Larry Gray, the tireless school-system activist who did his best to bring democratic reform to the District, must be rolling over in his grave today.
As for the District’s already disenfranchised voters, they must be suffering a serious case of deja vu.
It is the height of hypocrisy to beg for democracy and full representative government from the feds with one hand, then turn around and steal it from your own voters with the other.
During the last “antidemocratic” campaign concerning the governance of the District school board a few months before his death last year, the prophetic Mr. Gray pronounced: “The District will have an elected school board that hires and fires the school superintendent, sets educational policy and a budget to reflect that policy, or the real power and the real dollars will rest elsewhere.”
Anything else is a farce and merely “window dressing,” Mr. Gray said when Mayor Anthony A. Williams broke the law to force the current hybrid school board of elected and appointed officials on the District’s frustrated electorate.
Apparently, as we now learn, they sacrificed their limited form of democracy for naught because their Democratic mayor wants to dismantle that schizophrenic system for one with even less public representation.
Back then, the soft-spoken Mr. Gray, who served on the education committee of the mayor’s transition team, recommended that full power be restored to the elected school board.
Today, the D.C. Council, if it votes the right way, will honor Mr. Gray’s legacy and reject the mayor’s latest power-grabbing ploy to place the school system under his control.
If it’s been said once, it bears repeating: It’s management, not governance, that’s at the heart of the problem, stupid. The important issue of democracy aside, Teflon Tony is anything but a good manager.
Changing the form of governance alone will not solve the perpetual problems in D.C. schools of bad scores, bad attendance, bad facilities, bad curriculum, limited resources, sporadic parental involvement and mediocre management.
Teflon Tony must think that everyone else’s short-term memory is as bad as his because he has clearly demonstrated that he suffers from ADD (attention-deficit disorder) and CRS (can’t remember stuff.)
Didn’t the mayor already hire a liaison with the specific duty of collaborating between the school system and the Cabinet? What is that six-figure salary paying for?
Doesn’t Mr. Williams already count a majority on a nine-member board that already should give him all the power to push through any school initiative he wants?
The mayor says the school system, in which he invested his political capital but not his administration’s capital, is like a “slow-moving train wreck.” (Tell me, should you trust your education to a man who only speaks in such silly and sometimes inaccurate metaphors?) As Mr. Gray’s widow, Diana Winthrop, poses in her column in the Common Denominator, isn’t it Mr. Williams who has been driving that runaway train?
Just how many times is he going to give the same speech about fixing D.C. schools being his priority when his own appointees quit because the mayor wouldn’t return their phone calls?
Mr. Williams counts vouchers, which will assist a pittance of the District’s school-age population, as his claim as a fixer of this abused and abandoned system that is beset with serious and special needs that go far beyond the schoolhouse doors. Yet, this is the mayor who cut recreation programs and vocational education when he was the chief financial officer.
And he wonders why he gets “dissed” and hissed at places like Ballou High School. Folks can only be fooled for so long.
Mr. Williams’ school takeover proposals are actually about gaining control of a big budget and a lot of crumbling but cash-laden buildings that stand to get gobbled up in the general fund.
He proposes turning the hybrid school board into an advisory panel and the school superintendent into a chancellor to sit among his Cabinet.
To refresh Mr. Williams’ memory, the District had an all-appointed school board when the District’s financial control board was in charge. They brought in a chancellor, too, Gen. Julius Becton, to kick tails. It didn’t last.
The District has hired, fired or run out at least five superintendents in the past decade. The current interim superintendent, Elfreda W. Massie, announced “I’m outta here” because she quickly determined the mayoral and council meddling was not about educating children but massaging egos.
In all the egotistical gaming, have you once heard any serious debate about the outdated, irrelevant curriculum? When was the last time an elected official proposed building a new school in the District? Why weren’t more elected officials on hand at the public hearing last week to hear parents list their qualifications for a new superintendent?
Nothing’s changed to warrant the mayoral takeover of the school system. In fact, D.C. residents have greater evidence that the Williams administration is ill-suited and ill-equipped to take on another big agency. The mayor’s school takeover proposals should, like Mr. Gray, finally rest in peace.
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