Posts Tagged ‘Michelle Rhee’
Weekend in Review
Well, it took a few days, but the opinionmakers over at the Washington Post came up with some impressions on how D.C. public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee handled herself at a pivotal Thursday hearing before the D.C. Council. Here’s the WaPo editorial board, which hardly interrupts its yearslong standing ovation of the Rhee regime:
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Liveblog: D.C. Council Grills Michelle Rhee on Teacher Layoffs
Vincent C. Gray and the remainder of the D.C. Council have just gaveled to order a hearing on the “causes, implementation, and impact” of the D.C. Public School layoffs earlier this month.
LL will be following along on Channel 13 and live blogging the proceedings. (Actually, LL will be livetweeting and pasting those over here at City Desk.)
[Last update 7:05 p.m.]
# LL takeaway 10: LL is not sure if he can do this again tomorrow for the parks contracts hearing. 7 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 9: As every CM said, the tone is awful. Kwame was right; if the political games cont’s, reform will crash and burn. 8 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 8: Council did establish that the process did evade its authority and is possibly illegal. That’s a win for Gray. 14 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 7: Council did not establish beyond a doubt that this was done to fire bad teachers outside due process. That’s a win for Rhee. 16 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 6: Rhee gave good reasons for the hiring of 900+ teachers ahead of the cuts. Her reasons for delaying the cuts were not as good. 18 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 5: Noah Wepman is not very good in hearings. Smart, sure, but Gandhi/Rhee need to keep this guy away from microphones. 21 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 4: Michelle Rhee is very, very good in council hearings. She keeps an even tone and knows when to call CMs on their BS. 22 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 3: Agency CFOs are supposed to be independent of agency execs and report direct to CFO. At DCPS, this seems not to be the case. 23 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 2: Once again, Peter Nickles made the decision that kept council out of advisory role. Add it to the list. 25 minutes ago
# LL takeaway 1: By shifting cuts from summer school to teachers, executive again ignored council directive. Add it to the list. 26 minutes ago
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Is DCPS Continuing to Hire Teachers After Firing 229?
UPDATE, 6:35 P.M.: DCPS says this is a false alarm. The recruiter, says spokesperson Jennifer Calloway, was incorrect to say that the system “will resume the selection process next week.”
Rather, the intent was to keep its recruitment database up to date in order to “address normal resignations and retirements.”
The school system, Calloway says, “will absolutely consider” the pool of teachers let go earlier this month. The list is maintained “in case a vacancy arises in a subject area or specialty in which no teacher was RIF’ed….We do not want to be in a position where human resources is forced to scramble in order to make a potentially critical hire.”
ORIGINAL POST: On Oct. 2, 229 teachers employed by the D.C. Public Schools were laid off, along with 159 more support staff. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee claimed that budget cuts made by the D.C. Council forced the system to shed the staffers.
And yet, yesterday afternoon, a DCPS recruiter sent a message to candidates for teaching jobs in the system, telling them: “If you are still interested in teaching for DCPS during the 2009-2010 school year, please let me know. We will resume the selection process next week.” The e-mail contains a link to a Web page where recruits can indicate their intentions.
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What’s a Few Hundred Teacher Jobs Lost Here, When 250,000 Have Been Saved Elsewhere?
Don’t wallow in the District’s bad news about teacher layoffs! While hundreds are being booted from schools here under orders from Michelle Rhee, some 250,000 teachers elsewhere across the country are celebrating. Yay!
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Michelle Rhee: Not the Real Braveheart
Haven’t had enough fun at the expense of Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s “Braveheart” Education Next story? Head over to D.C. Wire, where Bill Turque makes a medieval jab at the profile and its over-the-top lead image:
“The accompanying story by June Kronholz is, as the picture suggests, almost uniformly admiring. Although it doesn’t address what happened to the real Braveheart, Scottish rebel William Wallace, who was hanged, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered in 1305 for rising up against the British crown.”
This Just In: Michelle Rhee Dubbed D.C.’s Braveheart!
Forget that picture of Michelle Rhee on the cover of Time magazine with that broom; that was child’s play. Click here to see her in her newest incarnation, care of Education Next journal.
How to Get a Sweet WaPo Editorial
In case you were doubting the tight relationship between the Washington Post editorial board and the upper echelons of the Fenty administration—particularly schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee—check this e-mail, sent on Oct. 5 from Rhee to embattled parks-and-rec director-designee Ximena Hartsock:
Spoke to Wapo ed board folks about you today. Told them you are the most qualified person possible, that you have amazing capacity and that everything you do has your hallmark of excellence. They’ll write a good piece for tomorrow.
Anatomy of a DCPS Layoff: On a Scale of Zero to 10, What Are Your “Significant Relevant Contributions”?
The Washington Teacher blog has posted a link to a 17-page memo sent recently from Jesus Aguirre, the D.C Public Schools’ director of school operations, to all DCPS principals, laying out Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s guidelines for the impending “reduction in force” she says is necessary because of budget constraints (in the real world, “RIF” means layoffs).
So how will the layoffs go down?
D.C. Teachers to Protest Michelle “Teacher Terminator” Rhee
D.C. teachers are preparing a protest for Thursday over the impending teacher layoffs announced last week by Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
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Cheap Seats Daily: What Does Michelle Rhee Know About Dunbar/Fort Hill, and When Did She Know It?
On this anniversary weekend of the Dunbar/Fort Hill debacle, it’s about time to call for an investigation of Michelle Rhee for her handling of the racial slur allegations made by Dunbar coach Craig Jefferies a year ago.
DCPS, the agency she lords over, has impeded every attempt to find out what really happened on that Allegany County football field last Sept. 19, 2008.
At least, that’s what school officials in Allegany County and Maryland athletic overseers say about Rhee’s handling of the matter.
Rhee won’t say anything. So why not believe everybody else?
(AFTER THE JUMP: Why didn’t Michelle Rhee cooperate in the Dunbar/Fort Hill investigations? Why won’t Michelle Rhee explain why she didn’t cooperate in the Dunbar/Fort Hill investigations? How did we reach a point where Michelle Rhee feels she doesn’t have to explain why she didn’t cooperate in the Dunbar/Fort Hill investigations? Redskins fans are racist? Dinosaurs and Indiana and preseason hockey trump postseason Mystics? )
The Last Word on Lafayette Elementary. For Now.
This morning, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee went on WTOP radio and said more than Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has about the process by which Hizzoner’s twin sons ended up enrolled at out-of-boundary Lafayette Elementary.
“I can assure you that no rules were broken,” Rhee said. “We have a number of provisions that allow kids to go to out-of-boundary schools and all of those things were followed.”
It’s not a complete explanation by any means, but it’s something. Rhee seems to grasp in some way what Fenty has not: That questions about his kids’ schooling concerns the integrity of a process relied upon by many parents in this town, and that they are questions that have implications for his grand project of school reform.
Since Fenty has made it quite clear that he will answer no questions about this issue, LL will not be asking him any further questions about the matter for the time being, barring further developments and the results of several records requests. But here’s a rhetorical question for Hizzoner: Why do this?
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Fenty Mum on Kids’ DCPS Schooling
This morning, the Washington Post reported that at least one of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s twin sons attended class at Lafayette Elementary School this morning—thus, it seems, making good on a vintage campaign promise from Fenty to have his kids attend D.C. Public Schools.
Yet Fenty, strangely, did not go out of his way to advertise that fact at a press conference early this morning. In fact, Hizzoner was quite terse in addressing questions about his kids, saying he would not discuss the matter out of respect for their “private life.” This evening, mayoral spokesperson Mafara Hobson doubled down on her boss’ silence, releasing this statement: “This morning Mayor Fenty and his wife, Michelle, officially enrolled their boys in DC Public Schools. Out of respect for the boys’ privacy, he has declined to comment further.”
But the fact is that his desire for privacy is caught up in a sticky political situation: Lafayette isn’t the Fenty family’s neighborhood school—that would be the somewhat lower performing West Elementary, at 14th and Farragut Streets NW. And the question is, how did the Fenty kids come to be enrolled at high-achieving Lafayette, across Rock Creek Park?
Congress’s D.C. Schools Report, and Cash for Clunkers
Michelle Rhee, the D.C. schools chancellor, was hot and cold on the Government Accountability Office report, delivered yesterday on Capitol Hill, on how well the clunker of a school system has done in the last two years implementing reforms.
Which is to say, she liked the part where it said she and Mayor Adrian Fenty were doing a good job and didn’t care so much for the part where it said they weren’t.
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Weekend in Review: The Menace of Street Racing
More bodies pile up thanks to the scourge that is street racing. This time, the two victims had pulled over to check out a race along I-70 just beyond the Baltimore city line. Last time, eight people were killed in Accokeek.
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Top D.C. Officials Haven’t Filed Financial Disclosures
Every May 15, legions of city employees scramble to finish their financial disclosure statements—public documents collected by the Office of Campaign Finance laying out whether government managers and certain other workers have any real or potential conflicts of interest.
This year, for instance, LL walked into Phil Mendelson’s office on May 15 to see the at-large councilmember hunched over a typewriter shortly before the deadline. Mendelson, as it happens, is one of the few folks in town who reports anything of substance on his forms.
Most declare nothing, and some haven’t filed at all. Last week, OCF published a lengthy list of nearly 1,000 nonfilers. Many of those are low-level functionaries, many of them no longer work for the District, but a handful were top-level officials.
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