MIchelle Rhee's Biggest Opponent

Colbert I. King on Saturday laid it out:

It is a large and powerful creature. Known by many names (most of them unprintable in a family newspaper), it bears the official title "Central Office of the D.C. Public Schools."

Through the years, the central office has done terrifying deeds to public education. It has kept schools from opening on time, swallowed repair orders by the thousands, made teachers' paychecks disappear, consumed tax dollars by the millions without producing any discernible results and, ultimately, acquired a well-deserved reputation for treating schoolchildren as if they are nuisances.

But the central office's chief enemy, for whom its most hostile behavior is reserved, is the reform-minded superintendent. In the battle against change, the central office, which consists of an unknowable number of human parts, remains undefeated.

Yet there are always challengers to its reign.

The latest is Michelle Rhee, who entered the fray a few weeks ago bearing a fancy new title, public schools chancellor. Rhee, a former teacher and highly praised teacher trainer and headhunter for urban public schools, was thrown into the ring without much preparation by her handler, Mayor Adrian Fenty.

The more I have studied school systems and particularly why school systems have such a hard time changing, the more I have come to realize the role that central administrative offices have in the complex picture known as education. It is easy to blame the teachers' unions, who while the union leadership may place barriers and obstacles in teh path of reform, most of the front line teacher truly have their heart in the right place--even if the union has their head muddled.

Central offices, like all bureaucracies, take on a life of their own, with their own agendas, their own quirks and their own unique failures. As King notes:

The central office has outlived superintendents, elected and appointed school board members, a congressionally created financial control board, an Army general, auditors and a rotating corps of inquiring reporters. Through it all, the central office has remained an incubator for incompetence, obstruction, cronyism and corruption.

The key of course, is to follow the money. Contractors make tens of millions of dollars a year by suckling at the teat of the DC schools. But following that money may take a very large team of forensic accountants, investigators, human resources out-processors, and potentially a new office in the DC District Attorney's office--for prosecuting corruption cases from the DC schools.

That may seem like a bold statement, but for a school system that spends in excess of $15,000 per student per year, the money has to go somewhere, because it surely is not making it into the school buildings, into school equipment, into the teachers' salaries or into the classrooms. With the results the funds have been getting, it would have been better to just take a dump truck loaded with cash and dump it into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, at least some fisherman would get some benefit--because the DC school kids aren't.

For every contract the school system currently has, there should be an investigation into the manner in which it was awarded, who awarded the contract and a background investigation in both the awarding office and the contractor. The story of Brenda Belton is probably not unique. For every contract that even smells suspicious, there should be heads rolling and Rhee should weild the axe liberally.

Then Rhee and her lawyers should do everything in their power to rescind the contract, terminate the contract early or renegotiate. Only by eliminating these wasteful contracts can Rhee get a grip on the "hydra."

But the dilemma for Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty is not how to tame the hydra, but what kind of beast to put in place. Here, Fenty's model from New York, can go a long way. By taking more and more power out of the central office for most administrative needs and focusing it in the hands of principals, you don't replace on hydra with another. Rhee has focused her personal attention on two intiatives, higher quality teacher hiring and retention and principal hiring and retention. Give principals more power, with a slew of accountants watching where every penny goes, you can replace the interests of the Central office with the interests of the principals--which are much more closely aligned with and tied to the fate of their students than any central office bureaucrat.

Central office bureaucracies create more problems than they solve. For every office or bureau within the central office, there must be a justification for their role. Any office that does not make education better by giving more control to principals, should be eliminated--with extreme prejudice.