H1927LLC IP Library cover for Democracy in Education, showing an empty Washington, DC community event venue with rows of chairs, a stage, and the article title.

Democracy in the Classroom: Who Actually Holds the Power in D.C. Education?

At a Ward 5 conversation on education, a memory about Jane Eyre opened into a much larger question about representation, authority, and who gets to shape the future of Washington's public schools.

By HH Prince deAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar
H1927LLC Intellectual Property Library
October 5, 2026 | Washington, D.C.

Fieldwork & Public Thought

Author's Note

I came to the October 5, 2026, Democracy in Education community conversation at the invitation of Ava, whose two children attend D.C. Public Schools. I then invited Edward, who also came. That small chain of invitations mattered to me. I was not entering the room as a campaign volunteer or an education-policy professional. I was there because someone personally connected to the public-school system invited me into the conversation, and I in turn brought someone else into it. The event was hosted by Dr. Lynn C. Jennings during her campaign for the Ward 5 seat on the D.C. State Board of Education. What follows begins with what I heard and observed in the room, then moves into research I conducted afterward using D.C. law, public records, institutional sources, and reporting. When I am describing what was said in the room, I make that clear. When the public record adds context, I identify it. This is an article about education, representation, and governance. It is not an endorsement of any candidate.

There is a moment in a good public conversation when the subject becomes larger than the event that brought everyone together. For me, that moment came when Lynn Jennings stopped talking about policy and went back to the ninth grade.

She remembered walking into English class at Western High School in Baltimore, an all-girls public school, where she and her classmates were reading Jane Eyre. Like a lot of students facing a long novel, they had figured out a shortcut. Read the conversation. Move quickly over the long descriptions. Keep the story moving. Their teacher, Ms. Sims, knew exactly what they were doing. Jennings remembered her sitting on the desk, telling them to open the book, and taking them back to a passage they had moved over too quickly. There was a tree. There was a division. There was meaning sitting inside the description that the dialogue by itself could not give them. Ms. Sims began breaking it down.

What Jennings said next stayed with me because the story was no longer really about passing English. She was a young Black girl listening to a Black woman teach a nineteenth-century English novel with confidence and authority, and something opened for her. She could understand this literature. She could question it. She could become an expert in it. She could even become the English teacher standing at the front of the room.

And she did.

After the event, I went back and looked at Jennings' own educational journey. EdTrust's biography of Jennings records that she earned her bachelor's degree in English from Spelman College and later a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She went on to teach English, African American studies, and women's studies at institutions including Spelman College, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is now a senior education policy and advocacy leader at EdTrust and an adjunct professor at Bowie State University.

There is history behind Western High School too. Baltimore City Public Schools identifies Western, founded in 1844, as the oldest all-girls public high school in the United States. In the early 1990s, Western and Philadelphia High School for Girls were described as the country's two remaining all-girls public high schools. That history also needs some care. Western was not founded as a Black institution. Baltimore's public school system remained segregated until 1954, when the city moved to end compulsory racial segregation after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The school Jennings experienced came out of that longer American history.

But sitting in the room that evening, the point felt much more immediate. Inclusion had become real for her through a teacher. Someone who looked like her stood at the front of the room and showed her, without giving a speech about representation, that literature, critical thinking, and intellectual authority belonged to her too.

That was the first question I carried into the rest of the evening: What happens when representation moves from the classroom into government?

Representation and the Power to Act

Robert Henderson, the current Ward 5 representative on the D.C. State Board of Education, took the conversation directly into that question. Henderson was elected in 2022 and is preparing to leave the Board at the end of his term. Jennings is one of two candidates seeking to succeed him in Ward 5, along with Jonathan Alfuth. The campaign setting matters, but Henderson's point was bigger than who wins one seat.

The D.C. State Board of Education has nine elected members, one from each of the eight wards and one elected at large. Most residents see an elected education board and assume that when there is a problem involving education, those elected representatives have the power to act on it. That assumption is understandable. It is also where the structure becomes more complicated.

D.C.'s State Board is not the same kind of local school board found in many other places. The structure changed significantly through the Public Education Reform Amendment Act of 2007, when D.C. Public Schools moved under mayoral control and state-level education responsibilities were reorganized around the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, or OSSE.

The current D.C. Code gives the State Board real responsibilities. It advises the State Superintendent and approves specific state-level policies, including academic standards, high school graduation requirements, portions of the accountability system, residency rules, attendance regulations, and other matters named in law. But the law also says the Board acts on policy matters when the State Superintendent brings a request for policy action before it.

That was the part that made me stop.

We elect these people. Residents bring their concerns to them. They sit in public meetings, hear testimony, and are expected to represent the people who put them there. But what happens when the person we elected does not actually hold the lever needed to make the change?

Henderson gave an example involving the way school accountability information is presented to the public. He described a process in which Board members wanted additional measures represented alongside a system heavily influenced by test performance. There was, in his telling, public support for changes. But the Board could not simply amend the policy placed in front of it. It could accept or reject what had been submitted, while OSSE retained control of the proposal itself.

His point was not that the Board has no power. His point was that an elected body can hear what residents want, advocate for it, and still find that the legal authority needed to make the change sits somewhere else.

So I went back to the record.

In March 2023, the State Board released an education governance report after two years of research, community engagement, and discussion with education stakeholders. The report made six recommendations. The first was almost exactly what Henderson described in the room: allow the State Board to initiate policy in areas where it already has the legal authority to approve policy, and allow the Board to amend proposals brought to it by OSSE. The other recommendations included giving the Board a form of "great weight" similar to the consideration afforded Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, improving its access to education data, giving it a role in approving school openings, closures, and siting, and creating a citywide board with oversight of DCPS operations and facilities.

Three years later, the basic limitation Henderson was talking about is still visible in the D.C. Code.

That does not mean the answer is simply to give the State Board more power and declare the problem solved. The 2007 governance structure was created for a reason. Moving DCPS under mayoral control was meant, in part, to make responsibility clearer. When authority is concentrated, the public can more easily identify who is responsible when a system succeeds and who must answer when it fails. Giving more power back to an elected board could create greater democratic participation, but it could also add another place where decisions have to be negotiated. Both sides of that question deserve to be taken seriously.

Still, democracy only works well when people can understand where the power is. If residents elect someone believing that person can act on their concerns, and the law says otherwise, that gap is not a small administrative detail. It becomes part of the democratic question itself.

Henderson also reminded the room that the Board does have meaningful authority. Academic standards are one example. In June 2023, the State Board unanimously approved revised social studies standards after a multiyear development and public-review process that began before Henderson joined the Board. OSSE described the revision as an effort to better reflect D.C.'s students, include multiple historical perspectives, and bring forward histories and experiences that have often been pushed to the margins. Implementation began during the 2024-25 school year.

So the State Board is not powerless. The better question is where its power begins, where it ends, and whether those boundaries still match what Washington residents expect from the people they elect.

Education Has to Lead Somewhere

Dr. Oye Owolewa pushed the conversation beyond K-12 education. Owolewa is a pharmacist, D.C.'s elected U.S. Shadow Representative, and the Democratic nominee for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council in the November 3 general election. He won a crowded Democratic primary this year after eight rounds of the District's new ranked-choice voting process. During the event, he spoke confidently about the work he hopes to do on the Council. Until voters make that decision in November, he remains the nominee, not a Council member-elect.

His argument about higher education began with his own family.

Northeastern University records that Owolewa was born in Boston to Nigerian parents who came separately to the United States during a period of upheaval in Nigeria. Both attended Northeastern in the 1970s, where they met. Their son later attended the same university and earned his Doctor of Pharmacy degree in 2014. Sitting in the room, I could hear why he returns to education as more than a policy subject. For him, education was part of the road that made his own family story possible.

Then he turned toward today's students.

Going to college, he argued, is not enough if the price of earning the degree leaves a young person carrying debt that limits everything that is supposed to come afterward. He spoke about vocational education, health-care careers, workforce development, and the University of the District of Columbia as parts of the same larger system. His challenge was to stop treating elementary school, high school, college, employment, and economic development as separate boxes that have nothing to do with one another.

I thought that was one of the clearest ideas of the evening: an education pipeline has to lead somewhere.

That idea also appears in Owolewa's public campaign platform, where he has proposed making UDC tuition-free for D.C. residents. UDC is already comparatively affordable, but affordable and free are not the same thing. The university currently lists resident undergraduate tuition at $324 per credit, with a 12-credit load totaling $4,318 once the listed $430 fee is included. Tuition is only one piece of the cost of going to college, but the figure helps make the policy question real. What would it mean for the District to treat its public university not only as a place where people earn degrees, but as part of the city's economic infrastructure?

That question does not end at graduation. If a resident can train for health care, a skilled trade, education, public service, science, technology, or another needed field without beginning adult life under a mountain of debt, that person has a better chance to work, build a business, support a family, rent or buy a home, pay taxes, mentor someone else, and, if the city remains affordable enough, stay in Washington. Education becomes connected to workforce development, housing, health, and the long-term stability of the city itself.

The publicly announced conversation also included Dr. Heather Harding and longtime D.C. cultural organizer Luci Murphy. Harding, now Senior Vice President for Programs at the NEA Foundation, has spent decades working at the intersection of educational opportunity and racial equity. Murphy has spent much of her life using music, organizing, and culture in movements for civil rights, labor, peace, and social justice. Their presence made the gathering feel less like a standard candidate forum and more like a conversation across different kinds of public experience.

Some authority comes from office. Some comes from scholarship. Some comes from a classroom. Some comes from organizing long enough that a community knows you were there before the microphone arrived.

Who Gets to Decide?

I left the evening thinking about the space between representation and authority. We often talk about representation as though seeing ourselves at the table completes the work. It does not. Seeing yourself in a teacher, an elected official, a curriculum, or a public institution can change what you believe is possible. Lynn Jennings' story made that clear. But being present inside an institution and having the power to change that institution are not the same thing.

That is why Robert Henderson's comments stayed with me. If people vote for representatives, bring them concerns, sit through public meetings, give testimony, and support policy changes, they should also be able to understand what happens after that. Who can introduce the policy? Who can change it? Who can approve it? Who actually carries it out? Who can stop it? And when nothing changes, who is responsible?

Those questions are especially important in a city where education authority is spread across the Mayor, DCPS, OSSE, the State Board, the Public Charter School Board, individual local education agencies, the D.C. Council, and other institutions. There may be good reasons for parts of that structure. There may also be places where the structure has become so complicated that ordinary residents cannot easily see where a decision is actually made.

Both things can be true.

And I kept coming back to the beginning of the evening, before the statutes, accountability systems, tuition figures, and workforce pipelines. I kept seeing Ms. Sims sitting on the edge of that desk with a book open in front of a room of ninth-grade girls who thought they could skip the description and still understand the story. She slowed them down. She showed them that the part they had passed over contained information they needed.

There is something in that for democracy too.

Democracy has descriptive passages. They are the parts about statutes, authority, governance, implementation, and who is actually allowed to move an idea into action. They are easy to skip because the dialogue is more exciting. Elections give us candidates, promises, debates, and votes. Governance tells us what those votes can actually do.

For Lynn Jennings, that classroom moment carried another lesson. A Black woman teacher helped her understand that the book belonged to her. The classroom belonged to her. The intellectual world beyond it belonged to her.

Public education carries that responsibility on a much larger scale. Students need to be able to see a future inside it. Families need to be able to find their voices inside it. Elected representatives need to understand what they can change inside it. And the public needs to be able to see where the power actually sits.

Representation begins with being seen. Democracy asks what happens after that.

Editorial Note

Research for this article was reviewed through October 5, 2026. The November 3, 2026, D.C. general election had not occurred at the time of writing. Candidate and officeholder descriptions reflect their status on the publication date. Firsthand portions are based on the author's attendance and contemporaneous notes from the Democracy in Education conversation. Biographical, legal, historical, tuition, and governance information was checked against public institutional records and reporting. The article intentionally paraphrases the speakers' remarks rather than treating an automated live transcription as a verbatim record.

Sources & Further Reading

About This Series

H1927 IP Library fieldwork and public-thought articles begin with firsthand observation and widen into the history, policy, culture, and human questions surrounding a place or event. The purpose is not to turn people into examples for an argument. It is to pay attention to what happens when lived experience meets the institutions that shape public life.

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