Steve Burns

WMAL.com

WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Following days of simmering outrage over his flouting of school lottery rules, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson’s resignation was announced Tuesday by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

“It became very clear to me over the last several days that Chancellor Wilson would be unable to successfully lead the schools, having not been able to regain the community’s trust,” Bowser told reporters.

Bowser said they are negotiating an exit and severance package to Wilson’s two-year contract. He had been on the job for just over a year.

D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles resigned last Friday after an Inspector General’s report revealed she had assisted Wilson in getting his daughter moved from the Duke Ellington School for the Arts into Woodrow Wilson High School, bypassing the school’s long wait list. Wilson’s inbound school was Dunbar High School.

Since the news came to light, calls for Wilson’s resignations grew louder from the D.C. Council, culminating by Tuesday morning with a majority of them asking for Wilson to step down.

Bowser told reporters earlier Tuesday that she had met in the morning with D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and Education Committee Chair David Grosso to look at next steps.

“We all agree that we have very complicated issues to review, and our focus, of course, has to be on all the children of our system,” she said.

By Tuesday evening, it seemed Bowser had made her decision.

“What we have is two people with just incredible credentials and intelligence that made bad decisions that, for us, were unpredictable and unpreventable,” she said. “Stability and continuity in our system is very important, but in order for that to be effective, a leader has to have the trust of the people he manages and the people he leads. That’s how we ended up here today.”

It’s another black eye for the embattled system, which just last month dealt with the fallout of a report that found one third of its 2017 high school graduates did not meet attendance and credit requirements. Bowser said the attendance issue did not factor in to her decision to remove Wilson. She also said she had no knowledge of the move prior to a notification from the IG’s office last week.

Wilson had helped to write new school lottery rules after it came to light early in his tenure that his predecessor, Kaya Henderson, had given preferential treatment to the children of many elected officials. It was those same rules that he violated months later.

In calling for Wilson’s resignation, some Councilmembers cited larger reasons outside of the lottery situation.

“He is committed to following the same flawed system that has led us to graduating students who are not at all ready for college or careers and, in some cases, are functionally illiterate, a continued and even widening achievement gap, demoralized teachers and one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the nation, social promotions, a loss of confidence in honest and truthful reporting, top-down administration with little room for creativity and flexibility, and a fixation on numbers rather than real educational achievement,” Ward Three Councilmember Mary Cheh wrote.

Bowser remained confident in the system’s long-term improvements, calling DCPS “one of the best systems anywhere in our nation.”

“Some people won’t remember from whence we came,” Bowser said. “We can look at the last ten years and know how significant the progress that we’ve made in public education in our city has been.”

DCPS’ elementary schools chief Dr. Amanda Alexander is stepping in as interim Chancellor.

“My aim, really is to just make sure that we finish the year strong,” Alexander said in brief comments to reporters. “We’ve got four months of school left, and I want to make sure that every day counts for our students, teachers and parents.”

The search for another chancellor will begin again soon, something Grosso, the Education Committee chair, knows well.

“I went through this search, we all did, just a couple years ago, and we’ll follow a very similar process in the Committee on Education,” he said. “We’ll have public hearings. We’ll have community-based meetings. We will (have) as much engagement as people want.”

Grosso said he had been impressed with Wilson’s tenure until last week, mentioning a solid working relationship the two maintained.

“This is going to be a challenge, but not an impossible challenge,” he said. “We’ll work through it and hopefully have some real continuity moving forward.”

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