From left to right – Adrian Fenty, Vincent Gray, Kaya Henderson and Michelle Rhee.

Although the injunction that would have stopped the closing of 15 DC Public Schools was denied and we’re still waiting to find out the date for the hearing that will decide the actual merits of the case, it might make sense to remind ourselves of the events that led to the lawsuit in the first place.

In my experience, the seeds for the lawsuit were sown in the first week of January, 2007, when the newly elected Council chair (Vincent Gray) dissolved the Committee on Education and the newly elected mayor (Adrian Fenty) announced his intention to take over the schools.

There was strong opposition to that idea expressed in testimony at the hearings and through protests and demonstrations. There was a call for the matter to be decided by the people in a referendum since a mayoral takeover required a change to the Home Rule Charter that would decrease the people’s power in determining their own affairs for themselves.

By June, Fenty had, through the Public Education Reform Amendment Act of 2007 (PERAA), stolen the power of the people and taken it unto himself. The law further decreased the power of the people by putting the elected Board of Education way over there to the side as an advisory body with little if any power, while the Council’s power to focus on education matters through a committee was weakened to near nothing by being dispersed among all thirteen members.

With the people shoved aside–no more Board of Education responsible for hiring the best qualified school Superintendent and no more Education Committee on the Council–Fenty used his power to appoint into the PERAA created position of “chancellor,” a woman who had never run a public school district before in her life. This too was opposed because the mayor bypassed the provisions of the law that first, required a search committee be formed to find candidates for the position, and second, required that the person be qualified by education and experience. That opposition was ignored as well.

Rhee’s experience in education consisted of attendance at private schools herself, three years of Teach for America experience in a pilot program to test a profit making company’s idea in a Baltimore public school, and 10 years as the founder and president of a teacher placement agency called the New Teacher Project in NYC. Nevertheless, Fenty handed DCPS over to her on a silver platter and the two of them quickly adopted an attitude that DCPS belonged to them in a very private manner and no one else had any say in it. Within two years of the establishment of the Ombudsman’s office, it was “defunded” and never heard about again.

Parents protest the closing of their children’s schools.

Throughout their tenures, opposition arose to many of the actions they took. Hundreds of people, elementary, middle and high school students among them, testified at innumerable Council hearings about the way teachers and their union were being treated–closing 23 schools, budgets that were all over the place, the assignment and reassignment of principles in all manner of nonsensical ways and much, much more. For the most part, the Council’s response was to shrug their shoulders claiming there was nothing they could do.

In 2010, Fenty was defeated by Gray; Rhee left; and Gray, also ignoring the provisions in PERAA for filling the position of “chancellor,” simply calls up Rhee’s Deputy, Kaya Henderson, who had no more idea of how to run a public school system than Rhee. Henderson came from public schools in a middle class suburban district, also got into teaching the Teach for America way and spent 3 years teaching Spanish before she became the Vice-president of the New Teacher Project (NTP). In that position she acquired a contract for NTP with DCPS to place teachers in it and eventually moved to DC to manage the contract on site.

Henderson and Gray have continued what Fenty and Rhee started–keeping the public’s voice out of any say in how the schools are run, despite the fact they they are funded by the public’s money.

The five year report on the mayoral takeover required by PERAA came due in 2012. But it has not been forthcoming. What the public got instead was another so-called Five Year Strategic Plan, “A Capital Commitment” that reads as nothing more than a list of many of the same problems DCPS started . . . → Read More: Events Leading Up To DC Public School Closings Lawsuit