Notes to Governor Spitzer
The Truth About Reform

By BRANDON WARD

During the course of the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, candidate Eliot Spitzer defined his Albany reform agenda in most dynamic terms: from "Day 1, everything changes." Now that the election has come and gone, Governor Spitzer's reform mandate comes to us courtesy of his lopsided victory over his opponent.

Notwithstanding his many reform successes as Attorney General, I would like to start a conversation about what Governor Spitzer should know about reform from my vantage point - an inside observer.

The source of my take on reform could be best explained by working in an agency (DOT) where reform is a euphemism for reorganization. Between 1994 and 2000, the agency experienced four commissioners in slightly more than six years.

Here's the thing, though; underneath the surface of each commissioner's reform rhetoric was the same old story: old patronage was replaced with new patronage. As they say in reformers' circles, chairs must revolve for the agency to evolve (i.e. musical chairs). Unfortunately, when the music stopped, blacks were often left without a chair and qualified managers were often replaced with entrepreneurial managers: individuals looking to find themselves in a new career opportunity.

Harder Than It Looks

For some unexplained reason, reformers have the tendency to make complex things, like democratic reform in Iraq or education reform in New York City's public schools, look so easy. Perhaps the trouble is with the word "reform." After all, from what I'm reading, the Department of Education's (DOE) reforms have been a lot like "the war on drugs," "the war on terror," "the war on poverty'' - you never know what to make of the results. For instance, the recent Citywide Council on High Schools' Annual Report recognizes the efforts of the DOE focusing on student achievement, accountability, and additional facilities but, in a detailed analysis of the department's graduation and class-size data, finds "a cloud of legitimacy over these numbers." In the case of the department's graduation rate methodologies, the report concludes that they "differ from other reputable methods and ... result in the most favorable statistic possible."

Despite the Mayor's many leadership virtues, his reform of the DOE is not without serious flaws. It is a hard sell, as much as we want reform at DOE, for skeptics like me to buy into the idea that reform of the nation's largest public school system can be led by a non-educator.

Disproved by Bush

Obviously, the Mayor embraces the exaggerated idea that a manager can manage anything. Assuming that to be true, I wonder how he might explain the fact that even with an MBA (from Harvard Business School no less), President Bush has failed to effectively manage the disaster-of-a-war in Iraq.

Perhaps the Mayor is convinced by what has become par for the course in my agency (DOT). That is, qualifications are synonymous with being qualified. After all, we are encouraged to believe that industry experience (in transportation) can be ignored for senior-level positions provided an individual "excel in other areas." Let's be real here; if anything is true of the war in Iraq and the Staten Island Ferry crash in October 2003, it's that bad management is not a victimless crime.

More fundamental, however, is the fact that one has to wonder if reform at the DOE is essentially a transfer of mayoral control to private, for-profit control: consultants. For instance, away from the public's eyes, consultants seem to play a central role in the administration's reforms of the department.

Testifying before the City Council's Education Committee regarding the DOE's $15.8 million no-bid consulting contract with Alvarez & Marsal to find ways to cut $200 million in the agency's budget, Kathleen Grimm, the Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Administration stated: ".. like any well-run organization or agency, we cannot let the process become sclerotic, paralyzing us from responding quickly and emerging needs." In other words, DOE's reformers must do what DOE's reformers must do: Think outside the city's contracting rules box.

Not There to Educate

As an aside, the idea of utilizing consultants, whose primary purpose is to sell expertise and not to develop agency expertise; to tell us what we already know to be true (that is, DOE's bureaucracy is bloated) is bizarre. Unfortunately, it seems that, in Bloomberg-land, ideas that run counter to established contracting rules (i.e. the PPB rules) are tantamount to "thinking outside the box." Remember the administration's no-bid Snapple contract?

Perhaps it's no accident that there is a resemblance between the Mayor's managerial impulses to change the department's management culture (utilizing consultants and stifling public discourse and community input services) and President Bush's missionary impulses to convert Iraq's dictatorship to a democracy by using armed invaders.

If anything, we should have learned something from Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. After all, what distinguished Mr. McNamara and his time in office was his insistence that the world would be a better place if people in Vietnam lived with the sort of government he approved of rather than the sort of government they might end up with if left to their own devices. To my mind, that approach to reform failed to show "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" that Thomas Jefferson felt was such a critical justification for the revolution that established American democracy.

That said, I am keenly aware that there is a big difference between political reform in Iraq and political reform in Albany. However, if there's an ounce of truth in the pounds of BS we were told about reform in Iraq, it is that we don't often know what we think we know. As Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld belatedly put it, there are known unknowns; and there are unknown unknowns; and then there are things about which we don't have a clue.

I must confess that for far too long the former Board of Education (now DOE) educrats had developed a special knack for hiding behind bureaucracy for failing to improve test scores. However, on balance, the current DOE testocrats are no bargain either. After all, as someone once observed, "any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it."

Indeed, it would be helpful if the DOE entrepreneurs with carte blanche to reinvent the city's contracting rules begin by asking the question, why is there the need for the PPB rules in the first place? Oddly enough, if reformers' strength is their ability to implement change, it is also their greatest vulnerability. After all, a man is wise only to the extent that he is aware of his own ignorance.

Here's the bottom line: I am optimistic about Governor Spitzer's agenda to reform Albany. Here is why: after playing the role of a butt-kicking Attorney General, Mr. Spitzer demonstrated you needed two things as a reformer: leadership, will and ethical clarity. From this observer's chair, Governor Spitzer has both.

Brandon L. Ward is president of the New York City Municipal Chapter of Blacks in Government, an employee advocacy group. He is a Mechanical Engineer with the Department of Transportation. He can be reached at brandonward@nycbig.com.