Yes, 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.

Yes, 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.