Michelle Rhee’s resignation as District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor, effective at the end of October after less than four years on the job, marks the end of a short, but intense and productive period of fundamental reform in the District’s chronically substandard public schools system. City residents — especially those with children — have Rhee and her political patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, to thank for this new focus on holding administrators, principals and teachers accountable for the results of their performance.Rhee made mistakes along the way, including her use of questionable budget figures to close unneeded schools less than a month before classes began and by appearing on Time magazine’s cover with a broom. She also antagonized some voters by publicly working for Fenty during his primary campaign against the eventual winner, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, and then calling Fenty’s defeat “devastating” for the city’s schoolchildren.
But Rhee also made a lot of enemies, and in all the right places, particularly the Washington Teachers’ Union, the single biggest obstacle to needed reform. The WTU endorsed Gray, spent thousands of dollars on advertising on his behalf and provided much of the energy behind his campaign. Even so, Rhee’s departure is not another example of the all-too-familiar exit of school superintendents who came in promising great reform but were eventually either worn down or pushed out by political infighting.
