Michelle Rhee

Yesterday I was going to blog about the outstanding opinion piece by Colbert King in the Washington Post on Saturday appropriately titled “Beyond Publicity, What is Rhee Producing”. King makes a great point that seems to occur with every rock star superintendent of schools – they make changes and are immediately canonized before we even see the results.

Teaching quality continues to move forward in the news. Mike Petrilli has an excellent write up in the Gadfly from last week and now a new article in the Washington Post about what the newly canonized Michelle Rhee plans to do. But they are all trying to run before we learn to walk.

Management texts will tell you that you need to focus on improving staff. In teaching, the staggering numbers always tell the tale.

The absolute most effective way to positively impact education is to actually do something in a school - not write about, not attend the countless briefings by the same 5-6 education experts in DC every week - but actually go to a school and help. And so it was with great excitement that I woke my family up at 6:30 am on Saturday to trek in from the suburbs to meet up with a half dozen other ABCTE'rs and help Michelle Rhee and the DC Public Schools on school beautification day.