D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee wants unprecedented power to fire hundreds of central staff employees who do not meet her standards. Getting rid of the administrative deadwood, she says, is critical to the success of her school reform efforts. It’s also critical to her own success, because if she doesn’t win this skirmish, she has no chance of winning the real battle ahead: getting rid of underperforming, union-protected teachers and ineffective principals.
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Mayor Adrian Fenty has proposed emergency legislation that would re-classify 754 of 934 nonunion central office staff into “at-will” employees, giving Rhee the legal authority she needs to ax hundreds of employees. In a school system with the highest per-pupil costs and lowest test scores in the country, anybody standing in the way of much-needed improvements — or simply taking up space — has to go.
DCPS doesn’t even have an accurate count of its own employees. It’s no coincidence that many of the deficiencies Rhee identified in her first four months on the job are in the human resources and procurement offices, where decades of cronyism and corruption have conspired to cheat thousands of District youngsters out of the quality education they deserve.
Nevertheless, the Battle of the Central Staff will be fierce and protracted. Entrenched bureaucracies don’t get whittled down without a fight, as veterans of such campaigns at the federal level can attest.
Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso told Examiner reporter Dena Levitz that there are “eight solid votes” for the mayor’s proposal — out of nine needed to pass the District Council. That’s where most of the hand-to-hand combat will take place, as politically connected DCPS employees run to their ward representatives for protection.
But veteran council members are the same people who sat around and watched for years while the city’s schools deteriorated before their eyes. District residents should not be fooled by a political show of agreeing to Rhee’s reforms in general, only to balk at specifics that actually make them work. This debate is about children, not jobs for adults.
Personnel is policy. If the new chancellor is ever going to pull off a dramatic turnaround of the city’s failed school system, and every District resident should hope she succeeds, she must be allowed to assemble a staff that at the very least is pulling in the same direction.
