DC screwed up, getting rid of the School Board

The City Council is supposed to handle oversight of DC Public Schools--the responsibility was removed from the School Board, which was reconstituted into a "State Board of Education" but with no oversight responsibilities for DCPS. Instead, the DC City Council picked up that responsibility.

There's no way they have the time, the inclination, and the resources to do it very well.

So they don't.

The Georgetown Dish has a piece about this, "D.C. Council, like students, must go back to school," reporting that Councilmembers Catania and Cheh are vying for the chairmanship of a newly constituted Education Committee-currently the oversight is vested in the "Committee of the Whole" which is run by the Council Chairman, Kwame Brown.

--

This problem was easily predicted.

What's really better is to have a school board.

The schools budget is more than $1 billion annually, when you include charters and everything else.

Our "part time" councilmembers don't have the time to manage this and everything else.

Why anybody would think differently is beyond me.

This is all fumbling.