Michelle Rhee and the DC public schools
Posted by
Mark
on Sunday, August 17th, 2008. Filed under Fresh Ideas.
If you think the airline industry is bad, how do you feel about public schools.
We don’t have kids, so I don’t have to experience the chaos and underperformance first hand. (For that, unfortunately, I’m grateful.) But all of us see what the public schools are turning out, some of us are hiring their “graduates,” and, of course, our tax dollars are funding the process.
Here’s hope in the form of Michelle Rhee, the 38-year-old chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public schools. I refer you to “The Iron Chancellor” in the September 2008 issue of Fast Company.
Public education is the most local of all institutions. I hear you on the lament of public education but it’s about one thing and one thing only…parents.
Show me a school where it’s near impossible to find a parking space at a PTA meeting or school concert and I’ll show you a successful school full of young people any business would be lucky to employ or college lucky to admit.
Show me a school where an alarming number of kids miss the first day of school because the parents didn’t know school was starting and…well you get the point.
Posted by B.I.G. on 08.19.08.