Taking over the underperforming D.C. Public School system is Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty’s most important challenge, and his success depends on getting it right. Mediocrity has prevailed for so long and corruptionruns so deeply in DCPS that only a total culture change will work. And that means handing out lots of pink slips to deserving recipients.
Fenty will need all the public support he can muster. Don’t expect it to come from recently elected Board of Education President Robert Bobb, who is already resisting a mayoral takeover. Fenty needs to move fast. A protracted power play with Bobb will divert attention from the monumental task at hand, which is to turn around a failing system in which more than 80 percent of schools do not meet basic academic requirements.
Fenty’s advantage is that the parents of more than 15,000 students have already enrolled their children in charter schools while the nine-member Board of Education comes under increasing fire for mishandling hundreds of millions of dollars and utterly failing in its responsibility to insure quality education for all DCPS students.
As The Examiner’s Bill Myers recently reported, the head of the Board of Education’s charter school office was forced to resign amid allegations she diverted funds to shell companies run by her friends and relatives; a recent audit of tens of millions in federal grant money found that DCPS — already considered “high risk” for federal funding — not only overcharged the federal government and failed to screen contractors, but blatantly violated federal record-keeping requirements. “For all 215 procurement transactions sampled, DCPS was unable to provide supporting documentation. …” the audit report stated.
Hmmm, where have we heard that before? Isn’t that the same thing D.C. Council auditor Deborah Nichols discovered last year in City Administrator Bobb’s office where more than a million dollars were spent without following standard procurement rules. In fact, Nichols singled Bobb out for what she called a “sham” in hiring his former colleagues from Oakland, Calif., and then paying them tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees without written contracts.
Unless Fenty moves fast and decisively, there is no reason to think Bobb won’t bring the same kind of mismanagement to the Board of Education and there preside over the spending of more than $2 billion in school modernization funds in a city that already spends $1 billion for the worst student test scores in the nation
Fenty will have to drill deep and ferret out long-term employees who have been helping themselves to tax dollars for years, leaving D.C.’s children in squalid buildings without books, supplies — or hope. If the new mayor does nothing more than getting rid of the deadwood, he’ll be remembered as a great reformer for generations to come.
