Major changes at 2 troubled D.C. schools – by Jay Mathews

Monday, October 26, 2009

After days of frantic blogging on the latest D.C. schools crisis and trading speculation with interested readers, I find it refreshing to visit three educators who are making major changes in two of the city’s lowest-performing high schools. Unlike me and many of the people I exchange comments with, they know what they are talking about.

George Leonard, 57, chief executive officer of the Friends of Bedford group from New York; Chief Financial Officer Bevon Thompson, 35; and Chief Operating Officer Niaka Gaston, 34, sit around a table in the basement of the District’s Dunbar High School. The school was so dark and filthy when they first saw it that they cringe at the memory.

Dunbar and Coolidge high schools, both educational disaster areas, are under the command of their consulting company. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee handed them the keys to the two schools because of the rigor and high graduation rates they brought to a small public high school, the Bedford Academy, in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Perplexed by D.C. politics, they dismiss some myths that live in the blogosphere about Rhee’s cut of 380 jobs a few weeks after school started. Neither Rhee nor any other central office personnel told them whom to fire, they say. They were told they would be getting $229 less per pupil than they had expected, but they decided how many employees had to be dismissed to stay on budget and which ones would get the bad news.

Read the full story