front page - search - community

EDITORIAL
Helping the children
(Published April 5, 2004)

Strong leadership, backed with political will, could quickly set the District’s public school system on a proper path to becoming a national model for improving academic achievement in urban education.

Unfortunately, none of the changes in school governance currently being considered by the mayor, city council and school board – along with the veiled threats of a misguided, paternalistic Congress ready to impose yet another experimental "solution" on the District’s citizenry – is likely to put the schools on that path.

Elected officials need to get serious about fixing the District’s public schools. Continuing to splinter available resources among an increasing number of so-called "school choice" initiatives, which help only a handful of D.C. schoolchildren, is merely a grandiose scheme to funnel public tax dollars into private hands with little public accountability.

When parents send their children to school, they want them to receive a well-rounded, basic education. They want that education to serve as a launching pad for their children to become independent, productive citizens who can make informed decisions about their future.

Millions of Americans are able to get that kind of excellent education for their children from public school systems across this country. Despite many politicians’ assertions to the contrary, public education in the United States is far from being a broken institution that needs major overhaul. Politicians’ constant tinkering to create a profit stream from public education is the basic problem in the District and in many other troubled school systems.

The political tinkering needs to stop.

D.C. City Council members who are now proposing that an all-elected, non-partisan school board be restored as the basic governing structure for D.C. Public Schools should be applauded. Direct accountability to the public is important – though robust competition for those elected seats should be encouraged to foster greater public involvement.

Reforms in school governance cannot stop there. No one is addressing the need to create a dedicated stream of funding for the schools. Without dedicated funding, and the taxing authority to adjust for fluctuations in need, the D.C. Board of Education will continue to bear heavy responsibilities with no independent means to address them. An elected body with clear responsibilities should not be forced to beg its funding from other elected officials, whose own funding priorities often get in the way. Such a structure only promotes failure.

The council should embrace Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ concern for improving public education by mandating that he create a plan for dedicated school funding, to be enacted in fiscal 2006 concurrent with a return of an all-elected school board.

In the meantime, the mayor also should stop his constant attacks on the public schools and use his current legal authority in a cooperative manner with school officials to improve the delivery of social, recreational and library services that he controls. The Williams administration has done a poor job of integrating child-related agency services with the schools, despite the mayor’s publicly stated desire to do so. What is stopping the mayor from helping the children right now?

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator