One of the most vitriolic and idiotic
elements of the Ed Deform and Teacher Bashing movements is their assertion that
the schools are filled with terrible or dangerous teachers who are impossible
to remove because of tenure and due process protections and that these
parasites force novice teachers (who are all presumed to be better than their
more senior colleagues) out of jobs.
But what about administrators who lack
the time or competency to effectively monitor and evaluate their employees or
who wield evaluations as a weapon to harass teachers they do not like? The fact
is that administrators themselves can be incompetent, abusive and even guilty
of criminal misconduct.
Should we end due process, seniority
and tenure for administrators?
Oh yeah, they don’t have these
protections. They have something better: status and power.
Consider the case of Ramon Cortines,
former superintendent of LAUSD, SFUSD, Pasadena and New York. He was accused of
sexually harassing a colleague and allowed to retire with benefits, while LAUSD
was forced to pay out $200,000, plus lifetime health benefits worth
$250-300,000 to Scot Graham, LAUSD’s former director of leasing and asset
management, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Cortines, like other high powered
abusers, denied that he harassed anyone, but admitted that he engaged "adult
behavior," and insisted that it was consensual. Yet Graham had complained
of Cortine’s behavior to superiors on three occasions. Meanwhile, the district
refused to investigate and encouraged him to drop his complaints.
While the out-of-court settlement
precludes us from ever knowing whether Cortines was guilty of wrongdoing, some
are asserting that the large size of the settlement is an indication of his
guilt and the district’s fear of going to court and losing. What is clear is
that Cortines enjoyed the protection of his district, which refused to pursue
the allegations, investigate his behavior, or otherwise threaten his
professional or social wellbeing.
San Francisco Breeding Ground for Corrupt,
Inept and Abusive Administrators
Not long after Cortines left San
Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bill Rojas administration oversaw
the misallocation (and theft) of millions of
dollars from the district. Up to $68 million disappeared into the
hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. Rojas
ultimately fled to Dallas, bringing with him several of his loyal criminal
cronies, where he managed to continue his incompetence and corruption while
evading the long arm of the law. William Coleman, who was Rojas’ No. 2 guy in
SFUSD and continued in Rojas’ new administration in Dallas, eventually pled
guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. However, while Rojas was fired from his job
in Dallas, he quickly landed a job at a for-profit charter school in Boston,
proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.
At SFUSD, Rojas was followed by Arlene
Ackerman who finagled a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing
allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit, which she was forced to do not
long after taking over. As superintendent of SFUSD she pretended to clean up
the district’s sloppy financial records and the scandals of the Rojas years,
while completely missing Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme which was occurring right
under her nose. This blunder was no doubt due to her obsession with quashing
dissent and getting her underlings to toe the line. “I can’t continue to tolerate the dissension,”
she said about her SFUSD staff and
teachers. Part of her strategy for reducing dissent was to spend $400,000 a year of district money on a PR
firm to put a positive spin on her leadership, money that should have gone to classroom instruction.
Ackerman
then went on to head Philadelphia public schools where she secured a raise that pushed
her salary higher than those of the mayor or governor. While in office
she gave a $7.5 million no-bid contract to cronies at IBS Communications to
install surveillance cameras despite previous
work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had
originally estimated. She
then scapegoated underlings for the scandal and squeezed the Philadelphia
school board for a $900,000 buyout package to get her to resign and go away.
Cheaters Prosper
In Washington, D.C., schools
Chancellor Michelle Rhee presided over one of the largest cheating scandals in
the nation. In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw an even larger cheating
scandal. In both cases the administrators
threatened to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up. In both cases, there
were abnormally high rates of erasures and implausibly high improvements in
test scores.
Rather than relying on independent
outside evaluators, both Rhee and Hall conducted their own biased internal
investigations that not surprisingly absolved them and their districts (see New York Times), despite the flagging of numerous schools by
McGraw Hill for the suspicious erasure patterns (see USA Today report). The State Superintendent of Education
also recommended
that the scores of many D.C. schools be investigated because of their
unusually high gains, something Rhee’s administration refused to do.
Rhee
was never fired, punished or held accountable for the cheating scandal. She did
resign when the mayor who had appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost his re-election
bid. Yet she remained the darling of the right wing Ed Deform movement, securing
millions of dollars in donations to her bogus student advocacy non-profit,
Students First, and numerous $50,000 speaking
engagements. To her supporters she is still seen as a
hero who took a tough school district and turned it around by being tough on
teachers and their unions. It doesn’t matter to them that those “gains” were
fabricated because they don’t really care about improved educational outcomes
for children. What is most important to them is improved business
opportunities, something that Rhee has championed through her support of high
stakes testing, private charter schools and her general attacks on unions.
Hall,
who has since retired, may not get off so easily. There is currently a grand
jury investigating the scandal and District Attorney Paul Howard has not yet
determined whether to file charges against her. (See Atlanta Journal Constitution
4/22/12). However, her former top adviser Kathy Augustine resigned after one
day on the job as superintendent of the DeSoto Independent School District,
with a severance deal worth $188,000, which is a far cry from punishment for
her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Three other former superintendents
are still on the Atlanta Public Schools payroll earning six-figure salaries.
