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

By Marc Fisher
Thursday, March 2, 2006

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."

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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