Structural Failures
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
This week, I (carefully) picked up and began reading The Power Broker, the epic (and massive) Robert Caro biography of infamous New York master builder Robert Moses. Bob Moses, it turns out, was one of the best-trained civil service experts of the age when he first began working for the city. He was, as Caro describes him, a consummate idealist, passionately dedicated to the principles of meritocracy (even if it was to be a meritocracy of Ivy League men), transparency, and accountability. As a young man, his civil service principles got Moses run out of town by the Tammany machine. When he next entered city government, Moses made sure to bring authority with him, ultimately wrapping power around himself tightly enough to obscure the empire of public money and manpower he came to control. The results were controversial and often destructive: the displacement of half a million New Yorkers, the systematic starvation of mass transit in favor of highway construction, and the preservation of a black hole in the city’s public administrative machinery that still confounds New York mayors.
But his reign was not without its popular programs and successes, and his career has been favored by recent revisionism, much of it based on the idea that sometimes, great problems require the ability to cut through the morass of dysfunctional government structures. It’s a tempting notion and worth evaluating in the light of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s battle to save the District’s public schools.
This week, the Washington Post published a scathing series of stories examining the pathologies of a school system that has failed generations of District school children. Of course, the only thing more stunning than DCPS’ long and unblemished record of poor performance is its invulnerability to reform of any kind. District schools posts are where well meaning public service careers go to die, and no amount of frustration or public outcry has yet been able to dissipate the inertia of failure that hangs over the system.
Until, perhaps, now. Taking a page from New York’s playbook, Mayor Fenty ascended to the mayoralty promising the take control of the public schools himself, the better to force change through the most reticent of administrative structures. His campaign to take the system’s reins came to fruition this week, when the Mayor assumed control of DCPS and named Michelle Rhee Chancellor of the system. Rhee’s merits aside, Fenty found himself using much of his first week as reformer in chief defending his choice and the way he made it.
The school shift was the second such centralization of power in as many weeks. Just seven days earlier, the D.C. Council voted to dissolve two major development agencies and place their responsibilities under the aegis of the Mayor. The National Capital Revitalization Corporation and the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation had been responsible for millions of dollars in development deals in the heart of the city and along much of the city’s waterfront. Now, primary authority for those deals will stop at the Mayor’s desk.
The revitalization and reform work is, of course, in addition to Fenty’s normal responsibilities, his barnstorming schedule of public appearances, and other important initiatives like crime reduction and the work to get a voting rights bill through Congress. Clearly it’s more than one man can handle, which means that the Mayor must rely on his staff to pick up much of the load and to see through many of the ambitious changes he seeks.
Picture taken by charroonemiller.
A bit of personnel maneuvering this week threw a light on the Mayor’s strategy in staffing his important positions and maintaining focus as the decisions get farther from the top. For weeks, the Mayor has been chasing Allen Lew, chief executive of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission and a man who has developed a reputation for completing massive projects on time and on budget. Lew helped build the Washington Convention Center and has wowed observers by overseeing the construction of the new Nationals ballpark, a project which has moved forward at a blistering pace. This week, it was announced that Lew will helm the city’s billion dollar effort to modernize District schools. If anyone can bring those projects to completeness quickly and successfully, it’s thought, it’s Lew.
Certainly, Fenty is smart to focus talent where it’s needed most, but the strategy of finding administrators with a “sense of urgency,” as Dan Tangherlini puts it, quickly runs into difficulty. On the one hand, supremely talented men and women are unlikely to stay around long. Lew, and Rhee, and Tangherlini (and Fenty for that matter) will almost assuredly hold their posts for under a decade, and probably less than that. If reforms are dependent upon the individuals who hold leadership posts, then reform will be fleeting.
Worse still, administrations built on talented individuals must face the problem of talent scarcity. Allen Lew is prized because men of his abilities are rare, and because they are rare, the stadium project must lose out by his departure. Moreover, by spending time seeking the people who can cut through the bureaucratic mess of the city’s administrative bodies, the city neglects what might be a far more effective strategy: fixing the mess itself. Lew and his ilk are marvelous at dealing with the notorious paper pushers at the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. Rather than move him from priority to priority, hoping he can continue to soldier on against the DCRA tide, why not fix DCRA? Why not create government structures that work, processes that are transparent and understandable, and real government accountability?
Reading the Post stories on DCPS, it’s hard to miss that so much of what is wrong with the schools stems from administrative failures. There may be easy steps to take to fix problems in the classroom, but it’s nearly impossible to tell what those might be because personnel files go missing, purchase orders never arrive at their destination, work orders sit ignored for years, and woefully qualified city employees drift through the system, unfireable.
The road to a functional school system travels through the administration and not around it. If Rhee succeeds by circumventing public bodies her victory will be fragile and uncertain. If she succeeds by building a functional system, a system where files get where they’re supposed to go and schools know who they are employing and why, then the reform will be more enduring. But it’s far from clear that such a strategy is on Rhee’s radar or the Mayor’s. From what we know of her, Rhee seems to place an emphasis on employing and retaining only the most successful teachers. That’s important, but it only begins to scratch the surface of the deep administrative roadblocks that stand between students and responsive government.
Rather than shifting the best performers around within the system, Fenty should be studying the processes successful performers use in order to generalize them and teach them to others. It’s not enough to copy the broad strategies of successful mayors; the District needs to learn how other cities are able to address basic organizational and administrative problems. Forget how things are done at the top, in lots of city departments, things should begin on individual desks and computers. How are files kept, how do employees spend their time, who audits what documents, and what happens to those who fail repeatedly at their jobs?
Our public services need talented people, but ultimately, a working bureaucracy shouldn’t need stars to make it function, just competence. To the extent that Fenty’s centralization of authority is a way to sweep aside particularly resistant strains of dysfunction and start building processes from the ground up, then he’s on the right track. If he hopes to bring in the brightest of the bright to order change from the top down, to grab departments by their ears and drag them from task to task, then he’s destined to fail. In a few years, he’ll be gone and his people will be exhausted, and the system will reassert itself. It’s far less glamorous, but creating structures that are sensible and observable is the surest way to build something lasting.
A storyline of bungling bureaucrats versus heroic cutters of red tape is more compelling copy than that of the transparent bureaucracy that quietly went about its job. But those of us that live in this city no doubt wish that local newspaper exposés were less interesting. Slash through the detritus of unworkable institutions all you want, Mayor Fenty, but please, leave something functional and enduring, and profoundly boring, in your wake.