The Final Exam
Franklin Smith Got High Marks in Life. But Has He Failed D.C.'s Schools?
By Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 16, 1995; Page C01
Franklin Smith is sitting at a conference table lit by the
afternoon sun streaming through his 12th-floor office window. Impeccably
dressed and surrounded by plaques, awards and framed crayoned pictures
on the wall, he looks every bit the part of a big-city school
superintendent.
But given that a 16-year-old student was shot and killed inside a
local high school just hours before, the office is an odd place to find
the chief of schools for the District of Columbia.
At the school, Cardozo High, students are setting fires and
smashing glass. Television crews are camped on the sidewalks. Two school
board members who rushed to the scene are comforting the dead boy's
distraught mother and the hysterical students. Smith, however, has
chosen to keep an appointment with a reporter to talk about his vision
to improve schools. He will visit Cardozo the next day.
It is vintage Smith -- personable, accessible and chock-full of
innovative plans. But at the same time, his critics charge, he is often
detached from what is happening inside his schools and sometimes
oblivious to the politics and symbolism of his actions.
He leans forward to explain his ideas: Power shifting from the
downtown bureaucracy to schools. Principals who share decisions with
their parents and teachers. More schools-within-schools, such as his
experiment with ungraded classes at Truesdell Elementary. Schools that
can buy outside services, such as the reading tutors hired a year ago.
Smith, 51, is a trim, soft-spoken man with an easy smile who
sprinkles his sentences with the jargon educators like to use:
site-based management, enterprise schools, school choice, restructuring.
But it all seems disconnected from the reality outside.
His crumbling old buildings couldn't even open on time in September
because they were filled with fire hazards. They will close a week early
because there's not enough money. His school grounds -- despite metal
detectors, locker searches and security guards -- are nearly impossible
to keep safe. His students, who still score among the lowest in the
nation on standardized reading and math tests, have outdated textbooks
and insufficient supplies. In recent years, their test performance has
actually gotten worse. And there is even a question about the number of
students; Smith says there are 80,000, but a new study he commissioned
says there may be 13,000 fewer.
Smith glances out his downtown office window. There is a
sweeping view of the Old Post Office and the Washington Monument. But
his gaze fixes on the steel beams and concrete blocks supporting a new
building going up across the street.
When he moved into this office nearly four years ago, the Federal
Triangle trade center was just a hole in the ground. Smith started to
compare his task of turning the schools around to the job of the
construction workers: They were both trying to build a new structure
from the ground up.
Although he's put in long hours and sacrificed his family life to
make the schools better, he faces intense criticism, more budget cuts
and more intervention from federal and local lawmakers. The painful
reality can't escape him: The building outside is almost finished.
Closing Remarks
Turn the clock back for the moment, to a cool spring evening two
years ago when Smith sat in the front of the packed gymnasium of M.M.
Washington, a vocational high school in Shaw. His eyes were downcast,
his expression grim.
A skeleton symbolizing the death of education hung at the entrance.
The bleachers were filled with angry parents, teachers, students and
community activists. Many wore yellow and black protest buttons.
Smith had been in Washington for 21 months. He had received kudos
for increasing high school graduation requirements, lengthening the
school day, cutting administrators and tightening security.
But now he was trying to close 10 half-empty schools, more than had
been shut in either of the previous two decades even though enrollment
had plunged from 146,000 to 80,900. It was a deal forged by Smith,
school board President R. David Hall, Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly and D.C.
Council Chairman John Wilson to save money for teacher raises.
Smith closed eight schools, winning points from Kelly and the
Committee on Public Education (COPE), a group of business and civic
leaders that issues annual report cards on the schools in an effort to
improve them. But first Smith had to endure nights like this as, one by
one, seething parents stepped to the microphone at M.M. Washington.
"Dr. Smith, you are destroying dreams," said David Gatling,
president of the Black Parents Association. "To destroy a black child
seems to be very easy for you."
A nervous smile crept across Smith's face.
"It's not funny," snapped Gatling. "Don't think it's funny. . . .
You send these children to another school and you'll be producing
dropouts. We're looking at destroying black children."
Loud applause erupted from the crowd. Council member Harry Thomas
Sr. walked to the microphone and glared at Smith. "Whoever came up with
the idea of closing this school has to have something wrong with his
head," Thomas said. A student named April was next. "You all feel the
students are irrelevant. This school is like my family. . . . If you
move me, I'm not going to finish."
So it went, night after night, across the city. But it paled in
comparison to his next big battle.
A year later Smith tried to hire a private company to cut through
his expensive and slow-moving bureaucracy and manage up to 15 of the
city's most difficult schools. He was intrigued with a Minnesota firm,
Education Alternatives Inc., that was already managing nine schools in
Baltimore. The hearings were sometimes rough -- and often ugly.
Smith was accused of trying to sell the D.C. schools to an outside,
white-owned company that would "make a profit on the backs of African
American children." He was an "Uncle Tom," some said, and a "slave
seller."
"Why doesn't the superintendent just admit that he is not
capable of running our schools?" said board member Valencia Mohammed at
one hearing.
Carrie Thornhill, a strong Smith backer, went to the hearings
and was repulsed by what she saw.
"The verbal abuse was absolutely as nasty as anything I've ever
heard or seen in this community," said Thornhill, a project director
with the Greater Washington Research Center and a former co-chair of
COPE. "People can disagree adamantly on ways to get things accomplished.
But to get personal in the way that happened is absolutely unhealthy for
our children and for education and our city."
Failing to get the support he needed, Smith pulled the plug on
privatization.
'Get Yourself a Job'
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The other stages of his life
were marked by success. Franklin Lee Smith almost always exceeded
people's expectations of him -- whether it was in the tiny town on the
Eastern Shore where he was born; in Petersburg, Va., where he attended
college and coached football and wrestling; or in Dayton, Ohio, where he
had a successful tenure as superintendent before coming to Washington.
Smith grew up poor on a farm on the rural back roads of Cape
Charles, Va. His father was a sharecropper, his mother a domestic worker
for the farmer who owned the land.
No one in his family had gone to college, and he certainly wasn't
planning to. Smith, the oldest of three brothers and two sisters, was
going to move to the big city -- Philadelphia -- and work after high
school, as had most of his cousins and friends.
But his principal took him aside. "You're a good athlete and you've
got good grades. You're too smart to waste your life," Smith recalls him
saying.
The principal paid for Smith to take the SAT and helped get him a
loan to attend Virginia State University in Petersburg. He majored in
health and physical education. After college, Smith figured, he would go
back to Cape Charles and coach football. Again, a mentor intervened,
this time a college administrator who urged him to dream bigger dreams.
"You have potential," Smith remembers him saying.
"He was a little country boy coming from the Eastern Shore," says
Rudy Cunningham, the former athletic director and head of student
affairs at Virginia State. "But he was a very, very good student. He was
one of the top students in his class."
The little country boy soon became "Dr. Smith." His success in the
classroom led to a master's degree in education at Virginia State and
then a doctorate in education administration from Nova University in
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (He went to a satellite campus in Richmond three
Saturdays a month and spent the summers in Florida.)
Back home, staying in school so long was unheard of. When he
returned during the holidays, his family wasn't exactly encouraging.
"Boy, you need to get yourself a job," his father would say.
Smith started his teaching career during college when he earned
money as a driver education and PE instructor at a Petersburg high
school. He also indulged his first love -- coaching -- and impressed
the locals. "The wrestling team was very poor," Cunningham says. "He
came in and took it from 0 to 10 and won quite a few state
championships."
Smith's coaching talents and his high school contacts led to an
assistant principalship after he received his master's, and eventually
he snared the job of assistant superintendent.
The big break came in 1985 when, after 17 years in the Petersburg
schools, Smith was plucked to be assistant superintendent in Dayton, a
city with more than three times as many students. Within a year, he was
promoted to superintendent, which catapulted him into an elite group of
only about 100 African American superintendents in the nation's 16,000
school districts. And most of the folks in Dayton applauded him.
"Dr. Smith was a wonderful salesman of the schools, but in a very
sincere way," says Ellen Belcher, an editorial writer who covered Smith
for the Dayton Daily News. "He was truly charming and smooth, and his
soft-spokenness was very reassuring to people."
He helped pass a multi-million-dollar tax increase to help
education, launched a magnet school program, strengthened academic
requirements, gave more power to schools and attracted cash and support
from the business community. In 1988, he was named Ohio's best
superintendent.
But in Dayton were the seeds of Smith's future troubles.
Some city leaders thought he might be more show than substance,
more salesman than educator. They are quick to point out now that when
he left, Smith was just starting to put his new programs in place. And
student test scores remained at the bottom of the state's urban schools.
"It sounded good at the top, but when it got down to the classroom
level, it left something to be desired," says Robert French, a member of
the Dayton school board for 12 years and its president while Smith was
superintendent. "His strength was in public relations. But I think his
administration was a little weak. He was not as thorough as he could
have been in making sure people were doing what they were supposed to
do. I saw him as an average manager, not a good one."
Still, Smith was a hot property.
Just after he negotiated a new five-year contract in 1991, the
overtures started pouring in from headhunters in Charlotte, Detroit,
Kansas City, Mo., Dade County, Fla., and Columbus, Ohio. "People came
after me and came after me," Smith says.
In Washington, the 11 school board members had fired superintendent
Andrew E. Jenkins and were looking for someone to smooth over conflicts,
be an impressive advocate and help them work together. They offered
Smith a $90,000 salary and other benefits for a total package of
$131,000.
The District had triple the number of students Dayton had, a budget
five times as large at more than $500 million, and schools rife with the
problems plaguing big-city schools nationwide. And the mayor had just
left office after a drug conviction.
But it was the nation's capital, Smith reasoned. "I thought it was
the place to be to make a difference. It was the premier urban education
job in the country," he says. "What better place could there be to make
model changes than in the nation's capital?"
Dr. Smith was on his way to Washington.
Going Home
About 9 one evening recently, Smith leaves his office, glances at
the construction across the street and takes the garage elevator to his
navy blue Buick Park Avenue.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich has poked fun at Smith for being
chauffeured around in a limousine, but that's not exactly true. Most of
the time Smith drives himself to and from work in a car leased by the
school system, and a security guard assigned to his office drives him to
meetings around town.
Winding past the White House, Smith settles back for the 25-minute
ride home. He shuts out all the crises that mark his days. Fire code
violations. Shootings. An unpaid insurance bill that abruptly halted
athletic activities. A principal who was caught taking boxes of food
from the cafeteria.
His face shows the wear and tear of the job. In a photograph in his
office snapped shortly after he arrived, he is standing at a lectern and
beaming. There are no traces of the gray hair that has grown in. Or the
eyes that have grown tired.
In his four years here, he has received high marks from business
leaders and some parents who think he's moving in the right direction.
Despite continued poor performance by city students, they like Smith's
reform ideas and are wary of a return to the turmoil that accompanied
the frequent turnover in superintendents before his arrival. Some of his
supporters also acknowledge that the dismal state of the schools means
the city might have trouble attracting anyone better. COPE praises him
for getting rid of hundreds of administrative positions and making
strides despite the interference of the school board. And Barbara
Somson, co-chair of the Ad Hoc Parents Coalition, wrote him a note of
support that he taped to a mirror at home.
But Smith's critics say he has miscalculated the city's treacherous
political currents and misjudged how important it is to garner community
support before trying to push through changes. And, they charge, he has
not been effective enough in getting rid of bureaucrats and making his
innovative ideas work for children.
In the dark solitude of his car, he turns off all the critical
voices that gnaw at him. The voices of dissatisfied parents like Alieze
Stallworth, who recently pulled two children out of her neighborhood
school.
"It doesn't seem important to him that neighborhood parents are
taking their children out. He leaves poor administrators in place until
you're left with a crisis," Stallworth said.
He shuts out the chorus of frustrated educators like Emily
Washington, a 21-year veteran who teaches humanities at the School
Without Walls.
"I pity him -- he's in over his head," Washington said. "Dr. Smith
relies too much on incompetent administrators and is too much of a nice
guy. He's just not aggressive. To clean up this mess, you have to be a
kick-ass guy."
Some observers think maybe no superintendent could succeed here. "I
don't think any human being could come in and get control of this school
system and make it work," said Jim Ford, staff director of the D.C.
Council's education committee. "It is first and foremost an employment
agency."
Smith sighs when asked about all the voices. For all he has been
through, the superintendent refuses to believe Washington is his
Waterloo. "D.C. is a very difficult place to learn," he says. "I'm an
outsider. I wasn't exactly naive. But I didn't really know about the
entrenched bureaucracy and the relationships people had with each other.
D.C. is a small place. There are people, many of whom were born here,
who grew up together, went to school and college together and were
friends or are related. I will always be considered an outsider."
"I've taken the attitude that you go home at night and say I did
my best' -- if you've done all you can do," he says. "I hear enough
support to keep me going."
A Lonely Life
Smith pulls into the driveway of his spacious home in Chevy
Chase-D.C. No one runs out to greet him. His wife, Gloria, and his
children all have their own lives, which rarely involve him these days.
"I am accustomed to him not being here," says Gloria, an English
teacher at a Fairfax County public school. "I've built my life around
his absence, not his presence. It's just the kids and me. When he comes
home early, around 9, the kids say, Dad, were you fired?'
"It's a lonely life," she says. "I immerse myself in my kids or my
job."
Smith puts in longer hours and attends more night community
meetings than he ever did in Dayton, leaving around 7:15 a.m. and rarely
arriving home before 10 or 11 p.m. "I haven't eaten dinner with my
family 20 times since I've been superintendent. It's not something I'm
proud of," he says.
He is hardly ever home on weekends, often traveling to out-of-town
conferences. He has taken one vacation in four years. When he is home,
Smith is on the phone. He doesn't read for pleasure. He bought his first
pair of jeans in 10 years when he helped with cleanup and repair work at
the schools last month.
Gloria, 47, resents the way her husband has been treated here,
especially since she feels he gives everything to his job at the expense
of his family. She will never go to a D.C. school board meeting again.
"I went to one recently and two women behind me were saying such
ugly things about my husband," she says. "One said he had other women.
The other said he liked men. It hurt."
Delvin, 16, and Kristy, 12, are the only two Smith children still at
home. Of the oldest three, who are Smith's children from a previous
marriage, Frankie, 26, is a computer analyst in Springfield. Ricky, 24,
is an assistant football coach at Purdue University in Indiana. And
Ericka, 21, is a junior at Virginia Commonwealth University. The two
youngest Smiths get angry sometimes about how much their father is away.
"I tell them he's making sacrifices for other children," their
mother says. "But they get hurt he doesn't go to their schools."
Smith doesn't attend Kristy's parent-teacher conferences at
Lafayette Elementary. He doesn't want her to be treated as the
superintendent's daughter. And he didn't go to Delvin's graduation from
Deal Junior High last summer because he was at a high school graduation.
"I don't put much stock in elementary or junior high graduations,"
says Smith, joining the conversation with his wife on the couch. "High
school graduations are important."
"It was important to Delvin," she says.
Delvin now attends St. John's College High School, a private Catholic
school near his home. Smith defended the controversial transfer, saying
it had nothing to do with the education his son was getting, but
everything to do with the teasing he was receiving because his father is
the superintendent.
Sacrificing his family has been a big price to pay, especially
when you consider some of the searing criticism. Take the comments of
council member Bill Lightfoot. When interviewed about Smith he gave him
a grade of B, saying he's "committed and moving in the right direction."
Then he thought for a few minutes and revised the grade. "Are the
students learning more now than before?" Lightfoot said. "The answer is
no. I will give him a C."
About an hour later, Lightfoot called back. "I want to change that
grade to a D," he said. "He hasn't moved fast enough or aggressively
enough to bring about change."
Some say Smith's days are numbered. School board member Mohammed
has even threatened to try to fire him. And it is unclear what role he
will have under the new control board set up by Congress to oversee
District finances.
But after all he's been through, Smith says he wants to stay until
he can see test scores improve. He negotiated a three-year contract last
year with the board and volunteered to tie his pay to student
achievement.
"I've never left a job that's not where I want it to be," Smith
says. "D.C. is not where I want it to be. I've never been intimidated."
Smith says he's "always looking, always open to options." But the next
stop will probably not be a superintendency. "What other school system
would I want to go to after being superintendent in the nation's
capital? I would rather go into corporate America."
"If it were up to me, I would leave tomorrow," says Gloria. "I
would leave yesterday. My skin is not as thick as his. I see my husband
putting in tons of hours all for the children. He has this strong
feeling he can make a difference. But . . . the negative articles. The
wear and tear on his body. The time away from his family. Is it all
worth it?"
"My answer is yes," Smith answers. "I want to finish what I
started."
Giving Testimony
The hearing before D.C. Council member Hilda Mason's education
and libraries committee would be a long one. Outside the council
chambers, the sun was setting as the superintendent came forward to
testify.
Out the window, cranes moved over the pink-streaked sky to lift
steel beams onto the new trade center across the street from his office,
the building that was nothing when he arrived and now is nearly done.
Smith stepped forward to join several school board members at
the testimony table and began reading a statement about how he wanted to
finish building his foundation. But Mason stopped him.
"Please stand and raise your right hands," Mason told them. They
looked puzzled. Never had members of the education committee asked a
city official testifying before them to take the oath.
"Raise your right hands," Mason said. "You need to take the oath to
tell the whole truth. And nothing but the truth."
Smith was surprised. After all he was trying to do, how could they
not trust him? Slowly, he raised his hand.
© 1995 The Washington Post Co.
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