Link to Original Story

The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Rhee should stay or go, not be a lame duck

Oh, no. Two D.C. Council members are essentially daring Vincent Gray, the man expected to be the District’s next mayor, to turn D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee into a lame duck.

Let’s hope Gray resists the call. Lame ducks shouldn’t be running a school system in need of reform; by the very nature of lame duckdom, nothing much can get done that can’t be undone when the lame duck leaves, and nobody knows that better than the folks who work in the D.C. public school system, who have had so many superintendents in the past 15 years that I can’t keep track. They know how to dig in and wait out reformers.

My colleague Bill Turque reports in this story that Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) and Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), allies of Gray, are urging him to negotiate with Rhee for an "extended transition" that could keep her in the job until the end of the 2011-12 school year.

What Gray, who beat Mayor Adrian Fenty in yesterday's Democratic primary, and Rhee should do right now is sit down and figure out whether, for the sake of the kids -- remember, it’s all about kids, right? -- they can reach some compromise that will keep her here plain and simple.

And if they can’t, because there is so much enmity between them, Gray should move swiftly to find a replacement and get on with reform.

Unfortunately, Rhee is supposedly going on vacation tomorrow. Not a great time to be away, though it seems pretty obvious that she planned it this way so she wouldn't have to be in the city if her patron, Fenty, actually lost. I can’t imagine what a principal would say to a teacher who asked for vacation time in the first month of school, but never mind.

Gray has to get on with it. If that’s with Rhee, fine. If it’s not, that’s fine, too.

Okay, the above article was yesterday's edition of "The Answer Sheet"...Valerie's first take on the aftermath of political change in Washington DC.

Below is today's edition...in which Valerie reacts to interviews provided by Michelle Rhee to her adoring fans.

From the Washington Post...

Link to Original Story

The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Is that so, Chancellor Rhee?

So, it turns out, the problem with school reforms in D.C. -- which contributed to the defeat of D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty in the Democratic primary -- wasn’t that some of them were punitive and nonsensical. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said in an interview today that the people just didn’t get it.

It’s the people’s fault, actually.

In an interview that Rhee did today with Nora O’Donnell, a reporter for MSNBC and a conspicuous fan of Rhee’s, the chancellor concedes that “we didn’t do as good a job as I think we could have in communicating why we were making the decisions that we did that sort of led people to be suspicious.”

It’s a communications failure, as it were.

She further suggests that people didn’t like the reforms -- which include linking teacher pay to student standardized test scores (a terrible idea) and increasing the number of standardized tests kids must take (another rotten idea) because they were hard.

The people just don’t want “hard” reform.

“Reformers across the country knew when the mayor and I took these aggressive reforms on that it was going to be tremendously difficult... People need to see how hard the work is.”

To the extent that Fenty’s fate was tied to Rhee’s performance, it would be wise to remember that communications lapses were the least of her problems. Failing to tell the truth on a number of occasions about major efforts is more to the point, as is pushing forward some reforms that make no sense, the biggest one her IMPACT teacher evaluation system. Overstating success was another issue, as my colleague Bill Turque (who has given us fair and really smart coverage of Rhee's tenure) wrote in this story.

Of course Rhee made some tough decisions that had to be made, including starting the process of fixing special education, helping to get textbooks and other resources into classrooms on time (though the problem is not completely fixed) and pushing ahead to identify bad teachers (though her method was lousy). She concluded a historic labor pact with the dysfunctional Washington Teachers Union that gave some D.C. teachers the highest pay in the nation, a recognition by Rhee that teachers really deserve to make more money than they do. Test scores are up over the course of her tenure (though the achievement gap remains very large and test scores shouldn't be considered a measure of much of anything).

In this interview, Rhee also said that she feels “somewhat bad and guilty” that Fenty lost in part because of her reforms. She shouldn’t. Fenty knew, or should have known, what he was getting into when he selected her.

What she should feel somewhat bad about is still refusing to understand that a lot of people rejected her reforms not because they didn’t understand them, but because they didn’t like them and in some cases thought they were harmful.