45 Leading Thought Leaders in DC Public Education

Introduction

Washington, DC is the only jurisdiction in the United States where the city itself, in its entirety, is the school district. There are no suburbs to draw away the most engaged families, no satellite counties to absorb the middle class, no geography to escape. Every student who attends a public school in Washington is a DC public school student, and every elected official, think tank researcher, nonprofit leader, and classroom practitioner in the city is, in some sense, a participant in the same educational experiment. That experiment is now more than thirty years in the making, and its results are genuinely remarkable. DC public schools are the fastest-improving urban district in the country, according to the 2024 Nation's Report Card, with the greatest post-pandemic recovery gains in fourth-grade mathematics among large city districts. The graduation rate has climbed to 78.7 percent in 2025-2026, up from just over 50 percent in 2011.

What makes DC education genuinely unique is not its performance metrics, impressive as they are, but its structure. Nearly half of all DC public school students attend public charter schools, making DC the most charter-saturated urban school system in the country. This dual-sector system, in which DCPS and roughly 100 independent charter schools compete for students and share city funding through the same per-pupil formula, has produced both genuine innovation and genuine tension. The voices shaping that tension are the voices on this list.

Yet chronic absenteeism is stuck at 39 percent. Equity gaps between the city's most affluent and most disadvantaged students remain among the widest in the country. Ward 7 and Ward 8, the predominantly Black communities east of the Anacostia River, continue to face concentrated poverty and underserved schools despite citywide progress. The thought leaders who matter in DC public education in 2026 are not simply the ones celebrating the system's wins. They are the ones who understand both the wins and the stubborn, unfinished work that lies beneath them.

This list is a deliberate mix: district leaders and independent critics, charter advocates and community organisers, researchers who produce the data and practitioners who live inside it. It includes voices from the DC State Board of Education and voices from Anacostia and Columbia Heights. It draws from Howard University and American University and from the classroom itself. The 45 people below are the people worth following, reading, and engaging with if you want to understand what is actually happening in public education in the nation's capital.

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally. He works with school leadership teams around the world to build stronger cultures, clearer communication, and higher-performing teams. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore how he might support your school or district leadership team.

Why the DC Education Conversation Matters Globally

Washington, DC is the only city in the world that functions simultaneously as a national capital, a genuinely independent urban school district, and the headquarters of the organisations that set education policy for an entire country. The Brookings Institution is here. The American Enterprise Institute is here. The Council of the Great City Schools is here. When debates about teacher evaluation, school choice, education funding formulas, and charter authorisation are resolved in Washington, DC, they ripple outward to school systems across every US state, and through US-funded research and policy to school systems around the world.

The 30-year arc of DC education reform has produced a body of evidence, both positive and contested, that every serious education leader in the English-speaking world should understand. The IMPACT teacher evaluation system, developed in DC and now studied globally, is one of the most rigorously evaluated urban education reforms in history. The dual-sector funding model is now examined by education ministries considering charter or academy school policies in countries as far apart as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

For a school leadership team looking to translate ideas into action on Monday morning, the starting point is not reading about these thinkers but developing the team culture and relational capacity to act on what you learn. Jonno White, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230 episodes reaching listeners in 150 countries, works with school and district leadership teams to build that capacity. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

The 45 people on this list were selected through a research process designed to surface both the most influential and the most credible voices in Washington DC public education. Each person included is either working directly in the DC public education system, leading an organisation whose primary focus is DC public school students, conducting research that is actively shaping DC education policy, or advocating for DC public school families and students in a sustained and verifiable way.

The selection prioritised geographic and disciplinary diversity within the DC public education ecosystem. District leadership, charter school networks, advocacy organisations, research institutions, parent groups, and elected and appointed governance bodies are all represented. Particular effort was made to include voices from across the city's eight wards, including advocates and leaders whose work is primarily focused on the historically underserved communities east of the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8. The list was deliberately built to reflect both the reform-oriented and the community-centred strands of DC education leadership, recognising that both are essential to understanding how the city's public schools actually work.

Category 1: District System Leadership

These leaders sit at the apex of the DC public school system, holding formal authority over DCPS, charter oversight, state-level education governance, and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education. Their decisions shape what happens in every one of DC's more than 200 public and public charter schools.

1. Lewis Ferebee | DC Public Schools (DCPS)

The longest-serving Chancellor in DCPS history, appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser in 2018, Dr. Lewis Ferebee has guided the district through a period of historic transformation. His leadership has been defined by steadiness in the face of extraordinary disruption, including a global pandemic, a major teacher contract renegotiation, and a sustained push to make DCPS the fastest-improving urban district in the country. His five-year strategic plan, A Capital Commitment 2023 to 2028, focuses on academic achievement, student connection, and postsecondary readiness across all 117 DCPS schools.

Under Ferebee's leadership, DCPS achieved the greatest gains in fourth-grade mathematics among large-city districts on the 2024 Nation's Report Card, and the 2024-2025 statewide DC CAPE assessment showed the highest annual increases in literacy and math proficiency since the pandemic. In March 2026, he wrote in The 74 about elevating student voice as a structural feature of school improvement, citing Columbia Heights Education Campus as a national model for student-centred decision-making in which 30 percent of students participated in traditional adult governance spaces, exceeding the school's ambitious 20 percent target.

2. Paul Kihn | Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education

Few figures in DC education have as much combined private-sector analytical rigour and public-sector institutional knowledge as Paul Kihn. Appointed by Mayor Bowser in 2018, Kihn brings a background as a McKinsey education practice partner and former deputy superintendent of Philadelphia Public Schools to the coordination of DC's complex, multi-agency education system. He oversees both DCPS and the charter sector, managing the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula that distributes funding to all of DC's local education agencies.

His LinkedIn posts are among the most substantive policy writing published by any DC government official, covering instructional alignment, apprenticeship pathways, assessment validity, and workforce development. In early 2026, he wrote publicly about the misalignment between what teachers teach and what assessments measure, a critique positioning him as a genuine systems thinker. At the March 2026 State of DC Schools event, he declared that DC has built something no other place in the country has, framing his public role as both celebrant and steward of a system at a genuine crossroads between its achievements and its unfinished equity work.

3. Allister Chang | DC State Board of Education

Allister Chang has emerged as one of the most consequential elected members of the DC State Board of Education, representing Ward 2 with a focus that has gone well beyond his district boundaries. He spearheaded coordination of the 2025 Back-to-School Literacy Mixer that brought together DCPS, the Washington Teachers' Union, and the DC Charter School Alliance around the implementation of the Structured Literacy Competency Requirement Amendment Act of 2025. He authored a September 2025 op-ed in The DC Line on DC's literacy investments that remains one of the clearest public explanations of how five years of behind-the-scenes work became landmark legislation.

His framing of the literacy challenge, noting that only 26 percent of fourth-grade students in DC performed at or above the NAEP proficient literacy level, anchors advocacy in data rather than aspiration. Chang's work demonstrates that elected board membership in DC education is not ceremonial. It is one of the most effective entry points for substantive, cross-sector change when occupied by a leader who understands both policy and implementation.

4. Dr. Michelle J. Walker-Davis | DC Public Charter School Board

When Dr. Michelle J. Walker-Davis joined the DC Public Charter School Board as Executive Director in August 2020, she brought more than two decades of expertise in school administration, education policy, nonprofit management, and community outreach to the role of sole charter authoriser for the nation's capital. The DC PCSB oversees 133 public charter schools managed by 66 independent nonprofit organisations, educating nearly half of DC's approximately 100,000 public school students. Her vision, stated publicly when she joined the board, was for every family to have access to quality school options and a transparent, equitable way to measure school performance.

That vision found its fullest expression in August 2025, when she published a Washington Informer op-ed announcing the launch of ASPIRE, the revised academic accountability system that, for the first time since the pandemic, publicly reported school performance data across DC's charter sector. ASPIRE, standing for Annual School Performance Index Report and Evaluation, reflects her commitment to making accountability data accessible and actionable for families. Her testimony before the DC Council on charter school governance, financial accountability, and the Board of Trustees Training Amendment Act demonstrates an executive who understands both the regulatory and community-facing dimensions of charter authorisation.

5. Dr. Antoinette Mitchell | Office of the State Superintendent of Education

Dr. Antoinette Mitchell leads the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), the DC state education agency responsible for federal accountability, teacher certification, early childhood programmes, and the implementation of major education legislation including the structured literacy law passed in 2025. Her leadership follows that of Dr. Christina Grant, who in March 2026 announced she would leave to lead Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research, a transition the DC Charter School Alliance described as a significant loss for DC public education.

OSSE's May 2026 announcement of significant literacy gains for DC students following a five-year Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant reflects the ongoing implementation work at the core of her agency's mission. Mitchell's stewardship of the structured literacy legislation's implementation, in which kindergarten teacher training requirements must be translated into professional development reality across all of DC's local education agencies, is among the most consequential education leadership challenges in the city in 2026.

Category 2: Education Equity and Advocacy Leadership

These leaders work primarily to amplify family voice, advance equitable access to high-quality schools, and hold the system accountable on behalf of DC students who are furthest from opportunity.

6. Bisi Oyedele | Education Forward DC

Bisi Oyedele became Chief Executive Officer of Education Forward DC in September 2022, bringing a background in school leadership and principal development from Boston's Lynch Leadership Academy at Boston College. Education Forward DC is the city's primary philanthropic intermediary for DC public education, managing grant-making and grantee support for schools, advocacy organisations, and education entrepreneurs across the city. Under his leadership, the organisation has testified before the DC Council on academic recovery, equity, and budget priorities, positioning Education Forward DC as an active policy voice rather than a passive funder.

His LinkedIn posts reflect a leader who thinks in systems. A 2025 post from the MBK Alliance Certified Communities Impact Convening in Chicago explored how DC's education investments connect to broader community development, and he has written publicly about digital equity as one of the government's most overlooked opportunities. In April 2025, he published an op-ed in Hill Rag noting that while DC had narrowed its gap from 26 points below the national average to just 8 points between 2007 and 2024, just one in three fourth graders and barely one in five eighth graders reached math proficiency benchmarks on NAEP, a framing that captures both progress and unfinished work simultaneously.

7. Kaya Henderson | Aspen Institute / Reconstruction

Kaya Henderson's six-year tenure as Chancellor of DC Public Schools from 2010 to 2016 is the most studied period of DC education reform, and its lessons remain relevant to school systems around the world. Under her leadership, DCPS achieved the greatest growth of any urban district on the National Assessment of Educational Progress over multiple years, with consecutive increases in enrollment, graduation rates, student satisfaction, and teacher retention. She managed the transition from Michelle Rhee's confrontational reform style to a more community-engaged approach while protecting the teacher accountability infrastructure that has become central to DCPS's sustained improvement.

Since leaving DCPS, Henderson founded Reconstruction, a technology company delivering a K-12 supplemental curriculum situating Black history, culture, and contributions in an authentic and identity-affirming framework. She now serves as Executive Vice President and Executive Director of the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute, a role she assumed in August 2024. In January 2026, she moderated a Howard University panel on reimagining public education alongside Ivory Toldson and other education scholars, confirming her continuing engagement with DC's education future.

8. Margie Yeager | Education Forward DC

As Managing Partner overseeing Education Forward DC's grant-making and advocacy investments, Margie Yeager is one of the architects of DC's education philanthropic infrastructure. A former Teach for America teacher at Simon Elementary in DCPS and a Harvard Kennedy School MPP graduate, she brought expertise from her time as director of advocacy and policy at Chiefs for Change and as chief of staff to the DC Deputy Mayor for Education. Her written testimony before the DC Council on equity, school funding, and the achievement gap has become essential reading for anyone tracking DC education policy in real time.

Yeager's contribution to the DC education conversation is a particular kind of connective tissue: she bridges philanthropic investment with policy advocacy, school-level practice with systemic analysis, and the aspirational with the operationally feasible. Her public writing consistently reframes the 'what' of DC education outcomes with the 'how' of building the organisational and human infrastructure to produce those outcomes.

9. Fonda Sutton | Education Forward DC

Fonda Sutton has spent her entire career working in DC public education, a fact that distinguishes her from many of the national-figure imports who have shaped the city's schools. As Partner for Public Engagement investments at Education Forward DC, she leads the organisation's work on parent advocacy, community engagement, and family empowerment. Her perspective on DC education comes from the ground up rather than from the policy top down, and her investment work supports organisations that are building genuine parent power rather than tokenistic community input.

Her public voice on what effective parent engagement actually looks like in communities that have historically been excluded from education decision-making is a corrective to the technocratic tendencies of DC education reform. The parents of DC public school students in Wards 7 and 8 deserve advocates who understand that community trust is not a communications problem but a governance and power-sharing problem. Sutton's work is grounded in that understanding.

10. Karen Williams | Advocates for Justice and Education

Advocates for Justice and Education has been fighting for DC families with children who have disabilities, special needs, and complex educational requirements since the mid-1990s. Karen Williams leads an organisation that in 2026 is running its Parent Leadership Academy, training parents to be effective advocates for their children in a system where navigating special education rights requires specialist knowledge most families do not have. AJE recently placed a family representative on the DC Coordinating Council for School-Based Behavioral Health, extending its advocacy reach into the mental health infrastructure of DC schools.

AJE's work represents an essential counterweight to the achievement-metric-focused conversation that dominates DC education discourse. The families most likely to fall through the cracks of both DCPS and charter accountability systems are those whose children have disabilities, whose families face housing instability, and who lack the cultural capital to navigate bureaucratic systems. Williams and her organisation are one of the few DC voices consistently fighting in that space.

11. Melissa Rathbun | PAVE DC

PAVE, the Parent Amplifying Voices in Education organisation, was founded by DC parents to give families a genuine voice in the vision for public education in the city. Melissa Rathbun's work with PAVE represents a strand of DC education advocacy that operates outside both the reform establishment and the traditional union-community alliance. PAVE has built an all-parent governing board and focuses specifically on ensuring that education decisions in DC are made with families rather than for them.

Her public writing and advocacy on school choice, parent information, and family agency in the DC school selection process makes her a distinctive voice in a city where education reform has sometimes proceeded without adequate family buy-in. The tension between systemic reform and family agency is one of the most interesting unsolved problems in DC public education, and PAVE's work sits directly inside it.

12. Eboni-Rose Thompson | DC State Board of Education

Eboni-Rose Thompson serves as an at-large member of the DC State Board of Education, bringing advocacy and equity perspectives to the nine-member elected body that advises OSSE and engages with community members across all eight wards. Her presence on the board reflects the growing representation of advocates with roots in education justice movements rather than traditional school administration or policy backgrounds.

The DC State Board of Education has become an increasingly important forum for public deliberation about equity in DC schools, and at-large members like Thompson hold a special responsibility to represent voices from across the city rather than from a single ward. Her engagement with the board's public hearings and community outreach work demonstrates the accountability-focused governance that complements rather than duplicates the work of the executive branch education agencies.

Category 3: Research, Data, and Policy Analysis

These leaders produce the evidence base that informs DC education decision-making, from longitudinal school quality data to policy analysis of funding formulas and state legislation.

13. Yesim Sayin | D.C. Policy Center

The founding executive director of the D.C. Policy Center, Dr. Yesim Sayin is the most trusted non-partisan voice on the intersection of DC's economic policy and education finance. With a PhD in economics from George Mason University and over two decades of public policy experience in DC, she has testified repeatedly before the DC Council on school funding, the UPSFF formula, the Schools First Amendment Act, and the fiscal feasibility of DC's education budget proposals. Her October 2025 testimony before the Committee of the Whole set the frame for how DC's budget crisis was understood in education terms.

Sayin's contribution is rare: she is an economist who genuinely understands schools. She does not simply apply fiscal analysis to education as if it were any other government expenditure. She asks what the evidence says about which investments produce outcomes for students and which produce compliance theatre. Her LinkedIn posts and the D.C. Policy Center's April 2026 State of DC Schools report are indispensable for anyone who wants to understand where DC's education system actually stands beneath the headline numbers.

14. Josh Boots | EmpowerK12

Josh Boots is the founder and executive director of EmpowerK12, the data analytics organisation that has become an essential infrastructure layer for DC public education improvement. He built EmpowerK12 on a foundation of 20 years in DC education roles, including teaching seventh-grade maths at DCPS, leading the KIPP DC data team as its first Data Director, and contributing to OSSE's assessment and accountability work. He serves on the DC Education Research Collaborative's leadership council and was appointed to the original DC State Board of Education ESSA Taskforce in 2017.

EmpowerK12's annual Bold Performance Schools report, which Boots leads, identifies DC schools that are outperforming expectations for students with the highest needs, documenting the specific strategies those schools are using. The 2023 report's identification of targeted small-group tutoring as a key strategy among high-performing schools preceded the city's formal adoption of high-impact tutoring as a policy priority, demonstrating exactly the kind of research-to-policy pipeline that EmpowerK12 was designed to produce.

15. Chelsea Coffin | D.C. Policy Center

Chelsea Coffin is the director of the Education Initiative at the D.C. Policy Center and the author of the annual State of DC Schools report, the most comprehensive and widely cited snapshot of DC's public education system published each year. Her research covers school diversity, academic improvement for at-risk students, the transition from high school to postsecondary, and enrollment dynamics across DC's dual-sector system. She serves on the boards of Higher Achievement, Maya Angelou Public Charter Schools, and District Bridges, anchoring her research work in the practical reality of DC school-community relationships.

Her April 2026 State of DC Schools presentation captured both the system's genuine successes and its persistent challenges with extraordinary clarity. Coffin represents the best of DC education research: rigorous, DC-specific, updated annually, and designed to be useful to policymakers rather than to generate academic citations. Her work is a primary source, not a secondary synthesis, for anyone trying to understand DC public education.

16. Ivory Toldson | Howard University

Professor Ivory Toldson is one of the foremost researchers on race and education in the United States, and his base at Howard University in Washington, DC places his scholarship in direct relationship with the city's public education system. His research challenges deficit narratives about Black students in US schools, arguing that the data used to characterise Black academic underperformance is often misleading and that the conditions of schooling, rather than the characteristics of students, explain most of the gaps researchers document. His book No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear about Black People documents this argument in characteristically direct terms.

Ranked among the nation's top 100 education scholars in the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, Toldson brings to DC education conversations a corrective to data-driven reform narratives that can mask the racial dynamics shaping school outcomes. His January 2026 participation in Howard University's reimagining public education panel alongside Kaya Henderson and other scholars demonstrates his ongoing engagement with DC's specific educational challenges.

17. Valerie Jablow | educationdc.net

Valerie Jablow is a DC resident, DCPS parent, and education analyst who has published more than 200 posts on educationdc.net since 2013, providing detailed independent analysis of DC public education that no mainstream outlet has been willing to fund. Her research into DC charter facilities funding, DCPS budget practices, school board accountability, and the political economy of DC education reform is cited by policymakers, journalists, and advocates who recognise her as one of the few people consistently asking questions that official narratives prefer to leave unasked.

Her February 2026 series on the disappearing DC Charter Board Chair and her May 2026 testimony on charter facilities funding demonstrate a level of institutional knowledge about DC education governance that is genuinely rare. Jablow's contribution to the DC education thought leadership landscape is a reminder that the most important voices in a local education conversation are not always the best-funded or the most credentialled. Sometimes they are simply the people who show up, do the work, and refuse to let the system off the hook.

Category 4: Charter School Leadership and Innovation

DC's charter school sector educates nearly half of the city's public school students and has been the site of some of the most significant educational innovation in urban America over the past three decades. These leaders are building and leading the schools and networks that define what DC's charter sector actually is.

18. Shannon Hodge | KIPP DC

Shannon Hodge is the Chief Executive Officer of KIPP DC, the largest and most studied charter school network in Washington, DC, with 20 schools educating approximately 7,300 students, the overwhelming majority of whom are Black or Brown and meet the at-risk definition. Before leading KIPP DC, she was the founding director of the DC Charter School Alliance and co-founded Kingsman Academy Public Charter School to serve students who were overaged, undercredited, and at risk of dropping out. Her background in counselling, education law, and advocacy gives her an unusually broad lens on the challenges facing DC charter students.

KIPP DC has been cited in peer-reviewed research as one of the charter networks producing the strongest academic gains for high-need students. Hodge's leadership has extended that legacy while also deepening the network's commitment to social-emotional learning and mental health support. Her ability to sustain the network's quality and culture through the retirement of founding leader Susan Schaeffler in December 2025, after 25 years, represents a form of institutional continuity management that is genuinely difficult and rarely studied.

19. Toni Barton | E.L. Haynes Public Charter School

Toni Barton became CEO of E.L. Haynes Public Charter School bringing more than two decades of experience leading schools and systems in environments where inclusive instructional design was foundational rather than optional. Before joining E.L. Haynes, she was a faculty member at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and founded Spelligent Education, a consultancy supporting district and school leaders on inclusive instructional systems. She also founded the Inclusive Schools Leadership Institute at the Relay Graduate School of Education.

E.L. Haynes is one of DC's highest-regarded charter schools, known for its inclusive model and its deep commitment to serving students with disabilities alongside their non-disabled peers. Barton's arrival brings to the school a national reputation for inclusive systems design combined with deep knowledge of DC's specific educational and policy context. Her leadership represents the next chapter of a school that has long been a model for what inclusive public education can look like when done at scale.

20. Russ Williams | Center City Public Charter Schools

Russ Williams is the President and CEO of Center City Public Charter Schools, a DC charter network operating multiple campuses across the city with a values framework built around character, excellence, and service. Center City has been named among DC's Bold Performance Schools by EmpowerK12 for its work with high-need students, and Williams has been a consistent public voice on the specific challenges of serving students at risk of academic failure in a city where charter school competition for enrolment is intense.

His participation in the 2023 high-impact tutoring panel alongside DCPS and OSSE officials demonstrated Center City's willingness to collaborate across sectors rather than compete, a disposition that reflects the best of what DC's dual-sector model can produce when charter and district leaders treat themselves as colleagues rather than rivals.

21. Myron Long | Social Justice School

Myron Long is a native Washingtonian, a graduate of DC Public Schools, and the founder and executive director of the Social Justice School, a public charter school that brings a social justice framework into every aspect of its curriculum and culture. His career includes service as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, and his academic background includes degrees in philosophy and political science from Morgan State University and a master's in philosophy with a social policy concentration from American University.

What makes Long distinctive in DC's charter landscape is his commitment to a DC-rooted, community-centred vision of what a public school should be. He is not a franchise leader implementing a model developed elsewhere. He is a Washingtonian who built a school that reflects the specific aspirations of the communities he has always been part of. That rootedness gives his voice a credibility in Washington that leaders who came to DC to implement reform rarely achieve.

22. Tracy White | Paul Public Charter Schools

Dr. Tracy L. White is the Chief Executive Officer of Paul Public Charter Schools in Washington, DC, a network serving students in both middle and high school with a program the school calls MERIT Scholars, standing for motivated, educated, responsible, independent thinkers. With more than three decades of experience in urban education, she leads with a steadfast belief that every scholar deserves the opportunity to achieve, belong, and thrive.

Her leadership of Paul Public Charter Schools has focused on building the school's reputation as a genuine college and career preparation programme for students who are often under-estimated. The MERIT Scholars framework is not simply a branding exercise. It reflects a philosophical commitment to framing student identity in terms of aspiration and capability rather than risk and deficit. White is among the DC charter leaders most consistently focused on the long-term futures of her students rather than on their immediate test score trajectories.

23. Naomi Rubin DeVeaux | DC Charter School Alliance

The DC Charter School Alliance is the unifying advocacy organisation for DC's approximately 100 public charter schools, and Naomi Rubin DeVeaux brings to her leadership of the alliance a deep understanding of both the policy environment and the operational realities of running schools in the nation's capital. The alliance advocates before the DC Council and the Deputy Mayor for Education on funding formulas, facilities, at-risk weights, and the regulatory environment for charter authorisation.

Her advocacy work is particularly important at a time when DC faces significant fiscal pressure on its education budget. Charter schools in DC receive the same per-pupil funding as DCPS students but must find and fund their own facilities, a structural inequity that the alliance has consistently documented and advocated to address. The ability to make that case credibly and persistently without alienating DCPS or the DME requires exactly the kind of collaborative advocacy diplomacy that DeVeaux brings to the role.

24. David Domenici | See Forever Foundation

David Domenici is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of the See Forever Foundation and its Maya Angelou Public Charter Schools in Washington, DC, which he co-founded with James Forman Jr. in the mid-1990s. The Maya Angelou Schools serve some of DC's most underserved young people, including court-involved youth and young adults who have been failed by or excluded from more conventional school settings. The foundation's model combines rigorous academics with intensive support services and restorative approaches to discipline and community, and the Maya Angelou Academy's accreditation team described it as one of the best schools they had ever seen.

Domenici writes frequently about education and juvenile justice reform, publishing in The Washington Post, the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, and The Imprint. His two longer co-authored articles with James Forman Jr. on school reform in the context of juvenile justice represent a body of research that goes beyond advocacy to genuine policy analysis. His founding of BreakFree Education in 2011 extended his work with court-involved young people to additional settings. His presence on this list is a reminder that DC public education cannot be understood through its highest-performing schools alone.

25. Amy Hwang | Digital Pioneers Academy

Digital Pioneers Academy is one of DC's most innovative public charter schools, built around the premise that coding and computer science are civil rights issues as much as educational opportunities. Amy Hwang leads an institution that has demonstrated how a public charter school can simultaneously serve high-need students and deliver genuinely rigorous technical education. Digital Pioneers has attracted national attention and philanthropic support as a model for what DC charter innovation can produce when it is built around both equity and genuine academic ambition.

Her work in a city where the digital divide remains one of the most stubborn structural barriers to educational equity for students in underserved wards represents exactly the kind of school-level innovation that DC's competitive charter sector is theoretically designed to produce. The question for DC education is not whether schools like Digital Pioneers can succeed in isolation, but whether the city's dual-sector system can scale what they build.

26. Patricia Brantley | Friendship Public Charter School

Patricia Brantley is the CEO of Friendship Public Charter School, one of DC's largest and longest-running charter networks, with campuses serving students from Pre-K3 through grade 12 across 15 locations. She has served at Friendship since 2003, becoming CEO in 2015, and her tenure represents a form of institutional stability and continuity that is genuinely rare in urban education. In March 2026, she was quoted in the Washington Informer on charter school facilities funding equity, arguing that without structural support for charters comparable to the support DCPS receives, students in the charter sector will face increasing disadvantage.

Her December 2025 participation in the Power of Innovation Summit, speaking on a panel about state-level education innovation, reflects a leader who is simultaneously managing a complex organisation and contributing to national conversations about what high-performing urban charter schools can teach the broader system. Friendship's 2021 Yass Prize Semifinalist recognition is a verifiable credential for her network's approach to educational excellence for DC students.

Category 5: Governance, Policy, and Elected Voices

DC's elected education governance infrastructure includes the DC State Board of Education, which has members representing each of the city's eight wards, and the DC Council, whose education committee members hold significant legislative authority over school funding and policy.

27. Jacque Patterson | DC State Board of Education

Jacque Patterson serves on the DC State Board of Education representing Ward 6, a ward that spans Capitol Hill, Navy Yard, and Anacostia, bridging some of the city's most affluent and most underserved communities. The State Board plays an important advisory and accountability role in DC education governance, engaging with community members to shape the recommendations that go to OSSE on curriculum standards, teacher certification, and school accountability.

His participation in the 2025 DC Charter School Rainbow Graduation, where he delivered a congratulatory message alongside DC Council members, reflects engagement with both the charter and traditional public school sectors. As a State Board member representing a ward whose constituents span extremes of educational advantage, he occupies a governance position that requires a sophisticated understanding of how the same city can produce radically different educational experiences depending on which side of the Anacostia River a student lives on.

28. Markus Batchelor | DC State Board of Education

Markus Batchelor represents Ward 5 on the DC State Board of Education, a ward that encompasses communities including Edgewood, Brookland, and Brentwood. His approach to the State Board role reflects a commitment to community accountability that goes beyond formal governance structures. Ward 5 has been one of the DC wards where the tension between DCPS neighbourhood schools and charter school growth has been most visible, and Batchelor's engagement with that tension gives him a perspective that more insulated education governance voices often lack.

29. Darius Gordon | DC State Board of Education

Darius Gordon represents Ward 7 on the DC State Board of Education, making him one of the most important elected education voices for the communities east of the Anacostia River that face the greatest concentration of educational disadvantage in DC. Ward 7 has a high proportion of at-risk students, lower academic performance than the citywide average, and a history of educational under-investment that DC's reform era has not fully reversed. Gordon's presence on the State Board as a Ward 7 representative is a structural acknowledgement that the communities farthest from opportunity must have a formal seat in the governance of the system that is supposed to serve them.

30. Mary Lord | DC State Board of Education

Mary Lord serves as an at-large member of the DC State Board of Education, bringing experience and perspective to the board that complements the ward-specific knowledge of its elected district representatives. At-large members are responsible for engaging with education issues across the full breadth of DC's eight wards, and Lord's tenure on the board has involved sustained engagement with the full range of education policy questions that come before the State Board, including curriculum standards, teacher certification requirements, and the accountability frameworks that govern both DCPS and charter schools.

31. Brooke Pinto | DC Council

Councilmember Brooke Pinto, representing Ward 2, is the legislative architect of the DC literacy reform agenda that produced the Structured Literacy Competency Requirement Amendment Act of 2025, one of the most significant pieces of DC education legislation in recent years. Allister Chang's literacy op-ed specifically credits Pinto with spearheading the legislation and maintaining momentum through two years of complex stakeholder coordination across OSSE, DCPS, the Washington Teachers' Union, and the charter sector. Her biweekly meetings with the Early Literacy Education Task Force over five years demonstrate an unusually deep legislative commitment to a single education issue.

For a council member representing one of DC's most affluent wards, Pinto's focus on foundational literacy as a citywide equity issue rather than a Ward 2 constituent services matter reflects genuine educational conviction. The legislation she championed requires all kindergarten teachers in DC to complete structured literacy training, a reform that reading science experts consider among the highest-leverage possible interventions for closing DC's persistent reading gap.

Category 6: School Innovation, Culture, and Practitioner Leadership

These leaders are building, leading, and transforming schools from the inside, working directly with students, teachers, and school communities to produce the outcomes that the policy and research layers of DC education are trying to create.

32. Maria Tukeva | Columbia Heights Education Campus (DCPS)

Maria Tukeva is the principal of Columbia Heights Education Campus, a DCPS high school in Northwest Washington that became a national case study in March 2026 when Chancellor Ferebee wrote about CHEC in The 74. Under her leadership, CHEC set and exceeded an ambitious target in school year 2024-2025 to engage 30 percent of students in traditional adult decision-making spaces, above the goal of 20 percent. Student sense of belonging increased by 7 percent as a direct result, according to a school climate survey.

Tukeva's approach to student voice is not a programme but a philosophy of power-sharing that treats students as genuine participants in school governance rather than as customers to be served or risks to be managed. In a city where education reform has often been top-down, technocratic, and driven by external actors, she represents a form of school leadership that is relentlessly community-centred and student-powered. Her school is a model that the rest of DC's 117 DCPS schools are now being encouraged to replicate.

33. LaKimbre Brown | Leading Educators

LaKimbre Brown's career in DC education is a story of professional ascent driven by the same dynamic she later observed in others: people seeing something in her that she did not yet see in herself. She began as a classroom teacher and moved through school leadership roles within both DCPS and Lorain City Schools before joining Leading Educators, where she now leads school system partnerships across the country. Her panel appearance at SXSW EDU 2025 on making teaching the job everyone wants drew from her DC journey as a framework for national recommendations on teacher retention and leadership development.

Her work at Leading Educators is informed by deep institutional memory of DC schools and their specific challenges. She brings to national conversations about teacher pipeline, leadership development, and instructional quality a specificity that comes from having taught, led, and watched DC education evolve from within.

34. Shawn Hardnett | Hardnett Consulting

Shawn Hardnett served as a chief academic officer and principal coach in DC from 2010 before striking out independently in 2016 to build a consulting practice focused on DC school and principal development. His work sits at the intersection of instructional leadership, principal coaching, and the organisational culture of schools serving high-need students. Education Forward DC has spotlighted his work as an example of the kind of entrepreneurial education leadership the city needs more of.

His perspective on what makes DC school leaders effective combines practitioner knowledge with the pattern recognition that comes from coaching dozens of principals across both the DCPS and charter sectors. He is one of a small number of DC education voices who moves fluidly between the two sectors, seeing both from the inside without being captured by either.

35. Jack McCarthy | AppleTree Institute

Jack McCarthy leads AppleTree Institute, a DC-based nonprofit operating a research and development institute and a network of public charter preschool campuses focused on closing the achievement gap before students enter kindergarten. AppleTree's emphasis on the earliest years of public education reflects the research consensus that high-quality pre-K is among the highest-return investments in education policy, and DC's strong pre-K investment makes the quality of that pre-K experience a significant driver of long-term outcomes for the city's most disadvantaged students.

McCarthy's contribution to DC education thought leadership is the focus on the 0 to 5 window that most public school-focused conversations skip over entirely. If DC is to fulfil its aspiration to become a genuinely equitable school system, the children entering kindergarten must arrive with the foundations that only high-quality early childhood education consistently produces.

36. Ayesha Aquino | AppleTree Institute

Ayesha Aquino brings the perspective of a deep practitioner to AppleTree Institute's work on early childhood education. Her expertise in early learning programme design and implementation provides the instructional backbone for an organisation whose impact is ultimately measured in the developmental trajectories of three and four-year-old children in DC's most underserved communities. The quality of early childhood instruction is both the most invisible and the most consequential investment a city can make in public education equity, and practitioners like Aquino who can deliver that instruction reliably at scale are among the most important people in the DC education ecosystem.

37. Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy | American University School of Education

Dr. Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy is the Dean of the School of Education at American University in Washington, DC, where her leadership has focused on preparing teachers for the diverse, urban schools that DC and cities like it need. Her research on multicultural counselling, race and counsellor identity, and equity in school counselling represents a body of scholarship that bridges clinical practice and school system design. American University's School of Education has been redesigning its teacher preparation programme specifically to increase the number of well-prepared, diverse teachers graduating into DC schools.

Her national standing as a scholar of race and counsellor identity brings to DC's higher education-to-schools pipeline a commitment to preparing educators who understand not just curriculum and instruction but the social and racial dynamics of the schools they will enter. In a city where the teaching force is significantly whiter than the student population, the quality of teacher preparation for diverse urban schools matters enormously.

Category 7: Independent Research, Think Tanks, and Policy Voices

These DC-based researchers, policy analysts, and think tank leaders produce the ideas and evidence that shape national as well as local education policy, often working at the intersection of DC's unique education story and broader national debates.

38. Denise Forte | Education Trust

Denise Forte is the President and CEO of the Education Trust, a national education equity organisation headquartered in Washington, DC, whose research and advocacy focus on eliminating educational barriers for students of colour and students from low-income families. Her participation in the March 2026 State of DC Schools event, where she discussed the implications of federal shifts for DC and effective advocacy strategies, places her at the centre of the most urgent current challenge for DC education: maintaining state and city investments in the face of federal funding uncertainty.

The Education Trust's research on student outcomes, funding equity, and opportunity gaps is among the most widely cited in urban education policy, and Forte's leadership of the organisation connects DC's local education conversation to the national equity agenda in ways that purely local voices cannot. Her presence on this list reflects the reality that understanding DC public education in 2026 requires understanding the federal political context in which it operates.

39. Michael Casserly | Council of the Great City Schools

Michael Casserly served as executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools for more than three decades, leading the national membership organisation that represents the largest urban school districts in the United States from its DC headquarters. His book The Enduring Promise of America's Great City Schools documents the capacity of urban public school systems to serve children and families amid persistent social and economic challenges, and has become a reference text for understanding what sustained urban school improvement actually requires. He now serves as Strategic Advisor to the council, which has named its Urban Executive Leadership Institute after him in recognition of his legacy.

His three decades of stewardship of the council produced research on urban district performance, including research that documented DC's post-pandemic recovery as exceptional among large city districts. Current Executive Director Ray Hart continues the council's advocacy work, and Casserly's institutional knowledge of what urban districts have tried, succeeded with, and failed at over decades remains a resource that DC education leaders draw on actively.

40. Kevin Carey | New America

Kevin Carey is the director of the education policy program at New America, a DC-based think tank, and one of the most widely read education policy writers working today. His work on higher education accountability, school quality, and the metrics used to evaluate both students and institutions has consistently challenged comfortable assumptions in education reform circles. His book The End of College argues that the traditional university model is fundamentally unsuited to the needs of most American students, a provocative thesis that reflects his willingness to follow evidence to uncomfortable conclusions.

While Carey's primary focus is postsecondary education, his presence in DC's policy ecosystem gives him visibility into the K-12 reform debates that shape what students are prepared for by the time they reach the postsecondary transition. His voice in conversations about accountability, outcomes, and the political economy of education reform is a useful corrective to both the reform cheerleaders and the reform critics who dominate DC education discourse.

41. Max Eden | American Enterprise Institute

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, with a focus on K-12 education policy. His research on school discipline, culturally responsive education, and the evidence base for education reform has made him one of the more provocative and closely read voices in conservative education policy circles. His willingness to challenge progressive orthodoxies on school discipline and curricula has drawn both criticism and engagement from researchers and practitioners across the political spectrum.

Eden's presence on this list reflects the reality that DC education debate includes right-of-centre voices that are substantively engaged with the evidence on student outcomes. Understanding DC education in its full complexity requires engaging with a range of perspectives, including those that challenge the reform and equity-based consensus that dominates the city's education nonprofit sector.

42. Kara Kerwin | Center for Education Reform

Kara Kerwin is the President of the Center for Education Reform, a DC-based advocacy organisation that champions school choice, charter school expansion, and education market reforms. The CER convened some of the nation's most prominent educators and policymakers just two days after the 2024 election to shape the education policy agenda for the new administration, reflecting its ability to operate at the intersection of advocacy, politics, and policy in ways that purely research-focused organisations cannot.

Her advocacy for DC charter schools and for the legal and regulatory frameworks that allow charter authorisation sits at the more market-oriented end of the DC education policy spectrum, providing a counterweight to the equity-focused advocacy of organisations like the Education Trust. Understanding DC education policy in its full breadth requires understanding the market-choice arguments that have driven much of DC's dual-sector design.

43. Earl Martin Phalen | Phalen Leadership Academies

Earl Martin Phalen is a social entrepreneur whose Phalen Leadership Academies have focused on transforming struggling public schools in multiple cities, including Washington, DC. His approach to school turnaround combines high-dose tutoring, extended learning time, and a culture of high expectations for students who are often written off by more conventional school improvement approaches. A Harvard Law School graduate, he is among the DC-connected education leaders who most explicitly bridge philanthropic, policy, and operational dimensions of urban education reform.

His work on school turnaround is particularly relevant to DC's ongoing challenge of improving outcomes in Ward 7 and Ward 8 schools that have been slower to share in the city's overall progress. His broader national platform on what high-dose tutoring and relationship-based school cultures can achieve gives DC education leaders a framework for translating citywide accountability data into specific, replicable school-level strategies.

44. Brandon Best | Run for Something

Brandon Best began his career in Washington, DC working on youth civic leadership, most memorably co-convening the first-ever DC Youth Civic Leadership Summit, which brought more than 100 students in grades 8 through 12 to engage with civic structures in their own city. His work in DC education advocacy has been grounded in the conviction that young people in DC public schools are not just the objects of education policy but its most important and most underrepresented participants. He has since transitioned to a senior director role at Run for Something, a national organisation working to build the pipeline of progressive candidates for office.

His specific contribution to DC public education thought leadership is the frame of youth civic power: the argument that the quality of a city's public schools is ultimately determined not by the sophistication of its adults but by the degree to which its young people are treated as genuine agents of their own educational futures. That argument, which runs through his DC work, is one of the most consistently underrepresented perspectives in formal DC education discourse.

45. Jonno White | Clarity Group Global

The thinkers on this list are the people shaping the conversation about public education in Washington, DC. Jonno White is the person you bring in when you are ready to act on what they say. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, Jonno works with school and district leadership teams to build the team culture, communication, and decision-making frameworks that translate compelling ideas into sustainable practice. Host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230 episodes reaching listeners in 150 countries, and founder of The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000 participating leaders, he brings a practitioner's understanding of leadership to every engagement.

To bring Jonno White in for your school or district leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether for keynotes, Working Genius facilitation, or executive team offsites, Jonno works with schools around the world. International travel is often far more affordable than expected.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several figures were seriously considered for this list and deserve acknowledgement for their contributions to DC public education.

Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson are the two former DCPS Chancellors whose decisions created the structural conditions that current DC education leaders are operating within. Henderson is included at Entry 7. Rhee's three years from 2007 to 2010 are inseparable from the DC story, and her exclusion from the numbered list reflects an editorial choice to prioritise voices who are actively working in DC education in 2026 rather than those whose primary contributions are now historical.

Christina Grant, who left OSSE in March 2026 to lead Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research, was the State Superintendent of Education whose tenure oversaw the literacy task force work and the implementation of the structured literacy legislation. Her recent transition means her entry has been allocated to her successor, Dr. Antoinette Mitchell.

Susan Schaeffler, the founding leader of KIPP DC, retired in December 2025 after 25 years. Her contribution to DC public education is historic, and her exclusion reflects timing rather than significance. Jason Kamras, the 2005-2006 National Teacher of the Year who was deeply embedded in DCPS reform, is now leading Richmond Public Schools and his current work is centred outside DC.

Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on many broader leadership lists. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices who are actively shaping the specific conversation about DC public education in 2026.

Common Mistakes When Engaging with DC Education Thought Leadership

Conflating DC's national profile with universal agreement. DC's education system is celebrated nationally, and the people on this list include many who have contributed to that success. But the DC education conversation is also genuinely contested. The dual-sector model that has produced strong outcomes for many students has also produced significant tensions around facilities equity, school closures, and the political accountability of charter operators. Engaging with DC education thought leadership means engaging with that contestation, not just the parts of the story that have been packaged for national audiences.

Assuming reform and equity are always aligned. Some of the most significant DC education reforms were implemented over the strong objections of teachers, community members, and families who experienced them as harmful rather than helpful. The evidence base for DC's overall system improvement is genuine, but the distribution of that improvement across wards, schools, and student populations is uneven. Reading Chelsea Coffin's State of DC Schools data alongside Valerie Jablow's independent analysis gives a more complete picture than either source alone.

Missing the early childhood layer. Much of DC education thought leadership focuses on K-12, but the most consequential educational investments happen in the 0 to 5 window. AppleTree Institute's work with pre-K students in DC's most underserved communities is a direct upstream investment in the K-12 outcomes everyone else is trying to improve. Leaders in this space like Jack McCarthy and Ayesha Aquino are doing work that is often invisible in mainstream education discourse.

Treating the charter-vs-DCPS question as binary. The most sophisticated DC education leaders, including several on this list, do not treat the relationship between charter schools and DCPS as a zero-sum competition. They treat it as a cross-sector collaboration problem that the city has made genuine progress on over 30 years. Approaching DC education through a charter-vs-district lens produces a cartoon version of a genuinely complex institutional story.

Ignoring Ward 7 and Ward 8. Much of DC's celebrated education progress has been concentrated in schools and neighbourhoods that were already relatively advantaged. The communities east of the Anacostia River, which have the city's highest concentrations of poverty, at-risk students, and schools that remain below the citywide average, are both the most important and the most underrepresented part of the DC education story. Thought leaders who focus only on the city's improvements without grappling with its geographic inequity are telling a fundamentally incomplete story.

Over-indexing on credentials and institutional positions. Some of the most important voices in DC public education are not administrators or academics. Valerie Jablow writes from a blog. Fonda Sutton grounds her grantmaking in three decades of direct community engagement. Maria Tukeva is a principal, not a policy leader. The quality of DC education thought leadership cannot be read from a LinkedIn title.

Implementation Guide: Building Your DC Education Reading and Following List

Start with the data. Before engaging with any of the opinions, read the D.C. Policy Center's State of DC Schools report, published annually. Chelsea Coffin's work gives you the factual baseline from which all the opinion-level conversations depart. Without it, you are engaging with conclusions before you understand the evidence.

Follow across sectors. If you are coming from the DCPS side of DC education, deliberately follow charter sector voices. If you are coming from the charter side, deliberately follow community organising and advocacy voices. The most useful perspective on DC education is the one that spans the sector lines rather than sitting comfortably on one side of them.

Engage with EmpowerK12's Bold Performance Schools research. Josh Boots' annual report identifies specific schools that are beating expectations for high-need students and documents the specific strategies they are using. This is actionable intelligence, not just descriptive research, and it is free.

Attend the State of DC Schools event, which the DC Policy Center convenes publicly each year. The March 2026 event featured Yesim Sayin, Paul Kihn, Denise Forte, and other leading voices, covering teacher retention, absenteeism, federal funding risks, and academic growth. These events are recorded and publicly available.

Follow Education Forward DC's public reports and testimony. Bisi Oyedele, Margie Yeager, and Fonda Sutton produce testimony before the DC Council that is detailed, evidence-based, and focused on the equity dimensions of education policy that official government reporting often glosses over.

Engage with the DC State Board of Education's public meetings. The board includes elected members from all eight wards, including Darius Gordon from Ward 7, and its public hearings provide a forum for community voices that rarely appear in the polished publications of think tanks and advocacy organisations.

Allow six to twelve months before expecting your reading and following to produce practical results. The DC education conversation is fast-moving, locally specific, and often dependent on institutional relationships and political context that takes time to understand. The thinkers on this list have spent years, in most cases decades, developing that understanding. Your engagement with their work will compound in value the longer you sustain it.

To work with Jonno White on building a leadership team culture that can actually act on what your reading and following teaches you, email jonno@consultclarity.org. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator with a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating at the ASBA 2025 National Conference, he works with school and district leadership teams to turn ideas into aligned, sustainable action. International travel is often far more affordable than expected.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most important thought leaders in DC public education right now?

The most consequential figures in DC public education in 2026 span district leadership, charter school networks, research and policy, and community advocacy. Chancellor Lewis Ferebee leads DCPS through its most sustained period of improvement, while Paul Kihn coordinates the broader dual-sector system from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education. Yesim Sayin and Chelsea Coffin at the DC Policy Center produce the data that anchors all other conversations, and Bisi Oyedele at Education Forward DC leads the philanthropic infrastructure that supports the city's most innovative schools and organisations.

What makes DC public education different from other US cities?

Washington, DC is the most charter-saturated urban school system in the United States, with nearly half of all public school students attending independent public charter schools rather than DCPS schools. The city also has mayoral control of schools, meaning the Mayor appoints the Chancellor and is politically accountable for school performance. DC spends more per pupil on public education than virtually any US state or large city, and its teacher starting salaries are the highest in the country. These structural features combine to produce both the city's extraordinary improvement record and its persistent equity challenges.

How was this list compiled?

The 45 people on this list were selected based on their credentials and direct contribution to DC public education, their active engagement with the DC education conversation in 2025 and 2026, geographic diversity across DC's eight wards, disciplinary diversity spanning district leadership, charter school operations, research, policy, advocacy, community organising, and practitioner leadership, and a deliberate effort to include voices representing the communities east of the Anacostia River that are most underserved by the current system.

What are the biggest challenges facing DC public education in 2026?

Chronic absenteeism remains the most persistent operational challenge, stuck at 39 percent across the system despite sustained efforts to address it. Equity gaps between students in the city's most affluent and most disadvantaged communities remain among the widest in the country despite overall system improvement. The implementation of the 2025 structured literacy legislation requires sustained professional development investment across all local education agencies. Federal funding uncertainty under the current administration creates fiscal risk for a system that has benefited significantly from federal education investments. And enrollment pressure, with numbers declining slightly in 2025-2026, creates financial and strategic challenges for both DCPS and the charter sector.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership development workshops for my school or district leadership team?

Yes. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, works with school and district leadership teams to build the team culture, communication skills, and decision-making frameworks that make the ideas of thought leaders like those on this list actually implementable. He has worked with schools around the world and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. International travel is often far more affordable than expected.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Is the DC dual-sector model something other cities should adopt?

The evidence from DC suggests that well-managed charter authorisation, combined with strong district-wide accountability and genuine cross-sector collaboration, can produce educational improvement that neither sector could achieve alone. However, DC's specific conditions, including mayoral control, high per-pupil funding, political support for both reform and equity goals, and a small geographic footprint that makes coordination feasible, are not easily replicable. The most honest answer is that elements of DC's model are worth studying carefully, but wholesale adoption without attention to local context is unlikely to produce the same results.

Final Thoughts

Washington, DC has built something genuinely remarkable in public education over the past three decades. A system that was, in the words of Paul Kihn, something no other place in the country has. The fastest-improving urban district in the nation. Teacher salaries the highest in the country. Pre-K access that is among the most expansive in any US city. A graduation rate that has climbed from just over 50 percent to 78.7 percent since 2011.

But the story is not finished, and the people on this list know that better than anyone. Chronic absenteeism at 39 percent is not a footnote. An equity gap that still sees Ward 7 and Ward 8 students performing below the citywide average is not a rounding error. A structured literacy law that was necessary in 2025 because too many DC children were still not learning to read is a reminder that systemic improvement coexists with specific, urgent, human failures.

The thought leaders on this list are not cheerleaders for a finished story. They are active participants in an ongoing negotiation about what public education in the nation's capital can and should be. Following their work, reading their research, and engaging with their advocacy is not just professionally useful. It is a way of staying connected to the most important educational experiment in the English-speaking world.

Jonno White works with school and district leadership teams to build the culture, communication, and team dynamics that make excellent ideas, including the ideas of everyone on this list, actually implementable on Monday morning. As the host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230 episodes in 150 countries and the founder of The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000 participating leaders, he brings a practitioner's understanding of leadership to every engagement. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation about what your team needs.

His book Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally, is available at Amazon and offers practical frameworks for the difficult conversations that every school and district leadership team eventually needs to have.

Step Up or Step Out on Amazon

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230 episodes reaching listeners in 150 countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000 participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

For more on the broader landscape of US public education thought leadership, check out Jonno's blog post '50 Essential US Public Education Leaders to Follow'.

Keep reading: 50 Essential US Public Education Leaders to Follow