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District schools czar Michelle Rhee just released a detailed list of what it means to be a good teacher. Schools are quite different on whatever planet Rhee comes from! Here are a few of the qualities that Rhee says good teachers will exhibit every half hour, according to the Washington Post:

• No more than five instances of “off-task behavior” by students
• Teachers will pose three “probing” interrogatives in response to correct answers
• No more than three minutes of time lost to disorganization
• Students will advance grades every 15 minutes
• One-hundred percent class attendance rate
• Negative ten percent tardiness rate
• Teachers will pass the Kobayashi Maru

In fact, only Vulcans need apply to teach in Rhee’s school district. Some of the qualities she insists on in good school teachers don’t really even apply to the instructors. Have you ever met schoolchildren? They are savages. Teachers should consider themselves lucky if they’re assigned students who limit their savagery to “off-task behavior.”

Rhee’s 200-some-odd-page “DCPS Teaching and Learning Framework” sounds like the sort of thing that gets delivered on Mount Sinai: a document that doesn’t merely clarify the aspects of the job that need clarifying but instead signals a shift in the company’s direction. More than just a shift: a wholly new initiative. On the heels of a major restructuring that included massive school consolidation and personnel turnover — which is to say nothing of the stalled negotiations with the teachers’ unions — Rhee announces an effort to quantify and mandate the experience inside the classroom. I believe the word is “micromanaging.”

No doubt, Rhee’s supporters — or alternatively, DCPS’s critics — will call it “bitter medicine,” the ultimate stage in a top-down revolution to transform a system that had few virtues. And parts of Rhee’s classroom-oversight program certainly sound good. As the Washington Post reports:

Teachers will be subject to revamped evaluations based in part on the new teaching and learning framework, which will deploy a corps of “master teachers” to join principals in assessing instructors. The changes are an attempt to make performance reviews more objective and less vulnerable to school politics or personal issues. The new evaluations also are expected to include improvement in student test scores as part of the criteria by which some instructors will be judged.

To my mind, these sound like features that could make for real improvements — if they are changes teachers have asked for. Do teachers believe that the problem with schools is internal politics? Because if they don’t, a “master teachers” corps may not be received enthusiastically by the “mastered teachers.” Meet the new boss. . . .