Fenty’s Defeat Won’t Kill School Reform

With the defeat of D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, education reformers will need to find ways to bypass the teachers' unions in their effort to fix our public schools.

Adrian Fenty’s defeat in the Democratic primary for Washington, D.C. mayor not only ends his career, it has also set the stage for the exit of Michelle Rhee. Rhee is the reformist chancellor of the District of Columbia’s public schools who along with Fenty pushed for necessary — but sometimes unpopular — changes to the education system.  Rhee was most notable for her willingness to fire under-performing teachers.  But the defeat of one mayor willing to reform education will not end the reform movement around the country.

Teachers’ unions spent heavily to defeat Fenty. While teachers’ unions and defenders of the status-quo will be pleased when Rhee leaves, an unintended consequence may be that reformers and politicians around the nation start to believe that fixing traditional public education is a lost cause and instead focus their efforts on other measures that undercut the traditional education bureaucracy.

Public education reformers eager to bypass a confrontation with the teachers’ unions and government bureaucracies will most likely redirect their efforts to promoting charter schools.  Charter schools are public schools and so receive government funding, but they are exempt from the usual rules and regulations that districts impose on schools. In practice, this means that they get to operate without bureaucratic interference and they have a reputation for avoiding the problems that some other schools have by not being beholden to teachers’ unions.

Paul E. Peterson, the Editor-in-Chief of Education Next argues that even in Washington D.C, the charter school movement is very strong. Partly because parents are voting with their feet on where they send their children, “You’ve had declining enrollments in the D.C. public school system for a long time, Rhee tried to stop that.”

Since Rhee was, as Peterson describes her, “unique and unusual in her willingness to face union opposition openly and directly”, her impending fall might make policy makers re-address the wisdom of that strategy, especially when the option of supporting charter schools is largely a popular one with the public. A Gallup poll from 2009 showed that 64% of adults supported charter schools.

It’s clear to see why embracing new charter schools can be a more appealing alternative for politicians than trying to reform the existing public school structure. In Washington, chancellor Rhee’s ambitious reforms created animosity with the teachers’ unions and it’s possible that even parents who supported Rhee’s reforms were unhappy with the perception that she was disrupting their communities. While teachers’ unions tend to be hostile to charter schools as well, approving new schools seems less “disruptive” then firing inadequate teachers.

The irony, of course, is that Fenty may not have lost his election because of Rhee and her education reforms but because of how he campaigned. Michael J. Petrilli, a Vice-President at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, agreed that Fenty’s loss — wrongly — creates the impression that education reform is politically toxic.  “The message will be that education reform is suicide for politicians in an urban setting, and I just don’t think that is true.”  A new piece in the Washington Post reports that Fenty largely avoided developing a coherent political strategy to counter the attacks that his leadership style was “arrogant” and that this was his real problem. (The Washington City Paper’s endorsement of Fenty sarcastically called him "The Jerk D.C. Needs.")

The defeat of Fenty and possible loss of Rhee in Washington does not, of course, mean that reforming traditional public education is doomed in every city. Both Peterson and Petrilli cited the efforts of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and union leader Joe Klein in New York City as a positive example of where reform is occurring but without the confrontation that characterized Rhee’s tenure. (Though it should be noted that New York’s own charter schools are performing well.)

However, if Fenty’s defeat leaves the perception that reforming public education directly and challenging the teachers’ unions head-on is impossible, it’s likely that reformers may pay more attention to those solutions that bypass the educational bureaucracy all together.

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