Fenty Regrets Copied Proposal

Reinoso apologized for failing to attribute quotations in his report.

"We drew from best practices, in some cases borrowing directly," Reinoso said. "I take full responsibility."

Reinoso said he has not visited the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system and did not talk to officials there while preparing the document. Nearly a third of the Fenty administration's report was identical to the strategic plan developed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Peter C. Gorman last November, according to iThenticate.com, a plagiarism detection system used by The Washington Post to compare the documents.

"It is bad enough that the work of others was copied without attribution," said Carol Schwartz (R-At Large), one of two council members to oppose the takeover. "But it is even worse that this was apparently done by the mayor's top appointee to lead his takeover."

Fenty said yesterday that word-for-word copying was not what he had in mind when instructing his aides to examine what has worked in other jurisdictions.

"When we talk about best practices, we mean a thorough examination of what has worked well in other school systems and bringing them back to the District of Columbia," the mayor said.

Reinoso, a former D.C. school board member, stressed that it is common practice for school systems to share information, adding that the D.C. school system's academic standards are virtually identical to those developed by the state board of Massachusetts.

Iris Toyer, head of Parents United for D.C. Public Schools, was part of a committee of parents, teachers and other school administrators that spent months adapting the Massachusetts standards for the District. The school system clearly notes on its Web site that the plans, which in some cases used the same language, were modeled on those standards.

"We didn't just say, 'Okay, let's use those,' " Toyer said. "We spent a lot of time making sure they provided the perspective that we wanted our students to have. . . . That's the type of analysis that you have to do if you're borrowing someone else's work. You just can't take it."

Education experts and Charlotte-Mecklenburg officials acknowledged that school systems share information about successful strategies. But they noted that what works in one place does not necessarily work in another. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg system has 130,000 students, far more than the District.

"You are a completely urban system," said Trent Merchant, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member. "We are known as a large urban system, but we are really a blend of urban and suburban. We've got small unique towns different than the center of the City of Charlotte. Our plan is designed to be site-specific.

"We did a lot of looking around at what other systems are doing, but there was some original thought about what would work well here. We synthesized it, and it was very comprehensive."

Charlotte-Mecklenburg has won raves for vast improvements over the past decade, after years of desegregation busing. But the gains were made under previous superintendents. Officials note that Gorman's plan is largely untested and has faced criticism from parents.

D.C. Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who supports Fenty's takeover, said she worried that the administration's mistake in copying the Charlotte-Mecklenburg plan is a "needless embarrassment that deflects from the ideas themselves."

Staff writer Theola Labbé contributed to this report.