Go Home Already: Shouts and Murmurs
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Judge Throws Out WTU Suit Over Teacher Layoffs
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.
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I firmly believe that the black hole known as DCRA is the "secure, undisclosed location" where Dick Cheney stays while the sun is out.
What DCRA needs is a complete top-to-bottom overhaul. Unfortunately, it tends to eat and then spit out its directors (hence why we are on our second interim DCRA director in less than 6 months). There is a good deal of basic incompetence at DCRA (basic job requirements for hiring during the Barry era: Do you know someone who knows Barry? Do you have a pulse? You're hired!). But there is also a ridiculous lack of basic technology (files get lost b/c no one remembers who's office the files now reside in; there is no centralized and useful computer tracking system). And there are lots of employees who check in at 9, check out at 5, and that's about it.
My suggestion for DCRA is breaking it into semi-autonomous agencies within the agency. DCRA does all sorts of stuff, mainly b/c previous mayors and councilmembers just tossed new requirements into DCRA b/c they didn't know where else to put them. If you break it apart, it's easier to fix b/c you're not dealing with as bloated an agency anymore.
And I'm reading Caro's book on Bob Moses, too! It'll take me most of the summer to read, but it's a heck of a book. Caro totally hooked me with his LBJ bios. Can't wait for the next in that series to be released.
Fenty has bit off more than he can chew. So far all he has accomplished is to usurp property owners rights and rip money from the hands of low paid hospitality workers through his smoking ban. That is all he has accomplished and it is a big negative. Tourism is down, tips are down, hotel bookings are down, restaurant and bar receipts are down. Great progress there! He thinks he now will be a development expert? Jeez Louise! He has appointed a woman now to run a run down failure of a school system who has no experience whatsoever in management of this magnitude or the sordid politics of this city. In the old days we were in fear of 9/11 and now this fool Fenty walks in and self distructs the entire city in three press releases. And the fun has just begun.
If Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace taught us anything, its that bureaucracies exist for the sole purpose of being manipulated by the Dark Side. I'm not saying Rhee is a Sith lord, but do we really want to take that chance? And allow me to channel Ross Perot for a moment when I say (high-pitched whine) I find it fascinatin' that liberals and conservatives both adore the "great man" theory of history. History is just the plaything of the Robert Moses and Napleons and Hitlers of the world, instead of being at the mercy of whole populations of evil bureaucrats like...ourselves?
Hitler didn't make the trains run on time. That was the Gestapo and the petty bureaucrats filing death sentences in triplicate with a smile and a curtsey. I've lost track of how many education czars we've had at DCPS, but they've all gone the way of every drug czar we've ever had: spend billions, declare victory, get a juicy consulting job somewhere, problem remains for the next poor slob to get rich off.
The fish stinks from the head down. At a certain point, you have to admit that all you've got is a dead fish and there's no point in spending billions to resuscitate it or send it on factfinding missions to Paris to see how the other dead fish teach their students how to be unique, precious, and stinky snowflakes. Is that throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Sure is, because when the baby's been floating around dead in a galvanized bucket for thirty years, your best bet is to call the police to the crimescene and have the "guardians" arrested for neglect. And while you're at it, find out where those billions of dollars of child support went.
ANd continuing on the DCRA issue, the Examiner brings word this morning that Bill Crews, the zoning chieftain at DCRA, has been canned by the interim agency director. That's pretty big news. Crews was super-duper powerful.
And today DCRA is unveiling its new permitting center. It's supposedly fancy-shmancy. We'll see how long it works.
That's some nice timing on the DCRA news.
So monkey, are you saying you agree with me? Or that we should get rid of the entire government? Somewhere along the line, I lost track of your metaphors.
I liked Crews as the ZA very much.
DCPS's problems started a long time ago and the track record of superintendents is just as long and just as pointless. I don't think yet another superintendent is going to change much of anything. More power to her if she thinks she can pull something, anything off. But to use your Robert Moses issue, he changed the landscape of New York and not all for the better, as anyone who's been stuck in traffic around NYC can tell you.
It's all well and good to talk in lofty terms about cutting red tape and demanding accountability, but I'd make the case that the basic premise of DCPS (locking kids up for 8 hours and talking down to them about crap they don't even need to know) is fundametally flawed. Decades of patronizing flavor-of-the-week educational "theory" has done little but create a vast underclass of functionally illiterate people with no job skills. What do these kids want to learn? What do employers want from them? Why are we spending the most per pupil yet getting the lowest scores of any district in the nation? Why aren't these questions being asked, and who do we have to beat to get an answer?
DCPS Admin is a fossilized relic from a top-down management era. Everywhere you look, organizations are becoming more decentralized, with authority delegated to autonomous working groups. Yet DCPS remains this black slab monolith where a teacher can't even get a goddamned pencil without filling out forms in triplicate that get lost for months. They spent millions on a pay system that never worked, so they had to go back to hard-copy filing that adds weeks to work. They can't even give you a straight answer as to how many students or teachers they have in the system. If they can't do something as basic as that, central admin needs to be dismembered, scattered to the four winds, and their funding distributed at the school level.
Nice try with the "why don't we just get rid of government" canard. You're talking to the guy who lost his faith in nihilism, so I got about as much use for anarchy as I do for a box of used erotica.
I didn't necessarily think you wanted to scrap everything, monkey, but you were talking about throwing out babies and bathwater and the fish in the bathwater, and I was wondering what you'd keep.
I'm not sure that breaking everything up into smaller parts is the answer. It might be, but it could also be the case that you'd then have lots of little dysfunctional groups instead of one big dysfunctional monolith. The keys are accountability and transparency, and in many ways having many small administrative structures would undermine those principles.
Part of the problem is that systems are too broken to actually observe what's really, fundamentally wrong. I think it's hard to ask questions about curriculum when the schools don't know who they're employing or where the order for textbooks went. One thing at a time. We should begin by setting up functional filing and accounting systems, training people to use them, and firing anyone who won't learn it and use it. Then we can move on to fixing the personnel processes, and then maybe we can address the weaknesses in what's taught and how. Baby steps.
But DCPS has ALREADY spent tens of millions on payroll, filing, and tracking systems that had to be scrapped because their contractors delivered bloated software that didn't work. Central admin handles almost everything exclusively by hard copy. And it's already impossible to fire anyone in DCPS, you can only promote them from out of your department. That's why you end up with senior level management that's so woefully incompetent: the only way to limit damage is to let them "work" a 20 hour week.
Williams tried to gut the DCPS bureaucracy in his first term. He made everyone re-apply for their position, and offered contract buyouts for the most inept employees. It accomplished little if anything. Having all the idiots under one roof doesn't seem to do much except improve their ability to do stupid things on A GRAND SCALE.
The school board accomplishes nothing but infighting and stagnation. DCPS admin exists for the sole purpose of witholding budget money within their petty feifdoms. Union laws prohibit firing anybody; the arbitration procedures can go on for years. The only hope for the schools is to disperse money from central admin directly into the hands of principals and make them accountable to the Mayor's office. I'd rather have the money go SOMEWHERE than know it's being circle-jerked somewhere downtown, even though some of that money might be misspent. We already know central admin is wasting money, at least the principals should get a chance to waste it at the neighborhood level, instead of having the Deputy Assistant Secretary to the Assistant Deputy Director of Esteem Programs blow it on a fact-finding junket to Bermuda.
Centralized school systems can work reasonably well, but the unionized administrative staff really needs to be gutted. Chicago, for decades had what was by general acclaim the worst public-school system in the country (worse than DC's!), has seen some promising results from Da Mare's takeover of the whole school system.
I realize the cities are vastly different, as Chicago has far more financial resources and a huge base of local businesses that have been very active in working on social issues in the city for 150ish years. But I don't see why DC can't see improvements from Fenty's school takeover, as long as structural changes are made.
I do agree with monkey, though, that the ossified administration needs to be vaporized. Daley's had some success doing that in Chicago, and also taking on the teachers' union, and that really is a requirement. These unions are far more interested in keeping their own members fat and happy than in doing anything useful for the kids.
I've met quite a few DC school teachers and I can safely say that none of them are fat OR happy. Particularly with the Gwen Hemphills of the world blowing their union dues on plasma teevees and vacations. Turnover is pretty ridiculous and the primary culprit is their inability to get even minimal support from central admin. It's sort of a running joke that the DC teachers union would protest a pay raise for their members just based on their sheer contrariness and dedication to the status quo, although at this point nobody's laughing.