Michelle Rhee fought the District’s public-school system, and in the end, the corrupt, crummy, calamitous system won.
No surprise, that.
D.C.’s public schools have been a dumping ground for decades, turning out Future Car Jockeys of America, Professional Panhandlers of America and attitudinally challenged nitwits who end up at DCRA.
Rhee came to the city with a novel idea: Let’s hold the teachers accountable. Let’s fire the incompetents and functional illiterates. And let’s stop cranking out so many car jockeys, panhandlers and DCRA malcontents.
This undertaking upset the status quo, especially the national teachers’ union that funneled gobs of cash in the direction of Vincent Gray’s Democratic mayoral campaign. The implication was clear. Once he earned the nomination, Rhee’s days as an architect of genunine change were done.
It just goes to show you that money talks, and all the hand-wringing over the ill-served youths of the city is so much chicken fertilizer.
George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, welcomes the “humanistic approach” of Rhee’s temporary successor, Kaya Henderson.
Translation: It is back to business as usual in the city’s public schools.
The big loser in all this are the children of the city’s have-nots, who, curiously enough, supported Gray in startling numbers at the polls. They are stuck with a system that was beginning to show improvement under Rhee’s cold-eyed stewardship.
That momentum has been lost because of politics, because of money, because of personalities, because of all the wrong things.
Give outgoing Mayor Adrian Fenty this: He did not pay lip-service to improving the city’s public schools, as his predecessors did. He hired an assassin, and Rhee carried out her duties with extreme prejudice, as well she should have.
She acted with fury, if not outrage.
We all should be outraged by the city’s public schools.
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