The Accountability Gap: D.C. Schools and Students with Disabilities
When I first moved to D.C., it took me some time to get used to the school system. Multiple city agencies share oversight of public schools, and enrollment is split nearly evenly between traditional public and charter schools— making finding a teaching job strenuous (lots of separate fingerprint appointments!). It wasn’t until I was in the classroom that I grasped how exhausting this fragmented system is for families. Witnessing the difficulty of transitioning from a public to a charter school was one of many consequences of this fragmentation. One of my parents moved to an online charter school because she was told her family would get more targeted support, only to realize that she had to quit her job to monitor her child’s lessons adequately due to her child’s ADHD.
In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed these challenges by releasing a report from their investigation on DCPS for discrimination of students with disabilities (SWD). In this report, the Commission highlighted two findings of discrimination: DCPS relies on due process complaints to deal with injustice, and they fail to provide transportation services for SWD that require it.
These observations contribute to a larger pattern of fragmented governance for marginalized students. The District of Columbia's education governance system is structurally fragmented in ways that obscure accountability and prevent meaningful community participation. Because D.C. functions simultaneously as a city and a state, its education agencies operate across overlapping and competing jurisdictions with no single body held democratically accountable for outcomes. This fragmentation did not flourish on its own; policy actors have prioritized market-based ideologies that treat parents like consumers in a free market. As a result of this neoliberal model, families in need are left with improper access to school resources and civic engagement. Both community and researcher voices agree that D.C.’s governance system requires structural reform to enforce democratic accountability and promote equitable access to high quality public and charter schools to all students.