Yup. We know that. The Governor knows that. And that’s why he killed the state’s accountability office. Very forward thinking of him.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make this school system excellent. And to the extent we can allow her to do that, as free from outside obstacles as humanly possible, the faster she will move.

Merrow notes that she has made some very controversial moves:

announc[ing] she would close the 23 chronically under-enrolled schools. Ongoing protests did not slow Rhee down. By the end of the school year, she had removed 36 principals, 22 assistant principals, and 121 employees in her central office.

She also revealed plans to overhaul 27 additional schools that had failed to meet federal standards for academic improvement.

Check it out, but also tonight on PBS, Merrow interview Paul Vallas who is pushing equally hard in New Orleans. As education leadership stalled out in Massachusetts, it is taking deep root elsewhere.

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette has a heartening feature today on the Mandarin classes now being offered in Shrewsbury’s public schools. But as Steve Ackley, spokesman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, points out:

There aren’t enough qualified Chinese teachers to serve the growing demand.

What’s a school district to do?

Virtualize.

I think today there is an inherent bias against virtual education - in many ways similar to the one against online dating that was once so common. Many people hear virtual education and think immediately of a correspondence course, which, of course, doesn’t have the same academic rigor as a classroom based one. Or so the prevailing wisdom would have us believe. But, just as today online dating is not nearly the social stigma it once was, there is a similar move in the direction of normalizing virtual education.

For instance, we at Pioneer just recognized the Florida Virtual School as the winner of our 2008 Better Government Competition and one of the recommendations (granted, just one of a myriad of recommendations) in the Governor’s Readiness Project report is the creation of a virtual school.

Virtual schools have the potential to upend the delivery mechanism for education, which currently, in its classroom form, is labor intensive. In a labor shortage, therefore, the service does not get delivered at a pace to meet demand - a la Mandarin and Arabic instruction. Harnessing technology for more efficient delivery would allow us to overcome just such a predicament.

The School Department’s increase of 658 positions since 2004 accounted for 64.1% of the four-year total of 1,026….The School Department is just 58 positions below its 2002 level while its
enrollment has dropped by 10.4% from 2002 to 2008.