From the archives: Fenty's Plagiarized Academic Plan

[jsteele]

For most of 2007, I published a blog focused on local District of Columbia issues. The blog is now offline, but I've decided to republish some of the school related posts here. Those interested in background to many of today's school issues may find them interesting.


Originally published May 22, 2007

“…It will be a campaign that begins a new era of accountability in the District of Columbia.” — Fenty for Mayor Website.

“My promise is simple. District government must become accountable to the people of our City. Accountability will be more than rhetoric in my administration.” — Fenty 2006 Campaign Literature.

If one word were to describe DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's approach to governing, it would be "accountability." Accountability was a major theme of Fenty's mayoral campaign and it has been used to justify many of his actions as Mayor. For instance, the supposed benefits of mayoral accountability was a major selling point for Fenty's plan to take over DC public schools.

However, while frequently acting in the name of accountability, Fenty has little to actually hold him or his administration accountable. Having won every precinct in the 2006 Mayoral primary and, more recently, ushered Muriel Bowser — a virtual unknown — to victory in a crowded race to fill his former DC Council seat, Fenty has established himself as the dominant political force in the city. Council members, many of whom likely fear becoming the next target of "Team Fenty", are generally reluctant to challenge the Mayor. In addition, the city's dominant newspaper, The Washington Post, has proven in its editorial pages to be decidedly pro-Fenty. This became very apparent during the recent Special Election campaign when the Post's editorial board endorsed a Fenty-backed candidate for each of the three contested seats.

Fenty's ability to escape accountably, and the Post's enabling of that ability, was illustrated recently when Carl Bergman, a local computer consultant and former DC government auditor, discovered that large portions of Fenty's Academic Plan — a blueprint to improve school performance — had been copied word for word from a plan drafted by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. On April 6, Bergman sent a proposed op ed article to the Washington Post, but his article was almost immediately rejected. Following that rejection, Bergman contacted local public radio station WAMU, which ran a story by freelancer Jeanette Lenoir on May 4th.

The Post's lack of interest and the nearly month-long delay before WAMU ran its story are significant because Fenty's school takeover plan had become an issue in the May 1 Special Election. In the Ward 4 race, for instance, Fenty-endorsed Muriel Bowser was alone among the 19 candidates in her support of Fenty's plan. Had news that over a third of that plan had been copied verbatim without attribution broken in mid-April, she would have likely found herself forced to defend plagiarism on the part of the Fenty administration. There is no way to know whether that might have affected the outcome of the election, but the Post's refusal to publicize an act of plagiarism by the top city officials is consistent with the paper's pro-Fenty and pro-Bowser stance throughout the campaign.

Lenoir's WAMU report stated that the office of the Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso at first denied the copying. However, Reinoso was quoted giving what would become the Administration's defense — that plans of several cities had been reviewed and subsequently "informed" the process of creating DC's plan. Astonishingly, Lenoir stated that the copying "may not have been plagiarism" (but she did say that it raised ethical questions).

There are four points in Lenoir's story that deserve emphasis:

1) Responsibility for the report is completely hung around Reinoso's neck. Fenty, who on February 27 had testified to the U.S. Congress that accountability be "clear, direct, and placed where it belongs — with the Mayor" was, for perhaps the first time ever, absent from the media spotlight.

2) The office of the Deputy Mayor's first reaction was to deny that parts of the report had been copied. This display of dishonestly has been largely ignored.

3) Reinoso's defense that several plans were reviewed and the best ideas included in the DC plan ignores the "cut and paste" nature of the copying which included not only ideas, but large sections of prose.

4) Lenoir's contention that this "may not have been plagiarism" is completely unsupported. The DC Public Schools define plagiarism as "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own." Dictionary definitions are similar. That the copying of large parts of Charlotte-Mecklenburg's plan was plagiarism is really not disputable.

While the Washington Post's opinion editors had known about the Fenty/Reinoso plagiarism since April 6, the Post's reporters were apparently in the dark until the WAMU story on May 4. On May 6, the Post ran a largely laudatory profile of Victor Reinoso by David Nakamura. Nakamura wrote that the activist group Save Our Schools had said that Reinoso lacks creativity and that the group cited the WAMU report that Reinoso and Fenty "had taken portions of their education strategy from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C. school system." Nakamura then immediately provided Reinoso's defense that "best practices" from several school systems had been incorporated into the DC plan. This hardly conveys the reality that over 30 percent of the Academic Plan was copied word for word and that the issue regarding Reinoso was not one of creativity, but integrity. However, Nakamura may not have been aware of the extent of the copying at that point.

Nakamura followed up on the Academic Plan on May 9, writing that "About 32 percent or 8,000 words, of Fenty's document is borrowed." Nakamura avoids use of the word "plagiarism" except for in reference to a system used to identify unauthentic material. Nevertheless, the article is quite damning, especially the annotated version of Fenty's plan showing which sections were copied.

The following day, Nakamura and Nikita Stewart reported that Fenty considered the lifting of sections of the report to have been a mistake. However, Fenty pronounced himself satisfied with an apology issued by Reinoso.

The Post's editors weighed in on the plagiarism controversy on May 14. The editorial gets off to a good start, citing the "inexcusable plagiarism of another district's education plan." But, then quickly turns its attention to damage control. Reinoso is identified as being responsible for the report and having accepted the blame. As in the case of Nakamura's May 6 report, the editorial claims that critics have charged Reinoso with a lack of creativity — building a straw man to distract from the real issue of a lack of integrity — claiming another's work as his own and initially denying it. Finally, the editors state that the "great strength of Mr. Fenty's proposal is his promise of accountability" saying that the case of the "purloined report" is an example of responsibility falling on Fenty's shoulders. This is an amazing thing to say after having just placed responsibility directly on Reinoso and doing nothing to support holding anyone accountable. Indeed, far from supporting the notion of accountability, the Post editorial actually relies on another straw man argument, saying that "a student would not be kicked out of school for one miscue." That may well be true, but the student would not likely escape punishment altogether which has been the case with Fenty and Reinoso.

Thus we have our first "accountability moment." Caught red-handed, Fenty pushes responsibility downstream, landing in this case upon Victor Reinoso. Reinoso's reaction is to fib, and when that doesn't work, dissemble. Eventually, he issues an apology, which Fenty accepts. The Washington Post, presented with evidence of the Fenty administration's plagiarism of a plan central to the administration's flagship issue, ignores it. When that is no longer possible, the Post turns to minimizing the fallout and declares Fenty's successful avoidance of blame and failure to impose any form of punishment for the transgression an example of accountability. Coming next week in the Post: up is down and down is up.

[Anonymous]

Wow.

Thanks Jeff. I'll hold my comments for now, there's a lot to digest here.