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Fenty loss worries education reformers

By: Kendra Marr

Mayor Adrian Fenty staked his career on overhauling the District of Columbia’s education system with Obama-style reforms — closing dozens of failing schools and firing hundreds of teachers.

Then the teachers struck back.

Fenty’s defeat this week — due in no small part to community and teachers union resistance to his education push — is emerging as a cautionary tale for education reformers, who fear that it could cause others to back away from aggressive reform programs swept into the mainstream by President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top.”

His downfall, observers fret, serves notice to officeholders coast to coast that they could suffer Fenty’s fate if they embark on that ambitious brand of school reform championed by Fenty and his controversial schools chief Michelle Rhee.

“This is a real wake-up call for the Obama administration,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who studies teachers unions. “The emphasis on firing teachers which was central to Rhee’s approach — she stood in a picture on the cover of Time magazine with a broom. That doesn’t seem to resonate with voters.”

Fenty wasn’t the only one to draw the teachers’ ire this week. In three New York state races Tuesday night, the teachers union and its allies helped beat back challengers who supported charter schools and other reform measures.

And now, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Roy Barnes — who made a name as an education reformer as his first go-around as the state’s governor — is apologizing to the teachers union that kicked him to the curb in 2002. As governor of the state, Barnes had pushed through a controversial package of reforms, including annual student testing and linking teacher pay to performance.

To be sure, a variety of local factors contributed to Fenty’s defeat, but by far his most high-profile initiative — and the one that drew the most fire — was school reform.

Rhee’s reforms closely mirrored those pushed by Obama’s “Race to the Top” sweepstakes to encourage more teacher accountability and tougher standards. Though she landed in Washington in 2007, Rhee set to work reorganizing the central office. She negotiated an innovative new contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union containing initiatives historically spurned by teachers. Rhee fired staff for poor performance, even dismissing her daughters’ principal. Fenty was supportive and approved the firing of several hundred teachers in the middle of his primary campaign.

But even some Fenty backers acknowledge he and Rhee didn’t always handle the reforms well, putting through wrenching changes in the schools without enough community buy-in, and giving critics plenty of ammunition to say they took a high-handed approach to an issue dear — and deeply emotional — to many parents.

And that’s where the American Federation of Teachers came in. The national union spent roughly $1 million in contributions to a labor-backed independent expenditure campaign — also supported by the public workers union AFSCME — and on its own extensive political operation, a Democratic political consultant familiar with the details of the spending told POLITICO.

The national union declined to comment. George Parker, president of AFT’s local Washington Teachers’ Union, said it’s “no secret” that Fenty wasn’t a friend of unions.

“The message is that you cannot omit and exclude parents, teachers and communities in terms of developing an education reform platform,” he said. “It is a referendum on the kind of leadership the city wants. The mayor’s style — un-collaborative and un-transparent — had as much to do with the election as education itself.”

Teachers unions, and AFT, in particular, haven’t been shy about expressing their resistance to the Obama-style reforms, saying they unfairly punish teachers and cause much broader problems in the education system. The Fenty vote shows that the unions can do something about it, beyond just complain, and serves as an important bit of electoral muscle-flexing for the AFT, Kahlenberg said.

“This is big and highly symbolic for the teachers unions,” said Kahlenberg.

But now that Fenty is out, reformers worry that it will be harder to make such reforms stick elsewhere. Justin Cohen, who previously worked for Rhee and now runs a school-turnaround nonprofit, asked, “How do you make, in a politically charged environment, real change sustainable?”

Emily Cohen, district policy director for the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group, fretted that Rhee’s departure might deprive reformers of proof that shaking up the system works.

“Without more time, we just won’t really know,” she said. “We won’t have enough evidence to show these are making things better for students.”

But there’s a different message out of the Fenty vote — that it’s time to rethink the Fenty and Rhee approach, of uncompromising standards no matter what the community thinks, said Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy.

“It should give reformers pause in that they should think about whether their reforms will be accepted enough to last,” he said. “There’s no sense in rushing through reforms if they’re going to be washed away.”

Others point to the results. In three years, D.C. was the only major city to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in 7th, 8th and 10th grade.

A recent report ranked Washington among the best cities for school reform. “Survey respondents report that Mayor Adrian Fenty is the only municipal leader willing to expend extensive political capital to advance education reform,” wrote Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

AFT President Randi Weingarten played a key role in negotiating a new contract with Rhee and Parker that increased teacher salaries and weakened the jobs-for-life protection of tenure. And unionized educators have vowed to carry out the agreement, which was ratified by District teachers in June after nearly 2½ years of contentious negotiations.

“Look, the union knows we have to improve our schools,” Parker said. “We have a contract that is about education reform. It doesn’t matter who the mayor is. The Washington Teachers’ Union is committed to that contract.”

Others vow to push ahead as well. Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said D.C.’s election result is “not going to stymie reform efforts around the country.”

“This certainly didn’t help reform, but the same challenges that existed for ambitious education reform existed on Monday existed on Wednesday too,” said Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and partner of Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to advance education for low-income students.