Class Struggle

"Hmmm," Ackerman says.

"Are we a comprehensive school?" the assistant principal asks. "If so, we need one set of resources. If we're a school set up to deal with the kinds of students who are sent to us, then we need another set of resources."

Ackerman nods.

There is a lengthy give-and-take session filled with educational jargon and acronyms. And then the tour starts. Ackerman, wearing a blue-denim business suit, is taken to just about every corner of the school. (As one might expect from a teacher with a $197,000 salary, she's an interesting dresser: Today's blue denim succeeds yesterday's bell-bottomed suit.) She has something nice to say about everything she sees, and the things that irk her are merely noted, pleasantly, out loud, and never expanded upon.

"Oh, there's trash on the floor," she says nicely, her smile uninterrupted.

The procession glides through the school, with the local administrators and Ackerman walking side by side, more or less in sync, stopping only to look in on classes. They are headed through one last corridor, with the exit in sight, when they walk past a door cracked open. Inside there are six students and one teacher, himself clearly disabled.

Ackerman stops. The procession moves on for a few steps.

"Is that special ed?"

The assistant principal nods.

"I thought so."

She walks just inside the doorway, watching a few minutes of a trivia game the students are playing. A few seem distracted, somehow removed from the activity. "As you can see, that teacher needs more support," the assistant principal says.

Eventually, Ackerman thanks the school staff for showing her around, and climbs back in her limo. She hasn't ceased smiling for the duration of the visit. But, all along, despite her grinning exterior, she has been seething.

"It was cold in there," she says, back in the Lincoln. "When you shook people's hands, they were cold."

Ackerman has a plan for making things warmer, and less trashy, and more suited to education in San Francisco's poorer schools. It's called the "Weighted Student Formula." It has been at least partly responsible for improving test scores in the last two school districts Ackerman has worked in. It also has the potential to be a lightning rod for the type of high-voltage political electricity that can light up a school board meeting, or toast a school superintendent.

The Weighted Student Formula, which Arlene Ackerman first encountered when she was the chief academic officer for Seattle's school system, is fairly simple on its face: The more "difficult" a school's student body is (in terms of special education pupils, students from poorer families, etc.), the more money it receives on a per-student basis.

Ackerman currently has a full-time staffer and a panel of about 40 teachers, parents, and principals developing a weighted funding formula that, they hope, will work in San Francisco. Ackerman used such a panel when the Washington, D.C., school district developed its form of a Weighted Student Formula, but she is hoping the formula will cause fewer headaches here. Although it was eventually approved in Washington, it was adopted only after a vitriolic public hearing and a series of compromises, and there were accusations the process was being conducted behind locked doors -- accusations made by those inside the doors as well as outside them.

"Oh, the way the formula was implemented created lots of problems," says Gail Dixon, a member of the elected D.C. school board. "You can't just plop down a formula that's going to equalize all that's been unequal in the past. I mean, small schools were imperiled by this."

Members of the panel accused Ackerman's deputy, Elois Brooks, of forbidding them to discuss the contents of closed-door meetings on the funding formula. The gag order made the news, which made for political controversy. The Washington school district is ordinarily run by an elected school board. When Ackerman took over, however, the schools were tangled in such a financial mess that the District of Columbia's financial control board had declared a state of emergency, and assumed oversight of the school district. In technical terms, then, Ackerman answered directly to the financial control board (and to Congress, which appoints the control board), but not to the school board that citizens had elected. The elected board, however, clearly resented being frozen out of the funding formula process, and responded by calling a hearing, which was attended by a number of "in your face" types, according to a few attendees.

"It was obviously very upsetting to her [Ackerman]," recalls Mary Levy, a member of the Weighted Student Formula panel. "Board members she spoke to in private said she was very hurt by this, and it definitely created a dynamic of adversarial proceedings for the rest of her tenure."