By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 13, 2007
As D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty proposed legislation yesterday that would grant schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee the power to drastically revamp the system's central office, Rhee said she also wants more authority to fire underperforming teachers.
It was her first public statement that teachers could be ousted as part of what Fenty (D) called "wholesale changes" to the 49,000-student system.
Within a year of enacting the legislation, Fenty said, "I would be surprised if we kept more than a small percentage" of the 934 central office employees.
"We're not going to tinker around the edges," he said in an interview.
The statements by Rhee and the mayor marked an escalation in their efforts to overhaul the bureaucracy. Their attempt to acquire broader personnel authority through legislation and labor negotiations is a key test of Fenty's power as the ultimate arbiter of city education.
Fenty's proposal would reclassify 754 nonunion employees as "at-will" workers, meaning they could be terminated at any time for nondisciplinary reasons because they would be serving at the chancellor's discretion.
Former superintendents have cut the central office before, but employees were reassigned to other jobs. "What we're looking to do is create a system where that doesn't happen," Rhee said in an interview.
The central office problems have included lost book orders, misplaced student files and a disorganized system of keeping 4.6 million personnel documents. What Fenty called "decades of mismanagement" has forced parents and educators to work around such problems.
In a news conference at which Fenty announced the changes, Rhee said she has started negotiations with the Washington Teachers' Union and is looking to "reward and recognize" high-performing teachers while weeding out instructors who are not serving children well.
"We have to be able to remove ineffective teachers from their positions," Rhee said. "Absolutely."
At the news conference, five D.C. Council members voiced support for Fenty's proposal, and the mayor said three other members support it. That would give him a majority of the 13-member council.
Union leaders said they will carefully examine the bill, although it would largely affect nonunion workers. "We are prepared to work to come up with a fair and efficient process," said Joslyn Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington AFL-CIO, "but we are not supporting a process that gives the chancellor carte blanche authority to fire individuals at will."
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."
Main said she has been served by some central office employees. "They try to help me and refer me, but there just seems to be some breakdown," Main said.
The skills that principals have developed to deal with such bureaucracy might represent Rhee's biggest challenge in her ultimate goal: to create an efficient central office, said Sheila A. Margolis, an Atlanta-based workplace consultant. Even with mass firings, educators may be reluctant to let go of the patterns that have helped them cope with the dysfunction, she said.
"They won't have trust until there's new systems in place that show them it's a different place," Margolis said. "They can't hope that it's going to be right; they have to really know."
Rhee tells central office anecdotes to drive home her point, and she has told this one several times:
When she saw that the school system was paying nearly $500,000 to educate two special education students outside the District, she wanted to know why. She found out that one placement specialist at the central office had not completed a needed form, and another had missed a filing deadline, leading to the costly out-of-town placement.
The chancellor recounted calling the employee into her office.
"You don't understand how busy I am," the employee told her.
"Wait a minute," Rhee said. "Everybody's busy. If you have a job that's too big for you, maybe you need to consider another job."
Staff writer Nikita Stewart contributed to this report.
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