D.C. education truce, or just hiatus?
By Mike DeBonis,
It was deja vu all over again in the John A. Wilson Building in many ways Thursday: An hours-long hearing on a D.C. schools chief, with emotional and sometimes angry testimony from residents upset over teacher firings and principal hirings and school closings.
But Michelle A. Rhee did not appear at the witness table, and things were otherwise quite a bit different: There were open seats in the council chamber. The witness list was relatively short. And every D.C. council member was in agreement: To lead the city schools, Kaya Henderson is just fine with us.
What a difference from late in the Rhee regime, when any appearance before city legislators became a forum for rhetoric and recriminations. That Henderson spent the better part of four years as Rhee’s right-hand woman — a co-architect of the policies that closed neighborhood schools, fired unprecedented numbers of teachers and laid the groundwork for other policies that contributed to Rhee’s departure last fall — barely registered with Rhee-loathing politicos, if at all.
Plenty has been said and written about Henderson — her softer touch, her scaled-back ambitions, her political savvy. But just as the chancellor has changed since eight months ago, so has the city and its politics.
For the four years between when then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) first suggested a mayoral takeover of the city schools and the day last in October when Rhee stepped aside after Fenty’s loss, the school reform debate not only dominated city politics, but also