Where's the Progressive Solution?

Day two of the Post's exhaustive series on the decades-long failure of DC Public Schools traces the history of constant leadership turnover and unfulfilled reform efforts. It also features more examples of corruption, recalcitrant bureaucracy and mind-boggingly inept management, such as this from former superintendant Arlene Ackerman:

Ackerman obtained extra federal money and pressed ahead with the summer school plan. But the school system's personnel office functioned too poorly to recruit additional teachers. Early in her tenure, for example, Ackerman came across a motorized filing system that had broken long ago, trapping hundreds of personnel records behind a wall.

"Somebody told me, 'Oh, this has been this way for years,' " Ackerman said. "Years! I'm thinking, no wonder people are telling me that they can't get data or records."

Ackerman and a few aides worked the phones to contact summer school teacher prospects. "One night, we were calling people until so late that I finally said, 'It's 11 o'clock. We can't call anybody else tonight and ask them if they want to work in D.C. They will know we're desperate,' " she recalled.

Ackerman puzzled over the central office culture. Late one night, after attending a meeting, she returned to headquarters to see a line of people in a hall waiting to see one of her subordinates. She said she eventually came to believe that the man, a longtime employee who no longer works in the system, had amassed great power through his ability to hand out jobs, award contracts and outlast superintendents. "He was like the godfather," Ackerman said.

So here's my question: what's the progressive / left-wing solution to the DCPS incompetence problem? I know what the libertarian / right-wing solution is: blow up the system and replace it with vouchers. I know what the centrist solution is: standards, accountability, and choice in a public context, i.e. charter schools. What's the liberal solution?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is one. That's not to say there's no progressive education agenda at all--left-wing folks reliably support things like funding equity and smaller class sizes, and there are places where those reforms are badly needed.

But those aren't solutions to the problem of an entrenched, dysfunctional educational bureaucracy. The biggest failure of the traditional liberal education agenda--and the main reason that vouchers and other dodgy ideas persist--is total silence in the face of educational problems like those in DCPS, failures that are literally ruining the lives of tens of thousands of low-income and minority students--the very students liberals are supposed to care about the most.