School reform: Haven’t we been here before?

Who needs to watch a movie to experience “Deja Vu” in the District?

Old ideas and initiatives, touting nebulous reforms such as “community policing,” “best practices” and “school reform” get recycled with every leadership change.

D.C. Mayor-elect Adrian M. Fenty’s power grab for the school system, for example, is not befitting “fresh eyes.” Listening to the resurfacing debate about the District’s perennial school problems, my institutional memory sets off warning signals that urge “don’t go there” because “we’ve been down this road before.”

But here we find ourselves again, revisiting the testy school governance issue with the Young Gun.

Having gone through at least three leadership models, not including the one imposed by the imperialistic D.C. financial control board in the mid-‘90s, you would think that city stakeholders would have realized by now that governance is only a small part of the formula of producing successful students.

That’s sad, because the fight over control of the school system’s boardroom and burgeoning budget will, as usual, overshadow what needs to be an all-out attack on what goes on inside and outside the classroom.

“We have a lot of adult conversations on governance, and my whole campaign is singularly focused on student achievement,” said Robert C. Bobb, president-elect of the D.C. Board of Education. That conversation “gets in the way of what it takes to improve student achievement.”

Exactly.

This evening, Superintendent Clifford B. Janey will present the State of Schools speech at McKinley High School, ostensibly to highlight what he considers the achievements his team has made during his two-year tenure.

More importantly, “He will issue a charge to the public to come out more and support the schools and some of the changes he has been making in the last two years,” his spokesman John C. White said yesterday.

Mr. Janey also is expected to outline the initiatives he included in the master facilities and education plans earlier this year.

We hope that everyone else who wants a piece of the besieged school system, including Mr. Fenty, will take the time to read these proposals in their entirety before we get bogged down in the divisive battle brewing over control.

Where’s the payoff for all the oversight that already exists? The school system needs fewer chiefs, not more. And the real issue is that the city’s schoolchildren need more coordinated resources that go beyond the classroom, not less.

The New York Times Magazine printed a thought-provoking article Sunday titled “What It Takes to Make a Student.” Read it. You will learn a lot about how important students’ home environment is to their academic achievement. The author, Paul Tough, makes the sweeping indictment that if you place an inner-city student in an inner-city school, that child is more certain to fail. Mainly, it is because they are so far behind to begin with. He argues, along with the professionals quoted, that low-income students — those who qualify for free school lunches as the majority of D.C. students do — need more school instruction and resources, not less.

Yet researchers and reformers rarely address the neediest of students holistically. For starters, you cannot help children without assisting their parents, many living in impoverished communities.

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