Where is Richard Donald?
Anybody remember Richard Donald? If you were working at city school system headquarters in the spring of 2006, you probably can't forget him.
Donald had been fired the previous fall from his job as a data analyst for the city schools, and he alleged he was the victim of institutional racism. On May 19, 2006, Donald called into a radio show on WOLB-AM and told the world that 10 top school system officials were out on a recreational boat trip as he spoke, and that the system had cut a check to cover the expense. After the broadcast, the officials paid for the trip with a personal check written by Alexandra Hughes (then an aide schools CEO Bonnie Copeland, now a spokeswoman for House Speaker Michael Busch). But Eric Letsinger, the system's chief operating officer and the organizer of the trip, was fired anyway amid an investigation into the trip and other allegations. A few weeks later, for a variety of reasons, Copeland stepped down, too.
So what became of our whistleblower? It had been awhile since I'd heard from Donald, but he called me this week from Denver, where he's enrolled in the Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University. He was calling to ask my help navigating The Sun's online archives. Turns out, he needed some old articles for a term paper he was writing. By the next morning, he had finished the paper and emailed it to me. He called it "Baltimore City Public School System: A Case Study of an Aggressive/Defensive Culture." I'll paste a few particularly inflammatory excerpts below.
From "Baltimore City Public School System: A Case Study of an Aggressive/Defensive Culture," by Richard S. Donald. Reprinted with permission.
The Baltimore City Public School System has been experiencing myriad management problems as of 1997. Since 1997, those appointed to senior management roles seemed to have ignored the system’s vision to accelerate “the academic achievement of all students, in partnership with community to ensure that students have the attitudes, skills, and proficiencies to succeed in college and in the 21st Century global workforce (BCPSS, 2007).” Few superintendents and their deputies had been dismissed from their positions for being insensitive to multiculturalism and ethical lapses in decision making. In other instances, misappropriation of funds allocated for bus repairs were used for pleasure trips during the workweek. The alarming fiscal deficits, coupled with other administrative deficiencies have created hygiene factors among employees. These mounting problems inhibited the organization from meeting its goal of educational excellence for its stakeholders....
The school district is very politicized, internally and externally. The governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore, by law, appoint their friends to the school board of commissioners at the Baltimore City School System. Other stakeholders, such as parents, community leaders, and education activists, are excluded from that school board. With such noticeable vacuum on the school board, politicians use the board to their best political advantage, while students are deprived of academic excellence....
Employees feel that they should compete and out-perform one another. In a culture like BCPSS’, many organizational members usually do not “fit in” to meet the expectations of corporate constituencies. The system’s employees are rather high on dogmatism and authoritanism. Subordinates see the world as a threatening place and regard authority as absolute....
Baltimore City Public School System is diversity immature. Its leadership practices what a former Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) official once referred to as “intersectional discrimination (Dominguez, 2007, October).” In November 2003 during the financial crisis, senior management laid off 1,000 employees, the largest staff reduction in 20 years. Many of those affected were African-Americans. No Caucasian was impacted by such move. A year later, most of those jobs were replaced with whites....
Baltimore City Public School System’s management has been structured on the basis of authority inherent in members’ positions. Members believe they will be rewarded for taking charge and controlling subordinates, and being responsive to the demands of superiors. In this case, those superiors are the schools superintendent, the city mayor or the state governor. Of what those ineffective managers are oblivious is that power-oriented organizations are less effective than their members might think; subordinates resist this type of control; hold back information, and reduce their contributions to the minimal acceptable level....
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Comments
I don't know the guy, but the short answer is that he's way off-base on at least some of this.
For instance: there were plenty of Caucasians who were affected by the 2003 layoffs; several of them are still working at the school level rather than back at North Avenue (if they're still working for BCPSS at all). The building is still considered short-staffed in several areas, and I know that in the offices where I have direct contact, the overall racial mix has changed only slightly, if at all. Those departments are still overwhelmingly staffed with African-Americans.
I'll say this, though: there does remain a certain culture in the building and, if you don't toe the line, your future options are certainly limited.
Posted by: Claude | November 8, 2007 11:21 AM