End Due Process for Abusive Administrators?

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.

Arlene Ackerman: Serial Golden Paratrooper

If memory serves, Arlene Ackerman was chased out of San Francisco Unified with her tail between her legs, but also with a hefty golden parachute. Now Philly is set to do the same. This week the Philadelphia School Reform Commission unanimously approved a buyout for former Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman worth nearly $1 million, according to Philly.com.

In order to get rid of their excess baggage, Philadelphia will have to pay Ackerman $500,000 in district funds. She will also get health and life insurance through June 2013 and a check for her unused sick and vacation time. The value of the insurance and unpaid leave has not been disclosed. However, she will also receive $405,000 in private, anonymous donations funneled through a nonprofit with ties to the Philadelphia School District. The Kansas City Star reported this week that Pennsylvania State Auditor General Jack Wagner plans to investigate the unusual arrangement. Could Ackerman have a secret admirer in the Billionaire Boys Club?

Her supporters are calling her ousting a “lynching,” blaming it on racism because she gave a large district contract to a black vendor, or because she did not “kiss the right political behinds.” However, not kissing the right political behinds is the usual reason for ousting an administrator, regardless of race. It is in the job description’s extra fine print. And the problem with her deal with the black vendor was not race, but the fact that the vendor, IBS Communications, got a $7.5 million no-bid contract despite previous work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated. 

Ackerman’s tenure in Philadelphia was a virtual replay of her stint in San Francisco, with similar incompetence and corruption, but a much more lucrative exit plan. As superintendent of SFUSD, she scored herself a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit. As superintendent, she pretended to clean up SFUSD’s muddy books and the scandals of the Bill Rojas years, yet somehow missed Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme, probably because of her obsession with quashing dissent. She spent $400,000 a year on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her autocratic and unpopular leadership.

SF Schools Rogues Gallery

Superintendent of San Francisco Schools, Carlos Garcia, has vowed to reform his administration and make accounting more transparent, in an attempt to clean up the image of SFUSD in the wake of the Trish Bascom embezzlement scandal. (Didn’t Arlene Ackerman do this already?) Garcia plans to tighten district accounting practices, hire an internal auditor and require competitive bids for future contracts with organizations running after school programs.

Bascom and four others in the Student Support Services Department are accused of diverting tens of thousands of dollars to their own personal bank accounts. Garcia continues to play dumb and to deflect all blame onto rogue elements in the district. “We were pretty shocked…” he said. “Our systems were good, but they could never ensure that our system could control someone doing something stupid.”

SFUSD has a long history of corruption and scandal reaching up to its highest echelons. Garcia should not only have been aware of this history, but actively working to destroy its remaining vestiges. Bascom, for example, had been an administrator since the Bill Rojas days. Considering how corrupt Rojas was, it would not be surprising to find out that Bascom picked up a few of her tricks from the expert himself. At the very least, Garcia had a responsibility to be aware of and to rectify the organizational defects that allowed Bascom to manage a department with a $20 million budget with nearly complete autonomy and virtually no oversight.

San Francisco’s Rogues Gallery

Of course Bascom’s scams are small potatoes compared to Rojas’. Under Rojas, millions of dollars of SFUSD funds were misspent, mismanaged or given away to cronies. Up to $68 million disappeared into the hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. He 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, pled guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. Coleman also agreed to testify against another former SFUSD administrator, Ruben Bohuchot, on multiple felony charges over Dallas dealings.

In contrast, SFUSD’s next superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, committed legal acts of corruption. Her first act was to finagle a sweet heart contract with SFUSD: $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit. She then pretended to clean up SFUSD, (obviously overlooking Bascom’s personal fiefdom), focusing more on stifling dissent and ruling with an iron fist. She spent $400,000 a year on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her autocratic and unpopular leadership. Then, when driven out of SFUSD by its progressive school board, she continued similar behavior in Philadelphia, where she gave a $7.5 million no bid contract to IBS Communications, a minority-owned company that had previously worked for the school district with cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated.