ARLENE ACKERMAN

(File Photo) Arlene Ackerman said she believes she is a top candidate for Becton's job. If appointed, she said, her primary mission would be "to bring our diverse community together around a single focus of improving student achievement and making our school district an exemplary one." Age: 51 Current Job: Deputy superintendent and chief academic officer, D.C. schools Appointed: August 1997 Public schools experience: 28 years Education: Harris Stowe Teachers College; pursuing a doctorate in Administration, Planning and Social Policy through Harvard Graduate School of Education.

By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 27, 1998; Page B01

Even before D.C. schools Chief Executive Julius W. Becton Jr. told his staff he was planning to resign, one of his top deputies, Chief Academic Officer Arlene Ackerman, had drawn a new organizational chart that gave her direct control over every aspect of the school system.

Ackerman felt she needed her "hand on the pulse" of school finances, personnel and facilities operations in order to achieve her goals: better teachers, tougher promotion requirements, more learning in every classroom across the city. The school system wasn't set up that way when she arrived from Seattle in September, so she decided to ask for the new powers.

Yesterday, it became obvious that she was about to get them. Becton, a retired Army lieutenant general, announced that he would step down in June and recommended that Ackerman be named as his replacement.

The D.C. financial control board will pick Becton's successor. Board Chairman Andrew F. Brimmer and the member most involved in school policy, Joyce A. Ladner, said they support Ackerman and would make a formal announcement in a matter of days.

That means Ackerman, 51, a soft-spoken but steely minded former deputy superintendent from Seattle, will almost certainly take full charge of Washington's 146 public schools, which for decades have suffered from poor management that has undermined classroom teaching and left thousands of children lacking basic academic skills.

"She has been a power since she arrived here," said Bruce K. MacLaury, chairman of the schools' emergency trustee panel, which makes recommendations to the control board on school matters. "When we interviewed her . . . she made it very clear that she had aspirations to be [superintendent] eventually."

In the last six months, Ackerman has canvassed the city to preach her vision of building an "exemplary" school system by 2000. She orchestrated the departures of some top administrators and promoted others, recruited high-ranking officials from school systems across the country and has promised more changes before the school year ends.

Although she often talks in bureaucratic jargon (she spoke yesterday of the need to "coordinate the functions and to identify the issues that are interdependent upon the successful implementation of the academic side of the house"), Ackerman doesn't mince words on the topic that has long been her passion: the educational difficulties of poor, inner-city, usually African American youngsters.

She called the city's dismal scores on last spring's standardized achievement tests evidence of "educational genocide," and quickly mandated that all elementary school students -- not only youngsters in grades 3 and 8, as Becton had proposed -- reach a minimal score on this year's test or risk being held back next year.

"I think Mrs. Ackerman has what it takes to do it," said D.C. Council member Kevin P. Chavous (D-Ward 7), a mayoral candidate and chairman of the council's education committee. "She just has to step up and ensure folks that they're going to be included."

Ackerman has won support from some parents, educators and school system watchdogs but has alienated others. Many principals are wary of her plans to base 50 percent of the principals' performance evaluations this year on how much their students' test scores improve. And parents have started complaining that her emphasis on achievement test scores is causing teachers to toss out their lesson plans in favor of test-taking strategies.

But Ackerman has held her ground.

"I've been in the classrooms. I've seen what's happening," she told a man who stopped her after a public meeting Wednesday night. She said she will not permit teachers to focus on the achievement tests rather than on whether students understand the concepts they are supposed to be learning. But she added that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Yesterday, she said she wants to make sure the control board and trustees support her plans for millions of additional dollars in remedial, special education and other academic programs before they officially place her in charge.

"This is sort of like a marriage," she said. "We both have to agree that we want to do this, and we have to be headed in a direction where we're both comfortable."

Ackerman prides herself on being accessible. She attends community meetings almost every night and often lingers long afterward to talk with parents about their individual concerns. But she alienated members of the school system's Diversity Task Force, which Becton created a year ago. Its members resigned last week, saying they felt they no longer had the ear of the people making the decisions.

After the "initial smiles . . . I found [Ackerman] totally unreceptive," said Arnoldo Ramos, a Diversity Task Force member who is director of the Council of Latino Agencies in the Adams-Morgan section of Northwest Washington. "When we raise an issue . . . she doesn't give us the sense that she's going to do anything about it."

In Seattle, Ackerman also worked for a retired Army general who had been brought in to make emergency reforms. She created a new curriculum, tougher graduation standards and an accountability program for principals -- all accomplishments she had pledged to duplicate here.

She worked previously as a principal and administrator in a school district outside St. Louis, where she grew up. Some accused her of focusing on the achievement of black students to the exclusion of white youngsters in that school system.

Ackerman, who is paid $120,000 a year and received a $25,000 contract signing bonus, is married to a school principal who has remained in Seattle this year. He is planning to move to Washington this summer and is weighing job offers from some suburban school systems. Ackerman said they will look for a house in the District. For now, she is staying in a luxury apartment building a few blocks from school headquarters, paying her own rent after the school system provided several months' rent.

Yesterday, Ackerman's supporters wondered whether she will succeed in her expanded role, noting that doing so is crucial.

"Can she clean up the management problems is, of course, an open question, because she hasn't had to be dealing with those," said Mary Levy, a former public school parent and longtime analyst of the system for the advocacy group Parents United for D.C. Public Schools.

"We have people all over the system who are demoralized by the failure of personnel and payroll and budget and administration, and until we get that straightened up, it's going to be very hard to have the academic reforms."

Staff writers Pamela Constable, Vernon Loeb and Vanessa Williams contributed to this report.