Posts by Steven Glazerman

Ward 5 is home to massive big box development with large surface parking lots, fast-moving commuter roads like Rhode Island and New York Avenues, busy intersections, and has perhaps the least amount of bicycle infrastructure and Capital Bikeshare coverage in the city.

Yet it also has three Red Line Metro stops and the Met Branch trail, and room for new transit-oriented development. McDuffie also mentioned a priority of "solving traffic problems" associated with development. I hope that he, and other candidates in Ward 5, understand the benefits of changes which slow down cars but benefit travel by transit, on foot and by bicycle.

Ward 1 and Capitol Hill provide good examples of residential and retail density with bike infrastucture that create desirable destinations and connections between adjacent communities. The tree-lined streets of residential Ward 5 can have the best of both worlds—good urbanism while preserving a sense of suburban tranquility.

McDuffie has made education a key point of his candidacy, creating an education priorities page on his website. He says he will "tackle truancy," "prepare students for higher education," and "increase vocational programs."

At a recent meet-and-greet, someone asked about the disposition of vacant or underutilized DCPS school buildings. McDuffie gave what I consider the "correct" answer without hesitating: make sure that operators who have shown themselves to be effective at educating kids have a fair crack at the buildings, and if that avenue is exhausted, seek a deal that is good for the city in terms of generating the most revenue.

As with most campaign platforms, the lofty pronouncements may be on the right track but don't delve into as much detail. It's easy to promise to address big problems, but harder to specify exactly how, (or how to pay for any changes). The challenge for voters is to read between the lines and guess what the candidates will do if and when they sit on the council.

The education priorities page does not address school modernization, school funding, or the equity and adequacy issues raised in the recent DC Public Education Finance Reform Commission report (and covered in the Washington Post). It also does not address any of the various education proposals that Kwame Brown has floated in the past few weeks. Will McDuffie side with Brown or take a different approach? What about the other Ward 5 hopefuls?

I look forward to hearing more about the specifics of McDuffie's views, and what the other Ward 5 candidates and at-large candidates running in the April primary have to say. I hope they will write position papers on their website, post on this blog, and even engage with voters in comments.

Currently, charter schools by law must admit anyone who applies. If the grade in question has more applicants than seats, charters use a random lottery to determine which students get an offer of a seat. The only exceptions to the lottery are siblings and founders' children.

Neighborhood schools, by contrast, must accept all students living in their boundary first. Remaining spaces are filled through an out-of-boundary lottery, with preferences for siblings, and for families living nearby but outside the boundary.

Unlike neighborhood schools, charters have to struggle to find facilities as opposed to having the District buy and maintain them. This often forces charters to move or split into multiple campuses, where an elementary school feeds into a distant middle or high school.

Charters need families who are committed to the program, rather than just attending for the short commute. Otherwise, if the school moves or when a student graduates to another campus, many of those families will simply leave the school. Too much turnover interferes with building a successful school.

In addition, charters (or any school of choice) without attendance zones can help break the ugly patterns of race and class segregation that divide our city.

With only neighborhood schools, school segregation usually mirrors residential segregation. Open enrollment and a vigorous parent education campaign can help ensure that charters serve all families, including the District's most disadvantaged, regardless of home address.

Public school choice became popular in the late 1970s in places like Philadelphia and St. Louis, where people sought a voluntary alternative to forced busing as a way to reduce segregation. For example, the Minneapolis Public Schools created a vast array of school types to appeal to people in ways that would draw voluntary movement so that formerly segregated groups would mix.

DC now has that possibility too. When affluent families in Ward 3 and low-income families in Ward 7 both want to attend the same school in Ward 5 because its innovative curriculum, we should not stymie the families' efforts.

The only rationale for this policy is a non-educational one: minimizing commuting distance. Sure, we could save a lot of energy and kids' time if nobody had to commute more than a mile or two. It would help children's fitness and neighborhood cohesion if all students walked to school.

Educational excellence should trump these convenience factors. Even a long school commute within DC is around 5 or 6 miles, which is no farther than many typical suburban school commutes. And frankly, most families will voluntarily choose the shorter commutes and safe routes for their kids even without special preferences or government restrictions.

For those families willing to make that tradeoff because they feel so strongly about the quality of the school, they should have the opportunity, or at least the same opportunity as anyone else. (Chairman Brown, for example, drives his child from his home in Ward 7 to school in Ward 3).

One exception where neighborhood preference would make sense is if the charter school's mission involved serving a particular neighborhood, and that mission were made explicit in the charter. It would make sense to try to find a legal way to allow these schools to offer neighborhood preference.

Maybe DC wants a lot of charter schools with such missions. In that case, the District needs to work harder to help such schools locate permanently in the neighborhoods they seek to serve. If charter schools grow in number, this might very well become a priority of the Public Charter School Board, which authorizes new charter schools. Meanwhile, we can have both types of schools, neighborhood and specialty schools, under DCPS and the Charter School Board.

The report authors crunched a lot of numbers in an admirably short period of time and produced some very interesting descriptive statistics, like the percentage of students below 185 percent of the poverty line in charters (75) versus DCPS (67).

The study counts, within each of 39 neighborhood clusters in the city, the number of "performance," or high quality, seats in schools and compares that to the number of school-age students living in that cluster. The difference is called a service gap.

It recommends schools for closure, or in some cases investment, to reduce these service gaps. But it doesn't justify the type of investment. Is it facilities? More teachers? Better teachers?

The authors define a "performance seat" as a seat in a school in the top tier of a 4-tier rating system they devised. Each school's tier comes from estimated percentages of its students who were judged "proficient" on the state assessment test in recent years, projected 4 years into the future assuming a straight line trend.

This study raises a lot of questions for most researchers and even lay readers. Two big flaws stand out, which are so basic and could do significant damage if city leaders overlook the problems.

It uses a flawed measure of school performance. At the heart of this paper is a 4-tier rating of school quality that relies on the percent of students who are proficient on the state test (called the DC-CAS). Never mind the fact that a proficiency rate throws away information by focusing only on whether a score was above or below a fixed cut point instead of how high or low it was.

Student proficiency rates have long been discredited as a school performance measure because proficiency rates capture student achievement at a point in time, but say little about how much the school or its teachers contributed to its current students' performance.

For example, a middle school could have declining proficiency rates if a feeder school begins sending more at-risk students to it, even if the teachers are especially skilled at working with a challenging population.

At a bare minimum, a sensible measure accounts for what a student knew before enrolling in the school (for example, using the student's score from the prior year). This is why more and more states, including DC, have adopted student achievement growth measures instead of proficiency rates for their teacher and school performance indicators.

Using a trend in proficiency rates doesn't help, and only creates a false sense of "gains" which is more likely to measure demographic change and other differences between successive cohorts of students cycling through a school than the performance of the schools' educators. That's because it compares students in one year to different students, instead of students in one year to the same students in the prior year.

By relying on flawed measures of school performance, policymakers risk closing down schools that are best equipped to work with challenging populations and replacing them with ones that would fail miserably if they started working with a different student body.

It ignores human behavior. There is a big difference between bean-counting and behavioral analysis. The latter recognizes that families make choices (within budget constraints) about where they live and where they send their kids to school.

School leaders make decisions too—over what programs to offer and how to allocate scarce resources to produce successful educational outcomes or whatever else they may value. In the case of charter schools, administrators choose whether to open a charter, where to locate, and what to offer.

In modeling supply and demand, however, the report ignored all of these factors. The report makes no attempt to model the behavior of these actors to predict the effect of different policies on outcomes. It is a bean-counting exercise.

For example, this study would say that a neighborhood has no service gap if it had a successful but highly specialized charter school, such as a Spanish immersion school. Obviously such a school could draw students from all over the city and residents of the immediate neighborhood may either not want to attend such a program or not be able to rely on being admitted because the pool of students in the lottery is so large.

Acting on this flawed study could end up making service gaps worse. For example, an affluent neighborhood may have far too many seats for its own students and yet its schools can be overcrowded because families from far flung neighborhoods want affluent peers or a school in a neighborhood with better housing stock.

Building more schools in the less affluent neighborhoods will not necessarily solve that problem. It might just create more under-utilized space. Yet that's exactly what this study recommends.

A smarter policy would strategically locate new schools partway between the current over-enrolled schools and the under-enrolled ones and design curricular offerings to induce the optimal mixing of students. Or better yet, the policy could rely more on information and transportation than simply construction and demolition.

In other words, knowing that a school is under-enrolled is less important than knowing why it is under-enrolled. It's important to know why parents make the choices that they make, not to just tally up their choices at a moment in time like an accountant.

It is possible to model the supply and demand of schooling without making naïve assumptions about schools and families. For example, there is work in progress by economists at Carnegie Mellon University demonstrating how it can be done.

In my own research I have simulated parental choice outcomes using behavioral parameters estimated from school choice data. This analysis illustrated how family preferences over the racial composition of the student body as well as commute distance and other factors such as school program offerings can influence sorting outcomes.

Planners can also consider trends in demographics, housing construction, and transit. They can simulate the results of a wide range of charter school and DCPS policies including not only facilities siting and improvements but varied attendance zones and expanded access to information about and transportation to schools beyond the immediate neighborhood.

The District needs sophisticated guidance to begin comprehensive, city-wide planning of school closures and investments and to help coordinate land use policy with charter school expansion. Unfortunately, this report doesn't provide enough of this guidance.

A fairer solution would be to allocate those dollars according to the uniform per pupil formula that is already in place. That formula is designed to ensure that each DC school child gets the same amount of funding, regardless of where he or she goes to school.

DCPS has completely legitimate funding needs. They want to use the money to increase food service contracts, supplement teacher salaries, and for other personnel costs. DC's public charter schools also have legitimate funding needs. In fact, they have exactly the same needs to feed their students and pay their teachers and other staff.

Public charter schools already have costs that don't apply to DCPS schools. For example, a new charter school has to find, buy, and outfit a building, while a DCPS school does not. But all the charter schools want is equal funding and an equal chance to prove their worth, knowing they can lose their charter if they don't perform well in educating their students.

Mayor Gray still has time to do what's right and fix this by distributing the newfound revenues in accordance with the existing funding formula. Equal funding for all of DC's public school students is not only good politics, it's the law, and it is in keeping with the promise of One City.

Just go and strike up a conversation. Start with the staff. Most of them don't bite, and welcome having new residents show an interest. If you have kids, talk to the other parents; even if they don't look just the same as you, they have the same desire for a safe neighborhood with lots for kids to do.

If you see crime, like drugs or weapons or vandalism, make sure to call MPD. Rec center staff don't have badges or guns. They need community members to help them report problems so the city can keep these places clean and safe for families and residents. Well cared-for recreation facilities improve the neighborhood and encourage people to stay instead of moving out as their families grow.

Now, it's December. The weather is only getting worse and the days are getting shorter, but there are plenty of indoor options, like basketball and swimming. Some have workout equipment.

DC residents can find community parks and recreation facilities at DPR's interactive map.

Have you been to your local rec center? What was your experience?

As families lock in their school enrollment choices for the coming fall, education writers perennially "investigate" public officials' choices of schools for their children, while public school defenders and detractors have at it. A recurring backlash to these stories asks whether any of this matters.

Is it an existential test of our leaders' faith in public education? Is it a sign of the economic gaps between our leaders, who have choices and money for tuition and transportation, and the people they serve? Or is it a private issue about each child's unique needs?

The question comes up when we elect a president with school-aged children. Perhaps the president's children have special security concerns, and most don't expect the First Family to be "regular people." But we see articles about where lawmakers send their kids, like in Texas and even the U.S. Education Secretary. Here in DC, many expect their councilmembers to reflect their constituents.

The Examiner's listing of the school each councilmember's family chose for their children—private or public, charter or DCPS, out-of-boundary or a neighborhood school—suggests an implicit hierarchy of "common man" virtue, with a private school being the most elitist, and a neighborhood school, preferably one with low proficiency rates (the Examiner lists these), being the most virtuous.

Where public officials send their children to school may tell us something about their beliefs, but further investigation often leads people to ask intrusive questions about children's needs and those questions should not be public matters. If CM Thomas has a child who wants more time in a baseball pitching rotation or had a preference for language immersion, is that important for us to know? What if his child were autistic or were being bullied?

Former Mayor Adrian Fenty and former Chancellor Michelle Rhee were each called out for sending their children to out-of-boundary DCPS schools, Lafayette ES and Oyster-Adams Bilingual ES, respectively. Was there any inconsistency between their public policies and private choices? In this case, not at all. In fact, exercising choice within the public school system is probably a good example to set, as long as they did not have any unfair advantages.

If they apply like anyone else and play by the rules, then they have a private duty to find the best school for their children, even while they work publicly to improve all schools for all children. If every parent tried to enroll their children in Lafayette or Oyster, then it would provide a useful signal that those schools may need to be expanded, or that those schools' successful programs be replicated elsewhere.

If you want to be judgmental, the sharpest dividing line is between the public and private sectors. The public sector, which includes out-of-boundary and charter schools, is qualitatively distinct from the private sector. It is subject to stricter regulation and oversight. There is no tuition, and every child, regardless of family income, has the same right to attend, with applicants admitted by random drawing where demand exceeds supply.

Finally, transportation is an important factor in school choice that is rarely discussed in education debates. A neighborhood school is usually a walkable school. The farther parents send their kids, the more time is spent in transit, and more cars and buses crowd the roads.

But commutes to school might not be such a bad thing, even in a city like DC that aspires to good urbanism. The availability of school choice means that the choice of a school and the choice of a neighborhood do not have to be linked. This leaves greater possibilities for racial and social integration.

For example, the chairman of the city council can live east of the Anacostia River and still send his kids to schools in a more affluent part of town. Affluent residents of upper Northwest can send their children to an innovative charter school that is located in a transitional or poor neighborhood in Northeast. A blighted neighborhood can be more a attractive place for homeowners to invest if they have more school options than the one in the neighborhood.

Breaking the link between housing and schooling is one way to reduce segregation in housing, schooling, or both. Now to complete this utopian picture maybe Chairman Brown can leave the SUV at home and show his kids how to ride transit to school.

The biggest surprise was that the candidate with the longest resume in the education field—Sekou Biddle—had the least specific responses to our education survey. Maybe he's been more specific on the campaign trail.

There is no easy way to summarize the results or say who "won," and my analysis is very subjective, so feel free to read the verbatim responses from verbatim responses and form your own judgment.

Educational opportunity for disadvantaged students

Interestingly, the one question that drew new policy ideas yielded the same policy idea from three of the candidates. When we asked about how we can create more equal educational opportunity for the city's most disadvantaged students, Weaver, Page, and Orange all advocated some form of additional pay for teaching in the poorest neighborhoods.

Weaver's very specific proposal called for up to a $16,000 bonus for a voluntary move and a three-year commitment to teach in the city's lowest-performing schools. Page offered many more specific ideas, but some of them were hard to follow, like paying teachers (doubling the incentives?) if they are effective (based on student input) and teach in a low-performing school. Others included pursuing a balanced plan of facilities modernization rather than favoring selected sites.

Biddle suggested that wide distribution of school performance data was a way to fuel the city's already active system of public school choice to equalize opportunity—the only candidate to take this angle.

But ideas like these were typically sandwiched between platitudes that gave little clue as to the policies we might see him advocate for as a member of the Council. (In fairness, he has already started introducing legislation, such as a bill to make transportation free for low-income families). This may be the strategy of a frontrunner, but it left us to focus on other candidates who provided meatier responses.

Teacher evaluations

Statehood Green candidate Alan Page gave the best response to a question about the the DCPS system of teacher evaluation known as IMPACT. For starters, he accurately described how it currently works, expressing support for it as a good start, suggesting that it could be improved to capture critical thinking, and saying he would hold stakeholder hearings. This would probably fall under micro-management according to Biddle's response, but might help citizens get a better understanding of this fundamental tool for making education policy in the District.

Most candidates did not get specific enough to demonstrate a full understanding of this or other key education policies like management of federal grants like Race to the Top and the lesser known State Longitudinal Education Data system (SLED).

Orange and Bryan Weaver recognized the failure of DC to execute on its SLED grant but nobody offered solutions. Weaver came the closest, asking for transparency in education performance data as well as the issue of surplus properties, advocating for a public database of the city inventory with agency contact information and other data.

Role of the State Board of Education

Vincent Orange had good answers about the role of the State Board of Education (SBOE) and about the disposition of public buildings that once housed under-enrolled DCPS schools. He acknowledged the reduced role of the SBOE, but recognized its value as an elected board that could bring constituent concerns on education to the policy arena. (Though this might be more accurate if so many of its members didn't consider the Board as merely a stepping stone to the Council.)

On buildings, he echoed a concern that other candidates raised for community input and that some raised for revenue generation, but noted that if we don't let charter schools occupy the schools, as they are promised by law, then (non-profit) charter schools will take some other property off the tax rolls.

Charters versus DCPS

We asked a somewhat leading question about whether candidates thought that charter and DCPS schools received fair budget allocations. Charter advocates have long complained that they are not treated fairly relative to the traditional district.

Orange wins bravery points for pushing back on this idea and suggesting that charters in DC are better off relative to their traditional school peers than in other states. He also called for weighted school formula funding and extra funding for magnet programs but did not explain why.

Biddle noted astutely that timeliness of the funds is a critical issue for charter schools. But Weaver really nailed the issue, focusing on facilities allocations and the fact that DC government has exposed itself to a lawsuit over this issue by not taking the issue of facilities funding equity seriously enough.

Vouchers

As readers will remember, Stephen is no fan of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, aka DC vouchers, so he naturally gave points to Weaver and Page for opposing it, while Biddle and Orange said they're for it. Voters who support the program might view this one differently.

Weaver just thinks the dollar amounts are too low to get poor kids into truly elite schools, and added that the voucher program shouldn't subsidize schools to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Biddle defended the program but also referenced a need for funded organizations to comply with the DC Human Rights Act. Orange hinted at the real reason we might want to support the program: the bribe that Congress offered, by including in the program equal funding bonuses for DCPS and DC charters if the program was enacted.

Chancellor selection

We asked some questions that flopped. One was about the selection of a permanent DCPS chancellor. The candidates who responded promptly to our questionnaire (Page and Orange) gave earnest answers and then Mayor Gray announced his selection, prompting the later-responding candidates to say they support Kaya Henderson. Not much to be learned there.

We need more city leaders who are knowledgeable about education and this survey shows is that the choice is not obvious. However, taken together, the candidates' responses can add a new layer to voters' understanding of where the candidates stand, how knowledgeable they are, and what they might do in the education arena if elected.

1. DC is already a school choice Mecca. We're the last places that needs the OSP.

A blogger for the National Review wrote that reauthorizing this program will "breathe life back into school choice in the nation's capital." Huh?

Poor kids in DC have a richer set of schools to choose from than almost any other city in the country. More than 40 percent of DC's schoolchildren attend schools of choice, mostly through charter schools, but also through the public school choice program within DC Public Schools known as the Out of Boundary transfer program.

The array of options and degree of innovation in DC's charter movement is stunning, ranging from a "Hospitality High" vocational high school to residential programs like SEED, from public policy themed schools like Cesar Chavez to a Chinese immersion International Baccalaureate elementary school.

We have KIPP schools, Lighthouse schools, and Friendship Academies. We have award-winning schools like the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Anacostia and E.L. Haynes in Petworth. We have bilingual schools like LAMB and Oyster. Parents clamor to get into popular DCPS schools like Stoddert in NW and the "cluster schools" on Capitol Hill.

And 19 new charter applicants are in the pipeline to be approved, expanding the choices even further. There is lots of room for improvement, but DC has an embarrassment of school choice riches.

2. The OSP lacks broad local support and political legitimacy.

Another problem with locating the voucher program in DC is that the site selection for the program is not dictated by a public policy need, but pure convenience. Because of a quirk on the US Constitution, Congress can legislate policy in the District of Columbia without seeking consent from its residents.

To be sure, there are strong local advocates for the OSP: families who stand to gain $7,500 per year, city leaders who want the extra funding for district and charter schools that comes with the program, and the supporters of the Catholic and other private schools whose tuition is offset by the scholarships.

These constituency groups would be created in any subsidy market. But why DC? And how much support does the program have from the broader community of residents and taxpayers in DC? We simply don't know.

The locally elected City Council hasn't voted on it. There has been no ballot referendum. The one locally elected representative to the Congress, non-voting Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, opposes the program. But none of that matters in the strange world of taxation without representation.

3. Public subsidies should come with public accountability.

It seems like a fair proposition that if a school receives public money it should be held accountable for results, even if it is not required to follow any of the regulations of a typical public school. That, in fact, is the premise behind charter schools.

Charters in DC do not have to hire unionized or even certified teachers. They do not have to use the same textbooks or curriculum as DCPS. They can innovate in their staffing models, their methods of instruction, and their school culture, carving out distinct identities and philosophies without seeking central office approval.

In exchange, they must demonstrate that they are teaching children the basic skills set forth in the DC state standards. They do so by participating in the state assessment system known as DC-CAS. They also cannot charge tuition or discriminate in their student admissions. Over-subscribed schools are filled by lottery.

On the other hand, Catholic schools and other private schools in DC do not have to keep up this end of the bargain. They are not accountable for the academic success of their students and they can use tuition and selective admissions to shape their student body as they wish.

Furthermore, unlike publicly funded schools, they can practice religion (80 percent of OSP students attended religious schools in 2008-2009). All of that is fine until they start accepting $7,500 per student through the Opportunity Scholarship Program. At that point, the schools become quasi-public entities but unlike charter schools, with no strings attached.

There are policy alternatives.

Providing educational opportunity for disadvantaged students is a critically important policy goal, but a voucher program in DC is not in the public interest. Instead, there are two policy options that OSP advocates might want to pursue.

First, if they want to keep the program alive, they should seek to move it to Ohio or Connecticut, the home state of the Congressional sponsors, or some other state where the voters can weigh in on whether school vouchers are a good policy and where you can demonstrate a real need to jumpstart school choice.

Second, if policymakers want to promote school choice and educational opportunities for disadvantaged students in DC, they should support policies that affect school site selection, affordable housing, and transportation, i.e. the factors that influence the commuting distance for low-income families and hence their access to school options.

Currently, it is very costly and difficult for charter schools to locate near the city center or near transit nodes. A much more direct method than vouchers for enhancing all forms of school choice would simply be to provide more school bus transportation and more generous facilities funding conditional on site selection that provides easy access to low-income communities.

This is where people in walkable neighborhoods can get their gloat on. (I happily dragged a sled around the corner to pick up fresh groceries during the snowpocalypse of February 2010, while suburbanites survived on canned goods).

But even DC schools have teachers who live in the suburbs and students exercising choice who attend schools outside their neighborhoods.

As a New England native, I would say as long as cars and buses can move (albeit slowly), they can get to school. (The only hazard for kids who walk to school was the strong temptation to stop and play in the snow). That usually meant anything less than one foot of snow was fine. Black ice, the worst non-snow impediment, slows down vehicles but doesn't stop them.

There will be car crashes, but there are crashes every day on the roads. Just drive carefully. Be flexible on arrival times. Fear of power outage or actual power outage or loss of water is reason to close a school. Anything less, however, is just wimping out. If we can't find our way to school during messy but passable winter weather, we should re-evaluate our school density and planning.

What is your cutoff? When is it too cold or too messy on the roads to keep schools open?

Henderson will face the twin tests of working within the new Mayor's collaborative style and advancing a reform agenda with a more confrontational union president, Nathan Saunders. With a contract already ratified, she should have some breathing room on the major union issues, but budget pressure will force hard choices over the coming year.

The Deputy Mayor for Education (DME) position is one that remains to be defined under a new administration. We've questioned the purpose of a DME when you already have strong leaders in the state and local education agencies appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the Mayor, but there are two ways in which a DME in the Gray Administration can be effective.

One is substantive, to advance the Mayor's early childhood and post-secondary education plans. The other is procedural, to keep both the Chancellor and the State Superintendent on message with the Mayor's priorities and prevent political trainwrecks like the one we saw this past year.

The DME can also make urbanists happy by helping the Mayor harmonize public school facilities policies so that all kids in the city can walk or have short commutes to modern, high quality public schools.

Specifically, Wright could help ensure that critical decisions about DCPS school closures, charter school construction, and school facilities modernization all serve the common good, not just serve DCPS at the expense of charters or serve business interests at the expense of families.

School density should follow neighborhood density and magnet programs should be centrally located near transit nodes. Making this happen will require coordination among several city agencies.

State Superintendent is a critical position for the future of DC's education landscape. The person in this role has to manage the District's $75 million Race to the Top grant, win and manage new federal grants, build out the city's education data infrastructure, administer school feeding programs, and write regulations on critical matters such as curriculum, standardized testing, and teacher certification that affect both DPCS and the public charter schools.

Hosanna Mahaley is an inspired pick because she brings fundraising experience and strong substantive background in education. She has been building a long resume, having earned a teaching certificate in California, an executive MBA at Northwestern, and served on the boards of the National Association of Charter School Authorizors, of which DC's Public Charter School Board is a key member, and Education Sector, a respected education policy think tank.

Her most important role has been at the Chicago Public Schools, a system about nine times the size of DCPS, where she oversaw an effort by the city school district to build out 100 new schools with various charter or charter-like governance arrangements. This suits her well for the District, which also must seek ways to improve both the traditional and charter public school sectors simultaneously.

There are several things Mahaley can do to be successful. First, while private fundraising is important, securing federal money is paramount for a state superintendent. It doesn't hurt that her former boss is now the U.S. Secretary of Education, but OSSE will have to be on top of its game if DC will continue to win funds that are awarded competitively instead of by formula.

Second, there needs to be a keen focus on data infrastructure. In 2007, DC won a $5.7 million federal grant to develop a data warehouse, but with the grant about to end in 2011, there hasn't been much public evidence of progress. The state superintendent's office selected a vendor and then canceled the contract in midstream, and a replacement has still not been selected.

So far, DCPS has led the way in using education data to measure teacher performance, but OSSE could provide leadership needed to accelerate the progress of performance measurement for charter schools and DCPS schools on equally rigorous terms. Having spent the last year and a half at Wireless Generation, a firm that provides consulting and software services to school districts, Mahaley should be prepared for this challenge.

Third, the charter sector and traditional public schools need a referee who can ensure that both sectors get the tools they need to compete fairly, succeed, cooperate and learn from each other.

Let's hope that the new education policy team works well together and carries out the Mayor-elect's promises for education reform. The leadership team represents a promising start.