. . . Headed in the Wrong Direction

Now that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has taken over the D.C. public school system (DCPS), Michelle Rhee has been confirmed as its first chancellor and nearly $2 million a year will be spent on the salaries of a new team of education bureaucrats, I am more convinced than ever that we are moving in the wrong direction.

The Post [Metro, Aug. 28; front page, Aug. 24] has been documenting problems with getting textbooks to children on time and a central office awash in unfilled personnel records. The cost of repairing dilapidated school buildings continues to rise, with no end in sight. Rhee has been throwing resources at these issues and promising to throw even more.

It's not going to work.

Contrast the D.C. public school bureaucracy with the exploding charter school movement. Somehow these independently run, individually authorized establishments, now educating more than 25 percent of schoolchildren in the nation's capital, find ways to avoid the troubles that are intractable for the District's public school system. Charter schools, fighting for their lives to find facilities in the costly D.C. commercial real estate market, do not operate in buildings where the bathrooms are falling apart and water fountains do not work. You do not find paint peeling from walls and air conditioners that do not cool. And these schools are safe.

The difference between DCPS and the charters is directly tied to the structure of governance. Charters are viewed by their founders, parents, staffs and boards as if they are their children. The power of ownership provides strong incentives to invest time and money into these schools. The power of school choice results in strong incentives to provide a product better than the one down the street.

Instead of trying to fix the D.C. public school bureaucracy, we should turn all of these schools into institutions of choice. With all the money we allocate to educating kids in the city (through DCPS, charters and the Opportunity Scholarship Program), we could provide each student with a $12,000 scholarship to a private school. Or, for a lot less money then we are currently spending, we could convert every school to a charter.

It is time, more than time, to make the District of Columbia's parents and their children the true focus of our educational landscape.

As board chair for one of Washington's charter schools, I can attest that the most common question we receive at our open houses is whether the students will have books on the first day of class. This inquiry represents the ugly reality that the kids are not, and never will be, the customers in large urban school systems.

What other explanation could there possibly be for parents' expectations to be so terribly low?

Yes, working day and night, Rhee and the mayor may have some limited success. Then they will move on, and their replacements will take their eye off the ball. And then the children of the nation's capital will be back to square one. I am not looking forward to the sequel.

-- Mark S. Lerner

Washington

The writer is chairman of the board at the William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts.