Clay Risen's new Atlantic profile of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is well worth a read. Rhee, of course, is the superintendent who offered teachers over $100,000 in pay to submit to a merit-based assessment system and voluntarily give-up tenure. The teachers' union rejected that effort. But what Risen really gets at, I think, is the fundamental tension between edu-reformers like Rhee and New York City's Joel Klein and the communities they purport to help, which are made up of low-income people of color. Parents without much political and economic capital (like all parents) deeply value input into their children's education. And when a Rhee or Klein tells them that local community boards, PTAs, and unions are no longer crucial voices in how schools are run -- that the central office calls the shots -- they chafe. Affluent parents are rarely shut out in this way. Risen writes:
In a city largely excluded from national politics, it makes sense that residents would feel particularly slighted by an outsider, installed without their input, who is happy to bypass the few forums left where poor and working-class parents can engage with the political system—the parent-teacher associations, the ward-level education committees, and other unofficial bodies that long wielded influence against the elected school board and suddenly find themselves powerless against a mayorally appointed chancellor. “I'm sympathetic with the need to act decisively and quickly, but at the same time, what does that do to one of our last democratic institutions?” asks Celia Oyler, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
It's not so easy to come up with a solution to this tension; urban school bureaucracies are deeply dysfunctional and desperately in need of improvement. Uber-local control hasn't worked. But families and neighborhoods are just as formative to a child's development as schools and teachers are --- if not more so. That's what folks like Geoffrey Canada, of the Harlem Children's Zone, really get. Unfortunately, as a schools chancellor, there's little Michelle Rhee can do to improve social services across the board. And currently, we have no national commitment to pairing education reform with anti-poverty efforts.
--Dana Goldstein
