Good Rheedance

Much as I'd like to, I can't take credit for that clever title. It goes to Roger Kaplan, who wrote an excellent article regarding Michelle Rhee's timely exit from the Chancellorship of the D.C. Public School system. You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/10/18/good-rheedance.

[P]ublic schools, like our nation, evolve, and indeed evolve in ways that parallel the larger society's. The most significant of these parallel trends is the surrender of local responsibility to government authorities, and the pretense of the latter to rely on "experts," a.k.a. technocrats, people parachuted into communities where they have no ties but whose problems they can solve . . . .

School reform has focused historically, one might almost say cyclically, on such scarecrows as "entrenched interests" and "out of date pedagogy." In plain English, reformers have tended to think they understand the problems and challenges of educating undisciplined if lovable savages (children and teenagers) better than the people whose job it is to do it, and furthermore that they have a system for teaching math and reading that will work better than any other. In both regards they are very much in the venerable American tradition of snake-oil salesmen, though the Ph.D.'s they often hold are authentic, compared to the "doctor" titles conferred upon themselves by your old-fashioned mountebanks. In terms of truth-in-packaging, the latter were probably more honest . . . .

The schools reflect our society, and being vitally, warmly, constantly interested in the immediate and crucial bond between our communities and our schools is part of the job of running them and working in them. This bond has been sundered by the massive infusion of federal money in our school systems. That is what is really wrong with them. It scarcely matters that teenage boys hate to read -- that would not be news. They should spend more time in shop then, or under the supervision of their coaches and their ROTC colonels. They will come to reading in their own good time. No superman is going to change that, and it is symptomatic of the narcissistic, rules-are-for-others types that they can think of nothing better than blaming teachers for a system that has lost its moorings and its compasses, including most pertinently its
moral compasses.