Worn Down by Waves of Change

Downward Spiral

During Reed's tenure, from 1975 to 1980, District schools were still viewed favorably by many. Reed, a popular superintendent, had championed the adoption of strict standards for what children should know in each grade. The Competency-Based Curriculum was seen by some parents and teachers as too rigid, but ultimately "it did seem to put a floor under the weaker teachers," said Levy, the lawyer and activist.

In the 1980s, national reports on urban schools spurred a reform movement. A group of 64 District business and community leaders released a comprehensive study in 1989 of deteriorating conditions in the schools. The D.C. Committee on Public Education, or COPE, made sweeping recommendations, from auctioning off underused properties to lengthening the school day.

In the wake of the report, the school board fired Superintendent Andrew Jenkins. At an extraordinarily emotional board meeting, outraged Jenkins supporters hurled water pitchers, glasses and nameplates. One member, Erika Landberg, who was voting to oust Jenkins, was hit in the head. She needed stitches. The offices of some board members who had voted against Jenkins were trashed.

The group of community leaders had criticized Reed's curriculum as outmoded, and it was quickly abandoned. Until Janey came in 2004, no superintendent had managed to both design and implement a comprehensive plan to teach reading and math, Casserly and Levy said.

"Each individual teacher pretty much did what they knew how to do," said Casserly, the Council of the Great City Schools director. "They made it up. Some were very good at it. Some were not."

As oversight of the curriculum unraveled, so did controls over the school system's basic operations. Mary Filardo, head of the District-based urban schools advocacy group 21st Century School Fund, recalled being surprised, as a young mother and new school activist in the 1980s, by how the central office had failed to adopt technology and train employees.

"What you have are pieces of systems," Filardo said. "Some of it that's still on paper. Some of it that's in mainframe systems. Some of it that's in PC systems. One person has one data set, and another one has another."

Filardo grew curious about whether the schools were paying less for trash collection as enrollment fell. She found the person in charge of the data "deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy." The woman put numbers into a computer spreadsheet program but didn't know how to use it properly. Filardo couldn't determine if the schools were overpaying.

"When I started working on school facilities, I thought, 'Of course people want to have all this data and information so they can understand what's really going on,' " Filardo said. "I have concluded that they do not want good information and data. I think there is an anxiety or fear that you will be held accountable for things you can count and measure."

Over the years, opaque school finances allowed corrupt officials to engage in bogus business deals, take kickbacks and create phony invoices and contract with fictitious firms to raid city coffers, court records show.

Many local politicians have railed against school failures without forcing real scrutiny of the dysfunctional system, Filardo said. She repeatedly asked the D.C. Council to audit school capital programs to find out why building projects cost so much, but to no avail, she said.

"They had oversight authority that they could have used, but they didn't," she said. "I think they preferred kind of blaming and pointing the finger."