Opening Statement of Councilmember Grosso, Chairperson

Committee on Education
Public Oversight Roundtable on
The Future of School Reform in the District of Columbia
May 16, 2018

I have convened this roundtable as part of a series of conversations about the state of school
reform in the District of Columbia. There have been significant changes in our education
system over the previous two decades. Test scores, recent scandals, and evaluative data show
us that we still have a long way to go.
A lot has been uncovered about our school system over the past year in the form of scandal
and it has been disruptive to students, teachers, and parents. We are facing a significant lack
of trust from the public about the true quality of our schools. As the governing and oversight
body, it is the responsibility of this Committee to take what we have learned and face it head-
on. The conversations are not easy or comfortable. We owe it to the children of this city to not
only have the tough conversations but be bold and swift about what changes must now be
made.
I believe we are also here today to talk about a bigger problem that is pervasive and systemic.
A problem that is woven into student attendance, standardized test scores and grades, teacher
evaluations, principal ratings, and school budgets. If we do not grapple publicly and honestly
with the role that institutional racism and racial bias play in our society, and the impact on
public education, we will continue to spin our wheels in efforts to close the achievement gap.
The public education system in the District of Columbia has come a long way, but we know
that we have a long way to go to claim success.
The evaluative report of the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (or PERAA) from 2015
highlighted specific issues of concern and every year since receiving that report, I have
questioned the Deputy Mayor for Education, DCPS, the Public Charter School Board, and
OSSE about how they are addressing the report’s recommendations.
The Committee on Education has been committed to analyze, legislate, and then fund the
recommendations from the report. I am going to take a minute to walk through some of the
work we have done in the Committee to be responsive.

• To build on the strength and performance of OSSE and in recognizing that there was a
failure to sufficiently collect data and use technology to our advantage, I worked with
the agency to get the additional funding needed for the data vault and build out of
SLED;

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 • Through oversight, we pressed OSSE, the DME, the PCSB and the State Board to have
more transparency and clarity about their function by holding more public meetings,
putting more content on their websites; and being more responsive;
• Through oversight and monthly meetings with the Chancellor, conversation with the
City Administrator and the CFO, we raised and continue to raise the unequal
distribution of highly effective teachers across the city. I consistently worked with the
Chancellor and the WTU President for four years to encourage meaningful negotiations
to get to a good-faith agreement on the teacher contract;
• I have worked tirelessly for two years on the inequities in terms of student discipline
and access to challenging learning opportunities. The Committee on Education passed
and earlier this month the Council unanimously adopted the Fair Access to School
Amendment Act, which will limit the suspension and expulsion of students to situations
of safety threats. This new law will directly address the school to prison pipeline and the
loss in instructional time from suspensions that contributes to the achievement gap.
• To further address the growing achievement gap – particularly for students with
disabilities, English language learners and students in poverty-- I challenged my team
to come up with immediate legislative solutions.
o One was the introduction of the Language Access for Education Amendment
Act of 2017, a bill to provide greater access to education for English language
learners. That bill was approved by both this Committee and the Committee on
the Judiciary, but it has now been languishing in the Committee of the Whole for
over a year.
o For students with disabilities, we held two roundtables and wrote a report about
the status of their education and services. We have tracked the work of DCPS,
charter schools, and OSSE to implement the special education laws from 2014,
which is coming to fruition with the lifting of the final subject to appropriations
clause in the FY19 budget.
• This Committee has made significant investments in the last four budgets toward
closing the achievement gap, including the early literacy intervention program that we
established, increasing the general Uniform Per Student Funding Formula last year and
the at-risk weight this year, enhancing funding for community schools and restorative
practices, and bringing a focus to the non-academic needs of students and families that
impact educational outcomes from trauma and adversity to behavioral and physical
health.
Despite the advances we have made on the recommendations from the PERAA report on data
collection, there are legitimate criticisms about the credibility of certain data points that we
have celebrated. This has led to questions about the integrity of our educational data overall.
Data is very important, and we need more of it, but data is not everything. We must also ask
the right questions and apply it correctly. We must also guard against the measurements
becoming more important than the reasons for the measuring.

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While there are many improvements that need to be made regarding how we collect and
analyze data, we have a consensus between the Council and the Mayor about the importance
of data and its accuracy. We have a State Superintendent of Education who has transformed
her agency into one that is far more credible than any previous time in its decade of existence.
I am skeptical of the value of creating a new entity that would gather and analyze data
separate from our State Education Agency, OSSE, when that is exactly the kind of capacity we
have been building at OSSE over the past three years. I am similarly skeptical that this new
entity would be any freer of political influence than OSSE.
Rather I think we should focus the dollars and energy that would go into creating such an entity
toward further strengthening OSSE’s abilities and insulating the agency from political
interference. The Alvarez and Marsal report on high school graduation policies and practices
showed the high level of work of which OSSE is capable. The question is how we get the
agency to do more of that. I hope to hear from witnesses today about this.
Similarly, in an effort to close the achievement gap, this Committee has sought to target
resources to the students and schools that need them the most. Implementation of the at-risk
funding weight was far from perfect, but one of the challenges has been the lack of
transparency with how those dollars have been spent. There are also real questions about
spending by LEAs on administrative needs versus student needs.
This Committee and school communities across the District have spent years trying to get
more transparency from the DCPS budget. This year the issue came to a head as the
Committee sought to more accurately account for the DCPS projected enrollment, but we
were prevented from doing so because the agency had already committed the dollars—not to
schools but to worthy programs in central office. Without a real understanding of how DCPS is
spending its dollars and the spending pressures that it faces as the by-right school, we cannot
properly budget. We also cannot have a proper conversation about whether the current
budgeting framework of the UPSFF, which was created by Congress in the 1990s, continues to
make sense. We cannot have the honest conversation about what changes, if any, might need
to be made. With the LEA payment initiative on pause, schools crying out that they are having
to cut staff, and over a thousand DCPS seniors not likely to graduate high school, I feel a great
sense of urgency here.
Yet language that the Committee included in its budget report to require greater transparency
from the Mayor and DCPS about budgeting and educational funding was struck from the
budget by Chairman Mendelson. Despite unanimous Committee approval, the Council
yesterday passed a budget that allows lack of transparency by DCPS and the Mayor to
continue. I hope to hear from witnesses today about these issues as well.

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Through this hearing today and the series of conversations in the coming months, I intend
focus on what more needs to be done by the legislative branch to fulfill the true promise of
school reform efforts—that puts every student in the best position to succeed.
This is just one of many opportunities for the public to weigh in on these important questions.
In addition to the numerous oversight hearings and roundtables that the Committee has held
over the past four months, I will also be holding town halls in all eight wards again this summer
to hear from residents in their own neighborhoods. I also encourage the public to stay up to
date with the activities of the Committee by visiting my website at davidgrosso.org.
With that, I’d like to thank our witnesses for being here today. I look forward to your
presentation and the conversation thereafter.
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