A summer job is supposed to teach youngsters useful life lessons — like the value of work, being prompt and taking responsibility for one’s efforts — but D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s disastrously mismanaged summer jobs programs wound up teaching them all the wrong things.

For starters, somebody in City Hall should have figured out that there was no way to create enough 10-week jobs for 21,000-plus teens in a city that still struggles with adult unemployment. So the make-work summer program turned into a fake-work program that fooled none of the youngsters, who have a built-in radar for adult dissembling.