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There is a lot being written and said about the big upset in the DC race for mayor and how Adrian Fenty, smart, hardworking and young, got kicked out of office Tuesday. Fenty was elected at the relatively tender age of 35, now he is going to be an ex-mayor at the age of 39. The Chairman of the DC Council, Vincent Gray, is taking his place. (There are very few Republicans in DC, so if you get the Dems nomination, you are pretty well guaranteed the office.)
What everyone wants to know is this: how did Fenty go from being one of the hottest young politician in the nation to a defeated mayor in just four years? For one thing, it seems like he forgot the African-American community in DC, the majority of voters, and he particularly forgot that segment which remain deep in long term near poverty. The once untouchable “mayor for life”, Marion Barry, always, always remembered this constituency and he gave thousands of young people summer jobs and many thousand more adults permanent jobs in the DC government.
The city of Washington, DC, employs over 25,000 full time people to run a government in a city of around 600,000 residents (one million on work days). While that doesn’t approach the levels in a nation like Greece (1 in 3 there work for some level of government), it is a high number and all of those employees have families and friends who know where the jobs came from and remember the politicians who made it possible.
Fenty says he did a lot for the city, building new swimming pools, fixing roads and other facilities, but his big project was the schools. This is most likely what formed his undoing. The AFL-CIO poured about a hundred thousand dollars into defeating Fenty and the teacher’s union was busy, but his biggest weapon against himself was probably Michele Rhree, the school reforming superintendent who made mortal enemies out of thousands of DC teachers with firings and impolitic explanations about the firings and layoffs. Rhree is a hot property nationally, with her picture on the cover of Time. In DC, she is radioactive and it would take about 15 seconds to form a committee on about any street corner (except in the northwest section) to get her run out of town.
People go crazy when you close schools and call teachers incompetent. While a lot of what Rhree has done needed to happen, she is not a politician and she probably little understands the impact of her actions. She is an action person, a determined reformer and Fenty backed her to the hilt. Fenty the politician put his fate in the hands of someone who made a point out of being a reformer, first and foremost, politics be damned.
Let’s be clear. The DC schools are a disaster zone. The District, with Federal help, spends more per pupil that almost any other city in America and gets the some of the worst results. The schools are riddled with violence and often falling down days after repair crews are sent in. It is a big, fat, ugly mess, one of the most intractable problems imaginable. Rhree was trying to turn the whole thing around, right now, and she drew national attention for her relative youth and flat out willingness to state the case bluntly. Perhaps too bluntly.
There are too many interest groups with their hands on schools everywhere. The teachers want to protect their jobs, their pensions and whatever free time they have left in the day and after school. The administrators want to save their jobs and pay scales. The parents are all over the place, fighting for their kid (each of whom are special, of course) and fearful of any change, while, at the same time, wanting better and better results. Throw on the top of all this the political leadership and school bureaucracy and you’ve brewed up a formula to defeat any effort at improvement, much less reform. Everyone has an idea about education and most ideas conflict with everyone else’s.
Reforming public schools is almost an impossibility. Little changes are difficult, big changes mean enormous problems. Fenty was a hard working, busy mayor known for trying to be everywhere at once and taking a break at mid-week to go on a fast. hard bike ride with friends around the city. For the last four years, he has been the personification of DC, but many constituents say he wasn’t out enough or willing to meet with some very important people. All of these complaints and others, however, would probably have never made it to the surface if he hadn’t tried to do so much, so fast with the schools.
You want better schools? Get ready for battle, a war. The teachers, the unions and the upset parents did Fenty in. Meanwhile, the kids of DC will have to live with the results. Everyone wants reform, they just don’t want to be reformed out of a job or out of their own comfort zone.
One good aspect of putting a new mayor in office, however, is that it shows the growing maturity of the city as a real place, with a measure democracy intact and functioning. Those who have not read the history of this place should know that DC did not even have a mayor until the 1960s and that the first one was appointed by Lyndon Johnson, not elected. Marion Barry was only the second elected mayor and the first elected without having been appointed previously. So., DC is growing up and still, like cities of similar size in the east, trying to find a way to handle its problems. The new mayor, Vincent Gray, is not going to have a happy time if he tries to be the un-Fenty, the same way Bush II tried to be the un-Clinton, with mixed results. DC is, in many ways, still a city in crisis and its schools are not even half way to where they need to go.
Doug Terry, 9.16.10
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