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FGHIJ Back to the books
an independent newspaper EDITORIALS
W The smooth opening of D.C. schools says a lot about improvements under Mayor Fenty.
HAT IS remarkable about the opening of D.C. schools is how un- remarkable it was. Schools were ready, teachers were in place and parents knew what to expect be-
cause of the system’s herculean efforts to share information. True, there were some textbooks still on back order, but in those rare instances, officials copied and distributed beginning chap- ters so students wouldn’t lose a step. Monday’s smooth opening contrasts with the days not so long ago when going back to school meant con- fusion and chaos for D.C. students. It should give pause to those who would belittle Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s accomplishments as he seeks to re- form the city’s public schools.
Of course, the success of a school system is based on much more than the system’s ability to stock paper supplies or keep its classrooms clean; what matters is how well it educates its students. But the historic inability of D.C. schools to perform even the most basic tasks was
Holding Pepco
accountable Better service means regulation — and more openness.
N THE WAKE of recent storms, more than 300,000 Pepco customers in Maryland experi- enced power outages, some spending days without power. After the thunderstorms came a storm of complaints, provoking hearings, re- form proposals and statements from everyone from the governor to the Maryland Public Service Commission. Pepco cannot be held accountable for extreme
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weather, and it may be true, as the utility has said, that it is not possible to restore power to nearly half a million people in 24 hours. Even so, the numbers are grim. Pepco ranks in the bottom 25 percent of utility companies, based on criteria that measure day-to-day reliability. Although company officials say that the frequent disrup- tions indicate that the system is working well — power shuts off if lines are hit by unknown objects and does not switch back on until they are cleared — the disruptions are also the result of an aging infrastructure frequently overburdened in an era when so many devices need to be plugged in. Demands on Pepco’s energy delivery system are
not likely to decrease. The company, working with its customers, must do more to ensure that service remains at acceptable levels. Stepping up regulation is one answer. Given
Pepco’s monopoly status within its region, it should be held to reasonable standards of per- formance. Proposed legislation would set more stringent standards and create a mechanism to hold Pepco accountable, requiring additional re- porting and imposing a penalty in the event serv- ice falls below a minimum standard. Perhaps Pep- co will take such accountability-building steps on its own. But any such measures must acknowl- edge the cost of improving service and determine ways of paying for it.
JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST James Moore, working for a Pepco contractor, removes debris from power lines in Rock Creek Park.
Pepco’s recently announced six-point plan will resolve some day-to-day issues. Improved technol- ogy, including smart meters, for which Pepco has already received federal funds, will help confine power losses to a smaller area. But Pepco’s plan will not be fully implemented until 2015. Pepco estimates that approximately 90 percent of the disruptions in the most recent storm were caused by branches falling from trees, and says that that 75 percent of these trees were privately owned. Tree owners must be willing to work with Pepco, either agreeing to sensible pruning or con- tributing to the cost of placing lines out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, placing lines underground — and thus out of the way of trees and wind — can cost
anywhere from $3.5 million to $11 million per mile. Because economic activity can be derailed by outages, some customers may be willing to pay more for upgrades in quality of service. Transpar- ency and communication will be essential for Pep- co and its customers to determine what level of service meets demands without unreasonably burdening ratepayers.
Tom Toles is away.
The incredible inedible egg Salmonella puts eggs on a long list of tainted foods.
administration. The new monitoring and safety requirements didn’t go into effect until last month. That was too late to possibly prevent the more than 1,200 cases of the illness, in at least 22 states, that have been reported since May. No deaths have been reported. But this latest out- break highlights once again that efforts to sew up the holes in the country’s food safety net have gone nowhere for more than a year. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg called it an “unfortunate irony” that the egg regulations became enforceable after the current outbreak was well underway. FDA investigators have zeroed in on two facilities in Iowa. Wright County Egg, owned by the DeCoster family, recalled 380
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ALMONELLA enteritidis is a food-borne ill- ness so common that the Food and Drug Administration moved last year to enact rules first proposed during the Bill Clinton
million eggs last week. Then, last Friday, Hillan- dale Farms, which has ties to the same family, re- called more than 170 million eggs that had been shipped to 14 states. The two companies shared the same supplier for young chickens and feed. And as The Post reported Sunday, the DeCoster family has a record of health, safety, labor and other violations that go back 20 years. The new egg rules now apply to the two Iowa companies and other egg producers with 50,000 or more laying hens. Those facilities that do not pasteurize their eggs must create pest and rodent control measures to prevent the spread of salmo- nella by people and equipment. They also must write and maintain a salmonella enteritidis pre- vention plan and document their compliance. Tests for the bacteria must be conducted in the chicken house. Positive results would require the operator to conduct more tests over an eight-week
period. If there are further positive results, the eggs would have to be treated to destroy the bac- teria or shifted to nonfood uses. The hatchery would have to be cleaned and disinfected. If there’s a silver lining in the massive recall, it
is that this latest outbreak of food-borne illness (remember peanuts, peppers, tomatoes, spinach, etc.) appears to have sparked action in the Senate, where comprehensive food-safety legislation has languished since July 2009. The bill would give the FDA the power to initiate a mandatory recall of contaminated products. And it would set up systems to trace food from farm to fork, thus mak- ing it easier and faster to pinpoint sources of con- tamination. A vote by the full Senate is expected as soon as it returns Sept. 13. In the meantime, go to
www.foodsafety.org to find out which brands of eggs are affected and what you can do to protect yourself.
Pepco’s management, not its infrastructure, needs revamping LOCAL OPINIONS
3Join the debate at
washingtonpost.com/localopinions Regarding the Aug. 21 Metro article “Md. offi-
cials skeptical as Pepco outlines plan on power outages”: I have been a Pepco customer for 38 years. For the past 32 years, I have lived a short distance from MacArthur Boulevard. Pepco’s lines are underground in my immediate neighborhood, but that has not prevented frequent power outag- es. Going three days without electricity is not un- common. The reason lies largely in Pepco’s failure to maintain its lines. A drive along MacArthur Boulevard from the District line to Falls Road will quickly reveal why we lose power so often. Not all the aboveground lines along MacArthur are Pep- co’s, but many are. All of them are overgrown with tree limbs, wild grapevines and other vegetation. The lines have looked like this the entire time I
have lived in this area. Most are on a public right- of-way. Obviously, they are not inspected or main- tained regularly. If Pepco does not inspect and maintain what it has now, I can’t believe that it will do any better at maintaining updated equip- ment. It seems to me that management of Pepco is what needs to be updated. R.H. DOGGETT, Bethesda
Recently my community of Sumner Village had
our fifth power outage in as many weeks. It used to be said of the highly inefficient Soviet agricul- tural sector that it had four problems: fall, winter, spring and summer. Could one say that Pepco also has only four problems: snow, rain, wind and sun?
BAHRAMNOWZAD, Bethesda ABCDE
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symptomatic of the dysfunction that made the system a national disgrace, with the vast major- ity of its students unable to read on grade level or do basic math.
And the improvements in basic school opera- tions since Mr. Fenty became mayor have been accompanied by encouraging progress in the areas that matter the most: student achieve- ment, student enrollment and graduation rates. There also has been success in shrinking the achievement gap between white and minority students between 2007 and 2010 on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System. African American students in particular had success in closing the gap, with the most significant gains on the secondary level. There is no question, as critics of Mr. Fenty are
likely to point out as the Sept. 14 primary draws closer, that monumental problems remain. You will get no quarrel about that from either Mr. Fenty or Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who cite the continuing challenges as reason for
their bold changes and urgent timetable. It is ap- palling that less than half of the system’s African American and Hispanic students, on both the el- ementary and secondary level, are proficient in math or reading. That, though, is not Mr. Fenty’s fault but the result of decades of neglect and in- difference by a progression of city officials too timid to take on the hard job of school reform. It is to Mr. Fenty’s credit — and a major reason for our endorsement of him over D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray — that he was willing to take on a task shunned by his predecessors. A report set for release Tuesday by the Thomas Fordham Institute on cities conducive to school reform credits him as a leader “willing to expend political capital to advance education reform.” The District is ranked No. 2 in the nation, behind New Orleans, for an environment healthy to school reform. We hope voters take for granted neither the hard-won achievements nor the commitment needed to continue moving for- ward.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2010
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
dletters@washpost.com
Muddling the Mideast picture
Regarding George F. Will’s Aug. 19 op-ed column, “Skip the lecture on Israel’s ‘risks for peace’ ”: Mr. Will began by enumerating the number of Is-
raelis killed during the second intifada, while ignor- ing the far greater number of Palestinians killed dur- ing the same period. Rewriting history, including the talks at Camp David in 2000, Mr. Will claimed that Israel captured the occupied territories “in the proc- ess of repelling the 1967 aggression.” In fact, it was Is- rael that initiated the 1967 war, not the Arab states. But the most egregious of Mr. Will’s many mislead-
ing statements was that the “creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state.” While technically correct — there was no Palestinian state prior to the creation of Israel in 1948 — it is breathtaking in its intellectual dishonesty. A Pales- tinian “state” may not have been destroyed, but more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were systematically expelled and more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages wiped off the face of the earth. Today we call this “ethnic cleansing.” Mr. Will concluded that “patronizing American
lectures” about peace are “obscene.” The real obscen- ity is Mr. Will’s astonishing ignorance of history and his callous disregard for the suffering of millions of human beings.
AMAL JADOU, Washington
The writer is deputy chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s general delegation to the United States.
In his Aug. 19 column, George F. Will lent far more credibility to the British-instituted Peel Commis- sion’s recommendation for a partition of Palestine than it deserved. By doing so, he perpetuated long- discredited myths about how the seeming incompat- ibility of national ideals makes partition an inevita- bility. It would be instructive for Mr. Will to study the effects of another British-facilitated partition that did not involve Arabs: the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. What was supposed to be a “surgical operation” of the kind the Peel Commission would have approved led to one of the worst phases of violence in human history. The echoes of that par- tition are still being heard loud and clear in the re- gion. Mr. Will is entitled to complain about the world’s
forgetting of the “intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.” But his casual discussion of partition comes at the cost of ignoring those very histories.
NINAD R. BONDRE, Stockholm Dr. Laura’s First Amendment rights
Regardless of what anyone believes about radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger and the remarks that led to her resignation, can we at least agree that it is not a constitutional issue? In the news story “Palin tells embattled Dr. Laura:
‘Don’t retreat . . . reload,’ ” former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was quoted as tweeting something to the effect that activists were taking away Ms. Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights. Two days later, Kathleen Parker wrote an op-ed, “Cut Dr. Lau- ra some slack,” defending Ms. Schlessinger and not- ing that the radio host was leaving her program to “reclaim her First Amendment rights.” While the text of the Bill of Rights says, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” it does not say you can say whatever you want in a public forum with no consequences. There is noth- ing in the amendment that prohibits individuals or groups from protesting, boycotting or putting eco- nomic pressure on those who say things they find of- fensive. If what you say makes you poison to sponsors, then market forces have earned you the right to speak freely to a much smaller audience. BEAUOBETTS, Annandale
The Post reported that on Aug. 13, President Oba- ma decided to wade into the controversy about a planned mosque near New York’s Ground Zero by saying that “Muslims have the right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.” The very next day he backed away from his remarks, saying, “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.” On Aug. 10, Laura Schlessinger used a racial slur on her radio program to make a point about some- thing and the outcry was similar to the mosque con- troversy. I am waiting for the president to wade into this issue as well, perhaps by saying that “Dr. Laura has the right to practice free speech as everyone else in this country.” Then, the very next day, he could say, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment on the wisdom of what she said.” DONALDROTUNDA, Washington
Standardized tests and the status quo
John D. Podesta’s Aug. 20 Washington Forum commentary, “How Obama got it right on school re- form,” proclaimed the importance of disrupting the status quo and praised the Obama administration’s policies of evaluating students’ progress via ever more high-stakes standardized testing. The status quo has consisted of high-stakes stan- dardized testing for a generation now, with devas- tating results. This invasion of our public schools has lined the pockets of the few and has demeaned, undermined and oppressed our youth and their classroom professionals. Mr. Podesta employed the analogy of children be- ing tested to the testing of seafood exposed to the toxins in the aftermath of the gulf oil spill. Children are not seafood and are not akin to shrimp from the gulf — except perhaps in one regard. Toxins in the gulf can be roughly equated with the poisons of pov- erty. Poverty saddles our children with all kinds of toxins — lead in the water, unstable families, the struggle for survival. These toxins are best ad- dressed not with additional oppressions — such as standardized tests — but with living wages. Absolutely, let’s disrupt the status quo. Let’s con- sider a living wage as an antidote. DON PERL, Greeley, Colo.
The writer is president of the Coalition for Better Education.
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