Class Struggle

New school superintendent Arlene Ackerman has fostered educational excellence -- and ignited political firestorms. Her first major initiative? A significant shift in funding, from wealthier to poorer schools, being planned behind closed doors.

By Jeremy Mullman

published: January 10, 2001

It is just past 6 p.m. on the first Monday of winter break, and the generally bustling central office of the San Francisco Unified School District is quiet. The slow moment is a rare one for an office that has been running at warp speed ever since its new superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, arrived in August, after deciding to leave the Washington, D.C., superintendent's post. In the office of Jennifer Hartman, one of Ackerman's assistants, the superintendent and a few members of her inner circle are taking advantage of the opportunity to kid around. Another Ackerman aide, Myong Leigh, who for a time ran the budget office for District of Columbia schools, is holding court, cracking jokes to a chuckling audience of Hartman, Ackerman, and Elois Brooks, another D.C. transplant. Because I'm there, Leigh is recalling the media frenzy that surrounded Ackerman's sudden decision to leave Washington after two productive, occasionally tumultuous years as superintendent of one of the nation's most troubled school districts.

"There were so many reporters that we thought about just sending her out to the balcony, like Evita," Leigh recalls, ""Don't cry for me, Washington.'" Hartman, a veteran SFUSD administrator who has been almost surgically attached to Ackerman since she arrived, finds this particularly amusing: "Oh, god, that's funny," she cackles toward her boss. "I haven't heard too many good ones like that around the office lately."

"That's 'cause they're all scared," says Ackerman, who began her D.C. tenure by cutting 600 staff positions at the District's central office, and who has already reduced the administrative payroll in San Francisco by $3 million. After an awkward silence, she decides to elaborate, her voice wavering a bit. "They just need to learn that I'm harder on myself than anyone else."

Brooks, the SFUSD's new chief of staff, has come out of retirement a second time for Ackerman's sake, and has been known to inspire significant amounts of fear all on her own. She looks askance at her boss, and makes a wry suggestion: "Try to remember that the next time you're screaming at me."

History shows that softening positions for political purposes is not something Arlene Ackerman does naturally or well. She says she has learned something of the political arts over time, but clearly her professional passions center on improving overall student performance, in large part by closing the performance gap between the richest and poorest children in public schools. Because overall performance has improved in the school districts she's led, Ackerman has earned wide acclaim in educational circles.

But for all her acclaim as an educator, Ackerman's résumé has blemishes. She was once fired from a Missouri principal's post in connection with a newspaper story in which she was quoted as saying she had a "black agenda." In the District of Columbia, her administration's occasionally abrupt manner and use of closed meetings left some parents and public officials feeling alienated, creating an adversarial climate that probably contributed to her relatively swift departure.

This reputation for combativeness -- what has seemed, at times, to be an affinity for the bunker mentality -- would probably come as news to those who have seen or worked with Ackerman in San Francisco. Here, during six months that have been something of a honeymoon period, she has concentrated on undoing the fiscal and organizational creations of former Superintendent Waldemar "Bill" Rojas. Because those creations caused widespread financial chaos, most of Ackerman's public appearances to date have been marked by lengthy, congratulatory exchanges predicated largely, it seems, on her not being named Rojas.

Eventually, however, she will shift from cleaning up the mess left by her predecessors to implementing her own agenda. That agenda includes, first and foremost, a plan for new funding arrangements that will likely attempt to revive poorer schools with money that has traditionally gone to wealthier ones.

The oldest daughter of a preacher and a teacher, Arlene Ackerman was one of seven black students at a large suburban high school outside of St. Louis in the early 1960s; it was an experience that hardened her, she says, the way heat tempers steel. "I was so isolated," she recalls. "And those were painful, painful times for me. But I think that's why I was so focused on doing well in school."

She did well enough, it turns out, to be the school's only black student to qualify for the National Honor Society. But when the time came for the ceremony, in which each honored girl was supposed to walk to the stage paired, arm in arm, with one of the boys, none of the other, white, honorees would walk with a black girl.

"I couldn't get any of the boys to walk with me," Ackerman recalls. "And, after a while, there was one young lady who said she would, but by then I wanted to walk alone."

The Honor Society slight was "just one of many," Ackerman recalls, and those slights left her with a worldview that has shaped her attitude as a school administrator and her philosophy as an educator. It is an attitude that can be encapsulated in two words: no excuses. Specifically, it is an attitude that does not allow school officials to use low socioeconomic status to explain away poor school performance. "Failure has never been an option for me," she says. "And I think that's why, you know, instead of making excuses about family and test scores, I'm like, "Whatever!' Would you stay with a doctor who complained about how you hadn't done this, or how you should have come to him earlier? No. So why would you want to educate children with that attitude?"

Her no-nonsense approach seems to have worked. She taught elementary school for 12 years in Missouri and eventually was promoted into the St. Louis and University City, Mo., school district administrations. By the early 1990s, she was running two neighboring schools at once. But her reputation for directness and action cut both ways. When she was named principal of one of those schools, 15 of the 55 teachers quit on the spot. (One teacher likened the atmosphere in her schools to a "military encampment.") Reminded of this, Ackerman laughs gently. "They needed to go," she says. "Change isn't always bad. Sometimes people will stay around and sabotage what you're trying to do."

Everywhere Ackerman has gone as a school administrator -- from University City to Seattle, where she was the chief academic officer, to Washington, D.C., and now San Francisco -- she has been charged with "closing the gap" in student achievement between poor and affluent students. At Brittany Woods Middle School in University City, where 80 percent of the students were black, and most of the black students were poor, Ackerman eliminated some advanced classes, which were attended mostly by white students, and used the money to shore up more basic offerings. Months later, she was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch referring to her "black agenda" -- a statement she says was taken out of context -- and the effect was polarizing. Many white parents felt she was "closing the gap" by lowering the educational ceiling, not raising the floor. Despite the controversy, the test scores at Brittany Woods were rising. Ackerman says she figured that was all that mattered.

She figured wrong.

In January of 1992, Ackerman was told that she was being fired due to budget cuts, reasoning that didn't exactly jive with the $3 million surplus the district reported only a few months later. She sued for her job back, and got what she wanted in a settlement. "At that point, I wasn't political at all," she says. "I was purely principled. And I think being principled is OK, but you have to understand the politics and make it a win-win for everybody. So when it happened, I was confused. I mean, I'd done everything I was asked. I'd turned test scores. I just didn't understand politics. And that's what this was; they admitted as much when they offered me my job back."

Ackerman didn't accept the offer. Instead, she took an 18-month academic hiatus in Harvard University's renowned Urban Superintendency Program, which all but assured her a position at or near the helm of one of the nation's largest urban school districts. (Her admissions essay dealt with her dismissal in University City.) During her time at Harvard, she studied student equity issues -- and was able to think about the politics of selling those issues to school boards and all the different interest groups in major urban school districts.

"[In University City], it all sort of snowballed," she says. "So I learned that, whatever we do to raise the floor, we have to be very cognizant of the politics of that. You have to be sensitive to how you discuss it, so that it doesn't polarize people."

Because today is Friday, Arlene Ackerman is complaining -- with a smile. She is in the middle of one of her weekly surprise drop-ins on San Francisco schools -- this week she is visiting the particularly troubled McAteer High School -- and, in her sweet-voiced, always-polite way, she is gently spouting a list of grievances to herself and the assistant principal who is showing her around.

"It's so cold in here," she says.

"The contractor left that mess lying around?"

"So we have this great facility, and the kids here don't get to use it?"

This is how the tour goes: Ackerman is dropped off -- unannounced -- by her chauffeur-driven Lincoln, finds the principal, and sits down for a discussion of school issues, before taking a guided tour of the school. Among this school's biggest problems, the assistant principal says, is attendance: Most of the students come from Bayview and Hunters Point, and it takes many of them two hours to commute via school bus. As a result, 10 to 15 percent of students are absent on any given day, and tutoring before or after school is virtually impossible.

"Hmmm," Ackerman says.

The school also seems to have an identity crisis of sorts.

"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."

In the end, a compromise was reached that protected smaller schools -- some of which had originally been projected to lose as much as $200,000 in annual funding -- by cutting other aspects of the district's $794 million budget. And since that compromise, the funding shifts in the District of Columbia have generally been seen as successful.

Still, the process of adopting the new funding formula set the stage for a confrontational relationship between the city's multiple oversight bodies and Ackerman, who frequently and publicly complained that the numerous political entities surrounding the school board were making it difficult for her to do her job. During a City Council hearing on administrative spending, one councilman, a "Republican bomb-thrower" (according to Levy) named David Catania, repeatedly called Ackerman a liar and refused to apologize when it turned out the numbers he'd based his accusations on were false. Some around the school district felt that the Catania incident was why Ackerman chose to leave; others believed the control board's decision to let a charter school keep its public school building, yet leave the school system, was the last straw. (Ackerman is a vehement opponent of charter schools.)

"To me, there were a small group of people who were used to working the system, and their representatives, that made her life unbearable," recalls former control board member Joyce Ladner. "These were people who were used to running their schools like they were semiprivate; Arlene showed them who was boss. And it set off this "I'm gonna get you' mentality. They were constantly dragging her to hearings, accusing her of lying. It's a testament to her fortitude that she got anything done at all."

She did get things done in Washington, most notably cutting the size of the central office from 20 percent of the district's total budget to less than 6 percent, and raising test scores in each of her years there. (On the Stanford 9 standardized test, the percentage of students scoring below the "basic" level in reading dipped 6 percent; the percentage of students scoring below "basic" in math dipped 8 percent.) But, as in St. Louis, she left despite the progress, telling local newspapers that the school district's governance structure made it almost impossible for her to stay.

"How many people can be involved in the day-to-day operations?" Ackerman says from her San Francisco office. "You just can't have everybody weighing in on decisions and expect to get anything done."

Clearly, one of the main reasons for Ackerman's political problems within and without the Washington, D.C., school district is named Elois Brooks. Brooks, a white-haired, slightly built woman, was Ackerman's deputy superintendent in the District of Columbia and also worked with her in Seattle. She agreed to come out of retirement for a second time to help the superintendent's transition in San Francisco.

Brooks, who started work as chief of staff this month at a salary of more than $100,000, is widely seen as a capable, competent administrator with experience at the highest level in some of the nation's largest urban districts. She is also described, even by Ackerman's supporters, as frequently combative and confrontational, and largely responsible for some of Ackerman's public relations problems in Washington.

"Ackerman really relies on her [Brooks'] skills, you know -- good cop, bad cop," says Delabian Rice Thurston, who is president of Parents United for D.C. Public Schools and did not want Ackerman to leave. "You just never got a sense of anything warm from [Brooks] at all."

And Dixon, the District of Columbia school board member, puts it more bluntly: "Arlene brought Elois back? Oh, god. Run."

"For the longest time," Dixon continues, "there was this very real sense of fear surrounding her."

These sentiments seemed to crystallize during the Weighted Student Formula process, in which Brooks told members of the closed panel that they could not speak about the proceedings publicly. "The instructions from Elois were that we were supposed to keep this behind closed doors," recalls Mary Levy, who was part of the panel that hashed out the D.C. funding formula. "She said: "This is not subject to what the community wants. We're telling them what they're getting.'"

But Myong Leigh, the guru of the Weighted Student Formula, says that Brooks' new position has an internal focus, and should better fit her personality. "I'm really excited about her coming here. She's very tough, definitely a taskmaster, and I think that she's someone who prefers staying focused on getting things done, rather than being a diplomat."

Ackerman concurs: "This is an opportunity for me to change Elois' role, to have her working more with staff and finishing projects."It's Dec. 13, and Leigh is talking to a dozen parents at a round-table meeting designed to let them discuss school issues with the superintendent. As an aide scatters some handouts, Leigh explains how the Weighted Student Formula was implemented in other school districts, how it gives the schools more discretion in how they can spend their funds, and -- most important -- how implementing such a formula is something the S.F. district is only "exploring." Ackerman -- dressed entirely in black, save for gold earrings and a gold necklace -- sits back as, mostly, the parents nod. There are too few specifics to have much of a discussion; besides, the parents came to the meeting with gripes about their own schools.

A parent with a child at Lowell High School, San Francisco's hallowed magnet school, begins with a complaint about the state of the school's cafeteria. A few other parents, some from Lowell as well, bat this around for a bit. They also discuss the use of a grant that was supposed to upgrade the school's computing network. Ackerman seems content to let the parents talk this one out.

The next complaint involves Charles R. Drew Elementary School; a parent is upset because the school has few certified teachers, is filthy, and can't seem to hold on to a principal. Or a nurse. This time, Ackerman jumps in. "Drew is a school that will benefit from the Weighted Student Formula," she says. "I've been out there, and I know it has problems. It's one of the reasons we need it [the formula] here."

Although this meeting goes smoothly -- it ends with the Lowell parents talking to the Drew parents about how to apply for grants -- it illustrates precisely the dynamic that became messy for Ackerman in St. Louis and the District of Columbia. What happens when the cafeteria at Lowell (or, more likely, some other, less-renowned, but still highly funded school) doesn't get painted, so Drew can be cleaned up?

Leigh, who facilitates the large committee discussions in San Francisco, says that regardless of how individual schools fare under the formula, it's hard to argue with the basic concept of the Weighted Student Formula. "I wouldn't say the concerns [about small schools losing some money] were paranoia. Those schools did stand to have their resources scaled back in certain versions of this, but -- from the other perspective -- those schools were getting disproportionately high resources all along."

There are some differences between the preliminary steps toward a Weighted Student Formula here and in Washington, D.C. Here, the minutes of panel meetings about the funding formula are posted on the school district's Web site, and round-tables like the one described above -- where parents can voice their own concerns -- tend to begin with a chat about the formula. Still, the meetings remain closed, as Marybeth Wallace of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth found out when she tried, but was not allowed, to attend. "All I wanted to do was observe," she says. "I'm still pissed off about it."

Asked about the closed meetings, Ackerman shrugs. "There's only so many people you can have in the room and still get the work done," she says. "Even the Senate and House use subcommittees."

Although she works well into the evening almost every day, Arlene Ackerman has been telling anyone who asks how much her time in San Francisco has refreshed and energized her. It's not hard to see why: She has begun to reform a central office that, during Rojas' tenure, operated under a constant cloud of suspicion, and, since Rojas left in 1998, has been deluged by a rain of audits that have confirmed the suspicions. Daily newspaper reports on Ackerman have almost glowed, painting her as a reforming "shero," to use her term. Pick up the Chronicle or the old Hearst Examiner on any given day, and you would see that she was slashing the central office payroll by $3 million, largely by sending employees with teaching credentials back to the classroom while promising further cuts; raising teachers' salaries; and launching an audit of the schools' much-maligned facilities departments.

"I believe she's making decisions with a sound basis," says Wallace, the activist peeved about being shut out of Weighted Student Formula meetings. "In the past, it always felt like there was an underlying, back-room reason for every decision. It looks like she's going to be more fair about these."

"Compared to before," S.F. school board member Jill Wynns says, "this is like a dream."

On Dec. 12, however, Ackerman dropped the first hint that school district life might not always be so dreamy. When contract negotiations between the district and the administrators' union stalled over the union's refusal to trade three-year principal contracts for one-year deals, she bypassed union leadership, sending a memo to all 230 principals disclosing details of the negotiations. In essence, the memo said the district was offering a significant pay raise in trade for a shortening of contracts (a move Ackerman believes will increase accountability), but union leadership was refusing even to consider the exchange. The letter prompted the leaders of the administrators' union to file an unfair labor practice complaint. While the negotiations were, legally, at an impasse, which could, technically, make Ackerman's memo to the principals legal, the union's leadership seemed puzzled by her actions.

"I think "amazed' is the word," says United Administrators President James Dierke. "The whole idea of collective bargaining is that you bargain in good faith. This is an insult, and it's not a good way to do business."

Later that day, at a pre-holidays school board meeting, sitting below a stage occupied by 40 bobbing youngsters decked in red bow ties, tuxedo vests, and Santa caps who were running through a medley of "Jingle Bells," "Silver Bells," and "Feliz Navidad," Ackerman chatted urgently with Hartman, her assistant. Eighty principals in yellow union visors looked on from the audience. After the kids finished their medley, they filed off, and all 80 principals rose. Dierke and a few others stepped forward to a podium and denounced Ackerman's negotiating tactics. And then they weaved through the auditorium chairs toward the stage, where they each walked right by Ackerman, in single file, totally silent.

The process took almost five minutes, and she sat stoically the entire time, her hands holding her chin, never moving.

A few days later, the superintendent wasn't about to apologize, and she didn't seem overly perturbed about the apparent downturn of goodwill in the stagnant negotiations. "We were at an impasse, and I felt like this was the best way for us to move forward," Ackerman said, sitting back, her grin evaporating. "Was I surprised at their reaction? I'm just going to say, "Yes. I was,' and leave it at that."

And she did.