By Marc Fisher
Thursday, May 12, 2005

The District school system will announce soon that it has hired a new principal for Deal Junior High School in upper Northwest, the city's only junior high that attracts a racially and economically mixed group of students. The new principal holds a master's degree in education, is an assistant principal in a respected suburban system and taught in Washington for a few years. By all accounts, she is a good pick.

This story is about a guy who didn't get the job. Somewhere in the mystery of why the D.C. schools rejected an application from Charles Abelmann lies a clue to the abiding failure of the District system.

Abelmann, a senior education specialist at the World Bank, first came to the D.C. schools in 1998, when he was lent to the system as special assistant to the superintendent. In 2001, he took an extended leave from the bank to serve as principal of Janney Elementary in upper Northwest. There, he introduced a new math curriculum, boosted test scores and won Blue Ribbon School status, making Janney one of only three D.C. schools so honored by the U.S. government. Janney parents loved his work, and after he returned to the bank last summer, they begged him to apply for the job at Deal.

Abelmann agreed to go for it. He aced the test the District requires for all applicants for principal jobs. He had outstanding evaluations at Janney. And he holds both a master's and a doctorate in education administration and planning from Harvard.

"He's clearly overqualified for the job," says Greg Baumol, a Janney parent and Abelmann supporter. "He brought in good teachers and encouraged bad teachers to leave."

But Abelmann's Harvard degrees aren't good enough for the District. His graduate degrees are in education administration and the D.C. schools personnel office says principals must hold a certificate in education leadership.

So last month, after Abelmann had made the first cut and been interviewed by administrators, he received an e-mail from schools personnel officer Nicole Wilds saying that "you will not be able to interview for any principal positions because you do not meet the employment requirements."

Abelmann's degrees are just fine for the World Bank, which has put him in charge of its education programs for all of China and Mongolia.

The D.C. system bounced Abelmann because the schools are trying to upgrade the corps of principals, says Superintendent Clifford Janey's spokesman, Alexis Moore. "We are talking about chronically underachieving schools, and we are determined to put highly qualified individuals in to lead these schools."

Which is well and good, except that the certificate the District requires for principals is granted by university programs that range in quality from "inadequate to appalling," according to a new study by Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. Levine concluded that programs in educational leadership are plagued by some of the lowest admissions standards in all of academia, irrelevant courses and faculty who lack the experience or skills to do the job.

Does it make sense for the District to be so rigid about leadership programs that Ted Sanders, former president of the Education Commission of the States, calls "little more than diploma mills"?

To its credit, the District has hired principals from New Leaders for New Schools, a group that trains promising people who come to education from other careers. There are 14 New Leaders principals in the D.C. system this year.

So why was Abelmann tossed midstream from the Deal selection process? Some parents contend that the system -- which has a student population that is only 4 percent white -- was unwilling to consider a white candidate as principal of its top junior high.

Moore rejects that notion, saying, "This administration is driven by one criterion only -- highly qualified personnel." She declined to comment on Abelmann's record other than to say, "It probably would be really difficult not to be a good leader at a school like Janney, with those resources in that neighborhood."

Victor Reinoso, the elected D.C. school board member for Wards 3 and 4, says he doesn't know if race or internal politics was at work, but he has concluded that it "does appear this was a political decision. Charlie taught in the Harvard program that accredits principals, but he didn't graduate from that program, so he's not qualified under DCPS rules. It just doesn't make sense."

At Janney, Abelmann rocked the boat on behalf of his school, and the system does not appreciate that.

Abelmann realized that the D.C. schools were unlikely to act on their own to capitalize on their extraordinary wealth of real estate. Janney sits on a large plot immediately across from the Tenleytown Metro station, probably the biggest development gold mine in Northwest. Abelmann approached developers and sought ideas for a public-private partnership. Two developers proposed to build apartments on part of the site, in exchange for which they would pay to renovate the sadly deteriorating Janney and build an addition to the school. The system did nothing either to advance the idea or to rehab the school on its own.

Like other Janney parents who were on the fence about sending their children to Deal, Baumol watched the Abelmann case for a sign of the system's direction.

"What drives me crazy," he says, "is that the purpose of certification is to keep unqualified people out. And yet the system is filled with people who are uncertified. Now they're using it as an excuse against someone who's proven himself as a principal. That worries me."

Come fall, his child will leave the D.C. schools to attend a Catholic school.

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