With a little over a month remaining in the school year, things aren’t slowing down for Michelle Rhee. Never mind that the D.C. Schools Chancellor is being named in what looks to be a time-consuming vanity lawsuit by Washington Teachers’ Union vice-president Nathan Saunders, or that City Council Chair Vincent Gray is messing with her budget. The woman has work to do.
As we mentioned this morning, Rhee has begun the process of notifying many DCPS principals that they will not be reappointed for the next academic year. Rhee’s spokesperson, Mafara Hobson, told DCist that while the Post reported that up to 30 principals will be dismissed, decisions are still being made. Although she couldn’t comment at this point on any specific criteria used to evaluate the administrators, it’s likely that over two dozen principals will be fired before the end of the month as part of Rhee’s compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and her desire to create a high-performing culture within the District’s schools.
Hobson said that principals who fill any vacant leadership positions will come from a combination of candidates found through DCPS’s nationwide principal search and from within the district. D.C. Wire also points out that certain contract clauses might allow some fired principals to fill different roles within the school system.
An Education Endorsement: As has been reported, last week Rhee mentioned that she supports the education plan of John McCain “far and away” over those of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. She’s a committed Democrat, but she’s also right on this one – although it took McCain until after he secured the nomination to start paying any attention to education, he has been the only candidate to speak strongly in support of reforming NCLB, which despite its execution flaws is a critical law, or to openly embrace accountability reforms like merit pay, which would link part of teachers’ compensation to their effectiveness. (Last summer, Obama started strong on merit pay, but later backed off under union pressure.) Meanwhile, Clinton and Obama are “pandering, quite frankly, to the teachers’ unions and other folks,” Rhee admonished, citing the Dem’s frequent NCLB-bashing applause lines.
