Class inaction; how 3,000 overpaid administrators stymie D.C. school reform

Washington Monthly, May, 1991 by Michael Willrich

Delabian Rice-Thurston, head of Parents United, a D.C. parents' group, recalls her first visit to her son's school, Stevens Elementary. "I noticed that there was no playground equipment for the kids, but when I asked the principal, he told me that the PTA had already bought $5,000 worth." It seemed the swing sets and jungle gyms were all in storage; the central office staff hadn't got around to installing them. The helpless principal then turned to Rice-Thurston, beseeching her to call the office and see what she could do.

A visit to that famous central office--honey-combed into the 12-story Presidential Building--helps explain why things fall through central office cracks. Employees peddle Mary Kay cosmetics from their cubicles; on a bulletin board, a party invitation reads, "Bring your favoret [sic] spirits." Insiders describe the central office as a fraternity of friends, where the only hard rule is "don't rock the boat." Jim Ford, the budget analyst for the City Council's education committee, puts it this way: "When I worked over there, we had a saying, 'If you're competent, you better have your resume in order. If you're competent and dedicated, you better have it circulating.'"

Many of the school system's bureaucrats came up through the D.C. schools together; more than a few are teachers and principlas who performed miserably in the schools and were "kicked upstairs." After one year's probation, almost all administrators settle into a tenured position--be it as a $38,971 procurement analyst or a $66,176 human resources coordinator or a $90,704 acting superintendent. Once they do, it's almost impossible to fire them.

No one, not even the Peat Marwick bean-counters hired by COPE to find out, knows exactly how many of these "administrators" are floating around the D.C. schools. That's in part a deliberate deception. The central office often camouflages administrators with inaccurate job titles--for instance, classifying central office staff members as teachers on the payroll. The system's official count of its "central management" and "central services" employees is 1,294. Peat Marwick, on the other hand, counted 3,153 non-schoolbased personnel.

How many of these employees are unnecessary? COPE said 400, the Rivlin Commission twice that. But even those numbers seem low when you consider this: Today, the D.C. schools employ more administrative employees than the largest school district in the country, New York City--which teaches 11 times more students and itself has a notoriously bloated school bureaucracy.

As parent leader Rice-Thurston observes, "If we had excessive administration and high levels of achievement, people wouldn't be concerned." Obviously, though, that's not the case. Every year, as more and more city money goes to staff, salaries, and administrative fringes, the system spends $532 to $682 less per student on instruction than comparable urban systems.

The only ones losing out, it seems, are the kids: kids like Melissa Brantley, a learning disabled student who was held back in second grade for three years, tossed around to three different schools, before the system finally tested her for a learning disability last year; the kids in one junior high school in Northeast, where the heating system is so bad that they shiver one day and suffer nose bleeds from dry heat the next; the 10th graders in one high school class in Anacostia, most of whom read at a fifth- or sixth-grade level; or the needy kids in D.C.'s Head Start program, who never saw $299,789 in federal funds marked for them in 1989. The D.C. government had forgotten to use them before the grant period expired.