Bottom drawer bureau - The Jokers Who Run Our Schools

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1990 by Gene Mustain

Memo random talk

Upon taking office, schools chancellor Joseph Fernandez asked his top administrators to submit secret memoranda to him describing their most urgent problems and how they intended to respond to them. Especially considering that jobs were at stake, some responses were nonsensical if not comical illustrations of bureaucratese. More important, the memos revealed what little effect the bureaucrats actually have on students' lives.

The director of the Office of Corporate Affairs wrote that his unit was created to provide "a brokering, facilitating, and marketing focal point" for companies that wanted to help the board educate children. Some of the companies, he noted, preferred an inside program "broker" as opposed to an "external vehicle," so it would be necessary for him to pool resources to meet "major systematic needs." He added: "Internally, it would mean working with those units necessary to properly formulate the issues/areas for addressment."

The director of the Office of Professional Development and Leadership Training--the office that is supposed to help teachers become better teachers--wrote that her No. 1 issue was "Concretizing Mission." That meant, she explained, "capacity building of personnel resources and personal abilities of central board of education, districts and school [sic] to facilitate generating vehicles to assist schools in nurturing student achievement. . . ."

There were numerous other examples of gobbledeygook in the secret memos, written by people making $75,000 to $100,000 a year:

* "Extant data systems contain an abundance of information which is underutilized due to deficit staff knowledge and abilities due to inaccessibility." Translation: We have a lot of information we can't understand or use.

* "The management of information requires organizing and structuring data into conceptually clear and logical component ideas that can be transmitted in forms that are user-friendly." Translation: Keep it simple. That's something New York City's education administrators rarely do.

A real Lulu

Out in the schools, where the city's future is on the line, most principals view the bureaucrats as adversaries rather than as partners--as bothersome, demanding in-laws who are all talk and no action. "They're immobilized," says Tobias Sumner, principal of a Bronx grade school, "they can't make things happen."

That's no surprise to anyone who's laid eyes on the department's organizational chart: It takes 82 pages to diagram the board's divisions, bureaus, offices, and units. The diagram shows no fewer than 17 offices engaged in monitoring various programs.

"The only thing the bureaucracy hasn't tried to solve by memo is cancer," says Jules Linden, principal of a Manhattan junior high school. "My rule of thumb is, when people can't see me because of paperwork demands, I dump [the paperwork]--and most of the time it's not missed."

"There was a big gap between what I did and its effect," admits Harriet Brown, who wrote reports and evaluated data for the high school evaluation unit of the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Assessment. She remembers going to schools to conduct surveys about programs, but having no place on her forms to put comments that mattered. "Someone would say, 'It's a really good program but it needs to start in an earlier grade.' I could not put that in my report because I was only there to gather statistics."