PP5168, One Page Short Essay #2.

What are the Key Lessons you learn from the Michelle Rhee and the
Washington DC Public Schools case

In my opinion, basic education and health are the two sectors that should
exclusively remain in public domain, being the basic requirements of all that must not
be left to the mercy of laissez faire. Public schools thus form the core of the public
education in any jurisdiction, at national or sub-national level. Being, myself a
product of public schooling system in India that suffered from almost all the ills
mentioned in the HKS case study, I feel very strongly with the narrative and ambit of
the paper. As mentioned in the paper, performance indicators for teachers like
students’ academic results, student retention and over–all performance in
Washington DC public school remained low due to lack of accountability, absence of
a robust evaluation mechanism and absence of fear of any tough administrative
action, including dismissal. The public schooling had almost been reduced to a
‘welfare scheme’ by hiring inefficient people at public expense in the hope of
securing their votes or perpetuating their positions with no accountability due to fear
of losing their votes. This brings to fore the problem of accountability management in
functioning democracies, where popular vote and not efficient management decides
the political fate and thus shapes the tone and tenor of public policy.

2. The biggest take away from the case study is the notion that to engineer any
forward-looking or corrective change, one needs to change the leadership,
chancellor of education, in this case, simply because the previous establishment is
deeply entrenched in the network of vested interests or caught in the web of
obligations and political correctness. Therefore, for any immense change, the heads
must roll. The second lesson is that unless the ‘change leadership’ gets a complete
functional autonomy and continuous political support from the elected leadership, DC
mayor Fenty in this case, who disregarded the political calculations in allowing 241
teacher dismissals, a patently unpopular and politically ‘suicidal’ move, a month
before the mayoral primary elections, the status quo perpetuates. (A political boss
like Fenty is a rare commodity, who comes off as an altruistic politician, an oxymoron
in my understanding.) The third take-away is the realization that challenges,
resistance and push-backs are an inevitable and inherent constituent of a change
process, which need to be anticipated, prepared for and continuously fended off for a
higher purpose. Pragmatically speaking, in a democratic set-up, such harsh and
unpopular moves are best left to bureaucrats, who don’t need to run for elections
and worry about being popular and thus provide a responsibility buffer to the political
leadership for allowing such changes. The last take-away is the realization that the
success of any public policy move lies in the institutionalization of the changes like
‘IMPACT assessment’ initiated by Rhee and not in the perpetuation of the post she
or the mayor Fenty held.