Photo used under a Creative Commons license with dbking.

If anyone who really dislikes mayoral control of city schools and Chancellor Michelle Rhee was expecting Vince Gray to abandon either of the two, they’re bound to be disappointed by a detailed education platform the mayoral challenger rolls out today.

During a busy week for education news — there was Monday’s forum that Mayor Adrian Fenty opted out of it, and Rhee’s comments yesterday hinting that she’d bail on a Gray administration — Gray will more fully flesh out his education plans during an event at the Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School this afternoon. Much like his campaign on the whole, Gray will focus on the way reforms to the troubled school system are made, more than the substance of the reforms themselves.

In a 12-page document outlining his plan for D.C. schools (see after the jump), Gray gives Fenty “tremendous credit” for making education the city’s highest priority, a practice that he promises to continue. But Gray quickly notes, “Fenty’s hands-off management style has resulted in a short-sighted, narrow, and clandestine approach to the education reform effort.” He pledges to “take a more holistic approach to education” by rebuilding public trust in the system, expanding community buy-in, and restoring accountability and sound management.

Knowing that Fenty — and now Rhee — have tried to make education a zero-sum proposal in the campaign, Gray makes clear that he’s not looking to turn back any of the changes that have been made so far. “Vince Gray knows that we can’t afford to go back to the old way of doing things in our schools, when an incremental approach was failing our students. We must keep our public schools under Mayoral control with a strong Chancellor in order to bring the kind of innovative systemic change that’s critical to turning our schools around,” his plan reads.

The plan doesn’t mention Rhee by name, but it does stress that Gray will grant the Chancellor substantial latitude to implement reforms. “Vince will empower the Chancellor to make tough decisions,” it says, adopting some of the same language Rhee used to criticize Gray. “Vince will give the DCPS Chancellor the tools and controls to manage his or her budget…He will continue to support the Chancellor in making hard choices with regards to staffing, hiring, and firing decisions to get bad teachers out of the classroom.”