By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 9, 2006

From Jan. 2, 1999 -- the date Mayor Anthony Williams was sworn in to office -- to yesterday, more than 1,700 people, mostly young black men, have been murdered in the nation's capital. That horrible statistic has an impact far beyond the grave.

Living within the city's borders is an army of survivors: broken-hearted parents and grandparents; traumatized single women facing an uncertain future with fatherless children; bitter young men, undereducated and unskilled, scarred by violence themselves and roving the streets with hair-trigger anger. They are a part of the city that Adrian Fenty will inherit when he is sworn in as the District of Columbia's fifth elected mayor in January.

It's not all bleak. Fenty also gets to preside over a D.C. treasury flush with cash and a downtown featuring new department stores, multiplex movie theaters and condos. Once inaugurated, Fenty can travel to the top floor of the John A. Wilson Building, gaze out the window and marvel at the visible signs of prosperity across the horizon.

But Mayor Williams is bequeathing more than a city on the economic rebound.

Fenty will also become chief executive of a city in which only 22 percent of households consist of families headed by married couples -- lowest in the nation. He will become mayor of a city with an HIV death rate 10 times the national average and a school system in which 62 percent of the children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Youth problems? During the Williams mayoralty, the city has referred more than 15,000 juvenile cases to D.C. Superior Court.

On the face of it, those statistics may seem to have no connection to one another. Taken together, they tell a story.

Many of those young black murder victims were enrolled at some point in the D.C. public schools. Quite probably they were eligible for free lunches and lived in single-parent homes. They were among the juveniles turning up in court. Some were fathers who never married their children's mothers.

Tragically, their stories don't end with their deaths. Hundreds of other D.C. youths are growing up in similar circumstances. Besides their socioeconomic link, the deceased and the living have something else in common: their source of public education.

I also am a product of the D.C. public schools, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The schools were legally segregated until I reached 10th grade. Desegregation made little difference. The 11th and 12th grades at my high school, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, were as racially exclusive as my kindergarten class.

But Dunbar students never considered themselves inferior to anybody. During Jim Crow, Dunbar produced generations of high-achieving students who held their own anywhere they went. Why? Because our parents and teachers had high expectations. Poor outcomes were unacceptable, period. That is not the prevailing attitude in today's D.C. public school system, as shelves of studies attest.

Which gets us back to Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty.

High on his to-do list are the public schools. Fenty's plan for improving the lives of our city's youth, especially those at risk, is to improve the delivery of social services and to "fix the schools," as he puts it. How, he hasn't exactly said. But he seems fascinated with the New York City school-governance model, in which the mayor runs the schools.

Since Fenty adamantly opposed that idea when Mayor Williams proposed it a few years ago, it would be nice to know what caused his about-face. But frankly, that isn't of burning interest to me today. The school-governance issue is a distraction from what ails us. Besides, as Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, put it: "The organizational boxes do not mean as much to the improvement of achievement as what the people in the boxes do."

Yes, schools are a problem. But they aren't the problem, as anyone who has honestly looked at the city knows.

Can the system use more talented teachers and principals with high expectations? Yes. Better textbooks, classroom resources, clean bathrooms, new buildings? Yes. Well-run schools with motivated teachers can help raise achievement. And most District students are eager to learn.

But teachers and kids can go only so far without help from the home. And that is where the breakdown has occurred.

No, racism does not get a pass. It can break the spirit, deplete hope, crush expectations. It has had a debilitating impact on black family life. As a lifelong Washingtonian, I know its virulence all too well.

But family breakdown is the reason funeral homes and jails are doing great business in the District. It explains the presence of neglected and abused children in our foster care system. It also has a strong bearing on student performance.

Fix the schools? Here's a greater but unavoidable challenge if we are to become a whole city: Fix the family. Anything less, political rhetoric notwithstanding, and we'll just keep fussing about the schools, inventing new Band-Aid programs and digging those burial plots.

kingc@washpost.com