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Who's not on first?

By Deborah Simmons
June 8, 2007

Public schools in the nation's capital, even the racially segregated black schools, used to be top drawer, as the city's lone congressional ranger, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a member of the last segregated graduating class of Dunbar High School, is fond of pointing out. Today, however, traditional D.C. schools occupy, and have for two decades, the bottom rung of the nation's academic ladder. Whether children finally will be given the opportunity for a brighter future now rests in the hands of City Hall.
    That's because President Bush this week signed historic legislation. The D.C. education-reform bill, which drew much rancor for several months, will become law next week. It gives for the first time since another Republican president, Richard Nixon, handed the city home rule and unprecedented control of public schooling to the mayor and the D.C. Council. It does this by stripping the oldest elected body in the city, the D.C. Board of Education, of its heretofore near-absolute authority over policy and budgets for D.C. Public Schools.
    A key lesson as the reform begins is a simple one: First, do no harm to charter schools. For thousands of students stuck in underperforming and violent traditional schools, charter schools came to the rescue. Indeed, children in charters, which are publicly funded just like regular schools, were instrumental in exposing two of the longstanding flaws in the D.C. system. The first is that one-size-fits-all academic programs do not work. The other is that classrooms shouldn't be tethered to a central bureaucracy.
    The D.C. reform legislation drew fire before and after the council approved it. Opponents essentially wanted the status quo with the school board and superintendent maintaining all controls, and unions holding sway over policy to stay in place. After reaching Congress, three Senate Democrats held up the legislation on three separate occasions. And the possibility of a summertime voter referendum that threatened implementation of the law was just settled this week, when the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics ruled the referendum null and void, since voters cannot overturn federal law.
    With those obstacles out of the way, proponents of school reform are urging City Hall to move forward with all deliberate speed. To their credit, Mayor Adrian Fenty and School Board President Robert Bobb announced this week that two respected firms, McKinsey & Co. and Alvarez & Marsal, will be conducting a comprehensive, $3.3 million audit of the school system. The results will be used to restructure the system.
    There is one critical significant difference, though, between the numerous audits and studies that have been conducted within the past 20 years and the ones currently underway: The new school "system" as defined by the new law includes charter schools.
    As the proliferation and academic performance of charter schools have shown, City Hall must think outside the box in order to truly reform the system. As Mr. Bobb said the other day, "At the end of the day, we must have the intestinal fortitude to implement things that have come out of this report." For sure, if the occupants of City Hall want to prepare students for work, college or the military, they can't make that happen by divining policy from their downtown offices. They have to engage the business community and parents, and holding the occasional town hall meetings simply won't cut it.
    Ask the parents and students at one of the city's most successful charter systems, Friendship Edison, whose campuses have been visited by President Bush and first lady Laura Bush and which has five campuses. Some overachieving students were recently heralded at a special luncheon. Better than 95 percent of graduates at Friendship Edison's Collegiate Academy are going to college, and scores of them will be studying overseas this summer. They are learning in a school house (the old Woodson Junior High) that D.C. school officials turned over to derelicts. The school now rivals any public high school in the city. The little ones on the Blow-Pierce campus are more articulate than many D.C. teachers, and the adolescents and teens on its other campuses (Woodridge, Southeast and Chamberlain) have a hunger for knowledge that is fed daily by their classroom teachers.
    Friendship-Edison doesn't treat its students as throwaways. In fact, some parents, like Rose Gregory, turn to Friendship-Edison because D.C. school authorities mislabeled their children as "special education" or because their children simply weren't being taught to learn. Today, Ms. Gregory's oldest daughter attends South Carolina State University and her youngest girl is looking forward to college. If this proud mother had not had the choice, who knows where her girls would be.
    Auditors will assuredly pour over the records of Friendship-Edison and other charter schools. But computerized documents and paper documents can't begin to tell the whole story. To get the real story, the occupants of both City Hall and school-system headquarters will need to engage parents and other stakeholders, and look inside charter schools and other schools that work.
    What stands before the reformers is daunting. The school system has been failing families for a long time. So, all during the initial reform efforts they must remember this: If it ain't broke, and most charter schools aren't, don't try to fix it.
    

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