Can D.C.'s Search Make the Grade?

Just over a year ago, St. Louis became the first school district to hire a bankruptcy firm to run its schools for a year. The New York company, Alvarez & Marsal, prefers to call its work "restructuring and turnaround," but rescuing bankrupt companies is what it does, and it does so by adopting a "take no prisoners" approach.

Alvarez & Marsal sent Vice President Bill Roberti and a team that had worked together on other projects to St. Louis. Roberti became superintendent early in June 2003, with a mandate to make the system financially and operationally efficient. Sensibly, "education reform" was not his mandate, because Roberti, a businessman who once ran Brooks Brothers, had never worked in education.

The day after Roberti became superintendent, he (and the school board) learned from the departing superintendent that the projected budget surplus of $37 million was actually a deficit of at least $35 million and perhaps as much as $90 million.

Roberti and his team rolled up their sleeves and went to work. They closed 16 schools and sold 40 properties; they outsourced some school services, including transportation, food services and custodial care. In his year in St. Louis, Roberti gave pink slips to more than 2,000 employees -- without laying off a single teacher. When school opens this fall, St. Louis will have 5,000 employees, not 7,000, although many of those who were laid off have been hired by the private bus, food and janitorial vendors. Roberti was harshly criticized by some in the community but remains unrepentant.

"This is not a jobs program," Roberti explains. "This is a school system that is supposed to teach kids, not to provide jobs to the community," he says, nearly jumping out of his chair to make the point.

And he adds, "I think that the public has a right to the same level of expertise in management, whether it's a school business or any kind of business that's public and trades stock. People should be held accountable."

I asked Roberti whether educators could be trusted to fix their own systems. Without hesitation, he replied, "No, I don't think so. Educators are an absolutely important component here but only one piece of the equation. St. Louis schools are a $500 million enterprise, Miami's a $4.2 billion enterprise, New York is probably $11 billion. These are big enterprises with lots of complex issues and problems, not just a bunch of classrooms with kids."

Roberti was not hired to fix the city's education problems, but he did not ignore them. He asked the Council of the Great City Schools to come in and assess the system, an act CGCS's Casserly says was "a bit like the battalion commander calling in an airstrike on his own position." Casserly and his team didn't mince words. "St. Louis's instructional program was among the worst that we had seen in any major city across the country," they reported.

What's more, their report noted that middle management demonstrated a strong reluctance to change what it was doing, as well as an exceptionally high tolerance for mediocrity. During the year, school attendance improved; it will take several years to determine if academic improvement will follow.

Of course, hiring a bankruptcy firm is not the only way to go, and it might not be the way for every system. If applied uncritically, if adopted as the next instant "cure-all," it will inevitably disappoint and fall into disrepute.

Still, Washington might want to heed Roberti's recipe for fixing urban education. "It's a little bit like alcoholism," he says. "First, you've got to admit you have a problem, and then you have to move to solve it. And you cannot fix the education problems until the operating and financial systems are in order."

Washington has been described as so troubled, so bound up in wrangling among mayors, council members and school board members, that those at the top appear far removed from the business of education. When the CGCS asked why student achievement was not improving, it found this answer: "The district hasn't done anything to improve achievement."

Here is where the search process fails Washington: The recycling of superintendents is unlikely to turn up the management muscle to create an effective bureaucracy -- or the political savvy and commitment to Washington's children that will keep a superintendent in the District long enough to reach the kids.

This, then, is the question Washington must ask about its public schools: Is the system broken? Is it educationally bankrupt? As the lawyers say, "Asked and answered."

Roberti told me that he has had conversations with several Washington school board members who visited St. Louis while conducting their own parallel search for leadership. That group has also spoken with the leadership of Alvarez and Marsal.

If Washington chooses the "turnaround" option, it must hire an outside firm precisely because it can ride out of town when the year is up. As Roberti told me, "St. Louis brought a firm in from outside to do this difficult work because no one inside the city of St. Louis could get away with doing some of the things that had to be done and live here later without suffering the consequences."

Hiring a bankruptcy firm is not a magic bullet. It will fail unless the school board agrees to stop micromanaging; it will fail if the mayor continues to dabble in school management; it will fail unless the mayor and the board agree that the school system is not a jobs program but a business with one central goal: the development of Washington's youth.

Author's e-mail: jmerrow@merrow.org

John Merrow reports on education for "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS. He is also a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, Calif.