Inside Job (DC Edu Research And Governance Edition)

Last month, the DC public learned the identities of members of a task force that the DC council committee of the whole (COW) had assembled almost a year earlier, in spring 2020, to look at learning loss in the pandemic and advise COW about it.

Pictured below, the eight task force members have about 11 years total of classroom teaching, from what I could discern from their online resumes (see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here).

While it’s unclear to me whether council members other than COW director (council chair Phil Mendelson) knew about this task force assembled on their behalf, it is certain that most DC taxpayers do not know the process by which this task force came into being, how often they met, with whom, and what was discussed.

To be sure, one might have a fairly good…