Time for holiday reading. Sara Mead of the Early Education Watch blog digs into the Five-Year Action Plan for the District of Columbia Schools and finds that in at least one respect, schools czar Michelle Rhee’s plan comes up wanting:

There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but one glaring omission that really troubled me: A total lack of attention to early education. The word “preschool” appears exactly once in the document, as part of a series of early education programs given a passing mention in a section dealing with parental engagement. Pre-kindergarten or early childhood education? Not a mention. Kindergarten? Nope. On the upside, early literacy does get mentioned twice, and Rhee is proposing a solid, research-based approach to early literacy, including increased use of tiered interventions for struggling readers.

Matthew Yglesias observes, “A certain type of person isn’t interested in any education improvements that don’t involve picking fights with teacher’s unions, and this seems to me like perhaps an example of Rhee suffering from that affliction.” Certainly the schoolteachers seem to think so.

Mead zeroes in on one aspect of the plan that might sow some confusion. “[T]he District of Columbia Council recently passed ambitious universal pre-k legislation to expand access to pre-k programs and to improve their quality,” she writes.

Does that mean that the D.C. Council and Michelle Rhee are working toward different mandates for school education? While it should not surprise anyone that the executive and legislative branches share responsibilities within a field as broad as the public school system, it seems that it would behoove both efforts if both the actors involved shared the same priority. If the Council decides that pre-K is where it’s at but Rhee barely mentions it, whose focus obtains?

Photo of educupcakes borrowed with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user clevercupcakes