Fenty's School Plan

Newly-inaugurated DC Mayor Adrian Fenty unveiled his plan to take over the D.C. Public Schools this morning. Key provisions include:

• Placing day-to-day operation of schools in the control of a NYC-style schools chancellor, who would report to Fenty and be a cabinet-level officer in his administration.
• Appointing a schools ombudsman.
• Creating a facilities management and construction authority to manage the district's school facilities and implement the School Modernization Financing Act of 2006.
• Stripping the elected school board of its day-to-day school oversight role and budgetary authority, but maintaining its responsibility for state level functions such as academic standards and teacher certification.
• Placing all charter schools under the oversight of the Public Charter School Board and requiring school charters to be reviewed every three years (instead of the current five year reviews).

FWIW, this plan--Fenty taking over day-to-day operations and the Board of Ed maintaining control over state-level roles--is the exact opposite of what I predicted will eventually happen and what several folks smarter than me have recommended.

Some of these steps could potentially be good ideas, but it's hard for me to say for sure until I see the text of the legislation. More importantly, no one should be tricked into thinking that just giving Fenty control of the schools, in and of itself, will translate into better learning for DC kids. After all, the District has had at least three different governance structures answering to both the electorate and various appointing entities over the past 10 years, but no one believes a lot of progress has been made as a result of these changes. Good governance is a prerequisite to reform, and putting the schools in the hands of someone who has the authority to act decisively to improve student achievement can produce good results, but it's what people do with their authority that really matters.

So far, Fenty's picked good people for his education team, and this makes me hopeful. (I recently learned that the excellent Abby Smith, who's been serving in Teach for America's DC office as their VP for Research and Public Policy, is joining Fenty's education team--this is good news.) But he said little about what he'll do in practice to improve the schools once he gets control. No one should be under the illusion that Mayoral control alone is a silver bullet.

The legislation needs to be approved by the DC Council. Fenty has a good moment of political support right now because of the desperation and urgency to improve DC schools, and a majority of the council members appeared with him today announcing the plan (although not all of those who appeared agreed to endorse it). But there is strong opposition from local activists on home rule grounds, as well as the DC education establishment. Newly elected school board president Robert Bobb has strongly criticized Fenty's plan. A lot of reform-minded people in DC who support Fenty's takeover idea also campaigned for Bobb as an education reformer, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice. Finally, there's the wild card of Congress here. It appears that Fenty could technically do many of the things he wants to do without Congressional approval, but Congress still holds the purse strings and they could also bigfoot Fenty's plan if they wanted to or enact it themselves if it can't get local support to pass (as happened with the School Reform Act of 1996 and charter schools). This could produce all kinds of insanity. Stay tuned for more.