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

• Author: Willrich, Michael

Class Inaction

The little kids attending D.C.'s Malcolm X Elementary School last year already had grown-up-sized hurdles to leap. Their reading and math scores ranked among the lowest in D.C.'s 175 public schools; 98 percent of them were eligible for free or subsidized lunches; the school itself had 114 fire code violations, including a broken fire alarm system. And every one of Malcolm X's students lived in Congress Heights, one of D.C.'s toughest enclaves. But looking back, Malcolm X parents believe the biggest obstacle to their kids' success was not poverty at all. It was the principal, Sandra Coates.

For several years, parents say, Coates hit their kids, refused to let the youngsters take textbooks home, and sold them school supplies that the taxpayers had already paid for. But when parents voiced concern, Coates dismantled the PTA. When parents took their complaints to the central office of the D.C. public schools, nothing happened. And Coates kept hitting up the children for money.

Finally, over fierce objections from the central office, the parents called a press conference, airing their charges and demanding a formal investigation. Only then did the central office begin to move. After a confidential investigation, Coates was removed--but not fired. Today, she's the principal at another elementary school in Southeast D.C., where the parents are a quieter bunch.

Deborah Vaughan, a single mother of four boys at Malcolm X, was the leader of the parents' fight against the principal and the central office. Her ordeal is over, but she knows that the problem remains. "We think it's terrible to send persons with such histories to other schools to do the same thing," she says. "We hold the administration responsible."

Holding the administration responsible--now that's something rare in the D.C. public school system, which possesses perhaps the most oversized and under concerned educational bureaucracy in the country. Many have tried to do it. But even the best--like the D.C. Committee on Public Education (COPE)--have failed to make the bureaucratic monster pay attention to D.C.'s little kids.

It's been two years since COPE, the blue-ribbon commission to beat all blue-ribbon commissions, united seasoned school activists and the cream of Washington commerce--Washington Post Co. Chairman Katharine Graham, hardware mogul John Hechinger, and developer Oliver Carr--to design a plan for reforming the D.C. schools. COPE spent a half-million private dollars on a top-to-bottom investigation of the system--counting every pencil pusher, poking every paint chip, and interviewing more than 1,000 employees. The resulting report, Our Children, Our Schools, documents one of the most troubled urban school systems in America. Choose your failure index: a 40 percent dropout rate; substandard test scores; a citywide grade average of D+; decrepit buildings that rain plaster on students. But perhaps most significant, COPE found that a third of the D.C. schools' $529 million budget was not being spent on students at all; instead, it sustained a school bureaucracy unprecedented for a school district of D.C.'s size. In order to put new programs into motion, COPE urged, 400 bureaucrats should be cut from the payroll--at a savings of $8.5 million a year.

A year later, a second civic-minded commission--headed by Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Alice Rivlin--sent its investigators to school. Its findings were even more urgent. Eight hundred unnecessary central office staff members should go--and the tens of millions recovered should be immediately infused into the needy, crumbling schools.

No school system could have had better blueprints for making lasting change. Unfortunately, making lasting change has turned out to be one of the D.C. school system's weaker subjects. So far, not a single D.C. administrator has received his walking papers. Not a single million has been diverted back to the kids. It turns out there was one thing Deborah Vaughan could've taught Katherine Graham and Alice Rivlin about the D.C. public school system. Knowing what's wrong is only the beginning. To fix it, you've got to reform the administrative culture that protects its own over the interests of kids. You've got to take on the powerful bureaucrats, the school board, and the teachers union--the quiet saboteurs of D.C. school reform.

The fizzling of the latest reform effort isn't much of a surprise for Washington school kids, whose expectations have never been high. Fully a third of them live below the poverty line. At some schools, seven of every 10 students come from single-parent homes, where parents themselves are often high school dropouts. Under such circumstances, a kid's outlook on the future can understandably be limited. That sense of personal limitation is only reinforced by a school system with rock-bottom expectations.

Parents like Vaughan bring change to their schools despite, not because of, the system. For at the core of the school system is a Sovietized central bureaucracy...