Three top education officials. Photo from the DC government.

A mayoral transition is a good time to think about budget-friendly changes to the org chart, and one constructive change might be to eliminate the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME).

Why do we need a DME when we already have an Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE)? The DME office (with its own chief of staff, 8 full time staff and a $1.3m budget after the Council made cuts) was created at the beginning of the Fenty administration and helped the mayor set education policy during the transition into mayoral control of the schools.

It helped build capacity until DCPS and OSSE staffed up. But now that those offices are up and running, the DME is an agency looking for a role, and that’s never a good thing for taxpayers.

Colbert King named all the newly created DME office’s staffers and their salaries in a 2007 Washington Post column. He was trying to contrast their salaries with those of DCPS teachers. Singling out these individuals was not very classy, but the larger point was a good one: we need to scrutinize these decisions and justify the added expense of the office.

With a new mayor, it’s time for a fresh start. Mayor Gray should appoint a strong administrator and trusted education advisor to head OSSE. This appointment may be the most critical one of Gray’s administration, far more consequential than the Chancellor of DCPS. OSSE has (or should have) authority over the Chancellor as well as the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), which is in charge of the city’s 55 public charter schools.

OSSE will be helping local education agencies implement the District’s $75 million Race to the Top grant and other federal grants. Want to improve the DC CAS, the standardized test upon which state and local accountability are based? OSSE selects and manages the test vendor.

To make up for the lack of a DME, the head of OSSE will have to be skilled at working with other city agencies like facilities management (OPEFM), police (MPD), parks & recreation (DPR), and mental health (DMH). He or she will need strong access to the Mayor and an ability to get a lot done on a limited budget.

The Mayor-elect has criticized his predecessor’s education policy for being too “short-sighted, narrow, and clandestine,” and for short-changing the city’s charter schools. Mayor Gray campaigned on a One City promise that all public schools would get equal funding and attention. One way to put that promise into action and simultaneously win good government points would be to centralize responsibility for education in a State Superintendent who can work well with the new Chancellor, the PCSB, the Mayor, and the Council.

That would free up the Mayor to eliminate the bureaucracy that his predecessor created and broaden education reform to encompass all public schools, not just DCPS. It would give the city a renewed focus on education, but in a more accountable and rational manner suitable for the next phase of the city’s education transformation.

Steven Glazerman is an economist who studies education policy and specializes in teacher labor markets. He has lived in the DC area off and on since 1987 and settled in the U Street neighborhood in 2001. He is a Senior Fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, but any of his views expressed here are his own and do not represent Mathematica.