Bottom drawer bureau - The Jokers Who Run Our Schools

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1990 by Gene Mustain

Bottom Drawer Bureau

110 Livingston Street, a dour gray building in downtown Brooklyn and headquarters of the New York City public school system, is a well-known symbol of bureaucratic nonsense and paralysis. In the face of steadily declining performance by its students, it grinds on as usual, perturbed but unmoved, spitting out paper, regulations--and high school graduates who cannot say how many quarters make $1.75.

"By far, 110 Livingston makes 1600 Pennsylvania look pretty good," says Robert F. Wagner Jr., who was the Board of Education president. Early in his tenure, when controversy arose over an erroneous charge that school health clinics were distributing condoms, he learned how difficult it is for even the board president to navigate the maze of units, offices, bureaus, and divisions that is 110 Livingston. It took Wagner dozens of phone calls and more than 10 days just to learn how many clinics the board operated among its nearly 1,000 schools.

Although 110's moribundity has been a fact of life--and a municipal joke--for years, it has become more urgent to do something to make the place work. The future is at stake. New York City, which already has a weak manufacturing base, cannot compete economically if it cannot supply competent workers. It cannot solve the problems of its ghettos if nearly half its ninth-grade students never graduate.

In many of his speeches, Richard Green, the late New York City Schools chancellor, used to say that if New York's public school system wasn't made to work, then the future of public education in all large cities was doomed--because New York is now confronting the problems those other school systems will face eventually. Alas, in Green's brief reign, little progress was made. Instead, the bureaucracy spent most of its energy on itself.

"The game plan over there was to protect the bureaucracy, not to serve the children," says Harvey Robins, who was deputy chancellor for finance at 110 Livingston before fleeing last year to a top job in the cabinet of New York's new mayor, David Dinkins.

Robins recalls attending meetings with representatives of other divisions who would cheerfully agree to deadlines for producing memos on issues under discussion, but who would then silently decide not to do what they'd agreed upon. "They had set the policy by inaction." Robins says.

Hand job

If sometimes slow in producing memos, the 110 Livingston bureaucrats are infamous for the ones they finally do write, or the ones they merely distribute, as illustrated by one ridiculous example last year:

When the bureaucracy got around to giving its teachers AIDS-prevention material, it included for all 64,000 teachers copies of a memo from the health department on how to wash your hands. Though it's hard to gripe about concern over a deadly health crisis, the memo was surely a preposterous waste of the copy machine. In seven detailed steps, it described the lost art of "proper handwashing"--from removing one's bracelets and rings right down to discarding used paper towels in a "receptacle."

"Apply soap, lather well," step three advised.

A if New York schools didn't have real problems. With 950,000 students and 110,000 mostly union-protected employees, the system would be the eighth largest city in the nation, and its budget is nearly $7 billion--bigger than the total budgets of 15 states, more than the gross national product of many countries. The system serves 700,000 meals a day and provides transportation to 550,000 pupils. The average number of students absent each day--140,000--would make up the sixth largest public school system in the nation. There are 120,000 students in special education, kids with a variety of emotional and physical ills requiring many specialized programs.

Nearly 280,000 students come from public-assistance families and thousands more from single-parent homes or homes undermined by drugs and domestic violence. The system has little power to attack the causes of its students' problems, but must try to overcome the symptoms.

To complicate matters further, while the New York City Board of Education runs the high schools and many special education programs, 32 elected local boards, allegedly representing the full contentious range of the city's multi-ethnic, multicultural universe, run the elementary schools. The Board, however, still doles out the money, has overall authority for policy and curriculum, and must monitor the educational performance of the local boards.

The setup was a well-meaning compromise to a partially race-based uproar over decentralization more than two decades ago. "We created the best and worst worlds then," says Wagner. "We gave control to the communities, but created a centralized bureaucracy that has taken almost no responsibility for the welfare of kids."

"Information exists in an overabundance here at Central, an overlapping, disparate, unstructured mass of data that lacks a strategic approach to its productive utilization," according to an assistant to Richard Green, the chancellor who died of an asthma attack a year after taking over. "Overlapping powers and duplicate responsibilities, both among Central offices and between Central and [the schools], reduce efficiency and accountability," echoed another aide.