Ever since the Washington Post reported that D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s office did a cost analysis for moving the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Rhee has been inundated with phone calls and e-mails from furious parents. Now she’s moving quickly to temper their anger, saying that the District has no immediate plans to move the school out of its Georgetown/Burleith location, although it would eventually like to move it into a new building.

The Washington Post is reporting that Rhee will meet with members of the school’s governing board today, too, to try to mollify their concerns. They had been unaware of the cost analysis report. Bill Turque writes “Michaele C. Christian, president of the school’s governing board, told Rhee in a letter Wednesday that she was ‘appalled’ by the possible move, which had been considered without consulting the school community. She called the Logan site ‘woefully inadequate’ and said the move ‘would eviscerate one of the most outstanding educational institutions in the District.’”

Fears that the school would be moved into a vacant school building near Union Station weren’t helped by Rhee’s recent overthrow of the popular principal of nearby Hardy Middle School.

So for now, the Georgetown and Burleith neighborhood get to keep a beacon of artistic achievement—and Georgetown students know for sure now that their big green drunk perch is safe and sound.

Photo from CitySifting

Having already replaced the principal of Hardy Middle School in a much-criticized attempt to make the school more appealing to local families, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is eyeing the Duke Ellington School of the Arts—that’s the one on 35th Street with the big green chair—for possible conversion from an illustrious performing arts-centric high school into a public high school that would serve Ward 2 families.

Rhee and school construction czar Allen Lew say that they have no concrete plans to convert the school yet, but the Washington Post’s Bill Turque reports that Lew’s office has developed a cost estimate for moving the Duke Ellington school into the vacant Logan Elementary School in Northeast D.C., near Union Station.

Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans (D) is also strongly in favor of the conversion, as Ward 2 is the only ward in the District that does not have a neigborhood high school.

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On Friday afternoon at Georgetown’s Hardy Middle School, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee proved speculations that she would remove the well-liked Principal Patrick Pope from his post to be correct. The Washington Post’s Bill Turque reported that before a roomful of incensed parents, Rhee announced that Pope would be leaving after this school year to plan a new magnet middle school for the arts.

Parents were outraged, Turque said, and for two hours, accused Rhee of trying to make the school more attractive to families of children at local, white “feeder schools,” which she has held meetings with over the past two years, at the expense of the school’s fine arts reputation.

On Monday, Jonetta Rose Barras seconded the accusations in her Examiner column:

“The recession, a new building and an education reform movement have merged to renew interest in Hardy among white residents. That’s a good thing. Problem is, they favor a traditional academic program and a principal who advocates that model. Hardy and Pope don’t fit that bill.”

Georgetown Metropolitan writes that after Rhee left, the Councilmember from Ward 7 Yvette Alexander told the audience gathered in the school cafeteria, “We’ve got to get rid of Fenty. And Rhee. And you can quote me on that!”

“Pope will be replaced this summer by Dana L. Nerenberg, principal of nearby Hyde-Addison Elementary, who will run both schools as a unified pre-kindergarten through eighth grade program,” Turque wrote.

He gave a speech thanking the audience for their encouragement without saying whether or not he had been forced out.

Photo taken from Flickr user David Clow – Maryland under a Creative Commons license.

Hardy Middle School

Michelle Rhee, the gung-ho, tenure-terminating, union-hated D.C. school chancellor, has more or less left schools in the Georgetown neighborhood alone.

In October, however, a Northwest Current article reported that she planned to make a “major announcement” regarding the local Hardy Middle School.

Parents of children there quickly grew nervous, not least of all because they understood one of her comments, that she wanted to “turn” the school, which is 70 percent black and draws from around the District, to mean that she wanted to make the school more attractive to local white children and their families.

After much uncertainty, Rhee plans to meet with those parents tonight at 6:30 in Hardy’s auditorium. From the Washington Post:

Rhee has yet to describe her plan for Hardy, which parents strongly suspect will include the exit of long-time principal Patrick Pope and a change in the school’s visual arts and instrumental music program. Speculation about his successor is centering on Elizabeth Whisnant, currently principal of nearby Mann Elementary, one of the schools Rhee would like to see Hardy draw from.

“Your voices must be heard before Hardy’s curriculum is changed without your input!” said the flier announcing the “urgent” meeting, scheduled for 6:30 pm in the school auditorium at 1819 35th St. NW.

The D.C. Board of Elections ruled that the newly passed law recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states is not subject to a referendum vote. The board ruled that if a referendum were allowed on the issue, they would be “authorizing discrimination.” Gay marriage opponents who had been fighting for the referendum immediately filed a lawsuit with the D.C. Superior Court. They’ve also asked the judge to “stop the clock” to prevent the new law from coming into effect on July 6.

The D.C. Council debated two competing anti-crime bills. The more hard-line bill, backed by Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) and Georgetown’s Councilmember Jack Evans (D—Ward 2) included a “civil gangs injunction” that raised civil rights and racial profiling concerns. The other bill, backed by Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D—At Large) was pretty similar but more ACLU-friendly and ultimately won out.

The hearing for Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn was delayed due to his medical condition (he was shot in the face during his attack). It was also revealed that in addition to being a white supremacist, von Brunn was also into child pornography. The D.C. Council also passed a resolution urging prosecutors to charge von Brunn with violating the city’s hate crime statue in addition to his federal charges.

After the jump: Michelle Rhee reaches the terrible twos, D.C. Voting Rights foe gets a nice helping of karma, and more!

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Time’s cover story this week is about DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.  Noted for her fierce demeanor and commitment of school reform, Rhee has “promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation.”

The cover story is definitely worth your time as it gives Rhee a fair shake while evaluating the dysfunctional DC school system.

In between all those Joe the Plumber references, the DC Public Schools got some play in last night’s presidential debate. One of the few things Obama and McCain agreed on was that DCPS sucks. Here’s the relevant clip – DCPS pops up around 2:30.

McCain argues that D.C. is proof that vouchers work. Obama responds, “We’ve got a wonderful new superintendent there who’s working very hard with the young mayor there” and that they actually support charter schools. So what’s the truth?
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In the midst of contract negotiations between DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the Washington Teachers’ Union, a group of area business people have taken matters into their own hands by hiring teachers to lobby their fellow educators in favor of Rhee’s plan. Rhee’s green tier/red tier system, which would allow teachers to forgo tenure in favor of merit-based pay raises, was contentious enough without help from this new lobbying group, Strong Schools DC.It makes sense that DC’s business community would want to push for measures that will raise standardized test scores, presumably because better public schools will have a positive effect on property values. But there’s no guarantee that Rhee’s plan will actually raise scores, and it’s sketchy that teachers are being paid to lobby for Rhee because it calls their feelings about the plan into question.

The worst part, though, is Rhee’s evasive not-quite-denial of involvement with the organization:

Through her spokeswoman, Mafara Hobson, Rhee said she can recall no communications with her staff about Strong Schools or with the organization directly.

I know she’s a busy woman, but not being able to recall something is pretty different from being sure you didn’t do it, and if Rhee is at all involved in paying teachers to push her plan, DCPS is in even worse shape than I thought.

Michelle Rhee’s tiered pay plan would allow DC school teachers to trade their tenure and scheduled pay raises in exchange for merit bonuses. Seems fair, but Nathan Saunders of the Washington Teacher’s Union is on WAMU right now saying that new teachers would automatically enter the merit bonus tier–effectively eliminating teacher tenure as tenured teachers leave the system.

This would create a backdoor for making the DC schools system performance-based. Performance-based pay might be a good idea, and the tier system is a good idea if it truly allows choice. Rhee shouldn’t be using the tier system, though, to impose performance pay on all teachers.

Saunders sounds like a crank, and pretty much is, but this looks like just another example of the Fenty administration avoiding fair processes in its rush to change the city.

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.