Save Our Schools DC

By Michael Casserly

The Washington Post
November 26, 2006

In the past two years, the D.C. school system and the city have taken substantial steps to improve student achievement, play a central role in the District's economic revitalization and increase the public's confidence in its schools.

The school district hired a well-regarded superintendent. It developed a new strategic plan. It adopted some of the nation's toughest academic standards and trained its teachers in their use. It upgraded its achievement testing system. It accelerated teacher and principal hiring. It overhauled its strategy for fixing buildings and approved considerable new funding to get the job done. It purchased new reading textbooks. It reassigned staff and recruited new talent. It renegotiated its collective bargaining agreement with teachers. And city leaders began working together in new ways to address chronic school problems.

The school district is expanding its preschool and kindergarten programs, bringing more special education programming in-house to reduce costs and improve services, and upgrading career and technical education. It is also moving to improve participation in Advanced Placement courses, developing a summer bridge program for incoming high school students and replacing many ineffective principals. None of these are small steps.

Still, in the wake of the recent elections, the city is poised to embark on yet another conversation about school governance. The truth is that no governance structure can, by itself, produce better schools. There are cities with conventional school structures -- elected board, traditional superintendent and independent taxing authority -- that are making significant progress in student achievement. There are also cities with the same structures that have seen no gains.

The New York City school district, among others, is being considered as a possible governance model for the District. Every indication suggests that the New York schools are doing better than they were before the mayor's intervention. But the steps taken in New York were designed to solve problems the District does not have -- or has in a different way. Adopting New York's governance model would solve the wrong problems, leave current problems unaddressed and create new ones.

The D.C. Public Schools do not have clearly definable regional offices with their own administrative bureaucracies and electted school boards, as New York City had. The District's elementary and high schools already operate under a centralized authority. And the D.C. school system has the ability to define its own programs and services in ways that the previous New York system did not have. The problems in the District are related more to overreaching and redundant decision-making authority above the school system and to weak capacity for solving the system's own problems. Having D.C. schools under the mayor's control would not solve this redundancy problem, and it would not address other challenges faced by the system. It might continue the debilitating turnover of school superintendents and add to the system's instability.

The biggest challenge to changing the school governance system in the District involves diluting the small semblance of voting rights that residents enjoy: being able to elect most of their school board members. Some cities -- such as Boston and Cleveland -- found after several years that their school systems were better under mayoral control and voted to retain their appointed boards. But other cities -- such as Detroit -- went in the opposite direction. Detroit returned to an elected board after five years with an appointed one, amid considerable community outrage at having its voting rights abolished. In a city such as Washington, where voting rights are such a hot-button issue, city leaders might find a community response more like Detroit's than Boston's.

The city could, however, give the mayor a stronger hand and clarify reporting lines at the same time by moving some of the school system's current responsibilities to a beefed-up State Education Office reporting to the mayor. These responsibilities could include authority over the state portion of federal grants and administration of speci! al education programs, test scoring, charter oversight, No Child Left Behind accountability, technical assistance and program improvement, program evaluation, teacher certification and licensing, graduation requirements, accreditation, student tracking, and attendance requirements. This arrangement would give the mayor more direct authority over the school system than most other mayors in the country have, including those who appoint all the members of their school boards.

Washington needs to avoid a debilitating political donnybrook over who gets to control the schools. Every time this happens in the District, progress in the school system stops while adults have a debate about each other, not about how to improve instruction and services for children. A school system with achievement as low as the District's simply cannot let this happen. It cannot afford to replace school leaders and start a new set of reforms.

The D.C. Public Schools are pursuing the right improvement strategies. They need stability and focus rather than more churning and upheaval.

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