D.C. Schools Chief Wants Power to Fire Ineffective Teachers

George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, played down Rhee's statements about teachers facing similar penalties as administration workers. He said the system has a 90-day process for getting rid of underperforming teachers, one of the shortest in the nation. "I don't know what authority she'd be seeking beyond that," he said.

Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray said he plans to schedule a public hearing as soon as possible on the legislation. Gray (D) said he wants a personnel consultant to conduct an independent analysis of the bill.

Gray also said he wants to know the connection between firing workers and improving students' education, which he said was the goal of the schools takeover. "We want to be convinced that this is going to do it," he said.

All sides agree that a well-functioning school administration office is as vital as a healthy heart that pumps blood and oxygen to the body's organs, delivering money, academic resources and education-related services to schools.

Employees who could be affected would range from managers to clerks. Only 337 of the central office workers are D.C. residents, according to the chancellor's office. About 123 were recently transferred to the state superintendent's office.

According to an analysis by Mary Levy, director of the Public Education Reform Project for the Washington Lawyers' Committee, the school system had 1,010 full-time positions in 1981 and 1,425 employees in 1991. With a change in superintendents, the number dropped to about 727 over the next several years. It has been generally growing since then.

Stories of principals and teachers making adjustments because of poor services from the central office are legendary. Lafayette Elementary School in Northwest Washington, a former Blue Ribbon school with high test scores, offers an example.

In May, Principal G. Lynn Main requested handwriting workbooks by following school system procedure. She completed an electronic purchase order that went to the central purchasing office in June.

When classes resumed in August, the workbooks hadn't arrived. Main called the publisher and was told that it had no record of the order. She decided to bypass the central office and fax the paperwork to the publisher.

The workbooks arrived within two weeks, Main said.

Teachers have also had to improvise. On a recent day, 20 students in teacher Blake Yedwab's third-grade class at Lafayette practiced cursive writing of the letter "j." To teach the lesson, Yedwab had photocopied pages the day before from a workbook she keeps in her classroom.

Workbooks help students to see their progress, Yedwab said. Individual sheets of students' work "is too much paper hanging around my classroom."