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

Washington Monthly, May, 1991 by Michael Willrich

It's not as if D.C. school officials need an old-boy network. They're already protected by a classic, seniority-based civil service structure--including a personnel regulation called "bumping" that provides one of the biggest excuses for avoiding administrative reform. When a tenured employee's position is eliminated, he can simply "bump" the job of a less senior employee--even if that employee is doing a superior job. If the system's 800 or so unnecessary positions were to be eliminated without reforming the bumping rule, a massive game of bumper cars could begin, with administrators bumping assistant principals, assistant principals bumping teachers, and so on down the line. That carries horrors particular to the schools. "We never know whether an administrator got out of the classroom because he was terrific or because he was awful," says Rice-Thurston. "We don't want bad people bumping back. We don't want to lose our new, good, young teachers."

School board games

Busting the old-boy network and saving those new, good, young teachers--that sounds like just the job for the school board: elected officials who can protect the interests of students when the central office won't. But take a look at the school board. You can't miss 'em, or at least the lifesize color photos of them displayed in a gallery just outside their offices in the penthouse of the Presidential Building.

Self-reverential poster art is just one of the many fringes of election to the D.C. school board, a well-established springboard into D.C. politics. (It's where former mayor Marion Barry got his start.) And as members plot their political futures from their offices, they do it in grand style. A 1989 survey of urban school districts by the National School Boards Association found that D.C. school board members were paid more than representatives of any other school board in the country--$27,575 in 1990, although board membership is a part-time job. But it's not just pay that sets the D.C. school board apart from its peers. It also boasts a more bloated staff than any other city surveyed. While the nearby city of Alexandria employs one clerk for its entire school board, for instance, D.C.'s dozens of school board staff members eat up an annual $1.5 million.

In interviews, school board members justify their own ungainly bureaucracy with this logic: Because the central administration is so screwed up, the board needs a full-time fiefdom of its own. Therein lies the problem, says former member Kinlow. "If you had board members who were truly part-time board members and they didn't have the luxury of trying to play superintendent themselves, they might more readily do their own job, which is to hold the superintendent's feet to the fire."

Instead, they more often find themselves complicit in central office deceptions. Last year, the city council learned that the schools' official student count of 88,000--the number driving its annual budget--included 8,000 kids who didn't exist. Several school board members knew of this discrepancy months before the annual budget hearings. But instead of getting angry, they kept quiet--to the city council's fury. The bigger the padding, after all, the bigger the schools' budget. And the school board is an ardent advocate of bigger budgets for the D.C. schools.