Media and Civic Engagement

The Washington Post showed its true colors yesterday, favoring autarchy rather than citizen-centric democratic processes, in editorializing in favor of the Mayor's proposal to take over the school system. See "A Vote for D.C. Schools."

The Post writes:

Arguing in favor of the mayor's plan are the undisputed failures of the past. Superintendents have come and gone. Millions of dollars have been wasted. The school board has seen new faces and forms. Nothing worked. By almost any measure, student achievement worsened. Add to that a system slow in fixing up schools and bad at keeping its books, and Mr. Fenty's offer -- to make improvements or be held accountable -- becomes even more appealing. There's been no widespread opposition to the plan, save for a vocal minority of activists. It's telling that their arguments have more to do with process (Delay the vote! No, hold a referendum!) than with the interests of students.

There are three important points in response.

1. OK, we agree about the undisputed failures. But where is the response, the plan to address this? Making City Council the School Board is hardly a solution, given their too often quick turn to personalize the City's laws in response to some anecdotal problem or story.

2. While maybe some activists opposed to the plan have focused on the process, a goodly number, including myself, are more focused on the question "where's the beef?," the substance.

It's all well and good to throw up your hands and make the Mayor "responsible" for the schools, but so many of our other government agencies aren't functioning at a best practices level either.

The "plan" is about control of contracts, and doesn't appear to be much focused on what happens in the classroom. It's fine that everyone talks about Chicago or New York City as examples, but each of these systems is 15-25 times larger than DC's. The scale difference makes comparison difficult and likely inaccurate.

3. I have argued for a couple years that if you truly want a community of learning, then engage the community. There is no one in the city who is comfortable with failing schools and failing our children. For the Post to denigrate the handful of us who are carefully focused on substance dissserves civic engagement and democracy.


The process has been problematic. I have been impressed with the failure to consider substantively best practices on urban school reform (and interpretations of failure).

Marion Orr's book on Baltimore, Black Social Capital, offers insight into why DC's school system is flawed, and the failure of most DC political and economic elites to acknowledge this--because they are beneficiaries of the flaws--could well doom this "reform" as much as any of the other "reform" movements of the past 20 years.

An interview with Professor Orr from the Baltimore Sun, "Race, politics and the schools," is well worth reading. Some of the interesting points in the interview are:

(1) how control of the public school system was given to the black community in the city while the business and political leaders (the "Growth Machine") continued to focus on downtown and other economic development projects and wanted to maintain that power as the city became majority African-American (a similar point about DC is made in the book The Future Once Happened Here);

(2) that patronage in this agency was to be expected and understood, given that ethnic control of various municipal agencies and resulting patronage is a Baltimore (I would say "urban" or even general government) tradition;

(3) that control was ceded in a time of difficult financial circumstances--"It was really an inopportune time to get control."

(4) and how: "Mayors are now beginning to see the danger of ignoring public schools. Now many of them are saying, "Please give me control over the schools," because they see that connection with economic development. When [Baltimore Mayor Martin] O'Malley was elected in 1999, he ran on a crime-fighting platform. He was going to stay away from the schools. It is cute to watch how this has played out.

To be fair, this was right after the state partnership legislation put limits on the mayor's authority in school affairs. But when I interviewed Mayor O'Malley a few years ago about his role in the school system, he told me that he played a very limited role, that his focus was on crime fighting.Now in his second term, he is talking about education. This is the shift you see in big-city mayors in the 21st century."