Putting Everything on the Table: Complexity, Context, and Community Engagement with Public Education

For the first time since 1968, local education authorities in Washington, D.C. embarked on a contentious process of engaging communities as part of a comprehensive revision of the city’s student assignment and school boundary policies in 2013. Despite the potentially divisive nature of the issue, public deliberation went beyond re-drawing school boundaries to address a broad range of educational equity issues in the city. Based on extensive qualitative data interpreted through a policy knowledge framework (Dumas and Anderson in Educ Policy Anal Arch, 2014, https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n11.2014 ), I present D.C.'s community engagement process as a case that represents alternative possibilities for educational change in global contexts when policy is derived through a deliberative process that embraces the complexity of schooling contexts, utilizes qualitative methods, and addresses inequality. Limitations of the process are also discussed.