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September 4, 2007

A National Disgrace

Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington embraced a Herculean challenge when he convinced lawmakers to give him direct control of the city’s corrupt and dysfunctional school system. The mayor and his new schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, are working hard to reassure nervous parents and to get the schools up and running for the new year. But remaking the schools will inevitably mean dismantling a central bureaucracy that has shown a disturbing talent for subverting reform while failing the city and its children in every conceivable way.

Washington has long been infamous for having the worst performing big-city system in the country. But The Washington Post exposed the scope of the problem earlier this summer in an eye-opening series. According to The Post, the city ranks first in terms of the budget share devoted to administration and last in spending on teachers and instruction. The imbalance is particularly disturbing, given that the District’s children fair worse at school than children in other big cities.

Nor is the administrative money well spent. Tens of millions of dollars have been thrown away on aborted or poorly thought-out projects that have become a fact of life in the nation’s capital. The system, which has a $1 billion budget and more than 10,000 employees, has been relying on paper records kept in cardboard boxes instead of computerized files. As a result, it has fallen years behind in processing paperwork and doesn’t quite know how many employees it has or what they all do.

The Fenty administration is struggling now to computerize personnel records and hopes to have the job done soon. But other problems won’t be so easy to solve. The damage wrought by lax management and cronyism have already been considerable. Last month, a former school official pleaded guilty to stealing more than $200,000 through a shell company that she controlled. In total, she arranged about $650,000 in illegal payments and insider deals for herself and her friends. She did this so easily that it suggests an absence of the most basic auditing and management procedures.

In the past, superintendents who wanted to restructure the disastrously dysfunctional central office were hampered by laws that guarantee displaced administrators the right to keep their salaries even as they moved to lower level jobs in the schools. The City Council will need to eliminate those laws if Washington is ever to remake its schools.