Meet Our New Public Education Personnel: Just Like the Old Ones (Only More So) | educationdc

Meet Our New Public Education Personnel: Just Like the Old Ones (Only More So) | educationdc:

Meet Our New Public Education Personnel: Just Like the Old Ones (Only More So)

Like shifting tides creating debris pools, the changing political winds of this election year have revealed common underpinnings of our public education system.

Let us start with Antwan Wilson, who has been offered the position of DCPS chancellor (albeit without the review of the DCPS Rising Leadership Committee—oops, so much for public engagement required by law).

The city council will hold three public roundtable hearings about Wilson:

—Wednesday, November 30, 5 pm, Brookland Middle School, 1150 Michigan Ave NE
—Monday, December 5, 5 pm, Benning Neighborhood Library, 3935 Benning Road NE
—Thursday, December 8, 10 am, Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Sign up for the roundtables is here.

Wilson himself embodies the path of many DC schoolchildren, having grown up with a single mother and attending 10 different (presumably public) schools. As the cross sector task force has examined, students with such high mobility are much more likely to do worse in school.

Wilson served as the head of public schools in Oakland, California, for about 2 years. His resume indicates that he has had many similarly short education stints elsewhere. Wilson’s longest employment appears to be as an administrator in Denver public schools, under the guidance of Denver superintendent Tom Boasberg, himself a proponent of charter schools and school closures—as well as a product of the elite DC private school St. Albans.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Wilson is also the beneficiary of training provided by a billionaire financier of education reform, Eli Broad, whose deep-pocketed foundation has funded a variety of pro-charter and school privatization interests.

Wilson is apparently leaving the Oakland schools mid-year, after making more than $400,000 a year in compensation.

So why take a pay cut to come to DC mid-year? And why the rush, such that the Meet Our New Public Education Personnel: Just Like the Old Ones (Only More So) | educationdc: