Notes on Washington DC's School Climate

Marc Fisher:

Somehow, when good, bright people get serious about the fact that thousands of children emerge from this city's schools year after year without knowing how to read well enough to get a decent job, those good people end up busying themselves with little boxes on a piece of paper.

Both say the schools alone can't make the fix; the city must intercede in the lives of dysfunctional families before children are born. Both agree the District has to knock down the walls that separate the agencies that deal with family pathologies -- agencies focused on prenatal care, child abuse, substance problems, street crime, absentee parents, unemployment, adult illiteracy, and on and on must finally coordinate how myriad arms of the city deal with a single child.

Both Reinoso and Bobb can and do catalogue the failures of the school board, the impossibility of getting stuff done in the labyrinth of the school bureaucracy and the fact that there is precious little reason for parents to send their kids to D.C. schools if they have any choice.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 2, 2007 6:02 AM
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