Robert C. Rice, the interim superintendent of the District's public schools, pounded the lectern as he surveyed rows of empty seats at the annual conference intended to galvanize the system's principals around common goals for the school year.
"This is not acceptable," Rice said. "This is not a social occasion for administrators of this school district. This is a time for us to come together and focus. We are going to have to change the culture of this school district . . . and it's going to start with these people in this room."
Interim Superintendent Robert C. Rice, left, said there would be "no more excuses." New Superintendent Clifford B. Janey is at right.
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Exasperated by the no-shows at the mandatory superintendent's conference last week -- at least a third of the top administrators failed to show up, he said -- Rice ordered his executive staff to take attendance. He compared the latecomers and absent administrators to tardy and truant students.
"We can succeed together, but we cannot do it separately," he said. "We can't do it with just part of us here, but with everybody here."
The comments by Rice -- a former superintendent in Estherville, Iowa; Luling, La.; and Anne Arundel County who has headed the District's schools since April -- reflected the frustration, and the hope, that many in the city's school system have expressed as they prepared for the start of classes Sept. 1.
The system has gone without a permanent leader since Paul L. Vance resigned last November. Two interim superintendents, including Rice, have overseen the 64,000-student system as top officials engaged in a frustrating stop-and-start search for a permanent leader. On Aug. 11, the Board of Education unanimously voted to appoint Clifford B. Janey, a former superintendent in Rochester, N.Y., as superintendent.
As Janey toured schools last week before officially starting as superintendent, the system faced serious problems: low test scores, high drop-out rates and school vandalism and violence.
Moreover, the traditional schools have been losing students to the public charter system and other schools, and could lose more as the nation's first federally funded voucher program gets underway.
Even so, other longstanding school shortcomings were beginning to be addressed as new and refurbished schools were being opened and the long-troubled special education transportation system was improving.
But Janey was not scheduled to start until late August, so it was left to Rice to lead the back-to-school conference.
"We begin the new academic year with one overarching focus: to improve student literacy and numeracy, thus providing our children with the tools for future success," Rice said. "This will be the single unified concept by which we will further student achievement across the curriculum."
Several initiatives around reading and math were announced during the conference. Both skills will be emphasized in all subjects, not confined to separate periods of the school day. "If we are to accelerate student literacy and numeracy, not simply remediate, this approach is essential," Rice said.
At the elementary level, the system intends to expand the 90-minute block devoted to reading instruction to 120 minutes. In addition, all classroom teachers not certified in reading will be urged to complete a course in reading instruction specific to the area they teach, such as science or social studies. Additional training will be provided on research-based strategies for teaching reading. The system also plans to spend $2.1 million to buy teacher's editions of a major reading program developed by the Houghton Mifflin Co.
Rice used the speech -- his final major appearance as the system's temporary leader -- to give a brief overview of two centuries of public education in Washington. He noted that schooling for black children did not begin until 1862, and that the schools were legally segregated until the Supreme Court's Bolling v. Sharpe decision of 1954. Today's challenges, he argued, are equally stark as those of the past.
