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EDITORIAL
This plan won't work
(Published June 14, 2004)

A messiah is coming.

That’s been the message from city officials since a delegation of four top-level elected leaders flew to California June 9 to persuade former Long Beach schools superintendent Carl Cohn that he should pull up his lifelong roots and plant them in the nation’s capital at the helm of D.C. Public Schools.

At this writing, D.C. City Council is poised to hold a special legislative session Tuesday night to approve legislation that will retain the current partially elected-partially appointed school board structure for another four years – for the sake of maintaining the "stability" that Cohn reportedly has requested.

The D.C. Board of Education is expected to vote at its monthly meeting Wednesday to offer the 58-year-old Cohn as much as $350,000 a year to become the District’s new school superintendent. (Previous superintendent Paul Vance was paid $175,000 a year, and more than 200 teachers are about to lose their jobs for lack of funds.)

Mayor Anthony A. Williams, who says he will give up his tenacious fight to take over control of the schools if Cohn is hired, plans to appoint the new superintendent to also serve as the District’s state education officer.

Sit back, relax. After months of closed-door meetings from which elected leaders have emerged to proclaim that the current school governance structure is too muddled and dysfunctional to retain, the public is suddenly asked to believe that everything is hunky-dory – because super-superintendent Carl Cohn will save our schools.

Never mind that Cohn’s decade-long success at navigating political bureaucracy and improving academic achievement in the Long Beach schools likely was aided greatly by the local knowledge, wisdom and commitment he brought to that job as a native son of the community. Those intangible elements of Cohn’s professional success cannot be transferred to the District of Columbia.

Never mind that the current plan to have Cohn perform two distinct jobs – as head of the public schools and chief of one of its oversight agencies, the State Education Office – sets up an inherent conflict. It also will add yet one more level of accountability for the superintendent, with direct reporting to the mayor required of the SEO director, to an overly bureaucratic system that already expects the superintendent to answer to the school board, the city council, Congress and the public.

Whatever happened to the argument for establishing clear lines of authority?

Already, labor leaders in the District are joking about the new negotiating tactic that D.C. officeholders have adopted to lure Cohn: Ask potential public employees what they want and then accede to their demands. City workers are eagerly anticipating that bargaining posture being present across the table when they open talks on their future union contracts.

The mayor, council, school board and Congress appear ready to add yet another failure-in-the-making to the long list of their bumbling stewardship over public education in the District. When will they learn that they must shoulder more of the heavy lifting needed to build excellent schools and that they should work with the public every step of the way to make it happen?

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator