Clean Up This Mess!

In the past decade, while the city stood by and did nothing, 17,800 of its students -- about 25 percent -- fled to these schools. That cost the system about $140 million in lost revenue last year, and much more if you count the millions wasted on maintaining vacant or underused school buildings.

And yet charters haven't proved to be a magic elixir. Their mixed performance points out just how tough it is to educate disadvantaged urban students.

Some of the new schools, such as the D.C. Preparatory Academy, the Knowledge Empowers You (KEY) Academy and the School for Educational Evolution and Development (SEED) and Howard Road Academy, are outstanding. But others have struggled; only five of 40 eligible charters met No Child Left Behind standards last year. And 12 have been closed because of financial problems and poor performance.

In addition to charters, a fledgling voucher program also draws students from the public schools. The two-year-old program, courtesy of outgoing Mayor Anthony A. Williams, the Bush administration and Congress, gives about 1,700 students as much as $7,500 for private school tuition. To dampen opposition, Williams reimburses the school system for the lost revenue.

Recently, however, Janey has begun defending his turf against charters and vouchers. He has called for a moratorium on charter schools and is talking about creating public schools that mimic charter features.

Whether he's successful in fighting the tide of school choice or not, the expansion of charter schools isn't likely to be unlimited, because of a dearth of the education entrepreneurs needed to start them and the talented teachers and principals needed to run them.

The need to fix the D.C. public schools isn't going to go away. And Janey, who ran the schools in Rochester, N.Y., for seven years before coming to the District, is trying to do something about it. He's moving on several fronts, urging broad changes that include:

· Introducing an ambitious 100-page master education plan that tackles many of the District's toughest school problems. · Importing tough new standards and tests from Massachusetts -- a courageous move, as the tests resulted in lower scores last spring. · Buying new textbooks and trying to reduce the time it takes to get supplies into schools. · Partnering with the New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit, on teacher hiring, a move that increased applications by 160 percent over two years. · Announcing a 15-year $2.3 billion plan to build 23 schools, renovate 101 and close 19 by 2021.

Janey hopes the last effort will help address his special-education problem by creating state-of-the-art facilities that will discourage parents from seeking budget-busting private placements. Tied into the plan is a proposal to transform the city's struggling high schools into theme academies -- some academic, others vocational. Janey also wants to expand preschool programs, increase the length of the school year and increase after-school and summer-school programs.

That's an impressive roster of changes with the potential to make a difference. But the question is whether the superintendent -- and probable mayor-to-be Fenty -- can navigate these and other reforms through the treacherous bureaucratic and political landscapes that have made ours one of the nation's worst school systems. Other urban school systems are beginning to ratchet up student achievement using reform blueprints similar to Janey's. But the difference is, they're not Washington.

ttoch@educationsector.org

smead@educationsector.org

Thomas Toch and Sara Mead are co-director and senior policy analyst of Education Sector,

an education-policy think tank in the District.