Tilting at Windmills - News Briefs

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2000 by Charles Peters

I LOVED THIS ITEM FROM THE St. Petersburg Times: "It was 1:28 a.m. Friday, hours after the nation learned that Texas Gov. George W. Bush pleaded guilty to drunken driving in 1976, when an urgent e-mail arrived at Channel 6 in South Florida.

`Pull the Crist campaign ad immediately,' the email requested. Charlie Crist of St. Petersburg, Republican candidate for Florida education commissioner, had been attacking Democratic opponent George Sheldon for a drunken driving arrest 16 years ago."

THE RECENT TROUBLE OF ONCE-MIGHTY AT&T illustrates an important fact of organizational life. If its leaders don't continually try to make it better, an organization is likely to get worse. This happens in government as well as in the corporate world. During the '30s, the Tennessee Valley Authority was a model government agency providing affordable power for millions of people in the South. By the 1960s, it had lost its sense of mission and became a major polluter.

But the reverse of this is true as well. Inept organizations can become models of efficiency. FEMA, terrible under George Bush, was vastly improved under James Lee Witt during the Clinton-Gore administration. Similarly, an organization that has gone from greatness to mediocrity can rise again. That's just what happened at IBM.

The lesson is that the owners have to pay attention to what's going on. If it's a public organization, that means the public has to pay attention--all of which is a long way of explaining why I'm so concerned about getting better journalism about government agencies. If reporters don't tell the public what is going on, how can the public know what's going right, what's going wrong, and what needs improving?

Here's a tiny example of the kind of thing the public needs to know. The District of Columbia has a lot of trees. Six thousand to 7,000 of them are dead, damaged, or diseased and need removing. Twenty thousand need pruning. So the District government just let seven of the city's 14 tree trimmers and removers take early retirement. Earlier, the city paid $25,000 bonuses to persuade 55 snow-plow operators to take early retirement. Now Mayor Anthony Williams says they're needed after all and is asking the city council for authority to rehire them. (Since there's relatively little snow in Washington during the typical winter, one wonders what these fellows do when they aren't plowing.)

GEORGE W. BUSH DESERVES immense credit for persuading Republicans to face the need for a federal role in making schools accountable. To me at least, this was the most positive element in his campaign. But it's too bad he has been unwilling to face the problem of fair funding for schools. A school should only be held accountable if it has a fair chance to achieve its goals. This means that we have to find a fair way to distribute money to schools. The disparity between the rich suburban public schools and many have-nots in rural and urban areas should not be allowed to continue.

IF WE ARE EVER TO HAVE FAIR funding for public schools across the country it will probably have to come from the federal government. As Ted Halstead and Michael Lind of the New America Foundation point out in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, "The federal government, like the central governments in virtually all other advanced nations, should pick up most or all of the tab for K-12 education." It is the only way to enforce nationwide equality of educational opportunity. Realistically, however, it is politically unlikely. The next best thing is for individual states to enforce equal funding within their borders, which states like Michigan and California have taken steps to do. Still, as Halstead and Lind point out, the disparity between states can be daunting--$4,000 per pupil in Mississippi compared to $9,000 in New Jersey.