DC Council needs permanent education policy office

When Chairman Kwame Brown resigned from the DC Council earlier this year, 2 of his 3 committee staff members overseeing education left with him, causing an all-too-common “brain drain” of Council committee staff. Until committee staff members are hired centrally by policy professionals, and not directly by councilmembers, the council will be unable to effectively budget, legislate and provide oversight in the area of education.

The Committee of the Whole, which the council chairman heads, currently oversees 14 agencies and numerous special funds including the 4-6 education agencies such as DC Public Schools (DCPS). When the council chairman changes, these staff members often change too.

Chairman Mendelson could end this problem by creating a centralized education policy office, hired and managed by an education policy professional and overseen by the entire council rather than just the chair.

Currently, councilmembers get funds to hire around 4 personal staff and 5 committee staff. Because they hire committee staff directly, councilmembers often treat their committee staff as their personal staff. In fact, many councilmembers explicitly assign personal responsibilities to committee staff members, such as constituent services for particular neighborhoods in their ward.

When councilmembers switch committees, their committee staff move to the new committee even if they have no experience with the new committee’s issues. And when councilmembers leave the council, their committee staff often leave as well. That has happened with much of Kwame Brown’s staff.

As a result, education agencies responsible for $1.5 billion of the $6 billion DC budget are now subject to oversight by a single staffer.

If you were a dedicated education policy professional, would you want to apply for a job with the DC Council that required you to spend much of your time providing constituent services? How about a job in which you may not oversee education at all if the committee chair is assigned to a different committee?

To their credit, Marion Barry and Tommy Wells each have a staff member (full- or part-time) who focuses exclusively on education. These education advisors focus solely on education regardless of their bosses’ committee assignments, but they concentrate on the needs of those members’ specific wards. We need centralized education staff who analyze systemic, city-wide education issues.

How could we improve?

The DC Appleseed Center issued a list of recommendations for improving the DC Council in 1999. Its authors stressed that their “fundamental conclusion” was that the Council should establish “a merit-based, centralized staffing structure that does not rely on patronage.”

Appleseed concluded that “the staff’s limited expertise in major subject areas … constrain[s] the Council’s ability to exercise its powers effectively.” “[W]hen oversight is undertaken,” the report observed, “Council staff is frequently ‘out gunned’ by lobbyists, interest groups, and the executive.”

Furthermore, in 11 city councils that Appleseed studied — Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Columbus, Denver, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Seattle — none of them allowed councilmembers to hire committee staff. In each jurisdiction, “staff work for committees is provided by a central staff that works for the full council and is under the leadership of a staff director.”

When Vincent Gray was council chairman, he created a small Office of Policy Analysis that was a small step in the direction advocated by Appleseed. However, when Gray became Mayor, the director of the office, Susan Banta, followed Gray and the incoming Chairman Kwame Brown discontinued the policy office.

The DC Council should ultimately adopt the Appleseed recommendations and replace the committee staffs with a centralized policy office. The challenge to adopting this recommendation, clearly, is political. Council members don’t want to see the staff they control decrease, even if committee staff shouldn’t be treated as personal staff.

First step: a central education policy office

Several councilmembers and advocates, including myself, have called for the creation of an education committee in the DC Council. However, without additional changes, staff members of an education committee would still rotate with each new committee chair.

The urgency of improving education outcomes in DC provides a more politically palatable path to a central policy office. By implementing the Appleseed recommendations in the area of education only, Chairman Mendelson can take an important step to make oversight of the executive more effective.

Instead of replacing the 2 education staff members who departed with Kwame Brown, Mendelson should create a central education policy office, whose staff members are permanent and accountable to an education policy professional for the quality of their work.

For the office to be permanent, and not fly-by-night as was Chairman Gray’s, Appleseed stresses in its report that the director be “appointed by a majority of Council members.” The director and staff, says Appleseed, should be subject to “conflict-of-interest and ethics statutes” and agree to keep their discussions with councilmembers confidential.

To replace the departed education staff members with new people whose jobs are tied to Mendelson’s chairmanship would be a disservice to the children in DC schools whose education deserves tough oversight.

Chairman Mendelson can leave a permanent mark on the DC Council and on education in DC by replacing the previous structure of education staff members who rotate based on council chair with a permanent education policy office that is chosen by the full council, not simply by the chair.