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One Year Later, Becton Still Struggles

D.C. schools chief Julius Becton

LaJuan Quander never thought D.C. school Chief Executive Julius W. Becton Jr. would work miracles in the first year of his emergency takeover of the city's troubled public school system, but she expected that the retired Army lieutenant general would at least make sure her son, a fifth-grader, had a teacher.

Instead, because the teacher assigned to her son's class is on sick leave, about two dozen youngsters at LaSalle Elementary School in Northeast Washington started the school year without a regular teacher. Until last week, after parents had gone to school headquarters to complain, the students were taught by a string of substitutes, scattered among other classrooms or -- at least once -- left unsupervised.

"This is ridiculous. This is appalling," said Quander, an administrative assistant at the National Capital Presbytery who has two children at LaSalle. "If you go downtown, you see all the signs and posters and pins: 'Children first.' 'Children first.' 'Children first.' And I just don't see that happening."

One year after the congressionally created D.C. financial control board fired Superintendent Franklin L. Smith, stripped the elected D.C. Board of Education of most of its powers and brought in Becton and eight appointed trustees to overhaul the 77,000-student system, the man many still call "General" can point to a series of important first steps in repairing crumbling buildings, initiating academic reforms and fixing broken personnel and financial systems.

But many of these new initiatives have caused turmoil, and problems such as teacher shortages persist. To parents such as Quander and to some public officials, the most basic promises made by the new school regime have gone unfulfilled, a situation that seems to epitomize the control board's failure so far to turn the ailing city around. And with a deadline of July 2000, when Becton is supposed to return a vastly improved school system to elected D.C. officials, the board's biggest and boldest experiment in revamping the District government is stumbling -- and way behind schedule.

'We've Lost a Year'
"I really think we've lost a year," said Emily Washington, teacher representative on the D.C. Emergency Transitional Education Board of Trustees, the panel that took over school operations in November 1996. "Academic achievement, for the most part, was placed on the back burner."

Becton, 71, who makes $125,000 a year, took 10 months to assemble his top administrative team, with Chief Academic Officer Arlene Ackerman, a former deputy superintendent in Seattle, the last to come on board.

Ackerman, selected after a national search, has won hopeful accolades. But her arrival in mid-September delayed implementation of Becton's proposed remedial and other academic programs because she wanted to revise them and test more students. Scores on recent national achievement tests show D.C. students are seriously below average in math and reading as they near graduation.

Similarly, personnel chief Shelia Graves discovered after being hired in June that many principals were not evaluated properly in the spring, leading Becton to postpone until the end of this school year much of his effort to clear out ineffective administrators.

Special Problems
G. Alfred Hess Jr., a professor at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy, said the D.C. school system, which for years could not say how many employees it had or account for how its money was spent, presented special problems for reformers.

"In terms of its administrative context, it is much worse than most large urban systems," said Hess, who has closely studied a similar takeover in Chicago two years ago. "Most of them do know where their money and employees are, [even if] they frequently spend their money in stupid ways."

Becton enjoys overwhelming support from the control board and many of his fellow school trustees, who credit him with tackling long-festering personnel, financial and building maintenance issues neglected by his predecessors. They applaud his controversial decision to quickly close 11 old and under-used schools and to replace roofs on more than 50 of the system's 146 aging buildings -- a project that started late and forced a three-week delay in opening schools this fall.

But those decisions, and more recent, though temporary, school closures during boiler and other roof repairs, have cost Becton a lot of the public goodwill his take-charge demeanor initially inspired. He defends his stewardship, saying he has laid the groundwork for Ackerman to make major strides in improving teaching and boosting student achievement.

"We have not resolved all the problems, but I can tell you, we're gaining ground," Becton, a gruff man who takes a position and sticks by it, said at a news conference Friday. "Change rarely is easy or quick. Despite that, our resolve to make D.C. public schools exemplary by the year 2000 is firm -- very firm."

Trustee Washington and others, including some control board members, say change would have come faster if Becton had ousted more longtime employees. Although hundreds have retired, quit or been dismissed, bringing the school system down to its budgeted 1998 roster of about 10,000 positions, Becton and the trustees have not used the vast powers given them by the control board to suspend personnel rules and fire anyone who doesn't seem to measure up.

In contrast, the D.C. government's chief financial officer, Anthony A. Williams, quickly replaced hundreds of payroll, finance and budget workers, triggering the most tangible results yet of the control board's efforts to overhaul city government.

"I wish [Becton] had moved faster in moving people out," said Joyce A. Ladner, the control board member responsible for overseeing schools. "The problem with keeping people around is they do become entrenched, and they can undermine you. One of Gen. Becton's characteristics is that he is cursed with being a very decent person. . . . He probably would have gained additional support had he gone in and shaken up the place."

Becton said quick shake-ups are "not my style of doing business." Instead, he is waiting until managers who have earned his trust have time to document the performance of their employees.

Ackerman has pledged to evaluate teachers and principals by how much their students achieve this year. And she is completing a plan to "reconstitute" the city's most troubled schools this summer -- reassigning their principals and most staff members if student progress doesn't improve.

"I am outraged," Ackerman said of students' poor test scores. "What I don't understand is what seems to be a sense of complacency with the results. I'm too upset to see people walk around as if it's no crisis."

Becton and the trustees will soon undergo evaluations themselves, though somewhat later than the Nov. 15 anniversary of their appointments.

Bruce K. MacLaury, chairman of the schools board of trustees, said the trustees will give the control board the first annual report of their achievements within six weeks and will evaluate Becton's performance, and decide whether he gets a bonus, during the same period.

Evaluations Delayed
Control board Chairman Andrew F. Brimmer says his board -- which grilled former superintendent Smith and his staff at public hearings before firing him -- will do a public evaluation of the trustees in the months ahead. Both reviews, MacLaury and Brimmer said, were delayed by this fall's school closing crisis.

Brimmer gives Becton and the trustees "very high marks." He blames outside factors for the problems, such as the 1992 lawsuit filed by the Parents United education advocacy group -- and settled this month -- over fire code violations.

"Someone without Becton's fundamental capabilities, wisdom and judgment would have done even worse under these circumstances," Brimmer said. "I am personally highly satisfied."

Such blanket praise leaves some critics wondering whether any of the pending evaluations will be objective.

"They can't point at Becton, because they've got four fingers pointing at themselves," said the Rev. Graylan Ellis-Hagler, a community activist and outspoken opponent of the control board. He is among several dozen parents and community activists who line up at public meetings to accuse Becton and the other trustees of not caring, not consulting and not knowing what the District's schoolchildren need.

Becton believes that most parents support him, saying the same small group of critics is making "the same stale arguments."

Many of the school system's accomplishments seem to have either gone unnoticed or unappreciated by the public -- in part, several school officials said, because the trustees operate mostly behind closed doors. Even where progress was made, such as putting on new school roofs, the achievement was obscured by questions about the cost of the work and the furor over the decision to postpone classes.

Broken Promises
But that project led Becton to break the biggest promise he made when he took over: to end the court-ordered school closings that had twice delayed the start of fall classes.

Becton bristled at D.C. Superior Court Judge Kaye K. Christian's close monitoring of the school repairs, saying it was "against my nature" to ask her permission to launch construction projects.

Distracted during the spring by the politically charged process of choosing which aging schools to permanently close, Becton and schools Chief Operating Officer Charles E. Williams were late signing up contractors to fix those that would remain open. When Christian ruled in July that students could not enter buildings until roof work was done, Becton chose to delay the start of classes at all schools rather than cancel the projects that were underway.

One failed promise begot another. Becton told frustrated students, teachers and parents that the late school opening was necessary to avoid roof leaks -- and more closures -- in the fall. But the summer construction frenzy made only a dent in the to-do list of school repairs, and leaks in other buildings led to a new round of closings a week after school began. Hastily relocated students and teachers crowded into makeshift classrooms that lacked books and equipment. Seniors struggled to find college and scholarship applications.

The turmoil ended this month when D.C. Corporation Counsel John M. Ferren negotiated a settlement of the lawsuit that will allow repairs to proceed while schools are in session.

Becton rarely admits to being wrong. But, given the backlash over closing under-used schools and relocating students during repairs at other schools, he has delayed any decision about future school closings and plans to have contractors brief principals and parent leaders before major repair work begins.

There have been other problems. Since June, school officials have been promising to release a roster showing where the system's approximately 10,000 employees work. Chief Financial Officer Edward H. Stephenson Jr. says that the list is accurate now and that the previous administration miscoded as many as one in three workers. But Mary Levy, a full-time analyst of D.C. school operations for Parents United and another advocacy group, says she is waiting to see the documentation.

"It's still not out," said Levy, who said she filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March asking for details and never got an answer.

The elected school board's president, Don Reeves (Ward 3), a vocal Becton opponent who holds a seat on the trustee panel but has been criticized for failing to work with that body, says the public does not know what the trustees are doing.

"I just don't see any difference between the old administration and this one," Reeves said, "except this one is more secret."

Systems in Chaos
Education professor Hess said such biting criticism was less common in Chicago, where the mayor supported the takeover and the old school board was abolished. It is difficult to make rapid progress in reforming a school system, he said, although Chicago quickly addressed pressing facilities problems and cleaned up its fiscal mess in four months.

D.C. school officials say their personnel, financial and student data systems were in such poor order when they arrived that they still are working to make sure information is reliable. In some cases, tightening oversight has caused new, unexpected crises.

Becton thought he had solved a citywide substitute shortage, which left Quander's son without a regular teacher, by raising pay so it would be comparable to neighboring suburbs.

But that was before school officials conducted employee background checks this summer that removed 32 substitutes -- and 550 school employees -- from the rolls because they had criminal records. Then scores of the remaining 170 or so substitutes were hired as full-time teachers to fill last-minute vacancies.

Becton still hasn't changed personnel rules to make it easier to replace a teacher out on long-term sick leave. But to expand the substitute pool, he recently proposed allowing retired teachers to substitute without deducting the daily stipend from their pensions. In the interim, personnel chief Graves says, she will find replacements for principals who ask her, even if it means using certified teachers now working in administrative offices.

Quander, whose son didn't have a regular teacher until last week, said she welcomes such changes, but she is worried about the rest of this school year and about next year. She and her husband are considering private school next year for their younger daughter. Her son wants to stay at LaSalle for the sixth grade, and she says she probably will let him and keep her fingers crossed.

"Maybe years down the road, D.C. public schools will be fine," Quander said. "But that does nothing for me when I have children in the system now."