D.C. School Takeover Gaining Support
Council Majority Backs Premise of Fenty's Plan

By David Nakamura and Nikita Stewart
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 10:44 AM

A majority of D.C. Council members said yesterday that they support the general tenets of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's proposal to take direct control of the city's failing school system, although they are waiting to see full details of his plan.

Fenty (D) took office yesterday in a small ceremony and will hold his public inaugural today at the Washington Convention Center. But he is already moving to line up votes for his first major legislative initiative: restructuring the governance of the 58,000-student system so that the superintendent reports directly to the mayor, and the Board of Education's authority is reduced.

"We're not going to ever fulfill our potential if we don't fix our school system," Fenty said this morning in an interview on Washington Post Radio. "We owe it to the kids, we owe it to the families of the District of Columbia. Someone's got to fix the school system. It might as well be the highest elected official in the city."

Fenty declined to provide details of his plan, saying he will wait until a news conference scheduled for 10 a.m. tomorrow at the John A. Wilson Building. But sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not yet been made public said the elected school board would remain in control of such functions as standardized testing and teacher certification, but would have no say over management, budget or programmatic decisions.

The legislation that will be unveiled by the new mayor also would give the council line-item control of the school system's budget, the sources said.

Fenty said he has built support for the plan among council members by meeting with each of them individually, and by arranging a trip to New York so council members could examine the results of a mayoral school takeover in that city.

"It's kind of a joint effort," Fenty said. "It's the whole city government saying, 'Enough is enough. The residents are fed up. Let's fix the schools.' "

Yesterday, six council members -- David A. Catania (I-At Large), Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), Harry "Tommy" Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) -- said they support the general framework of Fenty's takeover plan, on which they have been briefed. They represent a majority of the 11 members currently sitting on the council and said they will appear with Fenty at tomorrow's news conference.

Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), a former school board member, said he also supports Fenty's concept, although he has not decided whether to attend the news conference. Vincent C. Gray (D), who was sworn in yesterday as council chairman, said he will appear at the event but will seek public input before taking a position on the takeover proposal.

The early support is encouraging for Fenty, but it does not guarantee legislative success in his restructuring effort. Gray said he will hold several public hearings before scheduling a vote. Several members said that although they support a takeover in theory, they might not endorse all the details of Fenty's proposal. Reducing the authority of the elected board probably will be a contentious issue in the debate.

Cheh said Fenty's legislation needs to be tweaked to get her full endorsement.

"I support the essence of his plan," she said.

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.