DC Reorganizing School Bureaucracy

Pursuant to the school takeover plan by DC Mayor Adrian Fenty (D), several administrative programs will be moved to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, a mouthful name for an office tasked with many of the jobs as other states, even though DC is a city with one school system.

The agency will mostly take responsibility for programs already established and funded and doesn't anticipate many new hires, said Deborah A. Gist, state superintendent of education. A financial officer calculated the estimate of 400 employees at the request of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who set aside $26 million for the office in his 2008 budget, Gist said.

Officials don't have a complete list of the city agencies and departments from which the employees will come.

The uncertainty over the staff illustrates how difficult it can be to separate and merge bureaucracies, even within a single jurisdiction such as the District.

One large challenge comes in determining whether programs should be administered at the local or state level in a city with one public school system and 55 charter schools.

"Even though D.C. isn't a state, we have state responsibilities," Gist said.

Those responsibilities have historically included overseeing federal school nutrition programs, enrollment counts, residency requirements, postsecondary financial aid grants and educational research. Fenty renamed the former State Education Office in mid-June and expanded the responsibilities to include setting citywide policies, overseeing charter school funding and collecting statistics for reports. Public and charter schools will still have control of their curriculum, staff and day-to-day operations, Gist said.

The question is, how much of this is real reform and how much of it is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

The DC public schools have some 11,000 employees and most of them are bureaucrats supposedly serving and supporting the city's 4,200 or so teachers. In a school system with 55,000 students, do we really need to one adult employee for every five kids? Do we really need to have more bureuacrats and administrators than teachers? There is a teacher to bureaucrat ration of about 1:1.6 or three bureaucrats for every two teachers!!

A great deal of research had been done on the "optimum" student teacher ratio, but how much as been done on teacher bureaucrat ratio. T

he DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education will give a five fold increase in staff due to the transfers, but how many of those people truly need to transfer and how many simply need to be let go. As Chancellor Michelle Rhee settles into her job, one of her priorities should be on trimming the personnel fat of the DC schools. While the State Education office might be outside of Rhee's control, both she and Fenty would do well to really consider chopping the expected 400 staff by about 75 percent.

In many states, the superintendent's office is the highest office and oversees a number of districts. The Virginia superintendent's office employs about 300 people and oversees programs similar to those in the District. The Maryland office employees about 700 people who oversee 24 school districts. Unlike other states, the Maryland office also offers child-care certification, job training for impaired adults and prison education programs.

One wonders the what those 400 adults are going to do?