Jobs versus schools: it's complicated.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Brief article

In January of 1979, Marion Berry was about to take office for his first term as mayor of Washington. A mutual friend mistakenly thought we might hit it off and brought us together for lunch. He asked me what I thought was Washington's number one problem. I said, "The public schools," which were already deteriorating rapidly. He looked at me incredulously. Jobs, he said, were the city's pressing need. It wasn't that one of us was right and the other wrong. The city did need better schools if its children, the majority of whom were black, were to have a better chance in life. But their parents had to have the ability to make a stable home for them so that they could learn. So at least one parent, and often both, needed a job.

What happened in the recent D.C. election was a collision of these two interests. The black middle class that consisted mainly of the...