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EDITORIAL
Here we go again
(Published February 23, 2004)

It is disappointing, though not surprising, that Elfreda Massie has thrown in the towel after just three months at the helm of the District’s public school system.

She joins a list of D.C. Public Schools superintendents – including Paul Vance, Arlene Ackerman, Julius Becton and Franklin Smith – who have been hamstrung by political interference during the past decade in their efforts to refocus the system’s resources on providing an excellent learning environment for D.C. schoolchildren.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Massie’s decision to resign is the realization that Mayor Anthony A. Williams and the D.C. City Council still don’t seem to understand that they – not the school board – are among the biggest impediments to fixing the schools.

While the partially elected D.C. Board of Education is legally responsible for operating the schools, D.C. law requires the board to beg for its funding each year from another set of elected officials – the mayor and the council – who continually use their bully pulpit to posture over personalities.

The current legal structure, which fails to provide proper funding authority to the school board, cannot work in the present politically charged environment. A government structure whose success is dependent upon the personalities of the people in authority is a failed system. And that’s what we’ve got.

It is not productive for the mayor, the council and the school board to be moving in different directions to try to fix the schools. It is abundantly arrogant of the mayor and the council to refuse to allow the school board, with the majority of its members chosen by the voters, to take the lead in pointing the direction.

The recent fight over school vouchers is a case in point. Mayor Williams and the council’s education committee chairman, Kevin Chavous, sided with school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz – and against the majority of the school board, which does not select its president – to help well-funded national advocacy organizations and the Republican Party impose another controversial, expensive experiment on the District’s schools.

The time, energy and millions of dollars, public and private, invested on both sides of the D.C. voucher campaign – advocates claim vouchers will somehow indirectly help improve public schools – could have been more productively spent on direct efforts to work with school officials, educators, parents and students to tackle the problems.

Unfortunately, the people holding the purse strings for the District’s schools don’t seem to care what schools officials, teachers, students and their parents think. Darlene Allen, president of the D.C. Congress of Parents and Teachers Associations, said no one consulted her organization – the largest representative of D.C. parents – before Congress recently decided that federal tax dollars will build up to 25 new D.C. charter schools during the next five years, while no similar funding is provided for the crumbling public schools. Mayor Williams didn’t bother to seek school officials’ input before drafting a plan this month to put armed police officers on patrol in school hallways.

Politicians who continually bow to "the experts" on other issues should start respecting the real experts when it comes to D.C. Public Schools.