Michelle Rhee never stops thinking of ways to change Washington’s schools, and she’s rolling out another one today. Rhee promises that her proposal, which creates two tiers of teachers, will “revolutionize education as we know it”.

With a phrase like “revolutionize,” you might expect the two new tiers to be humans and robots, or at least proletarians and kulaks. Unfortunately, the truth is much duller. Teachers choose to be in either the red tier, and keep their tenure and traditional pay raise schedule, or the green tier, and elect to forgo guaranteed employment in exchange for cash bonuses.

Commenters on the Post’s website are sharply divided about the proposal, but most seem to be on Rhee’s side:

Look for all the living-in-the-distant-past national labor unions to circle the wagons and fight Rhee and Fenty tooth and nail on this overdue, commonsense solution to DCPS’s long-festering problem of too many no-good, lazy ignoramus teachers collecting free money at taxpayer expense

Excellent. Bust the union, bust them all. I’ll be happy when unions are no more than a footnote in a textbook.

By and large public school teachers are a fearful bunch. The mere idea of losing tenure strikes terror in their hearts. Why? Millions of private-sector employees work successfully at their jobs without any guarantee that they would ever lose their jobs

If these are the responses from a city as liberal as Washington, then it’s probably time to sound the death knell for organized labor.

Once again, I’m not sure what to make of Rhee’s actions. It’s good to eliminate ineffective teachers to make room for highly motivated new ones, and moving to the green tier is voluntary, so no teachers will be forced to give up tenure.

But the incentives could become coercive for teachers who are struggling financially, and with the termination tear that Rhee is on, making yourself vulnerable is a dangerous game. Not to mention that the system is sure to create divisions between teachers who stick with the old system and those who cross the hypothetical picket line.

In April, we complained that cities across the country were getting Google Street View while Washington, one of the nation’s most interesting-looking cities, went unphotographed. Now even Paris is on Street View. I guess it’s good that people can see some world capital, even if it’s not ours.

Speaking of Street View, it recently came to Houston (home of the Blog Summer White House) and I understand what people in the first cities to get Street View were saying about creepiness. Just looking for directions, I was confronted with the back of my car and my mom doing yard work.

Can you believe DC’s missing out experiences like that?

Flickr photo from user 0h used under a Creative Commons license

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is out to prove that gossip and personal attacks on classmates don’t have to end upon graduation. A Georgetown alum and the founder of the conservative publication The American Spectator, he’s distilled his disgust for Bill Clinton into a new book, The Clinton Crackup.

In the book, Tyrrell makes it clear that, unlike the College Democrats, he is not Bill’s homeboy.

This isn’t a new revelation: He’s already made something of a successful career of digging up dirt on Bubba. In 1994, the New York Times Magazine called him “a man obsessed” with the Clintons.

Today, Tyrrell shoots up again to stave off Clinton jonesin’. The article is an amusing reminiscence back to Bill and Bob’s days at Georgetown. Tyrell says Clinton was a fat schmoozer in school with girl problems (a classic case of eating his feelings). Tyrrell also calls Clinton’s claims of poverty grossly overstated.

Score one for Jesuit ideals.