Education Becoming Top Issue For D.C.
Economic Revival Fuels Attention

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Homeowners, business leaders and newcomers with a financial stake in the District's economic revival are pushing the troubled D.C. school system to the top of the city's political agenda in a landmark election year when voters will choose a mayor and council chairman.

Polls show education surpassing taxes, crime and affordable housing as the top concern among voters across the city. In a survey late last year for mayoral candidate and D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), almost 60 percent of those polled said education is the city's biggest problem, followed by housing at a distant second.

Mayoral contenders are hearing the same message on the campaign trail from childless couples worried about property values, business executives struggling to find qualified workers, and parents frustrated by the poor condition and academic performance of public schools.

Knocking on doors one afternoon in Capitol View, east of the Anacostia River, Fenty met Michael Shaw, who said he is unemployed. But Shaw isn't looking for the next mayor to find him a job. "I'm interested in whoever will build our school system back up so kids at least want to go to school," he said.

On the other side of town, Louise Brodnitz, an urban planner from Georgetown with two children in private school, attended a hearing last month to protest the potential closure of Hyde Elementary, the remaining public school in a neighborhood of wealthy, private-school families. Brodnitz said losing Hyde would deter home buyers with children and erode property values in one of the city's most affluent communities.

"This is not an issue for people with kids in public schools only," she said. "Everyone should be interested in this. Anyone who cares about the vibrancy of the city."

Pollsters say long-standing concern about schools has gained fresh urgency because of the contrast with other aspects of city life. Crime is down, municipal services are better, the once-destitute government is flush with cash and the median home price tops $400,000. But the D.C. school system still ranks among the worst in the nation.

Average test scores are lower than in every other district participating in a federal assessment of urban schools. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education labeled the D.C. system a "high risk" recipient of federal grants, calling its fiscal management, in effect, the worst in the country. With enrollment dropping, officials last week announced plans to close six underused schools. Program cuts mean art, music and Spanish are unavailable in some schools. At others, parent groups pay for libraries, nurses and teachers' aides.

There are bright spots. Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Tenleytown and Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Columbia Heights consistently rank in the top 1 percent of public high schools in the country and among the top 30 schools in the Washington region. But the overall picture is grim: Nearly half -- 44 percent -- of District residents don't have a high school diploma.

To a growing number of voters, the schools represent an abdication of responsibility to nearly 60,000 students, the majority of them black and poor.

"All of a sudden, that matters way more than we thought it would," said Erica Swanson, a civil-rights worker who bought a house with her boyfriend last year off H Street NE. While she worries about her neighbors' children, Swanson also wonders what she will do when she starts a family. The school system "is really the big question mark about whether I want to stay in D.C.," she said.

This spring, parents and education activists rebelled against an outlay of more than $600 million for a new baseball stadium and persuaded the D.C. Council to spend an extra $1 billion over 10 years to repair dilapidated schools, the largest funding increase in city history.

But repairing schoolhouses doesn't guarantee improvement in the classroom. Cherita Whiting, PTA president at the newly renovated McKinley Technology High School in Eckington, off New York Avenue NE, complains that some teachers don't enlist families to help their children excel.

"There are kids in McKinley with five F's on their report cards," Whiting said. "These kids want to do good. The problem is some teachers do not communicate with the parents."

This spring, Deanwood community activist John Frye pulled his 12-year-old stepdaughter out of Kelly Miller Middle School, which opened in 2004 in Northeast Washington. Frye noticed that the seventh-grader wasn't doing homework. She said her class didn't have books.

Frye complained to Principal Robert W. Gill Sr., then went to Kelly Miller to check things out. What he saw appalled him, he said. The teachers were at a training session, leaving children to run wild in the halls.

"It brought tears to my eyes," Frye said, "to see a whole generation of young black people out of control like that. No supervision. I said, 'What the hell is going on?' "

Gill called the incident unfortunate. "It's like when you invite somebody over to your house, and the lights go out," he said, adding that school system administrators quickly agreed to modify the teacher training schedule.

Still, Frye transferred the girl in February to one of the city's 52 charter schools, one of the nation's largest networks of alternative public education. Now, with a whip-smart 4-year-old just starting her formal schooling, Frye and his wife have decided to take no more chances. They bought a house in Upper Marlboro. Born and raised in the city, Frye is moving out.

"I kind of had faith in the public school system. But not anymore," he said. "We're moving on."

Parents such as Frye and Whiting are no longer alone in their desire for better schools. Pollsters say voters from all backgrounds are focused on the problem. And this year, after many employers complained of trouble finding workers, the city's most influential business groups declared public schools to be their top priority.

At an education summit convened in March by the D.C. Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Business Journal, Stephen S. Fuller, a public policy professor at George Mason University, reported that the District generated nearly 31,000 jobs from 2000 to 2005. But most of the jobs, which pay an average of $77,000 a year, require some college. Many D.C. residents couldn't compete. As businesses hired from the suburbs, the number of employed D.C. residents fell by 13,000 workers. The result: The D.C. government went without an estimated $107 million in taxes.

Barred by Congress from taxing commuters, the District must find jobs for more of its residents or lure more working people to maintain its economic momentum, Fuller said. In 2003, Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) set a goal of adding 100,000 residents by 2013. But the city lost about 21,000 people from 2000 to 2005 as singles moved in and families with children moved out, often because of frustration with the school system.

In many ways, "the District has done an amazing job," Fuller said. "It has more money in the bank than any city in the country. The housing market has turned around. The job base is strong. But they could lose it all if they don't get that one missing link: having middle- or upper-income families who want to live in the District."

If there is good news in the census numbers, it is a 13 percent increase in children 3 and younger, many born to couples who bought homes during the housing boom that followed Williams's 1998 election. The question is whether those families will leave for better schools in the suburbs.

That temptation hangs over Takoma, a liberal and racially diverse community of charming old houses on shady lots a few blocks from the Maryland border. New arrivals tend to be two-career families who believe strongly in public education. Over a recent neighborhood dinner of vegetarian burgers and butternut squash soup, a half-dozen parents described the agony of trying to find a place for their children in D.C. schools.

David Arthur, a lobbyist for a Detroit law firm, and consultant Denise Woods said they were only vaguely aware of the school situation when they bought a house as newlyweds in 2000. Then Maya was born, followed by Zoe. And thus began what Woods called "this nightmare process."

The couple quickly learned that their friends don't use the local school, the Takoma Education Center, dismissing it as hostile to parents. So they tried to enroll Maya, now 4, in the Spanish immersion program at Oyster Elementary in Woodley Park.

Oyster and other high-performing public schools have little room for out-of-boundary students. That left the expanding charter system. But sought-after charter schools conduct lotteries for admission, forcing parents to trust their child's education to a series of nerve-wracking games of chance.

At Woods's favorite, the Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School in North Michigan Park, Maya pulled No. 75 on a waiting list of 90 English-speaking students. She won a pre-kindergarten spot after proving to administrators that she was qualified to apply as a Spanish speaker.

Arthur and Woods are happy with the school, known as LAMB, and hope to send Zoe there, too. But LAMB goes only to the sixth grade. Arthur is worried about what happens after that. And he feels guilty as he watches other children walk to the neighborhood school his family has rejected.

"Sometimes it feels like we're abandoning the local public school instead of working to make it better," he said. "But at some point, you can't make your own child part of an experiment to save the world."

Staff writer Jay Mathews and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.