News Articles, 1995-1997
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The School Board We Elected

So where's the upside in this latest school system convulsion? Amid all the cries of assaults on democracy by a five-member snobocracy, let's see if we can find a few.

First, there's the fact that Superintendent Franklin Smith is going quietly. Remember the last time a D.C. school superintendent got cut loose?

Andrew Jenkins's departure from the school system's top spot six years ago sparked a mini-in\tifada, which culminated in some students boycotting classes, the vandalizing of a school board member's office and a tumultuous three-hour school board meeting d uring which Jenkins, as part of his leave-taking, blasted the board.

Some in the audience, caught up in the spirit of the occasion, pitched in by hurling debris at board members, including a water pitcher that struck Erika Landberg -- who, by the way, has elected to pursue another line of work at the end of her term this y ear.

So the bright spot? We're getting better at letting our superintendents go.

Any more upsides? Well, Smith's most abject apologists will soon leave the board. Even they don't represent rock bottom, however. Believe me, ye latecomers to River City, the nation's capital has seen worse.

Last week, financial control board Chairman Andrew Brimmer was fit to be tied over a staged mock lynching by school board member Jay Silberman. It was indeed an offensive and sophomoric stunt, but well within the zone of obnoxious behavior created by some of the school board's worst actors. Thank goodness the decorous Dr. Brimmer wasn't around to face off with former school board member Frank Shaffer-Corona. To recall:

Shaffer-Corona was a local college dropout who occupied his time as collection manager for a finance agency, as a seller of chimney cleaners and as a participant in voter registration drives -- which of course eminently qualified him to serve on the D.C. Board of Education. He did just that from 1977 to 1981, when the electorate came to its senses and turned him out of office.

While on the board, however, Shaffer-Corona set a standard for lunacy that even the current board has not been able to reach.

Regarding himself as a man of the world, he traveled widely, courtesy of the school system's coffers, to such places as Cuba -- where he shared his thoughts at a "Youth Against Imperialism" rally -- and to Beirut, where he engaged in an exchange of views with the pre-peace PLO. No cause was too great or beyond his reach. Shaffer-Corona ran up a $1,900 school system telephone bill making calls to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yes, my friends, as D.C. school test scores plummeted, buildings rotted and the b ureaucracy ran amok, our school board member was on the phones devoting himself to freeing American hostages.

When last heard from, the ex-board member was pleading guilty in D.C. Superior Court in 1989 to the theft of funds that a local bank had mistakenly deposited in his checking account. By the time the bankers recognized their boo-boo, (said they, in a civil lawsuit) Shaffer-Corona had withdrawn the money and was doing up the town in Mexico with his girlfriend.

Not so, replied he, upon receiving his indictment. The bankers, he charged, were participants in an anti-Shaffer-Corona campaign orchestrated by none other than Mayor Marion Barry and Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

For those in this city who tend to excuse self-destructive behavior as always somebody else's fault, who glamorize the slick, who give instant acceptance, if not respectability, to the half-baked and hot-air artists (as long as their targets are you-know- who), the Shaffer-Coronas remain persons of consequence. This week, the financial control board took it upon itself to put a halt to those indulgences. It slammed current school leaders for failing to stanch the hemorrhaging within the system and imposed its own hand-picked crew to run things. Shunting aside a newly constituted elected school board with four new faces without giving them a chance to reinvent the system can cause heartburn. The board's overall indictment of the current leadership is on tar get, however, and could have been handed up against a long line of elected officials and school administrators. It's also a judgment that can be laid at our feet.

Frank Shaffer-Corona, his predecessors, and those who've followed, didn't reach the board through osmosis. We put them there. True, they abdicated their responsibilities to this city's children. True, they presided over gross mismanagement, tolerated rott en, unsafe conditions, turned a blind eye to cronyism, waste, social promotions and powder kegs that pass for schools. But it was done before our very eyes.

Because of their failures -- and our complicity -- many District schoolchildren have been shortchanged. This city has been sold short, too.

When schools produce children who can't take tests, who can't think critically, who can't write, punctuate, spell or count worth a damn, we lose out, too. When children drop out or leave schools early -- as 40 percent of high schoolers have done -- we as neighbors, employers and as voting residents who depend on an intelligent and discerning electorate lose out, too.

Those kids don't disappear. They grow older and remain with us -- as part of this city's 25,550 Aid to Families With Dependent Children cases, as members of the roughly 44,000 households on food stamps, as the young men we see on the evening news in handc uffs leaning against police cars, as mothers and fathers of 9,000 children who were born out of wedlock in 1994 and among that small army of residents who have trouble getting and holding on to jobs because they function at fifth- and eighth-grade levels.

Shaffer-Corona and some of his successors may have been a bit ditsy and a hoot, but we are paying dearly for indulging them and their school administrators to whom we willingly and wittingly entrusted our children. We gave them aid and comfort by lowering our standards of acceptable performance.

If there is a real upside to this upheaval, maybe it's the possibility that we, as a city, are reaching a watershed in which the people and attitudes that have molded official behavior for so long are finally running their course. Maybe, too, we can start to make academic performance in schools, competency in government and the election of higher caliber leaders our central focus. Let's hope so.

Angry with a domineering appointed control board for supplanting the electorate's judgment with a panel of the elite? Fine. But let's also be angry with ourselves -- for letting it come to this.

The writer is a member of the editorial page staff.

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