By Raw Fisher
From Marc Fisher's Blog
Tuesday, January 22, 2008

She starts out alone, literally. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee walks into a conference room to meet with Washington Post editors and reporters and, unlike nearly every other public figure who joins us for such conversations, she has no aides in tow, no press handlers carrying folders of snazzy pie charts and carefully massaged messages. Rhee is making it clear that she's got the info and the 'tude to handle this on her own.

For 90 minutes, she takes nearly all questions; the only "no comment" comes on a query about how much of the school system's central office she plans to sack in the coming weeks. She's feisty, funny, frank. As a parent with two kids in the public schools, she says, "I can see all of the things that drive other parents crazy," such as the requirement that parents register their kids every year and the fact that after-school care starts several weeks after school opens.

Like the mayor who hired her, she does not hesitate to rip her staff and system. Like Adrian Fenty, she talks casually about race and class, as if they weren't the city's political third rail. "I am not going to allow them to dictate the decisions we must make," she says of the small but vocal group of protesters who accuse her of placing the brunt of her proposed school closings on poor black neighborhoods. When a member of her staff suggested she close a school in affluent, white Ward 3 for symbolic balance, Rhee says, "I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard."

She can be disarming, warm and embracing. But then we see the side of Rhee that those much-maligned central office employees are about to face: The chancellor, asked why she has allowed a TV crew from PBS to follow her around but has been stingy about giving time to a Post reporter, flares at a Post schools beat reporter and, in front of a room full of top editors, calls her out for supposedly not portraying the chancellor's comments as she'd wished in a recent story.

Public figures complain to editors all the time, as they ought to if they believe we've gotten something wrong, but it's rare to see such a personal hit in a large gathering like this. A whoosh of recognition sweeps the room: So here's how tough (and perhaps rough) this young chancellor can be.

What makes Rhee different and potentially special is that even after half a year in the District's strange political culture, she is angry and appalled when she runs across the complacency and righteousness that permeate the schools.

But Rhee says surprisingly little about what she hopes to change in the classrooms. She is, perhaps correctly, focused on systemic issues: which buildings, what staffing, how many dollars. She says parents and voters should see student performance start moving in the right direction in the next 12 to 18 months, but she warns, reasonably, that it will be many years -- at least eight -- before the District might be called one of the better urban systems in the land.

That's the sort of pipe dream superintendents have been hawking for decades, without the slightest hope of getting there. But Rhee has raised hopes and expectations. There really are new fields and repaired windows in some schools. At least some younger teachers seem energized, even as some older ones hunker down just as they did through previous threats of reform.

Rhee has weathered the storm over school closings far better than her predecessors over the past 20 years. She has not only faced the opposition, she's even won people over, if not to her list of schools, then at least to her overall approach. "Frankly," she says of those demanding that one or another school be saved, "the adult agenda has been dictating decisions for too long, and I'm not going to allow that to happen anymore."

I hope Rhee came to see us by herself because she's confident and knowledgeable about her path and not because she's a lone wolf. She will need allies, yet her first order of business is to clean house. Hers is a lonely task.