Cropp Shifts On Control Of Schools
Candidate Seeks Takeover If Standards Aren't Met

By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 18, 2006

D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp said that if elected mayor, she would seek to take control of the city's failing public schools on a case-by-case basis, a shift from her position on the council, where she sought to maintain the school system's autonomy.

In a policy paper released by her campaign last week, Cropp (D) laid out a plan to ask the council and Congress for authority to allow the executive branch to take over public schools whose test scores are below federal standards five years in a row.

Cropp's plan did not include specifics about how the schools would be managed once her administration took them over or how many schools would be targeted. Eighty of the city's 147 schools have made no progress on the federal No Child Left Behind Act standards.

In an interview yesterday, Cropp said she has not talked to School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey about her proposal. But she remains supportive of his leadership.

"We've got to give him a chance to deal with [the schools] first," Cropp said. "But if, in fact, after everything he puts into it, we still have some schools broken, we've got to do something different."

Cropp, one of five major candidates running for the Democratic nomination to succeed Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), is a former D.C. schoolteacher, guidance counselor and school board president. She has campaigned on her experience but has drawn criticism from competitors who point out that the schools have deteriorated during her 26 years in elected office.

Cropp voted against Williams's bid to seize control of the entire school system in 2004 and blocked his effort to appoint all members of the school board in 2001. She voted in favor of a compromise board, with five elected and four appointed members.

Lobbyist Michael A. Brown, one of Cropp's rivals for the mayor's office, said that he would not seek to take over the schools and charged that Cropp was being "inconsistent" on the issue. Another challenger, council member Vincent B. Orange Sr. (D-Ward 5), who has said he would seek a full takeover of the schools, said Cropp's plan is "naive" because it is perhaps more complicated to take over some of the schools than all of them.

"She has never had an educational agenda until now, because she's running for mayor," Orange said.

Some school system leaders and activists expressed caution about Cropp's proposal.

"She has been a friend of the schools and the independent authority schools exercise," said school board Vice President Carolyn N. Graham, an appointed school board member and former Williams administration Cabinet member who is running for board president. "And I'm certain that it would be a conversation we would have to have with her before any final decision is made about such a strategy."

Although she focused primarily on education, Cropp's position paper also touched more briefly on affordable housing, public safety, employment, health and family issues.

Cropp said she would demand that developers replace affordable housing units destroyed by development; redistribute some of the police force among neighborhoods; and support new hospital facilities -- especially focused on trauma and emergency medicine -- in Southeast and far Northeast. Cropp's campaign said she would be releasing more details on those issues and others in the next few weeks.

In her education platform, Cropp also said she would seek to provide pre-kindergarten education to all 3- and 4-year-olds, expand vocational education, create a principals training academy that would provide internships with business executives and courses at area universities, and help school system employees buy houses with government credit and mortgage assistance. Expanded pre-kindergarten education and vocational programs also have been championed by other mayoral candidates.

One of them, Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), has proposed appointing a deputy mayor for education and said he would consider pushing to take over the full school system if schools continued to underperform, but he would not do it piecemeal.

"If you do it, you do it the Bloomberg model," Fenty said, referring to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R), "where you establish the department of education and run the system."

Former Verizon executive and mayoral candidate Marie Johns has said that as mayor, she would seek to assume the day-to-day management functions of the school system related to ordering supplies and fixing buildings, but she would leave the role of education to the superintendent and school board.

Johns said Cropp's potential takeover of schools does not make sense because it is not clear what would happen to the schools once they were under the control of the administration.

"That may sound intriguing and have a nice ring to it," Johns said, "but I do not know what the heck it means."

Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who chairs the council's education committee, said she is not in favor of an administration takeover. She said, however, that she is open to the idea of giving more responsibilities to the city's State Education Office, which was created four years ago to handle education functions usually associated with state governments. The Williams administration oversees that office.

Darlene Allen, president of the D.C. PTA, said that her organization does not generally support a mayoral takeover of schools but that it would be open to listening to a more detailed proposal from Cropp or any other candidate.