By Michael Casserly
Sunday, September 7, 2008

In 1962, after the New York Mets had lost a record 120 games in the franchise's first year, Casey Stengel, the team's legendary manager, walked into the locker room and reportedly said, "I don't want you boys to feel bad about this. It's been a team effort. No one or two of you guys could have done all this by yourselves."

That version of a pep talk is useful to remember now, as students in the District trundle off to schools that members of both political parties call failures. That's a fair assessment of the situation, but it's wrong of members of Congress, or anyone else, to assert that the school district reached this sorry state of affairs all by itself. It had plenty of help along the way. As Casey would say, "It was a team effort."

Let's begin with the starting lineup: the school district. The system has done more than its fair share to earn a reputation as hapless and ineffective. Until recently, the school district has not been able to tell how many students it served or how many adults it employed. It sometimes couldn't pay people on time or in the right amounts. And it couldn't teach most of its children to an acceptable level. In short, the district has been a central player in its own losing streak.

But the D.C. public schools had lots of unnecessary coaching. City Hall, historically, has pushed relatives and friends onto the school payroll, whether qualified or not -- a practice that eventually prompted D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to fire staff she thought did not measure up. The media has fallen in and out of love with any number of superintendents before running them out of town. Congress has overstepped its oversight role repeatedly, passing legislation that often had little to do with improving the schools and more to do with the pursuit of one political agenda or another.

One of Congress's most controversial intrusions into the city's educational system was the legislation that opened the District to charter schools, passed in April 1996. The legislation included a compromise between the newly emboldened, pro-voucher Republican majority in Congress and a Clinton White House that knew reform was needed. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed on charter schools even if they couldn't settle on vouchers. The D.C. Council, for its part, also authorized charters over the objection of the D.C. Board of Education, signaling a split among the city's political leadership that continues today. Some 12 years later, nearly a third of the city's children go to a charter school.

The 1996 compromise was not the end of the voucher issue, of course. In 2004, Congress passed legislation that created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the organization that administers public funds for tuition at private and parochial schools. The bill had the support of then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams but not of other political leaders. Today, some 1,900 mostly low-income students citywide attend private schools with public money. Parents say they like having the choice of schools, but recent evaluations show that the program is having no significant academic effects.

The issue here is neither the voucher program nor charter schools themselves. It is a Congress and other political leaders who have established two alternative systems that now run parallel to the D.C. school district without boosting its capacity to get better. If this arrangement created competitive pressures to improve, it would have worked in the students' favor. But there is little to suggest that is happening here or in other cities. Instead, D.C.'s educational system is more fractured than ever, with little common ground among boosters of either strategy.

Congressional intrusion goes beyond what kinds of schools students can attend -- whether charters or using vouchers at private schools -- to affect what programs students use inside classrooms themselves. In recent years, Congress has approved funds for a number of programs -- from literacy to anti-violence programs -- without always knowing whether they were the right fit for the school system. It also has trespassed into management areas by alternatively approving, then disapproving, caps on attorney fees charged by lawyers suing the District over services to students with disabilities, raising the costs of special education.

At this point, the school system has been overruled and overrun, picked clean, pulled and pushed, poked, prodded and experimented with until it was not clear where it was going or why. In the process, schools effectively lost or silenced the voices of parents and community members, people whose involvement is desperately needed to offset the constant churn of leadership and sustain the reforms.

The point here is not that Congress and others should leave schools alone. The schools -- and the students they serve -- need all the help they can get. The point is that the larger community should be working in tandem to make the schools better.

Improving education is a community effort. The research is clear on that. Leaders must work in the same direction for a prolonged period of time toward the same overarching goals. This is more than sloganeering; it requires real leadership from the top in order to break down the distrust at the heart of all the pulling and tugging.

During the last year, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Rhee have pumped substantial and commendable energy into remaking the school district. They are generally on the right track. But, as I have seen in countless other cities, it's in the second and third years that reform efforts can falter. The political consensus for improvement often falls apart. Signs of this happening in D.C. are already emerging. So the city's leadership must now articulate a clearer vision for where it is taking the school system and rally people around that vision. The hardest reforms are yet to come.

One may remember that the same New York Mets who were so roundly disparaged in 1962 went on to win the World Series in 1969. They did it because, over the intervening years, they began playing like a team rather than like a group of individuals out for themselves. The District of Columbia Public Schools are far from being champions, but they could be in a few short years if the full roster of players -- Congress, the city council, the business community and others -- finally decided they wanted to play together for the whole nine innings.

mcasserly@cgcs.org

Michael Casserly is executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban public school systems.