Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Five D.C. councilmembers are now calling for D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson to step down, as concern over his flouting of school lottery rules does not appear to be fading away.
The only official to face employment consequences for last Friday’s announcement has been D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles, whose resignation was announced by Mayor Muriel Bowser. Bowser ordered Wilson to apologize, saying in a letter to the DCPS community, “I am committed to regaining your trust and continuing the reforms needed to ensure that our students have the tools they need to succeed in the world.”
A report from the District’s Inspector General’s office found Wilson violated the school lottery rules he had written a few months prior when he asked for help in getting his daughter transferred out of the Duke Ellington School for the Arts and into Woodrow Wilson High School. His home is zoned for Dunbar High School, into which his daughter could have transferred with little trouble.
“He shouldn’t have done it,” D.C. State Board of Education member Ruth Wattenberg told WMAL. “I do think it’s going to be hard for him to regain the trust necessary and the credibility necessary to make the big moves that our system needs.”
The five councilmembers calling for Wilson’s ouster are Robert White, Vince Gray, Charles Allen, Elissa Silverman, and Mary Cheh. Cheh’s statement cited not only Wilson’s lottery indiscretion, but more wide-ranging issues.
“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,” her statement read.
Wattenberg agreed, saying there needs to be change regardless of who is at the top.
“Whether he stays or whether he doesn’t stay, we really need to fix the way we oversee our schools. We need to fix the strategy behind it,” she said.
The Board of Education has been stripped of much of its authority, with all personnel and directives coming from the Mayor’s office in what Wattenberg called “one narrow cone.”
“There’s nobody on the outside overseeing it, monitoring it,” she said. “There’s no checks and balances.”
The systemic problems were laid bare in a report from the Office of the State Superintendent last month. It found about a third of DCPS’ 2017 high school graduates should not have been eligible to graduate. The report found the system widely misused credit recovery programs and, in some cases, inflated attendance numbers.
Responsibility was largely placed on Wilson’s predecessor, Kaya Henderson. Wilson has been on the job for just over a year.
“We’ve taken away from the schools and the teachers and the principals the discretion that’s necessary to make policies work,” Wattenberg said. “The system’s been run largely by top-down mandates, and that’s not how you educate kids.”
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