jonetta rose barras: Was the DC Council really talking about education?
“This is all about politics,” DC Council Chairman Pro Tempore and Ward 5 representative Kenyan McDuffie said repeatedly last week. He and his colleagues were engaged in a nearly two-hour debate about whether to relocate Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, as Mayor Muriel Bowser had proposed, to Rhode Island Avenue NW or whether to reopen what had been known as Shaw Junior High School on that site. The ruckus among legislators occurred during the final vote to approve the city’s $15.5 billion fiscal year 2020 budget and financial plan.
Truth be told, the meeting was a spectacle of pure, unvarnished politics accented by profanity and incivility. Substantial education policy questions critical to DC children and the city’s overall future were never genuinely examined. Council members were mostly focused on buildings and territorial ownership.
Bowser and her council allies weaponized education, arming one community against another. They also incited the fears of other residents, many of whom are either believers in “The Plan” — a mythical, subversive plot of white takeover — or acolytes of a budding nativist movement that has gained traction, targeting those not born in the city or those who allegedly oppose go-go music and anything else perceived as uniquely DC.
Just this week, McDuffie introduced legislation to make go-go the official music of the District; the 12 legislators who co-introduced the measure could be members of the movement or worried about being called out for not being supportive of it. Either way, given all the music that has been created in the city’s history, is go-go-really representative?
With or without the beat, we are witnessing an indisputable trickle-down coarseness of American political discourse hastened by language, attitude and tactics introduced by President Donald J. Trump and his cronies. Over the past year, we have seen evidence of its presence in local DC politics. The native Washingtonian movement, for example, has become so intense, I have said — jokingly — I half expect someone to demand construction of a wall between so-called gentrified areas and existing communities.
At one point during the contentious conversation on May 28, Ward 8 Council member Trayon White went street on the dais, asserting Chairman Phil Mendelson was talking “bull—t.” When a legislator noted that Banneker students had shouted through the halls of the John A. Wilson Building during their protest days before the legislative session, McDuffie offered that they had done a “damn good job.” Later, during a procedural dispute after a voice vote on an amendment to locate a new Shaw Middle School on what would become the former campus of Banneker, McDuffie, resembling a playground bully, taunted Mendelson, asking “How do you know how I voted?”
“I thought it was disrespectful, and he should apologize to Mendelson,” Ibrahim Mumin, a small-business owner who has been a resident of Shaw for 43 years, said about McDuffie’s behavior toward the council chairman; Mumin supports the opening of a Shaw Middle School on the site of the former junior high. (Oddly, just weeks ago a Ward 5 resident demanded an apology from Ward 3 Council member Mary Cheh when, arguing for a soda tax, she disrespected McDuffie.)
Mumin said the entire council meeting “bothered” him. “I am still trying to process and regroup. The biggest disappointment was the unacceptable behavior of Muriel Bowser.” He referenced former first lady Michelle Obama’s advice that when Republicans go low Democrats should go high.
“The mayor went low,” Mumin said.
Those of us who have been around politics know things sometimes can get heated and nasty. The behavior of some council members last week wasn’t misdirected passion, however. It was deliberate and aggressive, designed to project authority and to reassert territorial command.
“It was dispiriting to me,” said John Capozzi, a Ward 7 resident and longtime activist who supported relocating Banneker. He lambasted elected officials for “pitting schools against each other” and wondered why council members aren’t “debating other more important things — like the fact that five [new] charter schools were just approved. They will continue the drain on resources and the problems with half-empty schools, but there is no connection being made.”
Capozzi, who is white, said some people may try to make the debate about race but the young clients seen by the nonprofit where he works “just want to get help. They feel like, ‘If there is this white guy helping me get where I want to go, then that doesn’t matter as long as I get where I want to go.’
“It’s people in my generation who are the [extremists] and who are fighting each other,” added Capozzi.
Equally important, others say, why hasn’t there been a consideration of alternative sites? “Why aren’t we looking at charter school buildings?” asked 21st Century School Fund executive director Mary Filardo, noting that a couple of institutions like Cesar Chavez Prep are closing or will close. Could the DC government reclaim those facilities and use them for a school like Banneker — an application high school that draws a citywide student population and doesn’t serve a particular geographic area?
“They are not being creative. We have not used our capital dollars effectively in this city,” added Filardo, whose organization advocated for modernization of Banneker at its existing site and construction of a new Shaw Middle School on Rhode Island Avenue. The Fund asserted that relocating Banneker would rob the school of several acres of land that could accommodate functions it sought.
“We’re throwing out the boundary study that said there should be a center city middle school,” lamented at-large Council member Elissa Silverman during the meeting, referring to a citywide plan developed during then-Mayor Vincent Gray’s tenure by his deputy mayor for education, Abigail Smith. The result of extensive public input, the boundary plan was expected to grow and strengthen the network of neighborhood institutions inside the DC Public Schools system. Among other things, it was seen as a way to bring greater equity in resources to schools in low-income communities stabilizing the student population while potentially improving the teaching corps.
When Bowser took office, she immediately shelved the study, however. She had promised her supporters in several Ward 4 neighborhoods to quash any feeder lines that would deny them the opportunity to attend Alice Deal Middle School or Wilson High School, both in Ward 3. Some of those families would have been directed to Roosevelt High School or the then-unfinished MacFarland Middle School.
In the banneker-Shaw debate what residents are seeing their interests tossed or preserved as the 2020 political season opens? Up for re-election are Gray, now the Ward 7 representative on the council; Ward 8’s Trayon White; Ward 4’s Brandon Todd; and at-large members Robert White and David Grosso — all of whom voted in favor of relocating Banneker. At-large member Anita Bonds and McDuffie brought the total to seven.
Interestingly, instead of heeding Silverman’s caution about engaging in ad hoc education policymaking from the dais to score political points, McDuffie doubled-down, making what seemed an assault on even the idea of Shaw Middle School: “It still bothers me that this debate has devolved into just about Shaw — why is it just about Shaw?”
How can any discussion about the future of 1,302 mostly at-risk, black and brown students who school officials and advocates say are enrolled in elementary schools that would feed into Shaw be considered a devolution?
Bowser and others frequently give lip service to the plight of low-income residents. The practical and measurable reality is that elected officials repeatedly ignore their needs, especially around education. Ward 8 may have a fancy modernized Ballou Senior High, but the operational budget for that school, which is based on student population, essentially has been reduced because middle-class families or higher-performing students are seduced by Wilson or McKinley or Banneker. The council may have added more money for education, but it adhered to a spending formula that harms the most vulnerable students.
The class analysis of the fight between Banneker and the construction of Shaw Middle School has yet to be conducted; there is the perception that all communities of color are the same — a monolith, without regard to a family’s academic achievement, professional status or income. In other words, class rarely enters the discussion. Didn’t an African American man pay the debt for the 2019 graduating class at Morehouse College? That should tell you something.
Banneker’s profile suggests a difference: 74 percent of the population is African American and 20 percent is Hispanic. Only 20 percent of the student body is categorized as at-risk; 1 percent have been described as homeless and 1 percent as English language learners.
By contrast, the Shaw feeder population is fairly diverse — 42 percent African American, 38 percent Latino, 9 percent white, 8 percent Asian and 2 percent mixed race. Unsurprisingly, 38 percent of those students are considered at-risk and 35 percent are English language learners, according to the 21st Century School Fund.
Near the end of the council debate, Silverman may have captured the sentiments of many residents who witnessed the spectacle live or televised. “This has been one of the most disingenuous council meetings I have been a part of since I have been here, and I have been here for five years,” she said.
Considering Silverman’s comment, I was reminded of something author Stephen Carter wrote in his book Integrity: “If we refuse to take the time for discernment, a discernment that might challenge cherished beliefs, then it is hard to see how we can ever construct a politics of integrity.”
Perhaps DC elected officials aren’t any more interested in that than they are in solving some of the city’s decades-old public education problems, particularly those hurting low-income students.
jonetta rose barras is a DC-based freelance writer and host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
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