Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
This week, I (carefully) picked up and began reading The Power Broker, the epic (and massive) Robert Caro biography of infamous New York master builder Robert Moses. Bob Moses, it turns out, was one of the best-trained civil service experts of the age when he first began working for the city. He was, as Caro describes him, a consummate idealist, passionately dedicated to the principles of meritocracy (even if it was to be a meritocracy of Ivy League men), transparency, and accountability. As a young man, his civil service principles got Moses run out of town by the Tammany machine. When he next entered city government, Moses made sure to bring authority with him, ultimately wrapping power around himself tightly enough to obscure the empire of public money and manpower he came to control. The results were controversial and often destructive: the displacement of half a million New Yorkers, the systematic starvation of mass transit in favor of highway construction, and the preservation of a black hole in the city’s public administrative machinery that still confounds New York mayors.
But his reign was not without its popular programs and successes, and his career has been favored by recent revisionism, much of it based on the idea that sometimes, great problems require the ability to cut through the morass of dysfunctional government structures. It’s a tempting notion and worth evaluating in the light of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s battle to save the District’s public schools.
This week, the Washington Post published a scathing series of stories examining the pathologies of a school system that has failed generations of District school children. Of course, the only thing more stunning than DCPS’ long and unblemished record of poor performance is its invulnerability to reform of any kind. District schools posts are where well meaning public service careers go to die, and no amount of frustration or public outcry has yet been able to dissipate the inertia of failure that hangs over the system.
Until, perhaps, now. Taking a page from New York’s playbook, Mayor Fenty ascended to the mayoralty promising the take control of the public schools himself, the better to force change through the most reticent of administrative structures. His campaign to take the system’s reins came to fruition this week, when the Mayor assumed control of DCPS and named Michelle Rhee Chancellor of the system. Rhee’s merits aside, Fenty found himself using much of his first week as reformer in chief defending his choice and the way he made it.
The school shift was the second such centralization of power in as many weeks. Just seven days earlier, the D.C. Council voted to dissolve two major development agencies and place their responsibilities under the aegis of the Mayor. The National Capital Revitalization Corporation and the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation had been responsible for millions of dollars in development deals in the heart of the city and along much of the city’s waterfront. Now, primary authority for those deals will stop at the Mayor’s desk.
The revitalization and reform work is, of course, in addition to Fenty’s normal responsibilities, his barnstorming schedule of public appearances, and other important initiatives like crime reduction and the work to get a voting rights bill through Congress. Clearly it’s more than one man can handle, which means that the Mayor must rely on his staff to pick up much of the load and to see through many of the ambitious changes he seeks.
Picture taken by charroonemiller.
