Michelle Rhee, regardless of her specific impact on D.C. students, has chosen to join New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein in a national campaign for an overly simplistic and, on balance, harmful attack on incompetent teachers as the single most important problem facing public education. Although the test score gains on which Mr. Klein stakes his reputation have been exposed as seriously inflated, he and Ms. Rhee nonetheless chose the eve of her departure as the occasion for a “manifesto” of their views, published last week in the Washington Post.

The Klein-Rhee manifesto asserts that the difficulty of removing incompetent teachers “has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.”

Klein and Rhee base this assertion on a claim that, “as President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determinin…

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If ‘Michelle Rhee’ was the answer, what was the question?

Presumably: How are student interests put first; as, with the removal of ineffective teachers? Tenure and other things won by the teacher unions made it hard to put students first, so tougher management came to seem essential; has almost become the definition of ‘reform’.

OK. But lots of things are hard when you come at them the wrong way. What if ‘strengthening management’ is the wrong approach? The goal surely is: quality teachers who put students first. Might there be an easier way?

The country seems to have decided that much the unions have won is not in the student interest and not in the public interest. Their resistance on tenure, on compensation, etc. is ‘a problem’.

But problems, as someone once said, do not arise by themselves. They are the product of circumstances; can be solved only by changing the circumstances that produce them. So the important question is: “What causes teachers and their unions to behave as they do?

We need to consider that their actions over the yea…

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There are three key lessons would-be reformers should draw from Rhee’s tenure. First, despite the enthusiastic claims of some proponents, mayoral control has real limits. The problem is that those swearing by the power of mayoral control have drawn heavily on the experiences of two exceptional mayors who, for very different reasons, have been nearly unbeatable: Richard Daley in Chicago and Michael Bloomberg in New York. For other mayors, the calculus may play out very differently. Rather than their muscle stabilizing the superintenent, the pain of serious reform may imperil their tenure. Fenty was upended by a challenger who attacked him as high-handed and inattentive to community sensibilities. Rhee’s efforts were hardly the sole reason for this, but Fenty’s staunch support for her hard-charging measures became a primary point of contention. With Fenty out, the bottom fell out for Rhee.

Second, it’s a big mistake to imagine that things would have been different in D.C. if only Rhee or Fenty had been “nicer.” Education reformers love to talk …

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