Why are the D.C. schools so hard to fix? Why has it been so difficult to accomplish the simple things, such as counting students or delivering textbooks or stocking bathrooms with toilet paper?
True, we have run through superintendents faster than Dan Snyder sacks coaches. The school board has been inept. Governance is Byzantine.
But those of us who drill down into the system know one deep-set problem is nepotism, in the bureaucracy and in the union. Everyone is related by family or by cronyism.
Case in point is Barbara Bullock, defrocked president of the Washington Teacher’s Union. She’s serving time for embezzling $5 million from the union. Among the fur coats and Tiffany china she helped herself to, the FBI found she charged the union credit card for $29,000 worth of dental work for her and her husband.
Now we have Brenda Belton, executive director of the D.C. Board of Education’s charter school office. The FBI raided Belton’s office and home this summer in search of records for an investigation into possible misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal and city funds. Thanks to dogged pursuit by Examiner reporter Bill Myers, we know that some of the questionable funds may have gone to Equal Access in Education, a company whose offices are in a building owned by Belton’s daughter.
Belton is on administrative leave, still collecting her $98,500 salary. She has denied wrongdoing.
I bring nepotism and cronyism up now because they arecrucial issues as we prepare to elect a new school board president Nov. 7.
At a candidate’s forum Tuesday night at the Chevy Chase Community Center, the four candidates were asked their positions on charter schools. Carolyn Graham, currently vice president of the board, said she supported charters with one caveat:
“Accountability is lacking,” she said.
As Myers has reported, Graham was accountable for protecting Belton. Before the feds announced their probe and carted away the documents, a whistle-blower brought his concerns about Belton’s spending to the board. Rather than examining his concerns, Graham tried to protect Belton and undercut the whistle blower.
If nothing else, this tells me that Carolyn Graham is a captive of the system that has been failing the children of D.C. for too many decades. The watch word of the leaders and bureaucrats has been to protect your cronies and family members at the expense of the students. This is nepotism gone bad.
“I do not come to this work as a novice,” Graham told the audience at the candidates forum.
Indeed, Graham has wide experience in running city agencies into the ground. As director of human services and deputy mayor for children, youth, families and elders, Graham has left a trail of disarray and damage to the city’s most vulnerable.
We have not heard the last about the Belton investigation, but so far it shows all the marks of the cronyism and self-dealing that has decimated our school system.
Carolyn Graham was not a novice in this affair.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
