ROSEMARY: Michelle Rhee says “We Aren’t Done Fighting.” Really?

I’m sorry, but Michelle Rhee has quit the field.  It would be far more impressive for her to have stayed on as Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system without the protection of Mayor Adrian Fenty.  The whole business of "giving" the new mayor the opportunity to appoint his own Chancellor was not up to her. Mayor Vincent Gray has the power to do that, Michelle Rhee or no Michelle Rhee.  She executed a career maneuver which I have decided to blame on her youth and the political toxicity that shimmers over Washington like the preternatural light over a spent nuclear fuel pool with the Beltway as containment.  Washington needs a Charles Dickens to sort out its story … how education, a necessity for a democracy, is being denied to institutionalized children within the shadow of the halls of power. Because that is what failing schools are … jails for kids.  Michelle Rhee knew that, worked with lightening speed to fix as much as she could, made impressive inroads into restoring the mission of education to D. C. schools, closed down the schools that were functioning as holding cells, and stepped on a lot of toes in the process.  Her cause was just, and she should have stayed on the field of battle. If Gray had fired her, it would have had ramifications well beyond the moment and it would have been a natural consequence of the battles she has been waging. But … she quit the field, opened a Twitter account and went on Oprah.

I am unimpressed by StudentsFirst, Ms. Rhee’s new endeavor “… to build a national movement to defend the interests of children in public education and pursue transformative reform, so that America has the best education system in the world.”  StudentsFirst, in spite of lofty intentions, is one more case of abandoning local reform for a centralized movement. Bad education causes suffering that is local, politically useless and specific and it happens to urban, suburban and rural children alike.  Please read my friend Lynn’s December 12th  blogpost on the Granby Board of Education’s panel discussion, for it’s the kind of thing that happens in Bancroft, Iowa, Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon and everywhere in between, up above and down below this great nation.  One does not get to call the shots in the rough and tumble politics of a city like Washington, D.C., but I think Michelle Rhee could have been the stuff of legend if she had stayed and continued to fight for the children of the city. I have just finished reading Falls the Shadow, an excellent piece of well-researched historical fiction by Sharon Kay Penman.  The book culminates with the Battle of Evesham which was fought at Evesham, England on August 4, 1265.  Evesham was the last battle in an attempt to uphold the Oxford Provisions, often considered England’s first written constitution.  Evesham should have been an inglorious, ignominious defeat for the armies of the 6th Earl of Leicester, who led forces in support of the Provisions against Henry III and the royal House of Platagenet.  Militarily, and in the moment, it was.  But history tells a much different story, the story of a man and the forces he led who did not quit the field when all was hopeless.  I wish StudentsFirst could have been the brainchild of a woman who was forced to hand over the castle keep after fighting to the last rather than the invention of a fighter who stopped fighting and abandoned the local cause with the enemy still a ways off.