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District voters in some wards will be voting tomorrow for members of the DC State Board of Education (SBOE). But this isn’t a school board that oversees the DC Public Schools. So what is this board, and is there a point to it? As it happens, many people inside the education world ask and debate those same questions.

At recent forums, candidates for the SBOE have talked about hot issues like school boundaries and feeder patterns, coordination between charter schools and DCPS, and whether there’s too much standardized testing.

But unlike a local school board, a state board of education doesn’t exercise control over those day-to-day issues. Instead, state boards are responsible for setting broad policy in areas like graduation requirements, curriculum academic standards, and teacher qualifications. DC’s state board has that kind of responsibility, but there’s still a problem: it doesn’t have enough power to ensure its policy decisions get translated into reality.

DC’s state board is responsible for advising the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), the District’s state education agency.

The state superintendent is appointed by the mayor, who can hire and fire him at will. The agency the superintendent heads, OSSE, oversees education throughout the District, including both DCPS and charter schools and ranging from preschool through adult education.

Among other things, OSSE is responsible for standardized testing, compliance with federal law in areas like special education, and administering the federal education grants DC receives. The SBOE is supposed to advise the superintendent in the policies he applies.

By statute, the SBOE is also responsible for approving education policies. It’s supposed to do things like set academic standards and decide on teacher qualifications. Like other state boards, DC’s SBOE doesn’t have the authority to enforce or implement the high-level policies it adopts. Traditionally, that’s not a state board’s role.

Members say the SBOE does serve an important function in holding hearings and bringing education stakeholders together. According to SBOE Vice President Mary Lord, the policies it adopts affect “what every student in every grade in every classroom is expected to know and be able to do.”

Limits on the SBOE’s effectiveness

But Lord and three other SBOE members I interviewed also say the structure of DC’s government has limited the SBOE’s effectiveness.

One problem is that, although the SBOE sometimes has input into policy decisions, it doesn’t have the power to suggest new policy initiatives. Instead, members have to wait for OSSE to bring them up. And once that happens, SBOE members can only approve or disapprove them. They can’t modify them. That set-up limits their power to shape policy.

Some SBOE members also say OSSE and the SBOE can’t effectively exercise state-level functions because in the District, there’s no independent state education authority. All of DC’s many education officials—except for the elected state board—report to the mayor.

In the case of the state superintendent, that situation creates a conflict of interest: the superintendent is supposed to act as a watchdog over the mayor’s handling of education, but he’s accountable to the very person he’s ostensibly overseeing.

The SBOE is elected rather than appointed by the mayor, so theoretically it could act as a check on the mayor’s overarching authority. But that hasn’t happened because in many respects the SBOE has to rely on the superintendent to be effective.

How we got a state board

To understand how we ended up with a state board that lacks the kind of authority exercised by other state boards, it helps to know how and why the SBOE came to be.

Like other school districts, DC used to have an elected local school board that oversaw DCPS. But many felt its political nature and control over details impeded educational progress.

In 2007, the DC Council passed legislation handing control of the school system to the mayor and abolishing the local board. The Council also created OSSE, partly because the District needed a state education agency to apply for and administer federal education grants.

Though there was no federal requirement that the Council establish a state board, Councilmembers did so because they wanted to give the public some direct voice in education. The now-defunct local school board carried special emotional weight in DC because for a long time, it was the only elected body in the District.

The SBOE consists of elected representatives from all eight wards and one at-large member. It holds public meetings twice a month, and each member receives an annual stipend of $15,000. Members serve four-year terms, and elections are staggered, with candidates running this year in Wards 1, 3, 5, and 6.

The relationship between the board and OSSE

The first problem is the relationship between the SBOE and OSSE, both structurally and, at times, personally. Board members have complained that OSSE bristles at any suggestion that the SBOE’s role is more than advisory. And when the SBOE and OSSE don’t see eye-to-eye on priorities, OSSE has the upper hand.

When it passed the legislation setting up the SBOE in 2007, the DC Council said it wanted the SBOE’s role to be more than advisory, which is why it gave it the power to approve policies. But in practice, the SBOE’s reliance on OSSE has made policy-making difficult when the two agencies disagree.

One example of how this friction affects students is the issue of graduation requirements, which the SBOE is responsible for approving. The SBOE has been working on revising those requirements for years, holding hearings and gathering input from stakeholders. It submitted a draft proposal to OSSE earlier this year but now has to wait until that agency takes action. Some SBOE members say OSSE is dragging its feet.

According to Jack Jacobson, the Ward 2 SBOE member, a previous superintendent asked for the board’s help in revising the requirements. But the two subsequent superintendents haven’t been as interested. DC’s current superintendent, Jacobson says, “has had concerns with the draft proposal, so he hasn’t been as willing to work with the board on a final product.”

A spokesperson for OSSE responded in an email that the process of revising graduation requirements is one that “should not be rushed.”

The state superintendent’s subordinate role

The more fundamental problem, SBOE members and others say, is that DC’s superintendent is accountable only to the mayor’s office. In some states, the superintendent reports to the governor. In others, the state board hires and fires the superintendent.

Board members also point out that DC’s governmental structure ranks the superintendent lower than the DCPS chancellor. The chancellor reports directly to the mayor, while the superintendent reports to the deputy mayor for education. That makes it difficult for the superintendent to challenge the DCPS chancellor on issues such as whether schools are making enough progress.

Lord and Jacobson advocate making the superintendent accountable to the SBOE instead of the mayor to give the position real independence. The DC Council considered that option in 2007, but decided it was “unacceptable” to have the SBOE and the superintendent essentially overseeing the mayor.

Perhaps the SBOE doesn’t need the power to hire and fire the superintendent, says Monica Warren-Jones, an outgoing member from Ward 6, but it should at least have input into those decisions. She points to the fact that OSSE has been criticized for its administration of federal education grants and says more checks and balances are needed.

Some may worry that giving more power to the SBOE would bring us back to the bad old days when a local school board was micromanaging decisions that should have been left to school officials.

But a state board doesn’t get into matters that should be left to school officials, like which textbooks schools should use or what kind of contract a teachers union should have. And it doesn’t control school budgets, so it can’t decide how many teachers to hire or fire.

Instead, it can promote fundamental change, as the SBOE has tried to do in its now-stalled draft graduation requirements. The most innovative aspect of that proposal would allow DC schools to give students credit for mastery of subject matter rather than time spent sitting in a classroom.

DC’s complicated education scene would benefit from an overarching, elected body with real authority over policy-level issues that apply to both the charter and DCPS sectors. While that’s what the DC Council had in mind when it set up the SBOE in 2007, we have yet to achieve it.

Natalie Wexler is a DC education journalist and blogger. She chairs the board of The Writing Revolution and serves on the Urban Teachers DC Regional Leadership Council, and she has been a volunteer reading and writing tutor in high-poverty DC Public Schools.