THE WHISTLE-BLOWER
Curious Resident Dug Up Roots of the Plan
Carl Bergman says something in the writing of the mayor's proposal to take over the District's school system struck him as odd.
(By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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Thursday, May 10, 2007
Carl Bergman, a computer consultant and a former District auditor, is an unabashed policy wonk who finds it relaxing to spend his free time scrutinizing all manner of government documents.
One recent night, Bergman sat at his home computer perusing the platforms of all 19 candidates running for the Ward 4 council seat. On another night, he punched up Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's much-ballyhooed plan for overhauling the District's school system.
Too bad for the mayor.
Bergman does not recall the exact phrase or paragraph that made him doubt the plan's originality. He was about to make a discovery that so aggrieved him he would call the news media, leading to a Fenty adviser admitting that he had copied large portions of a North Carolina school system's blueprint for success.
Whatever the phrase that tweaked his attention, Bergman noticed that the language in the District's proposal was curious -- alternately "punchy," then dryly bureaucratic. "It just struck me as odd," he recalled yesterday, speaking by phone from his Shepherd Park home.
Bergman copied a few passages, entered them into the Internet search engine Google, and voila! Up popped references with identical language from a report issued by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.
"You won't believe what I found," Bergman announced as he walked into his bedroom, where his wife was half dozing beneath the blankets.
"He was pretty undone," Margie Odle recalled.
Yesterday, as word of the revelation swirled about the city, Bergman enjoyed his moment in the spotlight, even as his wife asked -- jokingly, she insisted -- "if every tax return we submitted would now be audited."
"I'm proud of him," Odle said. "But I'm a little nervous. I'm not used to being a public person."
Her husband was preoccupied with the notion that a high-ranking government official had brazenly plagiarized. He dismissed Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso's explanation that he had "compiled a compendium of successful reform initiatives, plans, and best practices."
"They were audacious," Bergman said. "This is not best practices. Best practices is the transfer of ideas. This is not a transfer of ideas. It's just cut and paste."
