Mayoral control of the city’s educational system, student enrollment and the District’s school lottery system topped the subjects that candidates for the Ward 6 seat on the DC State Board of Education explored during debates in the months leading up to Tuesday’s election. But some of the sharpest distinctions arise from their different experiences in the educational sphere.
Incumbent Joe Weedon and challenger Jessica Sutter shared their thoughts and platforms with community members during an extensive Sept. 20 candidates forum held at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital. The Hill Rag, the Ward 6 Democrats sponsored the event, which was moderated by Tommy Wells, director of the DC Department of Energy and Environment and a former Ward 6 DC Council member.
The Southwester and the Southwest Neighborhood Assembly organized another forum last week, which focused on some of the same issues.
At the Sept. 20 event, the two candidates shared similar expectations about increasing equitable access to neighborhood and citywide schools, ensuring racial and socioeconomic diversity in classrooms, improving funding for students with special needs, and addressing student and school achievement gaps in Ward 6 and across the city.
The candidates’ differences emerged when discussing their experiences within the education system: Sutter is a former teacher and education consultant, and Weedon is an education advocate and DC public school parent.
Sutter said that she’s concerned that community members don’t know enough about what the SBOE does. As a board member, she said, she would strive to involve Ward 6 communities and families in education policy recommendations considered by the SBOE.
“The DC State Board of Education needs a diverse set of voices. We have a number of parents, several DCPS alumni; we have only one person who has ever been a teacher in the classroom who plans to stay on the board next year. I think that’s a shame — out of nine members on the state board, only one will have been in the classroom implementing the policies the state board approves,” said Sutter, who taught middle school in Chicago and Los Angeles before moving to DC in 2006 to work in a charter middle school here. She later worked as a grant program officer at the Office of the State Superintendent of Education and as a senior adviser to the DC deputy mayor for education. Most recently she completed her doctorate in May on education policy studies. “Ward 6 needs a representative that represents and gives airtime to all 36 schools here in our ward,” Sutter said.
Weedon started his career as a legislative aide for the Illinois governor’s office in DC, where he focused on education and criminal justice policy. He is the executive director of Companies for Causes, a nonprofit that works with socially minded CEOs on community investments and problem-solving. He become involved with Ward 6 schools in 2003 when he joined community members to oppose a proposal to close Maury Elementary, one of the ward’s neighborhood elementary schools. He later enrolled both of his children at Maury.
In addition to his role as Ward 6’s State Board of Education representative since 2015, Weedon also assists the rocketry clubs at Eliot-Hine Middle School and Eastern High School, both in Kingman Park, and mentors students at Eastern High in an internship class.
“We need to empower schools and communities,” Weedon said. “I’m proud of the work we’ve done on the policy level, including establishing residency standards, graduation requirements and community engagement.”
Charter and traditional public schools
The candidates, who are vying for a four-year term, debated how to approach a conflict created by the composition of charter schools and DC public schools that have a variety of ripple effects. In DC, charter middle schools generally start at fifth grade, while standard DCPS elementary schools end after fifth grade.
In many instances, students leave public elementary school a year early to enroll in a charter school. Though families can wait until the student’s sixth-grade year to enroll, spots fill up quickly and chances of getting a seat are less likely.
The candidates agreed that coordination and mutual support are necessary to ensure that families are able to choose what’s best for their child and family.
Weedon said he supports charter schools in their efforts to attract and retain students and create independent educational programming, but he said it’s a mistake to think that charter schools are necessarily providing a better education than neighborhood schools do. Even so, Weedon said, DCPS needs to solidify its middle school and high school offerings in Ward 6 to reduce that perception and to bolster community confidence in neighborhood public schools.
“I think many parents don’t believe that their neighborhood middle schools or the pathway to graduation is strong enough,” he said. “To me, that means we need to roll up our sleeves, invest and build great schools in our neighborhood for the community.”
Sutter pointed out that charter middle schools initially chose to include the fifth grade in order to provide educational remediation for lower-income students arriving from struggling elementary schools and to get students on track for their middle school education. As neighborhood elementary schools in Ward 6 and across the city improve, city officials need to resolve the fifth-grade inconsistency between charter schools and DCPS in a manner that serves children’s needs and doesn’t destabilize schools in either sector, she said.
“We now have to ask why families are leaving the neighborhood schools and going to charter school: What is it that families need?” Sutter said. “I think we need to change the narrative around ‘we’re taking the kids,’ which I think charters often hear from neighborhood schools, [so that instead we’re talking about] what kind of system fits all of our children and how do we make it happen.”
Mayoral control and the DC State Board of Education’s role
Both candidates said they support mayoral control of the education system, while also agreeing that the current setup lacks accountability and transparency. They differed, though, on whether proposed changes are a good idea.
Weedon supported further discussion of aspects from two DC Council bills regarding OSSE — one introduced by at-large DC Council member David Grosso to make the superintendent more independent and the other from Ward 3 Council member Mary Cheh to place authority over the agency under the state board rather than the mayor.
Weedon said he’s concerned that all of the city’s top educational leaders, including the state superintendent and the DC Public Schools chancellor, report to the mayor. He argued that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees school data including enrollment numbers, test scores and report cards, should become an independent institution.
“We have not been honest with citizens about achievement gaps in the last decade; we haven’t been honest about graduation and whether our schools are meeting the standards,” Weedon said. “I believe OSSE should be independent [so it can] respond to parents and community members and policy makers so that we can understand the issues facing our schools and have the data to move forward.”
Sutter is open to Grosso’s bill, which would extend the superintendent’s term and insulate the office from political pressure. As for Cheh’s approach, Sutter expressed concern about trusting the state board with oversight of OSSE given that many of the community members she reached out to while campaigning didn’t know much about the role or responsibilities of the board. Those same people are generally familiar with the mayor and the council, she said.
“I think we would not have had the reforms we have had to date without a decisive executive making calls,” Sutter said. “That said, it bothers me immensely, as a former civics teacher, that there are no checks and balances on the differences of our state-level functions and local-level functions.”
Lottery system
Wells asked the candidates about trends in school segregation and the influence of the District’s school lottery system. Both argued that the lottery system as it now exists is flawed, widening achievement gaps and deepening socioeconomic and racial segregation.
Weedon noted that the current system benefits families who reside within the boundaries for a high-performing school who can nonetheless try their luck in the lottery in hopes of getting a seat at a school they see as more desirable. Meanwhile, he said, students who live in neighborhoods with low-achieving schools have no good alternative if they don’t fare well in the lottery.
“That’s not right, not fair — that’s not just.” Weedon said. Though the lottery system needs reform, he stressed, officials must also examine why families choose not to stay in neighborhood schools. Underperforming schools may need more investment and support for the school’s programs and educators, he said.
Sutter recommended adjustments to the lottery system to ensure that low-income or at-risk students receive equitable access to high-performing schools. Currently, the lottery system gives priority to siblings of students at the same school. Eliminating that would provide more students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds with access to high-performing schools, she said.
Sutter also suggested that buying a home near a certain school should not necessarily guarantee a seat there; an alternative system could give the family a right to one of several neighborhood schools, with the specific assignment made randomly through the lottery. Doing so would help free up seats in high-performing schools for students who otherwise wouldn’t have the option, she said.
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