Discouragement
Dear Encouragers:
Mary Brooks Beatty, below, writes about the discouragement of a civic
activist who is beaten down by the feeling that, "I do not trust or
respect my local government." It’s a story I’ve heard repeatedly from
people who are involved in public affairs on a local level in the
District of Columbia. Whether the story is, "I’m outta here," "I’m too
tired to deal with it anymore," "I’m sick of it all," or, as one person
wrote to themail several years ago, "I’ve moved thirty minutes and a
world away" to the northern Virginia suburbs, the underlying complaint
is the same. Dealing with the government here beats you down and drains
you of your energy.
Whether it’s the school mother who sends her child to a private
school and who says that it feels like she’s retired from a full-time
job of battling for her child’s education, or the neighborhood activist
who can’t understand why the DC government is forever working against
the interests of people who live in the city and who want to love it,
the wave of discouragement sometimes feels overwhelming.
So cheer us all up. Tell us again about "the benefits of this vibrant
and beautiful city" that Beatty refers to, because themail is supposed
to be about the benefits, too.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Ferreting Out Corruption
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
In the wake of the recent scandals that have involved government
employees and elected officials in the District, DC residents are
asking, quite naturally how did we get to the point at which fraud and
public corruption seems to be so pervasive. After all, the District, by
and large, has an informed, educated, civically engaged electorate that
follows the inner workings of the government closely. In addition, over
the years, a body of law has been adopted regarding, for example,
ethics, campaign finance, corruption, and the conduct of elections (e.g.,
the Board of Elections, the Office of Campaign Finance, the Office of
the Inspector General, the Board of Ethics and Government
Accountability, and the Office of the Ethics Counselor in the Office of
the Attorney General) to ferret out waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption
by public officials, government employees, and contractors.
So what happened? In the coming weeks and months, we need to focus on
whether there has been a "broadscale system failure" in the
investigatory and regulatory regime the District government has in place
to prevent corruption. Why, for example, did the DC Board of Election
(BOE) hold a show cause hearing just last week regarding multiple
violations of the District’s campaign finance laws (e.g., failing
to report two hundred ten donations totaling $102,763 and failing to
report fifty-three expenditures of $169,431) by the 2008 Committee to
Re-Elect Kwame Brown? While the DC Office of Campaign Finance has asked
the BOE to impose a fine of $53,400 (or $200 for each of the 267
violations), the Committee’s bank account has a balance of less than two
hundred dollars, and District law doesn’t allows the fine to be impose
against the candidate, Kwame Brown, or the campaign committee’s
treasurer, Che Brown. Are DC’s corruption laws not only not being
enforced? Are they essentially toothless in that they do not provide for
any real punishment or consequences if they are violated?
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The Beat of a Different Drum
Mary Brooks Beatty,
mbbeatty@aol.com
I’m writing to comment on Gary’s "The Beat Goes On," themail, June 2,
and "Competing with the Suburbs," themail, June 12. When I moved to DC
in 1999, Anthony Williams had just been elected mayor and there was a
sense that the city was moving in a new direction. Despite warnings
about crime, poor city services, political corruption, high taxes, and
poor schools, my husband and I chose to leave the suburbs of Northern
Virginia and move to Capitol Hill.
As a result of community efforts over the last fourteen years, my
northeast neighborhood turned from being a "hot spot" of criminal
activity to looking and feeling very much like Mayberry. During those
same years, nearby H Street, NE, went from burnt out, vacant buildings
to one of the most vibrant entertainment areas in city. But despite the
fact that our personal quality of life improved greatly over these
years, we have made the choice to leave DC. By moving to a suburban
community just outside Charleston, SC, we will reduce our property taxes
by 75 percent and lower our cost of living significantly. The murder
rate is almost nonexistent and violent crime overall is at about 2
percent of DC’s. Our new city (Mt. Pleasant) has been nationally
recognized as one of the best run, and it has an unemployment rate of 5
percent. These elements help define quality of life to me.
But these improvements are not the reason we have made the decision
to move. No, the greatest contributor to our decision is the incessant
corruption in our local DC government. By almost any standard, the
corruption has reached new heights of disrespect to taxpayers. We know
of members of the council stealing funds from city agencies intended to
help youth, of the high life that was funded with tax dollars and of
bribery for political favors. Just a few bad apples? I don’t think so.
In fact, that’s why the term "culture of corruption" is so often used to
describe DC government.
I do not trust or respect my local government. That feeling, which
might be best described as outrage, leads me to say good-bye to this
place that I have loved for the last fourteen years. It’s not the draw
of the suburbs that leads us to the decision to leave DC. I can put up
with the negatives of city living for the benefits of this vibrant and
beautiful city. But the steady beat of corruption in DC government has
become too much for me. While I admire and applaud Gary, Dorothy, the
local media, and hundreds of community activists who "fight the good
fight" to expose and eradicate the corruption, I see little hope of
reform. So for us, it’s time for the beat of different drum.
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Planning for the Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Central Library
Robin Diener,
robinsdiener@gmail.com
As you may know, the DC Library Renaissance Project has been calling
for a citizens task force on the future of MLK since the central library
debacle of 2006. My local ANC2B passed a resolution for citizens task
force on MLK in 2008, but the library system responded that it was
"premature." Suddenly, we now find one hundred million dollars in the
capital budget for MLK for 2017-18. The task force is no longer
premature! In February, my ANC re-sent its resolution, but it has been
ignored.
We need a citizens task force to take advantage of this
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plan for the central library that we,
as a city, want and need, now and for the future. Use this link --
http://www.districtdynamos.org/savemlk -- to
send a note to DC Council Chair Mendelson, Library Chair Catania, and
others, to ask that a Citizens Task Force be written into the Budget
Support Act during the council’s final vote on Tuesday. There is already
four million dollars for library planning in the budget, and a task
force would be a fraction of that.
Just so you know, ideas that are being floated call for a smaller
library (two levels), with no public parking, and additional privatized
floors of offices built on top. Must we privatize part of MLK in order
to modernize it? Public-public opportunities are being ignored. There is
forty million dollars in the budget for a new DC Archives, without a
location! The City Archives would pair perfectly with the mission of the
central library -- and, in fact, the city of Vancouver recently decided
to move its Archives onto its top two floors (of nine!). These kinds of
questions are best decided by the library-going public. Thank you for
weighing in. Please do not hesitate to call me at 431-9254 if you have
question or concerns about this matter.
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Why the WTU Run-off
Election Matters
Erich Martel, ehmartel at starpower dot net
In August 2011, after forty-two years in DCPS (Cardozo, Wilson,
Phelps High Schools), I retired. I continue to speak out against
administrative abuse and the misuse of student test results to excess
and fire teachers and close schools, instead of using data to analyze
student needs and then meet those needs. That is why I blew the whistle
on grade changes, social promotion, and principals’ abuse of their
supervisory authority. Liz Davis has challenged mismanagement many
times.
Over the past decade, the Washington Teachers Union suffered setbacks
to its integrity that weakened its ability to fully and honorably
represent its members. More than two years of bitter contract
negotiations with Michelle Rhee led to a public split in the union
leadership, with most members frustrated over the lack of union unity
and weakened due process rights that allowed the chancellor to use
annual changes in schools’ staffing model and changing budget
definitions as a pretext to excess several hundred teachers each year.
Despite being elected as a critic of the chancellor’s arbitrary
management, current WTU president Nathan Saunders has pursued policies
that further weakened the union. For many teachers, consumed with
endless hours of irrelevant, meetings, paperwork, and petty
micromanagement with almost every activity from sign-in to departure a
subject to arbitrary loss of IMPACT points, the silence of WTU President
Saunders is equated with silence of the union. That’s understandable,
but dead wrong.
Every member should express his or her frustration by voting to take
back the union for its members. The best response members can make to
the daily shock and awe of arbitrary decisions is to present the
chancellor and the mayor with the shock and awe of thousands of teachers
voting for a change, for a leadership that comes from the classroom and
is an advocate for both students and teachers.
Like elected local and national leaders, those holding office in the
WTU make decisions in the name of all teachers. It negotiates a contract
or "collective bargaining agreement" (CBA) with DCPS that defines your
working conditions, which directly affect your effectiveness in the
classroom. As your representative in all matters dealing with DCPS
officials, the difference between an effective and an ineffective union
can mean the difference between a supportive learning environment and an
abusive one. Since the union is in many respects like your attorney, a
decision to vote or to not vote is somewhat like the difference between
selecting an attorney or accepting a court-appointed one.
Liz Davis is a teacher, a scholar, and an activist. Liz has taught
for forty years in DCPS (Nathan Saunders for four and a half years). She
is presently assigned to Phelps ACE High School, where she is the
building representative. You can find her online. Almost every reference
describes her work with students, her advocacy. You owe it to yourself
to read some of the references. I can only give some highlights. As a
teacher-consultant for the DC Area Writing Project, Liz introduced
research and writing skills to her students ( http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/1353)
and to teachers across the city. She has also served as a
teacher-advisor to the College Board’s National Commission on Writing.
Liz is a teacher’s teacher, skilled at engaging students in knowledge
and teaching them how to use it in practical advocacy of their rights
and safety. As such, she personifies a concept that Chancellor Henderson
would like to crush: the teacher who combines instructional competence
with a fierce commitment to her students’ and colleagues’ well-being and
a refusal to bow and scrape before the misuse and abuse of authority.
Retaliatory transfers have not quashed her determination to demand
justice. In each of her schools, teachers voted to make her their
building representative.
As a building representative at PR Harris Education Center in 1993,
she led a successful challenge to reduce teachers’ case loads and have
duty-free lunch periods. When lead was discovered in the water
fountains, she demanded and got bottled water. When students and
teachers became ill from tar fumes from repair of the damaged roof
during the school day, she taught students how to write their elected
representatives and succeeded in having the repair work moved to
non-school hours.
After being transferred to Sousa JHS and learning that it was
designated for demolition, despite its landmark status as the school in
the Supreme Court’s Bolling v. Sharpe decision (the DC companion
case to Brown v. Board of Education), city officials responded to
her students’ letter writing campaign by moving Sousa to the head of the
school modernization list. When school officials endangered students and
teachers by starting modernization work while students were in the
building, she successfully demanded that classes be moved to a swing
space at Shadd until the work was completed. Her advocacy resulted in
her transfer to Hart Middle School. After co-authoring a Washington
Post op-ed analyzing the flaws in Chancellor Rhee’s reform plan, she
was invited to the central office to discuss it. When Hart MS was
reconstituted and consolidated with PR Harris, Liz refused to interview
for a position at Hart and requested a transfer to Phelps where she is
currently teaching.
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DCPS Teachers Are Fed Up
with Current Union Leadership
Elizabeth A. Davis,
elizabeth.davis704@gmail.com
During the Saunders administration, fifteen schools are slated to
close, and two were reconstituted. A Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) was
signed between Saunders and the Chancellor that violates our contract.
It’s June 2013 and teachers are still without a contract. Although the
Washington Teachers Union pays 100 percent of Nathan Saunders’ salary,
teachers are wondering if Nathan Saunders working for teachers or the
DCPS administration. While he continues to downplay the number of
teachers that received excess notices, Jason Kamras, DCPS Chief of Human
Capital, reported to the DC Council Committee of the Whole that with
school closings and consolidations this year, "in the order of five to
six hundred" teachers will be excessed and expected to find placement in
sixty days.
While Saunders beats his chest about giving jobs back to nineteen
excessed teachers, fifteen schools are slated to close and two
reconstituted without as much as a whimper from him. While excessed
teachers who are eligible for early retirement tally up their years of
credible service, Saunders signs a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with
Chancellor Henderson that will give some of them severance pay instead
of their hard-earned pension. President Saunders will have the privilege
of deciding who will get the severance pay. After a year of waiting for
a tentative agreement, as promised by President Saunders, DC teachers
continue to wait for a contract. Teachers are speculating that the delay
is due to added language extending the school day and year. If this is
the case, Saunders knows that it will cost him votes if the contract is
released before ballots from the run-off election are counted. It could
possibly place President Saunders in the "excess’ pool of teachers. But
wait! Is he actually in the pool of certified teachers? If his teacher
certification has expired, he could lose his job as a teacher as well as
WTU president, since only certified teachers can hold elected offices in
the WTU.
DC teachers are fed up with President Saunders for too many reasons.
One could start with his silence on the school closings. The WTU seems
to have no analysis that the closings are wrong. EMPOWER DC filed a
lawsuit to stop the closings, but President Saunders failed to put the
full force of the WTU behind it. For three years, teachers have raised
concern about Saunders’ failure to address such looming issues as the
cheating scandal. The union should have called for a real investigation
and pointed to the pressures on teachers and principals to game the
system. It is a scandal. WTU needs to offer a serious critique of
IMPACT. Fixation on rubrics hurts good teachers. Cheating makes
teachers’ baseline scores inaccurate. DCPS has one of the highest rates
of teacher and principal turnover in the nation. It’s bad for the
teaching and learning culture. It’s bad for kids. Professional
development days are still largely a waste of time. Don’t just negotiate
days. Ensure the time is well used or available to teachers. The roller
coaster of annual school budgets leads to excessing. Shifting central
office costs to the schools has meant cuts to which the WTU should have
objected.
The WTU needs to build a movement of parents and community groups who
want better schools. Instead the WTU fashions itself like a lawyers’
office making it much weaker than it needs to be. In essence, the WTU is
not seen as champions of quality. Nathan Saunders continues to play to
the stereotype of a union that blocks improvements. These are only a few
of the reasons why Saunders received only seventeen votes more than his
opponent, Elizabeth Davis. Davis is perceived by teachers as the only
candidate who could restore internal democracy in the WTU. She believes
that teachers need a more robust democratic process, dialogue at monthly
union meetings, open board meetings, frequent hearings, task forces, and
other ways to involve them in helping to shape WTU positions and
administration decision-making in DCPS.
She has promised teachers that she and her team will build powerful
alliances with parents and community organizations that would serve to
build a community coalition for the schools to defend public education,
engage on the content of reform by putting out white papers and engaging
teachers in asserting what research says the content of reform should
be, engage on issues of teaching and learning. The WTU needs to organize
the teachers’ voice on issues of curriculum, instruction, and
assessment, and work to cultivate a positive school climate in all
schools. The most important role for WTU is to make schools respectful
places to work and respectful places for parents to send their children.
A learning culture has to replace the current climate of fear that has
become the norm and organize for power because Davis understands that
professional expertise and public respect that is our greatest source of
power, not our ability to hire lawyers.
DC teachers are fed up with their current Union leadership and the
diminishing capacity of the WTU. They are looking for leadership that
will restructure the WTU for strength and restore respect to the
teaching profession. If the buzz on the social media networks in DC is
remotely accurate, teachers are looking closely at Elizabeth Davis.
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Opposition to Restaurants and Taverns Isn’t
Just White on Black
Richard Layman,
rlaymandc@yahoo.com
With regard to Carolyn Steptoe’s post [themail, June 12] in response
to a Clinton Yates article in the Washington Post, which I
thought was pretty facile, there are many examples of all races
expressing opposition to restaurants and taverns. In the Shaw
neighborhood, African-Americans "born in the US" opposed restaurant
efforts by Ethiopians. In the Shaw neighborhood, the Shiloh Baptist
Church opposed a liquor license’s being granted to an Ethiopian
restaurant, while a different black church opposed efforts by the now
closed Vegetate restaurant to get a liquor license.
In the H Street neighborhood, African-Americans opposed
restaurant-tavern efforts by a variety of people. And yes, "white
people" led in criticizing certain fast food and night club activities
by some black entrepreneurs, which the H Street CDC worked to make out
as a racial issue. I could probably come up with a number of additional
examples that eviscerate the white against black thesis expressed by
Clinton Yates in his piece.
I think of this as being a result more of conflict inherent in "mixed
use" development when commercial districts abut residential areas, but
also because some residents move into these abutting districts expecting
that commercial districts should have to modify their practices, not the
other way around.
And note that there is litigation going on right now in Camden, New
Jersey, where the city council passed legislation putting a curfew of
11:00 p.m. on businesses abutting residential areas,
http://tinyurl.com/l4y3gro.
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
The Future of Volunteerism on Community
Service Organizations, June 25
Anne Renshaw,
mlrddc@aol.com
Kweku Toure and Susie Taylor, Presidents of the Penn Branch Citizens
Civic Association and Cleveland Park Citizens Association, respectively,
will share their insights on "The Future of Volunteerism on Community
Service Organizations" at the June 25 Assembly of the DC Federation of
Citizens Associations, 6:45 p.m., at All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church
Hall, 2300 Cathedral Avenue, NW.
Mr. Toure and Ms. Taylor will describe their experiences heading two
of Washington’s energetic and outspoken citizens associations. These
dedicated community leaders will detail what it takes to sustain
grassroots, all volunteer neighborhood organizations in the age of
Internet-driven activism. Audience participation will follow the guest
presentations. Discussion on volunteerism’s future is expected to cover
such key issues as how volunteer-reliant organizations recruit and
retain long-term helpers and whether residents’ attention to
neighborhood issues, headlined at community meetings, has in fact
morphed into more listserv-based action.
The Citizens Federation’s Assembly is open to the public. All Souls
Memorial Episcopal Church is located at 2300 Cathedral Avenue, NW, near
Connecticut Avenue and the Woodley Park Metro (Red Line). The Church
parking lot is off Woodley Place, behind the church. The entrance to the
Church Hall is down the garden steps from the parking lot. The door will
open at 6:30 p.m. Presentations by Mr. Toure and Ms. Taylor, to include
audience Q&A, will begin at 7:15 p.m., following the annual election of
the Citizens Federation’s Executive Board. For further information,
contact Anne Renshaw, President, DC Citizens Federation, milrddc@aol.com.
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