Big Plans Haven't Produced D.C. School Reform

Kids couldn't read, schools were scary places and the bureaucracy was a byzantine mess. But the superintendent of the D.C. schools had a bold plan for sweeping reform:

Lengthen the school day, extend the school year, create classes for 3-year-olds, close or merge at least 10 schools, cut hundreds of administrative jobs and toughen graduation requirements.

The year was 1989, and the school board president, Linda Cropp, said this was the plan that would finally right the listing ship. "The school system is going to be on the cutting edge," she said, "making dramatic changes that will rock education in our city. The feeling now is, 'We can be pioneers.' " (This is the same Cropp who now proposes to be -- get this -- mayor .)

Seventeen years later, it's sweeping reform time once again in the D.C. schools. The number of students dives every year; test scores are abominable; the expectations students face in many classrooms are laughable; and parent involvement is maddeningly slight. So, of course, the chronically underperforming public schools, forever blamed for many of the city's ills, are gearing up again for total change.

This week, Superintendent Clifford Janey offered his version of the fix.

Flashback to 1993: Superintendent Franklin Smith proposes a "radical" reform plan to put 10 to 15 schools under private management, decentralize power and decrease central office staff, hire a private company to instruct low-achieving 11th- and 12th-graders and let a Fortune 500 company manage a high school.

Within months, the plan is dead.

Janey says it's time to extend the school year, create more preschool classes, raise expectations, add rigorous classes and give good schools more autonomy. Sound familiar?

For the first time since 1997, when charter schools started luring away thousands of families, the D.C. school system seeks to win back some of those students. Janey wants to "re-brand" some high schools. As if they were cereal. Eastern High School, once one of the District's proudest institutions, would become D.C. Latin, modeled on Boston Latin, Janey's alma mater and one of the nation's most successful and rigorous public high schools.

The new Eastern would focus on foreign languages and the humanities. Spingarn High would be recast to focus on the construction trades and Cardozo High on transportation. "High school should be the crowning experience for young people," Janey told The Washington Post's Dion Haynes. "We want to identify high schools with particular brands."