Worn Down by Waves of Change

Franklin L. Smith, who became superintendent in 1991, said schools were harmed by an intense rivalry between school board members and city officials. Unlike in most cities, politicians in the District cannot aspire to statewide office and so battle over a few elective positions.

"As a city council member, where is your incentive to make the board look good?" Smith asked. "There are limited positions, and almost all of them are aspiring to possibly be the mayor one day."

The activist group Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools tried to force city officials to help the schools in 1992 by suing over fire code violations in dilapidated buildings. Members thought they were helping Smith by forcing Mayor Marion Barry, the D.C. Council and Congress to pay to rebuild the schools.

Instead, D.C. Superior Court Judge Kaye K. Christian closed schools with fire code violations. The suit dragged on for years. It contributed to the 1996 ouster of Smith, a favorite of Parents United activists. Politicians, rather than helping fix the schools, decried the code violations as evidence of mismanagement and cut capital funding.

"In our wildest imaginings, we never thought this would happen," Delabian Rice-Thurston, then executive director of Parents United, told The Washington Post the day Smith was fired. "The whole thing -- the lawsuit, the court dates -- it all backfired. Be careful what you wish for; you might get it."

A General's Retreat

Becton succeeded Smith at the helm of a broken and intransigent bureaucracy. Smith said he warned him that it can be nearly impossible to dislodge weak longtime employees who have seniority -- and often unseen ties to District politicians. "There are people still there who will gladly tell you, 'I was here when the new superintendent arrived, and I'll be here for the next one,' " Smith said.

Still, "nothing prepared me for the chaos that existed," Becton recalled in an autobiography he is writing, a draft of which he provided to The Post. Payroll records were "a shambles," textbook publishers went unpaid and no one knew how many students were enrolled or where federal grant money was going.

Six months into Becton's regime, in 1997, Judge Christian was still shutting schools with fire code violations. A reporter pressed Becton to grade his performance. He gave himself a C-minus. Barry retorted publicly that Becton was flunking.

The next time the general saw Barry, Becton said, he told the mayor he was in no position to taunt him: "I was in the city when you came here and ran for the school board. Then you ran for president of the school board, then the city council, then mayor. . . . You've had 35 years. I've had six months."

Barry, Becton recalled, "changed the subject."

The mayor created a political conundrum on Capitol Hill for both Becton and his predecessor. Congress controlled the District's spending, and Republicans controlled Congress. Some were openly disdainful of Barry's reelection after a drug conviction.

Becton lobbied for $36 million in supplemental funding to reroof more than 60 schools in response to the Parents United lawsuit. Among those he solicited was U.S. Rep. Charles H. Taylor, a Republican tree farmer from North Carolina, who chaired the appropriations subcommittee on the District. "His comment was, 'I'm not going to give you a goddamned thing until you get rid of that mayor,' " Becton recalled.

"I said, 'Hey, I am the superintendent; I don't have a cotton-picking thing to do with the election of that mayor.' He said, 'Until he goes, you get nothing.' "

Taylor did not return calls seeking comment.

Rebuffed by the House, Becton had to find other funding. Fall 1997 was chaotic. Roofing was still underway when schools were supposed to open. Classes started three weeks late.

Early the next year, Anthony A. Williams, then the District's chief financial officer, issued a report slamming Becton's administration as having made little change in the system's "organizational culture of indifference and resistance."

Soon afterward, Becton quit, saying, "I am tired, I really am-- physically, emotionally, mentally, I'm tired." The lieutenant general had fought in three wars. In Korea, he was gravely wounded and medically evacuated the day before a battle in which most of his unit was killed or captured.

Trying to reform the District's schools, he said, "has been the toughest job that I've ever had."

Push Back

Shortly after Arlene Ackerman arrived in the District as Becton's chief academic officer, a stranger -- a man standing in the receiving line at a reception in her honor -- squeezed her hand so hard she thought he would break her fingers.

"They say they want you to fix it, but they really don't," she recalled the man telling her. "When you get to the point where you are really fixing things, you will know. You will know because you will get all kinds of unbelievable push back."

After Ackerman succeeded Becton as superintendent, she moved to raise test scores by spending more money in the poorest sections of the city. That sometimes put her at odds with parents and activists in predominantly white Ward 3, where student achievement was typically the highest. When she expanded summer school from 3,000 to 30,000 students, some of those parents initially complained, fearing that scarce resources would be taken from their schools, she said.

Ackerman obtained extra federal money and pressed ahead with the summer school plan. But the school system's personnel office functioned too poorly to recruit additional teachers. Early in her tenure, for example, Ackerman came across a motorized filing system that had broken long ago, trapping hundreds of personnel records behind a wall.

"Somebody told me, 'Oh, this has been this way for years,' " Ackerman said. "Years! I'm thinking, no wonder people are telling me that they can't get data or records."

Ackerman and a few aides worked the phones to contact summer school teacher prospects. "One night, we were calling people until so late that I finally said, 'It's 11 o'clock. We can't call anybody else tonight and ask them if they want to work in D.C. They will know we're desperate,' " she recalled.

Ackerman puzzled over the central office culture. Late one night, after attending a meeting, she returned to headquarters to see a line of people in a hall waiting to see one of her subordinates. She said she eventually came to believe that the man, a longtime employee who no longer works in the system, had amassed great power through his ability to hand out jobs, award contracts and outlast superintendents. "He was like the godfather," Ackerman said.

The school system's inscrutably chaotic operations provide cover for a host of people who have learned how to "game the system," Ackerman said. "It's the way of life in D.C. It may be in other urban school systems, but not as in-your-face as I saw it. And you need an army of people to fight it."

Ackerman balked when she discovered that the school system was paying millions of dollars annually to lawyers representing special education students who had successfully sued for better services. A lawyer sending a short form letter setting up a meeting might bill the schools $450, she said. Ackerman persuaded Congress to cap the amount lawyers could bill the schools at $80 an hour, she said.

Instead of winning plaudits for saving money, "you would have thought that I was responsible for World War III," Ackerman said. "I started getting pressure -- 'we don't need to get a cap,' 'this is not fair' -- and I mean from all parts of the community. Somebody said to me these were trial lawyers who support certain politicians."

Ackerman was summoned to meet with Williams, by then the mayor, about raising the cap. She resigned before the meeting took place, and her initiative was soon rolled back, she said. Williams, in a recent interview, conceded that he "might have caved in" to political pressure even though he fundamentally believed Ackerman had been right to limit money spent on lawyer fees that could have gone to classrooms.

When Ackerman left Washington in 2000, "I cried for six weeks, from the time I said I was leaving to the time I got on the plane," she said. "I felt like I was leaving with so much left to be done."

She cried for the dedicated educators "working inside these incredibly broken circumstances," she said. "To this day, I take my hat off to them and feel humble in their presence."

Williams, who left the mayor's office in January, said he shared Ackerman's anguish over the failures, by him and others, to mobilize the city's disparate communities to pull together to fix the city's schools. "It's my biggest regret as mayor," he said.

The Music Stopped

During her tenure, Ackerman transformed how individual schools were funded. Previously, the central office had maintained a large pool of money to cover expenses for all schools each year. Ackerman pioneered a popular system under which money would follow each child directly to his or her school, where the principal was supposed to work with a team of parents and teachers to determine how best to spend it.

When Paul L. Vance succeeded Ackerman, some of his administrators noted that many schools -- facing limited budgets and pressure for their students to score well on standardized tests -- were dropping art and music instruction.

While parents in prosperous neighborhoods sometimes held fundraisers to help pay for art and music teachers, poorer schools often did without. By 2005, 37 percent of schools surveyed by the residents group DC VOICE had no music teacher, 32 percent had no art teacher and half had no librarian.

Had she stayed in Washington longer, Ackerman said in a recent interview, she would have tried to prevent such a decline. "You had to have systems in place to monitor it," she said. "I just feel kind of bad. Maybe I shouldn't have done it. But when I put it in place, I didn't know that I'd be leaving."

As Fenty takes over the schools, some longtime activists worry that history will repeat itself. Fenty announced last week that the city was embarking on a privately funded $3.3 million project, tapping McKinsey & Co. to recommend improvements in school operations and another consulting firm, Alvarez & Marsal, to audit school finances. Six years ago, under Vance, McKinsey performed a costly study of the schools that was well-received, but its recommendations were never implemented. "The whole thing sort of petered out," Levy said.

Casserly, of the Council of the Great City Schools, is among those concerned that gains by the Janey administration will be swept away in the next tide of reform. Although Janey has been criticized for moving slowly on improving school buildings and business systems, he has focused on instruction, imposing the first comprehensive standards for teaching and assessing basic skills since reformers tossed away the last ones in 1989.

"I really regret that we're about to turn this all over again," Casserly said. "The impatience of the press and the politicians is going to mean that we're likely to start reforms all over again -- not necessarily better reforms, just a new set of reforms."

Studying the mayor's proposals, Casserly sees "nothing in there that would indicate how student achievement could actually be improved."

District students have taken two sets of standardized tests recently. If the results, due out later this year, show improvements, then that might indicate that Janey's reforms were beginning to work, Casserly said.

"My hunch is that, if Janey is gone, [and] the Board of Education is gone," Casserly said, "the mayor and city council will stand up and say, 'It was us!' "

Staff writers Dan Keating and V. Dion Haynes and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.