“Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it.  We learn only from failure.” Kenneth Boulding

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Superintendents and Chancellors don’t turn school districts around – that's the job of principals and teachers. What they can do is establish conditions that make turn-around more likely – budgets, infrastructure, incentives, empowerment, buy-in, and accountability. Leadership, generally equated with charisma, likeability and interpersonal charm, is nice to have, but the creation of a supportive district operating environment is fundamentally a problem of management.

On its face, DC Public Schools’ challenges would seem to call for a turnaround specialist like Bill Roberti of Alvarez and Marsal or Tom Payzant  formerly of Boston; someone whose book of “lessons learned” comes from the pain of their own “mistakes made.” The risk of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s decision to hire 37-year old Michelle A. Rhee is not that she lacks intelligence, the ability to learn fast, drive or even important experiences. The risk follows from the fact that founding a highly entrepreneurial education nonprofit like The New Teacher Project is nothing like managing an immense education bureaucracy.

In the former, hands-on management, imprinting everything with your own mark, assuring that staff are of one mind and, in effect,  assurring quality control personally, are possible, maybe even essential. The latter is about making choices that can only be implemented by literally thousands of civil servants, well out of earshot from the executive office, with their own views of  what’s important. The risk is that if Rhee can’t make the psychological transition, she will begin to make politically stupid mistakes; the prejudices that attach to her age, ethnicity and gender will appear to be confirmed; she will lose credibility; opponents will sense her days are numbered and then increase their passive resistance to change. At that point she might as well resign. Governors, generals, business executives, and district attorneys have failed to make the leap from the mindsets that made them sucessess in their first careers required to survive very long in their second. There's a reason why "nothing fails like success" is a very old saying among those who study government agencies.

It's an incredibly short journey from the start to the end of this scenario. In this case, the early signs are not auspicious. The Washington Post’s June 13 story by David Nakamura and Nikita Stewart suggests that the Mayor has made Rhee’s transition tougher by springing the appointment on virtually everyone with the power to make her job harder or easier. The Washington Times' Gary Emerling's June 14 story points out that Fenty's DC Public Schools' "takeover legislation says that "prior to the selection of a nominee for chancellor," the mayor is supposed to establish a review panel of teachers, parents and students and provide the panel with "the resumes and other pertinent information pertaining to the individuals under consideration" for the chancellor's position" and that "[h]e also is required to convene a meeting of the panel to hear its recommendations." The panel seems to have been convened in secret last week to discuss one candidate - Rhee.  It looks a bit arrogant of the mayor, especially when everyone seems to have been expecting Miami-Dade's Rudy Crew, and arrogance never helps school reform efforts.

One way or another, Rhee is bound to pay for Fenty's error - and it's not the best sign that she didn't insist on a better introduction. The new Chancellor won't be able to "hit the ground running," she'll be under a cloud, her legitimacy will be in question, and she'll have to spend time keeping up with appearances rather than policy.

More important, Rhee has lost an important guide to help her find a way through the system. The very capable and decent Robert Rice, who served as interim superintendent before Clifford Janey was appointed in August of 2004 and as his special assistant thereafter, has left along with his boss. And although it is entirely understandable that Rhee would want to bring someone from The New Teacher Project like Kaya Henderson along to help with the new job, both need to review another Washington leadership transition; the decision to take his Pentagon deputies along to the World Bank led to the isolation that set Paul Wolfowitz up for failure.  If Wolfowitz came to office with staff despising his position on the war in Iraq, Rhee is almost assured difficulty with the teachers union over staffing provisions in collective bargaining. (See here.) Even a real advantage of Rhee's - her ties to the New Philanthropy and their cash - comes with the baggage of resentment by those who are not part of it's in-crowd and those who fear its financial control of the charter school's movement.  (See for example, Alexander Russo's June 13 post in This Week in Education.) And to many in DC, an endorsement from the Fordham Foundation can only be a kiss of death.

What advice? Mark the words of New Teacher Project board chair Kati Haycock about Rhee: "She wants to get to what's important -- the bottom line. And the bottom line is getting really good teachers for kids. On that kind of focus, she's relentless."

Haycock is dead wrong. There is no single bottom line. Performance, equity, stability, solvency, and labor harmony are all the Chancellor's responsibility. Rhee will be held accountable for each. Failure on any one metric will undermine her ability to pursue all the others.

When managers don't know what they are doing, they tend to do what they know. Rhee knows teachers and teacher recruiting and teacher development. But if that’s the job she wanted, she should have been an assistant superintendent. Rhee’s position as chancellor requires her to delegate that function just as she would one where she knows little. Her relentless focus must be on the much tougher job of making an endless number of policy decisions in ways that lead to a district operating environment that encourages staff to work for better schools, and advantages and empowers those that do. Good policymaking for gigantic bureacracies is far harder than people realize, and each decision requires a good deal of strategic thought.  What's important here is that while many people can focus on getting good teachers, or building better information systems, or making sure schools make AYP, there is only one official paid to think about the whole system as a system, and to assure it has a bright future - and that's the chancellor. It's more than a full time job. But if Rhee sticks to the high ground of decisionmaking, she has a real chance of showing up the critics and doubters. Yours truly included.