Compromise Plan For D.C. Governance Stalls

By Catherine Gewertz

After weeks of wrangling over how to structure the District of Columbia's school governance, a series of 11th-hour disapprovals and dashed agreements left frustrated city officials little closer last week to rebuilding their school board than they were when the effort began.

The City Council and Mayor Anthony A. Williams had spent many hours in sometimes tense negotiation to come up with a plan for a hybrid board of elected and appointed members.

But that fragile consensus collapsed at the last minute, and the council scrapped the compromise and decided to let Washington voters choose between the mayor's plan, which would allow him to name all the board members, and the council's plan for...