For those of us who despair that no one can improve the District’s dysfunctional schools, I serve up a sliver of good news.
I heard that City Administrator Robert Bobb might become a candidate for school board president. Doubting that he would be interested in a thankless job for puny pay, I tracked him down.
“It’s right at the top of my thinking,” he told me. “I am giving it serious consideration.”
Why would I get so jazzed simply because the city’s top bureaucrat is eyeing a run for the school board presidency? Because outgoing President Peggy Cooper Cafritz has been so divisive, and because Robert Bobb has run the city government as if he were the business end of a 12-gauge shotgun.
“Two Bobb,” as he is affectionately called, took over as Mayor Tony Williams’ chief administrator in September 2003. He soon became known as Tony’s Enforcer. He took no crap from D.C.’s notoriously neglectful bureaucrats. He axed a few.
Says Bobb: “I brought a lot of order to disorder.”
One cold morning in the spring of 2004, I met Bobb on the back streets near North Capitol and New York Avenue. Caught in the whipsaw of urban renewal, the neighborhood was crowded with construction crews all day and crawling with heroin addicts all night. Bobb fingered it as one of the city’s “hot spots” and did what he did to each one: He walked it.
“Two Bobb” prefers starched white shirts, dark pinstripes and lizard-skin cowboy boots. Touring the hot spot that morning, trailing a bevy of cops and social services officials, he sported a blue wind-breaker — and boots.
“What doyou need?” he asked the cops. “What can we do to make this community work better?”
He listened that morning and many nights. He crafted a plan, delivered services and calmed the streets.
In the past two years, Bobb has taken on the city’s most difficult tasks, from crime to affordable housing to job training. Now he’s trying to save the mental retardation agency from federal takeover.
Unbeknownst to most, Bobb recently spent 10 months in the Broad Foundation’s Superintendent’s Academy, an elite school to train executives for urban school systems.
“It was tough work,” Bobb says.
He took classes and toured schools in Long Beach, Calif., Philadelphia and New York among others.
“I learned that many schools systems run on adult issues; they should be about student achievement,” he said.
Before coming to D.C., Bobb was city administrator in Oakland and Richmond. He was born in Louisiana.
His parents worked on sugar plantations. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school and college.
Bobb, 61, was here for about a year when people started to see him as a potential mayoral candidate. That moment has passed for now, and Bobb is surveying his options. He could do well as a consultant, but he could do more good as school board president.
“I’m at the beginning of my career,” he says, “not at the end.”
Run, Two Bobb, run.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
