President of the Board of Education Robert Bobb blasted the ongoing debate about Mayor Adrian Fenty’s proposed schools takeover plan as debilitating to the District’s reform efforts in a Friday afternoon address to a conference of education experts from around the country.

While he would fully implement any plan approved by the D.C. Council, Bobb said, the city must work harder to reach consensus.

“We have to put aside the issue of who’s in charge of the school system and remember parents and students are in charge,” he said at the conference held by the University of California Washington Center. “We want to be able to demonstrate we can have a good public discourse.”

Bobb also criticized the mayor’s plan as lacking clear benchmarks and as omitting strategies to increase parental involvement in their children’s education.

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“What I would want for the mayor’s plan are goals,” he said. “Neither plans have real strong strategies for engaging parents.”

Professors and education officials from across the country, however, raised examples from their cities of how mayoral control has benefited their school systems and helped attract outside investment.

“In the case of Boston, on balance a mayoral controlled system has worked,” said John Portz, a professor of political science and education at Northeastern University. “The business community was much more receptive to the appointment structure [that comes with mayoral control] because they know the accountability is there.”

Bobb also proposed a wide-sweeping reading-immersion program and increased pre- and postnatal care to reinforce early aptitude development.

“We need strong reading enrichment programs,” he said. “There should be no child coming out of kindergarten or first grade who isn’t reading at a third-grade level.”