D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee plans to ask the D.C. Council to suspend personnel laws to give her the authority to terminate several hundred DCPS employees she plans to fire without having to reassign them to other jobs. A story on the front page of today’s Washington Post indicates at least some Council members may be skeptical of Rhee’s plan, which reportedly includes adding new upper-level managers while at the same time downsizing the central administration by 30 to 40 percent. The story rather oddly quotes an anonymous Council member who called the potential firings a “TNT issue” that could be met with skepticism by the Council.
Currently, DCPS central office employees have the contractual right to be placed in a lower-ranking position after being relieved of their duties while maintaining their current salary. These contractual obligations are the very thing that have prevented previous superintendents from significantly restructuring the school district’s administration, even though serious restructuring is always cited as the first thing that needs to be done to fix D.C. Schools.
The power to fire is exactly the kind of authority the Chancellor should have under the mayoral takeover of D.C. Schools, and any Council member who feeds anonymous quotes like this to a Washington Post reporter should really think again. While acting as the gatekeepers of Mayor Fenty’s big plans is to be expected of this Council, standing in the way of meaningful reform — which absolutely must include firing redundant and ineffective employees — is irresponsible and frankly, fairly dumb. As Sara Mead noted on this site on Monday, we’ve been through the early stages of a new head of DCPS who was expected to lead a wave of radical change and didn’t deliver many times before. Should members of the D.C. Council begin actively preventing the new Chancellor from being able to make big changes at the central office, you can be sure voters, who swept in Mayor Fenty by a huge majority last fall thanks in large part to his promise to radically reform our failing schools, will remember.
