The impact of Michelle Rhee’s ‘culture of urgency’
It is an almost universal tribute offered about Michelle Rhee’s 3 1/2 -year tenure of the Washington D.C. school district — that if she accomplished one thing, it was to instill a sense of urgency in the city about the need to fix broken schools that had failed children for decades.
Actually, it was Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who hired Rhee and gave her carte blanche, who made school reform the city’s top priority. Rhee got all the attention because Fenty wanted it that way.
Read full article >>Who is missing from this lineup to evaluate Race to the Top?
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just convened a group of prominent people in the education world to take a comprehensive look at the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative and its impact on school reform around the country.
Race to the Top, the administration’s chief education initiative, is a competition that required states to apply for a share of a total of about $4 billion by promising to implement school reforms that were in part focused on the (unfortunate) primacy of standardized testing as the basis of evaluating schools, students, teachers and principals.
Read full article >>