Worn Down by Waves of Change

School system employees determined to keep their jobs worked the system to become "almost bulletproof," Chavous said. "They were so self-protecting and had built up such an arsenal of support for their existence that they knew what buttons to push with the threats of layoffs and reforms."

Roots of the Problem

The District operated separate schools for blacks and whites from the Civil War era until the Supreme Court's 1954 decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and a related District case, Bolling v. Sharpe.

After the court's decisions, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told District officials that he hoped Washington's schools -- then 57 percent black -- could become a model for equal educational opportunity.

Within a dozen years, however, more than 30,000 white students left. Schools were largely resegregated. Booming suburbs, urban renewal that obliterated some traditional black enclaves and housing laws that gave middle-class blacks mobility all contributed.

Some policies of the majority-white appointed school board allowed whites to be concentrated in certain classes or schools. The system also spent more on white students than on black students.

Hobson, the civil rights leader, told Congress in 1966 that in some ways black students fared better under segregation, when black educators shaped their curriculum.

That year, Hobson sued the schools. In Hobson v. Hansen, U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered sweeping changes to equalize the treatment of students, including integrating teachers and busing pupils to relieve overcrowding in black schools. Wright, a Louisiana native who had been hanged in effigy in New Orleans for enforcing desegregation there, declared the D.C. schools "a monument to the cynicism of the power structure which governs the voteless Capital of the greatest country on earth."

A subsequent decree by Wright attempting to equalize pay for black and white teachers produced an unintended result, a study later found: Many of the best, most experienced black teachers moved to schools in white neighborhoods.

In 1968, Congress, under growing pressure to give the District home rule, approved an elected school board. African American leaders celebrated the chance to reverse a century of racism in management and hiring.

It would take six years for the District to win the right to elect its mayor and council. In the meantime, the school board was "the only game in town" for local politicians, said Chavous, setting the stage for turf battles, nepotism and patronage.

"For a lot of these folks, it was an opportunity to control the government that had historically been controlled by the folks on the Hill," he said. "Our system morphed out of control, I think, largely because of the patronage history and the tendency to view the school system as a jobs system."

Power struggles on the school board grew raucous. Police were occasionally called. At one meeting in the mid-1970s, Superintendent Vincent Reed stepped in to keep one board member from choking another.