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Eminentoes
Gray Matters
Vincent Gray, Washington’s new mayor, is turning out as bad as predicted — which is great news for old cronies and lousy teachers.
Two months into his official term as mayor of Washington, D.C. — and five months after energetically defeating Adrian Fenty for the job — Vincent Gray is offering a glimpse into his style of governing. It isn’t pretty.
Last week, it was revealed that one of Gray’s campaign supporters, Cherita Whiting, gained a sweet job as a special assistant in the city’s parks and recreation department reporting only to the agency’s chief of staff. The fact that Whiting got the job outside of the normal civil service hiring process — and that 200 other administration posts are being filled the same way — merely adds to a growing perception that Gray wants to run city government like a jobs program.
Gray’s other appointments haven’t exactly given residents confidence that he’ll stay on a government reform-oriented course. In December, he appointed as fire chief Kenneth Ellerbe, a former city fire commander who had to formally quit his job two years ago after it was revealed that he was also serving as head of the fire department in Sarasota, Florida (and was still taking a tax deduction on his D.C. home even though he was no longer a full-time resident). The move didn’t sit well with the city’s firefighters union, which had backed Gray in his run for office (and expected to have a vote over who would get the job). He also created a new deputy mayor post, and revived another spot — to oversee the city’s police and fire chiefs — which Fenty left vacant; both spots will cost the city $370,000 a year.
Meanwhile Gray hasn’t exactly gotten down to the most-pressing business facing the District: Dealing with an expected $575 million shortfall in the 2011-12 fiscal year budget coming on line in October. While Gray has talked vaguely about spending cuts, tax increases, and a commitment to not using “shortsighted budget gimmicks,” he hasn’t laid out more-concrete plans. He’s also done a lot of hinting about future announcements of new initiatives on addressing public health and requiring contractors to hire more city residents to work on government projects. And that’s all.
By contrast, Gray has been active on one front: Dismantling the aggressive, often controversial, reform of the city’s traditional school district begun by Fenty and now-former chancellor Michelle Rhee. Last week, a transition committee Gray convened on education recommended that the district’s teacher evaluation system — which uses student test-score data to measure teacher performance — be overhauled because it supposedly lacked “public trust” and was seen as a “sorting and termination tool.”
Worse still, Gray is repaying the American Federation of Teachers and its D.C. local — which had long sparred with Fenty and Rhee and supported his election with a $1 million ad blitz — by placing its new local president, Nate Saunders, on the committee charged with finding Rhee’s replacement. Declares Frederick Hess, the school reform guru for the American Enterprise Institute, on his blog: “[School] reformers can pretty much pack it in.”
On one hand, it’s too early to conclude that Gray’s tenure is more likely to resemble that of the infamous Marion Barry or Gray’s onetime boss, Sharon Pratt Kelly — whose brief tenure was marked by fiscal mismanagement and an ignominious defeat at the hands of her notorious antecedent — than Gray’s more-recent predecessors, Fenty and Anthony Williams. One can at least say that Gray lacks the arrogant posture of Fenty, whose jerk behavior towards foes and friends alike doomed what had been certain re-election. More importantly, Gray, a technocrat whose most notable achievement up to now was presiding over D.C.’s dysfunctional city council, had been a backer of many of the very improvements initiated by Williams and Fenty that have made D.C. more attractive to (if not actually more livable for) middle-class families.
But given the District’s fiscal plight, the skepticism of young black and white professionals who are now a major force in local politics (and who generally backed Fenty and his school reform efforts), and the desire of his campaign supporters among the city’s ancien régime to return city government to the old corrupt order, Gray has little room to maneuver. Add to the mix the presence of congressional Republicans now back in control of the federal lower house, and the Obama Administration’s own desire to ensure that D.C. remains a shining example of school reform (and government management) success, and Gray’s margin of error slips to almost none. Gray will have to embrace the very reforms he criticized on the election trail — and take even more-radical measures — to keep the District from slipping back to the bad old days.
A NATIVE OF THE DISTRICT and a George Washington University graduate who was one of the first blacks to join the Jewish fraternity Tau Epsilon Phi, Gray got his start lobbying for the mentally retarded. He first became a player in D.C. politics in 1991 when then-Mayor Kelly appointed him to head the city’s oft-mismanaged Department of Human Services; he left three years later as Kelly was heading to defeat against Barry (whom residents returned to office despite his 1990 conviction for cocaine possession).
By 2004, Gray won a seat on D.C.’s city council by taking advantage of the anger directed at incumbent Kevin Chavous for backing the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity voucher program and charter schools. He moved up to the presidency of the city council, taking control of a body better known as a political clown college than as a deliberative body. A colleague of Fenty’s on the council, Gray initially backed many of his efforts as mayor, including his takeover of D.C. Public Schools, whose abysmal graduation rates and low levels of student achievement made it the Superfund Site of American public education.
But by 2009, Fenty and Gray were barely speaking thanks to the mayor’s penchant for squabbling with the council. The fact that Fenty rubbed everyone else (including Barry and other corrupt old-school politicians) the wrong way, snubbed Dorothy Height (a doyenne of the city’s black elite), and wholeheartedly backed Rhee’s Churchillian school reform efforts (which offended the AFT and old-school politicians long used to the school district serving as a jobs program) also gave Gray an opportunity to advance his career. Backed by the city’s most ardent foes of reform, the city’s public employee unions and the AFT local, Gray defeated Fenty in a racially tinged mayoral campaign in which he declared that he would roll back the most offensive of his opponent’s initiatives.
But now, Gray is in a bind. The very government and school reform initiatives that Gray criticized during his campaign (despite initially supporting them) are the ones that have helped D.C. become a better place to live — and why the city’s population increased by 5.2 percent in the past decade after a 50-year decline. While the city is becoming less of a Chocolate City, it is also becoming more middle class and more affluent. Given its fiscal problems, the affluence (along with better schools) will be needed more than ever.
Gray has already declared that he wants to avoid tax increases. But cutting spending may mean layoffs of the very public employees who supported his election. Nor is he getting much help from his former colleagues on the council, who can’t seem to agree on whether the city in fiscal trouble in the first place. Some of the solutions may lie with the very school reform tools Rhee has put in place. Thanks to a new contract with the AFT which all but ends the use of reverse seniority in layoffs, and most notably IMPACT, the teacher performance management system Gray wants to disassemble, the city can save money by handing walking papers to expensive laggard veteran teachers and poor-performing new hires.
Gray refuses to offer anything concrete on what he will do in the coming days. He scoffed at Washington Examiner columnist Jonetta Rose-Barras demand that he offer a plan for his first 100 days in office, saying: “Why don’t we have a 200-day plan?” He may need something more than that. Besides the short-term fiscal problems, there is the city’s defined-benefit pension funds, whose costs are spiraling out of control. The city is expected to shell out $130 million to keep up pension payments this year, a nearly two-fold increase over 2010; given that the valuations for the pensions were last updated in 2008 (just as the financial markets collapsed), the $103 million surplus will likely turn into a deficit.
Gray will face his biggest test in the coming months as the District searches for Rhee’s fulltime replacement to run the such district. Given how he essentially ran Rhee out of the job, few reformers will want to take her place. The candidate most likely to continue Rhee’s efforts would be her protégé, Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has already been backed for the job by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and many school reformers. But given Gray’s need to keep the AFT in his corner (and the wrongheaded decision to put new union president Saunders on the search committee), keeping Henderson may not even be a possibility.
Gray may turn out to be as good as Williams, if not better. But chances are that even Gray’s supporters may long for Fenty by the time Gray’s tenure is over.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (34) | Leave a comment
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Melvin| 2.22.11 @ 8:01AM
From Wisconsin to Washington D.C. the whole government run education system is a sorry stinking, rotten mess.
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.22.11 @ 1:53PM
House Republicans should pass a resolution that urges states, especially states with Republican governors, to end the public school system and replace it with private school vouchers funded by current school taxes. States should limit cities to governmental departments that are essential, such as police, fire, water, streets, and a very few other essential services; public schools should not be one of them.
Government control of the monopolistic public schools systems enables the government to brainwash students with the government party line which opposes Judeo-Christian values, U.S. political, economic and cultural history, the U.S. Constitution, and the idea that our individual rights come from God--not from the state.
I am persuaded that the leftists who control the schools of education and public schools work to make our students, and thus our citizenry, ignorant and incompetent. Why? Ignorant and incompetent citizens can be duped easily.
It will take generations for the permanent underclass created by Liberals and Progressives to be educated about the truth that there is no free lunch, because socialism works until there is no one left with money to confiscate for redistribution.
Until the victims in the underclass learn that they have been duped by the Liberals and Progressives, the public school system monopoly must be replaced by private schools that teach truth, goodness, beauty, virtue, wisdom, love of God, and love of neighbor. Starve the public schools of school taxes that should fund the private schools.
When the current thugs who rule the Senate and the Executive Branch are replaced by Conservatives and Republicans, then a law should be passed that grants the states the CHOICE to do all of the above. I say choice, because we must limit the Federal Government to the powers stated in the U.S. Constitution.
Do the above, and America will become once again a nation under God.
Richard Baker| 2.22.11 @ 9:51AM
The last DC leader who had any respect, and deserved it, was Walter Washington after the start of Home Rule. Since then, what a joke. What a shame that this City of buffoons has to be named after George Washington. Maybe we should re-name is Shaniqua, District of Clowns.
Aquanomics| 2.22.11 @ 10:42AM
What do you have against clowns?
Occam's Tool| 2.22.11 @ 6:30PM
As a general rule, they tend to be more scary than funny.
Richard Baker| 2.22.11 @ 10:00AM
rename it
Doctor Right| 2.22.11 @ 10:43AM
The populations of America's inner cities - mostly black and hispanic - routinely vote for Democrats and routinely choose civic leaders who are also black and hispanic Democrats and who routinely plunder the public coffers to line their own pockets and those of their political allies, like the teacher's unions.
It's been going on since the 1960's. when radical left-wing activists, most of them black, began to govern these same cities. The symptoms are the same - one fiscal crisis after another, increased taxation on individuals and business, increased entitlement spending, and increased crime. And it rarely gets better except in those instances when a real reform-minded Democrat like Newark's Corey Booker (or the extremely rare Republican like Jersey City's Brett Schundler) manage to get elected and attempt to institute sane fiscal and social policies. But even then, they are fought tooth and nail by the entrenched, liberal establishment (as Adrian Fenty was), and when these men and woman leave office, the shenanigans start-up again almost immediately.
And that is exactly what we are seeing in D.C. Adrian Fenty, in most cases a typical, reliable Democrat, was nonetheless trying to do what he could to fix the disastrous D.C. public schools system, but the NEA convinced D.C. voters otherwise, and so we have yet another kleptocrat in Vincent Gray pulling the strings and handing-out goodies to his liberal-democrat cronies.
Sorry, but there comes a time when the people who elected these bums - the same people who are ironically most damaged by a Liberal regime's disastrous policies - must be held accountable for their votes. They wanted Vincent Gray, and they got Vincent Gray. If the schools are still failing, and if crime is still increasing, and if the city is still broke, then that's too damn bad. Remember - this is the same city that re-elected Marion Barry AFTER he was convicted of smoking crack cocaine.
D.C., Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Camden, Philadelphia, etc...it's all the same. Get your own damn houses in order! The rest of us are sick of having to continually to pay for your mistakes with our tax dollars, and sometimes with our blood in your war-zone neighborhoods.
In a Democracy, you get EXACTLY what you deserve.
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.22.11 @ 2:10PM
I am white, and let us remember the white administrations over the decades in New York, Chicago, Jersey City, Kansas City and elsewhere who were expert at a dollar for the public good and more than a dollar for those who controlled the governments.
missbosslady| 2.22.11 @ 7:19PM
Enough Rope? We'll see.
As for your post....BLECH!
Seriously, Mr. White Guilt, you self-hating fool. We've been beaten over the heads for our crimes for as long as I can remember. Give it a rest already.
Loser!
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.23.11 @ 1:11AM
To missbosslady,
Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. May I ask you to consider truthful and just solutions for the problems of the inner city? Peaceful and respectful discussion is much conducive to just solutions.
Peace be with you.
missbosslady| 2.22.11 @ 7:16PM
Doctor (So) Right!
You get what you deserve, that's how you learn and if you don't learn, it's not my fault and not my job to bail you out!
Pat| 2.22.11 @ 12:39PM
What a strange coincidence – another majority black city finds itself flat broke, filled with corruption, hostage to powerful teachers’ and public employees’ unions and with a strong black man at the helm who keeps a mistress on the side at taxpayer expense. For residents of Detroit, this tale must sound like deja-vu all over again – only it was Kwame Kilpatrick instead of Vincent Gray, it was Christine Beatty instead of Cherita Whiting, it was Detroit’s treasury being systematically looted instead of D. C.’s. This story’s basic plot line sounds wearily familiar during recent decades – and certainly must engender some sympathy for a complaint of “Please, not another Robin Hood movie” uttered by those Hollywood banker types.
And, of course, this essay flogs the familiar theme of “how could this happen?”. Corruption, cronyism, a dismally mediocre education system – you’d think we’d get tired of watching the same nightly re-runs and begin to question whether the voters within these cities actually grasp the concepts of self-government. But to make such observations hits an exposed nerve, poses a touchy question that might better be left unexamined. So, let’s simply pretend we haven’t heard all this before, that only the actors change while the story endlessly repeats itself and that the voters, who seem content to repeatedly elect the same corrupt politicians, actually deserve someone better.
Doctor Right| 2.22.11 @ 12:43PM
A "dismally mediocre" education system?
You are far too generous...
cicero| 2.22.11 @ 12:50PM
I believe that when the Republic was first founded, the franchise was limited to those who owned land - and thus paid taxes. The Founders understood that universal franchise rights would result in chaos. Once the have nots recognized that they held the key to the treasury, there was no way to stop the raids. The majority only need vote themselves the tax monies paid by the minority. So, here we are.
Pelligrino| 2.23.11 @ 12:30AM
Cicero and Dr. R., thank you.
Both correct.
In colonial Virginia one could not vote unless male, an active member of the church, and a property owner.
While women might not like this, most males of this sort were indeed married. So it was considered a "household vote." I understand that some might dislike this, but what man will routinely vote something detrimental to his own wife and family?
Sad to say, but it but true: It is necessary to limit the franchise (right to vote). We have people who just don’t merit the right to cast votes.
I worked a polling station from the inside this past election. It is shameful seeing and interacting with what comes through the door to vote. While readers here might spend hours, days, months just wrangling over (reading, debating, studying, attending special forums, etc.) one or two key policy issues of the day like needed health care improvements or social security reform, i.e. doing your diligent homework in preparation PRIOR to primaries and election days in November....
You and your vote are nullified by 3 - 4 morons who are borderline IQ deficient, do not value self educating all through life, have no compunction about going on welfare, take no personal responsibilities, take no responsibility to go the polls very well informed, and cannot read (don't want to read).
There is no other way: We have to limit the franchise.
Otherwise Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Houston, and our capitol city will NEVER change. They will remain no-go zones unless you are just passing quickly through on workday daylight hours.
My nation's capitol is a national embarrassment going on 3 decades now....Isn't that long enough? I do know; it was the home of my grandparents until their neighborhood became far too unsafe for them to live.
Unless someone has demonstrated competencies, and real-life skin in the game, he or she cannot vote.
Right away: I am also for raising the voting age limit to a minimum of 21. (most at 20 and younger are not yet paying any of their own income/payroll taxes. They might have to file but are not losing money due to national income taxation.)
Incidentally: Due to this article, thank you for reminding me why Washington, D.C. residents should continue with “Taxation without Representation” on their auto license plates. They don’t deserve U.S. House or Senate members who would only vote/legislate to further deepen the D.C. Welfare Cesspool State.
DR| 2.22.11 @ 2:32PM
One of the problems is that too many of DC upper middle class and wealthy residents are focused on their own petty issues, not on the health and future of the city. For example, at a mayoral town meeting recently, many residents were asking about jobs, crime, and education. Then a woman from a wealthy NW neighborhood spent her time complaining about a pizza restaurant that she thought was a nuisance. Other activists in Georgetown and nearby areas obsessively lobby the DC government against small businesses, nonprofits (especially the Universities) and other organizations that provide employment and other economic activity. Residents need to stand up to these extremist activists and tackle the bigger issues that matter.
missbosslady| 2.22.11 @ 7:23PM
Oh, so the 'DC upper middle class and wealthy ' have less right to petition the government? Or, are you saying that your the arbiter of what they should, or should not be concerned about? Or, are you saying that they have money, so they should just shut up?
What is your point?
Perhaps, if people stopped trying to control other people's behavior (and all the dollars associated with such) then things might start to improve.
Just sayin'
DR| 2.23.11 @ 10:30AM
Did you read my post? If you had, you'd see that I want the wealthier residents to speak up, petition the government and spend time on issues that matter, like education reform and pro-business policies. Instead, many (but not all) residents of neighborhoods like Burleith, Georgetown and Foxhall focus on efforts that harm the city and restrict freedom, such as trying to shut down businesses, reducing property rights and harassing members of private institutions.
PCP Smoker| 2.22.11 @ 6:50PM
Who thought things were going to change in the Chocolate City (blame NPR for this racist slander)? Same corruption, same liberalism, brand new management.
Investigate if this guy does crack too.
missbosslady| 2.22.11 @ 7:28PM
Chocolate City....who was the other guy that used that term?
Ah, the dishonorable Ray Nagin, mayor of yet another bastion of Democrat Decline-ism.
But, what I really want to know is; where is Vanilla City?
AWG| 2.23.11 @ 9:50AM
I hear you. We lived in Northern VA for 12 year in the late 80's - 90's. Told me real estate agent I had no interest in diversity. With my wife's constant attention, the kids grew up beautifully. And sorry, we weren't rich. We watched that self-inflicted would east of the the capital building the whole while, including marvelling at Marion Barry's both time in office. And that want's statehood? I used to say fine give everything ourside of the federal zone to Maryland, but no doubt Maryland politicians worked har not to inherit that tumor.
AWG| 2.23.11 @ 9:52AM
Sorry...meant "self inflicted wound"...ouch I see more typos...sorry
With God all things r possible| 2.22.11 @ 8:59PM
DC Home Rule is an abject failure; the citizens of Washington, DC cannot or will not govern themselves. Bring back the Corps of Engineers.
Statehood? Not on your life. They can't even wipe their own noses.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 2.23.11 @ 11:58AM
Every city in this country run by affirmative action is being run into the ground, six feet under!
James| 2.23.11 @ 11:59AM
Ran Rhee out of town?? Puh-lease! Michelle Rhee announce months before the primary that she didn't think she could work for anyone but Fenty and actively campaigned for him! Stop trying to rewrite history.
Marc Jeric| 2.24.11 @ 2:55AM
I see not much difference between Washington D.C. and Lybia, except the murder rate in the latter is smaller and the literacy is higher.
Reebok | 8.11.11 @ 2:59AM
is good
Candice Graham| 9.14.11 @ 11:30AM
I'ld be interested in what Mr. Biddle thinks now, several months after this article, can you write update? Great article
Candice Graham | 9.14.11 @ 11:31AM
thanks for writing such an honest article