Word: reformations
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...year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders--even reform-minded ones--make in five years. She has shut 21 schools--15% of the city's total--and fired more than 100 workers from the district's famously bloated 900-person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed 270 teachers. And last spring she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood...
Rhee is, as a rule, far nicer to students than to most adults. In many private encounters with officials, bureaucrats and even fundraisers--who have committed millions of dollars to help her reform the schools--she doesn't smile or nod or do any of the things most people do to put others at ease. She reads her BlackBerry when people talk to her. I have seen her walk out of small meetings held for her benefit without a word of explanation. She says things most superintendents would not. "The thing that kills me about education is that...
...things that make school reform so wrenching and slow is that schools become embedded in people's hearts. This is true in rich neighborhoods and poor ones, with good schools and bad. Rhodes talks about his school as if it were an extension of himself. He talks about "my teachers" and "my staff," and he refers to other students as "my colleagues." "I love Anacostia High School," he says. At the same time, he is dismayed by his school. He walks through his halls, pointing out the litter on the floor and the broken lockers. Rhodes...
...campaign's final stretch, Obama was much more muted on education; it was McCain who made the boldest case for reform. And Obama's decision to elevate campaign adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford education professor whose positions are often aligned with those of the unions, to lead his education transition team worries the reform community. "The idea that Obama was wholeheartedly behind school reform might have been the triumph of hope over evidence," says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington...
...Obama presidency is not already in full swing, it will be before the year is out. Transition aides say a more detailed economic plan may come before Christmas; some elements could be drafted by the holidays and acted on by Congress in January. Other pieces, like health-care reform, can't be rushed. But there is a real chance that at least some of the economic jolt that Obama wants will be ready for his signature the moment he takes the oath of office. That will make for an extraordinary Inauguration Day--and mark just the start...