The District of Columbia's schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, is shaking up and shaping up Washington, D.C. schools.
BY COLLIN LEVY
"I see it as a social justice issue--I want them all to be in excellent schools. The kids in Tenleytown are getting a wildly different educational experience than the kids in Anacostia, so our schools are not serving their purpose."
So says D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has brought an unusual sense of urgency to her new job. One of her first decisions was to get rid of the furniture. When she arrived last summer, she says, there was a whole area, complete with couch and chair and TV for lounging in her sprawling, pink-carpeted office. Wasted space, she thought, "When am I ever going to have time to sit?"
That was a pretty good prediction for a woman whose first five months on the job have been a whirlwind of jousting with the dinosaurs in the city's education bureaucracy. So far, in her quest to turn around the public school system, she's taken on the unions, the city council and, most recently, hundreds of angry central-office workers.
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Comments (1)
It's a pretty sad comment on American public education when the fact that a school superintendent is accomplishing great things for the schools she leads becomes a news story. News is sometimes defined as man-bites-dog, instead of dog-bites-man, the usual. That this superintendent, Ms. Rhee, is making a big difference implicitly indicts all the rest, since the clear premise is that superintendents normally DON'T make much difference.
Instead, as here in southern Nevada, most school districts have high-powered PR operations. That means their flacks are able to usually place the stories they want into the local media, keeping the public confused about the actual quality of the schools. Nevertheless, the underlying reality of the schools actually remains quite grim.
Posted by career teacher | January 2, 2008 12:24 PM