Rhee Sees 'Tide Turning' For Schools

Chancellor Defends Progress On Painful Path to Change

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has proposed a controversial plan to close 23 schools. In the coming weeks, she plans to release a final list of the schools to be closed, along with transition plans. She visited The Washington Post last week to talk with editors and reporters to discuss that and other topics. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation. She began by describing the progress in D.C. public schools during her first seven months on the job.

I actually think we have accomplished a tremendous amount. The personnel legislation was significant. I think that we have begun to turn the tide at the central office in terms of setting a . . . culture of accountability, but also, I think, we've begun to turn the tide in the general public to make people feel like there is some hope. . . . Ultimately, we want to make sure that we have a portfolio of schools that provide the foundational academics for all students, but also have compelling programs and initiatives going on in them that are serving kids well and that are attractive to their parents.

Q: Where do things stand with personnel changes in the central office?

A:We have been going through performance evaluations for the last few weeks. That has been an interesting process. Mostly because they haven't been done for years, and so we have a lot of employees who never had a performance evaluation. I think there's a culture in general, probably in the city from what I hear from anecdotes, but certainly within DCPS, of people having what I think are sort of [inflated] perceptions of their performance and of their work.

How would you evaluate the school-closing process? It was interesting because I was in a community meeting a couple of weeks ago, and one of the people who was at that meeting came and sort of spoke out and she said, 'You know, you brought us together and you asked us how to engage the community, but you didn't listen to us.' I said I absolutely disagree with that. I think part of the problem has been that we came forward with a set of recommendations and we wanted to get community input on those recommendations, and for whatever reason, those recommendations were perceived as the decision. What I've said to people is, 'If those were the decisions that I was going to go with, I would have made them and saved myself seven weeks of getting yelled at every single day.' But I'm getting a lot of good input from the community. I think that what people will see in the end is that these recommendations will have changed pretty significantly, and some substantively, from the original recommendations, because of the feedback.

When you say significantly, do you mean actual schools coming off the list?

I'm not going to tip my hand on that. What I will say is that you will see very substantive changes from the original recommendations based on the feedback that we got from the community. And we have done a very, very comprehensive job. I have a binder that I've read through that has every single comment, suggestion, recommendation that was given, at every single one of the community meetings. I've met with some individual schools multiple times, with multiple groups of parents, teachers, administrators, and a lot of them have valid concerns. A lot of them have really good suggestions.

So we would expect to see a number of steps that would ameliorate these changes for parents and students involved?

I think that what you'll see is that we will have a transition plan in place for every school that is ultimately impacted. And I think that different schools have very different concerns and different things that we're going to have to look into. [At one of the schools] one of their primary concerns is around safety and the fact that we are merging two very distinct neighborhood populations together [in which] the neighborhoods have tremendous conflicts right now. We have to put a comprehensive plan in place for how we are going to look at that and deal with that situation.

This has been a very contentious process. How will you go about healing the community after your decision is made, because it's going to really take a lot of buy-in from parents and teachers at these schools in order for the consolidations to work?

I think, to your first comment, this has been really contentious. I've gotten e-mails and had conversations with superintendents from across the country and they're like, 'There's no good way to do this.' I've talked to some people who have gone through extraordinarily long processes and others who have gone through shorter ones. The ones who have gone through longer ones have said, 'We don't have any less pain and we don't have any less sort of feelings of anger because of the process.' And it's just an incredibly sentimental and emotional process. I think that what we're going to do to start to heal is to put in place these transition plans that address the community concerns and that will maximize the stability for the students.