D.C. School Takeover Gaining Support

If Fenty's proposal were to receive the necessary approvals, he would have unprecedented power as the city's chief executive to bring long-awaited improvements to an unwieldy school bureaucracy that has befuddled numerous superintendents, school board members and mayors. He would have vast authority to reshape such things as the governance structure and whether principals would be given power to hire and fire teachers.

"We need to change the [school governance] structure because the current structure does not work, has never worked and will never work," Evans said. "Everyone's in charge, and no one is in charge."

Fenty's bill will need approval from the D.C. Council and Congress. The 13-member council has two empty seats, in wards 4 and 7, which were held by Fenty and Gray and will be filled through a special election this spring. Until then, legislation needs just six votes for approval.

Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) and Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) said they do not support a mayoral takeover. Kwame R. Brown (D-At Large) said he is uncertain because he does not know enough about Fenty's plan.

"I can't vocalize support on something I haven't seen," Brown said yesterday.

Aides said Fenty has briefed several key members of Congress who have responded positively, including Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), head of the House Government Reform Committee, which oversees D.C. affairs.

Robert C. Bobb, the former city administrator who was elected president of the school board in November, said this morning that he could not comment substantively on Fenty's proposal because he had not yet seen it. But when told that Fenty would ask to shift control of the school system budget to the council, and day-today control of the schools to the executive branch, Bobb said: "I don't agree with any of that."

Fenty's legislation is based largely on a report he commissioned from the Parthenon Group, a management consulting firm that spent the past two months interviewing 60 stakeholders in D.C. public schools, including educators and parents. The firm also studied other cities where mayors have taken control of schools and those that have retained traditional school boards.

It concluded that the school system is in a "state of emergency," asserting that a mayoral takeover is the catalyst needed to turn it around. Although many reform plans have been introduced since 1989, few improvements have taken hold because of the system's convoluted governance structure, the report said.

In the District, the superintendent reports to the school board, mayor, council and Congress, a factor in the system's high turnover in school chiefs. D.C. superintendents, on average, serve half as long as their counterparts in the 50 largest U.S. cities, according to the study.

But the report said steady progress has been made in several big cities where mayors have taken over. In Boston, for instance, the average tenure of the superintendent increased from 3.3 to 10.8 years. In Chicago, the number of elementary students passing a state reading test rose by 6 percentage points from 1998 to 2002.

Staff writers V. Dion Haynes, Elissa Silverman and Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.