Changes Due No Matter Who Controls Schools

Somehow, when good, bright people get serious about the fact that thousands of children emerge from this city's schools year after year without knowing how to read well enough to get a decent job, those good people end up busying themselves with little boxes on a piece of paper.

So now, yet again, we have two competing sheets of paper, each festooned with boxes and arrows and revised titles and redrawn lines of authority, all adding up to a bonanza for companies that move office furniture. Yet again, we have a mayor who believes he can change what happens in classrooms by wresting control of the school system from the school board, which yet again promises to be different from and better than all previous school boards, which everyone agrees were awful bordering on criminal.

We've all seen this movie before, and it wasn't even good enough for cable.

But here's the good news: Mayor Adrian Fenty and school board president Robert Bobb freely admit that the 20-plus previous efforts at total reform left a legacy of failure and a firm foundation of cynicism. And both refreshingly concede that many, if not most, of the problems that have made Washington's public schools a national symbol of neglect and waste are probably impossible for schools alone to solve.

And here's the better news: The big battle pitting Fenty vs. Bobb, the showdown that's been all the talk of city politicos since the two ambitious men were elected last fall, isn't going to happen.

Despite his last-ditch attempt this week to derail the mayoral takeover of the system, Bobb, who was the city administrator under ex-mayor Tony Williams, is a savvy politician. He knows how to count votes, and he knows the D.C. Council is with Fenty on this one: "It's pretty clear to me that the mayor gets to take over the school system," Bobb told me yesterday.

Bobb rolls with the punches. Not 48 hours after he announced his plan to reform the schools with his own board still in charge, Bobb said that "whoever's in charge, the status quo has to go." So whether the council adopts the mayor's plan to put all school reconstruction efforts in the hands of an independent authority or accepts Bobb's proposal to keep the modernization drive in-house, "the important thing is that there be no more excuses," he says. "If cities can build facilities for the Olympics in less than 10 years, we cannot talk about it taking 15 years to rebuild the schools."

Comparing my notes from conversations with Bobb and the new deputy mayor for education, Victor Reinoso, it's hard to find any substantive differences in either their analysis of the problem or their outline of the solutions. The politicos in town are so excited about the prospect of a power struggle between the school board and the mayor that they're missing what's really exciting: Both parties to this debate have reached the same conclusions, and both are champing at the bit to get rolling.

Both say the schools alone can't make the fix; the city must intercede in the lives of dysfunctional families before children are born. Both agree the District has to knock down the walls that separate the agencies that deal with family pathologies -- agencies focused on prenatal care, child abuse, substance problems, street crime, absentee parents, unemployment, adult illiteracy, and on and on must finally coordinate how myriad arms of the city deal with a single child.

Both Reinoso and Bobb can and do catalogue the failures of the school board, the impossibility of getting stuff done in the labyrinth of the school bureaucracy and the fact that there is precious little reason for parents to send their kids to D.C. schools if they have any choice.

"Business systems are broken. Personnel systems are broken. Financial systems are broken," Bobb says.

"I worked for two years as a school board member to get new windows for Shepherd Elementary," Reinoso says. "Repairs should be made in 72 hours, but I spent two years nagging them. I watched them give a multimillion-dollar roofing contract to a company that doesn't do roofs. There are other ways to do this: In Edmonton, schools literally buy services from the central office, and if they don't like what they get, they can buy it from somewhere else outside the system."

Reinoso comes out of his time on the school board convinced that no matter how it is organized -- all-elected members, all-appointed, a hybrid -- "all you have to show for it is declining student achievement, decrepit facilities, high staff turnover and people leaving the system. As my 4-year-old gets ready to start at a D.C. public school in the fall, I know we've got to do it differently."

Next week: How to do that, and why Superintendent Clifford Janey is not part of the plan.

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com