School reform daze

For the most part, too much has been going on, and there is too much to try to assimilate to try to write something comprehensive about the state of school reform in DC, over the hand wringing in many quarters over Michelle Rhee.

Mostly, a lot of people have written a lot of stupid stuff, such as Terry Lynch ("The end of school reform in the District" in the Post) and this letter to the editor in the Post, "Rhee's defeat: Sad but no surprise" plus Post editorials.

The fact is, how many of us change positively at the threat of whips, chains, and loss of employment. If you're interested in how successful organizational change works, there are many resources. Maybe some of the best work on why the whips and chains approach doesn't work comes from Chris Argyris.

But there are some good pieces about how urban education reform should work, how the "manifesto" ("How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders") published in last week's Post is pretty much bunk, including:

- "How to fix our schools" by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute. It focuses on how 1/3 of student achievement is impacted by in-school experiences, and 2/3 has to do with life outside the school setting (home, etc.)

- "It is as simple as that," an opinion piece by Robert Vinson Brannum in the online Examiner, this piece was a shocker, well argued, from someone who I often find to be somewhat inconsistent. The article makes good points about the groundwork laid by then Superintendent Janey, and how much of this groundwork was then discarded.

- Larry Cuban's piece in the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog, "Rhee in D.C.: The myth of the heroic leader." Larry Cuban is a professor at Stanford, with a great deal of classroom and school administration experience.

- Actually, Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet blog in the Post is excellent. It's too bad her writing rarely makes it into the hard copy edition of the paper. Why is that? It's probably the best education analysis that occurs under the rubric of the Post and it never makes it into the paper--sort of like how the Washington Post Writers Group sells the Neal Peirce column on state and local policy, urban politics and revitalization in particular, an incredibly important topic which is undercovered in the paper and should be included along with Valerie Strauss.