September promises to be a big month for D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
She’ll be on the big screen as a key figure in Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary “Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America’s Failing Public Schools.” (Lest one worry about the stay-awake factor of such a film, know that Guggenheim was behind the wonk blockbuster “An Inconvenient Truth.”)
She’ll likely learn the fate of her employment based on the results of the mayoral primary.
She might get married.
And she’ll be a published author. Rhee penned a chapter of the “Waiting for Superman” book, to be released Sept. 14 in conjunction with the movie (and just in time for D.C. primary voters to purchase it before waiting in line at the polling stations).
The message is predictably Rhee (“Too often when we talk about fixing broken school systems, we focus on what adults think.”). But it highlights several things that happened after the filmmakers were finished filming.
She writes about the murder in April of Shaw Middle School principal Brian Betts at the hands of home intruders, calling it “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as chancellor. Brian Betts was the real thing.”
And she expresses no regret for firing more than 200 poorly performing teachers in July and August.
“Many people have said we should have tried harder to build consensus and rely on collaboration to reform the school system more gradually. But show me the parent who wants his or her child to wait in a subpar school while we work slowly and collaboratively to fix it.”
“Kids … know very well when they are being shafted, and as educators we should be accountable only to them,” Rhee wrote.
