D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) alumnus London Jones recently graduated from Lafayette College with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and sociology. He achieved this feat just two days after news dropped of DCPS Chancellor Dr. Lewis D. Ferebee’s transition to the private sector.
Though Jones, a POSSE scholar and Anacostia High School’s Class of 2022 valedictorian, never met Ferebee, and didn’t have much to say about him, he lamented a high school experience he said didn’t prepare him for a rigorous academic environment.
“I didn’t know how to format my first paper,” Jones told The Informer. “Of course, our professors gave us guidelines, saying ‘Use this font,’ but didn’t even know how to do that for real. And then, I didn’t even know what a primary source or secondary source was.”
Jones matriculated to Anacostia High School in 2018, months before D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser appointed Ferebee as chancellor. As a student, Jones navigated the pandemic while serving as a youth leader in Black Swan Academy. He also, as he explained to The Informer, saw his graduating class dwindle in the post-pandemic era while police officers became more of a presence on school grounds.
As he reflected on his college experience, Jones said there was more that he could’ve benefited from as a young person.
“When it came to writing essays and citing sources, that wasn’t something that was regularly taught,” Jones told The Informer. “I do want to commend my teachers. They were trying to instill that in us. It just wasn’t a part of the curriculum.”
One teacher, Jones said, assigned a seven-page paper during his senior year that he said challenged him like he had never been challenged while attending Anacostia High School. He expressed his hope that the next chancellor would place more of an emphasis on creative assignments, and less so on the assessments that have proliferated in recent years.
“I don’t like standardized tests,” Jones said. “Both of my majors included a lot of writing. [We needed more classes] to help people with their literacy through more writing assignments, even some like class discussions on books.”
A Ward 7 Advocate Commends Ferebee’s Attention to Literacy, While Bowser Touts Need for Mayoral Control of Schools
Ferebee will soon assume the helm of EdReports, a national nonprofit aimed at helping educators, school districts and states make informed decisions about curriculum selection and implementation.
His career pivot comes on the cusp of DCPS’ post-pandemic recovery and, more recently, assertions by three mayoral candidates that they wouldn’t retain him if elected to the District’s highest local political office.
Bowser, who told reporters she hadn’t been closely following election season education commentary, commended what she called Ferebee’s curation of a strong central office and teacher workforce.
“You have just done not just a great job in leading the progress,” Bowser told Ferebee during an event at Garrison Elementary School on May 20, “but an outstanding job leading to progress. You have built a talented team of educators, principals, central services staff, and leaders who have consistently delivered results.”
During that event, Bowser and other officials lauded the District’s designation as the top school district for post-pandemic math and English and Language Arts recovery, as reported by The Education Scorecard.
For Bowser, the District’s progress affirmed the effectiveness of mayoral control.
“It’s very important that we maintain the system of governance that has gotten us to where we are,” Bowser said on May 20, “where the mayor and the council are accountable to families and to taxpayers.”
After students’ and teachers’ 2021 return to the classroom, the public and public charter sectors experienced chronic absenteeism, concerns about student wellness, and low post-pandemic academic performance. Then-Deputy Chancellor Michelle Y. Kim, a figure some say wielded more power than Ferebee, also resigned amid allegations of verbal abuse in DCPS’ central office.
In the face of those challenges, Ferebee shepherded the school redesign process, with the financial support of XQ Institute, that garnered curricular revamps at Dunbar High School, H.D. Woodson High School, Coolidge High School, Columbia Heights Education Campus, and Ron Brown College Preparatory High School.
Ferebee also facilitated the implementation of the “Science of Reading” curriculum. In 2022, he and other education officials watched teachers execute the curriculum at Stanton Elementary School in Southeast, where students, taught by teachers who attended DCPS’ reading clinic, made significant gains in their reading skills between kindergarten and first grade.
Sheila Carr, a Ward 7 resident who’s long pushed for a citywide response to dyslexia, counted among those who stood in the room with Ferebee.
“It was exhilarating to see the children over here in Ward 7 were really getting the nuts and bolts at an early age that could and would propel them to do so much better in their life,” Carr told The Informer earlier this week. “They were mastering the English language along with grammar, comprehension and vocabulary.”
As Carr recounted, she met Ferebee at Roosevelt High School in Northeast shortly after his installation as chancellor. She told The Informer that he embraced her call for the early detection and response to dyslexia, a lifelong neurological learning disability that affects a person’s ability to read, spell and write.
“He saw the urgency,” Carr said. “He made it so that I could talk to the people under him. He would be there for me to talk to people who would implement it and would set the policy for the system.”
For more than three decades, Carr has pressed for quality literacy instruction, a crusade she said was inspired by her children’s treks across the District to attend high-performing schools. As someone who’s kept a pulse on local affairs, Carr tied Ferebee’s success to what his predecessors have been able to accomplish.
“There was a foundation laid by [former Chancellor] Kaya Henderson and [pre-mayoral control Superintendent] Clifford B. Janey,” Carr told The Informer. “Janey really laid down some solid changes that Chancellor Ferebee really came in and benefited off of. Things could have been better, but he did take what was given to him and he did improve it.”
Earlier in the week, Bowser asserted the need for continuity.
“I hope no one wastes time on trying to change where the boxes are in governance,” Bowser said. “Let’s just settle this. It’s working, and let’s just make sure that we can continue to invest in our teachers and make sure that we’re able to retain the best of the best in the system that we have in place.”
As far as Carr is concerned, there’s still work to be done.
“In the next chancellor, I’m looking for someone who will look at the whole system and go beyond just what the national testing is saying,” Carr said. “Testing isn’t everything that these children need. DCPS can really implement a type of programming that will make sure that all children have the basic reading ability and phonics and comprehension and vocabulary across the board.”
WTU Leadership Challenges DCPS’ Version of Events
Ferebee wasn’t immediately available for comment about how his work as chancellor will translate at EdReports.
During the May 20 program at Garrison Elementary School, Ferebee, DCPS’ longest serving chancellor in the era of mayoral control, reflected on a tenure he said was shaped by a positive relationship with the best of his school-level employees.
“I’m proud to just remind everyone that DCPS maintains a 95% retention rate for our effective and highly effective teachers,” Ferebee said. “Now, many would think that that’s primarily driven by compensation, but we know that we provide rich professional learning experiences for our educators as well.”
Washington Teachers Union (WTU) President Laura Fuchs says differently, telling The Informer that DCPS makes it difficult for teachers to hold the central office accountable to its employees.
“The grievance system within our contract is currently just completely broken in that we’re supposed to follow all these steps within DCPS before heading to arbitration,” Fuchs said. “What DCPS has done is create a bottleneck where a couple of steps will be easy to do with the principal, with the instructional superintendents, and if they can’t get resolved, the grievances get stuck in a scheduling nightmare [with] employee relations.”
In September, WTU filed more than 160 grievances with the Public Employees Relations Board (PERB) related to teachers’ low IMPACT evaluation scores from the previous school year.
“It takes almost the entire school year just to get through the IMPACT grievances,” Fuchs said, “and then once IMPACT are going right, we are filing other grievances because DCPS doesn’t really care about our contract.”
In 2019, Ferebee, former superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools, became interim DCPS chancellor. As recounted by Fuchs, who was a teacher at the time, District leadership continued what she called a tradition of tapping the chancellor without any input from union leadership.
“Never one time has the District followed the law in appointing the chancellor,” Fuchs told The Informer. “The law says that the WTU gets great weight and should be included in that process, [but] there have been times where they almost didn’t even have President Elizabeth Davis at the table. They did rectify that at the last second but she was basically shut out of everything, and that [tradition] started with [former Chancellor] Michell Rhee. WTU just never has been respected in the process.”
In the years that followed, DCPS under Ferebee’s leadership would continue to clash with WTU.
More than a year after Ferebee officially entered his role, he weathered the storm that was the COVID-19 pandemic while engaging the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) in lengthy discussions about the protocol for a safe return to in-person learning. By 2023, DCPS and WTU solidified a retroactive contract at the end of a three-year negotiation where some educators questioned the degree to which the education officials included their demands.
A subsequent contract negotiation wrapped up within a year of the retroactive contract expiring, but not without WTU filing a PERB complaint alleging delay tactics on the part of Ferebee.
“He didn’t always show up to those meetings, and just by all accounts, was rarely engaged unless it’s the lawyers,” Fuchs told The Informer. “They weren’t being more collaborative. They weren’t offering anything except their stances on managerial rights. We won [in our complaint] because they didn’t bargain in good faith on that contract. It was not a negotiation that went smoothly or had the union happy.”
More than a year after ratification of a WTU contract, as public employees grapple with Bowser’s proposed removal of future pay raises, the union continues the fight for suitable classroom conditions. As Fuchs explained, DCPS hasn’t provided recompense for instances when the PERB determined that the central office didn’t pay co-teachers when they stepped in for absent teachers.
“It makes teachers very upset with the District,” Fuchs said. “It makes them very upset with the union because they’re like, ‘Well, what’s the point of this contract if it says we’re supposed to get paid three hours under co-teacher pay?’ What DCPS should do is send in a substitute and they don’t, and DCPS has refused to pay it…because they realize they’re going to owe a lot of money.”
DCPS didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Per local education officials, DCPS’ graduation rate stands at 75%— an increase of 10 percentage points from when Ferebee came aboard as chancellor. As school officials await the release of scores from the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education, they continue to herald last year’s data showing a nearly 4 percentage point increase in the proportion of public and public charter school students meeting or exceeding expectations in reading and math.
As explained in The Education Scorecard, DCPS and OSSE rolled out a smorgasbord of strategies between 2022 and 2025 for student recovery. These programs, some buoyed with federal funds and philanthropy dollars, include: DC Math Centers as hubs for teacher professional development and high-impact tutoring; the Math for Educators program hosted in collaboration with Trinity Washington University; required language arts training for kindergarten teachers; the DC Reading Clinic; and the DC Readers Next Door series that exposes students to books written by DCPS teachers.
Fuchs, who started her DCPS teaching career during Rhee’s tenure as chancellor, said that District education officials often make the gains, particularly those in the post-pandemic years, sound more significant than what’s the reality on the ground.
“I am so tired of hearing the exact same catchphrase, ‘Fastest growing, fastest fill-in-the-blank.’ DCPS has been saying it since 2012. It came from [former U.S. Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan,” Fuchs told The Informer. “I hope whoever’s next retires it because it’s not accurate, and it shows such tiny gains on a test that doesn’t really matter, that has ruined so much of an education system with all the over testing, and the use of iReady, and the obsession with technology.”
A Disaffected Teacher Tells Her Story
Dominique Moore, a public school substitute teacher, said that Ferebee could’ve benefited from more direct interaction with teachers throughout his tenure. She told The Informer that the next chancellor should stand 10 toes down with teachers and community.
“I really lost a lot of faith in the chancellor’s position when schools were being surrounded by ICE and DCPS had no… formal guidance on how we protect our schools, our communities, our parents, our families,” Moore said. “We just need somebody willing to step in there and get in the field with us, as the kids like to say.”
During the 2024-2025 school year, when teachers were working under a contract that guaranteed an increase in wages and benefits, and more planning time for special education and English language lesson planning, Moore lost her job as a full-time special education teacher at Leckie Education Campus in Southeast.
Moore, who credited her firing to a low score on her IMPACT evaluation, said that she paid the price for taking her questions about protocol to WTU and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
“They refused for me to educate the kids in their proper, least restrictive environment, and that was the basis for my complaint,” Moore told The Informer about the administration she worked under at Leckie Education Campus.
In 2021, an American University study confirmed that IMPACT, which assesses instruction and an instructor’s commitment to the school community, exacerbates fear, distrust and competition, especially in low-performing schools. As the D.C. Council gears up to allocate funds toward an IMPACT Task Force, Fuchs is expressing her desire for a situation where teachers, particularly those who are new to the job, receive more coaching.
“There’s no help with IMPACT,” Fuchs told The Informer. “If you’re doing poorly, that is your administrator telling you it’s time to go, and that’s just not a healthy way to govern a district. A lot of our educators are new to teaching, and they do need a chance to grow. There has to be a middle ground between, ‘You’re doing okay, but in a few years, you’ll be so much better,’ versus someone maybe who’s like, ‘Sorry, this really isn’t the job for you.’”
Moore counts among those continuing the call for IMPACT’s elimination, telling The Informer that, before Leckie, she spent six years at Johnson Middle School under the direction of different principals, including Dwan Jordon, a leader alleged to have used IMPACT to silence critics.
“That’s the principal that scored me the lowest and then gave me the summer school principal job,” Moore said. “It’s just too many people who’ve had a problem with IMPACT. With any evaluation tool, I don’t know how you get rid of the bias.”
Moore, who’s currently immersed in her role as executive director of her nonprofit LifeReign and community organizer at EmpowerEd, went on to recount what she calls moral contradictions on her job search.
She recounted her attempt to secure an IMPACT exemption to work at another District public school as a special education lead teacher instructor. That process, she said, required approval from the principal and then-DCPS instructional superintendent Mary Ann Stinson, the latter of whom, according to the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability, received $170,000 in undisclosed consulting fees to influence DCPS’ use of the Relay curriculum deemed detrimental to Black students.
“I’ve met corruption at every stage of the system,” Moore said. “Under Ferebee, there have been some of the most egregious violations by DCPS central staff and instructional superintendents.”
Though Moore acknowledged the feats that DCPS achieved under Ferebee’s direction, she told The Informer that more could’ve been done to support teachers.
“I would like to thank him for his service and the time that he was here and the great things that he was able to do to maintain or push DCPS forward in ways that his supporters think he did,” Moore told The Informer. “But, for me, nothing great stands out.”
