DCPS schools, which is unequivocally false (see graph of proficiency rates below). It may be that a single charter school is outperforming some DCPS schools, or vice versa, but across the board, we see very similar patterns between proficiency rates and family income for DCPS and charter schools. Let’s state the obvious: There is not a single charter school in DC that has high proficiency rates when serving a majority of students whose families receive food benefits. Therefore, the memo essentially sets up an impossible standard for DCPS schools, while there are no consequences for charter schools with the exact same student outcomes.
The DC State Board of Education hosted a panel of experts who testified about the “measure”. The experts expressed support for a right to a quality education for all DC students and for providing legal recourse if students don’t have a quality option. But what the experts said in their testimonies didn’t match what was in the memo. The experts explicitly pointed out the problems with segregation and resource inequity. Yet the memo explicitly prohibits the allocation of additional resources to reduce resource inequity. One expert called for “ensuring the right applies equally to public and public charter students”. Yet the memo explicitly exempts public charters from consideration.
Historically, advocates have used the legal system to fight against wrongs, like inequitable and unequal educational resources and school segregation. But some legal remedies that would help to reduce inequity in DC are strictly forbidden according to the memo:
Prohibiting school segregation would require remedies like redrawing school boundaries and reserving seats in the My School DC lottery to decrease segregation. But we know this wasn’t the intent of the memo because school choice in the charter sector also contributes to school segregation, and charter schools were purposefully excluded. Moreover, the memo doesn’t mention segregation AT ALL. This was not the intent of the memo. (DC has the authority to redraw school boundaries, but whether they need legal pressure is an open question.)
The memo explicitly states that additional resources should NOT be provided to schools that are NOT “high-quality”, and no resources should be directed away from “high-quality” schools. Thus, the memo explicitly forbids any remedy that would focus on providing additional resources or increasing resource equity.
One expert suggested that one remedy could be DC granting students in a NOT “high-quality” school access to a “high-quality” school. DC could arguably already do this by requiring “high-quality” schools to set aside seats in the My School DC lottery to increase diversity (or reserved for students coming from specific schools), but it would only make a meaningful difference if charter schools were included in this too, and according to the memo, charters cannot be touched.
So what would the courts be allowed to do, according to the memo?
Defund DCPS schools by allowing families to redirect funds to private schools, a key goal of Project 2025. There is no restriction as far as I can see that prohibits redirecting public funds to private schools as the remedy. The memo states that the court has “broad discretion to fashion reasonable remedies.”
Close DCPS schools, which means loss of schools in some neighborhoods and longer commutes.
Whatever the judge decides. What could possibly go wrong?
I wholeheartedly support a right to a quality education for all students in DC – aside from the fact that using proficiency rates to determine quality is highly problematic – but this specific proposal isn’t it. Moreover, opening the door to more federal and judicial involvement in DC public education right now seems incredibly risky.
DC needs to pay careful attention to what happens to this memo and the details of this “measure”. If we don’t, we’re looking at Project 2025 and the defunding of DCPS schools.
