Worn Down by Waves of Change

"The efforts of all those good people pulling in opposite directions," Casserly said, have "resulted over the long run in a school district that didn't move at all."

Good Intentions

Over the decades, sometimes contradictory plans and reports by commissions and consultants, educators and activists, have piled high. They have advocated growing or shrinking the central office, giving the system more money or less, giving individual schools more autonomy or more oversight.

Meanwhile, generations of city children, especially the poorest, have attended crumbling, poorly maintained schools where too many have failed to learn.

"It's gotten to the point where I'm almost embarrassed to be associated with the word 'reform,' " said Mary Levy, a longtime activist who helped craft some of the plans.

With each new superintendent came new promises, "and we abandoned some other things," said Levy, a lawyer with the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. "Looking back on it, in a way what happened was everyone was bitten by the reform bug. It's all very well to throw out the bad, but not if you don't replace it with something at least as good."

Examples of the unintended consequences of constant reform are, unfortunately, numerous.

A comprehensive report from dozens of business and community leaders in the 1980s suggested that the District's curriculum, one of the first in the nation to detail and test what children should know at each grade level, was outdated. So the system was abandoned -- but not replaced. For the next 15 years, the District lacked a comprehensive plan for how to teach and test core subjects such as reading and math.

Reformers' lawsuits have backfired, time and again. In the 1990s, a lawsuit intended to pressure District politicians to pay for fixing fire code violations instead led to the shutdown of schools and contributed to the departures of two superintendents. Lawsuits meant to push the schools to better serve special education students wound up forcing the system to spend about $120 million a year to pay private tuition for 2,400 students out of a system of 55,000, plus $75 million for special education transportation. That left less money to fix the system's own inadequate special education programs that sparked the lawsuits in the first place.

Congress, over the objections of many public school officials, authorized charter schools and private-school vouchers in the District. Those programs, applauded by many for giving families alternatives, have also hurt the system by draining students and dollars, according to many school officials and activists. Another innovation, a funding formula designed to give local schools more autonomy, left the poorest children disproportionately without access to art and music classes, which were more widespread before the reform era began.

Constant change in leadership and philosophy weakened oversight of school system operations, allowing maintenance, finance and payroll problems to fester.

As superintendents and reforms came and went, there were few checks on the bureaucracy. Favoritism and poor performance "just went out of control," said Kevin P. Chavous, who served on the D.C. Council, once headed its education committee and wrote a book in 2005 promoting charter schools.

"Friends of friends were getting contracts and jobs," he said. "They weren't doing the job. We paid more for services than we should have. There was less and less focus on individual academic enrichment of children."