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

Flashback to 1996: School board president Jay Silberman pushes a "comprehensive plan" focused on boosting accountability, resources, training and standards.

A year and change later, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman announces that budget problems mean "we'll have to cut back on reform initiatives." One of her aides asks, "Do you get the sense that the reform effort is dying?"

Janey's plan tries to have it all ways. He stresses basics, yet tries to compete with charter schools by turning high schools into specialized boutiques emphasizing fields such as hospitality, entrepreneurship and health services.

He wants schools to be more autonomous, yet he devotes energy and resources to restructuring the city's middle and junior high schools so they all begin and end at the same grade levels. Much of the plan deals with issues far removed from teachers who demand little of their students, or students who lack basic skills, or parents who threaten and abuse teachers, or administrators who care more about clean and silent hallways than about rigorous academics, or principals facing disruptive midyear budget cuts.

Flashback to 2003: Superintendent Paul Vance announces an ambitious plan to dismantle and rebuild the city's worst-performing schools, calling them Transformation Schools. Two months later, Vance quits, saying, "To be very candid with you, I just don't want to be bothered with it."

You could heat your house for an entire winter using as fuel the massive D.C. school reform plans churned out every few years. When a lesson repeatedly fails to click, good teachers don't hammer children with the same plan; they try another approach.

Elements of Janey's plan are worthy, even exciting. He seems serious about addressing the system's embarrassing roster of empty or nearly empty buildings, a resource that could be used to create state-of-the-art facilities at relatively little cost.

But he has fallen victim to a disease that has consumed too many of his predecessors -- the master plan syndrome. Superintendents rarely stick around for more than three or four years, not remotely enough time to implement grand plans.

The D.C. schools will get better one classroom and one school at a time, and the people who will make them better are talented principals with the authority to hire passionate teachers and motivate children, parents and neighborhoods. Superintendents who spend their time with fancy consultants churning out thick reports succeed only in burnishing their résumés and deepening the city's reservoir of cynicism.

Today on the blog: Raw Fisher (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher) reports the sad end of a Washington tradition, the Olde Heurich brewery.

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