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

Washington Monthly, May, 1991 by Michael Willrich

Still, the school board has worked to remove at least one ineffective administrator--Andrew Jenkins himself. Tired of Jenkins's all-talk reorganization, the board at first tried to bribe him, offering him $200,000 to quit. When that failed, it fired him in December, sparking a schoolhouse brawl in the board room. Jenkins had packed the meeting with parents and activists who were convinced that if Jenkins were fired his plans for an Afrocentric curriculum would be threatened. Jenkins himself accused the majority-black board of racism. By the time the meeting ended, protesters had hurled trash at board members, pelted one member with a water pitcher, and vandalized another office. Today, Jenkins is no longer superintendent of D.C. schools, but he's still on the D.C. payroll--as a highly paid central administration employee.

Nobody said cutting administrators was going to be easy.

Creature teachers

Breaking the central office stranglehold is only the first step in D.C. school reform. For of all the waste and inefficiency protected by the system, none is more costly--in real terms--than the brotherhood of staff inside the schools. In buildings throughout the city, the school system posts its corporate motto: "All students can learn, all teachers can teach, all schools can be successful." The first and third are noble. The second, of course, isn't true.

The COPE report dubs D.C.'s 6,700 teachers the school system's "unsung heroes," praising them for doing a tough job amidst terrible conditions. But it mentions in passing that when principals and teachers were asked what portion of their school's teaching force was incompetent, the answers "were remarkably consistent--somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent." That's an enormous bloc of incompetent teachers. And that's an estimate made by teachers and principals, so the real figure is probably higher. But only 4 or 5 teachers get fired every year. That leaves, say, 665 of them in the classroom every year--and thousands of kids at their mercy.

In the rare case a principal does deem a teacher "unsatisfactory," a mountain of paperwork stands between the teacher and dismissal. That's a headache many administrators would just as soon avoid. So the "better" principals pass the trash to some other, quieter school. The rest just let sleeping dogs lie.

For years, parents complained about a second-grade teacher at Adams Elementary in Northwest. According to former PTA president Vic Miller, this elderly teacher used to teach junior high but could no longer handle her class. So she was dispatched to teach the little ones. At Adams, the teacher allegedly hit kids to keep order and rarely assigned homework. Along with other parents and an advocacy group, Miller filed several complaints with the central office, but heard nothing. After further inquiries, he was told that the teacher's file had been lost. Finally, a parent filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking for all the system's files on the case. That did the trick. After four years of work, Miller received word that the teacher had retired. "These kids have had a year stolen from them," he says bitterly.