Our incumbent Mayor in Washington, DC, Adrian Fenty, is in my opinion a pretty good mayor. He’s trying to reform the city’s long-screwed-up public school system and rework its transportation outlook while holding the line on crime. But there are certainly problems with his tenure. This starts with some allegations of corruption/cronyism that deserve a hard look, but continues into the policy arena. So given that our city council chairman has been itching to get into the race against Fenty, I’ve been hoping he’ll level a rigorous critique of Fenty’s record and maybe offer something better. But the Vince Gray for mayor kickoff has been strikingly vacuous. As Sommer Mathis reports:

Back at the Reeves Center, the most Gray offered about his mayoral platform was boilerplate material.

“I absolutely love this city,” Gray said. “But the reality is, we can do better.”

Jason Goodman, an HVAC mechanic from Ward 8, came out to support Gray, but not necessarily because of anything Gray has said he stands for.

“I am just so soured toward Fenty right now,” Goodman said. “I think he’s been making a lot of decisions behind closed doors. I think the city needs a change.”

I think you have to be suspicious in municipal politics when you hear people offering a lot of process criticisms of a reform mayor. The fact of the matter is that if you take a city like Washington that’s been known for years for public services that don’t perform well, and then you try to improve those public services, you’re going to make some people mad. Under the circumstances, complaints about Fenty’s style—complaints that seem to be the center of Gray’s campaign—seem to me a lot like complaints that President Obama is “moving too fast” or trying to “do too much.” In other words, they’re excuses for the fact that you just don’t want to see change.

Under Fenty, crime has gone down a bit and school test scores have gone up a bit. New businesses have continued to open despite the recession, and the city has added people. It’s a decent record to run on, and if you’re going to beat it you need to explain to me what it is you’re going to do to increase the pace of improvements not just complain that some toes have been stepped on.

Kevin Carey has a good post on the basic pointlessness of the DC school vouchers debate:

That said, there’s a strong element of artifice to this whole debate. The DC voucher program does not represent serious public policy. It was a P.R. move, a bone thrown by the previous administration to the privatization crowd it marginalized by supporting NCLB. The voucher dream (setting aside the obvious anti-labor agenda for the moment) has always been to introduce market dynamics to public education–to create new competition and provide incentives for innovators and entrepreneurs to bring energy and resources to the enterprise of educating students.

The DC voucher program does none of these things. No new schools have been built as a result, no groundbreaking programs created, competition spurred, or innovators attracted. It’s basically just an exercise in seeing what happens when you take a couple thousand students out of pretty bad schools and put them in a range of other schools that are, collectively, somewhat better. Answer: some of the students may be doing somewhat better! I think we already knew this.

Kevin notes that the real action in terms of choice and innovation in the DC school universe is happening through our large and growing public charter school sector. That’s correct. I would also note that during the voucher era, the number of private schools serving low-income children has actually declined as some private schools have converted themselves into charter schools. The other thing happening in DC, of course, is Mayor Fenty and Schools Chancellor Rhee’s continuing efforts to get the Washington Teacher’s Union to agree to a new collective bargaining agreement that will let the most effective teachers earn more money than they currently do, while making it easier to fire bad teachers.

Neither Rhee nor Fenty are exactly pawns of the union, but neither of them are investing tons of time and energy in the voucher fight. It’s symbolically important for folks on the right who enjoy acting like know-it-alls while, in fact, knowing nothing about education policy. But in terms of the future of DC schoolchildren, it’s just a distraction. If you want to pressure politicians to do something the union doesn’t like, press them to support the Fenty administration’s position in the collective bargaining agreement fight.

I have to say, this kind of thing does a lot more to make me think less of the Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO than it does to make me think less of DC Mayor Adrian Fenty. The crux of the matter here is that Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee have offered DC teachers a very generous proposal that will create an option for teachers to move onto a career track that features more money in exchange for less job security. The Washington Teachers Union is opposing this for reasons that mostly seem to amount to paranoia, since the policy merits aside it’s hard to see how this proposal would make any of their members any worse off. The WTU leadership is going to do what it’s going to do, I guess, but the rest of organized labor would do well to steer clear of this particular spat rather than taking it up as an opportunity to paint Fenty and other proponents of the proposal as somehow anti-labor — I think most unions would be glad to be getting offers of large pay increases from management.

This comes via Ryan Avent. It’s worth considering that DC is, at this point, in better financial shape than the vast majority of American localities and also has much worse schools. Under the circumstances, it’s the best possible opportunity for teachers to get what Rhee’s putting on the table — generous reform that puts real resources on the table and thereby keeps teaching as an attractive career path even while building some additional accountability into the deal.