…Lately it is education policy that attracts the young, the gifted and talented, the promising, with their big ideas and nifty charts; I read somewhere that “education reform” is the new “end hunger in Africa,” and that seems about right. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee comes to mind. She was doing good things for D.C.’s schools, yes, but her certainty; her absolutism; her disregard for a system and a culture that was intensely flawed but also intensely ingrained; her constant and militant peddling of trite sentiments about all kids summiting mile-high academic heights—all of it was and should have been discomfiting…
