A bad idea in D.C. on school reform
David Catania (By Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
My colleague Emma Brown reported in this story that David Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee, is using private donations to hire an outside law firm to help him design school-related legislation aimed at improving the city’s public schools. Here’s a piece about why this is such a bad idea. It was written by Sam Chaltain, a DC-based education writer, a senior fellow at the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and a former member of Mayor Vincent Gray’s transition team for education policy. He can be reached at schaltain@gmail.com.
By Sam Chaltain
The decision by D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania to hire an outside law firm to craft school reform legislation is an awful one, worthy of serious public rebuke – and for two interrelated reasons.
The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the least likely path towards achieving imaginative and effective policy. Despite public stereotypes of the profession, K-12 education is a complex web of cognitive, social, emotional, language, ethical and physical challenges and opportunities. Its systemic barriers to change are as myriad as our complicated shared memories of what schooling is (and is not). And it’s a field in the midst of a major