jonetta rose barras: Mayor Bowser’s education master facilities plan masquerades as a plan

Some education advocates have started describing Mayor Muriel Bowser and sections of her administration as “Trumpian.” They have joked, for example, that Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, continues to suggest that the 2018 Master Facilities Plan (MFP) disapproved earlier this year by the DC Council is perfect. 

That fantasy was on display this week when the council’s Committee of the Whole and Committee on Education held a joint public hearing on the MFP. In his prepared testimony, Kihn called the document a “forward-looking, comprehensive study that provides agencies, school leaders, stakeholders, and the community with the information needed to support current and future school facilities planning in Washington, D.C.”

It is, in his imagination, a beautiful thing.

Under the DC Planning Actively for Comprehensive Education (PACE) Facilities Amendment Act of 2016, an MFP is to be submitted to the council every 10 years. The first was to be prepared by December 2017. However, it wasn’t developed until 2018, and the council didn’t get it until February 2019. Before legislators left for summer recess, they formally rejected it. Currently, there is no council-approved MFP. 

Kihn recently provided an update to the rejected plan. He said the supplement is essentially “very similar” to the previous documents his office submitted. “It comprehensively updates a lot of the data” in the full 2018 report, he said. That additional information has been gathered through EdScape, the new software that’s enamored Kihn and the mayor.

“We are excited about the wealth of information that [the MFP] provides and we are using the information regularly to inform our policy and planning decisions,” he told the council. 

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and several education advocates weren’t buying what Kihn was selling. Even Education Committee chair David Grosso, who didn’t want to reject the MFP, expressed concern about the update. “It doesn’t appear to do any analyses on that data. It just puts it out there,” he said.

Mendelson told Kihn, “We are looking for something that is far more qualitative — a plan that tackles the harder, far more difficult problems.”

Ditto, said advocates from across the city, including wards 1, 3, 4 and 7, who were critical of the lack of tangible recommendations and solutions to deal with overcrowding and underutilization at various schools. They argued that if the goal is quality education, as the document suggests, then those areas should have been addressed.

“A good plan is not so much about facilities as it is about providing a good education for our children,” said Eboni-Rose Thompson, chair of the Ward 7 Education Council. “We have gotten a lot of information in this first round. Now we need recommendations.” 

Mark Medema, managing director of the Charter School Facility Center at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, argued that perhaps facilities planning should be left to entities more expert at land use or urban planning and “not an organization whose core mission is education.”

Sandra Moscoso-Mills, secretary of the Ward 6 Public Schools Parent Association, seemed to argue that the city may be putting the cart before the horse. “We are missing an overall master education strategy. Once [that] is in place, we can talk about a master facilities plan.”

It’s clear from the comments: The MFP, as written, is masquerading as a plan. It may be chocked full with an impressive amount of data, but it lacks bold or innovative solutions to the myriad problems confronting the city’s public education system — a system where at least two-thirds of the students are not ready for college or careers, according to standardized tests, and where most schools received star ratings of three or less. Many of those schools are in wards 7 and 8; they are severely underutilized. Interestingly, the largest number of school-age children live east of the Anacostia River — they just attend school elsewhere, generally requiring lengthy, time-consuming commutes. 

When I asked the DME prior to his council appearance about the fix for the mismatch, he said in an email that “the MFP recommends ways to align forecasted population growth, school enrollment growth plans, and future availability of public-school facilities.” He cited, as an example, the so-called redesign of Ballou and Anacostia high schools that Bowser announced recently; both are underperforming institutions with a reputation for chaos and violence, making them unappealing for many families looking for quality academic programs and more disciplined environments. 

Bowser said Ballou will strengthen the “career pathways currently offered at the school, including culinary arts, automotive technology and hospitality.” Anacostia’s redesign will include “a new civil and environmental engineering pathway that prepares students for high-demand careers, and implementation of a project-based learning approach that makes connections across courses and allows students to apply their learning to real-life topics in their communities and environment.” 

Mental health or trauma centers will be available to Ballou students, parents and staff. At Anacostia, a “Dream Team” will “support students in progressing through their individual goals,” Bowser said.

Shouldn’t that have been happening already? The DC government has become expert at repackaging and branding to create the illusion of something new and innovative. 

If opening a massive auto shop program or teaching how to properly corner bedsheets is what the administration thinks will pull families back into those neighborhood schools, the mayor and her deputy may want to have a talk with former President George W. Bush about “low expectations.” It’s unfathomable that newly collected data would lead to such a narrow imagining of the future for students east of the Anacostia River. 

Kihn and his team also have ignored the oversaturation of charter schools and its adverse impact on traditional facilities, particularly in wards 7 and 8. When I posed the question prior to the hearing about establishing a moratorium on opening new charters, he said the administration “remains agnostic about a sector a school belongs to” and that his office works with everyone “to create solutions to address the complexities of our unique system.”

Charter leaders might find solace in that message, but they have complained that Bowser is preventing them from getting access to empty government buildings. During the hearing Medema — along with Richard Pohlman of FOCUS, a charter advocacy organization, and Scott Pearson, executive director of the Public Charter School Board — underscored concerns about the amount of money charters are paying for rent where they don’t own their buildings. 

Pearson, who has announced his departure at the end of the school year, embraced the idea of “reusing public facilities for educational use, using vacant parcels in mixed-use development for educational purposes, and establishing incentives for developers to incorporate educational uses into their housing developments,” as the MFP recommends. 

“The plan needs to be refined,” continued Pearson, adding that an updated MFP should “speak to specific buildings and specific programs so that both the decision-makers and the communities impacted will have a clear view of the future landscape.”

Acknowledging the growth trajectory of DC Public Schools if current trends continue, Pearson said that instead of leaving buildings vacant for now, it would be “better for all concerned” for the city to offer them to charters as short-term or incubator space. 

Before the mayor and Kihn move to satisfy the demands of charter schools — which, while public, are supposed to be independent operations — they may want to propose a solution for addressing the overcrowding in Ward 2 and Ward 3 schools. Kihn didn’t offer a plan earlier this year, nor did he propose one this week. 

One pathway could be replicating and relocating popular academic and extracurricular programs in those schools to communities east of the Anacostia River and in Ward 5. That kind of change — more than outdated automotive programs — could entice students to enroll in their neighborhood institutions.

“Many families coming from 7 and 8 are looking for reliable [feeder] patterns and programs,” said Thompson. She cited the fact that her own sister, also a Ward 7 resident, chose a charter facility in Ward 4 because it offered a dual immersion French program, something that wasn’t available in the traditional schools in her own ward.

Kihn, pointing to attempts to address overcrowding, cited the changes at Anacostia and Ballou, the opening of Bard High School Early College DC, and the rise in enrollment expected to accompany modernization of Benjamin Banneker Academic High School. Those institutions are outside of the Ward 2 and Ward 3 school feeder patterns, however. 

Truth be told, only two — Bard and Banneker — offer the kinds of programs that might lure families away from wards 2 and 3. Furthermore, as Mendelson noted, none of the changes have been “set down in writing” in the MFP. “A lot of it feels ad hoc,” he said.

Despite the hours of testimony and clear frustration of residents and advocates at Wednesday’s hearing, Kihn insisted that he has followed the law. From where he sits, the master facilities plan remains a thing of beauty — which is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.

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jonetta rose barras is an author, a freelance journalist and host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com