printYes, she had been reforming the educational gulag that is the D.C. public school system, instead of abolishing it (abolition should include educational vouchers and charter schools, a species of the publicly funded system). But I can’t judge Michelle Rhee by this libertarian’s ideal. Rhee, chancellor of perhaps the costliest and crappiest urban school system in the developed world, has been forced to step down because she set about purging the deadwood and detritus, and the structures that nourish them (tenure as opposed talent, for instance), from the DC educational enterprise.
WaPo: “Student test scores rose, decades of enrollment decline stopped and the teachers union accepted a contract that gave the chancellor, in tandem with a rigorous new evaluation system, sweeping new powers to fire low-performing educators.”
Pursuant to her purging, Rhee has been forced, presumably, to parrot publicly that, “We have agreed that the best way to keep the reforms going is for this reformer to step aside.”
That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
The powers that be have been reinstated in the person of Kaya Henderson.
SHE’S IN:
RHEE’S OUT:
Is this a case of out-with-the-Asian-outsider and in-with-the-African home girl? As with everything else in the US, the racial overtones are palpable.
The context for this resignation is in a recent column by Pat Buchanan, detailing how the DC mayor who’d appointed Rhee was crushed in his re-election bid, primarily by black voters:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=205813
When you play the race card, everyone loses. Booker T.Washington tried to get people to listen while he tried to educate his people then. They still aren’t listening. Of course, we all know who loses. The Whites will follow her out toward good schools, the ghetto will take over the empty homes and continued poverty.
And the students benefitted how by her firing?
Obama screws the entire country to protect unions so why would we expect anything less here. This is about protecting union workers. DC is a dump. Look at Detroit. Liberal black leadership has destroyed two once great cities. I know there are some other factors involved, but this is what American style big government reaps.
This is the way everything is handled. Do our decisions help get the job done better? Help make the product with the best profit margin? Provide the best education for our young people? No, no a thousand times no. The only thing that matters is that the black power structure is happy that their charade continues and the whites either don’t care enough to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by fighting this system or they are among the elites gaining power and riches by being an active player in this hypocrisy. What a crock.
The racial overtones are even applied intra-racially. A black mayor, Fenty, makes some little headway in reforming the city’s pandemic corruption and is defeated in the primaries for being ‘out of touch’, ‘insufficiently black’, or ‘acting white’.
Whatever the sins of white racial/economic segregationists in the past, they pale in comparison to black racial/cultural purity of the present. Black cultural superiority insists on the Al Sharptons over the Thomas Sowells, and is prepared to pay the price of social disintegration of the black community – and even physical disintegration as in Detroit – in the name of purity. God help the uppity black man white people like.
It is somewhat hopeless for people to rely on government to educate their children. As for DC, the educational bureaucracy cares about themselves and the limited set of parents who care about educating their kids are mostly white and/or use private schools.
Voucher experiments on a LOCAL basis may be worth pursuing (if people are vigilant enough to prevent “strings” from being attached) but any national program, besides being unconstitutional, will only corrupt the private schools.
Apparently education represents a major source of employment for the residents of D.C. and being laid off from those jobs, due to poor performance, was more upsetting to the electorate of D.C. than the attempts to increase the quality of education for their kids.
It seems to me that Michelle Rhee was doing a fine job. However, if the voters of that district did not like the job she was doing (or Rhee) who are outsiders (those outside the district) to say that the voters were wrong? If they want to throw out Fenty and along with him, Rhee, that is their choice. The basic problem is that education is federally subsidized, with money from taxpayers who have no say in who gets hired and fired going to support underperforming schools in areas like D. C.. Stop that; let all decisions be made at the local level, including who is best qualified to run the schools. Eliminate all special privileges as well, in access to higher education. (Pipe dream, I realize.)