Fenty Needs Magical Powers To Conjure Up Success

Fenty pledges to reform public schools by taking "drastic action" and "doing things completely different." (By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post)

At 35, Adrian Fenty sports a bald head that makes him appear at once youthfully athletic and prematurely wise. He describes his dome as "aerodynamic," a concept that complements his vision of a District that soars to new heights now that he has been elected mayor.

It's a magical persona, emanating almost exclusively from the look of the politician's head, and each of the District's previous mayors had it in one way or another. One look at Walter Washington, the city's first elected mayor in modern times, and you could believe he would not rock the boat: In his 1950s-style stocking-cap waves, you could almost see smooth sailing ahead.

Marion Barry's 1960s-Afro crown made him appear as a mayoral mystic with the magic to bridge the city's disparate black and white worlds.

Sharon Pratt's perfect coif looked the part of a headmistress, which made her pledge to "clean house" and teach city employees how to answer telephones properly all the more believable.

And then came Anthony Williams, whose male-pattern baldness made him the perfect nerd for a city in need of a leader who could count.

In each case, the reality of the job put an end to any notion that the incumbent possessed special powers to turn the city around. After all of these years, the fundamentals of good government are nowhere to be found. The schools today are in worse shape than they were during the Washington years -- despite pledges by every mayor since to improve them. Crime continues to rise and fall, seemingly unaffected by all manner of law enforcement strategies employed by the city's elected officials to control it during the past 30 years.

Despite new housing and commercial construction that have changed the face of the city -- giving it the veneer of prosperity -- pockets of poverty have only deepened, and the gap between rich and poor has never been wider.

Now Fenty appears, a genie of a mayor, a political "Mr. Clean" who promises to get into those gummy crevices that muck up the government bureaucracy and to remove the urban stains that were too tough for other brand-name politicians to handle.

He, too, may be in for a rude awakening.

"When we were campaigning in Greenleaf [a city-owned public housing complex in Southeast], two, three times in a row residents would pull me into their homes to look at ceilings falling down, ceilings leaking," Fenty told me recently. "They were not getting any response from the city, so I got on the phone to the city right then. It was a weekend, but I stayed on the phone until I got someone from maintenance to come out and fix this stuff."

No doubt the affected residents were appreciative; it probably looked like magic to them. Fenty pays an incredible amount of attention to such details, and that's part of the reason he was such a fine D.C. Council member.

But the problems of poverty can't be fixed by summoning maintenance workers. Truth be told, those roofs have probably been fixed before; the broken windows replaced; the abandoned cars towed; the playground refurbished. Just as a politician's presence at the funeral of a shooting victim does not stop the killings, neither do building renovations and repairs get at the heart of the problem: society's structural defects that let poor people fall through the cracks and leave them to languish in hopelessness and despair.

Fenty has pledged to reform public schools by taking "drastic action," as he put it, and "doing things completely different." In my heart, I hope he succeeds. But I have heard this before. Mayor Williams repeatedly vowed to "blow up" the D.C. public schools central administration and rebuild the school system from scratch. But even with the backing of Congress, which was instrumental in getting him elected mayor, Williams succeeded only in shooting himself in the foot. He talked the talk but could not walk the walk.

Fenty would do well to dust off some of those special reports on school reform that have been produced through the years, if only to check out the names of the many authors -- the nationally renowned educators, university presidents, senators and CEOs. They all called for drastic action; they just didn't know how to take it.

Of course, Fenty can still go down in history as one of the city's most successful mayors. If all he does are the little things -- returning telephone calls, filling potholes, picking up trash -- voters will be content enough to keep him in office for two more terms.

But if he wants to be a great mayor -- to really get at the root of poverty and racism that really ails this city -- he'll most certainly need the powers of a genie. That is my wish. May it be his command.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com