Clean Up This Mess!

In 1950, the District had a higher percentage of residents with high school diplomas than any state in the union (now only 10 states have a lower percentage).

But events began to conspire against the city's kids as far back as the late 1960s, when the city erupted in race riots and the school board became the first home rule body. The riots and the advent of home rule caused many of the city's middle-class technocrats to flee the District and shifted the leadership of city institutions from public-service-minded citizens who sought to make city services work to political activists such as Marion Barry. Barry, who would become known for patronage and the decline of city services during his tenure as mayor from 1979 to 1991 and then again from 1995 to 1999, began his political career with his election to the District's school board in 1971.

What should have been a civil rights victory for District residents became an educational crisis for their children. As home rule was extended -- the city began electing a mayor and a City Council in 1974 -- the District's school system found itself at the mercy of a large and changing cast of political authorities. Today, the education chain of command runs through the superintendent of schools, the school board, an independent city finance director, the mayor, the City Council and Congress (which holds the city's purse strings, but where the House and Senate often disagree). Sometimes, the Education Department gets into the act, too.

It's a recipe for mismanagement, as the nonprofit Council of the Great City Schools confirmed in 2004. "The large number of political stakeholders in the District's schools," it reported in an audit conducted shortly before current School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey was hired, "makes it difficult to achieve a single vision for how low student performance should be improved."

The system's bureaucracy is one of the biggest impediments to change. Patronage became a problem in the 1980s. "We used to joke that we could do organizational charts by family -- who was related to whom," said one longtime District teacher and administrator. Fiefdoms resulting from a proliferation of federally funded school projects, and an absence of accountability made worse by the rapid turnover of school superintendents, also contributed to the breakdown of the central administration.

Today, the school bureaucracy is a virtual 19th-century relic. District school officials still don't know how many students show up every day. Last year, the central office had to go through nearly 13,000 personnel records -- by hand -- to make more than 10,000 payments to teachers and other employees who were owed paychecks and reimbursements, because the archaic personnel and payroll systems produce so many errors.

Until a couple of years ago, officials combed through boxes of teacher applications by hand, which helps explain why for years the system didn't begin hiring new teachers until the third week of August, and often didn't finish the task until the school year was well underway And until recently, it took two to three months on average to get supplies to schools, and the city had no inventory of its books and other teaching materials -- so it didn't know from one school to the next what topics its instructors were teaching.

The most glaring example of the system's bureaucratic shortcomings is its special-education program. Last year, the system spent more than 25 percent of its budget on its roughly 10,200 students with disabilities. And it spent about $118 million, or 15 percent of the budget, on the roughly 2,400 District special-education students enrolled in private schools. That's because the District failed for decades to evaluate many students for disabilities in a timely manner or to create adequate programs for those who need help. As a result, it has found itself forced under federal law to pay for students with disabilities to attend private schools.

The cost is prohibitive for a school system that already has money problems. It's local lore -- and an oft-repeated talking point among Republicans in Congress -- that the District's schools are awash in cash that only needs to be put to better use. In fact, the city's congressionally approved $1.05 billion operating budget generates less funding per student ($12,612) than do Alexandria ($15,871) and Arlington ($16,464). And while Prince George's County ($9,638) and Fairfax County ($11,915) spend less than the District, Montgomery County spends nearly the same.

Meanwhile, the exodus of the black middle class to the suburbs over the past three decades has left District schools with a large population of students living in circumstances that are more expensive for schools to overcome. Sixty-four percent live in or near poverty. Sixty-eight percent live in single-parent homes, and 52 percent live in homes without a parent who works full time. Other area school systems don't have to confront the consequences of statistics as daunting as these.

District residents have been voting for decades with their feet -- either moving to the suburbs or placing their children in private schools. But more recently, even those of lesser means have opted out as a possible solution to the schools crisis seemed to shine on the horizon -- public charter schools.

Congress sanctioned the creation of the publicly funded but independently run schools in the District in the School Reform Act of 1995. The schools are able to hand-pick teachers and principals, spend their money the way they want, and decide what and how they are going to teach their students.