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December 2, 2007

Checks and Balances

Dear Balancers:

It’s time to go back to basics. As we were all taught in elementary school, checks and balances are the genius of the American governmental system and of the form of democratic government that its founders invented. The three major branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, act as checks and balances on each other. No single branch is preeminent, and any branch can, under certain circumstances, veto and thwart the actions of the others. In the end, the people are the ultimate source of all the power and authority that they delegate to the government and its three branches, and they have the right and power to overrule and even to reconstitute them.

That system of checks and balances makes our democracy clumsy, slow-moving, and often frustrating. But it protects us against much bigger problems than slowness and frustration. Checks and balances are most necessary when the problems faced by government and society are worst, when the temptation is greatest to abandon these democratic protections. When a society is divided, when the issues that face it are most divisive, when the best solution to a problem is hard to discern or when there is no best solution, that is when open public debate and consultation among the branches of government and the people is most necessary. A good democratic government executive would not react to a difficult issue by resorting to unilateral decisionmaking, pretending that he was merely relieving the public and the legislature of the unpleasantness and messiness of public debate. A good executive would facilitate the process of public resolution; he would relish public debate, not seek to evade it. A public debate in the District over whether to close public schools and which schools to close would undoubtedly become loud and ugly, but school closing decisions made in secret meetings behind closed doors are inherently corrupt, as Marc Borbely demonstrates below.

Not only were the school closing decisions made in secret; Fenty is trying to keep the school budget a secret, too. We’re back to a system in which the executive hides the true budget from the city council, and thus from the people. On November 4, I wrote about how mayoral General Counsel Peter Nickles kept from the council Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi’s reservations about the deal for the city to subsidize the purchase of Greater Southeast Community Hospital (http://www.dcwatch.com/govern/cfo071023.htm). Last week, it was revealed that School Chancellor Michelle Rhee withheld from the city council a letter from Pamela Graham, CFO for the schools, that said the school system’s “deficit could be as high as $100 million” this year (http://www.dcpswatch.com/mayor/071121.htm). Although the mayor claimed in an October 3 press release that his supplemental budget included “only” $47 million for additional school financing, when all the requests for school financing that are currently in the supplemental budget are added, they total $118.2 million including the funds for schools that are hidden in requests for other agencies. For example, the administration admitted, in a November 19 letter in response to questioning from Council Chairman Vincent Gray, that one $6,000,000 request for the Workforce Investment Fund is intended to pay DCPS salaries, and that a separate $22,082,000 request for the Workforce Investment Fund is intended to pay for cost-of-living pay increases for DCPS employees. The additional request for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer is intended to pay for converting the DCPS from one computerized personnel system, CAPPS, to another, PeopleSoft.

During the last election, candidate Adrian Fenty never gave any specific recommendations about what should be done to fix the school system. He just said that "fixing" the schools would be important in a Fenty administration. He never advocated a mayoral takeover of the schools or removing all important powers from the elected school board. He never hinted at that, so it never became part of the election debate, and the people never had a chance to vote for or against it. Secrecy in school closings, misleading budgets, and a deceptive political campaign. Against that, I’ll take checks and balances any day.

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

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A Dilemma
Ed T Barron, edtb1@mac.com

After an eight-day trip to Seattle we arrived home to a mountain of fallen leaves. This is a dilemma for us. The good news about living on Massachusetts Avenue is that we need only to blast out of our eighty-foot driveway and we are on a snow emergency route when it snows. The bad news is that we don’t have leaf pickup at the curb. We can mulch some of the leaves, but then we must bag the rest for pick up,. five bags each week. Even shredded, it takes about five weeks of trash pickup to get rid of all the bags.

When asked about pickup of the leaves when raked to the grassy space between the curb and the sidewalk, the DPW said that there would be no pick up on Mass. Ave. and the respondent suggested what I call the Kosciusko maneuver. For those short-in-the-tooth folks, the Kosciusko maneuver dates back to the 1800’s in Brooklyn. In those days, before horseless carriages, horses pulled carts through the streets. On one occasion a horse keeled over dead on Kosciusko street. The local policeman who had to write up the incident could not spell Kosciusko, and had the horse dragged around the block to Smith Street. And that is what I do now, I dump all the leaves around the corner on 48th Street, where they are picked up in late November or early December.

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Spending More Time Listening and Learning from Each Other
Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com

The rise of the Internet has seen a flourishing of creative expression on blogs, web sites and YouTube. From out of nowhere, YouTube has grown to deliver two hundred million videos per day. Growing exponentially, it’s quite likely that YouTube will reach a billion video views per day sometime in 2008. I see this as a good thing. While there are many worthless videos on YouTube, there are also many gems. The Internet community does a fine job of sorting out the wheat from the chaff. For those who might be interested, I’ve begun some commentary on this topic at http://tinyurl.com/2g34yb

I’ll have more to say about this as we get closer to that billion video views per day milestone. There’s a shift of attention going on out there. People are listening to each other more. And when you listen more, you learn more.

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Some Background to the School Closure Proposal
Marc Borbely, borbely@FixOurSchools.net

Contrary to the messages we’re getting from Fenty/Rhee/Reinoso, the proposed school closing list is not some neutral, scientific, value-free product. Rather, I’ve learned, after speaking with the contractor in charge of producing the criteria for Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso, that it is the result of dozens of policy decisions, many apparently arbitrary choices, and a decent dose of corruption.

One of those policy decisions, made early on, was that the schools in Ward 3 should be protected. These schools have relatively higher test scores, a whiter and richer student body, and PTAs that raise tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. 21st Century School Fund, Brookings Institution, and the Urban Institute were hired to provide Victor Reinoso with school closing criteria. After considering various possible criteria, they proposed that Reinoso start with a list of the forty schools that have a below-average enrollment, and a higher than average enrollment decline over the past five years. A decision was made to close small schools, because those are the most expensive to run per pupil -- but only those that were significantly larger five years ago. This knocks out the small Ward 3 schools, which are small because they are in small buildings and so could not have been larger five years ago. Another decision was made not to look initially at the percentage of students who live close to the school (one thought was to consider whether a high percentage of students live more than half a mile away, for instance). This too saved Ward 3 schools. Decision-makers (perhaps wisely) don’t want to lose Ward 3 parents from DCPS or from the District. They should be upfront about this. Yes, Ward 3 schools are "full," but only because of the out-of-boundary process, driven by the much greater resources in Ward 3 schools. Instead of closing schools where most students live, DCPS could choose to invest in them. Most people would much rather send their children to their neighborhood school than drive them across town.

Once presented with the list of forty schools, Reinoso proceeded to take twenty-four schools off the list and add seven others, for various individual school-specific reasons. According to Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, the nonprofits, Hine Junior High School for example, at Eastern Market, was added to the school closure list because Councilmember Wells wanted it closed. Brookland Elementary School was taken off the list because it is next to a rec center, but similarly valid reasons could be found to keep almost any school open. Major changes to the fabric of a community should not be made arbitrarily, without real dialogue with those affected. Dialogue takes time. If we do this wrong, shoving closures down people’s throats, as it seems we are about to, we will see the further downward spiraling of DCPS enrollment, as families will continue to leave the school system in droves.

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Can’t Say No to Chancellor Rhee
Leo Hendricks, leohendricks@pol.net

[In the November 11 issue of themail, there was this message from Leo Hendricks. He has resent it, and asks whether there are any comments. — Gary Imhoff]

In Wednesday’s Northwest Current (November 7, http://www.currentnewspapers.com/admin/uploadfiles/1-181.pdf, page 5), it was reported that Chancellor Rhee, speaking at a Washington Rotary Club meeting, said Mayor Fenty told his cabinet members: "No one is allowed to say no to the chancellor except me. . . . If I hear that someone is standing in the way of progress, that person’s job would be at risk."

Mayor Fenty repeated his statement, Rhee said, when he learned that some high-level city officials were turning down her requests.

Question: save for maybe Mr. Nickles, who else in Mayor Fenty’s administration has this privilege? Where is it all this going? Oh, by the way, what is the latest on Mr. Nickles moving to the District?

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School Closings
Mary Melchior, Brookland, mulchness@gmail.com

The Chancellor sent a letter to parents with an outline that covers some ground the Post article didn’t. I was surprised by the number of schools targeted in Ward 5. One of the rationales for closings is to save money, and to concentrate resources in fewer schools to guarantee all schools have the resources for music, art, and special support teachers like literacy and math resource teachers. But I was surprised that the schools proposed for closing don’t necessarily seem to be the worst, and that some of the schools being kept open have smaller populations than some slated to be closed.

Others have expressed concern about the expanding some elementary schools through eighth grade. I know there are issues with having five-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds in the same school, but currently we have one middle school in the whole city that isn’t failing. I have my kids at Langdon, and I have a lot more confidence in that school expanding up to 8th grade successfully than I do in practically any middle school in the city, except Deal or maybe (very maybe) Hardy or Stuart-Hobson.

I think this plan shows the problem with control being too centralized and input from the citizens being weakened. I also think we need to be prepared to be well rounded with our approach. There is no doubt that schools have to be closed, but they need to be done rationally.

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Notes from a Blind Acolyte
Bill Coe, bceedeec@aol.com

Jim Graham is a fine councilmember, whom I admire very much. He has every right and reason to be annoyed by Mayor Fenty’s inadequate efforts to brief or consult the council before announcing major changes to DC’s school system. I agree with him that the mayor would be politic to grant the council some respectful standing in deliberations leading up to executive action since, ultimately, the legislature can influence or control his programs through the power of the purse. Still, Graham’s cries of “autocracy” are fluffy and hysterical. Mr. Imhoff, instead of critically examining Graham’s over-baked accusation, further lards it with some rhetorical icing of his own — trying to provoke us with such words as “dictatorship” and “communism.”

Puh-leeze. . . . DC’s voters did not relinquish their democratic rights by electing a mayor who promised to do what Adrian Fenty is doing with the school system. We are not struggling under the iron grip of an autocrat, crushed by a dictator, or smothered in the political vacuum of communism. Quite the opposite: citizens rationally chose to place responsibility and accountability for the performance of our schools in a single office, the mayor’s — within regular reach of our votes. I think there is nothing undemocratic in this arrangement.

This isn’t to say a better governance structure for the schools might not have been devised (although Mr. Imhoff and other critics of Mayor Fenty’s proposal have never offered a single viable alternative). This isn’t to say, either, that Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee will prove to be the best possible managers of our schools (for which failings they would be subject to removal by us citizens in future elections).

What all this does say is that voters were fed up with a school system in which responsibility and accountability were so scattered as to make success practically impossible. The old school board was populated with some of our best and brightest people but, operating in that fragmented system, they could produce little more than feckless analysis and a whole lot of politicking. Meanwhile, the school system they were supposed to be managing was administered day-to-day by deadwood bureaucrats and, it now appears, outright thieves. Any sustained attempt to perform competently in that environment was paralyzed by a shiftless, unresponsive central office. Too many of the schools themselves were notorious for the rise of a thug culture in which learning and achievement were held in low respect. The waste of human and material capital was immense. It was, from top to bottom, a catastrophe.

The result of all this is evident in recent reports on a generation of our young people who have emerged from their schools poorly prepared for any kind of promising life in today’s knowledge- and information-based society, where skilled services and intellectual capital are the main generators of wealth. These are youngsters (now in their twenties, heading for middle age) whose economic prospects are lower than their parents’ which, in my view, is the truest mark of failure in our American culture.

Mr. Imhoff needs to get past his unhappiness over losing the public debate on Mayor Fenty’s takeover of our schools — a debate which was settled by the last election (and, surely, will be revisited in the next one). We voters have spoken, in every precinct of the city. We didn’t elect the mayor (and hire Ms. Rhee) just to write reports or attend meetings or get themselves tied down by the “inconveniences of democracy” (as Mr. Imhoff absurdly puts it); we put them in office to kick serious butt and radically rearrange the facts on the ground. Given what’s at stake, we had no choice! I wish them well.

[I must note that Mr. Coe chose his title himself; I did not write it. — Gary Imhoff]

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A Dirty Job
Ed T Barron, edtb1@macdotcom

Identifying underutilized schools as candidates for closing is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Fenty and Rhee have decided that it is time to get the schools and budget under control. They are doing the right thing for the right reasons. Yes, they’ll be a hue and cry from many of the councilmembers who will really be just posturing for reelection. And, many parents will scream that there are no school closings in Ward 3. The schools that I’m familiar with in Ward 3, by the way, are all chock-a-block full and I’m pretty sure all of the Ward 3 schools are full to capacity. The dirty job needs to be done.

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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS

Gray and Cheh at Cleveland Park, December 4
George Idelson, g.idelson@verizon.net

Vincent Gray, DC Council Chairman, and Mary Cheh, Ward 3 Councilmember, will be the featured speakers at the Tuesday, December 4 meeting of the Cleveland Park Citizens Association. The subject is “One Year Later.” A year ago, shortly after election, these same speakers spoke to the association about plans for the year ahead. This will be a progress report as well as a look at the future agenda of the council and the city. The meeting takes place at the Cleveland Park Library, and begins at 6:30 p.m. All are welcome.

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DC Public Library Events, December 4-6
Kandace Foreman, kandace.foreman@dc.gov

Assistive Technology Users Group and Support (TUGS). Assistive technology users meet to share information. All ages who use assistive technology for the blind and visually impaired. Tuesday, December 4, 4:15 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, Adaptive Services Division, Room 215

Poetry at Takoma fall series. Poetry readings by local poets Katherine Gekker, Michelle Mandolia, and Andrea Wyatt. Tuesday, December 4, 7:30 p.m., Takoma Park Neighborhood Library.

Cinema night, Tuesday, December 4, 11, 18, 7 p.m., Anacostia Interim Library.

Storytelling in American Sign Language. Tuesday, December 4, 10:30 a.m.; Wednesday, December 5, 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; Thursday, December 6, 10:30 a.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, Children’s Division, Room 200.

The Art and Audiovisual Divisions present ANIME. Every Tuesday in December, 6 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library Art and Audiovisual Divisions, Room A-5. December 4, Tokyo Godfathers; December 11, Ghost in the Shell; December 18, Howl’s Moving Castle.

Philosophy Film Series: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Tuesdays, 1 p.m. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library Philosophy Division, Second Floor, East Lobby. December 4, The Hero’s Adventure and The Message of the Myth (Vols. 1 and 2); December 11, The First Storytellers and Sacrifice and Bliss (Vols. 3 and 4); December 18, Love and the Goddess and Masks of Eternity (Vols. 5 and 6).

Family night out, story time fun and crafts for the whole family in the Cozy Kids Nook. Every Wednesday in December (5, 12, 19, 26), 7 p.m., West End Neighborhood Library.

The Southeast Sister Circle. December 5-29, every Wednesday, 10 a.m. and every Saturday, 2 p.m., Southeast Neighborhood Library.

Brown Bag Recital Series, music of Brahms and Haydn performed by cellist Vasily Popov and pianist Ralitza Patcheva.. Thursday, December 6, noon. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, Music Division, Auditorium A-5.

Let’s Talk About Books. Discuss Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Thursday, December 6, 2:30 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, Language and Literature Division, Room 221.

Movie night, every Thursday in December (6, 13, 20, 27), 4 p.m., Robert L. Christian Neighborhood Library.

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Library Design Meetings, December 11-13
Martha Saccocio, marthans@aol.com

The DC Public Library is hosting a series of Community Design Meetings to work with the communities in designing and constructing three neighborhood libraries that are currently closed for reconstruction. The architects will be presenting the latest design plans to the community. The meetings scheduled are:

Benning Neighborhood Library: Tuesday, December 11, 6:00 p.m., Benning Interim Library, 4101 Benning Road, NE; Tenley-Friendship Neighborhood Library: Wednesday, December 12, 6:00 p.m., Tenley-Friendship Interim Library, 4200 Wisconsin Avenue, NW; Anacostia Neighborhood Library: Thursday, December 13, 6:00 p.m., 1800 Good Hope Road, SE.

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Council Hearing on E-Mails, December 13
Denise Wiktor, dwiktor@dccouncil.us

The Committee on Workforce Development and Government Operations, chaired by Councilmember Carol Schwartz, will be having a hearing on December 13 at 10:00 a.m. on a proposed bill to add E-mail to the records covered by the District’s record retention act. The Committee is interested in hearing from individuals or organizations that have an interest in this subject, including best practices, liability concerns, and historical perspectives. If you are interested in the details of the proposed legislation, Bill 17-0490, Electronic Mail Public Record Clarification Amendment Act of 2007, you may view it at http://www.dccouncil.washington.dc.us/images/00001/20071108160455.pdf. If you are interested in testifying please contact Denise Wiktor, Committee Counsel, at 724-8105 or dwiktor@dccouncil.us.

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Richard Moe Gets Scully Prize, December 13
Sara Kabakoff, skabakoff@nbm.org

The National Building Museum will present its Ninth Vincent J. Scully Prize to Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation on Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 6:30 p.m. at the Museum, 401 F Street, NW. The Vincent J. Scully Prize and endowment was established by the National Building Museum in 1999 to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. The award recognizes Moe’s leadership in moving historic preservation into the mainstream of American life and expanding the public’s understanding of the importance of protecting and celebrating our heritage. Carolyn Brody, Paul Goldberger, and William Hart will provide opening remarks. After the prize ceremony, Mr. Moe will give a presentation on how preservation is making a difference in the economic vitality and livability of communities by supporting smart growth and sustainability.

Tickets are $12 for Museum and National Trust for Historic Preservation members and Students; $20 for nonmembers. Prepaid registration required. To register, please visit http://www.nbm.org or call 272-2448. For more information, contact Sara Kabakoff, skabakoff@nbm.org, 272-2448, ext. 3201.

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