D.C.'s former state superintendent is going back to school at KIPP DC

Why this hire lands differently right now

Washington has a new mayor coming in January and a charter sector that educates roughly one in two D.C. public school students. The person tapped to run academics at the city's largest charter network just happens to be someone who once oversaw every public school in the District, charter and traditional alike. That is not a coincidence, and parents, principals, and policy watchers inside the Wilson Building will all be paying attention.

D.C.'s former state superintendent is returning to Washington to oversee academics at the city's largest charter school network. KIPP DC Public Schools announced that Hanseul Kang will become its newest superintendent, overseeing the network's 22 schools, whose charters serve nearly 7,500 students.

Kang will be responsible for overseeing academic strategy and school leader development at KIPP DC, with a start date of December 7.

December 7 is significant timing. Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George takes office in January, and her transition team has flagged education as a first-term priority. Kang will have been on the job for weeks before Lewis George's education deputies are even named. The relationship between a new mayor's Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education and the charter sector's dominant network gets set in those early months. Kang walking through KIPP DC's door first puts her in a position to shape that relationship from day one.

Who Kang is and what she did before

Kang brings over two decades of education and systems leadership, including her former role as D.C. State Superintendent of Education and as inaugural Executive Director of The Broad Center at Yale School of Management.

As state superintendent, Kang was tasked with improving the quality of education in the D.C. school system, a job she held for five and a half years. That means she ran the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), which oversees both DCPS and the city's charter sector, sets graduation requirements, administers federal education dollars, and runs the city's early childhood programs. She knew KIPP DC well before she ever took this job.

Before coming to D.C., Kang served as chief of staff for the Tennessee commissioner of education and as a managing director for the Teach for America office in D.C. A native of Albany, New York, she has a law degree from Harvard Law School and taught public school in New Mexico.

During her tenure as superintendent, D.C. public school students made nationally recognized strides with higher test scores on the SAT and on district-wide assessments. The National Assessment of Educational Progress identified D.C. as having the 'most growth' per its metrics in the past 10 years. Those gains covered both DCPS schools and charter schools. KIPP DC was part of that story.

Kang is the District of Columbia's longest-serving education appointee in the period those records cover. She left OSSE in 2020 to lead The Broad Center, a leadership development organization that trains education executives nationally.

What she will actually do at KIPP DC

The superintendent role at KIPP DC is not a figurehead position. In her new role, Kang will work alongside CEO Shannon Hodge to strengthen classroom instruction, support school leaders, and ensure educators across 22 schools have what they need to help the network's 7,500 students thrive.

The Chief Academic Officer and the Chief of Schools both report to the Superintendent, putting all instructional strategy and school leadership work under Kang's oversight.

The salary range posted for the role was $244,025 to $269,712, a full-time, fully in-person position based at KIPP DC's headquarters office.

Twenty-five years ago, KIPP DC founder Susan Schaeffler and a team of educators founded the network's first school, KEY Academy, in a church basement in Southeast D.C. Since then, KIPP DC has grown from 80 students in one middle school to nearly 7,500 students in preschool through 12th grade across 22 schools.

The network's job posting described the superintendent's task as guiding "a school system with 25 years of legacy and impact through a consequential academic transformation," with a focus on preparing all students to pursue the paths they choose in college, career, and beyond. The word "transformation" in a job posting usually means something specific: the board sees results that need improving, not just maintaining. KIPP DC has strong brand recognition in D.C., but like every network post-pandemic, it has been managing chronic absenteeism, teacher retention pressure, and test score recovery. Kang comes in with the state-level playbook on all three.

The charter-versus-DCPS question

D.C. is unusual nationally: about 48 percent of public school students attend charter schools, the highest proportion of any U.S. city. KIPP DC alone accounts for a significant slice of that. The relationship between the city government and the charter sector has never been simple. During Kang's time at OSSE, she was nominally the regulator of the charter schools she now joins. That overlap matters for anyone watching conflicts of interest.

Analysis: Kang spent her OSSE years arguing that DCPS and charter schools should be measured by common standards and should cooperate rather than compete for students. Coming inside the largest charter network is a bet that she can apply that philosophy from the other side of the table. Whether the incoming Lewis George administration sees her as a partner or a complication depends entirely on how the new mayor's education team handles charter school policy in its first year.

The D.C. Public Charter School Board, which authorizes and renews KIPP DC's charters, operates independently of the mayor's office. Overseeing the school system's progress toward the academic and school-level standards required for charter renewal and regulatory compliance is explicitly listed as one of the superintendent's responsibilities. Kang will now be on the renewal applicant side of a process she once helped design.

Reaction and what comes next

Kang said she 'can't wait to get to work with all of the fantastic students, families, educators, and school leaders of KIPP DC.'

KIPP DC's CEO Shannon Hodge and board member Saumil Shah are listed in the network's announcement as the leadership team welcoming Kang. The network's current strategic plan, called Ascend 2030: Rising Together, commits to academic excellence across KIPP DC's schools. Kang's hire is the most senior personnel move the network has made in pursuit of that plan.

She takes her seat December 7. The Lewis George transition team reports for work in January. Whoever the new mayor picks as Deputy Mayor for Education will walk into an education landscape where the city's largest charter network just hired someone who knows every lever inside the D.C. education bureaucracy better than almost anyone alive.

KIPP DC's headquarters sits at 2600 Virginia Avenue NW. The building is about two miles from the Wilson Building. Those two miles carry a lot of history in D.C. education politics, and starting December 7, they get a little more complicated.

What D.C. Residents Should Watch

• Lewis George's Deputy Mayor for Education pick. Whoever fills that role will set the tone for how City Hall and KIPP DC interact for the next four years. Watch for that announcement in December or early January.
• KIPP DC's charter renewals. The D.C. Public Charter School Board reviews school performance on a rolling basis. With Kang now responsible for renewal compliance at 22 campuses, any PCSB audit or renewal decision involving KIPP DC schools takes on added significance.
• OSSE leadership under Lewis George. The incoming mayor will appoint a new state superintendent. That person will, in effect, be Kang's regulatory counterpart. Who gets that job shapes the entire DCPS-charter relationship for years.
• Student outcome data, spring 2027. KIPP DC's next round of PARCC/state assessment results will be the first real test of whether Kang's hire translates to classroom gains. The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent releases school-level data each spring.

Sources: Washington Post, Nov. 9, 2026 | KIPP DC Public Schools | D.C. Council, Nov. 10 legislative agenda | OSSE, Bowser announcement of Kang as state superintendent | WTOP, Sept. 2020