I was waiting with bated breath. I was hoping against all odds. I tried ever so hard to keep an open mind. Maybe, just maybe, if I sat still and wished hard enough, I would actually hear something different.
You have no idea how much, for the sake of D.C. children, I longed to hear something different, to feel the aging cynic in me nudge.
Unfortunately, the yack-yack was the same during a one-hour editorial board meeting with D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.
Oh, for sure, now the hopeful promises and hard-edged pledges come wrapped in a young, pretty package. No question that this 37-year-old, Ivy League-educated mother and businesswoman is driven and determined to set her GPS on a more “focused” course.
Look out, loafers. The school system’s newest straight-shooter is selling wolf tickets with a take-no-prisoners attitude.
“My actions will speak for themselves,” a smug Mrs. Rhee said. “When I send the signal, there will not be any questions.”
Still, watching and listening to her closely, I wondered how long I should bet on the survival of this esoteric educator.
She is the latest in the long line of superintendents who sat in the same seat and spewed forth the same reformer’s rhetoric about this failing “faceless bureaucracy.”
As expected, Mrs. Rhee — a master of inane corporate public-relations pabulum — waxed bureaucratic gobbledygook about “verification teams” and “data-driven systems” and “incenting the right things” during her virgin visit to The Washington Times on Monday.
Excuse my lapse of gracious Southern hospitality, but I interrupted her in midsentence of a soliloquy about establishing better “processes” and “expectations” and “assessments” in the school system.
I respectfully issued a challenge, saying I sincerely hoped by the time she left the room, Mrs. Rhee would offer us something we haven’t already heard.
One simpatico editor, obviously feeling my pain, also asked her point-blank what made her think she could accomplish what so many others before her couldn’t in the two decades we’ve being covering D.C. schools, especially with so little experience as a school administrator.
Be you chancellor or superintendent, the central mission must be the same: improving academic achievement. City residents have ample evidence that a change of title or personage does not portend a regime change.
Mrs. Rhee said the school system does not need additional resources and has too many employees for the ever-shifting student population.
She has fallen into the trap of tarring and feathering all school employees with the same disparaging brush stroke that denies the unheralded progress of dedicated workers who have survived good and bad leaders — politicians as well as educators.
To her credit, the articulate fast-talker was taken aback for a mere second. Then Mrs. Rhee instantly recharged, sensing we wanted specifics. She proved what I’ve heard in initial reports from community activists: that she’s got a knack for listening and quickly distilling the speaker’s message and desire.
Then this wispy woman “got real.” With forceful hand gestures, she acknowledged that she could not “solve everything in the next six months.” She needs to be “focused … on a few key things” and “disciplined … to rebuild confidence.”
She said she told her senior staff that if they are intent “on being better bureaucrats, they might as well throw in the towel right now.”
When pressed further, Mrs. Rhee identified four broad areas she intends to work on immediately: improving student achievement, providing a safe and secure learning environment, increasing parental and community involvement, and staffing “a central office that serves students.”
The biggest priority on the former teacher’s to-do list this year, however, is “paneling” for “effective matches” of “principal placements,” delaying her focus on teachers until next year. No one will be hired without her personal approval.
“Absolutely,” she said, adding that she has full authority to fire “ineffective people.” Unions aside.
Having “sat in the living rooms in Ward 7 and Ward 3,” she said, she realizes the hard task ahead in changing the conversation about the impending school-consolidation process from one about “bricks and mortar” to an “educational standpoint.”
Good luck. I informed her that that paradigm shift had been unsuccessfully tried, too. Besides, you are never going to convince some District residents that the school takeover initiative is nothing more than a boon for developers.
Obviously, Mrs. Rhee is not entirely without political savvy, or how else did she get this far this fast?
Still, I suspect that her naivete about the District’s die-hard political and racial dynamics may trip her up or, at the very least, detour and distract her like so many who have gone to the guillotine before.
The only time Mrs. Rhee bristled was when I asked what she plans to do to restore the confidence of her boss, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, to get him to enroll his twins in the same school system in which he expects his constituents to invest so much faith.
The best thing Mrs. Rhee thinks she is capable of doing at this early juncture is begin to “create a sense of hope in the District that something is going to be different and something is going to be changed.”
After all, “this is not rocket science, right?” she said, shrugging with her hands held up. All she has to do is harness the community’s good will and get “everybody pointed in the same and right direction.”
Same old, same old?
The more important question is: Will we witness Mrs. Rhee act differently than her predecessors? Will her naive vigor actually translate into a “higher standard” of learning?
Only this time the learning curve is shorter and the grace period on wishing and hoping with bated breath ticks faster.
For Mrs. Rhee’s failure, we must remain mindful, would be yet another abysmal failure for D.C. students that we cannot abide.
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