Harry Jaffe: Michelle in the Lion's Den
By: Harry Jaffe
Examiner Columnist
October 30, 2009
Watching the nastiness that took place during Thursday's city council hearing, parents of public school children in D.C. might despair.
Don't.
Chalk it up to growing pains. Pin it on the natural disruptions of change. Be thankful that school reform will survive the kind of recriminations that we watched in the Wilson Building.
Starting after noon, School Chancellor Michelle Rhee appeared before the city council in what everyone understood would be a beat down of the school chief. Council members had been preparing to grill her for weeks, ever since she fired a couple hundred teachers. Other cities and states have been forced to let hundreds more teachers go, but in D.C., 200 was too many. Let's call this the piling up of the coals.
Then on Thursday morning, before Rhee sat in the witness chair, council members lit the match. They learned that the school system had moved $9.1 million from an account to pay teachers over to another account that would pay for summer school. Under city government rules, the school system should have gone to the council to "reprogram" the $9.1 million. It did not; it simply switched the money and paid for summer school.
You could almost see flames shooting from the ears of Council Chairman Vincent Gray and Ward 5 member Harry Thomas Jr.
"Shocked, shocked!" Thomas said to Rhee. "What you did defied, broke and did not follow the law."
Rhee agreed.
The chancellor essentially told the council members that their decision to cut the budget by killing summer school was a lousy idea. Rather than cut summer school, she decided to cut teachers.
One could argue that she is right, but that does not make it right for her to move the dough without notifying the council. Many council members were furious, and they were justified. Rhee was mildly apologetic. We have not heard the last of this.
Nor have we heard the last of the fulminations from council members like Marion Barry and Michael Brown. Their favorite word of the day was "toxic," which they used to describe the atmosphere created by Rhee as she goes about the process of changing the way D.C. educates its children.
In the annals of school reform, this too shall pass. What will not change is the school chancellor. Rhee withstood the nastiness with aplomb and equanimity. She stays.
Rhee is two and a half years into trying to change a system that has failed children in the capital city for five decades. Generations of kids have been consigned to failure because of our public schools. Politicians and the major frustrations of the system have pushed out a half dozen reform-minded school superintendents in the past two decades. They include Julius Becton, Franklin Smith, Arlene Ackerman, Paul Vance, and Clifford Janey.
Tommy Wells, a former school board member who now represents Ward 6, said schools have never been in better shape and added: "People are coming back to our public schools."
Amid the acrimony, that's a good thing.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at hjaffe@washingtonexaminer.com.
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