D.C. Governance Reform

The D.C. Council is holding hearings today on Mayor Adrian Fenty's proposal to take control over governance of the District of Columbia Public Schools. If you're a real school reform geek, you can watch the hearings here.

You can sense from the hearings that many of the councilmembers are very frustrated with the current system and eager for change. Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) seems to be the most opposed to Fenty's plans: She penned a Washington Post op-ed airing her concerns that ran over the weekend. I think Ms. Schwartz makes one very good point. Improving the District's public schools in long-term, laborious work that requires clear focus and a lot of political capital. Despite the D.C. Government's progress during the Williams adminsitration, there are plenty of city programs and agencies besides education that still need dramatic achievement. It is reasonable to ask whether a Mayor can have the energy and political capital to run the schools and improve student achievement while also fixing other city services. But the reforms Ms. Schwartz recommends in place of mayoral control are pretty weak. In particular, giving the council line-item authority over the school budget is a recipe for micromanagement that will only further complicated the tangled governance arrangements for schools in D.C. Mayor Fenty's legislation would also have given the Council a bigger role in school budgeting, and I think that's a mistake, too.

The current Board of Education also presented its own alternative plan yesterday. Under their plan, the existing board would maintain day-to-day control of school operations but set specific targets for school improvement in the next 18 months. Unlike Fenty's plan, which is purely a governance reform plan, the Board of Education's legislation includes a set of specific education reforms and goals. Both Fenty's plan and the Board of Education plan would create a new State Department of Education under the Mayor's control.

It seems pretty likely that, whatever else, we will get a new State Education Department for D.C. If so, we should take into account what nearly every major analysis of NCLB implementation so far has said: Existing State Departments of Education weren't designed to run accountability systems or support efforts to school improvement. The resources are focused in the wrong places and so they're doing a lousy job implementing the law. D.C. has an opportunity to build a new model of State Education Agency designed for today's education policy goals. Congress has an opportunity to help improve D.C. schools and address a key issue in NCLB by providing D.C. with additional funding to build an excellent model State Education Agency.

btw: Lots of speakers are talking about the impacts of other mayoral takeovers and what D.C. can learn from them. Completely independent of today's hearing, Ryan at edspresso looks at goings-on in NYC and LA here.